Automatic Eve Read online

  Automatic Eve

  KIKOU NO EVE

  Copyright © Rokuro Inui 2014

  English translation rights arranged with SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co., Ltd. through Japan UNI Agency, Inc., Tokyo

  English translation © 2019 VIZ Media, LLC

  Cover and interior design by Shawn Carrico

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

  HAIKASORU

  Published by VIZ Media, LLC

  P.O. Box 77010

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.haikasoru.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Inui, Rokuro–, 1971- author. | Treyvaud, Matt, translator.

  Title: Automatic Eve / Rokuro Inui ; translated by Matt Treyvaud.

  Other titles: Kiko– no ibu. English

  Description: San Francisco : Haikasoru, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019006396 | ISBN 9781974708079

  Subjects: LCSH: Robots—Fiction. | Empresses—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PL871.5.N88 K5513 2019 | DDC 895.63/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006396

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  First printing, August 2019

  Haikasoru eBook edition

  ISBN: 978-1-9747-1298-4

  Automatic Eve

  Hercules in the Box

  Theseus in the Age of Myth

  Renegade Geppetto

  Psyche Eternal

  About the Author

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  Beyond the back gate lay a dim, cramped alleyway that ran between the high wooden buildings to Tengen Street.

  Both sides of the alley were lined with slatted shelves stacked high with great jars of pickled ginger. They left barely enough room for one man to pass and filled the alley with a sickly vinegar smell.

  Nizaemon Egawa came through the gate as though sleepwalking on uncertain legs.

  How could this have happened?

  Leaning against one of the pickle jars to catch his breath, he looked down at his open hand.

  It was red to the elbow with blood.

  Blood that was not his own.

  He raised the hand to his mouth and licked his palm hesitantly. Metallic, with a hint of salt. Still warm.

  This was not like the stories he had heard. There was no stink of oil, no quicksilver gleam. This was human blood, almost black in the dim light.

  He lied to me.

  Vinegar smarted in his nose with every ragged breath he drew.

  Rage boiled within him.

  His hand went to the hilt of the two-foot katana he wore in a scabbard at his waist. He popped the guard with his thumb and slid the blade partway out.

  Like his hand, it was slick with dark gore. He had neglected to shake the blood off after using it a few moments earlier and had put it away wet. Fortunately, he saw no nicks in the edge.

  He decided to go, right now, to the home of the man who had deceived him, force his way in, and cut him down where he stood.

  He slid the sword back into its scabbard.

  Kyuzo Kugimiya.

  As Nizaemon walked toward Tengen Street, the memory of his first meeting with Kyuzo less than a year ago returned to him unbidden …

  I

  “You’re a bird from the south,” Nizaemon murmured.

  The bird was large and brilliantly colored. It was tethered by a thin chain to a perch made of an unpainted tree branch protruding from a black lacquered box. The box was about four feet high, with mother-of-pearl inlay.

  “A macaw, did you call it? I’ve never seen one before.”

  The bird’s back was lapis lazuli blue, while its breast feathers were yellow as kerria flowers. It opened its black beak as if yawning, then puffed out its chest and spread its wings. They spanned a good four or five feet.

  “Is that what you think?” said the old man standing beside the perch. He was peeling a kumquat, and Nizaemon watched as he brought a handful of peel close to the macaw’s beak. The bird snapped up the offering and then threw its head back to swallow it in a few deft jerks.

  The man was Kyuzo Kugimiya, assistant at the shogunal refinery. Perhaps sixty years old, and not much like Nizaemon had imagined him. He had the air of a petty functionary and wore a long crepe silk jacket over a plain indigo kosode kimono. No sword, although he had to be of the samurai class.

  The refinery’s original role had been to produce steel and other metals, as its name suggested. But its remit had gradually expanded, beginning with research into more efficient furnaces and now encompassing all aspects of technology, including chemistry, electricity, and mechanics.

  Kyuzo lived in a lonely mansion across the river from the neighborhood where the daimyo kept their second residences in the shadow of Tempu Castle. This put him on the outskirts of the city, but his high stone walls enclosed a plot of land much larger than seemed justified for a mere “assistant”—a title which seemed at odds with his manner to begin with. Despite the much larger second building beside his residence, he was said to live there alone.

  The room they were in had a wooden floor and was full of strange and unfamiliar furnishings, some whose purpose Nizaemon could only guess at. At his host’s urging, he sat down uneasily on a couch placed artlessly in the middle of the space. Its sturdy timber frame was upholstered with a tapestry of tiny flowers in gold, red, and green. Imported, presumably.

  “Why don’t you tell me what brings you here?” asked Kyuzo, stroking the macaw’s neck.

  Nizaemon curled his hands into fists on his thighs. “I want an automaton.”

  One of Kyuzo’s thin eyebrows raised a fraction. “I’m afraid I don’t follow,” he said.

