The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

Except, of course, it wasn't God. It was a supernova, about a million years ago.

  Look farther out, and there are more bubbles, their walls intersecting and merging, forming a vast froth-like structure tens of thousands of light-years across. There are the structures of Loop I and Loop II and the Lindblad Ring. There are even super-dense knots where the dust is almost too thick to be seen through at all. Black cauls like the Taurus or Rho-Ophiuchi dark clouds or the Aquila Rift itself.

  Lying outside the Local Bubble, the Rift is the farthest point in the galaxy we've ever traveled to. It's not a question of endurance or nerve. There simply isn't a way to get beyond it, at least not within the faster-than-light network of the aperture links. The rabbit-warren of possible routes just doesn't reach any farther. Most destinations—including most of those on the Blue Goose's itinerary—didn't even get you beyond the Local Bubble.

  For us, it didn't matter. There's still a lot of commerce you can do within a hundred light-years of Earth. But Schedar was right on the periphery of the Bubble, where dust density began to ramp up to normal galactic levels, two hundred and twenty-eight light-years from Mother Earth.

  Again: not good.

  "I know this is a shock for you," another voice said. "But it's not as bad as you think it is."

  I looked at the woman who had just spoken. Medium height, the kind of face they called "elfin," with slanted ash-gray eyes and a bob of shoulder-length chrome-white hair.

  The face hurtingly familiar.

  "It isn't?"

  "I wouldn't say so, Thom." She smiled. "After all, it's given us the chance to catch up on old times, hasn't it?"

  "Greta?" I asked, disbelievingly.

  She nodded. "For my sins."

  "My God. It is you, isn't it?"

  "I wasn't sure you'd recognize me. Especially after all this time."

  "You didn't have much trouble recognizing me."

  "I didn't have to. The moment you popped out, we picked up your recovery transponder. Told us the name of your ship, who owned her, who was flying it, what you were carrying, where you were supposed to be headed. When I heard it was you, I made sure I was part of the reception team. But don't worry. It's not like you've changed all that much."

  "Well, you haven't either," I said.

  It wasn't quite true. But who honestly wants to hear that they look about ten years older than the last time you saw them, even if they still don't look all that bad with it? I thought about how she had looked naked, memories that I'd kept buried for a decade spooling into daylight. It shamed me that they were still so vivid, as if some furtive part of my subconscious had been secretly hoarding them through years of marriage and fidelity.

  Greta half smiled. It was as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.

  "You were never a good liar, Thorn."

  "Yeah. Guess I need some practice."

  There was an awkward silence. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. While we hesitated, the others floated around us, saying nothing.

  "Well," I said. "Who'd have guessed we'd end up meeting like this?"

  Greta nodded and offered the palms of her hands in a kind of apology.

  "I'm just sorry we aren't meeting under better circumstances," she said. "But if it's any consolation, what happened wasn't at all your fault. We checked your syntax, and there wasn't a mistake. It's just that now and then the system throws a glitch."

  "Funny how no one likes to talk about that very much," I said.

  "Could have been worse, Thorn. I remember what you used to tell me about space travel."

  "Yeah? Which particular pearl of wisdom would that have been?"

  "If you're in a position to moan about a situation, you've no right to be moaning."

  "Christ. Did I actually say that?"

  "Mm. And I bet you're regretting it now. But look, it really isn't that bad. You're only twenty days off schedule." Greta nodded toward the man who had the bad teeth. "Kolding says you'll only need a day of damage repair before you can move off again, and then another twenty, twenty-five days before you reach your destination, depending on routing patterns. That's less than six weeks. So you lose the bonus on this one. Big deal. You're all in one shape, and your ship only needs a little work. Why don't you just bite the bullet and sign the repair paperwork?"

  "I'm not looking forward to another twenty days in the surge tank. There's something else, as well."

  "Which is?"

  I was about to tell her about Katerina, how she'd have been expecting me back already.

