The gong did not fall silent all at once. It ebbed for a long time like the sea withdrawing from a shore and when nothing remained of it but a stubborn ringing deep in my left ear I opened my eyes on a sky that was not mine.
It was blue the way an over-washed cloth stays blue. Grayish streaks scored it from one edge to the other, too straight to be clouds, too motionless to be smoke; nothing in the summers of my childhood or in the mornings after storms above Grenoble had prepared me for that tired color.
I had no time to worry about it. Between that sky and me stretched the canopy of an enormous tree and each of its leaves sizzled. The gray fog of the mine had returned and it had found something to feed on: back there it had covered a motionless gallery; here it clung to thousands of leaves that the wind stirred, each trailing behind it its own snow of golden dots, so that the whole foliage seemed caught in a storm no one else could see. The pressure came back behind my eyes, much faster than underground and much harder.
My right hand sought the quartz before I thought of it and closed only on damp earth.
I propped myself up on an elbow and felt the ground around me: dead leaves, a root, more earth, a soft mushroom that burst under my fingers releasing a smell of cellar. I had a very clear memory of having gone through the arch with the shard.
I searched my jacket, both pockets, the inside pocket whose lining hung torn, trying not to look up at the foliage, which amounted to looking for your keys in a nightclub whose strobe lights had been turned up to maximum. At the bottom of the right pocket of my cargo pants, at last, my fingers met the object, smooth and cold. I did not remember slipping it there. My hands, evidently, had had more sense than I had.
I closed it in my fist to give it as much skin as possible. Pain planted itself in the middle of my forehead, violent enough to wring a grunt from me and make me draw my knees to my chest but I held on because I now knew what would come next. It took longer than in the mine. A gallery doesn't move but a forest never stops moving and my brain had to sort in real time a tree, its thousands of leaves, the wind stirring them and everything living around and beneath. The chaos finally slowed all the same and the two images, instead of tearing each other apart, agreed to overlap.
What I discovered then made me forget my migraine for a moment. Beneath its russet gown the forest was crossed by a slow, innumerable traffic: the sap still rising in the trunks despite the season, the water deserting the doomed leaves, the filaments of Ether plunging with the roots into a soil teeming with a life too small to name and all of it crossed paths, dodged and handed off without a sound, from the crown to the rootlets. Behind the forest anyone would have seen there existed a second one, made of everything that circulated in the first and that one never stopped working.
I lay still a moment with my fist clenched against my chest, breathing. The air, at least, had changed for the better: cold, damp, laden with a smell of rotting leaves and wet wood, it finally went down to the bottom of my lungs and I took three deep breaths in a row just for the pleasure of checking that the thing was still real.
My legs agreed to carry me with the ill will of an oncoming flu. My balance was off, the ground tilting to a side my eyes refused to confirm. Inner ear battered, sensory overload or slightly different gravity, the list of explanations was growing much faster than reason. I leaned against the nearest trunk (a broad twisted oak) and only then did I think to look at where I had landed.
There was no longer any arch. The oak's roots lifted the ground at the exact spot where I must have appeared and on the other side of the trunk the slope ran off between the trees beneath a carpet of russet ferns. I circled it twice before realizing my piece of beam was gone. I had been holding it in my right hand as I went through (I was certain of it) and my palm, still scraped by its splinters, could vouch for it. I searched the ferns three meters around without finding the slightest trace. The pebble thrown into the arch had vanished without a sound; the wood had apparently taken the same path or another, which was not reassuring when one had just taken the trip oneself.
"Léa?"
My voice carried, this time. I called again, louder, Léa, then Jeanne, then Chris, leaving between each name the time someone needs to come to and answer. A jay took off from a low branch with an outraged cry as if I had just pulled it from a well-earned nap.
I stood with my mouth half open, ready for a fourth attempt, then closed it.
My fingers went back on their own to the jacket's inside pocket. The notebook was there, stiff in its waterproof plastic sleeve: my lab notepad, full of neutron diffraction diagrams that had just lost all use, with its penlight stuck in the spiral. Switched on for a second, the phone showed ten percent, no signal and 4:12. I looked up. The sun was already passing above the treetops, high and frank, with all the aplomb of midday. Either I had been unconscious for many hours or this sky couldn't care less about Grenoble time and I had no way to decide. I turned off the phone, opened the notebook to the first blank page and noted what I knew, which was not much:
Arrived in forest. Phone: 4:12. Sun high. Unconscious how long? Another hour of another world?
