The Library Machine (The Extraordinary Journeys of Clockwork Charlie)

by Dave Butler

  His head was spinning, and if he took a wrong step now, the magic that fueled him might stop working. Of course, if he made a different wrong step, the Iron Cog might destroy London.

  He wanted to slow down and think it through.

  “No,” Thomas said, “there’s more. We pound in two of the nails. I know some words, and a sort of…dance. Those will summon the demon back into this hole, and then we pound in the third nail. And then it’s done.”

  “It don’t sound safe, being down here with a demon,” Ollie grumbled.

  “It won’t be safe.” Thomas looked at Charlie. “I think my father planned to do the magic himself, and I was only a backup. And I don’t think he planned to survive.”

  Charlie nodded. “And once you’ve done it, you and I…”

  “We’ll have done what we were made for. What our fathers created us to do. We’ll be successful, Charlie; we’ll be heroes. We’ll have stopped the Iron Cog.”

  “We won’t survive.”

  And Charlie wasn’t certain that was why his father had made him anyway.

  Jan Wijmoor wept softly.

  Why had he wanted to come along with them, really? Why not stay in Marburg, like the Rosenbaums?

  Thomas walked to a second hole in the floor—

  “Thomas!” Charlie cried.

  Thomas ignored him. He knelt and pushed in the cold-iron knife.

  “You’re very brave, Thomas,” Charlie said. “You’re braver than I am.”

  “Maybe we’ll stop.” Thomas’s face looked stricken as he spoke. “Probably. But this is the thing I was made to do. It’s the thing I have to do.”

  Thomas was willing to die.

  And Charlie realized that he was willing too. But he also realized that his own death wasn’t really what was bothering him.

  “Forget about us,” Charlie said. “What about the rajah and his people? Won’t their pumps stop? And their tractors?”

  Thomas nodded.

  “And the mechanical libraries. And the airships. And the Sky Trestle in London, and Big Ben. All of it will stop. And all the inventions that could happen, in the future. Who knows what those could be? Travel to the moon…cures for terrible diseases…tractors that make food cheap and plentiful.” He thought of the rajah and smiled. “The dwarf wizard was right, at least in this one thing he said. Magic isn’t good or evil; inventions aren’t good or evil. Those things are just tools. Taking the tools away from the world may take away someone’s power to do evil, but it also takes away someone else’s power to do good. Of course, Suleiman wanted to lock up all the technology for himself, and that isn’t the right answer either. If we really trap this demon, all those good inventions will stop.”

  “And so will the Cog,” Thomas said. “With their part-machine soldiers and their part-machine beasts.”

  “Will they stop?” Charlie asked. “I know that was your father’s idea, but what if he was wrong? Will the Cog give up, or will they just find a different way to accomplish what they want? Their goals sound lovely—peace and plenty—but to get there they want to control everybody. They’re trying to do it using machines, and I don’t really entirely understand how, but if they lose the machines, won’t they just try the same thing another way?”

  “What other way?” Thomas took two steps toward the third hole in the floor. If he began to chant or dance, what would Charlie do? Would he tackle his brother and try to stop the magic?

  “War,” Charlie said. “They’ve already shown they’re willing to go to war, and they don’t need fancy machines to do that. Guns, knives, poison, clubs, fists. There are lots of ways to hurt and bully people, Thomas. Whatever we do today won’t put an end to people being cruel. But we can make it harder for the rajah’s people to get water, and for the students in Marburg to learn. We can take Thomas out of the world, and that would be a loss.”

  “Yes, there’s war,” Thomas said. “There’s war coming to London, the pixies said! We can do something about it. Are you saying we should do nothing instead? That doesn’t really seem like my brother Charlie. Or is this just your nature? My father made me shy to keep me out of the hands of his enemies. You told me once that your father made you disobedient for the same reason. Are you sure you aren’t just resisting because your bap designed you to resist?”

  Charlie laughed. “No, I’m not sure. And are you sure you aren’t just following your father’s plan, because that’s what he made you to do?”

  Thomas shook his head slowly. “I’m not sure of anything.”

