Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

“What does the spider do?” he asked.

Feng remained silent until Gavin added, “Please answer.”

“I do not know.”

“It’s obvious,” Alice said. “The spider makes him tractable. He does nothing he isn’t told to do, and he follows orders from anyone who speaks to him. Isn’t that right, Feng? Please answer.”

“I do not know,” Feng said, “but that sounds true.”

“That’s… awful,” Gavin said. “Can we take it off? Or shut it down?”

“It would take some study,” Alice replied. “However, I am forced to admit that I’m not well versed in biology, and this device combines automatics with that science. Good heavens, why would they do such a thing?”

“The Gontas are trying to dominate the Zalizniaks permanently,” Gavin said. “This is an experiment in that area. Feng can still think and act, but is perfectly obedient.” And would never chase pretty girls again, he added silently. Not unless he was ordered to.

Alice thought a moment. “Feng,” she said, “obey your own orders. Think for yourself and do as you wish.”

Feng’s entire body twitched as if he’d been jolted by electricity. His face contorted and he made a small sound. His hands flew up to the spider. The sound he made grew louder and louder, and the facial contortions showed pain.

“Never you mind, Feng!” Alice cried. “Obey me now! Go back to the way you were!”

Feng instantly calmed and went still.

“Sit down, Feng,” Gavin said. “You look tired.”

Feng sat on the deck and looked grateful.

“I wonder if we can have him ask for something,” Alice mused.

Gavin squatted next to the exhausted Feng. He wanted to put an arm around Feng, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch the puckered flesh or the evil spider. “I’m sorry,” was all he could say. “We’ll find a way to help you once everything calms down.”

“Speak for yourself, if you wish,” Alice said. “Say whatever you think you should say.”

“Alice!” Gavin said. “No!”

“Speaking is different from acting or thinking,” Alice said.

Feng had already opened his mouth. “Wha… Wha…,” he said.

“Go ahead,” Alice said. “Say what you want when you please.”

“Why did you come back for me?” Feng burst out. “What possessed you?”

This took Gavin completely by surprise. He floundered a response. Finally Alice said in a small voice, “We had to save you.”

“So you believe.” Feng’s face was set like rock.

“I don’t understand,” Gavin said. “You’d rather we left you there?”

“Look at me!” he spat. “How do you think my family will receive me now? I already live in disgrace, and now I’m a living wreck.”

“We couldn’t leave you there,” Alice replied stubbornly. “It was our fault you were captured, and it was our duty to save you.”

“Not everyone wants to be saved, Alice!” Feng cried. “Did you ever consider that?”

Alice said, “You’re talking nonsense.”

“Am I? The Cossacks are coming to kill everyone in the circus because you saved me. If you had simply walked away, none of this would be happening.”

“And those children would still be in cages,” Gavin shot back.

“You could have taken them away without coming for me,” Feng said. “The Cossacks became truly upset only when you used that… that music thing. Now they want it, and they are angry at you because you could not let me go.”

Gavin took a step backward at that. He had never mentioned the words that Adames had spoken or the cards Linda had drawn to Feng. He looked at Alice.

“I am not discussing this,” she said firmly, but Gavin recognized the stress in her voice and in the set of her mouth. “We need to find Dr. Clef and my little automatons so we can gather some things and evacuate. The Cossacks will be here any moment.”

Her words hit Gavin hard. He looked about the Lady , the graceful, comfortable ship he had built with his own hands. They couldn’t reassemble and inflate the envelope in time to fly her out of Kiev, which meant that in less than an hour she would be in the hands of the Gonta family. The thought made him sick.

“Let’s look for Dr. Clef below,” Alice said. “Feng, you too.”

Feng checked Dr. Clef’s stateroom while Alice went to her own room carrying Kemp’s head. Gavin headed for the laboratory. It was a snowstorm of papers-diagrams and equations pinned to the walls and to the workbench like captured snowflakes. Gavin stared. The diagrams consistently portrayed two objects: Dr. Clef’s eye-twisting Impossible Cube, and pieces of Gavin’s paradox generator. Several equations, many done in purple crayon, tugged at his eye. The plague stirred, then roared to life. He dove into the equations and guzzled them down. The square root of two. Matter and energy. Parallel particles locked together. Vibrating strings. Electricity that cycled around an irrational number. And he knew what Dr. Clef wanted. A chill dropped through him, freezing him from scalp to instep.

“He’s not anywhere on the ship,” Alice said. She held Click in her arms, and a flock of little automatons hovered around her and perched on her shoulders. Feng came up behind her. The lab was almost too crowded to move. “Feng didn’t find him, either. Do you have any ideas?”

Before Gavin could answer, a faint rumble crept up through his boots, then died away. Another rumble that died, then another. A second chill followed the first.

“Can you feel that?” Gavin said. “Footsteps.”

“Is that what it is?” Alice whispered. “Good heavens.”

“What makes them?” Feng asked. He had found a shirt, which covered the scars on his chest and torso, though the spider on his face and neck still gave him a sinister appearance. He also seemed to have calmed down from his earlier rant. At least he could still speak freely.

“The Cossack mechanicals. They’re coming.” Gavin listened, let the vibrations shake through his body, and his brain worked out more math. “Eighteen minutes, twenty seconds.”

“We need to leave,” said Alice in a no-nonsense voice that was nonetheless filled with tension. “Where would Dr. Clef have gone?”

Gavin gestured at the diagrams. A strange calm came over him, and the words fell from his mouth like lead lumps. “The Cossacks are the least of our worries, Alice. Dr. Clef wants the dam.”

“The dam? What for?”

“He’s found a way to get back the Impossible Cube,” said Gavin, “and I think he’s going destroy the universe.”

There was a long, long pause.

“What?” Feng said at last.

“What?” said Alice at the same time.

“He’s going to destroy the universe,” Gavin repeated. “With the Impossible Cube.”

Feng put a hand on the spider scrawled across his face. “I do not understand.”

“Nor do I,” Alice said. A little automaton buzzed too close to her face and she brushed it away. “He told me himself that re-creating the Impossible Cube was… well, impossible.”

“He isn’t going to re-create it,” Gavin said, trying not to get more upset. “The Cube still exists. Or it will, very soon.”

“I am still not following this,” Feng said.

They didn’t share his fear because they didn’t understand. Gavin tried to keep his voice steady to explain, but ideas formed and rushed out of him like water bursting from a dam.

“Dr. Clef has been working on a project he wouldn’t tell us about, remember? And my paradox generator… and the cycles in electric power… and the alloy that warps gravity when electricity powers it… and his proof that time changes depending on local gravity… Come on!”

He pushed past them, through the flock of automatons, and ran up to the main deck. The others followed. Gavin was hoping he was wrong, praying with every fiber of his being that he had misinterpreted what he’d seen in the laboratory, but the pieces continued to thud into place like granite weights. He swore and pointed at the roll of alloy wire that had once been the endoskeleton for the ship’s helium envelope and provided extra lift. The roll still lay on the deck where Alice’s automatons had placed it, but one end was missing a noticeable piece.