Part 4 of Guilty in Every World
The Constituency
The hole put him nine thousand kilometres from his own passport, in a workshop behind a constituency office in coastal Andhra, where the man who built the other machine has a different face, a different name, and has never once switched it on.
Every rule he has works in Europe.
The passport in the drawer works because the man in the drawer has his face. The card works because he chose the number. The borders do not work at all, because there are twenty-nine countries over there with no checks between them and he can walk across the lot of them.
This is the episode where none of that is true.
He knew before he opened his eyes, because of the heat.
Not the temperature. The quality of it. Twenty-nine degrees at ten at night with the air standing perfectly still and full of the smell of hot dust and diesel and something green cooking somewhere, and a ceiling fan going round on a slow brown-out wobble that he could have identified with his eyes shut, because a fan on a sagging supply is a thing he had been listening to in laboratories for eleven years.
He was on a concrete floor in a workshop with the shutter half down.
And on the bench beside him, wired into a step-down transformer that was easily thirty years old and had been rewound by hand, was a box ten inches by ten by four.
"Pim," he said, very quietly. "Where."
"I have nothing to go on."
"Then look at the transformer."
A pause. "The winding notation is not European. The script on the label is Telugu."
The man who came in under the shutter was about sixty, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he took one look at Rasmus sitting on the floor of his workshop beside his machine and did not shout, or run, or reach for anything.
He stood there. He looked at the box in Rasmus's arms and then at the identical box on his own bench, and something went across his face that Rasmus had seen on nobody, in any world, up to that point.
It was relief.
"Ah," the man said, in English. "So it does work."
"You have never used it."
"I have never used it." He pulled the shutter down the rest of the way and put the light on. "Forty-one years I have had that on a bench in some form or another. Sit properly, you are on the floor like a sack."
Rasmus sat properly.
"My name is Surya Rao. I am the member for Vemulapadu, which you have not heard of, and before that I was an engineer at the thermal station at Simhadri, which you also have not heard of." He filled a steel tumbler from a clay pot and put it into Rasmus's hands without asking whether he wanted it. "And you are the man who built one and switched it on. Drink that. You have the colour of somebody who has not eaten."
The trouble started about forty minutes later and it started the way Rasmus had known it would since the moment he heard the fan.
"I have no papers," he said.
"I assumed."
"I have a Dutch passport in my coat with my photograph in it and it is no use to me at all, because nobody in this country is expecting a Dutchman to walk out of a workshop at eleven at night, and the moment anybody looks at it properly there is no visa in it, no stamp in it, and no record anywhere of me entering this country, because I did not enter it."
"That is correct."
"In Europe I can do this." Rasmus heard how it sounded and said it anyway, because the man deserved the whole of it. "I arrive, and there is a version of me two streets away with a drawer, and I take his passport, and my thumb opens it because we had the same mother, and then there are twenty-nine countries I can cross without anybody asking me for anything. That is what I have been doing for five weeks. That is the whole of my method and I am not proud of it."
Surya considered this.
"And here your thumb is not my thumb."
"No."
"No." He held his own hand up, turned it over, looked at it. "We are not the same man. I worked that out in about four seconds, and I imagine you did too, and I would like to know what you think it means, because I have had forty-one years to wonder and you have had five weeks and sometimes five weeks is better."
"The machine does not find people," Rasmus said. "It finds machines. It comes out next to the nearest working one. In four worlds now it has put me down beside a bench with my own face standing at it, and I assumed that was the rule."
"And it is not the rule."
"The rule is the box. The face is a coincidence that holds while the branches are close." He looked at the old transformer with its hand-wound coils. "Somewhere far enough back, ours went different ways, and it still made a man who read the same paper and had the same stupid idea and spent forty-one years on it. That is not me finding me. That is the idea finding the idea."
Surya Rao smiled for the first time.
"Then eat," he said. "You are in my constituency, you have no papers, and nobody is going to ask you for any, because nobody here asks a guest for papers. That is not a rule of the machine. That is a rule of the house."
He stayed eleven days.
He has thought about those eleven days more than about anything else that has happened to him, and he has never been able to describe them to anybody without sounding as though he is making a point.
Nobody asked. That is the whole of it. He slept in a room behind the office with a mosquito coil and a bucket and a window with no glass in it, and in the morning a woman called Padma who ran the office brought him coffee in a steel tumbler and told him in Telugu, at length, about her son's examination results, and Surya translated about a third of it and Rasmus understood none of it and she did not care in the slightest.
