The Havoc Machine ce-4

by Steven Harper

  “Are you all right?” A finger of warmth went up his spine at her entrance. She was a good and familiar sight in this awful place, and he was happy that she seemed to be all right, though her hand concerned him. He reached for it, but she pulled away. “What happened?”

  “Miss Ekk,” Mr. Griffin said. Sofiya ignored him.

  “The havoc spiders,” she said. “You won’t believe it, but it is true.” With quick, succinct sentences, she explained. The more she spoke, the more unsettled Thad became. When she got to the part about the twisted versions of Nikolai, he was staggering beneath the weight of her words, and had to catch himself against a crate.

  “Don’t lean on that,” Mr. Griffin warned. “Delicate.”

  “The bridge has burned and the havoc spiders are trapped on Vasilyevsky Island,” Sofiya finished, “but we have to move quickly if we want to stop them from…from…whatever it is they’re trying to do. Whatever it is involves Nikolai. It’s good you didn’t leave him up on the surface.”

  Thad’s mind whirled with the new information. He stared around the chaotic chamber, a mirror of the one Sofiya had just left. He stared at his hand, a mirror of Mr. Griffin’s jar. He stared up at the shadowy tunnel entrance where sat Nikolai, a mirror of the one on the island. A number of ideas slammed together. Thad turned to the brain, complacent in its unbreakable jar. He felt cold and alone, even with Sofiya there.

  “It’s you,” Thad said. “Everything leads back to you.”

  More fluid dripped and blooped through the pipes. “Is it?” Mr. Griffin said.

  “You are the one…man that holds everything together. You sent me to Havoc’s castle to get the machine. You forced the circus to bring you here. Now, by sheer coincidence, you’re fomenting a rebellion in the same city where everything is happening. And you’re always interested in Nikolai. You have been from the very beginning. You didn’t want just that ten-legged spider from Havoc’s castle. You also wanted Nikolai. That’s why you sent me in there. You knew I had lost a child and that I probably wouldn’t destroy an automaton that acted like one.”

  “There was a ninety-four point six two eight percent chance that you would both rescue the automaton and keep it with you,” Mr. Griffin agreed.

  The walls were closing in on Thad now, invisible walls that had been there all along but he was only now starting to see. He was nothing more than a puppet at the end of a string, an automaton following a program within its memory wheels. Was this how Nikolai felt all the time? Perhaps even now, his words were predicted, scripted, pulled out of him with no choice of his own. A puppet who could see the strings still had to dance.

  “That’s why you insisted I hire the circus for you and why you wanted me to continue working with you,” Thad said. “Because you knew Nikolai would attach himself to me and would stay in the city as long as I did.”

  “A ninety-one point seven five percent chance there. And an eighty-nine point two percent chance the tsar would command a performance once he heard of Sofiya and her horse, which would keep the circus and Nikolai in Saint Petersburg. Alexander does enjoy a beautiful woman.”

  “Why?” Thad asked.

  “It seems to be a failing among men. The tsar, in particular, has numerous mistresses who-”

  “Why are you doing this?” Thad shouted.

  Zygmund looked up from his wireless, and the man at the telegraph paused. Were they puppets, too? Could they see the strings?

  A flurry of movement came from behind the machinery where Dante had disappeared a while ago, but Thad was too intent on Mr. Griffin to take much notice. “Doom!”

  “I am not a fool, Mr. Sharpe,” said Mr. Griffin. “Normal clockworkers, foolish clockworkers, reveal their plans in long, maniacal monologues, but I am above that.”

  Frustration and rage tinged Thad’s vision. He wanted to leap over the stupid machines and smash that glass jar to pieces. Instead, he forced his voice into a reasonable tone. The puppet might be controlled by his strings, but those strings led inevitably back to the puppeteer.

  “Of course you’re a fool,” Thad said easily. “Good God-ninety-one point one two percent chance. Naturally.”

  “What are you-?” Sofiya began, but Thad stepped on her foot.

  “Point seven six,” Mr. Griffin corrected.

  “Whatever, whatever.” Thad waved. “As if anyone could predict human behavior to that extent. It’s quite impossible. Everyone knows that. Even Sofiya here.”

