“What was that?” he asked, his voice low.
“Qin Lung,” said the man.
“I don’t understand.”
“My name here is Qin Lung. Means—”
“Azure dragon.” Here Gavin did sit down, though it was because his legs went weak. The wings clinked, hanging over the edge of the porch. “All the Dragon Men are named Lung.”
“Yep, yep. They—we—ain’t members of our own families anymore and get the family name Lung. Dragon. The people here don’t see a lot o’ blue eyes, and I came from across the water before I found my balance, so they called me Azure Dragon. My name in America”—he said the word as if he hadn’t spoken it in a long time—“was Henry Uriel Ennock. But I don’t go by Henry. Call me Uri. Or Dad. Whatever floats your airship.”
“Uriel? Your name is Uri?” The revelations were coming thick and fast, which was probably why Gavin couldn’t help but focus on small, foolish details.
“Yep.”
“All right.”
Heavy silence dropped over them. There was so much to say, so much to ask, and Gavin didn’t know where to start. His entire life was a tangle of threads, and he couldn’t find an end to pull. He felt tense and strange. Uri, on the other hand, seemed perfectly at ease. The quiet, serene expression never left his face.
“So,” Uri said, “I’ve sorta lost track of time. How old are you now?”
“I turned nineteen this last summer.” Gavin held up the Impossible Cube. “Though if you look at it another way, you could say I’m twenty-two.”
Uri let that pass. “How’s your ma? And your brothers and sisters?”
This raised some hackles again. “I haven’t heard from them in a while. Jenny’s married and probably has a kid by now. Harry works as a drover, but he drinks. Ma was able to send Patrick to school some with the money I sent her after I joined the Third Ward, but that was a while ago, so I don’t know what he’s up to now. Violet’s working in a factory, I think. You’d know all this if you were home.”
“But I ain’t home, so I don’t know. That’s the way it is.”
It was on the tip of Gavin’s tongue to ask why, but the words wouldn’t come. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.
Uri set his hands on his knees. “Your feelings are jumbled up. You wanna talk to me, but you don’t know how.”
“How do I talk to a father who was never there?” Gavin shot back.
“I’m here now. Or maybe you’re here now.” Uri stroked the bird on his shoulder. “It wasn’t easy to make that happen, kid.”
“Yeah? How did you make it happen?”
“Those birds. I invented them a long time ago, when I first got to China,” Uri said in his quiet, absent voice. “They grabbed the emperor’s attention, and he wanted a whole flock of them for a weapon. The Jade Hand ordered me to make them, so I did.”
Uri pointed to his ear, and for the first time, Gavin noticed the salamander curled around it. A strange hope swirled inside him.
“You’ve lived a long time as a Dragon Man,” he said in a tight voice. “I don’t understand how.”
“Nah. You wouldn’t. Not yet.” Uri rose and got two cups of tea from the table. He gave one to Gavin. “But I’m telling this story out of order, aren’t I? It’s because time means somethin’ . . . different in this place.”
Gavin accepted the cup but twisted it in his fingers, too distracted to think of drinking. Everything was so damned strange. He wanted to hate his father, but he also wanted to please him. He was caught on the edge of a square, unable to tell which way he would tip.
“I was an airman, you know,” Uri said.
“Yeah. Me, too.” He paused, still hanging on the edge of the square. “Are you glad?” Proud?
Uri waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter. Your own path has to make you glad or not. Another guy’s opinion matters much as wind matters to a mountain. But,” he added thoughtfully, “being an airman is a damned good path.”
It was the right thing to say, and Gavin felt himself relax a bit. “So how did you end up in China?”
“I was on a run to San Francisco, and I pulled down the clockwork plague.”
Gavin breathed out. He knew this was the case, but it was hard to hear it said aloud. “And?”
“I thought I was going to die. I was sick bad, but no one would help me or even let me come close to them. One night I fell asleep in a stinking alley, and my fever broke. I still remember how it felt, like something snapped inside me. It jerked me awake, and the entire universe swallowed me. It was incredible. I was a clockworker, and I wasn’t sick anymore.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Gavin demanded, angry again. “Why didn’t you write or telegram? Or come home?”
