Some part of me calmly judges the distance we cover, and counts:
Ninety-three, ninety-two,
ninety-one
... I mumble random numbers to myself, and when that fails, I reset the count arbitrarily:
Eighty-one, eighty-seven, eighty-six, eighty-five, eighty-nine . . .
A new universe, of light, stale air, noise-and people,
countless people —
explodes into being around me. I keep pushing the man on the door, until someone runs towards me and gently prises me away. Elaine. She guides me over to the front steps of a house, while another Runner with a first-aid kit approaches my bloodied passenger. Groups of people stand or sit around electric lanterns, filling the streets and front yards as far as I can see. I point them out to Elaine. ‘Look. Aren’t they beautiful?’
‘John? You OK? Get your breath. It’s over.’
‘Oh, fuck.’ I glance at my watch. ‘Twenty-one minutes. Forty-five per cent.’ I laugh, hysterically. ‘I was afraid of
forty-five per cent?’
My heart is working twice as hard as it needs to. I pace for a while, until the dizziness begins to subside. Then I flop down on the steps beside Elaine.
A while later, I ask, ‘Any others still out there?’
‘No.’
‘Great.’ I’m starting to feel almost lucid. ‘So . . . how did you go?’
She shrugs. ‘OK. A sweet little girl. She’s with her parents somewhere round here. No complications; favourable geometry.’ She shrugs again. Elaine is like that; favourable geometry or not, it’s never a big deal.
I recount my own experience, leaving out the apparition. I should talk to the medical people first, straighten out what kind of hallucination is or isn’t possible, before I start spreading the word that I took a pot shot at a glowing blue pipe organ from the future.
Anyway, if I did any good, I’ll know soon enough. If The Intake
does
start drifting away from the planet, that shouldn’t take long to make news; I have no idea at what rate the parting would take place, but surely the very next manifestation would be highly unlikely to be on the Earth’s surface. Deep in the crust, or halfway into space—
I shake my head. There’s no use building up my hopes, prematurely, when I’m still not sure that any of it was real.
Elaine says, ‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
I check the time again. Twenty-nine minutes. Thirty-three per cent. I glance down the street impatiently. We can see out into the wormhole, of course, but the border is clearly delineated by the sudden drop in illumination, once outward-bound light can no longer penetrate. When The Intake moves on, though, it won’t be a matter of looking for subtle shifts in the lighting. While the wormhole is in place, its effects violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics (biased thermal motion, for a start, clearly decreases entropy). In parting, it more than makes amends; it
radially homogenises
the space it occupied, down to a length scale of about a micron. To the rock two hundred metres beneath us, and the atmosphere above
— both already highly uniform — this will make little difference, but every house, every garden, every blade of grass — every structure visible to the naked eye — will vanish. Nothing will remain but radial streaks of fine dust, swirling out as the high-pressure air in The Core is finally free to escape.
Thirty-five minutes. Twenty-six per cent. I look around at the weary survivors; even for those who left no family or friends behind, the sense of relief and thankfulness at having reached safety has no doubt faded. They — we — just want the waiting to be over. Everything about the passage of time, everything about the wormhole’s uncertain duration, has reversed its significance. Yes, the thing might set us free at any moment — but so long as it hasn’t, we’re as likely as not to be stuck here for eighteen more minutes.
Forty minutes. Twenty-one per cent.
‘Ears are really going to pop tonight,’ I say. Or worse; on rare occasions, the pressure in The Core can grow so high that the subsequent decompression gives rise to the bends. That’s at least another hour away, though — and if it started to become a real possibility, they’d do an air drop of a drug that would cushion us from the effect.
Fifty minutes. Fifteen per cent.
Everyone is silent now; even the children have stopped crying.
‘What’s your record?’ I ask Elaine.
She rolls her eyes. ‘Fifty-six minutes. You were there. Four years ago.’
‘Yeah. I remember.’
‘Just relax. Be patient.’
‘Don’t you feel a little silly? I mean, if I’d known, I would have taken my time.’
One hour. Ten per cent. Elaine has dozed off, her head against my shoulder. I’m starting to feel drowsy myself, but a nagging thought keeps me awake.
