Tales of Henwa Island
Azula Verses The Future
Karo had few times when he had to spend time with Azula inside so he liked to think he chose to do this. On Henwa, the wet season which lasted from September to December tested his resolve to eventually marry the princess. When the monsoon belt moved over Henwa and its dependencies no one went outside unless they worked for the Ministry of the Environment checking rain gauges (they got hazard pay for this duty). This October Sunday afternoon found Karo and Azula sitting on the couch with Azula reading a graphic novel and Karo leaning over the coffee table drawing and doodling.
"The Legend of Korra – The Graphic Novel? When did that come out?" Karo looked at the fancy new publication Azula had in her hands. Karo had spent Saturday and most of Sunday in the house trying to keep his mind occupied and keep from annoying Azula. He had read many graphics novels and like Azula; enjoyed science fiction themes. In spite of his status as a cartoon artist of some standing; he had never felt the desire to write a graphic novel. A few artists could work alone and write out a complete graphics novel but Karo didn't rate his storytelling highly enough to meet the standards of the great publication houses of Ba Sing Se.
"I found it in the comic store down the street from the newspaper office." Azula lifted the book up so Karo could see the cover. "I ducked into the store to have a quick look and to clear my snorkel and saw it sitting on the shelf. I don't know if it will succeed but the concept intrigued me. It takes place in a futuristic city called Republic City. It's all about the adventures of the new Avatar – Avatar Korra of the Water Tribe. I don't know if I like it yet; but the idea of Aang being dead in seventy years does give me some comfort."
Lady Zhao looked into the back yard of the townhouse and didn't much like what she saw. Water came down the downspout and up over the rain barrel and then spilled over into the enclosed back yard turning it into a bog.
She could hear her son and future daughter in law mumbling about comic books. She decided to do something about that: "Karo and Azula? Do you want supper?"
"Sure!" Karo answered back cheerfully.
Lady Zhao shouted back: "Good...I have a list of things we'll need. Would you two put on your rain gear and head down to the store and pick some things up?" Lady Zhao walked into the living room and placed a piece of paper in front of Karo.
Karo didn't argue and simply put his pencil down but Azula grumbled as she folded her book.
"I feel like I'm putting on a deep diving suit! This rain gear makes me sweat and squeak!" Azula began to take the rain gear she had left near the front door over a pan and carefully unfolded it. "Did they give any thought about comfort?" Azula tugged on the arms of her bright red rain coat as Karo fiddled with his metal snaps on his black colored jacket.
Karo put on his floppy red rain hat and patted his head to push the hat down.
"You're still going to get wet, you know." Azula pushed the door open and pushed Karo gently into the rain.
"In the time of the future Avatar Korra, do they have hovercars?" Karo asked as they walked down the driveway. "Does that book talk about robots and automatic highways?"
Azula took a long look at Karo who looked rather wet and ridiculous in his rubberized rain gear. "The Futurama display at the Model A car dealership is not the future."
Karo slopped forward and felt his chest. "We forgot the note!"
Karo Zhao had elevated the comics in the daily paper to a new level. He had taken the Sunday Comics and turned them into a lush, colorful and vibrant artistic expression. Karo had never viewed himself as a serious artist – he worked for the newspaper and he viewed his job as selling newspapers. He wrote his comic strips and did all sorts of graphics work and had come to view himself as an extension of the advertising department of the newspaper.
Karo didn't mind this.
He sat in his office at his drawing board with a pencil in his hand and the task of drawing a new tourist map for the local Chamber of Commerce. On a cloudy Monday morning punctuated by showers; he felt content with his lot. He had never considered that he had become an artist of note or had a fan base. The paper received letters on his behalf and he replied to them in his honest, polite and unassuming way. He didn't think he received as much as the editor or the political reporters which suited him.
Karo didn't want fame. Inside the young cartoonist, lay a little boy fascinated by drawing things. Karo never lost that kind of innocent fascination with art and drew because he enjoyed making lines into people and giving them a kind of inner life.
The two unshaven men in their thirties about to knock on his office door actually had a kind of begrudging admiration for Karo Zhao. They drew graphic novels with long involved plots and dark, sinister themes. They dreamed up characters with deeply rooted neuroses and troubled histories. Killers, thieves and psychopaths were their specialty. Everything that Karo Zhao drew including the pending map; should have brought out their disgust and disdain. Karo drew a lyrical, fun and pretty world of characters full of humor and moments of bombast all in a world full of the soft pastel colors.
They fought their nerves as the tall of the two rapped on the door of Karo's office. Dai Mang had no idea what to expect. His shorter companion with the pointy beard, Eho Han twiddled his thumbs. Karo Zhao had come from Ba Sing Se but lived a private life along with the disgraced Princess of the Fire Nation. Dai and Eho lived in Ba Sing Se and had assumed Karo was also from the Earth Nation.
"Hello?" Karo answered the door.
Eho and Dai had not expected the short, thin, black haired Fire Nation denizen who answered the door. Karo dressed neatly and looked a good deal like a Fire Nation noble except he had a pencil behind his left ear.
