by Ian McDonald
“Marcus? You okay?
“Marcus!”
The figure on the floor, lit blue by the light of the screen, lay supine, head tilted back, repeatedly slamming the rear of its skull against the cigarette-burned floor tiles. Arms and legs thrashed, the body convulsed epileptically. Tears of blood trickled from each eye, down the cheeks, onto the floor.
“Christ, Marcus!” Ethan Ring came around the desk to touch, to help, to do something, anything, anything. And the thing in the blue screen reached out and smashed him against the wall.
ONCE, WHEN ETHAN RING was a boy, he had given himself a severe electric shock playing with an old television.
Once Ethan Ring caught some mutant strain of influenza that sent his temperature to 103 and hallucinated he was climbing the concrete and glass face of an infinite office block, up and up and up and up and up.
Once, Nikki Ring’s old Vauxhall Nova with Ethan-at-seven in the backseat had been sideswiped at a dark country crossing by something that did not stop and it had been spun three times around before Ethan Ring came to looking at a billboard proclaiming “All Have Sinned and Fallen Short of the Glory of God.”
Once, Ethan Ring, walking merrily mellow back to his flat, had been set upon by two young white men in designer sportswear who headbutted him, kicked him in the small of the back, and relieved him of eighty ecus and a take-away curry.
The thing in the screen was all those. The thing in the screen was more. It was shock. Toxic karmic physical spiritual emotional culture techno socio cold turkey pure total utter: shock.
His heart skipped and misfired. His breath fluttered. His head screamed migraine at him. His hands, his arms, his legs, would not obey him but thrashed spastically. Urgent nausea pressed at the base of his gullet. He opened his eyes. The thing in the screen leapt out of his peripheral vision and slammed his brain against the inside of his skull. He waited forever hiding inside his skull until proprioception told him his body would now do what he told it. Eyes closed, he groped across the floor. He swore at his hands stop shaking, stop fucking shaking. His eyes flickered at the touch of soft, spasming flesh. No. No. Medusa’s sister, basilisk’s brother. To look upon their faces was to die. Fingers climbed the desk leg, crossed the desktop, found the off switch, and pushed it. Almost, he opened his eyes. Almost. Marcus could have printed out a hardcopy. Fingers felt their way to the printer, delved into its nooks and crevices. Nothing. He opened his eyes. The disk. The fracter disk. He ejected it from the drive. It burned his hand like an ingot of white iron. Taking the elevator to the front door was eternal torment.
“If you boys spent as much time on your projects as you did in the Union bar…” admonished the doorman, well used to student excess.
“An ambulance!” Ethan Ring screamed. “Call a fucking ambulance!”
The last of the ten Sefirot was enthroned.
Keter: the Void. Annihilation.
THERE IS TO BE a Fire Ceremony tonight at Temple Twenty-four. All are welcome, Priest Tsunoda tells us. He is a small, vigorous man of great charm and charisma; a retired cram-school teacher in Beloved Schoolmaster tradition of Bette Davis, Robert Donat, Robin Williams. The stories that roost around this isolated cluster of three Temples at the tip of the Muroto Peninsula whisper that he could have been a Nobel laureate in his chosen field of mathematics, but he renounced worldly fame and the praises of men to devote his life to what he called “subversion through education”: kebabing the Japanese sacred cow of exam-cram-4-job-4-life-in-the-Company on the thin, dangerous skewer of learning for learning’s sake. School governors, PTAs, local politicians, villified him. His students deified him. Bertrand Russell’s quotable: “How good it is to know things!” had been painted above his chalkboard. It followed him to Temple Twenty-four with only one change: the addition of the prefix “un” to the penultimate word of the motto.
“One third of your life to learn things, and the rest of it to unlearn all the rubbish they cram into you,” he says as he shows us to our neat, scrupulously clean room, scented with sandalwood, lavender, and the sea. “Quality: to know what is good, what is not good, and why: that was what I was trying to teach. If even a handful learned that, I can pass from this world content.”
Cape Muroto is a sixty-mile sharks-tooth hooked into the skin of the Western Pacific Basin. Its northern face is a forbidding scarp of sheer black cliff, its southern a grand sweep of sandy bays and headlands terminating in Cape Ashizuri two hundred kilometers to the south. Enola Gay used Moroto as a landmark en route from Tinian Island to her two minutes of fame over Hiroshima. To the henro, it marked in no uncertain terms the arrival of the hardships of Tosa Prefecture.
