by Unknown
“Double-transference is an imaginary cyclical transaction. You should know that. Here even the magatama itself is nothing more than a concretion that the
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“—harm from deprivation?” He stood up, gripping the can tightly. “This is already a fait accompli.”
“Probably so. Like they say, history repeats itself.”
“Not like this.” The man in the white coat tossed into the ultimaterial bin the can, which had at some point transformed into a light bulb, and stared firmly into the face of the worker. “Can’t you feel a presence there behind you?”
“I’m not the type to believe in ghosts.”
“After you came out of your coma, you had your share of freakouts, though. ‘It’s the man I saw in my dreams,’ you said.”
“And that’s been taken care of through cerebro-physiological means. Now I just have dreams about everybody floating in the darkness.”
“Right. That’s because he’s drifting through interstellar space in a one-man interstellar flight capsule even as we speak. By continuing to speak, he’s protecting us. The coordinates are—”
“I’m sorry, but it’s time for me to go. Work is work, even in a world like this one. I’m off to the canvasser now, so I’ll see you later.”
The man in the suit crossed over the manifestation boundary as he departed, and disappeared. Dazedly, the worker moved away from that place. He knew that the scene he had just witnessed could not exist according to the law of causality. In other words, this was not the past.
“Hey, are you listening?”
Double exchange, interstellar flight capsules—as he was strolling along unable to collect his thoughts, he bumped into an invisible wall. There were limits to the scale of space that a magatama could contain. The other side of the wall was covered in fog through which another town could be dimly seen.
“Even you must’ve sought after answers any number of times. Why are we employed by directors? When did we sign such contracts? What are we getting in compensation? Oh, we remember these things dimly. That we signed a contract, that we received a baptism. But why aren’t these things consistent even in our own memories? What were these directors and humans originally?”
Those who are ever damned … those who long for return … those who trick us into servitude.
“Why are there magatama even inside the canvassers? Does it mean that those disgusting things—I don’t even know whether they’re alive or machines—are our original forms? Why? Why? Look—you must be able to see it!”
The worker looked across the parish town, and simultaneously he was looking down at it with a bird’s eye view. Dimly, he could make out the ghost of the
“Whenever a fundamental question occurs to you, the lice appear and devour your thoughts.”
The worker strained his eyes at the rows of houses and streets on the other side of the fog. Transforming his arms into Code, he pried open the invisible wall and stretched out his hand toward the mist-enshrouded town.
“So we forget the inconsistencies right away. The same questions occur to us, and we forget them again. This cycle has been repeating for generations. When the nymphs hatch from the lice egg cases—”
Those weren’t louse nymphs. They were bits of Code as well, implanted by the directors in the roots of their hairs to prevent the lice egg cases from hatching—in other words, to prevent the activation of the snowpetal bugs, which were a self-defense mechanism of the magatama.
“—they cover your head like a lampshade and suck out every last bit of your soul. Even if you’re disassembled afterward, there won’t be a magatama inside.”
That was because the snowpetal bugs would become temporary whisper leaves and bequeath all of the magatama’s data to the canvassers’
“If that happens, you’ll be left a CP-type suffering from hyperfrequent hemo-φιλία.”
Regardless of whether business was good or bad, many things were needed to preserve and reunify the inner world of the cherubim: the magatama that served as its seeds, its dull aqua development medium, cogitosomes to expand it, and corpuscyte to protect the cogitosomes. Even if it were to all end in a reboot …
“W-what are you doin—?”
The worker was staring at the roads and the buildings of the two towns as they began to connect one to another, and at the same time, he was staring at the corners of the disassember’s mouth as they cracked apart, opening wider and wider until the sides of his face had split in half.
The worker grabbed hold of the magatama stored inside the disassembler’s skull, then pulled his arm back out. The disassembler collapsed like a puppet whose strings had suddenly snapped.
On the second floor of a certain hospital in the midst of the expanded city, however, the disassembler, who had been lying comatose, opened his eyes, turned toward the worker—who was watching over him from above through the window—and nodded.
As he hallucinated the ghost of a planet. Of a
Chapter 3: The Rite Came Off Without a Hitch
The workers who had been ordered to perform were standing in a line on a wharf near the outer edge of the ceremonial grounds with nothing to do.
The worker from the synthorgan company as well was standing on the cargo platform of the moored groundship, observing with a complicated expression the Festival that was also known as General Assembly. On coagulating land whose reaffirmation was complete, a great multitude of directors from all manner of businesses had gathered together and were crowded around a sacred palanquin. It was walnut-shaped, and about the size of an island. No canvassers came to attack. Already, many years had passed since the last sighting of them. With a presentiment that all things were coming to an end, the worker felt relieved and at the same time afraid, fearful of a future that he could not see.
Pushed along by the directors, the palanquin moved forward little by little, the ground beneath it crushed and turned up by its underside. Of those caught underneath and crushed there was no end; for workers, this was less a festival than an execution.
