Dimension Nine

The cell had been drawing a clean violet all afternoon and Rasmus Holt had been turning the dial in quarter steps for six hours, and at nine and a quarter the hum went out of the room.

Not the plasma. The plasma was fine, a thumbnail of light behind the quartz, doing what it had done since two o'clock. It was the building that stopped. The fluorescent tubes in the Oostveld Institute's basement corridor had hummed every Sunday he had ever worked there, low and flat, a note he could have sung back without being asked, and it went out from under him the way a floor goes out from under a man on a stair he has miscounted.

Then it came back. Not higher. Not lower. Just not the same note, in a way he had no word for and wrote down anyway.

He wrote down what he could see, because that was the whole of his training and all he had left. Drive nine and a quarter. Cell nominal. Corridor hum, changed. Then he went out into the corridor and found that the door numbers had been counted from the other end.

He was still standing in front of B-14 when somebody stopped behind him, very suddenly, the way you stop when you come round a corner and find the one thing you were not braced for.

"Rasmus."

He turned round. She was about his age, in a coat that had been rained on, holding two coffees she had clearly carried a long way, and she was looking at him the way you look at a man standing on a ledge.

"What are you doing in here," she said.

"Working."

Both coffees went down on the corridor bench so fast that one of them went over.

"Do not say that again. Not to me, not to anybody, not in this building." She had hold of his sleeve. "Say you got lost. Say a door was open." Her voice dropped. "Rasmus, there is a card reader on those stairs and it wrote your name down at four minutes past nine."

"I don't understand."

"You are not allowed to be in this building." She said it the way you say a thing to somebody who has been concussed. "That was the whole of it. Not the flat, not the passport. That one condition, and they gave it to you because I stood up in front of a judge in Den Haag and said you would keep it."

Somewhere above them a door went, and she flinched, and he understood that she had been flinching at doors for months.

"Marieke," he said, because it was on the visitor badge clipped to her coat.

She let go of his sleeve.

He watched a woman he had known for ninety seconds hear her own husband read her name off a piece of plastic. He would have given a great deal, then and for a long time afterwards, to have said anything else.

"You're going to tell me you're tired," she said.

"No."

"Because that is what you said in March, and it was not true then either."

"What happened in March?"

He asked it plainly, because he did not know what else to do, and it went into her like a thrown thing.

"Joost Peeters died in that room," Marieke said.

---

He got back inside B-14 and put his back against the door, and she told him the rest through it, because she would not come in and he could not make himself go out.

A technician, twenty-six, in that basement on a Sunday night in March with a cell running, found in the morning. The Institute had written accident on the first page and gone on writing it. The prosecutor in Rotterdam had not. There had been a run logged that night on a drive number nobody could account for, and it was Rasmus Holt's name on the log, and Rasmus Holt's account that had authorised it, and Rasmus Holt who had said in three separate interviews that he had no memory of setting it.

"Which is the truth," Rasmus said, through the door.

"I know."

"You believe me."

"I have believed you for six months," Marieke said. "In front of my mother. In front of a judge. In front of every person we used to have dinner with. And you have just read my name off my own badge, so I need you to understand what tonight has done to me."

He turned round and looked at the bench, and that was when he saw the second thing.

There was a gap in the dust.

It was the size and shape of the box he was carrying, and it was in the middle of a bench where nobody had worked since March, and around it, still plugged into the wall, still warm to the back of his hand, was a step-down transformer wound for a hundred volts.

Nobody in this country needs a hundred volts. Nobody in this building had any business owning one.

He stood there with his own machine in his bag and looked at the outline of another one.

And then, because he had been a working engineer for eleven years before he had been anything else, he stopped being frightened for about ninety seconds and worked out what it meant.

He took the phone out of his inside pocket. It had no signal and was never going to have one again, and it held about forty gigabytes of reference material and a small model he could talk to, and it was called Pim because Marieke had named it that in 2019 as a joke he could no longer remember the shape of.

"Pim. I need you to check something I already know."

"Go on." Flat, quiet, a little slow. It ran on the phone and nothing else.

"When the aperture opened, where did it open?"

"On your bench. Roughly forty centimetres from the cell."

"And where did I arrive."

A pause while it did nothing clever at all, because it was not a clever thing.

"You have not told me where you arrived."

"Forty centimetres from a bench," Rasmus said, "with a transformer on it."

He put his hand flat on the dust where the other box had been, and felt the whole architecture of the next several years of his life arrive at once.

It did not go anywhere. It went to the nearest one of itself. That was why he had come out in a basement and not in the North Sea, and it was why the socket had been wired for a hundred volts before he got there, and it was why he was going to keep doing this and keep finding a bench and keep finding, standing near that bench or recently gone from it, a man with his own face.

