by Ian McDonald
“That depends if the man truly has power to do good, son, or is merely made impotent by guilt.”
“This man has power to do good beyond your conception of power.”
Mr. Spider raises his head, as if he knows the scent of a soul.
“And therefore evil.”
“The reason he has come on this pilgrimage is to escape from great evil that lies in his past.”
“Escape, son, may not be the way,” says Mr. Spider. “It would be reassuring if everything was finally reducible to Light versus Darkness, Order versus Chaos, Good versus Evil. However, life is not pulp fantasy. If the Way were easy, what virtue would there be in following it? The teaching of the Daishi is that the Way does not lie in escape, or even in defeating. The answer to abuse is not disuse, but in the learning of right use, surely.”
“I was afraid you would say that.”
“So was I,” says Mr. Spider.
“The Christians say all spiritual life is one beggar showing another beggar where to find bread,” I say. Mr. Spider nods.
“The Daishi wrote a poem in this place,” he says. He admits he has no reciting voice—it sounds like a cracked bamboo flute—but the words are strong in themselves.
“Muroto:
Though day in, day out,
Waves crash, winds roar,
Yet, still,
The voice of the Buddha is heard.”
“The Buddha of Medical Mercilessness?” I ask.
“The Buddha of the Chicken Gate?” He smiles. “I rode Space Mountain twenty-six times, in another incarnation, son.” His six legs carry him carefully back along the cliff edge to the huddled dark geometries of the temple. “Sleep well, kid,” he calls after me. After a time with the waves and the wind, I follow.
“Mas.” I do not like to wake him from such a pure and untroubled sleep, but if I linger, my resolution will falter. “Mas.” The moon is high behind me; silver light on a paper wall. I feel like a figure from poetry. “Mas.”
“Ethan?”
“Healing. Laughter. Tears. Ecstasy. Fear. Pain. And forgetting. I didn’t mention it, yesterday at Turtle Beach, the forgetting. I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of what you might ask me.”
“To make me forget.”
A subtropical moth has been trapped by the image of the moon on the shoji.
“It would be complete. It would be as if she had never existed. Is that what you want, for her to be gone from your life forever?”
“Ethan, she is gone from my life forever. I don’t want to forget, I just want it to stop hurting. Can you do that?”
“There is no one fracter that can take away the hurt and leave the memory. I have one that can make you live it again, as if you were there in person; what you do with that chance to live it again is up to you.”
“Ethan…” He grips my arm. His fingers are shapely, aesthetic.
“I’ll go with you as far as I can. I have a fracter that will make sure it is never more than you can handle.”
“Ethan, I can’t go on the way I am.”
“Then close your eyes,” I tell Mas. “Don’t look at me until I tell you.”
The batteries in the demon box are low; two drops of syrup restore them to life. The fracters I require are low order; demons-minor, so familiar to me I have become almost immune to them: La Serenissima and Mneme. On the pine dressing table is a folded lacquered fan. I open it, peel the backings from the fracters’ adhesive tabs. La Serenissima I place on the picture of quarreling magpies in the branches of a mountain pine; Mneme on the obverse, the file of happy smiling pilgrims wending down one mountain, up the next. I kneel before Masahiko, the fan open on my thighs, La Serenissima uppermost.
“Look now.”
The breath goes out of him in a long, low sigh.
“What is it?”
“Marcus called it La Serenissima,” I say. “Avatar of peace and tranquillity, serenity and calm. It stimulates the brain to produce endorphins, natural opiates.” Mas nods slowly. His pupils are so widely dilated I imagine I can see the image of the moon contained there, whole, entire in each.
I turn the fan over in my lap.
“Mas,” I say. “Remember the night she died.”
Shadows cross his face, shadows from within. A movement of the moth on the paper wall, when I look back, every trace of the artificial peace of the Serenity fracter is wiped away. Only terror, helplessness, anger. Through the memory fracter, he is standing in that alley with the yellow streetlight gleaming from the polished plastic of the Daihatsu 4x4.
“Tell me, Mas.”
