by Ian McDonald
A television with a hand-sized Sony camcorder clipped to it stands on a corner shelf. Onscreen twenty-two men in shorts chase a black and white checkered ball about an astroturf field. In the bottom right corner, two faces, an old man and an old woman. The simulas of dead grandparents, keeping watch on their beloved granddaughter from Amida’s Pure Land in the West through the little Sony camera. Seeing henro in their field of vision they smile and bow to us from beyond life.
If the girl notices us as we hold our albums over her and offer prayers she makes no response. Mrs. Morikawa seems satisfied and thanks us for our time and prayers. The Daishi will save her daughter. She has faith. A faithless gaijin, I feel guilty, fraudulent, an itinerant rainmaker, a wandering snake-oil seller.
Over pork chosenabe—we use an old Buddhist euphemism of calling wild boar “mountain whale” to subvert meatlessness—Mrs. Morikawa’s three sons and younger daughter question us about the pilgrimage. If they recognize Mas they are too well brought up to pester him with Kabukiman questions. Cakes are served, and tea. The youngest boy fetches in a big pallet of beer cans. Considering himself excused from the injunction against alcohol because he has performed a virtuous deed, Masahiko drinks freely. The others join him only out of politeness. I decline. There is a pain in my stomach. It is not muscle cramp, it is not a foreign devil’s misreaction to Mrs. Morikawa’s pork chosenabe. It is the sharp-hooked horn of dilemma twisting in my guts. I can save myself and damn. I can damn myself and save.
“And Mr. Morikawa?” Mas asks, made overconfident by 8.5 percent proof.
“Dead these three years past,” Mrs. Morikawa says. “He died up at Temple Eleven. Akiras had taken over the Temple; he could not stand the thought of them turning one of Shikoku’s Sacred Sites into a latrine. He was a stupid man in many ways, but not so stupid as to go up against them alone. Then Tosa Securities bought out the policing contracts to the valley and as a gesture of goodwill mounted an offensive against bandits and petty warlords upcountry, including the akira chapter at Temple Eleven. It was terrible; we could hear the shooting all the way down in the valley. We could see the muzzle flashes the tracers. Eventually, my husband could not stand by and listen to them destroying his Temple anymore. He went up there to try and talk sense into them. A ToSec enforcer shot him by mistake for an akira, even though he had a white flag with him. It had only been two months since his last download; they took his tap across the Inland Sea to the Osaka Number Eleven simulator. He grew up near there. This year the premiums are up twenty percent and ToSec are sending their enforcers to every household to encourage prompt payment.”
To follow as a pilgrim in a master’s footsteps leaves you no choice over which way to go. You do as he would do, no matter the pain.
With apologies, I leave the somber little party for the barn. The lights come on automatically; curious kittens peep from the hayloft and come swooping down on their wings to alight on the floor beside me, rubbing and purring. It is exactly where I left it in the bottom of my left-hand bag. The organic batteries are still strong and there is a new cartridge of biodecay paper in the printer. Because any words of mine would only frighten and confuse, I say none and slip past the big farmhouse kitchen to the sick girl’s room. No witnesses: I switch off television and ’corder, banish grandpa and grandma to cybernetic limbo. Moths dance on the window glass. By the light of the moon, I set up the demon box.
FRACTER GENERATION SYSTEM LEVEL THREE INTERFACED, says the demon box.
My fingers hesitate for a moment over the Qwerty symbols on the flat black face of the box. Like that other box in the legend, once this is opened, what comes out cannot be put back again.
TIFERET, I type, one slow letter at a time.
COMMIT CODE?
WHAT I TELL YOU THREE TIMES IS TRUE.
The screen blanks. My mouth is dry.
PASSWORD VALIDATED. VISUAL DISPLAY OR HARDCOPY?
HARDCOPY.
The printer shrieks. I peel off the backing strip, stick the adhesive slip to the television screen, swivel an anglepoise to illuminate the thing printed on it, and go to the side of the bed.
“Come on, daughter,” I say in English. “Time for thine eyes to see the glory of the coming of the Lord.” With my back to the chaotic un-geometries of the fracter, I open her eyelids with my thumbs.
No audible response, no tactile change beneath my fingertips. But her pupils dilate. She sees. And being seen, the fracter slips past the defenses of her consciousness into the primal presentient core of neurochemical reaction.
