Make Your Selection

"I went there looking for proof that I had been there. And the dust was smooth in every direction, all the way to the horizon, as though nobody had ever set foot on it in the history of the world."

The crossing was neither violent nor gentle. There was a pressure at the back of my neck, and a fine warping in the air across my face, and a buzz at the base of my skull that I recognised from being nine years old and standing too close to a transformer on a fence line outside Morphett Vale—and I went through the wall of that service corridor in two entirely ordinary steps, one foot and then the other, and then the sound went out of the world.

That was what I noticed first. Not the light, and not the air. The airport had been humming away behind me—three vending machine compressors, and a strip light ticking, and that enormous soft roar of six thousand people which comes up through the fabric of a building even when no single part of it can be picked out—and the whole of it simply stopped, in the middle of a stride, the way a radio stops.

And I stood on red dust under a blue sky and could hear my own heart.

The air was thinner and it was cold, properly cold, fifteen or twenty degrees below what I had walked out of, and my lungs went in and did not fill and I had to take another breath immediately and then a third.

And it moved. There was a breeze coming across that plain, faint and steady and cool, in off the sea somewhere behind my left shoulder—and it was lifting the surface dust off the ground in long thin drifting curtains and carrying it inland, and it moved the hair on my forehead. After the held, total, appalling stillness of my first visit, it was almost more than I could stand.

The sun was up there. An ordinary sun in an ordinary sky, laying an ordinary shadow of me out across the ground to my right—and it had frightened me more than anything else the first time and it frightened me all over again, because I needed very badly to feel foreign in that place, and I could not feel foreign anywhere the light fell the way it fell at home.

And then I looked down.

The dust in front of me was smooth.

I did not understand it at first. I turned my head, and looked further out, and turned round on the spot and looked behind me, and it was smooth there too—and then I walked out a few paces and stood and turned round again, and I could see the whole plain from where I was standing, out to the rise in one direction and away to the cliff in the other, and there was nothing on any of it.

Nothing. Not a mark anywhere.

No footprints. Not one. Not the long line of them going out towards the rise, and not the second set coming back down off it with the heels dragged out where I had been running, and not the churned patch where I had knelt down and dug a hole in the ground with both hands and found a floor underneath it.

All of it was gone. The dust lay across that plain from horizon to horizon as fine and as smooth and as undisturbed as flour in a bowl, and there was not one single thing on it anywhere to show that a human being had ever in the history of the universe set foot on the place.

And I stood out there in the wind and something went out of me.

Because I had known. That was the thing. Somewhere underneath all the reasoning I had been so pleased with—the controlled test, the critical assumption, the professional negligence of not checking—somewhere underneath the whole of that architecture, I had been carrying a picture in my head of what I was going to find when I came through that wall. And it was my own footprints. Lying in the dust exactly where I had left them. Sharp-edged and undeniable, with the tread of my shoe in them and the wear along the outside of the left one where I have always worn my shoes out.

That was what I had come for. That was what I had opened a hole in the world inside an airport for. I had not admitted it to myself in the plastic chair by the gate, or in the queue, or in the corridor with my thumb on the indent—but I had come here to look at a mark I had made, and to say to myself, out loud if it came to it: there. You did that. You are not mad.

And the plain had taken it.

I got down on one knee in the dust and put my hand flat on the ground.

It was cool and dry and it went in a good way past the first knuckle, and it had no smell at all, and when I lifted my hand there was a print of it in the surface—the fingers, the heel of the palm, everything.

And I knelt there and watched the breeze take it.

It happened faster than I would have believed. The edges softened first, the sharp lines going furred and vague, and then the whole shape began to fill in from the upwind side, a fine red powder pouring across it and settling into the hollows—and inside of a minute the print of my own hand had gone shallow, and then indistinct, and then it was simply a slight unevenness in the ground, and then there was no unevenness in the ground.

The place did not keep anything.

I sat back on my heels with my hand still out in front of me and thought about four days of that. Four days of a steady cool breeze coming in off a silent sea and going across two thousand acres of powder with nothing on it to hold it down—no grass, no root, no crust, no stone small enough to shelter anything. Four days of it, quietly, patiently, with nobody watching.

