Automatic Eve

by Rokuro Inui

  Should trouble at home or abroad threaten the shogunate, all the agents were expected to gather on the shogun’s orders at his residence, ostensibly to tend his Garden of August Repose. In the absence of such trouble, they had no reason to exist, putting them in much the same position as the Conch and Taiko.

  “Do you know of a man named Kyuzo Kugimiya?” asked Kakita.

  Jinnai shook his head.

  “He is the refinery assistant.”

  “Assistant?” Jinnai was unfamiliar with the position.

  “He specializes in automata but maintains a residence above that station. There are suspicions that he is a front concealing the true nature of their finances.”

  It was certainly plausible. “Assistant” was a vague position; perhaps it had been invented to put away funds in secret.

  “Understood, Lord Kakita,” said Jinnai.

  When he left Kakita’s residence, the sun was still high in the sky.

  He headed straight for Kyuzo Kugimiya’s residence. The most direct route was a long, inclined road lined with bamboo thickets that buzzed with striped mosquitoes not just in summer but all year round.

  A fine, misty rain began to fall as he walked, which suited his purposes perfectly. The drizzle would erase his presence. He pulled his conical straw hat low and quickened his pace, ignoring how damp he was getting.

  Kyuzo’s residence was in a lonely area across the river from the neighborhood where the domains kept their compounds. As Jinnai had heard, it stood on a relatively large plot of land surrounded by walls of pounded earth. Peering over these, he saw the main residence and another even larger building.

  Jinnai circled the exterior walls once and decided to leave. The area was too isolated and empty; it would arouse suspicion if anyone saw him lurking there.

  Turning the corner, he saw a human figure and froze.

  It was a woman holding a red umbrella, just emerging from Kyuzo’s gate.

  It was Eve.

  And now he was escorting her to the karakuri show at Nakasu Kannon.

  The floats faced each other across the plaza, one in the east and the other in the west. Each was about six feet high with a two-foot wooden rail jutting out from its roof and a red-carpeted platform beside it. Jinnai heard flutes and bowed strings being played.

  Suddenly, with a loud springing noise, a three-foot doll in the form of a child somersaulted backward out of the float on the east side to land on the wooden rail. The audience cheered. The doll was dressed in rich maroon fabric embroidered with gold and silver thread, and carried a sword at its waist.

  How the doll’s mechanism worked Jinnai did not know, but as he watched, it spun at the end of the rail, straightened its back, and then seized the hilt of its sword and drew the blade. Even Jinnai cheered at that.

  He glanced at Eve standing beside him and was surprised to see what looked like melancholy pity on her face as she watched the doll posing atop the float.

  Jinnai’s intuition as an intelligence agent warned him that there was something strange about this woman. The only problem was that he couldn’t tell just what that something might be. This had never happened to him before.

  With a burst of percussion, the float at the west edge of the plaza began its own show.

  A large drum began to beat, so low that Jinnai felt it in his gut, and a doll about four feet tall and dressed in a monk’s black robes rose from the depths of the float.

  Instead of somersaulting, it plodded out along the rail step-by-step, turning its head from side to side as it went. It carried a naginata pole arm in both hands and had an iron club and forked sasumata strapped to its back. Unlike the fresh-faced doll across the plaza, it had a grim, grizzled mien, and its head was shaved bald.

  When both dolls had reached the edge of their respective rails, the floats themselves began to move. The audience fell back, clearing the space between the floats as they came together close enough for the rails to almost touch.

  And then the automata raised their weapons and began to fight.

  Jinnai had heard that the floats were impressive, but seeing them in person was astonishing.

  Tiny sparks flew with every clash of their blades.

  Each karakuri was accompanied by a man in a black eboshi hat who watched the fight closely and signaled to the float with a baton. The dolls must be controlled from inside the floats, each of which could fit a team of twelve or more by Jinnai’s estimation.

