by Sean Wallace
Odd indeed: the mechanika clasping Master Ko did not, ultimately, cry out at all, but simply held Ko aloft. The old man looked at the machine with a look that quickly shifted from startlement to curiosity, as he muttered something too quietly to be heard by any in the room save perhaps the mechanika itself. The translator, a young man – it was difficult to guess his age, though he was probably not quite twenty – native to the Chosŏn kingdom, and who had apparently studied in the West, held on to his odd little horse-hair scholar’s hat (which reminded Lasher of a bishop’s mitre) as he quickly translated: “It cannot do a man harm, Master Ko says. Its mind is intelligent, yes, but rebellion is not in its constitution, for it has been built in accordance to the Five Relationships of Master Kong – Confucius, as you know him – and the Sixth Relationship added by the mechano-philosopher Cheng-ja. The mechanika must be in need of repairs. This is, you may be certain, its only way of alerting Clockworks Master Ko to an unnoticed problem or malfunctioning system.”
“I see,” said Lasher with a nod, wondering whether they had withheld the power of speech from mechanikae because of technical limitations, or out of obeisance to some obscure Oriental doctrine. But the automaton seemed to understand Master Ko’s words as well as the translator did, or perhaps at least, like a dog. As the old man spoke, it slowly set him down to the ground. It did so with head bowed, in the deferential manner that Eastern subordinates seemed unfailingly to show their betters – except, of course, in the ever-recurring times of open revolt.
Lasher thought of Tokyo aflame, of the scorching of Kyushu and Honshu, of the rumors that had circulated about the destructions there. Before his mind’s eye, he could see still the tattered, secret Kodaks he’d glimpsed at opulent, secret meetings, white borders framing the sepia-toned images of heartless figures – perhaps men, perhaps Nipponese mechanikae – caught red-handed and jolly as they busily decorated towers and bridges with ornamental strands of human corpses. He glanced at the machine, saying, perhaps as much in hope as in commentary, “It bows before Master Ko.”
The other Westerners of the party nodded, muttering as their tension suddenly eased. Lasher listened to them not at all: he had locked eyes with MacMillan, and the older man was nodding, his fine mottled-brown bowler clutched against his chest with one hand, the very image of panic stifled by a stalwart heart. The translator, Hwangbo, was prattling on about how mechanikae had long been designed to defer to living men, but how apparent age also factored into the severity of deference shown by any given mechanika to a human or to another mechanika.
“Fascinating,” MacMillan commented, and tapped his cane noiselessly upon the dirt floor of the factory. He turned to the translator and held out his hat as if it were a prop, a tool to facilitate the discussion. “But would it not be simpler, and less jarring, to have the mechanika spit forth its communication, say, upon a slip of paper, as do the gearmen of the Continental Trappist abbeys? I mean, if you are going to make them intelligent enough to perform tasks at all . . .”
The translator smiled, and shook his head, the horsehair mitre bobbing a little has he did so. “Do you not wonder why it is also against the law for a citizen of Chosŏn to teach you our language? It is forbidden that a machine should have any language capacity at all, even at an . . . an unconscious level. Language, Mr MacMillan, is always power, and we have learned from your tragedy in Paris.”
“Indeed,” MacMillan said, nodding. “But language can empower you, and your, ah, tools, as well.” Lasher followed the older man’s gaze to the far side of the clockworks, where a peasant was silently modeling the use of some sort of hoe to a gleaming, metallic giant off to one side of the Clockworks. “Whilst you must teach your mechanikae how to perform even the simplest tasks, we can explain, or better yet, we can write the commands in a special language that hurries a mechanika’s learning. It needn’t understand, beyond in the functional level. Mechanika need not be intelligent for them to grasp—”
“I know quite well how European and American gearmen work,” the translator cut in with a smile. “There was a Wedgewood Butler unit serving in my rooming house at Cambridge, sir. Vintage of ’71, I believe, but a sturdy machine and showing no sign of flagging at all! But . . . we do things differently here in Chosŏn, sir. That is a simple fact that you shall have to accept while you remain our guest here.”
