From my tool roll, I slide out a plastic probe and use it to pry open the lace dress. Inside, I find sparkling networks of rack-and-pinion gears. This artifact isn’t anything close to a real girl, but she’s a lot more complex than a porcelain doll.
She is a classic court automaton, built during the Renaissance—one of many, though most are lost. Once upon a time, artifacts like this were gifted to the world’s wealthiest, most powerful human beings. Their owners kept these primitive robots locked in wonder rooms and art collections while they argued over whether the devices were animated by demons, angels, or natural magic.
Hundreds of years later, the last of these artifacts are scarce to the point of extinction, nearly always hidden in private collections, and otherwise almost impossible to find and study. On the final stop of a road trip through the Old Believer communities of the Pacific Northwest, this is the first artifact Oleg and I have been able to access. And it’s the only one I’ve seen in years that hasn’t been vandalized.
“Please tell him I appreciate this opportunity,” I say.
Oleg nods, turns, and I hear the quiet whisper of Slavic language. The Old Believer laughs once, a sharp grunt, and says something.
“What did he say?” I ask.
“He says he is doing you no favor. The church only wishes you will document the porcelain girl of Saint Petersburg before the…wolves take her.”
I glance at the Old Believer. His outfit is identical to what his ancestors were wearing when their religion was outlawed during the Great Schism of the seventeenth century. To escape persecution, these people spread to the far corners of the earth. That was more than three hundred years ago, yet he still speaks an old dialect of Russian.
“Wolves?” I ask Oleg, raising my eyebrows.
The translator nods, confirming the word.
My mouth goes dry at the thought that the same vandals I have seen other places could be operating here. Lately, it seems that whatever time hasn’t destroyed, someone else has.
I thought this place would be different.
The Old Believers are an obstinate people. Century after century, they’ve carried their sacred books and artifacts everywhere they’ve settled—from China to Oregon. In the old days, their scholars perpetually made copies of their libraries by hand, racing to rewrite each book as time turned the pages to dust. Everything in this room is sacred, meant to be cared for and protected at any cost.
Wolves.
A small oval face beams up at me from the foam pad, a century’s-old dimple in her cheek. Prodding with the tool, I find an inscription plate under the creases of her dress.
The text is in Old Russian but I can make out the dates and names. My guess is she was a gift to Pope Clement II from Peter the Great. The tsar of Russia considered himself divinely anointed to lead his people—with a direct line to the Almighty. He didn’t have much use for a pope. This automaton would have been a horrendously expensive gift. She could have been a peace offering, or a bribe.
Or a message.
I turn the artifact over in the lamplight, admiring the lacework of her dress as I remove the clothing from her back.
“She’s really incredible,” I murmur.
Oleg stands up and stretches. He steps closer to me, his feet silent on the thick carpet, and glances at the automaton with disinterest. The translator snorts, and speaks again with a heavy Ukrainian accent.
“A doll?” he asks.
I reach into my tool bag and remove my camera. I turn its heavy glass eye on the little girl, her body slight and delicate in the bunched folds of the dress.
The room strobes as I take a photo.
Snap.
“An automaton,” I say. “Sort of like a robot. But made before electricity. Before cars and planes and phones. Probably by a mechanician who answered to the tsar himself. For a little while, this ‘doll’ was very likely the most complex machine on the face of the planet.”
“A toy.”
“An emperor’s inspiration,” I say. “A link in a chain of technology that stretches into prehistory. How far, no one knows.”
“An old toy,” says Oleg.
I narrow my eyes at the man, pushing him away with my frown. Oleg chuckles and ambles off a few feet, pretending to inspect the rows of leather-bound books lining the shelves. The more sophisticated and well crafted the machines of antiquity are, the easier it is for modern people to dismiss them as toys.
But our ancestors had their triumphs, too.
I peel the rest of the clothing away from the automaton. Under the crumbling fabric, her golden limbs are honed, gleaming dully in the lamplight. She sprawls in my hands, a brass skeleton with a baby’s face.
