Automatic Eve

by Rokuro Inui

  “What’s happening here?” asked Jinnai, warily keeping the point of his sword toward Kyuzo.

  “I’m finally free of this unsavory fellow,” said Kyuzo coolly, “and I have your help to thank for it. Even from behind, I never found an opportunity to take him on. This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance.” He glanced up at Jinnai and nodded. “Finish him.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Jinnai ran the blade through Matsukichi’s throat. The man croaked like a frog and breathed his last.

  Kyuzo crouched to confirm that Matsukichi’s heart had stopped, then rose to his feet. “No time to waste,” he said. “First we go to the master of the Conch and Taiko and arrange for him to clear you with the magistrate. You will be his new agent, replacing Matsukichi. Secrets are better shared with as few as possible, after all.”

  It appeared that Kyuzo had another plan, but Jinnai was in no position to object. Presumably the money matters that had attracted the attention of the master of accounts would be quietly forgotten in the confusion as well.

  “I have no idea what’s going on,” Jinnai said.

  “Weren’t you listening earlier?” Kyuzo shook his head sorrowfully. “I was a simple karakuri maker when Matsukichi recruited me as a mole at the Institute of Machinery. I had neither the money nor the introductions to enroll on my own, so the proposal was just what I needed. At first, I thought only of stealing the technology and know-how of the great Keian Higa, but after a few years as his student, I had fallen under his sway. But Matsukichi was an intelligence agent. I knew that if I disappointed him my life would be forfeit, so I never revealed anything to Keian, even when I became one of his most trusted disciples.”

  Kyuzo’s remorse was palpable.

  “When I became involved in the construction of the imperial automaton, I started wishing I could see the Sacred Vessel for myself. But that wish was never granted. Keian’s plot was revealed, and he was beheaded. The Conch and Taiko made sure that their mole was set free, and I found work at the refinery as an assistant. But I still regret letting Matsukichi talk me into infiltrating the institute. I should have lived out my days as just another karakuri maker.”

  Kyuzo spoke haltingly as he looked down at Matsukichi.

  Some called Kyuzo Kugimiya a genius of automata. Others called him a demon. But Jinnai had not expected to discover this side of him.

  When Kyuzo finally left the room, Eve came in directly.

  “Eve,” said Jinnai.

  “Make your preparations. We have to visit the Conch and Taiko,” she said.

  And smiled.

  VII

  Jinnai stood before the hundred-prayer stone at Nakasu Kannon, waiting for the abacus to reach ninety-nine.

  “Jinnai,” Eve said, eyes widening just a fraction, when she returned to find him leaning against the pillar.

  “I never did thank you properly,” said Jinnai with a smile.

  Without replying, Eve pushed the final tab on the abacus into place and turned to walk toward Ten-Span Bridge.

  Jinnai fell into step beside her. “I’ll be leaving Tempu soon,” he said.

  “I see.”

  Kihachi had delivered the news of his new assignment in a different province only yesterday.

  Kyuzo had pulled a string here and there to have the magistrate’s warrant canceled and Jinnai made the new spy for the Conch and Taiko.

  Kyuzo’s goals had been to eliminate Matsukichi and free himself from surveillance. Eve had recognized Jinnai as an intelligence agent from his first overtures, and it appeared that Kyuzo had been positioning him to replace Matsukichi all along.

  Officially, his new assignment far from Tempu was a punishment from Kihachi, overseer of the Garden of August Repose, for having come under suspicion by the magistrate’s office. In fact, he was being sent by the master of the Conch and Taiko to investigate the reclusive empress.

  “Kyuzo feels bitter remorse for what he did,” Eve said. “I am proof of that. He helped me escape from the institute before the shogunate ransacked it and continues to treat me as his daughter instead of surrendering me to them.”

