Automatic Eve

by Rokuro Inui

  In his role as refinery assistant, Kyuzo himself had never let the secret slip. He doubted that he would have been believed anyway, without Eve herself as proof.

  Then came a humid day of early-summer rains.

  As hollow inside as ever, Kyuzo was reading alone in the house the shogunate had given him when he noticed that a visitor was at his gate.

  He opened the front door. It was noon, but the sky was cloudy and the day dark. The red kosode of the woman at his gate seemed to bleed vividly into the gray that surrounded her.

  She held her umbrella low, concealing everything but the lower half of her face.

  Her red lips were curved into a smile.

  Eve.

  Heedless of the rain, Kyuzo was rooted to the spot as she shuffled toward him.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Kyuzo Kugimiya.”

  She raised her umbrella, revealing gleaming, agate-green eyes that pierced his own with their gaze.

  From this distance, he could see that the hem of her kosode was dirtied and torn. She wore no footwear save tabi socks so tattered they were little more than scraps of fabric. He felt the length of her journey keenly.

  “My body requires your assistance in many places.”

  Kyuzo fell to his knees where he stood, muddying his clothing in a puddle. He collapsed forward and pressed his forehead against the paving stones, as if drinking the muddy water. Then he began to weep.

  They were the first tears he had shed since Keian’s death.

  And that was the last time he ever revealed any sort of emotion before Eve.

  As he gazed at the Vessel on its bench now, something like those long-lost emotions welled up within him once more.

  He yearned to reach out and touch it.

  Of course, as part of his inspection, he had poked and prodded it everywhere, but this was different. He wanted to touch the sleeping Vessel not as a maker of automata but as a man.

  A memory came to him of Eve, lying in Keian’s workshop still incomplete.

  He felt his heart pound.

  He reached out toward the Vessel’s pale chest and slipped his hand between the folds of its white silk underrobe.

  How long had it been since he’d last felt this way?

  He felt a pang of melancholy at his advancing years beside Eve, still young and beautiful, and now the Vessel that was her twin.

  Gently, he cupped the Vessel’s left breast in the palm of his hand.

  Supple elasticity. Softness. Vulnerability.

  Kyuzo was overcome not by lust but by nostalgia. Longing for what was now lost.

  Yes. What Eve had once meant to him—

  Suddenly he felt movement through his palm.

  For an instant, he wasn’t sure if it was the beating of his own heart or the workings of the equivalent mechanism inside the Vessel.

  He looked down to see the Vessel’s long-lashed eyes slowly open.

  Next, like a flower bud blooming, her pale pink lips parted. White teeth carved of pearl oyster shell gleamed between them.

  “Kyuzo … Kugimiya?”

  The illusion was complete. For Kyuzo, time had run backward to Eve’s awakening.

  VI

  The great hall in the castle keep had been furnished with a long, carpeted bench on which sat a row of insect habitats of various shapes and sizes.

  These were the crickets that had lost their bouts and would not be competing before the shogun. Crickets could not survive the winter; this was the only season they would see. They had been reared solely to fight for the shogun’s amusement, so after the tournament they were presented to him as gifts.

  Dominating the room was a large five-sided table of ebony. This was where the fights would take place. The finest seat at the table was for the shogun. Two more sides were reserved for the referee and the official. The final two were for the trainers of the west and east corner for each bout. Behind the trainers stood two more carpeted benches, each holding five habitats—one cricket for each side of the five bouts to take place in the shogun’s presence.

  A number of nervous-looking men were sitting near the table on the east side, and one of them was Sashichi. One of Utsuki’s crickets had made it through to the tournament’s final round, giving Sashichi his first opportunity to wield the senso in the shogun’s presence.

  Opposite Sashichi on the west side was a trainer who was a cricket-fighting official himself. Hawk and Plum, the shogun’s cricket, was also among the final ten.

  Another several dozen men from various domains sat some distance from the ebony table, waiting impatiently for the shogun to arrive.

  Only those who were at the table itself looking into the fighting basin could follow the bout directly, but this was well understood by all. The referee’s wooden fan told the story for those who could not see. His grip, the angle at which he held it, how he moved it—all of this conveyed information about the progress of the fight in a code that every enthusiast knew.

  Those close to the table had been waiting quietly at first, but now they began to murmur to each other uneasily. It had already been an hour since the appointed start time.

  Jinnai, too, had the vague feeling that something had gone awry.

  The first clue was when Kihachi Umekawa, who had positioned himself in a corner of the great hall to watch Jinnai, had disappeared.

  Something that required Kihachi’s presence despite his having other plans was clearly not a minor issue.

  As Jinnai was mulling this over, the six-paneled set of sliding paper screens at the back of the hall, painted with a bamboo thicket and a tiger, slid open from the middle.

  The whole room froze, thinking that the shogun had arrived. A moment later, the tension in the assembled faces was replaced by confusion.

  Standing in the opening between the screens was a woman dressed only in a thin underrobe.

  “Where is he?” she asked, scanning the room with a look of concern. Her words did not seem to be addressed to anyone in particular. She looked right through those present, as if the great hall were empty.

