The Impossible Cube

by Steven Harper

  Gavin sighed as they squeaked back downstairs on threadbare carpet. Although he was getting used to Feng’s forthrightness and his interest in… romance, it was still a little unsettling, and he could understand why Feng’s father had despaired of him ever becoming a diplomat. Feng’s undeniably exotic good looks doubtless made matters worse—Gavin imagined he found it easy to sweet talk his way into any number of beds. Fortunately, he did seem to understand that showing even the slightest interest in Alice would result in a personal and rather brief experiment with the force of gravity from the deck of the Lady of Liberty, either at Gavin’s hands or Alice’s.

  “I won’t share… quarters with her,” Gavin said. “Not until I can make an honest woman of her.”

  “And when will that be?”

  They reached the little lobby again and a glimmer of brass caught Gavin’s eye. His blood went cold and he nearly dropped his fiddle case. Susan Phipps and Simon d’Arco were talking to the clerk.

  “Run,” he whispered hoarsely, and bolted back up the steps.

  They both smashed straight into Alice’s door. It splintered open. She lay on the bed and she was still dressed, a fact for which Gavin felt grateful. He scooped Alice up while Feng grabbed the bedspread from underneath her. Alice squawked as footsteps pounded on the stairs leading up to their floor. Gavin glanced at the window, but they were three stories up. No escape that way. They would have to fight their way out. He frantically assessed the room. Bed. Bare wood floor. Window. Thin curtains. Chamber pot. Washstand. Mirror. Light. Feng. Bedspread. Sheets. Fiddle case.

  “Put me down!” Alice barked.

  Gavin flung her back on the bed along with his fiddle case. He ripped the curtains off the wall with one hand and snatched up the room’s paraffin oil lamp in the other. Then he dug into his pockets for a match. Simon burst into the room, and Feng, who was standing beside the door, flung the bedspread over him like a net and kicked his legs out from under him. Simon went down with a muffled yelp. Phipps appeared in the doorway, more cautious. She held a pair of tuning forks in her hands.

  “You!” Alice cried from the bed.

  “Caught you,” Phipps said, “you son of a—”

  Gavin threw the lamp at her. She automatically parried it with her metal arm, and the cheap glass shattered, covering both her and the bedspread with lamp oil. Gavin popped the match alight with his thumbnail and applied it to the sheer curtain he was holding. Fear clenched his every nerve as it began to burn. Fire was the enemy of every airship, and to die in flame was the secret nightmare of every airman. He remembered Captain Naismith aiming a blazing crossbow bolt at the envelope of the Juniper, and how close he had come to dying in an inferno. His hands shook, making the fire dance.

  “You won’t,” Phipps said flatly, and moved to strike the forks.

  Gavin ran straight for her, trailing flame. Phipps leaped backward, her eyes wide with fear, an expression Gavin had never seen on her before. Alice recovered herself and bolted after him with Feng right behind her. A bit of blazing curtain flapped behind them, preventing the oil-soaked Phipps from pursuing right away if she wanted to avoid bursting into flame. Smoke and heat scorched Gavin’s face and heated his hands. The clerk stared at the trio from behind his desk as they fled outdoors.

  The sun shone on the bright, cobblestoned street. In the distance, calliope music played and people applauded. Traffic and pedestrians were currently giving the hotel a wide berth, though, because Glenda was standing on the sidewalk in one of the big mechanicals.

  “Wotcha,” she said, and reached for Gavin and Alice with big metal hands.

  “Shit!” Gavin flung the flaming ball of cloth at Glenda’s head. It bounced off the clear bubble encasing her, but the woman jerked out of reflex, which gave Gavin, Alice, and Feng a chance to dodge around the machine.

  “This way!” Gavin grabbed Alice’s hand and ran.

  Glenda recovered quickly and spun to face them. Gavin jumped into a nearby cab, pulling Alice with him. The startled driver didn’t even have time to protest before Gavin shoved him out with a “Sorry!” and snapped the reins. The horses, already nervous about the mechanical, leaped forward. Feng managed to leap aboard as well, despite the rucksack that weighed him down.

  The cab jolted down the street with the mechanical in pursuit. Brass footsteps thundered behind them. Alice shouted at people to get out of the way, and Gavin grimly steered the frantic horses. Glenda swiped at the cab, missed, and gouged a chunk out of the street. People and horses screamed and scattered. Other automatons skittered out of the way. Fear gripped Gavin’s heart. Even if they got away now, their situation remained dire. Phipps was a bulldog, willing and able to track them, and Gavin’s conspicuous airship made the situation worse. They had to escape, not only now but in the long term.

