As shocked as I was by the fact that she had lied to me - and as fearful as I was about what the truth might hold - I couldn’t turn off the professional part of me, the part that took pride in recognising such things.
Greta nodded. ‘Those are the main commerce routes, the well-mapped connections between large colonies and major trading hubs. Now I’ll add all mapped connections, including those that have only ever been traversed by accident.’
The scribble did not change dramatically. It gained a few more wild loops and hairpins, including one that reached beyond the wall of the Bubble to touch the sunward end of the Aquila Rift. One or two other additions pierced the wall in different directions, but none of them reached as far as the Rift.
‘Where are we?’
‘We’re at one end of one of those connections. You can’t see it because it’s pointing directly towards you.’ She smiled slightly. ‘I needed to establish the scale that we’re dealing with. How wide is the Local Bubble, Thom? Four hundred light-years, give or take?’
My patience was wearing thin. But I was still curious.
‘About right.’
‘And while I know that aperture travel times vary from point to point, with factors depending on network topology and syntax optimisation, isn’t it the case that the average speed is about one thousand times faster than light?’
‘Give or take.’
‘So a journey from one side of the Bubble might take - what, half a year? Say five or six months? A year to the Aquila Rift?’
‘You know that already, Greta. We both know it.’
‘All right. Then consider this.’ And the view contracted again, the Bubble dwindling, a succession of overlaying structures concealing it, darkness coming into view on either side, and then the familiar spiral swirl of the Milky Way Galaxy looming large.
Hundreds of billions of stars, packed together into foaming white lanes of sea spume.
‘This is the view,’ Greta said. ‘Enhanced of course, brightened and filtered for human consumption - but if you had eyes with near-perfect quantum efficiency, and if they happened to be about a metre wide, this is more or less what you’d see if you stepped outside the station.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
What I meant was I didn’t want to believe her.
‘Get used to it, Thom. You’re a long way out. The station’s orbiting a brown dwarf star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. You’re one hundred and fifty thousand light-years from home.’
‘No,’ I said, my voice little more than a moan of abject, childlike denial.
‘You felt as though you’d spent a long time in the tank. You were dead right. Subjective time? I don’t know. Years, easily. Maybe a decade. But objective time - the time that passed back home - is a lot clearer. It took Blue Goose one hundred and fifty years to reach us. Even if you turned back now, you’d have been away for three hundred years, Thom.’
‘Katerina,’ I said, her name like an invocation.
‘Katerina’s dead,’ Greta told me. ‘She’s already been dead a century.’
How do you adjust to something like that? The answer is that you can’t count on adjusting to it at all. Not everyone does. Greta told me that she had seen just about every possible reaction in the spectrum, and the one thing she had learned was that it was next to impossible to predict how a given individual would take the news. She had seen people adjust to the revelation with little more than a world-weary shrug, as if this were merely the latest in a line of galling surprises life had thrown at them, no worse in its way than illness or bereavement or any number of personal setbacks. She had seen others walk away and kill themselves half an hour later.
But the majority, she said, did eventually come to some kind of accommodation with the truth, however faltering and painful the process.
‘Trust me, Thom,’ she said. ‘I know you now. I know you have the emotional strength to get through this. I know you can learn to live with it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me straight away, as soon as I came out of the tank?’
‘Because I didn’t know if you were going to be able to take it.’
‘You waited until after you knew I had a wife.’
‘No,’ Greta said. ‘I waited until after we’d made love. Because then I knew Katerina couldn’t mean that much to you.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘Fuck me? Yes, you did. That’s the point.’
I wanted to strike out against her. But what I was angry at was not her insinuation but the cold-hearted truth of it. She was right, and I knew it. I just didn’t want to deal with that, any more than I wanted to deal with the here and now.
I waited for the anger to subside.
‘You say we’re not the first?’ I said.
‘No. We were the first, I suppose - the ship I came in. Luckily it was well equipped. After the routing error, we had enough supplies to set up a self-sustaining station on the nearest rock. We knew there was no going back, but at least we could make some kind of life for ourselves here.’
‘And after that?’
‘We had enough to do just keeping ourselves alive, the first few years. But then another ship came through the aperture. Damaged, drifting, much like Blue Goose. We hauled her in, warmed her crew, broke the news to them.’
‘How’d they take it?’
