Automatic Eve

by Rokuro Inui

  This was bad.

  Tentoku dropped to his belly and fairly slid out of the bath chamber.

  The washing room looked much the same as before. Tentoku saw the boy who had been trying to get into the baths before—he was naked and not bothering to hide the little acorn dangling between his legs. The boy patted Tentoku’s whale tattoo as he passed, and when Tentoku turned to look at him, he beamed. “They say touching the whale on your back makes you stronger!” he said.

  “Oh my! Sorry, Tentoku. My husband wasn’t watching the boy, as usual.” A middle-aged woman who was presumably the boy’s mother hurried over, not bothering to hide her sagging stomach either. Just as she reached him, she slipped and fell on her behind with a loud smack.

  Laughter filled the washing area again.

  “Sorry,” muttered Tentoku, the only one not sharing in the levity. Still pale, he hurried off to change.

  “Leaving already?” asked Chitose from her chair. Without responding, or even drying himself, Tentoku pulled on his waistcloth, ran his arms through his yukata’s sleeves, and all but ran out into the street.

  “Hey!” he heard the boy shout as he left. “The water’s red! Is there something special in the baths today?”

  He was finished. It was all over.

  Tentoku trudged aimlessly down the street as the sun began to sink.

  In a day or two, three at most, the authorities would be after him for the murder. He would never see the Akesaka stables again. And, since Seijuro had been one of Chokichi’s men, he was sure to be pursued from that direction as well.

  He could not even walk the streets without the irritation of people greeting him by name or approaching to touch him.

  Setting his back to the crowds and making for the quieter, lonelier parts of the city, he eventually arrived at Ganjin Canal again.

  It occurred to him that the boats on the canal would be an ideal place to drop out of view for a while. When he stepped onto one, it yawed alarmingly, like a balance scale with weights on only one side, and a series of waves washed across the soupy brown water.

  The boat’s low-roofed cabin barely had room for the bed. Tentoku hunched his shoulders to get through the door. The air in the cabin reeked of the rotten sardine oil used in the lamps.

  A woman came into view in the dim light. Tentoku’s eyes flew open in shock.

  He could not guess at her age, but she looked like an old crone of seventy or eighty. She wore only a flimsy underrobe, and her face was a mask of white makeup with a mouth drawn across it in crimson. Her long hair was almost entirely white, although nearly half of it had fallen out. The skin he could see on her arms and chest was covered in liver marks and pustules; she was clearly in the advanced stages of some dire disease.

  “Oh my!” she crooned. “A big one! I wonder if I have what it takes.”

  “I just want to hide here for the night,” Tentoku said. “Please.”

  He pulled some cash from the front fold of his clothing and offered it to her.

  “Hmm …” she said.

  He had thought the money would capture her attention, but she was peering closely at his face, head cocked with curiosity.

  “I’ve seen you somewhere before,” she said.

  Tentoku was disgusted. Did even the women who sold themselves in boats on the canal know about him?

  But the story she told him was even stranger.

  “You might not believe it to look at me, but in my youth I had a room near the top of the Thirteen Floors,” she said. “But then I fell pregnant to one of my regulars. I’d had the pox, so I’d thought I could never conceive. I decided to keep the baby. The overseers beat me, but I protected my baby. Oh, he was a strong one. No matter how they punched and kicked my belly, he stayed where he was. But I was sent to the lowest floor.”

  Her illness might have started to affect her brain, Tentoku mused. He flopped onto the moldy-smelling bed and listened without interest as she continued her story.

  “He was such a big boy. In my final month, my belly was round as the moon. I kept dreaming that there was a whale in there.”

  Tentoku sat up in shock.

  “I couldn’t bear the thought of him growing up on the banks of the canal around the Floors, so I gave him to a kindly couple who owned a bathhouse. I wonder what he’s doing now.”

  The woman closed her eyes and turned her face upward as they welled with tears.

