Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (16 page)

“Well, you got a long way, didn’t you?”

Black skirt, long, fringed, and a-jingle with Indian bells; black Docs; black sleeveless poloneck. Much silver. That ludicrous crest of black hair she could never keep out of her eyes.

“You get as far as the Daishi permits you,” I say. “This far, this pilgrimage, I only have grace enough for twenty-seven and a half temples.”

We embrace; she wraps her long skinny bare arms with their jangling silver bangles around me; I feel the quick shiver of bare emotion. I do some sort of half hug, all forearms and elbows, strangely reluctant to touch her with my plastic hands.

“How are they, Eth?” I show her. She looks disgusted.

“Jesus, Eth. I told Mas I’d foot the bill. I mean, make the appropriate contribution to temple funds. They’re sharp boys, these monks. Mas won’t hear of it, he says he makes five times what I do and will never miss it, which is probably true, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

“They’ll be as good as they were before,” I say. “Almost.” Then: “They’re gone, Luka. That was why I did it. It was the only way to get rid of them. Burn them out.”

“It was always heroes and angels with you, wasn’t it, Eth?” She leans back against the veranda rail, stretches her arms as far as they will go to either side along the knotted wood.

“The disk is gone too, Luka. It burned in the fire. All gone. The fracters, Marcus’s dream, burned.”

“Mas says when he found you you were muttering something over and over and over.”

“What?”

“ ‘I’m sorry, Marcus; I’m sorry, Marcus.’ Over and over and over.”

“Luka.”

She smiles out at me from underneath that ludicrous hair.

“I’m free. I died in the fire with the Takeda simulacrum. Ethan Ring does not exist anymore. A closed file in a gray office in Ghent.”

“Shit, Ethan, I don’t want to run all my life. I’ve got better things to do…”

“You won’t, Luka. I’m sure of it. Without the fracters, they have no use for me.”

“Well, if they change their minds and decide they want you back after all, they’ll have to come through me.” She looks over her shoulder at the temple garden. “I’m fucking starving, Eth. I’ve been on the go since before breakfast. You know, Mas wouldn’t tell me where you were? I had to meet him in Yawatahama and let him bring me here.
Mondo secreto.
What did you do? The whole country is going mad out there.”

“I’m pretty much out of the world here,” I say. “Thankfully. I can get you something to eat but they’re pretty strict interpretation Buddhist diet-wise. Vegetables, no grains.”

“Suits me.”

“Eat what I eat.”

“Become you.”

“Is that what you want?”

For the first time we dare eye contact.

“Yes it is. Yes.”

She pulls me to her, runs her tongue over my red-stubbled scalp.

“That fabulous, fabulous hair,” she mourns; then, intimate, in my ear, sly: “How are they about other things?”

“To the brothers, it’s a spiritual grace. As long as there’s love in it.”

“I think that could be arranged.”

She takes my destroyed hands in her hands, lifts her arms high, opens them wide.

“They’re gone, Luka. They won’t come back. But sometimes, if the light is right, in the early morning, or at sunset, I think I can see something written there, under the plastic.”

She freezes, every muscle prepared for a final, killing act of betrayal. In the same instant she chooses to trust me.

“What do they say, Ethan?”

“ ‘Emon Saburo Reborn.’ ”

“And are you going to tell me what that means?” Our hands come together at the bottom of the circle of air.

“Some year, Luka, some year.”

Ptey, sailing

O
N THE NIGHT THAT PTEY
voyaged out to have his soul shattered, eight hundred stars set sail across the sky. It was an evening at Great Winter’s ending. The sunlit hours raced toward High Summer, each day lavishly more full of light than the one before. In this latitude, the sun hardly set at all after the spring equinox, rolling along the horizon, fat and idle and pleased with itself. Summer-born Ptey turned his face to the sun as it dipped briefly beneath the horizon, closed his eyes, enjoyed its lingering warmth on his eyelids, in the angle of his cheekbones, on his lips. To the Summer-born, any loss of the light was a reminder of the terrible, sad months of winter and the unbroken, encircling dark.

But we have the stars, his father said, a Winter-born. We are born looking out into the universe.