Karo looked up at the two men in their mid thirties and dressed in nice tan Earth Kingdom clothes, Karo had no idea why they would stand there. They didn't look related: they both had brown hair but the tall man had a bare if rugged and unkempt looking face while the shorter one had one of those pointy beards. They looked unshaven but had their long hair in nice Earth Kingdom hair ornaments so Karo tried to work out some words since they didn't look obviously criminal.
"The Hotel Regal is across the street." Karo pointed in the vague direction of the five story building. As a neutral inoffensive reply, it made sense. Karo couldn't find a proper explanation for why two Earth Kingdom visitors would come to Komatsu to wander around a newspaper.
"Karo Zhao?" The taller man asked as he bowed.
Karo asked the next obvious question: "What did my fiance do this time?"
"We came to see you..." The shorter man with the small triangular beard said quietly. "I am Eho Han and my companion is Dai Mang and we write graphics novels. Have you heard of The Life the Last Airbeneder and The Legend of Korra?"
"Uh...No?" Karo's eyebrows curled as he concentrated. "No...wait that last one. My fiance is reading it. Well...please come in."
As if the Cosmos worked to a script, Azula walked into the office. "You have your door open. You never..." She looked at the two men. "Picking up rough trade on the docks?"
Karo blushed. "Dai and Eho, may I introduce my fiance Azula."
"Charmed..." Azula stood at the door, looking taciturn with her arms across her chest. "You only get an hour off for lunch and we have to find that stupid ball and chain thing for the toilet or your mom will not quit nagging either of us about it."
"These two men come from Ba Sing Se and write graphic novels."
"How did you ever get into the country past customs?" Azula asked without looking at either of them.
"They wrote two graphics novels..." Karo implored, " The Life the Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra!"
"You didn't include anything I'd want in the future like a private robot or a computer that uses whizzing tape and accepts commands from me. In seventy years I'll be...older...but I would have liked to have some future technology that didn't just toast bread." Azula scowled at the taller one who's face had grown very pale. "Did you say you two wrote: 'The Life the Last Airbender'?"
"No!" Karo jumped in front of Azula as she prepared to deliver a well aimed martial arts kick to Dai's unprepared crotch.
"In those graphics novels; they made my character look like a mad, insane, ethically untutored moron! I didn't torture anyone and I never did anything resembling a war crime – maybe a war crimes misdemeanor but not any murder and mayhem! Except for Aang but no one got killed! I ended up going insane and you portrayed my mental anguish in a shameful way!" Azula tried to work past Karo. "I won't kill them!"
"You should leave now if you value your lives!" Karo said as he struggled with Azula like someone fighting a rabid cat.
"Wait!" Azula tried to climb over Karo. "People can survive third degree burns over two thirds of their body!"
"No they don't! Go!" Karo yelled urgently and pointed to the door.
The two men didn't take this very seriously and looked more bemused – like they were watching a circus act not realizing the bear in the magenta too too had plans to maul them.
"Go! She once bit off one of my testicles when I brewed the wrong flavor of tea!"
The two men ran for the door.
"If I brain injure them in the region that tells them they were beaten up!" Azula screamed as she began to pull Karo around the room by his collar. "They won't even know!" She finally succeeded in crawling over Karo.
Karo breathed a sigh of relief as he looked out the window and saw the two men in the rain running like dogs in the direction of the docks.
Every University or government agency on the planet had a department that employed dozens of people who did nothing but add sums to do mathematics for studies of various sorts. They sat for hours and days with adding machines and did the grunt work so those professors that did the simple experiment could gain all the glory. The Analytical Department as Komatsu University called them, went on strike for three months during the fall semester three years ago. They went on strike along with other support staff and negotiated things like benefits and working conditions until both sides got fed up.
One of the concessions allowed the Analytical Department to move from a badly lit and poorly ventilated room on the first floor at the back of the Physical Sciences building to a carpeted office with decent veneration and lighting on the first floor of the Mathematics Building. Azula acquired the old room because The Radio and Audio Electronics Laboratory needed more room and it moved out of a windowless room in the basement of the same building to this one. The library used the windowless basement room for back issues of unpopular magazines.
Azula worked in a rectangular room about the size of a basketball court. She needed this room because some of her experiments exploded, set fires or both and because electronic devices designed around vacuum tubes took up lots of space. She worked alone much of the time although the odd physicist made cloud chambers, primitive particle accelerators or cathode ray tubes using the tools of the lab as did one psychologist who wanted to build a precision device for stimulating the brains of dogs using fine wires.
The room had high windows, no cross ventilation and dark brown badly varnished floor with boards that squeaked and occasionally spit up nails. It had the exact shade of beige paint on the walls designed to give no pleasure to anyone with normal color perception and in one corner the paint had begun to peel. A heavy wooden door with a frosted glass window led to the main building while two badly hung barn doors she had cut into the back wall led outside. She could ferry heavy bits of machinery in and out of the facility through them.