  “Where should we go?” Alice cried, echoing his thoughts. “How do we get away?”

  And then he knew. It came to him in a flash of inspiration, and he had no idea whether it was inspired by the clockwork plague or his own imagination, but either way, it might work. Hope replaced some of the fear.

  “I have an idea,” he said. “But we left my fiddle.”

  “I have it,” Alice said, brandishing it. “Didn’t you notice?”

  “God, I love you.”

  “Faster!” Feng shouted behind them.

  Glenda swiped at the cab again, and this time she clipped it. The cab yawed sideways, and Alice clung grimly with her free hand. Gavin hauled on the reins, turning the yaw into a full-out left turn around a corner. The cab tipped on two wheels, then righted itself with a crash that slammed Gavin’s teeth together. The move caught Glenda by surprise, and she had to back up to make the turn, which bought Gavin a bit of lead. He shouted at the horses, but they were already going flat out.

  “Glenda!” Alice called over her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this! The Third Ward is dead!”

  But Glenda either didn’t hear or didn’t care. The mechanical came after them with implacable determination. The horses were slowing, tired, allowing Glenda to make up the lost time. Gavin listened. The streets here were nearly empty and the calliope music was growing louder. He pulled the horses to a stop and jumped out of the cab.

  “Jump!” he said as Glenda brought both mechanical hands down. Feng and Alice leaped free as the mechanical smashed the cab to pieces. The panicked horses galloped away, dragging the remains with them. Glenda turned to face the trio, her expression stony.

  “What are you doing?” Feng demanded, but Gavin was already moving.

  “Come on!” He dashed down a side street, giving Alice and Feng no choice but to follow. There were still no people in evidence, but the narrow street was cluttered with front stoops, carts, piles of coal, and other street detritus. The trio leaped and twisted around it all, but Glenda was forced to slow a little.

  “I’ll catch you eventually,” she shouted. “You can’t keep running!”

  Gavin burst out onto a main street and into a crowd lining it. The calliope music leaped into full volume. Coming up the street was a man in a red top hat and a red-and-white striped shirt with garters just above the elbows. He wore a cloak flung back over his shoulders and he carried a silver-topped cane. Behind him lurched a great brass elephant, puffing steam from its tusks. Its gait was oddly uneven. Scarlet signs on the animal’s sides spelled out Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles in graceful, garish letters. Behind that came a horse wagon with an calliope on it played by an automaton, followed by the rest of the circus—clowns and acrobats and lion cages and girls on mechanical horses, all waving and smiling. The crowd that had gathered to watch stared, unsure if Gavin’s actions might be part of the show.

  Without a pause, Gavin shoved through the crowd and made for the ringmaster at the front of the parade. He snatched the man’s hat off, revealing sandy hair.

  “What the hell?” the ringmaster said, then blinked. “Gavin?”

  “Great to see you, Dodd.
” Gavin flicked the cloak free. “Just go with this and I’ll explain later.”

  “Gavin, what are you—?” Alice began, but he shoved the top hat on her head, tossed the cloak around her shoulders, and ran around the other side of the lurching elephant without looking to see if Feng and Alice followed him. They did, however, and that was fortunate. Glenda reached the mouth of the side street, but her view of her quarry was blocked by the elephant, who bumbled along as if the people didn’t exist. Up top, the mahout looked down at them warily.

  “Take off your goggles and scarf and your shirt,” Gavin whispered to Feng, keeping pace with the elephant. “The circus has Chinese. You’ll look like an acrobat. Give me the rucksack.”

  “What about you?” Alice buttoned the cloak and drew it around herself, hiding her body and Gavin’s fiddle case. “And how do you know these people?”

  Feng handed Gavin the rucksack, pulled off his shirt, and wrapped it around his head in a crude turban. He had a build that could pass for acrobatic, at a distance. Several people in the crowd had noticed Glenda’s mechanical, but they seemed to think it was part of the parade. They pointed and gasped with amazement. Glenda was momentarily stymied. She couldn’t move forward without crushing people or sweeping them aside and hurting them, which Gavin didn’t think she’d be willing to do.

  A clown in white makeup, orange wig, and blue nose hurried up with a broom and a bucket. “What are you three doing? Do you speak English?”

  “Bonzini!” Gavin said. “Remember me?”

  “Gavin?” the clown gasped. “What in—?”

