by Ian McDonald
“Morning,” said Ethan Ring. The man in astonishing rubber fled. Down where the tar-scabbed foam styrene and fragments of drift net washed up, he set down Marcus’s disk, anointed it with paint thinners, and tore a match from a book bearing the crest of a doubtful Greek restaurant. A meteor crossed the sky.
“Fuck it”
He sent the matchbook, with its memories of souvlaki and salmonella, spinning after the fading meteor. Backpack heavy across one shoulder, he walked through the soft sand toward the lights of the town to tell Luka Casipriadin what he had done.
One week later, Luka Casipriadin applied for a transfer to the Ècole des Beaux Arts et Desinées in Paris and moved out of the flat upstairs from Ethan Ring to address unspecified.
AFTER TEN YEARS THE smell of paint thinner has left the demon box. The certainties and dogmas of those years have likewise faded: from the Heisenbergian perspective of early thirtyhood I understand that Ethan Ring walking along that beach beneath the fall of early spring meteors must have had some compelling reason for not destroying the Sefirah disk. But I cannot remember what it was.
I find Mas’s Dirt Wolf propped against a wall beside a public telecom bubble at Twenty-six. I tap the plastic to let him know I have arrived. Instantly, he cuts short his call and hangs up. English. I heard him speaking English. I note a number penciled on the User Information Chart: doodled Kabukimen identify it. A Yawatahama code.
“Who was that?” I ask. False innocence.
“Just a friend I haven’t seen for some years,” he answers. False ingenuousness. Liars both, we go up to the temple to pray for grace from the hands of Kobo Daishi. Armed and armored security police checking identities at the Shinto simulator look long and hard at us as we bypass the crowds and go up the shallow steps to the Butsu Hall. On their jackets and helmets is the eagle and lightning bolts of Tosa Securities Incorporated.
THEY CAME DOWN FOR him as the band at the Thursday night spot in the deconsecrated church played its final cover. Since losing Luka, Ethan Ring had thrown himself into the regular class bacchanalias with the desperate enthusiasm of a man watching the trap of his own limitations close around him.
“Why won’t she come back to me?” he confided to Kirstie-Lee, the class tramp who was wrapping her pink lycra thighs around his waist and her tongue around his cochlea because he might, sometime, someplace, be of Political Value to her.
And they came in through both sets of doors and fire exits. What? Chairs tables bottles rolling over unh? the band pulling plugs and hurrying backstage “Luka!” but it was in fact a big pig policeman spread-eagling him against the wall with the posters for legendary bands from the glittering 1970s, kicking his legs apart, fishing in his pockets “What the…? and coming out with something between his fingertips, something that looked like a Ziploc plastic bag with something in it that looked exactly like marbley-red pills in the shape of winged cherub heads.
“Now, wot ’ave we ’ere, den?”
“You put them there,” Ethan said, utterly incredulous. “You bastards!”
“Language, sir,” said the big pig policeman spraying aerosol hallucinogens in Ethan Ring’s face and tables chairs bottles band classmates and Kirstie-Lee unfolded into huge angel wings of light.
THE TOILET. THAT WAS the first thing. It was a metal slit in the floor.
The graffiti. That was the second thing. It was in a language full of doubled vowels, vaguely Hanseatic-looking.
The food. That was the third thing. It was exquisite. There was even a bottle of a beer he had never been able to justify on student budgets.
“Oh, Christ, I’m in Belgium,” he said and threw up into the metal slit in the floor. When the last abreaction to the hallucinogens had passed, they came and took him from the rubber-floored cell to a woman with red glasses and lots of rings on her fingers, which she constantly twisted and turned. From the way she tilted her head toward him as he sat down in the comfortable chair he understood she was blind.
“Ghent, actually,” she said in the idiomatic but slightly ungainly English of those not born to it.
“Ghent,” Ethan Ring said. “What’s in Ghent?”
“The European Common Security Secretariat.”
“Isn’t this a little excessive for a drugs bust?”
The blind woman smiled and from the drawer in her desk took a mega-density computer disk. It smelled faintly, but distinctly, of paint thinner.