Minutes pass, slow, stretched, time-dilated. Her eyes close, she slips back into sleep. I am no medico, but I know the difference between this and the shallow, restless drowse from which I woke her.
Voices in the landing. Mas, Mrs. Morikawa. The bedroom door opens, a crack, a line of yellow light. They cannot see what I am doing here. I slam the door, turn the deadlock.
“Ethan?”
“Leave me, Mas. I can help her, trust me.”
“Mr. Ring?”
“It will be all right, Mrs. Morikawa. I will not harm her, I swear. Just give me this one night. Please.”
This has always been the way with the fracters: evil sown with the good. With healing and wholeness, suspicion and mistrust. What other choice did I have but to make them mistrust me? I find a chair out of the line of sight, to sit, to wait. Nightwatch. The clustered lights of the low-orbital manufactories arc slowly overhead and I remember the life of Ethan Ring.
ALL HER MAJOR DECISIONS, she said, were made by contrail-o-mancy. Jet trails. Inbounds, outbounds, conjunctions, and near-misses. Hexagrams of the heavens. “Make a lot more sense than leaves, cards, and bones. Divination should be a product of its time. It’s only logical.”
“What do you do on cloudy days?” he asked.
“Cloudy days I don’t even get out of bed.”
At which precise moment an outbound trans-polar suborbital made a perfect thirty-two-degree trine with an inbound shuttle from Frankfurt and he fell in love with her. Having never fallen in love before, it was a pleasure to discover that falling was the most precise description language could offer of the sudden, shocking emotional vertigo he felt. It terrified him. It thrilled him. It was like being handed the keys to the best ride in the fairground and told to play until dawn. Thoughts of her crept unasked into every stray moment, kept him warm and horny.
“So when are you going to do something about it?” asked Masahiko the anime hero and Marcus Cranitch the computer junkie and his girlfriend who looked as if her name should end in a “y” and was in fact called ’Becca and all the drinkers thinkers jokers poseurs bozos bimbos nymphos and boyos who comprised first-year B.A. Hons Graphic Communications, who had collectively and individually noticed that Luka Casipriadin was climbing the five flights of stairs between Fine Arts on one and Design on six at least four times a day.
“Do something?” said Ethan Ring, who had never considered the possibility that so splendid a creature could reciprocally love him.
“Do something!” thundered Masahiko Marcus ’Becca-without-the-Y and the drinkers thinkers jokers poseurs bozos bimbos nymphos and boyos.
She came knocking on his apartment door one Tuesday winter evening, waltzed into his kitchenette space, and while washing down fistfuls of Rice Krispies with milk from the bottle (“They snapcracklepop on your tongue”) said, “Got something to show you. Come on,” and shoved him into a waiting taxi.
“Where?”
“Here.”
She unloaded a computer from the front seat, paid the driver.
“But there’s nothing here.” His breath steamed in the damp November cold. Spirited out without even a grab for a jacket, he shivered and wrapped his long orangutan arms around him for warmth.
“Yes there is. A building site is here. Not any building site, but the building site for the Wildwood Center, no less; the Numero Uno Leisure Shopping Development in the Industrial Northwest.”
“A building site.”<
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“Yeoman.” She waved. In his glass security cabin bolted to the steel exoskeleton of Wildwood, the night-watchman waved back. Razor-wire-topped metal gates slid open on creaking rollers.
“Shall we?” Bank by bank, section by section, yellow floodlamps kicked on, throwing planes and shafts of light and shadow across the rectilinear frame of girders and floors.
“Fucking hell,” said Ethan Ring.
“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Luka showed him into a service elevator. “But not in the biblical sense.” Up: ten twenty thirty meters into the grid of light, “Fourth floor; ladies foundation garments, rubber hosiery, and exotic millinery.” She ducked under the safety gate, pulled Ethan after her into an Escheresque dimension of concrete horizontals interrupted by support piers and prefabricated walls. In places floors and ceilings were incomplete; yawning voids opened and overlapped onto lower levels; above, the cold November sky, threatening rain. The unavoidable debris of Construction Man lay scattered about (“You should hear some of the propositions I’ve had”); his tools, his toys, his topless Page Three girls, his diet Coke cans.