Tosa is the Devil’s country,
No hospitality there, you may be sure.
complained a sixteenth-century henro. The names may have changed—it’s Kōchi Prefecture now—but the song remains the same.
We were ten kilometers out on the main road east out of Hiyasa—not a route we would have chosen but the rough coastal terrain made beach riding impossible—when we hit the checkpoint. We came on it unawares, blindsided by a line of trucks. Glimpsing uniforms and flashing blue lights between the walls of traffic, we imagined an RTA. Only at the head of the queue did we see our mistake. Two armored personnel carriers—ex-military—were parked across the highway; on their flanks, on the helmets and shoulders of the armored men checking the vehicles through one by one was a symbol of an eagle clutching crossed lightning bolts in its talons and the name: Tosa Securities Incorporated.
They were the ones who had caused Mr. Morikawa’s death at Temple Twelve. We were entering the heart of their empire.
“Purging undesirable elements, they tell you,” the driver of a pickup told us. He was transporting a load of young trees with their roots wrapped in wet sacking. “My ass. It’s good old medieval transit tax.”
A white-helmeted, white-gloved private policeman beckoned us forward, polite, but eternally a policeman. Our security transit passes—supposedly good for all the private forces on the pilgrimage route—henro albums, and my European passport were examined minutely, then taken for further examination by an unseen officer inside one of the troop transports. I found it a thoroughly disagreeable sensation, to have one’s identity, one’s right to move and be, taken away, to be so vulnerable. After ten minutes our papers were returned stamped with transit permits and thirty-day policy cover-notes for which we were required to part with thirty thousand yen each.
At least you could tell Long John Silver by the parrot on his shoulder. I could not rid myself of the impression that my documents had been digitally scanned. They smelled vaguely… electronic, like fresh photocopies, or faxes. Everything in order, the policeman welcomed us to Kōchi Prefecture, advised us to stick wherever possible to the signposted Approved Tourist Route as “Antisocial Elements” were still active and he could not guarantee that our policy would fully cover us if we wandered off the proper way. He politely bowed us through. Dodgy cover or not, we were seldom so glad to find an opportunity to turn off the Approved Tourist Route onto the old henro path.
The Way, through coastal towns, along fearsome cliff paths, was terrifying and thrilling. The eighty kilometer stretch between Twenty-three and Twenty-four—to us, only a strenuous day’s ride—with few towns and less alms persuaded many to rethink their calling to the pilgrim life. One chronicler of the pilgrimage comments that Awa, the prefecture behind us, was famed for its perfection of the art of the ballad-drama. Tosa bred fighting dogs. On the coast road stand stone images of Jizo, protector of children, living gateway between worlds, rescuer of the perishing from the torments of hell. The images all look out to sea, watching over the souls of sailors, fishermen, and all who go down to the sea in ships. Hard land. Stern spirits.
Though it is late, and we are tired, Priest Tsunoda advises us to visit the sea caves while there is still light. Tucked between the roots of a subtropical banyan, the wave-cut caves are wide, low, dry, intricately intersecting with
each other. This is the place where the Daishi at last achieved enlightenment as the morning star, the avatar of Kokuzo, rose out of Yakushi’s Pure World in the East. Pilgrims have built cairns of flat sea-washed stones in commemoration of his achievement, as pilgrims will. The sound of the sea is oddly muted, the air moves in odd vortices through the interlinked caves, but try as I might I cannot find in myself any of that ancient spirit of ecstasy and tranquillity. All long since carried away with the flotsam on the flooding tide. The light is fading fast now, shadows fusing and melting into greater darknesses. I lift a stone to place it on a cairn. In the dark recesses of the grotto a shadow moves.
My right hand moves toward the cuff of my left glove.
“Sorry to have alarmed you, brother henro,” a refined male voice says. There is a strange, arthropodal clicking. Something moves in the shadows, steps toward us on too many feet. Far too many feet. Half man, half… “Please, place your stone,” the hemi-human says. “Permit me to introduce myself. Mr. Spider at your service.”