I’ve always assumed that the wormhole moves because its efforts to stay put eventually fail — but what if the truth is precisely the opposite? What if it moves because its efforts to move have always, eventually, succeeded? What if the navigator breaks away to try again, as quickly as it can — but its crippled machinery can do no better than a fifty-fifty chance of success, for every eighteen minutes of striving?
Maybe I’ve put an end to that striving. Maybe I’ve brought The Intake, finally, to rest.
Eventually, the pressure itself can grow high enough to be fatal. It takes almost five hours, it’s a one-in-one-hundred-thousand case, but it has happened once already, there’s no reason at all it couldn’t happen again. That’s what bothers me most: I’d never know. Even if I saw people dying around me, the moment would never arrive when I knew, for certain, that this was the final price.
Elaine stirs without opening her eyes.
‘Still?’
‘Yeah.’ I put an arm around her; she doesn’t seem to mind.
‘Well. Don’t forget to wake me when it’s over.’
* * * *
APPROPRIATE LOVE
‘Your husband is going to survive. There’s no question about it.’
I closed my eyes for a moment and almost screamed with relief. At some point during the last thirty-nine sleepless hours, the uncertainty had become far worse than the fear, and I’d almost succeeded in convincing myself that when the surgeons had said it was touch and go, they’d meant there was no hope at all.
‘However, he
is
going to need a new body. I don’t expect you want to hear another detailed account of his injuries, but there are too many organs damaged, too severely, for individual transplants or repairs to be a viable solution.’
I nodded. I was beginning to like this Mr Allenby, despite the resentment I’d felt when he’d introduced himself: at least he looked me squarely in the eye and made clear, direct statements. Everyone else who’d spoken to me since I’d stepped inside the hospital had hedged their bets; one specialist had handed me a Trauma Analysis Expert System’s print-out, with one hundred and thirty-two ‘prognostic scenarios’ and their respective probabilities.
A new body.
That didn’t frighten me at all. It sounded so clean, so simple. Individual transplants would have meant cutting Chris open, again and again — each time risking complications, each time subjecting him to a form of assault, however beneficial the intent. For the first few hours, a part of me had clung to the absurd hope that the whole thing had been a mistake; that Chris had walked away from the train wreck, unscratched; that it was someone else in the operating theatre — some thief who had stolen his wallet. After forcing myself to abandon this ludicrous fantasy and accept the truth — that he had been injured, mutilated, almost to the point of death — the prospect of a new body, pristine and whole, seemed an almost equally miraculous reprieve.
Allenby went on, ‘Your policy covers that side of things completely; the technicians, the surrogate, the handlers.’
I nodded again, hoping that he wouldn’t insist on going into all the details. I
knew
all the details. They’d grow a clone of Chris, intervening
in utero
to prevent its brain from developing the capacity to do anything more than sustain life. Once born, the clone would be forced to a premature, but healthy, maturity, by means of a sequence of elaborate biochemical lies, simulating the effects of normal ageing and exercise at a sub-cellular level. Yes, I still had misgivings — about hiring a woman’s body, about creating a brain-damaged ‘child’ — but we’d agonised about these issues when we’d decided to include the expensive technique in our insurance policies. Now was
not
the time to have second thoughts.
‘The new body won’t be ready for almost two years. In the mean time, the crucial thing, obviously, is to keep your husband’s brain alive. Now, there’s no prospect of him regaining consciousness in his present situation, so there’s no compelling reason to try to maintain his other organs.
That jolted me at first — but then I thought:
Why not?
Why not cut Chris free from the wreck of his body, the way he’d been cut free from the wreck of the train? I’d seen the aftermath of the crash replayed on the waiting room TV: rescue workers slicing away at the metal with their clean blue lasers, surgical and precise. Why not complete the act of liberation?
He
was his brain — not his crushed limbs, his shattered bones, his bruised and bleeding organs. What better way could there be for him to await the restoration of health, than in a perfect, dreamless sleep, with no risk of pain, unencumbered by the remnants of a body that would ultimately be discarded?
