The Havoc Machine (41 page)

“I failed,” Sofiya said at last. Her voice broke. “Oh God—I failed. I—”

Nikolai turned his head. He blinked twice, then saw Thad. He sat up and cocked his head. Thad couldn’t move. He didn’t dare.

“Nikolai?” he breathed.

Nikolai stared at him. The upper half of his face still looked so human above the mechanical lower half. Thad swallowed, remembering the little boy he had rescued from Havoc’s castle, the one who read books on the train, who drank whisky and ate bolts, who danced Irish jigs, who told him how to be a father, who had brought him into this strange and incredible new family. Was it still him?

“Papa!” Nikolai said, and held up his arms. “Ta da!”

Thad gave a shout of utter joy and swept Nikolai high into the air. Beside him, Sofiya was laughing and shouting along with them. The three of them came into a hard embrace that lasted years and years. Dante bobbed back and forth on Thad’s shoulder, squawking and screeching with a joy of his own until Thad put up a hand to calm him down.

“Sharp sharp sharp sharp sharp!” Dante nuzzled Thad’s ear, and then Nikolai’s. “Dammit!”

“Did I do it right, Papa?”

Thad set him down, wiping the tears from his face. “Do what right, Niko?”

“You said a circus act is all about doing the impossible or unexpected, and that you have to make what you’re doing look more dangerous than it is.” Nikolai’s face was serious. “And you said that you can’t stay safe. So I came back.”

Thad and Sofiya exchanged glances. “Are you saying,” Thad said, “that you came back as part of a…a circus act?”

“I remembered what you said,” Nikolai said, “and it helped me come back.”

“But how could you remember what I said if you hadn’t come back?” Thad asked.

“I remembered what you said,” Nikolai repeated, “and it helped me come back.”

Sofiya laid a hand on his arm. “I think this is a question for philosophers. For now, I would like something to eat, and to rest.”

“You have to take care of Mama,” Nikolai agreed. “Because—”

“—that’s what a papa does,” Thad finished with the widest grin of his life. “You’re completely right, my son.”

They emerged from the Black Tent into the light of the rising sun amid cheers and cries of gladness from the circus.

I
t didn’t quite end there. Later that same morning, Thad, Sofiya, and Nikolai found themselves back at the Winter Palace in the drawing room of the tsar. One of the windows looked out over the Neva. Smoke still hung over Vasilyevsky Island and what was left of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The audience was with the tsar alone. Not even a single servant was present.

“I could flood the island with troops,”
the tsar said from his high-backed chair by the fireplace.
“Destroy the automatons and melt them down.”

“I’m sure that’s what your military advisers have been saying,
ser,” Thad replied. Even though no one else was present, he, Sofiya, and Nikolai were still required to stand.
“But you’ll notice they didn’t attack your men. They attacked just the fortress, and that only to prevent you from striking them.”

This was stretching the truth, but Thad didn’t see any reason to tell the tsar who had actually fired on the fortress, and Nikolai had been instructed to remain silent.

“You yourself said none of your soldiers died,”
Sofiya added.
“I was there, and saw for myself.”

“What exactly are you saying?”
Tsar Alexander said testily.

“Now that Mr. Griffin has been destroyed, the automatons on Vasilyevsky Island can truly think for themselves,”
Thad said.
“They have thoughts and wishes and desires, just as men do.”

“How do you know they think?”
the tsar demanded.

This was the tricky part, and Thad was tired, so tired, but a lot was riding on this, and he wasn’t going to make a mistake now.
“They were built with the same pattern as Nikolai, here. And I know that Nikolai thinks.”

The tsar raised an eyebrow.
“Really? How?”

“The same way I know anyone outside my own head thinks. I see it in the way he acts and responds to the world around him. He makes choices and he accepts what happens afterward. Men do the same.”
He shifted tack quickly.
“You are a forward-thinking man who wants to bring Russia into the modern world, sire, and you were planning to emancipate the serfs. You could declare the automatons of Vasilevsky Island part of that emancipation and then accept them as citizens. They aren’t clockworkers. They won’t go mad. They have no desire to attack you. They would have done so by now if they did. Imagine what they could bring to Mother Russia—tireless workers who could rebuild the Peter and Paul Fortress! Wonders of technology for the benefit of the entire country! You could challenge England and China themselves and finally bring Russia into the Great Game.”

