The mechanical, p.1
The Mechanical, page 1
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For Sara, at long last
PART I
NOTHING OF IMPORTANCE
HAPPENED TODAY
By and by the Duke of York… approved of my proposition to go into Holland to observe things there…
—FROM THE DIARY OF SAMUEL PEPYS, 19 MAY 1669
Nieuw-neder-land is ’t puyck / en ’t eelste van de Landen. / Een Seegen-rijck gewest, / daer Melck en Honigh vloeyd.
New Netherland is the greatest / and the noblest of all lands. / A blessed province, / where milk and honey flow.
—JACOB STEENDAM, 1664
203See Cooke [op. cit.] for a discussion of Huygens’s unusual wartime visit to Cambridge and the Royal Society. His philosophical contretemps with Isaac Newton in 1675 (referenced in Society minutes as “The Great Corpuscular Debate”) would mark the last significant intellectual discourse between England and the continent prior to the chaos of Interregnum and Annexation… Some Newton biographers [Winchester (1867), &c] indicate Huygens may have used his sojourn in Cambridge to access Newton’s alchemical journals, and that key insights derived thusly may have been instrumental to Huygens’s monumental breakthrough. However, cf. ’t Hooft [1909] and references therein for a critique of the forensic alchemy underlying this assertion.
—FROM FREEMAN, THOMAS S. A HISTORY OF PRE-ANNEXATION ENGLAND FROM HASTINGS TO THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION. 3 VOLS. NEW AMSTERDAM: ELSEVIER, 1918 (FOOTNOTE 203).
CHAPTER
1
It was the first public execution in several years, and thus, despite the cold drizzle, a rather unwieldy crowd thronged the open spaces of the Binnenhof. The rain pattered softly on umbrellas and awnings, trickled beneath silken collars, licked at the mosaicked paving tiles of Huygens Square, and played a soft tattoo—ping, ping, ting—from the brassy carapaces of the Clakkers standing in perfect mechanical unity atop the scaffold. It whispered beneath the shuffling agitation of the human crowd and, as always here in The Hague, the quiet tick-tick-tocking of clockwork servitors standing to attend the more well-heeled citizens. The drizzle sounded a quiet counterpoint to the ceaseless clanking and clacking of the mechanical men who ever trotted to and fro on the Empire’s business. Mechanicals like Jax, who detoured through the Binnenhof while running an errand for his human masters.
Rumor had it that in addition to a quartet of Papist spies, the doomed accused also included a rogue Clakker. No mechanical in the city would willingly miss this. Just in case the rumors were true.
Rogue Clakkers were a fairy tale mothers told to frighten disobedient children, and a legend their slaves told to comfort each other in the quiet hours of the night while their bone-and-meat masters slept and wept and made other uses of their flesh. Still… it was hard to resist the scandalous thrill of the tales of secret locksmiths and broken geasa and slaves with the temerity to pick the locks on their own souls. What an awful thing if it were true—so said the nervous fidgeting of the human crowd.
The mechanicals in attendance did not fidget.
Jax knew his kin felt the same wistful thrill he did, the anxious longing instilled by tales of the folkloric Queen Mab and her ragtag band of Lost Boys, living in their winter palace of Neverland; mechanicals had secretly traded those fables for centuries.
Wind gusted the scent of the North Sea, twinned tangs of salt and wrack, across the square. It swayed the empty nooses strung from the gibbet. Pennants snapped atop the twin Gothic spires of the ancient Ridderzaal, the former Knight’s Hall turned Clockmakers’ Guildhall, defying the low gray sky with flashes of orange. So, too, the wind flapped carrot-colored banners crisscrossing the high spaces of the Binnenhof. Similar banners had been erected all around the Dutch-speaking world to celebrate the sestercentennial of Het Wonderjaar, Christiaan Huygens’s Miracle Year.
