Shattered Elegance: The War of Laputa
Chapter 14A
Onayi hacks at one of the plane's rough hewn plywood parts with a pick, digging out the web. On the piece's long edges, glue has oozed out between the small pieces of wood and dried clear, looking almost like little blisters.
"Okawari?" Satomi gently says as she sets a plate from her meal cart on the small table beside him.
"Gracious, señora," he nods to her.
They stare at each other for a minute, each of them with silent tears. Two best friends who can't understand a word of the other any more.
"Gomennasai," she says at last, and walks away, pushing her meal cart.
He takes a few bites, then covers it with his hankerchief to finish the piece he's working on before handing it off to Chobasi to finish by sanding. Each piece he gets is smaller than the previous. "At least I'm well fed," he says.
Hotana is showing three of the children how to make paint. The three kids speak the same language, but not the same as Hotana. The result is that Hotana doesn't say much, while the children discuss the work animatedly with each other.
"Oh, the color scheme he has in mind," Pazuu hands Oyagata one of his birds, painted blue on the underside and mottled brown on top, "He wants us to be harder to spot, I guess."
"I can't blame him," Oyagata says, "He's probably figured out that we're over Vendoa. And if a plane departed from the flying castle that killed my son and landed next to my house, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't give those aboard enough time to explain, let alone that they'd almost certainly be speaking a different language."
"If you were Vendoan and had a son," Pazuu says, "You probably wouldn't even know it. They're like that; it's why I left."
"When I get home, will my wife understand me? Little Madge," he weeps, "They might not even understand each other. That would be terrible, she's only three."
"Look on the bright side," Pazuu says, "Madge will grow up knowing both languages, right?"
"Your Majesty," says General Tali through the console, from his tattered uniform, half of which appears to have been scalped from a Vendoan sargeant, "Everyone, both Jenwan and Vendoan, is trying to kill anyone in a Laputan uniform.
"That explains the bizarre outfit on your back," Lucy sighs. Her own pink gown has seen better days.
"I have two hundred, thirty-seven loyal men left," Tali says sadly, "including twelve Vendoan defectors who know Nihongo, and thirty Laputans who don't."
"There are a hundred, sixty-three people left up here," Lucy says, "There are at least seven different languages, but we've all managed to unite on building the plane, communicating through drawings and numbers. We've agreed on, er," she looks for a way of describing it, "kind of a loopy set of characters for the numbers. Zero to nine here," she taps a couple spots on the console, changing the view for both ends of the call:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
"They're neither Laputan nor Nihongo. Funny, both the nazohoyai and shesheme understand Nihongo numbers," she giggles, "but everyone seems to be picking these up the fastest." She types in, "so these are the numbers we've spoken just now:"
237 12 30 163 7
"Cool," he says, "I'm glad to hear you guys are getting along up there, 'cus it's a major mess down here. Oh, and you might want to know, you're gaining altitude, now up at several thousand feet, I hope you don't get mountain sickness."
"I'm scared to try the main controls," Lucy says, "I can't read the black console in the lower garden, that's the helm, but also the main weapon controls. I don't want to fire the cannon by accident."
"Then you're completely adrift," Tali says, confirming what she already knows.
"The behaviour of the castle is predictable, at least," she says, "I've figured out how to read our exact position and altitude. We are at 5270 feet, and I'll show you our position on the map."
It appears on the viewer.
"Day three of our flight," Lucy sighs, "For a million ton castle, we are making good time."
"How's the big tree handling it?" Tali asks.
"Happy as pie!" Lucy says.
3.141259...
They laugh as the console displays the number to over a thousand places.
Lucy sighs again, then says, "I don't know if it's because we're paying for our crimes against God or if it's because Romu threw himself off. Or maybe it's because it's sunny. I don't know that thing as well as I let on."
"Well, I'll let you get back to work," Tali says, "There's a mob hitting us."
