Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone E-Book

Ian McDonald

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 315

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

"Cyberpunk's first lyrical poem, mixing Kabbalah, manga, pop-culture trivia and Zen with enough style and dexterity to actually pull it off . . . [McDonald] does more in a page than most writers do in a chapter." —Neal Stephenson Words can control you, words can make you act against your own will...and words can kill. Ethan Ring discovers computer graphics with profound effects on human minds—fracters. Dark political forces want his power, and Ethan must face the consequences of his creation, and his actions. In search of redemption, he embarks on an ancient thousand-mile pilgrimage, but can he ever escape the forces that once controlled him, and can he resist the power of the deadly images tattooed onto his hands? This ebook edition also includes the 2008 novella, The Tear.

Leseprobe

SCISSORS CUT PAPER WRAP STONE

Copyright © 1994 by Ian McDonald

All rights reserved.

Originally published by Spectra.

THE TEAR

Copyright © 2008 by Ian McDonald

Originally published in 2008 in Galactic Empires, an anthology of novellas edited by Gardner Dozois.

Published together as an eBook in 2019 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in association with the Zeno Agency LTD.

ISBN 978-1-625674-03-6

Cover design by Dirk Berger

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

49 W. 45th Street, 12th Floor

New York, NY 10036

http://awfulagent.com

[email protected]

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

The Tear

Thanks and Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Ian McDonald

1

The Berlitz-Kikoyan skull-tap gives me idiomatic Tokyo-Bay argot, but the pilgrim’s prayer, as ancient as the pilgrimage is long, defies easy translation: “Homage to Kobo Daishi, source of spiritual yearning, guide and companion on our quest.” So much more elegant and simple in Japanese: Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo; easy on my lips as I kneel before the image in the Daishi Hall for the short preparatory ceremony. The muttered chains of repetitions, mantralike, slip between self and spirit, ease the excruciating self-consciousness of an over-tall, over-here, Euro. With red hair. At an alien altar.

The first thing prayer changes is the prayer, Masahiko—companion, guide, fellow pilgrim on this thousand-mile journey—tells me. And the last thing also. I hope so. I pray so.

There is no longer an incumbent at Temple One; a big Neo-Shinto shrine has wedged itself into the compound of the old Buddhist temple like a cuckoo chick into a sparrow’s nest; its priest maintains grounds and buildings out of a sense of architectural and historical respect, but wary of offending the spirits, he does not assume any religious responsibilities. Our albums—the pilgrim’s passport, to be stamped in vermillion with the official seal of each of the eighty-eight sacred sites—are marked by a coin-in-the-slot robot much in need of a new coat of paint. A sluglike feral zoomorph—brilliant yellow, with long trailing blue tendrils—feeds parasitically on the muscle-unit, tracking spirals of silver slime. The bright red stamp on the pure white paper is reassuringly exact, definite, bold, a statement of resolution. No going back now. We are committed. All the world knows the proverb that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. What is not so widely known is that here, at Temple One, one takes that single first. Here also at Temple One is the last step, a thousand miles and eighty-eight temples later. Like the quest for enlightenment, the Shikoku pilgrimage is a circle, never beginning, never ending. Destinations are false goals; it is the Way Gone that matters.

We pause before the temple gate where we have left the bicycles to pay our respects at the Shinto shrine. The shrine is busy. Prayers for this, supplications for that, requests for healings, petitions for aid, for small, cybernetic miracles, for offenses to be pardoned and misfortunes lifted. It does not do to affront the simulacra of the ancestors. Linked through the Life Assurance Company AI matrix into the international datawebs, they can shovel a truly cosmic amount of shit your way. Religions, like pilgrimages, go in circles. As the Shingon Buddhism of Kobo Daishi—the saint in whose literal footsteps we follow—overwhelmed and absorbed primitive ninth-century Shinto, so twelve centuries later a renascent techno-Shinto of persona-simulation and soul-taps has pushed Buddhism into a seemingly terminal decline. What say the attenuated joys of nirvana against the recording and storing of memory, experience, and emotion with the hope of someday breaking through into true personality reconstruction?

