Between classes, studying, and calling on some patients, he began the work.
In darkness he rode away. In the night he chopped down what he would need. Before the roosters crowed, he returned with a wagon filled with the materials made familiar to him by a childhood of servitude and hardship. He was an indio; the automaton guards ignored him.
He made a prison for himself. In the drafty and cold stone house without horses in its stables, he built a man in his own image.
He formed arms and legs with sturdy bamboo poles. Through the hollow of the poles he coursed water with coconut oil. He split bamboo stems and made jointed fingers, moved by treated abaca fiber, held together by dried rattan. He made tubes from ornamental bamboo vines.
A skull of coconut husk housed an amount of quartz, sufficient to move galvanic current to the heart that pumped the pneumatics. It also contained a clockwork system, allowing the being to understand commands. By triggering its steel heart with a starter device of his making, he primed the galvanic current, and caused the completed being to move. A wooden body with a heart and a brain.
He burned wood, he created sparks, he caused small explosions, and he lodged splinters in his fingers. But wood and metal became man.
“What have you been up to, my friend?” Isagani had asked several times, coaxing him awake while eating. “We almost never see you now.”
“Come and see,” he finally said one day.
He showed him the first working version of the wooden man, as it clumsily walked through the clearing, before it tripped and fell in a heap.
But Isagani did not laugh. He scratched his head. “I think it needs more stability at the legs and feet.”
Basilio sighed and agreed.
“How else do you need help?” Isagani asked.
The question led to more conversations, more plans, and more late evenings that turned to mornings.
“Who asked you to do all this?” Isagani asked again.
“A – patron. A rich patron,” Basilio answered. After all, while Simoun was a well-known man, no one else knew that they were more than acquainted.
With more testing, Basilio caused the wooden man to walk, to run, to lift, and to hold. He fed orders to the clockwork. He armed his creation with arnis sticks of kamagong, and pistols filled with seed and iron bullets.
The being was light but sturdy, parts easily replaced with materials quickly sought and found. It was not immune to fire, but would not be quickly weakened or maimed. A series of valves ensured that the being would keep walking even if an arm were removed, or keep shooting with a pistol if it lost a leg.
Within a month, he headed to the second-floor receiving room, filled with the clockwork of many lands. He walked to Simoun’s wide narra desk, and lay before him the final plans for the wooden clockwork being.
A mandirigma: a warrior.
WITH ALL THE ice in his heart, with chilled blood in his veins, he entered the mansion dressed as an indio servant, in a plain tunic. He had shaved, but kept his hair long and tied back at the neck.
Basilio checked that the clockwork explosives had been properly lodged in the stone house’s eaves, ramparts, and foundations. He ensured that the pomegranate lamp had been placed at the center of the dining hall, where all the dignitaries and friars mingled and laughed, dressed in their finery and pride. A beautiful piece of glass and clockwork, a centerpiece deserving of notice. He lowered his head, as the elite circled in admiration. He left unopposed through the servant doors.
But standing in the street, he found the person he least wanted to see. He found Isagani.
His friend from the university looked questioning, confused, but nourished, at peace with everything except not being Paulita Gomez’s husband.
He called out to him, in spite of all the warnings his mind gave. “’Gani.”
His friend turned to face him, kept staring in the dimness of the early evening. “Is it really you, Basilio?”
He nodded.
Isagani pulled him into a darker shadow. He looked at him again in the rising moonlight. He then wrapped his arms around Basilio’s neck, clutched him well, and held him tightly, silently.
Basilio felt his bony frame surrounded by warmth, his heart ticking away the time, in rhythm with the clockwork devices under the mansion.
He decided. He took Isagani’s hand.
“’Gani. Come with me. We need to be somewhere safe.”
Isagani chuckled bitterly. “Paulita will look her best today. Don’t you want to see her? One last time. Before they take her away.”
