“It’s nothing, Katana-san.” Natsume made a hurried and complicated motion with both hands. “A difference of perspective between friends.”
“My apologies, then, for the intrusion.” Katana bowed over fists gathered one into the other, and the two newcomers withdrew into the arched tunnel. I didn’t see whether they walked away in real time or not.
“Perhaps,” began Natsume quietly, then stopped.
“I’m sorry, Nik.”
“No, you are right of course. None of this is real in the way we both used to understand it. But in here,
I
am more real than I ever was before. I define how I exist, and there is no harder challenge than that, believe me.”
Brasil said something inaudible. Natsume resumed his seat on the wooden steps. He looked back at Brasil, and after a moment the surfer seated himself a couple of steps higher up. Natsume nodded and stared at his garden.
“There is a beach to the east,” he said absently. “Mountains to the south. If I wish, they can be made to meet. I can climb anytime I wish, swim anytime I wish. Even surf, though I haven’t so far.
“And in all of these things, I have choices to make. Choices of consequence. Bottlebacks in the ocean or not? Coral to scrape myself on and bleed, or not? Blood to bleed with, come to that? These are all matters requiring prior meditation. Full-effect gravity in the mountains? If I fall, will I allow it to kill me? And what will I allow that to mean?” He looked at his hands as if they, too, were a choice of some sort. “If I break or tear something, will I allow it to hurt? If so, for how long? How long will I wait to heal? Will I allow myself to remember the pain properly afterward? And then, from these questions, the secondary—some would say the primary—issues raise their heads from the swamp. Why am I really doing this? Do I
want
the pain? Why would that be? Do I want to fall? Why would
that
be? Does it matter to me to reach the top or simply to suffer on the way up? Who am I doing these things for? Who was I ever doing them for? Myself? My father? Lara, perhaps?”
He smiled out at the filigree poppies. “What do you think, Jack? Is it because of Lara?”
“That wasn’t your fault, Nik.”
The smile went away. “In here, I study the only thing that scares me anymore. Myself. And in that process, I harm no one else.”
“And help no one else,” I pointed out.
“Yes. Axiomatic.” He looked around at me. “Are you a revolutionary, too, then? One of the neoQuellist faithful?”
“Not as such.”
“But you have little sympathy with Renouncing?”
I shrugged. “It’s harmless. As you say. And no one has to play who doesn’t want to. But you kind of assume the rest of us are going to provide the powered infrastructure for your way of life. Seems to me that’s a basic failure in Renouncing, all on its own.”
I got the smile back for that. “Yes, that is something of a test of faith for many of us. Of course, ultimately we believe all humanity will follow us into virtual. We are merely preparing the way. Learning the path, you might say.”
“Yeah,” snapped Brasil. “And meanwhile, outside the world falls apart on the rest of us.”
“It was always falling apart, Jack. Do you really think what I used to do out there, the little thefts and defiances, do you really think all that made any difference?”
“We’re taking a team into Rila,” said Brasil abruptly, decided. “That’s the difference we’re going to make, Nik. Right there.”
I cleared my throat. “With your help.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, we need the route, Nik.” Brasil got up and wandered off into a corner of the quadrangle, raising his voice as if, now the secret was out, he wanted even the volume of conversation to reflect his decision. “You feel like giving it to us? Say, for old times’ sake?”
Natsume got up and regarded me quizzically.
“Have you climbed a sea cliff before?”
“Not really. But the sleeve I’m wearing knows how to do it.”
For a moment he held my eye. It was as if he were processing what I’d just said and it wouldn’t load. Then, suddenly, he barked a laugh that didn’t belong inside the man we’d been talking to.
“Your sleeve knows how?” The laughter shook out to a more governed chuckling and then a hard-eyed gravity. “You’ll need more than that. You do know there are ripwing colonies on the top third of Rila Crags? Probably more now than there ever were when I went up. You do know there’s an overhanging flange that runs all the way around the lower battlements, and the Buddha alone knows how much updated anti-intrusion tech they’ve built into it since I climbed it. You
do know
the currents at the base of Rila will carry your broken body halfway up the Reach before they drop you anywhere.”
“Well.” I shrugged. “At least if I fall, I won’t get picked up for interrogation.”
Natsume glanced across at Brasil.
