Sisyphean

by Dempow Torishima

  That was when Kugu-shi noticed something else: the number of caravan hands was short by one. He looked around, but the young fattener who had just lost an ear to that dust crystal was nowhere to be seen.

  “Where is … Saroku, was it?”

  “The boy didn’t get away in time. If only he’d joined the Kannagara, we might’ve been able to see him again someday. But he was never willing, no matter what I said to him.” Sagyoku-shii had been speaking in a monotone, but now suddenly her voice cracked: “Listen, Kugu-shi, you come with us … there’s still time for you to make it.”

  Kugu-shi held his peace and closed his eyes. It felt like his own body had just turned into an active dustwreck.

  Homaru shot a meaningful glance at Romon. “It’s no use,” he said. “Why do you think we kept this a secret for so long? But we’ll take the old geezer with us. His consciousness might come back if he’s Translated.”

  “Looks like a pile of wasteflesh already, though,” said Romon. “There’s no guarantee it’ll work.”

  Kugu-shi was on the verge of shouting, No! I won’t let you do that to him! when a groan rose up from right beside his feet. Everyone’s eyes turned to where Master lay.

  “That won’t be … necessary.” Like a seam whose stitches had just come loose, Master’s lips were moving. They were parched and cracked, and were beginning to ooze blood. “Where I’m useful is in the Dustclingers. In the Vastsea. I have no intention whatsoever of being parted from this worlde.”

  Neither Romon nor Homaru—let alone Kugu-shi—could conceal their joy, and they all cried out to him.

  “Romon and Homaru. As of this instant, you two are expelled. Leave now.”

  Cheerful smiles still on their faces, the two former clan-brethren turned their backs, and without a word set off across the still-smoldering floor of the valley. Sagyoku-shii and her apprentices followed along behind them.

  As Sagyoku-shii was heading off into the distance, she turned to look back just once.

  “Did the Kannagara give you your marching orders?” said Master. “Or did the Vastsea guide you? Or did those Vastsea crossers force your hand? Who put you up to this, I wonder?”

  “Huh?” Kugu-shi turned around and bent down next to Master.

  “I was watching you all the whole time,” the old man said. “But I couldn’t move. I’m sorry; there was nothing I could do.”

  “I’m the one who should apologize. Such a—” But Kugu-shi couldn’t continue past those words. The muscles in his face tensed up, and he wore an expression that was somewhere between laughter and tears.

  As he looked on, slender metal fibers started poking out all over Master’s body, intertwining themselves with the ground, as if sewing it and him together.

  Chapter 9:

  The Beginning

  Particles of light began to dance in a primordial darkness once thought to have been sealed away forever. Presently, a sharp beam of light shone into it, caressing every nook and cranny of a great mass of city and flesh and slumber, which had been functioning as a mere hub for shared branches of memory. At the touch of the beam, this conglomerate fell apart into fibers. Losses in the irrecoverable sections were supplemented by a steady flow of replacement data from subordinapes.

  Consciousness flickered faintly into being amid brain cells and nerves in the process of being assembled.

  It saw nothing, felt nothing, and remembered nothing, however; there was nothing that it wanted to do, and nothing that it didn’t want to do.

  Each time a bubble of perception floated to its surface, it simply popped and disappeared.

  Beneath eaves formed of brain matter, eyeballs, nerves, and so on were woven into existence, and pupils dilated.

  The darkness lost its depth and became metaphorically “visible” as a spherical kernel wall. The consciousness became aware that it was being held in custody, though it did not know the reason why or even who it was that was detained in the first place.

  In the back of its mind, letters began to assemble themselves into a line. It was a long line. It brought its eyes nearer to see what was written, and one by one, the letters blurred and became gigantic animals covered in white fur: white … mo … momonji … a long line of momonji … a caravan column … and leading it were scraplings wearing smiling faces. Severed branches of shared memory began to connect themselves to the past—a buried shrine deep underground … a pair of legs that had been wrenched from their stumps … an expanse of calmdust, like a lotus receptacle—and bubbles of flesh, gulls by the seashore, dinners with Hamuro, the yard with its davidia and plantain lilies—the fragrant smell of bread, warm paper bags, the town streets with their abundant greenery, the alleyway, the dimly lit—

  Hisauchi was walking alone down a dimly lit alleyway. In his arms he carried a warm paper bag. Beyond the familiar stucco walls that ran along both sides of the road were long rows of everyday, single-family homes. The trees in their yards threw out large canopies of branches and leaves. Dry leaves danced to the ground with their customary motions.