‘About as well as you’d expect.’ Greta laughed hollowly to herself. ‘A couple of them went mad. Another killed herself. But at least a dozen of them are still here. In all honesty, it was good for us that another ship came through. Not just because they had supplies we could use, but because it helped us to help them. Took our minds off our own self-pity. It made us realise how far we’d come, and how much help these newcomers needed to make the same transition. That wasn’t the last ship, either. We’ve gone through the same process with eight or nine others, since then.’ Greta looked at me, her head cocked against her hand. ‘There’s a thought for you, Thom.’
‘There is?’
She nodded. ‘It’s difficult for you now, I know. And it’ll be difficult for you for some time to come. But it can help to have someone else to care about. It can smooth the transition.’
‘Like who?’ I asked.
‘Like one of your other crew members,’ Greta said. ‘You could try waking one of them, now.’
Greta’s with me when I pull Suzy out of the surge tank.
‘Why her?’ Greta asks.
‘Because I want her out first,’ I say, wondering if Greta’s jealous. I don’t blame her: Suzy’s beautiful, but she’s also smart. There isn’t a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial.
‘What happened?’ Suzy asks, when she’s over the grogginess. ‘Did we make it back?’
I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembers.
‘Customs,’ Suzy says. ‘Those pricks on Arkangel.’
‘And after that? Anything else? The runes? Do you remember casting them?’
‘No,’ she says, then picks up something in my voice. The fact that I might not be telling the truth, or telling her all she needs to know. ‘Thom. I’ll ask you again. Did we make it back?’
A minute later we’re putting Suzy back into the tank.
It hasn’t worked first time. Maybe next try.
But it kept not working with Suzy. She was always cleverer and quicker than me; she always had been. As soon as she came out of the tank, she knew that we’d come a lot further than Schedar Sector. She was always ahead of my lies and excuses.
‘It was different when it happened to me,’ I told Greta, when we were lying next to each other again, days later, with Suzy still in the tank. ‘I had all the nagging doubts she has, I think. But as soon as I saw you standing there, I forgot all about that stuff.’
Greta nodded. Her hair fell across her face in dishevelled, sleep-matted curtains. She had a strand of it between her lips.
‘It helped, seeing a friendly face?’
‘Took my mind off the problem, that’s for su
re.’
‘You’ll get there in the end,’ she said. ‘Anyway, from Suzy’s point of view, aren’t you a friendly face as well?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But she’d been expecting me. You were the last person in the world I expected to see standing there.’
Greta touched her knuckle against the side of my face. Her smooth skin slid against stubble. ‘It’s getting easier for you, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘You’re a strong man, Thom. I knew you’d come through this.’
‘I haven’t come through it yet,’ I said. I felt like a tightrope walker halfway across Niagara Falls. It was a miracle I’d made it as far as I had. But that didn’t mean I was home and dry.
Still, Greta was right. There was hope. I’d felt no crushing spasms of grief over Katerina’s death, or enforced absence, or however you wanted to put it. All I felt was a bitter-sweet regret, the way one might feel about a broken heirloom or long-lost pet. I felt no animosity towards Katerina, and I was sorry that I would never see her again. But I was sorry about not seeing a lot of things. Maybe it would become worse in the days ahead. Maybe I was just postponing a breakdown.
I didn’t think so.
In the meantime, I continued trying to find a way to deal with Suzy. She had become a puzzle that I couldn’t leave unsolved. I could have just woken her up and let her deal with the news as best as she could, but that seemed cruel and unsatisfactory. Greta had broken it to me gently, giving me time to settle into my new surroundings and take that necessary step away from Katerina. When she finally broke the news, as shocking as it was, it didn’t shatter me. I’d already been primed for it, the sting taken out of the surprise. Sleeping with Greta obviously helped. I couldn’t offer Suzy the same solace, but I was sure that there was a way for us to coax Suzy to the same state of near-acceptance.
Time after time we woke her and tried a different approach. Greta said there was a window of a few minutes before the events she was experiencing began to transfer into long-term memory. If we knocked her out, the buffer of memories in short-term storage was wiped before it ever crossed the hippocampus into long-term recall. Within that window, we could wake her up as many times as we liked, trying endless permutations of the revival scenario.
At least that was what Greta told me.
‘We can’t keep doing this indefinitely,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Isn’t she going to remember something?’
Greta shrugged. ‘Maybe. But I doubt that she’ll attach any significance to those memories. Haven’t you ever had vague feelings of déjà vu coming out of the surge tank?’
‘Sometimes,’ I admitted.
‘Then don’t sweat about it. She’ll be all right. I promise you.’
‘Perhaps we should just keep her awake, after all.’
‘That would be cruel.’
‘It’s cruel to keep waking her up and shutting her down, like a toy doll.’
