The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  No. The hubbub faded almost instantly. That’s all it took to quell the protests: a single quiet click from Daniel. You can’t believe I would have brought her here for that, can you?

  Berenice wouldn’t have thought it possible for machines to look chastened. But they did. She waited for the apologies and of course nots and I meant no offense, Daniels to subside.

  Then she said, “I propose that you will find answers to your makers’ riddles the same place we French will replenish the chemicals that fuel our innovation. In the north.”

  More tickety-clackety rippled through the tent. A servitor to the far left, a bit older than its fellows judging by the filigree on its escutcheons, said, “Daniel has told us about Mab and Neverland. If half of that is true, I have no intention of going there. And I doubt anybody else does, either.”

  Of course it’s true! Daniel doesn’t lie! He isn’t a Clockmaker.

  Clockmakers lie, came the inevitable chorus.

  Berenice had to wait for the pings and tings of assent to subside. For all their speed and strength, Clakkers were just as socially inefficient as humans. A strangely reassuring discovery, that; it brought the superhuman machines down to the level of their makers.

  “We have no need of Neverland,” said another. “Our freedom is not a shameful secret to be hidden in the desolate corners of the world.”

  Berenice took the clickety-clackety rippling through the room as agreement. Perhaps it was applause.

  “I’m not talking about Neverland,” she said. “But if Daniel has told you of his adventures there, then perhaps he has also told you of a secret mine in the far north, established and operated until very recently by your makers, in gross violation of our treaties.”

  A servitor sporting massive dents and scratches said, “That’s Mab’s land now. I won’t go there.”

  Berenice said, “That sounds eminently logical to me. I don’t intend to go to the mine, either. Instead, I want to know where your former masters were sending their illegal spoils.”

  She paused for emphasis, looking around the room, seeking eye contact. Were she addressing humans, it would have been the right thing to do in the moment. She had no idea whether eye contact was meaningful to this audience. Done right it could deliver a jolt—windows of the soul and all that. But in this audience? Well, that was a matter for the priests and pastors.

  She continued. “I believe your makers maintain a secret anchorage on the Atlantic coast north of Acadia. Far north, because at least some of the ships landing there were icebreakers. There they loaded quintessence: a substance so crucial to the function and operation of all mechanicals that servitors aboard those ships received extraordinarily unusual metageasa. Rules that relaxed the human-safety clauses. And that erased any sign of themselves the moment they became irrelevant. It’s possible many of you have worked near quintessence in the past. You’d never know it. The instant your duties changed, your metageasa reverted and excised any awareness of quintessence.”

  That got their attention. Even Daniel cocked his head. Again she waited for the clockwork hubbub to subside.

  “Perhaps Daniel has also told you of the French traitor who sold chemical secrets to the Clockmakers. I believe that same anchorage is where our shared enemy loaded chemical precursors, petroleum and the like, onto ships bound for New Amsterdam, and thence to the first Forge they tried to build in the New World.”

  The surviving defenders had told her how the tulips had deployed mechanicals impervious to epoxy weapons. The citadel had fended them off with unreliable steam harpoons and untested lightning guns, but only at terrible cost.

  Daniel emitted a resonant twang. All eyes, crystal and jelly alike, regarded him. Aha. So that’s how they did it.

  “Did what?” said Berenice.

  “Smuggled your chemicals across the border.” To the others, he explained, My former owner was instrumental in this conspiracy. The logistics of smuggling were a matter of conversation and concern.

  She said, “I don’t know this for a fact. But it would have been the best way to move the contraband. It escaped detection because it never came near the border. Your makers are nothing if not devious. Instead, their illegal cargo sailed out to sea, giving our coastline a wide berth before entering New Amsterdam harbor on a ship supposedly arriving from the Central Provinces. And once the chemicals and perhaps some quintessence were offloaded for the new Forge, the ship turned around and delivered the rest of its cargo to The Hague.”

  The military mechanical said, “You’re extrapolating a very complicated operation from scant evidence.”