“I’m standing shouting. I can’t do anything but shout. What use is shouting? Why don’t I do something? Why don’t you do something? Why are you sitting there with that stupid, stupid, stupid look on your face?” It is not me he is shouting at; he cannot even see me, only the street, the night, her, “Don’t you know that isn’t going to do anything, anything but get you killed?”
“Go back,” I order. “Back. How do you come to be in this street, at this time?”
A moment of La Serenissima.
“The basho. I forgot; it’s the big sumo play-off tonight. The police have the stadium cordoned off, there are detours posted. The cars are tailed way back for several blocks. Don’t bounce your hands on the horn. ‘Come on come on hurry up get a move on; look, it won’t make it clear any faster. It’ll clear in its own time. They’ll still be around when we get there. You always were an impatient driver.”
“You are not to blame,” I say for the first time. “It’s all right to be angry with her. She wasn’t perfect, nobody’s perfect. Dying hasn’t made her perfect. Dying doesn’t make any of us perfect. The dead can be stupid. The dead can be arrogant and impatient. You are allowed to be angry with them. You are allowed to hate them.”
Mas is trembling but I do not turn the fan La Serenissima face outward. Not yet.
“Go back,” I say. He goes back.
“Hey! I remember a way around; not exactly a shortcut, more of a long-cut, but quicker than this. I grew up near here, I should know. Anything to get her to this party, though there are reports on the radio: trouble next zone over. The security forces are trying to close down some akira chapter. I never thought they would try to break out.”
Memory to tranquillity. The harmonies and rhythms of the fracter touch my peripheral vision as an almost landscapelike serenity.
“Even if you suggested the detour; even if you heard the news and thought there might be danger, still, you are not to blame,” I say. And it is the second time.
“Somebody has to be to blame.”
“You?”
“Who else could it be, Ethan?”
“Her. She heard the radio reports too. She decided to take the detour. Why, Mas? Where was it she was so determined to get to? Why was she so impatient?”
Mneme now, and Mas’s face is clawed by guilt.
“Why did you want to go to the party, why did I have to agree to go with you? It would be the same thing it always is, the same faces saying the same polite things, no one ever telling me what they really think, about me, about my work. Let’s give it a miss, go see a movie, go out and eat, go shopping. ‘There’ll be People there,’ you say. ‘People, from Companies. They’re always headhunting, that’s what these parties are really for: headhunting expeditions.’ There will be Sony-Virgin-Columbia PR daimyos there with pockets full of contracts, and you’ll be damned if you’re going to miss out on them. You’re always dreaming of this mythic, golden California. Well, maybe I don’t have any ambition, maybe I’m content to be what I am, doing what I do. You get so angry when I don’t do what you want. Well this time you aren’t going to let my pathetic little shynesses and reclusivenesses stop you from going after what you want. Not this time.”
“Would she have gone without you?”
“You’re stalking up and down, up and down the hall in your party heels; it’s so short you can only
take three steps from end to end: click click click turn click click click turn…”
“Would she have gone without you?”
“Yes!” he shouted. “Yes. You would have gone. I asked you to wait five minutes while I got ready. Yes!”
“She would have gone to the party, taken the detour, ignored the warnings, run into the akiras, without you?”
“Yes,” he says. “Yes. Yes!”
“You are not guilty,” I say. “You are not to blame.” I bring my right hand up before Mas’s face. No glove. No spray-flesh. Naked. I open my fingers. “Believe me.”
Tattooed in the palm of my right hand is the image of Malkhut, that Sefirah fracter that whoever sees it, obeys.
“Believe me.” Mas’s pupils dilate as the quasi-fractal shatter of images slips up his optic nerves, around the curves and folds of his visual cortex, past all logic and rationality and consciousness, into the dark, preconscious fist of the medulla where sentience first sparked out of pure animal being three and a half million years ago.
“Believe me.” What I tell you three times is true. True beyond any denial, true beyond any pain or guilt or fear or anything that might say no to it.
