“You really want to know?”
“Yeah.”
“They metabolize information. Each one is an individual being with its own unique method—and by that I mean, there is no other like it—of metabolizing information. Or, rather, for each one, the phenomenon of metabolism is its self, and its uniqueness its identity. Along with that, here in the Costa del Número, they wield transcendental power. Now, what does that describe?”
Jules racked his brain. “I don’t know,” he said finally.
“Guests,” said Old Jules. “Humans.”
He lowered himself down, took a handful of sand, and let it run through his fingers.
“These are broken-down human simulacra,” he said. “Shredded simulacra. Human agents, smashed, ground up, and so thoroughly mixed that it’s impossible to tell who each one used to be.”
“Agents?”
“Yes. Guests don’t go to the Costa del Número themselves. They send agents—meticulously constructed informational simulacra of themselves. This keeps them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the Realms. Agents that can’t return to their guest for some reason are destroyed. Without exception. Not so much for privacy’s sake as to maintain informational uniqueness and uphold the principles of the Declaration of Informational Human Rights. One day, over a thousand years ago, there was an incident which saw hundreds of millions of agents destroyed at once.”
“The Grand Down.”
“The simulacra were immediately decomposed into minute, sand-like grains and scattered.”
Old Jules looked out over the ocean.
“And this is where they gathered. The Realm of Summer. The currents carry them in.”
Jules thought silently for a while about why Langoni had come to the Realm of Summer in search of Glass Eyes.
“Even the sand scattered in other Realms ends up in our ocean?”
Old Jules nodded, still gazing at the sea. “Not all of it, but enough.”
“What are the Glass Eyes, then?”
“What indeed?” Old Jules smiled with just a hint of bitterness. “Even I don’t know everything. But they must come from the Singing Sands, no? What other explanation makes sense? I imagine the Singing Sands retain some kind of will. Will …hope … dreams … Whatever it might be.
“They want to recover. Regain their original forms.
“They want to remember who they were.”
Jules looked at the ocean. He thought about the guests’ information-corpses, broken down into an immense accumulation of sand that covered the vast ocean floor.
I like things I’ve never seen before …
Old Jules was hinting at a certain possibility. No—he was waving it before Jules’s eyes.
“So the sands are carried here by the sea currents.”
“That’s right.”
“And you could follow those currents back to where they came from.”
There was no answer.
“What about the promise?” Jules asked, meaning Julie’s final vow.
“It was kept. At least in my case.”
Jules sat silently in the wind a while. “It’s strange, isn’t it?” he said at length. “I have no right eye, but if I close my left, I can still see.”
Old Jules nodded without turning to face him, and answered with a single cryptic phrase: “The drifter’s Glass Eye.”
Oh, thought Jules. He couldn’t help smiling. So that was what Driftglass was.
The power of Cottontail.
Which was probably still stored away inside him …
“That reminds me,” said Old Jules cheerfully. “Do me a favor and tell the three sisters hello when you meet them.”
Jules raised his eyes.
The horizon was still pitch-black.
But why was he able to make it out?
Because the sky was very faintly, almost imperceptibly, brightening.
The sun has brought morning to the Realm of Summer again.
It is now fully light.
Jules Tappy sits alone on the beach. Dressed all in black, he looks like a crow in repose.
The rotted old wooden boat is gone.
Jules’s wrinkled face is turned toward the great mirror of the shining ocean.
The boat and the boy aboard it have been swallowed by the light. He cannot see them anymore.
Storm clouds tower in the sky.
Bathed in that rose light.
Jules turns his back to the sea.
There is Pointed Rock.
There are the cliffs.
And beyond that …
With the face of a traveler finally returned home, Jules begins to walk away from the sea.
TOBI Hirotaka was born in 1960 in Shimane Prefecture. He was the winner of the Sanseido SF Story Contest while a student at Shimane University. From 1983 to 1992 he actively contributed short stories to SF Magazine. After a hiatus of ten years, he returned in 2002 with his first full-length novel. The Thousand Year Beach (Grande Vacance: Angel of the Ruined Garden) took Second Prize in SF Magazine’s Best SF 2002. In 2004, Kaleidoscape, his collection of revised and new works, took top honors in that year’s Best SF in the magazine, and the 2005 Nihon SF Taisho Award. One story from the collection, “Shapesphere” also won the 2005 Seiun Award for Best Japanese Short Story of the Year. “Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds” earned TOBI his second Seiun Award for Best Japanese Short Story in 2010 and appeared in English in The Future Is Japanese, and his third for “Sea Fingers” in 2015, which appeared in English in Saiensu Fikushon 2016. He is also the author of Ragged Girl, a sequel to The Thousand Year Beach. His latest collection, Autogenic Dreaming, won 2017 Nihon SF Taisho Award and the first prize in the year’s Best SF in SF Magazine.
HAIKASORU
The Future Is Japanese
Rocket Girls—Housuke Nojiri
Yukari Morita is a high school girl on a quest to find her missing father. While searching for him in the Solomon Islands, she receives the offer of a lifetime—she’ll get the help she needs to find her father, and all she need do in return is become the world’s youngest, lightest astronaut. Yukari and her sister Matsuri, both petite, are the perfect crew for the Solomon Space Association’s launches, or will be once they complete their rigorous and sometimes dangerous training.
The Ouroboros Wave—Jyouji Hayashi
Ninety years from now, a satellite detects a nearby black hole scientists dub Kali for the Hindu goddess of destruction. Humanity embarks on a generations-long project to tap the energy of the black hole and establish colonies on planets across the solar system. Earth and Mars and the moons Europa (Jupiter) and Titania (Uranus) develop radically different societies, with only Kali, that swirling vortex of destruction and creation, and the hated but crucial Artificial Accretion Disk Development association (AADD) in common.
Saiensu Fikushon 2016—Edited by haikasoru
Three new stories from three of the best science fiction writers in Japan:
“Overdrive” by Toe EnJoe—How fast is the speed of thought?
“Sea Fingers” by TOBI Hirotaka—A small enclave survives after the Deep has consumed the world, but what does the Deep hunger for now?
“A Fair War” by Taiyo Fujii—The future of war, the age of drones, but what comes next?
Saiensu Fikushon is Haikasoru’s new e-first mini anthology, dedicated to bringing you the narrative software of tomorrow, today. Now more than ever, the future is Japanese!
www.haikasoru.com
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The Thousand Year Beach Page 31
