“I’m not getting all nostalgic, no. After all, what I’m looking toward is the future.”
There was no hesitation or uncertainty in Hanishibe’s answer. He stamped his foot a few times, checking the curved surface of a crystalline lattice.
“I’ve gone and dredged up a hoary old word again,” Master said. “But it’s the same for me. Travel the Vastsea long enough, and even the long stretches of time that run together like lasagna just melt away like stew.”
Something about the term “floating bridge” had caught Umari’s attention. She remembered hearing Dr. Shibata use that term once—when had that been? When she tried to recall the conversation, her thoughts were buried under a pile of lasagna—the nature of which she was understanding less and less.
“Our
“It doesn’t matter which direction you hope in, but if you want to make it home safely, forgetting is key.”
The trio walked on, crossing the calmdust in silence.
A rumble ran through the ground, and their footing began to vibrate wildly. Grazed by the fingertips Umari held out to steady him, Hanishibe sank into the ground. One of his feet was stuck in a hole.
Looking down through the network of multilayered crystalline lattices, they could make out the dim shadow of something huge and black as it came into view, then slowly passed on by. Hanishibe was panting so hard that his breaths sounded almost like screams.
The shadow receded into the distance, and as soon as the ground stopped shaking, Master broke out in an uncharacteristically loud burst of laughter. “Now wait a minute; the city you were living in must have been in a canvasser just like that one. You’re a ghost; what have you got to be afraid of?”
“I’d never seen one from the outside before,” Hanishibe protested. A profuse, oily sweat had broken out on his forehead.
Huge though the canvassers might be, Umari still had trouble grasping the idea that cities full of ghosts existed within their six-meter bodies. It was hard to understand as well how crawlbackers could come out of canvassers.
Together with Master, they pulled Hanishibe up out of the hole.
As soon as Hanishibe had climbed back up on the crystal lattice, the curved surface at his feet began to boil and melt. The other two backed away. The crystal lattices melted outward from where Hanishibe stood, closing off many of the holes with a thin, liquid film. A silvery depression formed that was about three meters in diameter. Within its gently sloping curvature there appeared varied rippling patterns, forming a sort of mandala. Scattered, sticklike projections jutted out as it transformed moment by moment, like a kaleidoscope.
“Doilies” was the term Umari used for this kind of metamorphic rippling. They bore a strong resemblance to the little lace mats that the mothers at the maternitorium would crochet to amuse themselves.
Master and Umari were keeping their distance so as not to be pulled in, but Hanishibe was standing right in the middle of that doily. He was completely still and appeared to be lost in deep thought. That vacant gaze was directed at a spot about ten paces ahead, where a new doily was taking shape. Something was rising steadily upward there. It looked like a cube.
“Close your eyes now!” Master shouted. “I told you—don’t hope for anything. Your feelings are way too strong.”
Taking short, rapid breaths of air, Hanishibe shut his eyes, but the cube was already taller than he was and was steadily growing even larger. Its topmost portion began to tilt, and rectangular depressions began to appear at vital points on its vertical surface. A mansion was beginning to form—the kind sometimes excavated from dustsunk land to be reconstructed on the surface. A terrace with a table and chairs rose into view, and on the far side of a grassy lawn the molten ground became a lake that shone in the morning sunlight. Bathed in that gleam, many rounded poles reached skyward, surrounding the mansion and forming a dense forest.
Using carrier tone, Master began chanting a calmsong. Umari joined in as well, singing one octave higher.
The doily emanating from Hanishibe’s feet began to settle down, and the holes reappeared as the film covering them popped like bubbles.
In no particular order, the trees began to sink back into the ground, the mansion’s sharp corners grew rounded, and the grounds of the estate lost their shape and grew indistinct. While all this was happening, Umari’s heart stirred—she thought she’d caught a glimpse of a human figure in one of the collapsing windows.
The mansion regressed until it became like a mud pie, but there its movements grew dull. Hanishibe’s thoughts were still exerting an influence. In the end, the trio departed that place, having been unable to return it to its flat, crystalline form.
They advanced northwestward in silence for exactly half an hour.
The dustwreck jungle was closing in, roughly a hundred meters ahead of them. One portion of it bulged out toward them, cracked apart as though shattering, and then formed shapes of dense, leafy foliage.
They braced themselves, thinking at first that the nanodust was reacting to Hanishibe’s emotions again. What pushed its way through the dense leaves, however, turned out to be a three-eyed face covered in white fur. The jungle spat out momonji after momonji after momonji, like whitish insects freshly emerged from their chrysalises.
Golden eyes, long hair, brown stripes—every one of them was a high-grade breed. Now they were forming up in ranks and setting out across the calmdust belt. They were apparently using one of the permanent guidelines that required a usage fee. The dustmancers walking between the momonji raised their hands toward the trio and lightly turned their wrists.
“They look awfully proud of themselves, don’t they?” Master said as he returned the gesture and Umari copied it. It was a very common greeting between caravan drivers.
Master turned his back on the momonji caravan’s long train, took a sextant from the bag that hung from his belt, and looked up at the sky.