  Instead I said: "I'm worried about the others. Suzy and Ray. They've got families expecting them. They'll be worried."

  "I understand," Greta said. "Suzy and Ray. They're still asleep, aren't they? Still in their surge tanks?"

  "Yes," I said, guardedly.

  "Keep them that way until you're on your way." Greta smiled. "There's no sense worrying them about their families, either. It's kinder."

  "If you say so."

  "Trust me on this one, Thorn. This isn't the first time I've handled this kind of situation. Doubt it'll be the last, either."

  I stayed in a hotel overnight, in another part of Saumlaki. The hotel was an echoing multilevel prefab structure, sunk deep into bedrock. It must have had a capacity for hundreds of guests, but at the moment only a handful of the rooms seemed to be occupied. I slept fitfully and got up early. In the atrium, I saw a bib-capped worker in rubber gloves removing diseased carp from a small ornamental pond. Watching him pick out the ailing metallic-orange fish, I had a flash of deja vu. What was it about dismal hotels and dying carp?

  Before breakfast—bleakly alert, even though I didn't really feel as if I'd had a good night's sleep—I visited Kolding and got a fresh update on the repair schedule.

  "Two, three days," he said.

  "It was a day last night."

  Kolding shrugged. "You've got a problem with the service, find someone else to fix your ship."

  Then he stuck his little finger into the corner of his mouth and began to dig between his teeth.

  "Nice to see someone who really enjoys his work," I said.

  I left Kolding before my mood worsened too much, making my way to a different part of the station.

  Greta had suggested we meet for breakfast and catch up on old times. She was there when I arrived, sitting at a table in an "outdoor" terrace, under a red-and-white striped canopy, sipping orange juice. Above us was a dome several hundred meters wide, projecting a cloudless holographic sky. It had the hard, enameled blue of midsummer.

  "How's the hotel?" she asked after I'd ordered a coffee from the waiter.

  "Not bad. No one seems very keen on conversation, though. Is it me or does that place have all the cheery ambience of a sinking ocean liner?"

  "It's just this place," Greta said. "Everyone who comes here is pissed off about it. Either they got transferred here and they're pissed off about that, or they ended up here by routing error and they're pissed off about that instead. Take your pick."

  "No one's happy?"

  "Only the ones who know they're getting out of here soon."

  "Would that include you?"

  "No." she said. "I'm more or less stuck here. But I'm OK about it. I guess I'm the exception that proves the rule."

  The waiters were glass mannequins of a kind that had been fashionable in the core worlds about twenty years ago. One of them placed a croissant in front of me, then poured scalding black coffee into my cup.

  "Well, it's good to see you," I said.

  "You too, Thorn." Greta finished her orange juice and then took a corner of my croissant for herself, without asking. "I heard you got married."

  "Yes."

  "Well? Aren't you going to tell me about her?"

  I drank some of my coffee. "Her name's Katerina."

  "Nice name."

  "She works in the department of bioremediation on Ka-gawa."

  "Kids?" Greta asked.

  "Not yet. It wouldn't be easy, the amount of
time we both spend away from home."

  "Mm." She had a mouthful of croissant. "But one day you might think about it."

  "Nothing's ruled out," I said. As flattered as I was that she was taking such an interest in me, the surgical precision of her questions left me slightly uncomfortable. There was no thrust and parry, no fishing for information. That kind of directness unnerved. But at least it allowed me to ask the same questions. "What about you, then?"

  "Nothing very exciting. I got married a year or so after I last saw you. A man called Marcel."

  "Marcel," I said, ruminatively, as if the name had cosmic significance. "Well, I'm happy for you. I take it he's here too?"

  "No. Our work took us in different directions. We're still married, but…" Greta left the sentence hanging.

  "It can't be easy," I said.

  "If it was meant to work, we'd have found a way. Anyway, don't feel too sorry for either of us. We've both got our work. I wouldn't say I was any less happy than the last time we met."

  "Well, that's good," I said.

