The Network

"I had not been opening doors. I had been installing them. And a door, once it is in, does not much care who walks through it."

The sound hit me first, exactly as it had the first time, and it very nearly put me on the floor of a service corridor in Melbourne Airport.

Three vending machine compressors. A strip light ticking overhead. A tannoy going somewhere a long way off, muffled by two hundred metres of building, telling somebody that the final call for their flight had been made. And underneath the whole of it that enormous soft roar of six thousand people going about their day, which I had walked straight past without hearing and which now came at me like a wall.

And the smell, which was worse than the noise. After the mineral nothing of that plain—air that had never in its entire existence carried the scent of anything organic—the corridor came at me as an assault. Floor polish. Disinfectant. Old coffee. Hot electrics off the vending machines. The faint sweetish reek of whatever was rotting away in the bin I had dropped my cup into. It was the smell of a place where things live, and eat, and decay, and I stood in it with my eyes watering and could not have said whether I was appalled by it or grateful for it.

I turned round. The wall was a wall.

Painted plasterboard. The scuff at knee height. The long grey smear where something had been dragged along it. There was nothing on it anywhere to show that anything at all had happened, and I put my palm flat against it and it was cool and slightly gritty under the paint and it did absolutely nothing whatever, and I stood there with my hand on it like a fool.

Then I looked down at myself.

I was red to the elbow. Both hands, and both forearms up to where I had pushed my sleeves back. My right knee, where I had gone down into the dust, was a great crescent of it soaked right into the weave. There was red across the front of both thighs. There was red in the laces of my shoes and packed hard into the welt where the sole met the upper—and when I moved my foot a little of it sifted out onto the lino and lay there in a small ochre drift.

And behind me, running from the wall to where I was standing, in that fine red powder that was not like any dust on this planet, were two clear footprints.

I had done this before, and that is the unforgivable part of it. I had walked out of a wall in a government office in precisely this condition, and I had spent forty minutes on my knees blotting a carpet and flushing another world down a toilet in three goes—and I had learned nothing from it at all. I had gone through that wall with a plan that had ten seconds in it, and a great deal of very satisfying arithmetic about cameras and cleaners, and not one single line anywhere in it about what I was going to be wearing when I came back.

The trolley was still there, and it was the only mercy in the whole business. Ten metres up the passage with the mop still standing in the bucket, exactly as it had been—which meant that nobody had come, and that nobody had walked round that corner and found a doorway to another world standing open in their corridor, and that whatever the cleaner was doing, they were still doing it a very long way from me.

So I got down on the floor and cleaned it with the sleeve of my own jacket, and it took a great deal longer than it should have done, because that dust did not want to be gathered up. It went into the lino. It went down into the grouting at the edges of the run and settled there, and I got up what I could and made a considerably worse job of the rest—and at the end of it there was a faint rust-coloured shadow lying across a metre of the floor of that corridor which I could not lift, and I stood up and looked at it and made myself walk away.

Somewhere in that building there is a service corridor with a stain on the floor and a wall that is not a wall.

The lavatory outside had a folding yellow sign in front of it saying CLOSED FOR CLEANING, and I went into it anyway, and it was empty, and it had not been cleaned—which told me a great deal about where the cleaner was not, and absolutely nothing whatever about where the cleaner was.

And I stood at a basin in an airport lavatory and watched Clivilius come off me and go down a plughole for the second time in my life.

The water went orange. Properly orange, silt-thick, spiralling away and taking a piece of another world down into the sewers of the city of Melbourne—and I scrubbed at my forearms and it kept coming and it kept coming. I did my face. I did my neck. I got my head under the tap and rubbed at my scalp, and the water ran red off the back of my skull, and I stood bent over that basin with my eyes shut and let it run.

And I dug at the beds of my fingernails with the corner of a folded paper towel, one hand and then the other, ten fingers, every one of them—and they stayed dark, exactly as they had stayed dark the last time, and I scrubbed until the skin around them was pink and stinging and they were still dark.

The trousers were beyond anything. I did what I could with a wet towel and made mud, which I knew perfectly well I was going to do and did anyway, and in the end I got most of it off the knee and left the rest, and stepped back and looked at myself in the mirror.

A man with wet hair standing up in points and a great rust-coloured bruise across one knee and his eyes gone somewhere I did not care for at all. Entirely capable of walking onto an aeroplane. Entirely capable of being looked at, and glanced past, and forgotten.

And it was while I was standing there with my hands under the tap and the water finally beginning to run clear, that the whole of it arrived.

It did not come as a flash. Nothing ever does with me, whatever people say about that sort of thing. It came the way a thing comes when the parts of it have all been going quietly into the same drawer for an hour and then somebody opens the drawer.

The screen had shown me two rooms.

Meeting Room 4B. And the corridor.

And it had shown them to me from the other side. Standing out on a plain on another world, I had been offered a choice of two locations on Earth—not a memory of them, and not a picture of them, but the rooms themselves, held, available, waiting to be selected. And I had selected one of them, and it had opened, and I had walked through it.

Which meant that Meeting Room 4B was still sitting on that screen.

A cold little room on the fourth floor of a government building on the other side of the country, with a stakeholder meeting booked into it for the start of the week, and a stain in the carpet underneath two chairs, and a wall that every single person in that department believed to be a wall.

It was not a wall. It had not been a wall since the afternoon I first put my thumb down in it. It was a door, and it was a door that happened to be shut.

I stood at that basin with the tap running and my hands under the water and could not make myself move.

Because I had assumed—right from the beginning, from the very first time, and I had never once gone back and examined the assumption, which is unforgivable in a man who does what I do for a living—I had assumed that a portal was an event. A thing that happens and then stops happening. Press the device, a hole opens, walk through, come back, the hole closes; and the wall is a wall again and the world is the world again and nothing whatever has been left behind.