Uri remained serene. “I was a different man then, Gav. I didn’t always think right. That’s not an excuse. It just is. Maybe I thought I was sparing you the pain of hearing I was sick. And later, I was sparing you the pain of having a clockworker in the family.”
“Yeah, well, you were wrong.”
“Can’t argue with you. There’s no way to make up for it. I would if I could. All I can do is say I’m sorry.”
Gavin shifted on the hard stone. Suddenly he realized that he hadn’t touched this man, his father, except to hit him. He set the cold cup down and reached out to put a hand on Uri’s shoulder. It was heavy and warm. Gavin’s throat thickened, and he dropped his hand.
“Anyway,” Uri said, “I woke up in Peking after a fugue. Looked like I’d stolen a boat, fitted it with a new engine I built, and zipped all the way across the Pacific just for the hell of it. The Chinese realized I was a clockworker—Dragon Man—and they brought me to the Forbidden City. In there, the eunuchs stuck me with a salamander like yours, and for months I invented for the emperor. I built birds. Wings. I was always good at wings.”
Gavin flexed his own. “It runs in the family.”
“Those,” Uri said, “are fucking genius, and I want to look at them. I was never able to fly myself.”
“Not enough lift, right?”
“Yep, yep. Even Chinese kites don’t give enough.”
“It’s the alloy. The wings push against—” He stopped. “No. I want to hear about you. What happened then?”
“I invented birds that recorded messages and flew to the last person they touched. The emperor loved them, and he gave them to his family. Later, they became the big thing for running messages between lovers.”
Dad had built the silver nightingale that recorded voices? Gavin felt in his pocket, but it was empty. Alice still had theirs.
“Then the emperor told me to make my birds into weapons because he wanted something that would patrol the borders. I didn’t want to, but when the Jade Hand talks, you listen. I made two, just enough to shut the Hand up. But what the emperor didn’t know was that I also had added somethin’ to the design. Somethin’ the Hand didn’t ask for. It didn’t say I couldn’t, you know? See, I added a bit that put the birds on the lookout for my kids. They all look for you kids, just in case you might come to China.”
“How the hell would they do that?”
“We’re all made up of tiny bits that copy themselves over and over, and half of those bits come from our moms and half from our dads. Maybe one day we’ll be able to tell exactly who is born to who, and the emperor won’t need to hide his concubines behind red walls. But my birds look for people who are half like me. My kids. My son.”
“Why?”
His gaze went far away again. “Time is all one piece, Gavin. It’s a river with a beginning and an end, but it’s still all one piece, and everything happens all at once. You can be sucked into it, or you can stand outside it, but it all stays one piece.”
“So you’re saying you saw that I was going to come, and you arranged for the bird to tell you when I crossed the border.”
“Kind of. I knew about you because it was also happening when I first arrived. And it’s still happening now. I couldn’t avoid creating the bi
rd to find you, and you can’t avoid singing the moon song. It had already happened, and it was happening, and it will happen again. That’s why you came, you know. You couldn’t avoid it any more than I could avoid sending the bird. Yep, yep.”
“So we have no choice?” Gavin interrupted. “We’re little automatons that follow the rules?”
“Not what I said. You’ve already made all the choices, the ones that make the river’s course. Us guys who step outside the river can see them; that’s all. It’s better to accept what has happened and what will happen.”
Gavin’s head was beginning to swim. “How does it all end, then? Can you see that?”
Uri ignored the question. “Once I finished the emperor’s command, I was . . . unhappy. I didn’t want to create more weapons, no sir. But I heard rumors about a place where Dragon Men could go, a place where they could invent and study in peace until their time came. A place called the Blessed Monastery of the Azure Water. When I finished the two birds, the Jade Hand stopped commanding me, so I created a spinning device that mesmerized the eunuchs. That let me sneak out of the Forbidden City. Took me a few weeks of searching, but I found this place. It looks like an ordinary monastery, and the emperor leaves it alone, but there’s a lot more to it than he knows.”