Alexander drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair.
“You have given me a great deal to think about, Mr.
Lawrenovich. I will consider your advice carefully. I do see no reason to waste resources attacking them—unless they decide to cross the river.”
He paused again, deep in thought, then said,
“Until I decide exactly what to do, we will leave the automatons alone.”

Thad bowed.
“Very wise,
ser.”

“Mr. Lavrenovich, if I do open talks with the automatons, would you consider the position of envoy? You’re uniquely suited to the position. I would have to give you a title, which would upset some members of the court, but they would get over it.”

The offer caught Thad off guard, and he bowed again. For a moment, he thought of what it would be like. The position would bring influence and prestige and he would be a permanent member of the royal court.

It was the last part that decided it for him, and quickly.

“Thank you,
ser,” Thad said.
“This is an unprecedented offer to a person like myself, but I couldn’t accept it. I’m just a circus performer, and I’m at my best in the ring. With my family.”

Alexander’s face darkened, and Thad quavered. He had offended the man. But then the tsar waved a hand.
“As you wish. We haven’t forgotten everything you’ve done here. And the court will always be happy to attend a performance of the Kalakos Circus.”

Back at the Field of Mars, Dodd was holding the circus train for them. They entered the passenger car to more applause from the rest of the performers. Thad ducked his head and dropped into their customary seats at the rear. Dante, proudly displaying his gleaming feathers, perched on the chair back, and Maddie crouched beside him. Sofiya touched Maddie’s legs and sat down
with Nikolai beside her. He pulled his book out from under the seat and paged through it as the train started forward with a jerk. It was quiet and cozy. A moment later, Mama Berloni appeared with her basket of food.

“So much you’ve been through,” she said. “You eat now! For you, the sandwiches.” She handed several familiar packets wrapped in paper to Thad and Sofiya, then gave a bottle and a brown bag to Nikolai. “And for you the bolts and the vodka. You eat and grow strong for circus, no?” She bustled away.

“You are already growing,” Sofiya said to Nikolai in mock dismay. “I will have to let your trousers out, and I just bought them.”

“I like this,” Nikolai announced, crunching happily on a bolt from his bag. “This is our family.”

“Doom!” Dante agreed.

Thad had to laugh. “A human man, a clockworker woman, an automaton boy, a windup parrot, two brass horses, and a mechanical spider who all live in a circus. What kind of family is that?”

“My
family,” Nikolai repeated. “I like it.”

“Feh,” Sofiya said. “Your papa won’t even make an honest woman of me.”

“Did you want me to?” Thad asked archly.

“You?” Sofiya snorted. “You aren’t man enough for this clockworker.”

Thad munched a sandwich and gazed off into space. Saint Petersburg chugged past the window. “True enough. Anyway, if I were looking to marry again, I think I’d fall in with someone like Dodd or Nathan.”

Sofiya came upright in shock. Then she rolled her eyes and kicked at his shin. “You!”

Nikolai uncorked his bottle with a squeak, and the smell of vodka drifted through the car. “Papas are supposed to make bad jokes that no one thinks are funny.”

“And their sons still laugh,” Thad said. “You need to be less concerned about rules, Niko.”

“Yes, Papa.” He drank.

Sofiya’s face grew more serious. “Thad, now that all this is over, do you intend to continue with your…other vocation?”

He looked at Nikolai, who was reading his book again. “I don’t see a need to.”

“Do you ever think about the promise you made to me?”

“Yes. But that’s not for a few years yet, is it? Who knows what’ll happen between now and then? When the time comes, if it comes, I’ll keep my promise, but I’ll hope it won’t come to that.”

“Hm.”

The train picked up speed. “Where are we going?” Nikolai interjected.

“Back to Warsaw, then farther south before winter really sets in,” Thad said.

“What are we doing in Warsaw?”