Worshipers stare as we approach the massed banks of miniature television screens, each bearing the simula of some dear departed summoned back from informational limbo. Photographs, mementos, memorabilia, the toys, tricks, and trivia of living are epoxied to the television shells. The accepting, enfolding spirit of the Daishi Hall is shattered; my fears of being an alien in an alien place return redoubled. Masahiko reassures me. It is our white robes and sedge hats—the mark of a pilgrim, a henro—that are attracting attention. They are a rarity these days. Once thousands made pilgrimage each year; now if there are fifty geriatrics in a chartered coach it is a sign of mass spiritual revival. Once the ashes of the dead were taken to Mount Koya, across the Inland Sea in Wakayama Prefecture, Shingon’s most holy place, to ensure rebirth in Amida’s Pure Land in the West. Now on the local shrine anniversary, those insured with the big corporations come to have a year of recorded memory, emotion, experience downloaded from their soul-taps into the biocores.

I clap my gloved hands three times and run my yencard through one of the readers suspended on webbing straps from the lower branches of the cedars. At the beginning when everything can seem like an omen, you need all the good karma you can get. I wonder: Mas says that Japan’s population has been falling steadily since the advent of soul-tap technology; have the life assurance companies accidentally created a dearth of spirits to be reincarnated?

As we leave the shrine an old woman comes pushing through the crowd in the gateway to press some small coins into our hands. She insists we accept. I am reluctant, Masahiko advises I take them. They are settai, pilgrim offerings; a tradition as old as the pilgrimage itself of bestowing small gifts upon henro: a few coins, like these, some summer fruit, a bowl of rice, a meal, a back massage. To refuse is pride. Humility of spirit is the Way of the pilgrim. Many of the ancient—and not so ancient—henro begged their way around the whole thousand miles. As etiquette demands, we give the old woman printed name slips. Mas’s excites great interest, being a slip of ten-second smartplastic depicting Danjuro 19: Kabukiman!—his creation and Japan’s number one anime superhero—transforming into one of his Classical Theater alter egos to battle evil. My humbler contribution is received no less thankfully: the old woman tells us the ceiling of her master bedroom is papered with henro name strips collected over several decades. Her continued physical vigor she attributes totally to their spiritual efficacy.

Outside the temple gate, we unlock the bikes. I check the bags—Mas’s assurance that no one would dare steal under the gaze of the guardian deities who flank the gate, sifting souls, does not convince me. The demon box is where I left it, untampered with, untouched. Safe. Of course. But why does the best man at a wedding check his pocket for the ring every twenty seconds?

Ryōzen-ji’s attendant town is busy; narrow streets overhung with neons and tattered plastic banners advertising European consumer electronics are crowded with trucks and pickups both hydrocarbon and muscle-powered. Smart market stalls and street vendors’ booths hung with long, lovely vegetables—fed on nightsoil and artificial light until unbelievably huge and ripe—remind us that, despite the close-packed midrise emergency housing thrown up to accommodate refugees from the decaying offshore corporate arcologies, this is at heart farming country. We weave an uncertain course between darting biopower mopeds, their riders’ eyes grim beneath helmets and smog masks. Massive, slow-moving tractor-trailer combines intimidate the roadside stalls and lean-to shelters of streetdwellers. Even in such company, we turn heads in our fluorescent MTB gear, white hip-length henro robes and inverted bowl-shaped henro hats clipped over safety helmets. The sedge hats are inscribed in quarters with the words of a very ancient, very Buddhist poem. As the urban drawl in my tap is not up to the highly Sinicized language of classical Japanese literary style, Masahiko translates:

For the benighted: this world’s illusions.

For the enlightened, knowledge: all is vanity.

In the beginning was no east, no west,

Where then, north and south?

Draw your own conclusions, pilgrim.

