by Ian McDonald
More things than tourist-talk Japanese in my plastic socket.
“It is a mistake to rely on only one weapon,” I quote, gasping, heart hammering.
“Quite,” says the Takeda-thing. “But you are not the only one who can play the Scissor-Paper-Stone Game.” The faceless television opens its single eye. It is only because I once saw its face and survived that the Keter fracter does not cinder my eyes in my head. Even the split second of recognition and reaction is like lightning earthing down my spine. What? Where? Feel. Feel. Wooden floor. Closed. Keep your eyes closed. Feel. My quivering fingers touch the carved foot of a wooden Boddhisattva. I hear clicking, mincing footsteps. My enemy, closing to destroy me. But the battle is more than Ethan Ring’s personal nemesis now. A ToSec in possession of the passwords and commands recorded on the soul-tap wired into my skull and loose in the world with the fracters in its hands: there is no imagining how this drama of history will end.
“I can see you, Mr. Ring. Can you see me?”
You cannot afford one glance; for if you have just handed it Malkhut the Obedience fracter… Keter you might survive through familiarity, but an unrefusable order to slit your own stomach…
Movement sensors. Infrared. And, in my belt pouch, the can of spray lubricant I used on that troublesome gearshift… I check with my fingers for my cigarette lighter. Work, fingers, fuck you, work. Get that top off. Christ, I can hear it, stepping across the floor. Get away, you bastard, get away. I feel my way along the Buddhas. Forgive me, Lord Daishi. The oil spray ignites into a gout of fire; I wave my improvised flamethrower over the wooden images, sending the Buddhas up in a roar of enlightenment I can no longer hear the sure click, step of the Takeda-robot. In the shelter of my arms, I snuff out my fire, spray thick, black oil over my wraparound MTB shades.
“Right, you bastard.”
Fools, fighting in a burning house…
“Impressive, Mr. Ring.”
The voice, too close, too near… Multijointed fingers clamp around my throat, squeeze blood from the hairline wound, push me back toward the blazing Buddhas. I hammer with the base of my spray can, but robot fingers lock onto my glasses; lift them. My one free hand sprays pure blackness into the place I hope the screen to be. Plastic fingers spasm; I snap joints like crab legs, wriggle free. Do I, dare I, dare I, do I? One glance. I dare. I do.
The spray has blacked out the left side of the winged helmet and three quarters of the glowing screen. Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo! I must act quickly, decisively, before Takeda reformats the fracter into a smaller screen.
One glance can contain the key to victory. On the rear of the carapace, exactly where I remember Luka had plugged the multiplex link transmitter into her Oddjob, is a fifteen-pin socket, standard issue on the Dornier Mark 15.
The Takeda-thing spins on its legs, hunting for a true image in the blur of infrared distractions but I am faster. In the instant before its motion sensors register, I am on top of it. The Daishi Hall is a hell of blazing Boddhisattvas and Boddhidharmas, but the demon box is off my belt, its adaptor pushed into the socket where the Takeda-thing cannot reach.
“You wanted the fracters,” I shout over the roar of burning, the scream of fire alarms. “Then have them.”
I press the DUMP DISK key.
COMMIT CODE? asks the demon box.
My fingers, numbs from Keter-shock, miskey. A crushing agony in the back of my neck; robot fingers trying to tear head and spine from my body.
WHAT I TELL…
The other hand is spidering on broken fingers around the base of my skull, feeling, questing, feeling…
WHAT I TELL YOU THREE…
A chitinous finger screws, screws into the plastic vulva of my taphead socket The pain is delirious, but nothing to what it will be if Lord Takeda succeeds in firing a macrovolt charge through my cerebellum.
WHAT I TELL YOU THREE TIMES…
I am burning. I am dying.
IS…
He is scraping out the inside of my skull, sucking down my soul, swallowing me.
TRUE.
COMPLETE FRACTER SYSTEM DOWNLOAD EFFECTED says the demon box. And in the same instant, Lord Takeda’s grip on my soul is released. Pain ceases, I roll clear. By the light of a hundred burning Buddhas, I see the Takeda-thing, legs locked into a pyramid, arms out at its sides, rigid, while Marcus’s Sefirah disk pours all the fear and all the joy and all the pain and all the annihilation and all the madness and all the healing and all the holiness and all the remembering and all the forgetting and all the highs and lows and peace and loathing and death in all the world through him.