“That must have been years ago. How are you still alive?” Gavin leaned forward. A hope he had been hiding, not daring to show, slipped out into the moonlight. His voice was small. “Dad, do you have a cure?”
“Ah. That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Uri touched his salamander again. “There’s a cure, but it’s not the one you’re thinking of.”
Gavin’s breath caught with excitement. “Can you cure me?”
“No.”
The hope died, and he felt the wings dragging at his back again, pulling at the scar tissue under his black shirt. He looked away, not wanting Uri to see him upset.
“But,” Uri continued, “you can damned well cure yourself.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yeah. That’s why you still carry the plague.” Uri set his cup on the stones with a soft click. “See, the reason we clockworkers die so fast is that the plague makes us look the universe straight in the eye. Trouble is, we have a strong sense of self, so we try to stay separate from the universe even when the plague makes us look at the whole damn thing. We’re part of the universe, not separate from it. Means we can’t hold ourselves apart while we’re looking at the whole. The paradox burns your mind out, like a candle dropped into a bonfire.”
“Then how—?”
“The candle can’t hold its shape in the bonfire. It has to become one with the fire. If it does that, it still exists, but in a new form. You gotta accept yourself as a clockworker, accept everything the universe is trying to show you, become one with it. The universe can’t harm itself, you see. Become one with it, and you become immune to it. Serene. Balanced.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Gavin scoffed. “It’s a disease. You can’t become ‘one’ with it or cure it by . . . by thinking hard.”
“But here I am, kid,” Uri replied with a quiet smile. “You felt it when I touched you. And there are more than a dozen like me. Almost ageless, like the dragons.”
“Ageless? That’s why you look so young?”
“We age slowly. I figure I’ll live another three hundred years. You can find it, too, Gavin.”
“Find what?”
“I told you: acceptance. Serenity. It’s all part of the balance.”
“Now I’m confused again.”
“Yeah, it’s hard to explain. The balance is all one piece, like time. You need to understand it, all at once. And when you do, nothing else will matter.”
Nothing else will matter. Gavin remembered his first flight, how nearly perfect everything had felt, and how nothing else had mattered—until the giant squid had come for Alice.
Uri nodded at the Impossible Cube. “That’s a real piece of work. What is it?”
“Dr. Clef—a friend of mine—made it. I don’t understand it completely. I brought it along because . . . I don’t know why, actually.”
“What’s it do?”
“It twists the universe around itself. It transforms energy from one form into another and fires it. And it probably has a few dozen other uses we haven’t figured out yet.”
“How’s it do that?”
“It’s unique in all the universes,” Gavin said. “It—”
“No.” Uri held up a finger to interrupt. “It ain’t. Nothing’s unique. Nothing. The Dao teaches that everything has to balance. Everything has an opposite, and the opposite holds a seed of the original.”
“Why are we talking about this?”
“It’s important, Gavin. You gotta understand.” From beneath his tunic he extracted a medallion. Two fishlike designs swirled around it in black and white. The white half had a black dot in it, and the black half had a white dot in it. When Gavin looked closer, he realized the two dots were actually the overall design done in miniature. He had never seen the design before, but it was compelling. He felt another fugue coming on, and he pushed hard to keep it at bay.
“The yin and the yang,” Uri said. “Female and male, water and fire, light and dark, mountain and valley, death and life, plague and cure. They can’t exist without each other. Sometimes one gets to be more powerful than the other for a while, but eventually the universe finds the balance. Plop a stone in a pool, and you create waves, highs and lows, but finally the pond becomes calm and smooth like the silk on an envelope.”
Gavin tore his eyes away from the medallion. “What does this have to do with Impossible Cube?”
“That Cube of yours can’t exist on its own any more than light can exist without darkness or joy can exist without sorrow. You said the Cube fires energy and twists the universe in weird ways. It’s unstable. So its opposite must absorb, take things in and hold them, make everything more stable. Those two things will find each other, pull together eventually to create a balance.”
