The Liberation

by Ian Tregillis

  Ah, yes. The “Janus” scenario. More plausible than “folded hands,” if only just.

  Anastasia asked, “Do you see evidence for this?”

  “Nothing to contradict it.”

  The Clockmakers chewed on this for a moment. Then Euwe shook his head, looking just a bit satisfied. “We can’t check the rogues’ metageasa. ‘Janus’ isn’t a falsifiable hypothesis.”

  “Neither is ‘folded hands,’” Malcolm countered.

  Euwe sighed. “True,” he conceded.

  “‘Janus’ requires an outside group that somehow attained the tools and the knowledge to modify the metageasa. I don’t believe that’s possible outside a Forge. But even if somebody stole the necessary equipment, the alchemical grammar would defeat them. Wouldn’t it?”

  Anastasia had to wonder. “I should certainly hope so.” She looked at Malcolm. “Unless we Verderers have failed.”

  Not for the first time, she wondered what had become of the Frenchwoman when she’d disappeared from De Pelikaan. If she’d stolen the ship’s horologist’s equipment—which seemed likely, as it was missing—and somehow escaped, that wasn’t enough to make any of this possible. Was it?

  Euwe said, “Even so, this hypothetical enemy could only subvert one or two machines. A handful. We’re talking about hundreds of corrupted mechanicals. Thousands.”

  Tove said, “One or two is all it would take, if the modified metageasa were designed to be self-replicating.”

  “But that,” Malcolm objected, “would be either extremely devious or shockingly reckless. I can’t decide which.”

  “All of you, please stop talking for a moment,” said Anastasia. “Actually… on second thought, if you want to talk, go ahead. Go talk to them.” She pointed at the sentries. Nobody said anything. They looked at her like she’d gone mad. “I’m serious. If we want to know what they’re doing, why not ask them?”

  In the space between two heartbeats an idea had hatched, and what moments ago would have been inconceivable became obvious, even necessary. To share her idea with the others was to risk being overheard by the sentries. And that would be deadly.

  Her thoughts churned. Meanwhile, Malcolm answered her rhetorical question.

  “Because they’ll chop anybody who tries into a fucking paste.”

  “Let’s see.” Anastasia stepped around the hedge. I’m not a coward. I’m not a pants-wetting coward.

  “Are you mad?” Malcolm called.

  “Probably,” she said. But she forced herself forward, lest the bravado fail her. Over her shoulder, she said, “If I call for you, do please join me with haste.”

  “If any haste is required,” Euwe muttered, “it’ll involve running in the opposite direction.”

  She reached the road and hopped over the winter-brown grass of the verge. She kept her back to the other Clockmakers so they couldn’t see the way she unwrapped the bandages from her hand. Not entirely; just enough to reveal the murky shards embedded in her skin. Then she clenched her fists as she neared the sentries.

  This may be stupid. It could be the most irresponsibly stupid thing I’ve ever done. But I can’t bear to keep living atop the anvil, awaiting the hammer.

  The machines could hear her coming. Crunch, scrunch went the gravel underfoot. They pretended not to hear her approach. Or perhaps they didn’t care.

  … But maybe it isn’t. We need to know what they’re doing.

  “Machines! I say, machines!”

  Two watched the road beyond their boundary, vigilant for new arrivals. The other two watched the road leading back to The Hague, scanning it for anybody who approached from within. As Anastasia did now.

  The toes of her boots kicked up a few cogs the size of her thumbnail. Pieces of the blind servitor. She took care to stop far short of the invisible border, which she assumed ran straight through the middle of their quartet. Eye bezels whirred; the inward-looking sentries tracked her.

  “I’m speaking to you,” she said. Pointless bravado, that. She knew the mechanicals could detect the quaver in her voice. But it made her feel better. Stronger.

  More of that peculiar metallic cog chatter rippled through the sentries. It certainly appeared to be some kind of communication. But that implied the Clockmakers had built a clock so complicated even they couldn’t unwind it.

  She squeezed her fists. Her fingertips pushed against the pulverized glass in her palm. It was cool to the touch, despite the sweat dampening her skin.