I notice Oleg peeking again, despite himself.
“She was incredible. And she wasn’t the first of her kind,” I tell him. “Socrates warned that the ‘movable statues’ created by the master artificer Daedalus needed to be chained down, in case they ran away. Hero of Alexandria built an artificial man whose head famously couldn’t be severed with a blade. And more than a thousand years ago the Chinese artificer Yan Shi supposedly built an automaton that could walk.”
“Legends,” says Oleg.
I lift the naked automaton, feeling her hunched body, the slender ribs radiating like bicycle spokes. A complicated brass mechanism is mounted inside her narrow chest. With the limp weight of her body in both my hands, I lower my eyelids for a moment and try to imagine the lost centuries she has somehow survived.
“But she’s real,” I say to myself, ignoring Oleg.
This awe for the past is what brought me here.
Years ago, with a small brass key clutched in my sweating fingers, I unlocked a beat-up ammunition box. I slid the oil-soaked cloth off an incredible artifact—a spoil of war and a timeless secret between my grandfather and me. The relic belonged to another world, and I could sense an epic history locked in its fractal patterns.
I threaded a chain through the tips of the crescent relic and hung it around my neck. The artifact was with me, a familiar weight, as I studied linguistics; history; engineering; and finally medieval automatons. I solved a hundred little mysteries, with the biggest one hanging over my heart. And the more I learned, the further I sank, my grandfather’s relic always pulling me deeper into the shrouded past.
2
MOSCOW, 1709
The doll’s face is the first thing I see. She is my first memory, and the last sight I could ever forget.
I do not remember opening my eyes.
The candlelit path of her cheek eclipses a great darkness. As she moves, the outline of her face becomes a wavering blade of light. Her skin is made of hard porcelain. Leaning over a wood desktop, clad in a dress, she scratches marks with a quill pen held in frozen ceramic fingers. Her black eyes aim at the paper without seeing.
The doll’s hand swoops back and forth as she mindlessly writes her message. A flutter of gears under the fine fabric at her neck beats a false, mechanical pulse, and yet this is the heartbeat of my world, a rhythm, steady and quiet and hard under the warm-wax smell of candles and the canopy of a low wooden ceiling.
Then comes the old man.
An amorphous shape—shifting between shadows that flick like snake tongues up timber walls. Thin and bent, the man drapes long fingers over my face. I turn my head slightly to inspect him, blinking to focus. His features sharpen into detail: wrinkled bags under glittering eyes. His lips are pressed together and white within a graying beard. Every half second, his limbs quake slightly as his heart throbs in a narrow chest.
I will come to know this man as Favorini. My father. Or the closest thing to it.
Now the old man is holding his breath, watching me with wide eyes.
“Privet,” I say, and he collapses into a faint.
Without thought, I catch him by the shoulder. Eyelids fluttering, his head dips like a sail dropping to half-mast. For the first time I see what must be my own hand. An economy of brass struts wrapped in supple leat
her. And now I truly begin to understand that I am also a thing in this world. Not like the doll who is writing a few feet away with all the mindfulness of water choosing a path downhill. Something more. But also not the same as this fainting man, made of soft flesh.
Somehow, I am. And, I tell you, I find it a strange thing, to be.
The idea of it settles into my mind. A world outside me, perceived through vision, hearing, smell, and other senses more innate. And somewhere inside, I am placing the sights and sounds into a smaller, simpler idea of a true world that is too complex. From within this little world in my head, I am making decisions.
So I catch my father by his shoulder.
The old man slumps, held upright by my fingers. His chin falls to his chest and his face is lost in strands of brown-gray hair. I have saved him from falling into a sharp jumble of tools that lie scattered around my legs. This room is a…workshop, without windows, lit by a tilting confusion of candles sprouting from every surface. Splintery beams stripe the ceiling, and the low room stretches beyond the light into warm darkness. A patchwork of desks and tables is arrayed in groups. Some are empty, but most are piled high with scraps of metal, twists of rope, wooden bowls filled with unknown substances, fouled spoons, and all manner of glass vials and tubes.