“Burn in hell, you bastard!”
The pillars are alight, flames are running along the roof beams and trusses. The shoji walls have already gone. I have only moments before the roof comes down, but there are two last things to be burned in this fire ceremony. The heat and smoke force me down to crawl, choking, skin seared, across the floor to the fallen image of Kokuzo.
Once, Luka had videoed a young street preacher who used a large paschal candle as an allegory of hell. “One thousand ecus to anyone who will hold his finger in the flame for one minute!” he would harangue the Saturday shoppers. “One minute? No takers? How can you then contemplate an eternity of burning in hell!”
But some things must be contemplated. Some hells must be embraced. I press my hands to the glowing wood. The pain blows away every thought, everything except the need to stop it, stop it, stop it. But I cannot. I cannot. Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo. Hold them. I watch my hands blacken, hold them and split, hold them and smoke, and burn, and crisp to obscene scraps of charred gristle. Hold them. I hold them until very trace and line of the things that were engraved there are burned away. Only then, transfigured with pain, do I run from the Daishi Hall as the roof falls in a gout of flame on the blazing, melting Takeda-thing, run out between the smoking torii gates beneath the glass roof of the hollow Graceland that cracks in the sudden uprush of heat and shatters into dozens of tesselated Fuller-hexagons, all falling down, all drifting down, all coming down, raining down on me.
THE LEGEND ATTACHED TO the small, un-numbered bangai a morning’s walk through beautiful country beyond Temple Twenty-seven is one of the most unusual of the whole pilgrimage. As the Daishi was passing through this part of Shikoku he met a trader leading a packhorse laden with dried salt trout. Kobo Daishi asked for the gift of one fish but years of sin had hardened the fish trader’s heart, and not even sparing the smallest and least fish, he urged his horse on. Immediately, it was struck with paralyzing colic and the man, remembering he had heard that a great holy man was abroad on the island, went back to beg the Daishi’s forgiveness. The Daishi handed the trader his begging bowl and told him to fill it with water from a nearby spring and give it to the horse. This he did, and the horse was at once restored. In gratitude, the trader offered the Daishi all his load of fish but the saint would accept only one, the smallest and least, which he put into the spring, prayed, and immediately, it was returned to life. The fish trader built a hermitage by that spring, which over the centuries has become this Buddhist Temple. Fish still swim in the pool fed from the spring; the monks are keen to show visitors the marks behind their heads, on either side of their backs, and on the tails that are the prints of the Daishi’s fingers.
On their instructions, I am to bathe my hands twice a day—dawn and sunset—in the restoring waters. I cannot say I have felt any great blessing, perhaps what benefit there is exists in the physical exercise of walking down to the pool and the spiritual grace of watching slow creatures in deep, clear liquid. Whatever, my nurse assures me that when I do go to bathe, the bioassay lines on the robot that follows me like a bad conscience dip into smoother, more tranquil configurations.
They are a kind and true people, this reclusive brotherhood of homosexual monks. They live the spiritual life with the natural, liquid grace of a trout in water. Few things are more attractive t
han natural saintliness, few things rarer to find. Many of them are men who have stepped away from the professional world but feel that their sexual orientation precludes them from the regular spiritual orders; the Trout Brook Temple brothers are renowned among the few who know of their existence as strong gentle healers, razor-sharp accountants, and fearsome lawyers. After Mas found me in the chaos and destruction of Graceland and brought me back to the Tanazaki-ya, the Tanazakis sent for the brothers of Salt Trout Temple, knowing that they possessed both the power to save me and keep me hidden from those who might be interested in the man who single-handedly destroyed Tosa Securities Incorporated. Like all men of spiritual integrity, the brothers have little interest in the processes of history.
While the major players in Japan’s unfolding act of kabuki manipulate and maneuver in the vacuum left by the sudden collapse of ToSecInc, I become acquainted with my new hands. The plastic skin is a little disconcerting, especially its shocking, terminal junction with the pale, freckled Ethan-skin of my wrists but Brother Saigyo, my loving nurse, gives me daily assurances that beneath the stiff, clawlike carapaces, new skin is growing, thickening, laying down layer upon layer, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Pigment, hair, nails, fingerprints, all will be exactly as before thanks to the miracle of accelerated regeneration.
