I turn left, just in time to see a trail of glowing arrows hiss into place on the road behind me.
I’m almost at my first assignment. I tap a button on my backpack and peer sideways at the display, as it switches to a plan of the target house. As soon as The Intake’s position is known, Dolores’s software starts hunting through databases, assembling a list of locations where there’s a reasonable chance that we can do some good. Our information is never complete, and sometimes just plain wrong; census data is often out of date, building plans can be inaccurate, mis-filed, or simply missing — but it beats walking blind into houses chosen at random.
I slow almost to a walk, two houses before the target, to give myself time to grow used to the effects. Running inwards lessens the outwards components — relative to the wormhole — of the body’s cyclic motions; slowing down always feels like precisely the wrong thing to do. I often dream of running through a narrow canyon, no wider than my shoulders, whose walls will stay apart only so long as I move fast enough; that’s what my body thinks of
slowing down.
The street here lies about thirty degrees off radial. I cross the front lawn of the neighbouring house, then step over a knee-high brick wall. At this angle, there are few surprises; most of what’s hidden is so easy to extrapolate that it almost seems visible in the mind’s eye. A corner of the target house emerges from the darkness on my left; I get my bearings from it and head straight for a side window. Entry by the front door would cost me access to almost half of the house, including the bedroom which Dolores’s highly erratic Room Use Predictor nominates as the one most likely to be the child’s. People can file room-use information with us directly, but few bother.
I smash the glass with a crowbar, open the window, and clamber through. I leave a small electric lamp on the windowsill — carrying it with me would render it useless — and move slowly into the room. I’m already starting to feel dizzy and nauseous, but I force myself to concentrate. One step too many, and the rescue becomes ten times more difficult. Two steps, and it’s impossible.
It’s clear that I have the right room when a dresser is revealed, piled with plastic toys, talcum powder, baby shampoo, and other paraphernalia spilling on to the floor. Then a corner of the crib appears on my left, pointed at an unexpected angle; the thing was probably neatly parallel to the wall to start with, but slid unevenly under the inwards force. I sidle up to it, then inch forwards, until a lump beneath the blanket comes into view. I hate this moment, but the longer I wait, the harder it gets. I reach sideways and lift the child, bringing the blanket with it. I kick the crib aside, then walk forwards, slowly bending my arms, until I can slip the child into the harness on my chest. An adult is strong enough to drag a small baby a short distance outwards. It’s usually fatal.
The kid hasn’t stirred; he or she is unconscious, but breathing. I shudder briefly, a kind of shorthand emotional catharsis, then I start moving. I glance at the display to recheck the way out, and finally let myself notice the time. Thirteen minutes. Sixty-one per cent. More to the point, The Core is just two or three minutes away, downhill, nonstop. One successful assignment means ditching the rest. There’s no alternative; you can’t lug a child with you, in and out of buildings; you can’t even put it down somewhere and come back for it later.
As I step through the front door, the sense of relief leaves me giddy. Either that, or renewed cerebral blood flow. I pick up speed as I cross the lawn — and catch a glimpse of a woman, shouting, ‘Wait!
Stop!’
I slow down; she catches up with me. I put a hand on her shoulder and propel her slightly ahead of me, then say, ‘Keep moving, as fast as you can. When you want to speak, fall behind me. I’ll do the same. OK?’
I move ahead of her. She says, ‘That’s my daughter you’ve got. Is she all right? Oh, please ... Is she alive?’
‘She’s fine. Stay calm. We just have to get her to The Core now. OK?’
‘I want to hold her. I want to take her.’
‘Wait until we’re safe.’
‘I want to take her there myself.’
Shit. I glance at her sideways. Her face is glistening with sweat and tears. One of her arms is bruised and blotchy, the usual symptom of trying to reach out to something unreachable.
‘I really think it would be better to wait.’
‘What right have you got? She’s
my
daughter! Give her to me!’ The woman is indignant, but remarkably lucid, considering what she’s been through. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like, to stand by that house, hoping insanely for some kind of miracle, while everyone in the neighbourhood fled past her, and the side effects made her sicker and sicker. However pointless, however idiotic her courage, I can’t help admiring it.