The henro’s staff, bell, and stole that identifies him as a layman engaged on religious works we have had to forgo. Instead we have twenty-four-gear Day-Glo Dirt-Wolf freestyle MTBs hand-calligraphied by Masahiko with prayers and proverbs for the protection of travelers. Hard physical exertion and closeness to nature is an essential part of the pilgrimage: the God head in all things is the spirit of the Daishi’s mountain Buddhism. That is why the most perfect way around the eighty-eight Sacred Sites has always been on foot. But in the post-industrial Japan of the second decade of the third millennium, Buddhism is in decline, the old path is impassable in many places, and the threat from bandits and power-armored akira gone AWOL from local security companies increases every year. We must cover long stretches of national highway, and inns and temple lodging houses are no longer numerous. On the terrain bikes we can honor the principle of achieving enlightenment by our own sweat and, where the path remains, follow the steps of the Daishi.

The steps of the Daishi. Dogyo Ninin: another pilgrimage proverb, painted by Mas on the front and rear shocks. We Two, Pilgrims Together. The belief has always been that Kobo Daishi walks at the side of each pilgrim, at times unseen, at others appearing in different forms and guises, occasionally manifesting himself in the full glory of his enlightenment. Dogyo Ninin. In honesty, the ideograms on our forks should read We Three, Pilgrims Together. Another shares the Daishi’s place as invisible companion. Not by virtue of grace or enlightenment or any especially spiritual quality, but because of who she is, what she is.

I last saw her—unseen guest—in Capetown.

“Can’t keep away from each other, can we, Eth?” After the Marrakech Room, her agency-ware had a decade’s worth of industrials with tax-bucks to dump and commissions to offer stacked up. Maslow-Huitsdorp had outbid the competition (but then the Suid-Afrikan bioindustries could outbid almost anything except the European multinationals) and were weaning her off jet lag in the shadow of Table Mountain before taking her up to Bloemfontein to survey a site. As ever, I was a skulker in the shadows of the European Embassy, this party in the Kursaal where we met an attempt to woo the emergent black entrepreneurial caste away from Pan-Islam to Dame Europa’s fiscal tit.

“Karmic cycles, Eth. It is predestined that our life paths cross and recross. Round we go, and round. In a previous existence we were probably Tom and Jerry.” Her face had always held too much personality to be merely beautiful. Features wide, flat, scribbled by a child’s crayon, ugly-beautiful, and that soft cockatoo crest of black hair that was always always always falling into her eyes. “Oh God, get me out of here. Everyone’s so pretty and witty and gay. I need your uncompromising yeoman stodginess.”

We walked on the beach, away from the stifling heat of the Kursaal. She slipped off her shoes and fastened them to her belt, let warm sand caress bare soles. The ocean fell and ran, fell and ran on the long beach.

“Atlantic or Indian, Eth? Where exactly does Atlantic end and Indian begin? If you’re in a boat and cross the line, can you tell?”

Her entire life, it seemed then, had been made out of questions and considerations like those, of the peripheries of things.

“Heard from Mas?” she asked.

I told her that Danjuro 19: Kabukiman!, slayer of ronin, akiras, renegade robots, and Yakuza, Sword of Righteous Justice, et cetera, was now syndicated to fifteen Pacific Rim cable channels.

“Come a long way from a man, an anime deck, and a secret nocturnal vice,” she said.

“He wants me to go on some crazy thousand-mile Buddhist pilgrimage with him,” I said. “Says it would be good for my soul.”

“He’s probably right.”

“He probably is.” Even before Capetown, even before her, I had decided I would go. For my soul.

She took my hands in hers, studied them minutely.

“No more kid-glove treatment, Eth?”

“Synthetic skin. Looks better. It comes off as easily as the gloves.”

“That’s what frightens me, Eth.”

She let go of my hands, took my face between the palms of her hands, looked into my eyes. Gently but firmly she slapped me across the left cheek. Again and again and again, fitting her words to the tempo.

“Stupid stupid stupid boy. Always heroes and angels, isn’t it, Eth?”

She stalked away toward the lights of the Kursaal. An International Fireworks Convention in town the same time as Europa’s Three-Ring Diplomatic Circus was coming to a climax in the sky beneath Table Mountain.

“You’re not fucking worth it, Ethan Ring. There only ever was you; is that not enough?”

In the morning the assignment was waiting for me on the room fax. I called at the desk to leave a goodbye, and an apology for her. The lobby was full of hung-over black businessmen hunting down breakfast. The white receptionist said she had left before dawn.