The box did not open onto worlds. It opened onto other Rasmus Holts. There was no version of this where he arrived somewhere and was nobody.

"Pim, tell me the good half."

"I do not know what the good half is."

"The good half is that I cannot land anywhere without one, and nobody builds one of these without a wall to plug it into." He heard his own voice steady out as he said it, which was what talking to it had always been for. "I am never going to come out of this in a field in the twelfth century. Wherever this is, it has a grid, and it has a government, and it has somebody who did what I did."

"That does not follow from anything you have shown me."

"No," Rasmus agreed. "It follows from the dust."

"Then you should use the battery."

He did not answer that for a while.

The battery was on the side of the box, four crossings in it, and he had built it in the first month because any engineer builds the emergency before he builds the thing. It worked. He had tested it twice, in a car park, and both times it had opened and both times the opening had been somewhere he had not aimed at and had been very glad to step back out of.

A grid is a flywheel the size of a continent. Four hundred million people and every turbine between here and Warsaw, all of them leaning on the same note, holding it inside a corridor twenty thousandths of a hertz wide. That is what he had been multiplying. That is why the number meant anything at all.

The battery has none of that behind it. It runs a small oscillator that drifts with its own heat and its own charge, and it cannot lock onto anything, and so a battery crossing does not go to the nearest box. It does not go anywhere in particular. It makes a hole and puts him through it.

"The battery is not a way out," he said. "The battery is a way of not being here any more."

"Those are the same thing."

"They are not remotely the same thing, Pim, and I need you to log this so that when I am tired in about four months I can read it back and remember that I meant it." He said it slowly. "On mains I can always leave again. The only places mains can send me are places with a wall socket in them, because that is what it homes on. On the battery I can leave from anywhere, and I can arrive somewhere that never invented the wall socket, and the only thing that fills the battery back up is a wall. Three crossings left, no wall, and I will spend them, because that is what a frightened man does with three of anything. And then I am a man in a field."

"With a field's worth of options."

"With none. And it will not even be the past, which is the part people get wrong when I try to explain it and I have stopped trying." He was talking to keep his hands working. "It does not go backwards. It has never gone backwards. It goes sideways, into the same Sunday I left, in a world that turned somewhere mine did not. So if I come out somewhere with no electricity it is not because I have landed in history. It is because I have landed in a now that never got here."

"Logged."

"Read it back to me if I ever sound casual about it."

"I will read it back to you," Pim said, "and you will do it anyway, because you did not build a four-crossing battery for a thing you were never going to use."

---

He took stock on the floor of B-14, because he had about four minutes and because taking stock is what you do instead of panicking.

The box is ten inches by ten by four, which is a shoebox that has been on a diet, and it weighs fifteen pounds, and almost all of that is three things: the resonant converter, which is the working half and is mostly copper and ferrite; the capacitor bank, which is the part he is frightened of; and the battery, which is on the outside because he wanted to be able to look at it. It goes in a backpack. It does not go in a backpack comfortably. Fifteen pounds on one strap will have you leaning by the end of a kilometre and he has learned to walk with both.

It has a lead on it and a plug on the end of the lead, and the plug is the whole of his life now. Two hundred and thirty volts into a step-down transformer, a hundred volts into the box, and the converter takes whatever note the wall is singing and multiplies it by the number on the dial. Plug it in and it charges the battery at the same time, which is the only mercy in the design and is not a mercy he put there on purpose.

That is all of it. That is the entire machine, and he could carry it up a flight of stairs, and it has cost one man eleven years.

"Pim. Money."

"You have sixty-two euros and a bank card."

"The card is no good." He had known that since the corridor and had been putting off saying it. "There is a Rasmus Holt in this world with an account at the same bank. If I put my card in a machine here it will either be declined, which is nothing, or it will work, which is very much worse, because it means the two accounts are the same account and I have just spent his money in a city he is not allowed to be in."

"Then do not use it."

"I am going to have to use something."

He sat with it.

The thing about arriving where you already live is that there is always a drawer. Somewhere within eight kilometres of here there is a flat with a Rasmus Holt's passport in it, and a Rasmus Holt's bank card, and he knows which drawer, because he knows where he keeps his, and a man who has kept his passport in the same drawer since he was twenty-six does not start keeping it somewhere else because history took a different turn in 1997.

He knows the PIN. That is the part he had not let himself arrive at until now. He knows it because he chose it, for a reason that was true about him before either of them was anybody, and the other one chose the same one for the same reason.

And the face on the passport is his face. If the branch is recent enough, the fingerprints are his fingerprints too, because a version of him who split off when he was thirty-four had the same mother and the same nine months and the same hands, and the machine at a border does not have an opinion about which of the two of them is standing in front of it.

"That will work," Pim said.

"Yes."

"You do not sound like a man it worked for."

