“What do you mean ‘team shrink’?” Charli snapped.
“Just what I said,” retorted Shelley. “That’s your qualification, isn’t it? Your key skill.”
“Oh, and yours is…?” Charli would never have let Shelley goad her like this a few weeks ago, never have let their discussion move onto an argument and into a full-scale row. “Because I’m not sure what use a spin doctor is to us out here.”
“PR exec,” said Shelley, tightly.
Good
, thought Charli,
I’ve got to her. See how she likes it
. Then she added, “But you’re meant to be our beloved leader, even if that was naked nepotism.”
“Why yes,” said Charli, “my position is connected to having been married to the project’s chief scientist, I won’t deny that. Because I lived with Rory I had – still have – a higher level of knowledge of the portal than the rest of you. And I’m also more qualified to manage people than anyone else. If you didn’t like that, you shouldn’t have volunteered for the project. Most people have slightly less drastic mid-life crises than trying to run away to another world.”
“It’s a pretty dysfunctional response to grief, too.” Before Charli could defend herself Shelly continued, “What I was saying about your position is true though. Given that you are our leader, how come you’re spending so much time wandering round the city? You’re meant to be there for us, aren’t you?”
“I am, if anyone wants me. They don’t. And it’s not like anything I – or any of us - can do is going to change things. We need to accept our situation.”
“You’re losing the fucking plot, Charli,” said Shelley, and walked off.
The insult did not hurt as much as it should have.
Control, I’m afraid that Ranjit hasn’t succeeded. He also injured himself in the attempt. I think he threw himself at the portal. He’s bruised, perhaps concussed. Hassan has sedated him. We’ll report any further developments.
Charli knew about denial; she had studied its mechanics, and had seen it in operation in the many teams she had managed throughout her administrative career. Part of her knew Shelley had a point; she was neglecting her duties. But why not? Ranjit had devoted himself to his work, Shelly and Hassan had each other. Why shouldn’t she enjoy the city she was coming to love?
She only realised her ulterior motive when she found the next figurine.
Again, it was in a location that had been empty before, this time near ground level. Charli didn’t hesitate: she sat down and reached out eagerly.
The rush this time was not quite the same. Less intense: more familiar. Almost as if something already inside her was being enhanced. And the afterglow was different: instead of the sense of reverence and beauty she felt an incredible peace, and a surety that she could bring harmony to those around her, if only she could get them to see the wonders they walked among. When she recovered enough to look around her, the colours of the city seemed brighter and her body felt more alive. And the silence sang to her.
She rushed back to the camp; this time she should tell them, and it would bring them together, and even if, as Charli had now come to suspect, there would never be a way back, it wouldn’t matter.
There was no one there. Charli didn’t panic: she was beyond panic. Ranjit would still be at the portal. Shelley and Hassan were probably out and about somewhere. They’d come back when they were ready.
Control: Hassan’s disappeared. The three of us are going to look for him now.
“When did you last see him?” Charli had to force the concern into her voice, fighting the calm veil that had descended over her.
“This morning. He said he was going out for a walk. Like you keep doing, you know?”
“Charli! Shelley!”
They both turned at Ranjit’s shout, drifting up from the platform outside the common room window.
“I’ve found him.”
Charli wasn’t surprised that Hassan was unconscious. He’d collapsed on a high platform, a step away from a steep slope.
Shelley stayed with him. The next day Hassan died, as Charli knew he would. Shelley insisted that she and Ranjit help her carry his body back to base camp. Ranjit looked to her for guidance, and after a moment’s thought she agreed. The flesh was nothing, but she may as well humour Shelley.
It wasn’t as though Charli spent much time at the camp anyway. She spent her days, and some nights, walking the city. She knew now that it had not been built in the same way humans build things. It had grown here. Or coalesced. There were no words in her limited human vocabulary to express the concepts nibbling at the edge of her consciousness. This was like waiting for an inevitable revelation, but the more she tried to analyse the feeling, to pin it down, the faster it receded. Which was why she needed to keep looking for the figurines.
She still tried to reconnect, when she remembered. She knew, intellectually, that Ranjit and Shelley were her responsibility.
She also knew that Andresh’s and Hassan’s deaths were her fault. The others had no idea. Shelley was panicking about alien diseases, but whatever killed Andresh and Hassan wasn’t a disease. It was a condition twenty-first century science had no concept of, like dying of a broken heart. She had actually thought she might do that, when Rory went. She could barely remember that pain now.
She needed very little sleep these days, but whenever she did rest she dreamt constantly. Not about Rory again; the dreams almost felt as if they belonged to someone else, and they evaporated when she opened her eyes.
Control, there’s only me and Shelley left now.
Ranjit jumped off the portal platform. He left a note. It said, ‘I’m so sorry I couldn’t get us home.’
That’s all.
Charli decided to move up to the camp Ranjit had made at the portal. There was an element of guilt in her decision, she observed coolly: she knew she should have seen the signs in him, spotted that he was low enough to kill himself. That was her job. Had been her job.
When she told Shelley she was going to the portal, the other woman screamed at her. “You can’t!”
“Are you worried about your garden? You can still tend it, if you like.” Not that Charli was concerned with food much anymore.