  “I’m looking for two men and a woman!” Glenda boomed from the mechanical. “They just came this way. There’s a reward!”

  “That’s torn it,” Alice said.

  “No,” Feng said. “The crowd speaks French and German.”

  “Thanks, Bonzini.” Gavin plucked the wig and nose from the clown, jammed them onto his own head and face, and grabbed Bonzini’s broom and bucket. The pack with the firefly cure in it went on Gavin’s back.

  “Hey!” Bonzini protested.

  But Gavin was already moving farther back, now using the calliope wagon and then a lion cage for cover. Alice and Feng came with. Glenda gave up on the crowd and was now nudging people aside so she could move onto the street. The calliope continued to hoot out something in D-major.

  “Split up,” Gavin said.

  “Why can’t we just keep hiding behind the calliope?” Alice hissed.

  “The wagon’s high enough for her to see our feet.” Gavin brandished the broom. “Hide in plain sight. Smile and wave and tell anyone who asks that Dodd said it was all right.”

  Gavin followed the lion cage with the broom over his shoulder, taking care that the bristles blocked Glenda’s view of his face. Behind Gavin, a pair of jugglers tossed clubs and balls. Alice and Feng dropped farther back into the parade, smiling and waving as they went. The parade moved ahead with aching slowness. The horse drawing the lion cage dropped manure onto the street right in front of the spot where Glenda had finally worked her way through the parade audience to the curb. Gavin swallowed hard and kept his head down as he paused and swept the smelly stuff into the bucket. Glenda scanned the street with flat, hard eyes. Gavin felt her gaze rest on him for a moment, and he forced himself to put a jaunty spring into his step, though tension dried his mouth and tightened his knuckles on the bucket. He was just a lowly sweeper clown. Not worth examining closely. Glenda narrowed her eyes and her mechanical took a step forward. Gavin held his breath. Then Glenda turned and stomped away. The crowd cheered and pointed at her, still sure she was part of the parade. Gavin let out his breath and stole a glance over his shoulder. Alice and Feng smiled and waved near a troop of acrobats. The automaton on the calliope finished its song and swung into another one. Gavin continued on his way with the bucket full of manure.

  Eventually the parade made its way to a field at the edge of town. The big striped tent—called the Tilt, Gavin remembered—rose up among a number of smaller tents and circus wagons. Off to one side waited the red locomotive and bright boxcars Gavin had seen from the airship earlier just before a clockworker fugue had taken him away. If not for the clockwork plague and the unexpected memory of his father, he might have recognized the train right away instead of recalling it later. He had also seen the flyers for the Kalakos Circus plastered about Luxembourg by the advance man, but they were in French and he hadn’t paid close attention to them. He wasn’t sure how he had missed the name; the French version wasn’t so very different.

  The parade continued right up to the complex of tents. Behind the parade came an enormous crowd, all ready to see the show. The performers quickly scattered, some toward the Tilt, some to the sideshow tents, and others to direct the oncoming crowd toward the ticket sellers, who wore stovepipe hats with oversized tickets attached to the top so people could locate them. An intricately decorated mechanical clock at the entrance of the Tilt ran backward, counting down the minutes until the performance began. A life-sized female automaton was attached to the clock, and even as Gavin watched, she jerked to life. She had only head, chest, and arms, and Gavin assumed this made her sufficiently inhuman to make her legal under Luxembourg law.

  “Mesdames et messieurs!” she called in a voice that carried from one end of the circus to the other. “Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes! Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes!” And then she went still.

  Nearly an hour before the show, according to the clock. The extra time, Gavin recalled, gave the audience a chance to buy tickets, then get bored and decide to spend money at the sideshow.

  A firm grip took Gavin’s elbow. “The ringmaster wants to see you in his car,” said Bonzini, “and you better not have sneezed inside my nose.”

  The ringmaster kept an entire train car to himself. Alice took off the red top hat. Feng pulled on his shirt and tried to smooth out the wrinkles. Bonzini ushered the three of them inside, but didn’t enter himself. The car had a large bed, comfortable chairs, two wardrobes, a small stove, full bookshelves, and a perfectly functional bar. It hadn’t changed since Gavin had seen it more than two years ago. Neither had Dodd, who was waiting for them.

  “Good God, Gavin,” he said, his face split into a wide grin. “I hope you have a good explanation for nearly wrecking my parade today. Who are these people? And where’s Cousin Felix?”