  Greta leaned over and touched my hand. Her fingernails were midnight black with a blue sheen.

  "Look. This is really presumptuous of me. It's one thing asking to meet up for breakfast. It would have been rude not to. But how would you like to meet again later? It's really nice to eat here in the evening. They turn down the lights. The view through the dome is really something."

  I looked up into that endless holographic sky.

  "I thought it was faked."

  "Oh, it is," she said. "But don't let that spoil it for you."

  I settled in front of the camera and started speaking.

  "Katerina," I said. "Hello. I hope you're all right. By now I hope someone from the company will have been in touch. If they haven't, I'm pretty sure you'll have made your own inquiries. I'm not sure what they told you, but I promise you that we're safe and sound and that we're coming home. I'm calling from somewhere called Saumlaki station, a repair facility on the edge of Schedar sector. It's not much to look at: just a warren of tunnels and centrifuges dug into a pitch-black D-type asteroid, about half a light-year from the nearest star. The only reason it's here at all is because there happens to be an aperture next door. That's how we got here in the first place. Somehow or other Blue Goose took a wrong turn in the network, what they call a routing error. The Goose came in last night, local time, and I've been in a hotel since then. I didn't call last night because I was too tired and disoriented after coming out of the tank, and I didn't know how long we were going to be here. Seemed better to wait until morning, when we'd have a better idea of the damage to the ship. It's nothing serious—just a few bits and pieces buckled during the transit—but it means we're going to be here for another couple of days. Kolding—he's the repair chief—says three at the most. By the time we get back on course, however, we'll be about forty days behind schedule."

  I paused, eyeing the incrementing cost indicator. Before I sat down in the booth, I always had an eloquent and economical speech queued up in my head, one that conveyed exactly what needed to be said, with the measure and grace of a soliloquy. But my mind always dried up as soon as I opened my mouth, and instead of an actor I ended up sounding like a small time thief, concocting some fumbling alibi in the presence of quick-witted interrogators.

  I smiled awkwardly and continued: "It kills me to think this message is going to take so long to get to you. But if there's a silver lining, it's that I won't be far behind it. By the time you get this, I should be home in only a couple of days. So don't waste money replying to this, because by the time you get it I'll already have left Saumlaki Station. Just stay where you are, and I promise I'll be home soon."

  That was it. There was nothing more I needed to say, other than: "I miss you." Delivered after a moment's pause, I meant it to sound emphatic. But when I replayed the recording it sounded more like an afterthought.

  I could have recorded it again, but I doubted that I would have been any happier. Instead I just committed the existing message for transmission and wondered how long it would have to wait before going on its way. Since it seemed unlikely that there was a vast flow of commerce in and out of Saumlaki, our ship might be the first suitable outbound vessel.

  I emerged from the booth. For some reason I felt guilty, as if I had been in some way neglectful. It took me a while before I realized what was playing on my mind. I'd told Kate-rina about Saumlaki Station. I'd even told her about Kolding and the damage to the Blue Goose. But I hadn't told her about Greta.

  It's not working with Suzy.

  She's too smart, too well-attuned to the physiological correlatives of surge tank immersion. I can give her all the reassurances in the world, but she knows she's been under too long for this to be anything other than a truly epic screw-up. She knows that we aren't just talking weeks or even months of delay here. Every nerve in her body is screaming that message into her skull.

  "I had dreams," she says, when the grogginess fades.

  "What kind?"

  "Dreams that I kept waking. Dreams that you were pulling me out of the surge tank. You and someone else."

  I do my best to smile. I'm alone, but Greta isn't far away. The hypodermic's in my pocket now.

  "I always get bad dreams coming out of the tank," I say.

  "These felt real. Your story kept changing, but you kept telling me we were somewhere… that we 'd gone a little off course, but that it was nothing to worry about."

  So much for Greta's reassurance that Suzy will remember nothing after our aborted efforts at waking her. Seems that her short-term memory isn't quite as fallible as we'd like.

