The Impossible Cube

by Steven Harper

“What does this have to do with anything?” Alice asked.

  Gavin turned his eyes on her, and they all but glowed with intensity. “To get the distance between the stopping point and the peak, that is, the distance between the pause and the cheese—”

  “Oh!” Alice interrupted. “You’re going to tell me it’s the square root of two.”

  “Well, you multiply by the square root of two, but yes.”

  “God in heaven!” Dr. Clef dropped his pencil and scrabbled for it on the rocking deck. “I knew this fact, my boy, but I never made the connection. The electricity in the alloy cycles between the average and the peak—the square root of two—and when combined with the Impossible Cube’s design, it forces a constant on the universe and changes local time.”

  “My paradox generator might do the same thing,” Gavin said. “If we used your alloy in it and powered it correctly.”

  Dr. Clef clapped his hands with newfound glee and cooperation. “It would take a lot of work and careful calculation.”

  “Wait a minute,” Alice put in.

  “And precise measurement, which we couldn’t do here, with the lab rocking.” Gavin began to pace within the shack, stepping over Click without really seeing him.

  “One moment, please,” Alice said.

  “But we’ll be in Berlin in a few hours.” Dr. Clef flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. “The train will stop.”

  “Now, see here,” Alice said.

  “And we’ll be able to buy more materials in a large city,” Gavin said. “We may have to build a few tools first, but—”

  “Wait. A. Minute!” Alice shouted.

  Both men blinked at her, as if only then remembering she was there. Click’s green eyes shuttered open and closed with little clicking noises that were clearly audible despite the rushing wind outside the shanty.

  “What’s wrong, my dear?” Dr. Clef asked at last. “You see how well we are working together. Is this not a fine thing?”

  “You should not be discussing any of this,” she said, one hand pressed to her bosom. Her heart fluttered about her rib cage like a frightened bird, and she felt a little sick. “You’re treating the idea of changing something as fundamental as time itself like nothing more than some schoolboy’s science experiment. This is… it’s… Good heavens, I don’t know what this is! Why would you do such a thing?”

  Gavin looked at her, truly puzzled. “It’s for you.”

  Alice hadn’t thought she could be more shocked, and was even more shocked to learn she’d been wrong. His words sent an electric jolt through her gut, and she found herself pressed against the wall of the shanty. “What do you mean?”

  “You need more time,” Gavin said. “We need more time. You need to spread the cure and recover from it. And I’m… well, I don’t have much time left. If I can find a way to change the way time flows for us, I can speed us up—or slow the world down. You’ll have more time to recover. We’ll have more time together. We can save the world, Alice. Just like Monsignor Adames said.”

  Nausea and more than a little fear sloshed around Alice’s stomach. The very idea of tampering with time, let alone doing so in her name, screamed with wrongness. Alice tried to reply, but all that came out was a squeak. She tried again. “Gavin, Doctor—you can’t be serious. I would never ask for such a terrible thing.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m doing it.”

  He reached for her hands, but she snatched them away. “You don’t understand at all. This is a horrible idea, Gavin. It’s the sort of thing the Doomsday Vault was built to contain. What if you make a mistake? What if you speed time for us and the rest of the world goes ahead as normal and that tears a big piece out of the earth itself?”

  “I wouldn’t make such a mistake,” Gavin soothed. “Truly. I don’t make mistakes.”

  “You make mistakes all the time!” Alice felt like she was arguing with a tree. “You decided to escape the world’s most powerful police force in an airship that can’t fly without making a spectacle of itself. You used that whip of yours without knowing how much power was left in it, and it fizzled away right when you needed it most. Just now you tried your… your thing on Dr. Clef without considering whether or not it might damage his brain. No sane scientist would—” She clamped her lips shut and turned her face away. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Gavin wasn’t… wasn’t…

  She couldn’t bring herself to complete the thought.

  A hand took one of hers. Gavin looked her in the face, his expression worried and agitated at the same time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. It’s… I’m going in strange directions, Alice. I’m changing. My brain runs ahead of my mind, and I don’t think. No, that’s wrong. I do think. I think too much, and these ideas come to me, and it doesn’t even occur to me that there might be something wrong. It scares me, Alice. I don’t know what to do.”

