Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with Mab, a female servitor or robot, coming to consciousness in the Forge. We later learn that this is where the Clockmakers create their alchemical automatons before sending them out to serve in an alternate medieval world where the Netherlands is the dominant power (and winning its war with France).
Mab is subsequently sent to crank a pump handle “in the darkness under the city”, a job she does for 18 years. During this period we learn that the servitors are compelled by the geasa implanted in them to follow human instructions (the geasa are analogous, in part, to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics): if the servitors do not comply with these geasa, however, they experience pain. We also discover that Mab is different to other servitors when she tries to speak to Perch (a visiting maintenance servitor) using human language. When Perch replies, but she doesn’t understand the clicks and buzzes the servitors normally use, he relents and speaks to her the same way she spoke to him. He tells her many things about the world she inhabits and then says, before he leaves, that he will return to teach her how to speak the servitors’ language in eighteen months.
Perch never returns, and seven years pass before a visitor from the Clockmakers arrives with a writ demanding that she returns to the forge:
For every moment of the past eighteen years, an ineradicable compulsion has ensured she did nothing but operate a pump. That geas vanishes the instant she sees the embossed seal of the Rosy Cross, but the pain does not. A new geas takes its place. Life, she realizes, is neither miracle nor mystery: it is a series of consecutive agonies joined at airtight seams.
Back at the Forge Mab watches the Clockmakers’ many repair and assembly procedures, and likens the place to a charnel house before realising that she is a chattel, and that her body is not her own.
The rest (and the bulk) of the story takes place at her next place of service, the house of the wealthy van Leers (they have a lucrative franchise to supply the secretive Clockmakers—who are particularly protective of their arts—with the tools they require). Here Mab becomes a milkmaid as she is considered to be a mute by the other servitors (she still cannot speak their clicking language). She still finds out, however, that the mistress of the house is soon to give birth, and later discovers, when a servitor called Jig visits her milking stall, that this is causing the master of the house sleepless nights:
He points at the pail. “The master of the house suffers from insomnia. He believes a draught of warm milk will fix that.” The newcomer crouches next to her, clearly waiting for her to finish. His body noise grows louder. Remembering how Perch had gone out of his way not to interfere with her crank-turning geas, she speeds up. He continues, speaking loudly as his body noise builds to a crescendo of tormented clockworks, “I believe that until the thing growing inside her decides to pop out of our mistress’s belly, pink-faced and hale, nothing short of a hefty dose of laudanum or”—now he sounds ready to shake apart—“the swift blow of a claw-hammer between the eyes will do the trick.”
The punishment is explosive. Volcanic. She’s never experienced searing heat like this outside the Forge. The overt sedition ignites a firestorm from the rules stamped upon her soul. Wracked by the worst agony she’s ever known, her body jackknifes at the waist, hard enough to head-butt the floor.
The startled cow kicks the pail, sending a spray of milk slopping over the brim. The spillage incites yet more admonishment from her geasa. Desperate to lessen the torment, she blurs forward to right the tipping pail. The cows in the other stalls start lowing, alarmed by the noisy way her visitor writhes in the hay. The pain doesn’t fade until she considers that he may be severely defective and charts the quickest route to alert a human.
When she can speak again, she says, “Are you insane? Why would you do that to us? It wasn’t very nice.”
He straightens, indicating the manor house with a jerk of his head. “There’s a lot of speculation about just how different you might be.” He plucks a tuft of hay from his skeleton and holds it aloft. “I drew the short straw.”
After this Mab meets a friendlier servitor called Maikel, who eventually teaches her how to speak the clicking language.
Years pass, and various set-piece scenes deliver information about the house, the servitors and the world Mab lives in (e.g., while Maikel and Mab are pulling a carriage for their mistress they see a papist couple apprehended by two Stemwinders—mechanical centaurs with four arms—and the man killed). Eventually, the mistress’s baby son Piet grows from a spoiled and greedy infant into a spoiled and greedy young man. Then, during a drunken shooting party (spoiler), he decides to use Maikel as a target. When he damages the servitor—part of Maikel’s skull is blown off—he and his friend Roderik make the mistake of going for a closer look at what is inside Maikel’s head:
He isn’t rendered inert: The shot didn’t scour the sigils from his forehead. That would have been a mercy. Instead, he’s lost a great deal of function, including the ability to speak. But the hierarchical metageasa are relentless. More and more clauses are activated as his body attempts to assess the situation: the severe-damage geas, demanding Maikel notify his leaseholder that the terms of his lease require he go immediately to the Forge, either under his own power or shipped at his owners’ expense if his locomotion is too compromised for the journey; the technology-protection metageasa, demanding he recover every piece of his body and return them safely to the Clockmakers lest they fall into enemy hands; the human-safety metageasa, requiring him to assess whether any shrapnel from his body has harmed the bystanders, and render immediate aid if necessary. . . .
When Piet and Roderik see more than they should, Maikel is driven by the technological metageasa to strangle them both.
Later on, a repaired Maikel returns from the Forge and, after talking to him, Mab determines she needs to return there. She searches for parts of Maikel at the scene of the shooting and, when finds some, returns under the compulsion of the same geas that drove Maikel to kill the two men.
When Mab arrives at the Forge she is sent to a Clockmaker called Gerhard for experimentation. His final investigation on her involves the use of a lens made from pineal glass, which releases Mab from all her geasa. She grabs Gerhardt and asks him if he knows what the pain of a geas feels like before sticking his head in the furnace used to make the lens.
The story ends with Mab returning to the van Leers’ house, where she kills Jig before telling the other servitors to tell their masters, “Queen Mab was here”.
This is a well told piece with a neat central idea and an intriguing parallel world background. I particularly liked how Tregillis dribbles out the details of this peculiar alternate world (Huygens inventing alchemical robots and the Dutch taking over the world!) without slowing down the pace of the story or making it otherwise intrusive. The only problem I have is with the ending, which has a couple of problems: first of all, I don’t understand why Mab killed Jig (why would she particularly want to avenge herself on a fellow servitor, even one who had not treated her well?) and, secondly, the story is open-ended (although I assume that the results of Mab’s actions are dealt with in the related trilogy1).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 16,500 words.
1. The trilogy comprises The Mechanical (2015), The Rising (2015), and The Liberation (2016). Much as I liked this I am not sure I am interested in another 1,300 pages worth.