  Mouth working silently with astonishment, Tentoku looked at the woman more closely.

  He had just opened his mouth to speak when his right hand began to move against his will.

  It seized the woman by her brittle-looking neck and threw her backward onto the bed.

  “Is this how you like it? You don’t have to be in a hurry—I’ve got your money, so you’ve got me till morning.”

  “No,” said Tentoku. His right hand squeezed harder. He scrabbled at it with his left, trying to pull it off. The incident in the sumo ring came back to him. It was happening again.

  Eventually the woman began to fight back, gasping and groaning. The little boat rocked violently.

  Finally Tentoku managed to drag his hand away from the woman’s neck. Struggling to keep it under control, he crawled out of the cabin into the moonlight.

  “Look! It’s Tentoku!”

  On the banks of the canal where the boat was moored stood a group of men. Gando lanterns swung to shine their beams of light in his direction.

  Chokichi’s men. They must have gathered out of curiosity about the violently rocking boat, only to see the very man they were looking for crawl out right before their eyes.

  The metallic right hand, acting on its own, seized the stone canal wall and hauled Tentuko’s massive body up to the bank.

  When one of the men swung a sword at him, his right hand closed around it and snapped it in two before swinging like a club, blade still gripped in its fist, and crunching into his attacker’s windpipe with such force that Tentoku felt the man’s neck bone break and then watched him fly backward into the air, landing on his head and convulsing briefly before falling still.

  The other pursuers hurled themselves at him bodily. One of them managed to bury a foot-long dagger to the hilt in Tentoku’s abdomen. But Tentoku himself was at the mercy of his own right arm, which spun like a windmill. Desperately pulling the dagger from his stomach with his left hand, he tried to hack the rogue automaton off his right arm but only succeeded in raising a few sparks before the blade snapped.

  Spooked by his bizarre actions, the remaining attackers fled, and Tentoku collapsed into a bloody heap.

  The dagger must have reached his vital organs. The blood kept pouring forth. Everything began to recede from him.

  What had happened to the woman on the canal? He dragged himself along the ground, hoping to somehow get back onto her boat, but his strength failed him first.

  VII

  “Tentoku in the Box?”

  The master of the Aoiya frowned at the new Kainsai piece his go-between had brought in.

  “Is this some kind of joke?”

  Notwithstanding the title, he saw no sign of Tentoku in the picture. Instead it depicted a thick wooden box on legs, like a go board, with an intricate mechanism of cogs and clockwork extending out from it in all four directions. What attracted the eye most of all was the peculiar design—like a wrinkled jellyfish—that was superimposed over the box at the center of the picture. It was not erotic or witty in the slightest. It barely seemed a Kainsai at all.

  “If it isn’t to your taste, that’s fine. I don’t think Kainsai will be drawing any more pictures anyway.”

  “They’re not moving to another printer, are they?” said the master of the Aoiya suspiciously.

  Kyuzo shook his head.

  Ignoring the other man’s entreaties to stay, Kyuzo left the Aoiya and began the
walk home, thinking as he went.

  It had begun when he started sending Eve to dissections at the execution grounds to record skeletal and organ structures in detail. Her sketches had been remarkably good. Intrigued, he had sent her to the bathhouse to observe the various naked forms she saw there—young and old, male and female—so that she could draw them later. He thought they might be useful to him as he built more automata. Her work was devoid of subjectivity; she simply reproduced what she had seen as she had seen it, but that was exactly what he wanted.

  Curious about what a professional might think of her work, he had taken a selection of female nudes to the Aoiya as a go-between, and thus had begun the career of Kainsai. The name was his little joke: take the characters used to write “Eve,” remove a few elements—including, notably, the one that meant “person”—add the sai that meant “studio,” and “Kainsai” was the result.

  He did find it mysterious, however, when after a certain point she developed an exclusive preference for drawing Tentoku.