  He nudged her foot again. Sofiya blinked, then said, “Yes, of course. Completely impossible.”

  “I assure you, it is quite possible. The proof is that you are both standing here, and there’s a revolution beginning up there.”

  “Ex post facto,” Thad replied airily. “You’re merely taking credit for something that would have happened anyway. You don’t have a plan. You’re just trying to trick me into working for you for free. I can’t believe I followed a brain in a jar all the way across Europe. There’s the fool.”

  “I HAVE A PLAN!” Mr. Griffin thundered from his speakers. The men in the room jumped, and Maddie quivered on Sofiya’s shoulder. Thad kept his expression bland.

  “Naturally, yes, yes,” he said with blatantly false placation. “Never mind-I believe you.” He turned to Sofiya. “He does have a plan. We should believe him. Absolutely!”

  “You don’t believe me.” Mr. Griffin’s voice was icy now, and Thad recognized the stage. “My plan is brilliant.”

  “Tell us some other time. We should go join the revolution.” Thad took Sofiya’s hand, the uninjured one, and looked around for Dante. “As you said we should.”

  “I knew from the start that Havoc’s machine would survive your attempt to destroy it,” Griffin said, “because I was the one who created it in the first place.”

  That got Thad’s attention. “Did you?”

  “Havoc was one of my clockworkers here in Saint Petersburg. Didn’t that occur to you? No, of course not. You don’t have a clockworker’s intellect. Havoc was a genius at understanding how the brain works. He merged brain tissue with machinery, and from there worked out wonders with memory wheels alone and got machines to appear to think. He even learned how to make a machine that could make itself more intelligent by adding memory wheels to itself. Meanwhile, I myself invented a spider with the ability to make copies of itself, though the initial prototype was flawed and merely walked about eating everything in sight in order to make materials for more copies, and I was forced to shut it down. Havoc became fascinated with my machine. Obsessed. He combined my designs with his own, and created a machine that was intelligent enough to improve itself and make intelligent copies. And that gave me my plan.”

  “It doesn’t sound like a plan,” Thad scoffed. “It sounds like you stole someone else’s work and took credit for it.”

  “Havoc was a mere tinker,” Griffin snapped. “He didn’t see what our work could do. The idiot stole the machine one night to keep me from realizing its true potential, vanished right out of this very laboratory. It took some time to make arrangements to chase him, and that was when I learned of Miss Ekk. I hired her just for it, kept her ignorant-that was easy-and we went to Lithuania to hunt him down. Originally I had planned to use her to regain my machine, but you happened along instead, and that made everything easier.”

  “Why didn’t you just rebuild the machine?” Thad asked. “Or use your wireless signals to call it back to you?”

  “Havoc wasn’t stupid. He kept the spider in a box designed to keep my signals out until he reached a stone laboratory that they couldn’t touch, either. As for rebuilding it, I needed Havoc for that,” Griffin admitted grudgingly. “Just as I needed him for the other half.”

  “Other half?” Thad echoed, as he knew Griffin wanted him to.

  “The other half of the machine. You said our revolution isn’t armed, Mr. Sharpe, and that is not quite true. We are-I am-creating an army.”

  “You’re going to make an army of spiders to fight a re
volution?” Thad said. “That won’t begin to work. Spiders can kill a lot of people, true, but the tsar’s army will crush them in no time at all, once they recover.”

  “And those new spiders are destroyed by water,” Sofiya pointed out. “This is a significant weakness.”

  Griffin’s machines bubbled very like the sound of frustration. “We are making an army of human automatons.”

  Thad felt sick. Sofiya gave a false laugh that didn’t touch her eyes. “Those twisted things? Don’t be silly. They couldn’t fight a fly.”

  “And how would you control an entire army?” Thad said. “Radio signals? I’ve seen you and that machine give simple tasks through…wireless radio waves, is it? Your spiders require constant attention to deal with relatively simple tasks like keeping your equipment in good repair. Even a clockworker doesn’t have the brain-power to control an army of complicated human automatons with weapons, with strategy and tactics and adapting to situations in combat. Soldiers need both to follow orders and think for themselves.”

  “Yes,” Griffin said.