2

This first day of the pilgrimage we move up the Yoshino Valley, visiting each of the temples there and staying over at Temple Ten where the priest is a relation of a relation of a friend of Mas’s. This is good farming land, a many-colored land: neat fields of yellow rape, purple clover, the sheer startling viridian of rice shoots, but mostly we make our way down footpaths and tractor tracks between tall, whispery groves of sugarcane. Near Temple Three we passed a big syrup factory; rural Japan seems to have adopted the biomechanical revolution more quickly and completely than the monstrous, decaying urban sprawls. The houses that we pass, the neat hamlets, the new villages, are all green-roofed, the engineered grass has the warmth and rusticity of the old rice thatch but never needs replacing. The few remaining sheet-metal roofs are garish and sharp-edged in comparison.

I do place and people a disservice to paint them as rustic characters. These quaint hamlets and villages are the heartland of the post-industrial revolution; each green roof sports a satellite dish to keep Juniors One Two Three in touch with the orbital EmTeeVee and sports channels, all along the valley construction teams from the big telecom companies are laying new fiber-optic cables. This is telecommuter land. Those casually dressed farmers who wave to us as we wheel past are the new caste of lawyers, doctors, accountants, designers, engineers, management consultants, near-space laborers, deep-sea miners. When Mas had a sebaceous cyst removed from his back, the only human he saw during the operation was the receptionist. The cyst had been excised by a teleoperator robot controlled by a surgeon three hundred kilometers away in a country manor among the green and pleasant golf courses of Shizuoka Prefecture. “Faith healing for agnostics,” Mas calls it. When he called for his checkup, even the receptionist had been replaced by a suite of interactive software. “When it descends to sticking needles into holographic simulations of the patients to make them better, it’ll really be cybernetic macumba.”

Every Eden has its serpent. Among wage-earning professional A-type males age thirty-five to fifty the most frequent cause of death is suicide, the second, exercise-induced coronaries. Death by volleyball. I suppose if I were Adam in a beautiful, perfect paradise where every need, every whim, was catered for, without change, without challenge, I might develop a taste for apple.

Wrong god. In Buddhism, what shit you get is of your own making. You don’t inherit someone else’s racial midden. The doctrine of Kobo Daishi’s Shingon school is that any man may achieve enlightenment in this present life, not solely after struggling through countless thousands of painful incarnations. The Japanese have always been an optimistic people. You make your own karma.

The climb out of the valley to Temple Ten is steep. Thigh muscles throb and ache. After a long day in the saddle, we do not need this. It is as if the pilgrimage is testing our constitution and resolve: the way will only get harder; are you up to it, pilgrim?

Pilgrim drops down into low gear, grabs thrustbars, leans into pedals. I think I can I think I can I think I can…

I know I can.

The altar in the Daishi Hall of Temple Ten enshrines two images, both statues of Kannon, Boddhisattva of Mercy. According to temple legend, the first was carved by the Daishi from a living tree; the saint bowed three times before each stroke of the adze. The second is a woman weaver, a refugee from some Kyoto palace intrigue, who offered the saint a cut of her cloth—hence the name Kirihata-ji, Cut-Cloth Temple—to replace his ragged clothes. In reward for her piety a purple haze descended, and she was enlightened and transformed into a statue. After our devotions, Priest Mizuno shows us both images. I murmur with properly respectful awe, though both are crude, a few rough slashes in a wooden log. I suppose one must see with the eye of faith. The point, the priest tells us, is that anyone, including women—at the time an heretical notion, dogs had a better chance of gaining nirvana—may aspire to enlightenment.