“How old is he?”
“Leave him alone, Nik. He’s wearing Eishundo custom, which he
found,
he tells me, while wandering around New Hokkaido killing mimints for a living. You do know what a mimint is, don’t you?”
“Yes.” Natsume was still looking at me. “We’ve heard the news about Mecsek in here.”
“It’s not exactly news these days, Nik,” Brasil told him, with evident glee.
“You’re really wearing Eishundo?”
I nodded.
“You know what that’s worth?”
“I’ve had it demonstrated to me a couple of times, yeah.”
Brasil shifted impatiently on the stonework of the quadrangle. “Look, Nik, are you going to give us this route or not? Or are you just worried we’re going to beat your record?”
“You’re going to get yourselves killed, stack-irretrievable, both of you. Why should I help you to do that?”
“Hey, Nik—you’ve renounced the world and the flesh, remember. Why should how we end up in the real world bother you in here?”
“It bothers me that you’re both fucking insane, Jack.”
Brasil grinned, maybe at the obscenity he’d finally managed to elicit from his former hero. “Yeah, but at least we’re still in the game. And you know we’re going to do this anyway, with or without your help. So—”
“All right.” Natsume held up his hands. “Yes, you can have it. Right now. I’ll even talk you through it. For all the good it’ll do you. Yeah, go on. Go and die on Rila Crags. Maybe that’ll be
real
enough for you.”
Brasil just shrugged and grinned again.
“What’s the matter, Nik? You jealous or something?”
• • •
Natsume led us up through the monastery to a sparsely furnished suite of wood-floored rooms on the third floor, where he drew images in the air with his hands and conjured the Rila climb for us. Partly it was drawn direct from his memory as it now existed in the virtuality’s coding, but the data functions of the monastery allowed him to check the mapping against an objective real-time construct of Rila. His predictions turned out to be on the nail—the ripwing colonies had spread and the battlement flange had been modified, though the monastery’s datastack could offer no more than visual confirmation of this last. There was no way to tell what else was up there waiting for us.
“But the bad news cuts both ways,” he said, an animation in his voice that hadn’t been there before he started sketching the route. “That flange gets in their way as well. They can’t see down clearly, and the sensors get confused with the ripwing movement.”
I glanced at Brasil. No point in telling Natsume what he didn’t need to know—that the Crags’ sensor net was the least of our worries.
“Over in New Kanagawa,” I said instead, “I heard they’re wiring ripwings with microcam systems. Training them, too. Any truth in that?”
He snorted.
“Yeah, they were saying the same thing a hundred and fifty years ago. It was paranoid crabshit then, and I guess it still is now. What’s the point of a microcam in a ripwing? They never go near human habitation if they can avoid it. And from what I recall of the studies done, they don’t domesticate or train easily. Plus more than likely the orbitals would spot the wiring and shoot them down on the wing.” He gave me an unpleasant grin, not one from the Renouncer monk serenity suite. “Believe me, you’ve got quite enough to worry about climbing through a colony of
wild
ripwings, never mind some sort of domesticated cyborg variety.”
“Right. Thanks. Any other helpful tips?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. Don’t fall off.”
But there was a look in his eyes that belied the laconic detachment he affected and later, as he uploaded the data for outside collection, he was quiet in a tightened way that had none of his previous monkish calm to it. When he led us back down through the monastery, he didn’t speak at all. Brasil’s visit had ruffled him like spring breezes coming in across the carp lakes in Danchi. Now, beneath the rippled surface, powerful forms flexed restlessly back and forth. When we reached the entrance hall, he turned to Brasil and started speaking, awkwardly.
“Listen, if you—”
Something screamed.
The Renouncer’s construct rendering was good—I felt the minute prickle across my palms as the Eishundo sleeve’s gecko reflexes got ready to grab rock and climb. Out of peripheral vision suddenly amped up, I saw Brasil tense—and behind him I saw the wall shudder.
“Move,”
I yelled.
At first, it seemed to be a product of the doorkeeper tapestries, a bulging extrusion from the same fabric. Then I saw it was the stonework behind the cloth that was bulging inward, warped under forces the real world would not have permitted. The screaming might have been some construct analog of the colossal strain the structure was under, or it might simply have been the voice of the thing that was trying to get in. There wasn’t time to know. Split seconds later the wall erupted inward with a sound like a huge melon cracking, the tapestry tore down the center, and an impossible ten-meter-tall figure stepped down into the hall.
