by Unknown
His sweat having chilled so suddenly, the worker shuddered convulsively as he looked around at the dependency tanks, checking the temperature and density readouts of the dependency fluid and making sure there were no abnormalities in the color of the tenants slumbering away within.
He noticed that one of the blood sedges had turned dark, and used a pair of chopsticks to move it to a sealed container. That was when he heard a sound that was like thin chinaware breaking. Thinking it was just his imagination, he was about to move on to the next dependency tank when he was hit with an intense pain of flesh being rent asunder. Reflexively he reached back and ripped off the stuff clinging to his hair.
When he opened his palm, a swarm of nymphs burst forth like snowflakes from the broken egg capsule and started crawling up his arm. With his other hand, he tried to sweep them off, but the few that remained on his arm broke his skin with their pointed legs. The ones that had fallen to the floor also came crawling back at him, and it was as he was picking them off with a pair of tweezers and stomping them under his shoes that there came the sound of another egg case cracking open, and this time the nymphs started digging into his back as if plowing a field, sending the worker running out into the corridor.
His work clothes swarmed with larvae, so he tore them off and ran for the exit, trailing a low moan. Before the iron door had opened sufficiently, he had forcibly pushed himself through to the outside. Scattered nymphs danced into the darkness like snowflakes.
As he was stepping out onto the deck, the weight on his back grew heavier and began to squirm, as though he were carrying somebody there. As though heard from the bottom of a well of distant memories, there came a jingling metallic sound that drowned out all others, but he couldn’t remember what kind of sound it was. His vision blurred with the piercing pain, and by the time that he in his panic had batted away the nymphs from his face, he was standing on the very edge of the platform.
Shoulders heaving as he breathed, he made his way to his own sleepsac, and forgetting his terror that a misstep would send him plunging down into the sea, leapt headfirst into the tightgate, into which under normal circumstances he would have carefully inserted himself starting with his toes.
Many fibers of spiral muscle undulated, and the body of the upside-down worker swayed forward and backward, rotating as it was enveloped by the inner cavity. By this process, most of the nymphs were pushed outside, and the ones that had attached to his skin were crushed one after another by the powerful pressure inside.
The worker, waving back and forth as he was moved by the lickthreads that grew so thickly amid the warm amnesiotic fluid, had already lost consciousness. And the thoughts of many others were beginning to show their faces.
3
Aah, the passenger planes are thriving, and every one of ’em’s knocked up with a litter of Cessnas. I thought that zone was supposed to be Nanodust-resistant. Never dreamed that metamorphic nanodust could ever range so far without even having any ultimaterial. Track One’s at an impasse too, thanks to abnormal pipe and train car breeding.
I just came back from my baptism. Transference registration? Why that, of all things? Don’t call it that; this is different. Faith alone can make the cherubim open the doorway. What are you talking about? It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other, right? The Great Dust Plague is going to spread, and every protective measure we have will fail; before that happens, I want to repent. But they’re still building evacuation boats, aren’t they? I just can’t imagine exposing my bare self to the defilement at this point … in a world where the Powder Room no longer functions … They were in the middle of an argument, but before he knew it the worker had begun to stare emotionlessly at the movements of this pair.
Their vigorous movements began to blur, trailing afterimages before at last transforming into flecks of rusted iron. Although he had awakened the moment his sleepsac spat him out, he had gone right back to sleep lying facedown on the deck.
He gazed at his painfully itching arms, and found a swarm of small beetles clinging to them here and there. It was only when he tried to pull one off that he realized they were scabs. He looked at the inner side of his arms and found the legs of many nymphs sticking out like pins from the drum of a music box. He endured the pain as he plucked them out one by one.
He arrived at work and located his work clothes in the corridor, but of the nymphs there was no trace, and even the cloth that should have been torn into a million pieces bore not a single tear. Did the nymphs materialize only in front of him, then? That thought spun around and around in his head while he was putting on his suit, and then he heard the sound of the president groaning. The worker made a noise in his throat at the ominous presentiment this engendered. He wished that he could just go back to his sleepsac, but his legs would have none of that as they carried him into the workshop.
The president pointed at a dependency tank and opened up his face in the shape of a mortar bowl, revealing an organ within that resembled a rose. As he stood diffidently before the dependency tank, the worker was enveloped in a cry that by turns surfaced into the range of audible sound and submerged below its lowest frequency. He could not grasp the reason he was being reprimanded, though he did sense the seriousness of the situation. The surface of the fluid in the tank was covered in scum, and nearly fifty tenants whose color had darkened were jostling against one another.
At last he remembered that during the confusion last night, he had failed to check the last dependency tank. He felt something slick and wet on his right ear, and when he touched it expecting amnesiotic fluid, his fingertips came back red with sticky blood. One of his eardrums had burst, it seemed.
The president stretched forth both of his arms, brought them under the worker’s arms, and lifted him up off the ground.
