They emerged in the captain’s cabin. The afternoon sun streamed in through the broad, paned window she had observed from outside, illuminating a space that combined luxury with cramped conditions and odd materials. Fine brass fittings gleamed everywhere, including lamps of a peculiar design fixed to the khoresh-wood walls, but most of the furniture was woven of wicker or rattan; the ceiling beams were so low that even Arabella had to duck, and the captain bent over nearly double. But clearly he had long experience with the situation, as he somehow contrived to move about the cabin with the same long-legged grace he displayed in the streets outside.
The captain moved to a figure seated near the window, silhouetted against the bright light from outside. Despite the man’s large and rather outlandish hat, Arabella had failed to notice him at first, so quiet and still was he. “How do you do?” she said, and slightly raised her cap. But to this greeting the seated figure made no reply.
The captain chuckled slightly. “He does well, Mr. Ashby, quite well indeed.” He reached over and turned up the wick of one of the lamps.
The seated figure was a Turk, dressed in the most extraordinary garb of that nation, complete with a silk turban, flowing sleeves, and a red waistcoat embroidered with metallic thread and spangled with sequins and tiny mirrors. But as he turned to face Arabella, she found his motion even more extraordinary.
The Turk’s head tilted, his surprisingly bright green eyes glittering in the lamplight as he silently regarded Arabella. Then his entire upper body rotated as a unit, starting suddenly, turning with a smooth uniform motion, then halting just as abruptly.
He was an automaton!
Arabella approached more closely. Never had she seen an automaton so lifelike. Its face and hands, painted in dark but quite natural-looking skin tones, included eyelashes and lacquered fingernails. Its chest rose and fell in a very convincing and subtle simulacrum of breathing. And its eyes, which she saw now were finely crafted of glass, seemed to be inspecting her carefully. “It is amazing,” she breathed.
The automaton inclined its head in seeming acknowledgement.
Startled, Arabella looked to the captain, and saw that he had one hand on a bank of levers on the side of the desk at which the automaton sat. She chuckled nervously, acknowledging that she had been taken in by the trick.
Bending to inspect the desk, she saw that the automaton was not merely seated at it, but was built into it. The desk, which was mounted on small wheels, enclosed the entire space which would normally hold the user’s chair, and the automaton’s legs merged into the desk at that point. He seemed to be a sort of centaur—half Turk, half desk. The desk’s khoresh-wood top was bare and smooth except for a regular grid of small holes, one per inch; all four of its sides were completely covered with brass levers, ivory pointers, and wheels displaying numbers and letters. “May I see inside?”
The captain smiled broadly. “Not one person in ten chooses that as his first question.” He snapped open a pair of catches, then swung one of the complex side panels aside.
Revealed within was a dense array of gears, cams, springs, rods, levers, and wires, many of them ticking and twitching in regular motion. So many parts, so closely packed, that Arabella feared she would never be able to understand what they all did. She leaned in close but kept her hands behind her, and even breathed shallowly through her nose, for fear of damaging the delicate mechanism.
“You see that cam there?” the captain said, pointing at a bit of brass the size of a sovereign, shaped rather like a comma.
“Yes…”
“What is its function?”
Arabella began to protest that she had no way of knowing, but the pressure of the captain’s gaze closed her mouth. Instead, she peered closer.
The indicated item was clearly built to pivot around a shaft that pierced its center, the two being joined together by a small set-screw, and a thin finger of brass at the cam’s edge would cause it to rotate. No, on second thought, it would not.… The angle was wrong, and the brass finger too fragile. It must be instead that the shaft rotated, causing the finger to move as the cam’s curved edge turned. Tracing the finger with her eyes, she saw that it attached to a wire which tugged on a cylinder painted with numbers. “When the shaft rotates,” she said, “the cam causes that lever to move, which makes the numbers change.”
“What happens when the shaft turns clockwise ten times?”
Arabella chewed her lip as she stared into the gleaming mechanism. “The number increases by one.”
“And when it turns anticlockwise ten times?”
She opened her mouth to provide the obvious answer—that the number decreased by one—but then looked closer. The numbered cylinder’s edge was notched, and a small pawl with a spring would drop into each notch as the cylinder rotated. “Nothing. It only goes one way.”
“Very good.”
“But what is it for?”
“That is what is known as an arithmetic accumulator. It is a very useful component in the calculation and display of trigonometric operations.”