Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

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 Unmoglicheskubus,” 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 time. 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.

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 fiance 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.