Ptey’s father commanded the little machines that ran the catamaran, trimming sail, winding sheets, setting course by the tumble of satellites; but the tiller he held himself. The equinoctial gales had spun away to the west two weeks before and the catboat ran fast and fresh on a sweet wind across the darkening water. Twins hulls cut through the ripple-reflections of gas-flares from the Temejveri oil platforms. As the sun slipped beneath the huge dark horizon and the warmth fell from the hollows of Ptey’s face, so his father turned his face to the sky. Tonight, he wore his Steris Aspect. The ritual selves scared Ptey, so rarely were they unfurled in Ctarisphay: births, namings, betrothals and marriages, divorces and deaths. And of course, the Manifoldings. Familiar faces became distant and formal. Their language changed, their bodies seemed slower, heavier. They became possessed by strange, special knowledges. Only Steris possessed the language for the robots to sail the catamaran and, despite the wheel of positioning satellites around tilted Tay, the latitude and longitude of the Manifold House. The catamaran itself was only run out from its boathouse, to strong songs heavy with clashing harmonies, when a child from Ctarisphay on the edge of adulthood sailed out beyond the outer mole and the fleet of oil platforms to have his or her personality unfolded into eight.

Only two months since, Cjatay had sailed out into the oily black of a late winter afternoon. Ptey was Summer-born, a Solstice boy; Cjatay a late Autumn. It was considered remarkable that they shared enough in common to be able to speak to each other, let alone become the howling boys of the neighborhood, the source of every broken window and borrowed boat. The best part of three seasons between them, but here was only two moons later, leaving behind the pulsing gas flares and maze of pipe work of the sheltering oil fields, heading into the great, gentle oceanic glow of the plankton blooms, steering by the stars, the occupied, haunted stars. The Manifolding was never a thing of moons and calendars, but of mothers’ watchings and grandmothers’ knowings and teachers’ notings and fathers’ murmurings, of subtly shifted razors and untimely lethargies, of deep-swinging voices and stained bedsheets.

On Etjay Quay, where the porcelain houses leaned over the landing, Ptey had thrown his friend’s bag down into the boat. Cjatay’s father had caught it and frowned. There were observances. Ways. Forms.

“See you,” Ptey had said.

“See you.” Then the wind caught in the catamaran’s tall, curved sails and carried it away from the rain-wet, shiny faces of the houses of Ctarisphay. Ptey had watched the boat until it was lost in the light dapple of the city’s lamps on the winter-dark water. See Cjatay he would, after his six months on the Manifold House. But only partially. There would be Cjatays he had never known, never even met. Eight of them, and the Cjatay with whom he had stayed out all the brief Low Summer nights of the prith run on the fishing staithes, skinny as the piers’ wooden legs silhouetted against the huge sun kissing the edge of the world, would be but a part, a dream of one of the new names and new personalities. Would he know him when he met him on the great floating university that was the Manifold House?

Would he know himself?

“Are they moving yet?” Steris called from the tiller. Ptey shielded his dark-accustomed eyes against the pervasive glow of the carbon-absorbing plankton blooms and peered into the sky.
Sail of Bright Anticipation
cut two lines of liquid black through the gently undulating sheet of biolight, fraying at the edges into fractal curls of luminescence as the sheets of microorganisms sought each other.

“Nothing yet.”

But it would be soon, and it would be tremendous. Eight hundred stars setting out across the night. Through the changes and domestic rituals of his sudden Manifolding, Ptey had been aware of sky-watch parties being arranged, stargazing groups setting up telescopes along the quays and in the campaniles, while day by day, the story moved closer to the head of the news. Half the world—that half of the world not blinded by its extravagant axial tilt—would be looking to the sky. Watching Steris rig
Sail of Bright Anticipation
, Ptey had felt cheated, like a sick child confined to bed while festival raged across the boats lashed beneath his window. Now, as the swell of the deep dark of his world’s girdling ocean lifted the twin prows of
Sail of Bright Anticipation
, on his web of shock-plastic mesh ahead of the mast, Ptey felt his excitement lift with it. A carpet of lights below, a sky of stars above: all his alone.

