Clockwork Universe

by Seanen McGuire

  “Yes, but we know what he did wrong now.”

  “You’ve discussed this with your mother, I take it.”

  “She’s delighted. She never liked my going all the way to Boston.”

  “Then I suppose you’ve already settled the matter between you and my permission is unnecessary.”

  “But appreciated,” I said brightly.

  Early the next morning, I set out, ostensibly to search for an apartment. Mother had it in her head that I’d live at home in my old room. She gave way eventually, provided my brother went along when I inspected apartments. Rob was only seventeen, but as the star forward on his high school football team, he was big and strong. He was living for the day he’d be on the starting line for Harvard or Bowdoin.

  Once we were trundling along in the Stanley, he nudged me. “You’ve already picked out an apartment, eh, sis? Somewhere around Harring Place?” He chuckled at my surprise, a deep, warm sound. “Dad’s not the only one with reporting instincts. I, too, have my sources.”

  He was no fool, despite being a bit spoiled. The two infants who had followed me into this world had each died within months. Rob had survived a sickly babyhood. Reason enough to spoil him. Add a roguish charm that had been prompting illicit sweets from cooks, parlor maids and maiden ladies since he was in his pram and he was able to drift through life on a smile and a wink.

  Later, as we walked in the park, he brought up the story from the Sahara. It had run on page 14, between a story on the new Arizona copper boom and an ad for elastic-sided boots.

  “By Jingo, imagine if it were true! It’s like something out of a Boy’s Own Paper. I just wish I could go and see for myself.”

  “Father said the reporter isn’t very reliable.”

  “Still … just imagine what we could learn!”

  The Letters to the Editor for the next several days were divided between Rob’s level of excitement and sharply expressed opinions that the Times had sunk to the level of the yellowest of journalism.

  Though my position at the college didn’t start until the fall semester, I found myself drawn to the lab every day. Dr. Brook, a woman with a delicate elegance many a debutante lacked, merely smiled understandingly and put me to work with those dozen or so others who were irresistibly drawn to electricity. I had no attention to spare for wild tales of alien craft.

  Six days later, the Red Queen took up position just north of the Faroe Islands, about four hundred miles off the coast of Iceland. This time, there was no delay in reporting. It could be seen, like the arc of the sun above the horizon, from Iceland, Norway and the north of Scotland.

  Almost at once, steamers full of tourists began heading out for a closer look, beating even the navies of several nations. The London Times shared their reporting with the New York Times until, by bribing a cruiser captain to go farther than recommended and by tearing off the superstructure to feed the boilers, one of our reporters reached the site.

  Sending heliographs on that beautiful spring day was easy. Until the sky lit up with a crackling fire that blinded the relay station operator and could be seen as a flashing light on the horizon as far away as Newfoundland and Labrador in the West and Germany and Lithuania in the East. How it looked to our reporter is unknown, except that it was likely the last thing he ever saw in this world.

  The horrible bolts of lightning continued to flash for almost two hours. When they ceased, a three-mile wide vein of destruction ran straight as a ruler for almost thirty-five hundred miles, between the Sahara and the North Sea. It became known as The Line. Scotland, England, France and Spain, Morocco and communities around the Bay of Oran suffered the most complete devastation. Fires burned in every street. Forests had become conflagrations which spread beyond The Line. Many months passed before anyone attempted to estimate accurately the numbers of the dead.

  Infants in cradles, women at their sewing, men in the pubs, schoolchildren at play, birds wild and domesticated, even the rats in the sewers, died between one instant and the next. The British lost a fifth of their royal family. In Spain, a medical convention held by an ill-fate on the track of The Line meant that an eighth of their nation’s medical staff was wiped out. An American battleship sailing through the Mediterranean drifted onto shore with a crew dead at their stations.

  The next day, again, for two hours out of every four, the lightning flashed and burned through the sky by daylight and moonlight. The smell of ozone was unbearable anywhere near The Line. The outpost at Ain-Salah reported through Danvers that the White Queen was both receiving and sending these powerful bolts in a violent battle with the nemesis over the water. The ships that dared to go close to the Red Queen reported the same actions.