After showering and freshening up, we dine with the priest’s young family. His two sons, ten and twelve, are politely gobsmacked to be in the presence of the creator of Danjuro 19: Kabukiman! I am certain that the smartplastic anime slips Mas presents to them will be as enshrined and treasured as the Daishi’s images of Kannon. After tea, Mrs. Mizuno announces that our baths are ready. As I have been expecting. As I have been dreading. On the pretext of blisters I return to our room and hunt for the synthflesh. For one heart-stopping moment I cannot find it among socks underwear shorts teeshirts weather-proofs, then my fingers close around its stubby, comforting cylinder. This product dries to a flexible, porous, smooth finish in fifteen seconds, say Hoffmann Helvetica Chemie Ag. Eyes firmly shut, I slip off my left glove, feel cool spray in the palm of my hand. I give it a double dose, just to be sure. Thirteen hippopotamus fourteen hippopotamus fifteen hippopotamus. Quick glance to make sure I am alone, then I close my eyes again, repeat the procedure for the right hand and go to join Mas and Mizuno, who, it transpires, is an old Soul fan. Up to our chests in hot, tangerine-scented water, we holler out Motown, Atlantic, and Stax classics in creaky three-part harmony. Mrs. Mizuno says it is the funniest thing she has heard in weeks.

The henro lodge is cool and airy, filled with the sounds and scents of late spring in the Yoshino Valley. Sleep is easily found in such a room: within seconds I have tumbled into the slumber of the righteous.

When the cry wakes me I cannot think where I am for one hideous instant. I find my fingers tearing at the scab of artificial flesh in the palm of my right hand. No. No. Namu Daishi Henjo; I fight the demons with the weapons of a good pilgrim. And it passes.

Masahiko is bolt upright in his bed, eyes wide, body rigid, trembling. I can see that he is deep, far below the surface of his subconscious.

“Mas…” Kneeling before him, I touch his shoulder, gently.

“No! No!” he shouts. “Leave her alone!”

“Mas?”

No answer.

“Mas…”

No answer. I sit with him until whatever storm has troubled him has passed and he has settled back into sleep. I join him, we two, pilgrims together, and sleep without any further dreams until dawn.

3

The day is warm and bright as we splash across the gravel bed of the Yoshino River and follow the old henro path into the hill country. At Temple Ten valley Buddhism ends, mountain Buddhism begins. Zen is the spirit of the valleys, Shingon the spirit of the mountaintop. And as the spirit of Zen is different from the spirit of Shingon, so the sunlight and warmth of the valley give way to the more testing weather of the mountains. Gray wads of cloud move in from the west; within an hour it is raining steadily. Rain and mud, the henro’s twin curses. Our legs are spattered with it, the bikes are caked with it, and our hands and faces are numb from cold rain. Rain sheets from our plastic capes and pilgrim hats. The way is steep and treacherous—bottom gear for an hour, with many portages. All head-on into wind and driving rain. Concentration is total. Misery absolute. Temple Eleven is deserted, derelict, decaying, vandalized by akiras. Among their graffiti, their beer cans, we find the remains of cooking fires, silver foil sachets of camping ready meals, condoms, needles, rotting biomotors and batteries, empty cartridges.

“I don’t like this,” says Mas, clearly spooked. Pigeons explode from beneath the eaves of the ruined Daishi Hall. Some, I notice, have parasitical zoomorphs clinging to their bodies. Reading it for an ill omen, we press on.

From Eleven to Twelve is half a day’s ride past two bangai—unnumbered temples on the pilgrimage route that are not Sacred Sites. Both, like Eleven, are deserted and desecrated. On. Uphill all the way. I find my mind withdrawing, shutting out the sensual world and its insistencies, drawing veils of memory. I am no longer conscious of the cold and rain, the ache in my thighs. I remember.

I remember his life.

I call him “he” because, though he shared the same face, the same name, the same body and mind as I, he is dead. Unarguably. Indisputably. Dead. He was killed. Not with bullets or knives or monomolecular wire in an alley in some anonymous central European city, not with drugs or poisons. He was killed with guilt. What survived him, this thing pushing its gaudily colored MTB up the side of a Japanese mountain, is only the slag. Only the ashes.

I remember…

4

On the day that Ethan Ring was conceived, West Germany won the World Cup to the refrain of Luciano Pavarotti singing Nessun Dormas as Nikki Ring, twenty-something, unemployed, unemployable, engaged in five minutes of intense coitus in South Mimms Services car park off the M25 with a Dutch truck driver hauling a consignment of salad vegetables.

On the day that Ethan Ring was born an armor-piercing smartbomb hit an underground shelter in Baghdad and incinerated five hundred men, women, and children while Bette Midler sang about God watching us from a distance.