There was a catch in her voice when she answered me.
‘Keep at it, Thom. I’m sure you’re close to finding a way, in the end. It’s helping you, focusing on Suzy. I always knew it would.’
I started to say something, but Greta pressed a finger to my lips.
Greta was right about Suzy. The challenge helped me, taking my mind off my own predicament. I remembered what Greta had said about dealing with other crews in the same situation, before Blue Goose put in. Clearly she had learned many psychological tricks: gambits and short cuts to assist the transition to mental well-being. I felt a slight resentment at being manipulated so effectively. But at the same time I couldn’t deny that worrying about another human being had helped me with my own adjustment. When, days later, I stepped back from the immediate problem of Suzy, I realised that something was different. I didn’t feel far from home. I felt, in an odd way, privileged. I’d come further than almost anyone in history. I was still alive, and there were still people around to provide love and partnership and a web of social relations. Not just Greta, but all the other unlucky souls who had ended up at the station.
If anything, there appeared to be more of them than when I had first arrived. The corridors - sparsely populated at first - were increasingly busy, and when we ate under the dome - under the Milky Way - we were not the only diners. I studied their lamp-lit faces, comforted by their vague familiarity, wondering what kinds of stories they had to tell; where they’d come from, who they had left behind, how they had adjusted to life here. There was time enough to get to know them all. And the place would never become boring, for at any time - as Greta had intimated - we could always expect another lost ship to drop through the aperture. Tragedy for the crew, but fresh challenges, fresh faces, fresh news from home, for us.
All in all, it wasn’t really so bad.
Then it clicked.
It was the man cleaning out the fish that did it, in the lobby of the hotel. It wasn’t just the familiarity of the process, but the man himself.
I’d seen him before. Another pond full of diseased carp. Another hotel.
Then I remembered Kolding’s bad teeth, and recalled how they’d reminded me of another man I’d met long before. Except it wasn’t another man at all. Different name, different context, but everything else the same. And when I looked at the other diners, really looked at them, there was no one I could swear I hadn’t seen before. No single face that hit me with the force of utter unfamiliarity.
Which left Greta.
I said to her, over wine, under the Milky Way: ‘Nothing here is real, is it?’
She looked at me with infinite sadness and shook her head.
‘What about Suzy?’ I asked her.
‘Suzy’s dead. Ray is dead. They died in their surge tanks.’
‘How? Why them, and not me?’
‘Something about particles of paint blocking intake filters. Not enough to make a difference over short distances, but enough to kill them on the trip out here.’
I think some part of me had always suspected. It felt less like shock than brutal disappointment.
‘But Suzy seemed so real,’ I said. ‘Even the way she had doubts about how long she’d been in the tank . . . even the way she remembered previous attempts to wake her.’
The glass mannequin approached our table. Greta waved him away.
‘I made her convincing, the way she would have acted.’
‘You made her?’
‘You’re not really awake, Thom. You’re being fed data. This entire station is being simulated.’
I sipped my wine. I expected it to taste suddenly thin and synthetic, but it still tasted like pretty good wine.
‘Then I’m dead as well?’
‘No. You’re alive. Still in your surge tank. But I haven’t brought you to full consciousness yet.’
‘All right. The truth this time. I can take it. How much is real? Does the station exist? Are we really as far out as you said?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The station exists, just as I said it does. It just looks . . . different. And it is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it is orbiting a brown dwarf star.’
‘Can you show me the station as it is?’
‘I could. But I don’t think you’re ready for it. I think you’d find it difficult to adjust.’
I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Even after what I’ve already adjusted to?’
‘You’ve only made half the journey, Thom.’
‘But you made it.’
‘I did, Thom. But for me it was different.’ Greta smiled. ‘For me, everything was different.’
Then she made the light show change again. None of the other diners appeared to notice as we began to zoom in towards the Milky Way, crashing towards the spiral, ramming through shoals of outlying stars and gas clouds. The familiar landscape of the Local Bubble loomed large.
The image froze, the Bubble one amongst many such structures.
Again it filled with the violent red scribble of the aper
ture network. But now the network wasn’t the only one. It was merely one ball of red yarn amongst many, spaced out across tens of thousands of light-years. None of the scribbles touched each other, yet - in the way they were shaped, in the way they almost abutted against each other, it was possible to imagine that they had once been connected. They were like the shapes of continents on a world with tectonic drift.
‘It used to span the galaxy,’ Greta said. ‘Then something happened. Something catastrophic, which I still don’t understand. A shattering, into vastly smaller domains. Typically a few hundred light-years across.’
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