Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

Dr. Clef didn’t seem to share Gavin’s unhappiness. He stayed locked up in the ship’s laboratory, scribbling with pencil on endless sheets of paper or with chalk on a slate, and manipulating long sections of his alloy into odd shapes. Gavin had been afraid that he was trying to re-create his Impossible Cube, but Dr. Clef waved this idea aside.

“It is as I told you,” he said blandly. “I cannot re-create it, now or ever.” But he would not say what he was working on.

As time passed, Gavin took to spending more and more time in Dodd’s car. It was larger and more comfortable than any stateroom on Gavin’s ship, and Dodd seemed glad to have him, his sole connection to Felix Naismith, though they never spoke of the man.

Enforced idleness didn’t sit well with Gavin, and his hands worked without him. Even now, as the train puffed through Kiev, he wound wire around a wooden dowel, slid the dowel free, and snipped the length of the resulting coil with cutters, creating a pile of little rings.

At last the train screeched to a stop. It had taken a spur of track that cut past an enormous open square, perhaps three hundred yards on a side and bordered by tall buildings, beyond which rose columns of smoke and flame. Half the stone square was crowded with market carts and sooty freestanding tents. The other half, the side closest to the tracks, had been painted off, clearly set aside for the circus. Just beyond the tracks lay the slate-gray Dnepro River. Oil glistened in a rainbow sheen on its surface far below the cut stone banks. Steel boats of varying sizes chugged along in orderly procession, their stacks spewing yet more smoke into the already overburdened air.

The moment the train halted, the door to Dodd’s car jerked open and in popped a portly man with long mustaches under a bowler hat. His name was Harry Burks, and he was the advance man, the person who traveled ahead of the circus to start the publicity and smooth the way with local officials. He spoke a dozen languages and loved nothing more than spending an evening in a pub making new friends. Gavin had never known him to forget a name or a face.

“Dodd!” Harry boomed. “Right on time. Good, good! You know how the Ukrainians feel about punctuality.”

“What’s the news, Harry?” Dodd asked.

“Nothing major, thank heavens, thank heavens. We have the southern half of the market square for as long as we need it, and we can leave the train on this side spur, though I had to promise the chief of police and the town council and their families front-row tickets along with the usual bribes. Placards are already up all over town, and I’ve taken out advertisements in all the usual places. I’m also trying something new-paying hansom cabs and spiders a small fee to paste placards on themselves. Walking advertisements, you know. We’ll see if it helps, if it helps.”

“Fine idea,” said Dodd.

“And remind everyone not to go out after dark,” Harry warned. “Kiev clockworkers can snatch anyone off the street after sunset, and there’s nothing you can do about it, nothing you can do.”

Dodd nodded. “Will do. And the other matter?”

Harry gave a sideways glance at Gavin. “Not a word, not a word. Your little friends may have been the toast of Berlin, but no one’s talking about a reward for an American boy or an English girl, and clockwork cats are all the rage in Kiev. I think you can come out and breathe some smoky air at last, my boy.”

A load of tension drained from Gavin, and he slumped in the padded chair. Freedom at last!

“But,” Harry continued, holding up a finger, “there are other rumors. I’m hearing tales about a young woman, an angel who cures the plague with a touch, with a touch, and of her young lover who makes beautiful music for her.”

“Uh-oh,” Gavin said. “How is word getting around so fast?”

“Who knows, who knows?” Harry shrugged. “But there is more. The newspapers are saying there are fewer new cases of plague, and more of those who have it are recovering. Recovering! People are beginning to hope. That should give you reason to be careful, my boy, especially here.”

“I’m always careful,” Gavin said, though even as he said it, he knew it was mostly a lie. “But why here?”

“Don’t forget that Kiev is supposedly the birthplace of the plague. She certainly has more zombies and clockworkers than anywhere else in the world, and it’s a pity the Zalizniak and Gonta put all their resources into machines of war. They might have found a cure of their own, otherwise. At any rate, if the general population learns where to find you and that young lady, you’ll be overrun, like Jesus and the lepers. So watch your step, my boy, watch your step.”

An image of Alice caught in a mad mob of desperate plague victims flashed through Gavin’s mind and his fingers went cold. “Understood, sir,” he said.

Dodd rubbed his hands. “Let’s get set up. I want the midway ready by nightfall so we can make parade by tomorrow afternoon.”

Outside the train, a crowd was already gathering under the gloomy sky, though everyone stayed carefully outside the painted boundaries. Here, no one stepped out of line. Once again, something about the crowd nagged at Gavin. He examined the people, trying not to stare, but still he couldn’t work it out. They looked perfectly normal. Perhaps a few more than the usual had clockwork pieces or prosthetics, but that wasn’t it. Gavin shook his head. It would come to him later, he was sure.

Performers in work clothes spilled out of the other train cars and slid open the boxcar doors. The animals within howled, roared, and growled with agitation, glad to see sunlight, however hazy. Gavin sympathized. An official-looking man dressed in a blue uniform and accompanied by a brass spider the size of a collie strode up to Dodd and spoke in Ukrainian, to which Dodd smiled blankly. Harry stepped forward and took over, withdrawing a sheaf of stamped papers from his coat pocket while the circus buzzed to life and the drab crowd watched with interest. The cool autumn air was heavy with acrid smoke and steam, no little of which was added by the circus’s own locomotive. Gavin smelled coal and ash and dust and polluted river water, but the city air wasn’t as close as the air within the train car, and Gavin stretched, enjoying it.

Despite frequent visits when he was younger, Gavin had never been part of the circus setting up, and he turned to Dodd with a certain amount of excitement, especially after spending nearly a month in hiding with so little to do.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Dodd said frankly, “so the best thing you can do is stay out of the way.”

The circus performers worked liked a well-oiled mechanical. First the mahouts led the elephants, both mechanical and biological, out of the boxcars while other roustabouts hauled out enormous rolls of canvas and bundles of wooden stakes with the ease of long practice. It wasn’t possible to pound tent stakes through cobblestones, but before Gavin could wonder about that for too long, he saw a pair of roustabouts slide a stake into a hole that already existed, drilled long ago for exactly this purpose. It meant that the circus had no flexibility about what tent could go where or how big each could be, but it did allow a circus or other events to exist in the center of a city with no parks or grassy squares. The roustabout teams pounded the long stakes into the earth below the street with sledgehammers while teams of other workers laid out canvas. Once two rows of stakes were all in place and the red-striped canvas was laid out between them, the roustabouts pushed two long poles under the canvas and propped them up to create an opening underneath. Two more poles were placed farther in to lengthen the opening, which made enough space for the next step.