Automatic Eve

by Rokuro Inui

  He saw a woman in a red kosode standing by the entrance to the main house. In her hand was an umbrella.

  His own umbrella clattered to the ground, coming to rest with the handle up like a gigantic spinning top.

  The woman approached the gaping Nizaemon with a graceful tread, then crouched to retrieve his umbrella for him.

  “You will be soaked,” she said, offering him the handle.

  Rain ran in cold rivulets down Nizaemon’s forehead and over his cheeks to drip from his chin.

  “Hatori,” he said, forgetting even to accept his umbrella back. “What are you doing here?” His breath was white in the cold.

  “I am not Hatori,” she said, red lips curving into a smile. “But this is not our first meeting.”

  “No …”

  “I am Eve.”

  Eve rose onto her toes, stretching to angle his umbrella over him and at least keep him from getting any more drenched than he already was.

  Without thinking, as if to test whether she was of flesh and blood or not, he wrapped his arms around her.

  She let out a short cry. The two umbrellas she was holding fell, and a gust of wind carried them spinning like wild things across the empty yard.

  Holding her fragile body to his, Nizaemon felt ribs behind the slight swell of her breast and remembered the macaw. Her body was warm, and—whether from his own imagination or because of some component’s movement—he even felt something like a heartbeat.

  A curious mood gripped him. If this automaton lacked life, he thought, then what did it even mean to live?

  Where was it from, the life that took up residence in the human form?

  V

  Now Nizaemon was back at Kyuzo’s residence again.

  The gate was open, just as it had been last time.

  The streets were deserted this far from the city center, but Nizaemon was careful to look around before ducking under the crossbar and unsheathing the sword at his waist.

  He followed the stepping-stones to the main house. When he kicked at the wooden door leading to the room with the earthen floor, the crossbar snapped at once. He gave vent to his rage, stamping on the door until it came loose and toppled into the house.

  “Kyuzo Kugimiya!” he bellowed into the dim room beyond. “Are you in there?!”

  There was no reply.

  He strode into the house, not bothering to remove his wooden clogs, and began searching for Kyuzo. Some of the paper screens he kicked down like the front door; others he ran through with his sword.

  A sudden, shrill squawk made him jump.

  He turned toward the source of the sound and saw a brightly lit room. Inside the room was the box with the mother-of-pearl inlay and the perch protruding from it, and on the perch was the macaw. Its wings were spread, its black beak wide open, and it leaned toward him as if in threat.

  Nizaemon strode to the bird in a few steps, then slashed at it with his sword. He felt the jolt of metal on metal, and sparks flew from the blade, but the bird was split in two from crown to feet.

  A moment later, the clockwork that had been stuffed into its chest spilled out. Gears of all sizes bounced around the room with a sound like pine cones popping in the fire. Thin wires of steel bent with sharp sounds, and the bird’s shriek echoed across the room. Nizaemon kicked over its box and slashed at it again and again in a frenzy until it was silent.

  Leaving the main house, he approached the other building. He passed through both doors and stepped up into the spacious room beyond, where the eternal clock still stood wordlessly marking the passage of time.

  A hatch about a foot square was set into the wooden floor. He pulled it open and saw a staircase that led straight down. Warily he descended to a lacquered door, and in the room behind this door he found Kyuzo.

  The old man stood beside a waist-high workbench with a human arm placed carelessly on it. No—a mechanical arm, still under construction. What protruded from the shoulder was not flesh and bone but a tangle of steel fibers and thin tubes filled with silver.

  Kyuzo appeared to have been in the middle of a delicate operation. Removing some kind of monocular magnifying scope that had been held in place between brow and cheekbone, he turned to look at Nizaemon.

  “Not one for subtlety, are you?” he said. “Put that thing away.”

  Instead of returning the sword to its scabbard, Nizaemon pointed its tip directly at Kyuzo. “You lied to me,” he said. “That was no automaton. That was Hatori herself, in the flesh.”

