Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

“I don’t know anything about tarot cards,” Alice said primly. “I avoid this sort of thing as nonsense.”

“Place your hands palm-up under the window, if you would be so kind.” Charlie slid aside a small opening at the bottom of his glass case, much like a ticket taker might. After a moment’s hesitation, Alice obeyed. The spider on her left hand left her palm bare, but the metal clanked against the shelf beneath the window opening. Gavin watched warily. A pair of red lights beamed from Charlie’s eyes and ran over Alice’s hands. She jumped, but didn’t pull away. The lights ran over every inch of Alice’s hands, then went out.

“Very interesting,” Charlie said. “You have refined tastes, but you work with your hands. You’ve been touched by the clockwork plague more than once, you are deeply in love, and you can’t get this spider off your arm.”

“And you can tell all that from my palms, can you?”

“No, that’s just gossip around the circus. Your palms say the future is going to be difficult. Your fate line is ragged and rough, especially after your heart line. That means your future will be twisted and shredded by emotional decisions. You can change that, of course, but it’ll be entirely up to you.”

“Didn’t Gavin say you were a wire walker?” Alice asked. “Why are you telling fortunes?”

“I was a wire walker first,” Charlie replied genially. “But now that I’m freed of my body, I can see a great deal that other people can’t. It lends itself to fortune-telling.”

“So you’re not reading my palms at all.” Alice’s tone was shrewd.

Charlie shook his head with a faint creak. “No. I pretend because no one believes pronouncements from thin air.”

“That’s not true,” Alice said. “We believe pronouncements from teachers and parents and others in our lives.”

“You didn’t believe Monsignor Adames.”

Gavin blinked. “How did you know we talked to Monsignor Adames? The church… mess was in the newspaper, and I can see how people in the circus might put that together with our absence, but we didn’t even tell Dodd that we talked to Adames, or what he said.”

“I saw it.” Charlie ran a metal finger over the glass casing that topped his head. “Everything is connected. I told you that. Bits of pasteboard can give us a crude glimpse into the future, and the particles that run through my brain give me even clearer knowledge.”

Alice said, “That’s-”

“Nonsense? Ask your Dr. Clef about that,” Charlie said. “According to some very interesting theories he’s been busy proving as we speak, certain tiny particles affect one another over long distances. Turn one particle, and its twin, no matter how far away it is, will turn as well. Just like flipping a card. Clef also claims that time is nothing but an illusion created by our own limited senses, and that as many as eleven other dimensions exist beyond our ability to see, but they still affect what happens to us. Everything is connected in one way or another, and once you accept that idea, the possibility that three tarot cards could fall out of Linda’s deck and my electrical systems could play ‘Camptown Ladies’ at the very moment you had a conversation with a man named Nicolas Adames doesn’t seem very far-fetched.”

Linda, who had been waiting near the table all this time with her hands folded, said, “Honey, let me tell you what the cards mean and then you can decide what to do about it, all right?”

“Very well.” Alice sighed, clearly not convinced. She took up a stool next to the table and Gavin stood behind her. Strangely, he didn’t share her skepticism. In the long moments when he watched over Alice, he sometimes found himself drawn into deep places, places where things could exist everywhere and nowhere all at once, where tiny, graceful objects appeared and disappeared so quickly, it was difficult to say they had hardly existed at all, where almost everything was vast, empty space that threatened to swallow him up, where matter was made of an infinity of tiny, delicate strings that vibrated and sang with a wonderful perfection that made him weep with joy and envy. And just as he was reaching out to touch them and change their song, alter matter itself, Alice murmured in her sleep, and the sound snatched him backward and upward into a bumbling world of impossible hugeness that could only be manipulated by tearing it apart by fire or grinding it around gears. It was maddening. If there were a way to better understand how it all fit together, he wanted to hear about it.

Linda took up a stool opposite Alice while Charlie watched from his booth. Tiny jolts of electricity arced across his brain.

“Normally, honey, I’d dim the lights and burn some incense and have Charlie make some whoosh-whoosh noises,” Linda said, “but you aren’t flatties, so I’ll give it to you without the show.”

“We appreciate that,” Alice said.

“How do you tell fortunes to people who don’t speak English?” Gavin asked.

“I speak more than just English, honey, and Charlie speaks what I don’t. The pictures on the cards tell the rest. Most of my business is actually from women who are expecting.”

“Why them?” Gavin said.

“They want to know if it’s a boy or a girl. I dangle her wedding ring on a string over her middle and tell her what the baby will be based on which way the ring moves. Then I write it down in my book.” She gestured to a leather-bound diary on a high shelf. “I have predictions going back twenty years.”

Alice leaned forward, interested despite herself. “And how many come out right?”

“Lord, honey, I have no idea. Probably half. I can’t tell a thing from a wedding ring. I just tell them what they want to hear. Part of the show.”

“So what happens when you’re wrong?” Gavin wanted to know.

“Usually we’re long gone by the time the baby’s born, dear. But sometimes when we come back to a city, I’ll get an annoyed mother who shows up with a daughter, ready to fight because I told her she’d have a son. I tell her that I didn’t get the prediction wrong. She heard me wrong. Then I get my book down and show her where I wrote she’d have a daughter, and I’m off the hook.”

“Because you write the opposite of what you say,” Alice supplied.

Linda nodded with a smile. “There you have it, honey. It won’t do to have the fortune-teller come out wrong.”

“So why should we believe you now?” Alice demanded.

“Do or don’t.” Linda shrugged. “But you aren’t paying me and I like you both, so I have no reason to make anything up.”

Alice didn’t look convinced, but Gavin said, “Fair enough. Tell us what the cards mean, Linda.”

“Sure, honey. Look closely.” She gestured at the cards on the tiny table in front of her. “All three cards come from the trumps. They indicate large, important events that are difficult to control or change. The first card that fell out of the deck was the mystery trump, which everyone calls Death. Before you panic, let me tell you that it doesn’t mean someone’s going to die. It means one thing will end so something else can begin. You can’t stop the end from coming, but you can decide which direction the new thing will take. Since it fell out first, I assume that’s what’s coming first.”

“All right,” Alice said.

“The second trump card is the House of God. It’s as bad as it looks-utter destruction. Unlike the Death card, this is an end out of which nothing new can begin. It doesn’t mean someone will die, but it might. It’s not a good omen, honey.”

Linda’s words sent a chill over Gavin’s skin, and her cheerful tone only made the dreadful prediction worse. Alice, however, remained unmoved.