Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (15 page)

This house; this cultural schizophrenia; this Neo-Imperial adventure: I understand. Behind the white-painted geisha mask, the soul lies unchanged, unchanging, unchangeable.

“And now you’re taking up the sword of Mishima.”

“It requires a special nobility to disembowel yourself on a hotel balcony, but Mishima was an idealist, and idealists are fools. We Takedas are pragmatists: I merely want what was always mine to begin with; my lands, my respect, my name.”

“If it had been for the soul of Japan, I could have understood,” I say. “But you’re just one more fucking little
daimyo
.”

“Who wants, and will have, your head, Mr. Ring.”

The blade moves. This time I am ready. My right hand is held up before me.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Takeda.”

“
Lord
Takeda, if you please. And, as I have said before, I do think so.”

The arc of the cut passes so close, my reflex recoil so slow, that I feel the kiss of the steel across my throat. The samurai-robot clicks into combat stance; one blade raised high, the other drawn back for the killing thrust.

Blood
warm on my fingers. I stare at my right hand disbelievingly.

Impossible. Impossible.
Impossible.

Left hand. Chaos hand. Death hand. The backs of my knuckles are pressed against my face.
Die, you diseased fuck.

“It is written, Mr. Ring, that the way of victory lies in
becoming your enemy
,” says the cultured BBC accent. He speaks? He sees Keter and lives? How?
How?
I hardly hear his words for the blood surging red in my brain. “I know you, Mr. Ring. Do you think your European masters would have let their most valuable, most powerful weapon go cycling gaily over hill and dale unchaperoned?”

“They had you watch me?”

“We were contacted by the European embassy while you were still shopping for bicycles in Tokyo with your animator friend. Since you stamped your albums at Temple One, ours has been the unseen presence accompanying you on your pilgrimage. We Two, Pilgrims Together. You did manage to evade us at Tokushima but we caught up with you again at Temple Nineteen and put up the Hiyasa checkpoint to lock on. I am still not certain whether it was unfortunate or serendipitous that you left the Approved Tourist Route at Aki. If you hadn’t, you might never have encountered the dog patrol and I would never have seen exactly why your European masters value you so highly.”

Those dead televisions, those semi-fracters blizzarded with interference. Someone had been monitoring those dogs, as I had suspected, but no one living.

“Had I been observing you through purely visual channels, my persona would be as hopelessly disrupted as your other victims. But I am hunting you with subtler senses—infrared, sound, motion sensors…”

“My head does not come easily, Mr. Takeda.” Europeans too can read the masters.
Strike in an unexpected manner,
writes Miyamoto Musashi. Robot limbs are strong but the muscle joints are fragile. Do my enemy’s sensors register a warp of heat, a flicker of digits as I dart between the splayed legs, wrench down the upraised blade arm, break its joint across my knee, and, as the second blade comes blurring toward me, cleave it cleanly at the first joint with the stolen sword?

More things than tourist-talk Japanese in my plastic socket.

“It is a mistake to rely on only one weapon,” I quote, gasping, heart hammering.

“Quite,” says the Takeda-thing. “But you are not the only one who can play the Scissor-Paper-Stone Game.” The faceless television opens its single eye. It is only because I once saw its face and survived that the Keter fracter does not cinder my eyes in my head. Even the split second of recognition and reaction is like lightning earthing down my spine. What? Where? Feel. Feel. Wooden floor. Closed. Keep your eyes closed. Feel. My quivering fingers touch the carved foot of a wooden Boddhisattva. I hear clicking, mincing footsteps. My enemy, closing to destroy me. But the battle is more than Ethan Ring’s personal nemesis now. A ToSec in possession of the passwords and commands recorded on the soul-tap wired into my skull and loose in the world with the fracters in its hands: there is no imagining how this drama of history will end.

“I can see you, Mr. Ring. Can you see me?”