They were not stars. They were the eight hundred twenty six space habitats of the Anpreen Commonweal, spheres of nano-carbon ice and water three hundred kilometers in diameter that for twice Ptey’s lifetime had adorned Bephis, the ringed gas giant, like a necklace of pearls hidden in a velvet bag, far from eye and mind. The negotiations fell into eras. The Panic, when the world of Tay became aware that the gravity waves pulsing through the huge ripple tank that was their oceanbound planet were the bow-shocks of massive artifacts decelerating from near light-speed. The Denial, when Tay’s governments decided it was Best Really to try and hide the fact that their solar system had been immigrated into by eight hundred and some space vehicles, each larger than Tay’s petty moons, falling into neat and proper order around Bephis. The Soliciting, when it became obvious that Denial was futile—but on our terms, our terms. A fleet of space probes was dispatched to survey and attempt radio contact with the arrivals—as yet silent as ice. And, when they were not blasted from space or vaporized or collapsed into quantum black holes or any of the plethora of fanciful destructions imagined in the popular media, the Overture. The Sobering, when it was realized that these star-visitors existed primarily as swarms of free-swimming nano-assemblers in the freefall spherical oceans of their eight hundred and some habitats, one mind with many forms; and, for the Anpreen, the surprise that these archaic hominiforms on this backwater planet were many selves within one body. One thing they shared and understood well. Water. It ran through their histories, it flowed around their ecologies, it mediated their molecules. After one hundred twelve years of near-light-speed flight, the Anpreen Commonweal was desperately short of water; their spherical oceans shriveled almost into zero gravity teardrops within the immense, nano tech–reinforced ice shells. Then began the era of Negotiation, the most prolonged of the phases of contact, and the most complex. It had taken three years to establish the philosophical foundations: the Anpreen, an ancient species of the great Clade, had long been a colonial mind, arranged in subtle hierarchies of self-knowledge and ability, and did not know who to talk to, whom to ask for a decision, in a political system with as many governments and nations as there were islands and archipelagos scattered across the world ocean of the fourth planet from the sun.

Now the era of Negotiation had become the era of Open Trade. The Anpreen habitats spent their last drops of reaction mass to break orbit around Bephis and move the Commonweal in-system. Their destination was not Tay, but Tejaphay, Tay’s sunward neighbor, a huge waterworld of unbroken ocean one hundred kilometers deep, crushing gravity, and endless storms. A billion years before the seed-ships probed the remote star system, the gravitational interplay of giant worlds had sent the least of their number spiraling sunward. Solar wind had stripped away its huge atmosphere and melted its mantle of water ice into a planetary ocean, deep and dark as nightmares. It was that wink of water in the system-scale interferometers of the Can-Bet-Merey people, half a million years before, that had inspired them to fill their night sky with solar sails as one hundred thousand slow seed-ships rode out on flickering launch lasers toward the new system. An evangelically pro-life people were the Can-Bet-Merey, zealous for the Clade’s implicit dogma that intelligence was the only force in the universe capable of defeating the physical death of space-time.

If the tens of thousands of biological packages they had rained into the world-ocean of Tejaphay had germinated life, Tay’s probes had yet to discover it. The Can-Bet-Merey did strike roots in the afterthought, that little blue pearl next out from the sun, a tear spun from huge Tejaphay.

One hundred thousand years ago, the Can-Bet-Merey had entered the post-biological phase of intelligence and moved to that level that could no longer communicate with the biological life of Tay, or even the Anpreen.

“Can you see anything yet?” A call from the tiller.
Sail of Bright Anticipation
had left behind the carbon-soaked plankton bloom, the ocean was deep dark and boundless. Sky and sea blurred; stars became confused with the riding lights of ships close on the horizon.

“Is it time?” Ptey called back.

“Five minutes ago.”

Ptey found a footing on the webbing, and, one hand wrapped in the sheets, stood up to scan the huge sky. Every child of Tay, crazily tilted at forty-eight degrees to the ecliptic, grew up conscious that her planet was a ball rolling around the sun and that the stars were far, vast and slow, almost unchanging. But stars could change; Bephis, that soft smudge of light low in the southeast, blurred by the glow of a eight hundred moon-sized space habitats, would soon be once again the hard point of light by which his ancestors had steered to their Manifoldings.

“Give it time,” Ptey shouted. Time. The Anpreen were already voyaging; had switched on their drives and pulled out of orbit almost an hour before. The slow light of their embarkation had still not reached Tay. He saw the numbers spinning around in his head, accelerations, vectors, space and time all arranged around him like fluttering carnival banners. It had taken Ptey a long time to understand that not everyone could see numbers like him and reach out and make them do what they wanted.