  “And?”

  “I killed her.”

  “I see.” Kyuzo had not moved an eyebrow at the sight of Nizaemon bursting in with sword in hand, but amusement showed on his face now. “Why did you do that?”

  Nizaemon struggled to find the words. Finally, through gritted teeth, he said, “Because she looked too much like herself.”

  This had been enough at first.

  Eve’s resemblance to Hatori had been more than superficial. Her voice, gestures, and even thought patterns had been identical. Nizaemon only knew Hatori from the Thirteen Floors, but Eve seemed more than plausible as what she would have been like as a free woman.

  Then, one afternoon, she said something that gave him goose bumps.

  “I wonder what happened to that cricket.”

  “What cricket?” he asked.

  “The female with the missing leg. The one you put in the habitat to mate with your fighting cricket after its match.”

  How could Eve have known about that evening? He saw no way to explain it.

  “Amazing,” he said. “Kyuzo can even re-create memories in his automata?”

  He sat down beside her and examined her face closely, noting the concern in it. He touched her cheek. It was as soft as a mochi rice cake, and he saw the downy fuzz on her skin, dazzling white as the sunlight caught it. No matter how he tried, he could not convince himself that she was a creature of springs and gears like the macaw at Kyuzo’s mansion.

  Could she actually be real?

  He began to nurse this suspicion a while after they moved in together. But there was one thing he didn’t understand: how she could be identical to Hatori. Unless Hatori had a twin sister he had been unaware of, he could not see the Eve who stood before him as anyone other than Hatori herself.

  When he asked Eve directly, she insisted that she was nothing but an automaton made in Hatori’s image. But even when they shared the bed at night, she gave no indication of anything but humanity, to the point that Nizaemon found it disturbing.

  This led him to wonder where exactly Hatori had gone and what she was doing with the freedom he had given her. Abandoning his resolution to make a clean break, refrain from looking for her, and comfort himself with Eve alone, he hired someone to search for her.

  They found nothing. His suspicions grew stronger.

  Without telling Eve, Nizaemon went to visit the Thirteen Floors.

  Hatori’s old room was now used by her former attendant Kozakai, who had since graduated to full courtesan. Nizaemon bought her attentions for the evening.

  “You mustn’t sneak around behind Hatori’s back, Niza,” she said, looking surprised but not entirely unhappy to see him. She leaned into him with a flirtatious smile, perhaps remembering how freely he had spent as Hatori’s client.

  But Nizaemon had other intentions.

  “Do you know the man Hatori was in love with?” he asked her.

  Seeing that Nizaemon was as single-mindedly infatuated with her old mistress as ever, Kozakai gradually abandoned the coquettish approach and looked at him with exasperation from under a furrowed brow.

  “And her little toe—who did she send it to?”

  At first Kozakai insisted that she knew nothing, nothing at all, but eventually she talked, although not without resistance. His sheer dogged persistence had worn her down.<
br />
  “Hatori told me not to say anything, so you didn’t hear this from me,” she began.

  He nodded.

  “I was the one who cut off her toe, with the help of one of the boys from our establishment. I tied it off tightly where it joins the foot and chopped it off with a single blow from a carving knife. The bleeding went on forever, and—”

  “I don’t care about that,” Nizaemon said irritably. “Get to the point.”

  “We put the toe in a silk-lined box and then had the boy deliver it.”

  “Where?”

  “You really don’t know?”

  “Enough theatrics. Just tell me.”

  “Kyuzo Kugimiya.”

  Nizaemon was dumbstruck.

  “And Hatori told you not to tell me?”

  Kozakai nodded, without meeting his eyes. She had gone pale under her white makeup.

  Nizaemon’s hands trembled with rage. Everything fit together now. Hatori had sent her toe to Kyuzo as the traditional sign of devotion. They had secretly been lovers all along, conspiring against him.

