The Impossible Cube

by Steven Harper

  Gavin ran lightly up the street to the lead mechanical, which was close to eighteen feet tall. Danilo Gonta sat in the bubble, his expression cool and calm, his white lab coat stained with blood. Then he saw Gavin, and his face twisted into an animal snarl.

  “That’s right, Danilo!” Gavin shouted. “You want me, not them!”

  Inside the bubble, Danilo spun something, and a rifle on the shoulder of his mechanical turned. It fired a burst of bullets, but Gavin was already moving, diving away from the gunfire and toward the mechanical. He shouldn’t have been able to dodge the hail, but the plague was clearly working on him, and he flicked around almost faster than Alice could follow. Her heart climbed into her throat, and she desperately cast about for something—anything—she could do to help him.

  Gavin reached Danilo’s mechanical, which had stopped in its tracks to fire at him and thereby blocked the progress of the other Gontas behind it. They stomped their feet, and a few of them made BEEP sounds Alice had never heard before. People from the surrounding buildings fled into the streets and away. Clearly they’d seen altercations before.

  Alice stayed close to a brick wall with Feng, Click, and her automatons and forced herself to remain calm, to think as frightened people streamed past her. Even from here, she could trace the workings of the lead mechanical, see the way it moved and how it fit together. Was there a weak spot she could exploit? If only she could figure out what Gavin was—

  Gavin jumped onto one of the mechanical’s broad feet and climbed like a monkey. In a flash, Alice understood what was going on. Brilliant! She hoped it was Gavin’s idea, and not something dreamed up by the clockwork plague. She very much wanted to feel pride for his intelligence instead of fear for his sanity. With a quick motion, Alice snatched up Click and turned to the whirligig mechanicals hovering behind her.

  “You carried Aunt Edwina when she tried to steal the giant war machine outside London last summer,” she said to them. “Can you carry me?”

  They squeaked and bobbed up and down in midair with obvious enthusiasm.

  “Feng,” she said without thinking, “wait here with my spiders. You, you, you, and you,” she continued, pointing to different whirligigs, “carry me to that mechanical. Quick!”

  The whirligigs took Alice firmly by the shoulders and back of her dress and lifted. Their propellers spun madly only inches away from Alice’s face, but they lifted her handily from the ground.

  “Wait!” Feng cried. “Alice, I cannot—”

  But Alice was already rushing toward the big mechanical with Click in her arms. The sensation of flight swooped through her, filling her with exhilaration despite the danger. Why had she never tried this with her automatons before? Gavin had managed to skitter up to Danilo’s bubble. The Gontas behind them were becoming angrier and angrier, but they were still hemmed in by the narrow street and unable to do anything. Gavin clambered up to the very top of Danilo’s bubble. One of Danilo’s hands swiped at him. Gavin leaped over it. When he landed, he made a face at the Gonta behind Danilo, a plump man in brown leather.

  “Good thing I killed Ivana!” Gavin shouted at him. “They can feed China now! She had more rolls than a bakery!”

  Alice held her breath. Danilo swiped at him again, like a man swatting at a fly, but Gavin nimbly leaped away. The Cossack behind Danilo was getting angry. Alice could see him turn red and purple, and it would have been funny if Gavin hadn’t been dancing with death. She was almost there.

  “You could stand to lose a few pounds yourself,” Gavin taunted him. “Gain any more weight, and planets will orbit you.”

  The arm of the mechanical behind Danilo tracked around and its fingers revealed themselves to be rifle barrels.

  “You don’t have the guts,” Gavin yelled. “It’s all lard!”

  Too late Danilo realized what was going on. “Ni!” he shouted into the speaking tube, but his fat brother Cossack had already fired. Gavin dropped down to the chest piece of Danilo’s mechanical and hung there by his fingertips just as the fat Gonta’s ammunition slammed into Danilo’s bubble. The glass exploded. Danilo flew out of the mechanical and smacked the brick streets. He twitched once and lay still.

  With her free hand, Alice gestured at the fat Cossack. “There! Go!”