  The paper bag suddenly became heavier. When he looked, he saw that it had changed into a complex metal object resembling an engine. Unable to carry its weight, he let it go—or should have; one of his arms had fallen off with it. The hunk of metal and the arm that was still holding it dug into the ground and, with a sticky sound, continued to gradually sink. A slight creaking began to emanate from the land.

  With a sigh, Hisauchi looked up overhead. The black celestial sphere began spitting out a succession of complex geometrical patterns, and soon it looked like the surface of a lake when it rains. The repeating patterns increased in speed until the eye could no longer follow them, then they all went blurry. Countless stars were beginning to twinkle—or so he was thinking when the sky brightened with a faint whiteness, only to hastily darken again. In brilliant, repeating flashes, the day and the night and the sun, moon, and stars pursued one another across the heavens, moving so quickly that each seemed the afterimage of what came before it.

  Dazzled, Hisauchi closed his eyes.

  He began to feel the touch of fur in the palm of his right hand.

  “Master!”

  The voice called out to him from behind, and taking his hand off the momonji, he turned and looked back.

  Kugu-shi, wearing his shadecap, was approaching him from far away. At his side, the giant momonji were crawling slowly forward as the wind beat against their soft down. The gusts were getting terribly strong.

  He remembered now: he was still going on momonji drives.

  He was old though, and most of his former strength was gone. This might well be his final journey.

  With the exception of his apprentices Kugu-shi and Gei’ei-shi, the lineup of clan brethren was now entirely different—except for one other: Renji, in a state of near-death, was still sealed within a crystalline dustwrought carried in a covered wagon at the tail end of the column. It had taken many months of hard work, but they had finally succeeded in hauling her up from the deep layers of the Vastsea.

  No matter how they wore themselves out trying though, they couldn’t cast out the possession verse that was in crystal to get Renji out of it. Renji had chanted that dustwrought as an emergency shelter even as the active layer was swallowing her, and for some reason, it was stubbornly holding onto its eidos and function. Using the possession verse employed here, it might have been possible to realize the complete calming of the Vastsea. However, to know that would also be to break down that perfection.

  Without warning, Master was taken suddenly with the notion that the one in the crystal was not Renji, but in fact his own veriform.

  From behind him, the sound of footfalls making long strides drew near. Kugu-shi came up beside him and stared at his face. To the right and left of Kugu-shi’s wide nose, both eyes were moist for some reason.

  “I’ve been calling you over and
over,” he said.

  “I was just remembering some things about myself.”

  “What are you on about? Come on, look what’s headed our way.”

  Master turned his heavy old body around.

  “Farther off, toward that hill.”

  Another caravan was just descending the dustwreck hill Kugu-shi indicated. The first several momonji in the lead were goldeneyes. Catching the strong light of the westering sun, the irises inside their golden eyeballs shone like works of damascene craftsmanship.

  By their side walked a young girl. She was striding across the uneven ground on legs of silvery white.

  The girl was also looking this way. She pushed back her shadecap, and a fluff of cottony walnut hair appeared. Her haggard face, gaunt like that of a convalescent, wore a smile, allowing twin rows of white teeth to peek through.

  “That couldn’t be—”

  Master and Kugu-shi raised their hands up high, twisting their wrists and bending their elbows. From across the windswept plain, the girl returned the gesture. It was a common greeting that caravans exchanged when passing one another.

  The two momonji caravans headed toward each another for a little while before diverging once again.

  A lone spider came crawling across the junk-strewn ground. It walked up in front of them; lowered its huge, inflated abdomanus; and formed a membrane across the spaces between its eight legs, which it then began to flap like wings. It flew up in front of Master’s nose, and he caught it—an earwing butterfly—by the roots of its wings. The earwing extended its proboscis, placing the pointed tip against its belly. Its belly, which was a vocollector tube, then began to turn.

  In fits and starts, Master could hear a soft, low voice that sounded like someone speaking with cartilage in her mouth. Master brought his ear closer and narrowed his eyes.

  “So even Master has tear ducts,” Kugu-shi teased happily. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen them in action. So what does Umari have to say?”

  Biting down hard on his memories, Master raised his voice in laughter.

  “That girl! She’s been digging and digging through archive vaults at recuperation blocks all over the place, and she seems to have really found something.”

  “What did she say she’s found?”

  “It seems she’ll be entertaining us next time we meet up in a recuperation block.”