The roof leaked because the same union that represented the Analytical Department workers represented the building maintenance workers. They were on strike when the request to fix the roof was passed. It wound up on the desk of the head of building maintenance because he had gone out on strike. The request got lost so the roof never got fixed.
Azula looked up at a row of large, clear and very dead light bulbs that had exploded when she turned on the lights of the room that morning.
She sat on the floor and looked up at the drips of water. Light bulbs didn't matter but she had thousands of delicate glass valves in a precise pattern and water meant a problem for the kind of machines based on electronics. The Radio and Audio Electronics Laboratory received some funding from private corporations but not enough to merit a leak free roof.
She felt the kind of severe frustration anyone felt when working with wet and flaky electronics. That morning, she had watched helplessly as a very expensive meter wide glass enclosed, vacuum sealed mercury rectifier had cracked and then quit after barfing fumes because water had reached its insides. Meter wide vacuum tubes cost a good deal to make.
She also looked forward to days of chasing down leaks, finding enough fans to dry out the lab and then having to test everything (without electrocuting herself in the exercise) before returning to real work.
She was calmer than she had been but still felt pissed.
Eho and Dai stood outside of the frosted glass door to Azula's lab. A big chalkboard nailed next to the door had 'Do Not Disturb' as well as a skull and crossbones drawn on it.
They looked at it with all the enthusiasm of a doomed man seeing the noose of the gallows.
"Did you enjoy your lunch?" Dai asked Eho.
Eho sighed. "No. Just knock and remember the way to the fire exits."
Dai knocked quietly hoping the beast that lurked inside would never hear him.
"Put whatever mail you have through the brass slot." A familiar voice shouted from the other side of the door. "I have bigger fish to fry right now."
"Ba Sing Se doesn't have the people we need for our project so we came to Henwa because they do." Eho motioned back to the door. "We had the idea to make our graphic novels into animated films. "We wanted artistic help so we tried to talk to Karo. We need help with sound track recording so we need the woman who invented most of the technology."
"Too bad everyone on this island is nuts." Dai prepared to knock but heard footsteps from beyond the door.
"Son of a bitch!" Azula poked her head out of the door half expecting a lost student.
Azula looked at the two men now cowering behind the door. "It is five past three. Tell me why you two are stalking me!" Azula looked very mad. "I have many frustrating things to do. If you have a message, leave it with the department receptionist."
"We came to see you and Karo." Eho pleaded from behind the heavy door. He hoped it was heavy enough. "Please don't hurt us – we have wives and children. We want to make an animated film and we need your help."
"Go away." Azula barked. "Karo has a gift as an artist but I have no such talents."
"Ba Sing Se makes movies but you know the state of the art in sound is not quite so state of the art." Dai spoke up with despair in his voice. "One of your teachers told us of your work when we went to him for his help. You invented frequency modulation broadcasting for sound which sends a nearly flawless sound signal through the air. I heard some tests which sounded amazing."
The Electrical Machine Industries Corporation holds those patents," Azula said bitterly, "and as far as I know, they have no plans to use them in the near future. I merely figured out how to make it work but the real genius lies in getting it deployed. People just bought their first radio at great expense so they don't want another."
"We want to show people what they have been missing." Dai spoke as the passionate artist while Azula decided not to slam the door just yet. She needed time to figure out places to dump the two bodied if they gave rise to too much offense. "Stereo soundtracks, rich sound and compelling animation all in full, vibrant color."
"EMI has facilities in Ba Sing Se." Azula said as she reached for the doorknob. "Approach them to develop the tools to meet your needs. They have deep pockets with the success they have had with the Long Play Lifelike Stereo Recordings."
"They want money up front," Eho exhaled as he relaxed a bit believing that he was no longer in mortal danger, "and we have no money."
Azula wore a rather unemotional look that also managed to give off contempt: "I can't imagine why a private for profit corporation would want money up front to develop something for which no market exists. A phonograph that can play in stereo costs a fortune so I can only imagine the cost of fitting a stereo system in your neighborhood Nickelodeon theater." Azula hung back. "Current color technology stinks so how do deluded fanboys plan to also give the theater goer full vibrant color?"
"I thought you might have a solution." Dai began to move from behind the door.
Azula scratched her head: "You have let your ambitions run ahead of what we can practically achieve given our current technology."
"We let our imaginations free!" Eho countered.
"Welcome to the World of Tomorrow!" Azula made flowing gestures with her hands. "Follow me."
"Where are you taking us?" Dai asked timidly.
Azula began to walk down the hall slowly: "To church."
The Ioakimnen Kiokai had stood on the hill overlooking the harbor for centuries until Fire Lord Ozai had it pulled down. The almost German like Baroque style offended the Fire Nation sense of aesthetics and the Henwanese monotheistic God violated some sense of spiritual self righteousness in him. After his death, the citizenry had rebuilt the building stone for stone as an exact and artistically true copy.