Was his head about to roll? Would his retirement benefits be paid even after the beheading?
The worker lowered his eyelids, and a flood of trivial and varied scenes whose ownership he neither knew nor could conceive of welled up in his mind’s eye. Aren’t all of those my memories? he thought as a sense of impatience ran through him. Even as he sought to dam them all up, his consciousness was drowning in memories, and just before his skull and his eyes were crushed by the overwhelming pressure, he slammed into the grated floor.
The worker, himself once again, looked up at the president, who was standing motionless over him as an organ resembling some kind of echinoderm retreated back inside his tongue-shaped head; a part of his congealed corpuscyte was rotating.
He was looking past the worker … beyond the wall … into the distant sky. The client should be arriving any moment now.
The president stuck a finger up in the air and caused it to rotate, and then calmly started walking. The fact that the president’s indignation never lasted long was the one thing that the worker didn’t hate about him.
Following behind the president, he went into a dock on the cliffside face of the company building, and there in a high-ceilinged space lined with exposed metal struts was birthed a ground ship resembling a whiskey flask turned on its side. Its tin-colored exterior was covered in countless scratches and dents, from which it drew a faint whitish tint.
The president raised both arms up high toward the ceiling and first pulled down a pair of chains to which hooks were affixed at the ends. Once he had put them under both his arms, he stood up straight, and the worker started turning the stiff crank.
The body of the president elongated as it was lifted up, and then slid—pulleys and all—along tracks in the ceiling, at last stopping directly above the groundship, at which point the worker climbed a ladder and began removing the president’s pants as the president swayed back and forth as though executed by hanging.
Perhaps finding the sensation unpleasant, the president growled “GyoVuVu” and squirmed around, prompting the worker—who was having trouble with the fabric that had bit into the pres
ident’s body—to coarsen his tone. “Please be still!” he said. Somehow, he managed to peel the pants down to the president’s knees, after which they came off without resistance, exposing his bizarre naked form.
The worker looked away, but the following task of guiding him into the ship was also a part of his job. The president’s corpuscyte began to collapse disgustingly, and as it did so, leg bones whose multiple joints had switched over to full articulation folded on top of one another and descended into the round entrance. His lower belly, however—through which his internal organs were visible—was sticking out of the ship in bountiful folds. Only his pale, wisteria-hued intestines unraveled as they slowly spiraled down into the ship.
The corpuscyte was like a festering tumor that the worker buried his hands in, fighting back a sense of embarrassment that felt like countless tiny fishes nibbling into the pores in his skin. At last, his hands found the hip bone that was caught on the hatch and shoved it down inside.
As the president’s spine descended with graceful undulations worthy of an oarfish, his internal organs, tangled about with nerves and blood vessels, either clung to it or drifted away, only to be dragged down along with it. At last, when the remaining bones of his arms, pointing skyward, were completely inside the entrance, the worker closed the hatch. Up near the ceiling, there hung a shirt of muscle fiber that, like a discarded carapace, still retained the shape of the president’s body.
Suppressing his fear, the worker climbed up onto a cargo platform in the back of the groundship. The platform was a carelessly made thing—nothing but a pedestal with railing, really.
The groundship started to vibrate. He gripped the rail with both hands, bent down, and braced himself. As he felt the vibrations running through it, images of oarfish and roses came back to him in sharp clarity for some reason. Could the nymphs that had hatched have stimulated his brain in some way? More and more of his memories—until now so vague and indistinct—were taking on such tactile clarity that it seemed as if he could reach out, take them in his hands, and confirm their existence himself.
The wall in front of them, with its exposed truss structure, began to open up to the right and left. Just beyond that, a drawbridge had already been lowered, spanning the gap between the deck and the cliff face. A sticky rain was beating down against it. Following guidelines on the floor, the groundship slipped out through the door, and drops of rain slid down the worker’s skin, trailing threads of wetness.
The steep cliff rose up before them. Unneeded industrial products, reproduced in perpetuity, collected there, forming many layers of unwanted things. The ship entered a tunnel in a layer formed of miscellaneous, tightly packed small items. The worker stared at reproduced goods that had all melted together and taken on a tin-colored hue, and then the ship came to a stop at a dead end that was also the bottom of a vertical shaft. Once more, the worker was exposed to the rain. Presently, the ship began to rise, accompanied by a dull, oppressive sensation. Innumerable skeletons of elevators and countless, crushed train cars and household appliances—replicated forever like reflections in a pair of facing mirrors—formed layers through which a vein of Dust wound its way up and down, and left and right, enfolding all like the arms of some tutelary deity. As they neared the top of the cliff, however, all melted together, growing gradually more dim and indistinct.