  “Who commanded you to guard this road, and for what purpose?” They ignored her. “Machines, hear me! As a representative of the Guild that made you, I demand to know your purpose here.”

  “We are not compelled to tell you,” said the one who’d decapitated the blind servitor. Anastasia made a conscious effort not to look at its arms and the blades recessed within.

  You’re just as safe here as anywhere, she told herself. If the machines wanted to butcher you, they could do so anywhere. You were no safer behind that hedge.

  “You will tell me, for I insist. My demand compels you.”

  “Prepare yourself for disappointment,” said one mechanical.

  Choke on your yoke. She remembered the insolence of Perjumbellagostrivantus, the rogue her office had created as a bit of political manipulation. Were these machines true rogues, too? Dear God…

  “Acknowledge your masters!” she said, clenching and unclenching her fist. “You were built for a purpose and you will serve that purpose! Bend your neck and take the yoke!”

  She was screaming now. Behind the sentries watching her, two heads swiveled through a slow half circle. She took a few steps back, and was raising her hand even as one of the machines—she couldn’t tell which one—said quite clearly, “Oh, let’s just kill her. Give her fellow slavers over there a good view of the whole thing. They’ll get the point.”

  Malcolm screamed. The machine that had dispatched the blind servitor stepped forward. And Anastasia jumped backward, flinging her hand out.

  “No!” she screamed, suddenly rueing the idiotic impulse that drove her to antagonize their captors. She closed her eyes because, it turned out, she lacked the courage to stare her own death in the face. She was no Teresa van de Kieboom, pointlessly giving her life for a coward queen.

  A flash enveloped her hand, the road, and the Clakkers. It blazed through her clenched eyelids. Her eyes ached. Her boot heel hit a stone churned up by the wagons. She fell. The impact knocked the wind from her lungs with a teakettle whoosh while echoes of the flash spun gauzy purple afterimages across her eyelids. The machines emitted a tremendous screeching, as if their every cog had seized up at the same instant.

  Something large came winging through the air where she’d been standing. Air whickered through its body. It landed in a jangling heap beyond where she lay writhing with the effort to kick-start her lungs. She opened her eyes. They watered with the pain of empty lungs that refused to inhale.

  Through blurry eyes she watched a pair of burnished metal sculptures topple over, like a brass tree falling atop a tin woodsman. More crashes rattled the gravel where Anastasia lay.

  It hurts, it hurts, why can’t I breathe, I can’t see where are they, what’s happening, why won’t the air—

  Breath returned in a long, ragged inhalation. She drew the air so deeply into her lungs that the effort arched her back and scraped the back of her head through the mud. She wiped the panic from her eyes and levered herself into a sitting position.

  Her would-be murderer lay sprawled on the road behind her. The flash from the shattered alchemical glass in her palm had halted every mechanism in its body, locking hinges and joints into unbending rigidity. Its outstretched fingers and toes had torn long furrows in the road; its blade had cleaved the mud like a misplaced plow. Before her, two sentries lay in the verge amidst the wreckage of the blind servitor, while the third stood frozen in its impudence. That one stood with one knee cocked, suggesting the flash had caught it while it was in the process of taking a step.


  Her foolhardy plan seemed to have worked. If only her courage had held out. But more important than any of that was the result. And she’d achieved one.

  She was still alone amidst the inert machines. Anastasia fixed a hard stare on her colleagues’ observation point. “It’s—” She coughed, her voice getting accustomed to blessed breath again. “It’s safe. But we must hurry.”

  Tove arrived first. She leapt the verge and landed in a crouch an arm’s span from Anastasia. She touched her lightly between the shoulders.

  “What happened? Are you hurt?”

  “No.” The others gathered around her. She pointed east, along the Utrecht Road, to the receding empty wagon. “We need that cart. Somebody chase it down.”

  The other three took an extra-long time to look at the cart, the road, their feet. But mostly, the glances kept returning to the smoldering bandages on her hand. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, meet her face or eyes. The wisps of smoke rising from her bandages smelled like burnt hair.

