The Impossible Cube

by Steven Harper

  An image of Alice caught in a mad mob of desperate plague victims flashed through Gavin’s mind and his fingers went cold. “Understood, sir,” he said.

  Dodd rubbed his hands. “Let’s get set up. I want the midway ready by nightfall so we can make parade by tomorrow afternoon.”

  Outside the train, a crowd was already gathering under the gloomy sky, though everyone stayed carefully outside the painted boundaries. Here, no one stepped out of line. Once again, something about the crowd nagged at Gavin. He examined the people, trying not to stare, but still he couldn’t work it out. They looked perfectly normal. Perhaps a few more than the usual had clockwork pieces or prosthetics, but that wasn’t it. Gavin shook his head. It would come to him later, he was sure.

  Performers in work clothes spilled out of the other train cars and slid open the boxcar doors. The animals within howled, roared, and growled with agitation, glad to see sunlight, however hazy. Gavin sympathized. An official-looking man dressed in a blue uniform and accompanied by a brass spider the size of a collie strode up to Dodd and spoke in Ukrainian, to which Dodd smiled blankly. Harry stepped forward and took over, withdrawing a sheaf of stamped papers from his coat pocket while the circus buzzed to life and the drab crowd watched with interest. The cool autumn air was heavy with acrid smoke and steam, no little of which was added by the circus’s own locomotive. Gavin smelled coal and ash and dust and polluted river water, but the city air wasn’t as close as the air within the train car, and Gavin stretched, enjoying it.

  Despite frequent visits when he was younger, Gavin had never been part of the circus setting up, and he turned to Dodd with a certain amount of excitement, especially after spending nearly a month in hiding with so little to do.

  “What can I do to help?” he asked.

  “You have no idea what you’re doing,” Dodd said frankly, “so the best thing you can do is stay out of the way.”

  The circus performers worked liked a well-oiled mechanical. First the mahouts led the elephants, both mechanical and biological, out of the boxcars while other roustabouts hauled out enormous rolls of canvas and bundles of wooden stakes with the ease of long practice. It wasn’t possible to pound tent stakes through cobblestones, but before Gavin could wonder about that for too long, he saw a pair of roustabouts slide a stake into a hole that already existed, drilled long ago for exactly this purpose. It meant that the circus had no flexibility about what tent could go where or how big each could be, but it did allow a circus or other events to exist in the center of a city with no parks or grassy squares. The roustabout teams pounded the long stakes into the earth below the street with sledgehammers while teams of other workers laid out canvas. Once two rows of stakes were all in place and the red-striped canvas was laid out between them, the roustabouts pushed two long poles under the canvas and propped them up to create an opening underneath. Two more poles were placed farther in to lengthen the opening, which made enough space for the next step.

  The mahout whistled, and the mechanical elephant puffed and snorted its way into the dark interior. Roustabouts followed with more long poles. Gavin, itching with curiosity, couldn’t stand it anymore. He ran down to the tent and ducked inside. The brass elephant, now operating with perfect efficiency under Alice’s careful repairs, was dragging tall, heavy tent poles upright, thereby shoving the tent’s roof higher and higher. Gavin stood out of the way, feeling like a child near the enormous mechanical beast in the increasingly larger space. Once there was enough room, more elephants—live ones—were brought in, and the work went faster. The three enormous center poles took a trio of elephants to haul upright, with the trapeze artists and spiders up in the rigging to ensure they were set properly at the roof. Other spiders scampered about, fastening ropes and tying knots. The center ring was hauled in piecemeal and fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. An automaton wheeled the talking clock woman to the entrance and wound her up, touched her metal cheek, and went off to help with other jobs. More people brought in bleacher seats to assemble, and the tent became loud with clacks, clatters, clinks, and shouts. For once, the clockwork plague kept its distance, and the analytical side of Gavin’s brain remained quiet, allowing him to watch in wonder as the Tilt assembled around him like a genie rising from the desert.

  “Incredible, isn’t it?” said Alice.

  Gavin hadn’t noticed her slip up to next him. A smile automatically burst across his face, and he leaned in to kiss her. She still looked a little pale, her skin contrasting sharply with the dark metal of the spider on her hand.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Not entirely myself, but one can only sleep for so long,” she said with more candor than she usually allowed herself. “Thank you for watching over me.”

  He flushed a little. “I thought you were asleep.”

  “I heard you singing in my dreams and knew you were there.” She squeezed his hand, and the entire circus slowed and stopped. He became aware of the softness of her skin on his, the warmth of her breath, the pulse of their hearts. He never wanted the moment to end, but the second hand on the clock outside ticked forward, and the noises smashed back into existence.

  “We need to go,” Alice said.

  “Where?”

  “Linda wants to see us.”