Dai and Eho had come to Henwa knowing only a few things about the culture. They knew the island had a subtropical climate and rude people. The idea that the Henwanese had a history struck them as odd and the two artists would have rejected the very idea such people had high culture as absurd. The Ioakimnen Kiokai blew that very notion out of the window as it had stood for centuries and the flying buttresses and fine brickwork blew their minds. The Earth Kingdom used thick stone walls and never bothered to engineer with stone as they could simply bend it; Henwa had no access to Earth Bending and so making stone walls as light and as sturdy and as tall as possible had preoccupied them.
"The Joakim's Church," Azula translated as the tram slowed to a halt and they moved to the rear exit. The church sat in the midst of a fine park. The huge light gray marble faced granite building dominated the city and the steeple could be seen long before the island grew visible. "The Temple to God and to Music: a long time ago, these people decided only one God existed and they believe in his prophets or saints. The rest is history."
Dai looked at his fellow artist as he stepped off the tram onto the brick cobbled sidewalk. As far as two graphics artists from Ba Sing Se knew; they had stepped onto the far side of the moon.
"I have found this place endlessly fascinating as an engineer and a physicist. The cathedral has a vast interior and yet the pastor doesn't have any need for amplifiers so you can here his voice all the way at the back." Azula put her rain hat on as another shower started. "The church hosts concerts sand the radio station records and airs those concerts and manage to achieve very good sound." She stood on the sidewalk. "Lets go have a look." Azula spoke in her best Chinese but Dai and Eho could hear the Henwanese accent seeping through.
Dai and Eho had never visited outside of the Earth Kingdom. They had come to accept that Henwanese made use of the regal Chinese symbols and the phonetic symbols. They looked up at a phrase delicately carved in a Times Roman style font in Chinese and Henwanese characters over the huge archway of the black wooden doors.
"God is the Creator of All: Man is the Measure of All." Azula translated for them. "Call it the national motto. Get off the sidewalk: the little old church ladies get upset if you block their way when they leave the tram on their way to bingo."
"I see the character for God and I think I see the character for Man but..." Dai said slowly.
Azula had found Henwanese grammar self evident: explaining it to Earth Kingdom Chinese speakers made for more of a challenge. "Henwanese...it doesn't have room for ambiguity." Azula began slowly as they walked down the flagstone paved path the the steps of the church. The extra little phonetic symbols marked grammatical endings of which Chinese had none. She didn't know how to explain how gender for nouns worked as the rain fell off her hat and she had better things to do than stand in the rain with these two morons so she kept things simple: "We call a Flying Lemur Bat, a Lemur, a Tigerdillo, a Dillo and so on. Just put it down to a strange preoccupation for precision."
Dai and Eho had never seen flying buttresses and as they followed Azula up the steps of the church, they both looked at each other. Eho wondered if this now represented the Temple of the Metal Benders as he looked up at the huge iron strapped oak doors and rejected this as irrational as he stood before a cathedral of stone. Dai pragmatically wanted to know how such tall stone walls and the glass rosette could possibly keep together: in his eyes the stone and mortar church looked all too frail to hold together.
Azula pushed on a brass plate hung at shoulder height. The tall door creaked open. The church was new but the faithful had reproduced it in all of its detail.
"I'm not worthy!" Eho uttered as the space revealed itself. He didn't see a sacred or divine sanctuary. He saw a space with no pillars larger than even the best public buildings in Ba Sing Se. That such a heavy building could stand without pillars and yet cover a space as vast as a village astonished him.
"The Henwanese forbade the use of bending when they built the church," Azula walked forward across the Narthex. "Only here on this island, do we see the use of flying buttresses – those arched stone supports you see outside. You can empty out the interior and put the supports on the outside to buttress them."
"Quit drooling." Dai punched Eho as they stepped onto the deep red carpet that lavishly covered the floor between the rows of pews and covered the altar.
"I don't believe in God. I admire the efficient thinking of the Henwanese to get rid of all Gods but one. I decided on going one God further." Azula said as she took off her hat and rain coat.
"Such wonderful glass windows." Dai stammered. Even in the glum rain, the windows made the interior light up with vibrant colors.
"One of the stained glass windows tells the story of the four evangelists." Azula walked past the two men with her rain coat in her hands. "Take your gear off. You're in church."
"Four evangelists?" Eho asked as he took off his hat.
"The four messengers of God who spread the good news. Actually there are five." Azula said dismissively. "The four evangelists and Saint Bach who spread the word through music."
Dai banged into a heavy wooden pew made of some kind of red tropical hardwood that hurt his shin. He hadn't yet realized the church had them. "What do we do with our rain coats?"
Azula tossed hers over a back pew.
Karo walked from around the back of the church and altar. "Fire Lord Zuko paid to rebuild this place; he has the plans for the catacombs and they'll find where you hid the bodies!"
"How did you guess we'd be here?" Azula shouted to Karo across the vast space as both her guests held their ears. She had forgotten how good the acoustics were in the sanctuary of the church and fallen victim to the illusion that she needed to shout to have her voice heard across such a space.