  “So when you told me you weren’t his real daughter …”

  Eve smiled at him. “Are you wondering if I am Keian Higa’s daughter instead?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “You are an intriguing man, Jinnai Tasaka,” she said, stopping in the middle of the path. “So perceptive, and yet sometimes you overlook the most pertinent truths of all.”

  The stream of people on the road flowed around them as they stood on the path.

  “I come here to pray that one day I might become human.”

  Jinnai doubted his ears at first, not comprehending. “No,” he said. “Surely not.”

  “Foolish of me, I know. But we are free to wish as we will, are we not?”

  Eve began to walk again.

  “Does that mean you were created by Keian?” asked Jinnai. This would make her a kind of sister to the imperial automaton.

  “Kyuzo appears to think so.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Eve stopped again at the very top of the arched bridge. She leaned over the railing and gazed into the river. The seabirds perched on the poles took to the air in a flurry of wings and flew off toward the gilded tiles of Kannon-do.

  “Do you remember when we spoke about not being able to cross the same river twice?” she asked.

  Jinnai nodded. He remembered that conversation well but had yet to understand what she had meant by it.

  “Keian designed the imperial automaton based on the Sacred Vessel. He inspected and analyzed the Vessel for years, examining even the smallest detail and replacing parts one by one in the name of maintenance.”

  Jinnai joined Eve at the railing. A boat laden with fishing nets was slowly passing under the bridge.

  “True artisans of automata—Keian was the same way—cannot abide letting the unknown slip from their grasp. If they can keep it close at hand, they do; if not, they strive at least to record it in writing.”

  Jinnai looked at Eve beside him as he struggled to grasp her import. Her profile bore the same melancholy expression as the one he had seen at the karakuri puppet show.

  “Suppose you replaced every part of an automaton, component by component, and reassembled the parts you removed into a new automaton entirely. Which would be the real one?”

  She turned her dark eyes to his, and a chill ran down his spine as he felt, just for a moment, as if he were looking at thousands of years of memories.

  All the way back to the Age of Myth.

  “What they call the Sacred Vessel sleeps even now in the imperial tomb,” she said.

  “But if I understand you correctly …”

  “By inspecting my person down to the smallest detail, Kyuzo’s mastery of automata came to rival even Keian’s,” she said with another smile. “He says that his dream is to inspect the Sacred Vessel for himself. Should that dream ever come true, I hope he is not disappointed.”

  With a parting nod, Eve began the descent to the other side of the bridge. Jinnai stood and watched her go, as if in shock.

  In the far distance, the usual smoke billowed from the refinery chimneys.

  I

  “Now hear this: the day is come!”

  When the court lady’s voice rang out in the attendant’s quarters, Kasuga sat up and rubbed her sleepy eyes.

  Alongside the other ladies of the innermost sanctum—all girls her age—she briskly pulled on her uniform of a white habutai silk marusode over scarlet hakama trousers.

  Once dressed, Kasuga left their quarters with the other girls, laughing quietly and commenting on the cold.

  Even after pulling on her long uchiki as outerwear, Kasuga was still shivering. Pale crimson had only just begun to color the eastern sky, and her breath came in white c
louds.

  The attendant’s quarters were in a triangular courtyard surrounded by a high stone fence. The palace had four other courtyards of the same shape, encompassing a larger pentagonal space at the middle to form a five-pointed star. This prevented anyone from moving between courtyards without passing the imperial tomb at the center.

  In the imperial palace, “day” came only with the waking of the empress. At this signal, the rest of the residents began to stir as well.

  In the past, the empress had woken at the same time every morning, with a regularity that was almost mechanical. Over the past year or so, however, her health had worsened, and “day” sometimes began before sunrise, forcing the attendants to hurry their morning chores, or she might not wake till the sun was high in the sky and everyone was anxious and impatient.

  Kasuga heard a long, low tone. The palanquin bearers must have started the fires.

  The palace compound contained a network of countless iron pipes. The pipes would freeze solid overnight, but when the wood-burning furnaces and the points of the star were lit in the morning, steam would pass through the pipes again, making them ring out musically as they thawed.

