The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (20 page)

“So good to see you up and moving, my young treasure. I have kept your clicky kitty wound for you,” said Dr. Clef over his pencil. He face and hands were gray with soot. “I find the fresh air helps me think, don’t you?”

At that moment, a particularly thick cloud of cinders engulfed the shanty before being blown to shreds by the wind. Alice coughed over Click’s back into her much-abused handkerchief. “Fresh air. Hm. What are we doing up here, Gavin?”

“Just listen.” He set the new machine down and pulled the protectors over his ears. They were wooden cups stuffed with wool, apparently designed to keep out sound. Then he turned the machine’s crank.

From the speaking trumpet emerged an unearthly sound. It sounded like a chorus of ghosts sighing from high to low and low to high all at once. Gavin continued turning, and the sound repeated endlessly. The pitch rose higher and higher and higher and fell lower and lower and lower, but it never seemed to reach the top or bottom of any scale. It turned endlessly, the tonal equivalent of a figure eight, always moving and going nowhere. It made Alice’s skin crawl.

“I don’t understand,” she said when he stopped.

Gavin pulled the protectors off his ears. “I think I broke Dr. Clef.”

Dr. Clef sat motionless. He stared into space without blinking, and only the faintest breath fluttered from his chest. A line of spittle drooled down the side of his mouth. The engine blew its whistle, high and shrill.

“Good heavens.” Alice shook Dr. Clef’s shoulders, and he didn’t respond. Gavin handed her a bottle of smelling salts, and she opened it under his nose. He coughed awake and waved the bottle away.

“Where am I, then?” he asked. “What is happening?”

“I think only Gavin can explain that,” Alice said.

Gavin gestured to the new machine. “It generates a tritone paradox,” he said. “Kind of hard to explain. The machine plays a one-octave scale that goes down and another that goes up. When the machine reaches the top of the ascending scale, it drops back down to the bottom and starts over, but the volume changes so that you don’t notice the switch. It does the same for the descending scale. But then things
really
get interesting.”

“It’s just a noise,” Alice said doubtfully. Click squirmed in her arms, so she set him down.

“Not really,” Gavin said. “The machine also adds another pair of ascending/descending scales, but those are a tritone above the first two. It creates the illusion of a sound that’s always going up or always going down—it depends on your ear—but it never actually goes anywhere. Clockworkers, though, are sensitive to tritones and have perfect pitch—”

“—so it creates an unsolvable paradox for us,” Dr. Clef put in. “And the addition of the other tones does away with the pain and makes the entire scale hypnotic. I remember only a lovely sound that— Wait! Wait!” He clapped his hands and his face flushed.
“Du Lieber! Ach, das ist ja nicht zu glauben! Wie habe ich das verpaßt?”

“What’s wrong, Doctor?” Alice asked. “What did you miss?”

“This tritone paradox is an auditory version of my Impossible Cube! Play it again! Play it now!”

“Just a moment,” Alice said, holding up a hand. “We don’t know everything this does yet. Is it harmful?”

“I don’t know,” Gavin replied. “It seems to have helped Dr. Clef. He’s talking to me instead of arguing.”

“Why, so I am!” Dr. Clef exclaimed. “We should be fighting, yet we are not. I am filled with goodwill toward you, my boy. What an amazing thing! Did you create it just for this purpose? So that we can work together?”

“No,” Gavin said. “I created it because I think it’s possible to slow time.”

There followed a long, long pause. Wind whistled through the cracks in the shanty walls, and Click’s steel wool tongue rasped as he cleaned his paws.

“Sorry,” Alice said. “Did you say—?”

“It’s possible to slow time,” Gavin repeated.

“How?” Dr. Clef said in a low, steady voice.

“With your new alloy, Dr. Clef.” Gavin gestured at the rolled-up wiring that still lay on the deck. “I saw your calculations, the ones that prove gravity distorts time.”

Dr. Clef held up a finger. “That is not quite correct. I proved that time isn’t a constant. The flow of time speeds up or slows down based on a number of forces, including the power of gravity, but we don’t notice because we’re
in
whatever passes for local time. If you could somehow put a clock two or three thousand
miles above the surface of the planet, for example, within a few days you will find it is running faster because Earth’s gravity is weaker up there. Time for an object also changes based on how fast it moves. I have reason to believe—though I have not yet proved it mathematically—that if you could somehow accelerate to the speed of light, time would stand still for you.”

