Ascendancies

by Bruce Sterling

  “I wonder what message it carries,” panted Encho.

  “Nothing good, I’ll warrant,” said Onogawa grimly. They had to struggle to match the thing’s pace. They burst from the southern edge of the Ginza Bricktown and into the darkness of unpaved streets. This was Shiba District, home of the thieves’ market and the great Zojoji Temple. They followed the wires. “Aha!” cried Onogawa. “It’s heading for Shinbashi Railway Station and its friends the locomotives!”

  With a determined burst of speed, Onogawa outdistanced the thing and stood beneath the path of the wire, waving his broken pipe frantically. “Whoa! Go back!”

  The thing slowed briefly, well over his head. Stinking flakes of ash and sparks poured from it, raining down harmlessly on the ex-samurai. Onogawa leapt aside in disgust, brushing the filth from his derby and frock coat. “Phew!”

  The thing rolled on. Encho caught up with the larger man. “Not the locomotives,” the comedian gasped. “We can’t face those.”

  Onogawa drew himself up. He tried to dust more streaks of filthy ash from his soiled coat. “Well, I think we taught the nasty thing a lesson, anyway.”

  “No doubt,” said Encho, breathing hard. He went green suddenly, then leaned against a nearby wooden fence, clustered with tall autumn grass. He was loudly sick.

  They looked about themselves. Autumn. Darkness. And the moon. A pair of cats squabbled loudly in an adjacent alley.

  Onogawa suddenly realized that he was brandishing, not a sword, but a splintered stick of ironbound bamboo. He began to tremble. Then he flung the thing away with a cry of disgust. “They took our swords away,” he said. “Let them give us honest soldiers our swords back. We’d make short work of such foreign foulness. Look what it did to my coat, the filthy creature. It defiled me.”

  “No, no,” Encho said, wiping his mouth. “You were incredible! A regular Shoki the Demon Queller.”

  “Shoki,” Onogawa said. He dusted his hat against his knee. “I’ve seen drawings of Shoki. He’s the warrior demigod, with a red face and a big sword. Always hunting demons, isn’t he? But he doesn’t know there’s a little demon hiding on the top of his own head.”

  “Well, a regular Yoshitsune, then,” said Encho, hastily grasping for a better compliment. Yoshitsune was a legendary master of swordsmanship. A national hero without parallel.

  Unfortunately, the valorous Yoshitsune had ended up riddled with arrows by the agents of his treacherous half-brother, who had gone on to rule Japan. While Yoshitsune and his high ideals had to put up with a shadow existence in folklore. Neither Encho nor Onogawa had to mention this aloud, but the melancholy associated with the old tale seeped into their moods. Their world became heroic and fatal. Naturally all the bourbon helped.

  “We’d better go back to Bricktown for our shoes,” Onogawa said.

  “All right,” Encho said. Their feet had blistered in the commandeered clogs, and they walked back slowly and carefully.

  Yoshitoshi met them in his downstairs landing. “Did you catch it?”

  “It made a run for the railroads,” Encho said. “We couldn’t stop it; it was way above our heads.” He hesitated. “Say. You don’t suppose it will come back here, do you?”

  “Probably,” Yoshitoshi said. “It lives in that knot of cables outside the window. That’s why I put the shutters there.”

  “You mean you’ve seen it before?”

  “Sure, I’ve seen it,” Yoshitoshi muttered. “In fact I’ve seen lots of things. It’s my business to see things. No matter what people say about me.”

  The others looked at him, stricken. Yoshitoshi shrugged irritably. “The place has atmosphere. It’s quiet and no one bothers me here. Besides, it’s cheap.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of the demon’s vengeance?” Onogawa said.

  “I get along fine with that demon,” Yoshitoshi said. “We have an understanding. Like neighbors anywhere.”

  “Oh,” Encho said. He cleared his throat. “Well, ah, we’ll be moving on, Taiso. It was good of you to give us the borubona.” He and Onogawa stuffed their feet hastily into their squeaking shoes. “You keep up the good work, pal, and don’t let those political fellows put anything over on you. Their ideas are weird, frankly. I don’t think the government’s going to put up with that kind of talk.”

  “Someday they’ll have to,” Yoshitoshi said.