  Alice squeezed his hand in both of hers, flesh on metal on flesh. The spider’s eyes glowed red. “It’s the plague. You have to fight it, Gavin. For as long as possible.”

  “Help me,” he said simply. “Lead me.”

  “I’ll try.” It was hard to speak around the lump in her throat. “I’ll never stop trying.”

  “Don’t fail,” Gavin said. “Adames said I can cure the world, but you mustn’t fail. Maybe that’s what he meant.”

  “I am confused,” said Dr. Clef. “What are we doing?”

  “We’re realizing what we should and shouldn’t do,” Gavin said. “This”—he gestured at the paradox generator—“was a mistake. I’ll destroy it now.”

  He drew back his foot to kick the generator over the side and let it smash on the rocky railroad bed. Then he hesitated.

  “What’s wrong?” Alice asked.

  “I can’t do it,” he said. “I worked so hard on it, and it’s so beautiful and perfect. How can I destroy it?”

  “Then I’ll do it.” Alice leaned down to pick up the generator herself, but Gavin’s arm on her shoulder stopped her.

  “Don’t!” he cried, then let her go with a start. “I mean, you can’t… oh, God. I don’t want… it’s so beautiful, Alice.”

  Alice pursed her lips, frustrated but understanding. “I see, darling. Perhaps there’s another way. Dr. Clef, I’m going to take Gavin for a little walk. While we’re gone, I want you to destroy this thing.”

  A horrified expression crossed Dr. Clef’s face. “But it is as Gavin said—so beautiful! We cannot!”

  “Of course we can.” Gavin’s voice hardened and he showed a bit of anger. “We must. Do you understand me, Doctor?”

  Dr. Clef cocked his head. “I can,” he said slowly. “If I must.”

  “You must,” Gavin said. “We cooperate now, and you must.”

  “Then I shall.” He sighed. “I promise. Ah, well. It does make fun to knock things apart, yes?”

  Alice embraced Gavin hard, and belatedly realized her cheeks were wet. “Thank you,” she said as the engine whistled again. “I love you always.”

  “And I love you always.”

  They joined hands and strode out into the wind.

  Dr. Clef and Click watched them go. A look of bemusement crossed his ashy face. Then he picked up the discarded paradox generator and rocked it like a lost child. A single tear, and then another, leaked from his eye and splashed on the wooden casing. Click rubbed against his knee.

  “Mein armes Unmöglicheskubus,” Dr. Clef moaned. “My poor Impossible Cube. He has abandoned us. Abandoned! And now I must destroy this thing of beauty.”

  Click continued to rub against Dr. Clef’s knee, and Dr. Clef stroked his metal sides. They were gray with soot as well. “You understand, my clicky kitty. You are a delightful machine and would not alter your path, just as this train would not. Could not. But that boy, he is brilliant, far more brilliant than I, yet he follows his genitals to obey the woman. How can they save the world when they don’t have enough time, my clicky kitty? How? The boy and the girl need more tim
e. The boy needs more time. He needs more time.”

  Tears ran down his face and he rocked the paradox generator in his lap, lost in memory for a moment. Then a change came over his face. Sadness and despair dropped off, gave way to crafty resolve.

  “We must show them they are wrong, mustn’t we, my clicky kitty?” he cooed. “Yes, we must. Yes, we must! I can use the boy’s theory and his generator to re-create my Impossible Cube, can’t I, my kitty? Yes, I can. Yes, I can. Once I have my Cube back, I will be able to stop time forever, and that will give the boy and the girl all the time they need. At last the boy will have more time. Yes, he will. Yes, he will. I will stop time forever, my clicky kitty. Forever!”

  Click only purred as Dr. Clef’s joyful laughter poured out of the shanty.

