Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [58]
Probably not. This lot are all so polite and reserved it’s amazing they don’t explode. It’s all very Spock – it’s not that they’re emotionless, it’s that the emotions are buried under the surface. If you show anger, you lose face.
So I’ve got to do everything right, or at least, as right as I can. But as my dad would say, the product does the selling, not the packaging.
And have I ever just made a sale.
After making me watch the execution, they made me wait for ages in an anteroom. Every time the door slid open and I thought it was my turn to go in., some samurai would appear, bow over the threshold, and go into the daimyo’s guest room.
At last one of the pages gestured me in. I did the bow without looking too stupid, and knelt/sat in front of Gufuu Kocho, lord of Han, Daini and Sanban districts.
I think I’d gone a bit funny by that stage. I wasn’t going to be able to wow them with toys or technological curiosities. If I didn’t come up with something, something huge, I was going to be Joel Mince.
The guy is short, but from where I was kneeling, he looked about twenty feet tall. His hair is white – a bit prematurely, I think, he’s not that old. He’s got a hard, hard face and nasty eyes, like a tough general out of a war movie.
119
But he hides it behind the good manners and the soft voice.
‘You say you have knowledge which could help me,’ said Gufuu. ‘What do you have to say?’
‘Your Majesty,’ I said, sounding like a complete schmuck, ‘I’ve travelled here from a distant land, a very distant land. I brought with me as much of the knowledge of, er, my people as I could fit into this device.’
I had the PowerBook with me. An attendant pushed one of those eensy tables over to me, and I put the computer on it. The daimyo waited, probably thinking I was nuts.
‘I wasn’t sure at first what kind of machinery or information you might find useful,’ I said. ‘But at last, I realized what I had that you could use.’
I turned the PowerBook around. The daimyo leant forwards, peering at the faint screen. The attendant obligingly moved the little table closer to him.
‘That illustration shows a machine called Jacquard’s automatic loom. In my country, weaving is done by large, complex machines, instead of by hand, using a spindle. The machines can weave far more quickly and efficiently.’
The daimyo looked up from the PowerBook screen. I was really surprised by how readily he’d accepted it. A good sign. He said, ‘This mechanism would be of use to me if I was a merchant. How can it help a warlord?’
‘I’m glad you asked,’ I said. ‘With modifications, that machine is capable of much more than just weaving. . . ’
And then, dear diary, I explained how to build the world’s first computer.
Brief explanation. The earliest computers were based on the Jacquard loom.
The thin sheets of perforated wood it uses to weave complicated patterns became paper punchcards, and so on. The Analytical Engine used punchcards –
so does Penelope’s time machine; I’ve seen the little box she keeps them in.
All very steampunk.
I was trying to convince the daimyo how much more efficient his military record-keeping would be with the help of a konpyuuta, but he was already having all sorts of thoughts about how it could be used – record-keeping for his estates, building stronger castles.
God help me, I think I’ve just introduced Computer Aided Design to the sixteenth century.
The idea, of course, is to see what good I can do here while the daimyo is playing around with his overblown calculator – and it’ll be years before that’s built. I’ll have to gradually unload the secrets of my mystic laptop as they’re needed. And I’ll have to make sure they’re not misused.
That’s enough to keep any techhead busy for the rest of his life.
The thing now is to make sure that life isn’t a very, very short one.
∗ ∗ ∗
120
Te Yene Rana held the device up to the lamp, turning it in her hands, lovingly.
It was soft and warm, a few