On the day that Ethan Ring kissed his first girl—Roberta Cunningham at the back of Miss MacConkey’s P2 class—Europe very quietly, very unremarkably, without any embarrassing mess or fuss or anyone noticing, united.

On the day that Ethan Ring took his first date, Ange Elliot, age thirteen, to the local Pizza Hut for a double-cheese, diet Coke, and under-the-table footsie, Doctors ten Boom and Huitsdorp of the new, respectable, fully integrated, and racially harmonious South Africa won the Nobel prize for biology in recognition of their work on designing an artificial organism that converted sugars into useful electricity—to layman Ethan and his contemporaries, a living battery.

Too tall too early, red hair—too much of it—socially crippled by acne and self-consciousness, Ethan Ring would almost certainly have grown into neurotic teenhood but for the shelter, succor, and support of the Nineteenth House kinship. From the moral ruins of the HIV-haunted nineties, strewn with the desiccated bones of broken relationships, a new sociological order had emerged of clusters of single women—separated, widowed, divorced, never partnered—joined together under a common roof against a sea of free-floating males. The kinship: average size five point three: three point two generating the income to support themselves and the average two point one career mothers who parented the children. Men come, men go at the individual partners’ discretions, but are never considered part of the family unit. 2003: the kinship achieves legal recognition in the European courts. 2012: one third of all permanent relationships are kinships. 2013, early May: Nikki Ring joins the Nineteenth House gaining a telecommuting designer of European farming magazines, a home-delivery sandwich Empress, a jewelry maker, a co-mother who has retired thankfully into parenthood out of Futures, two new daughters, one new son, a condominium on the South Coast (the eponymous Nineteenth House) with sun terrace and shared swimming pool, peace, stability, love, security; contributing: Ethan Ring. Ethan Ring gained roots; he whose prior experience of the New Europe had been Doppler blur of tail-lights punctuated by ten thousand radio jingles and the smell of scorched sunflower oil in a nation of bed’n’breakfast rooms. The fertile ground of the kinship germinated a long-dormant talent for visualization, for seeing ideas projected on the backs of his eyeballs and making them seeable to others. Nurtured by his ex-Futures co-mother, his talent took him through and out of Michael Heseltine Comprehensive to art college in some rainy day city in the north to study Graphic Communications. He suffered agonies of acclimatization and socialization. He contemplated leaving. He contemplated a bottle and a half of paracetamol. He found friends in time: a Japanese exchange student with a dark and secret passion for comic-book animation; a dark-haired computer junkie from the North Country who taught Ethan the necessary skills of drinking rolling joints pulling girls; his girlfriend, a fellow Graphic Communications student who looked as if her name should end with a “y” but in fact didn’t.

On the day that Ethan Ring met Luka Casipriadin, Leconte Bio in Lyons discovered a technique for loading human memories, emotions, and experiences from an implanted bioprocessor onto a mainframe AI template to create an interactive simulacrum of the dead. The first immortal since ancient Greece came from Santa Rose, CA, had Made It in sugar beet, but couldn’t beat the carcinoma. Her persona was alone three years in cybernetic heaven before anyone could afford to join her.

Somebody had stolen Ethan Ring’s shopping. He had gone back to lock up his rustbucket of a Ford and the bags were gone from outside his first-floor flat. Life in the rainy-day city had made him stoical: microwave TVchow-4-Is made him fat and gave him wind anyway. The next day there was a knock at his door. On the landing was the girl from first-year Fine Arts you could not help noticing because she had shaved her head except for a crest of black hair that flopped into her eyes all the time.

“You could at least have made some effort.”

“Pardon?”

“Knocked a few doors. Made a few routine inquiries. You could have tried a little.”

“I’m sorry. Are you sure you’ve got the right flat?”

“Okay okay, I admit it. I took your food. Me. Luka Casipriadin. I live upstairs from you. You didn’t know. Ah. It’s Georgian, originally. Casipriadin. So my father says. Can I come in?”

“You took my food? Why did you take my food?”

