Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

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.

Gavin doubled over, cackling and howling at the joke. Voices and faces swirled in a twisted rainbow around him. A slight stinging to his face told him he’d been slapped, but it didn’t faze him in the slightest. He laughed and laughed and then the world went black.

Sometime later, Gavin bolted awake. He always bolted awake. The attack by the pirate Madoc Blue and the lashing Gavin had endured afterward had destroyed peaceful sleep and gradual waking. By now, he had forgotten what it was to slip calmly out of slumber and greet the day without sweat on his forehead and his heart in his mouth. He sat up and found he was on the bed with his shoes off.

The sunlight had moved, and the car was dimmer. At the little table sat Nathan Storm, his sunset hair gleaming in the low light. The man was smoking a pipe, and the pungent tobacco smoke floated in a blue cloud near the ceiling. Everyone else was gone.

“Nice to see you among the living.” Nathan puffed gently.

“Where’s Alice?” Gavin asked.

“Exploring the midway. She slept and then wanted some air.” He drew on the pipe again. “That was interesting. You were cackling like…”

Gavin found his shoes on the floor and laced them on. “Like a lunatic? Yeah. Clockworkers are mad. You know that.”

“What’s it like?” Nathan said.

“It’s hard to describe.” Gavin sighed. “The plague shows me things, strange things, true things. I’m not insane. Not really.”

“You sounded pretty mad. You really hurt Dodd.”

Gavin winced. “Shit. Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Nathan.”

His pipe went out, and he tapped it into a bowl on the table. “You’re apologizing to the wrong person.”

“He and Felix aren’t-weren’t-really cousins, were they?”

That earned him a short bark of laughter. “You were young, weren’t you? They met in Hamburg when Felix was working some leaky old airship and Dodd was still winding spiders for Viktor Kalakos. They tried to stay together, meeting up in whatever large cities they could, but it just didn’t work. They did stay close friends. Dodd doesn’t have any other family, so he started calling him Cousin Felix , and it stuck.”

“And now you two…”

“Not ‘now,’ Gavin. For years. Since before Felix started bringing you to visit.”

“Right.” Gavin rubbed his face and remembered Simon, whose romantic tastes ran in the same direction. What were the chances? The corners of his mouth quirked, and he quickly ended that line of thought. “Even clockworkers can be stupid.”

“Damn right. You want something to eat? I’ve got beans and bread here, unless you’d fancy a candyfloss.”

At the mention of food, Gavin’s stomach growled, and he went light-headed. “How long was I… away?”

“All the way through the first show. The second starts in a few minutes.”

Nathan brought him a plate at the bed as if he were an invalid, but Gavin got up and ate at the table. He felt perfectly fine, except for the hunger.

“Where’s Dodd?” he asked around a mouthful.

Nathan looked surprised. “Dodd’s in the ring. The show must go on. If you’re done eating, let’s go find your two friends so you can tell me what you’re really here for. I don’t think you hid in the parade just to have an excuse to deliver bad news.”

Outside, afternoon was fading into evening. The Tilt and the tents cast canted shadows over brightly painted wagons. Gavin knew from his previous visits that the wealthier performers lived in the wagons, which were rolled into the train’s boxcars when circus left town. Poorer performers lived in tents. Other tents housed the sideshow exhibits and the animal cages. Smells of fried food and cooking sugar mingled with calliope music. Men, women, and children wandered about. A few stood in line outside the main entrance of the Tilt, handing over their tickets so they could file inside to find seats as the clock automaton shouted in French that the show would begin in one minute. The performers were out of sight behind the Tilt, awaiting cues and entries.

“There you are!” Alice threw her arms around his neck in a near choke hold and kissed him. “You scared the life out of me. Us.”

“I’m sorry. I need to apologize to Dodd.”

“You must wait,” Feng said. “The performance will begin soon. Mr. Storm, could we go into the main tent? We should not be out in the open in case Phipps has tracked us here.”

Nathan nodded and took them past the ticket taker into the Tilt. Inside, tall rows of bleachers were bent around a wide red ring, and chatting, laughing people filled most of the spaces. Sawdust lay scattered on the ground. Food sellers moved among them with trays of rich-smelling roasted peanuts and pink cotton candy. Off to one side, the automaton played its calliope. Just as the group arrived on one side of the ring, the tent flaps on the opposite side exploded open and Dodd strode into the Tilt. He had his red hat back, and his silver-topped cane waved in time to the music. Behind him came the mechanical elephant, its feet thudding unevenly on the packed earthen floor. The mahout looked a little seasick at the uneven footsteps. Then came a rainbow explosion of clowns and a group of horses, both live and mechanical, accompanied by slender girls in white feathered dresses, and behind them came acrobats in tight red shirts. A trainer led a lion on a leash and made it roar. For the hell of it, Gavin snatched the recording nightingale from his pocket and pressed the left eye just as the trainer made the lion roar a second time. Then he held the nightingale to his ear and pressed the right eye. It opened its beak and roared like a little lion, which made the real lion look around, startled. Alice shot him a hard look. Oops. He hadn’t realized it would be so loud. Gavin stuffed the nightingale into his pocket and looked innocent. The parade, a smaller one than the one in town, stomped round the ring and stormed out to cheers and applause from the audience while Dodd went into the center and leaped onto a small platform with stars on it.

“Bienvenue,” he said, “au le Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles!”