Basilio chose to be frank, for time passed quickly. “Isagani, listen. The mansion is filled with explosives. At the height of the dancing, a clockwork lamp, filled with high-grade nitroglycerin, will explode. It will kill everyone inside.”
Isagani stared at him, searching his face. Basilio kept his steady gaze and his firm grip on the hand. Paulita Gomez was nothing to him. Captain ’Tiago was already dead. The mansion meant nothing to him. His life meant nothing. There was nothing left to lose. Except Isagani.
“The plan is set. The gears are in motion. The clockwork for all the devices is ticking. Soon all the foreigners will be dead. Soon it will truly be our people who will rule our land.” He spouted the words he had heard from the jeweler, convincing himself that he believed them as well. “That moment will be soon. We have to get away.”
Isagani’s eyes widened, as each word finally made its point. He turned to run, toward the mansion.
Basilio pulled him back. “Please. Don’t go in.”
“You said there’s a bomb! I have to go, I have to save her –”
Basilio kept his grip. “If you enter, you enter to die.” He pulled Isagani away. “Paulita will never be yours. She will be no one else’s. Stay here.”
“But – Basilio –”
Basilio drew him close. “Let me keep the last person I hold dear.” With all his remaining strength, he pulled at Isagani’s wrist, and set him walking away from the mansion.
Isagani’s hand was cold inside his, and it shook. His voice trembled as he spoke. “My friend?”
“Yes?”
“I adored Paulita’s eyes.”
“I know.” Basilio kept his own eyes on the darkened cobbled street, walking hurriedly, his hand tightly around Isagani’s wrist.
“I adored Paulita. I loved Paulita. I wanted to be married to Paulita.”
“I know.” So had all of their friends. “I know.”
“But –” Isagani said, “I refuse to lose you.”
Basilio turned and faced him, as the mansion grew silent.
He looked away, as the mansion erupted.
THE WOODEN WARRIORS began their attack.
They were attired in the clothes of farmers, covering the nakedness of the metal and wood: cheap long-sleeved tunics, coarse trousers, silent straw sandals, and straw hats. They were armed in like manner, with bolos, arnis sticks, and sickles.
The first group of mandirigma, hidden within stables and storehouses, appeared soon after the explosion. They surrounded the mansion, killing every man who managed to survive the blast. Several decimated the mechanical guardia civil at the city walls. Others eliminated everyone in a uniform within range, mechanical or human. Some walked into the churches, eliminating every man in a cassock. People rushed to the closed gates and were crushed there, as the alarms were raised, as fire spread through the Intramuros. The mandirigma surrounded the walled capital. They had been instructed to kill any peninsular, insular, or mestizo who dared to leave the walls. Human bodies littered the thick walls and filled the moat.
The second group deployed at dawn, accompanied by his countrymen from the mountains. Outside the walls, the mandirigma walked quickly through the cobbled streets, tall and sinewed, with eyes, but without faces, without souls. On command, the wooden beings destroyed houses and set buildings ablaze. The Pasig River brightened with the glow of conflagration.
HE WAS A doctor first.
Pe
ople kept coming to the jeweler’s house, somehow finding out that Basilio stayed there, knowing he was the only one who was any kind of doctor. Soon there would be more people coming, and more people he would turn away. The breezes from the Pasig blew in the stench of death, smoke, and gunpowder.
His trousers and dress shirt were bloodstained. Blood caked around his fingernails. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot. He had not slept or eaten the whole night. He patched wounds and cleaned sores and removed shrapnel and eased what pain he could.
Bayabas leaf poultices for wounds. Clean cotton cloths, boiled in hot water. Small amounts of opium he managed to beg from around Binondo.
He drowned out the thoughts that the wounds were inflicted by his own creations, by filling his mind with the work of saving life. He ignored the screams in his brain by making his brain shout stranger words: People deserved to be dead. Death was needed to create revolution. Yet his brain kept screaming: You caused this. You allowed this to happen.
He finally fell into a few hours of exhausted slumber, the jeweler's desperately triumphant words filling his dreams.
