No sooner did it occur to her that the shaft wall might be going flaccid than she felt its pressure on her. It began to pulsate, like the peristaltic movements in the digestive tract. With an audible crack, the bonebell in her breast pocket broke.
Umari untied the cord that held Master to her back, curled up her body, and crawled down underneath Master. Bracing her legs firmly on the ladder, using the elastic wall to just barely support her back, she pushed Master’s huge form upward little by little.
Her left foot was cramping by the time she finally pushed him up to the surface. Both arms were trembling as she pulled her own upper body onto the rim of the shaft and blew out an exhalation as though it had been squeezed out of her. It felt like her alveoli were setting off tiny explosions one after another.
She tried to get her right leg onto the rim of the shaft, but it wouldn’t budge. She looked down as the shaft, puckering like a pair of lips, closed in around both of her legs, all the way up above her knees.
Frantically, she chanted carrier tone, but her breathing was so ragged she couldn’t hold it; it had no effect on the nanodust. As she squirmed trying to get loose, the left arm that was supporting her body also sank into the ground. The ground squeezed her arm and her legs, and in agony Umari gave a shrill scream, like a thick iron beam being twisted to the breaking point. She couldn’t believe such a sound had come from her. She cried out for help through tears and through mucus, but Master remained limp and didn’t move.
The dull sounds of squishing flesh and breaking bones came to her with maddening sluggishness. She felt all the color draining from her face, a greasy sweat breaking out all over.
Unexpectedly, her body became lighter, and she fell over onto her face.
When she turned her upper body around, everything beyond a point just above her knees was gone, and bright red blood was gushing out. She extended her left hand to try to stanch the bleeding but saw nothing beyond the wrist there either. Her body had lost so much heat that she felt like she had frozen.
Even as she writhed amid the pain and the terror that assaulted her, Umari drew her tamer and set it on her stomach, using her right hand only. With trembling fingers, she picked an eidos bullet from her ammo belt, loaded it, and pressed the tamer up against the crystalline lattice. Holding her breath, she pulled the trigger. A current ran through her whole body, and her spine arched backward.
Presently, medibugs known as scab ants boiled up out of the bullet hole and began to grow. Leaping lightly, they set about covering the severed ends of her legs and wrist. She moaned in the warm numbness.
Besides the scab ants, medibugs resembling centipedes and spiders had also spontaneously generated, but finding themselves with nowhere to go, they were simply left stamping their feet. It was easy for these kinds of bugs to respond to humans and grow automatically, but there was no guarantee they would be the proper type, and there were plenty of examples of them undergoing dangerous transformations.
If I can just send out some earwings next—
Repeatedly, Umari pulled eidos shells from her ammo belt only to drop them, and by the time she finally managed to reload her tamer, she lacked the strength to pull the trigger.
Die! her finger laughed scornfully.
But when her head started to go fuzzy from the excess of pain, she noticed a small, distant shadow that reminded her of a seedling that had just broken through the sheath of its seed. It was a linelayer, carrying a huge spool of guideline on his back. He was getting closer, using a pulley on his waist to trail the momonji guideline over the ground.
Far, far beyond him, she could see the blurry shapes of momonji. Umari tried to call out, but all that would come from her mouth were bitter-tasting bubbles and the sound of escaping air.
The linelayer came to a halt and shifted his center of gravity to one leg. The wind beat against his shadecap, and in that moment his face turned toward Umari. She could sense his two eyes, so far away she couldn’t possibly see them, staring at her two legs, which couldn’t possibly still be there. The linelayer set his huge spool of guideline down on the ground and quietly came running.
2
A solitary momonji was crawling along a guideline laid across the calmdust belt.
On its soft back, Umari was lying face-up next to Master. With her right hand, Umari was clutching its soft down, her body writhing as she endured the intense pain.
Walking along beside them at an easygoing gait was tall, skinny Soho-shii.
“They just couldn’t wait,” he said.
Umari raised her head and could see Kugu-shi and Gei’ei-shi come running toward them. Soho-shii had sent earwing butterflies ahead to let them know what had happened. The potsherd-brown of the recuperation block towered up behind the two of them. Umari lowered her head back into the soft fur, and tears pooled in her eyes.
The momonji’s epidermis was suddenly pulled over toward one side. Kugu-shi and Gei’ei-shi had scrambled up onto its body. The two of them cried out to Master.
Master moaned as if in answer. Reddish-black dried blood covered an area from just below his nose all the way down to his throat.
“Umari …” Kugu-shi was staring at the severed ends of Umari’s legs.
“I’m sorry, Brother … I’m sorry. I’m sorry …” The words came spilling out, and she couldn’t stop them.
“Does it hurt?”
She nodded. He pulled a needler from the case that hung from his belt and pierced her sweaty neck with it. The pain began to ebb, and she closed her eyes.
The tense voices of her two teammates calling out to Master sounded far away, as if she had a seashell pressed against her ear. Whenever she was on the point of falling asleep, her consciousness would rise back to the surface, only to start drowsing once again.
A vibration was transmitted to her through her back. She could tell that the momonji had taken its claw-legs off the guideline and was crawling up the base of the recuperation block.