  The first I knew of the devastation of The Line came when I arrived at the lab that morning. Dr. Brook stood at the blackboard, writing out formulae. Her audience was not undergrads and coeds but stern men with square shoulders set off by epaulettes stiff with gold. She introduced me. They told me tersely what had happened. I had to sit down, head to my knees. The most decorated of them all brought me a paper cup of water. I apologized for my weakness.

  “Never mind, Miss Lyle,” General Cotman said. “When they told me, I had to lie down.”

  “They had to revive me with brandy,” said the glittering one in blue.

  “Well, hand it over, George.”

  So we all had some in paper cups, the wax lining peeling off to float in the brandy. They resumed the discussion I’d interrupted. The military wanted to know, immediately, what kind and level of power they were to anticipate. Similar meetings were underway in Chicago, Austin, the University of Los Angeles, and anywhere else a scientist or alchemist had spent any time at all on an obscure study.

  “Naturally, gentlemen, without proper measurements, it is difficult to analyze these events comprehensively,” Dr. Brook began. “There are sure to be more reports coming in. I ask you to ensure that I and my national colleagues see whatever information you receive from whatever source.”

  “Absolutely guaranteed,” General Cotman promised. “I speak for President Armstrong when I say this. I met with him this morning.”

  Dr. Brook returned to the board, attempting to show in simple terms the mysteries we spent our days trying to unravel for ourselves. Like my father, all they really knew was that electrical force had killed one of our young nation’s most promising minds a hundred years previously and caused the disaster at the Paris Exhibition of 1868. Now it had slaughtered millions.

  “What I wonder is,” I said, into an appalled silence, “why here? Why Earth? There are at least six unpopulated planets just in this solar system. Why come to Earth to fight their battles?”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” General Cotman asked. “They may be intelligent but as far from us as we are from ants. Why have they come here to fight, young lady? Why should they go elsewhere? We can’t stop ‘em or tell ‘em to vamoose. Did anyone ask the ants at Gettysburg if they’d mind if we fought a battle where they lived?”

  For the next three weeks, Dr. Brook and her assistants labored to solve the tiniest piece of the puzzle before us. We learned that the Red Queen tended to float higher above the water than the White did above the sand. But we didn’t know what made it hover. We estimated the mass, the length, the volume of the ships, and the capacity of the bolts thrown, seeking the one fact that would open our understanding. Always at the back of our minds was the horrible cost of The Line.

  General Cotman or his aides called upon us every day but we had no answers. Our counterparts, including now Russian and Chinese experts, showed no greater results.

  Our task was made no easier when fewer students and adjunct professors came to work each day. Even those I’d taken for the most enthusiastic and dedicated were failing to appear at the lab. When they did come, they hardly worked at all. Some slept at their desks, others stood about talking idly. They spent their nights at parties that continued until dawn or they wandered aimlessly about the town in search of yet anoth
er party. No one seemed to care any more about the Queens.

  Then, one day, no one came. I finished my formula and put away my equipment, the coils and the wire. I told Dr. Brook that I’d return shortly. She nodded, smiling her far-away smile. As I looked back, I saw her nipping from a small silver flask. She caught my eye. Hollowly, she said, “Toothache.”

  The last person to abandon her studies had been Anna Clary, a quiet girl from Brooklyn. She’d been there yesterday. I’d see to it that she’d be there tomorrow if I had to drag her by the hair. I felt invincible in my cloak of scientific righteousness.

  I heard her apartment before I saw it. Though the morning was far advanced, the numerous persons at her apartment were all attired in at least the remnants of evening wear. I recognized several of my fellow students, at least two of whom were drunk. The girls only giggled at my severe glance.

  Anna wasn’t there; neither were either of her roommates. I refused a breakfast of caviar, melting ice cream, and French onion soup and went to search for the next student on my list.