"I finished work early so I decided to fetch you so we could buy that toilet thing before my mom got the water bill! We need to fix that before we use up all the fresh water on this island, or worse, my mom sees that the water bill from the city tops the gross domestic product of Omashu! I saw you leave the campus with those two!" Karo pointed and shouted because he also had fallen under the same illusion about the acoustics. "The nearest prison is at Iguana Point some thirty miles from here and I didn't want to have to make the trip on weekends for conjugal visits because my wife killed two people and got two or more life sentences for burying them under the organ bellows!"
"Can you keep it down please? You are in the House of the Lord." A white haired man with a pleasant face wearing in a gold miter and long white and gold robes said politely but firmly. He walked down the steps from the door that led behind the altar.
"Sorry Bishop Meskat." Karo faced the Bishop and bowed as he almost whispered reverently. "We won't bend will we?" Karo glanced sideways at Azula, "because bending in church is forbidden."
"Why?" Dai held his shin.
"Bending the elements leads to sloth." The Bishop approached Azula. "Sloth leads to sin and sin leads to temptation and to destruction. God gave us the gift of bending but power hungry people made it into an awful thing."
Dai felt a shiver run down his spine. "How did you build all this...without Earth Benders?"
"We worked hard my good man." The Bishop held out his staff. "We found the old stones of our sacred church and carved by our own hands those which had gone missing or that Ozai destroyed."
"You think bending is wrong?" Dai stood up as he felt the man approaching held a position of some importance.
"All things are permitted; not all are beneficial." The man smiled with his blue eyes betraying a wise intellect. "Bending can help or destroy depending on the character of the person to whom such a gift was bequeathed. I have met Avatar Aang, Katara of the Water Tribe and Fire Lord Zuko and found them of the kind of moral character and judgment worthy of respect. Our believers didn't use it because the sacred nature of the space arises out of the work and effort of those who loved it and sacrificed to rebuild it. Bending would remove that."
Azula had always liked Bishop Meskat. He had a keen wit and even more unconventional humor. She knew the reason the church prohibited bending but didn't want to deprive the Bishop of the enjoyment he found in playing the two artists for fools. She knew this church contained old and sacred relics, a pipe organ that would rival a computer for complexity; all of which needed protection from the wayward whims of careless benders.
"Equalist?" Dai asked.
The Bishop approached the group until he stood next to Azula. "I have no idea what that could mean." He motioned in that slow and graceful manner of pastors and pointed to the vast and elaborate pipe organ at the front. "The Great Organ above the altar weights as much as four steam locomotives, may have more moving parts than anything ever seen on Earth and a careless Earth Bender could damage it beyond repair. Azula could wipe it out." He smiled wryly.
Karo ran up to Azula and puffed for breath.
The basement of the church was a maze of low vaulted halls, stone passageways, steam pipes, wires and small windowless rooms dimly lit by a single bulb hung on a wire. Moisture seeped through the massive foundations and formed dark spots on the stone walls and the rough stone floor. When the Fire Nation had destroyed the church, the foundations and catacombs below had remained. Fire Lord Zuko had paid to have the church above rebuilt on top of the ancient foundations as the locals wished to keep as much of the church as authentic as possible.
"The organ doesn't use bellows." Azula said pedantically. She swung a heavy bronze key and led the other three along the narrow passageways. "It has a motorized squirrel cage fan that blows air."
"It sounded like a good thing to say at the time." Karo said in the wobbly voice of someone who hated dark passageways.
The Great Organ had been utterly destroyed by Fire Lord Ozai's men. Some of the gold and valuable silver bits were melted down. Those pipes made of tin, lead, sheet steel and wood were piled together along with the centuries old wooden carvings and burned to ash. Fire Lord Zuko had offered to rebuild the huge instrument as a peace offering to the city. The people of Komatsu decided to break the bank and built a new organ even more baroque and complex than the one the Fire Nation destroyed.
Fire Lord Zuko had the same mental image of an organ everyone in the other nations had. He had never seen the original and though he was paying for a small room sized machine of the sort used in grand theaters. He assumed the Henwanese would economize and use mass produced parts. They didn't. They hand built the most complex machine seen on the planet and gave Zuko the bill. The Great Organ cost more than a Fire Nation Naval group even including the costs of munitions and men.
Azula had spent some of her brother's money. The old organ had been a tracker organ. Church goers took turns operating huge leather bellows to make air. The organist played and operated a complex system of strings, pulleys and weights to pull on valves that directed air to the right pipes. Such a machine looked and worked like some kind of cartoon machine that made music.
This new organ didn't work that way at all. With electricity available, engineers installed a huge electric motor and blower to supply air. Azula designed a system that used electromagnets to open the valves and the box of expensive electronics that controlled it all.
Azula enjoyed spending the Fire Lord's cash to try new ideas.
Azula stood in front of a thick oak door with a padlock and chain locking it shut. She flipped the lock up, moved a hinged plate, shoved the key in and turned it. The lock made a loud clang and she pulled it and the chains free of the door. Azula pushed the door in.
Dai and Eho couldn't see inside the dark room until after Azula felt along the side of the wall, a row of lights came on with a brief flicker.
