The Havoc Machine

by Steven Harper

  “So Thad was wrong, and you did place the bomb!” Sofiya exclaimed.

  “Certainly not.” The spiders backed away from the device, and Mr. Griffin’s voice had returned to normal. “That was a terrible complication, and you, Mr. Sharpe, both helped and hindered us. It is, in fact, why I was planning to send for you.”

  “You’re confusing me again,” Thad said. “Your brilliance is simply beyond me. Please explain slowly, so I can understand.”

  “Bless my soul,” muttered Dante.

  Sofiya gave Thad a sharp look, and the spider on her shoulder tapped its feet. Thad returned her look blandly.

  “I am happy to oblige,” Mr. Griffin said, now in Polish. “The bomb would have killed the tsar and many members of his court, true, but a number of our supporters were present among the latter, and we would not want them to perish. Besides, a bomb is terribly blunt. Any fool can cobble together an explosive.”

  Now Thad gave Sofiya an arch look, which she returned blandly.

  “Plastids! I have the plastids!”

  “That’s it! I’m going to stuff that microscope up your—”

  “Tritone, gentlemen.” Mr. Griffin’s machines made a noise that came across as a sigh. “In any case, we aren’t ready to move yet, and the tsar’s death at this juncture would be inconvenient. Unfortunately, your attempt to save his life only made everything worse, Mr. Sharpe.”

  “I can’t say I would have done anything differently,” Thad replied with a stiff jaw. “Not with all those children in the room, and my own self.”

  “My spiders were there, Mr. Sharpe,” Griffin reminded him. “You did see them in the Winter Palace. We—the Reds—had heard about the bomb and I sent my spiders to find and disarm it. They made themselves obvious to you along the parade route to warn you. They had just located the bomb when you interfered. If you had just kept your hands to yourself, none of those people would be sitting in prison right now.”

  A heavy hand of guilt pressed against Thad’s back.

  “I fail to follow your logic.” Sofiya crossed her arms. “The people at fault are you and General Parkarov. Parkarov placed the bomb, not Thad. He ordered those poor people brought in, not Thad. Your spiders failed to find the bomb earlier. You failed to inform us of your plans so we could remain aloof. Don’t try to blame us for your shortcomings, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Sofiya,” Thad murmured. He recognized the clockwork temper flaring.

  “I have no shortcomings,” Mr. Griffin snapped. “Everything was proceeding according to plan until the two of you interfered, and now I’m forced to alter my plan and bring you in before you do something worse.”

  “Perhaps we could all have some vodka and caviar,” Zygmund said. “I have some nice—”

  “Why don’t you just kill us with your little spiders,” Sofiya snarled, “since we interfere so? You could pour our cerebrospinal fluid into your brain jar.”

  “Because you’re useful,” Mr. Griffin said. He seemed to have gotten himself back under control, though the fact that he had lost control, even for a moment, was interesting to Thad. “You are both favored of the tsar, and Mr. Sharpe is talented at manipulating clockworkers. He has done a marvelous job of manipulating you, Miss Ekk.”

  “What?” Sofiya was in a full temper now. She whirled on Thad, eyes flashing. Maddie’s claws flashed at her shoulder.

  “Doom!” Dante squawked.

  “Sofiya,” Thad said, thinking quickly, “Mr. Griffin is the manipulator here. You’re smarter than that. He thinks you’re less intelligent than he is, and he thinks you’re not smart enough to figure out what he’s doing. He’s trying to make you upset, unhappy, angry. Remember what happens when you become angry. Remember your sister. Remember Olenka.”

  Thad spoke in a low, fast voice. For some reason, clockworkers responded to patterns in speech, though Thad was rarely in a position to talk to them. An angry Sofiya was unpredictable enough, and an angry Sofiya in this place was a disaster.

  “Remember Olenka,” he said again. “Remember Olenka.”

  The anger left Sofiya’s eyes. She backed up a step and put a hand to her mouth. “No,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “I know,” Thad said. “It’s all right. We’ll talk about it later.” He raised his voice and switched to Polish. “Very amusing, Mr. Griffin.”

  “You have demonstrated your talent admirably,” Griffin said. “Manipulating a clockworker to prove that you hadn’t manipulated her. Brilliant!”

  “I—” Sofiya said.

  “So you want me to help you keep the clockworkers in line and use my influence with the tsar to aid your cause,” Thad said.

  “You think well for an ordinary man,” Griffin said.

  Thad tried not to be insulted and focused instead on how he had been correct, that Griffin’s ego was enormous and that it needed constant care and feeding. It made him feel better, more in control. He touched Dante’s wings with his brass hand, and Dante ducked his head.

  “Why don’t we simply kill Parkarov?” Sofiya said. “It would be easy enough.”

  “Not yet,” Zygmund spoke up. “The tsar would assume—rightly this time—that a clockworker was behind his death, and it would only make the situation worse. Mr. Sharpe, right now we need you to use your influence at court to slow or stop this massacre. Miss Ekk, any invention of war that you can create for us would be helpful. And we always need money.”

  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.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  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.

  “I need to speak to the tsar,” Thad panted. “He’ll see me. You remember!”

  One of the guards drew a pistol. “You are not to see the tsar.”