“Oh, shit.” Then, conclusions colliding like subatomic particles. “You broke into my flat. My flat…”
“It fell into our bailiwick when the police resurrected the hard disk data your friend was working on before the, ah, accident? The police technician is out of intensive care, but it’s debatable whether he will ever regain full control of his motor functions.”
Nightmare trip. Someone had sold him something in the men’s toilets and any moment now he would wake on his own or someone else’s floor with a weapons-grade migraine.
“I must admit I’m a little disappointed in you, Mr. Ring. I’d expected more of the designer of these…”
“Fracters. Lady, just who are you?”
The blind woman smiled with the minimalism of those who fear how much may be displayed on a face.
“We are a Research and Development Division of the European Common Security Secretariat. Our field of activity is psychological techniques.”
“The fracters.”
“Exactly, Mr. Ring. We know from Mr. Cranitch’s notebooks of the existence of over one hundred fracters, as you call them, on that disk; psychological weapons of a power and refinement that makes our current projects look as sophisticated as Halloween masks and calling rude names.”
“You went through Marcus’s room? You picked through his stuff?”
“Mr. Ring, you really will have to learn to be less scrupulous when you are working for us.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to any prospective employment.”
“It’s a simple either/or, Mr. Ring. The ‘either’ is: Go back to university. Complete your course. Get your qualification. Keep the computer. Keep the fracter programs. You have the passwords: keep them. We will give you a job in European Public Relations, pay you, protect you, keep you safe. In return for this, use the fracters for us when we need them. It will not be often. It may be never.
“The ‘or’ is: Take your chances with the White Americans, the Pacific Rimmers, Pan-Islam. Frankly, I can’t see them taking time to have this discussion with you. Tell me, how long do you think you could bear to watch your girlfriend—what’s she called, Luka Casipriadin—what is that, Armenian, Georgian?—how long could you watch her being raped by dogs? Two hours? Four hours? Eight, even? And once they had what they wanted I think you’d find they’d forget about any gentleman’s agreements they might have made. A bullet in the left eye is current mode d’emploi of the PRCPS Security corporations.”
“You’re not frightening me,” he said, which is only ever said by those who are very, very afraid.
The blind woman set a black cellphone on the desk beside the Sefirah disk.
“Call her. Luka Casipriadin. It should be breakfast time; she always was a late riser. I don’t see how she stomachs that bran mush muck every day when they do excellent croissants in the Ècole refectory. I suppose the Californian raisins help. The code from Ghent for Paris is 00 33 1.”
“Fuck you, you bitch. Fuck you to hell.”
“You’re welcome to try, Mr. Ring. Do you want to accept now or think about it?”
“Is there any point?”
“Should I take that to be an affirmative?”
“You should.”
“I’m glad, Mr. Ring. You see, there is a small button on the arm of my chair that I really didn’t want to have to press. I was a little… economical with the truth. We couldn’t really have let you take the ‘or’ option and gone to the Yankees, or the Islamics. The side of the desk facing you conceals a compressed-gas-powered guillotine—most sharp.” She left h
er seat, came around the desk. Her fingers brushed Ethan Ring’s thigh, spidered up two steps above his navel. “It would have cut you cleanly in two”—her fingers tapped black denim shirt still smelling of beer, smokes, and spray-crazy—“just about here.”
Tappy tap.
IF IT WERE ETHAN Ring making this pilgrimage, he would observe that life is a circular pilgrimage from nothingness to nothingness, the Temple Zero of nonexistence, up the steep ascents of circumstance and Murphy’s Law to mountaintops of self-realization, down long easy descents when sore spirits can relax from pushing the intractable mechanism of living on through history, from dark sea caverns of acedia, filled with the ocean-sound of mortality to six-lane highways crammed with rushing, prehistoric behemoths.
Strange: the more I re-create of the life of Ethan Ring, the less there is of him that I can recognize in me. Some grace of Kobo Daishi, that I can no longer draw absolutes from particulars as he once would have in self-justification. My homily would be that the Buddha-head rests as comfortably in the Shinamo gear-train of a twenty-four-speed MTB as in the face of Kokuzo carved into the flesh of a living tree and that the temples of true, real, burning living are so few and far between that we must hold hard to our sacred moments.
