Automatic Eve

by Rokuro Inui

  “No one can cross the same river twice,” Eve said, meeting his eyes again and holding his gaze. “‘Okawa’ only names the form. The water itself flows ever out to sea. Today’s Okawa might look like yesterday’s, but in fact nothing of yesterday’s flow remains. So—where is the Okawa itself?”

  “Well …” Jinnai trailed off.

  Eve rose to her feet and dusted off the seat of her kosode, giving him a sidelong glance. “The magistrate’s office, the Conch and Taiko, the master of accounts—none of them understand the situation they find themselves in. And neither do you.”

  As she stepped forward, Jinnai stepped back.

  He gripped the hilt of his dagger, but he felt deeply uneasy about his chances with this slender young woman. He had never felt this way before.

  “I am going home,” Eve said. “Please step aside.”

  Jinnai had no choice but to do as she asked.

  Eve nodded politely as she passed him, then walked away with her refined gait.

  Jinnai realized that his entire body was drenched in cold sweat.

  V

  That night, Jinnai scaled the high walls around the shogunal refinery, dressed in the close-fitting black garb of a shinobi.

  A smear of red floated in the darkness ahead—molten iron visible through the furnace’s chute. Dormitories stood at the base of the chimneys, and under their eaves he saw the indistinct forms of the engineers and laborers who worked in shifts to keep the refinery running all day and all night.

  The security here was even lighter than he had expected. Most of the premises were taken up by the refinery itself, so absent special circumstances like Jinnai’s, there was no reason to break in.

  Instead of making straight for the refinery and the dormitories, he headed in the other direction, toward the residence of the refinery chief.

  None of them understand the situation they find themselves in.

  What had Eve meant by this? He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was missing something. Something important.

  Lord Kakita had been interested only in the refinery chief’s finances.

  The magistrate’s office, too, was likely motivated solely by the sincere if mistaken belief that Jinnai had murdered Kakita.

  What was still unknown? The goals of the master of the Conch and Taiko. The aims of the refinery chief. The truth about Kyuzo and Eve.

  But investigating the Conch and Taiko on his own was a daunting prospect. This left him with one realistic option: to break into the refinery chief’s residence and search the books confiscated from Keian Higa for information about the Sacred Vessel.

  Whether he could identify the documents was an open question, of course. Even if they were placed right in front of him, he still might not understand what they said. And he did not have much time.

  Compared to the furnace and dormitories, the area around the refinery chief’s residence was quiet. The residence was a fine mansion, complete with tiled roof, and had a fireproof earthen storehouse to one side. If the institute’s library were here, that was where it would be.

  Jinnai saw no guards. In fact, the area felt deserted. Still, he approached the storehouse with caution, then picked the padlock, cracked open the door, and slipped inside.

  Standing in the darkness, he produced a tube containing a live coal and used it to light a candle he had also brought with him.

  Vindication—the storehouse was full of books. The walls had been lined with shelves almost to the ceiling, and every shelf was piled high with books.

  Not unexpectedly, the sheer size of the library was overwhelming. His chances of picking out the right volume in just one night with nothing to go on were minimal.

  No point worrying about that now, though. If necessary, he would just have to break in again to continue his search. And again, and again.

  Starting from one end of the shelves, Jinnai began checking the titles written on the bottom edge of each book. This task alone might take the whole night.

  He scanned the shelves doggedly for a full two hours, hammering each title into his head whether he understood it or not, just in case.

  Then his attention seized on a volume placed unassumingly on a middle shelf.

  The Mechanism’s Workings Are Obscure. There on its bottom edge were Matsukichi’s words. The words that represented the Sacred Vessel.

  Jinnai pulled the book from the shelf. The same phrase was written on its cover. He flipped through the pages quickly. There was no introduction. Just plans and schematics from the very first page.

  Jinnai gasped. “It can’t be,” he muttered.

  Some of the pages had detailed measurements and other written notations as well as diagrams, but nowhere did the book say what exactly the plans were for.

  It did not need to. And the lack of any commentary only added to the ominous feel of the work.

  The mechanism’s workings are obscure. If he had not heard this phrase, Jinnai doubted the book would have stood out to him among the others. Certainly he would not have understood what it contained.

  His hands trembled as he turned the page.

  Who else knew about this, outside the imperial family?

  If the master of the Conch and Taiko had kept the truth to himself, terrible things were afoot.

  Was it to protect this secret that Keian Higa had plotted his coup?

  Ideas that had been fragmentary and disconnected snapped together in his mind like a child’s puzzle.

  One thing was clear: a visit to Kyuzo Kugimiya was in order.

  Jinnai tucked the book into the front fold of his clothing. If the theft were discovered, no excuse would save his life—but the same was true of simply having learned the secret. His nature would not let him rest until he had followed the trail as far as it went.

  Jinnai emerged from the storehouse, refastened the padlock just as it had been, and left the refinery premises at a run.

  VI

  As he made his way to Kyuzo’s residence across the river from the merchant houses and domain compounds, Jinnai wondered if the magistrates had put it under surveillance, but he saw no sign of that when he arrived.

  Tense and watchful, he stepped through Kyuzo’s gate.