As he clicks and hums his way over the rocks he tells us the story of his last two incarnations on his way to enlightenment. He first was as Kiyoshi Ueno, number one salesperson of the IkoIko Zipper Company; then came his head-to-head encounter one Tuesday night with a ghost-driver in the fast lane of the West Bay Elevated Sky Way. Closing velocity: two hundred kph; range: fifty meters; the ghost-driver chickened, lost it, and flipped across three lanes inbound to fireball out among Korean guest-workers’ allotments. IkoIko Zipper Salesperson of the Year impacted with the central crash barrier and was removed to the Chiba District Trauma Center sustaining multiple fractures to fifty percent of his skeleton. After four months immobilized in a steel frame, only his spinal cord in the region of vertebrae twelve and thirteen remained unrepaired and, his doctors gently convinced him, unrepairable. At some point in those four months fixed to the corners of the metal frame the life that was Kiyoshi Ueno died and, while the attention of the medical robots was turned elsewhere, was reborn as Mr. Spider.
The mobility unit fits around the waist and supports his body in a plastic cradle. Six biomotor legs carry him across the surface of the planet; strong, tireless, but to my unenlightened eyes disturbing: synthetic muscle hooked onto metal limbs by neuroplastic sinews. At his invitation we examine the synaptic interfacers drilled into the back of his neck, the rainbow swathes of datacore. He proudly points out the corporate ident stickers plastered over every available surface of his walker. Similar logos adorn his henro hat and robe. His stole is sponsored by the Sea of Tranquillity Holistic Drinks Company, his staff by Sony. His henro bell, made for him by one of the last Living Treasures, the irreplaceable master craftspersons of Japan, rings continuously as he moves with a deep, ocean-clear voice, oddly tranquil for such restlessness.
“The Daishi gave me back my gift of mobility so that I might use it not for myself, as I did when I was Kiyoshi Ueno, but for others,” he says. Since leaving rehab he has raised money for just causes by the simple—for some—act of walking. The Tokaido first, then the pilgrimage of the thirty-three temples of Kannon that cross the spine of Honshu from sea to shining sea. After that climbing Mount Koya to the Shingon capital on its summit, and going straight on to complete the miniature circular pilgrimage of temples on Shodo Island in the Inland Sea. These, he says, were merely preparations for this his heart’s desire, the great Shikoku pilgrimage. Twenty major companies are sponsoring him or have donated funds to enable him to make the trip; the number of individuals runs into the hundreds. A Tokyo media-news company are payrolling him for progress reports; he faxes them in as regularly as the humbler pace of a foot pilgrim will permit. With the money he hopes to alleviate the suffering of children worldwide.
“We are the most terrible of species,” he says. “Only praying mantises hate and mistreat their offspring more.”
True holiness, I suppose, is like true humility. The one who claims to possess it is the furthest from it. Mr. Spider would be deeply shocked if he were told he was a true hijiri.
After dinner, Mas apologizes and slips out to make a lengthy ’phone call. Mr. Spider and I take tea and oranges and he tells me his pilgrim’s tales. May he mention us in his next report? Priest Tsunoda has said he may use the temple fax. I would deem it an honor, I tell him, and it is not mere polite formalism. Time spent in the company of remarkable men is time well spent.
We go up to the Fire Ceremony, where we are joined by two others, young women, one of them heavily pregnant. We kneel, we five, before the central image of the Buddha, exquisitely crafted, as things must be in Shingon, the two young women, Mas, me, Mr. Spider, his metal legs folded beneath him like some cyborg centaur in repose.
One hundred and eight sticks of fragrant wood for the hundred and eight illusions of man.
Fire leaps in the stone basin on the altar, chases strange shadows from the recesses of the Daishi Hall.
The gong is struck. The bells rung. The mantras chanted. The prayers recited.
One by one, the hundred and eight sticks—the delusions of the material world, the hardships of the spiritual way, the sins of man’s condition—are fed to the flames.
Doves rustle their rice-paper wings under the hammerbeams of the roof.
Fragrant leaves, incenses, oils, are cast upon the fire. Shadows move upon the priest’s face, like uneaten sins driven from the lips and nostrils by the influx of penetrating light.
