Кобо Абэ - The Ark Sakura

“Oh, yeah? I didn’t see anything.” He paused just before entering the passageway. “There was a trap where we just came through, I know, but that’s all. I swear I never saw anything else.”

He was telling the truth. The safety mechanism was intact — and that wasn’t all: the working part of the cylinder had been hardened with spray coagulant, so skillfully that the eye could scarcely detect anything amiss. This was the work of someone who knew all my secrets, I feared. How long had I been under surveillance? There was no denying that Sengoku was in a position to know or surmise a great deal about my traps, having had access to the list of goods I ordered.

“I wonder if all my traps have been tampered with,” I said.

“Looks that way,” said the shill as we pushed forward, our only source of light the beams emanating from our helmets. “If there were any traps in working order, they’d have caught the intruders, and there’d be nothing to fear. It all goes to show our coming on board wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. Am I right?”

Several yards ahead, the ceiling suddenly rose. On the left was a gentle flight of stairs, and straight ahead, an array of small, irregular cubicles like ancient cave dwellers’ homes. The results of numerous test bores here had apparently been uniformly disappointing, each soon abandoned.

“If the rubble were cleared away,” I said, “I thought this would make a good living area. All private rooms.”

“Great idea.” He turned around and grinned. “Put up steel bars and it would make a good isolation ward for violent patients.”

“You know, I’m sorry,” I apologized.

“What for?” We started down the stone staircase.

“I should have leveled with you from the start. There was never any question of how I planned to use this quarry. It’s got to do with the tickets to survival. You see, this will be a bomb shelter in case of nuclear war.”

“You’re weird, you know that?” He turned to look back at me without slowing his pace. For a moment the light on his helmet blinded me.

“The danger is real — and imminent, let me tell you,” I said. “Even if everybody goes around looking as if nothing were the matter.”

“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” he said. “I mean, really — tickets for survival, qualifications to board a ship, man-powered generators, air filters. what could it be but a bomb shelter?”

“So you knew.”

“Naturally. You are weird.”

“Then what made you suggest dumb ideas like vegetable storage, or a hotel for escaped criminals?”

“Well, you’ve already managed some pretty good businesses on the side, haven’t you, Captain? Disposing of fetuses, illegal dumping of toxic wastes. ”

“That’s different,” I protested. “I can call it quits anytime I want, without repercussions. But fugitives and loony birds are human. Once I let them on the ship, I couldn’t just toss them overboard whenever I felt like it.”

“Like you will us.” The shill swallowed noisily, a sign of nerves. “Let me ask you one question. As captain, what sort of people have you got in mind for your crew? So far I get the idea you’re after people with more respectable backgrounds than us — but you know, respectability isn’t everything. It could be boring as hell. Besides, we don’t know beans about who you really are, either, do we? There’s no point in putting on airs.”

“I’m not putting on airs. But when the time comes, this ship’s crew will form the gene pool for future generations, don’t forget. That leaves me with a heavy responsibility.”

“Let me make one thing clear,” he said firmly. “As long as she stays, I’m not setting foot out of here, either.”

We came upon a third large room. This one was no simple rectangular shape but fairly convoluted, rooms within rooms extending along diagonal lines, high and low, each one supported by pillars. The effect was one of haunting solemnity, as in some ancient cathedral. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that ancient cathedrals are a practical application of that effect.

The shill lowered his voice. “Just between the two of us, she’s a very sick woman.”

“She is? What’s wrong with her?”

“Cancer. The bone marrow has lost its blood-making function. The doctors give her six months to live.”

I started to smile, and couldn’t breathe. The air had turned hard as glass. One of them was lying, or both. They hadn’t checked their stories out with each other, and ended by dropping separate fishlines. There was also the (admittedly small) possibility that both were telling the truth. Perhaps they had met by chance in some hospital waiting room. It wasn’t inconceivable. But I hadn’t the courage to ask. Two cancer patients, each ignorant of the truth about himself/herself, each protecting the other: to take away their tickets to survival would be too cruel.

In the wall facing us, at roughly three-foot intervals, were three tunnel entrances. The one on the right had tracks and headed downhill; the center one was a dead end; and the one on the left was a gentle ascent, up stone steps. The shill cocked his head.

“That’s funny. Which one was it?”

“If you went to the river, it’s got to be the one on the left.”

“I’m damned if I remember this — three passageways lined up side by side. I guess it’s because we were running so fast. I almost caught up with him here, too.”

“The one on the right is another dead end. It leads to a cave-in.”

“You know your way around, don’t you?”

“It’s part of my daily routine: morning exercises, and then two hours surveying or more. I’ve never missed a day yet.”

The way leveled off, then went sharply downhill. We took the stairs by the wall. A wind blew up at us, caused by the difference in temperatures. Mixed with the smell of water and seaweed was the sharp odor of metallic ions.

“Does that river empty into the sea?” he asked.

“I think in part it leads into a spring at a Shinto shrine. There are a couple of noodle stands that serve rainbow trout.”

“No effects as yet from the chromium?”

“None that I know of.”

“Later on, let me have a look at your surveyor’s map,” he said. “You’ve got one, haven’t you?”

“There’s a rough sketch hanging on the wall of the conference room,” I said, unable to bring myself to say “operational headquarters.”

“But you did do some surveying, didn’t you?” he said. “You must have some record of your work.”

So I did. In fact, I had kept detailed records: sixteen ichnographic projection drawings that had taken a full six months to complete. But for some reason, when I tried to convert them to orthographic projections I ran into trouble. When I forced myself to visualize a perspective drawing of the quarry interior, landslides and cave-ins took place in my head. Doubtless there were flaws in my surveying techniques and drawing ability. But a bigger source of the problem, I believed, lay in the slipshod, hit-or-miss operations of the stone-quarrying authorities themselves, or their workmen. No straight line was in fact straight, no right angle was in fact ninety degrees. Errors accumulated little by little until finally southwest was skewed around to southeast, and the floor that should have been below a flight of stairs came out on top.

Yet the degree of complexity involved could not be attributed solely to haphazard, trial-and-error procedures. Four companies had leapfrogged through the mountain in fierce competition, ignoring all agreements. If Company A crawled under the belly of Company B and tied up its legs, Company B swung ahead of Company C and pinned down its head; Company C poked holes in Company D’s arse, while Company D slammed Company A in the ribs. Unreported cave-ins — even bloodshed — had apparently been everyday affairs.