  This system had been constructed by the refinery when the palace had been moved to this site thirty years ago, and it was used by the kitchen as well as for heating. They had been inspected many times to discover why they made their musical noises despite being jointed seamlessly, but no answer was forthcoming. It was simply one of the mysteries of life at the palace.

  The corridor between the attendants’ courtyard and the central pentagon was raised to keep their feet clear of impurity. Kasuga and her group opened a heavy door in the pentagon’s thick raised-earth wall, revealing the tomb in the courtyard.

  Of course, the imperial tomb itself was just a low mound perhaps twenty or thirty feet around. What was peculiar about it was the ominous heft of the cover that sealed it up.

  A dome of thick iron covered the entire mound, and the exterior of the dome was crisscrossed by iron catwalks as if to hold it in place. The rust was scoured off once a year, but the surface of the blackly gleaming sphere had reddened in places all the same. Thin white steam rose from the iron, as if it were heated from below.

  The overall impression was that the tomb had been hurriedly sealed up and then covered with several layers on top of that. There was not a hint of the elegance and splendor that characterized the rest of the palace.

  In the dim early-morning light, beyond the shadows of the dome, Kasuga saw smoke pouring from the furnace chimneys. The whole palace should be awake by now, but she heard nothing except the pipes groaning like a wild beast.

  When the palace had been moved there, the imperial tomb had already been in place. The moving procedure began with a ritual formula inscribed on a great turtle’s plastron, which was then thrown into a fire. The cracks from the flames were interpreted by augurs to reveal where the palace should be moved, and the plastron last time had indicated that the most suitable location was the imperial tomb in which the Sacred Vessel rested.

  Although the tomb thus stood at the center of the largest pentagonal courtyard and therefore the entire palace, few gave it much thought. Even to approach it too closely was forbidden, and Kasuga, like the others, had only seen it from afar when passing through one of the raised corridors.

  The group made their way toward the empress’s bedchamber.

  Court ladies were only permitted as far as the outer rooms. An attendant led them through the hall to a door of cryptomeria wood with a dragon painted on it, which was the entrance to the empress’s private quarters, known as the inner rooms.

  Beyond the dragon door stood a gentlewoman. She led Kasuga and the others along a raised corridor to the inner rooms proper, where they dropped to their knees and crawled through the vestibule into the empress’s private quarters.

  This sequence was repeated every morning, and Kasuga never failed to find it tiresome.

  There was a reason that their guide changed so frequently. Court ladies were barred even from the outer rooms; attendants were permitted in the outer rooms but no further; the inner rooms were restricted to gentlewomen and others who attended the empress directly, including Kasuga and the other ladies of the innermost sanctum.

  How closely a person was permitted to approach the imperial person was strictly determined by birth and rank. The empress’s most private rooms were off-limits to all but family members, those specifically selected for the position like Kasuga, and a handful of exceptions like nursemaids, physicians, and so on. Even those at the highest level of the palace bureaucracy, the most senior ladies-in-waiting and women of the chambers, did not have access.

  On the other hand, among the attendants who served in the inner rooms, the ladies of the innermost sanctum were at the bottom of the hierarchy, lower even than the equerries. For that reason, even in the outer rooms they were barely viewed as human, and those who served in the inner rooms often ignored them completely.

  It was customary for daughters of the lowest-ranking noble houses to work for a few years somewhere in the palace. A household that could place its daughter beyond the veil, in the innermost sanctum, could attain status equal to an archivist of the sixth rank.

  Kasuga entered the bedchamber to find the empress still under the covers, lying on her back.

  As usual, she was staring blankly into space.

  The bed was surrounded by white damask curtains with a peony motif, but these had already been raised by the two ladies who had been stationed in the neighboring room overnight. Kasuga had nothing to do but wait for the empress to rouse herself.

