Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

“I’m sorry.” With effort, she pulled her hand back. “I wish there was some way we could…”

“We’ll live,” he said.

But you won’t, she couldn’t help adding to herself. I can save everyone else. Why can’t I save you?

The little automatons were still hovering in the doorway, some of them literally. Alice shooed them off. “What happened while I was asleep? Kemp told me only a little.”

He turned back to the efficient worktable, upon which perched a new machine the size of a shoe box. A speaking trumpet was affixed to the top, and a crank stuck out of the side. One side of the box was open, and a few stray pieces lay on the table with some tools. Alice craned her neck to see what the machinery inside was for, but the angle was bad, and Gavin’s body blocked the way.

“Let’s see.” Gavin picked up a screwdriver and set to work with it. “After Phipps broke the firefly jar, we got back to-”

“She what ?” Alice cried.

He set down the screwdriver. “You didn’t know?”

“No!” Alice’s knees went weak, but there was no place to sit down. She leaned on the worktable instead. “How do you mean it broke?”

“Phipps threw a rock. All the fireflies flew away, though they bit a lot of people first. I’m sorry, Alice. I thought you were still awake when it happened.”

“Dear God.” She looked down at the spider gauntlet on her left hand. No possibility of cutting it off now. The escaped fireflies would infect a number of Flemish, but only a few of them would travel beyond their homes, and it would take years for the cure to reach around the world without artificial means. She had planned to release a few fireflies in every city they passed through, hastening the cure’s movement, but now…

“I’m all of it,” Alice said. “I have to spread the cure as far as I can now.”

Gavin set his face and went back to work with the screwdriver. “You can only do so much, Alice.”

“I have to do what I can. I have to save them, Gavin.”

“It won’t do the world any good if you kill yourself in the process.”

Despair crashed over her, extinguishing her earlier arousal. “What should I do, then? Every day I malinger in bed, recovering from curing people, someone else dies.”

“I’m working on a way to help.” Gavin tightened the last piece of machinery and closed up the box. “There!”

Alice blew her nose into a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes, a little miffed that Gavin wasn’t offering more sympathy, but also curious about the machine. “What is it?”

“I call it a paradox generator. But I can’t actually use it. Not directly.”

“What? Why not?” Alice drew back. “Will it destroy the world or something?”

“I hope not.” Gavin snagged a set of ear protectors similar to the ones Alice had seen Aunt Edwina use back in London. “But if it works, it’ll… Look, I can’t explain it. Let’s take it up top and I’ll show you.”

The wind on the main deck was fierce. It blew Alice’s hair and skirts straight behind her and roared in her ears. The disguised airship was the last and tallest car on the train, so there wasn’t even any shelter from the brightly painted boxcar ahead of them. Far up the track, a plume of black smoke blew from the engine’s stack backward over the rest of the train. Ash and cinders clogged the air. The little automatons, afraid of being blown away, stayed below. Gavin took Alice’s hand and brought her to a three-sided, roofed shanty that had apparently been erected on the deck while she had been asleep. The opening faced the leeward side, allowing them to stand out of the wind but still be outdoors. In the shanty was Dr. Clef, who was scribbling in a notebook. Click sat beside him, but he ran over to rub against Alice’s legs. Alice picked him up and cooed at him, eliciting his mechanical purr.

“So good to see you up and moving, my young treasure. I have kept your clicky kitty wound for you,” said Dr. Clef over his pencil. He face and hands were gray with soot. “I find the fresh air helps me think, don’t you?”

At that moment, a particularly thick cloud of cinders engulfed the shanty before being blown to shreds by the wind. Alice coughed over Click’s back into her much-abused handkerchief. “Fresh air. Hm. What are we doing up here, Gavin?”

“Just listen.” He set the new machine down and pulled the protectors over his ears. They were wooden cups stuffed with wool, apparently designed to keep out sound. Then he turned the machine’s crank.

From the speaking trumpet emerged an unearthly sound. It sounded like a chorus of ghosts sighing from high to low and low to high all at once. Gavin continued turning, and the sound repeated endlessly. The pitch rose higher and higher and higher and fell lower and lower and lower, but it never seemed to reach the top or bottom of any scale. It turned endlessly, the tonal equivalent of a figure eight, always moving and going nowhere. It made Alice’s skin crawl.

“I don’t understand,” she said when he stopped.

Gavin pulled the protectors off his ears. “I think I broke Dr. Clef.”

Dr. Clef sat motionless. He stared into space without blinking, and only the faintest breath fluttered from his chest. A line of spittle drooled down the side of his mouth. The engine blew its whistle, high and shrill.

“Good heavens.” Alice shook Dr. Clef’s shoulders, and he didn’t respond. Gavin handed her a bottle of smelling salts, and she opened it under his nose. He coughed awake and waved the bottle away.

“Where am I, then?” he asked. “What is happening?”

“I think only Gavin can explain that,” Alice said.

Gavin gestured to the new machine. “It generates a tritone paradox,” he said. “Kind of hard to explain. The machine plays a one-octave scale that goes down and another that goes up. When the machine reaches the top of the ascending scale, it drops back down to the bottom and starts over, but the volume changes so that you don’t notice the switch. It does the same for the descending scale. But then things really get interesting.”

“It’s just a noise,” Alice said doubtfully. Click squirmed in her arms, so she set him down.

“Not really,” Gavin said. “The machine also adds another pair of ascending/descending scales, but those are a tritone above the first two. It creates the illusion of a sound that’s always going up or always going down-it depends on your ear-but it never actually goes anywhere. Clockworkers, though, are sensitive to tritones and have perfect pitch-”

“-so it creates an unsolvable paradox for us,” Dr. Clef put in. “And the addition of the other tones does away with the pain and makes the entire scale hypnotic. I remember only a lovely sound that- Wait! Wait!” He clapped his hands and his face flushed. “Du Lieber! Ach, das ist ja nicht zu glauben! Wie habe ich das verpa?t?”

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Alice asked. “What did you miss?”

“This tritone paradox is an auditory version of my Impossible Cube! Play it again! Play it now!”

“Just a moment,” Alice said, holding up a hand. “We don’t know everything this does yet. Is it harmful?”

“I don’t know,” Gavin replied. “It seems to have helped Dr. Clef. He’s talking to me instead of arguing.”

“Why, so I am!” Dr. Clef exclaimed. “We should be fighting, yet we are not. I am filled with goodwill toward you, my boy. What an amazing thing! Did you create it just for this purpose? So that we can work together?”

“No,” Gavin said. “I created it because I think it’s possible to slow time.”

There followed a long, long pause. Wind whistled through the cracks in the shanty walls, and Click’s steel wool tongue rasped as he cleaned his paws.