LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FOUR

      Molly saw Commodore Black opening the door to Tock House just as she was struggling up the main staircase with a wooden crate full of periodicals, news sheets and journals. The old u-boatman rushed over to pick the box out of his friend’s arms. With his bulk and strength he lifted it up easily before she caught him remembering to put on a show, pretending to puff and struggle.

      ‘Have you been laying in reading material for Coppertracks, lass? The old steamer is off in the woods again, tinkering with his tower – his genius is occupied enough for now, I think. No need for these.’

      ‘These news sheets aren’t for his distraction, Jared,’ replied Molly. ‘I need to track down Oliver Brooks. Coppertracks can find patterns in the information, things too subtle for me to notice. Somewhere in here is the clue to where I can find Oliver.’

      ‘Good luck to you, then, for our old steamer isn’t noticing much these days except his tower and his dreams of conversing with the man in the moon.’

      Molly looked towards the house’s orchard. The tip of the lashed-together tower was just visible over the trees. ‘He wants to prove the Royal Society wrong.’

      ‘He wants revenge,’ said Commodore Black. ‘That’s what his boiler heart desires now, and that’s not an emotion that sits well with a blessed steamman.’

      And that was equally true of another creature of the metal Molly was well acquainted with. She thought of the Hexmachina’s final plea to her before it was frozen in the centre of the earth. It seemed so much like a dream now, she was half-doubting her own memory of the vision. Perhaps she had been working too hard of late?

      Molly left the commodore and walked over towards the orchard. She had always loved the peace of the apple and pear trees, left to run slightly wild in their grounds. In the summer months, Molly would take an old collapsible card table from the cellar of the house and set it up in a glade alongside the ruins of an overgrown gazebo. There she would lay her writing paper and pencil down on the green felt top, watching the butterflies flit over the lilacs while she imagined tales of terror to stir the hearts – and pocketbooks – of the penny dreadful readers. Now, of course, she had the presence of Coppertracks’ tower of science for company, a small Porterbrook-model portable steam engine chugging away beside the ever-lengthening pyramid of lashed together girders, crystals and cables.

      Molly could tell that Coppertracks was agitated, his mu-bodies falling over themselves to keep the tower running smoothly as his attention darted between his drones and the task at hand. One of the drones held a cluster of cylinders to its cyclopean eye, taking a reading from the sun, while Coppertracks seemed more interested in a large sheet of calculations resting on her card table, still out from her morning writing session. As Molly got closer, she saw there was also a map of the stars open before him – she even recognized a few of the constellations.

      ‘What’s the matter, old steamer?’ Molly called.

      ‘The matter? Why, everything is the matter, Molly softbody. Reality is not as it should be.’ Coppertracks’ caterpillar tracks ground at the grass in frustration. ‘I have been checking the declination of my tower’s transmissions to our closest neighbour in the heavens, Kaliban, and I have been missing the red planet by at least two degrees.’

      Molly stared up at the dish at the top of the tower, a polished silver shield like a giant’s porridge bowl turned on its side. ‘Maybe the rain last night knocked your dish out of kilter? It sounded like it was becoming quite a squall from my bedroom.’

      ‘That is what I had assumed too, but my mu-bodies have checked and rechecked the tower and my apparatus has not shifted by an inch. It is transmitting at exactly the same angle as it has always been, yet now my signals are passing by Kaliban and falling away into the void.’

      ‘Then if your tower hasn’t moved, the logical conclusion to draw would be that it is either the Earth or Kaliban that has shifted.’

      ‘Precisely, but as we both know, that is impossible. Celestial bodies do not jiggle around their orbits like fidgeting young children swapping desks in a classroom.’

      ‘Very odd,’ said Molly. A puzzle fit for one of her celestial fiction novels, certainly.

      ‘It gets worse,’ said Coppertracks. He indicated the constellation of the Windmill on his astronomy charts. ‘I have been checking the position of the stars from my observations the other night against the official charts and something is terribly wrong. While some of our stars are precisely where they should be, others have changed station, a couple of stars have vanished entirely, and I have even found a new star appeared as if from nowhere.’

      ‘Surely not? You always told me—’

      ‘Yes, I know,’ said Coppertracks ‘and I still hold to my people’s belief that the stars are celestial bodies similar to our own sun, but viewed from the vantage point of an incredible distance. Huge cosmic kilns many times larger than our own world, able to circulate heat with an efficiency that makes my own boiler heart look like a toy.’ Coppertracks tapped his charts. ‘But measuring against the astronomical record, the face of night above us has been transformed in a manner that should be impossible. Conventional science can offer no explanation for this. We might as well subscribe to the teachings of the old Quatérshiftian religion and assume that Furnace-breath Nick is flying through the sky on his demon steed, snuffing out the candles of the Child of Light and firing up his own wax lights in their stead.’

      Now Molly saw why Coppertracks was close to despair. Entire stars disappearing, while their neighbours twisted across the firmament to settle in new positions. It made even the problem of a new moon appearing in the sky appear like a mere distraction in the cosmic ordering of things. What if their sun should just disappear? It would be as if the boiler were turned off at Tock House in the dead of winter. No heat, no light. An eternal winter of such ferocity would make the coldtime look like a picnic in Goldhair Park on a balmy summer afternoon. The world would die, as would every creature that swam, walked, flew or crawled across its surface.

      ‘So what are you going to do about it?’ asked Molly. ‘Does King Steam know about this?’

      ‘I am certain he does,’ said Coppertracks, distractedly. ‘With our new array tracking Ashby’s Comet, King Steam’s astronomers would have to possess defective vision plates not to have noticed this.’

      Coppertracks’ mu-bodies began shinning up the tower, recalibrating the transmission dish and showering Molly with flecks of paint and dust from the girders as they scrambled about on high.

      ‘You’re continuing with your work on the tower?’ Molly was flabbergasted.

      ‘Dear mammal, the forward momentum of science must not be swayed off-course by an as-yet-undiagnosed disorder in celestial mechanics. I must press on with my transmissions.’

      Above their heads, the dish was ratcheted around to a new setting.

      ‘Even if you find someone on one of the other celestial spheres with a level of engineering as advanced as ours and willing to converse with you, what in the name of the Circle would you say to them now?’

      Coppertracks stopped for a second, as if this thought – of all

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