‘I should remind you that your policy specifies that the least costly medically sanctioned option will be used for life support while the new body is being grown.’
I almost started to contradict him, but then I remembered: it was the only way that we’d been able to shoehorn the premiums into our budget; the base rate for body replacements was so high that we’d had to compromise on the frills. At the time, Chris had joked, ‘I just hope they don’t get cryonic storage working in our lifetimes. I don’t much fancy you grinning up at me from the freezer, every day for two years.’
‘You’re saying you want me to keep nothing but his brain alive —
because that’s the cheapest
method?’
Allenby frowned sympathetically. ‘I know, it’s unpleasant having to think about costs, at a time like this. But I stress that the clause refers to
medically sanctioned
procedures. We certainly wouldn’t insist that you do anything unsafe.’
I nearly said, angrily: You won’t
insist
that I do
anything.
I didn’t, though; I didn’t have the energy to make a scene — and it would have been a hollow boast. In theory, the decision would be mine alone. In practice, Global Assurance were paying the bills. They couldn’t dictate treatment, directly — but if I couldn’t raise the money to bridge the gap, I knew I had no choice but to go along with whatever arrangements they were willing to fund.
I said, ‘You’ll have to give me some time, to talk to the doctors, to think things over.’
‘Yes, of course. Absolutely. I should explain, though, that of all the various options—’
I put up a hand to silence him.
‘Please.
Do we have to go into this right now? I told you, I need to talk to the doctors. I
need
to get some sleep. I know: eventually, I’m going to have to come to terms with all the details . . . the different life-support companies, the different services they offer, the different kinds of machines . . . whatever. But it can wait for twelve hours, can’t it?
Please.’
It wasn’t just that I was desperately tired, probably still in shock — and beginning to suspect that I was being railroaded into some off-the-shelf ‘package solution’ that Allenby had already costed down to the last cent. There was a woman in a white coat standing nearby, glancing our way surreptitiously every few seconds, as if waiting for the conversation to end. I hadn’t seen her before, but that didn’t prove that she wasn’t part of the team looking after Chris; they’d sent me six different doctors already. If she had news, I wanted to hear it.
Allenby said, ‘I’m sorry, but if you could just bear with me for a few more minutes, I really
do
need to explain something.’
His tone was apologetic, but tenacious. I didn’t feel tenacious at all; I felt like I’d been struck all over with a rubber mallet. I didn’t trust myself to keep arguing without losing control — and anyway, it seemed like letting him say his piece would be the fastest way to get rid of him. If he snowed me under with details that I wasn’t ready to take in, then I’d just switch off, and make him repeat it all later.
I said, ‘Go on.’
‘Of all the various options, the least costly doesn’t involve a life-support
machine
at all. There’s a technique called biological life support that’s recently been perfected in Europe. Over a two-year period, it’s more economical than other methods by a factor of about twenty. What’s more, the risk profile is extremely favourable.’
‘Biological life support? I’ve never even heard of it.’
‘Well, yes, it is quite new, but I assure you, it’s down to a fine art.’
‘Yes, but
what is it?
What does it actually entail?’
‘The brain is kept alive by sharing a second party’s blood supply.’
I stared at him.
‘What?
You mean . . . create some two-headed . . . ?’
After so long without sleep, my sense of reality was already thinly stretched. For a moment, I literally believed that I was dreaming — that I’d fallen asleep on the waiting room couch and dreamed of good news, and now my wish-fulfilling fantasy was decaying into a mocking black farce, to punish me for my ludicrous optimism.
But Allenby didn’t whip out a glossy brochure, showing satisfied customers beaming cheek-to-cheek with their hosts. He said, ‘No, no, no. Of course not. The brain is removed from the skull completely, and encased in protective membranes, in a fluid-filled sac. And it’s sited internally.’
‘Internally?
Where,
internally?’
He hesitated, and stole a glance at the white-coated woman, who was still hovering impatiently nearby. She seemed to take this as some kind of signal, and began to approach us. Allenby, I realised, hadn’t meant her to do so, and for a moment he was flustered — but he soon regained his composure, and made the best of the intrusion.