I’m lucky. My ex-wife, and our son and daughter, live halfway across town from me. I have no friends who live nearby. My emotional geography is very carefully arranged; I don’t give a shit about anyone who I could end up unable to save.
So what do I do — sprint away from her, leave her running after me, screaming? Maybe I should.
If I
gave her the child, though, I could check out one more house.
‘Do you know how to handle her? Never try to move her backwards, away from the darkness.
Never.’
‘I know that. I’ve read all the articles. I
know
what you’re meant to do.’
‘ OK.’ I must be crazy. We slow down to a walk, and I pass the child to her, lowering it into her arms from beside her. I realise, almost too late, that we’re at the turn-off for the second house. As the woman vanishes into the darkness, I yell after her,
‘Run!
Follow the arrows, and
run!’
I check the time. Fifteen minutes already, with all that stuffing around. I’m still alive, though — so the odds now are, as always, fifty-fifty that the wormhole will last another eighteen minutes. Of course I could die at any second — but that was equally true when I first stepped inside. I’m no greater fool now than I was then. For what that’s worth.
The second house is empty, and it’s easy to see why. The computer’s guess for the nursery is in fact a study, and the parents’ bedroom is outward’s of the child’s. Windows are open, clearly showing the path they must have taken.
A strange mood overtakes me, as I leave the house behind. The inwards wind seems stronger than ever, the road turns straight into the darkness, and I feel an inexplicable tranquillity wash over me. I’m moving as fast as I can, but the edge of latent panic, of sudden death, is gone. My lungs, my muscles, are battling all the same restraints, but I feel curiously detached from them; aware of the pain and effort, yet somehow uninvolved.
The truth is, I know exactly why I’m here. I can never quite admit it, outside — it seems too whimsical, too bizarre. Of course I’m glad to save lives, and maybe that’s grown to be part of it. No doubt I also crave to be thought of as a hero. The real reason, though, is too strange to be judged either selfless or vain:
The wormhole makes tangible the most basic truths of existence. You cannot see the future. You cannot change the past. All of life consists of running into darkness. This is why I’m here.
My body grows, not numb, but separate, a puppet dancing and twitching on a treadmill. I snap out of this and check the map, not a moment too soon. I have to turn right, sharply, which puts an end to any risk of somnambulism. Looking up at the bisected world makes my head pound, so I stare at my feet, and try to recall if the pooling of blood in my left hemisphere ought to make me more rational, or less.
The third house is in a borderline situation. The parents’ bedroom is slightly outwards from the child’s, but the doorway gives access to only half the room. I enter through a window that the parents could not have used.
The child is dead. I see the blood before anything else. I feel, suddenly, very tired. A slit of the doorway is visible, and I know what must have happened. The mother or father edged their way in, and found they could just reach the child — could take hold of one hand, but no more. Pulling inwards is resisted, but people find that confusing; they don’t expect it, and when it happens, they fight it. When you want to snatch someone you love out of the jaws of danger, you pull with all your strength.
The door is an easy exit for me, but less so for anyone who came in that way — especially someone in the throes of grief. I stare into the darkness of the room’s inwards corner, and yell, ‘Crouch down, as low as you can,’ then mime doing so. I pluck the demolition gun from my backpack, and aim high. The recoil, in normal space, would send me sprawling; here it’s a mere thump.
I step forward, giving up my own chance to use the door. There’s no immediate sign that I’ve just blasted a metre-wide hole in the wall; virtually all of the dust and debris is on the inwards side. I finally reach a man kneeling in the corner, his hands on his head; for a brief moment I think he’s alive, that he took this position to shield himself from the blast. No pulse, no respiration. A dozen broken ribs, probably; I’m not inclined to check. Some people can last for an hour, pinned between walls of brick and an invisible, third wall that follows them ruthlessly into the corner, every time they slip, every time they give ground. Some people, though, do exactly the worst thing; they squeeze themselves into the inward-most part of their prison, obeying some instinct which, I’m sure, makes sense at the time.
Or maybe he wasn’t confused at all. Maybe he just wanted it to be over.
I hoist myself through the hole in the wall. I stagger through the kitchen. The fucking plan is wrong wrong wrong, a door I’m expecting doesn’t exist. I smash the kitchen window, then cut my hand on the way out.
