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Sisyphean
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Sisyphean
Kaikin no To (Sisyphean and Other Stories)
Copyright © 2013 by Dempow Torishima
English translation rights arranged with TOKYO SOGENSHA CO., LTD.
Cover and interior design by Adam Grano
No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.
HAIKASORU
Published by VIZ Media, LLC
P.O. Box 77010
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.haikasoru.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Torishima, Denpō, 1970- author, illustrator. | Huddleston, Daniel, translator.
Title: Sisyphean / Dempow Torishima ; translated by Daniel Huddleston ; illustrations by Dempow Torishima.
Other titles: Sisyphean. English
Description: San Francisco : Haikasoru, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017037281 | ISBN 9781421580821 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Genetic engineering—Fiction. | Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / General.
Classification: LCC PL876.O75 S5713 2018 | DDC 895.63/6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017037281
Printed in the U.S.A.
First printing, March 2018
Haikasoru eBook edition
ISBN: 978-1-9747-0214-5
CONTENTS
Prologue
Fragment: Plunder
Sisyphean
(or, Perfect Attendants)
Fragment: Jewel
Cavumville
(or, The City in the Hollow)
Fragment: Genesis
Castellum Natatorius
(or, The Castle in the Mudsea)
Fragment: Exile
Peregrinating Anima
(or, Momonji Caravan)
Finale
About the Author
Prologue
In stable orbit above a congealed accretion disc in the depths of galactic space, there swarmed untold millions of corporatians, who together formed the immense, nimbotranslucent corpuspheres of which an archipelagolopolis was composed. In the midst of their jostlings were two consolidated corporatians—
Fragment:
Plunder
Many affiliated corporatians had created a transitory organizational confederation and into themselves enveloped an interstellar seedship of heretofore unknown make, which a Planetary Intellect had captured and sold to them. The corporatians ordered their subordinapes to disincorporate it, and with their tentacles they examined each and every piece. Although its chief part was missing, the coordinates of the world that had launched the vessel soon became clear, and based on the compatibility of its surrounding interstellar environment, that planet was identified as a candidate for Cradling.
The slide into instability began after the seedship had been divided among a great many corporatians via auction. A thorough investigation revealed that the hull of the seedship was in fact a dangerous mass of nanomachines, each no larger than a speck of dust, locked into their present form by a disc-shaped relic. As such, the ship was isolated from the incorporeate archipelagolopolis, and then in a follow-up investigation, it was learned that the seedship’s world of origin was a bizarre collective life-form completely covered in the same sort of nanomachines—in a state of delerium, it was groping around blindly through every nearby star system. Planning for its wholesale affirmation was begun.
Chapter 1:
The President
Waited On
1
The date from which the tale is set forth matters little; to begin with the awakening of its protagonist is a mere convenience for the telling. Still, he had awakened just slightly later than usual this morning.
Clinging to the edge of a rusted metal deck one hundred meters above the surface of the sea was a row of tear-shaped sleepsacs, their gnarled and withered hind legs dangling from their undersides.
Nearly all of them were shriveled and dried, and only one, at the rightmost end of the row, yet retained its original form, swelling outward in the shape of a ripened fig. From the muscular tightgate that protruded from its upper tip there sprouted the rather dimwitted-looking face of a worker. Borne forward by the action of lickstrings connected to the sleepsac’s inner membrane, the worker’s slender, naked form was vomited out onto the deck, trailing behind it sticky threads of secretion.
The name of the worker was GyoVuReU’UNN. Although he had no memory himself of having ever been called by that name, there were no other freewalking subordinapes at his workplace, so this was not a problem for him.
The worker’s shoulders quivered, and when he raised up his body, it was with movements similar to the curling of a burning piece of paper. His feet were dripping with amnesiotic fluid, and taking care not to let himself slip on it, he stood erect on a deck that lacked so much as a single guardrail. In his ears, he could still hear the indistinct voices of countless unknown colleagues whispering to one another.
“Stand up on the deck” / “I don’t want to remember anymore” / “That was an awful sight” / “What’s awful is it’s just like everyone says” / “It’s what they call collective unconsciousness” / “Like they had before” / “I don’t remember that” / “I never seen it” / “Maybe you were just delirious” / “We’ve been horribly oppressed” / “By the way, I hear the next town over is closed off …”
The worker came fully awake as peeling, rusted iron bit into the soles of his feet. A sweetness and a grainy, figlike texture was spreading into every corner of his mouth. This was the flavor he always tasted whenever he came out of the sleepsac. Although the concentrated sweetness of dried figs was his favorite, the worker had never actually eaten one.
The last of the amnesiotic fluid dribbled out of his ears, a strong cold wind brushed against his eardrums, and the muffled sound of the waves came to him. The worker frowned at the creaking of iron that could occasionally be heard between their crashes.