  “Let’s go,” Onogawa said, with a sidelong glance at Yoshitoshi. The two men left.

  Onogawa waited until they were well out of earshot. He kept a wary eye on the wires overhead. “Your friend certainly is a weird one,” he told the comedian. “What a night!”

  Encho frowned. “He’s gonna get in trouble with that visionary stuff. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, you know.” They walked into the blaze of artificial gaslight. The Ginza crowd had thinned out considerably.

  “Didn’t you say you knew some girls with a piano?” Onogawa said.

  “Oh, right!” Encho said. He whistled shrilly and waved at a distant two-man rickshaw. “A piano. You won’t believe the thing; it makes amazing sounds. And what a great change after those dreary geisha samisen routines. So whiny and thin and wailing and sad! It’s always, ‘Oh, How Piteous Is A Courtesan’s Lot,’ and ‘Let’s Stab Each Other To Prove You Really Love Me.’ Who needs that old-fashioned stuff? Wait till you hear these gals pound out some ‘opera’ and ‘waltzes’ on their new machine.”

  The rickshaw pulled up with a rattle and a chime of bells. “Where to, gentlemen?”

  “Asakusa,” said Encho, climbing in.

  “It’s getting late,” Onogawa said reluctantly. “I really ought to be getting back to the wife.”

  “Come on,” said Encho, rolling his eyes. “Live a little. It’s not like you’re just cheating on the little woman. These are high-class modern girls. It’s a cultural experience.”

  “Well, all right,” said Onogawa. “If it’s cultural.”

  “You’ll learn a lot,” Encho promised.

  But they had barely covered a block when they heard the sudden frantic ringing of alarm bells, far to the south.

  “A fire!” Encho yelled in glee. “Hey, runners, stop! Fifty sen if you get us there while it’s still spreading!”

  The runners wheeled in place and set out with a will. The rickshaw rocked on its axle and jangled wildly. “This is great!” Onogawa said, clutching his hat. “You’re a good fellow to know, Encho. It’s nothing but excitement with you!”

  “That’s the modern life!” Encho shouted. “One wild thing after another.”

  They bounced and slammed their way through the darkened streets until the sky was lit with fire. A massive crowd had gathered beside the Shinagawa Railroad Line. They were mostly low-class townsmen, many half-dressed. It was a working-class neighborhood in Shiba District, east of Atago Hill. The fire was leaping merrily from one thatched roof to another.

  The two men jumped from their rickshaw. Encho shouldered his way immediately through the crowd. Onogawa carefully counted out the fare. “But he said fifty sen,” the older rickshawman complained. Onogawa clenched his fist, and the men fell silent.

  The firemen had reacted with their usual quick skill. Three companies of them had surrounded the neighborhood. They swarmed like ants over the roofs of the undamaged houses nearest the flames. As usual, they did not attempt to fight the flames directly. That was a hopeless task in any case, for the weathered graying wood, paper shutters, and reed blinds flared up like tinder, in great blossoming gouts.

  Instead, they sensibly relied on firebreaks. Their hammers, axes, and crowbars flew as they destroyed every house in the path of the flames. Their skill came naturally to them, for, like all Edo firemen, they were also carpenters. Special bannermen stood on the naked ridgepoles of the disintegrating houses, holding their company’s ensigns as close as possible to the flames. This was more than bravado; it was good business. Their reputations, and their rewards from a grateful neighborhood, depended on this show of spirit and nerve
.

  Some of the crowd, those whose homes were being devoured, were weeping and counting their children. But most of the crowd was in a fine holiday mood, cheering for their favorite fire teams and laying bets.

  Onogawa spotted Encho’s silk hat and plowed after him. Encho ducked and elbowed through the press, Onogawa close behind. They crept to the crowd’s inner edge, where the fierce blaze of heat and the occasional falling wad of flaming straw had established a boundary.

  A fireman stood nearby. He wore a knee-length padded fireproof coat with a pattern of printed blocks. A thick protective headdress fell stiffly over his shoulders, and long padded gauntlets shielded his forearms to the knuckles. An apprentice in similar garb was soaking him down with a pencil-thin gush of water from a bamboo hand-pump. “Stand back, stand back,” the fireman said automatically, then looked up. “Say, aren’t you Encho the comedian? I saw you last week.”

