Speaking Bones, page 97
Soto gave her a bitter grin of acknowledgment. “Even so, my case would be bolstered if I had documentary proof—Gin’s trial transcript, Zomi’s retraction, Rin Coda’s suicide note, and so on…. Well, no point in pining after the impossible. But even if I could summon such corroborating documents, I can only write one book, and one book is easily destroyed. How many minds can a single silk scroll change? Even if it works, it will take a long time, time we may not have.”
“I wish I had better ideas,” Fara lamented. “But all I know is poetry, painting, music. I really know nothing.”
“That is not nothing,” Soto chided. “Beauty and art can persuade through the heart even when grand speeches from learned philosophers fail to sway the mind.”
Fara forced herself to smile, knowing that Soto was trying to cheer her up. But her spirits had sunk lower than ever. Her brother and aunt-mother were set on a collision course that she was certain would end in disaster, but she was helpless to avert it.
Throughout the conversation, Savo sat to the side, listening but saying nothing. He wanted to help Fara mend a broken family and a country about to be torn asunder, but he didn’t know how.
Something Soto said stayed with him, however: But I can only write one book.
* * *
The seaside villa welcomed a new guest: Rati Yera.
After a brief council of war, Phyro had dispatched the Blossom Gang and the rest of his small band of rebels to different parts of Dara to prepare for the assault on Pan. But Rati Yera, upon finding out that Savo and Fara were sheltering with Widow Wasu, wanted to visit her prized students first. The old inventor was, after all, committing treason, and they might never see each other again.
Though two years had passed since they were last together, Rati and Savo soon fell back into their easy rapport. With pride, Savo showed Rati a writing zither he had taken with him from the Temple of Still and Flowing Waters.
“What a marvel!” exclaimed Rati. Although she couldn’t read the wax logograms carved by the machine, she admired its whirling gears, swinging cams, bouncing levers, vibrating strings. “Your invention would surely dazzle even Na Moji, were he to return to life.”
Savo beamed. There was no one whose praise of his engineering skills he craved more. “If I am able to soar high in the air today, it’s only because a great teacher took care to launch me into the wind.”
Rati laughed, but the corners of her eyes were moist. “The cerulean dye may come from the indigo plant, but it glows with a hue far brighter than the flower of the original. The luckiest teachers are those who live to witness their students surpass them.”
Savo blushed with pleasure. “The writing zither is a good instrument and may do much good, but it isn’t quite enough.”
“How so?”
And so Savo described Lady Soto’s dilemma, the problem that he had been trying to solve for days with little result. Soto wanted to write a book to reveal Empress Jia’s manipulations to the world, but a single copy of the book would accomplish little. Plus, she could not corroborate her account with documentary evidence.
“Ah, I could perhaps help you out there,” said Rati, smiling.
She revealed that when the Blossom Gang left Last Bite to join Zomi Kidosu, Mota, Arona, and Widi had secreted some of the most important documents related to Gin’s trial in Rati’s wheeled chair and snuck them out of the archives.
“What?” Savo couldn’t believe his ears. Dimly, he seemed to recall that Rati Yera’s wheeled chair had indeed seemed extra heavy and clumsy on the day they departed from Last Bite.
Rati chuckled. “We are, after all, a gang of thieves. And though we agreed to work with the emperor and Secretary Kidosu, we didn’t forget about Mota’s dream of one day proving the Marshal’s innocence.”
“Lady Soto will be overjoyed,” exclaimed Savo. “The documents will strengthen her case and fill in gaps in her own personal knowledge. The gods are truly with us.”
“The gods do get a lot of credit,” said Rati, a bit miffed.
Savo’s brow knitted again. “But even the documents exist in only one copy…. We still cannot reach everyone in Dara. I could construct a writing zither to write in Lady Soto’s hand and teach her to use it. The writing zither is faster than the carving knife after one becomes proficient with it. But even if I could teach both Fara and Lady Soto to master the instrument, with all three of us working nonstop, we wouldn’t be able to make enough copies of the book and the documents to make a difference.”