Gavin almost protested again—Uri almost seemed to be attacking the uniqueness of Dr. Clef’s work, and even after everything the man had done, Gavin still felt a loyalty to Dr. Clef—but then he knew what the answer was, and it sent a little thrill through him.
“The Ebony Chamber,” he breathed. “It’s an infinite set that opens into an infinite number of universes. The Cube is a fixed point across the universe. They’re opposites. Why didn’t I see that when I started to put the two of them together?”
“You did what?” A tremor crossed the serenity on Uri’s face. “God’s balls, Gavin! What possessed you to do something like that? Yin and yang need each other, but they’re still separate. Together, they destroy each other completely.”
“I was in a clockwork fugue.” For a moment Gavin felt like a little boy who had been caught throwing rocks at windows. “I wasn’t thinking right. But Alice stopped me.”
“Alice?”
“Oh.” He felt flustered again. “She’s my . . . we’re getting married.”
“She a clockworker?”
It wasn’t the reaction Gavin had been expecting. This entire conversation wasn’t anything he’d been expecting. “What? No. She cures the plague. But not in clockworkers.”
“Yin and yang,” Uri said with a nod. “One is earth and water, the other air and fire. They always find each other.”
“That’s not—I don’t—”
“Listen, Gavin, does the universe speak to you? Do you see what no one else does? What not even other clockworkers see? Tiny things?”
Here Gavin stared at him again. “Yes. Particles that move one another. I’ve never been able to explain it.” He began to grow excited. It was the first time someone else seemed to have experienced such things. “They have colors and . . . flavors. Sort of. No, that isn’t right, but we don’t have words for what they are or what they look like. Maybe you can’t even give a name to something so small. Some of them affect each other without touching, in p
airs . . .”
He stopped. Uri’s serene expression remained.
“You’re going to say yin and yang, aren’t you?” Gavin said.
“I don’t need to.”
“But what does it all mean?”
“Why don’t you know how they all work?” Uri countered. He held up the medallion, swirling and enticing. Gavin couldn’t take his eyes from it, and he found answers sliding out of him like water from a sieve. “Why don’t you understand these tiny particles of yours?”
“I’ve tried, but something always seems to get in the way.”
“What, exactly, gets in the way?”
“Alice,” Gavin replied without thinking.
“How does she stop you?”
“She calls me back every time I go too deep.”
“Why does she do that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do. Why?”
“Because she loves me.”
“But if she loved you, she’d want you to be happy and find what you need to find.”
“She’s afraid I won’t come back. She won’t . . .” He trailed off, and the rhythm faded.
“Won’t what?”
“She won’t let me go,” he whispered.
“Is that important?”
“Very.” He sat up straighter, and his wings clinked. “Those particles are the key to understanding everything, aren’t they?”
Uri merely gave the serene smile. He set the medallion aside, breaking the half fugue.
“If I understand the particles,” Gavin said slowly, “I’ll understand the universe. Become ‘one’ with it. And that’ll cure me because the secrets won’t burn out my mind anymore.”
“Yep, yep.”
Gavin blinked, surprised. “No mysterious questions? No strange double-talk?”
“Nope. You nailed it.”
“Let me see that amulet again.” Gavin took it from Uri’s proffered hand. The design was a snowflake frozen in metal and paint. The two dots of black and white that were themselves designs contained two dots of black and white that were designs, which contained two dots of black and white. They pulled him in and down, farther and farther down. The crystalline lattice that made up the medallion’s structure repeated itself, shapes within shapes, patterns within patterns. The tiniest particles hovered there, dancing in pairs. And what were they made out of? He reached for one of them, and it turned. So did its partner. Incredible. He could go farther down, pry the particle apart, and peer inside. Secrets whispered inside his head, scratching at his mind like an infinite number of cats in their infinite boxes. An overwhelming, endless field of infinitesimal boxes lay before him. It was too much, too powerful. The little bits pulled him in an infinite number of directions, and he had to keep himself together, had to . . .
The Dragon Men Page 24