The shrine was ensconced in its appointed place, where it tilted just slightly before coming to a rest. Then the directors, bodies radiating visible light, began moving in ranks two or three deep around its circumference as the upper hemisphere of the shrine, rotating in the opposite direction, began to rise. At last it came to rest, floating in midair.
From the underside of this upper portion, long tubes known as fiddleheads extended downward, and the directors crowded around them. As the fibers of their clothing unraveled and dissolved, they were sucked into the tubes like snails going back into their shells. First one and then another; one by one, they disappeared from sight.
Suddenly, the bodies of those awaiting their turn began for some reason to undulate. All attention was drawn to a cluster of seven directors in their midst who were standing perfectly still.
They awakened in the worker an ineffable sense of otherness. The other directors surrounding them began to draw back.
It appeared as if those seven had leaned back to back against one another, when radiating outward from their feet there appeared cracks in the ground, exposing a greenish, translucent hill-like thing.
For some reason, their fourteen legs were attached to its surface. Still crowned with the seven directors, the hill began to heave upward, rapidly expanding and growing in volume. It had apparently been buried to a considerable depth. In no time, the upheaval had become a giant figure with the seven directors stuck to its face, dragging itself up out of the ground with a terrible rumbling.
Its cyclopean body was ten times the size of a director, and a jumble of iron building materials could be seen inside its pale green form. It also contained a pattern of dark spots that in the right lighting would be revealed as the floating skulls of assimiants.
The worker looked on in utter shock and surprise. He had never seen a crossing guard this close up before. It appeared vastly more massive than before. Mowing down director-humans with its clusters of arms, the crossing guard swung from left to right a face where traces yet remained of the seven directors, and pressed that face up against the fiddleheads.
As the crossing guard invaded the shrine’s interior by way of those tubes, steel towers, train cars, and the like were falling out of its body. They cracked the ground, and splashes of jellymire formed huge waves that began to engulf the entire area.
Many directors came running forward to try to pull the crossing guard’s huge body out of the fiddlehead, but they were swallowed up instantly and their organs squelched. Numerous whirlpools appeared all over the crossing guard’s body, and with a deafening roar it moved into the crowd of directors, who cried out in baleful screams. There were also earnest protests from those who had voices to utter them.
INGuRoBaReMo, SoReBaDeSaGiMiDda, WaddaGoHome, DoToRe, WaddaGoHome—
As the worker looked on, the upper hemisphere of the shrine the crossing guard had hijacked lost no time in withdrawing its fiddleheads, and slowly began to rise higher. The directors lost themselves completely, and as they ran about in confusion looking for an escape, the space around the shrine grew distorted. In the space of an instant all fell dark as the light was sucked from the air in a radial pattern.
By the time a dim illumination had returned, the upper hemisphere of the shrine had vanished.
The many directors were lying on their backs, bobbing up and down with the waves of mud spreading out in concentric rings from the remaining lower hemisphere, and the survivors began to hurry as they tried to evacuate to the wharf where their attending workers awaited them.
This time, however, four long legs—wrapped about with thick, stringlike tissues through which not a gap was showing—emerged from the lower half of the shrine. They rose up vertically, and just as they started to twitch as they strained to their highest possible altitude, all of them bent in their centers. Like sickles swinging downward, they stabbed into the face of the land.
Now these four legs had become support structures lifting up a gnarled, bony body from out of the shrine’s lower half. All of the onlookers were staring up in fascination as its body bent farther backward. A thin steam was rising from its surface.
The scheduled one, the true settler: a child of the planet—
said one of the terrified workers that had gathered together.
—come down to turn the screw of Earth’s axis.
Beneath the four legs, the outer shell of the shrine rotated and began sinking into the ground. The child of the planet crouched down to peer into the dark, ever-deepening shaft, and jabbed the tips of its four legs down into those inner walls. It raised and lowered its joints as though they were loaded with springs and then started to fall forward.
Amid intermittent rumblings in the earth, a few weak shadows that the directors could hardly be said to cast came near the wharf. Among them was the president, his shriveled upper body bare and exposed. A cloudy pool of blood was visible inside his stomach. Utterly exhausted, he returned to the wharf. Then, as he was placing one leg on the groundship to steady himself, the body tissue of his face congealed into an oval shape that reflected an inverted image of the worker.
The worker nodded and said, “Shall we go back to the workshop, sir?”
A thought flitted through his mind of their remaining store of liquor. Would just that much be enough?
That was the last straw. Broken down into more than a hundred different parts, that which had been the worker was suspended in midair. It was the president’s judgment call. From among these parts, the lungs, the liver, the thighbones and all manner of defective parts were levied into the president’s body.
Finally, the magatama was removed from his pineal gland, and the remaining fragments of the worker came pouring down like rain on the jellymire.