The room looked like a gray granite lined tomb without a sarcophagus. The roof had massive granite beams holding up the weight of the huge organ above. The room looked about the size of a large dining hall but big machines enameled with teal lurked against the walls. Dai could smell ozone in the air. Eho wondered to himself why they had gone on a tour of the machine room.
"Karo?" Azula asked quietly. "Can you go upstairs and take a seat in front of the organ. Find something simple to play."
"Sure." Karo didn't protest. He knew enough about the keyboard to pull off a simple tune. If Azula wanted a mind blowing demo and Karo figured if she intended to blow Dai and Eho's mind; the organ could play itself since it had the ability to record the performance of organists within itself. "Something Water Tribe perhaps?"
"I'll play, you explain to – the bearded guy how things work." Azula grabbed Karo by his arm. "Tell him how The Admiral works in as simple a way as possible," She sneered, "very simple."
"Eho...my name is Eho."
Azula looked at him: "Whatever. The other one whose name escapes me. I need someone to help me – so come this way." She motioned her hand.
The reason why the organ had six keyboards escaped Dan and he didn't even try to imagine why it needed three rows of black wood foot pedals shaped like the handles of boat paddles. The keyboards used dark wood for the 'white keys' and some beautiful red wood for the 'black keys' and each one spanned a meter and a half. The organ had switches, knobs and indicator lights on all sides. Some had the names of familiar instruments like trumpet, flute, oboe and bassoon, others had exotic names like Theramin and some bore names that had no meaning to Dai.
Azula sat down on the large tan ostrich horse padded wooden bench and shifted around. She looked around and then focused on a screen that glowed orange.
"Have a seat." Azula continued staring straight ahead at the vast ranks of keyboards. "It takes a few minute for everything to warm up." Azula opened a drawer under the keyboards and pulled a thick blue covered book. "What does a machine the size of four houses have to do with animation? That question must be foremost on your mind."
"I took music lessons." Dai said as Azula leafed through the large blue book. "I can play a mean guitar."
Azula leaned over the keyboards and placed the book on the wooden stand: "This organ uses air blowing through pipes to make the notes you hear as music. The old organ used pulleys and strings so when the organist hit a key, a vast set of strings and pulleys moved, opened valves, directed air and sent it to the one pipe of thousands the organist wanted to play. When they rebuilt the organ; they found no one who could build such a mechanism. The Air Nomads had built the original many centuries ago and of course their secrets could not be revived. Azula pulled a brass cord to turn on the bright brass shaded light above the stand. "They made great effort to find someone to help. You see...without a control mechanism; the organ would have no voice. When I moved here, the builders had built the church and yet not the organ. My brother and Avatar Aang suggested I could help. I have no idea if they did this as a joke to humiliate me. Perhaps they expected me to fail or perhaps my brother just wanted to quit paying for the damned church. I don't know."
"Did you fail?" Dai looked at the vast console and overcome with awe, spoke serenely.
"A wise man from the Fire Nation named Dou Ring speculated about mechanical minds. He lived before the War and he described mechanical devices like wind up clocks and adding machines." Azula turned to her right and looked at that screen and then continued. "He said that a dead simple set of steps could carry out any operation or set of operations in logic. I thought about this and realized organs worked with dead simple steps – classical mechanics." Azula looked at Dai. "Have I lost you?"
"No." Dai said.
"I decided if I couldn't build a mechanical control system; I could make an electronic brain that thought about organ playing." Azula tapped the middle C key. "Such a machine could operate the organ by taking input from me, running the organ control program, figuring out what I wanted to do, what I had configured the organ to do and issuing commands to the organ which could then play the proper note using electrical impulses sent through telephone wires. I like to think I avenged myself by solving this problem and saved my brother money in the process."
"Uh huh?"
Azula opened the door below the keyboards and pulled out a heavy black metal headset with a large telephone style pick up. She placed the contraption on her head and then plugged a metal end into a jack just below the screen.
"Karo?" She yelled into the pickup. "Did you crash the thing!"
"Hold on...Eho touched something when I toggled the boot program." Karo replied. "The whole machine panicked. If I can keep artists from touching the colorful blinking lights...wait...go ahead."
A set of small reddish orange characters appeared on the screen. Azula pressed a foot peddle down and a low rumble made a shiver down Dai's spine. Azula took the headset off and unplugged the wire then put it back in the drawer.
Karo had to look up in order to glare at Eho and deliver his words of warning: "If you want to press any more buttons then make sure the electrical jolt kills both of us so I won't have to explain to the church and worse, my fiance, how we broke a machine that cost more to build than most battleships."
Eho stared at the sleek metal fronts of the three large fridge sized boxes Karo called the Admiral. On each huge box, the top had tine arrays of lights, the middle section of each fridge size metal box had colored switches and the bottom had a grill to let cool air into the interior. He could see something orange glowing from the inside through the metal grates at the bottom and the room grew warm. "I apologize. What went wrong?"