  Chapter Eight

  Kiev was the opposite of Luxembourg. Funny how two places could be populated with human beings but be so completely different, Gavin mused as the train puffed and growled through town. Although the city was built on a series of seven hills with a winding river at the bottom of the valley, the place had no greenery in it whatsoever. Not one tree, flower, or blade of grass grew anywhere. Stone and steel, smoke and sludge hemmed Gavin in. Street after street of blocky buildings crouched low over cobblestoned streets. Gargoyles clung to rooftops and intricately carved monsters crawled across archways. Forests of chimneys belched out clouds of smoke or flashed plumes of yellow flame. Pipes urinated endless streams of waste into the river. A crowd of workers huddled outside a factory, hoping to be called in for a job. More people moved up and down crowded sidewalks. The men wore gray shirts, and the women wore brown dresses and head cloths, and they kept their heads down as they walked. Bright colors seemed to have been outlawed, and the lack pulled Gavin’s spirits lower and lower with every passing moment. Something else bothered him about the crowds, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

  Mechanicals ruled the streets. Skittering spiders and brass horses and hovering whirligigs clogged the pavement and the air above it. Automatic streetcars rattled down their tracks, drawing iron boundaries behind them. They all pumped out steam and coal smoke, turning the air thick with white mist and yellow sulfur. Gavin turned away from the window with a feeling of nausea. The something he couldn’t figure out continued to bother him, and it gave him a slight headache.

  “How can people live here?” he said.

  “People live in all kinds of places,” Dodd said philosophically from his own chair near the table. “Many of them can’t go anywhere else. My usual thought is to be grateful I don’t have to stay.”

  Gavin thought of his ship, his graceful Lady, now being hauled inexorably into this stony trap by an iron demon, and wondered how grateful he should be. He sighed. Once Alice had finished distributing the cure here, and once they were reasonably safe beyond the reach of Phipps, they could reassemble the Lady and fly for the Orient. As it was, he felt restless and out of sorts after days of inactivity. They had arrived in Berlin to find reward placards with Gavin’s likeness on them plastered over nearly every empty surface and a notice about him that circulated daily in every local newspaper. Alice, who hadn’t been with the Third Ward long enough to be photographed, had escaped such treatment, but her description had been bandied about, as was Feng’s. This forced Gavin to stay hidden either aboard the Lady or in Dodd’s car during the circus’s entire time in Berlin. Alice and Feng risked slipping out to spread the cure around and brought back reports that underground stories of a woman with a demon’s hand and a man with an angel’s voice were already circulating. A number of Alice’s “patients” asked Feng to sing, and he quickly demurred.

  “When I sing,” Feng said, “donkeys die in the street.” So one night Gavin spent an hour with the little nightingale, recording the same song over and over until he was satisfied he’d done it perfectly. He gave it to Feng so he could play it for Alice on her nightly missions. But some time later, the nightingale came fluttering back to him. His careful music was gone, and the nightingale instead spoke in Feng’s voice.

  “The lady wants you to know that the nightingale’s music is pretty, but not the same as yours,” it said, “and it makes her sad to hear it.”

  More than once, Feng himself happily remained behind to accept from a grateful cure recipient what he called “additional gratuity,” a practice that infuriated Alice and Gavin both—Alice on moral grounds and Gavin because it meant Alice was forced to travel back to the circus unescorted through Berlin streets. Feng, however, seemed unfazed by their fury, and Gavin understood more fully why Feng’s father had decided not to allow him to continue as a diplomat in England.

  When Alice returned from these midnight excursions, she collapsed into a deep sleep that lasted long enough to make Gavin nervous. He spent hours sitting by her bunk, just to be near her. The iron spider on her arm lay between them, glaring red and bubbling with blood. He barely got to speak with Alice, hardly even saw her awake. This mission to cure the world drove her to exhaustion, and while he couldn’t fault her for it, he found himself wishing she would give up some of her intensity. Leaving London and Alice’s fiancé behind was supposed to have granted them the freedom to love each other, but instead they found even less time for each other than before. How could Gavin compete with a world of plague victims? At times he wanted to shake her and shout that he was dying, that any day his life could end, and she would have all the time she wanted to spread the cure. But he didn’t. The devotion and intensity made Alice herself, and changing any of it would make her into a different person, someone he wouldn’t want to spend his remaining time with. He could either love her or change her, but not both.