“Sod the fucking garden. You see everything around you as puzzles to be solved, Charli, but we’re
people
. Were people. Most of us are
dead
now. You don’t care about anyone or anything, do you?”
“I cared about Rory.”
“Really?”
“When he died,” Charli paused, able now to look at the gap her husband’s death had torn in her without feeling the pain, “my heart died too.”
“So you’re sure he’s dead?”
“What do you mean?”
“I saw his file. I saw quite a lot of files, some of which I don’t think you ever knew about.”
“What? How?”
“Oh, the how was just… I persuaded someone. That’s my talent.”
“Your talent… yes. Yes it is. Whore.”
“What?”
“Your archetype. You use affection, attention, and of course sex, to get what you want –”
“– why you –”
“– yes, because Andresh was an ascetic and spiritual seeker, Hassan was a healer and mediator. Ranjit was a logical explainer, a teacher; he despaired because nothing made sense and he had no one to explain it to anyway. Of course! That’s it: archetypes. It’s all about archetypes.”
“I have no idea what you’re on about, Charli.”
Charli looked at Shelley, coming back to the present conversation. “It doesn’t matter. Not to you. What did you find out about Rory?”
“The Foundation would never let him go through. He was too valuable. After all, he’d come up with the design in the first place. In a dream, apparently.”
Charli thought back to her old life, so distant now. “He was concerned they might not let him go. But he said he’d persuade them. And then he disappeared. Killed himself.” That betrayal, so unexpected, so complete; she’d nearly died of it too.
“Disappeared, yes. Killed himself, no. They found his car, his apparent suicide note, but not his body.”
“I know that. The river was in flood –”
“I think he came here. He built the portal, so of course he could come through it, but because the powers that be thought he might be able to build another, he knew he would never be
allowed
to go through. And he cared about the portal more than he cared about you, Charli. So he faked his death and came through. When he got here, he trashed the probe that would have filmed him leaving the platform. It all fits.”
“Yes,” said Charli, slowly, “it does.”
“What? You call me a whore then agree with my theory? What the hell have you become?”
“I’m not sure. You work it out, if it matters to you. I’m going back to the portal. I’m going to bring this back to everyone, this revelation.” Because the alternative, the seductive, dangerous alternative was that she would just keep searching for the figurines, and never stop.
Shelley shouted after her, “
What
revelation?”
Charli ignored her.
She fired up Ranjit’s computer more out of curiosity than because she expected to find anything of use. Somewhat to her surprise she understood what he had been trying to do at once.
The key was light, or rather EM emissions. Solid objects couldn’t pass back through the portal, but radio waves could. What she needed to do was convert herself to light.
It sounded crazy, but six months ago a portal to another world had sounded crazy.
But it had been beyond Ranjit’s abilities.
Ah, so that had been the final straw, the reason he jumped.
Was it beyond hers? Her mind was so much sharper, so much bigger, than it had been.
But she needed more. She needed to find and absorb another statuette.
Except there wasn’t one to be found. She searched for the best part of a day, climbing the steepest steps, descending down to the shadowed ground, looking into every room she passed.
As she ascended the staircase back up to the portal platform, she heard something. A tiny sound, too faint to identify, but enough to disturb the perfect silence. She hurried up the last few steps.
Her camp had been destroyed. The modulating laser, Ranjit’s laptop: all smashed.
As Charli stood there, staring at the devastation, Shelley stepped out from behind the warped mirror of the portal. She was holding the hand-gun the team had been issued in case they had, despite the evidence of the probe, found any hostiles. Charli had forgotten about the gun. They had all had basic training but, on Charli’s recommendation, Hassan had been looking after the weapon. Thanks to his unpleasant childhood in Africa, Hassan both knew how to use a gun, and would be unwilling to do so lightly.
“I found one too,” said Shelley, conversationally.
Charli flinched to hear the silence broken. “One what?” she made herself say.
“You know what. A statue.”
Charli said nothing. Part of her, the part that had arrived here, felt vindicated; in occasional cold, logical moments, when she stopped to think, she had worried at the lack of corroborating evidence for her experiences. Save for the dead team members, she might have thought she was going mad.
Shelley advanced on her. “Stop pretending, Charli. You’ve obviously found more than one. You’ve changed so much. I want to know what you know, what you’re planning.”
“No.”
“I’m the one with the gun, Charli.”
“So you are.” Charli rushed her. It wasn’t a conscious decision, and her mind caught up a fraction of a second later, and was appalled.
The gun clicked.
Charli barged into Shelley. Neither of them knew how to fight. They were just grappling, wrestling. Then Charli managed to knock the gun out of Shelley’s hand; Shelley’s gaze followed it, just for a moment, then caught as the gun fell.
Everything seemed to slow down. Charli knew she was fated to push her, and that Shelley was fated to step back. Once. Again, because she was off-balance now. Then again.
And then there was nothing to step back onto.
She didn’t make a sound as she fell. Charli experienced brief gratitude and respect towards her for that.
The gun must not have been loaded. Hassan had probably emptied it, when he saw how things were going.
Charli looked around. She was unsurprised to find a figurine lying in front of the portal. It hadn’t been there earlier. She reached out for it.
This time, the rush knocked her unconscious instantly.