  The automatons skimmed over the mechanical with the shattered bubble. Alice caught a glimpse of Gavin hoisting himself with the incredible agility of a clockworker into the driver’s seat, where he took up the controls. Then her own automatons dropped her on the bubble of the fat Cossack. Click fell from her arms and she scrabbled a moment on the smooth glass before regaining her balance. Behind, the other Gontas were still trapped in the narrow street, and unlike their brother, seemed unwilling to fire on their own family, especially now that Gavin had shown the disastrous consequences of doing so. The fat Cossack in the mechanical looked up, surprised.

  “Cut, Click!” Alice ordered.

  Click extended hard claws and scrawled a wide circle in the glass just as he had done on the roof of L’Arbre Magnifique’s greenhouse. Alice stamped in the center, and the circle fell in, striking the Gonta on the head. He shouted at her in Ukrainian, but Alice was already giving orders to her little automatons. They zipped into the mechanical like hornets invading a beehive, snatched the fat Gonta up, and yanked him out into open air. He yelped, chins quivering. The automatons labored hard, and Alice tugged him upward as well, then kicked him over the side. He fell away, and the automatons let him go. Alice herself dropped into the opening and found herself sitting on a padded bench at the controls. Click leaped down to join her. Alice’s inborn talent with automatics let her see instantly what went where. Pedals for the legs, hand controls for the arms, a number of switches and dials for other functions. She spun the mechanical around to face the other Cossacks.

  All this had happened in only a few seconds. The remaining Gontas hadn’t been expecting to be attacked. Their surprise combined with the confined space to render them helpless, but only for the moment. Already, rifles and launchers were clicking around to train on Alice. In a strategically placed mirror mounted on the controls, she could see Gavin behind her. The weapons were trained on him, too. A strange calm descended over her, as if she were sinking into a bath of ice water that sent all emotion into hibernation. Moving with care and deliberation, she made the mechanical scoop up the squawking fat Gonta in one metallic hand.

  “You don’t want the circus,” Alice said into the mechanical’s speaking tube. Her voice boomed against the high gray buildings on either side of the street. “You want us. Gavin and me.”

  “We will destroy you!” said one of the Cossacks. Alice couldn’t tell which, but she supposed it didn’t matter, when they spoke with one voice.

  “Not today. Back up or I’ll kill him.”

  “You risked your life to save dying children. You would not kill helpless man.”

  That stymied Alice. The Cossack was right. She loathed the filthy Gonta-Zalizniak family, but the thought of crushing one of them in her hands, even mechanical hands, only brought up sickening memories of the dead girl. The weapons whined with power.

  “Alice!” Gavin called behind her. “Duck!”

  Immediately Alice dropped the mechanical into a crouch. Something flew over her head, but instead of striking any of the mechanicals, the object hit one of the nearby buildings. The thing exploded. Smoke and the sharp smell of gunpowder enveloped Alice, and Click hissed on the bench next to her. The building leaned precariously, then toppled into the street with rocky thunder. It was higher than the street was wide, so it smashed into the building across from it, creating a diagonal barrier. Alice felt the concussion thud against her very bones, and she was suddenly glad that the people had fled the surrounding structures.

  The ruined building effectively blocked the street between Alice and the rest of the Cossacks and, incidentally, prevented both sides from firing at each other. Alice dropped the fat Gonta, who yelped and hobbled away on a sprained ankle.
r />   “If you want us, come and get us,” Gavin’s voice taunted.

  Alice took the cue. She and Gavin both turned their mechanicals and ran with the faint howls of Cossack outrage following behind.

  “If you wanted to get them even angrier, you succeeded handily,” Alice called.

  “At least they’ll be chasing us and not going after the circus,” Gavin called back. “We can’t— Shit!” He brought his mechanical up short, and Alice nearly crashed into him.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s—?”

  “Feng!”

  A pang went through Alice. She spun her mechanical. Nearly half a block up the street, past where they had already run, stood Feng, exactly where she had left him. He was surrounded by her little mechanicals.

  Feng, wait here with my spiders.