Rati Yera’s eyes lit up. Nothing excited her more than an engineering challenge. “During the war with the Lyucu,” she mused, not noticing the way Savo’s face flinched at this, “I had to figure out a way to instruct thousands of ornithopters all at once. Mechanizing the process of copying a composition in the language of drilled holes around many cork cylinders, though far simpler than replicating a composition in the language of Ano logograms on many scrolls, is fundamentally the same problem. Here, let me sketch for you what I…”
As Rati delved into the details of her invention, Savo’s initial instinct was to stop her. He didn’t want to hear about machinery invented for war and killing, and he didn’t want to arouse Phyro’s suspicion that he was, despite everything that had happened to him in Dara, spying for the Lyucu. Yet, a quote that Master Nazu Tei had taught him, attributed to Luan Zyaji, came back to him.
“A knife is not malicious merely because it is sharp, and a plot is not evil merely because it is effective. All depends on the wielder.”
Why can’t inventions birthed in war be copied and wielded to promote peace?
“Unfortunately, my solution isn’t directly translatable to your problem,” said Rati Yera regretfully. “I needed only a few dozen pseudo-logograms to devise my flight plans—even navigating the freedom of the skies is but a tiny, bounded domain compared to the vastness of all human experience, a borderless province that could only be described via hundreds of thousands of logograms. My cork-cylinder copying machine is too simple.”
Savo’s fingers idly struck the strings of his writing zither as he pondered Rati Yera’s words. Copy. Copy. Copy. As the zither’s tiny whirling blades carved out the same logogram over and over, the same musical phrase echoed around the room.
“Can’t you play something a little more tuneful?” asked Fara, entering the room bearing a tray of snacks and tea. “You play so repetitively that one could have mistaken you for a puppet in Na Moji’s mechanical orchestra. I, after all, am your music master. Your playing reflects on me.” She laughed at the wounded expression on Savo’s face.
“Sorry,” said Savo, fumbling to take the tray from her. “I was too absorbed in—”
“Wait!” cried Rati Yera. “Dandelion—er, Princess, Your Highness, what was it you just said?”
“I was just kidding with Savo—”
“No, no, before that. Something about a mechanical orchestra?”
“Oh, it’s from an old account back in the time of the Tiro states. Na Moji supposedly constructed a team of wooden puppets for the King of Xana that was capable of playing the moaphya. The witness described the mechanical orchestra’s playing as skillful, but I imagine the admiration was mostly from the fact that it could be done at all rather than that it was done well.”
“Fara told me about that back at the Splendid Urn,” added Savo. “It helped me grasp your instructible carts.”
“A mechanical orchestra,” muttered Rati Yera, holding up a hand to silence the other two as she squeezed her eyes shut in concentration. “Another level of abstraction… yes, another way to teach and learn…”
At length, Rati’s eyes snapped open as she let out a satisfied sigh. “The answer is automata. Or, as Secretary Zomi Kidosu put it, ‘to multiply the work of one adept a hundredfold’ through the use of machines.”
“Automata?” asked Fara, looking lost. “Do you mean… like the cooking automata at the Splendid Urn? You want Savo to build an orchestra of mechanical scribes to pluck at writing zithers?”
Rati laughed. “No, not literally a mechanical orchestra, though a scribe using Savo’s machine to write also plays music.”
Savo gazed at her intently. “Master, I’m afraid that you’ve flown too high for me to follow.”
“I haven’t worked out the details, but here’s what I’m thinking. In principle…”
Rati explained that in her exploration of the art of automata construction, two principles had proven to be helpful in overcoming most obstacles.
The first principle was higher abstraction. The primitive system of individual wheel turns that defined the capability of the instructible carts threatened to overwhelm the pilot until abstracted into a system of compound knots that could be strung together to represent a map. The primitive language of punched holes that specified each minute aspect of the wingbeat of an ornithopter was impossible to use to write a flight plan until it was abstracted into the higher language of pseudo-logograms that represented numbers, directions, and degrees.
