The Thousand Year Beach
Copyright © 2002 TOBI Hirotaka
Originally Published in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing, Inc.
English translation © 2018, VIZ Media, LLC.
“La chanson des marins hâlés”, copyright Paul Fort. Publisher has attempted to contact copyright holders. Please contact us with information. Translation, “Song of the Sunburned Sailors,” by John Strong Newberry (1921).
Cover and interior design by Fawn Lau
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: Hirotaka, Tobi, author. | Treyvaud, Matt, translator.
Title: The thousand year beach / Tobi Hirotaka ; translated by Matt Treyvaud.
Other titles: Bit-sein beach. English
Description: San Francisco : Haikasoru, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018002552 | ISBN 9781974700097 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / General.
Classification: LCC PL871.I76 B5813 2018 | DDC 895.63/6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018002552
Printed in the U.S.A.
First printing, June 2018
Haikasoru eBook edition
ISBN: 978-1-9747-0462-0
Characters
1
The Vacant Summer
2
A Woman Victorious • A Man Delayed • The East Bay Resurgent
3
The Mineral Springs Hotel
4
Souci • The Mechanism of the Trap • The Counterattack
5
The Four Langonis • Intelligent Conversation • The Empty Corridor
6
The Angel
7
The Back of the Hand • Triple Mirror • Hair Object
8
The Chronicle • Liquid Glass • The Keystone
9
Their Two Graves
10
Microexistence Beach
About the Author
Jules Tappy
A young boy
Julie Printemps
A teenage girl
Anne Cachemaille
A fisherwoman
José van Dormael
A fisherman; Anne’s right-hand man
Yvette “Yve” Carrière
A blind lacemaker
Felix Carrière
A tailor and Yve’s husband
Anna
Eldest triplet
Donna
Middle triplet
Luna
Youngest triplet
Bastin
Deputy mayor from Town Hall
Bernier
A retired employee of Town Hall
Denis Prejean
Manager of the Mineral Springs Hotel
Pierre Affre
A local young man
René
A shipwright
Georges Crespin
A hunter
Stella
An employee of the Mineral Springs Hotel
Joël
The cook at the Mineral Springs Hotel
Old Jules
A mysterious old man
Langoni
Commander of the Spiders
I’m going to go to the Singing Sands and look for Glass Eyes.
This was the first thing Jules Tappy decided when he woke that morning.
As far as he could see from the window by his bed, the summer sky was an endless blue, and the wind was calm. Days like this were when wonderful things could be found washed up on the shore. Jules sprang from his bed and leaned out the window, feeling the morning air on his cheeks.
A well-trodden red dirt road ran past his house. Eventually it gave way to a narrow cobbled lane, then widened gradually into a respectable paved street that led down the hill into town.
Beyond that crowded jumble of red roofs was the fishing harbor. The sea was blue and calm, and above its vacant spread towered colossal thunderheads. Tinted pale rose by the last lingering rays of the morning glow, the clouds looked like monuments carved of marble, hard and solid and grim.
Jules knew, though, that this was not truly so. Clouds were drifting accumulations of minuscule water droplets—amorphous, ever-changing forms that could not be possessed or even fixed in place. Not objects, but phenomena.
The scent of the sea breeze at the Singing Sands rose from Jules’s memory.
What sort of Eyes would he find there today?
Might there even be Driftglass?
As twelve-year-old boys often do—almost as if he were a real twelve-year-old boy—Jules grew excited by the promise of his own groundless hunches.
Such was the beauty of the morning.
The streetscape that sprawled below him, made in the image of a small harbor town in southern Europe and now bathed in light of a clarity permitted only to summer mornings, perfectly incarnated the concept of this Realm: a summer vacation in a small town, old-fashioned and inconvenient.
Using the cool water still in the pitcher from last night, Jules washed his face in the washbasin and went downstairs. Tiny droplets of water twinkled in his bangs, which were the same fine, soft blond as the rest of his hair.
The dining room was filled with the welcome aroma of breakfast.
In one corner stood a display cabinet containing a trophy with a chessman motif. A chess tournament was held every summer at the Mineral Springs, the finest hotel in town. The tournament had a long history, with the list of previous winners full of celebrated names and grandmasters. Jules had first entered the tournament at the age of nine, handily winning. The trophy had been placed in the display cabinet the following morning and remained there ever since, gathering dust for over a thousand years.
“Good morning, Jules,” his mother called over her shoulder as she put the finishing touches on breakfast.
She plucked leaves from the herbs growing in the window planter, chopped them finely, then sprinkled them on the clam soup. Unleavened bread came out of the stone oven to be placed on the table. The tomato salad had been tossed in garlic-infused olive oil and vinegar.
Jules always liked the way his mother set the table for breakfast.
An unbleached tablecloth. Wooden bowls and china plates.