  Outside the tent, the midway and sideshow were taking shape. Animal cages and brightly painted wagons were rolling out of the boxcars, and several smaller tents were going up. No one merely talked. They shouted and hollered, bellowed and bawled, trying to attract as much attention as possible for the circus. Lions roared, seals barked, elephants trumpeted. The sounds bounced off the hard buildings that bordered three sides of the square, creating a swirling cacophony that both unnerved and exhilarated Gavin.

  As they picked their way through the chaos, Gavin noticed the dam for the first time. It rose high above the oily Dnepro upriver, clearly visible in the dank air even though it sat between two hills well over a mile away. Water gushed through spillways, and Gavin’s sharp ears picked up the faint roar of it all even above the noise of the circus setting up.

  “Wow,” he said. “How did they build that?”

  “I have no idea,” Alice said. “But I’m sure it’s the reason Kiev has so many electric lights. Come along.”

  Where the sideshow was setting up, they came to a canary-yellow wagon, its wheels chocked into immobility. The door sported a sign: MADAME FABRY. The sign also showed a crystal ball, stars, and a palm, in case the viewer couldn’t read English. Gavin knocked, and the door flew open to reveal a tallish woman who Gavin happened to know was over sixty but could have passed for ten years younger. Her thick brown hair was covered with a gypsy scarf, and she wore glasses. Her overly patched skirt and blouse—part of a costume, now that they were setting up—rustled about her busy frame as she put her hands on her waist.

  “Well, it’s about time you got here, honey,” she said brightly. Her accent was American, probably Midwestern, though Gavin had heard her speak with a Southern drawl more than once.

  “Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘You’re late,’ or something like that?” Alice said.

  “Why would I say that, sweetie?” she said. “Oh! The fortune-telling. Right. No, dear, I save that for the flatties. Gavin’s been rude, is all. Dozens of cookies and butterscotch sweets I’ve given him over the years, and then he hides in the circus for weeks without coming to see me even once.”

  “Sorry,” he said, unabashed. “I’ve been a little busy.”

  “Kemp said you wanted to see us,” Alice said.

  “Yes, yes, come in.”

  Linda ushered them into her comfortable wagon. Against the back wall stood an intricately carved bedstead with a plump featherbed and duvet covering it. Wooden cupboards hung from the walls, and a tiny stove took up one corner. A table folded down from the wall, with stools to sit on. But Gavin’s eye went straight to the automaton. He stood in the corner opposite the stove in a case of glass and metal similar to a ticket boot
h. From the waist up he looked like a brass man wearing a brown jacket and red vest. From the waist down, he was a complicated mass of metal and gears—no legs or feet. His jointed fingers gleamed in the light of the lamp hanging from the ceiling off the rivets on his face and neck. The top half of his head was made of glass, and suspended in some sort of clear medium within which floated a human brain. Copper clips and wires were attached to it, and little electric sparks flicked and jumped about like fireflies. No matter how many times he had seen that, it took Gavin a moment to remember not to stare. Alice put a hand to her mouth.

  “Hi, Charlie,” Gavin said.

  The automaton opened his mouth. “Gavin,” he said in a metallic voice. “And this is Alice?”

  “I am,” she said. “You have the advantage of me, sir.”

  “Sorry. Charlie Fabry. I’d offer to shake hands, but…” He tapped the glass in front of him with a brass finger. “And you’ve met my wife already.”

  “Quite,” said Alice, and Gavin knew her well enough to see she was trying to cover shock.

  “Charlie used to be a wire walker,” he told her. “He fell during a show and would have died, but a clockworker happened to be in the audience, and… well, you can see the result.”

  “Gives you a whole new insight,” Charlie said cheerfully. “No appetites, fewer needs, simpler wants. Liberating.” He leaned forward with a creak until his nose nearly touched the glass and his voice dropped to a raspy whisper. “You can see what you never saw before.”

  “I don’t understand,” Alice said.

  “We’ve been discussing your little trip to the church in Luxembourg, honey,” Linda said.

  Alice looked startled. “You know about that?”

  “Everybody knows about that,” Linda said. “Not much goes on without everyone hearing about it eventually. I read in the newspaper that a large piece of the church was destroyed, too, but the vicar is planning to rebuild it even bigger, which will help when he applies to have it declared a cathedral.”

  “Is that what you wanted to ask about?” Gavin put in.

  “Lord, how I do talk. No, honey. This is.” Linda lifted a handkerchief from the fold-down table, revealing three tarot cards. The first card portrayed a skeletal figure swinging a sword over a field of grain and was labeled XIII. The second showed a burning tower falling to pieces. Two men fell screaming from it, and it was labeled XVI: LA MAISON DIEU. Laid crosswise over the dying tower was the third card, on which was rendered a man in priestly red robes. He held a golden staff in one hand and made a gesture of benediction with the other. This card was labeled V: LE PAPE.

  “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 lean
ed 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.”