  Eve was standing outside in her red kosode, as if she had foreseen his visit.

  She bowed deeply. “We have been waiting for you,” she said.

  Saying nothing, Jinnai followed her into the house. Eve showed him to an inner chamber, then went to summon Kyuzo.

  Many of the furnishings in the room were unfamiliar to him. He did not even know what some of them were for.

  There was an exotic bird in one corner—a macaw, was it?—with brilliant blue and yellow coloring. It was chained to a branch that protruded from a four-foot black lacquer box with mother-of-pearl inlay, and it pecked at its wings with apparent boredom as it sat on its perch.

  There was also a four-legged box shaped like a go board. Drawn on its surface in practiced brushwork was a fin whale raising foaming waves. Jinnai pulled it closer and sat down on it to wait.

  Unable to relax, he touched the book he had stolen from the refinery, now hidden in the front fold of his clothing. Where should his conversation with Kyuzo begin? He still wasn’t sure.

  He heard people approaching the room and turned to watch the entrance. The sliding paper screen opened, and Eve showed herself again. Behind her stood two men.

  As soon as she saw Jinnai, she opened her mouth wide and shrieked. She ran across the room and hurled herself at him.

  Jinnai fell off his seat onto the floor, utterly baffled. Eve crouched and embraced the box, then turned to glare at him. “This is not a stool!” she said. “Please don’t sit on it!”

  The older of the two men standing in the doorway spoke, not sounding amused. “I don’t believe we’ve met before. Jinnai Tasaka, was it?”
>
  Jinnai got to his feet with some embarrassment.

  Beside him, Eve was muttering darkly as she polished the box with her sleeve.

  “I am Kyuzo Kugimiya,” continued the man. “I think you know my other guest.”

  Even with this introduction, Jinnai could not place the slightly built other man right away. He looked closer at his face before finally realizing that it was Matsukichi, former live-in student at the Institute of Machinery, now a beggar under Chokichi Yaguruma’s protection.

  The broken, fearful man that Jinnai had met was all but invisible. This Matsukichi was smartly dressed and held his head high, meeting Jinnai’s gaze with a smirk.

  “Eve, leave us,” said Kyuzo.

  She did, carrying the box out of the room with her. Still not over Jinnai having used it as a stool, clearly.

  “Now, we reached this point the long way around, but …”

  Kyuzo gestured for Jinnai to sit in one of his exotic imported chairs, pulling one closer for himself as well. Matsukichi did the same.

  “I assume you’re here because you found Keian’s book,” Matsukichi said.

  Jinnai, on the other hand, still had no idea why Matsukichi was there. He fixed them both with a glare as he replied, “I have some questions for you first.”

  “No doubt,” said Kyuzo, nodding.

  Jinnai took a deep breath to still his emotions before speaking again.

  “The empress in the palace isn’t human, is she?”

  Silence followed, as if time had stopped.

  Then Matsukichi laughed, and Kyuzo did too, chuckling quietly despite himself.

  “What’s the joke?” said Jinnai irritably.

  “Well done,” said Matsukichi. “You’re the first one of the shogun’s spies to get this far.”

  He really was nothing like the man Hambei had brought to that dingy restaurant. No wonder Jinnai hadn’t recognized him.

  “Who are you really?” asked Jinnai.

  “A spy for the Conch and Taiko. I can’t give you my name. Matsukichi will do.”

  Jinnai was dumbstruck. Apart from Kihachi Umekawa, none of the spies were supposed to know what their fellow spies were investigating.

  “So that story about the Institute of Machinery, and your arrest and expungement from the temple rolls … ?”

  “You need to find a new jitte waver. I heard that Hambei Sayama was looking for people from the institute, and when I came to him with a made-up story, he bought it completely.” Matsukichi laughed. “As did you! Did you check my connection to Chokichi? Go ahead, poke around. There’s no beggar by the name of Matsukichi under his protection. Of course, he’d have told you there was—I paid him enough for that.”

  The man was obviously several steps ahead of Jinnai. The Conch and Taiko were good. He must have sprung into action as soon as Jinnai started looking into the refinery’s finances for Kakita.

  And now Jinnai was confused. His deduction that the empress was an automaton appeared to be correct, but how did these two fit into the story?

  “Keian Higa visited the imperial palace many times to inspect the Sacred Vessel,” said Kyuzo. “During that period, the reigning empress conceived her second child—potentially the first girl born to the imperial line in many years. But, cruelly, the empress died in childbirth, and the gods soon reclaimed her newborn daughter as well. The imperial household was already reliant on the shogun not just for the funds to relocate the capital but for everything else. To keep him from insinuating himself further into imperial business, they formulated a plan: until a girl was born in the line of direct succession, they would replace the heir who had just died with an automaton—and make it the new empress.”

  Jinnai gasped.

  “It was the Vessel, passed down within the imperial family since the Age of Myth, that made this plan possible. Keian was the first outsider permitted to inspect it, and the knowledge he gleaned let him create something thought to be impossible: an automaton indistinguishable from a human. You found the plans he drew up, in that book entitled The Mechanism’s Workings Are Obscure.”