Death awaited should he lose his footing. And yet it was always after the danger had passed that he felt most conscious of it. Seeking to ease the stiffness in his neck, he turned his head southward to look across the dark, steel-blue vastness of the sea and into the blur of mists in the distance.
It looked as though the deck were floating high up in the sky. At one time, the worker had been quite sure that it was, but then one day he was made to assist in repairing the lift, and dangling from the edge of the platform, he had been lowered to a point about fifty meters beneath it. Or had that been the time he had tried to escape by way of the lift? In any case, he had learned that day that the platform was supported by many long, thick steel columns lashed to one another. And on the face of the sea right below his gaze, the waves had been crashing against a group of small islands. The steel support columns rose up from the centers of these islands—islands composed of rotting heaps of flesh: the piled corpses of stringbeasts such as coffin eels and bloodtide wayfarers that had tried and failed to climb up to the office building on the deck.
Pinching the left ear that was supposed to have been ripped off as punishm
ent for having tried to run away, the worker looked up at the overhanging cliffs of landfill strata that towered above him on the eastern side. It was not merely a projection of his psychological state that made their striped patterns look different every time he saw them; even now, the willy-nilly counterfeiting of all manner of industrial products from the eidos of each one—and the collapse of those goods beneath their own weight—was ongoing.
Unable to entirely abandon his hopes of retirement, the worker made a visual estimate of the distance to the cliff. Although it looked rather close, he realized belatedly that there was no way he could leap across, and let out a long sigh.
He turned around and saw the company building, resembling the tongue of some giant that had been cut out and stood up on its end, right before his eyes. Skinboard-paneled walls that had been able to breathe when they were new now bore the scars of the canvassers’ repeated sales calls. Now covered in scar tissue, the walls could no longer breathe at all.
The worker, having completed his commute to the office in only ten paces, set his center of gravity in his hips, slid open an iron door more than twice his height, and stepped into the stuffy, humid air of the corridor.
As he was closing the iron door, he felt an unpleasant, oppressive feeling, like being swallowed whole into the gullet of a coffin eel. He turned around and saw a pair of thighs right in front of him, with far too wide a space between them.
The worker’s gaze crawled upward along the ridges of a special fabric knitted from muscle fiber, and sticking out from the wide opening of its collar was an eyeless, noseless, mouthless, translucent head whose shape mimicked that of the office building itself. Tiny particles and a smooth, glossy sheen slid across its surface as it looked down at the worker.
“Mr. President!” the worker said shrilly—adding, “Good morning,” once he had steadied his breathing.
Wrapped in its sleeve of knitted meat, the president’s long arm twisted as it curled upward. Four fat fingers—their bones and nerves visible under translucent skin—pointed toward the inner room. Tiny bubbles of air fizzed from the spherical surfaces of his fingertips. When this was apparently insufficient to get his point across, he stretched his fingers still farther outward, and the pressure within his corpuscyte instantly ruptured the shells of the waybugs that lurked inside the digits. He showed the worker their still-beating hearts—about the size of sesame seeds—as they floated clear of the puffy clouds of red now spreading out in his fingers. The hearts continued to tick away with unnerving speed.
It dawned on the worker then that he had apparently come into the office later than usual. Was something wrong with his sleepsac these days? His regurgitation time was lagging.
The president’s featureless face descended until it was right before his eyes. Within its interior, bone fragments, scales, and air bubbles floated, and a morel-shaped organ of unfathomable function bobbed back and forth with an irregular rhythm, managing to shift its position considerably though wrapped all around with winding, branching nerves and blood vessels. In the midst of a face that almost seemed more plastic than organic, an indentation suddenly began to sink inward. All around the deepening hollow, the face was starting to roil with waves, and then suddenly the hollow deepened and began to vibrate.
“GUEVOoOo—UENGuUuUNNuN—GUEPU, VV!”
The piercing cry reverberated all through the building. He was urging the worker to see to his disinfecting right away and get to his seat.
It was not, however, through the comprehension of words that the worker had arrived at that understanding—rather, it was the president’s gestures and tone of voice that led him to that conclusion. The worker sometimes wrote down the president’s words to try to learn to speak his language, but when he tried to say them aloud later, they would come out both resembling the original and sounding nothing like it. Given the structure of his larynx, the best the worker could do was make a noise like a clogged sewer pipe backing up. Or like someone doggedly clearing his throat to expel a mass of phlegm.
The worker threaded his way down a narrow path along which wound a synthorganic digestive tract, and went into the washroom. The space enclosed by its scaly walls was only barely wide enough for one person to stand. Still, being there allowed him to recover a slight trace of his composure.