But she was already sitting on his curry-and-beer-stained sofa scrutinizing with the eye of first-year Fine Arts his soft-porn posters of airbrushed cyber-girls with chromium breasts. Shit shit shit piles of dirty underwear Chinese food cartons beer cans.

“One life furnished in early squalor. You know you are what you eat?”

“Unh?”

“I’m beginning to think maybe I made a mistake with you. Syllogismic logic: if I am what I eat, and you are what you eat, then if I eat what you eat, therefore I should become you.”

“So you ate my food.”

“And got fat and farted a lot.”

“Why…”

“Because you have fabulous hair I would kill for. Because you were never going to talk to me, so I had to get to talk to you. You hungry? Of course you are. I ate all your food. Come up to my place. I’ve got stuff on.”

“My stuff?”

“My stuff. Eat my food, be me. You have a name?”

“Ethan Ring.”

“Oh, classic name. I knew I hadn’t made a mistake with you.”

5

From the perspective of a fluorescent speck clinging to a mountainside in Shikoku, I am able to tell her that she had, she did, a small mistake, a misjudgment of character, that would slowly, gradually, destroy entire lives. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions; one word, one act, can change the world. Well they named it chaos theory.

From the perspective of the pilgrim, this mountain land is exhilarating; the swoop from the mountaintop temples down the sheer henro path is thrilling, madly reckless. There is a great spirit in high country. Shinto peopled the peaks with ancestors and kami but clung to the valleys; Buddhism took its temples to the very mountaintops and opened the numinous to the people of the valleys. The legends attached to Shikoku’s high places gives an indication of the power of the spirit of the mountains in the Japanese psyche.

A hundred years before Kobo Daishi, En the Ascetic, an early Buddhist missionary, bound a fire-breathing dragon that had been ravaging the farms and livelihoods of the people below beneath a stone on the hilltop where Temple Twelve now stands—the temple to which we are traveling along forest trails and firebreaks. Inspired by the Buddha, the boy Daishi went up to the mountain peaks above the valley of his birth—a subtemple of Temple Seventy-five commemorates the spot—and leapt from the summit, crying out, “If I am to be the people’s savior, then save me, O Buddha! If not, then let me perish!” Naturally, Buddha erred on the side of mercy. To me the most meaningful legend of mountain Buddhism is that of Emon Saburo; a rich and oppressive landlord from Ehime Prefecture (a valley man, short in spirit) who shat in the begging bowl of a wandering priest—the Daishi in disguise—and thus earned the Job-like curse of losing family, friends, and fortune in a single night. Smitten by conscience, he gave all his lands to his tenants and set off in pursuit of the Daishi to beg forgiveness. But however strenuously he pursued the saint, he was never able to catch up with him. After four years and twenty circuits, he was struck by the idea that he would stand a better chance of meeting the Daishi if he reversed the direction of his pilgrimage and so met him coming. On his twenty-first circuit of Shikoku he came, near to death with cold and exhaustion, to a mountaintop. The Daishi appeared to him and absolved him of his sins. Before dying, Emon Saburo requested that he might be reborn as the lord of his home province—then Iyo, now known as Ehime—so that he might do mighty works of good to atone for his evil deeds in this life. The Daishi picked up a small stone, wrote Saburo’s name on it, and pressed it into his hand. Then Emon Saburo died and the Daishi buried him and changed his pilgrim staff into a cedar.

Like all good stories, there is a twist in the tale. Late the next summer, the wife of the Lord of Iyo gave birth to a son; fine, healthy, beautiful, except that his left hand was clenched shut and could not be opened. A Shingon priest was summoned, who prayed and invoked the name of the Daishi over the boy. Slowly, his fist relaxed, and opened. Inside was a small stone. On the stone were written the words “Emon Saburo Reborn.”

Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo!

We ride up the long, shallow steps to Temple Twelve. No priest here, nor any pilgrims; we share the mountainside forest clearing with a handful of industrial robots marked with the ciphers and seals of Tokushima Prefecture Bureau of Antiquities. Beyond Twelve the gray weather breaks. Unfaltering sunshine lights our way and we go ridgerunning across the tops of the valleys and down the mountain paths. Light has always made me feel reborn. I want to do this forever.