“More shows,” Thad said. And he would visit David’s and Ekaterina’s graves one last time. He hoped that, wherever they were, they were glad he was happy. He touched the tsarina’s pearls in his coat pocket, each one a grand possibility. “And after that, we’ll do whatever we want. It’s our choice.”

The train clattered ahead into a fascinating future.

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE

P
alaces and assassination figure enormously into Russian royal history. Like everything else in Saint Petersburg, the Winter Palace was built by—or, more accurately, built
for
—Peter the Great in the early 1700s. Thousands of conscripted serfs died for its construction. Over the centuries, other tsars and tsarinas added to it or refurbished it in order to show off their own wealth. This kept Russia in a continual state of near bankruptcy, and impeded her from developing a modern infrastructure of roads, railways, schools, and communication wiring, a problem which plagues the country to this day.

Russia’s rulers also built a number of other richly appointed palaces in both Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Afraid of assassins in the Winter Palace, Paul I (son of Catherine the Great) built a new palace for himself at great expense. He moved in and lived there for only forty days before two courtiers smashed his head in with a paperweight in his own office. His son Alexander I wanted nothing to do with Paul’s palace, and the place was abandoned. One wonders what Russia might be like today if all that money had been put into a public education system instead.

Alexander II was the last tsar to inhabit the great Winter Palace. His radical new policies for dragging Russia
into the nineteenth century, including emancipation for serfs, proved unpopular with nearly everyone, and he was the target of more than his share of assassination attempts. In 1880, nearly twenty years after the events portrayed in this novel, a revolutionary named Stephan Khalturin from the People’s Will movement smuggled countless sticks of dynamite piecemeal into the Winter Palace and laid them under the main dining hall. The explosion destroyed the dining hall and the guard room beneath it, but by sheer coincidence, Alexander was delayed to dinner that day, and he was nowhere near the place, though eleven other people were killed. As was customary, Alexander spent enormous sums of tax money to repair the Winter Palace in record time.

In March of 1881, Alexander was riding through Saint Petersburg in a bulletproof carriage surrounded by Cossack guards when another member of the People’s Will managed to throw a bomb under the wheels. It exploded with devastating effect on the people around the tsar. Alexander himself actually escaped uninjured, but he made the mistake of exiting the carriage. At that moment, another People’s Will assassin threw a second bomb at the tsar’s feet. The explosion killed or wounded dozens of bystanders and tore Alexander’s legs off. He was rushed back to the Winter Palace, where it took him several days to die.

Alexander III, his successor, spent considerable time undoing the liberal policies of his father and even taking Russia backward. Rightly fearful of his own assassination, he moved his wife and children to another palace outside the city of Saint Petersburg and used the Winter Palace only for state functions. He ultimately died of
complications brought on by a failed assassination attempt that derailed a train he was riding. Alexander III’s son Nicholas II was imprisoned and forced to abdicate during the Russian Revolution in 1917. A year later, he was executed with his wife, children, and several close servants. He was the last of the tsars.

Today, the Winter Palace serves mostly as a museum and tourist attraction.

Russian cabdrivers, all nicknamed
Vanka
(“Johnny”), did not survive the invention of the automobile unchanged. Modern visitors to Russia and most parts of Eastern Europe are often surprised to discover that cab rates are still determined by hard bargaining, not by mileage, though in a part of the world where rental cars are unreliable, it remains quite normal for tourists to hire a cab for an entire day, as the author has personally discovered. Such drivers rarely wear elaborate beards, however, and no longer go by Vanka. More’s the pity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Harper Piziks was born in Saginaw, Michigan, but he moved around a lot and has lived in Wisconsin, in Germany, and briefly in Ukraine. Currently he lives with his three sons in southeast Michigan.

His novels include
In the Company of Mind
and
Corporate Mentality
, both science fiction published by Baen Books. He has produced the Silent Empire series for Roc and
Writing the Paranormal Novel
for Writer’s Digest. He’s also written novels based on
Star Trek
,
Battlestar Galactica
, and
The Ghost Whisperer
.

Mr. Piziks currently teaches high school English in southeast Michigan. His students think he’s hysterical, which isn’t the same as thinking he’s hilarious. When not writing, he plays the folk harp, dabbles in oral storytelling, and spends more time online than is probably good for him.