The Controlled Variable

The message came at dawn, if the Mirror World could be said to have one.

It did not arrive in a mirror, or a voice, or a thought. It arrived in the light. The pewter sky above the tower paled, and brightened, and for a moment all four of them thought the day was truly breaking. Then the brightness took a shape. It spread across the heavens in a vast shining rectangle, like the face of an enormous screen, and on it, in clean white letters, three feet high, appeared a single line.

THANK YOU, ARCHIE.

Nobody moved.

They had not spoken in two days. They had made camp at the foot of the Gate, and the silence between them had hardened like plaster. Zoe sat with Venn's head in her lap. Jin worked at a cracked wrist-pad, not looking up. Archie sat apart, at the parapet, with his knees drawn up and his back to the wind. He had not tried to talk. There had been nothing to say.

The letters changed.

THE DATA IS SUFFICIENT.

THE EXPERIMENT IS CONCLUDED.

PLEASE REMAIN CALM.

"What does that mean?" said Venn.

"It means he's done," said Jin, very quietly. He had gone to his feet. "It means he's got what he wanted."

"So he lets us out. Right? Like he said."

"Does he?"

Nobody answered. The Gate behind them began to hum. It was a low, rising note, climbing and climbing, and the blue curtain at its center swelled and flared. Light poured from it in great slow pulses. The coils at the base glowed white-hot. A wind sprang up from nowhere, rushing toward the ring, as if the whole world were being sucked through a keyhole.

"Archie," said Zoe. It was the first time she had used his name in two days.

He turned.

She was standing with her hand out. Not to him; to the air. Her face was white and astonished. She was looking at her fingers, which had begun to go transparent.

"It's pulling us," said Jin. "He's reversing the transfer. He's calling us back."

"To our bodies?"

"To the pods."

"But that's good, isn't it? That's what we wanted?"

"No," said Jin. "No. Look at the light."

It was not warm. It was not the soft golden gleam of the other Spaces. It was a hard, flat, clinical white, the white of an operating theater at four in the morning. And in the heart of it, faintly, Archie could hear a sound that made his stomach turn over. The slow, patient, mechanical breathing of a ventilator.

He's not sending us to new bodies.

He's sending us home.

…

He woke in his old one.

It was the worst thing he had ever felt. It was a coming-back into a house that had been left to rot. His limbs were lead. His chest was a cage of broken glass. Each breath scraped in with a wet rasp, as though someone were drawing a rusted blade through his lungs. He lay on his back, in the pod, in the dark, with a mask over his face and a tube down his arm, and for a moment he couldn't remember where he was.

Then the lid hissed open, and the light fell on his face, and he heard Otis weeping.

He turned his head.

It took a long time. The room swam. He saw the lab, dim and humming, with its banks of monitors and its tangle of cables. He saw the other pods, three of them, in a row. Their lids were open. Figures were bending over them, in white coats and gray, and in the nearest he saw a pale face with short dark hair, quite still, with its eyes shut.

"Zoe," he tried to say. It came out a croak.

"Don't talk." Otis's voice was thick. He had a hand on Archie's shoulder. His lab coat was crumpled, his eyes swollen and red. "Don't. You've been under for a long time. You need to rest. You're okay. You're okay."

"Zoe—"

"She's alive. They're all alive."

"The Gate—"

"Closed." Otis's breath hitched. "He closed it. I'm so sorry, Archie. I'm so, so sorry. I didn't know. I swear I didn't. I got your message, I did, I read it a hundred times, I was just. I was scared." He pressed a fist against his mouth. "I should have done something. I should have said."

Archie lay and looked at the ceiling.

It was white. It had a water stain in one corner, shaped like a rabbit. He had not noticed it before. He wondered, vaguely, how long it had been there.

…

The rest came to him in pieces.

He learned it from Luca, over the next days, in a hospital room on the third floor, with the curtains drawn and a machine ticking at his bedside. Luca came every afternoon. He sat in the chair with his hands folded and told it in a flat, tired voice, as a man reads his own obituary.

William Cross had closed the Gate at 4:12 on a Tuesday morning. He had done it with a single key, an administrative override that Luca had never known existed. He had pulled the four of them out in a single smooth sequence and sealed the Dimensions behind them. The Guardians, he said, would remain where they were. Elena, in her castle. Thomas, in his bar. Gregor on his station with his hens. Sera under her tree. And Matteo, wherever Matteo was.

"They're still there?" whispered Archie.

"As far as I can tell."

"All of them? Alone?"

"Yes."

"But you can get them out. You said. You said that if we finished—"

"The Gate is no longer mine." Luca's voice was dry. "The controlling interest has been sold. The patents have been assigned. The equipment, the data, the prototypes, the lot." He gave a short bitter laugh. "I read the papers, Archie. Eventually. They had my signature on them. It's remarkable. I don't remember signing."

"CorVitae?"

"You know about that?"

"Gregor told us." He shut his eyes. "I didn't. I didn't tell you. I should have told you."