You cannot afford one glance; for if you have just handed it Malkhut the Obedience fracter… Keter you might survive through familiarity, but an unrefusable order to slit your own stomach…

Movement sensors. Infrared. And, in my belt pouch, the can of spray lubricant I used on that troublesome gearshift… I check with my fingers for my cigarette lighter. Work, fingers, fuck you, work. Get that top off. Christ, I can hear it, stepping across the floor. Get away, you bastard, get away. I feel my way along the Buddhas.
Forgive me, Lord Daishi.
The oil spray ignites into a gout of fire; I wave my improvised flamethrower over the wooden images, sending the Buddhas up in a roar of enlightenment I can no longer hear the sure click, step of the Takeda-robot. In the shelter of my arms, I snuff out my fire, spray thick, black oil over my wraparound MTB shades.

“Right, you bastard.”

Fools, fighting in a burning house…

“Impressive, Mr. Ring.”

The voice, too close, too near… Multijointed fingers clamp around my throat, squeeze blood from the hairline wound, push me back toward the blazing Buddhas. I hammer with the base of my spray can, but robot fingers lock onto my glasses; lift them. My one free hand sprays pure blackness into the place I hope the screen to be. Plastic fingers spasm; I snap joints like crab legs, wriggle free. Do I, dare I, dare I, do I? One glance. I dare. I do.

The spray has blacked out the left side of the winged helmet and three quarters of the glowing screen.
Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo!
I must act quickly, decisively, before Takeda reformats the fracter into a smaller screen.

One glance can contain the key to victory. On the rear of the carapace, exactly where I remember Luka had plugged the multiplex link transmitter into her Oddjob, is a fifteen-pin socket, standard issue on the Dornier Mark 15.

The Takeda-thing spins on its legs, hunting for a true image in the blur of infrared distractions but I am faster. In the instant before its motion sensors register, I am on top of it. The Daishi Hall is a hell of blazing Boddhisattvas and Boddhidharmas, but the demon box is off my belt, its adaptor pushed into the socket where the Takeda-thing cannot reach.

“You wanted the fracters,” I shout over the roar of burning, the scream of fire alarms. “Then have them.”

I press the
DUMP DISK
key.

COMMIT CODE?
asks the demon box.

My fingers, numbs from Keter-shock, miskey. A crushing agony in the back of my neck; robot fingers trying to tear head and spine from my body.

WHAT I TELL
…

The other hand is spidering on broken fingers around the base of my skull, feeling, questing, feeling…

WHAT I TELL YOU THREE
…

A chitinous finger screws, screws into the plastic vulva of my taphead socket The pain is delirious, but nothing to what it will be if Lord Takeda succeeds in firing a macrovolt charge through my cerebellum.

WHAT I TELL YOU THREE TIMES
…

I am burning. I am dying.

IS
…

He is scraping out the inside of my skull, sucking down my soul, swallowing me.

TRUE.

COMPLETE FRACTER SYSTEM DOWNLOAD EFFECTED
says the demon box. And in the same instant, Lord Takeda’s grip on my soul is released. Pain ceases, I roll clear. By the light of a hundred burning Buddhas, I see the Takeda-thing, legs locked into a pyramid, arms out at its sides, rigid, while Marcus’s Sefirah disk pours all the fear and all the joy and all the pain and all the annihilation and all the madness and all the healing and all the holiness and all the remembering and all the forgetting and all the highs and lows and peace and loathing and death in all the world through him.

“Burn in hell, you bastard!”

The pillars are alight, flames are running along the roof beams and trusses. The shoji walls have already gone. I have only moments before the roof comes down, but there are two last things to be burned in this fire ceremony. The heat and smoke force me down to crawl, choking, skin seared, across the floor to the fallen image of Kokuzo.

Once, Luka had videoed a young street preacher who used a large paschal candle as an allegory of hell. “One thousand ecus to anyone who will hold his finger in the flame for one minute!” he would harangue the Saturday shoppers. “One minute? No takers? How can you then contemplate an eternity of burning in hell!”

But some things must be contemplated. Some hells must be embraced. I press my hands to the glowing wood. The pain blows away every thought, everything except the need to stop it, stop it, stop it. But I cannot. I cannot.
Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo.
Hold them. I watch my hands blacken,
hold them
and split,
hold them
and smoke, and burn, and crisp to obscene scraps of charred gristle.
Hold them.
I hold them until very trace and line of the things that were engraved there are burned away. Only then, transfigured with pain, do I run from the Daishi Hall as the roof falls in a gout of flame on the blazing, melting Takeda-thing, run out between the smoking torii gates beneath the glass roof of the hollow Graceland that cracks in the sudden uprush of heat and shatters into dozens of tesselated Fuller-hexagons, all falling down, all drifting down, all coming down, raining down on me.