The warmth of the sun weakened, and she opened her eyes just slightly. The groined archway of the gate was passing by directly overhead.
She heard the sound of shoe soles scraping across the ground. Soho-shii was leaning against the momonji’s face with his full weight.
The momonji’s body was pushed upward just slightly, and then it came to a halt.
Umari turned her face to one side and saw a line of vendors’ roofs. Beyond them, piles of dungplast stretched out alongside the blockwall like a chain of small mountains, and in the valleys between, people were gathering. Maybe the painkillers were to blame, but all of their faces looked like Hanishibe’s. One of them bore a resemblance to Romon. She tried to communicate this but was unable to speak properly.
She had been sleeping again, it seemed.
Consciousness returned at the sound of footsteps racing toward her. She could hear Renji’s and Homaru’s panic-stricken voices.
“You two take care of Umari,” said Kugu-shi.
She could hear the pair gasp. Umari’s body was pulled away from the warm fur and began to descend. Something struck against her legs’ severed ends, and Umari was turned over, facing upward. At last, she was set down on the ground. Bathed in the momonji’s warm exhalations, she felt herself being lifted up again—unsteadily—and laid down on a stretcher.
Renji’s upside-down face was right before her eyes. Her thick eyelashes were like eaves over eyes she had averted from Umari.
On one side of Umari’s field of view, a wall of white hair began to move. Urged on by Soho-shii, the giant momonji was slowly turning around.
“Huh? Why, Brother Soho-shii, didn’t you just set out—?” Then from the other side of the momonji, an unexpected voice gasped.
“‘Keep a firm grasp on the situation,’” said Soho-shii. “Isn’t that what I always say, Romon? That’s why there’s no end to these injuries. Kugu-shi! When the old m
an wakes up, tell him I’ll be coming by every month to collect interest on his borrowed life.”
“Thank you for your help,” Kugu-shi said with a slight bow.
“Just look at this mess! I told you this was going to happen someday!” Romon’s voice was shrill and emphatic. “What are we supposed to do now, Brother? Departure’s in four days!”
“That discussion can wait until we’ve carried these two back to the dojo. You go call Dr. Shibata.”
“These two?” Romon’s face entered Umari’s blurred field of view from a diagonal angle. “Ah, dungheaps! So that’s who got in the way. This is why I was always against letting this … this child into the Dustclingers.”
“Stop it, Romon,” said Homaru. “The girl can’t ever …”
“No,” murmured Renji. “Umari’s a convalescent, and a convalescent is what she’ll go right back to being.”
Master and Umari were carried to the Dustclingers’ one-story dojo in the residential district, where they were laid out on bedding.
Umari provided a brief summary of what had happened.
“That dirty crawlbacker!” Kugu-shi spat, pressing his face against the wall. “I knew there was something fishy about him. I saw him out on the street earlier, carrying this black box around all serious-like. I should’ve punched his lights out.”
“You’re just full of energy, aren’t you?” a new voice said. “Now shut up before I wire your mouth closed.”
The door marked “Ki” had opened. Pushed along by an assistant in a wheelchair made of bone, an old woman covered in wrinkles came into the room. Behind her, Romon shut the door.
“Dr. Shibata.”
The clan-brethren greeted her meekly. Rumor had it that she had changed from a man to a woman when she was younger, but now she was so wrinkled that no one could guess what gender she was from her looks alone. She was so old that patients at her clinic sometimes joked that she was the one who should be admitted, but she was also one of the few clinicians well-versed in medical techniques from before the Great Dust Plague.
Her assistant, looking like a wax figure in a stand-up-collar shirt, lifted Dr. Shibata out of the wheelchair and set her down at Master’s bedside.
“Well, Ol’ Dustclinger, this is quite a mess we have here, isn’t it?”
Dr. Shibata narrowed her eyes, making the loose skin under them bulge outward. There were some who said in all seriousness that she had specialized sensory organs hidden inside of those bags that could look right into the body and see the parts that were afflicted.
The assistant took a large leather bag from a rack on the back of the wheelchair. He released its clasp with an audible snap and opened the top. The bag was packed with countless bizarre medical instruments, and after asking Romon to go get a bucket, he pulled out a tube-shaped container and handed it to the doctor.
With trembling hands, the doctor took off the lid of the container and pulled out a string of several silvery white jewels that were stuck together. With fingers as shriveled as raisins, she popped off the jewels one by one, dropping them onto Master’s chest.
When this was done, she laced the fingers of both her hands and began reciting a stream of possession-verse that sounded like a sutra. Many limbs stretched out of the jewels, and they began moving about like mites. They crawled over his throat, climbed up his chin, leapt across his lips, and burrowed into his nostrils one at a time.
“These are medibugs that I made out of eidos bullets I originally bought from you. I trust you’ll have no complaints … even if they go berserk and leave him full of holes, right?”
She laughed, exposing twin rows of yellow teeth with a few silver ones mixed in. That kind of thing frequently happened when the possession-verse was composed by an unskilled dustmancer.
Romon was back now, and he placed the bucket near Master’s head, right where the doctor was pointing.