That time in Marrakech with Luka, we went down at nightfall to the Square of the Souls to watch a man push a thin metal skewer through his tongue from side to side while he danced and clicked his fingers and yelled praise to God. Each of those believe mes is like a thin, keen, leather-stropped skewer, driven through my lips, my tongue, the palm of each lying hand.
IN THE NIGHT THE wind backs into the east, driving up great waves that shake Temple Twenty-four to its bedrock. A fine carrying wind for bicycle pilgrims, swirling us along the old coast path up through Temple Twenty-five to Twenty-six, flapping our henro robes like akira war banners. The sea below us is whipped up into long, foam-flecked combers; the pathside pines toss and blow. It is like riding through a Hiroshige print.
A kilometer out from Twenty-five we sight the clicking arthropod shape of Mr. Spider whirring along the henro path, corporate sponsorship logos bold and bright in the morning light, stole flying, bell chiming. He greets us warmly. He has been on the road since dawn—observing our bikes and outlandish garb, he comments that foot henro must have a good start under them before the day is too old. I cannot tell him that there is now a compact of secrecy between Mas and I as deep and dark as the compact of self-destruction he and I made on the cliff-top because I trusted his truth that the answer to misuse was not disuse—destruction—but right use. Name slips are exchanged—Mas’s smartplastic gewgaw evokes a smile, but here we are first and last pilgrims meeting in a summer storm. He waves his staff as we pedal off up the path. Dogyo Ninin.
Rain had eroded the way into narrow, treacherous channels. My sudden braking sends the bike slewing across the henro path. Wet gravel crunches beneath my tires. Perplexed, Mas stops, pushes up his shades with gloved hand.
“Wait for me at Twenty-six,” I shout to him over the wind roar. “Something I have to do. It’s all right. Don’t worry. Go on. Go. Scoot.”
Alone with the wind and the rising ocean, I order one of my paper demons from the black box. The deep-throated mantra of the bell is heard before its bearer is seen. Presently, Mr. Spider tops the rise.
“Settai, Mr. Spider.” I hold the folded slip of paper out to him.
“May this pilgrim ask what it is?” says Mr. Spider, settling with a hiss of hydrolastic struts into repose.
“A powerful talisman, bestowing health, vitality, and blessing upon all who meditate on it.”
He laughs, swaying in his support cradle.
“It will need to be an exceedingly powerful talisman indeed.” But he accepts it.
“When you no longer need it, pass it on to another,” I tell him, though by that time the time-lock paper will have disintegrated. “Until then, you must not let another person see it.”
“You can imagine a day when I will have no need for health, vitality, and blessing?”
Right toe into toe-clip, ready to push off. Wind eddies under the rim of my henro hat, lifting it. I could not have offered him the naked hope of regeneration, for he would not have dared accept something that, should it be false, would destroy him. Yet each time he contemplates Tiferet, it will slip past hopes and fears into due place where scarred, severed nerve fibers will grow again, where dead synapses will flicker and fire, bones strengthen, muscles firm and flex, legs walk.
“I can imagine that day,” I say. At the point of the next headland I look back to admire the tiny, resolute figure—infinitesimal in this huge landscape—of Mr. Spider pressing on through the summer storm. I look, and I look, and I wait, and I watch, but there is no sign of him. No sign of him at all.
We Two, Pilgrims Together.
BECAUSE HE TOLD HER to meet him in a Hi-Victorian majolica-tile waxed-wood and patinated-brass bar he despised; because when she arrived she found him alone in a booth drinking brandy that he detested, she knew what had happened. She let it work itself out under its own gravity; dark, cold subterranean waters following cracks and seams and fault lines.