  He recorded only a set of coordinates in the earwing’s vocollector tube, then released it in midair.

  “What’s this all about? Tell me, please, Master.”

  Swept off course repeatedly by the powerful winds, the earwing receded into the distance as it chased after Umari’s column.

  Master squatted down on the ground and grabbed hold of an antique skittle that had been the spider’s abdomanus.

  That day, strong winds were blowing across the Vastsea, and many sounds resounded like the distant howls of giant beasts, like waves upon the ocean—like parts in a multilayered composition. Amid the movements of the Vastsea whose actions no man could read, many caravans were at a standstill, having lost sight of the routes along which they should progress. The reason for all this became clear as a rumbling in the atmosphere presently began to be heard.

  All were looking up at a tattered sky full of clouds resembling scrapes and scratches: Master and Kugu-shi from the midst of a dustwreck jungle, Umari from a belt of calmdust.

  A huge, rounded pillar of chalk was reaching up toward the heavens. It reminded onlookers of the smoke of a volcanic eruption. With ferocious energy, it climbed unstoppably onward. Its coordinates were the same as the Dustclingers’ present destination. Farther off in the distance still, the slightly blurred shapes of two more white pillars could be seen.

  Master opened the cap of his skittle and swallowed a gulp of sake. A strong smell of iodine spread through his nostrils.

  “Is that a floating bridge?” Kugu-shi murmured as he took the skittle in hand.

  Umari, on the lotus receptacle, was still grooming the sweat-steamed down of a frightened momonji.

  A drizzling rain began to fall.

  Outside the atmosphere, the floating bridges connecting heaven and earth budded into many reed arks loaded with planetary bioprobes and released them toward the far horizons. Afterward, the columns quickly crumbled, like weathered dirt walls, and darkened the sky with their dustsmoke.

  Spreading out from the three collapsed floating bridges, morphwave after morphwave rolled out across the activated Vastsea, triggering a Great Dust Plague that rivaled even that great disaster of antiquity. Once again, many recuperation blocks were swallowed by the waves and sank beneath the dust.

  When the waves receded, towns began to pop up one after another, as though the world that had existed before the dustsinks had returned. Over ten thousand people were living peacefully in those days. There were even some who returned from evacuation chrysalises and managed to reunite with their old friends. This was a temporary leakage from the though. Eventually the people, the houses, and everything else began to melt.

  The scarce number of human survivors once again formed caravans and began trekking back and forth across the Vastsea.

  The number of those living on the Vastsea continued to dwindle inexorably.

  On the night that the blazing red trails of the meteor swarm—of the prison shells from another world—came streaking across the sky, there were only a bare handful of caravans left to behold them.

  Finale

  The Chaos was expelled into the supergravity that lay in the midst of the accretion disk.

  As it fell away toward darkness eternal, the past raining down from beyond was absorbed into every nanite of its being—the ragged gasps of worlds made into Cradleland; the ephemeral, blissful exhalations of civilizations blossoming anew; brilliant blue skies shining from the shards of sky spheres; bright little lights blinking through the Mudsea; reports from interstellar spacecraft seeking new lands and new skies—these the sounds of homecomings long borne in their bellies—the rumbling of the Great Dust Plague that covered the face of the land; the sound of the canvassers’ … of the cherubim’s … of the pleopods; the footfalls of caravans crossing the Vastsea; the creaks of the ropes as momonji crawled along; the roar of engines as reed arks departed the floating bridge; the friction of prison-shells as they rained down toward the earth; the impacts; the heavy crashes of waves on the vast, reaffirmed land; the frozen sighs of those perfect attendants forced to labor daily without end; the belches of presidents waiting eagerly to go home; the screwlike noises of a Planetary Child on the axis of a world—all of these things were taking the place of countless stars scattered across untouched sectors on lines of sight spreading out continuously in every direction from the ship-shell. Amid the supergravity, the Chaos was destroyed, and yet the form of it remained, scattered across all possible worlds.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dempow Torishima was born in Osaka. He graduated from Osaka College of Art and worked as a freelance designer and illustrator. He won the Sogen SF Short Story Award with his debut fiction “Sisyphean” (Kaikin no to) in 2011. Since then, he has been writing a series of stories in the same far-future world of Sisyphean, which was published as Sisyphean and Other Stories in 2013. The book was chosen as the best SF of 2013 in SF Magazine, won the Japan SF Award, and was nominated for the Seiun Award in 2014.