  Idiot! She had ordered him to stay there, and now he couldn’t move. Even as she watched in horror, a Cossack projectile launched itself over the stony barrier blocking the street and described an arc that would carry it straight toward Feng. He looked up at it, his eyes wide despite the spider on his head.

  Desperately, Alice looked at the controls of her mechanical. Her mind made quick connections, and she remembered something she had seen a mechanical guard do in the Gonta-Zalizniak house. Praying she had it right, Alice flipped two switches and yanked a lever. The projectile began to fall, whistling as it came down toward Feng. The right arm of Alice’s mechanical burst free of the main body and flew toward Feng, trailing a cable. The projectile dropped closer. Just as the mechanical’s hand hit Feng, Alice yanked back, killing the momentum and closing the fingers around Feng’s body. He made a hoik sound and Alice yanked. The spiders leaped aboard the fist right when it snatched Feng backward. The projectile hit the cobblestones and exploded, but Feng and the spiders were already well beyond its reach.

  Alice held Feng up in front of her bubble. “Are you all right?”

  “Do not put me through that again,” he said. “You—”

  “—don’t need to save everyone. I know. Just… just shut it, Feng.” She dropped him into Gavin’s mechanical. “We have to find Dr. Clef.”

  Alice ran with Gavin past the remains of the circus, hoping that the Cossacks would indeed follow them and leave the circus alone. There was nothing for it now if they didn’t—Alice and Gavin had to stop Dr. Clef. They had no time. Or, very soon, they would have an infinity of it.

  The mechanical ran beside the gray water as fast as Alice could make it go. Half a mile upriver, the heavy dam seemed to glower down at the city. If Dr. Clef managed to stop time for the entire universe, would she even know? Would she and everyone else simply freeze like fireflies trapped in amber, aware but unable to act? Or would she simply cease to exist, along with everything else? Ice ran through her veins, and the Cossacks coming behind her suddenly didn’t seem like such a big problem.

  They arrived at the bottom of the dam. It made a wall four or five stories tall. Angry water boiled and roared at the base, and a number of stone buildings huddled around it. A network of heavy cables led from the dam to a snarl of iron towers on the bank. Near the entrance to one of the buildings stood the half-wrecked elephant.

  “He’s here!” Alice shouted to Gavin over the roaring water. “But where did he end up? I don’t know a thing about dams.”

  “I don’t, either.” Gavin looked stricken. “I didn’t think of that.”

  A faint vibration shivered up the mechanical though Alice’s body. More mechanical footsteps.

  Gavin felt it, too. “Fourteen minutes,” he said. “At least they didn’t stop to destroy the circus.”

  Alice cast about, looking for something, anything that might tell her where to—

  “Click!” she exclaimed. The cat looked up at her quizzically from the padded bench. Alice made the mechanical kneel, popped the bubble, and climbed down. Click followed, as did the spiders and whirligigs.

  “What are you doing?” Gavin called from his own mechanical. Feng sat pale next to him. Alice paused a moment to look at the elephant. Her practiced eye told her the pistons had seized and its memory wheels had frozen. The poor thing would never move again. She patted it once in sorrow. She didn’t believe that living animals, let alone mechanical ones, had souls, but she hoped that somehow, somewhere, some piece of this magnificent beast survived.

  “Alice?” Gavin said.

  Good heavens! This was no time for philosophical rumination. She turned to the mechanical cat. “Click!” she said. “Find Dr. Clef!”

  The cat cocked his head, but didn’t move. Finally, he sat down.

  “You’re asking the cat?” Gavin said. “He won’t—”

  Alice cut him off with a gesture. “Shush! Click, go!”

  Click stood up again, stretched, and with studied nonchalance, wandered toward one of the buildings. It was just occurring to Alice that a power production factory must employ a large number of people, and they should be here somewhere, when the large doors that Click seemed to have chosen burst open and a horde of men in work clothes stampeded into the street. Click and Alice only barely dodged aside. The men looked wild-eyed and fearful as they ran for it, scattering in a dozen different directions. Gavin and Feng watched from the safety of the mechanical.