“When I was eight my grandmother died,” he began, twirling the stem of his brandy glass between thumb and forefinger. “She left me a pair of little ornaments that used to stand on her dressing table; a peasant boy whistling and a girl with a rabbit. They’re on my bookshelf. You laughed at them. Cheap ornaments, the sort of thing you get on a day at the seaside; terminally tacky. But they outlived my grandmother, those two china ornaments. And they could outlive me. The life of Ethan Ring, passed into nothing, gone, forgotten, but still that barefoot girl would be cuddling her rabbit, that boy whistling down the wind with his hands in his pockets. It was like ice in my heart, that realization, like a huge, dark wall at the edge of life, so tall you couldn’t get over it, so wide you couldn’t get around it, overshadowing every waking thought and deed, and every day, every minute of every day, every tick of your watch, growing closer, taller, wider. For three months, I couldn’t go anywhere, see anyone, do anything without seeing the shadow of mortality in them.”
“We’ve immortality now,” Luka said, thinking she gave comfort.
“We’ve ghosts and memories, for those that can pay.”
Men in suits with digiphones and Olivetti/ICL Mark 88 bioprocessors folded into their inside pockets came crowding into the Hi-Victorian bar, cawing and crowing with that deliberate loudness particular to men in suits. With digiphones. And Olivetti/ICL Mark 88s.
“Marcus died this morning. Eighteen minutes past eleven.”
“Fuck… Ethan.”
“At eleven-twelve he came out of the coma. At eleven-thirteen, he started convulsing. At eleven-eighteen, everything flat-lined. Twenty-three minutes later he was pronounced clinically dead and they took his liver and kidneys and pancreas. They left his heart and corneas. There was nothing left of them, they said. I was with him when he came out of it. For a moment he was himself, he was Marcus, waking up from a nightmare. Then it was as if he remembered something, saw something, a nightmare that blew out every neuron in his skull.”
“Christ, Ethan… the fracters.”
Tracing the damp rings left by the glasses on the much-graffitied tabletop, Ethan Ring nodded.
“I caught a glimpse of it when I found him. It was like someone had hit me across the back of my neck with a piece of four by two. I couldn’t walk, couldn’t see properly for days after. God knows how long he’d been staring at it. Luka, I took the disk. I couldn’t let them find it.”
“Get rid of it, Ethan. Drop it in the river, dump it in a trash compactor, burn it, get rid of it. What I tell you three times is true. It’s death.” She took his face between her hands, then struck him hard across the cheek. Men in suits turned, made animal jeering noises.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” She struck him again. “Do it. Or you’ll never see me again.”
She had never looked so beautiful to Ethan as on the end of that bl
ow.
For two days the disk sat in a Prisunic bag on his folding kitchenette-space table. On the evening of the second day, at about Soap Opera Time, she called him up.
“Have you done it yet?”
“Not yet; Luka, I’m still thinking…”
She hung up.
For two days more the disk sat on top of the Prisunic bag on his folding kitchenette-space table. It kept creeping into his peripheral vision. At the start of the ads in the middle of Coronation Street, she called him again.
“Well, have you done it?”
“I’m going to, tomorrow, I promise…”
She hung up.
For a further two days it sat in his backpack with a pair of hiking boots with the socks still stuffed into them while he vacillated between ax petrol deep water office block foundations. During one of those Great Scenes in the Rover’s Return, she rang.
“Well?”
“Luka, it’s not that simple…”
“It’s as simple as yes or no, Ethan.”
“Luka…”
Prrrrrrrrrrr.
“Luka!”
He took the backpack to a bus to a train to a biopower taxi to the door of the Nineteenth House and his co-mothers.
“It’s Luka,” said the sandwich Empress, recently out-franchised.
“He’s got her pregnant,” said the ex-dealer in Futures, anticipating new lives to welcome into the embrace of the kinship.
“He’s in trouble with the cops,” said the jewelry maker.
“It’s drugs,” said the telecommuting designer of European farming bulletins.
“No one gets busted for drugs anymore,” said Nikki Ring.
“Well?” they all said.
“I’m all right,” Ethan Ring said, which every mother knows for a lie when she hears it. “I need a little time to think things over.”
The time ran out at four twenty-three A.M. at the dark end of the beach, where the lights of the condos and the yellow glow of the newly rebuilt marina did not reach. Trekking down with his backpack, Ethan encountered a man out running in astonishing rubber gear.