"Because it is theft, and it is theft from the one person in any world who is in more trouble than I am." He put his head back against the door. "And because I have just worked out what every single one of us does when we get here, and it is this, and it means the man they convicted in this city did it too, somewhere, to somebody, and I am about four hours behind him and going the same way."

He looked at the plug on the end of the lead.

"And because it only works while the branch is near. Split off ten years ago and I am him to a fingerprint reader. Split off in 1815 and I am a stranger with his face who does not have his hands, and I will not know which of those I am in until somebody asks me to put my thumb on something."

"There is a second thing you have not thought about."

"There are about nine."

"Borders," Pim said.

And Rasmus, sitting on the floor of a room he was not allowed to be in, found that he had already solved that one without noticing, and that the solution was not his and he did not like it.

He was not going to be crossing borders to get to other worlds. That was the whole point of the thing on his knees. The box does not fly him anywhere: it opens next to the nearest working copy of itself, and if the man who built that copy happens to live in Lisbon or Kraków or somewhere considerably further than that, then that is where the hole comes out, and Rasmus will arrive in a country he has never been to with fifteen pounds on his back and no say in the matter whatsoever.

The destination is not a decision. It is an address, and it belongs to somebody else.

What he would have to do, over and over, is the smaller and more tedious thing: get from wherever the hole put him to wherever he needed to be, inside one country's worth of world, with somebody else's documents.

And in this half of the world that is nothing at all, which is the joke. Twenty-nine countries with no border check between them. He could walk out of this building with a passport from a locker and be in Germany by morning and Italy by Thursday and nobody at any point would ask him for anything, because the whole of the continent decided a generation ago to stop asking. The same twenty-nine countries, near enough, that share one locked grid and one frequency. One note under the floor and no checkpoints on top of it.

"That is convenient," Pim said.

"It is convenient here." He was looking at the plug again. "Somewhere out there is a branch where the man who built one of these is nine thousand kilometres away and is not Dutch and does not have my face, and I will come out in his workshop with a Delft passport in my coat and nothing in that country will match any part of me. No visa. No face. No thumb. Nothing but the truth, which is the one document nobody accepts."

"What would you do."

"Ask somebody for help," Rasmus said, "and find out what kind of world it is by whether I get any."

---

He got the rest of it in about ten minutes, and it was not clever. It was arithmetic, and it was worse than arithmetic.

The dial was not a dial. It was a multiplier, and the thing it multiplied was the note under the floor. Nine and a quarter times whatever the wall was doing, and the wall in Delft and the wall in Lisbon and the wall in Warsaw are all doing the same thing at the same instant, because the whole of continental Europe runs as one locked grid, four hundred million people on one frequency. Cross the water to England and you are on a different grid and a different set of doors, ninety miles away.

And a grid does not run at fifty. It runs at about fifty, drifting all day inside a corridor twenty thousandths of a hertz wide, moving with every kettle between here and Kraków, never once sitting on the number printed on the transformer.

He had the multiplier. Nine and a quarter, written down, underlined. What he did not have, and was never going to have, was what the Oostveld bench had actually been doing to three decimal places in the second he crossed. That number existed for about a second, in a world he was no longer in.

He could reach nine and a quarter times fifty exactly. That was a door. It was next to his, and next to is the whole of the problem.

And somebody had stood at this bench, on a hundred volts, and gone somewhere.

"Marieke." He had his forehead against the door. "In March. When they say I did it. Did anybody see me leave the building?"

A pause.

"No," she said. "That is the whole case. Nobody saw you come in and nobody saw you leave, and the card reader has you inside for eleven minutes, and eleven minutes is not enough time to do what was done to that room."

"No," Rasmus said. "It is not."

He made himself ask the next one, and he already knew he was going to be sorry.

"Marieke. That night. Did I come home?"

The pause on the other side of the door went on long enough that he heard the building settle.

"Yes," she said.

"What time."

"About eleven. You were fine." Her voice had gone very careful, the way a voice goes when it is walking over something. "That is the part I have never been able to say to anybody, because it is the part that sounds worst. You came in at eleven, and you were completely fine. You ate. You asked about my father's scan. You did the washing up, which you never do, and I stood in the kitchen and thought, he has had a good night in the lab, and I did not ask, because when you have a good night I never ask."

"And in the morning."

"In the morning they came, and you did not know what they were talking about, and I watched you not know." She stopped. "I have spent six months telling people that a man who had just done that could not have stood in my kitchen and asked about a scan. And every single one of them heard me say it and thought: or he could."

Rasmus looked at the gap in the dust on the bench.

Somebody with his face had come up out of this basement at half past ten, washed his hands, gone home to this woman, eaten a meal with her, asked after her father, and slept. And then, at some point before anybody came looking, had put a transformer down on a bench and gone somewhere no policeman was ever going to follow.