Lasher smiled at the young Corean man’s pride: the lad had seen the West. He knew a thing or two, standing there before them in his white tunic and tatty pantaloons, in his white rubbery slippers and black horsehair scholar’s hat, looking for all the world like some benighted oriental Papist as he spoke his English in lovely, dulcet tones.
Translators. Lasher loathed them like nothing else.
The street market was a horror of noise and stink, soul-churningly loud and crammed with peasants who seemed to have only one volume at which to speak, that being their absolute physical maximum. At one corner, an old woman stood beside a broad basket of shriveled, miniature oranges; at another, there were cages of small beasts for sale – chickens, mice, birds, and creatures for which Lasher did not know the names. Old men were gathered around one large bucket of a whitish, cloudy liquid, into which they sank their dippers, thereafter raising them to their lips – without doubt, some sort of Asiatic liquor, Lasher supposed with a shudder.
The odours of any other city – the sweat of the masses, the reek of rot and death and illness, and the choking smoke of burnt wood and coal – here were complemented by the prodigious stink of garlic, the overwhelming aroma of something gone outright rotten – something vegetal and vinegary – and the foulness of a latrine or foul standing water somewhere in the vicinity.
Yet if any one of the five senses were most battered by the assault of the marketplace, it was one’s hearing. One would be forgiven for imagining that the market folk believed screaming at passers-by would magically induce them to buy something: a man nearby selling apples and some other round orange fruit clapped his hands so hard it seemed he was hoping the skins of his palms would somehow peel straight off by the day’s end. A pair of female musicians – blind, as was apparently the custom – wailed at the top of their lungs while sawing away at horrid little bowed instruments, the sound of which resembled nothing so much as cats being tortured by schoolboys. Somewhere nearby, an express locomotive screamed along its track and through the market, and chickens and fishmongers shrieked in its wake.
For a man of delicate constitution, the place represented a sort of hell. Unfortunately, Lasher’s constitution was, indeed, quite delicate; yet, regardless, this was the one place where Lasher was assured a measure of privacy with which to speak to MacMillan, who thus far had been content to stride alongside him in thoughtful silence, puffing on his calabash pipe. They could, at least, be certain that the commoners hereabouts spoke no English, beyond the few foul words that were uttered by the skinny young woman in a dreadfully filthy white smock, who was just then following them along the roadway.
Young woman, indeed – nobody could call her a young lady, not while she was offering such services as were communicated with those foul, dreadful words. She may once have been, Lasher suspected, a girl of virtue; but her virtue had undoubtedly gone elastic at some point in the not-too-distant past, and her wits had been dulled by too much foul usage and filth. Her eyes, Lasher noted as he glanced back at her, were red as if from a hard night of liquor, and hollow as one would expect in the eye sockets of any woman who had sold off her dignity and virtue to the voracious, wicked night. He found himself staring for a moment, and wondering what it felt like to be a person like her.
MacMillan’s voice brought him back to the conversation: “The translator,” the Scotsman grunted, as if it were a complete statement on its own.
“Indeed,” Lasher replied, turning his attention to the matter at hand. He was hoping MacMillan would expand on whatever observation it was to which he’d just alluded. But MacMillan just cleared his throat slowly, coughing. Smoke of some sort �
� it reeked neither like wood nor like coal, but of some other vegetal sort entirely – had wafted into the roadway, momentarily, from some doorway nearby, but it was now dissipating. Perhaps an opium den, though the translator-boy had claimed (as he had, falsely, so many other things) that such did not exist in Chosŏn. Upso, upso, the boy had said when Lasher had asked. That dreaded word, upso, which meant “have not got”.
It was a curse in this country, upso, the word that was, without fail, spoken about nearly every blasted thing a civilized man might want or require. In China, Lasher had found few such limitations; it had seemed that, at times, everything had been available for a price (though that, at times, had provided him with a shudder as well). But in Chosŏn, upso, upso, upso was the rule, and indeed a law both ceaseless and oppressive. At times, the civilized man would be forced to assume these people had nothing at all. Except, Lasher thought, glancing over his shoulder again, but he found that the girl was gone now, finally.