  “That’s me,” Encho shouted cheerfully over the roar of flame. “Good to see you fellows performing for once.”

  The fireman examined Onogawa’s ash-streaked frock coat. “You live around here, big fella? Point out your house for me, we’ll do what we can.”

  Onogawa frowned. Encho broke in hastily. “My friend’s from uptown! A High City company man!”

  “Oh,” said the fireman, rolling his eyes.

  Onogawa pointed at a merchant’s tile-roofed warehouse, a little closer to the tracks. “Why aren’t you doing anything about that place? The fire’s headed right for it!”

  “That’s one of merchant Shinichi’s,” the fireman said, narrowing his eyes. “We saved a place of his out in Kanda District last month! And he gave us only five yen.”

  “What a shame for him,” Encho said, grinning.

  “It’s full of cotton cloth, too,” the fireman said with satisfaction. “It’s gonna go up like a rocket.”

  “How did it start?” Encho said.

  “Lightning, I hear,” the fireman said. “Some kind of fireball jumped off the telegraph lines.”

  “Really?” Encho said in a small voice.

  “That’s what they say,” shrugged the fireman. “You know how these things are. Always tall stories. Probably some drunk knocked over his sake kettle, then claimed to see something. No one wants the blame.”

  “Right,” Onogawa said carefully.

  The fire teams had made good progress. There was not much left to do now except admire the destruction. “Kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” the fireman said. “Look how that smoke obscures the autumn moon.” He sighed happily. “Good for business, too. I mean the carpentry business, of course.” He waved his gauntleted arm at the leaping flames. “We’ll get this worn-out trash out of here and build something worthy of a modern city. Something big and expensive with long-term construction contracts.”

  “Is that why you have bricks printed on your coat?” Onogawa asked.

  The fireman looked down at the block printing on his dripping cotton armor. “They do look like bricks, don’t they?” He laughed. “That’s a good one. Wait’ll I tell the crew.”

  Dawn rose above old Edo. With red-rimmed eyes, the artist Yoshitoshi stared, sighing, through his open window. Past the telegraph wires, billowing smudge rose beyond the Bricktown rooftops. Another Flower of Edo reaching the end of its evanescent life.

  The telegraph wires hummed. The demon had returned to its tangled nest outside the window. “Don’t tell, Yoshitoshi,” it burbled in its deep humming voice.

  “Not me,” Yoshitoshi said. “You think I want them to lock me up again?”

  “I keep the presses running,” the demon whined. “Just you deal with me. I’ll make you famous, I’ll make you rich. There’ll be no more slow dark shadows where townsmen have to creep with their heads down. Everything’s brightness and speed with me, Yoshitoshi. I can change things.”

  “Burn them down, you mean,” Yoshitoshi said.

  “There’s power in burning,” the demon hummed. “There’s beauty in the flames. When you give up trying to save the old ways, you’ll see the beauty. I want you to serve me, you Japanese. You’ll do it better than the clumsy foreigners, once you accept me as your own. I’ll make you all rich. Edo will be the greatest city in the world. You’ll have light and music at a finger’s touch. You’ll step across oceans. You’ll be as gods.”

  “And if we don’t accept you?”

  “You will! You must! I’ll burn you until you do. I told you that, Yoshitoshi. When I’m stronger, I’ll do better than these little flowers of Edo. I’ll open seeds of Hell above your cities. Hell-flowers taller than mountains! Red blooms that eat a city in a moment.”

  Yoshitoshi lifted his latest print and unrolled it before the window. He had worked on it all night; it was done at last. It was a landscape of pure madness. Beams of frantic light pierced a smoldering sky. Winged locomotives, their bellies fattened with the eggs of white-hot death, floated like maddened blowflies above a corpse-white city. “Like this,” he said.

  The demon gave a gloating whir. “Yes! Just as I told you. Now show it to them. Make them understand that they can’t defeat me. Show them all!”

  “I’ll think about it,” Yoshitoshi said. “Leave me now.” He closed the heavy shutters.

  He rolled the drawing carefully into a tube. He sat at his work-table again, and pulled an oil lamp closer. Dawn was coming. It was time to get some sleep.