“I hope not,” I say but I have never yet, and never will, let Brother Saigyo into my little joke. I hope not; I think not. When the medical robot unseals these plastic shells and I dip them into the Daishi’s water, the sight of them may run slivers of neurasthenic shock into my brain, but they feel good, they feel clean.
“Visitor for you,” says Brother Saigyo, grinning impishly. I am not surprised, I have been expecting this visit since I came out of anesthesia in a blissful high of pain and remembered what Mas had said that night in the Tanazaki-ya. “Will you go down, or shall I send her up?”
“Send her up,” I say, comfortable, secure with my beer, newspapers, diskperson, and robot familiar on the pilgrim hostel veranda. I watch the way she moves up the flagged path through the funeral plinths, brushing the stones with her hands, past the sub-chapels, feeling the soft stroke of pine needles through her fingers, the unconscious sensuality of everything she ever did, her unfettered spontaneity, and it is like a nail in my heart. She mounts the veranda steps, one, two, three, four, surveys my empty beer cans, newspapers, disks, robot.
“Well, you got a long way, didn’t you?”
Black skirt, long, fringed, and a-jingle with Indian bells; black Docs; black sleeveless poloneck. Much silver. That ludicrous crest of black hair she could never keep out of her eyes.
“You get as far as the Daishi permits you,” I say. “This far, this pilgrimage, I only have grace enough for twenty-seven and a half temples.”
We embrace; she wraps her long skinny bare arms with their jangling silver bangles around me; I feel the quick shiver of bare emotion. I do some sort of half hug, all forearms and elbows, strangely reluctant to touch her with my plastic hands.
“How are they, Eth?” I show her. She looks disgusted.
“Jesus, Eth. I told Mas I’d foot the bill. I mean, make the appropriate contribution to temple funds. They’re sharp boys, these monks. Mas won’t hear of it, he says he makes five times what I do and will never miss it, which is probably true, but I’m going to do it anyway.”
“They’ll be as good as they were before,” I say. “Almost.” Then: “They’re gone, Luka. That was why I did it. It was the only way to get rid of them. Burn them out.”
“It was always heroes and angels with you, wasn’t it, Eth?” She leans back against the veranda rail, stretches her arms as far as they will go to either side along the knotted wood.
“The disk is gone too, Luka. It burned in the fire. All gone. The fracters, Marcus’s dream, burned.”
“Mas says when he found you you were muttering something over and over and over.”
“What?”
“ ‘I’m sorry, Marcus; I’m sorry, Marcus.’ Over and over and over.”
“Luka.”
She smiles out at me from underneath that ludicrous hair.
“I’m free. I died in the fire with the Takeda simulacrum. Ethan Ring does not exist anymore. A closed file in a gray office in Ghent.”
“Shit, Ethan, I don’t want to run all my life. I’ve got better things to do…”
“You won’t, Luka. I’m sure of it. Without the fracters, they have no use for me.”
“Well, if they change their minds and decide they want you back after all, they’ll have to come through me.” She looks over her shoulder at the temple garden. “I’m fucking starving, Eth. I’ve been on the go since before breakfast. You know, Mas wouldn’t tell me where you were? I had to meet him in Yawatahama and let him bring me here. Mondo secreto. What did you do? The whole country is going mad out there.”
“I’m pretty much out of the world here,” I say. “Thankfully. I can get you something to eat but they’re pretty strict interpretation Buddhist diet-wise. Vegetables, no grains.”
“Suits me.”
“Eat what I eat.”
“Become you.”
“Is that what you want?”
For the first time we dare eye contact.
“Yes it is. Yes.”
She pulls me to her, runs her tongue over my red-stubbled scalp.
“That fabulous, fabulous hair,” she mourns; then, intimate, in my ear, sly: “How are they about other things?”
“To the brothers, it’s a spiritual grace. As long as there’s love in it.”
“I think that could be arranged.”