  The acrobat in maroon finally got the better of the black-robed monk, ending the show. The gathered crowd started to break up and drift away. Jinnai and Eve walked with the current of people toward Ten-Span Bridge.

  “I suppose you approached me because you know that I live with Kyuzo Kugimiya,” Eve said. “Is there something you wish to ask?”

  This caught Jinnai off guard.

  “Well …”

  Not knowing exactly how far she had seen through his ruse, he decided to keep things vague.

  “All right,” he said, flashing a rakish smile. “You win. There’s no sister. I have seen you before, though, and it was love at first sight. I’ve been waiting since then for a chance to talk to you. I gather that you’re Kyuzo Kugimiya’s daughter?”

  “Not his real daughter,” Eve said. She tilted her head as she looked at him. He thought he detected a hint of loneliness.

  “By which you mean … ?”

  “He treats me well, but he does not think of me as his child. This is what I pray to Lady Kannon for—to become a real daughter to him one day. Even though I know that such a wish can never be granted.”

  “I see.”

  Not knowing what other words to offer her, Jinnai said nothing more.

  II

  “Smells rotten to me,” muttered Kihachi Umekawa.

  “Rotten?” said Jinnai.

  “You remember late last year when the Muta domain was dissolved.”

  Jinnai nodded.

  The two of them were speaking in a quiet corner of Tempu Castle’s white-graveled grounds. It was a peaceful, sunny day. Kihachi was standing on a rickety wooden stepladder, using two-handed shears to prune a plum tree now bare of flower and fruit.

  Jinnai, dressed in a gardener’s work clothes, was holding the stepladder steady with a foot on its lowest rung.

  Guarding Tempu Castle was one of the most important responsibilities of the intelligence service, but in a time without war, they were not so much guards as gardeners, dividing their time between the occasional patrol and tending the Garden of August Repose.

  As head gardener, Kihachi was on permanent assignment at the guardhouse inside the castle. On the rare occasions he came to somebody’s attention, he was just a cheerful-looking old man who roamed the grounds with a broom. He made himself useful and was well-liked by the castle’s maids and concubines for that reason.

  Few suspected that he ran the shogun’s entire network of spies.

  “I asked around the cricket-fighting officials,” said Kihachi, considering each branch carefully as he pruned the tree. “It seems there really was an incident at the grand tournament last year. Someone had a mechanical cricket.”

  Kihachi’s ear for rumor never failed to impress. The other members of the service each had their own patron and pursued their own goals. Not all of those goals were mutually compatible, so few shared information freely.

  But Kihachi’s case was different. As head of the service, he knew what everyone under him was doing, at least in broad strokes. They all reported to the castle every few days for patrol duty, and if you asked him a question on one visit, he was guaranteed to have an answer by the next.

  This was certainly handy, but whether the information could be put to good use or not depended on the agent. Not even Kihachi would reveal who else might be involved, or in what capacity.

  Most of the agents came to
Tempu Castle not for the purpose of fulfilling their duties as guards and laborers so much as to consult with Kihachi. Some came even more often than they were required to.

  “The way I hear it,” Kihachi said, “it started as an accusation of fielding a drugged insect, but it turned out that the thing was actually an automaton.”

  “And that’s why Muta domain was dissolved?”

  “Sounds like it,” said Kihachi, snipping off another branch.

  It would certainly have been an unprecedented outrage to secretly enter an automaton in the grand cricked-fighting tournament attended by the shogun himself.

  “But that’s not all,” Kihachi continued. “The one who caught Muta cheating was a man from Ushiyama domain by the name of Egawa. And he’s gone missing.”

  That was an unsettling detail.

  A pair of samurai wearing long and short swords—probably stationed at the castle—walked by joking with each other, not even glancing at Jinnai and Kihachi.

  This was how Kihachi worked. He discussed every topic in the same mild tone he used for the weather or his plans for lunch. The official who had spoken to him about the tournament probably didn’t even remember what he had leaked.

