Steven Harper - The Dragon Men

The Jade Hand lay limp on the cracked stairs. More beautiful than a warrior queen, Alice Michaels stood over Su Shun’s unconscious form, the quivering sword in one hand, gauntlet shielding the other. Tearing wind blew her hair around her head. The Impossible Cube lay in his hands between them. His world moved around her, but he had to leave her to save it. Fatigue pulled at him, and the Cube was oddly heavy. His wings pulled at his aching back. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t leave her alone again. What was the point? He wanted nothing more than to hold Alice and wait for it all to end.

“Go!” Alice shouted. “It’s your time, Gavin! Go now!”

He shook his head. “I left you once, Alice. I won’t do it again. I’m tired , Alice. I’m tired of fighting the plague and fighting for the world. Eventually one of these stupid weapons we make will succeed. Why not let this one do it and get it over with so we can be together?”

Alice looked stricken. Tears stood in her eyes. “You can’t, Gavin. You have to go. Take the Cube away.”

He kissed her. “No. I’m finished, Alice. I’ve gone through hell once. I’m not doing it again.”

“Oh, Gavin.” She dropped the sword and put her hands on his wrists. More lightning sundered the sky. “Gavin, please. I don’t want to do this. Don’t make me do this.”

“Do what?”

Her voice was measured, but there was a catch in it. “Don’t you see it, darling? Look at the sky. Look at the clouds, the mist, the air.” She was crying now, tears flowing in twin streams down her face. “And the Cube. The patterns on its back, its middle, its front. The patterns move and shift, move and glow. Aren’t they fascinating? It’s a pattern inside a pattern inside a pattern. Regularity inside regularity, infinite inside infinite.”

Her voice, still audible over the shaking earth and growling thunder, reached inside him. He knew what she was doing, but still he couldn’t stop it. The plague roared to life. The patterns she had mentioned were obvious now. He could see fractals in the clouds, patterns made of smaller patterns that repeated endlessly downward. The Cube was doing the same thing, creating more and more patterns. He couldn’t stop looking at them. Now that she had pointed them out, he didn’t want to.

“You want to have a closer look,” she said. “You can fly, glide, soar, and examine, scrutinize, inspect.”

“Alice. .,” he whispered, and then took off with great sweeps of his mechanical wings. She spiraled down beneath him, and he caught “I love you always” as he flew away.

The Impossible Cube glowed a deep indigo as he clawed for altitude. The battery indicator on his wrist said he was running low, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had plenty of height, that he could reach the clouds. His ears popped, and he swallowed. An enormous lightning bolt zipped past him, missing him by only a hundred yards and filling his nose with ozone. Thunder boomed. Then the air grew cold and quiet, and damp mist closed in all about him, though it also felt heavy. The perfect crystalline chime kept him aloft and free, nothing holding him down, nothing holding him back. He rose above the cloud layer, trailing bits of mist. The clouds spread in all directions beneath a perfect silver moon. Flashes of red and blue light rushed about beneath his feet, and the Impossible Cube sent out its terrible, beautiful indigo glow. The patterns were so enticing. He stared at them, lost and thrilled. This was what he had been born for, and Alice had let him go.

He stared down at the Cube, rushing in and down now as he had rushed out and up before, finding the designs that made up designs, tiny particles made of particles made up of particles. And there they were, caught in the dance-the little pairs. The Impossible Cube had them, too. They turned and moved together. What one did, the other did. They were all connected. Particle and particle. Void and solid. Water and fire. Air and earth. China and England. Clockworker and Dragon Man. Cube and Chamber.

The Cube’s countless particles had all changed color. He could see it now. They were supposed to be paired with the particles in the Ebony Chamber, but they weren’t. They were pairing with particles in the earth, with particles that stabilized matter and made up gravity and affected time. When the Cube’s particles turned, so did the ones in the earth, and when enough of them turned, the planet would tilt.

But Gavin could see it now. If the Cube’s particles paired with something else, the Cube’s grip on the earth would relax, and nothing would happen. All he had to do was redirect the pairing. He could do that if he understood the particles and became one with them so they answered his touch. He had to go down farther again, as he had almost done before.

The Cube’s glow shifted again. It was a deep violet now, and the storm below Gavin’s feet was growing more intense. The battery gauge on his wrist gave him only a few minutes more power as well. All this he was aware of even as he examined particles so small and so fast, they barely seemed to exist at all.

He reached down and in with his clumsy musician’s fingers. The particles scattered before him. He had to do this, find the balance. He could do it. He had only to achieve perfection and the balance would be his. Perfection was the key to-

Uri’s voice came to him as if from a book of wisdom. “Perfection doesn’t exist, kid. One mistake doesn’t ruin the entire song any more than a single ripple ruins an entire stream.”

But that wasn’t true. It was entirely possible to play the perfect song, build the perfect ship.

Be the perfect husband.

Perfect lover.

Perfect son.

But perfection was impossible, and anything that was impossible was therefore flawed. Perfection was therefore imperfect. It was a strange symmetry, an odd balance. Gavin shook with the implications.

Secrets whispered at him, pulled his mind in a thousand directions, pulled him away from the particles. But away was also toward. Out was in. No matter which direction he went, it would be the right one. He let himself go, released his hold on everything, and let a universe of particles and atoms and molecules and lattices and planets and quarks and stars and galaxies all rush through him all at once. He was a river, one piece that nonetheless flowed from beginning to end. He let go of Gavin Ennock.

An explosion rushed through him. He felt himself everywhere and nowhere, light and darkness, separate and together. He was himself and he was the universe because they were both the same thing. A calm ecstasy filled him. There was nothing more he needed now.

He found himself pulled toward a single particle. With negligent ease, he pulled himself toward it and looked inside, even though he already knew what was in it. He found himself looking at the entire universe again from the top down. And within that universe was a galaxy, and within that galaxy was a star, and around that star orbited a planet, and above that planet hovered a young man who didn’t need a name anymore, for a name only served to separate him.

The Impossible Cube was fading, shifting into a spectrum of light not visible to the naked eye. But the young man could still feel the Cube in his hands. In fact, he could feel his entire body, every organ and cell and neuron and protein and molecule of water. He saw the microscopic plants clinging to his brain cells, and he saw another balance-plague and cure. Yes.

The Impossible Cube had warped time and sent the clockwork plague from the tortured present into the innocent past. The plague had then created clockworkers and a society that loved and feared them. One of those early clockworkers had created the Ebony Chamber, a balance for the future Impossible Cube. Or perhaps the Ebony Chamber had forced the creation of the Impossible Cube as a balance for itself. And then one day, a clockworker had created the Impossible Cube, which had warped time and sent the plague into the past.