A swell of water appeared amid the waves and a human head rose up out of the water. His face was different from that of the man they’d glimpsed going down into the water earlier, although it too was the face of no one in particular. His eyes were open wide, heedless of the drops of seawater running down over them. His shoulders surfaced next. Was it some deathseeker grown bored of even his craving for death? His form was revealed little by little as he drew nearer to shore. He was wearing a navy blue suit.
Behind the dripping-wet deathseeker, seagulls were gliding toward the face of the gentle ocean, snatching prey from the water with their beaks. One of these tilted its wings sharply, turned around, and traced out a leisurely arc as it made for the shoreline. Both of its wide wings, stretched out fully to the left and the right, grew steadily larger. Its stately form was intimidating, and in a moment, it was closing in before their eyes. Its two wings, like giant sickles, were headed straight for the cringing pair—
And then with a powerful shock, Hisauchi only was thrown backward. He collapsed onto the sand and lay there on his back. The seagull’s wings flapped in his field of view, and each time they moved it felt like his insides were being twisted.
Beyond the wings’ afterimages was Hamuro, standing frozen with both hands held up to her mouth.
“What’s … happening?” Hisauchi moaned.
Hamuro came to his side, grabbed hold of one wing with both hands, and pulled. His chest rose up, pulled along with the wing.
“It’s no good, you’re fused with the gull. It went right through me … But why?”
Beyond the tips of his feet, Hisauchi spotted the death-seeker. He was approaching them, his whole body dripping with seawater.
He drew near, tangles of seaweed wrapped about his feet, and finally stopped in front of Hisauchi.
“Ah, may I?” he said to Hamuro hesitantly.
The deathseeker bent down, reached forward with his wet hands, and grabbed hold of the right wing. With no trouble whatsoever, he folded it over in the direction of Hisauchi’s chest. Then he did the same with the left wing. When he took away his hands, Hisauchi rubbed his chest. The seagull had vanished without a trace.
“W-what just happened … ?” Hamuro said, confused. But Hisauchi, with the deathseeker’s outstretched hand before him, thanked the man and grabbed hold of his arm.
When the deathseeker pulled him up, however, something twisted powerfully inside, and this time Hisauchi fell face forward. His face twisted with agony as it plowed into the sandy ground. Sand was stuck all over his lips. He tried to cry out in anger, but no sound came out—it was like a lock had been fastened to his Adam’s apple. His arms and legs were beyond his control as well. Hamuro let loose the scream that he could not.
Locks of wet hair were still plastered across the death-seeker’s lifeless face, but he spoke in a clear, crisp voice:
“Suspect’s veriform in custody; type-one containment shell set internally. No, the coordinates had pointed me toward a position under the sea. How about the dispersed individual registries? They won’t converge? Well, for the time being, all we can do is isolate them. Activate type-one containment shell.”
A feeling of vertigo assaulted Hisauchi, and his focus seemed to lag as multiple fields of vision began to overlap his own. They moved about wildly, and his stomach started to churn. It wasn’t just Hamuro and the deathseeker he could see; his own prostrate form was visible to him as well. Even when he squeezed his eyes shut, the visions wouldn’t disappear.
I’ve got to get away from here—
Hisauchi couldn’t hold still and couldn’t wait to get away.
The gentle, sandy ground suddenly heaved upward, forming long, enormous rises, as if the beach itself were suffering an acute attack of edematous blood vessels. Resembling echinoderms, sand-covered lumps of all shapes and sizes rose from the ground. They jiggled as though made of gelatin and began rolling toward where the three people were. The clumps of sand that were stuck to their surfaces peeled off and fell away, exposing various types of internal organs. Dully reflecting the sunlight, the organs came pouncing toward the deathseeker. Branching veins writhed in midair.
“What is this stuff?” the deathseeker cried, losing his cool demeanor as he stomped underfoot a mass of viscera that had wrapped around his ankle—
—Hisauchi was assaulted by a sudden rush of nausea, and for some reason, a vast, honeycomb-patterned landscape flashed before his eyes—
—then with a sickening squelch, the organ collapsed under the deathseeker’s foot, sending a spurt of mucusy goo up into the air. On the sandy ground, a bloodstain was spreading darkly outward, but even so, the number of organs showed no sign of decrease. Hisauchi’s heart was pounding fit to burst.
“Investigative Bureau unit is under attack.
“That infotumor?”
As the deathseeker batted away an organ that had crawled as high as his abdomen, he continued to carry on a conversation with himself.
“It looks that way. There’s congestion centering on the suspect.
“Fragmentary city data detected inside. Resembles Yaoyorozu in composition.
“We’ve got some crosstalk here.
“Thanks to this guy, this parish is—
“Don’t squash any more tumors. It’ll complicate the reconstruction. Analyze the cellular nuclei.”
I’ve got to get away—
“W-what the—? The suspect’s veriform is—”
From deep inside of Hisauchi, there began to emanate a sound like something coming to a boil.
Hamuro covered her face with both hands and screamed.