“This is more than I can follow,” Alice admitted.

“But”—Gavin lifted a finger—“you used your electric alloy to make the Impossible Cube, and it warped the universe around itself. Have you thought of why the alloy does this?”

Dr. Clef shrugged. “I assumed it was to do with the nature of electricity. Electric current cycles back and forth between negative and positive, like a mouse running back and forth between its hole and a piece of cheese. We measure the distance between the two points and call it volts.”

“But,” Gavin said again, “we don’t actually measure the farthest distance. I’ve been reading your notes. We measure from a point just below and above the two extremes. To use your metaphor, it’s as if the mouse paused on the way to the cheese, and then paused again on the way back to its hole, and we actually measure how far the mouse ran from the pauses, not from the cheese or the hole. We do that for convenience because it’s very hard to measure electricity at its peak and its low.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Alice asked.

Gavin turned his eyes on her, and they all but
glowed with intensity. “To get the distance between the stopping point and the peak, that is, the distance between the pause and the cheese—”

“Oh!” Alice interrupted. “You’re going to tell me it’s the square root of two.”

“Well, you multiply by the square root of two, but yes.”

“God in heaven!” Dr. Clef dropped his pencil and scrabbled for it on the rocking deck. “I knew this fact, my boy, but I never made the connection. The electricity in the alloy cycles between the average and the peak—the square root of two—and when combined with the Impossible Cube’s design, it forces a constant on the universe and changes local time.”

“My paradox generator might do the same thing,” Gavin said. “If we used your alloy in it and powered it correctly.”

Dr. Clef clapped his hands with newfound glee and cooperation. “It would take a lot of work and careful calculation.”

“Wait a minute,” Alice put in.

“And precise measurement, which we couldn’t do here, with the lab rocking.” Gavin began to pace within the shack, stepping over Click without really seeing him.

“One moment, please,” Alice said.

“But we’ll be in Berlin in a few hours.” Dr. Clef flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. “The train will stop.”

“Now, see here,” Alice said.

“And we’ll be able to buy more materials in a large city,” Gavin said. “We may have to build a few tools first, but—”

“Wait. A.
Minute!
” Alice shouted.

Both men blinked at her, as if only then remembering she was there. Click’s green eyes shuttered open and closed with little clicking noises that were clearly audible despite the rushing wind outside the shanty.

“What’s wrong, my dear?” Dr. Clef asked at last. “You see how well we are working together. Is this not a fine thing?”

“You should not be discussing any of this,” she said, one hand pressed to her bosom. Her heart fluttered about her rib cage like a frightened bird, and she felt a little sick. “You’re treating the idea of changing something as fundamental as time itself like nothing more than some schoolboy’s science experiment. This is… it’s… Good heavens, I don’t
know
what this is! Why would you do such a thing?”

Gavin looked at her, truly puzzled. “It’s for you.”

Alice hadn’t thought she could be more shocked, and was even more shocked to learn she’d been wrong. His words sent an electric jolt through her gut, and she found herself pressed against the wall of the shanty. “What do you mean?”

“You need more time,” Gavin said. “
We
need more time. You need to spread the cure and recover from it. And I’m… well, I don’t have much time left. If I can find a way to change the way time flows for us, I can speed us up—or slow the world down. You’ll have more time to recover. We’ll have more time together. We can save the world, Alice. Just like Monsignor Adames said.”

Nausea and more than a little fear sloshed around Alice’s stomach. The very idea of tampering with time,
let alone doing so in her name, screamed with wrongness. Alice tried to reply, but all that came out was a squeak. She tried again. “Gavin, Doctor—you can’t be serious. I would never ask for such a terrible thing.”

“I know. That’s why I’m doing it.”

He reached for her hands, but she snatched them away. “You don’t understand at all. This is a horrible idea, Gavin. It’s the sort of thing the Doomsday Vault was built to contain. What if you make a mistake? What if you speed time for us and the rest of the world goes ahead as normal and that tears a big piece out of the earth itself?”

“I wouldn’t make such a mistake,” Gavin soothed. “Truly. I don’t make mistakes.”

