Hobart Is Exactly That Small

The Portal flared, as it had flared for every passage in the days since the threshold first opened to traffic, and a Toyota Hilux came through it at speed. The vehicle was wet. Water ran from the wheel arches and the underside of the chassis in dark rivulets, and the ochre beneath the tyres darkened in patches where the rainwater struck it and then began, almost at once, to lift again as a faint steam — the kind that rises off warm bitumen after a summer shower, low and slow and barely visible against the light. The Hilux slewed in a long ragged arc, came to rest at an angle to the line of its own arrival, and the engine cut. For one held beat the only sound was the tick of cooling metal under a sun the metal had not been built for.

The passenger door opened. Adrian came out wearing two climates at once. His shirt and trousers were soaked through with the cold of a Tasmanian winter rain, and the heat met the wet of him at once, and the fabric began to cling and steam in the same breath — a thin haze rising from his shoulders, his sleeves, the small of his back, where the temperatures of two worlds were arguing across his skin. Blood had crusted along one side of his face. The cannabis still in his bloodstream was being burned out of him by the desert at a rate that left him stranded between two impairments without the comfort of either. He came around the front of the vehicle. He brought his fist down on the bonnet with force enough to ring the metal like a struck bell. He turned. He walked at the Portal. He thrust his hand into it.

The Portal answered. A burst of colour and force erupted at the point of contact, and Adrian was hurled backwards across the ground, arms flung wide, back striking the dust several paces from where his boots had been planted a heartbeat earlier. The breath left him in a single audible expulsion. The screen returned to its patient shimmer, indifferent.

Paul Smith was already running. He had begun running when the fist had met the bonnet, and he had not stopped, and he was still running when the Portal flared a second time and the motorhome came through.

The vehicle erupted onto the dust at speed, brakes already shrieking, suspension compressing on ground that had not been built to receive anything that heavy. Dust exploded outward in great choking ochre waves. For several seconds the patch of ground near the threshold disappeared into a churning fog through which only the silhouette of the motorhome was visible, sliding on locked wheels along a trajectory whose terminus was the place where Adrian had landed. The motorhome shuddered to a halt. The dust began its slow descent. When it had settled enough to permit vision, Adrian's head and one shoulder were visible from beneath the chassis, and the high clearance of the vehicle had passed across the rest of him without taking anything that mattered.

The cab door above him banged open. Beatrix Cramer came down the step at a fall and arrived in the dust on her knees, an apology already moving across her face before her hands had reached him. Luke and Paul converged from the other direction, and the three of them between them got Adrian out of the dirt by the wet shoulders of a shirt that still smelt of Hobart rain. He was filthy. He was lightly concussed. He was, against any reasonable accounting of the previous thirty seconds, alive.

Two more figures resolved themselves out of the haze from the direction of the unseen camp. They had been walking that ground at the slower pace of an errand — a check on supplies. Kain Jeffries moved on aluminium crutches, paying for every step on terrain that had not been designed to receive them. Nial Triffett reached the figure on the ground first.

And then he stopped.

The recognition arrived in his face all at once. His swearing was brief and not aimed at anyone present. Nial went down on one knee, and his hand found the side of Adrian's face in a series of small sharp slaps that were trying to do two different jobs at once and not entirely succeeding at either. And the patch of ground beneath the contact became, in that moment, a small gathering of Hobart. Five people drawn through one threshold across days and assembled, by no design any of them could have predicted, into a single minute of recognition on a square of dust. The Portal had not selected for this. The Portal had no opinions. But the dust held what it held.

What followed broke in several directions at once. Beatrix turned for the threshold — not in retreat, but in pursuit of something on the other side that mattered to her more than the dust did — and the colours flared at her approach and folded around her and let her through. Adrian, recovering enough motor function to remember he wanted what was his, broke from the grip on his shoulders and lurched across the ground toward the driver's door of the Hilux. The door opened. The engine started. Kain Jeffries did not attempt the intercept; the terrain and the aluminium would not have permitted it. Nial, after one held beat in which the geometry of the situation arranged itself in front of him, went around to the passenger side and got in instead.

The Hilux pulled away at a speed the suspension complained about. The dust it raised hung in air that had no wind to take it. The vehicle climbed the rise toward the camp it was driving toward, crested it, and disappeared from view, and the column of ochre it had drawn up behind it remained where it was, suspended, slow to disperse, marking the line of the departure as if the day itself were unwilling to release it.