That was not what it was. That was not remotely what it was.

Every time I had pressed that thing against a wall, I had not opened a door.

I had installed one.

And it stayed installed. It went onto a list, and it sat there in whatever that screen was—held, recorded, permanent—and it could be opened again from the far side, at any hour, by anybody who could get to that screen and mean it hard enough.

I had put a permanent doorway into another world into a meeting room in a government building where thirty people came to work every morning. And I had just put a second one into the wall of a service corridor at Melbourne Airport, which is a secured Commonwealth facility, four gates down from an aeroplane with two hundred people sitting on it.

And I could not take them out again. I did not know how. There was no clause for it. There had been nothing in Seth's letter about closing an account, and there had been nothing anywhere on that screen that looked remotely like a means of removing something from it—and even if there had been, I would not have known how to use it, because I did not know how to use any of this, and there was nobody alive that I could ask.

Two doors. Made by me. Both of them in buildings that belonged to other people.

I turned the tap off. And I stood in the silence of an empty lavatory that somebody had put a sign in front of, and said out loud, to a mirror: "You are not carrying it."

Because that was what I had thought I was doing. That was the shape I had been holding the whole thing in since the laneway. A man with a bag. A courier. A custodian. Somebody who had been handed an object and was moving it from one place to another and would eventually be able to put it down.

I had not been carrying anything. I had been building—every time I pressed it I had been adding to something, and I had not asked what, and I had not asked how many, and I had never once asked whether it could be undone. I had let a device do my thinking for me, because it did not seem to want anything, and it did not seem to cost anything, and it only hurt the once.

And then, standing at that basin with the water off and my hands dripping and my ears going, I saw the rest of it.

There had been a third image on that screen.

A room with amber light in it, and something gauzy half-drawn across a window I could not see, and dust hanging in the air of it—stopped, suspended, frozen dead in the act of drifting.

I had not opened that room.

I had stood out on that plain with my head splitting and my hand over my eye, and I had chased that image round twice and refused to look at it, and I had told myself it was because my head hurt and because I had a flight and because there was no time. And none of that was true. I had not looked at it because some part of me had already worked out what it was, and had very sensibly declined to tell me while I was still standing on another world with no way home except a machine I did not understand.

A location got onto that screen when somebody opened a doorway in it. That was the only route in and it was the only route there had ever been. 4B was on that list because I had pressed a device against a wall inside it. The corridor was on that list because I had pressed a device against a wall inside it. There was no other way for a room to get onto that screen, none, not one.

And the amber room was on the list.

Which meant that somebody, somewhere, had taken a Portal Key out of my group of five, and had pointed it at a wall in a room with the curtains half-drawn, and had put their thumb down on it.

And the dust had been hanging in the air.

I have never been able to leave that alone. Dust did not hang in the air of a room unless something had disturbed it—unless a curtain had been pulled, or a drawer had come out, or a box had been lifted down off a shelf, or somebody had walked across a floor that nobody had walked across in a long time.

Somebody had been in that room. Somebody had been moving about in that room. And the air was still full of what they had stirred up, at the exact instant that a doorway into Clivilius was opened in it.

It had not been me. And it had not been Josh.

And that was not a guess. That was a deduction, and it is the coldest and the most solid one I have ever made in my life, and I made it standing at a basin in an airport lavatory with red water running off my hands.

Because if Josh had opened his—if that parcel had come to Broken Hill, and he had done what I told him and shut the door and pointed the thing at his lounge room wall—then his lounge room would have been on that screen.

It would have been the fourth image. It would have been right there, riffling past with the others: a wall, and a television, and Mason's things all over the couch.

And it was not there.

That screen gave me three locations and it gave me three only, over and over, round and round until my head split. One of them was mine. One of them was mine. And one of them was a room I had never been in.

Josh never opened it. Josh never opened it, because Josh never got it, because that parcel never arrived and never was lodged and never existed—and somebody else had it, and they had used it, and I had just been shown the room they were standing in when they did.

I could not have said how long I stayed in that lavatory. Long enough that somebody rattled the door once and went away again, presumably on account of the sign.

What I remember is standing with both hands flat on cold porcelain, leaning on them, looking down into a basin with a faint orange tidemark round the inside of it, and doing the only thing I have ever been any real use at, which is to lay a thing out in order and look at what it actually says.

One. Every activation was permanent. It went onto a list and it stayed on the list, and I did not know how to take it off.

Two. There were five devices in my group. One of them was in my trouser pocket. Three of them were in the front pocket of a backpack lying on the floor of an airport lavatory. That was four.

Three. The fifth was not lost. It had never been lost. Somebody knew precisely where that one was, because somebody was using it.

Four. And whatever they opened with it came out on the same plain that I came out on. The same two thousand acres. The same silent sea, and the same red dust, and the same manufactured floor underneath it—because it was a group, and it was my group, and the address was fixed.

Which meant that there was a stranger who could walk into Saint Phillis whenever they cared to.

And it meant that there was a stranger who could stand exactly where I had stood, in front of that screen, and be offered a choice of three locations on Earth.

And two of the three were mine.

Meeting Room 4B, on the fourth floor, where Sal kept her succulents and Verity sat with her head down doing arithmetic that nobody had asked her to do.

And a service corridor at Melbourne Airport, four gates from an aeroplane, with a mop standing in a bucket.

I had not given somebody a doorway into my world. I had given them two. And I had done it with my own thumb, and I had been extremely pleased with the second one, because it had only taken ten seconds.

I picked my bag up off the floor.