Somehow, the knowledge of this is already in me.
Half-formed body parts are also sprawled among the clutter. Chunky torsos filled with fine gears, supported by whalebone ribs and riddled with veins of India rubber. This place is more than a workshop…it is a womb.
Sitting up at the waist, I lay the old man over an empty desk.
My body has been arranged on a long wooden table. Nearby, the doll thing nods sightlessly, her pen scratching as she covers a stiff page with scrawls of ink.
She and I are kin, I know it.
My shape is that of a man, crafted in perfect proportions. Long golden legs, light winking from hundreds of rivets. My skin is made of bands of a beaten gray-gold metal, fastened to a solid frame. Through narrow gaps in the tops of my thighs, I see rows of braided metal cables, pulled to tension, wrapped around circular cogs.
When I move, I hear a clockwork grind coming from inside.
“Hello?” murmurs the old man. “My son?”
The consonants of his language echo in my mind, resolving into words. I can almost remember hearing his voice before. Lessons whispered in my sleep.
Gnarled fingers wrap around my wrist. Faintly, I can feel the heat inside the man’s hands. I sense he is full of warm blood, carrying energy through his body. His skin is not like mine, nor his heart. There is no blood within me, for my father and I are not alike. He is a human being, and I am…something else.
“You are here,” he says, his grip tightening on my wrist. “What do you remember? How far back?”
I cast my mind into the past and find only the void. Shaking my head, I pull my arm away from the old man. For an instant, he seems disappointed.
“Who…who are you?” I ask.
My voice comes from somewhere deep inside my chest. I can feel a device in there, a bellows that contracts and sends wind up my throat and between my teeth. There seems to be a multitude of voices beneath my voice.
“Giacomo Giuseppe Favorini,” says the old man. “But call me Favo. I am the last mechanician to Tsar Pyotr Alexeyevich. Practitioner of the ancient art of avtomata and keeper of the anima. Successor to the great alchemists who came and went before history. And, if you will believe the tsar’s wife, Catherine Alexseyevna…I am a devil.”
“Last mechanician?”
“I will explain. Ten years ago, the tsar visited Europe in secret. The Netherlands, England, Germany, Austria. He returned with shipbuilders, artists, and mechanicians. To one group of us, he gave a special artifact—the anima. With it we were to build…you. But the tsar’s wife never saw the promise. It has been so long. Catherine has managed to send the other mechanicians east to exile. I am the last.”
The old man trails off, sadness in his voice.
“But you are here now!” he exclaims, snatching a small hammer from the table. “Come, look at you! Talking! Can you see me? Tell me what you see!”
“A room. A man. Machines.”
Some knowledge of this world is already inside me, packed into words that reveal themselves when I try to think of them. But I can already sense that there is much, much more to be learned.
“Concise,” Favorini says, tapping my chest lightly and listening. “The old texts were true. The anima is working…”
These words confuse me. Extending my gauntlet-like hands, I clench my fists and grind the hard metal of my own fingers together. Squeezing, I push to the tolerance of my strength, until the gears in my hands are straining. I swing my legs off the workbench and my wooden heels scratch the floor.
I stand, the top of my head nearly brushing the ceiling.
Favo scurries away into the darkness. In a moment he returns, his thin arms wrapped around a tall golden panel. The polished bronze groans as he drags it over the wooden floor, its surface glowing in the candlelight. He props himself against it—holding the long rectangle before me—then stops and stares.
“Look upon yourself,” he whispers.