  Thad backed up and trod on Sofiya’s foot, and the other people in the crowd pulled away. “The tsar would not be happy,” Sofiya said sharply, “if he knew you were keeping one of his trusted advisers away from him.”

  “Our orders come from General Parkarov,” the soldier snapped.

  The general clearly didn’t want Thad talking to the tsar. That made it all the more important. Alexander had reached the stairs to the grandstand only a few paces away, though his back was to Thad and Sofiya. Thad thought about making a break for it, but the soldier cocked his pistol and aimed it at Thad’s chest.

  Thad hoisted Dante high above his head. “Call it!”

  “Bless my soul!” Dante shouted. “Sharpe is sharp! Doom! Doom!”

  The sound of the parrot’s voice brought the tsar’s head around, and his eye fell on Thad and Sofiya. A smile broke across his face, and he gestured at them to join him on the stairs. The men were forced to give way, and Thad shot them a triumphant look.

  “Thanks, birdbrain,” he said, setting Dante back on his shoulder. “I promise you some extra oil this evening.”

  “Pretty boy,” Dante replied. “Sharpe is sharp.”

  One of the soldiers yelped as Sofiya passed him on their way to the grandstand. Thad glanced at her. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing important,” she sniffed. “Don’t keep the tsar waiting.”

  When they reached the steps to the grandstand, they bowed and curtsied and joined the tsar at his royal box. The tsar sat and Thad and Sofiya stood while the court whispered wildly behind fans and gloved hands. Thad hovered, unsure what to do next.

  “A fine day for a hanging,” the tsar said. “I know my wife rewarded you, but allow me to offer you a view from the royal box as my own thanks. Unfortunate about the circus, but there will be other days.”

  “The circus?” Thad echoed. “I’m sorry, sire, but I haven’t heard.”

  “I canceled today’s performance in favor of this.” He gestured at the gallows, where an automaton painted black was taking up a position at a lever that would open all six trapdoors at once. “Too much in one day stirs the masses.”

  “They do seem agitated,” Sofiya said carefully. Maddie the spider slid backward on her shoulder, as if hiding from the tsar. The cages bearing their sad cargo rolled relentlessly up to the gallows and stopped. Soldiers armed with rifle and pistol moved up to each one. An automaton was hanging nooses from the crossbar with mechanical precision. With awful dread, Thad noticed three of the prisoners in the cages were children, not even twelve years old.

  “Sire,” Thad said, “I was talking with General Parkarov. As an expert at spotting clockworkers, I advised him that the people he had arrested were perfectly normal and innocent, the children doubly so. I’m curious about the decision to—”

  “Some of the ones in the first cages are definitely clockworkers,” the tsar said. “More are coming in a moment. Parkarov convinced me—quite rightly—that it would be best to rid Russia of them. Too dangerous
.”

  “Are the children dangerous, sire?” Thad asked. His entire body raged with the need to move fast, but he was hobbled by the power of the man sitting next to him. Every word had to be soft and polite and careful.

  “Children of gypsies and Jews,” the tsar said dismissively. “No one will miss them. The other peasants were probably hiding clockworkers or plague victims, even if they aren’t clockworkers themselves. We’re getting rid of them, just in case. I’m being merciful in allowing them to be hanged instead of beaten and dismembered.”

  “I see. But sire, aren’t you planning to emancipate the serfs? This seems…counter to that.”

  The tsar looked honestly surprised. “I’m setting serfs free to bring Russia’s economy into the modern age, not to allow them to make assassination attempts or rise up against the throne. We are making an example of these. But enough of that.” He shifted on the padded bench. “Have you made any progress at finding the clockworker who tried to assassinate me, as my wife requested?”

  Thad wanted to hit him. The man was as much admitting that none of the people in the cages had anything to do with the plot to kill him, but he was still planning to carry out their deaths. Thad looked at the children in their cages of gold and decided to risk the truth.

  “I know who tried to kill you, sire,” he said slowly. “Though I do not know if you will believe me.”

  “Death,” murmured Dante. “Doom, defeat, despair.”

  Here, the tsar spun on his bench to stare at him. “Who was it? Tell me!”

  At that moment, General Parkarov, without his pipe, marched with several aides out to the gallows. The band of automatons struck up a loud, brassy tune, temporarily overpowering the shouts of the crowd. A pair of soldiers arrested another demonstrator and dragged him, shouting, into the barrack building. The general noticed Thad standing next to the tsar, and the look he gave Thad was an icy blade. If the tsar didn’t believe Thad, the general would be a deadly enemy. But he couldn’t remain silent.

  “It was General Parkarov,” Thad said. “His lands and serfs are double mortgaged, and he’ll lose everything in the emancipation. To stop you, he planted a bomb while he was inspecting the Nicholas Hall for safety, and then, when his plot failed, he brought you pieces of a spider and started this massacre to distract you—and me—from finding out what truly happened. I think now he’s trying to stir up the crowds against you.” A number of disparate thoughts were coming together now, and Thad spoke carefully. “He’s ordered his men to be deliberately brutal to try and make the people angry. He’s hoping for a lucky accident, or perhaps he has planned something more direct, and he’s going to blame it on an angry rioter. You should leave, sire, and have the general arrested.”