The Zen Gun

11

The natural colour of this planet’s sky was a blue so pale as to be almost white. The sun was large and alum-pale, glaring behind that sky like a ghost of a sun, shimmering, casting a moderate heat.

Hako Ikematsu was interested in neither sky nor sun, but he frequently peered overhead nevertheless. The processes that took place in the sky, in the air, sometimes reaching down to the ground, were interesting indeed.

They were, of course, the same as had appeared on board ICS Standard Bearer, but here the range of their operations was easier to view. It was rather as if the space near the planet had been engulfed in a sort of linear cobweb which entered the atmosphere occasionally, blown by a cosmic wind. Long glistening threads, always dead straight, always parallel. He had, of course, guessed the nature of those threads, even since being transposed, in the twinkling of an eye, from the corridor of the flagship to the surface of this world.

It was surprising he was still in one piece. He suspected he would not be so for long if those threads should touch him again. In the days that the weaponless kosho had been searching for his nephew he had come upon the remains of numbers of people, beasts, buildings and artifacts. In every case they had been dismantled; not clumsily, as a butcher or a demolitioner would do it, but with extraordinary finesse. In the case of the organic remnants there was often remarkably little blood. Separations were apt to be along natural lines of division: membranes, sinews, systemic functions. Nerves were left dangling, sometimes pulled out of their ensheathing flesh to a length of several feet, or with receptor organs still attached. How such careful dissection had been accomplished, by beings who did not even seem to be beings, and who lacked any apparent means of manipulation, was a mystery.

Neither did the disassemblers seem to be able to differentiate between what was organic and what was not. Besides separated limbs and organs, Ikematsu had seen bits of machinery carefully laid out as if ready for assembly, and whole buildings unfolded like packing cases and laid flat. Even stretches of landscape had been pulled apart and rearranged, leaving weird patterns in soil, vegetation and concrete.

The agents of these mutilations were not hard to identify. Ikematsu paused, his shrewd brown eyes intent, as they came down again, the limitlessly lengthening lines slanting down like hawsers of steel sunlight. The cluster stroked the landscape midway to the horizon. It was moving sidewise, progressing towards him.

Uncharacteristically Ikematsu tensed. But the lines vanished, as quickly as they had come.

He continued on his way. This region appeared to have been thinly populated. So far he had found no one left alive apart from himself. But he would not rest until he knew what had happened to Sinbiane, even though there was no guarantee that the boy had materialised anywhere near him—or, indeed, that he had rematerialised at all.

A road ran from planetary west to east through meadows of bluish grass. A mile away to the west he saw a solitary house—the first standing building he had seen for some time.

He reached it in half an hour, approaching slowly and cautiously, to find that it was no more than a cottage. In a neatly tended garden furniture had been tumbled, mixed amid flowers and miniature trees.

Ikematsu knocked on a door panel, finding no call plate. When there was no answer he attempted to slide the panel aside; it failed to yield. He pushed it; it swung inward upon hinges.

He stepped directly into an empty room illuminated by a wide one-way window. The kosho halted. So as to be able to take in the nature of this room, he suspended all emotional reaction.

A blue eye, distinctly human, stared at him from the surface of the wall opposite. In the wall to his right two equally human brown eyes were similarly embedded, but separated by a distance of about ten feet, one near the ceiling, the other, placed vertically, in the corner near the floor.

The match to the blue eye Ikematsu found near the door jamb.

But not until he had seen much else. There were human fragments fused throughout the walls, floor and ceiling. Ears toes, fingers and young male genitals sprouted like pale fruits. Here and there the surfaces bulged, in shapes resembling a heart, a liver, or a pelvic bone.

And running throughout walls, floor and ceiling, like an embossed design, were tiny pipelike protrusions: arteries and veins. Ikematsu stepped closer, inspecting the glistening surface. He saw a faint tracery, spreading over the wall like fronds.

Nerves.

Suddenly a whispering, muffled voice came from somewhere. “Uncle! This is me, Sinbiane! I am alive!”

“Sinbiane!”

“Yes, uncle, I am here. And Trixa too.”

“You can see me?”

“Yes.”

Ikematsu took up a position in the centre of the room and stared straight into the blue eye, paradoxically aware that Sinbiane must thereby have a double view of him, both front and back. “Tell me what you understand of your situation,” he ordered.

“I know what has happened, uncle,” the hidden voice said. “Our bodies have been dispersed throughout the walls of this cottage. It is a strange experience. I am wrapped right round you. With each eye I look at the other eye.”

“Is there any pain?”

“No, not even hunger.”

“What of your mental condition?”

“I am all right, uncle. I have stayed collected. But if we get out of here my friend will need considerable psychological help. He is in a state of total shock.”

“That is because he lacks mental training.”

Taking care where he trod, Ikematsu moved to the window and looked out. The sky was clear of alien rods.

Briefly he reflected. Apparently the intruders from the other facet were not content with simple analysis; they were trying to manipulate the world more positively.