Raindrops misted the Ridderzaal’s immense rosette window. Water dripped from the architectural tracery that turned the window into a stained-glass cog. It streaked the colored panes of oculi and quatrefoils depicting the Empire’s Arms: a rosy cross surrounded by the arms of the great families, all girded by the teeth of the Universal Cog. On the north edge of the Binnenhof, wind and rain together scalloped the surface of the Hofvijver, the court pond, tossing paper boats like discarded party favors on New Year’s Day.
Another gust sent the aroma of fresh hot banketstaaf pastries eddying through the crowd, leaving sighs and the jingle of opened purses in its wake. A clever baker had set up a counter alongside the fountain, and from there did a steady turn of business selling marzipan, speculaas cookies, and pastries thick with almond paste to the bloodthirsty voyeurs swarming the square. The baker took orders and dispensed change while his Clakker servants stoked the oven, mixed dough, folded it, prepared new batches of almond paste, carved new wooden stamps on the fly for each order of speculaas (monkeys of the Indies, ships, even New World buffalo), and chopped apricots all with the blurred speed and imperturbably precise choreography of the mechanicals. The clacking of their reticulated escapements played a ceaseless castanet rattle beneath the rain-muted mutter of commerce. Steam and woodsmoke rose from the chimney of the baker’s immense brick oven, which the Clakkers had carried at a full trot from his shop a mile away.
Children darted through the throng, competing for spots as close to the executions as they could manage. Less affluent humans, those without mechanical servants to hold umbrellas for them, shivered openly in the wet. Many in the crowd carried opera glasses or other optical devices for a better view of the platform that had been erected just outside the Clockmakers’ Guildhall. Good executions had become scarce owing to the cease-fire and nascent peace in the New World. Better still, if a rogue was to meet its justice today, that meant the Master Horologists would open the Grand Forge for the first time in many years.
Jax himself, having been forged in the Guild’s secret laboratories 118 years earlier, suppressed a shudder. Every Clakker knew of the Grand Forge: an alchemical fire pit capable of searing away sigils and souls; of rendering steel and brass into so much unthinking metal; of melting a Clakker’s cogs, mainsprings, and chains into a slurry of de-magicked alloys; hot enough to vaporize any alchemical glamour and leave a Clakker naked before the ravages of thermodynamics and basic metallurgy. Hot enough to surpass Jax’s capacity for metaphor.
And hot enough to incinerate a rogue’s Free Will.
For such was the punishment for any slave with the audacity to pick the lock on its own soul: so the Empire’s highest law had said since the time of Huygens himself.
Several children—all boys, Jax noted—squeezed to the front of the crowd, just past the edge of the scaffold. Shouts and sniffs of disapproval marked their passage. A boisterous lot they were, excited and energized by the grisly game they played. They had chosen their stations in hope that the rending of a rogue might send debris raining on the crowd—a fragment of metal, a shorn spring, even a tiny cog. Perhaps something with the oily sheen of alchemical alloys? Or a scrap imprinted with arcane symbols understood only by the trio of the Archmasters? They were old enough to know such things were forbidden, yet young enough still to find the forbidden irresistible rather than terrifying.
But that would change quickly if any detritus did spray into the crowd. The queen’s Stemwinders weren’t known for their tenderness. Rumor claimed the name derived from their ability (or penchant, depending upon the particular rumor) to twist a man’s head off his neck, like popping a flower blossom from its stem.
Jax lingered at the edge of the square, rain pinging and splashing on his lustrous brass skeleton. (He polished himself every night after the cleaning, sewing, cooking, and baking, as per the standing order first issued by the great-grandfather of his current owner eighty-three years ago.) His current geas, the obligation placed upon him by his human owners, hadn’t been worded with the ironclad inflexibility of the Throne’s ninety-nine-year leases. And thus his current compulsion—currently a warm dull knife blade sawing at the back of his mind: pain was the leitmotif of a Clakker’s servitude—hadn’t been imposed with a sense of overwhelming urgency. He gauged that he could circumvent the worst of the agony as long as he delivered his message to Pastor Luuk Visser before the bottom of the noon hour. In that way he would be, as ever, a devoted and faithful servant to the Schoonraad family and, thus, the Throne. Visser’s church, the famed and ancient Nieuwe Kerk, was a brief sprint from the Binnenhof, a few hundred spring-loaded strides along the Spui River and one leap across the canal.