Voices pierced the quiet.
“Long live the Katipunan!”
“The strangers who have ruled us are dead! The land is ours! Rise up with us and claim what is our right!”
“We are not the islands of a dead king. We are the people of our sovereign land! We are the Maharlika! Let us claim what is ours!”
In between such shouts were screams of pain, shots from rifles, blasts from cannons, and pleas for mercy.
He walked away from the blood and the pain, closing a door behind him in the large old stone house. He clutched at his chest and calmed his breathing, hoping both would decrease the pain in his heart. But none of his medical training eased the hurt.
IN BETWEEN THE waves of arrivals, he sat at a large narra desk. On the desk was a pistol, gutted of its bullets and bullet carriage. Beside it was a treatise by Galvani, on current and power. A small piece of quartz acted as a paperweight for some hasty notes and sketches.
Pistol hammer hits quartz, quartz creates power, power converts to galvanic current, galvanic current moves in straight lines, galvanic current moves toward another conducting metal that will receive it.
He slipped on rubber gloves, connected quartz to galvanic converter, and attached both to the pistol. He raised it and felt its weight. The crystal and the converter had not altered the weight much, and added stability to his grip on the trigger.
Isagani found him that way when he opened the door. He, too, was stained with blood, grime, and sweat, from setting order to the chaos that arrived for the doctor.
“Get some rest, Basilio. You have done more than enough.”
“That is what frightens me,” he replied.
“Why? That, out there, is the sound of victory, of freedom! You said so yourself!”
“No, it is not. I never said that,” Basilio muttered.
It was the sound of delusion made apparent.
“It’s my fault as much as it is yours,” Isagani said. “Because I helped you make those things.”
He shook his head. “The fault is all mine, because the plans were mine. Simoun gave me the reason to make it, but I agreed. Your only fault was wanting to be with me for so many hours, and helping me think by doing so.”
Isagani released an uncertain chuckle. “So you noticed.”
“Yes.”
“Did you – well – did you dislike it?”
“No.”
“You are being kind.”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean –” He sighed, feeling all his weariness once more. “I am not lying to you. I appreciated your company, and that you did not think me a fool for making the wooden soldier. I am grateful. I am pained that such conversations and thoughts have been used to these ends, to kill and to maim.”
The stench of death remained in the air, stale and sour. For a moment he clutched his heart. The pounding in it had slowed but remained. He held his heart, and breathed deeply.
The sky dimmed. Isagani clasped his hand.
Basilio caught his breath. He brought the hand up to his lips. He kissed it. He decided. “’Gani. I have to go.”
“Where?” the other asked.
He did not answer. He remained silent as he looked down at his hand.
“At least,” his friend said, “leave with this.”
He was too late to stop Isagani from placing lips over his mouth. He paled, as his eyes darted in all directions, keenly aware of being behind a door that anyone could open, where anyone could accuse. He became painfully aware of his sweat, his grime, his bloody hands, his filth, his sin. His heart pounded, as his mouth was kept locked in place. He gasped for air, as the lips were taken away.
Gaining his breath, he placed a kiss on Isagani’s forehead. Then he stood.
He took up the pistol from his desk, and walked out the door.
HE MET HIS first mandirigma at the San Gabriel bulwark of the Intramuros, nearest the España bridge. He clasped the starter in his left hand, a strange pistol inside a hand familiar with scalpels, not weapons. He aimed it at the wooden soldier’s chest, a foot or two above his head. He twisted the starter pistol’s knobs, turning them to their highest settings. He pulled the trigger, and sent a surge of lightning.
The surge hit the mandirigma squarely. Current coursed through its body, disabling its heart, head, arms, and legs. The body fell down onto one knee, before toppling into the moat.
When the device delivered a small bolt of current, it started the quartz deep in the heart of each mandirigma, which made it pump the fluids that oiled and moved them. A small surge of current was enough to move each for days. A strong one paralyzed it.
He walked toward the fort as he primed the starter to reload.