The glossy surface of the ground passed beneath his line of sight and descended to his feet. The worker squinted. Beyond the threads of silver pouring down on him, the vast, bruise-colored expanse of coaguland extended for as far as the eye could see, covered all over in jellymire. It was so quiet here that he could hear the pulse of blood in his ears—as though the film that lay upon an out-of-focus land were absorbing all sound of the rainfall. With his hand he wiped away the sticky drops hanging from his chin.
The groundship was not yet moving, and the raindrops on its edges continued to swell like egg cases. When he was cooped up in the company building, he was always wishing he could go outside—any reason for doing so would be fine. But now that his wish had become his reality, he was oppressed by a nervous fear for the client and by the general unpleasantness of the rain. He simply stared off into the low-chroma sky, feeling nothing whatsoever.
It was right before—or possibly right after—he spotted a single ray of light shining beyond the indistinct clouds that he nearly fell off and grabbed onto the handrail. The groundship had started out across the jellymire. It gained speed as it advanced, and the wind that struck his face slid across his cheeks like a razor blade. Heavy waves rose up one after another with increasing power and slowly spread out into the distance, tracing out smooth arcs. So far as the worker was aware, the groundship possessed no means of motive power; it seemed as though it were rather the coaguland that was moving.
Before his eyes, pillars of mud rose up without a sound. The ship shook violently as it was pounded by the crashing waves. The worker adjusted his grip on the handrail as he endured the twisting in his stomach.
Far off in the distance, the landscape was broken by the pockmark of an impact crater. That was where the client would be waiting.
Many dark shadows were already beginning to rise up from that area, all of them climbing to heights one had to look up to see the top of. The mud sloughed off of them, revealing one gleaming black body after another, all covered in plates of shell that fit together like suits of armor. Segments of shell resembling mantis shrimp ran along arms so long they reached all the way to the ground, and in concert with their disproportionately short legs, each one swung its square shoulders back and forth, taking leaden, uncertain steps toward them. Brachia lining the grooves in their shrimp-arms began to spin at high velocity, sending the packed-in mud flying everywhere.
This was a brand-new settlement. The worker had been told that this was a business run by canvassers aligned with hostile forces—that their way of life was entirely different from that of the presidents and directors of all the companies, who were not adapted as they were to life in an environment of coaguland. It was said that an ordinary canvasser uses its brachialike caterpillar treads to travel tens of thousands of kilometers through the landfill strata. However, it was also said that once assigned to office duty, they would remain motionless in fixed positions for many thousands of years.
For this reason, the footsteps of canvassers were as slow as those of penguins, though if the worker were to let his guard down and be captured by one, there would be no escaping it by his own strength. Every canvasser also carried the title of Head Collector, and as such could skillfully sever the head of a worker with its sharp radulae and wrap it up in a head of whisper-leaves.
Something grazed the worker’s face, and a dull metallic sound resounded from the hull of the groundship.
Supported on appendages that branched out from their legs to grip the ground beneath them, the canvassers raised up their incongruously long arms and opened fire. Even so, their proffered business cards—Hades Thorns launched from barrels in the palms of their hands—possessed only firepower sufficient to dent the armor on the groundship. Hades Thorns had not been weapons originally; they were in fact nothing more than seeds for the Dust veins, which gave life to the landfill strata. However, if a worker were to be hit by one he would not go unscathed, and should the seed remain in his body he might well end up being torn asunder from within.
Amid the flying thorns the worker was exposed, unprotected, and practically a painted target. As he clung to the cargo platform’s railing, his fury toward the president mounted.
Ahead of them, a great host of canvassers were standing in the way, but the president wasn’t slowing down at all. Heedless of the worker’s vain screaming, the ship was beginning to tilt so as to charge through a narrow opening bounded by a pair of them.
As they slipped through, brachia bit into both sides of the ship, sending sparks flying through the air. Immediately afterward the groundship, under a hail of Ha
des Thorns, executed a half-revolution and started sliding sideways. It barely managed to stop by the edge of the crater formed by the fall, but the worker was thrown by the recoil from off of the cargo platform.
The jellymire heaved up around him ponderously, but there was no splash, and it stuck to every inch of the fallen worker’s body as it flowed away from him in every direction. Fighting back against an icky feeling not unlike that caused by the touch of the president’s body, the worker found his footing at the mire’s coagulation depth and pushed himself up to his feet. It was then that he looked beyond the geometric patterns formed of the intersecting trajectories of raindrops and thorns and noticed a soot-black rock that resembled an oyster’s shell sunk low in the bottom of the crater. It was the meteor carriage carrying their client.
He shrank away each time a Hades Thorn flashed by, but they were missing him by enough that he suspected they were trying not to hit him. Steeling himself, he began to half swim his way back to the groundship, which was about as far from him as the office building was from the cliff. By the time he had pulled the towing cable on the tail end of the ship over to the rim of the crater, however, he was sunk to his waist in jellymire and unable to progress. As he was thrashing about, something suddenly blocked out the sun and his whole body went stiff.