  “I’m sure of one thing,” Charlie said. “My brother Thomas is as magnificent as a tractor, and the world is better off because he is in it.”

  Thomas smiled. “What do we do, Charlie?”

  Charlie thought for a moment. “We try to do what Papa Wilhelm said. We try to make a world where people can be happy, and where they can also be free.”

  Thomas nodded.

  Charlie gently took the third nail, the nail of the intellectual world, from his brother’s hands. “I’ll hold this, in case we need it. But I think if we go back to London, we can find another way.”

  “What’s in London?” Thomas asked. “Besides the danger?”

  “My friends Ingrid and Grim. Lloyd, I think. The queen—she doesn’t know me, but she’s seen me.”

  “And is that enough?” Thomas asked. “Is that enough friends and allies to stop the Iron Cog?”

  “Maybe not,” Charlie said. “But I think we have to try.”

  “Okay, Charlie. I’m willing to try.” Thomas looked briefly at his feet, but then he looked up again, smiling. “I’ve never been to London.”

  Charlie grinned. “We’re world travelers, you and I.”

  “And so am I!” cried a new voice.

  It belonged to Heinrich Zahnkrieger, the kobold Charlie had once known as his father’s partner, Henry Clockswain, but who had spied on Charlie’s father and betrayed him. Zahnkrieger wore a bulky airman’s suit and goggles, as if he’d just stepped off an airship, and a large rucksack strapped to his back. He climbed slowly down the stairs into the chamber, pointing a brass wand at Charlie.

  “I’m glad to see you, my friends,” Zahnkrieger said.

  He muttered quick words—Charlie didn’t hear them clearly, and the Babel Card didn’t help—and Charlie felt his body freeze.

  Gnat leaped forward to attack, and an arc of blue light leaped from the tip of Zahnkrieger’s wand. It struck the pixie in mid-leap and knocked her to the cavern floor.

  She groaned.

  “I came directly here from Cader Idris.” Zahnkrieger smiled. “It’s about time you caught up.”

  “Heinrich,” Jan Wijmoor said. “Please don’t do this.”

  “Do what, Meneer Doktor?” Zahnkrieger asked. His sneer twisted the other kobold’s titles into an insult.

  “You can make the world a better place in many ways,” Wijmoor said. “But not this way. Not forcing people.”

  “How odd.” Zahnkrieger reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. He smiled at Wijmoor, stroking the straps of his rucksack. “That’s not what you said when they were stripping me of my degrees and titles, and beating me with carter’s whips, and throwing me out of the Syndikat.”

  “I was wrong.” Wijmoor gulped. “As you are wrong now. I’ve regretted it since, and not only because it drove you into the arms of those people. But at the time, I did what I thought I had to do. For the Syndikat.”

  “As I do what I think I have to do now.” Zahnkrieger nodded. “For the world. For all peoples.”

  The redcap muttered obscure words that the Babel Card didn’t translate.

  “Hey!” Thomas shouted.

  “What are you doing to my brother?” Charlie yelled.

  Zahnkrieger tightened one shoulder strap. “If he resists, he’ll only get hurt.
”

  Thomas’s head wiggled in outrage, but from the neck down he was absolutely still as Zahnkrieger plucked the nail of the intellectual world from Charlie’s hand.

  Then the kobold turned and threw the chalky spike down the hole in the center of the floor.

  “There,” he said. “Fixed.”

  “You can’t take away everyone’s right to disagree,” Wijmoor said.

  “Psh, right.” Zahnkrieger laughed. “You have gotten so metaphysical, Meneer Doktor. When did my old thesis advisor cease being an engineer and become a professor of philosophy?”

  “I’m still just a grinder of gearwheels and polisher of ball bearings,” Wijmoor said. “I’ve made plenty of mistakes. But I know what’s wrong. And I recognize madness when I see it.”

  “We’re not going to take away from anyone any right.” Zahnkrieger continued as if Wijmoor hadn’t spoken. “We’re going to take away the ability to disagree. From everyone. For their own sakes.”