The milk jug, the pepper mill.
Knives and forks, spoons, napkin rings.
The flatbread was dense and chewy, redolent of whole grains. The tomato juice that collected at the bottom of the salad bowl was finer than any you could buy at the store. The minuscule particles of the steam that rose from the soup traced beautiful spirals in the summer light.
The light hits that chair, too, Jules thought. The chair across from me—Papa’s chair. But no one’s sitting there.
No one ever did.
Papa wasn’t here.
Papa had not come to this dining room, this house, this town, this summer, for over a thousand years.
“I’m going to the Singing Sands today,” said Jules. “Julie’s amazing at catching crabs in the rock pools.”
“Sounds good. Make sure you stay where it’s safe.” Jules’s mother smiled the way she always did. A kind smile, but a complicated one. “How’s breakfast?” she as
ked.
Oh, Mama, don’t worry about me. I’m fine. I don’t go to school, but I’m healthy and strong, and better educated than anyone in town. Or is it me being with Julie that concerns you? The way she lives her life? In all the Realm of Summer, Mama, you’re the only one who worries about that.
“Delicious!” replied Jules, just as he always did. He took a bite of bread and chewed silently.
“You’re going to the rocky part of the west bay, right? Would you mind stopping by Grandpa’s to buy a few things?”
“Grandpa” was an old man who kept a small stall on the western rocks. Not for tourists—he sold only the freshest, finest seafood, and very cheaply at that. Jules had run errands there any number of times.
But there was something about him that Jules just didn’t like.
“Just tell him I want to make fish stew. He’ll put together a package for me.”
Jules grunted noncommittally.
His mother added just a dash of coffee to his milk. The coffee made the sweetness of the milk stand out. What a delicate thing the human sense of taste was.
Breakfast. If the day was an engine, breakfast was its starter. Jules and his mother had been sitting down to breakfast in this dining room ever since the ChronoManager had begun keeping time one thousand and fifty years ago, and would presumably continue to do so in future. Just a boy and his mama, sitting across from each other at a table with no father, eating their breakfast together.
“Don’t forget your hat. And make sure you come back for lunch.”
“Yes, Mama.”
Jules got himself ready and then went to the front door. He stepped outside the house, as tiny and cute as a toy, and was just adjusting the brim of his straw hat when—
“Jules!”
The spirited call came from above. He turned back toward the house and looked up. There, on the orange-shingled eaves above the front door, was Julie, standing tall.
Yes: standing tall.
Julie was a vision in white.
She wore a plain linen shift that hung from her shoulders,
her blond hair, cut short as a boy’s, had faded to platinum in the summer sun,
and she wore a bracelet of white shells around her wrist, with matching anklet below.
Jules would go on to live far, far beyond his thousand-year boyhood, but the way Julie looked that morning, the whiteness of her as she stood like a sapling between the red tiles and the blue sky, he would never forget.
“All right, all right!” Julie shouted. “You should see your face!”
Her dress fluttered in the wind. She was naked underneath. For a moment, a patch slightly darker than her hair was visible between her legs.
“You’d better be careful, cousin!” Julie laughed, throwing her head back. Her teeth were her whitest part of all. “Looks like you’ll trip over your jaw!”
“Julie.” Jules’s face was bright red. “Come on.”
“Gangway!” Julie said, and then, without even a pause, leapt from the edge of the roof.
Following the gutter partway down, she swung across to a tree and slid to the ground. She carried herself as bravely as a firefighter and as lightly as flapping laundry.
She touched down right in front of Jules.
“What do you think of my dress? Mom made it for me.”
She raised her arms and spun in place. In the concavities where her arms met her torso were chestnut shadows, dark smudges Jules could hardly tear his eyes away from.
“Really?” Jules said, feigning mild surprise. He knew, in fact, that Julie’s mother made her clothes.
“Really.”
“You look great in it.”
“Really?”
The shift was simply cut and sewn, but that only emphasized the outline of her body.
“Yep.”
“Really? Are you sure it’s my dress you’re looking at?”
Julie’s lips curled into a grin. The feel of their touch came back to Jules suddenly.
“Positive.”
“I wonder … Really?”
Her eyes, green-black like ripe olives, met his own gaze.
They were the only part of her that wasn’t white. The restless spin of Julie’s feelings always showed unguarded in her face. She loved love like a puppy, kept her distance like a mother cat, and had eyes as stubborn as a young girl’s—which she was, in fact, being only sixteen.
“Well, whatever,” Julie said. “I can’t out-argue you.” She rubbed the short hair at the nape of her neck. Her hair looked soft to the touch.
Julie didn’t care whether Jules was a genius or not. Jules’s unusual intelligence had attracted resentment since he was young, and it was only when he was with his “cousin” that he could forget all that.