A dead leaf drifted past me on the breeze. I reached out to snatch it from the air and missed by a good ten centimeters. I had aimed true all the same: the image of the leaf was exactly where I expected but the leaf itself was already farther along. I followed a second one with my eyes, fingers half open, without trying to grab it and the phenomenon repeated identically, what I saw always arriving a little after what was happening. It was the lag of my hand in the mine, which the quartz reduced to a few tenths of a second without removing; in a motionless gallery I had barely noticed it but in a forest where everything moved it became a handicap.
"Great. Even this reality has lag."
For an experimenter a constant delay is almost a gift since it can be measured and compensated. I had spent enough evenings on poorly hosted game servers to know what to do with a bad ping: you don't aim at the opponent where you see him but where he will be. I waited for the next leaf and closed my hand slightly ahead of its image. I missed by a hair. The third settled into the hollow of my palm, soft, half decomposed, perfectly ordinary and I felt, contemplating it, a quite disproportionate pride.
My balance, incidentally, had recovered. It had probably depended less on my inner ear than on the disagreement between what I saw and what I felt and that disagreement, now that I knew how to correct it, had stopped making me sway.
I returned to the oak and laid my palm flat on its bark. The contact tightened my perception around it like focusing under a microscope and the tree lost all its majesty at once. Seen from below it had looked sturdy; seen from within it was sick. Its main limbs twisted like arthritic fingers, the bark peeled in plates from lumpy wood and dark swellings broke the surface here and there. Thin currents of Ether accompanied the sap along the trunk and some stopped dead. Under a swollen plate of bark the vessels responsible for carrying it tightened around a denser mass where the Ether accumulated without managing to go on its way. Two other knots of the same kind obstructed the trunk lower down, almost at root level.
I walked around the tree. All three knots were on the north side and it was on the north that the branches were dying: above each blockage the bark swelled, below it the wood turned gray. I had observed this pattern dozens of times on metal test specimens, never on a living being. A part rarely breaks where it is weakest on average; it breaks where a tiny flaw forces the whole load to go around it so that the neighboring material, overloaded, ends up giving way in turn.
My fingertips were a few centimeters from the lowest knot. I laid them on it. The mass was warm under the bark, compact and the flow that ran into it piled up the way a stream's water does behind a jam of branches. The urge to undo it itched in me and I hadn't the faintest idea how to go about it. In the lab the intern who touched the diffractometer without reading the manual earned a week of glassware washing; the pressure in the middle of my forehead reminded me that my brain had barely rebooted. I withdrew my hand.
My throat had been dry since waking. My last meal came down to a sandwich swallowed in front of the console the evening before and night would eventually fall with or without shelter for me. Somewhere Léa and the others were perhaps injured too on the other side.
Which side, though?
The oak had been dying slowly for years; it could bear one more day. As for me, the three-day rule for going without water allowed no mitigating circumstances.
Before leaving I picked up three flat stones and stacked them between two roots two paces from where I had appeared. If the arch reopened or if someone else made the same journey that little cairn would be the only sign that a human being had stood there. I added in the notebook under the first line:
Sick oak, three knots north side. Cairn of three stones. Come back.
I underlined the last word twice.
For direction the forest proved more cooperative than the sky. A steady breeze climbed the slope and blew in my face a smell of wet earth. Any paraglider pilot from Saint-Hilaire-du-Touvet would explain it by drawing curves with their hands: as soon as the sun heats the valley floor the warmed air climbs the slopes and keeps climbing as long as the afternoon lasts. This one therefore came from below and it had crossed something damp on the way. Water always flows down; the air that smelled of water rose from below. I chose a first landmark (a pale birch some fifty meters lower) and set off with the quartz clenched in my right hand.
The descent was gentler than I had feared. Ferns lashed my knees, acorns rolled under my soles between patches of moss and the slope, from ledge to ledge, let me guess beneath the dead leaves the rounded shoulders of big boulders the forest had ended up adopting. With each step the second forest glided around me and I got used to it the way you get used to the noise of a city.
At the foot of the birch a gap in the canopy opened a view of the rest of the slope. The forest tumbled down for kilometers in russet and ochre waves, dotted with the dark patches of conifers until it lost itself in a bluish haze that drowned the valley floor; for a moment I forgot thirst before this immensity of autumn. My gaze caught on the flaw. Far below a band crossed the slope at an angle, across its whole width, where the colors died out: neither russet nor green, the dull gray of cold ash as if someone had run an eraser over the landscape without finishing the job. In the other layer, at the limit of what I could perceive, the gold of the filaments lost its weave there and blurred like a damaged stretch of an old videotape.
I closed my eyes, counted to ten and looked again in case my exhausted perception was playing a trick on me. The band was still there. I didn't know what it meant but it barred exactly the slope I had just chosen and the breeze that brought me the smell of water also rose from there.