  “What makes you think you’ll get out of this pit alive?” Gnat looked up from the floor, gripping the Hound’s tooth hanging from her neck.

  Zahnkrieger patted the strap to his rucksack. “I have a device,” he said. “But if I die here, the Cog carries out the plan without me. I am completely redundant at this point.”

  “But if I die here, my folk will never stand for it,” Gnat snarled.

  “Ah, yes, Underthames.”

  “You are mad,” Charlie said. “What you’re talking about is impossible.”

  “You of all people—or should I say, of all things?—ought to know better, Charlie.” Zahnkrieger rubbed his hands together. “You were built to disobey, but that was a perversion of the technology Joban Singh was working on.”

  Charlie felt cold all over. “You’re lying.”

  Zahnkrieger shook his head. “The first generation of experimentation was Wilhelm Grimm, who trapped his own soul in a device with the help of his brother. The second was you two, Charlie and Thomas, the creation of a new soul in a device. And of course the rabbit, which was how Brunel tested the broadcasting technology.”

  Broadcasting? Charlie thought of the visions Aunt Big Money had given him, and the dreams. “What do you mean?”

  But Zahnkrieger pulled at a thread on his airman’s suit and continued, ignoring him. “The third generation was the Hound, and now the machine soldiers. The use of the spirit stone to connect a living soul to a part-flesh and part-mechanical body. The fourth generation, and where we have been going all along, is the use of a machine to control living souls, through the medium of the powdered spirit stone.”

  Charlie stared.

  Zahnkrieger smiled. “A little bit inhaled, Charlie, just a little of the same substance that makes you so marvelous. Breathed in or swallowed, in a glass of water. Don’t you want everyone else to be as wonderful as you are? But the little bit we’ll put into them will take away their power to disobey. We will broadcast, and everyone who has taken in the spirit stone will do as they are told. For their own good, of course. You know what I’m talking about, Charlie. The constant war between rats and pixies will end when the rats and pixies are all under our control. Everyone benefits; everyone prospers. That oaf Grim Grumblesson will stop fretting about who marries whom once he’s no longer making the decisions.”

  “You would enslave my people!” Gnat stood.

  “We’ll try. Anyone too stubborn to surrender to the powder will have to be controlled…or put out of the way…by other means.”

  Gnat hissed.

  “Heinrich here was my student, Charlie.” Jan Wijmoor’s voice creaked with pain. “Many years ago. And his thesis—the research he wanted to do—was on the Library Machine.”

  “You don’t mean the card catalog,” Charlie said. “You mean Papa Wilhelm.”

  “That’s exactly right. Wilhelm Grimm managed to connect his spirit to a white stone, which let him live beyond his natural death.”

  “He called it the spirit stone,” Charlie said. And then Charlie realized what Papa Wilhelm had been trying to tell him, that part of the magic that made Charlie work must be that a bit of the spirit stone was inside Charlie himself. And another bit was inside Thomas—that was what really made them brothers, and Papa Wilhelm and Aunt Big Money their family.

  “His brother Jacob found it. The stone also connected Wilhelm to mechanical devices,” Jan Wijmoor continued. “Such as the projector and the gate that you know. Such as the card catalog, which Wilhelm powered. You saw the spirit stone—it was buried beneath the library. And Heinrich believed that the same connection could be used to control people.”

  “I did not believe.” Heinrich straightened the front of his suit. “I inferred from the data. And Singh and Brunel proved me right!”

  “He stole pieces of the stone.” Wijmoor’s shoulders slumped. “We never found it—the evidence wasn’t conclusive, as I testified on his behalf—but at his review, the Internal Auditor determined that he should be terminated.”

  “Killed?” Thomas asked.

  “Exiled,” Zahnkrieger snarled. “But then the pebbles for which I had risked my life and my career were stolen from me, by those ingrates Joban Singh and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.”

  Gnat took a step forward.

  “Stop!” Zahnkrieger barked. “Or I leave, and seal you in.”

  “That’s the stone inside me,” Charlie said. “And Thomas. And Aunt Big Money.”

