The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (35 page)

“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.

T
he 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.

“Don’t!” Alice cried. She ran toward him. Gavin grabbed
Feng’s arm and ran as well, though they were a good hundred feet away. Dr. Clef smiled beatifically and struck a large tuning fork on the table. A pure A rang through the room, and Gavin remembered that he had sung that same note in the same octave on the night he had caressed Alice with his voice and made the Cube vanish in the Doomsday Vault. It was the same note Dr. Clef had struck the day he had completed the Impossible Cube in his laboratory at the Third Ward and accidentally made the Cube disappear through time. Gavin had struck the fork again to bring the Cube back. A. The first note. The pure tone that rang through time and space and called the Cube to itself.

Dr. Clef pressed the handle of the fork to the arc, and the arc’s light became a white so beautiful, it made Gavin’s heart ache. They weren’t even halfway to him when Dr. Clef reached into the opening. It snapped and growled as it swallowed his hand. Gavin stared in fascination even as horror crawled over his skin. His steps faltered. The machines were hypnotic, thrilling. He was watching the most brilliant clockworker the world had ever seen bend time itself to his will with a unique machine. He was also watching the most powerful act of destruction in the history of the universe.

“He cannot.” Feng tugged at his arm now, trying to hurry him forward. “He will not.”

Dr. Clef whipped his hand out of the arc. The metal glowed bright as the sun. Alice, who was several paces ahead of Gavin, stopped in her tracks and threw up her arm to protect her eyes. Her little automatons squeaked in fear, and Click hissed. The glow faded a
little, and when Gavin’s vision cleared, he saw Dr. Clef was holding the Impossible Cube.

“Shit,” Gavin whispered.

“My Cube,” Dr. Clef crooned. “
Mein liebes, schönes Kübchen.”

The Cube was just as Gavin remembered it. It was only the size of a hatbox, but its intricate metal lattice twisted the eye. The back seemed to shift to the front, or perhaps the front was fading into the back. One of the bottom struts crossed impossibly over the top. It shouldn’t have existed, but it did. Behind it, the arc continued to glow with holy fire.

Gavin shook off the fascination and started forward again with Feng. Alice did the same. He was in a dream, running through tar and molasses. Dr. Clef popped a pair of protectors over his ears and flipped another switch. The paradox generator atop the arc cranked to life, and the double tritone rippled through the chamber like demons and angels at war, amplified by the arc’s power so that the noise was clear even over the turbine whine. Gavin dropped to his knees at the terrible perfection of it.

Alice and Feng kept running. They had nearly reached Dr. Clef’s table, with Click and Alice’s automatons following in an angry brass cloud. Gavin admired her determination and tenacity, her beauty and power. Dr. Clef picked up another fork, and the small part of Gavin’s brain that wasn’t enthralled by the perfect, rapturous sound of his own generator noted the length of the prongs. D-sharp. Alice gathered herself to leap at him.

“
Nicht,
” said Dr. Clef, though the word was barely audible over the turbines and tritones. He struck the fork and pressed it to the side of the Cube. Instantly a cone of sound blasted from the Cube and through the fork. It hit Alice and shoved her backward into Feng. The two of them toppled to the ground. The little automatons were scattered in all directions, rotors and legs bent and laboring. Click bowled over backward. A piece of Gavin’s awareness flashed hot anger at Alice’s injury, but the rest of him remained consumed by the tritone paradox. Then an edge of the cone caught him. It simultaneously dampened the tritone paradox and slapped him in the face. His ears rang. Abruptly, the sound was no longer so hypnotic. Gavin leaped to his feet and automatically ran toward Alice.

“I’m fine!” she gasped. “Stop him!”

“Help her, Feng,” Gavin said. “Help us! Do whatever it takes to help!” And without waiting for an answer, he ran toward Dr. Clef’s table. Another cable ran from the paradox generator. It ended in a clip that Dr. Clef was ready to connect to the Impossible Cube. But now Gavin was close enough. He raised his wristband, aimed fast, and fired. The cog spun through the air and knocked Dr. Clef’s hand aside. He yelped but didn’t drop the clip. The ringing in Gavin’s ears continued to muffle the tritones, though he heard enough for it to be a distraction.

Dr. Clef blinked at Gavin, who was already aiming another cog. There was only one left, and there was only one choice of what to do with it. Grimly, he cranked the magnetic power as high as it would go. Flung at full strength, a spinning cog would slice through flesh
and bone like butter. Dr. Clef glanced at the wristband, his brilliant mind making instant connections, and Gavin saw the understanding in the eyes of his mentor, a man who, despite a few arguments, had never been anything but kind and helpful to Gavin, who wanted only to help him now. Gavin’s legs trembled, but his aim remained firm.