“It’s farther south,” he said.
They walked for another ten minutes or so and arrived at their goal’s coordinates. It was a perfectly ordinary intersection of crystalline lattices.
Master took his tamer from its holster and crouched down on one knee. He pushed the muzzle up against the center of the intersection, and then he pulled the trigger.
A dull sound rang out. It sounded like someone punching a large metal bell. At the same moment, faint beams of light danced across the bonelike surface.
Spreading out from a mark made by the eidos bullet, the crystal began to melt, forming a hole. It grew deeper and deeper, as though an invisible heat source were melting its way downward, creating a vertical pit. The holes that lined its inner wall began to close like eyes being lulled to sleep, smoothly transforming the wall into a curved shaft without bumps or dents.
At last a long, intricately detailed ladder came bubbling up out of the pit’s inner wall, stretching vertically from the opening all the way down to the darkness at the bottom.
“So it can really form shapes this quickly!” Hanishibe said with a cry of amazement. “Though this is exactly why the worlde ended up like it did.”
Master, Hanishibe, and finally Umari began climbing down the ladder. Although the piled layers of nanodust could be transformed like magic, they wouldn’t hold the shape for long. Unlike Master, Umari could not yet estimate how long the possession-verse would hold.
After descending roughly fifty meters, they reached the bottom, which was a wide, empty cavern. The air amid the gloom was damp and smelled of mold.
Master, having stepped off the ladder, held a four-sided lantern up over his head. The first thing that leapt into view was a series of wooden divine gates, blackened and corroded, centered between half-fallen wo
od plank fences. To Umari’s eyes, the straight lines of the structures seemed terribly ominous. Beyond the divine gates, there stood a building roofed with moss-covered mats of thatch and logs lined up on its peak. It was leaning a bit toward the right and looked as if the slightest breath might topple it.
Hanishibe, clinging to the ladder just beneath Umari, let out a deeply emotional sigh.
On the roof of that great cavern, a large number of indistinct shapes seemed to mimic the thatched roof but were facing in the opposite direction. Like bracket fungi, they overlapped with one another, forming several layers, and as gently as clouds, drifted along toward the inner darkness.
Hanishibe jumped down to the ground, stumbled immediately, and fell on his backside.
On closer inspection, it turned out that the ground here was shaped like a staircase. A large number of shapeless blobs resembling huge jellyfish lay scattered about here and there. They accounted for the surplus mass that had been displaced when the pit had been chanted from the nanodust.
Umari waited for Hanishibe to get back up, then jumped down herself. She scuffed her soles as she stepped onto the stone steps, embracing a sense of reverence toward their unswerving stability.
Master set his lantern down on the ground and with tamer in hand knocked on the walls from which the divine gates’ pillars protruded, checking to see how active they were. The gates resembled chain-replicated bas-reliefs.
“I wonder why this cavern holds its shape?” Umari murmured unconsciously. Even if the calmsong had penetrated this far down, there was no way localized, specific forms could be taking shape. It was a mystery as well why the transformation had gone no farther.
“A reverence for things holy is built into the nanodust,” Master said, moving his hands as if trying to shift some invisible thing in midair. “That said, the reason that that instinct is at work here is because this shrine’s Kosmetics are functional even now. The kosmetic seal that was bestowed on this place before it sank into the nanodust has effectively served to protect the shrine. Ironically enough.”
As Master was speaking, a sound of footsteps overlapped with his voice.
Hanishibe, with a vacant expression, was climbing up the wide stone steps as though he were being pulled. At last, he came to a halt between the thick, round pillars of a gate nearly eight meters in height, where the wood grain was visible. Hanishibe waved his lantern in a wide arc, like the sun in its course through the sky, and illuminated the pitiful state of a moss-covered thatched roof that was a little lower than the divine gate and had mostly decayed into dirt.
Looking askance at Hanishibe’s unmoving silhouette, Umari asked, “Um, what are Kosmetics?”
“Just like you dress up in beautiful clothes to hide your nakedness, there was an age when reality was covered over in many layers of an ideal fabric called Kosmetics. At shrines like this one, gods such as Chinju-no-kami and Ubusunagami manifested before humans. They were incorporated into the governing bodies and became intimately involved in people’s daily lives to a degree never seen before.”
“There were … gods?”
“It was the basic concept translated into Codeblocks, of course. But the informational management and patronage they provided let people enjoy lives of incredible—even perverse—convenience. Later, the raw material of nanodust, also known as ‘Yaoyorozu,’ recreated the world in matter, but in the end … it brought about the unprecedented disaster of the Great Dust Plague …”
Master pulled up the hemp curtain of his shadecap and pressed the stock of his tamer’s grip against his temple.
“Master?”
“But even so, Chinju-no-kami and Ubusunagami wouldn’t forsake their parishioners … They were sealed away, however, by the replayable intellects … because their presence interfered with people’s … escaping … from this world.”
No sooner did Umari notice Master faltering than he fell over sideways onto the ground.
“Master!”