  “What on earth?” Alice asked when they passed.

  “I do not wish to know what frightened them so badly,” Feng said.

  Alice ignored him. Click was already heading for the open doors. She followed him with her spiders and whirligigs.

  “Come on, Feng.” Gavin clambered down from his mechanical with Feng as a reluctant shadow.

  They found themselves in a wide, long room that seemed to be a receiving area. Alice sniffed the air. Ozone, hot steel, and… something else. A chemical smell she couldn’t identify, but one that made her heart beat unaccountably faster and brought a hint of fear to her chest. She glanced at Gavin and Feng. Were they feeling it too? Click seemed unbothered. He took them through another doorway and down a set of stairs. Their footsteps echoed off metal and stone. The spiders’ feet clicked across the floor, and the whirligigs’ propellers made a sound like hummingbird wings.

  “Did you hear something?” Gavin said hoarsely. “I thought I heard something.”

  “We’re just… nervous,” Alice replied. Her mouth was dry and her hands were shaking. “Good heavens, I’m so nervous. I don’t understand.”

  “I am not,” Feng said.

  The chemical smell was stronger down here. Alice sniffed again, and her heart lurched. “It’s that smell.”

  “A gas,” Gavin said. “Some sort of airborne chemical that causes a fear reaction. Dr. Clef must have created it to frighten the workers away. It doesn’t bother Click or the little automatons because they’re mechanical.”

  “And Feng is…” Alice trailed off.

  Feng touched his own spider. “Yes.”

  “At least the worst of it has cleared out,” Gavin continued quickly. “Or I think we’d be running, too. Where’s Click gotten to?”

  They found him waiting at the bottom of the stairs. A whining, humming noise came from the other side of a heavy door, which was marked with Cyrillic writing.

  “I believe it says Power Production,” Feng translated.

  “And that’s where we’ll find Dr. Clef.” Alice flung the door open with her iron hand.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The soft whine burst into full volume. The room beyond the door was long and high, fully the size of a dirigible hangar. Five turbines, nearly flush with the floor, occupied most of the space. They looked to Gavin like giant coiled seashells of segmented metal, each thirty feet across. Automatically he tried to calculate diameter and radius, but he kept running into pi, a number nearly as bad as the square root of two, and he forced himself to stop. A covered shaft in the center of each turbine was connected to an electrical generator. The shafts spun at a dizzying 180 revolutions per minute. Under Gavin’s feet, he felt water rushing through the turbines
and sensed immense kinetic power barely held in check by the sturdy walls of the dam. It was at the same time intoxicating and intimidating.

  Near the third turbine stood an arc of lacy metal just high enough for a man to walk under. At the spot in the arc normally occupied by the keystone was Gavin’s paradox generator. A table filled with a snarl of equipment sat next to the arc.

  In the middle of the long floor near the pile of equipment was the plump form of Dr. Clef. He wore dark goggles over his eyes. A snarl of cables connected the central turbine’s generator to the machinery, and a smell of solder in the air said Dr. Clef had been welding. He looked up and pulled his goggles off when Alice shoved the door open. His face burst into a cheerful grin.

  “I thought you all might arrive soon,” he called over the turbine whine. “And you brought my clicky kitty. So kind of you.”

  “Doctor, you have to stop,” Gavin called back. “You don’t want to do this.”

  He looked genuinely perplexed. “But I’m doing this for you, my boy. Everything is calculated and calibrated. In a moment, you’ll have all the time in the universe. You can save the world at last.”

  Before any of them could respond to this, or even move, Dr. Clef threw a switch. The whine increased, and power snaked up the cable, through the machinery, and into the delicate arc. All the turbines slowed as the generators engaged and the arc drained their power. The arc glowed an electric blue, and the space within filled with light, first red, then orange, then yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. Gavin’s mind flicked back to a moment in the stone corridors beneath the Third Ward, a moment when he dropped the Impossible Cube and it changed colors as it fell in exactly the reverse order he was seeing now.