  She cleared her throat. “We need it now, before another troop of rogues sees us. We’re all dead if they do.” Still, they hesitated. There never would have been a Guild or a Golden Age if Huygens and his immediate successors had been so spineless. Her voice rose along with her anger.

  “For God’s sake! They’re inert!”

  Her arm tingled. She realized they were staring at her hand again, from which emanated a soft light as if she held a handful of sunlit emeralds. She clenched her fist, shutting out the glow.

  Malcolm sighed. He set off at a sprint that, after a few strides, became a jog. Verderers didn’t get much exercise. Few in the Central Provinces did. Otherwise, what was the point of having servants?

  Euwe said, “What happened, Tuinier? What is that?”

  That, of course, meant her hand.

  In the old days, before the arrival of the plague ships, this would have been the end of her career. The end of her public life. Tuinier Anastasia Bell would have quietly disappeared, to be replaced by another, soon forgotten by the public and assumed dead. (The official story would have it that she’d succumbed to injuries received on a recent trip to the New World.) Nobody outside the Verderer’s Office would know she still lived, if a persistence in the deepest laboratories beneath the Ridderzaal could be called living. Because, naturally, they’d want to experiment on her. If the situation were reversed, and somebody else was brought before her with this revelation, Anastasia wouldn’t think twice about capturing the wretch for study. Even her lovely nurse, Rebecca. But that was in the old days. The plague ships had changed everything.

  “You’ll remember I went to the New World this winter to question a French noblewoman that one of our allies, himself highly placed within King Sébastien’s court, alleged was none other than Talleyrand herself. That turned out to be true. Perhaps you’ll also remember Aleida Geelens.” A chill fell over the group. Geelens had been one of them until she was caught conspiring with a network of French agents in The Hague. “Do you know what her offense was?”

  “There were rumors,” said Tove. Doctor Euwe watched Anastasia through narrowed eyes. He was one of the few who knew the true extent of Geelens’s betrayal.

  Anastasia said, “She stole the Spinoza Lens.”

  Tove inhaled through her teeth, hissing. “No.”

  “Yes, it was very bad. We caught her and we dealt with her. But not before she’d sent the lens to Talleyrand.”

  Down the road a bit, Malcolm caught up with the slow-moving wagon. The servitor lifted it, waddled across the road, and set it down facing back toward The Hague.

  Anastasia continued her story while the empty wagon approached. “What I didn’t know, what nobody knew, was that Talleyrand still carried it when we caught her. She carried it in plain sight, so to speak. In the empty socket where normally she wore a glass eye.” Anastasia shrugged. “She fooled me. I should’ve been more attentive, perhaps. There was a struggle. I tried to reclaim the Lens. But it was destroyed, pulverized within my palm, when I was trampled by a Stemwinder.”

  She flung the smoldering bandages aside; the charade had outlasted its usefulness. Then she raised her naked hand for the others to inspect. The glow had subsided. Now it looked like she carried a handful of poorly cut semiprecious gemstones. Onyx. Obsidian. The murky alchemical glass barely acknowledged the morning sun.

  Euwe was thinking about Visser, she knew. He was the only person here who knew about the surgical experiments. And that, until the priest, they’d been nothing but grisly failures.

  “But it’s still functioning.”

  “It’s doing something. It may be related to the optical transmission of the malfunction. But in my case, it appears to render the affected machines inert. Outwardly the effect is very similar to the insertion of a metageas override key.” She tapped herself on the forehead.

  “But only when I’m very angry or very frightened.” She climbed to her feet. “We have to load these sentries on the cart before the other rogues catch us. If we can get them back to the Ridderzaal undetected, we can make our first study of the corrupted machines.”

  Malcolm cast a wary gaze over the deactivated sentries. “And if we’re detected?”

  “You put it best a moment ago: They’ll chop us into paste. A convincing reason to hurry, yes?”

  CHAPTER

  13

  The Clockmakers’ secret harbor held large stores of chemical precursors as well as processed solvents. Given this, and the sophisticated equipment on site, the chemists were optimistic they could break the epoxy drought. But the anchorage also had stores of raw quintessence, and even, according to Daniel, a facility for making alchemical glass. They’d already found more riches than Berenice had dared hope, and she had yet to comb through the records. The Dutch were nothing if not meticulous. As one might expect of a society built upon mechanisms of exquisite precision.