He ate with them. He was fed the way you feed somebody who has walked a long way, which is to say more than he wanted and then again. He sat on a plastic chair in a courtyard while men came and went with grievances about water and a school roof and a road, and listened to the member for Vemulapadu deal with each of them in about four minutes, and saw a politician up close for the first time in his life and found, to his considerable annoyance, that he liked him.
On the fourth day Surya said, "You are an engineer and you are doing nothing, which is making you ill. Come and be useful."
The problem was the feeder to the community hospital at Rachapalem and it was a problem Rasmus had been half solving his entire professional life without ever once seeing what it was actually for.
"Fourteen villages on that line," Surya said, in a jeep on a road that was not really a road. "The hospital is at the far end of it, which is the worst place on a feeder to be. When the load comes up in the evening the voltage at that end drops away, and their equipment browns out, and twice this year their oxygen concentrators have tripped and restarted and tripped, and once a man on that machine did not do well out of it."
"What is the frequency discipline like?"
Surya glanced across at him.
"That," he said, "is the first question you have asked that nobody here asks. Say more."
So Rasmus said more, on a bad road, at forty kilometres an hour, and it came out of him in a rush, because it was the only subject on Earth he was certain about.
"Where I come from the grid holds fifty hertz inside about twenty thousandths either way. Twenty millihertz. Four hundred million people, thirty-two countries, all of it locked together so hard that it behaves like one enormous flywheel, and you can set your watch by it and I have." He was turned round in the seat. "Your code says forty-nine point nine to fifty point nought five. That is a hundred and fifty millihertz. Seven times wider than mine, and it is wider because you are doing something much harder than we are with much less margin, and every person who has ever told you that number as though it were a failing was wrong. It is not a failing. It is a different problem."
"It has been tightened four times in my career."
"I know. I can hear it in that fan." Rasmus rubbed his face. "And in 2012 you lost six hundred and twenty million people in two days because states kept drawing when they had been told to stop, and that is the largest blackout there has ever been, and the reason I know about it is that every power engineer in Europe was made to read that report. All of us. It is the most studied thing in my field and nobody in it is Indian, in my world, in the rooms where it gets discussed."
Surya drove for a while.
"What would you do about my hospital," he said.
What he did about the hospital took six days and was not clever.
It was not a wormhole and it was not a breakthrough. It was a man who understood power electronics sitting on a concrete step with a borrowed multimeter, finding that the tap changer on the distribution transformer at Rachapalem had been left on the wrong tap since a replacement in 2019, so the whole feeder was starting three percent low before a single light came on. Then it was two days of arguing with a distribution engineer in Kakinada who did not want a Dutchman's opinion and was entirely right not to, until Surya made a phone call and then another phone call and then went and sat in somebody's office for three hours.
Then it was a tap change, and a pole-mounted capacitor bank that Surya found the money for out of a fund intended for something else and was very cheerful about, and a written instruction that the concentrators be moved onto the one circuit that came off the good side of the board.
On the eleventh evening Rasmus stood in the yard of a community hospital at Rachapalem with a meter in his hand at half past seven at night, which is the worst minute of the worst hour on that line, and read two hundred and twenty-six volts.
"Is that good," said Surya.
"It is boring," Rasmus said. "It is completely boring. It is the most boring number I have ever been happy about."
The sister in charge that evening was called Jyothi and she had been at Rachapalem for nine years, and she came out into the yard to see what two men were doing standing in the dark staring at a meter.
Surya explained. She listened to about half of it and then turned to Rasmus and asked him a question in Telugu, and Surya said, "She is asking whether it will hold at eight o'clock, because eight is worse than seven."
"It will hold at eight. It will hold at nine."
She absorbed that. Then she told him something, at some length, and Surya did not translate it immediately, and when he did his voice had changed.
"She says that for two years she has done it by hand. When the lights go brown she goes and stands in the room with the concentrators and she watches them, and when one of them cuts she restarts it and counts, because they take about forty seconds to come back up to flow and in forty seconds a man in respiratory distress will have understood what is happening to him." Surya was looking at the ground. "She says she has learned to talk to them through it. She says she has a particular thing she says. She would not tell me what it is."
Rasmus stood in the yard with a multimeter in his hand.
He had spent eleven years on the drift of grid frequency. He had written a thesis about it. He had built a machine out of it that had cost him his wife, his name and his entire world, and he had spent five weeks thinking of a wall socket as a door.
He had never, once, in all of that, thought of it as forty seconds of somebody counting.