Ah, upso, he sighed to himself, though, strangely, on some level he had known she’d gone – that he had not turned until he was sure she already had left to attempt to peddle herself to someone else.
After what felt like a long pause, MacMillan turned to Lasher with some amusement on his face, and while adjusting his bowler, doubtless to place his arm just so as to conceal his words from any who might be watching and reading his lips at a distance, he clarified, “Well, what did you think of him?”
“What? Ah . . . oh! I think . . .” Lasher cringed a little, realizing he’d been staring off into the distance. The translator, that lad in the black hat, he was the subject of their discussion – of course he was! What was the lad’s family name again? Sometimes, Lasher dreaded these conversations. He found himself so muddled, at times, names slipping out of his grasp, details eluding his notice that MacMillan had picked out in an instant. Often he felt as if MacMillan was speaking to him only in the way a teacher speaks to his pupil – an answer tucked in behind every possible question, every exchange either concealing some sort of test, or else facilitating nothing more than a slow, utilitarian externalization of the instructor’s own already formulated thoughts.
Endless they seemed, these questions which he was supposed to answer in order that MacMillan might proceed directly to furnish on his own far superior answers, which invariably led to the hidden truth. It was not that MacMillan tended to be angry, or to ridicule him: far from it, he was constantly encouraging, and listened very carefully to Lasher’s thoughts. But the process nonetheless seemed less than complimentary to the brilliant Scotsman’s conversational partner.
Nonetheless, as always, Lasher felt compelled to attempt the problem.
“Hwangbo?” he said, shaking his head a little. “I find he is more than a bit arrogant, and believes that he is quite deeply intimate with the mechanics of Western thinking. I suspect that he really does know many more things than he lets on, things that he will refuse to explain to us. Such as, for example, how mechanikae could observe the Five Confucian relationships, and be bound by this Sixth one invented by this Cheng-ja, without any degree of language within their consciousness. How can a subject recognize king, or elder recognize junior, or machine recognize human, without words to give the notions meaning? And of course, how is respect defined? Is it subservience? What of ‘harmful aid’ provided to one’s master, or to any human? These are difficult problems, much less the question of how a machine might differentiate its own kind from human without the use of language or intelligence for sorting through such categories?” Lasher shook his head, concluding, “Simply put, I trust him not at all to translate anything as accurately as we shall need.”
“Mmmm. Yes, I agree. There are plenty of baffling obfuscations surrounding this foolishness – this insistence by Chosŏn tinkers to give their mechanika intelligence, after all the recent horrors of in France, and, er, elsewhere . . . and Hwangbo is abetting their secrecy. And of course, he is the source of the letter,” MacMillan added, as if simply in passing.
“He is?” Lasher exclaimed, once again taken aback at how MacMillan could have ferreted out such a conclusion from observation alone.
“Of course he is.” MacMillan patted him softly on the back, and said, “Lasher, Lasher, did you not listen to his words, his phrasing, the iambs and dactyls that saturated all of his comments today? It is as if you have never read a poem, my dear lad . . . have you, indeed? At times, one must realize, the words chosen in order to convey a message, and the rhythms with which they are delivered, are often more significant than the mere message itself. The mark of a mind, of a certain kind of mind at least, can be spied out in the words selected by a fellow, whether inscribed or spoken, and a certain identity of one’s linguistic self carries over from one form to the other.”
Lasher had stared at the letter enough times to have passages, at least, burned into his memory: the dire summons to Hanyang; the danger in which the nation’s Emperor had of late found himself; the accusations that would persist until such time as firm evidence contradicting them could be forwarded; and the peril for stability in the Far East that was posed by the events hinted at in the letter.
“Make no mistake, Lasher: the author of our letter is nobody but the translator Hwangbo. This much is true, but . . .”
“Yes?” Lasher raised an eyebrow, and curled his upper lip inward, expectant in his demeanor. He had taken an instant disliking to the lad, and though he wasn’t sure why, he was certain that practically any gossip would have entertained him immensely.