"I have no idea." Karo could read the messages given in text displayed by tiny arrays of light bulbs. Needless to say, the machine couldn't convey much about its state. "Azula coined the term 'panic' when the core control program did something stupid and quit. Azula had made the organ work, but the control systems had a few of what she called 'bugs' because like the real bugs, they annoyed her and proved hard to get rid of. Karo had learned all of this through listening to Azula's tirades when the machine did something unpredicted. "You must have toggled in an instruction to tell it to divide against zero, channel dead Avatars or it simply didn't like you."
The warm room made Eho feel light headed. He felt fuzzy minded and had trouble focusing. He had come to the Dominion of Henwa with his co-worker but not by completely official means.
"You must find all of this boring." Karo held the microphone on the stand that had allowed him to reply to Azula when her voice boomed over a set of speakers hung on the stone walls. A familiar low note rumbled across the room and kicked up some dust.
"Not at all," Eho felt his forehead. "I have a headache."
The City of Komatsu collected taxes and despite complaints over the costs of fixing potholes or that the traffic signals made people heading downtown wait too long in the heat; the taxes paid for mosquito control. Henwa had a tropical climate and as a result had mosquitoes and had endemic malaria. A combination of regulating dank water, not allowing outdoor pools and pesticides like DDT kept the problem manageable. Malaria had once been a huge health threat but had vanished from most people's list of concerns. The locals took medication as a matter of routine as a preventative measure.
When Eho fainted and sank like a dropped sack onto the floor; Karo didn't think of malaria. No one got sick from it and no one except a madman or an exceedingly dumb or misinformed one spent time in Henwa without taking malaria pills.
Eerk!
Azula and Karo eased their worry by playing Operation. Karo had made a mistake removing the Funny Bone and a buzzer in the big red metal box that housed the game let him know it.
Eerk!
Azula did no better with the lobotomy: "I think the only way to win is to take the damned battery out."
The Department of Infectious Diseases shared a large waiting room on the sixth floor of the Komatsu hospital with Pediatric Oncology. Katara was a healer but the layout of the Komatsu General Hospital made no sense to her but neither did much of what they did to heal people. 'Take two pills and call me in the morning' formed the slogan of modern medicine with their trained doctors and nurses. Katara had by no means a lack of knowledge about healing but she didn't fit into the system characterized by the industrial approach with which the Henwanese healed people. She could heal by bending but people with her skills were rare. The Henwanese had few benders, no water benders and so had hospitals. As a means of healing, it worked and in a typical Henwanese way, it took longer, required people with expensive training and so commanded a higher fee. She could heal a broken leg in minutes with her bending but if she needed two doctors, two nurses, a surgical pin, two hours and an X-Ray machine then she could charge much much more to the heath plans.
She wandered through the pediatric oncology department in the late evening after the sad looking cancer kids had gone to sleep and wondered where in the hell Karo, Azula and the malaria stricken Earth Kingdom men had been filed.
Erp! Erp!
"I won't be on call for open heart surgery in this hospital." The familiar voice of Karo rang through the quiet beige halls. "I swear that buzzer keeps saying loser! loser!"
Azula faked her pining. "If Dai and Eho die I will never know how The Legend of Korra ended. Even worse, they'll die of a disease any first year medical student can treat – stupid uninsured retards."
Katara walked into the room and in order to avoid much unnecessary complaining from Azula asked a simple question: "What happened? Karo wasn't clear over the phone."
"Two Earth Kingdom artists are in the Infectious Disease Ward having blood tests done for spirochetes." Azula explained bluntly a she cleanly removed a small Bakelite liver from the game board. "They have no money but they have malaria."
A short, flabby doctor in a white lab coat approached the trio and looked at his clipboard. He looked at Azula and then to Katara under the impression Karo who had flubbed at Operation didn't merit his expensive attention. He had a bald head, mustache and glasses and the only thing making him attractive to Katara was his salary.
"Do you know Dai Mang and Eho Han – the malaria victims?" He wheezed.
"Yes?" Azula said tentatively. "Not well though."
"Yeah." The doctor coughed. "Thought we had a new strain of medication resistant malaria. Thought I would have lots of interesting work in my lab but it turns out they slipped past customs and didn't take their antimalarial drugs." He looked at his clipboard. "We did a liver biopsy which confirmed the liver damage. We gave them the appropriate drugs but they won't be able to leave hospital until the end of the week because we don't want their livers to fail before the medication kills the parasite." He shook his head and walked away muttering: "I could have had something interesting to publish in a paper but no..."
"Why are you here?" Azula asked Katara.
"I work as a medical record keeper here...didn't you know?" Katara found that Karo and Azula gave rise to constant frustration and neither of them paid much attention unless forced to by circumstances. "I started working here a month ago. I told you countless times! Don't you ever listen?"
"I paid more attention to how you looked in a bikini clutching a surfboard." Azula chauvinistically taunted. "You probably told me while you had one of your cute bikinis on and my mind was focused on other things."
Erp!
Karo remained silent and played Operation. He had a better sense of self preservation.