  Dr. Clef didn’t seem to share Gavin’s unhappiness. He stayed locked up in the ship’s laboratory, scribbling with pencil on endless sheets of paper or with chalk on a slate, and manipulating long sections of his alloy into odd shapes. Gavin had been afraid that he was trying to re-create his Impossible Cube, but Dr. Clef waved this idea aside.

  “It is as I told you,” he said blandly. “I cannot re-create it, now or ever.” But he would not say what he was working on.

  As time passed, Gavin took to spending more and more time in Dodd’s car. It was larger and more comfortable than any stateroom on Gavin’s ship, and Dodd seemed glad to have him, his sole connection to Felix Naismith, though they never spoke of the man.

  Enforced idleness didn’t sit well with Gavin, and his hands worked without him. Even now, as the train puffed through Kiev, he wound wire around a wooden dowel, slid the dowel free, and snipped the length of the resulting coil with cutters, creating a pile of little rings.

  At last the train screeched to a stop. It had taken a spur of track that cut past an enormous open square, perhaps three hundred yards on a side and bordered by tall buildings, beyond which rose columns of smoke and flame. Half the stone square was crowded with market carts and sooty freestanding tents. The other half, the side closest to the tracks, had been painted off, clearly set aside for the circus. Just beyond the tracks lay the slate-gray Dnepro River. Oil glistened in a rainbow sheen on its surface far below the cut stone banks. Steel boats of varying sizes chugged along in orderly procession, their stacks spewing yet more smoke into the already overburdened air.

  The moment the train halted, the door to Dodd’s car jerked open and in popped a portly man with long mustaches under a bowler hat. His name was Harry Burks, and he was the advance man, the person who traveled ahead of the circus to start the publicity and smooth the way with local officials. He spoke a dozen languages and loved nothing more than spending an evening in a pub making new friends. Gavin had never known him to forget a name or a face.

  “Dodd!” Harry boomed. “Right on time. Good, good! You know how the Ukrainians feel about punctuality.”

  “What’s the news, Harry?” Dodd asked.

  “Nothing major, thank heavens, thank heavens. We have the southern half of the market square for as long as we need it, and we can leave the train on this side
spur, though I had to promise the chief of police and the town council and their families front-row tickets along with the usual bribes. Placards are already up all over town, and I’ve taken out advertisements in all the usual places. I’m also trying something new—paying hansom cabs and spiders a small fee to paste placards on themselves. Walking advertisements, you know. We’ll see if it helps, if it helps.”

  “Fine idea,” said Dodd.

  “And remind everyone not to go out after dark,” Harry warned. “Kiev clockworkers can snatch anyone off the street after sunset, and there’s nothing you can do about it, nothing you can do.”

  Dodd nodded. “Will do. And the other matter?”

  Harry gave a sideways glance at Gavin. “Not a word, not a word. Your little friends may have been the toast of Berlin, but no one’s talking about a reward for an American boy or an English girl, and clockwork cats are all the rage in Kiev. I think you can come out and breathe some smoky air at last, my boy.”

  A load of tension drained from Gavin, and he slumped in the padded chair. Freedom at last!

  “But,” Harry continued, holding up a finger, “there are other rumors. I’m hearing tales about a young woman, an angel who cures the plague with a touch, with a touch, and of her young lover who makes beautiful music for her.”

  “Uh-oh,” Gavin said. “How is word getting around so fast?”

  “Who knows, who knows?” Harry shrugged. “But there is more. The newspapers are saying there are fewer new cases of plague, and more of those who have it are recovering. Recovering! People are beginning to hope. That should give you reason to be careful, my boy, especially here.”

  “I’m always careful,” Gavin said, though even as he said it, he knew it was mostly a lie. “But why here?”

  “Don’t forget that Kiev is supposedly the birthplace of the plague. She certainly has more zombies and clockworkers than anywhere else in the world, and it’s a pity the Zalizniak and Gonta put all their resources into machines of war. They might have found a cure of their own, otherwise. At any rate, if the general population learns where to find you and that young lady, you’ll be overrun, like Jesus and the lepers. So watch your step, my boy, watch your step.”