T
HE LEGEND ATTACHED TO
the small, un-numbered
bangai
a morning’s walk through beautiful country beyond Temple Twenty-seven is one of the most unusual of the whole pilgrimage. As the Daishi was passing through this part of Shikoku he met a trader leading a packhorse laden with dried salt trout. Kobo Daishi asked for the gift of one fish but years of sin had hardened the fish trader’s heart, and not even sparing the smallest and least fish, he urged his horse on. Immediately, it was struck with paralyzing colic and the man, remembering he had heard that a great holy man was abroad on the island, went back to beg the Daishi’s forgiveness. The Daishi handed the trader his begging bowl and told him to fill it with water from a nearby spring and give it to the horse. This he did, and the horse was at once restored. In gratitude, the trader offered the Daishi all his load of fish but the saint would accept only one, the smallest and least, which he put into the spring, prayed, and immediately, it was returned to life. The fish trader built a hermitage by that spring, which over the centuries has become this Buddhist Temple. Fish still swim in the pool fed from the spring; the monks are keen to show visitors the marks behind their heads, on either side of their backs, and on the tails that are the prints of the Daishi’s fingers.

On their instructions, I am to bathe my hands twice a day—dawn and sunset—in the restoring waters. I cannot say I have felt any great blessing, perhaps what benefit there is exists in the physical exercise of walking down to the pool and the spiritual grace of watching slow creatures in deep, clear liquid. Whatever, my nurse assures me that when I do go to bathe, the bioassay lines on the robot that follows me like a bad conscience dip into smoother, more tranquil configurations.

They are a kind and true people, this reclusive brotherhood of homosexual monks. They live the spiritual life with the natural, liquid grace of a trout in water. Few things are more attractive than natural saintliness, few things rarer to find. Many of them are men who have stepped away from the professional world but feel that their sexual orientation precludes them from the regular spiritual orders; the Trout Brook Temple brothers are renowned among the few who know of their existence as strong gentle healers, razor-sharp accountants, and fearsome lawyers. After Mas found me in the chaos and destruction of Graceland and brought me back to the Tanazaki-ya, the Tanazakis sent for the brothers of Salt Trout Temple, knowing that they possessed both the power to save me and keep me hidden from those who might be interested in the man who single-handedly destroyed Tosa Securities Incorporated. Like all men of spiritual integrity, the brothers have little interest in the processes of history.

While the major players in Japan’s unfolding act of kabuki manipulate and maneuver in the vacuum left by the sudden collapse of ToSecInc, I become acquainted with my new hands. The plastic skin is a little disconcerting, especially its shocking, terminal junction with the pale, freckled Ethan-skin of my wrists but Brother Saigyo, my loving nurse, gives me daily assurances that beneath the stiff, clawlike carapaces, new skin is growing, thickening, laying down layer upon layer, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. Pigment, hair, nails, fingerprints, all will be exactly as before thanks to the miracle of accelerated regeneration.

“I hope not,” I say but I have never yet, and never will, let Brother Saigyo into my little joke. I hope not; I think not. When the medical robot unseals these plastic shells and I dip them into the Daishi’s water, the sight of them may run slivers of neurasthenic shock into my brain, but they feel good, they feel clean.

“Visitor for you,” says Brother Saigyo, grinning impishly. I am not surprised, I have been expecting this visit since I came out of anesthesia in a blissful high of pain and remembered what Mas had said that night in the Tanazaki-ya. “Will you go down, or shall I send her up?”

“Send her up,” I say, comfortable, secure with my beer, newspapers, diskperson, and robot familiar on the pilgrim hostel veranda. I watch the way she moves up the flagged path through the funeral plinths, brushing the stones with her hands, past the sub-chapels, feeling the soft stroke of pine needles through her fingers, the unconscious sensuality of everything she ever did, her unfettered spontaneity, and it is like a nail in my heart. She mounts the veranda steps, one, two, three, four, surveys my empty beer cans, newspapers, disks, robot.