The second principle was imbuing machines with wisdom. Whether it was the self-adjusting feedback loop powering the even-tempered archon or the human intelligence encoded in the knot-map and the master cork cylinder, marvelous automata were made possible by reifying wisdom, by reducing experience and practiced routine into precise instructions that could be carried out by a machine, repeatedly and at high speed.
She beckoned at Savo and gesticulated at the writing zither as she elaborated, “If I understand correctly, for the zither-playing scribe, the musical phrase associated with each logogram is just a mnemonic device. But the music can also be interpreted as a series of precise manipulations of the zither strings. The musical score then can be used to control the writing knife and the wax depositor just like the language of drilled holes instructs the wings and fins of the ornithopters. Once we have the score, we don’t need to play it as music; we just need to feed it through the writing engine as quickly as possible.”
Savo tried to imagine such a thing: himself translating each logogram into a musical phrase and compiling Lady Soto’s manuscript into a score; mechanical fingers hovering over the zither strings and plucking out the music; cords and levers connected to the zither strings moving the writing knife and wax depositor to carve out new sequences of logograms….
* * *
Savo began by developing the “score” format. Based on Rati’s experience with ornithopters, he settled on using punched holes to encode the machine-instruction language. However, instead of small cork cylinders, he would use spooling silk cloth hardened with varnish as the medium to account for the increased complexity of logograms.
First, he mapped the individual actions of the writing knife and the wax depositor into distinct patterns of holes. Individual logograms would then be composed from these patterns—essentially a “song” for each word. He compiled long tables mapping the most commonly used logograms to tunes. More obscure logograms would be added on an ad-hoc basis.
Next, he tackled the construction of a writing engine that could read the score and produce logograms. Translating the pattern of holes into lever presses, gear turns, rack slides, and arm swings was a relatively easy matter of mechanical engineering, and by using a comblike row of pins that dipped into the holes as the spooling cloth was scrolled underneath, he rigged a simple reader that could drive the writing zither’s wax-carving engine in place of the scribe’s string-plucking hands. The matter of replicating the details of Soto’s hand in each logogram, however, posed a challenge.
Savo was no skilled calligrapher; he had but the roughest understanding of how a scribe’s touch translated into specific artistic effects in the final logogram. When he had devised the writing zither for his fellow Mendist monastics at the Temple of Still and Flowing Waters, his task had been simplified by the relative austerity of the standard clerical script and the extremely loose form of torrent script—it was easy to write in neat cuts or wild strokes. His imitation of Fara’s hand, on the other hand, had been much less convincing—though passable due to a lover’s idealization of the beloved. As Lady Soto’s unique hand was an essential part of the text’s claim to authenticity, the machine had to get it exactly right.
Fara came to his rescue. A practiced calligrapher and artist, she dissected the strokes of Soto’s handwriting with far more insight. With her help, Savo finally succeeded in tuning the writing engine to replicate Soto’s hand with nearly perfect fidelity.
“Once we have your book in the form of a scroll of holes instead of wax logograms on cloth, we would be able to make a new copy of your book just by running the spool through the writing engine,” explained Savo.
“But how do we translate my book into this scroll of holes?” asked Soto, looking at the clacking writing engine with suspicion and confusion. “And it isn’t just my book; we have to make facsimiles of all the other documents as well.”
Savo’s face fell. The tables for translating individual logograms into patterns of holes were long and unwieldy. Even he, the designer, could not memorize them all. To create the punched-hole scrolls by hand, one logogram at a time, was beyond daunting.
“Could you build a writing zither that punches holes in cloth instead of carving wax?” asked Fara. She was proposing, in essence, that Savo build an encoder.
