The Call

"My brother has never once in his life believed a thing he couldn't check. I loved that about him, right up until the afternoon I needed him to believe me."

I went looking for four walls and a door, and it took me one complete circuit of the fourth floor to establish that the building did not contain any.

That was not an accident, and I knew perfectly well that it was not an accident, because I had sat in the workshops where those decisions get made, nodding along while a consultant with a clicker explained that transparency drives collaboration, and I had personally written the requirements documents that turned those words into glass.

Every meeting room was frosted on at least one side. 4B now had a man in it setting up a laptop. The two smaller rooms were booked solid until four. The kitchen had three people in it. The breakout space by the windows was a sofa sitting in the middle of a carpet. And the disabled toilet was the only lockable room in the entire building with a hard door on it, and I stood outside that toilet for several seconds genuinely considering it, and understood that I had arrived at a point in my life at which I was contemplating ringing my brother from a lavatory, and turned away.

Which left the fire stairs.

Nobody ever used the fire stairs. There were two lifts and they were perfectly adequate, and so far as I had ever been able to establish the stairwell existed principally so that a form could be signed once a year; and the door at the end of the corridor with the green running man on it had a bar across it and a sign saying THIS DOOR IS ALARMED, which it was not, and which everybody in that building had known for years.

I pushed it open and went through, and it swung shut behind me and the office went out like a light, and the heat came up around me like water.

The stairwell had been baking quietly all summer with no air conditioning and no windows that opened, and the air in it was thick and dead and about thirty degrees, and it smelled of concrete dust and old paint and the ghost of cigarettes from some era before mine.

And then the door finished closing, and it banged, and the bang went up and down the shaft.

It doubled and re-doubled, ringing off bare concrete and steel handrail, going up four floors and down four floors and coming back at me from every direction at once—and I stood there with my hand still on the door and let it happen, and something in my chest came loose.

It echoed.

I made a small noise, deliberately, just to hear it. A cough. And the cough came back off the walls, cheap and hard and unlovely, and it was the most beautiful sound I had heard in an hour, because it meant that I was in a place which could hear me. On that plain I had shouted my lungs out and the world had simply declined to take it. Here, in an ugly concrete box that smelled of paint, I coughed once and the building answered.

I sat down on the fourth step below the landing, out of the eyeline of anybody who might open the door above, and put my back against the wall.

The concrete was warm. Everything was warm. Within a minute or two I was sweating again, and the sweat ran into the raw skin around my fingernails and stung, and I sat in that hot shaft with my cuffs buttoned down over my red forearms and my hip aching and my head splitting, and looked at the fire escape diagram bolted to the wall opposite.

A little map of the fourth floor. Rooms, corridors, the two exits, the assembly point marked out on Collins Street. And a red dot with an arrow, and beside the arrow, in white capitals:

YOU ARE HERE.

I laughed out loud, and the stairwell laughed back at me, four times.

Then I got out my phone and found him.

Josh. Just that. Not Josh mobile, not Josh Cowdrey. He had been in my phone since before phones had proper names in them, and he had never needed a qualifier.

The photo was old. Him at a barbecue somewhere, holding tongs, squinting, laughing at whoever was behind the camera. He'd had more hair.

My thumb sat over it and would not go down.

When had I last actually rung him? Not messaged. Not sent him a photograph of something stupid. Rung him, and talked, and listened to him talk.

Christmas. And Christmas had not been a conversation, it had been a queue—Mum's kitchen, the good tablecloth, somebody's toddler having a catastrophe in the hallway, and Josh and me leaning against the bench saying how's work and how's the dog and you look well. Twenty minutes, and a handshake that turned into half a hug because we have never in our lives worked out which one we do.

And before that? His birthday. Eleven minutes.

Fourteen months older than me. Eighteen years in the same house. And I could not have told anybody the name of a single person he worked with.

That was not, I think, an unusual arrangement between brothers. I have known a great many men who were running precisely the same one with somebody who shared their surname—a decade of affection maintained on something like ninety minutes of conversation a year, each of them privately and quite comfortably certain that the other would come if he called.

And it had never once been tested. Not once, in thirty-three years. It had held up beautifully the entire time for the simple reason that nothing had ever been put on it, and neither of us had the faintest idea what it would actually bear.

And now I was going to ring him from a fire escape and ask him to believe in another world.

Hello, Josh. I've been to a place called Clivilius and an artificial intelligence has given me two thousand acres of it and I need you to help me build a settlement. Also I'm covered in it. Also I may be unwell.

I tried it three or four ways. I tried starting with Seth, and it sounded like a man reporting a crime. I tried starting with the portal, and it sounded like a man in the grip of something. I tried starting with I need you to keep an open mind, and heard, in my own head, in my brother's flat dry voice: Righto. Here we go.

There was no good way. There was no version of this that did not end with him frightened for me.

I pressed call before I could construct another one, and sat in a stairwell in Hobart with my heart going and listened to a phone ringing eight hundred kilometres away in a demountable office on the edge of a mine in the far west of New South Wales.