Hisauchi’s shirt began to swell ponderously outward, buttons began to pop, and then all his bowels came gushing out. Agony coursed through his every vein. The rent in his stomach peeled back, and the moist mucous membrane of his coelom began to envelop his whole body as it was turned inside out.
“What’s happening here?
“Brainwaves flatlining—
“Type-one containment shell destroyed during construction by transposition of his veriform tissues’ order of precedence—
“What?!”
All that was still recognizably human now lay between Hisauchi’s elbows and his fingertips.
The vast multitude of organs that had bubbled up out of the sand converged on the everted body, splorching and splurching loudly. They bubbled as if fermenting and melted into one another, making his white bones bob up and down, flowing randomly this way and that as the whole mass expanded.
“The infotumor’s genes are a match for the suspect’s.
“So this is what dispersed the individual registries?
“Aah!
“What’s the matter?
“Th-the infotumor—it’s reached this room!
“Seal it off. Leave only the barest minimum of a transmission channel. First activate a type-two—no, a type-three—containment shell. I’ll use the relic’s timespace properties to send it back to the Genesis Period.
“Activating type-three containment shell.
“Data spillback from the suspect. This is dangerous; subjective viewers, please cut your connections.”
The deathseeker let go of Hisauchi’s hand, but his entire forearm, sleeve and all, was beginning to swell up with blisters already.
“Separate elbow joint and discard!”
With that urgent cry, everything from the deathseeker’s elbow forward came loose and fell to the ground.
Hisauchi’s five fingers each bent in impossible directions and were enveloped by the everted membrane. His entire body had now kneaded its muscles, its bones, and its organs into a warped conglomeration of flesh and blood, covered in a net of blood vessels.
Out among the waves, small, ovoid shells bobbed to the surface here and there. Their numbers increased with every rolling wave, and they began
to cover the surface of the sea. They washed up on the shore and, pushing and shoving against one another, began crawling up the sandy beach. A sharp tail was sticking out from the rear of each shell. They were horseshoe crabs. They swarmed in as if tracing the movements of the mass of organs, climbed up the pile of flesh that was Hisauchi, and attached themselves to it one after another.
As the horseshoe crabs fused together to form a containment shell, several reddish-black spheres bulged out from areas that were not yet covered and, pulsing erratically, began to expand. They sprayed violent geysers of rotten soup all around and, with raucous, mucusy shlurps, peeled away from the containment shell, becoming flesh-balloons that floated up and away from the sandy shore.
Hamuro and the deathseeker stared up dazedly at the sky as the wind carried those fleshy balloons higher and higher.
It hadn’t happened only at the beach. Similar flesh-balloons were taking flight from all over the parish.
Numerous beyond all counting, they floated across the sky like giant, explosively breeding medusae, layers of mucous membranes tinged orange in the light of the evening glow.
Gradually, they converged and stuck together, becoming an uneven agglomeration of bubbles resembling a giant cluster of grapes and casting an incredibly long, vast shadow across the city.
The conglomerate continued to rise up through the troposphere. Each time it passed through some thick cloud, it came under fierce assault by spears of lightning, but the electricity was discharged instantly from the top. High up above, a halo of light began to expand from a single point.
Far, far below, Parish 153 floated alone in darkness, a rec-tangular patch of skin waiting to be grafted. The other parishes making up the rest of the
At last, the mass of fleshy balloons reached the stratosphere. Nacreous clouds shone like mother of pearl as they drew near from all around. Atomized particles of nitric acid began to blacken and dissolve the fleshy, bloody mass, but then the blackened outer layer peeled away, a new layer regenerated, and the conglomerate continued to rise ever higher.
At last it neared the point at which it could no longer clearly be seen. Countless fleshy sacs were twisted and squashed, as though being strained through the celestial sphere, and at last they vanished from the
That day, the break of dawn brought no color to the
Chapter 4:
The Shrine Visit
1
In the residential quarter on the south side of Tochino Recuperation Block, the buildings were reinforced by coats of dungplast mixed with momonji dung and bonemeal. With little rhyme or reason, the structures had been built onto and rebuilt repeatedly as they competed for space, and they looked like they might start falling down at any moment. Toward the east, located in an area of especially convoluted pathways where the sunlight never reached, was the recuperation block’s archival warehouse.
There Umari sat covered in dust, up on a ladder attached to a storage shelf that rose all the way up to the high ceiling.
That man is dead now, so why do I have to do this? she wondered.
Unsatisfied with the answer, she had been paging endlessly through piled stacks of old documents, looking for materials suited to their next job. It took half the day, but she finally scraped together what was needed—maps of the dustsink, project plans related to sewer construction, and so on—and at last put the archives behind her.
From a narrow path, she emerged into the arcade running north to south through the residential area and started walking toward Caravan Square. There were a lot of discontinuities in the ground, and here and there grilled sweets lay crumbling, as though they had been smashed.
When she was three shops from the gate leading to the square, Umari came to a halt and turned toward the building on her left. Its second story faced the arcade, while its ground floor was hidden by a row of three bone doors. On each of these doors was engraved a single character, spelling out Ki-jin-mon, or Dustclinger Clan.