  He held the end of the paper tube above the lamp’s little flame. It browned at first, slowly, the brand-new paper turning the rich antique tinge of an old print, a print from the old days when things were simpler. Then a cigar-ring of smoldering red encircled its rim, and blue flame blossomed. Yoshitoshi held the paper up, and flame ate slowly down its length, throwing smoky shadows.

  Yoshitoshi blew and watched his work flare up, cherry-blossom white and red. It hurt to watch it go, and it felt good. He savored the two feelings for as long as he could. Then he dropped the last flaming inch of paper in an ashtray. He watched it flare and smolder until the last of the paper became a ghost-curl of gray.

  “It’d never sell,” he said. Absently, knowing he would need them tomorrow, he cleaned his brushes. Then he emptied the ink-stained water over the crisp dark ashes.

  The Little Magic Shop

  The early life of James Abernathy was rife with ominous portent.

  His father, a New England customs inspector, had artistic ambitions; he filled his sketchbooks with mossy old Puritan tombstones and spanking new Nantucket whaling ships. By day, he graded bales of imported tea and calico; during evenings he took James to meetings of his intellectual friends, who would drink port, curse their wives and editors, and give James treacle candy.

  James’s father vanished while on a sketching expedition to the Great Stone Face of Vermont; nothing was ever found of him but his shoes.

  James’s mother, widowed with her young son, eventually married a large and hairy man who lived in a crumbling mansion in upstate New York.

  At night the family often socialized in the nearby town of Albany. There, James’s stepfather would talk politics with his friends in the National Anti-Masonic Party; upstairs, his mother and the other women chatted with prominent dead personalities through spiritualist table rapping.

  Eventually, James’s stepfather grew more and more anxious over the plotting of the Masons. The family ceased to circulate in society. The curtains were drawn and the family ordered to maintain a close watch for strangers dressed in black. James’s mother grew thin and pale, and often wore nothing but her houserobe for days on end.

  One day, James’s stepfather read them newspaper accounts of the angel Moroni, who had revealed locally buried tablets of gold that detailed the Biblical history of the Mound Builder Indians. By the time he reached the end of the article, the stepfather’s voice shook and his eyes had grown quite wild. That night, muffled shrieks and frenzied hammerings were heard.

  In the morning, young James found his stepfather downstairs by the hearth, still in
his dressing gown, sipping teacup after teacup full of brandy and absently bending and straightening the fireside poker.

  James offered morning greetings with his usual cordiality. The stepfather’s eyes darted frantically under matted brows. James was informed that his mother was on a mission of mercy to a distant family stricken by scarlet fever. The conversation soon passed to a certain upstairs storeroom whose door was now nailed shut. James’s stepfather strictly commanded him to avoid this forbidden portal.

  Days passed. His mother’s absence stretched to weeks. Despite repeated and increasingly strident warnings from his stepfather, James showed no interest whatsoever in the upstairs room. Eventually, deep within the older man’s brain, a ticking artery burst from sheer frustration.

  During his stepfather’s funeral, the family home was struck by ball lightning and burned to the ground. The insurance money, and James’s fate, passed into the hands of a distant relative, a muttering, trembling man who campaigned against liquor and drank several bottles of Dr. Rifkin’s Laudanum Elixir each week.

  James was sent to a boarding school run by a fanatical Calvinist deacon. James prospered there, thanks to close study of the scriptures and his equable, reasonable temperament. He grew to adulthood, becoming a tall, studious young man with a calm disposition and a solemn face utterly unmarked by doom.

  Two days after his graduation, the deacon and his wife were both found hacked to bits, their half-naked bodies crammed into their one-horse shay. James stayed long enough to console the couple’s spinster daughter, who sat dry-eyed in her rocking chair, methodically ripping a handkerchief to shreds.

  James then took himself to New York City for higher education.

  It was there that James Abernathy found the little shop that sold magic.

  James stepped into this unmarked shop on impulse, driven inside by muffled screams of agony from the dentist’s across the street.

  The shop’s dim interior smelled of burning whale-oil and hot lantern-brass. Deep wooden shelves, shrouded in cobwebs, lined the walls. Here and there, yellowing political broadsides requested military help for the rebel Texans. James set his divinity texts on an apothecary cabinet, where a band of stuffed, lacquered frogs brandished tiny trumpets and guitars.