  He pulled Gavin into a warm embrace without waiting for an answer, and Gavin suddenly found himself at the top of an upswell of emotion. His throat thickened, and words wouldn’t come. The memory of Captain Felix Naismith’s last moments slammed through Gavin, and he saw the captain’s expression as a pirate’s glass fléchette sliced his flesh and ended his life. He heard the small sound that escaped the captain’s throat and felt the thud as the captain’s body slammed into the deck.

  Dodd read Gavin’s expression. “No.”

  “Yeah,” Gavin said thickly. “Uh, this may take a while to explain.”

  “Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante minutes!”

  “I have fifty minutes,” Dodd said.

  Alice set Gavin’s fiddle and the rucksack with the cure in the corner and everyone sat down. Gavin introduced Alice and Feng and then started in with the loss of the Juniper to pirates, moving to the death of Dodd’s cousin, Captain Felix Naismith. Dodd’s face hardened as the story progressed. Alice went to the little bar and came back with a half-full glass, which Dodd drained with a shaky hand when Gavin finished.

  “I haven’t seen him in almost two years,” Dodd said in a hoarse voice. “I had no idea he was dead. Oh, God. What am I going to do?”

  Gavin didn’t know what to say. Alice and Feng, who didn’t know Dodd at all, sat in uncomfortable silence.

  “Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans vingt minutes!”

  “We go months without contact,” Dodd said, “but that was all right. I was so glad when he got of
f that stupid scow he played second mate for and got on a real ship, and he was so happy when Boston Mail gave him his own command. Youngest captain in their fleet, he is. Was. Now he’s gone. Shit.”

  Alice coughed, and Dodd raised his glass to her in apology, then stared off into space. Dodd was young himself for a circus ringmaster, barely thirty, with large brown eyes that made him look even younger, despite the side whiskers. Gavin glanced at him, then around the little car. Whenever the Juniper was in a European port, Captain Naismith checked to see if the Kalakos Circus was in town too, and if it was, he always took Gavin and Tom with him to visit. The cousins caught up while the cabin boys got free run of the show. After the performance, Dodd gave them treats from the grease wagon, or even a windup toy from his workshop.

  “I’m sorry to bring bad news,” Gavin said. “I miss him, too. And Tom. But there’s more.”

  Gavin gave a thumbnail sketch of how Alice’s aunt Edwina had used her cure for the clockwork plague to manipulate Gavin and Alice into joining the Third Ward so Edwina could destroy it, and how Lieutenant Phipps was now chasing them—

  “Wait,” Dodd interrupted. He pointed at Alice. “You’re a baroness who can cure the clockwork plague?” He pointed at Gavin. “And you’ve become a clockworker?”

  Gavin nodded. “Yes. Now we—”

  “What do you do?” Dodd interrupted again, this time pointing at Feng. “Walk on water?”

  “With a good running start,” Feng replied.

  “Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinq minutes!”

  A sharp knock came at the door, and a red-haired man with startling blue eyes poked his head into the car. He wore an Arran fisherman’s sweater and a cloth cap. “Dodd? Show’s on. Are you— Gavin! Good Lord, lad, it’s been ages. Where are Tom and Felix?”

  Dodd rose a little unsteadily. “They’re dead, Nathan.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” Nathan strode in and caught Dodd in an embrace that went on for rather longer than most Englishmen or Irishmen felt comfortable with. Gavin suddenly put together a number of cues that had completely escaped him when he was younger. He glanced at Feng, who cocked his head, and the ridiculousness of the situation occurred to him. A baroness with an iron spider on her arm, a plague-infested airman, and an undiplomatic Chinaman hiding from a giant mechanical with a circus ringmaster who fell in love with men. A wave of mirth suddenly overcame Gavin, and inappropriate laughter bubbled in his throat. Alice glared at him. Feng looked surprised. The laughter bubbled up again, and this time Gavin couldn’t stop it. He laughed and laughed and pounded the little table with his fist and laughed some more. The odds of any of this happening were so high, they were impossible to calculate. Just the idea that his own ancestors would meet and produce offspring that would end in him while Alice’s and Feng’s own families were doing the same thing, completely unaware that the culmination of their work and toil and sex would end in a circus with a ringmaster who dabbed it up with men. Trillions upon trillions of events, both enormous and minuscule, had to take place in perfect sequence in order for this meeting to occur and if any one of them had failed to happen, the three of them would be somewhere else—or perhaps they wouldn’t even exist. Best of all, they wouldn’t even know the difference. Maybe they didn’t know the difference now.