  This one, David McArmish, was at his home, not far from my apartment. The door stood open. A gathering was in progress there as well. He wore a bedsheet, toga-fashion. A chaplet of vine leaves sat askew on his flaxen head.

  “Why aren’t you at the lab?” I demanded as if I had a right.

  He poured a glass of rich red wine. “What’s the point? We aren’t going to learn anything new. Have we advanced one inch beyond where we started?”

  “But today we might …”

  “Ah, today’s breakthrough or tomorrow’s. No, no, my dear girl. Some say the Queens are our punishment for our sins. But what sins? I’ve never committed any before today. Yesterday? Recently. I could pray but I’d rather get drunk. To imminent demise!” He drank.

  “So why not indulge ourselves?” I asked scornfully. “Throw ourselves into sin and spiritual waste. Do all the things we’ve been warned against all our lives?”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  I took the glass from his hand and tossed off the dregs. I knew in my heart that he was right. No one could predict what the Queens would do or when. They might leave as suddenly as they came or move over another area creating another Line in their battle. We, the human race, were helpless and doomed.

  I remember little of the next several weeks. Despair burned like a drug in our veins. Nor was it the only drug to be had. Pharmacies reported break-ins in record numbers, strychnine and other poisons stolen as often as cocaine. Liquor stores couldn’t keep glass in their windows. Gambling halls, brothels, and bars did a roaring trade among every age and sex.

  Life for me became a traveling circus. I saw my brother and his cronies once or twice, never to speak to, only in passing. We all started to paint our faces, men and women both, to conceal or emphasize the ravages of our brutal, senseless new life. Some died of alcohol poisoning, overdoses, or wild rages that became murder. We hardly acknowledged their deaths as the bacchanal rolled on.

  One afternoon, red-stained sunset light filling my apartment, I awoke alone in my own bed. I had no recollection of how I got there. Someone was knocking on the door. I stepped over a few sleeping strangers, still entwined in temporary passion on my floor. I’d fallen asleep wearing someone else’s black evening gown, ripped at the shoulder and smelling of beer.

  “I heard you come in,” my landlady said. “So I took the liberty of bringing up this note.”

  The respectable creature I’d rented from was now as frowsy and red-eyed as any Bowery Madame, as I was myself. But she still looked at me with mingled pity and disgust. “I thought you was such a nice girl, being one of them scientists and all.”

  “No nice girls now,” I said. “No scientists either. And no answer.”

  The note came from my mother’s doctor. “Mrs. Lyle is quite ill and asks to see you if you can spare the time from your studies.”

  I threw cold water on the strangers and boiled myself in the tub. Unearthing a clean shirtwaist and skirt, I fancied that I at least looked decent. But my straw hat, once charming, only emphasized the hollows in my cheeks and the black marks under my eyes. I resisted the urge to stop into a 24-hour bar for a steadying sip.

  I walked to my parent’s home. The summer’s heat had come to New York, like a sticky net that I dragged behind me, collecting emotional garbage and dead spirits. I paused in a pocket-sized park to be sick. I felt more myself afterwards.

  My mother’s priest was with her but only for comfort, not for anything dire. I, at a loss in the home of my childhood, sought for comfort in the attic nursery. I couldn’t look at the dolls, slumped in attitudes too reminiscent of my recent decadent life. I turned instead to the desk under the window, where Rob and I had first learned our letters and numbers. An ornate iron-work shelf held my earliest scientific books, still in alphabetical order. Anderson’s Multiples of Mathematics. Bocault’s The Story of Steam. Riviere’s First Principles of Alchemy. I toyed with the old ebony ruler with which Miss Pontifex, our governess, had often threatened but never struck.

  Every schoolchild knows how Archimedes discovered the principle of displacement while lounging in his bath. I’d always had doubts about it. Experimentation, elimination, examination—these lead to discovery, not some sudden flash of insight.

  Yet I was blinded in that instant by an insight so profound that I threw the ruler on the desk and covered my eyes with both hands. But the inner illumination could not be blocked out. It burned like phosphorus, like magnesium, like colloidal copper. It burned away the last of my despondency, even as cleansing fire destroys an infestation of some disease.