  This caught Thad completely out. The room rocked and he surreptitiously put out a hand to steady himself on the engine cover again. “Think…for themselves?” he said.

  “We-I-need an army that can grow, reproduce, and think,” Griffin said. “The new spider can reproduce. The other half of Havoc’s machine can think and grow.”

  “Nikolai,” Sofiya whispered.

  “Indeed,” Griffin said. “As you said, Mr. Sharpe, I needed Nikolai in Saint Petersburg, and you very nicely rescued him from Havoc’s castle and brought him here for me.”

  “Good God.” Thad spun to look up at the entrance tunnel, expecting Nikolai to be gone. But he was still there at the top of the rungs, sitting with his knees pulled up under his chin. Relieved but still unnerved, Thad edged toward the ladder.

  “You ordered the new machine to flood the city with its spiders. It was supposed to find Nikolai and copy his design,” Sofiya was saying, “but it didn’t work.”

  “It worked well enough. Once I combine Nikolai’s unique brain with the machine’s capabilities, it will spread and devour everything in its path. It will produce an army of free-thinking automatons who will fight for me like good sons obey their father. The machine and the automatons will grow and reproduce and grow and reproduce until we have spread over Saint Petersburg, and then Russia, and then the world.”

  “The world?” Thad said.

  “Doom!” Dante had clambered to the top of a cabinet with a bent spider leg in his beak and leaped to Thad’s shoulder.

  “We will supplant all human life with automatons,” Mr. Griffin said reasonably. “Russia’s hatred for clockworkers will end.”

  “Because there will be no humans to hate them,” Sofiya said.

  “Not entirely. I do need a supply of cerebrospinal fluid.” Mr. Griffin’s speakers gave a little chuckle, and a few bubbles coruscated across his brain.

  Thad was at the ladder now. “Zygmund and his friends over there haven’t figured out your plan, have they? They think you’re working on a real revolution. What’s to stop us from revealing your little plan and letting him and his friends destroy you now?”

  “My spiders and the ninety-nine point four percent chance that you will flee this chamber within the next sixty seconds,” Mr. Griffin replied, unperturbed. “I have arranged another task for you. And if you want to survive my revolution, you will return to work for me afterward.”

  “Why,” Thad said through clenched teeth, “would I return to-”

  “Dante,” Nikolai grunted above him. “Thaddeus. Sofi-ya.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Thad bolted up the ladder with Sofiya hot on his heels. His brass hand clanked on the rungs. Nikolai waited for them at the mouth of the tunnel at the top. Thad grabbed his shoulder.

  “Thad,” the boy grunted. The voice was guttural, like something from the back of a cave. Unlike the Nikolai Thad knew, this version of him had dull, flat eyes. His clothes were ill-fitting, as if he had stolen them from a clothesline, and he jerked when he moved. “Sofi-ya.”

  This time Thad did throw up. The acid burned all the way up and splattered across the stones. It felt like his entire body burned with bile.

  “Help me,” whistled Dante.

  “What did you do with him?” Sofiya shrieked at Griffin.

  “He is fulfilling the purpose for which he was created,” Mr. Griffin said from below.

  “How-?” Thad said.

  “I did say that you arrived too early. I needed a moment to spirit him away to Vasilyevsky Island and ensure everything had time to move. Did you think you could trick me into revealing my plans so you could stop me? It’s far, far too late for that.”

  Then Mr. Griffin laughed. It was a deep, rich sound, a completely artificial one made by a machine. Mr. Griffin claimed that the clockwork plague was no longer driving him mad, but living as a brain in a jar was doing an admirable job.

  “Run!” Thad said, and the two of them fled up the tunnel, leaving the twisted Nikolai and Mr. Griffin’s laughter behind.

  “Sofi-ya!” Nikolai called.

  Outside, Kalvis was waiting for them. No longer worried about calling attention to themselves, they jumped aboard the clockwork horse, Sofiya in front, and galloped away. Thad’s entire body was tight with worry. Sofiya had described the machine on Vasilyevsky Island, and he imagined Nikolai shoved into that chair with a cord in his ear, all alone, with no one to help him. Rage gnawed at him, and…

  He shoved the feelings aside. Nikolai wasn’t a little boy. He was a machine. He couldn’t get hurt. He couldn’t feel real pain.