  The legs of the empress’s sleepwear ended in something like socks to prevent her feet coming into direct contact with her bedding. Her slender arms were crossed lightly over her chest.

  Her chestnut hair was slightly wavy and came down to her waist, and her eyes had the translucent hue of amber.

  At her first sight of the empress, Kasuga had gasped. Although nearly thirty years old, she looked like a girl of fourteen or fifteen, no older than Kasuga herself.

  It was said that grave illness had halted her physical development, and the ladies of the innermost sanctum believed this too. The conversations Kasuga overheard in their quarters expressed sincere pity for the empress’s plight. Some of the more ingenuous girls even wept for her.

  Those who served in the innermost sanctum were forbidden from addressing the empress on their own initiative. Not even greetings were permitted. Accordingly, for Kasuga to urge the empress to get up was completely out of the question. She could only wait silently until the empress did so of her own accord.

  Kasuga stepped out of the innermost sanctum with two other girls to make the preparations for the empress’s morning toilet. They tied their sleeves back with tasuki cords as they made their way to the bathing chamber elsewhere in the inner rooms.

  The bathing room contained a tub of fragrant wood fed by warm water from the heated pipe system. The tub was already full to overflowing and was billowing steam.

  Kasuga and the two other girls used a small wooden pail to fill a large washtub with hot water, then carried it back between the three of them. This was among the more physically taxing chores in the innermost sanctum, especially for young girls. What was more, the corridors here were entirely floored with tatami mats, meaning that not a drop could be spilled on them.

  Returning to the bedchamber, they found the empress already sitting up. Another servant was helping her undress.

  Her skin was smooth and white as porcelain, and the first swellings of her breasts were tipped with nipples like delicate pink sakura buds. She was hairless between her legs—probably naturally so, since Kasuga had never heard of anyone being called upon to help her shave.

  The empress leaned over the washtub Kasuga and the others had brought and scooped handfuls of water up to her face.

&nbs
p; When this was done, it was time for the four servants present to soak silk cloths in the hot water, wring them firmly, and then work together to scrub every inch of the empress’s body. The empress stood naked and motionless, feet a shoulder span apart and both arms raised to a horizontal position, waiting for them to finish. She did not even twitch.

  The girls helped the empress slip into a gown, neatly combed and coiffed her hair, and then applied her white powder and red lipstick. Next, the empress headed for “the eastern quarter”—the lavatory.

  Kasuga had heard that the empress would extend her arm from behind the curtain for her physician to take her pulse while she was occupied there, but she had never seen it herself. Not even the ladies of the innermost sanctum accompanied the empress to the eastern quarter. It was Kasuga’s understanding that a woman with the title osashi was charged with the specific duties of burning incense and wiping the imperial posterior once her business was done, but again, she had never met such an official. Perhaps due to the nature of their duties, they were separated from Kasuga and the other attendants intentionally.

  Once the empress returned, it was time for breakfast, or “first repast” in the language of the palace.

  “Now hear this: first repast has begun!”

  Just like the announcement of the day’s dawning, the cry passed from the gentlewomen to the attendants in the outer rooms, then to the court ladies and beyond, spreading voice by voice throughout the quiet palace that was by now enveloped in bright morning sunshine.

  “Kasuga.”

  Startled at the voice, Kasuga looked around but saw no one.

  Perhaps she had imagined it. She had certainly been nodding off.

  Kasuga was sitting beside the empress’s bed. The curtain was now lowered again, the bedchamber lit by a paper lantern, and Kasuga was waiting impatiently to hear the long, even breathing of sleep from within. She must have dozed off herself.

  Like the dawning of the day and first repast, the empress’s slumber had to be conveyed to the rest of the palace too. Alignment with the empress’s movements was the fundamental law of the palace, so Kasuga’s role here was an important one. If the empress did not fall asleep, most of her staff could not either, in case she decided to summon them.