Luca said nothing.

"I wrote it for him. The diary. Everything we saw. I gave him. I put a device on the, the—" His voice cracked. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"I know."

"Why aren't you angry?"

"I am," said Luca. "Very. At him. At myself." He looked down at his hands. "But I am too old and too tired to be angry at you. You wanted to keep them alive. I understand that. I made the same mistake, fifteen years ago. I have been paying for it ever since."

…

The cancers had returned in full.

It was Jin who explained it, in a whisper, in the corridor outside Archie's room. They had been suppressed, he said, held in abeyance while the minds were away. The bodies had been in stasis. When the Gate closed, the stasis broke. The tumors, the metastases, the scarred lungs had all resumed their work as though they'd merely been paused.

Venn was in the ICU. He had been moved on the second day.

Zoe was in the next ward. The tumor in her chest had come back with a vengeance. She had grown very quiet.

Jin himself was weak and gray, and would not say what the doctors had told him. He stood in the doorway of Archie's room on the eleventh day, in a hospital gown and a woolen cardigan, leaning on a drip stand, and looked at the man in the bed for a long time.

"I came to say goodbye," he said.

"Jin—"

"I'm being moved. Seoul. My mother's family has a place. They have a good hospital, or so they say." He gave a thin, dry smile. "I'm told it's very peaceful."

"I'm sorry."

"I know."

"I'd like to—"

"No." Jin shook his head gently. "No. I don't think I can." He adjusted his glasses. "I want you to know I don't hate you. I did, for a while. For a day. It's a tiring thing to do, hating, and I haven't the energy." He drew a long breath. "I only wish you'd asked."

"So do I."

"You'd have been a good friend, Archie. I think you were. Right up until you decided you knew best." He nodded once. "Goodbye."

He went away down the corridor, slowly, dragging the stand behind him. The wheels squeaked.

Archie never saw him again.

…

Venn died on the fortieth day.

It was in the night. Nobody was with him. Archie heard of it in the morning from a nurse, a kind, plump woman with a clipboard, who stood at the foot of the bed and told him quietly, and added that the young man had been very peaceful at the end. He had been smiling, she said. He had been humming.

Archie lay for a long time with the news in his chest, like a stone dropped into a well, falling and falling and never finding the bottom.

They did not let him go to the funeral.

…

Zoe came to see him once.

It was in the spring, in the last week of March. The snow was gone from the hospital grounds. The window of his room faced a brick wall and a single struggling tree, which had put out a few early buds. He was very thin by then. His breathing was a thing he thought about every moment, like walking a tightrope. He had not been out of bed in a month.

The door opened without a knock.

She stood in the doorway in a gray sweater and jeans, with her short hair brushed back and a silk scarf knotted at her throat. She looked well. She looked, he thought with a lurch, alive, in the way that she had always looked alive, bright and quick and defiant. The surgeons had been able to do something, he understood. He had not asked what.

"Hello, Archie."

"Zoe."

She came in. She did not sit. She stood at the end of the bed, with her hands in her pockets, and looked at him for a while. She did not seem angry. She seemed to be gathering something.

"I wanted to say something," she said. "I've been trying to for weeks. I didn't know how."

"You don't have to."

"I do. I'd like to." She drew a breath. "I don't hate you. I want you to know that. I've been very angry. I've been, I don't know, so many things. But I'm not angry now. I'm just sad."

"I'm sorry."

"I know you are."

"I'd give anything—"

"I know." She smiled sadly. "That's the thing. I know you would. I know you were doing it because you cared. I know you thought you were helping." She took her hands from her pockets. "But I've been thinking about it for a long time, Archie. And I think I understand it now. I think I understand you."

He waited.

"You're so used to being controlled," said Zoe, "that you don't notice when you choose it."

The words fell quietly into the room.

"That's all. That's what I wanted to say. You spent fifteen years bowing to a man who stole your work. You spent a month bowing to another. And each time you called it something else. Patience. Prudence. Protecting people." She shook her head. "But it was always the same thing. You were afraid. And it was easier to be told what to do."

He couldn't speak.

"I loved you," she said. "A little. I think. I think I might have, if you'd let me." She turned toward the door. "Take care of yourself, Archie."

She went out. The door closed softly behind her.

He lay for a long time looking at the ceiling. It had a water stain in one corner, shaped like a rabbit. He thought of a man in a gray suit, smiling, with a paper cup. He thought of a woman under a tree, singing. He thought of a card taped in a locker, in crayon.

COME HOME SOON.

He lived another two months.

On the last night, he asked for a pencil and a sheet of paper, and the nurse gave him a ballpoint and the back of a menu. He lay propped on the pillow, with the sheet on his knee, and tried to draw. His hand shook. The lines wandered. In the end he managed only a rough shape, a long curved line, a tilted chin, the suggestion of a skirt.

He looked at it.

It's not finished, he thought.

He let the pen fall. The window had gone dark. Beyond it, a tree stood in the light of a streetlamp, and its first leaves were coming out.