Standing flush against the wall, he lifted up the grated floor, faced the hole, and let his immature excretory organs do their business into a pit through which whistled a distant, vacant-sounding wind. Replacing the grated floorpiece, he then stood on top of it and turned a brass, starfish-shaped handle on the scaly wall. Pure water, filtered through the purification tank, showered down on him from overhead. As beaded drops of lukewarm water drummed against every inch of his body, he grabbed a bar of winedregs hanging from the wall and began scrubbing away at himself, scouring off the filth that his eyes couldn’t see. These dregs the worker had himself scraped from the bellies of winesprites.
A lock of hair got tangled in his fingers, knotted up, and came loose. Its gleam called to mind an image of glass fiber, and the worker stared at it, captivated. At what point had it become so faded and white? He was still too young to have his hair turning silver. He was only thirty-two, wasn’t he? But in the instant that he thought that, he wondered again if he wasn’t fifty-four. And after he had corrected himself yet again—No, I was twenty-eight!—he stopped thinking about it. He grabbed a meatpleat that was hanging on the wall and wiped off his dripping body. The intestines of sand leeches formed droppings hard enough to use as bullets, so it was hardly surprising that they dried his skin in no time.
He went back to the corridor and pulled a gray work uniform down off the wall. It was the sort of business suit that an accountant might have worn long, long ago; for some reason the clothes the company provided were all a little formal, though, so it wasn’t like he had any choice.
When he arrived in the workshop, the president was slowly pacing in front of the faintly glowing dependency tanks, varied medicine bottles, and jumbled synthorgans lining the ten shelves built along the U-shaped wall.
Stepping forward at what he judged to be the proper moment, the worker slid—or was driven—into one corner of the workbench. When he lowered himself into a leather chair stained deeply by medicinal fluids, he found three slabs of slimecake spread out on the table, already sliced into shapes anticipating the organs they would be sculpted into. IV drips were keeping them in a state of quasi-life.
Hurriedly, he slid his hands into a pair of skingloves ridged with stillvein cords. Experiencing an odd sensation like joining hands with some total stranger, he opened his toolbox and laid out the needler, the tube-shaped reflex mirror, and the other implements he would need.
The worker jabbed his needler into a cross-section of slimecake and injected the guidejuice. The president held out his thick fingers, and keeping them perfectly motionless, forced from their tips waybugs about the size of rice grains. At any given time, about five hundred waybugs were being nourished amid the currents of the president’s body, receiving training according to their specialized functions. No sooner had the waybugs fallen onto the slimecake than they sought out the needle marks and burrowed in, expelling silver thread from their anuses as they tunneled along either vertically or horizontally, each in its turn raising a little ridge in the surface as it went. At last the waybugs emerged from the cut faces at fixed distances from one another, and the worker touched each with a pair of red-hot tongs. Their shells split open with brittle sounds, and their bodily fluids sizzled as they vaporized.
Every time the worker saw waybugs crawling around like ants, his breath started to seize up. The sight always took him back to the hills of Stillville, located thirty kilometers away on the mainland. With pointed jaws radiating outward from bodies about the size of a puppy dog’s, the ants there had dug countless tunnels into the coaguland. Because of that, a large group of winesprites, their shells piled up one again
st the other on the surface, had all at once sunk into the ground. The worker vicariously experienced the torment of suffocating while caught up in the midst of that rescue operation, while the president stretched one arm all the way up to a shelf near the ceiling, grabbed hold of a few things, and tossed them down onto the bench.
These included three different kinds of neurofungi. Their threadlike, whitish bodies twisted and wrapped themselves around each other, painful even to look at.
The stupid things you come up with! If I’d died of suffocation back then, who is it that’s handling these slime molds right now?
The worker drove the disquieting memory from his mind. He laid the molds down on a tray where a great deal of powdered dogshell had been sprinkled and turned them over. This step was to prevent them from taking root in the slimecake too quickly.
When he first started here, he had worked barehanded and had once let a neurofungus adhere to his fingertip. That had ended with him on the floor, writhing in white-hot agony. But now he was able to braid neurofungi into spiral cords with nimble, experienced hands.
It was a simple matter to tie the ends of these spiral-shaped cords to the waybug threads left inside the holes in the slimecake slices, and—applying a steady rhythm from the holes on the opposite sides—tug them on through. The spirals would resist with all of their might, though, so it was necessary to pull and stretch that carpet of meat as he threaded the fungi into the tunnels. Whenever it looked like one was about to get tangled, he would loosen it using crochet needles inserted into adjacent tunnels.
TAPUVuu—the president expelled air from a vacuole, breaking the worker’s concentration. When he returned his attention to the task at hand, he saw that the last remaining thread had snapped. He pushed his crochet needles into the web of tunnels to hunt for the broken end, and the president pointed out the correct position with a fat finger. That finger, however, blocked the worker’s line of sight and brought with it an unpleasant sensation, like having his eye socket covered by it. The feeling gradually spread from his eye until at last he was assaulted by the feeling that his entire body was being sealed up inside that of the president.
Sisyphean