The Mirror Lab

The doors were not locked.

That was the first wrong thing. They stood in a row at the front of the gray concrete block, glass and steel, with brushed handles and a panel of unlit buttons. Jin pushed on one with two fingers, and it swung inward with a soft pneumatic sigh. A breath of cold air rolled out to meet them. It was conditioned and filtered and faintly antiseptic. It smelled of something Archie knew.

"It's the lab," said Zoe, in a small voice.

"It's not the lab."

"It smells like it."

"It's a copy." Jin stepped over the threshold and looked up at the ceiling, where long tubes of fluorescent light ran in a grid. "A reflection. The Mirror World has made one from memory. Look at the layout. Reception. Waiting area. There's the corridor to the pod bay."

"How do you know?"

"I've been in it for six weeks," said Jin dryly.

They went in.

…

It was like walking into a photograph that had been left out in the sun.

Everything was right. Everything was wrong. The reception desk had a vase of dead flowers on it, and the dust on the petals was a quarter-inch thick. A coffee mug sat beside the telephone, with a ring of stained residue at the bottom. The calendar on the wall read a date fifteen years gone, and a month, and a day, in a hand he half knew. The clock above it had stopped at nine-fourteen.

Nine-fourteen, thought Archie. That's when they went in.

He did not know how he knew.

They moved down the corridor in a close group, Archie at the front and Venn at the rear. The floor was linoleum, pale green, with an old-fashioned speckle. The walls were lined with framed certificates, awards, a grant citation from the National Science Foundation. Through the glass doors on the left, they glimpsed offices: tidy rooms with leather chairs, wall charts, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. Everything coated in dust. Everything perfect. It was a lab in the instant after the last person had stepped out, and the lights had never been turned off.

"Nobody's here," said Venn, uneasily.

"Somebody is," said Jin, and nodded down the hall.

At the end of the corridor, behind a half-open door, a light was moving.

…

It was a study.

It was a long narrow room lined with bookshelves, with a desk at the far end, and above the desk a window. Through the window shone the pewter sky. At the desk, with his back to them, a man was writing.

He wrote with a fountain pen, in a notebook. His head was bent. His shoulders were stooped under a rumpled white coat, and his hair was dark, thick, and wild, as if he had been running his fingers through it for days. He did not look up. The pen moved steadily across the page, scratching, pausing, scratching. A cup of tea sat at his elbow. The steam from it rose in a thin motionless thread.

"That's him," whispered Zoe. "Mr. Pell's man in the window."

"It's not a man," said Jin.

"Isn't it?"

"Look at the steam."

They looked. The thread of vapor rose, and rose, and did not curl, and did not fade; it stood in the air like a strand of spun glass. The man's pen moved. The page filled. He turned it, and wrote, and turned it, and the page was blank again. He turned it. It filled. It was the same page. It was the same sentence.

"It's an echo," Jin said softly. "A loop. It's someone's memory, caught in the glass. Someone who sat here a very long time, and thought the same thought, over and over."

"Whose?"

Archie stepped forward.

He went round the side of the desk, quietly, until he could see the man's face. It was a young face. It was perhaps thirty-eight, lean and eager and tired, with deep furrows between the brows and the beginnings of silver at the temples. The eyes were large and brown. They stared at the page without blinking. They were entirely unfinished, as Eli had said: the iris was a smudge, the pupil a pencil dot. The mouth moved, very slightly, in time with the pen.

I will save him, it said. I will save him. I will save him.

"Luca," said Archie.

The pen paused.

For an instant, an eyelash of an instant, the unfinished eyes moved. They slid sideways, toward the sound. A line of puzzlement crossed the young brow.

Then the pen resumed. The echo went on writing.

"He's lost in it," murmured Jin. "It's a memory from, what, fifteen years ago? From when Matteo went in. He sat in this room and wrote this sentence a hundred thousand times." His voice softened. "And the Dimension remembered."

"That's horrible."

"It's grief," said Zoe. "It's what grief looks like. A man who can't stop."

She laid her hand on the young man's shoulder.

He did not feel it. His pen scratched on. But a very faint smile touched his mouth, and the steam over the teacup curled, for the first time, into a slow soft loop.

…

They split up to search.

It was Jin's idea. The building was large. It held three floors and a basement, and they could not afford to waste a day. He took the upper levels, with Venn as his bodyguard; Zoe took the east wing and the pod bay; and Archie, with a lamp in his hand, went down the stairs to the basement.