  “I’m not proud of asking this,” said Nizaemon. “Yesterday, I saw something … I saw a machine I could hardly believe was real. I came here because when I asked who could have made such a thing, there was only one answer: Kyuzo Kugimiya. I heard other rumors, too—talk of automata who look like people, living undetected in the city.”

  “So you got it into your head that I could make you one?”

  Despite the ridicule in the other man’s tone, Nizaemon nodded earnestly.

  “What made you think that was possible?”

  “I …” Under Kyuzo’s cold stare, Nizaemon began to fear that he had miscalculated terribly. He lowered his eyes.

  “Follow me,” Kyuzo said. He turned and left the room, leaving Nizaemon to hurry after him.

  He led Nizaemon out of his house and across a path of stepping-stones toward the larger second building on his property. The autumn sun was already low.

  Nizaemon saw no evidence of the slightest interest in landscaping or gardening. Not a single blade of grass grew on Kyuzo’s property. The yard was a plain expanse of earth, so flat and gray that it might have been pounded.

  The second building was built like a storehouse, with thick mud walls finished with plaster. It had no windows, and the front entrance was secured by an extra plaster-coated sliding door inside the front door itself.

  Both doors were open as they reached the entrance. The spacious packed-earth floor inside extended to the usual stone step for removing footwear and wooden board marking the beginning of the interior. Beyond that he saw an airy room dominated by a clock as high as a man. Its porcelain base was placed right at the center of the well-polished wooden floor. The timepiece itself was a three-story hexagonal construction not unlike a castle tower.

  “This is an eternal clock,” said Kyuzo, resting the palm of his hand on the dome of glass a
t its crown. The dome glowed a very faint green. Peering inside, Nizaemon saw a celestial globe marked with the stars of the night sky.

  “It marks the seven days of the week, the sixty-day cycle of the heavenly branches and earthly stems, and the twenty-four solar terms of the year. And unlike a foreign clock, where all the hours are the same length, it divides each day up correctly from sunrise to sunset. Naturally, the intercalary days and months are also accounted for in its workings. It contains well over ten thousand gears, some more than a foot wide, others smaller than a newborn baby’s fingernail.”

  Lost for words, Nizaemon could only gape at the clock. It gleamed with skillfully executed gold repoussé, and the base was adorned with masterful depictions of the guardian deities of the four directions.

  “Only remember to wind it once a year, and this clock will run forever. But its complexity is nothing compared to the human body. I have attended many dissections at the execution grounds to observe human anatomy in detail, and I can tell you that to automate it would be virtually impossible.”

  “And yet, they say that you could—”

  “Why,” interrupted Kyuzo, “do you want this automated doll to begin with?”

  “There is a woman …”

  “Ah. A woman.”

  “Her name is Hatori. She is a lady of pleasure.”

  As if in reply, the eternal clock chimed for sunset.

  II

  “I trust your cricket is not drugged?”

  The words slipped out of Nizaemon’s mouth as he looked down on his own cricket, which lay lifeless in the fighting ring with its head torn cruelly to shreds.

  “You dare to insult me?” asked the man across the table. He rose to his feet, reddening, and his hand found the hilt of his sword.

  Murmurs rippled across the assembled crowd. The cricket-fighting tournament was held for the shogun’s pleasure in the great hall at Tempu Castle, specially opened for the occasion.

  Nizaemon stared the man down. “Your cricket did not flinch even once at the bite of my Autumn Winds,” he said. “Now it continues to savage an opponent that is already dead. I have reason to be suspicious.”

  Despite their cool, soothing calls, crickets could be ferocious and cruel. Cricket fighting exploited this by goading two males into a fight. Some unscrupulous competitors used drugged feed or water to excite their crickets before a match; others painted their crickets with noxious oils, getting them used to the very same smell that would sap their opponent’s fighting spirit.

  To raise crickets in their specially constructed habitats and train them to fight by the rules was a pastime for warriors, which only made the use of drugged insects more shameful.

  “Calm yourself, Nizaemon,” said the chief administrator of the Ushiyama domain’s presence in Tempu, alarmed. But Nizaemon could not restrain himself.

  He had roamed far and wide all spring in search of the finest crickets, collecting thousands of specimens in his travels. Whenever there was a cricket-fighting tournament in one of the villages around Ushiyama Castle, he had bought the winner for a considerable sum. He had fed and watered his crickets diligently and pitted them against each other to find the best of all, on which he had bestowed the fighting name Autumn Winds.

  “I will not accept losing like this.”

  “Then bring a bowl of water here right now!”

  This was the standard way of determining whether a cricket had been given an unfair advantage. If it had been painted with oils, a rainbow pattern would soon show on the water’s surface. If it had been drugged, the water would flush its system, leaving the cricket suddenly and drastically enfeebled.

  A bowl of water was placed on the table, and the cricket was placed on the surface of the water.

  Nizaemon and his opponent, who was from the Muta domain, leaned in to watch closely. Officials and referees crowded around too, bumping foreheads over the bowl.

  Nizaemon had expected the cricket to go limp at once, but it defied his expectations. The water rippled as it continued moving its legs and wings.