Four rings. Five.

"Hello?"

Low. Unhurried. A decade of Broken Hill worn into the vowels, so that my own brother came down the line sounding faintly like somebody else's, the way he always did on the telephone.

"Josh. Hey. It's me. Nathan."

"Yeah," he said. "I got that."

A chair creaked. Behind him, something enormous was working—a low industrial thudding, rhythmic, patient, the sound of a great deal of rock being persuaded through a great deal of machinery. Somebody said something to him and he said "Yep" without moving the phone away.

"You all right?"

And then, immediately, before I could answer—faster, harder, with the speed of a man snatching his hand off a hotplate:

"It's not Mum, is it."

"No. God, no." The words came out in a rush. "Everyone's fine. Mum's fine, Dad's fine, nobody's died, it's nothing like that."

"Right." A breath. "Right."

And I heard the relief go out of him and something else come in behind it, because his brother had just rung him on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a working week for the first time in eight months, and had opened by telling him that nobody was dead.

"So what is it."

"I need to talk to you about something." My voice did something in the middle of the sentence that I had not authorised. "Something strange."

A pause. I could see him. I could see him exactly: leaning back, one hand behind his head, staring at a ceiling tile.

"Define strange," Josh said.

"I—"

"Strange like you've seen a bloke wearing socks with sandals." The dryness came in like a man rolling up his sleeves. "Or strange like the pigeons are working for the government."

"Otherworldly strange."

The machinery thudded.

"Hang on," he said.

And then, away from the phone: "Nah, mate, give us five. Five." A scrape. Footsteps. A door, and then a change in everything—the industrial thump dropping away, replaced by a vast dry openness, a wind coming across a very large amount of nothing.

He had gone outside. He had taken it outside, away from whoever was in that room, because he did not know what was coming and he did not want it overheard.

My brother had made a decision about my dignity before I had said a single word.

"All right," Josh said. "I'm listening."

So I told him.

I told him about the Post-it note on my monitor and the way the letters had been pressed hard enough to indent the paper. I told him Seth had stood over me at Cornerstone with a day-old cut on his jaw and had not sat down, not once, not for a second, and that Seth Holder has never in ten years remained standing in a pub or a café or anywhere else if there was a chair going.

I told him about the white van with no markings on it and the man who searched the windows with his hands behind his back.

I told him about the envelope and the letter and the five small grey objects that weighed more than they should. I told him what the letter said—the ancient civilisation, the Guardians, the five of us, the choosing—and I heard how it sounded coming out of my own mouth, in a stairwell, in daylight, and I kept going anyway.

I told him I had wedged a chair under the door handle of Meeting Room 4B and pointed a device at a wall, and that the device had taken a drop of my blood without asking me for it, and that the wall had stopped existing.

And I told him about the plain. The red dust. The sun that looked exactly like our sun, and that this was the worst part. The ground with a lid on it. A sea breaking on a cliff fifty metres below me in total silence. A handprint of mine lighting up in the stone.

And a voice, in the middle of my head, that had said my name.

He did not interrupt. Not once. Not one word, the entire way through—and I have never in my life been given that much uninterrupted room by anybody, and my brother, who had a mine running behind him and a job he was supposed to be doing, stood out in the wind and let me get to the end of it.

When I stopped, there was nothing.

Just the wind, and a very long way away, a truck reversing.

I took the phone off my ear and looked at the screen to see whether the call had dropped.

It hadn't.

"Nathan," Josh said.

"Yeah."

"Are you serious."

"I've never been more serious about anything in my life."

A breath went out of him, long and slow.

"Bloody hell."

"I know."

"No—" He stopped. Started again, and his voice had changed; it had gone careful, and my brother being careful with me was somehow worse than anything else that had happened that day. "Mate, do you hear it? Do you hear what you just said to me? A door in a wall. Magic sticks. A voice in your head that knows your name and tells you it can see you." A pause. "That's not a story. That's a symptom."

"Yes."

"That's the sort of thing people say right before their families have to have a very difficult conversation about them."

"Yes."

"You're agreeing with me."

"I'm agreeing with you completely," I said, and my throat had gone tight. "If you rang me and said this, I'd say the same thing. I'd say it kinder than you're saying it. But I'd say it."

He laughed, once, and there was no humour anywhere in it.

The wind blew.

"Here's where I'm at," Josh said, and I could hear him picking his words up one at a time and looking at each of them before he used it. "I don't think you're mad. All right? I've known you thirty-three years. You're a lot of things. You're impulsive and you're a soft touch and you let Seth Holder fill your head with rubbish, but you don't invent. Seth invents. You listen to Seth inventing and then you tell me about it at Christmas and we have a laugh about it."

"Josh—"

"So if you're sitting there telling me this happened to you, then I believe that you believe it happened to you." A beat. "And that is as far as I can go down a telephone, and you know it is."