He had not been leaving a crime. He had been leaving a life, and he had waited until he had had one more evening of it.

That was the thing Rasmus could not get past, then or afterwards. Not the death. The washing up.

He thought about a man with his face and his hands and his exact handwriting, who had worked out the same thing he had worked out, because he was the same man, and who had done something on a Sunday night in March and had needed very badly not to be in the Netherlands any more.

And who would, at some point, want a way back. Or a way further. Or somebody else's clean life with nobody's name on it.

"Marieke." He had his hand flat on the door. "Ask me something."

"What?"

"Ask me something only he would know. Please. I need you to do it now and I need you to do it fast, because I am about to say a thing that will sound like the worst lie anybody has ever told you and I would rather you had tested me first."

A silence. Then:

"Where did we get married."

"Delft. The old town hall on the Markt." He had it before he had decided to say it. "March. It rained and your uncle made a speech about herring."

He heard her breathe out.

"That is right," she said.

"It is right and it is worthless, and I need you to understand why." He pressed his forehead against the wood. "I did not learn that. I have it because he has it. Everything in my head that is about you is in his head too, identically, because up until some Sunday a few years ago we were the same man having the same life. You cannot catch me out on the past. There is nothing in the past that separates us."

"Then what are you saying to me."

"I am saying that the only difference between us is what happened after." He turned round and put his back on the door again and slid down it, which was not dignified and he did not care. "Ask me what I did in March."

"...What did you do in March?"

"I do not know," Rasmus said. "I have no memory of it, and neither does he, because he was not there for it either, because he was somewhere else being a different version of the same man. And that is why he said it in three interviews and meant it, and it is why he is going to go on meaning it, and it is why nobody is ever going to be able to tell the difference between a man who did not do it and a man who does not remember doing it."

The footsteps above them had reached the landing.

"That is the worst thing anybody has ever said to me," Marieke said, quite calmly.

"I know."

"Because it fits." Her voice had gone somewhere he could not follow. "Do you understand that? Six months of standing in rooms saying he is not the kind of man who could have, and you have just handed me a version where he is exactly the kind of man who could have and would not know. It fits, and it fits better than anything the prosecutor has, and I have never once been able to say to a single person why I believed you, and now I can and the reason is monstrous."

"Marieke."

"No, let me have it." A pause, and when she came back she sounded, for the first time, completely certain about something. "Say the thing. The one that sounds like a lie."

"I have never met you," Rasmus said. "I am so sorry. I have a wife with your name and your face in a Delft that is four streets different from this one and I have never met you, and about nine hours ago I was in a basement wondering whether I would be home before she went to bed."

He waited for it.

"All right," Marieke said.

He had not expected that and it took his legs out from under him more effectively than anything else that night.

"All right?"

"You called the town hall the old town hall." She said it very fast, the way you say a thing before you can talk yourself out of it. "Nobody in Delft calls it that. He does not call it that. It is a thing an outsider reads on a sign, and you have said it like a man who has read it on a sign, and I have been married to somebody for eleven years and I know what he calls that building."

Rasmus put both hands over his face.

"That is not proof," he said.

"No. It is worse than proof. It is the only thing you have got wrong all night and it is the thing he would have got right without thinking about it, and I am going to have to live on that."

---

"Marieke, listen to me and do not ask me to explain it."

"There are two of them on the stairs."

"I know. Listen." He was already unplugging his own box, and his hands were doing it steadily, which he hated. "Whatever happens next, if I turn up again, if I come to the flat, if I am standing in your kitchen in a month being completely normal about all of this. Ask me what your mother said in the car after the hearing."

"What?"

"You heard me. Ask me that, and if I answer, do not let me in the house."

A long silence on the other side of the door, and in it he heard her decide something about him that he would never know the shape of.

"Go," Marieke said.

---

He turned the dial and the hum fell away, and the last thing in that world was a woman with her back against a door for a man who had just told her he had never met her.

It came back wrong, the way it always would from now on.

Rain on hot tarmac, and he was outside, on his knees on wet ground with the box in both arms, and four people standing in a half circle looking at him, one of them already talking into a radio.

What he caught, before he understood anything else about where he was, was his own surname said with the particular flatness of somebody who has been given it in a briefing.

Rasmus got up.

Somewhere in the wall of the building behind him there was two hundred and thirty volts he could not use, and somewhere in this city, if it was anything like the last one, there was a man with his face who already knew that.

"Pim. Anything at all."

The phone was in his hand and the rain was coming down on it and it looked, for a second, at the only thing he had given it to look at, which was a sign on the building behind the four people walking towards him.

"Latin alphabet. Dutch orthography, older spelling conventions than yours. The crest has seven arrows and no crown."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning I do not know," Pim said, "and neither do you, and you have about forty seconds to decide whether that matters."