Of course they were gone. It was not even a mystery. It was not even strange. That is what a footprint does in fine dry dust in a place that has weather in it, and I could have told anybody so if they had put the question to me in a meeting, and I had not thought of it once.

And I knelt there and understood, in a way that went all the way down through me, that it had all been taken. The parcel that had never been lodged. The number that was not disconnected but simply no longer anything at all. The stairwell conversation my own brother could not remember having.

And now this. My own footprints. Smoothed over. Given back.

Nothing I had done anywhere in the last four days—not on this world and not on my own—had left a mark that had survived.

The wind came in off the water and went over me and went on inland, and I knelt on a plain on another world and could not for some time make myself get up.

What got me up in the end was the only thing that ever gets me up, which is that there was a problem in front of me and I had not finished thinking about it.

Because I had come here to establish something, and I had lost my nerve the moment the ground did not give me the answer I wanted, and I had spent several minutes on my knees feeling sorry for myself in the dirt—and none of that was an argument. None of it was even relevant. The absence of my footprints told me precisely nothing about whether any of this was real. It told me something about wind speed and particle size, and that was the entire content of what it told me.

So I stood up, and I made myself do the thing I am actually for.

I stood still, and turned all the way round, slowly, and I looked at the place—which I had never once done the first time, because the first time I had spent every second of it in a state of controlled panic with the clock going.

And there it all was.

The rise. Away to the east, exactly where the rise had been, the ground lifting gradually and then more steeply, with that same fold in it about halfway up.

The rock formations, standing about in ones and twos at long intervals, worn round and smooth and headless. I could see three of them from where I stood and I recognised the shape of every one.

And the cliff, away to the west, the ground running out flat and red and then simply stopping—and the sea below it under its torn white mist, the swell coming in and lifting and breaking against the base of the rock fifty metres down, in total and complete silence.

And every part of it was where it had been. Not approximately, and not roughly, and not in the vague way a dream repeats itself—identically, in every particular I could check from a standing position, in a place I had visited exactly once, for less than half an hour, while frightened out of my wits.

And I had opened that wall in a government building in Hobart.

And I had opened this one in a service corridor at Melbourne Airport, in another state, on another day, six hundred kilometres away.

And I had come out on the same plain, with the same rise in the same place, and the same rocks standing in the same relation to one another, and the same cliff, and the same silent sea.

That is not a hallucination. That is a result. Run the same procedure from two entirely different starting conditions and get the same output in every measurable respect, and what is in front of a man is not a symptom. It is a system, behaving consistently—and behaving consistently is the one thing a delusion has never in the whole history of medicine managed to do.

I did not need my footprints. I had never needed my footprints. I had wanted them, which is an entirely different thing, and I had wanted them for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with evidence.

I stood on that plain in the wind and laughed out loud, once, and the sound of it went nowhere at all.

And then the rest of it landed.

Because if it opened onto the same place from Hobart and from Melbourne—if the address was fixed, and it made no difference at all where on Earth I happened to be standing when I pressed the thing—then Josh would have come out here.

On this ground. If that parcel had ever arrived, and if he had done what I told him and shut the door of his lounge room and pointed it at a blank wall, he would have stepped out of a house eight hundred kilometres from the room where I first pressed mine, and he would have come out standing exactly where I was standing.

And he would have gone looking for the horizon, in whatever he happened to have on his feet, exactly as I had.

And I had not told him about the cliff.

I made myself think about the time after that, and it was harder than it ought to have been, because standing in that place made every arrangement I had ever made in my life look absurd. I was on a world with a manufactured floor underneath two thousand acres of dust, in a silence with mass to it, under a sun that had no business being that colour—and somewhere on the other side of a hole in the air there was a departure board with the word Adelaide on it, and a woman with a scanner who would call my name twice and then give my seat to somebody else.

And I did not want to go back, which surprised me. I stood there in the cold with the wind coming off the water and my chest going, and I did not want to go back through that wall.