I put my head back against the concrete and shut my eyes.

"That's fair."

"It's not fair. It's just what it is." Something in him gave, slightly. "I can't do anything with a story, Nate. I've never been able to do anything with a story in my life. Give me something I can check."

And there it was. He had walked himself all the way out to the edge of it, on his own, in the wind, without the smallest assistance from me, and he had asked me for precisely the thing that was sitting in my pocket.

I looked at the fire escape diagram on the wall opposite. YOU ARE HERE.

"All right," I said. "I'll send you something."

Silence.

"Send me what?"

"Something you can check."

"Nathan." The care had gone. Something harder underneath. "Send me what?"

"When it arrives, you'll know," I said. "And I'm not going to try to explain it first, because I can't, and because every word I use is going to make it worse. That's the whole problem. That has been the whole problem since eight o'clock this morning."

The wind. The truck, somewhere, still reversing.

"Do you want me to come down?"

It went into me like something sharp.

He said it flatly, and quickly, as though he had been holding it and had decided to put it down before he lost his nerve—do you want me to come down—and for one moment I could see the whole of it. Josh in my kitchen in Battery Point. Josh sitting across a table from me with a cup of tea while I laid it all out and put the thing into his hand and watched his face while he turned it over. Him and me and the truth, in a room, together, the way it ought to be done.

Three days. He would have to sort the mine, get to Adelaide, get a flight. Three days minimum.

And Seth had told me to choose wisely and be careful, and I had been careful for precisely none of that day, and there was a red plain sitting in another world with my footprints all over it, and Seth's phone was disconnected, and I could not—I could not—sit alone in that flat for three days with three Portal Keys on my kitchen table and nobody in the world who knew.

"No," I said. "Stay there."

"Nathan—"

"Stay there. I'll send it. Just—" and my voice went, properly went, and I had to stop and take a breath in a stairwell that smelled of paint. "Just don't open it in front of anybody. Please. Whatever else you do. Promise me that."

The pause went on so long that I thought I had lost him.

"All right," Josh said, very quietly.

"Promise me."

"I promise you."

And then, after a moment, in a voice I had not heard out of him since we were teenagers:

"Nate. Are you safe?"

I sat on a concrete step with another world under my fingernails and my brother's voice in my ear asking me whether I was safe.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm fine."

Third lie of the day. I was getting quick at it.

He rang off, and the stairwell came back.

The silence in it was not like the silence out there. It had a hum in it—the building, doing whatever it is that buildings do, humming quietly through eight storeys of concrete. It sounded like a held note, and it sounded, I thought, rather like the inside of something that was alive and breathing very slowly.

I sat very still with the phone in my hand, and in stages the thing arrived that I had been outrunning all afternoon.

I had just done it to him.

I had done it to him exactly. Precisely. Step for step. A man had come to me that morning with something in his hands which he could not explain and did not fully understand, and he had refused to explain it, and he had said choose wisely, and he had said don't open it in front of anyone, and he had put it into my hands anyway and walked away and left me to find out for myself—

—and I had spent the entire afternoon in a state of quiet fury with him for doing it.

And now here I was. On a concrete step. Having just told my own brother that I could not explain, and that he would know when he saw it, and that he must not show it to anybody, and that no, he should not come.

I was Seth. I had become Seth in a single working day.

Except that Seth had said sorry.

Seth had stood over me in Purdy's Mart with his hands shaking and a cut on his jaw and he had looked me in the face and said You were the only one I could think of. I'm sorry about that. He had known exactly what he was doing to me. He had known the weight of it. And he had had the decency to name it out loud before he walked away.

I had not said sorry. I had not said anything of the kind. I had said I'm fine, and let my brother go back to work.

My thumb went to his name.

I could ring him. Right then, ten seconds after hanging up. Josh, listen. I need to tell you what I'm sending you and what it will do and I need to say sorry, properly, before it gets there.

He would never have let me post it. That was the truth of it, and I knew it while my thumb was hovering. If I had told him then, in words, what was coming, he would have talked me out of it in ninety seconds flat, because he is better at that than I am and always has been, and he would have got on a plane, and I would have spent three days alone in a flat in Battery Point with three doorways to another world in my kitchen drawer and a friend who had vanished off the network.

I did not ring him.

Nobody made me do it. I sat on a warm concrete step in a fire escape with my thumb over my brother's name for about forty seconds, entirely capable of undoing every part of it, and I put the phone back in my pocket instead.

Then I sat there a while longer, in the heat, with the building humming around me.

YOU ARE HERE, said the little red dot on the wall.

At length I got up, and my hip complained, and my head complained, and I stood in that stairwell and understood that the next thing was going to be the hardest part, and that there was no possible way of avoiding it.

I was going to have to write it down.

I was going to have to sit at my own desk, in an open-plan office, on a Wednesday afternoon, and find the words to put into an envelope with a piece of impossible technology, and there were not going to be any words, and I was going to have to find them anyway.