“But someone would still have to read each book and rewrite it using the zither,” said Savo. He did some quick math. “We have to work slowly and be careful about mistakes, since holes are much harder to patch than errant wax carvings. All of us would have to pitch in—”
“I’m too old to learn a whole new system of writing,” fretted Soto.
“It’s worse than that,” said Savo. “Copying books every hour for the next few months, checking and rechecking for errors… that would… would bore—”
“—why should we learn to write for machines when machines should learn to read like humans?” said Rati at the same time.
The two looked at each other and burst out laughing as they recognized a kindred spirit of productive laziness.
“So what would be the more interesting solution?” asked Fara. “How could we get an automaton to turn a manuscript into a pattern of punched holes?”
“We need to teach the machine to read,” said Rati.
Soto and Fara looked at her as though the master engineer had lost her mind. Even Savo didn’t see how this was possible.
But Rati kept on muttering under her breath, “If only the oculium eye could see more than a single point of light….”
* * *
To occupy herself in the isolated seaside manor, Fara had taken up gardening.
While pruning a beach-rose bush, she noticed a hefty bumblebee crawling over a dandelion flower at her feet. The insect was so large that the thin stalk of the flower was unable to support it, swaying back and forth precariously as the bumblebee shifted from one side to the other, scrambling to hold on like a drunken sailor clinging to the mast or a tyrant struggling to remain on her throne.
Fara laughed at the image. She decided she would turn the scene into the pattern for a knitted shawl. The nights were growing chilly, and she wanted something warm to wear and amusing to look at—besides, knitting would keep her mind off her worries about Phyro.
As she worked in the garden with her sketch pad, bleary-eyed Rati and Savo emerged from the house to have their breakfast in the garden—they had been working on the writing engine all night.
Savo took a bowl of hot porridge, flavored with wild vegetables and pickled caterpillars, to Fara.
“What are you working on?” he asked.
She showed him. She had started with a sketch of the oversized bumblebee on the dandelion. Then she had drawn a grid of tiny squares over a thin, translucent sheet of paper and overlaid this atop the sketch so that she could redo the picture as a mosaic of black-and-white squares.
“Why are you doing this?” Savo inquired in puzzlement. “Your original sketch is much prettier.”
“Spoken like someone who’s never knitted,” said Fara. “This is how you make a knitting pattern.”
She explained how each square represented a stitch, knit, or purl, and that by working like this, one square at a time, she converted the scene into the language of loops of yarn on the needle.
“That is a fascinating way to see the world,” Savo said. He knelt down to examine the grid, admiring the way Fara had translated thicknesses, curves, and shades into patterns of black-and-white squares.
“I suppose all artists strive to come up with new ways of seeing the world,” said Fara. “Lady Mira saw the Hegemon as abstract, geometric shapes, and captured the essence of his spirit in the bold strokes of her embroidery. The mathematical painters of the Tiro states discovered the world seen through the pinhole in a camera obscura, and thereby devised methods for creating the illusion of depth on a flat page. Men and women in past generations learned to visualize the world as a grid of colored knots, and that is how we have pretty sweaters, shawls, and the knotwork of old Xana.”
Rati, done with her porridge, joined the pair. Intrigued, the two engineers continued to observe as Fara slowly filled in the grid with a piece of charcoal. When she reached the bumblebee’s eyes, she hesitated.
“It’s funny,” said Fara. “I sometimes wonder whether the bumblebee sees the world the way a knitter does. It has such strange eyes—each seems composed from numerous facets.”
“I think each facet is actually a smaller eye, if the zoologists at the Imperial Academy are to be believed,” said Rati. She vaguely recalled Kisli Péro telling her something about the so-called “compounded eyes” of bees.
Fara nodded. “If so, then perhaps each simple eye only sees the world in its view as a dot of light and color, which then must be added to the dots perceived by all the other eyes to make up a full picture.”
“What an interesting observation!” said Rati. “Though it seems more likely to me that each of the little eyes is like the pinhole on—” Abruptly, she ceased talking, and stared at the pattern under Fara’s charcoal intently.
