Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone (3 page)

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.”

F
ROM 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.

Over pork chosenabe—we use an old Buddhist euphemism of calling wild boar “mountain whale” to subvert meatlessness—Mrs. Morikawa’s three sons and younger daughter question us about the pilgrimage. If they recognize Mas they are too well brought up to pester him with Kabukiman questions. Cakes are served, and tea. The youngest boy fetches in a big pallet of beer cans. Considering himself excused from the injunction against alcohol because he has performed a virtuous deed, Masahiko drinks freely. The others join him only out of politeness. I decline. There is a pain in my stomach. It is not muscle cramp, it is not a foreign devil’s misreaction to Mrs. Morikawa’s pork chosenabe. It is the sharp-hooked horn of dilemma twisting in my guts. I can save myself and damn. I can damn myself and save.

“And Mr. Morikawa?” Mas asks, made overconfident by 8.5 percent proof.

“Dead these three years past,” Mrs. Morikawa says. “He died up at Temple Eleven. Akiras had taken over the Temple; he could not stand the thought of them turning one of Shikoku’s Sacred Sites into a latrine. He was a stupid man in many ways, but not so stupid as to go up against them alone. Then Tosa Securities bought out the policing contracts to the valley and as a gesture of goodwill mounted an offensive against bandits and petty warlords upcountry, including the akira chapter at Temple Eleven. It was terrible; we could hear the shooting all the way down in the valley. We could see the muzzle flashes the tracers. Eventually, my husband could not stand by and listen to them destroying his Temple anymore. He went up there to try and talk sense into them. A ToSec enforcer shot him by mistake for an akira, even though he had a white flag with him. It had only been two months since his last download; they took his tap across the Inland Sea to the Osaka Number Eleven simulator. He grew up near there. This year the premiums are up twenty percent and ToSec are sending their enforcers to every household to encourage prompt payment.”

To follow as a pilgrim in a master’s footsteps leaves you no choice over which way to go. You do as he would do, no matter the pain.

With apologies, I leave the somber little party for the barn. The lights come on automatically; curious kittens peep from the hayloft and come swooping down on their wings to alight on the floor beside me, rubbing and purring. It is exactly where I left it in the bottom of my left-hand bag. The organic batteries are still strong and there is a new cartridge of biodecay paper in the printer. Because any words of mine would only frighten and confuse, I say none and slip past the big farmhouse kitchen to the sick girl’s room. No witnesses: I switch off television and ’corder, banish grandpa and grandma to cybernetic limbo. Moths dance on the window glass. By the light of the moon, I set up the demon box.

FRACTER GENERATION SYSTEM LEVEL THREE INTERFACED,
says the demon box.

My fingers hesitate for a moment over the Qwerty symbols on the flat black face of the box. Like that other box in the legend, once this is opened, what comes out cannot be put back again.