In the stony understory stood something not known to kami or man. A gauzy white ginkgo leaf rooted and enlarged a hundred times. It did not disappear when Amaterasu brushed it with her paw, but from the nodules lining its edge released a puff that might have been spores.
She bounded up the mountain, the moss rocks glowing like firefly bulbs at her footfalls, the ginkgo fans fluttering. A wolf extracted its head from a fawn, growling, until it glimpsed that white coat and blazing reflector.
Upland, the understory thickened, the beech’s autumn leaves like confetti bursts amidst the evergreen bamboo. Amaterasu slipped fishlike through the gaps, old branches gifted spryness to flex around her. More anomalies: folded strips that fluttered like origami butterflies; still and wispy growths like bleached seagrass; loose spheres, light as temari, spilling, when kicked, specks that looked like seeds. These things all frostily hued, for all her passing’s warmth.
A ledge. Rose finches fought, or maybe just played, beside the long drop. Kites wheeled languidly in viscous light, lost feathers regenerating, as sunbeams swept the mottled vista. Anomalies twinkled, thickening toward the southeast. Toward the southeast Amaterasu ran, and ran, until the first dusk stars peeked through the clouds.
She slept by the crotch of a stream, flanked by processions of bubbles. The rain hissed steaming around her reflector, a lambent sauna for sparrows. A turtle passed floating belly-up.
Day broke with golden curls of steam, sugar-fine droplets sifting through the canopy. She descended into yet damper air, stream-laced lowlands littered with leaf skeletons. Stopped to entertain a pair of bear cubs, wrestling, running, thrashing dead bamboo like dog bones, all before the mother’s watchful eye. Amaterasu hesitated when a cub batted one of the temari balls toward her. Then batted it back.
By noon, openness at last, the clouds like spills of cream in the lakewater. Skimming that celestial reflection, she might have felt a sense of flight. She passed a concave islet on which was a fledgling black with ants, moving. If she’d seen it, I wonder what she’d have done, what expression would have passed across her face.
She reached the shore at golden hour. Susuki stalks strained honey from the sun. The grass frissoned at her passing, all of autumn’s seven blooming in her wake. Anomalies like rock formations made dilated melodies from the wind and bounced cricket calls. Dragonflies chewed the heads of false white moths, sparing real ones.
At last she reached the grotto. Here the anomalies grew so thick as to crowd out the grass, and grew in great diversity, everything seen before plus crowds of discs and stems and wisps and coral stands. But one patch was clear, containing two straw mats, one sakazuki cup, one bowl of stir-fry, and one ink-stained notebook; and, on the far mat, one six-tailed kitsune.
“Amaterasu,” I said, bowing, “I am humbled by your presence. Please accept my offerings.”
She started on the stir-fry.
For a few moments I waited, holding my breath, pins and needles intensifying in my extremities. Then I gave in. “A scholar in Tochigi determined that a spider the size of a brush tip eats about three insects per day. Three insects every day to have their insides dissolved. By my count you passed about a hundred webs every day on your way here. And that is just to speak of one kind of predator. Thanks to you this world is as kind a place as ever it’s been, but still it’s not enough.”
Her expression remained neutral, but she’d stopped eating and looked at me.
“The welfare of mortals stands upon a foundation of cruelty. So we need a new one. The autonomous life I’ve crafted constitutes exactly this. It just needs your support to flourish.”
She gave a long exhale, and before her feet bloomed a blue rose.
“But how can’t it be possible?” I nudged my notebook over, summoned a gust of wind to flip through the pages. “Look, see this design—it puts out roots like a plant’s, cycles nutrients, but propagates without pollinators. The fruit is nutritious to all. And this one, people can use it for construction just like the susuki. I designed the roots to work the soil like worms. There’s proper detritivores, too, traps for flies that kill them right away, no pain—it’s only sustaining it all that’s hard, but if only you extended the blessing of your light, then all will be solved.”
The look on her face reminded me of my mother’s after the fifth time she’d found me hiding in the fields past bedtime. The tiredness that follows from burned-out frustration. From her bag she removed a glowing device and through some tactile interface issued commands. The clearing became a tangle of information, 3D schematics and hyperlinks and animated time series. I could not have hoped to analyze half of it before the night was done, yet I divined the intent as easily as I’d recognize my own face. It was the same thing I’d spent centuries doing—save for one key difference.
“You tried to keep everything. Every extant species, alongside the new.” The thought of the endeavor made my head tingle. “But of course that won’t work. The complexity is too great. You have to excise at least the lower taxa.”
She looked away. I did not follow her gaze but in the silence noticed the susurrations of crickets and visualized that persimmon dusk, the migrating wagtails starkly underlit; I saw her dark eyes twinkle with fireflies. The flowers that bloomed around her were carnations.
“I feel that love too,” I said softly. “More than you must think. But I also know how they suffer.” And I really did. I took a deep breath, prepared at last to recount my awakening, the incarnations I’d remembered, the thousand infant deaths preceding each adulthood; prepared to bare my heart, to render some sample of my nightmares with my brush; but for all my rehearsals the words would not come, and my tails, my legs, had begun to tremble.
A sunbeam fell warm upon my head as Amaterasu lay beside me. Though tears blurred them, I recognized around her white lilies and chrysanthemums, a mourner’s arrangement.
Ultimately I never explained any of it. I think she gleaned it anyway, through some divine or maternal instinct. I must have moved her somehow, for she returned with daybreak, the sunlight no longer bouncing off but suddenly shining through the anomalies, revealing the veins inside, flushing them green and orange and red, ripening candy-colored fruits. And she is with me now, leafing through my notes, sketching revisions, evaluating compromises. As I watch her, my heart, that old threadbare thing, buoys with warmth like a floating lantern. I think that maybe something will finally come of all my pain. I think that maybe, for the first time since the world was born, things will be okay.