“But, my dear fellow . . . what I meant to ask, in point of fact, is whether or not you have noticed that he is at present following us, albeit at a considerable distance?”
Lasher fought the urge to look over his shoulder. “Indeed?”
“Yes, indeed,” MacMillan replied with a curt nod. “If you had not been so distracted by that Nipponese streetwalker who followed us.”
“Nipponese?” Lasher asked. “But, James, how can you tell?”
MacMillan turned, grinning. “Yes, Nipponese; I imagine she is a refugee of some sort. There are a number of them about, if you keep your eyes open. But if you haven’t figured out how to tell them from the Chosŏn peasants, I’m not going to ruin the puzzle for you. And besides, it is of no consequence to us at present, considering the tenacity with which our young translator is tailing us. I have discovered that he has absolutely no connexion whatsoever to the Emperor of Chosŏn.”
Lasher glanced, finally, over his shoulder but glimpsing neither Hwangbo nor his black hat, while despairing of ever keeping up with his mentor. At times like this, MacMillan left him whole trails of clues to guide him to the same observations, if a bit belated, but Lasher was just then far too flustered to ask for the explanation that MacMillan would have so delighted in giving. Instead, he simply blurted out, “Look, the translator . . . is he following us conspicuously? Or on the sly? Is he alone? Who the devil could be so interested as to have us watched?”
“I mean to find out, and within the next few minutes,” MacMillan said, and gestured with his walking stick toward an alleyway between two ramshackle wooden buildings. Lasher followed him into the alleyway, hurrying past a small squadron of chickens tethered to a single point by a stone-and-masonry wall, and round a dingy corner.
“We shall wait for him here,” MacMillan whispered with a mischievous grin on his face, and leaned into a dark doorway behind a mound of foul, stinking garbage.
“All right,” Lasher said, ducking behind a trash bin just as MacMillan shushed him silent. A few moments later, some strange, unseen zoomechanika clicked past somewhere, nearby, noisy as any Afghan battlefield, and similarly unwelcome. It was a minute or so later that the translator finally hurried past them, that lad who had given his name as Hwangbo. He was glancing curiously about, this way and that, and bore some oversized listening device in his hand, a tube extending up from its side into his ear. Without a moment’s warning, MacMillan leapt out at the boy, cracking his walking stick acr
oss the fellow’s head – and sending that black mitre flying from it, into the gutter – just before tackling him.
As MacMillan’s arms closed about the lad’s neck, the listening device clattered to the ground and broke apart. Then the Scotsman succumbed to gravity and landed square upon young Hwangbo, who for his part, struggled and cried out only a little. As the two howled at one another, MacMillan grabbed at the topknot on the lad’s head, now exposed. Lasher quickly stepped out from behind the trash mound, blinking slowly, his derringer in his hand.
“Oy!” he yelped at the struggling pair.
MacMillan ignored him, reaching out for the cane that he had dropped during the altercation. If he could reach it, he would be able to choke the translator to death, or perhaps even draw out the blade, and run the lad through. The scene was desperate, Lasher was reminded, by the way his mentor had resorted to such violence so soon: his bowler had flown to the filthy ground, and his greying mane was unfortunately disheveled already, only moments after the beginning of the melee. It was an extremely bad idea – the running-through of the Corean lad, that is. Whatever MacMillan’s standing back in Scotland, Hwangbo was considered by his countrymen to be an adult man, and, what was more, he was (unlike MacMillan) a native of this country. His death would carry much more severe penalties if perpetrated by a foreigner: of that much, Lasher felt certain.
“Oy! Stop it!” Lasher called again. This time, MacMillan heeded, letting the translator out from under his person. Hwangbo, for his part, raised up his two hands, as Lasher supposed he must have been taught to do during his Cambridge days, in military exercises or some such. As the two men rose to their feet – MacMillan without raising his hands at all, so certain must he have been in his trust of a friend – Lasher shouted, “What nasty bloody business are you about, then, you filthy ragamuffin of a savage?”