  “Now, this Egawa,” Kihachi said. “From what I hear, he was a very regular visitor to the Thirteen Floors, right up until he disappeared. And Kyuzo sometimes came along as his guest.”

  Jinnai neatly swept up the cuttings under the tree, handed Kihachi a small token of his appreciation, and left the castle grounds.

  Something about Kihachi’s story didn’t sit quite right with him. Was it really possible to make a cricket automaton so skillfully that it was indistinguishable from the real thing? He thought back to the karakuri show he had watched with Eve several days before.

  Jinnai knew little of automata, but in the short time since beginning his investigation, he had gathered that most of the technology currently in use ultimately derived from the Institute of Machinery, a private school run by a certain Keian Higa in Utsuki province.

  Keian Higa. Not a single member of the intelligence service was unfamiliar with the name, albeit for entirely different reasons.

  Some thirty years ago, Keian’s institute had freely shared knowledge of chemistry, electricity, and mechanics with all who came to learn, both young and old. Before long Keian had over a hundred students. The Utsuki domain granted him special privileges. Retainers and even daimyos from far-flung provinces sent their sons to learn at his feet.

  All the while, however, Keian was forming an army of ronin unhappy with the shogun’s governance and working with his closest disciples to devise and manufacture peculiar weapons of war, from guns and cannons that did not need to be lit to devices whose purposes were still unclear. He built up his arsenal in secret, quietly preparing to overthrow the shogunate.

  The planned rebellion was nipped in the bud when one of Keian’s ronin tipped off the authorities. Keian was arrested and executed, and his severed head was displayed for days. Most of his students met the same fate.

  The institute’s collection of books, plans, and automata had been seized and inspected. Jinnai had heard that this library was the cornerstone of the refinery’s technology and was likely stored at the refinery to this day.

  Management of the refinery did not pass from father to son as it did for the Conch and Taiko. Like the office of the master of accounts, the refinery was part of the public service and was staffed by retainers and senior officials—bureaucrats, in a word, not experts in refining or technology itself. Perhaps because of these special circumstances, the head of the refinery had been replaced twice in the past decade alone. Kyuzo Kugimiya might be only an assistant, but his history at the refinery went much further back.

  Which was why Jinnai had decided to ignore the actual head of the refinery for now in favor of investigating Kyuzo, his circle, and their connections to Keian Higa.

  He realized that he was walking toward Nakasu Kannon. The loneliness in Eve’s expression as she watched the karakuri show came back to him.

  He crossed Ten-Span Bridge and passed through Bonten Gate, but the plaza was not nearly as crowded now that the festival was over.

  Heading toward Kannon-do, he stopped at the hundred-prayer stone. None of the abacuses appeared to be in use.

  He felt an unfamiliar combination of disappointment and relief.

  Even if he had found Eve here, what could he have said to her? Too much contact with her could undermine his investigation.

  But he could not deny that part of him longed to see her again, even if only from afar.

  He turned back without visiting Kannon-do, then paused at the top of Ten-Span Bridge.

  On the far side of Tempu, beyond the busy streets, he saw twin threads of white smoke rising from the furnaces of the refinery.

  “You wanna know about Keian Higa?”

  Jinnai was in a cheap, filthy restaurant made of timbers scavenged from nearby Ganjin Canal. Sitting across from him were two men. The one who had spoken was named Matsukichi, and it seemed the question had made him nervous.

  The other man kicked Matsukichi, making him wince. “Show some respect! You know who Jinnai works for?”

  This was Hambei Sayama. He was an informer and sometime investigator for the magistrate’s constabulary, but before that he had been a thief, a mugger, and a generally unsavory character.

  Jinnai knew the type. As soon as they got their jitte, the pronged baton preferred by the authorities, they started shaking down their former associates with it.