After a little while, a single medibug came rolling back out of Master’s nostril and began unspooling string from its posterior. The doctor ran her fingertip over it and gave instructions to her assistant.
The assistant pulled a coiled tube from the case, unraveled it, and stretched it out over the bucket. Finally, he stuck one end deep into Master’s nose. A bag of skin resembling a scrotum was hanging from the middle of the tube; the assistant started squeezing it tightly. Dark blood began squirting and spurting from the other end of the tube, which curved down into the bucket.
At last, the remaining medibugs returned as well. Each one spat out its string, and the doctor’s face blanched as she read it with her fingertips.
“Doctor?” Kugu-shi asked in a whisper.
“The treatment is finished, and it all went well. They even sewed up the ruptured blood vessels—but his brainwaves are disturbed in a way I’ve never seen before. This Dustclinger’s affliction may be due to a disorder of the cranial nerves.”
“You mean nerve disease?”
“No, I mean that every nerve in his body is artificial. If they were made of Yaoyorozu or Tsukumo, they couldn’t have remained functional without being affected by the Vastsea. They’re probably made of something older.”
“Yaoyorozu?” Homaru asked.
“It’s a product name for the raw material that nanodust was made from.”
“I know that, but for something like Yaoyorozu to have been used …”
“Exactly,” said Romon. “We’d be talking about something that happened before the Great Dust Plague. That was three hundred years ago, wasn’t it?”
“What? Don’t you all know?” the doctor said, turning to look at Romon.
“Master,” said Kugu-shi, his thick arms crossed, “is a survivor of the Great Dust Plague.”
“That’s right,” Gei’ei-shi agreed with a nod.
Umari heard Renji’s gasp and turned her face upward, staring at a ceiling mottled with peeling dungplast.
“Whoa, whoa! Just how old is he supposed to be?”
“I myself am a witness,” the doctor said to the astonished apprentices. “Surely you lot have the nightmares too. But the Great Dust Plague is what reminds me that those aren’t nightmares or anything even close. Even now, I’ve got memories coming back to me all day long, and sometimes they even make my teeth chatter. After the Floating Bridges fell and the Second Evacuation came to a standstill, everything started to go downhill. Those of us who refused to be Translated—or were refused Translation—were insulted with slurs like ‘non-replayable intellect,’ and our only option was to build evacuation chrysalises, lock ourselves up in them, and wait out the Great Dust Plague in a state of low-metabolism suspended animation, having no idea when it would be over.”
“I’ve heard that the Great Dust Plague settled down after about thirty years,” Homaru said.
“It did, although the actual period varied from place to place. The evacuation chrysalises made estimates of the Vastsea’s activation state, molted out their occupants, and became new living spaces called recuperation blocks. But there were other, rare cases where evacuation chrysalises might spend two hundred years or more sunk in the Vastsea before someone happened across them and rescued their occupants. That was what happened to us.”
“That’s … incredible …”
“So, how can we help Master get better?” Kugu-shi asked.
“I don’t know what to do myself. But there’s a clinician by the name of Kawamura at Rengen Recuperation Block who was with us in the same evacuation chrysalis. Originally, he was a technician whose work involved nanomotes. If he could have a look at him …”
“Rengen Recuperation Block isn’t far from our next destination,” Kugu-shi said. “We’ll go see him.”
Umari started coughing hard. Renji, who was sitting at her side, put a hand under her head, lifted it up, and put a bag to her mouth. She vomited up bloody phlegm. It was sticky in her throat.
The doctor nodded and signaled to her assistant with a jerk of her chin. He picked her up off the floor and set her back down next to Umari.
“Now, let’s have a look at you.” With the bags under her eyes, she stared at the violently choking Umari. She opened Umari’s shirt, and after pressing her stethoscope against a chest that showed all its ribs, she unleashed the medibugs again and had them burrow in through her nostrils.
The sensation of foreign objects inside her moved down her throat, and soon her lungs began to hurt, as if they were being pierced by countless tiny needles.
Next, the doctor took off several of the scab-ants covering the severed ends of her legs and checked the condition of the wounds.
“Your wounds have already forgotten legs were ever there and have almost closed. There’s not a thing left for an old clinician like me to do. Um, what’s your name?”
“I’m Renji.”
“What’s in a momonji’s second-row-right and fifth-row-left claw-legs?”
“Um, painkillers and antibiotics.”
“Buy some from the pestler, and have this girl take both after every meal. Once her condition stabilizes, you can buy her prosthetic legs and a staff.”
Umari sneezed repeatedly, blowing medibugs every which way.
The doctor held out her round container and made them go back inside by humming carrier tone. Dr. Shibata’s assistant set her back in her wheelchair, and after they had gone, the clan-brethren sat down in a circle and opened up a discussion of what to do about the momonji drive coming up in four days—Master was supposed to have served as team leader. The caravan’s employer was waiting in Nankou for their arrival, and based on the projected course of the radioactive mobiles, departure could no longer be delayed. They had their instructions from Master already and had mostly finished mapping the route and making the eidos bullets. All that was left now was to make it through the journey by themselves.
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