I refuse to glance at the map. I don’t want to know the time. Now that I’m alone, with no purpose left but saving myself, everything is jinxed. I stare at the ground, at the fleeting magic golden arrows, trying not to count them.
One glimpse of a festering hamburger discarded on the road, and I find myself throwing up. Common sense tells me to turn and face backwards, but I’m not quite that stupid. The acid in my throat and nose brings tears to my eyes. As I shake them away, something impossible happens.
A brilliant blue light appears, high up in the darkness ahead, dazzling my dark-adapted eyes. I shield my face, then peer between my fingers. As I grow used to the glare, I start to make out details.
A cluster of long, thin, luminous cylinders is hanging in the sky, like some mad upside-down pipe organ built of glass, bathed in glowing plasma. The light it casts does nothing to reveal the houses and streets below. I must be hallucinating; I’ve seen shapes in the darkness before, although never anything so spectacular, so persistent. I run faster, in the hope of clearing my head. The apparition doesn’t vanish, or waver; it merely grows closer.
I halt, shaking uncontrollably. I stare into the impossible light. What if it’s not in my head? There’s only one possible explanation. Some component of the wormhole’s hidden machinery has revealed itself. The idiot navigator is showing me its worthless soul.
With one voice in my skull screaming,
No!
and another calmly asserting that I have no choice, that this chance might never come again, I draw the demolition gun, take aim, and fire. As if some puny weapon in the hands of an amoeba could scratch the shimmering artifact of a civilisation whose failures leave us cowering in awe.
The structure shatters and implodes in silence. The light contracts to a blinding pinprick, burning itself into my vision. Only when I turn my head am I certain that the real light is gone.
I start running again. Terrified, elated. I have no idea what I’ve done, but the wormhole is, so far, unchanged. The afterimage lingers in the darkness, with nothing to wipe it from my sight. Can hallucinations leave an afterimage?
Did the navigator choose to expose itself, choose to let me
destroy it?
I trip on something and stagger, but catch myself from falling. I turn and see a man crawling down the road, and I bring myself to a rapid halt, astonished by such a mundane sight after my transcendental encounter. The man’s legs have been amputated at the thighs; he’s dragging himself along with his arms alone. That would be hard enough in normal space, but here, the effort must almost be killing him.
There are special wheelchairs which can function in the wormhole (wheels bigger than a certain size buckle and deform if the chair stalls) and if we know we’ll need one, we bring one in, but they’re too heavy for every Runner to carry one just in case.
The man lifts his head and yells, ‘Keep going! Stupid fucker!’ without the least sign of doubt that he’s not just shouting at empty space. I stare at him and wonder why I don’t take the advice. He’s huge: big-boned and heavily muscled, with plenty of fat on top of that. I doubt that I could lift him — and I’m certain that if I could, I’d stagger along more slowly than he’s crawling.
Inspiration strikes. I’m in luck, too; a sideways glance reveals a house, with the front door invisible but clearly only a metre or two inwards of where I am now. I smash the hinges with a hammer and chisel, then manoeuvre the door out of the frame and back to the road. The man has already caught up with me. I bend down and tap him on the shoulder. ‘Want to try sledding?’
I step inwards in time to hear part of a string of obscenities, and to catch an unwelcome close-up of his bloody forearms. I throw the door down on to the road ahead of him. He keeps moving; I wait until he can hear me again.
‘Yes or no?’
‘Yes,’ he mutters.
It’s awkward, but it works. He sits on the door, leaning back on his arms. I run behind, bent over, my hands on his shoulders, pushing. Pushing is the one action the wormhole doesn’t fight, and the inwards force makes it downhill all the way. Sometimes the door slides so fast that I have to let go for a second or two, to keep from overbalancing.
I don’t need to look at the map. I
know
the map, I know precisely where we are; The Core is less than a hundred metres away. In my head I recite an incantation:
The danger does not increase. The danger
does not increase.
And in my heart I know that the whole conceit of ‘probability’ is meaningless; the wormhole is reading my mind, waiting for the first sign of hope, and whether that comes fifty metres, or ten metres, or two metres from safety, that’s when it will take me.