“You make mistakes all the time!” Alice felt like she was arguing with a tree. “You decided to escape the world’s most powerful police force in an airship that can’t fly without making a spectacle of itself. You used that whip of yours without knowing how much power was left in it, and it fizzled away right when you needed it most. Just now you tried your… your
thing
on Dr. Clef without considering whether or not it might damage his brain. No sane scientist would—” She clamped her lips shut and turned her face away. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Gavin wasn’t… wasn’t…

She couldn’t bring herself to complete the thought.

A hand took one of hers. Gavin looked her in the face, his expression worried and agitated at the same time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. You’re right. It’s… I’m going in strange directions, Alice. I’m
changing.
My brain runs ahead of my mind, and I don’t think. No, that’s wrong. I
do
think. I think too much,
and these ideas come to me, and it doesn’t even occur to me that there might be something wrong. It scares me, Alice. I don’t know what to do.”

Alice squeezed his hand in both of hers, flesh on metal on flesh. The spider’s eyes glowed red. “It’s the plague. You have to fight it, Gavin. For as long as possible.”

“Help me,” he said simply. “Lead me.”

“I’ll try.” It was hard to speak around the lump in her throat. “I’ll never stop trying.”

“Don’t fail,” Gavin said. “Adames said I can cure the world, but
you
mustn’t fail. Maybe that’s what he meant.”

“I am confused,” said Dr. Clef. “What are we doing?”

“We’re realizing what we should and shouldn’t do,” Gavin said. “This”—he gestured at the paradox generator—“was a mistake. I’ll destroy it now.”

He drew back his foot to kick the generator over the side and let it smash on the rocky railroad bed. Then he hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” Alice asked.

“I can’t do it,” he said. “I worked so hard on it, and it’s so beautiful and perfect. How can I destroy it?”

“Then I’ll do it.” Alice leaned down to pick up the generator herself, but Gavin’s arm on her shoulder stopped her.

“Don’t!” he cried, then let her go with a start. “I mean, you can’t… oh, God. I don’t want… it’s so
beautiful
, Alice.”

Alice pursed her lips, frustrated but understanding. “I see, darling. Perhaps there’s another way. Dr. Clef,
I’m going to take Gavin for a little walk. While we’re gone, I want you to destroy this thing.”

A horrified expression crossed Dr. Clef’s face. “But it is as Gavin said—so beautiful! We cannot!”

“Of course we can.” Gavin’s voice hardened and he showed a bit of anger. “We must. Do you understand me, Doctor?”

Dr. Clef cocked his head. “I can,” he said slowly. “If I must.”

“You must,” Gavin said. “We cooperate now, and you must.”

“Then I shall.” He sighed. “I promise. Ah, well. It
does
make fun to knock things apart, yes?”

Alice embraced Gavin hard, and belatedly realized her cheeks were wet. “Thank you,” she said as the engine whistled again. “I love you always.”

“And I love you always.”

They joined hands and strode out into the wind.

Dr. Clef and Click watched them go. A look of bemusement crossed his ashy face. Then he picked up the discarded paradox generator and rocked it like a lost child. A single tear, and then another, leaked from his eye and splashed on the wooden casing. Click rubbed against his knee.

“Mein armes Unmöglicheskubus,”
Dr. Clef moaned. “My poor Impossible Cube. He has abandoned us. Abandoned! And now I must destroy this thing of beauty.”

Click continued to rub against Dr. Clef’s knee, and Dr. Clef stroked his metal sides. They were gray with soot as well. “You understand, my clicky kitty. You are
a delightful machine and would not alter your path, just as this train would not. Could not. But that boy, he is brilliant, far more brilliant than I, yet he follows his genitals to obey the woman. How can they save the world when they don’t have enough time, my clicky kitty? How? The boy and the girl need more time. The boy needs more time. He needs more time.”

Tears ran down his face and he rocked the paradox generator in his lap, lost in memory for a moment. Then a change came over his face. Sadness and despair dropped off, gave way to crafty resolve.

“We must show them they are wrong, mustn’t we, my clicky kitty?” he cooed. “Yes, we must. Yes, we
must
! I can use the boy’s theory and his generator to re-create my Impossible Cube, can’t I, my kitty? Yes, I can. Yes, I
can.
Once I have my Cube back, I will be able to stop time forever, and that will give the boy and the girl all the time they need. At last the boy will have more time. Yes, he will. Yes, he
will.
I will stop time forever, my clicky kitty. Forever!”