Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

Nikolai fished a pair of brass nails out of the peanut bag and popped them into his mouth. He crunched loudly. “You slept three days and three nights and part of today.”

“Three days?”

“It was a long time.” Nikolai crunched more nails.

Thad said automatically, “Don’t talk with your mouth-wait a moment! Are you eating?”

“Yes. I like the brass ones best. The iron ones don’t taste very nice, but they are good for me.”

“Doom,” Dante said.

All the strength drained out of Thad’s legs. He staggered to the grandstand to sit down. Nikolai came with him, crunching more nails. “Sofiya, I’ve never seen an automaton eat anything and grow from it. Is this-?”

Sofiya leaped gracefully onto Kalvis and held her body parallel to the horse’s back on her hands alone. Then she did a complicated little flip that landed her in a sidesaddle position. Nikolai applauded.

“Oh no,” Thad said. “You are not doing what I think you are doing. Actually, I know what you’re doing, and you’re not doing it.”

Sofiya laughed. “I am doing exactly what you do think I am doing.”

“No,” Thad repeated.

“Yes! It will be fun.”

“Did we not just watch a clockworker put to death?”

“Everyone loves a circus,” she said. “Look around you.” The stilt walkers were dancing a giraffe’s waltz while the poodle yipped at their feet. Loreta Francesca hung by her teeth from a bar and whirled in a dizzying spin. Mordovo conjured bright handkerchiefs out of nothing. “Who would think to find a clockworker performing acrobatics with her clockworker strength and clockworker reflexes among people such as this?”

“I want to perform too,” Nikolai said.

Thad felt the situation getting away from him. “You do? And what can you do, then?”

In answer, Nikolai produced from his rags one of Thad’s long daggers. Before Thad could react further, Nikolai tilted his head back. With a faint squeak, his head and his jaw flipped apart so wide, his forehead and chin were nearly touching his back and chest. Nikolai thrust the dagger point-first down his metallic throat with a clink, then pulled it back out again. His head snapped back to its normal position.

Dante whistled. “Bless my soul.”

“Ta da!” said Nikolai.

There was a moment of silence. Then Thad burst out laughing. He couldn’t help it. Days of tension and terror, stress and strain rushed out of him like fireworks, and he laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed until his stomach hurt and tears streamed from his eyes. He tried to wipe them away, and noticed he was trying to do so with a brass hand. That struck him as even funnier, and fresh gales swept over him.

Sofiya regarded him from her horse. “I think maybe this one is ready for the automatic cage.”

“Doom,” said Dante.

“It wasn’t meant to be funny,” Nikolai said petulantly. His face, his strange little face, looked serious, even hurt. Thad tried to get himself under control and finally managed it with some effort.

“I’m sorry, Niko,” he said, and ruffled the boy’s hair with his brass hand. “But I don’t think that will fly in the ring.”

“Why not?” He still sounded unhappy.

“A circus act is all about doing the impossible or unexpected,” Thad explained. “Look up there in the rigging. No one expects human beings to move like that. It almost seems as if they can fly. And look at Mr. and Mrs. Stilgore over there. No one expects people to have such long legs or to be able to walk about on stilts like that. Men also don’t toss torches about or breathe fire.”

“Or swallow swords,” Nikolai put in.

“Or swallow swords,” Thad agreed. “And you’ll notice that all these acts are more than a little dangerous. That’s why people come, really. They’re hoping to see a stilt walker trip or a flyer fall or a fire eater burst into flame or a sword swallower slice himself in two. They want to see a lion eat the tamer or a horse girl break a leg or the elephant boy get trampled. They wouldn’t say that and they’d deny it if you asked, but that’s why they come, nonetheless.”

“So I can’t swallow swords because that won’t hurt me.”

“Now you have it.”

“How do you stay safe, then?”

“There are two tricks to that.” Thad looked into the distance. “One is to make what you’re doing look more dangerous than it is.”

“What’s the other?”

“Don’t stay safe.”

Nikolai thought about that. “I understand. Thank you for the nickname and the papa lecture.”

“What?” Thad stared at him.

“You taught me something and you gave me the nickname Niko. That is what papas do. I think you are doing a wonderful job. Especially because you didn’t die.”

“He has you,” Sofiya said gaily. “Why don’t you run down to the bath tent now, dear? As Niko points out, it has been more than three days, and you are rather ripe.”

“Oh no-we aren’t heading in that direction. No dear, no darling, no sweetie. This isn’t a marriage, even of convenience.”

“It is anything but convenient,” Sofiya agreed.

* * *

The machine had grown enormously larger. It had added thousands of tiny memory wheels to itself, and found itself able to understand more and more without the signal’s help. It learned how to expand the limited capabilities of its tiny receiver and listen to other signals that expanded its knowledge further. It captured a spider and ordered it to run a wire up to the delicious and intricate web of metal that ran above it, and suddenly the machine was exposed to trillions of dots and dashes that carried information of all sorts. It shivered once, and a signal of its own rippled throughout the city above. The wire signals fell silent for a few seconds, then came alive with frantic chatter as the operators asked themselves what had happened, who had sent the rogue signal, how it would be investigated. Some time later, an admonishing signal came from the Master, ordering the machine not to tamper with the telegraphs again, lest it draw attention to itself, and the machine obeyed. It did not care one way or the other.

The machine had only one imperative: improve its own operation. It cared about nothing else, had no real mind or thought. It did as the Master said and carried out its orders.

To that end, it captured another of the Master’s spiders and sent it up to a thing called an engineering library in the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences , which was almost directly above it on the place called Vasilyevsky Island across the River Neva and near another place called the Field of Mars and the Kalakos Circus.

Thoughts of the circus awakened a small independent sensation in the machine. It felt a…longing. A desire. A want. The machine was indeed familiar with desire. It desired metal to build new parts so it could expand and improve itself. It desired to follow the Master’s orders as transmitted by the signal. It desired knowledge, also to improve itself. But those desires were all directed toward the machine’s directive of self-improvement. This desire was for something else, a desire the machine could not yet name.

The machine would have to improve itself to the point where it could do so.

Thad pulled on fresh trousers, then looked at himself in the full-length mirror inside the door of the wardrobe in his wagon. Atop it was his bed, the one his parents used to sleep in and which he now used. Beside him on the wall hung his collection of clockwork trophies. They seemed forlorn now instead of menacing. The blank eyes of one of the automaton heads looked more reproachful than glassy. Maybe it was time to take them down. Beneath them, the fold-down shelf Sofiya had put him on was still piled up with dirty quilts. He had slept on that shelf as a very small boy, though in later years his parents had acquired a tent that draped over the front of the wagon to effectively double the living space, and Thad had slept on a camp bed out there.