Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

Gavin bolted upright, and Alice released his foot. “Tuesday? How long was I-?”

“You’ve been missing for three days, darling.” Alice took a teacup, which rattled in her metallic hand. “It’s been hell.”

“Three days ?” Gavin sank back onto the chair and bit into a ham sandwich without really paying attention to it. “I thought it was only a night.”

“Antoine has powerful sleep drugs,” Feng said.

Gavin stared past Alice at calm, blue infinity. He should feel safe, at home in the ship he had created with his own hands. She ignored gravity, soared silent currents, explored the limits of daylight. Set him free. But all he felt was violated, stripped of his clothes and then his skin. He wondered how long he had hung unconscious in Antoine’s greenhouse, a piece of meat in the hands of a twisted homunculus. His gorge rose, and then he was at the gunwale, the few bites of sandwich falling to the forest far below. The pieces seemed to fall slowly, pushing aside the billions of tiny bits that made up the air. The bits rubbed against the falling pieces and raised their temperature as they fell closer to hell.

“We could harvest the energy of the pieces,” he said. “The billions of bits would make a hellfire and cook twisted hunks of homunculus.”

“Sir?” Kemp handed him a cup of tea. Gavin swished and spat over the side. The tea spread in both droplets and a stream, both wave and particle. He watched it, an eternity caught in a split second. Then the tea vanished.

“Wave to particles,” he muttered. “Wave them away.”

Alice had had the good sense to keep her seat, though her face tightened as Gavin sat back down in his own chair. “You’re talking like a clockworker,” she said, her voice heavy with worry. “It’s already starting, isn’t it?”

“It’s all mixed up inside me, Alice.” He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to cheer up, but the violation and the fear dragged him down. “I’m sorry. Your aunt knocked me out, locked me in that tower of hers, and infected me with this plague. She treated me like a piece of meat. So did the pirates who captured the Juniper and made me fiddle for them. Now I learn Antoine held me for longer than I knew. He stole time from me, and I don’t have time to steal.”

She took his hand across the tea tray. “We’ll get to China. If anyone can cure clockworkers, they can.”

“The Dragon Men are very powerful,” Feng agreed from the helm. “They can do anything.”

“Hmm.” Dr. Clef opened a chest and unrolled an enormous chart on a table near the helm. “Peking is approximately seven thousand miles away, if we fly over Istanbul and the Gobi Desert. We could detour south into India, around the Himalayas, but that would add another four thousand miles or so. This ship’s top speed is fifty miles per hour. If we travel for twelve hours each day, the journey will take us approximately twelve days.”

“That’s all?” Alice said. “It doesn’t seem like-”

“This is also assuming,” Dr. Clef continued, “that the ship always travels at top speed-it cannot-and that we have the wind behind us-we do not-and that the engines or helium extractors never break down-they will-and that the sky never sends us any bad weather-it shall-or that any number of other delays do not delay us. I believe it will take closer to two months, perhaps three.”

“Oh.” Alice nibbled her sandwich as a cloud drifted past. “Well, that will still be plenty of time. He was infected last May. It’s only late August.”

“It is not much time,” said Dr. Clef. “He is already beginning to babble. You see things, don’t you, boy? Beautiful things. Like the universe is handing you its keys, one by one.”

Gavin thought about his vomit and the falling tea water. “Yes.”

“And you love and hate the tritones,” Dr. Clef continued. “Square root of two, lovely and deadly as infinity.”

Just the memory of that horrible, enticing number and the brain-bending sound that went with it made him shudder. He nodded.

“I shouldn’t be so far along,” Gavin said quietly.

Dr. Clef shrugged. “There is a range. Some clockworkers last only a few months, others last for two or three years. Edwina’s version of the plague was experimental, so who knows what it was like? You shouldn’t have become a clockworker, but you did. You should have shown no symptoms for several weeks, but you have. Losing yourself and talking about what you see is a sign of the final phase, where I am. You have about three months left. Four months if you are lucky. You will be a raving lunatic by the time we reach Peking, and then Alice will still have to find a Chinese clockworker who can cure you, and that assumes such a clockworker even exists. So you will die, my boy. But don’t worry.” He clapped Gavin on the shoulder. “They say once we clockworkers go completely mad, we do not even know what is happening, and we enjoy it. We can go mad together, yes?”

“Why did you bring him with you?” Feng asked.

“He jumped on board the ship while we were running away from the Third Ward headquarters,” Alice said dully. “Perhaps I should have kicked him off.”

“No.” Gavin straightened. “I’m not going to give in to this. We’ll find a way to get to Peking, and we’ll find a Chinese clockworker-”

“Dragon Man,” Feng interrupted. “We call them Dragon Men.”

“Dragon Man,” Gavin continued, “who has a cure. If we can’t find time, we’ll make time.”

An odd look came over Dr. Clef’s bulldog face. “Make time.”

“But we do have a more powerful problem.” Feng moved the Lady ’s helm to adjust for a current. “This ship is very easy to see. Many airships fly, but none of them glow blue.”

“She’s very beautiful,” Gavin said, feeling defensive. The motor gave a pleased-sounding hiccup and went back to its normal quiet murmur.

“True. But beauty has its price,” Feng said. “Hers is that she attracts attention. Also, if Third Ward agents are spreading word and money to look for us, we have more trouble. How do they do it so quickly?”

“Several clockworkers in England and in Europe invented wireless communication devices,” Gavin said. “You can send messages at the speed of light to any other wireless device that listens to the same frequency. They’re better than a telegraph because you don’t need to raise poles or string wires.”

“We can’t outrun such a message,” Feng pointed out. “As it is, we lost three days when you were captured. I imagine that was what your Lieutenant Phipps wanted-to catch us up. It is fortunate she seems to have no airship.”

“Yeah. We’ll have to think of some way to hide better. I just wish we had more time.”

“You said that.” Alice set her cup down with a clink of metal on china and came around behind his chair to put her arms around his neck. The iron gauntlet was chilly. “And you’re right, darling. We’ll find a way. We’ll find time.”

Her touch made him feel better, despite the spider. Even though he was barely nineteen and she was twenty-three, he felt no difference in their ages. Alice had been initially put off by it. The gap had been one of the reasons she had resisted admitting she loved him.

Gavin touched Alice’s hand, letting himself drink in her steady presence. And she was so beautiful. Her deep brown eyes set off her honey-brown hair, and her triangle face and little nose and rounded curves all came together like the parts of an intricate fugue, compelling and hypnotic. He still found it hard to believe she was with him-and that it had taken her so long to break society’s rules and leave her horrible fiance. She leaned down. Her scent wafted over him, and he kissed her softly in the free and open sky. The kiss intensified, and a thrill went through him. He could do this. He could conquer the whole damned world, as long as Alice Michaels stood beside him.