  When his investigations revealed that the wrestler was also an attendant at the bathhouse, where he sent Eve for her anatomical studies, he realized that she was simply choosing her own subjects and decided to let her continue.

  Anything made in human form attracts spirits who take up residence inside it. So they said, and he had seen it for himself many times in the past.

  But even that, Kyuzo believed, could be re-created in an automaton’s workings. The mechanism for an effect he had not intended had crept into the system he had designed. That was all. He had given her free rein in order to learn more about what had happened.

  An ensouled automaton! The idea was ridiculous.

  Or so he had thought.

  When he arrived back at his home, Eve was fast asleep, slumped forward over a four-legged box like a go board.

  No. She only looked asleep. She had simply closed her eyes and stopped moving.

  Tentoku had been half dead when she had found him aboard a boat on Ganjin Canal.

  His automated right arm was missing, and the wound in his abdomen was maggoty and foul, but he still drew breath.

  Kyuzo had his doubts about how diligently Tentoku had been nursed aboard the boat, but certainly he had been better off there than by the side of the path along the canal, waiting for someone to finish him off.

  The box was what had become of him.

  It was an emergency measure, and Kyuzo had his doubts about whether the result could even be called human.

  “Eve.”

  Her eyes opened.

  A human form without life and a life shut up in a box. An interesting combination, but were he in that circumstance, he would not have been able to love either the form or the life, he mused.

  Then it hit him. If that was so, then when one person loved another, it was neither form nor life that they loved but something else entirely.

  But what could it be? No answer suggested itself.

  “I was dreaming,” Eve said slowly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kyuzo snapped as he sat down by her, legs crossed. “Automata do not dream.”

  “I dreamt I was a whale swimming in the open sea,” she said, and stroked the box with affection.

  I

  Nakasu Kannon Temple stood on a permanent sandbar in the Okawa River. It was connected to the shore by an arched drum bridge, so wide that everyone just called it “Ten-Span Bridge” and so high at its peak that to observers below the people crossing it looked like tiny dolls.

  Jinnai Tasaka stepped onto the bridge and began to climb. The mouth of the river was not far away, and he could faintly smell the ocean. Here and there a seabird perched on the bridge’s red lacquered railings.

  At the top of the bridge, Jinnai stopped to lean over the railing and look down. A little fishing boat full of nets was making its way to the sea. He estimated the bridge’s height at thirty, thirty-five feet.

  He turned to survey Nakasu Kannon itself. The sandbar was as large as a small island, and the temple complex covered it from end to end. The bridge led directly to a path that passed through Bonten Gate into a broad plaza. Facing the plaza were a five-story pagoda with a sharply rising finial and Kannon-do, a cavernous hall with a roof of gilded tile.

  An elderly woman whose dress suggested that she had traveled a long way to get there dropped to her knees beside him, heedless of the people around her, and began mumbling to herself with prayer beads in hand.

  First-time visitors to Nakasu Kannon were often overcome by the majestic view as they crested the bridge. To them, it was like a vision of the paradise they were promised in the next life.

  Jinnai, however, did not much care for the temple’s sumptuous adornments.

  He finished crossing the bridge and began weaving through the crowds around the stalls that lined the main path, his eyes fixed straight ahead.

  It was even more crowded than usual today. The first Day of the Ox each month was a festival day at Nakasu Kannon. The usual karakuri floats would be trundled out, and Jinnai imagined that many of the people here had come specifically to see the little automated dolls perform.

  He passed under the massive Bonten Gate into the plaza, which was even more crowded.

  At the east and west of the plaza were parked two gigantic wheeled floats, each two stories high with a peaked roof, patiently waiting for showtime.

  Slipping through the crowds, Jinnai made his way toward Kannon-do, where the crowds were surprisingly thin.