Long hard haul down the south coast of Muroto. Only four temples between the West Temple and Kochi City; there would be much room for the contemplation of the Buddha of the gear-train were it not that our way lies along the main provincial highway. A fifty-meter cloudbase discharges a steady, penitential drizzle; thundering truck/trailer combos spray us with a viscous film of oily grit. At a bangai incorporated into a syrup-station and travel lodge we are given settai of tea and tangerines by the proprietor: a brief blessing. Then: smog masks and wraparounds; helmet down and push.
When we find a bas-relief finger on a squat pillar pointing down a muddy footpath through birches and alders, it is like the manifestation of the saint himself. Joyfully we turn off the road and hurtle as fast as we can down the old path among the birch trees.
The henro path leads us into a rich, timeless agricultural landscape. We cycle through grass-roofed villages, along narrow causeways between flooded paddies where mud-smeared wading robots tend crops of tall, slender shoots—tatami reeds, Mas informs me. Absurdly, I feel like the hero in a spaghetti Western. Though my plastic rainsheet bestows some characteristics of the Man With No Name, this awareness comes not from any change in myself, but in my surroundings, so pervasive yet subtle it is several kilometers farther before I can pinpoint it. On every house. On every shop. On every vehicle and robot and biogas plant and windpump and gatepost and signpost: the mark of the eagle and the lightning: Protected by Tosa Securities Incorporated.
“Like a set from a Kurosawa movie,” agrees Mas, drawing alongside. Troubled in spirit, we press on and the rain steepens into a general downpour.
In an attempt to expose us to a wider world than typography and corporate logos, the mandarins of Graphic Communications decreed that we attend weekly lectures on whatever particular hobbyhorse the tutorial staff liked to ride. The only one I remember was Jake Byrne, our year tutor, proposing his outrageous/right-wing/racist/xenophobic theory of sociological inertia. Reader’s Digest condensed version: national characteristics as bred in bone as hair/eyes/coloring: re Japan:zaibatsus collapse, arcologies burn, Euro/Islamic graverobbers dismember, honorable salaryperson throws off business suit out come swords/armor/helmet waiting in the attic, hello boys it’s the Last Remake of Kagemusha: the Shadow Warrior. If Masahiko can no longer see the Japan of his childhood in the Japan of his thirty-somethings, perhaps we should not be surprised to find this prosperous farming land the fiefdom of some neo-feudal private security company.
I feel very far from the Approved Tourist Route.
The inscription tells us that the shrine has stood for three hundred and twenty-eight years, and implies that it will be here long after the incongruous modern green of a private golf course straddling the henro path has returned to nature again. Its guardian is newer, and more transient, than even the golf course. Mas dismounts, crouches down, obscenely fascinated. His raincape sheds sheets of water. Small tearing animals have ripped away lips, cheeks, eyes; the ears have been reduced to two knobs of gnawed gristle. Where it has been tattooed, the skin has remained intact by virtue of some preservative feature of the inks. The plastic helmet is impervious to both elements and animals, the plastic ident tag likewise, concealed among early summers burst of rain-wet bluebells, aconites, and wild garlic. On the edge of the rough, the head of the young akira keeps watch on the plaid trousers and Mr. Dormie club-bags and biopower golf karts. Are the junior account managers and sales executives applauding beneath their corporate golf umbrellas—golfu is too important a thing to be surrendered to a mere monsoon—when Mr. Chairman hits one straight down the middle aware of the barbarism not a hundred meters from the thirteenth tee? What are the Acceptable Levels for an uninterrupted round of Royal and Ancient?
Mas has found an accountholder’s plastic smartcard among the wet spring flowers. Embossed on its plastic face is the ubiquitous thunder-eagle of Tosa Securities Inc.
“Christ’s sake, Mas, leave it.” Foolish pilgrim, who does not recognize an omen.