  Was he screaming when he sat in the chair?

  “Is anyone chasing us?” Sofiya asked.

  “I don’t think so.” Thad’s reply was breathless. It was difficult to ride behind the saddle of a brass horse, but he managed. The metal was uncomfortably warm. “But that worries me. Why didn’t Griffin simply kill us? We know where he is and we know his plan. We could bring the tsar’s entire army down on him.”

  “He said we have another task to do. And he still…watches my sister. I can’t let the tsar know where Mr. Griffin is.”

  They rode grimly through the darkening city. People were back in the streets now, mostly milling about and wondering what was going on. Many carried torches and lanterns, and a fog of tension filled the cold air. Soldiers marched in groups with their rifles over their shoulders through a pall of smoke. A hundred yards from the bridge, Sofiya halted Kalvis so quickly, Thad came up against her back.

  “Bless my soul,” Dante said.

  “What-?” Thad asked.

  “Look!” Sofiya pointed at the bridge. The place where she had shot it gaped in a breach too wide for any man or horse to leap. Charred beams and blacked edges hung over the water, and a few flames licked feebly at the wood. The bridge itself was empty. On the mainland side, a regiment of soldiers was standing guard with rifles at the ready. The island side…

  The island side had changed. Metal gleamed in the light of the setting sun-iron and brass and copper and even gold. Cables and wires wound between the buildings, creating a great metal web that covered every building. Havoc spiders scuttled along them. Some of them trailed more cables. In the streets below lumbered larger spiders, from dog size to horse size. Carts moved by themselves, carrying machine parts. And there were human-shaped automatons as well. They walked or lurched or trotted or trundled over cobblestones and dirt. They were different shapes and sizes, a version of a human population taken to an extreme. Some had fingers, some had mittens, some had eyes in the backs of their heads, some had large wheels from the knees down. Some were tall, some were short, some were thin, some were stout. Some had hair, some did not. Many wore clothing, though it fit poorly.

  All the automatons were working. They modified buildings and dug trenches and laid cable and fixed other automatons. They worked ceaselessly, tirelessly, and at amazing speed. The sound of thou
sands of clacking metal parts reached across the river.

  Dante bobbed up and down on Thad’s shoulder, fascinated by the sight. “Pretty boy! Pretty, pretty boy!”

  Thad stared. At first he thought the entire island had changed, but now that he looked more carefully, he could see that so far it was only the rim, the parts nearest the river. The interior was so far untouched, though even now spiders were pulling cables farther inland. It wouldn’t take long.

  The mainland side of the River Neva was also in chaos. Boats lined the near bank, and none were in sight on the far side. Refugees stood or sat near the water, most of them dripping wet, with looks of shock and fear on their faces. Every so often, another person emerged from the clockwork city and leaped into the river. When that happened, a boat from the mainland side rowed out to pull the person to safety. Thad wondered how many had drowned, or if the automatons had killed anyone. The automatons themselves stayed well away from the water.

  “How did they build so much so fast?” Sofiya wondered aloud. “Just finding the materials and metal-”

  “The shipping docks,” Thad said. “And the foundry. Built by Cousin Peter. All the materials and metal they need. Once they have the island, they’ll jump the river to the main city. The city has railroads to other cities. After that, we’re undone.”

  “They don’t seem to have killed anyone so far,” Sofiya said. “Only driven them away.”

  “Even if they never kill anyone-and I doubt that’ll last-Mr. Griffin said he wanted to push all humans out,” Thad said. “It’ll be war between humans and automatons eventually, mark it.”

  “He’s a human,” Sofiya said. “Doesn’t he think-?”

  “It’s clockworker logic,” Thad told her. “If glass shatters too easily, don’t switch to metal; find a way to stop glass from breaking. If a tree is blocking your view, build a machine to turn the house around. If some humans persecute you, destroy all humans.”

  More citizens of Saint Petersburg were crowding the streets as word spread of what was happening. They gawked and pointed and asked questions among themselves. Thad wanted to know what would happen to the refugees from the island-and how many people were still trapped across the river, along with Nikolai. He was in there, somewhere.