Luka unhooked a wraparound VR audio-visualizer and paired datagloves from her belt and handed it to Ethan Ring.
“Watch and learn, lover.”
The lift into altered perception was terrifying and thrilling.
Planes and shafts of stabbing color, curves, angles, all connected by rushing lines of force, of velocity. The sense of speed as he moved across the concrete floor sent him reeling. Air compressors, welding equipment, power tools, portable generators, became vibrant vortices of movement. He could see the energy they contained as a rush of images, time dependent action compressed into static timelessness. A discarded bottle opened up into spirals and planes of stored power; a crumpled newspaper became a whirling concatenation of information and vertigo.
“What is this?” he begged, seeking stability, seeking Luka, seeing a blur of kinesis.
“The Boccioni-verse.” Her voice was a deep, sure root in the hurtling instability. “Umberto Boccioni; doyenne of the Italian Futurist painters, 1882—1916; obsessed with industry, energy, velocity, and aggression. This place is perfect for him. ‘The City Rises’! Can’t you just smell the testosterone? Would have made a great fascist if he hadn’t fallen on his head while out riding one morning in Verona and prematurely terminated himself.”
The slightest movement of his head sent lines of colored energy rushing past him.
“How do you do this?”
“With computers. Isn’t everything? I remixed an old video image-processing system using retailored commercial enzyme programs to hack it apart and reassemble it.” Shedding planes of hand-shaped light, she picked up a fiber-optic cable, burning, writhing with visible information. “Head-mounted cameras pick up images, the mobile here processes them and feeds them back to the YRs. This one’s visual-only mode. Later I may add extra dimensions. Next, I’m thinking, maybe a Cubist-verse, or even Kandinsky. Miro, perhaps? You fancy me as a squiggly black thing with a little blobby head? Eventually, I want to create my own discrete, personal universes. Luka-verses like no one’s ever seen before. Found sources. Junk aesthetics. Reality overdubs.
“They can’t see it, Ethan. The others in my class. Because I want to use software remixing to mold reality/virtuality overlays, I’m a fascist. Mechanistic, soulless, irrelevant to the Zeitgeist of twenty-first-century man trapped in a universe of quantum indeterminacy, they say. But at least I care. I love what I do, I love why I do it; I’m not tapping my forehead three times in the shit to Ideology-of-the-Month. They care about their P.C. credibility, or being talked about by the right set, or mentioned by the right tutors, or if they’re tutors themselves, at the right parties, fuck integrity, fuck originality, fuck art. I care, Eth. I care like fuck, and I want someone to know it.” Her voice, speaking from the heart of a whirlwind of cascading images, held a dark, tightly focused savagery Ethan Ring found disturbing and exciting for the same reasons.
Mechanistic soulless irrelevancies to the Zeitgeist notwithstanding, she received a Distinction for the Boccioni-verse project and persuaded Ethan to throw a celebration party in his flat.
“What’s wrong with yours?” he asked.
“Ah!” was her only answer.
Everyone from his and her classes who was not too small-spirited to accept turned up. They danced badly to far too loud music. They drank far too much. They smoked atrocious things and popped worse. They behaved abominably in public at antisocial hours, reeling up and down the street on each other’s shoulders, falling on cars, denting bodywork, setting off a Stockhausen symphony of security alarms. All night he watched her moving around his flat talking, laughing, drinking, grinning, looking beautiful and brilliant in a head-turning rubber dress, surrounded by brilliant beautiful drinking laughing talking people as irresistibly drawn to her as he in a cordon he could not penetrate for one word, one laugh, one dance for himself. Returning from the bathroom—so full of dope smoke it disconnected its many visitors from reality as effectively as any of Luka’s virtuality overdubs—he met her in her breathtaking rubber dress filling in clues on the World’s Longest Crossword that ran all the way around his living/sleeping room into the kitchenette space.
“Ethan.” Her fingers on his arm were urgent in a way he had never felt before. “Come on.” She pulled him away from the World’s Longest Crossword, away from the party, up the stairs to her flat. “Come on.” Into her bedroom. “Three parallel outbounds this evening. A crux, a crisis, a point of transition. This is the time.” She pulled him to her. She smelled of whiskey, warm rubber, and wild wild things. “Why do you think I had the party down in your place?” She locked the door. “Welcome to the Luka-verse.”