He stopped when he met a mandirigma, disabling each with a single strong burst of galvanic current. He was smaller than any of them, and weaved through their bodies with ease. He ignored those that ignored him.
He kept walking through the darkness of the early summer evening. The streetlamps remained unlit. Windows and doors remained shut. Still in his tattered and bloody surgery apron, Basilio walked through the streets of the walled city, now silenced and still.
Bodies of mechanical guardia civil and human katipuneros littered the ground. Four mandirigma surrounded him, as he approached the gates. He fired four well-aimed charges, toppling the guardia civil automata toward his feet. He walked over the figures of metal and wood. He kept walking until he reached the government house, where any Spanish officer who remained was kept. He kept walking, his starter ready to fire.
He finally stood before the governor’s palace, his back to the Fuerte de Santiago.
“You are sabotaging your masterpieces, Basilio!”
He heard the voice he sought.
The jeweler peered over the window. The long whitened hair no longer hidden under a hat, no longer pulled back elegantly to face the elite. The eyes were still hidden behind dark lenses, even in the fading light of evening. He still wore his dark coat. His hand still grasped a jeweled cane. The man was regal, even at the height of his despairing mania.
“Yes, Ginoô,” Basilio answered. “I am.”
He felt the weariness of too many hours awake, too many hours watching the wounded and the dead. He walked inside the palace with even steps, walking past the bodies of uniformed soldiers and the debris of ruined guardia civil. He walked up the grand stairs of thick native wood.
Simoun sat at the head of the long meeting table. The flag with the Spanish king’s coat of arms had been torn away behind him. A crude red flag was spread out now, with three capital Ks at its center, the symbol of the Katipunan. His elbows were over the table, his hands steepled under his tinted lenses. Men in farmer’s tunics and rifles flanked him, the red kerchief of the katipunero around their necks. The floor had pools of blood, soaking the silk coats of the fallen colonial officers.
Basilio stopped at the other end of the
table. “What have you done?” he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.
“What you have wanted for this country,” the jeweler said.
“My creatures have helped you get rid of them. But I do not want one tyrant replaced by another,” he answered. He held the starter pistol by his side. “I want my people to rule my land. But not with fear and terror.”
“The man who wanted that is long dead.”
“The man before me will let many people die, among our own as well as our enemies –”
“The mandirigma will turn the tide in our favor,” the jeweler interrupted.
“What kind of a victory, what kind of rule is this, if people cannot decide to die for their country, because they died before they could decide?”
The jeweler watched him through his tinted lenses. “It is too late now, Basilio,” he said.
Basilio kept his gaze. “Maybe. But I will stop what I can.” He raised the starter pistol. The surge of galvanic current sparked as lightning, and arced toward the jeweler. But the jeweler ducked away, and the surge hit the red flag on the wall.
Basilio then turned the device, and placed it over his heart.
He pressed the trigger.
INTRAMUROS REMAINED, BUT it became a shell of itself. The reminder of Spanish rule was set aside.
The government buildings were ransacked. The fort was deserted. The universities were emptied. The churches were locked. The automaton guardia civil were dismantled, gutted by katipuneros or turned into blades. The gates of the walled city remained open. The seat of power was moved outside its walls.
Wars and skirmishes continued in all the islands. But all the islands were furnished with mandirigma, unmatched in their speed and agility. The negotiations required for such warriors caused a united front, resulting in a united battle.
Until some semblance of peace, and a semblance of a national government by the people, was found.
IN A DAMAGED stone house in Binondo, a man remained.
He sat behind a large narra desk. He stared at the plans sketched on great swathes of paper, covering the desk, lit only by a small oil lamp moved to a corner. The setting sun darkened the room, dimmed with relics, gears, and dust. Keeping the time was a gentle ticking of clockwork. The clockwork prompted a galvanic starter, strapped around the man's chest, urging a human heart to beat.
Philippine Speculative Fiction, Volume 10 Page 15