Umari hummed carrier tone, recalling the nervousness she had felt the first time she stood before those doors. That day, Romon had opened the door for her, and for some reason he had looked at her like he couldn’t believe his own eyes.
After being shown inside, she had pleaded with Master to be trained as a dustmancer, but Romon had inserted from the side, “You can’t be no dustmancer. You’ll put us all in danger; everybody’ll end up getting hurt really bad. Go on back to the maternitorium where you belong.”
Umari’s reflections were cut off by the sound of a latch being loosed. She slipped in sideways through the door marked Ki.
In the midst of a large, low-ceilinged room that reeked of mold, her clan-brethren were up to their necks in preparations for the next momonji drive, which was coming up in just a week. Master was standing next to a work desk by the wall, watching over the work with a careful eye. Did there used to be a whorl somewhere on that hairless head of his? Umari was wondering, when Master suddenly turned around.
“Hurry up and bring me those!”
Umari was so surprised she almost dropped her bundle of old documents. She steadied her grip and handed them over to Master.
Master set his cast-iron tamer on one end of a document roll and used it as a paperweight as he spread the sheet out on the desk in a swift, one-handed motion. “Can’t use ’em,” he said after flipping through each of the pages. “Well, what are you standing there for? Go and get me some more!”
Umari took off running. She could hear Romon’s laughter: “Is collecting debts all she’s good for?”
It took her another four trips to and from the archives before he would take what she brought him. By that time, the sun had long since set.
Early the next morning, Master got to work and spent a little less than a day patching together the old documents. The rest of the prep he entrusted to Homaru, who was skilled in the composition of possession-verse. During the remaining half of the day, Homaru easily finished the handwritten crafting-notes and chanted them into eidos grenades about the size of his thumb. The silver teeth peeking out from between his lips looked black as night in the room’s dim illumination.
In the crisp air of the early morning, Master and Umari were waiting in front of the West Gate of the recuperation block.
A man dressed in caravan gear approached them, dodging past the earthcreepers lying before the rows of houses in the residential district. Through a thin hemp curtain that hung from the edge of his shadecap, Umari could make out the rounded features of Hanishibe. She was at a loss for words. “Are these clothes all right?” Hanishibe said in a bright, clear voice. “I put the outfit together at a secondhand place …”
“That’s an old type of camouflage,” said Master, “but since we’ll be in a calmdust belt, there shouldn’t be any problem.” The three of them passed beneath the thick western gate and departed Tochino Recuperation Block.
The plain of calmdust spread out under an empty sky, its surface honeycombed with countless holes. Outlines of crystalline lattices, oft likened to coral formations or fossilized lotus receptacles, stood out in striking relief as they caught the morning sunlight.
A wind was blowing across the pitted surface layer, and low moans sounded out continuously.
Master stepped out onto a crystallized lattice that resembled the femur of some dinosaur, and Hanishibe and Umari followed him in turn. All three trod on their own long shadows as they carefully made their way across the calmdust.
The holes were about as big around as a person’s waist, and since the crystals on which they found their footing were about as wide, it was no trouble stepping across from one lattice to the next. Looking down at the endless succession of crystals gave the illusion of floating high up in the sky.
Hanishibe’s knees trembled as he hobbled along in front of Umari, perha
ps out of fear.
Has he never crossed a calmdust belt before? The thought was a strange one for Umari. If that were the case, how had he ever come to Tochino Recuperation Block? And could he and that crawlbacker from before really be the same person?
Crouching figures came into view here and there on the calmdust flat. Each of them had one hand pressed against the ground.
“Who are those people?” Hanishibe asked.
“Dustmancers retained by the recuperation block. They use their tamers like that to periodically exorcise various kinds of invasive eide. Thanks to them, the region around the recuperation block is kept inactive, as a calmdust belt of honeycombed crystal lattices.”
The calmdust belt extended for another two kilometers; past that point, unearthly dustshoots rose up toward the sky, and beyond them a vast dustwreck jungle unfurled, in which dustwroughts of every conceivable kind grew in a thick, chaotic luxuriance that engulfed the horizon.
“This place was once a discardation stratum too, wasn’t it?” said Hanishibe.
“We don’t call it that,” said Master. “There’re lots of units of structure for things, depending on their size and stage of activation. Starting from the very smallest—a single nanomote—we’ve got dustwrecks, wreckcliffs, and so on—lump all of ’em together and you ultimately get the Vastsea itself.”
Hanishibe nodded understanding. He was gazing off toward distant heights far beyond the dustwreck jungle. All Umari could see, however, were altocumulus clouds that looked a bit like a momonji herd. When she lowered her gaze, Hanishibe was walking with an awkward and unsteady stride.
“You’ll fall in a hole if all you do is stare at the sky,” she said suddenly.
And the moment that she said so, Hanishibe wobbled, and Umari had to prop him up from behind. The flab she could feel through the cloth was distressingly soft.
“You miss looking up at those floating bridges they had in the good old days?” said Master, his back still turned.
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