THE VOICE WAKES ME. For the second it takes the tap to download I cannot understand; then glass pyramids of language crystallize in my mind.
“Please, I’m so hungry, can’t I have something to eat?”
Dull gray light in the window; dawn light. She is so weak and frail she can hardly hold herself upright in the bed. The dull deathliness is gone from her eyes. There is a new light in her.
My ribs ache, the backs of my knees throb from having fallen asleep with my feet propped on the dressing table. Head like a loaf of stale bread, mouth like Satan’s rectum. Before I destroy the evidence of my dark art, I permit myself one brief glance.
Tiferet: Angel of Healing and Wholeness.
Well-being cascades through my chakra centers from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Muscular aches and nags are wiped away. I feel I can run a marathon, outspring a greyhound, leap tall buildings in a single bound. I feel Olympian. I feel immortal.
“Please, mister, something to eat?”
I go out into the hall and call for Mrs. Morikawa. The house is awake within seconds. I gain the impression that no one has been asleep. While Mrs. Morikawa and family run about filled with joy, preparing miso soup, sloppy rice, tea, I wake Mas.
“The girl?”
“She’ll be all right now.”
He is still drunk with sleep.
“What… how?”
“Later. I promise.” What have I forced myself into? What lies, what deceptions, what mistrusts and hurts? A spiritual searcher would pray Lord Daishi for grace to save him from the consequences of doing right, but I am only doubting, profane Ethan Ring. “We should get going if we want to be on the far side of Tokushima City by nightfall.”
“It’s twenty past five in the morning.”
“I know.”
I want to be on the henro path and over the next mountain before the Morikawas, after rejoicing, remember us, and want to thank us, praise us, give us things. Ask us questions. Bikes are ready, packs prepared in half an hour. With the light coming up all around us, pouring into the valley, flooding over us, we climb up through the bamboo and cane groves toward the henro way, me leading, Mas close up on my rear wheel.
From the high farming country we dip do
wn again onto the densely populated coastal plains. Many temples here, much traffic inbound for Tokushima. No place for the uninterrupted cultivation of memory. The way demands total concentration. Tokushima City, the prefectural capital, is noisy, dirty, nasty; straining to the point of collapse under the weight of migrants from the failed offshore colonies and the social chaos of the Tokyo Bay conurbation. Tokushima is—always has been—a barrier gate city. In historical times, the borders between provinces were tightly policed, and barriers established to check on the authorization and travel permits of traders and visitors. Henro were barely tolerated, suspected of being spies, assassins, Imperial agents, or other undesirables. Alongside the political barriers existed a second kind of barrier gate: temple barriers, places of spiritual examination and testing, where the pilgrim who was able to worship freely and purely might continue, but if misfortune was encountered, or ill omen, he must return and begin his pilgrimage again.
The political barriers may have fallen, but the spiritual gates still stand. The henro path takes us away from Tokushima City’s thronged main thoroughfares, through back streets and industrial districts where the now-permanent recession that has struck down Japan is everywhere visible, the closed-up shops, the shut-down small factories. Mass-produced accommodation pods stacked ten, twenty high pen us in, direct us into a labyrinth of lanes and alleys. Emergency housing; the estate of the new dispossessed. Mas is visibly uneasy; even I can sense the angry desperation, one freakish alien among two hundred million; more, I am of that people that challenged and defeated their empire and condemned them to the estate of refugees in their own country. Children in This Year’s Model sportsgear watch with a disturbingly adult intensity from the scramble nets and bamboo ladders that access the higher levels; men squat at intersections around boomboxes, play handball against graffiti-stained walls, hang about, hang out, wait; women are the salarypersons here, casual part-time workers in labor-intensive service industries. Only the biopowered robots have jobs for life with the compassionate the caring the Company. Smells of shit, charcoal, street food, engine oil, hot dust, and the undefinably familiar sweet scent of home-brew E-Base. Sounds of twenty satellite channels playing at once; in every stall, every bar, every shop, every home, robot-manufactured flatscreen Sonys play all day, play all night. Life during prime-time. Disemboweled vehicles. Shot-down streetlights. Abandoned shopping trolleys. Graffiti aspiring to be Art, and Noticed. Dogs—fighting dogs.