It was cold down there, and silent. The corridors were narrow, with exposed pipes along the ceiling and the smell of damp cement. Doors stood on either side, each with a numbered plaque. He tried them one by one. Storage. Boiler room. A janitor's closet with a mop in a bucket. At the end of the passage he found a heavy fire door with a small brass plate: ARCHIVE — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.

It opened under his hand.

The room beyond was a long chamber lined with steel filing cabinets. A single bulb hung from a cord. On a metal table in the middle lay an open ledger, and beside it a lamp, and a magnifying glass on a stand. A chair had been pushed back from the table, as though someone had risen in the middle of a sentence and gone out.

He crossed to the ledger.

It was a logbook. A neat, upright, meticulous record, in ink, in a woman's hand. The pages were ruled in columns: date, time, subject, parameters, notes. He turned the cover and read the first entry.

Run 1. March 9. 09:14. Subjects (3):

V. — Vasquez, E. (F, 43)

H. — Halvorsen, G. (M, 56)

F. — Ferrara, M. (M, 25)

Gate Mark I, calibrated at 0.74. Entry nominal.

His mouth was dry.

Elena. Gregor. Matteo.

He turned the page. The next entry was dated three days later, and the one after that, a week; a long dreary column of readings, of voltage and frequency and cortical activity. He ran his finger down it. Then he stopped.

At the foot of the page, in the margin, was a note. It was in the same hand, but the strokes were quicker, the ink blotted. It had been added later.

Run 1. Late addition, 09:11, unregistered. Fourth chair, no paperwork. Subject: Marlowe, S. (F, 31). Stage IV. Declined further treatment. Arrived by referral, unsolicited. I could not turn her away. She had a rope and an expression I've seen before. Approved by D.C. Entered the Gate 09:14 with the others. Dr. F. unaware.

Archie read it twice.

A fourth chair.

I was a late addition, Sera had said. A woman in a hurry. They had an empty chair.

He stood very still in the swinging light. A cold line ran down his spine.

Someone put her there. Someone knew. Someone sat in an archive in the basement at nine in the morning and looked at a woman with a rope, and thought, I cannot turn her away. And did the unauthorized thing, and signed it with two letters.

D.C.

He turned the page.

The next entry was a single sentence. It was written across the whole width of the page, in a bolder hand, and the ink was smeared as if with a thumb.

They have not come back. God forgive me. God forgive us all. — D.

He closed the ledger.

His hands were shaking. He did not know why. He only knew that the room had gone suddenly, intolerably cold, and the single bulb swung gently on its cord, and in the corner of the chamber, behind the last filing cabinet, there was a door he had not noticed before. It was a plain wooden one, ajar. Light fell through the crack, thin and yellow, like the light of a lamp.

He went to it.

He pushed it open.

The room beyond was small, no bigger than a closet. It was a darkroom, once. There were trays on the bench, and a rack of chemicals, and a string of clips across the ceiling for hanging prints. A red lamp burned in a bracket. And on the wall, pinned in a row, edge to edge, were photographs.

He stepped in.

There were dozens. They were black and white, mostly, a little curled at the edges, and each one was dated in a small neat hand along the border. He moved along them slowly, with the lamp held up. Here was the lab, gleaming new, with a ribbon being cut. Here a group of technicians in white coats, laughing at some joke. Here a young man with dark wild hair, grinning at the camera with one arm round the neck of an older brother, who was struggling not to laugh. Matteo. He knew him from Luca's dream.

Here was the Gate itself.

And here, at the end of the row, in a silver frame, hung a portrait.

He lifted the lamp.

It was a woman.

She stood in the doorway of the lab in a white coat with her sleeves rolled to the elbows. She was perhaps forty. She was tall and slender and straight-backed, with short black hair and large dark eyes, and a face of such quiet, luminous intelligence that, for a moment, Archie forgot to breathe. She was laughing. She was looking at someone out of frame, with her head tipped slightly, and a clipboard held against her chest.

Beside her, one arm lightly round her shoulders, stood a younger Luca Ferrara.

Below the picture, in a neat engraved plate, was a line.

FDRI CO-RESEARCHER: DR. DIANA CHEN.

The lamp trembled in his hand.

Chen.

He knew that face. He had seen it every day for a month. He knew the eyes, and the tilt of the head, and the curve of that laughing mouth, and he had never in his life seen anything that looked so like his own heart. He had seen it on a girl in a red dress. He had seen it on a girl with a bow.

Zoe's mother.

Zoe's mother worked here.

Zoe's mother worked with Luca.

He stood in the red light of the darkroom with the silent photographs all round him, and he could hear his own pulse.