At my full height, I see my movements reflected in the gleaming panel. I am tall and thin. Very tall. My face is smooth, chin dimpled, eyes sharp and predatory over a straight nose. Ringed in brown curls of hair, my face is only crudely human. My lower lip is pulled to the side, slightly disfigured. I am not wearing clothes. Instead, my chest and arms are layered in beaten metal banding with occasional tight swathes of leather tidily placed underneath. A winking light haunts the depths of my brown eyes, and I now understand why Favo has awe in his voice.
“My son?” he asks.
“Yes,” I reply.
“What is the first thing?” he asks.
“The first thing?”
Flexing my fists again, I feel an unyielding strength in my metal bones. I am so much bigger than this small old man.
“Yes,” he whispers. “In your mind. Reach inside and tell me the first thing. The first word you ever knew. What is your Word, my son?”
I find a hard honesty to the limits of my body—to the solid press of my flesh and the clenching strength of my grip. Pushing into my mind, I search for the answer to Favo’s question and find another principle, incontrovertible, even stronger than that of my flesh. It is the reason for my being—a singular purpose hewn into the stone of my mind.
There is a word that is the shape of my life.
I set my eyes upon the old man, and the leather of my lips scratches as I say the Word out loud for the first time.
“Pravda,” I say. “I am the unity of truth and justice.”
3
OREGON, PRESENT
As I continue working, it hits me: Oleg’s flat dismissal of the court automaton as a simple doll, a child’s toy, has really irked me. I know it’s pointless to lecture—the guy has the imagination of a boulder—but part of me wants to convince him, to show everybody, really, that this little girl means something.
“Okay, Oleg, so we don’t have solid written records of the earliest automata,” I say, laying the heavy camera on the table and lifting my penlight to inspect the automaton’s interior workings. “But that doesn’t mean the legends aren’t true.”
Oleg grunts, noncommittal.
“Albertus Magnus. A thirteenth-century Dominican monk. There are eyewitness reports that he built an artificial man out of brass that could talk. Thomas Aquinas is said to have personally destroyed it with a hammer as an affront to God.”
“Good for him,” says Oleg. “We are God’s creations. We cannot be replicated.”
Outside, the rain is coming down harder. Distant, grumbling peals of thunder waver beyond leaded-glass windows.
“A popular point of view,” I say. “That’s why the Old Believers search out these automatons. They believe our bodies are mansions for our souls, and artifacts like thes
e pose a valuable question.”
With the doll lying on her face, I notice an abrasion on her tiny porcelain palm. I turn her narrow wrist between my thumb and forefinger.
“What question?” asks Oleg.
“If we built our own mansions, could God give them a soul?”
Lightning flashes somewhere far away, revealing a crease along the doll’s wrist.
Now, I understand—this device is designed to write a message. The scraped spot must be an attachment point for a writing instrument. Through my thin gloves, I can feel a ridge that could have once fastened to a quill pen. All the brass hardware, still untarnished, has a purpose. At its heart, this automaton is a piece of equipment designed to share a message in a deceivingly simple way—by literally writing it.
“God gives us all a purpose, Oleg,” I say, smiling up at him. “Let’s find out what hers was.”
Squinting, I use the probe to walk myself through her anatomy. The logic that makes her work is timeless; it feels to me like a connection to another mind, from another age. It’s only as I trace through each part of her that I begin to notice an absence. Like a black hole—only visible by the stars affected around it—I can see now that the inner workings of the doll terminate in an empty space. Something crucial is missing.
There is a hole where her heart should be.
My cheeks heat up with sudden adrenaline as I push the penlight deeper into the hole. The gear mechanism is untouched. None of the machinery damaged. But there is a gap where something important has been ripped out of the doll’s frame. I drop the probe on the table, sit back with my shoulders slumped.
For so many years I have been looking into the past, searching for the sense of awe I felt as a kid. But every time I get close to catching that spark, it flickers away. Putting an artifact on a shelf isn’t enough. I need to make them work—to take something lost and make it found. I want to see what people saw five hundred years ago, and feel the same wonder.
The Clockwork Dynasty Page 2