  The most noticeable detail, however, was that she was spattered head to toe with blood.

  Eve?!

  Jinnai, among the crowd assembled for the tournament, was about to call out to her when he stopped himself.

  No. That wasn’t Eve.

  Which meant it was—

  Jinnai rose to his feet, but before he could move forward, the official who had been sitting at the table approached the woman.

  “Do you realize where you are, woman?” he demanded. “How did you get in here?” His hand was on the hilt of his sword, but to Jinnai he looked more unsettled than angry.

  “Are you of the shogunate?” she asked.

  “I am. As an official at this tourna—” His words became a scream.

  Jinnai did not have a clear view from where he stood, but he could see the woman’s long, slender arm extended toward the official’s face and the official scrabbling at it with his hands.

  Finally the rest of the room saw what the woman was doing—plunging her thumb and index finger deep into the official’s eyes.

  The whole room snapped to attention, everyone half rising to their feet.

  The woman stepped into the room, dragging the screaming, thrashing official behind her by the eye sockets. He left two red streaks of blood on the tatami mats behind him.

  The referee and trainers who had been at the ebony table backed away hurriedly, faces white with terror. Sashichi scrambled toward Jinnai, practically on all fours.

  “Jinnai! Is—is that—?”

  “No,” said Jinnai. “That isn’t Eve.” He seized Sashichi by the nape of the neck. “Listen to me! Leave the castle and go to the house. Tell Eve what has happened.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m going
to look for Master Kyuzo. Whatever happens, don’t do anything rash until I bring him out safely.”

  With that, Jinnai all but tossed Sashichi out of the room.

  He looked back at the woman. Still dragging the now-limp official behind her, she was roaming the great hall craning her neck to peer this way and that, clearly searching for something. She did not seem to notice the tension and fear that now filled the room.

  She moved just like Eve.

  Noticing the insect habitats on the long carpeted bench by the wall, the woman cast the official’s body aside and went to investigate.

  One by one, she tore off the paper seals to see what was inside. Every time she did, a cricket would spring out of the habitat, and she would let out an incongruous “Oh!” of surprise.

  Was this the Sacred Vessel from the Age of Myth?

  No, Jinnai realized. This was the automaton that Keian Higa had built in imitation of the real Sacred Vessel. This was Eve.

  “There she is!”

  Before Jinnai had decided what to do, half a dozen grim-looking men dressed for battle—domain samurai, presumably—kicked in the sliding screen and poured into the hall. About the same number of men ran in through another entrance dressed in simple work clothes. These were the gardener agents of the shogun’s intelligence service. Some of their faces were familiar to him.

  About half of the people who had originally been in the great hall had already fled.

  Swords drawn, the warriors and gardeners approached the Vessel from behind as she inspected the cricket habitats.

  One of the men stepped forward and brought his blade down on her unprotected shoulder.

  Instead of felling her in a gout of blood, the sword snapped and clattered onto the floor without harming her in any visible way.

  The Sacred Vessel slowly turned.

  There was no rage or hate in her face, but within moments she had grabbed the warrior by his topknot and thrown him into the air. He tumbled in an arc that brought him down headfirst on the carpeted bench. The bench cracked in two pieces, and the man’s neck bent at an awful angle.

  The cricket habitats that had been on the table scattered onto the floor. The ones she had not checked yet cracked open, allowing their inhabitants to escape across the tatami mats.

  “Wait!” the Vessel said, panicking. “Stop!”

  She hurried after the fleeing insects, leaving the broken-necked man to twitch behind her. The sight was almost comical.

  As she tried to cup her hands over one of the crickets, looking on the verge of tears, one of the gardeners moved in and swung his sword at her. She caught the blade in her hand irritably, then pulled it out of the gardener’s grasp and started to wave it around.

  “Please don’t tread on the crickets!” she cried, voice rising to an unhinged shriek as she wildly swung the blade. “Don’t step on them!” Several men fell at her feet, already dead.

  Making no attempt to parry or dodge the blows aimed at her, she moved forward in a straight line, slashing all who stood in her way so that even those with considerable skill were helpless against her. Even when a sword ran the Vessel through, it did not seem to hurt her or affect her, not even when blade struck bone and snapped off inside her.

  The blood of the warriors who had opposed her spattered across the floor, the ceiling, the kicked-in sliding screens.

  The gardeners had already vanished. Must have recognized their disadvantage and gone to call for reinforcements, Jinnai thought.

  He realized with a start that he was the only man left in the room.

  What’s more, he was unarmed. Kihachi’s suspicion that he was trying to smuggle something untoward into the castle had seen Jinnai thoroughly searched before he entered.

  The Vessel came to a halt, sword dangling from one hand. She seemed to be at a loss. Then she looked at Jinnai.

  The crimson smears of blood on her face only emphasized the fairness of her skin. Jinnai saw great beauty there.

  “Are you of the shogunate?” she asked.

  Jinnai shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “I see.” Appearing to lose interest in him at once, the Vessel resumed her search, flipping over corpses to look under them.

