Steven Harper - The Impossible Cube

“He needed a bit of that?” Alice said. “What’s going on?”

“Not just a bit of that. He was making more in the Black Tent. I was using some of it, but he kept the rest,” Gavin said. “He needs a lot of it.”

“But what for ?” Alice demanded. “I still don’t- Oh! Oh! Good heavens! I understand now.”

“What?” Feng ran a hand over the spider on his face. “What does he plan?”

Alice’s expression grew agitated, and her spiders danced around her feet, mimicking her mood. Click sat nearby and washed a paw. “When Gavin last used the Impossible Cube in the Doomsday Vault, it disappeared and we assumed it had been destroyed. But Gavin thinks the reason it disappeared is that it went through time.”

“Not quite,” Gavin said. “The Cube is a constant, which means it didn’t move. It actually twisted time around itself, and since we’re in the stream of time, it appeared to us that-”

“Does that matter ?” Alice cried, and several of her automatons squeaked in alarm. “Gavin! He’s going to reach through time to snatch the Impossible Cube out of the past at the moment you destroyed it. Feng, listen-the alloy cycles electricity at frequencies of power that match the sounds made by Gavin’s paradox generator. Those frequencies are the same-the square root of two. The Impossible Cube itself is built around that very number. If Dr. Clef pumps enough electricity through Gavin’s generator at the right intervals, he could, I believe, create a sort of opening into the past that would allow him to bring the Impossible Cube into the present.”

“Why is this bad?” Feng said. “The Impossible Cube has enormous power, does it not? We could destroy the Cossack clockworkers with a single blow.” His voice became grim. “I will do it myself.”

Gavin wanted to shake Feng. The other man didn’t understand. Gavin remembered with clockwork clarity that awful night he had held the Impossible Cube in his own hands in the dungeons beneath Third Ward headquarters, how the Cube crackled with energy between his palms as he sang one note that the Cube twisted into pure power that pounded through stone and ripped away rock.

“Dr. Clef doesn’t want to destroy the Gontas and Zalizniaks,” Gavin said carefully. “He’s obsessed with time. ”

“His calculations,” Alice said. “When he was talking about clocks orbiting the earth and gravity changing time. It was nonsense, I thought.”

“No,” Gavin told her. “Look, I nearly destroyed the entire Third Ward with the Cube and the finite power of a single note from my voice. Another note made the Cube travel through time. Yet another destroyed all the visible light energy within a hundred yards of the Cube. When you feed it a single note, it affects mere energy, but what do you think would happen if Dr. Clef played the infinite sound of my paradox generator into it?”

“Good heavens.” Alice put a pale hand to her mouth as another set of footsteps shook the ship.

Gavin nodded, unhappy that she was afraid, but glad she understood. “The paradox generator makes an infinite sound based on an irrational number: the square root of two. The Impossible Cube is a singular object, and it twists an infinite amount of time and space around itself using the square root of two as the basis for everything it does. If Dr. Clef feeds that infinite sound into the Impossible Cube, he’ll have the power to stop time. Everywhere. Forever.”

Now Feng went pale around the spider and his voice fell into a whisper. “Would he do such a thing?”

“Of course he would,” Alice replied faintly. “He thinks he’s helping us. We don’t have enough time to do everything we need, and his own time in this world is growing shorter. This is his way of giving us more time. An infinite amount.”

“I see.” Feng paused, and the ship shook yet again. Gavin automatically calculated: ten minutes, five seconds before they arrived. “Except there should be no problem. He does not have your paradox generator.”

Gavin blinked and relief made his muscles go limp. “That’s true,” he said. “I had it in the Gonta-Zalizniak house.”

“Oh, thank goodness. ” Alice ran her hand over her face and sighed heavily. “We’re saved. Where is the generator right now, then?”

He paused. “I… that is…”

“Gavin.” Alice’s face went tight again. “Where is it?”

Gavin bit his lip and his heart started a snare drumbeat again. He had to think for a moment. Everything had gotten so busy, and there was the little girl’s death and the boy’s reunion with his father and the argument with Dodd. The generator hadn’t seemed important. What had happened to it? The heavy footsteps continued to shake the ship.

“I think I left it on the elephant,” he said at last.

“And if Dr. Clef is not on the ship…,” Feng began.

They all traded horrified looks, then bolted for the ladder. In seconds, Gavin, Feng, Alice, Click, and the automatons were all racing back toward the elephant. People still rushed around the circus grounds. A number of the performers had vanished into Kiev, but those who had children or who couldn’t travel easily or who were unwilling to abandon wagons were still busy. Trash and a tent or two littered the square around the Tilt. The train stood still, though a curl of smoke drifted up from the engine’s smokestack. The watching crowd had vanished, scattered by the sound of mechanical footsteps. They knew what was coming. A line of circus wagons and horses moved down the street toward the stone bridge and the road out of town. Upriver, the dam housed its spinning turbines even as it held back countless tons of water beneath a cloudy sky. The sheer power in it made Gavin’s fingers tingle.

A few blocks away, between the buildings, Gavin caught a glimpse of metal. The Cossack mechanicals. His stomach tightened as he saw the distance left for the circus to travel to the bridge.

“Where is the elephant?” Alice asked.

The elephant was gone.

“Bastard!” Gavin snarled. The clockwork plague thundered through him. Dr. Clef had thwarted him, deliberately disobeyed his order to destroy the paradox generator and now he had stolen it for himself. “He was waiting for us to leave it. He’s got the elephant and my paradox generator!”

“What do we do now?” Feng asked. He seemed surprisingly calm.

Numbers clicked and spun in Gavin’s head. “These people aren’t going to make it. They need more time.”

“We have to warn them.” Alice looked increasingly desperate. “They need to abandon everything and run.”

“We cannot run fast enough to warn them, either,” Feng said.

Gavin glanced about. If they made for the dam, the Gontas would kill everyone in the circus, including Dodd and Nathan and Linda and Charlie. If they warned the circus, Dr. Clef would be able to stop time forever. Save a few people, or save the universe. More numbers ran through his mind, painting new realities behind them. The choice was obvious.

“Come on, Alice,” Gavin said. “I’ll need your help.” And he ran straight toward the Cossack mechanicals.

Alice’s heart stopped. The plague’s driven him completely mad, she thought. Now what do I do?

“Come on, Feng!” she shouted, and ran after Gavin. Feng twitched once and followed with Alice’s automatons. Gavin had a decent head start, however, and he wasn’t wearing a skirt, so he kept his lead.

“Gavin!” she yelled. “What are you doing?”

But he ignored her. The narrow street that led into the square was packed with a single-file line of large mechanicals, the same ones Alice had seen in the dungeon below the Gonta house. She remembered counting forty, and it appeared that nearly so many thumped down this street, cracking the cobblestones with the sound of angry gods. The smallest was twice as high as she was, and most of them were at least two stories tall. All of them bristled with weaponry-swords and launchers and rifles and objects she couldn’t discern. Alice remembered the clockwork revolution headed by the Gontas and the Zalizniaks that had ended the Russian and Polish occupation of Ukraine, and she began to understand why the occupiers hadn’t stood a chance. Most of the mechanicals were topped by a glass bubble, and in each sat a Gonta. The machinery spewed ashy clouds of smoke and fumes. The streets were only wide enough to allow one mechanical at a time to pass, which was why they came in a deadly single file, heading for the circus. Once they reached the square, they could spread out and follow the river. Dodd’s little collection of automatons and fragile wagons wouldn’t stand a chance, and when the Gontas crushed them into meat and metal matchsticks, it would be Alice’s fault for bringing them here. More death on her head.