  He stopped before a white stone pillar that stood by the path. The pillar was square, with an empty chamber at the top like a lantern. The chamber was open to all four sides of the pillar, and in each opening had been set an iron rod threaded with wooden tabs. It was the shrine’s hundred-prayer stone, and each of the four iron rods was an abacus for the use of devotees completing the traditional ritual of praying in Kannon-do one hundred times on a single visit.

  The abacus on one side appeared to be in use.

  Jinnai looked toward Kannon-do Hall and saw the woman he was looking for.

  Her kosode was a startling red, and her long black hair was pinned neatly up with a single hairpin. The nape of her neck was a hypnotic white.

  Her name, according to his sources, was Eve.

  She lived in the private residence of Kyuzo Kugimiya, assistant at the shogunal refinery, but it was not clear whether she was a family member or some kind of servant. Kyuzo was not married, and Jinnai had heard no suggestion that he had a daughter.

  Whenever this woman had business by the Okawa, she always made time to visit Nakasu Kannon and offer a hundred prayers.

  Examining the abacus more closely, Jinnai saw that she only had a few rounds to go. He moved a short distance away to avoid disturbing her and waited patiently.

  When Eve returned from her final lap, she found him leaning against the pillar. An uncertain expression crossed her face.

  Her eyes were like green agate, so richly colored that they seemed almost translucent. He felt drawn into them despite himself.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, reaching out to push the final tab on the abacus to the end with her slender white fingers.

  He had not heard her speak before. Her voice was deeper, more self-possessed than he had expected.

  “You come here to pray a lot, don’t you?” he said with careful mildness, as if discussing the weather. “I see you here occasionally. Got to wondering about you.”

  “Is that so?” she replied. She looked puzzled.

  “It’s just that you look exactly like my little sister back home.”

  “Your sister? That one won’t work on me, I’m afraid,” she said with a hint of a smile.

  “No, it’s true,” Jinnai insisted. “Listen, the stalls are all open today. Let me buy you some dumplings.”

  “If you insist. You’re the first
man to approach me this way, you know,” Eve said, although she did not seem especially pleased about the experience. She straightened the neck of her red kosode.

  Jinnai smiled inwardly. Success.

  As they walked toward the plaza, Jinnai cast his mind back to the day, about a month ago, when he had been summoned to an audience with the shogun’s master of accounts.

  “I am to investigate the refinery’s cash flows, then?” asked Jinnai. Still prostrating himself, he raised his head to see the nod of reply from Lord Kakita, governor of Aji. The governorship was largely an honorary title, but his position as master of the shogun’s accounts made him a powerful man.

  “The Haga family, who run the bureau of the Conch and Taiko, order fifteen hundred ryo of public funds diverted to the refinery each year without any discussion.”

  “I see.”

  Investigating a matter that had been placed beyond discussion was not a legitimate use of a shogunate intelligence agent like Jinnai.

  In other words, this was a private inquiry by Kakita alone.

  “Once we find their weakness, they will be ours,” said Kakita. “Do not waste your apprehension on the Conch and Taiko, of all organizations.” He smoothed his long white eyebrows as he spoke, as he always did when irritated.

  Officially, the Conch and Taiko were responsible for sounding the conch trumpets and beating the taiko drums in battle, just as their name suggested. The bureau had been controlled by the Haga family for generations, since the founding of the Tempu shogunate itself, but in this age of peace their only duty was attending an annual falconry expedition and entertaining the participants with the fruit of their daily practice. Or, at least, this was how the public thought of them, as well as much of the shogunal bureaucracy.

  The master of accounts were responsible for the shogunate’s public funds that related to matters of the stage. But the Haga family outranked Kakita in status, leaving him no choice but to follow their orders even in his own domain. Apparently Kakita found this difficult to bear.

  The intelligence service Jinnai belonged to reported directly to the shogun, but officially it did not exist, leaving it without formal support. Normally, agents simply found patrons within the shogunal bureaucracy as they wished. Jinnai was employed by Kakita’s office as a retainer.