"Tell her," he said, and then had to stop and start again. "Tell her that the reason it was happening is that a tap on a transformer four kilometres away was set one position wrong in 2019 and nobody looked, and that it is not anything she did, and that it was never anything she did."
Surya told her.
Jyothi said something short.
"She says she knew that," Surya said. "She says she has been telling them for two years."
They drove back in the dark and Surya said the thing he had been not saying for eleven days.
"You want to know why I never switched it on."
"You will tell me if you want to."
"I will tell you because you will work it out on the plane, so to speak, and I would rather you had it from me." He drove with both hands, slowly, the way older men do. "I finished it in 2004. I had it on the bench in this workshop and it was correct, I had checked it four ways, and I sat and did the last piece of arithmetic, which was how I would get back."
"Oh," Rasmus said.
"Yes. You see it."
"The band."
"The band." Surya nodded once. "Your machine multiplies the frequency of the wall. To come home you must reproduce the number you left on, and that means reproducing what your wall was doing at that instant, and your wall is held inside twenty millihertz by half a continent. Mine moves a hundred and fifty. I did the arithmetic in about one evening and what it told me was that if I stepped through that thing, the door I came out of would never be found again, not by me, not with a lifetime of trying."
"So you stopped."
"So I stopped." He said it without any drama at all. "And I have spent twenty-two years telling myself that this was wisdom. It was not wisdom. It was arithmetic. If I had been born in Delft I would have looked at twenty millihertz and thought, well, that is nearly nothing, and I would have gone." He glanced over. "That is what I want you to hear, because you have been carrying something since you got here and I think it is shame. There is no difference between us. There is a difference between our grids."
Rasmus looked out of the window at a country he was never going to see again.
"There is a third one," he said.
He told him all of it, in the workshop, with the shutter down.
Joost Peeters in Delft and Elke Vos in this world's February, the man in the house who had done it twice and could name the street he was on in Ghent, and the third one, unaccounted for, who does it and leaves and has never once been seen.
Surya listened the way he listened to men with grievances about water.
"And your wife is with the one who ran," he said, at the end.
"Yes."
"Who did not do it."
"Who I have spent five weeks calling a murderer, yes."
"Hm." Surya got up and stood looking at his own machine on the bench, forty-one years of his life, wired into a transformer that somebody's grandfather had rewound. "Then I am going to say the unkind thing, because you have fixed my hospital and I owe you a true sentence rather than a comfortable one. That box on my bench is the most dangerous object in this district."
"Yes."
"You say he hunts them. He will not find mine; nobody finds anything, you have explained why. But somebody who already knows about mine could come to it." He turned round. "And there is now exactly one person in creation who knows about mine, and he has a machine, and he is standing in my workshop."
Rasmus did not say anything for a while.
"I would never."
"I believe you," Surya said. "I would also have believed the man in the house, two months before he became the man in the house. That is not an accusation, it is the whole of the thing you have been telling me about for an hour. So."
He unplugged the transformer and began, unhurriedly, to strip the windings off it.
"Stop."
"No."
"Surya, that is forty-one years."
"It is forty-one years of a thing I was never going to use, sitting where a man who is not you could one day reach it." He did not look up. "Also I am sixty-two and I would like to spend the rest of it on the road to Rachapalem, which is genuinely worse than the machine and which nobody is ever going to fix if I am in a workshop."
He got the last of it off, and coiled the wire, and put the coil in a drawer, because he was a man who had never thrown away a length of copper in his life.
"Now. You cannot stay, because in nine more days somebody official will ask Padma who you are and she will lie, and I will not have her do that. And you cannot fly anywhere, because you do not exist. So you will use the box, and it will put you next to the next one of these, wherever in the world that is, and you will not know until you are standing in it."
"I know."
"Then take this." He put a steel tumbler in Rasmus's hands, the one he had been drinking from for eleven days, dented on one side. "It is not worth anything. It will go with you, which is the point. When you are next standing somewhere with nothing, you will have one object that somebody gave you instead of one you took out of a locker."
Rasmus found that he could not answer that.
"Go on," said the member for Vemulapadu. "And do not come back here, because I have just spent an hour learning why."
He crossed from the workshop at nine and a quarter on a grid that runs a hundred and fifty millihertz wide, which is a thing no cautious man would do, and he did it anyway, because he had no better option and because by then he had understood that the only real difference between him and the man watching him go was where each of them had happened to be born.
The last thing in that world was an old engineer with a coil of copper in a drawer and the shutter half up, and the smell of dust and diesel and something green cooking somewhere.
The tumbler is in the bottom of the backpack. It is dented on one side.
It is the only thing he owns.