Steven Harper - The Havoc Machine

The string of pearls in Thad’s pocket felt very heavy, and he wondered if Griffin or the revolutionaries knew about it. Thick liquid rushed through glass and metal and machinery clanked and puffed. Thad didn’t say a word.

“Well, then,” Sofiya said, “I think we need to return to the circus. We need to check on Nikolai.”

“You do indeed,” Mr. Griffin said. “And how is Nikolai?”

“He’s well,” Thad replied shortly.

“You don’t like it when I ask after him. Why is that? I thought you didn’t care for clockworker inventions.”

“I don’t discuss my private affairs with you.”

“Am I alive, do you think?” Mr. Griffin asked abruptly.

Thad paused, honestly baffled. “I don’t understand the question.”

“You don’t care for me very much, either. I’m a clockworker. To you, I’m less than human. That’s rather like your view of Nikolai. My body is almost entirely machinery. I am, in fact, less than point five four percent organic material. Am I alive?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Thad said.

“Are you alive, Mr. Sharpe?” Mr. Griffin continued.

“Of course I am.”

“Do you think for yourself?”

“That’s a ridiculous question. I’m completely…” Thad trailed off. He was going to say “organic,” but his brass hand lay heavy at the end of his forearm.

“Sharpe is sharp,” said Dante.

“No. You are not totally organic. Neither am I. If I am not alive, and you are, Mr. Sharpe, where is the dividing line between us? Twenty percent mechanical? Fifty percent? Seventy? Eighty-one point six? Ninety-nine? One hundred? What if Nikolai had a living hand, or part of a living brain inside him? Would you think of him as alive?”

“This is a foolish debate.”

“Is it? How can I tell if you think for yourself, Mr. Sharpe? From my perspective, you are nothing more than a clump of cells following a biological imperative to eat, sleep, and gather enough resources to reproduce. Even your hatred of clockworkers is a biological imperative, is it not?”

“Now look-”

“I thought you were intelligent enough to see it. Miss Ekk reset that spider’s memory wheels so it would obey a new set of directives-her orders. The spider’s experience changed it and made it behave differently. You were a brilliant circus performer until you met a Polish woman who changed your memory wheels, at which point you wanted nothing more than a quiet life as a knife sharpener. Later, she died and a clockworker killed your son, which changed your memory wheels again and gave you a new imperative. None of this is any different than the spider encountering Miss Ekk’s probing fingers.”

Sofiya touched the spider on her shoulder, but remained silent.

“It’s completely different,” Thad shot back. “I make choices about what I do. That spider makes none.”

“And Nikolai? Does he choose?”

“He doesn’t. He’s a machine. I put my hand inside his head.”

“These machines put their claws inside my head,” Mr. Griffin replied, unperturbed. “ Did you actually make your choices, or were you forced to do what you did by circumstances? Everything that has happened to you led up to that choice, to that of killing clockworkers. Your life programs you to do it, just as those spider’s wheels program it to obey Miss Ekk.”

It was more than enough. Thad sketched a mock salute. “We had a nice visit, but now it’s time to go. We do have a performance coming up.”

“I’m sure it will be a fascinating one,” Mr. Griffin said. “Keep the spider with my compliments, Miss Ekk. Next time, you need only ask, if you would like one. I seem to be mellowing in my old age.”

“Plastids!”

“Shut up!”

“We can find our own way back,” Thad said quickly. “No need to see us out.”

When Vanka dropped them off at the Field of Mars, they found a large crowd already gathering. Thad checked the time. They had more than an hour before the first performance of the day, and it was unusual for people to show up so early. Then he saw the soldiers and signs:

DOWN WITH ALEXANDER.

NO MORE SLAVERY.

FREE THE PRISONERS.

HANG THE TSARINA.

“Applesauce,” Dante said.

“This is not pretty,” Sofiya murmured beside him. “I hope Nikolai is all right.”

The crowd on the street was thick and tense, and a cacophony of voices bounced off the barrack. The soldiers had lined up on the Field of Mars and were working on keeping the people off the field. Occasionally a small group of them made a foray into the crowd to go after one of the sign-holders, but the heavy crowd made it difficult, and the signs were made of cheap muslin unrolled between two sticks, which meant they could be collapsed and hidden almost instantly, which further hampered the soldiers’ ability to arrest anyone.

Thad snagged a man holding a FREEDOM NOW sign. “What is happening here?”

“You haven’t heard?” The man nodded at the Field of Mars, where a pair of automatons were laying the crossbar on a large gallows, complete with six trapdoors on the plank flooring. To one side stood another group of automatons with marching-band instruments. “General Parkarov has convinced the tsar to execute all the clockworkers in the Peter and Paul Fortress.”

Sofiya’s face turned to ice. Thad’s legs went shaky. “And everyone is protesting this?”

“No.” The man shook his sign in anger. “We don’t care about clockwork filth. But there are rumors the general will execute a number of the people he arrested last night, and they are not clockworkers. They have done nothing but be born peasants and Jews.”

The automaton drummer set up a beat. Already the awful cages were trundling across the bridge from the island fortress, five of them with four people each. Thad couldn’t imagine that Saint Petersburg had twenty clockworkers. Rumor said the British government scoured its entire worldwide empire for clockworkers and still had fewer than two dozen at any given time. Even Mr. Griffin only had six. The man was right-the general was going to execute normal men and women.

The man with the sign moved on to avoid being snatched up by soldiers. Sofiya put a hand on Thad’s arm so as not to lose him in the crowd. “Why is the tsar allowing this? He supports the serfs.”

Thad set his jaw. “Maybe we can find out from them.” A line of carriages cut through the crowd, which had to back up or be trampled. From the first emerged the tsar in his uniform. This drew a mix of cheers and boos from the crowd. This surprised Thad, who had never in his life seen a monarch held up to public disapproval. Groups of soldiers ran into the crowd and cracked dissenters over the head or beat them about the body and dragged them away. This didn’t seem to discourage the others much, though neither did it turn into an outright riot.

Tsar Alexander magnificently ignored the jeering, walked to the grandstand where his wife and son had seen the clockworker beaten and dismembered only a few days earlier, and took a seat. Courtiers and high-ranking members of the military followed, though there was no sign of the tsarina or General Parkarov. Thad made his way through the crowd with Sofiya in tow until they reached the soldiers guarding the grandstand. By a stroke of good luck, among them were the men who knew Thad had saved the tsar’s life, but when he muscled his way up to them, they barred his way.