Vampires in the Lemon Grove Read Online Free PDF Page B

silk that we
kaiko-joko
can produce in a single day. The Agent boasts that he has made us the most productive machines in the empire, surpassing even those steel zithers and cast-iron belchers at Tomioka Model Mill.
    Eliminated: mechanical famine. Supply problems caused by the cocoons’ tiny size and irregular quality.
    Eliminated: waste silk.
    Eliminated: the cultivation of the
kaiko
. The harvesting of their eggs. The laborious collection and separation of the silk cocoons. We silkworm-girls combine all these processes in the single factory of our bodies. Ceaselessly, even while we dream, we are generating thread. Every droplet of our energy, every moment of our time flows into the silk.
    I guide the sisters to the first of the three workbenches. “Here are the basins,” I say, “steam heated, quite modern, eh, where we boil the water.”
    I plunge my left hand under the boiling water for as long as I can bear it. Soon the skin of my fingertips softens and bursts, and fine waggling fibers rise from them. Green thread lifts right out of my veins. With my right hand I pluck up the thread from my left fingertips and wrist.
    “See? Easy.”
    A single strand is too fine to reel. So you have to draw several out, wind six or eight around your finger, rub them together, to get the right denier; when they are thick enough, you feed them to the Machine.
    Dai is drawing red thread onto her reeler, watching me approvingly.
    “Are we monsters now?” Tooka wants to know.
    I give Dai a helpless look; that’s a question I won’t answer.
    Dai considers.
    In the end she tells the new reelers about the
juhyou
, the “snow monsters,” snow-and-ice-covered trees in Zao Onsen, her home. “The snow monsters”—Dai smiles, brushing her white whiskers—“are very beautiful. Their disguises make them beautiful. But they are still trees, you see, under all that frost.”

    While the sisters drink in this news, I steer them to the Machine.
    The Machine looks like a great steel-and-wood beast with a dozen rotating eyes and steaming mouths—it’s twenty meters long and takes up nearly half the room. The central reeler is a huge and ever-spinning
O
, capped with rows of flashing metal teeth. Pulleys swing our damp thread left to right across it, refining it into finished silk. Tooka shivers and says it looks as if the Machine is smiling at us.
Kaiko-joko
sit at the workbenches that face the giant wheel, pulling glowing threads from their own fingers, stretching threads across their reeling frames like zither strings. A stinging music.
    No
tebiki
cranks to turn, I show them. Steam power has freed both our hands.
    “ ‘Freed,’ I suppose, isn’t quite the right word, is it?” says Iku drily. Lotus-colored thread is flooding out of her left palm and reeling around her dowel. With her right hand she adjusts the outflow.
    Here is the final miracle, I say: our silk comes out of us in colors. There is no longer any need to dye it. There is no othersilk like it on the world market, boasts the Agent. If you look at it from the right angle, a pollen seems to rise up and swirl into your eyes. Words can’t exaggerate the joy of this effect.
    Nobody has ever guessed her own color correctly—Hoshi predicted hers would be peach and it was blue; Nishi thought pink, got hazel. I would have bet my entire five-yen advance that mine would be light gray, like my cat’s fur. But then I woke and pushed the swollen webbing of my thumb and a sprig of green came out. On my day zero, in the middle of my terror, I was surprised into a laugh: here was a translucent green I swore I’d never seen before anywhere in nature, and yet I knew it as myown on sight.
    “It’s as if the surface is charged with our aura,” says Hoshi, counting syllables on her knuckles for her next haiku.
    About this I don’t tease her. I’m no poet, but I’d swear to the silks’ strange glow. The sisters seem to agree with me; one looks like she’s about to