  "It's funny you should say that," I tell her. "Because, actually, we are a little off course."

  She's sharper with every breath. Suzy was always the best of us at coming out of the tank.

  "Tell me how far, Thorn."

  "Farther than I'd like."

  She balls her fists. I can't tell if it's aggression, or some lingering neuromuscular effect of her time in the tank. "How far? Beyond the Bubble?"

  "Beyond the Bubble, yes."

  Her voice grows small and childlike.

  "Tell me, Thorn. Are we out beyond the Rift?"

  I can hear the fear. I understand what she's going through. It's the nightmare that all ship crews live with, on every trip. That something will go wrong with the routing, something so severe that they 'II end up on the very edge of the network. That they'll end up so far from home that getting back will take years, not months. And that, of course, years will have already passed, even before they begin the return trip.

  That loved ones will be years older when they reach home.

  If they 're still there. If they still remember you, or want to remember. If they 're still recognizable, or alive.

  Beyond the Aquila Rift. It's shorthand for the trip no one ever hopes to make by accident. The one that will screw up the rest of your life, the one that creates the ghosts you see haunting the shadows of company bars across the whole Bubble. Men and women ripped out of time, cut adrift from families and lovers by an accident of an alien technology we use but barely comprehend.

  "Yes," I say. "We're beyond the Rift."

  Suzy screams, knitting her face into a mask of anger and denial. My hand is cold around the hypodermic. I consider using it.

  A new repair estimate from Kolding. Five, six days.

  This time I didn't even argue. I just shrugged and walked out, wondering how long it would be next time.

  That evening I sat down at the same table where Greta and I had met over breakfast. The dining area had been well lit before, but now the only illumination came from the table lamps and the subdued lighting panels set into the paving. In the distance, a glass mannequin cycled from empty table to empty table, playing Asturias on a glass guitar. There were no other patrons dining tonight.

  I didn't have long to wait for Greta.

  "I'm sorry I'm late, Thom."

  I turned to her as she a
pproached the table. I liked the way she walked in the low gravity of the station, the way the subdued lighting traced the arc of her hips and waist. She eased into her seat and leaned toward me in the manner of a conspirator. The lamp on the table threw red shadows and gold highlights across her face. It took ten years off her age.

  "You aren't late," I said. "And anyway, I had the view."

  "It's an improvement, isn't it?"

  "That wouldn't be saying much," I said with a smile. "But yes, it's definitely an improvement."

  "I could sit out here all night and just look at it. In fact sometimes that's exactly what I do. Just me and a bottle of wine."

  "I don't blame you."

  Instead of the holographic blue, the dome was now full of stars. It was like no kind of view I'd ever seen from another station or ship. There were furious blue-white stars embedded in what looked like sheets of velvet. There were hard gold gems and soft red smears, like finger smears in pastel. There were streams and currents of fainter stars, like a myriad neon fish caught in a snapshot of frozen motion. There were vast billowing backdrops of red and green cloud, veined and flawed by filaments of cool black. There were bluffs and promontories of ochre dust, so rich in three-dimensional structure that they resembled an exuberant im-pasto of oil colors; contours light-years thick laid on with a trowel. Red or pink stars burned through the dust like lanterns. Orphaned worlds were caught erupting from the towers, little spermlike shapes trailing viscera of dust. Here and there I saw the tiny eyelike knots of birthing solar systems. There were pulsars, flashing on and off like navigation beacons, their differing rhythms seeming to set a stately tempo for the entire scene, like a deathly slow waltz. There seemed too much detail for one view, an overwhelming abundance of richness, and yet no matter which direction I looked, there was yet more to see, as if the dome sensed my attention and concentrated its efforts on the spot where my gaze was directed. For a moment I felt a lurching sense of dizziness, and—though I tried to stop it before I made a fool of myself—I found myself grasping the side of the table, as if to stop myself falling into the infinite depths of the view.

  "Yes, it has that effect on people," Greta said.

  "It's beautiful," I said.