  They had swindled him out of his priceless fighting cricket habitat, sold it to buy Hatori’s freedom, and then taken what was left as payment for an automaton they never meant to build. Perhaps even the habitat they had sold was just another copy and the original was still in Kyuzo’s hands.

  If so, Kyuzo had ended up with not only the money and the woman but the habitat as well. He must be laughing himself sick.

  The memory of Hatori’s apparent humiliation at the hands of Kyuzo came back to him. He imagined them laughing together at his discomfort, and his insides boiled with fury and shame.

  “Were you laughing at me with them, too?” he demanded of Kozakai.

  Once the wick of his rage was lit, it was uncontrollable. No one had ever made a fool of him like this before.

  Kozakai hurriedly tried to soothe his agitation. On the Thirteen Floors, to anger a customer was taboo. She could be whipped for it if word got out. Nor would she go unpunished if it was revealed that she had helped Hatori amputate a toe and send it to a customer.

  But the more desperately she sought to calm him with her feminine charms, the more of Hatori he saw in her.

  When he came to his senses, her bloodied form lay at his feet.

  From elsewhere in the pleasure quarters, he heard the strains of a three-stringed shamisen, coquettish voices at a party. He was fortunate that he and Kozakai had been alone in the room together.

  He slid his sword back into its scabbard without even shaking the blood off, then covered Kozakai’s corpse with a blanket, blew out the lamp, and quietly left the room.

  Hiding his bloodstained hands in his sleeves, he descended the staircase and departed the Thirteen Floors entirely. He crossed the bridge back across the canal and began the long walk back to the city along the path between the rice paddies, trying not to be seen.

  Looking back, he saw the brightly lit Thirteen Floors towering against the indigo veil of night. Beyond the railings that ringed the balconies, through the latticed windows, he saw silhouettes without number in constant motion.

  When he arrived breathlessly back at the rooms he shared with Eve, she was still awake.

  Her kimono was of a plainness he would never have imagined possible from the Hatori he had known at the Thirteen Floors. She wore no powder or other makeup at all, but her simple beauty was not diminished in the slightest.

  Hearing him come stumbling in, she paused and looked up from her sewing. There was surprise in her expression but also a kind of sadness, as if she had already sensed something.

  “I told you happiness was not in my future,” she said.

  “You’re Hatori.”

  “Can I not just be Eve?”

  Her dark-green eyes bored into him. For a moment Nizaemon wavered.

  “Does it matter exactly what I am?” she continued. “Sometimes it is better not to know what is real and what is not.”

  “If you’re an automaton,” Nizaemon said, “then show me your gears.” He drew his sword and brought it down on her where she sat.

  Eve did not attempt to dodge the falling blade. She only closed her eyes, as if resigned to her fate.

  A cascade of gears and springs, oil and mercury instead of blood—right up to that moment, Nizaemon still had hope that this was what he might see.

  But what spilled from the wound his sword made was a tide of all-too-human blood.

  VI

  “You tricked me. It was all an act—a plot to buy her freedom and swindle me out of that cricket habitat.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  Kyuzo had let Nizaemon explain, his breath ragged, what had brought him here. Not a hint of animosity had shown in the old man’s face.

  “I was the one Hatori sent her toe to,” Kyuzo continued. “That much is true.”

  “In which case, the man she loves is you?”

  Kyuzo snorted and shook his head. “I don’t know where you got that idea. Do you realize where that toe is now?”

  “No, I do not!” Nizaemon shouted, swinging his sword at Kyuzo in sudden rage.

  Kyuzo sidestepped the blade with surprising agility. The workbench was sliced in two, and the mechanical arm rolled onto the floor. It began to flex its elbow and knuckles violently, spasming like a newly landed fish.

  “Nizaemon Egawa, do you have a heart? If you do, what does it love?”

  Not understanding what the question meant, Nizaemon adjusted his grip on the sword as he edged Kyuzo into a corner.