But I turned round, and there it was.

It stood on the plain in front of me with its base in the dust—a doorway, not a window, its bottom edge sitting on the ground exactly as a door sits on a floor, and the red powder blowing across the foot of it and going past. A tall rectangle of churning impossible colour, standing out there in the open on an empty plain with two thousand acres of nothing around it, throwing its light across the ground and casting no shadow anywhere.

And it looked exactly as it had when I stepped through it, and I checked that before I checked anything else. It had not thinned, and it had not dulled, and the colours had not pulled inward towards the middle—and I looked at it with something I am not too proud to call gratitude, because the last time I had turned round and looked at one of these things I had watched it going out.

Then I walked towards it, and got about four steps, and stopped, because a thought had arrived and it was not one of mine.

It did not come the way my thoughts come—in words, in my own voice, with all the usual hedging and preamble. It simply presented itself, entire, sitting in the middle of my head with its hands folded.

You do not need the device here.

I stood in the dust and looked at that doorway full of light.

It is yours. On this side you have only to mean it.

And the whole of me went cold, because there was no reason on this earth for me to know that. Nobody had told me. Seth's letter had run to eight paragraphs and had told me about prophecies and factions and a man in San Francisco, and had not contained one single practical instruction about how to shut a door behind me. I had never done it. I had never seen it done. There was no route by which that piece of information could have got into my head.

And it was in my head, and I knew that it was true.

And I did not want to test it. I had every reason not to want to test it, because the last time something arrived in my head from outside it, it had been a voice that knew my name—and now here I was, standing on that plain with the wind coming in off the sea, being handed the operating instructions by whatever it was that had been watching me ever since.

But I had a flight, and there was no other way of finding out.

So I looked at the doorway, and I did the thing I could not describe then and have not managed to describe any better since. I meant it to close.

And it closed. There was no sound; there never is, with any of it. The colours came up all at once—sharpened, went hard and bright and violent, the whole surface flaring outward as though it were drawing breath—and then they went inward on themselves and were gone, in a good deal less than a second.

And what was left standing on the plain in front of me was a screen.

It had not appeared. It was simply what the thing had turned into. In the place where the churning colour had been there was now a great flat pane—three metres across and more, standing upright with its base sitting in the dust exactly where the doorway had stood, so that the wind came along the ground and struck the foot of it and went round.

It was faintly translucent. I could see the plain going away behind it—the rise, the rock, the sky—bent, and slightly wrong, the way a thing goes wrong when it is seen through the air above hot tarmac. It caught no light. It cast no shadow. And the dust that the wind was carrying went past it and around it and not one grain of it settled on the surface.

And it was not a machine. There were no buttons on it, and no controls, and no lights, and no housing, and nothing whatever about it that any person could have manufactured. What it looked like, standing out there with the wind going over it, was a thing that was waiting.

I took a step towards it.

And it woke up, and I was not remotely ready for what it did.

The plain behind the pane went out, and images began to come—and they came fast. I mean fast. They went past me the way cards go past when somebody riffles a deck. Meeting Room 4B, for perhaps a third of a second. Gone. A corridor. Gone. Something warm and amber that I did not know. Gone. 4B again. The corridor again. The amber thing. Round and round and round, over and over, faster than I could get hold of any of them, and my eyes could not keep up with it and my head began to ache behind the left eye almost at once.

I put my hands out. I could not have told anybody what I imagined I was going to do with them.

And I stood in the dust with my arms up like an idiot and understood, after some seconds of it, that the thing was not malfunctioning. It was not broken and it was not showing off. It was waiting for me to do something—and I did not know what, and it was going to go on doing this until I worked it out.

So I stopped trying to look at them. That was the only useful thought I had in the whole of it. I made myself stop chasing the images with my eyes, and I stood still with my hands down and my head splitting, and I did the one thing that had worked on the doorway, because it was the only technique I had.

I meant one.

And it slowed.