  “This makes no sense,” he said. “It shouldn’t—”

  “You persist in this insolence?” cried the man from Muta. He had been accused of cheating at a tournament held for the shogun. There was no greater insult.

  He drew the sword at his waist. Nizaemon’s flashed free at the same time.

  But Nizaemon’s blade fell not on his opponent but on the table. The bowl was sliced cleanly into two pieces. A dark patch appeared and began to spread on the red tablecloth as it absorbed the water.

  “What—?”

  By the time his opponent spoke, Nizaemon’s sword was already back in its scabbard.

  A moment too late, the men of the various domains watching the argument leapt to their feet and drew their own swords.

  “Hold!”

  The tournament official halted them with a gesture. “A mechanical cricket?” he asked, his voice hoarse. His hand went to his chin.

  The damp patch on the tablecloth was dotted with dozens of finely toothed gears no larger than sesame seeds. At their center lay the remains of the cricket itself. It had been cut in two, but its hind legs still moved uselessly as their exposed clockwork ran down.

  “I gambled everything in that moment. If that cricket had been real … Just thinking about it makes me break out in a cold sweat all over again.”

  Nizaemon smiled and shrugged at Hatori, who was peering into the tiny cricket habitat placed in the corner of the room.

  The shogun’s cricket-fighting tournament was held in autumn, and each domain brought the strongest champion they had that year. Every cricket entered in the tournament had beaten out thousands of others, and money and care had been lavished on its upbringing. If Nizaemon had sliced one of them in two, an apology would not have saved him. He would not even have been permitted to end his life honorably by way of seppuku—beheading would have been his fate. There were domains who had been stripped of all status and property simply because a retainer had accidentally stepped on one of the shogun’s private stock.

  “Why are men so passionate about making insects fight?” Hatori asked, smiling and cocking her head. “Personally, I prefer listening to them.”

  A cool breeze passed through the room. Calming trills that sounded like the rolling of a ball came from within the habitat.

  Nizaemon turned away from the window where he had been sitting with a cup of sake, looking down at the reed-tangled canal far below that separated the pleasure quarters, known as the Thirteen Floors, from the rest of the city. He rose to his feet and came to sit cross-legged beside Hatori. Inside the habitat, two crickets were huddled close.

  Hatori leaned into him. “Why does one have a missing leg?” she asked.

  “That’s the female.” Nizaemon put his arm around Hatori’s shoulder and pulled her closer. “Fighting crickets are all male. To calm their excitement after the fight, we put a female in with them so they can mate.”

  “But where did her leg go?”

  “We remove one of the female’s rear legs before putting her in the cage with the male. Otherwise, if she doesn’t feel like mating, she might kick the male and injure him.”

  “Poor thing …”

  Hatori gazed into the habitat with a melancholy expression. Consciously or unconsciously, she drew her feet under the hem of her exquisite kimono, out of Nizaemon’s sight.

  He knew, however, that one of her feet was missing its little toe.

  Inside the habitat, the male had not mounted the female. The two of them were simply touching feelers as they trilled together. A warming sight, like a married couple who were comfortable in each other’s company, but Nizaemon knew that the female whose leg had been removed for mating would die before long.

  Who could have guessed that the cricket he had faced today would turn out to be an automaton? />
  The situation was unprecedented. His opponent from the Muta domain had been taken into custody at once, and Nizaemon understood that he was now facing severe questioning. He had brought not a drugged insect but an automated one to the shogunal cricket-fighting tournament. Muta would be lucky if the shogun only forced its daimyo to commit seppuku. The whole domain could be dissolved as punishment.

  Nizaemon closed the lid of the habitat, put it in a rattan cage, and hung it under the eaves to catch the breeze.

  He had received the habitat, along with the cricket inside it—who had succeeded the unfortunate Autumn Winds in the tournament—from his own domain’s liaison as a reward for seeing through the Muta domain’s treachery.

  Crickets did not survive the autumn, but a habitat could be reused every year. And this habitat was a work of art, so fine that even Nizaemon was not sure he deserved it.

  “There’s somebody else, isn’t there?” Nizaemon whispered as they lay side by side listening to the crickets.

  “What?”

  Hatori’s eyes flew open. She gazed at his face.

  Scrub off her white powder and red lipstick, he knew, and her face would be simple and plain. But she would never show it to him, just as she would never reveal her innermost heart. Even her smiles were manufactured, no different from a mask.

  “Tell me the truth,” he said.

  “The truth? What do you mean?”

  “I can’t figure out who you sent your little toe to. I just want to know where your heart is.”

  Hatori’s gaze stayed on his face, as if probing his thoughts.

  “What kind of man is he?” Nizaemon asked.

  “He’s already very far away from here.”

  She spoke evasively, but he could tell from her tone that whoever it was might be gone, but not forgotten.

  “I’m planning to buy out your contract,” he said.

  Women were bonded to the Thirteen Floors by indenture. A rich patron could pay off the debt of a favorite and set her free.

  “But …”