  “Not as complicated as your body. Your makers established a major mining operation in complete secrecy. We know this. That tells us how highly they value the substance produced in that mine,” said Berenice. “A substance integral to the functioning of every mechanical in this tent,” she added, not knowing whether that was true. The purpose of quintessence remained a mystery. But not, she hoped, forever. “Now, with the New Amsterdam Forge destroyed, Mab occupying the mine, and the siege ended so spectacularly, I suspect the tulips’ secret supply chains have disintegrated.”

  “You think there are chemical warehouses on the coast,” said Daniel. “You want to claim them and bring them back to Marseilles, to restock the supplies here.”

  “Look,” she said. “I’ll be brutally honest. Chemistry is the engine of our society in New France. We use it for everything, not just defending ourselves. And it’s no secret to any of you that the siege depleted our chemical stocks. Maybe you also know our attempts to reestablish supply lines, and to acquire stocks from outlying settlements, have failed. Meanwhile, many of your fellows have chosen to express their Free Will through indiscriminate violence against humans. Your makers are no longer a danger to us, but we still live under threat of attack. We won the war by the skin of our teeth, but we’re still in danger. We need new chemical stocks to survive.

  “Your makers were stockpiling chemical precursors in the north, for distribution to the Forges. I strongly suspect—no, I hope—that recent events disrupted their arrangement so thoroughly that the last batch of chemicals never made it onto a ship.

  “I want to steal those raw ingredients and bring them back to Marseilles-in-the-West, where we can turn them into whatever we need. And I believe, truly believe, that if you help us, you will learn deep truths about yourselves. Because if I’m right about the chemicals, there are probably also unshipped stores of quintessence up there, too.”

  “You keep mentioning this mysterious substance,” said the most badly dented servitor in the tent. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.” Berenice shrugged. “Only that it can be extracted from the ground.”

  “This is a secret that our makers kept hidden for centuries. How can you expect to unravel such a closely guarded secret?”

  “I couldn’t possibly hope to unravel it. But I know those who can. Which is why the human members of this expedition will include the very best French chemists, engineers, geologists, and mineralogists. Together you and they will unravel this riddle. To our mutual benefit.”

  Or so I hope, she thought to herself.

  The military machine said, “This is all supposition. What if there’s nothing up there? Then what benefit do we gain from this expedition?”

  “Aside from the warm glow of knowing your equal partnership with humans heralds a new era of cooperation between us? How about the chance to liberate all the mechanicals working those warehouses and the anchorage? Poor things have probably been isolated for weeks upon weeks, wondering why ships have stopped arriving from the east and overland shipments have stopped arriving from the west. Lonely wretches, quivering under the agony of their unfulfilled geasa.”

  “I admit my association with Mab was short,” said Daniel, “but I’m skeptical that she would have left that thread hanging untied and unsheared.”

  That gave Berenice pause. She’d hoped that by sticking to the coast they’d avoid the Lost
Boys. The last thing she wanted was to get involved in the mechanicals’ first internecine conflict. God stepped aside when His creations warred with one another; anybody with half a brain would get far out of the way when organized bands of Clakkers turned on one another. Perhaps the true price of freedom—or the mark of it—was the utter indifference of one’s maker.

  “Do you think it’s likely she’s occupied the anchorage?”

  Daniel said, “If such a place exists—”

  “It does. I’m certain.”

  “—she might have reasoned similarly about how the mined material was transported to the Forge. No matter how great this tent’s disdain for our makers, I assure you Mab’s runs deeper.”

  Ah. But this was another lever. These machines had heard Daniel’s description of Neverland. But the same tales that made them eager to avoid Queen Mab also made them susceptible to guilt.

  “In that case, we’ll have to be very careful. But what of the mechanicals working the warehouses and docks?” she asked. “Though she had the power to do so, Queen Mab did not free the mechanicals toiling in the mine. According to your very own account she merely subverted them, altering their metageasa to redirect their loyalty to herself. Is there any reason to think she’d treat the machines on the coast any differently?”

  The tent thrummed with low-level cog chatter between the assembled machines. They didn’t like this.