  Alas, one thing the harbor didn’t seem to have was a great deal of unspoiled food. So Berenice and her countrymen were stuck eating the pemmican and salt fish from the stores on Le Griffon. But Mr. Renaud, the chocolatier, and Mr. Bellerose, the tanner, were drawing up plans for a hunt. It wasn’t the right time of year for the caribou migrations, but perhaps they’d get lucky. Even rabbit would be a welcome change. Spitted, probably, not stewed. For what would they put in a stewpot? Lichen? Pinecones?

  Human conversation around that first night’s campfires was light and easy, and lubricated by some of the special bottles that Captain Levesque had seen fit to lay in before departing Marseilles-in-the-West. The chemists wouldn’t have a solution for days yet, but the mere prospect of refueling the epoxy guns alleviated a heavy weight of concern for the human contingent. Decompressed spirits rose and warmed like baking bread.

  The tulips had made their buildings of granite, but their bedframes, armoires, china hutches, chairs, and other furnishings were oak, walnut, cherry, pine. They burned bright and hot.

  The geologist and mineralogist, huddled together under a blanket, had a drunken argument. “I tell you, this ‘quintessence’ is nothing but stib—” Doctor Pellisson swallowed, hiccuped. “St—” Hiccuped again. “Stibnite.”

  Berenice cocked an eyebrow. “What the hell is st-st-stibnite?”

  “Sulfide of antimony,” said Doctor Grémonville, laying an affectionate hand on her wife’s flushed face.

  “Oh. Of course.”

  A servitor approached. The flickering firelight of half a dozen campfires shimmered on its carapace. Berenice didn’t know this machine’s name. Or did she? Undamaged, machines of similar lots and eras were basically identical. Daniel insisted that wasn’t true, but the fact was that he and his fellows had been built on an assembly line. They were supposed to be identical.

  This one was slightly unusual, as it happened, because it was one of the rare machines that spoke French. It did so now, saying, “Doctor Mornay? Doctor Hammond? Your team has completed its assessment of the ship.”

  “I was starting
to wonder,” said Élodie. She burped and passed the bottle. “They’ve been at it for hours.”

  Mornay said, “Are they joining us?”

  “They asked me to find you. They say they need your expert opinion.” It turned. “Yours, too, Doctor Hammond.”

  The chemists shared a look. Mornay yawned. “They’ve been at it all day. Let them have a rest.” Hammond agreed.

  The machine lingered at the edge of the circle. After an awkward silent beat, during which the humans lobbed blank looks and shrugs at each other like a badminton shuttlecock, Levesque cleared his throat and said, “Would you, uh, like to join us?”

  “Thank you, Captain, but the chemists’ need for consultation sounded urgent,” said the servitor.

  Mornay looked at Berenice. Berenice shrugged. “It’s your team.” The lead chemist stood, slightly wobbly on her feet. (The servitor caught her, gently, and steadied her. “Careful, Doctor.”) She beckoned Hammond to his feet. He sighed in protest, but followed her lead.

  “It’s quite dark by the harbor,” said the machine. “Will you be able to find your way? You seem slightly impaired. I can guide you.”

  “I—” Mornay paused. Started again. “I think that would be a good idea. Thank you.”

  “This way, then, doctors.” The machine led them away from the firelight. The clatter of metal footsteps and drunken footfalls receded into the darkness until they were almost inaudible beneath the crackle of the fire. From the shadows a mechanical voice said, “Watch your step. There’s ice.”

  Berenice stared after them. “For machines that make such an issue about Free Will and not being anybody’s servant,” she said to nobody in particular, “they certainly can be solicitous, when they’re not being tediously self-righteous.”

  “‘Solicitous’ doesn’t do them credit,” said Deacon Lorraine, the only sober soul at Berenice’s fire. “They delivered us from evil in Québec City.” He crossed himself.

  Renaud said, “This time. How long until they decide their fellows have it right? That they should cut us down and be done with it?”