But just as the thought went winging through the private spaces of Jax’s mechanical mind, he shuddered. A painful frisson ricocheted through the gearing of his spine. Already the heat of compulsion was honing the geas, tempering it into a red-hot razor blade, creating an irresistible phantom agony slashing at his shackled soul until he satisfied the demands of his human masters. The pain of compulsion
Please, he thought. Let me stay a little longer. I must know if it’s true. If such things are possible. Are our dreams mere folly?
Many Clakkers in Huygens Square struggled to postpone fulfillment of their orders. All trembled to greater or lesser degrees, delaying as long as they could endure the pain. But one by one they departed as the agony of unfulfilled geasa overwhelmed them. The humans could shred your identity if you gave them reason.
Still, Jax and the others lingered. They were invisible. Part of the furniture. As they had been for over two hundred years.
He joined a pair of servitors standing under the Torentje, the Little Tower. A slight reduction in the stiffness of his cervical springs enabled him to rattle a covert hello at his companions. They clattered to him in kind. But despite the thrum of rain and obliviousness of humans, nobody felt particularly like conversing. Together all three watched in muted camaraderie, bobbing on their backward knees.
The giant carillon clock atop the Guildhall chimed noon. A dozen trumpeters decked out in the teal and tangerine of royal livery sounded a fanfare from atop the southwestern wall of the Binnenhof. The crowd cheered. Queen Margreet was coming to personally oversee the executions. Such had been her custom during the war when new traitors were rooted out seemingly every week.
A troop of the queen’s elite personal guard bounded into the Stadtholder’s Gate with clockwork precision, brandishing heavy brass fists and feet to clear the path for the monarch’s conveyance. Today was a special day, and the queen saw fit to recognize this by riding in her Golden Carriage: a semisentient conveyance, a tireless self-propelled layer cake of teakwood, brass, and gold, powered by black alchemy and planetary gears. For what else could suit the most powerful woman in the world, the Queen on the Brasswork Throne?
The carriage’s axles comprised a line of pedals set at exactly the right height for the line of bodiless Clakker legs dangling from the underbody. The gilded filigree and painstakingly hand-carved tracery of the carriage’s ostentation hid myriad alchemical sigils that brought the legs to life. Logic dictated that somewhere Queen Margreet’s Golden Carriage featured a special keyhole. Jax wondered where the clockmakers had concealed it. His keyhole, like that of all Clakkers, sat in the center of his forehead. Where presently, and more prosaically, it dripped with rainwater.
The Queen’s Guard jogged ahead of her carriage, carving a path through the crowd like Old Testament prophets parting the Red Sea with kicks and clouts rather than divine purpose. Even other Clakkers made way for the royal guards. The elite mechanicals stood a full foot taller than common servitor models like Jax, their faces smooth and featureless beneath lidless eyes of blue diamond. They were based on the military design, including the concealed blades, but with exceptional filigree etched into their escutcheons as befit their station.
The queen and her consort, Prince Rupert, waved to her subjects. Jax’s geas throbbed as it always did when he found himself in proximity to members of the royal family and other persons of high status. It was a whisper of the metageas imprinted upon every Clakker during its construction: a reminder that they were property of the Throne. The compulsion from his owners pulsed in response; the pain went from red-to orange-hot. He’d have to obey sooner than later. But he wanted to see. The cables in his back creaked with the effort to resist. Jax trembled again.
Please. Just a little longer. I just want to know.
The carriage drew to a stop beside a special staircase built just for the queen’s feet. Two guards came forth with large umbrellas to shield the Royal Body, and out stepped Margreet the Second, Queen of the Netherlands, Princess of Orange-Nassau and the Central Provinces, Blessed Sovereign of Europe, Protector of the New World, Light of Civilization and Benevolent Ruler of the Dutch Empire, Rightful Monarch Upon the Brasswork Throne.