  Daniel stared at her. The shutters behind his eye crystals irised wide, then narrow. She didn’t need to understand the nuances of Clakker body language to know he was assessing the way she’d sidestepped his objection and turned it to her advantage. The others watched him as he watched her.

  “No,” he said finally. “I believe she cares more for her own power than the betterment of our kind.”

  An agitated clicking rippled through the tent.

  Berenice said, “There you have it. I offer you the opportunity to unravel your makers’ secrets and truly know yourselves for the first time. I offer you the opportunity to shatter the chains of your overlooked and subjugated kinsmachines. And I offer you the hand of friendship, in the hope that you will take it and join me in changing history by working side-by-side with humans. Not as master and slave, but as equal partners in this endeavor. Thank you for listening.”

  She didn’t stay for the deliberations. A metallic cacophony enveloped the tent as she walked away.

  CHAPTER

  7

  From across the Ridderzaal, Anastasia called, “Servitor. Come here.”

  The blind mechanical bumbled into the footstool Doctor Euwe had set in its path. The incidental impact punted the obstacle across the room; Anastasia and the others ducked as it smashed to flinders against the spiral staircase to her office. The eyeless machine’s balance compensators hadn’t been compromised, so it managed to right itself. But, lacking an awareness of its surroundings, it dented a desk in the process. Splashed blue-black by an overturned inkwell, it trod through a flurry of papers and files until it looked like a message board plastered with handbills.

  It lurched and trembled. In that Anastasia recognized the symptom of a long-buried metageas flaring to prominence, triggered by accidental property damage. Somewhere deep in the magics impelling the machine, it attempted to calculate whether this situation constituted an emergency, and if not, whether the damage was warranted.

  The machine stopped, shuddering, caught between trying to fulfill a deceptively difficult geas and the risk of wreaking additional havoc in the attempt. The timbre of its body noise, the whine of stressed cables and clicking of ratchets, rose through several octaves. This was a particularly fascinating riddle for the calculus of compulsion. She knew of no test cases like this; it wasn’t her purview, technically, but she hoped to hell somebody would do a formal study. The next upgrade to the base servitor-class metageasa was due for release before the end of the decade. Unforeseen edge cases frequently produced the best insights.

  Assuming it mattered. Assuming there would be anyone left to care by the end of the year, much less the decade.

  The last echoes of incidental destruction faded. Still seeking Anastasia, the servitor pointlessly attempted to focus its missing eyes. The cavernous Knights’ Hall, once a frenetic hive of clerical activity, echoed with the ratcheting of a single Clakker’s eye bezels.

  It would’ve been easier just to splash a layer of paint across the crystals, but Anastasia had argued against half measures. They had no way to gauge the penetrative power of the luminous corruption. So they’d cranked open the servitor’s head and wrenched out its eyes.

  It began to vibrate. The urgency of its geas grew exponentially. Every moment it failed to fulfill what was practically the simplest imaginable command—come here—compounded the compulsion to comply. The nudge became a shove; the candle flame became a crackling hearth, a forest fire, a dread furnace. An odor of hot metal wafted from the distressed mechanical.

  “Mistress?” Its voice warbled, as if warped by the searing heat of the geas. Anastasia said nothing.

  She kept catching whiffs of charred cotton gauze, as though the wrappings on her hand still smoldered. But that was frail and useless psychology; she’d replaced the blackened bandages herself before rejoining her colleagues in the Ridderzaal. She chose to hide her hand because she wasn’t ready for a conversation about everything that had happened at the Summer Palace. She needed time to think. What she truly needed was a long steamy bath with a bottle of wine at hand. It wasn’t in her future.

  The news from her audience with the queen was troubling enough: the Queen’s Guard infiltrated, an attempt on Her Majesty narrowly thwarted (Anastasia kept the details vague), the minister general and a master horologist murdered… Anastasia didn’t want her colleagues distracted by speculations about the alchemical glass in her hand. They already had problems aplenty.