Not much, and not well. It was like trying to steer a boat by leaning, and my head went from an ache into something a great deal worse than an ache—but the cards went from a riffle down to a shuffle, and then to something I could very nearly follow, and I stood on that plain sweating in fifteen degrees and hauled at it with something in my mind that I had never used before in my life and did not have a name for.

And I caught Meeting Room 4B, and I held it.

And it was not a window.

That is what I had assumed, and I was wrong. It was not that room as it stood at that moment, six hundred kilometres away, with the blinds down and somebody's cold coffee sitting on the table from Friday afternoon.

It was a photograph.

The chair was wedged under the door handle.

I had put that chair there. I had dragged it across the carpet and jammed it up under the handle with my own hands—and afterwards I had taken it away again and put it back at the table, and shifted the table eighteen inches to the left, and stood two chairs on top of a stain in the carpet, and walked out, and smiled at a man I had never met, and said all yours.

That room had not looked like that for four days.

And there it was in front of me, held in a pane of something that was not glass, on a plain on another world: a cold little meeting room with a chair wedged under the door handle and a wall standing where a wall was about to stop existing.

The screen was not showing me where the door went.

It was showing me the moment the door was made.

I lost my grip on it—the thing slipped away from me like a wet bar of soap—and the images came round again, and I caught the corridor on the second pass and held that instead, and by then my head was pounding so hard that I had my hand up over my left eye.

Vending machines. A strip light with one tube gone. A cleaner's trolley standing abandoned about ten metres up the passage with a mop in the bucket.

And it was still. Utterly still. The tube was not flickering. Nothing in the air of that corridor was moving. It was a photograph of a place I had been standing in a few minutes earlier, taken at the precise instant I put my thumb down on the indent, and it was going to sit on that screen looking exactly like that for as long as the screen existed.

And then it slipped, and the amber thing came round, and I made the mistake of looking straight at it.

A room. Indoors, somewhere. Light coming into it low and warm and orange through something gauzy and half-drawn, and the corners of it dark, and no furniture that I could make out, and no door, and nothing on the walls, and not one single feature anywhere in the whole of it that told me what country it was in or what hour of the day it was.

And there was dust hanging in the air of it.

A great deal of dust, turning in the light—except that it was not turning, because nothing in that image was doing anything at all. It was hanging. Suspended. Stopped dead in the act of drifting, a whole column of it standing motionless in a shaft of amber light.

And dust did not hang in the air of a room unless something had disturbed it.

Somebody had moved in there. Somebody had come into that room, or crossed it, or pulled at a curtain, or set something down—and the air had lifted, and the dust had come up off whatever it had been lying on, and it had still been up in the air and turning over in the light at the exact instant a doorway to another world was opened in that room.

And it had not been opened by me.

I lost it. The image went, and the whole thing came apart in my hands and went back to riffling, and I stood on that plain and let it, because I could not have held on to anything at all just then.

And then the voice came. It did not travel, and it did not come through the air, and it had no direction and no body and no accent and no age. It simply arrived, complete, in the middle of my own head—the same voice from the meeting room and the same voice from the clifftop, patient, unhurried, and entirely uninterested in whether I was ready for it.

Make your selection.

And I stood there in the dust with the wind coming in off a sea that made no sound, in a pair of trousers I was going to have to walk through an airport in, with a boarding pass on a telephone in my pocket.

Two rooms that I had opened. And a third one that I had not.

And I did not interrogate it. I did not ask the obvious question, or work the problem, or do any single one of the things I have been paid to do for eleven years. I hauled at that screen with my head splitting and my hand over my eye, and I made it come round, and I chased the amber room past twice and would not look at it—and then I got the corridor, and I got hold of the corridor, and I held it.

The vending machines. The mop. The strip light with one tube gone.

And I meant it.

And the screen burst.

The whole pane went at once—colour tearing across it from the middle outwards, blue and violet and a green that has no name, the churn coming up through the surface and swallowing the corridor and the trolley and the flickering tube—and it was standing open on that plain with its base in the red dust, roaring at me without making any sound at all, throwing its light out across two thousand acres and casting no shadow anywhere.

And I walked into it.