  “First principles,” I gasped. Somewhere recently I’d learned a low-class fast-paced shuffling tap step and I did it now, my feet clattering over the boards.

  “What the devil is all this row?” My brother, his eyes as hollow as the walking dead’s, flung open the door.

  “First principles!” I laughed, grabbing his hands to have him dance with me.

  “You’re on the hop, here?” he demanded, surprisingly shocked considering all I’d seen and heard of his activities.

  “Neither mad, drunk, nor high, dear brother.”

  “Then what the devil … ?” His dull eyes brightened as if he’d downed a gallon of black coffee. “You’ve got it. Have you got it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Listen, what kind of shape are you in right now?”

  “Nothing a quick gin and quinine won’t fix.”

  “No, you mustn’t…”

  “Preaching propriety? After what I saw you up to…”

  “We’re not going to talk about that. Not now. Not ever.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  We solemnly shook hands. “Listen, remember something for me, can you? My head’s going to burst. Remember just one thing.”

  “What?”

  “Not a battle but a battery. Go dress and come with me but keep repeating it. Don’t forget. Not a battle but a battery. Please, don’t forget.”

  I sat at the desk and searched for paper, finding none. The ink in the pot had dried up and the only pen I found had a broken nib. I rang vigorously for the maid, demanding pencil and paper. The butler brought it, true to his training, showing no alarm at my wild looks. The paper was a single scented sheet and the pencil a pretty sky-blue.

  I wrote a note to my mother and stole the pencil. We found an omnibus going in the right direction. I scribbled on my cuffs, Rob’s cuffs, and would have started on strangers’ linen if some kind soul hadn’t handed me the Times to write in the margins. Thus I learned that the White Queen had moved from the Sahara to the Gobi Desert. No word yet on whether the Red Queen would match her sister’s movements. I alone knew that she would do so soon and had a notion where she’d wind up.

  Our first stop was Dr. Brook’s. I left Rob to sober her by fair means or foul. I raided her dusty desk for paper. Formulae and images flowed from my hand like water from a fountain. Rob’s methods opened the doctor’s eyes; my scribbl
ings completed her cure.

  Dr. Brook communicated with the uniforms, bidding them to meet us at the lab. The generals and the admirals arrived simultaneously with the Press, who’d been alerted when Mother had shown my note to Father. Military decorum was forgotten as they all shouted more or less the same questions. Rob ushered the Press into a separate room easily enough, having known most of them since childhood.

  Whatever doubts anyone had—and there were many—were resolved when the Red Queen moved over the Continent and settled over the cold Antarctic Ocean not far from Tierra del Fuego precisely as I had predicted. The projected line from one Queen to the next threw the Far East into frenzy. Massive evacuations began from the major population centers of Pekin and Tianjin as well as Jeju Island off the coast of Korea and the southernmost tip of Japan. A great many areas, especially in China, had little communication with the outside world. It sounds callous to say that we only lost a million people when the New Line fired, but we had surmised that twenty million at least would perish.

  The key to my plan was the recent copper boom in Arizona. The United States’ government stepped in to commandeer the entire production. Surprisingly, though resistance had been expected, there was none. Mine owners from the largest industrial producers to the smallest single-man operations stepped forward. Mr. Pullman and Mr. Rockefeller offered their extensive railroad holdings. Massive amounts of ore and smelted metal began to pour into factories.

  I traveled to new factories in Chicago, to converted yarn mills in Massachusetts, to Brooklyn and Hoboken. I felt awestruck that a few words and symbols from my mind had led to all this industry. It was a measure, I suppose, of humanity’s desperation that they’d seized upon the only hope offered.

  Only to Rob, my companion on these tours, did I dare express my own doubts. I can never forget his kindness during that dark time. People would tell me many times a day that they prayed for our success. I prayed, too, the prayer of the slide-rule, an abacus my rosary. Rob alone could tell me to put them away to eat, to sleep.