For Julie, Jules played a similar role. Her sexual self-control was broken. She would sleep with anyone. But that didn’t bother Jules a bit.
“Come on,” Jules said. “Let’s go”
“Now, now. No need to rush.” Julie unhurriedly cleaned her ear with her little finger.
“What if someone gets to the Eyes before us?”
“No one’s going to get to them. It’s a secret beach. It’s been a thousand years, and no one’s ever found it. Why should today be the day?”
“Still, it’s going to be hot later. Let’s go while it’s still cool.”
“You sound like a mom, you know that? Yes, it’ll be hot later. I understand that. But you know what? I don’t care a bit how hot it gets. In fact, I prefer the heat. I’m not satisfied unless it’s so hot that my hair starts to smolder.”
Eventually the two of them began to walk toward the sea. They left the cobbled road to take a shortcut through the trees. They smelled the sweet fragrance of the orchard. The buzz of bees was dancing in the air somewhere.
“What’re you doing tonight?” asked Julie. “Are you entering the tournament?”
“Of course I am.”
The annual chess tournament was to be held at the Mineral Springs tonight.
Why would Julie ask him that?
Because she didn’t want him to enter. But Jules had no intention of changing his plans. Making Julie wish he would was one of the reasons he was entering it in the first place, after all.
“Even if I string you up with Spider silk?”
This was a common figure of speech in the Realm of Summer. The “Spiders” it referred to, though, weren’t the common arachnids an outsider might assume. They were something much more specific to this virtual resort—the boundless Costa del Número.
Who kept the old house that Jules and his mother called home in good repair? Spiders. Who defended this lush green orchard from pests? Spiders.
The paved road into town, the water supply that ran beneath it, the engines of the trucks going to and fro: all the maintenance the town needed—that the whole Realm of Summer needed—was carried out by robots called Spiders. You could always find one nearby if you looked carefully. They kept the Realm running smoothly, and they were everywhere.
“Hey, what’s that?”
Pruned branches from the orchard were piled up a short way from the red dirt road. Gathered around them was a teeming mass of Spiders.
A gathering of Spiders wasn’t strange in itself. But this one was unusually large.
“I wonder what’s going on?”
The Spiders of the Realm were obviously not actual arachnids. Still, they made a very similar impression. Spiders really did feel like the only reasonable name for them.
No two Spiders were exactly alike. But they did share some common traits: they moved smoothly on multiple legs, and they spun “silk.”
Julie stroked the soft hair at the nape of her neck again. A rattle came from her loose bracelet.
The Spiders seemed to have been drawn to a large hole, about f
orty centimeters across, which hung angled in midair just above the ground.
The hole was perfectly round. It looked like a large vinyl LP (still the preferred audio format in this Realm) propped up against the pile of branches. But it was not an object: it was a hole in thin air. Its crisp edges looked like the work of a sharp blade. Inside the hole there was only darkness, with nothing visible no matter how you squinted.
The Realm was a nearly perfect virtual resort space, but gaps like this did open sometimes. They were like graphical bugs. They caused no real harm, and the Spiders usually repaired them right away.
“What’s wrong, guys?” Julie prodded the Spiders with the tip of her sandal. “You’re sluggish today.”
Spiders were highly diligent by nature.
Most holes were surrounded and blanketed with a sheet of Spider silk while still tiny. Within five minutes, the silk would morph into whatever was around the hole. The hole itself would close, the same way a wound healed. Spiders roamed the Realm constantly, assiduously repairing daily wear and tear in this way.
In response to Julie’s prodding, though, these Spiders did nothing but slowly squirm. They seemed to be somehow at a loss. Julie reached down to pick up a Spider that had latched on to her ankle. About the size and shape of a round of Camembert cheese. Covered in a gray camouflage pattern. Twenty legs. Retractable eyes on both faces of its central disc, so that it could still work if flipped over. The Spider—which, naturally, had no emotions, but even so—seemed highly disturbed.
“‘What—should—I—do? This—is—a pickle,’” said Julie, speaking for the Spider. “Don’t worry, I can’t just leave you like this. Let me think of something.”
Julie tossed the Spider away to free her hands. Among the white shells of her bracelet was a single Glass Eye. It looked like a battered old bead of blue glass.
Putting her other hand to her bracelet, Julie stretched her arms out before her, finger pointed at the hole.
There was a small, tightening sound. The edges of the hole turned a glowing red. The hole had been caught. The dark circle began to contract, edges glowing brighter and brighter as it did, until it finally vanished, leaving a strong smell of ozone.
“Done and done.”
“Right, but … there’s something wrong with the Spiders,” Jules said. He reached into the mass at his feet and tried to pull one free. As he lifted the Spider, ten more came with it in a dangling chain. Their legs were tangled together, but that wasn’t all. Their bodies had partly melted into each other, fusing together. They let out little screams in protest at their suffering.
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