It was as if a Renouncer monk had been pumped so full of high-grade lubricant that his body had ruptured at every joint to let the oil out. A gray-coveralled human form was vaguely recognizable at the center of the mess, but all around it iridescent black liquid boiled out and hung on the air in viscous, reaching tendrils. The face of the thing was gone, eyes and nose and mouth ripped apart by the pressure of the extruding oil. The stuff that had done the damage pulsed out of every orifice and juncture of limb as if the heart within was still beating. The screaming emanated from the whole figure in time with each pulse, never quite dying away before the next blast of sound.
I found I’d dropped to a combat crouch that I knew was going to be worse than useless. All we could do now was run.
“Norikae-san, Norikae-san. Please leave the area now.”
It was a chorus of cries, perfectly cadenced, as from the opposite wall a phalanx of doorkeepers threaded themselves out of the tapestries and arced gracefully over our heads toward the intruder, wielding curious, spiked clubs and lances. Their freshly assembled bodies were laced with an extrusion of their own that glowed with soft, crosshatched golden light.
“Please lead your guests to the exit immediately. We will deal with this.”
The structured gold threads touched the ruptured figure, and it recoiled. The screaming splintered and mounted in volume and pitch, stabbing at my eardrums. Natsume turned to us, shouting above the noise.
“You heard them. There’s nothing you can do about this. Get out of here.”
“Yeah, how do we do that?” I shouted back.
“Go back to—” His words faded out as if he’d been turned down. Over his head, something punched a massive hole in the roof of the hall. Blocks of stone rained down, and the doorkeepers flinched about in the air, lashing out with golden light that disintegrated the debris before it could hit us. It cost two of them their existence as the black-threaded intruder capitalized on their distraction, reached out with thick new tentacles, and tore them apart. I saw them bleed pale light as they died. Through the roof—
“Oh, fuck.”
It was another oil-exploded figure, this one double the size of the previous arrival, reaching in with human arms that had sprouted huge liquid talons from out of the knuckles and under the nails of each hand. A ruptured head squeezed through and grinned blankly down at us. Globules of the black stuff cascaded down like drool from the thing’s torn mouth, splattering the floor and corroding it through to a fine silver filigree underlay. A droplet caught my cheek and scorched the skin. The splintered shrieking intensified.
“Through the waterfall,” Natsume bellowed in my ear. “Throw yourself into it. Go.”
Then the second intruder stamped down and the whole of the hall ceiling fell inward. I grabbed at Brasil, who was staring upward with numb awe, and dragged him in the direction of the wedged-open door. Around us, doorkeeper figures rallied and flung themselves upward to meet the new threat. I saw a fresh wave come out of the remaining tapestries, but half of them were grabbed up and shredded by the thing on the roof before they could finish assembling themselves. Light bled like rain onto the stone floor. Musical chords rang through the space of the hall and fractured apart on disharmonies. The black shredded things flailed about them.
We made it to the door with a couple more minor burns and I shoved Brasil through ahead of me. I turned back for a moment and wished I hadn’t. I saw Natsume touched by a misshapen tendril of black and somehow heard him scream across the general shrieking. For a scant second it was a human voice; then it was twisted out of pitch as if by an impatient hand on a set of sound controls, and Natsume seemed to somehow swim away from his own solidity, thrashing back and forth like a fish trapped between compressing sheets of glass, all the time melting and shrieking in eerie harmony with the swooping rage of the two intruders.
I got out.
We sprinted for the waterfall. One more backflung glance showed me the whole side of the monastery punched apart behind us and the two black-tentacled figures growing in stature as they lashed at the doorkeepers swarming around them. The sky overhead was darkening as if for a storm, and the air had turned suddenly chilled. An indescribable hissing ran through the grass on either side of the path, like torrential rain, like leaking high-pressure gas. As we skidded down the winding path beside the waterfall, I saw savage interference patterns rip through the curtain of water and once, as we arrived on the platform behind the fall, the flow staggered altogether into a sudden bleakness of naked rock and open air, spluttered, then restarted.