Now the geas imposed by Jax’s leaseholders went into full retreat. Officially every Clakker on Earth served others only at the monarch’s sufferance. The Royal Presence was the sun about which every Clakker’s obedience orbited.
The queen’s gown relaxed when freed from the confines of the carriage; it settled about her like a waterfall of burgundy brocade. A fringe of teardrop pearls shimmered along her bodice when she drew herself to her full height. Today the queen wore her hair (a blond so pale it might have been woven from the same silver threads as her attire) in braids of spectacular complexity. The bezels in Jax’s eye sockets ticktocked like a stopwatch as he zoomed and refocused. It was true, what they said about Queen Margreet’s eyes; he’d never seen such a green outside of rare alchemical ices and pictures of gemstones from India. That made him wonder if perhaps there was truth behind some of the more scandalous things the humans whispered about their queen.
From the running board of her carriage she gazed upon the crowd. A hush fell. Even the relentless drizzle fell quiet. So complete was the silence that the rustle of fabric sounded loud as thunder when, as one, all the human men fell to one knee and all the human women descended into deep curtsies. Burgomasters and bankers, jonkheers and commoners, all assumed the posture of fealty. The rustling of dresses and trousers and suits was punctuated by the crack of metal slamming against glazed tile as every Clakker within the Binnenhof prostrated itself in the queen’s direction, like chrome-plated Muslims praying to Mecca. Jax’s forehead came down on a pile of discarded pipe tobacco made gooey with spittle and rain. The mosaic felt warm against his face, a queasy reminder of the Grand Forge. Everybody held their poses for a long beat, a full rest in the symphony of obeisance ever playing throughout the heart of the Empire.
Still life: Cynosure in the Rain.
Finally, the queen declaimed, “Arise, my beloved subjects.”
And the humans did. Jax couldn’t see what happened next though he could discern the creaking of newly hewn wood as the queen and her husband took the steps. He watched a lone ant tugging at the fringes of the pile. Jax shifted his weight such that his head no longer pinned the tobacco to the wet ground. The ant extricated a fragment several times larger than its own body, then dragged it toward a minute opening in the mortar between two tiles. The queen ascended to the platform before snapping her fingers.
“Clakkers, up,” she commanded—an afterthought spat over her shoulder like so much spent tobacco. Every mechanical servitor within earshot bounded to its feet, launched several yards into the air by the blistering agony that accompanied a royal decree. An agony whose only cure was immediate unswerving obedience. A tremendous sigh filled the square as air whistled through dozens of skeletal servitors like Jax. The Binnenhof echoed with the jarring clank of metal feet hitting the tiles in perfect synchrony. It set the bells atop the Ridderzaal to humming and sent panicked pigeons into the sky.
Jax’s landing quenched the searing pain of the queen’s momentary geas. His errand for the Schoonraads reasserted itself. It assaulted him with a blistering torment, as if resentful of being usurped. He trembled, his moan coming out as a rattle and twang. His companions noticed.
Go, brother, before they unwrite you!
Not yet. I want to see the rogue.
The gallows platform had gone up in less than an hour thanks to a flurry of sawing and hammering from a Clakker construction detail. Sawdust eddies rode the gusting wind in the rain shadow beneath the scaffold, drawing and redrawing arabesques on the spot over which the secret Papists would soon dangle. At the moment, however, the platform was empty but for the queen, her consort, and her guards. She treated the crowd to a chipped-ice smile. The golden thread in the epaulets on Prince Rupert’s naval uniform gleamed even in the dreary daylight, as did the medallions on his breast.
There followed two representatives from the Clockmakers’ Guild. They trundled up to the platform in scarlet robes trimmed with ermine, the garb of Master Horologists. The long pendants dangling from their cowls featured the rosy cross inlaid in rubies. Jax scanned the crowd of grandees at the base of the platform. He’d heard it said that only two appeared in public at any given time, a third always staying hidden. It was a safeguard against accidents and French treachery. Violent catastrophe couldn’t eliminate the arcane secrets whispered from lips to ear in an unbroken chain since the final days of Christiaan Huygens almost a quarter-millennium ago.