She takes my destroyed hands in her hands, lifts her arms high, opens them wide.
“They’re gone, Luka. They won’t come back. But sometimes, if the light is right, in the early morning, or at sunset, I think I can see something written there, under the plastic.”
She freezes, every muscle prepared for a final, killing act of betrayal. In the same instant she chooses to trust me.
“What do they say, Ethan?”
“ ‘Emon Saburo Reborn.’ ”
“And are you going to tell me what that means?” Our hands come together at the bottom of the circle of air.
“Some year, Luka, some year.”
The Tear
Ian McDonald
Ptey, sailing
ON THE NIGHT THAT PTEY voyaged out to have his soul shattered, eight hundred stars set sail across the sky. It was an evening at Great Winter’s ending. The sunlit hours raced toward High Summer, each day lavishly more full of light than the one before. In this latitude, the sun hardly set at all after the spring equinox, rolling along the horizon, fat and idle and pleased with itself. Summer-born Ptey turned his face to the sun as it dipped briefly beneath the horizon, closed his eyes, enjoyed its lingering warmth on his eyelids, in the angle of his cheekbones, on his lips. To the Summer-born, any loss of the light was a reminder of the terrible, sad months of winter and the unbroken, encircling dark.
But we have the stars, his father said, a Winter-born. We are born looking out into the universe.
Ptey’s father commanded the little machines that ran the catamaran, trimming sail, winding sheets, setting course by the tumble of satellites; but the tiller he held himself. The equinoctial gales had spun away to the west two weeks before and the catboat ran fast and fresh on a sweet wind across the darkening water. Twins hulls cut through the ripple-reflections of gas-flares from the Temejveri oil platforms. As the sun slipped beneath the huge dark horizon and the warmth fell from the hollows of Ptey’s face, so his father turned his face to the sky. Tonight, he wore his Steris Aspect. The ritual selves scared Ptey, so rarely were they unfurled in Ctarisphay: births, namings, betrothals and marriages, divorces and deaths. And of course, the Manifoldings. Familiar faces became distant and formal. Their language changed, their bodies seemed slower, heavier. They became possessed by strange, special knowledges. Only Steris possessed the language for the robots to
sail the catamaran and, despite the wheel of positioning satellites around tilted Tay, the latitude and longitude of the Manifold House. The catamaran itself was only run out from its boathouse, to strong songs heavy with clashing harmonies, when a child from Ctarisphay on the edge of adulthood sailed out beyond the outer mole and the fleet of oil platforms to have his or her personality unfolded into eight.
Only two months since, Cjatay had sailed out into the oily black of a late winter afternoon. Ptey was Summer-born, a Solstice boy; Cjatay a late Autumn. It was considered remarkable that they shared enough in common to be able to speak to each other, let alone become the howling boys of the neighborhood, the source of every broken window and borrowed boat. The best part of three seasons between them, but here was only two moons later, leaving behind the pulsing gas flares and maze of pipe work of the sheltering oil fields, heading into the great, gentle oceanic glow of the plankton blooms, steering by the stars, the occupied, haunted stars. The Manifolding was never a thing of moons and calendars, but of mothers’ watchings and grandmothers’ knowings and teachers’ notings and fathers’ murmurings, of subtly shifted razors and untimely lethargies, of deep-swinging voices and stained bedsheets.
On Etjay Quay, where the porcelain houses leaned over the landing, Ptey had thrown his friend’s bag down into the boat. Cjatay’s father had caught it and frowned. There were observances. Ways. Forms.
“See you,” Ptey had said.
“See you.” Then the wind caught in the catamaran’s tall, curved sails and carried it away from the rain-wet, shiny faces of the houses of Ctarisphay. Ptey had watched the boat until it was lost in the light dapple of the city’s lamps on the winter-dark water. See Cjatay he would, after his six months on the Manifold House. But only partially. There would be Cjatays he had never known, never even met. Eight of them, and the Cjatay with whom he had stayed out all the brief Low Summer nights of the prith run on the fishing staithes, skinny as the piers’ wooden legs silhouetted against the huge sun kissing the edge of the world, would be but a part, a dream of one of the new names and new personalities. Would he know him when he met him on the great floating university that was the Manifold House?