Even now, with the land handed over to the child of the planet, the president was still waiting, and the next worker continued to do his work. Though the canvassers had been wiped from the plains of coaguland, a reconstituted
If a planet is a suitable cradle, exiles will surely be sent there to reaffirm it. Assimiants will continue to be made from the magatama. And the date from which the tale is set forth will matter little.
A hunter crept through the wood below the black mountain. He came to the edge of a clearing where a gray bird sat preening in the sunlight, unaware of the snake sliding up behind it until the snake struck and the two fell to thrashing in the dust.
Finally, as the bird’s tail vanished down the snake’s throat, a boar rushed out of the wood’s shadows and broke the snake’s back with its hoof; with a grunt, it set to devouring the remains. The hunter drew back his bowstring, his arrow poised to fly through the oblivious boar’s heart, and the trees stopped creaking as the wind stilled, but then he lowered his bow and put the arrow back in his quiver. Cackling broke out among the treetops, and a wicked voice said, “I am the tengu of the wood, and if you had slain the boar I in turn would have slain you.”
The hunter said, “I held my shot so as not to be a link in a chain of murder. And so, I have saved you as well, for the chain of desire is never ending.” Both of them were silent for a moment, aware of the black mountain looming above them, the pressure of its mass, the menace of its snows.
The hunter hung up his bow and became a hermit widely known for his compassion. As for the tengu, he took on several fencing students, some of whom became notable swordsmen. He never harmed a human being again.
Introduction © 2014 VIZ Media
Foreword © 2014 VIZ Media
Five Tales of Japan © 2014 Zachary Mason
Shikata Ga Nai: The Bag Lady’s Tale © 2014 Gary A. Braunbeck
Scissors or Claws, and Holes © 2014 Yusaku Kitano
Her Last Appearance © 2014 Lauren Naturale
He Dreads the Cold, © 2014 James A. Moore
Girl, I Love You © 2014 Nadia Bulkin
The Last Packet of Tea, © 2014 Quentin S. Crisp
The Parrot Stone, © 2014 Seia Tanabe
Kamigakari © 2014 Jacqueline Koyanagi
From the Nothing, With Love, © 2008 Project Itoh
From Project Itoh Archives, published by Hayakawa Publishing in 2010
Those Who Hunt Monster Hunters © 2014 Tim Pratt
Inari Updates the Map of Rice Fields © 2014 Alex Dally MacFarlane
Street of Fruiting Bodies © 2009 Sayuri Ueda
From Uobune, Kemonobune, published by Kobunsha in 2009
Chiyoko © 2011 Miyuki Miyabe
From Chiyoko, published by Kobunsha in 2011
Ningyo © 2014 Benjanun Sriduangkaew
Thirty-Eight Observations on the Nature of the Self © 2014 Joseph Tomaras
Sisyphean © 2014 Dempow Torishima
From Sisyphean and Other Stories, published by Tokyo Sogensha in 2013
Sisyphean illu
strations © 2014 Dempow Torishima
Gary A. Braunbeck has published ten novels and over a dozen short story collections, the most recent of which, Rose of Sharon and Other Stories (an assembly of his mainstream work), has been garnering excellent reviews. His novels include In Silent Graves, Keepers, Coffin County, and the forthcoming A Cracked and Broken Path, all of which are part of his on-going “Cedar Hill Cycle” of works set in the fictional town of Cedar Hill, Ohio. His short story collections include Things Left Behind, Home Before Dark, and the Bram Stoker Award–winning Destinations Unknown. His work has garnered seven Bram Stoker Awards, an International Horror Guild Award, and a World Fantasy Award nomination. Publishers Weekly has said, “Braunbeck’s work stirs the mind as it chills the marrow.” You can find him online at the woefully-in-need-of-updating web page www.garybraunbeck.com.
Nadia Bulkin writes scary stories about the scary world we live in. Her fiction has appeared in ChiZine, Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters, Fantasy Magazine, and Strange Horizons, among others. Her essay “The Postwar Child’s Guide to Survival” recently appeared in The Battle Royale Slam Book, published by Haikasoru. She lives in Washington, D.C., works in research, and tends her garden of student debt sowed by two political science degrees. For more, see nadiabulkin.wordpress.com.
Quentin S. Crisp was born in 1972, in North Devon, in the United Kingdom. Leaving A-level college without grades, he spent five years working with Wolf and Water Arts Company (then The Common Sense Project) before going on to study Japanese at Durham University. He graduated in the year 2000. His first collection of fiction, The Nightmare Exhibition, was published by BJM Press in 2001, while he was teaching English in Taiwan. He returned to Japan later that year to research Japanese literature on a scholarship at Kyoto University, studying in particular the works of Higuchi Ichiyo. Unable to convert his research into an MA due to depression, he returned to Britain in 2003, since when he has had fiction published by Tartarus Press (Morbid Tales, 2004), PS Publishing (Shrike, 2009), Eibonvale Press (Defeated Dogs, 2013) and others. He currently resides in a damp flat in South East London/North Kent, and is editor for Chômu Press.