In all the world, there are only two sounds. The voice of Priest Tsunoda intoning the prayers. The heavy thump of the surf—more felt than heard—upon the rocks beneath Temple Twenty-three. At times those two sounds flow into one sound, one universal ocean-voice. The lanterns move in the warm night wind, the shadows shift. And the sense of the numinous that had eluded me in the sea caves takes me up.
Of the time spent in that altered state of consciousness called divine ecstasy no one can speak for it transcends thought, self, language, logic. Any statement that may be made about it falls so far short of the truth of the experience as to be at best worthless, at worst misleading. Pure being. Well the medieval mystics named it the Cloud of Unknowing.
The flames gutter low. The chant ends. Beater strikes gong. The spirits are dispelled. Our sins, our weaknesses, our failures and false desires are burned to nothing. Priest Tsunoda indicates for us to draw near and rub the ashes onto whatever part of us is in need of grace. The second young woman rubs her pregnant friend’s belly. The pregnant woman rubs ash onto her friend’s lips, breasts, and loins. Mr. Spider rubs ash into his breast. “Keep my spirit pure, Lord Daishi,” he whispers. “Keep my purposes holy.” His bell whispers in reply. I lift the soft gray ash onto my fingers and rub a little carefully into the synthetic plastic palm of each hand. Mas watches me, takes ash from the firebowl, rubs it into his heart and his head.
MY WOODEN ROOM IS too full of the sound of the sea for sleep, the moon too bright, and I fear Mas’s voice crying out beyond the shoji door in a sleep through which the akiras run with banners and blades in their fists, cutting long, slow-healing gashes along the folds of his brain. I fear it because there are things in my demon box that could end his nightmares, end them as if they had never been, and I fear them more. I fear the seduction of my power. Outside in the night the temple is still, dark, the air warm, troubled only the dim ionospheric rumble of aerospacers, the trans-horizon grumble of bulk carrier engines. I walk out along the cliff edge. The broken, moonlit ocean below is an almost sexual enticement. Heights have always held an unclean fascination for me, heights over dark water most of all. When I found Luka that time in San Francisco she had invited me to join her in a long-anticipated ambition to walk the Golden Gate Bridge. (“Not run, not jog, not power-walk, not street-hike, just per-am-bu-late, Eth.”) We stopped where the sweeps of cable meet to watch the radio masts and satellite dishes of a Trans-Pacific freighter pass beneath (perhaps indeed the same one I hear tonight, out on the dark ocean) and I had confessed.
“Would it shock you if I said
part of me wants to climb up on the rail and jump off?”
“Born with the moon in Cancer, under the sign of two transpolars,” she had said. “Self-destruction shot through you like lightning.”
How easy—how appealing—to fetch my bicycle and ride off into Kannon’s Pure Land in the South. I can imagine the wheels leaving the neat turf of the cliff edge. I can imagine man and machine falling together; I can anticipate the skill that will be necessary to keep us one unity, manmachine. What I cannot imagine is the impact of the moonlit, wave-washed rock.
When the voice speaks, it is as if the Daishi himself has interrupted my thoughts.
“The wounded and the maimed, so?” Mr. Spider is night-silent on his arthropod legs. “Some places are naturally more conducive to it than others. Waterfalls. Lakes. Woodland clearings. Some gardens. High places, of course. Some places can move to suicide people who would never consider killing themselves ordinarily. Think much about it, son? Nothing to be ashamed of. I do. Every day. Every day, son. Look at me, son. Look at me, what do you see? A brave man struggling against terrible disability? A hero? A saint? I’ll tell you what I see. I see a travesty. A Tinkertoy man. An impotent, sterile thing kept in existence by the mercilessness of modern medicine. A man who is dead already. Dead already. Every time I look in the mirror, son, I look at death. Death in a bottle, death at the end of a rope, death under the wheels of a fast train, death at the foot of this cliff. I look, and I look, and death looks back and I see that there is something more ludicrous and disfigured and hideous and sterile and impotent than myself, and its name is death. By such small disclosures, we go on. We go on, son.”
“You’re a braver man than you admit, father.”
“Or the greatest coward you are ever likely to meet, son.”
“The greatest coward is the man who refuses to do good because of the hurt it may cause him, father. The man who fears to do good because it might cause evil.”