  Jinnai heard several dozen men in the corridor outside approaching at a run.

  He hesitated, then decided to make himself scarce.

  Finding Kyuzo and seeing him out to safety was a more pressing concern than the Vessel. He had an uneasy premonition that Kyuzo might already be in grave danger.

  Running out into the corridor, he almost collided with a group of samurai and gardeners.

  Kihachi was among them.

  “This better not be your doing, Jinnai,” he snarled.

  “Shut up and listen,” Jinnai said. He pointed at his chest. “I’m Jinnai Tasaka, apprentice of the great artisan Kyuzo Kugimiya. The woman in that hall right now is an automaton. Those dull blades won’t even scratch her skin, let alone break her bones.”

  Some of the men in the group looked shocked.

  Must have already seen a lot of their fellows die.

  “If you want to stop her, aim for the solar plexus,” Jinnai said, recalling a story Kyuzo had told him about another rogue automaton. “There’s a place there where her skin was made thinner. Jab a finger in and push the mechanism behind her breastbone. Her clockwork will disengage and wind down, and she’ll—”

  “Don’t listen to him!” Kihachi screamed. “He’s a former agent of the Conch and Taiko. A traitor to the service!”

  At this prompt, one of the warriors rushed toward Jinnai as he raised his sword.

  Jinnai dove sideways through one of the doors in the corridor, smashing through it and rolling into the room beyond.

  Half of the men in the corridor ran on to the great hall to subdue the Vessel. The rest poured into the room after Jinnai to finish him off.

  “We don’t have time for this now!” Jinnai cried, but the men around him were too ready to fight to listen.

  If he let them surround him, that would be the end. Domain samurai aside, all of the familiar faces among the gardeners were better trained than him. Taking them on alone and unarmed would be suicide.

  Kihachi stepped through the ring of men forming around Jinnai to stand before him. “I should have killed you when I had the chance,” he said. “I’ve always been too sentimental for my own good.” He accepted a sword from a nearby gardener and moved closer.

  Jinnai dropped into a low stance and watched him closely.

  “Goodbye, Jinnai.”

  Kihachi’s blade began to fall.

  Jinnai tensed in anticipation.

  Then Kihachi’s arm stopped, as if caught on something in midair.

  A moment later, half the arm fell onto the ground like a sliced daikon.

  For a moment, even Kihachi himself did not seem to follow what had happened.

  Then he began scrabbling at his neck with his sole remaining hand as his body rose five inches off the ground.

  Something had been pulled tight around his neck, sinking into the flesh just under his Adam’s apple. Dark blood welled from the line for an instant. Then his body fell heavily to the ground, followed an instant later by his tumbling head.

  Jinnai looked around in confusion. He saw something like glinting thread above him.

  Then that glint sliced through the air. The men surrounding Jinnai fell like dominoes as their legs were severed beneath them.

  Jinnai looked up. To prevent intruders hiding in the ceiling, it was open to the rafters. Fifteen or twenty feet above him, he saw a figure in indigo shinobi garb standing on a rafter.

  “Long time no see, Jin.”

  The figure reeled in her wires and stored the weights at their ends in her sleeves, then somersaulted through the air to land before him, one knee on the floor.
/>   “Kasuga?”

  The last time he had seen the former palace ukami, she had been just a girl of fourteen or fifteen. Ten years later, she was more mature. She might even have been wearing makeup; in any case, her red lips gave her a stern, handsome look.

  “What are you doing here?” Jinnai asked. It was too soon for Sashichi to have sent anyone.

  “Eve told me I should drop by.” Kasuga picked up the sword of the closest fallen warrior and tossed it to Jinnai. “Her Majesty and I went in for maintenance, but a couple of hours ago Eve started getting fidgety. A gut feeling, maybe.”

  “Eve?”

  Kasuga nodded.

  Had the awakening of the Vessel, her twin, caused some sympathetic resonance?

  “She says Kyuzo’s missing,” Kasuga said.

  “He has to be in the castle somewhere. And I think I know where.”

  Jinnai jammed the sword into the obi around his waist.

  “Looks like you’ve found yourself some real trouble this time,” said Kasuga. “When did you take up tinkering with karakuri, anyway? It doesn’t suit you at all.”

  “Save it,” Jinnai said, and broke into a run. Kasuga stayed right on his tail.

  They left the main building, and Jinnai headed directly for the lower western courtyard.

  On the way they passed many guards and domain samurai who had fled the great hall and were wandering around nervously, not sure what to do next. None paid any attention to Jinnai and Kasuga.

  They cleared the green bamboo barrier in a single bound and kept going. In this part of the castle, they were alone.

  Racing through the bleak, skeletal plum grove, they came to the area with the storehouses.

  Jinnai had a hunch that one of them was being used as an impromptu workshop for Kyuzo’s inspection of the Vessel. His plan had been to search them one by one, but he noticed immediately that one door was already ajar. Without hesitating, he ran through it.

  In the dim room, he saw walls and shelves crammed with familiar tools and materials.

  There was a workbench in the middle of the room, and beside it was a slumped figure.