It is only a few hundred meters across rough, fairway, and Number Thirteen green—we can see the marker stone at the edge of the woodlands, the henro path itself wending into the trees—but among the golf karts puttering and stuttering over the grass is a blue and white buggy adorned with ToSec’s thunder-eagle. The angularities of light-power armor beneath Adidas trackwear are visible from our position on the edge of the rough. I cannot see enforcers who tear off a trespassing akira’s head taking kindly to two henro leaving tire tracks across the apron of the par three Number Thirteen.
We are effectively stymied. We cannot go forward, we will not go back, not twenty kilometers through Clint Eastwood country to the Tourist Route again. Therefore, we go around. Golf courses only seem to go on forever. A hundred or so meters back, past the dark shrine, we find a path—little more than trampled vegetation—headed in what seems like generally the right direction. After twisting and turning through riotous vegetation running wild in expectation of summer the trail plunges headlong into a vast sugarcane plantation. The rain patters on the alien cane. We have no idea where we are going; we trust that a straight path must have a destination. After ten minutes—not so much a plantation, this, as a monoculture—we hit a wide access route and come out of the claustrophobic cane on top of the cane farmer himself engaged in some cannicultural activity involving standing in the back of a Nissan pickup.
Guilty both legally and spiritually of trespass we accelerate past him before he can protest. At the sound of a shouting voice I glance over my shoulder. The farmer is waving something in his hand—I cannot be certain at this distance but it has the hard glitter of electronics. What is he shouting? Dogs? What about them?
Hydrogas shocks notwithstanding, the bike rattles as it takes the ruts, and I glance back again, just for an instant. The farmer is in his pickup now, driving after us. I shout to Mas but he has already seen and, one foot thrust out as a brake, skid-turns ninety degrees into a narrow file where no pickup can follow.
Dogs?
Somethings. Fragments of movement Discordant patterns of light and shade within the regularity of the head-high sugarcane. Glimpses. Glances. Flickers. More than five, I reckon, less than twenty. And not human. Too low, too fast, too relentless to be human. Mas too senses them; a glance is the signal for us to flick into high gear. The hunters in the cane match us without a flicker of hesitation. I hear Mas swear. I glance back. Dogs. A hunting pack of ten, closing on us. Cancerous bulbs of bioprocessor implants blister their skulls; each wears the unmistakable ToSec logo spray-painted on its chest.
That hint of electronics I had seen in the farmer’s hand was a command unit.
That time, in Marrakech, Luka took me to a dog pit in the old city. Under the white heat of the kilowatt
floods we watched the augmented dogs tear and rip and spray red arterial blood over the front rows. We watched them die on the bloody sand and still they tore at each other, enslaved even beyond death to the commands pouring from their sweating, screaming masters’ control gloves.
Except this man was not threatening us. He was warning us.
Mas’s sudden brake and swerve almost sends me into him. A hundred or so meters ahead, a second pack of augmented dogs is bounding toward us with elegant deadly fluidity.
I have seconds. Only seconds…
“Close your eyes!” I shout to Mas and they are on us. The lead dog leaps. I meet it with my naked left hand. It spins into the cane, neck broken, writhing, yelping hideously.
If the right hand is truth, what is the left?
Answer: destruction. Keter: the Void, Annihilation, the shock fracter. Animal, human, artificial intelligence: whatsoever has eyes to see, it will destroy.
Wherever I turn my left hand, dogs jerk and spasm and fall. They are savage, they are deadly, but those are not enough, not against an enemy that attacks on sight. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. In as many seconds. The cane field is littered with twisted meat, kicking in the red mud. Slipping between close-packed cane, I go from dog to dog, clamping my left hand over each face until the spasms stop. Mercy mercy. On its side in a drainage ditch, a dog beats its stump tail weakly, watches, panting, with puppy-dog eyes free from the unclean light of simulated sentience. Its breath is warm on my skin. Hush, hush there, I whisper in English as I press my left hand over its eyes. It jerks. Once.
A sugarcane farmer, however large his holding, could not afford twenty cybercanines. A time-share and a control unit, yes, but the true owners, the true masters, are elsewhere and cannot be oblivious of what has happened to their property. Or of us. Why would a farmer who had warned us of his dogs not stop them with his command unit? Unless, in a higher place, control was taken away from him, by someone who knew exactly what he/she/it was looking for.