  Jan Wijmoor looked at Charlie and smiled sadly. “You boys have souls, I believe. Or maybe you have a portion of Wilhelm Grimm’s soul, but who’s to say that isn’t the same thing?”

  “And then, after testifying on my behalf,” Zahnkrieger growled, “which is to say, telling the board of directors that they were probably right that I was a thief, but that without definitive proof they should merely demote me and put me on probation—”

  “You were a thief!” Wijmoor shouted.

  Zahnkrieger smiled slowly. “Very well. You were then content to control me, to take away my freedom, to meddle in my destiny. You were perfectly happy to side with the Internal Auditor and the board and see me thrown to the wolves.”

  “The wolves didn’t eat you,” Wijmoor observed, pointing a slow and weary finger at the ceiling. “You joined their pack.”

  Heinrich Zahnkrieger threw back his head and laughed. “So true. But don’t worry, soon enough there will only be sheep, one happy bleating flock to be regularly sheared and occasionally, happily, eaten.”

  “Did my father know you were in the Iron Cog?” Charlie was afraid of how the rest of Zahnkrieger’s story would go.

  Zahnkrieger shook his head. “I’ll give you this gift, Charlie, to prove my good intentions. Your father and Brunel were innocent men. They knew the Cog as an honorable association of thinkers and noblemen, with the aim of benefiting all people—which is true, of course. We brought them to the work and kept its full nature hidden from them, believing that they would scruple at some of the plan’s details. So your father believed he was creating artificial life, for purely disinterested and benevolent purposes. And when he found schematics that revealed to him what we were truly attempting, he and Brunel both fled.”

  “But you,” Charlie said. “He must not have known you. Or he never would have taken you as his business partner in the shop.”

  “I supervised him in secret,” the kobold agreed.

  “And the fake Queen Victoria?” Charlie asked. “You needed my father to activate her. It.”

  “That’s true.” Zahnkrieger nodded. “We chose Singh and Brunel because they were the best engineers we could find working on simulated persons. But since the events of the Jubilee, we’ve been able to recover the false Victoria and reverse engineer the work your father did. We’ve deployed it in Prussia, for instance.”

  “Bismarck,” Jan Wijmoor said. “You’ve replac
ed him with an automaton, and the automaton has declared the war you wanted.”

  “Which very conveniently let us take Hesse and Marburg. We have the stone now,” Zahnkrieger continued, still talking to Charlie. “And we’ve mastered the technology. So we don’t need your father or Brunel. And we don’t need you.”

  “You just came to stop us from stoppering up the demon.” Charlie’s heart sank.

  “I’ve been waiting here for weeks. Since I last saw you.” Zahnkrieger raised his hands. “My fingers still hurt from you stomping on them, as does the back of my head from that bottle.” He glared at the pixie.

  “Aye, I’ll be sure to use something sharper this time,” Gnat growled.

  “There will be no ‘this time.’ ” Zahnkrieger twisted one of his suit’s buttons. “Your journey ends here.”

  “And how will you escape,” Gnat asked in a suddenly sweet, calm voice, “if you cannot see?”

  It was a signal to Ollie.

  Bamf! Charlie smelled rotten eggs, and with the disappearance of the moonbeam snake, the cave was plunged into near-complete darkness. A faint glimmer of yellow light filtered down from the gaslights in the chapel above.

  Thud! Pfffff­fffff­ffft!

  A hissing sound filled the room, and then Charlie heard Gnat cursing. Something spherical blocked off the light, and then came the patter of Gnat’s feet.

  “Light, Ollie!” Gnat cried.

  Bamf! Ollie dropped back into his moonbeam snake shape, and Charlie could see again.

  Gnat sprinted up the circular stairs as fast as her tiny legs could take her, but it wasn’t going to be fast enough. Jan Wijmoor now rushed after her, but he was even slower.

  Ollie hissed in frustration.

  Where Heinrich Zahnkrieger had stood, a steel canister lay on the floor. A balloon had sprouted out of the kobold’s rucksack, and it now carried him quickly up to the top of the chamber. The kobold had to duck and bring in his arms and legs to be small enough for the bottleneck, but he grinned as he did so.