  The volume, as Jinnai had discovered in the library, contained elaborate diagrams of the Sacred Vessel—a human automaton. It explained that the Vessel had been locked up in an iron cabinet that stood in a cavern underneath the imperial tomb that had been closed off during the Age of Myth, and it detailed how the “empress” had been built in imitation.

  The schematics included in the book began with an automaton in the form of an infant. This had been remade for key occasions so that it was always the expected age. Keian had secretly been entrusted with the work of research, maintenance, and reconstruction, which necessitated regular visits to the palace.

  “The plan was to yield the throne to the first daughter born to the imperial family. But no heir was born for five years, then ten. Eventually, certain shogunate officials came to view this with suspicion.”

  “My patrons, the Conch and Taiko,” said Matsukichi. “You know how Keian Higa’s story ended. I don’t think his aim was to protect the imperial secret. I think he just loved the imperial automaton he had made, like any father loves his daughter. He decided to topple the shogunate before she could be exposed, gathering ronin and building weapons the likes of which you’ve never seen. His plan was to strike simultaneously in Tempu and Kamigata, decapitate the shogunate by burning down Tempu Castle, and then have the automated empress order him to bring the remnants to heel.”

  But a traitor among Keian’s secret army ended the plot before it could be set into action. That informant had ended up in the Muta domain. And Muta, after the incident at last year’s cricket-fighting tournament, no longer existed.

  “Keian’s students were rounded up, leaving no one to repair or remake the empress. The imperial household claims that a grave illness has halted her growth, trapping her forever in her youthful form, and she no longer emerges from her quarters.”

  “I assume,” said Jinnai hoarsely in the stifling atmosphere, “the fact that you haven’t been hunted down by the palace despite what you know indicates that the Conch and Taiko are keeping this secret to themselves rather than sharing it with the shogun.”

  In other words, the Conch and Taiko were planning their own revolt against the shogunate.

  They were probably plotting some kind of reform from within that would let them retain their current position within the public service, rather than an armed coup like Keian had envisioned. They had swiped enough information to give them all the cards, but they were playing them close to their chest.

  “Excellent deduction,” said Matsukichi. “The Conch and Taiko sent someone to the Institute of Machinery to guide the situation. And that mole was …” He glanced to his side.

  Jinnai followed his gaze. “Kyuzo Kugimiya?!” he exclaimed. He had expected to learn that Kyuzo had been one of Keian’s students but not that he was an agent for the Conch and Taiko.

  Kyuzo’s eyes were cold and still, his expression utterly unchanging. “I had already made a name for myself in Tempu as a karakuri builder of some skill,” he said. “You watched the show at Nakasu Kannon with Eve, I think? My designs, both of them. Early pieces.”

  “We wanted to know the secret of the Vessel,” said Matsukichi, “so we recruited Kyuzo here and sent him to enroll in the institute. I’d have gone myself, but I don’t know anything about chemistry or mechanics—I’d have been discovered right away.”

  Matsukichi held out his hand.

  “I think it’s time you handed over what you stole,” he said. “I knew I could count on you to get it out of the refinery if I told you the title. Now I can get it to the Conch and Taiko before someone who actually understands it joins the refinery.”

  “And once I give it to you,” said Jinnai, “you’ll have no further use for me.”

  “Again, excellent deduction.”

/>   It was the perfect plan. Matsukichi hadn’t been able to break into the refinery to steal the book himself—if he got caught, the Conch and Taiko would immediately come under suspicion. Kyuzo, as refinery assistant, could have consulted or even borrowed the volume but not disposed of it, and his attentions might also signal to others that the book was of interest.

  And so they had manipulated Jinnai, who had no connection to either of them, into bringing it right to them.

  “You’re not getting the book.” Jinnai’s hand found the hilt of his sword. “I’m going to take it to the authorities and clear my name.”

  “Not likely. The magistrate’s office has no idea what the Conch and Taiko are plotting. They think they just sit around tooting on shells all day,” Matsukichi said, miming the action.

  Suddenly there was a slim dagger in his hand.

  Jinnai popped the seal of his own sword.

  “Don’t you two know how to behave in someone else’s house?” said Kyuzo, standing behind Matsukichi. But the other two already had their full concentration focused on each other’s movements and did not reply.

  A bead of sweat from Jinnai’s forehead ran down his temple, then his jaw. Finally it dripped from his chin.

  As it hit the floor, Jinnai broke the standoff, his hand moving a fraction before Matsukichi’s followed suit.

  Then came the boom of exploding gunpowder.

  For a moment, Jinnai wasn’t sure what had happened.

  Matsukichi, already moving toward him, collapsed to the floor.

  Kyuzo stood behind him with a short, oddly shaped pistol in his hand. White smoke still rose from the barrel.

  “Vintage Keian Higa,” he said. “I’d never tried firing it before. Certainly does the job.”

  Matsukichi groaned, scrabbling at the floor in a growing pool of his own blood.

  “Shot but still alive,” said Kyuzo. “Just like a real lizard?”

  “Kyuzo,” snarled Matsukichi. “You …” He glared up at the other man, his face twisted with rage.