His fallen tamer bounced on the stone steps, then sank into one of the giant jellyfish. Antidust camouflage didn’t work if the shape of something was taken in directly. Immediately, tamer-shaped projections blossomed all over the gelatinous hemisphere’s surface. This was further imitated by the ceiling directly overhead; tamers grew out of it in a radial pattern and began sagging downward like stalactites.
With no idea what was happening, Umari ran to Master and dragged him down several steps.
The tamers that had chain-replicated from both above and below made creaking noises as they joined one to another, forming a pillar resembling a dolomite crystal. Tamers sank into the pillar one after another, and explosions rang out from their barrels as they were squeezed together on the surface. A volley of tamerfire was starting up.
Reflexively, Umari threw herself on top of Master.
With deafening reverberations, countless tamershots rang out all through the cavern, raining down fragments of wall on top of Umari, who had gone pale as a sheet. Tamers were not made for killing or maiming, but no one who got hit would be walking away unscathed.
Within several seconds the tamershots died down. Thank goodness it was a single-loader, Umari thought, exhaling a deep sigh.
She lifted herself up off of Master, and when she turned to look toward the shrine, she saw Hanishibe peering timidly back from the shadow of the divine gate’s pillars. He dodged around the pillar made of tamers and came running up to them.
Master’s face had started to twitch, so they undid the cord under his chin and used his shadecap as a pillow. They kept calling to him, and presently his eyebrows drew together. “Let me go! In the shaft, I-I didn’t shoot the eidos shell to muh-muh-muh maintain the shape! There’s no time!” He closed his eyes, groaning.
Hanishibe nodded and set off running for the thatch-roofed building.
Behind his thick eyelids, Master’s eyeballs were moving furiously.
“It’s no good. What’s going on?” Master gasped. “I’m losing my senses. I can just barely control my larynx, but it feels like I have bits in my mouth. Have I been thrown out of the
“Master!” Umari screamed, practically beside herself.
“It’s no good. I’m shut off from everything. In that case, how about a shared branch of the whisper-net? This one, this one, and this one … the terminal points are blocked by dummy signals. So is it only this parish that’s isolated from the others, like we saw from up in the sky? But still—”
Something gurgled inside of Master like a backed-up pipe. Dark blood spilled from his mouth and his nostrils.
“Master! Master!” Umari kept calling until she was hoarse, and finally their eyes met.
“What is this? My body, it feels awfully heavy. Is something wrong with my visual intercessor? I’m starting to see something vaguely. A face? The intimacy level’s deepening. Getting too deep. I see capillaries through the skin … a scattering of pigmented nevi. And the left and right sides of the face have lost too much of their symmetry. Don’t tell me this is some kind of medical test subject—”
“Master?”
“Are you calling me? Who in the worlde are y—”
“It’s me. It’s Umari.”
Behind her, she heard the sound of gravel and turned around. Hanishibe came running down the stairs, carrying a laquered black box in his arms. Was it something that had been hidden inside the thatch-roofed building? Was that what he had come here to look for?
�
��Mr. Hanishibe! Master is—”
Hanishibe ran right past them without so much as a pause. He came to a halt at the bottom of the shaft and tied the box up with a cord.
“Please! Help me carry Master out of here!”
Without even answering, Hanishibe shouldered the box, started up the ladder, and disappeared from view.
Umari threaded both of her arms under Master’s armpits. He was giving off an unusual amount of heat. Carrying his upper body, she dragged him as far as the bottom of the shaft.
She undid a cord that was coiled up inside her shadecap and, bearing Master up on her back, tied it around her body. Her legs, however, buckled immediately, and she grabbed the stone wall with both hands. There was a weight differential of more than thirty kilograms between them.
She started up the ladder, but under so much more weight than she had expected, her arms and her calves felt like they might burst open at any moment. Beads of sweat broke out and rolled off her here and there. Soon enough, she had to stop, rest a bit, and then start climbing again. Her breathing grew ragged. Blisters on her fingers and palms burst, and she nearly fell when her hands slipped on the oozing pus. I must be paler than a corpse by now, she thought.
It was when they were about halfway up that the shaft began to narrow. The wall turned fibrous and began to unravel. Master’s body was hot against her back. She clenched her teeth and climbed on with single-minded determination.
The disk of blue sky circumscribed by the mouth of the pit grew nearer. Her whole body cried out for oxygen. Her lungs hurt, as if they were being scraped out from within—probably, she had breathed in too much nanodust. Her palms throbbed painfully, as though from festering burns, and the muscles of her upper arms and calves had hardened into stiff things that felt ready to snap at any moment.
Just a little more, she said to herself and started up again.
With the exit right before her eyes, the shaft began to twist. It became difficult to move. She squeezed out the last of her strength and tried to make it up one more rung, and that was when she felt it: a strange sensation spreading out on her tongue, as if a piece of sugar candy had been crushed on top of it. The strength went out of her. Sweat that had pooled on the wings of her nose dribbled off. Fearfully, she moved the tip of her tongue across her teeth to make sure. Toward the back of her mouth on the right side, she found a huge, gaping emptiness. She spat out bitter-tasting saliva together with the shards of a broken tooth.
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