Katara clutched her hands: "Anyhow..." She gritted her teeth. "Lady Zhao is on the warpath. She called me just before the end of my shift and she wanted to know where you two had gotten to. One of the nurses told me Azula had signed in two Earth Kingdom malaria victims and so I have searched the hospital countless times looking for you two!"
"I never want to see that island again." Eho leaned over the white painted rail of the ocean liner. He had come to find people to help animate their work and instead had nearly died. He still looked a tad yellow but the medication had done its job and cleared his liver of the parasites. He felt somewhat gladdened by the warm sun which had made a brief appearance between rain showers and let him see the coast of the island. He hoped the coast would recede but they had two more stops to make on Henwa before heading home.
The large ship carried its two thousand passengers along the northern coast of Henwa as the tourists among them wished to see the sights. Eho had no interest in the line of radio transmitters on a high hill, the large paper mill one a huge flat peninsula belching sulfur into the air and mercury in the sea, or locomotives belching smoke as they chugged along the rail lines that followed the coast. To Eho, Henwa had been a vast disappointment and the whole place looked like a hilly industrial park. None of the other passengers milling about the open deck, looked unhappy about leaving Henwa either but none of them looked yellow either. They had taken the advice of their travel agent and taken their quinine or whatever hideous tasting equivalent was offered.
"The ship stops in Misini in a few hours and then finally in Astruoni in the evening to pick up passengers bound for the Earth Kingdom. We haven't left yet." Dai spoke as if delivering a pronouncement of doom. He stood leaning with his back against the railing and reading from a large red hard covered book with a dust cover and the ominous title: Henwanese Grammar for Chinese Speakers. He had no love for Henwa but the book Azula had given him was the one she had used to master aspects of the language and was considered authoritative. Dai found out this didn't mean 'easy to read' as the book had more pages than the equally popular 'The History of the Monarchy of Ba Sing Se'.
The book still pulled him in. Henwanese grammar had some weird fascination for the kind of artistic mind like Dai's that thrived on difficult problems. He imagined a day when he woke up and understood why Henwanese had masculine, feminine and neuter genders for nouns and had an epiphany for how the accusative ending for nouns worked.
"Henwanese or Suihan as the Henwanese call it is what linguists call a language isolate: it is related to no other modern or ancient language on the planet." Dai read out loud to an apathetic Eho.
Dai had recently shown Eho one of the appendices of that book entitled 'Appendix F: Complete Conjugation of a Regular Intransitive Verb: 'naf – to swim'. The list of all possible forms of that word went on for three pages!
"Put that book away." Eho looked down at the clear blue seas as dolphins swam beside the ship. "You're going to go blind."
The small scale 'true' digital computer used to run the organ didn't stretch the state of the art as much as the patience of the user. The Admiral Mark I made by Electric Machine Industries (EMI) used valves (tubes) only in a few places and instead resorted to a new kind of primitive electronic device called a field effect transistor (not a true transistor but a kind of switch). EMI chose this new device on an experimental basis. Valves could last many thousands of hours but the number needed would require huge amounts of power.
Fire Lord Zuko provided nearly unlimited funds and so much research into field effect semiconductors could proceed as EMI and academic labs had the extra capital needed to proceed. The Admiral became a testbed for cutting edge ideas that lacked commercial applications and while Zuko paid for an organ; he also paid for fundamental research into the development of computers. The mathematical principles of the programmable computer had already been well described by wartime mathematicians and few doubted such a device could work. With Fire Lord Zuko's sponsorship and the project underway to restore the Great Organ, the geeks had all the reason they needed to proceed.
Azula did some of the hardware development although Lin Song of National Electric Corporation in Ba Sing Se had developed the core memory system in the machine and Taihan Inoue of Omasho Electric Works (Oshiba) actually did much of the engineering. Azula deserved credit as the first person to exploit the idea of a 'programmable' computer by developing two key components: a programming language called C Script (a pun on the musical note 'C') and the compiler which built programs. She use these two tools to make the first operating system called Omix or Operating Machine Interface Computer System – OMICS pronounced omiks and shortened by her to Omix.
The latest version of the machine that played the organ – the much bigger version with a teletext printer: The EMI Admiral 670 – lay in crates in the hold of the ocean liner. The engineers on Henwa Island had lovingly crafted it by hand and included all the paper tapes needed to install Omix into the machine. The University of Ba Sing Se had decided to blow the budget (or those of rich alumni) and buy four of these machines for their mathematics department.
The computer had escaped from Henwa.
Author's Notes: The Use of Solid State Switches in Computers
The use of Field Effect Devices predates the invention of transistors but were a descendant of the Cat's Whisker diode. The FET had existed for some time during the age of radio but was not a true transistor as originally conceived. The Admiral Mark I used FETs because the machine had to fit under a church organ and the developers had both a 'blow the budget' attitude and a 'make the Fire Nation pay attitude' because Fire Lord Zuko paid for it. In such a machine, it acted as a configurable switch but cold not amplify signals and so needed vacuum tube elements in order to properly function.