Lucy calls up the map again, "Head to this position in Jenwa," she instructs, "Some calculations Pazuu has run show that it will be the most fertile area near you once it starts growing again after recovering from the cannon damage."
"Have you given up on the Tekiton children?" Tali asks.
"No," Lucy says, "but the plane will move quite fast. Pazuu is training on a core console nearby. Let me see if I can bring it up."
It shows a perspective of Vendoa, near Tekiton. The craft is flying at a minimum of twice a horse's gallop.
"Uwah!" Tali gasps, seeing that it is actually flying at about four times a horse's gallop, a speed the display calls "54.7m/s". It pulls up, and the speed indicator goes down, while the altitude indicator starts increasing. "Is he actually flying it, I thought you said it wasn't going to be ready for another three days!"
"It's a simulation," Lucy says, "Something only our core can do. I'm amazed at how he's been able to program it. Even the Boss is jealous."
"And he can't change the castle's course either?" Tali asks.
"The helm only responds to the one who has the crystal," Lucy says, "and he's scared of firing the main cannon, too."
Back in the shop, the kids, on a short scaffold under the wing, slide a ventral skin panel into place under the wing. Oyagata and Hotana are installing wicker seats with webbing seatbelts in the hull. Their feet are held in the floor with a "dovetail" and block, making it hard for natural forces to get the seat out of the floor, but relatively easy for a person to remove when he actually wants to.
The wheels of a cart squeak.
"A little early for supper, Satomi," Oyagata says before he realizes that her cart is loaded up with the latest part from Chobasi's finishing bench, a stack of star-shaped dowels, two buckets of glue, three of paint, and a roll of drawings from downstirs.
She giggles, "I thought you might say that." Her face and tone sober quickly as she says, "We have enough food to last only two weeks, water for one, and for obvious reasons, we aren't expecting any deliveries."
"Three days," Oyagata says, "especially if you're helping. Thank you. And there is lots of water in the outer courts, you just need to filter and boil it first."
"Shesheme," Hotana says to her, making her blush. He then turns to the seven kids on his assembly crew behind him and starts issuing instructions. The cart is soon almost empty.
"We're using the dowels for internal fixtures," he explains to the three children who understand him.
"Any way I can help?" Satomi offers.
"Oh?" Oyagata says.
"I have some spare time," she says.
"You're small enough to fit between the spars in the wing," he says, "So yes, you can put these dowels into the left wing," he starts to show her on one of the fuselage ribs. Soon she is climbing into the wing, wearing pants and a short sleeve shirt, with a bag rope tugging a small jug of glue and bag of dowels.
"Do well," Oyagata instructs, "Your life and those of all your friends depends on it, and I can't fit in there to check your work."
"I need a lamp," she says, "It's too dark in here."
Oyagata realizes that they are all in use, "Oh, no, I don't have one."
"I do," Lucy says softly, having somehow snuck up on him.
She holds her control stone in her hand, "Be gentle," she says to it in Nihongo, and then recites the Laputan spell: "Ratobarita urusu ariarosu baru netorirru."
The stone lights up softly.
"I need it back, Satomi," she says as she tosses it into the wing after the girl.
"Oh thank you, Your Majesty," Satomi says from inside the wing.
[From the movie: I verified that number kanji are the same on all three Chinese subtitle tracks; the Japanese subtitles always use the Arabic "loopy" numerals, but I know from elsewhere that Japanese uses the same kanji numbers, and I can read them. "Nazohoyai" and "Shesheme" are "Thank you" in the "Chinese 1" (Cantonese) and "Chinese 2" (Mandarin) audio tracks (at 1:11, where Sheeta thanks Harry for his offer to help in the kitchen. "Chinese 2" matches at 1:33, where Sheeta thanks the current gardener for the flowers; "Chinese 1" does not dub that line.) The "dovetail" was inspired by the fact that they don't have nails, and is a common way turbine and compressor blades are secured to the rotor disks of jet engines in real life.]