  Jinnai reached for his chipped cup and took a sip of cloudy sake. He despised men like Hambei, but he knew that they could be surprisingly obedient, even useful, if you fed them.

  Now Hambei turned to Jinnai. “I’ve cleared it with the boss, so you can ask whatever you like,” he said, pounding Matsukichi’s back once more and laughing louder than he had to.

  “The boss” was Chokichi Yaguruma, who ran half the city, from Ganjin Canal to Renkon Inari. Jinnai had suspected that Chokichi’s organization might be harboring a few of Keian Higa’s former students—those who had escaped beheading but been removed from the census lists, rendering them nonpersons in the city. He had slipped Hambei some money to sniff around, and Matsukichi was the result.

  Matsukichi was a beggar surviving under Chokichi’s protection. If he had been a student at the Institute of Machinery, he had probably harbored ambitions of becoming a scholar at some point, but you would never guess it to look at him. He was gray, defeated, gaunt; his bulging eyes looked around him incessantly, as if he were a rabbit thrown into a weasel’s den. He had not been to the barber to maintain his topknot in some time, and even the parts of his scalp that had no doubt once been shaven were covered in thinning white hair.

  “I’m not going to eat you,” Jinnai said, filling Matsukichi’s cup with sake. “Relax.”

  He didn’t actually hold out much hope of learning something of interest from the man. If Matsukichi had escaped execution, he couldn’t have been too deeply involved in Keian’s rebellion, which meant he probably wouldn’t know much about it.

  “The man’s poured you a drink!” Hambei shouted. “Thank him and drink it!” He kicked Matsukichi under the table again. Matsukichi made no attempt at dodging or protest. He only let out a low groan.

  “We can’t talk with you doing that,” Jinnai said softly. “Could you give us a minute?”

  Hambei made a face but then picked up a bottle of sake from the tabletop and went to bother the dangerous-looking group huddled around the next table.

  “Sorry about that,” Jinnai said to Matsukichi. “Look, this isn’t a formal inquiry. I just heard you were at the Institute of Machinery, and I was hoping you could tell me what it was like there.”

  Matsukichi was momentarily distracted by Hambei and the men at the next table shouting at each other, but Jinnai will
ed himself to ignore it, not even turning to look.

  “And you’re …with the magistrates?” asked Matsukichi.

  “No. I can’t tell you who I work for, but I’m just doing a little investigating around a certain situation.”

  The next table sounded on the verge of either an all-out brawl or weapons being drawn. Then it abruptly fell silent. Hambei must have flashed his jitte. Jinbei glanced over to see the group of toughs sitting back down. They looked disgusted. Hambei was smirking.

  Provoke people intentionally, reveal the jitte at the last moment, and then force them to take you out on the town as their treat. Not an uncommon hobby among the magistrates’ informants, but eventually men like that made one too many enemies and were found floating facedown in Ganjin Canal. Jinnai had seen it many times, but he found it difficult to muster much concern for Hambei. Plenty more where he came from.

  “I’m not an expert or anything,” Jinnai said, “but I hear that today’s karakuri are all based on Keian’s designs.”

  By now Hambei was forcing the men to keep his cup full as he regaled them with tales of his exploits as a hired thieftaker.

  After considering Jinnai’s questions, Matsukichi began, haltingly, to speak.

  “The incident happened less than a month after I moved into the institute,” he said.

  Inwardly, Jinnai sighed. The man had gotten caught up in events before he could even learn what they were. He sympathized with Matsukichi’s ill fortune, but this meeting with him was probably a waste of time.

  “‘The mechanism’s workings are obscure,’” muttered Matsukichi.

  “What was that?” Jinnai said.

  But he was drowned out by Hambei guffawing at the next table. His captive audience forced a thin chuckle too.

  “I said shut up!”

  Jinnai usually avoided speaking too bluntly to fools like Hambei, finding politeness a more effective way to remind them who was in charge, but Hambei’s antics had driven him past his limit.