  “Die, Kyuzo!” he said, raising the blade.

  But then something knocked him off-balance.

  He looked down as he stumbled. The arm from the table had fastened its fingers around his ankle.

  Kyuzo took advantage of the distraction to close the distance between them. Then he jabbed Nizaemon in the solar plexus with surprising power using his middle and index fingers.

  A hole had opened in Nizaemon’s chest, and Kyuzo’s fingers were buried in it to the root, searching for something behind his breastbone. It was the same movement he had used to stop the macaw.

  Nizaemon felt paralysis overcome him. His movements halted. It was like waking from a nightmare and finding himself unable to move or even struggle. His sword slipped out of his hand.

  “What did you do?” Nizaemon said.

  Even moving his lips and throat was painful.

  “Were Hatori’s feelings for you too powerful? Or were you too well-made? They say that anything made in human form attracts spirits who take up residence inside it. I wonder if this is what they mean.”

  Nizaemon’s arm was still raised, trembling regularly. Kyuzo picked up the sword and chopped at the younger man’s shoulder.

  What spurted from the wound was not blood but quicksilver.

  Nizaemon watched in astonishment. He felt countless tiny pieces inside him grinding against each other, followed by snapping sensations.

  Globules of mercury bounced off the wooden floor like water on oil. Pressing one hand to his shoulder, Nizaemon fell to his knees.

  The blow from the sword had upset the delicate balance within his body. He felt springs and clockwork made of whalebone and steel strain past the breaking point within him. Other connections loosened and unraveled.

  Kyuzo walked around behind him, touched the point of the sword to his back, and ran him through. The blade burst forth out of Nizaemon’s chest. A dark mass was speared on it.

  “Look closely,” Kyuzo said.

  Nizaemon stared at the mass. Its darkness seemed to be the result of discoloration or degradation of some kind. And it had a fingernail at the tip.

  “This is what Hatori went to all that trouble to send me—so I could build it into your body.”

  “I …”

  “You are a
n automaton, Nizaemon. A perfect replica of a man who no longer walks this earth. Commissioned by Hatori, and made, of course, by me.”

  Kyuzo’s voice seemed to be coming from very far away.

  “You—no, I should say, the man on whom you were based—had already been involved in one double suicide attempt. Hatori, the woman of pleasure, and Nizaemon Egawa, the young samurai from the country … Nizaemon died that day, but Hatori was saved.”

  The scene burst into Nizaemon’s mind, notwithstanding the fact that he should not remember any of it. He and Hatori had put the nooses around each other’s necks and pulled them tight, but he had not been able to bring himself to use his full strength on Hatori’s.

  “An attempt at suicide is a grave crime for a courtesan, but fortunately her owners were able to hush the incident up. They could not bear to throw such a reliable earner to the riverbanks, so they burdened her with extra debt, just when she was about to pay her original debt off, and asked me to make an automaton of the samurai who had died. I suppose they only wanted to obscure what had happened on the Thirteen Floors, but you surprised us all by settling into your life at the Ushiyama compound.”

  Nizaemon’s vision was beginning to mist up as Kyuzo leaned in close to his face.

  “To be honest, sometimes you exhibit gestures and movements that I do not remember building into you. What exactly is happening here I do not claim to understand. Perhaps, against my expectations, a spirit has taken up residence in you, giving you a soul. I only wish these things were visible …”

  Whether he had a soul or not was a question Nizaemon himself had never contemplated.

  But he certainly existed. He had thoughts, feelings. Whether all this was the spirit of the dead samurai Kyuzo had mentioned or not, he did not know.

  “Do you have a soul, Nizaemon?” asked Kyuzo.

  “Yes,” rasped Nizaemon.

  “How will you prove it to me?”

  “If I had no soul,” Nizaemon said laboriously, “it would not be about to depart from me.”

  Kyuzo nodded, saying nothing.