Temple Thirteen—Dainichi-ji—is sited on a coll at the head of a valley of big, prosperous farmhouses set like scattered islands in a sea of gently undulating sugarcane and bamboo. Like Twelve, it has fallen from grace, staffed also with stolid robots in the employ of the Bureau of Antiquities. Prayers in an empty hall; a computer stamps our albums. As we click into our toe clips, lean into handlebars, a Nissan biopower pickup pulls up outside the gate in a crunch of damp gravel. A middle-aged woman with startling fluorescent green rubber boots leaps out and greets us warmly. Her name is Mrs. Morikawa. She owns a farm ten kays down the valley, but is also the official curator (part-time) of Buddhist Cultural Heritage Sites Twelve—Fifteen. Her monitors flagged her that there were henro working their way along the old pilgrim path: we are the first in three years to have followed the Daishi’s Way, would we do her the honor of staying the night as guests in her farmhouse?

We consider her offer of settai. The afternoon is almost gone. Temples Fourteen and Fifteen are eight kays distant over heavy terrain. Mas has booked us into a drab tourist motel just outside Tokushima on the main interprovincial highway. Waiting is a warm farmhouse, country food, clean beds, hot water.

The bikes go in the back, we squeeze into the front beside Mrs. Morikawa. Gunge-tacked to the dash is a mass-produced plastic statue of the Daishi in henro robes. Dogyo Ninin.

As we drive through the cane plantations and bamboo, Mrs. Morikawa confesses an ulterior motive behind her gift of hospitality. Her eldest daughter is sick with an unnamed wasting disease. The doctors and their robots have offered the most advanced medical science but they admit that sicknesses such as these are as much of the spirit as of the body. She wonders: could we, would we, see her daughter? Ancient belief credits great power to the temple seals inscribed in henro albums; Mrs. Morikawa and her mother before her saw great acts of healing when pilgrims passed their albums over the bodies of the sick. Mas protests: we are not faith healers, miracle workers, shamen, hijiri—itinerant Buddhist holy men—we are spiritual seekers sinful as any men. We do not emulate the Daishi, merely follow his way. The woman pleads—it can do no harm. Indeed, it cannot, nor any good, if it is only a matter of calligraphy passed over a sick spirit. But I feel, I know, that it may be more. Must be more. Demons and Daishis are jealous masters where spirits are at stake. Wind stirs the tall bamboo and in the space of a few sentences the dirt road with its twists and turns has become the entrance to a moral trap so intricate, so labyrinthine, I am its captive before I am aware I have entered.

“We will do it,” I say, cutting Mas’s protests short. Mrs. Morikawa is overjoyed.

Grass roof sloping nearly to the ground, satellite dishes, comlinks, shit digesters, methane plants, syrup tanks, agricultural robots: a typical twenty-first-century Japanese country manor. A son leaves off easing the dead biomotor out of a roboplanter to store the bikes in the barn. Halfway to the house something hits me a huge, soft thump in the back. As I go sprawling on the concrete the woman picks up a black, flapping something, shouts at it, throws it away from her. With a scream of indignation, it scuttles into the barn.

A glider cat.

The woman apologizes. They recently bought a franchise. Now every time anyone calls at the house, they come swooping down from high vantages on the webs of furred skin between their fore and hind legs to investigate. As she opens the door, a black ball of fur crouched above the porch opens moon-yellow eyes and regards us balefully.

The smell of death in the sick girl’s room is so strong as to be almost overpowering. It is not easily learned, but once you have the stink of it, it never quite leaves you. I cling to the door frame to steady myself.

“Won’t eat, won’t talk, won’t let anyone help her, won’t do anything but lie in her bed and swallow pills,” says Mrs. Morikawa in the voice of a woman so accustomed to pain it has become an intimate friend.

The girl is fifteen, sixteen, the age it likes its victims best. Anorexia, bulimia, cognitive metabolic disorder; they have found new names and faces for it but at its heart its name has always been self-loathing, its face, self-destruction. The doctor who called it a disease of the spirit advised well. Mas swears quietly, reverently in English.

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.