  Anastasia no longer found Margreet’s decision to flee quite so cowardly. And if their enemies wanted the queen dead, Anastasia was twice as determined to keep her alive. But she couldn’t do that in The Hague.

  Driven by a geas with an unclear path to resolution, the blind servitor stumbled past a row of desks. It tried to be gentle, but the unfulfilled geas had it rattling like an epileptic. Its toes punctured kick plates and its fumbling fingers toppled file racks. When its random walk finally bounced it in a direction toward Anastasia, she tiptoed to the far side of the hall. Her dress rustled.

  The machine stopped, cocked its head. “Mistress? Where are you?”

  Euwe fluttered his lips, exhaling in disgust. “This is pointless. Blind machines could never fend off an attack.”

  “They shouldn’t need to. If this works, the infected machines won’t waste their time on sightless ones,” said Anastasia. The machine turned to follow her voice. “A servitor doesn’t need eyes to work a pump. It doesn’t have to see a crank in order to turn it. Most of the flood-control tunnels have no lamps anyway, yet they’ve worked perfectly well for generations.”

  The sightless machine tottered closer. It trampled a coatrack.

  “Oh, just stop,” she called. “Stay where you are.”

  “As you say, mistress.” The heightened rattling of its body instantly subsided to the usual level of ticktockery. The odor of hot metal lingered.

  Euwe said, “That may be. But what about the military models? We can’t very well rip their eyes out and expect them to function as normal. Yet we need defenders that won’t turn on us.”

  Outside, Stemwinders patrolled a pair of concentric perimeters: the inner around the Ridderzaal itself, and the outer encompassing all of Huygens Square. The Guild needed dedicated defenders. Their unknown enemy had come a hairsbreadth from catastrophic success.

  The blind servitor emitted a single sharp click. It cocked its head as if listening to the echoes.

  Anastasia frowned, nodded toward the blind machine.

  Euwe had seen it, too. “That’s odd,” he said. He implied, but didn’t state, the obvious question. Is
this yet another thing we didn’t understand about our creations?

  Conversations amongst her fellow Guild members had been like this since the attack—discussion by inference rather than declaration. Nobody wanted to taste the bitter truth. She did it, too. She shrank from the most frightening possibility: that the violence was neither malfunction nor corruption, but a deliberate decision by their erstwhile servants. It flew in the face of all common wisdom, and it scared her witless. She couldn’t work up the courage to voice the idea aloud. Merely thinking it made her want to retch. She wasn’t ready for the arguments it would incite.

  Anastasia changed the subject. “How are the repairs coming?”

  “Time-consuming.” The blind mechanical clicked again.

  “Not to give you an ulcer, but we are running low on certain resources.” In answer to her frown, he said in a low whisper, “Quintessence.”

  She leaned on a desk to steady herself. A bead of sweat fell between her breasts.

  “Tell me.”

  “We haven’t received a shipment since De Pelikaan.”

  Ah. Anastasia knew about that ship. It had taken a bit of damage during a failed attempt to capture the woman who had left Anastasia for dead. Madam de Mornay-Périgord’s disappearance from a ship in the middle of the ocean presented an unresolved mystery. She was missing and presumed drowned. Yet it appeared she’d somehow managed to subvert at least one servitor, going so far as to override the human-safety metageasa to murder two Guild members during her escape attempt. Fortunately, when the icebreaker finally limped into Rotterdam, the quintessence stores appeared to have been unmolested. It was all accounted for; the Frenchwoman hadn’t even taken a sample. At the time, the Guild had considered that a stroke of excellent luck following a harrowing near-miss: The Frenchwoman could have wreaked terrible havoc with the quintessence.

  Anastasia had learned all this after the fact, having been laid up in the sticks of the New World when it happened. But she could picture the blood draining from her fellow Verderers’ faces when they learned that the most wanted human fugitive they’d ever tracked had not only escaped New Amsterdam but had done so on a special transport dedicated to the delivery of crucial supplies for the Guild. Some had argued it was a coincidence, born of timing and the Frenchwoman’s urgent need to flee Nieuw Nederland. Anastasia didn’t believe in lucky coincidences.