It was remarkable that they were able to disperse the boys’ bodies while still maintaining the integrity of all the somatic systems, particularly the vascular and nervous systems. It said much for their own mode of perception.

“Uncle,” Sinbiane said, “can we be restored to what we were before?”

“Yes, you can,” Ikematsu told him. “The surgeons on the Imperial fleet would be able to put you back together again. But that will depend on their recovering this planet. At the moment when the aliens snatched us away, the flagship was under attack and had been boarded. If others have taken control of the fleet they will have moved it out of the danger area by now.”

To that, Sinbiane was silent. “I have no intention of lying to you,” Ikematsu said. “Meantime you have a rare opportunity to practice mental flexibility. It should stand you in good stead when you train to become a kosho.

“I never imagined anything like this happening, uncle.”

“I hope you do not expect the world to be limited by your imagination, nephew.”

Ikematsu paused again, still thinking. “Is there anything you can tell me about the beings who did this, or how they did it?” he asked Sinbiane.

“It happened so quickly, uncle. It was all over in a moment. But I seemed to gain a mental impression of them. They are very confused. They don’t understand our world, but they are trying to understand it. That is why they did this. They don’t realise they are meddling with living beings.”

“They have no conception of discrete objects,” Ikematsu agreed. “That is deducible from their own manifestations.” In fact, he told himself, an act of this kind was probably not even possible in “normal” space. They had brought their own kind of space with them. That was what appeared as the extending lines or threads.

“Did you see the animal, Pout?” Sinbiane asked.

“No,” Ikematsu replied quickly, immediately interested. “Why do you ask?”

“He was here too. He cannot be far away.”

“Was the same thing done to him?”

“I do not know. But I don’t think he is here in the house.”

“I am leaving now to find the chimera,” Ikematsu said. “I will return when I am able. Meantime, do not shame my abilities as an instructor by losing courage.”

Sinbiane did not reply as he strode from the room.

It did not take long to locate Pout. The chimera was but a few yards farther down the road, partly hidden in a thicket of coarse long-stemmed plants.

He was, in fact, incorporated into one of the plants, or vice versa. He was jammed in a squatting position, while the stems, entering at his buttocks, merged with his legs, his arms and his torso, emerging at knees, elbows, and through his abdomen and thorax. A large, yellow-petalled flower seemed to frame his face.

His face. It was his face that riveted Ikematsu’s attention, while the chimera squirmed in dumb distress, glaring with huge piteous eyes. For in that face, set into it as if set in blancmange, was the zen gun. The gun was his face, or a part of it. The barrel jutted straight out in place of a nose, waving and poking towards Ikematsu, making the whole visage hatchet-shaped. The stock merged with and disappeared into Pout’s pendulous mouth.

After studying the spectacle Ikematsu leaned towards the chimera hands on hips. “How you loved your toy! Now it is truly yours. But do you still want it?”

Pout waved his head vigorously from side to side, making the yellow petals shake as if in a storm. A howling wave of rejection emanated from his crazed brain.

“NO GUN! NO GUN!”

“If I succeed in relieving you of it, will you concede that the gun becomes mine? You must grant it to me willingly. Otherwise it stays attuned to you.”

The effort of communicating to Ikematsu seemed to have exhausted Pout. He sagged, sucking air into his throat round the intruding stock that nearly blocked his mouth. Slowly, his head nodded.

“Good…” Ikematsu mused. “But how is it to be done…?”

Tentatively he reached out a hand, touching the wooden barrel. Seizing it between thumb and finger, he tugged experimentally.

Almost without resistance, the gun slid out of Pout’s face. There was a plop as his features re-formed behind it.

Pout began to cry.

At last, kosho Hako Ikematsu permitted himself to exult, at last he held the zen gun in his hands.

Zen in the art of electronics…

Curiously there was no trace of its contact with the interior of Pout’s person. No slime or moisture. No body heat, only the ordinary cool warmth of friendly wood. Ikematsu turned it over and over, examining it at length.

He knew its age: more than three Earth centuries. He knew its provenance: the zen master who made it had been a member of the order from which his own had originally sprung. The external appearance of the gun was a testament to certain cultural concepts: it seemed improvised, unfinished, crude, yet in its lack of polish was a feeling of supreme skill… in the Nipponese language of the time it had wabi, the quality of artless simplicity, the rustic quality of leaves strewn on a path, of a gate mended roughly with a nailed-on piece of wood and yet whose repair was a quiet triumph of adequacy and conscious balance. It had shibusa, the merit of imperfection. Only incompleteness could express the infinite, could convey the essence of reality. Hence, the unvarnished wood bore the marks of the carver’s chisel…

These qualities were themselves but superficial excrescences of the principles on which the gun acted, principles so abstruse in character that one dictum alone succeeded in hinting at them: Nothing moves. Where would it go? Pout the chimera had succeeded in using the gun as an electric beam to hurt or kill, without regard to location. But that was the most trivial of its capabilities. Only a kosho could unlock its real, dreadful purpose…