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

by Gardner Dozois

  "Do you mean beautiful, or terrifying?"

  I realized I wasn't sure. "It's big," was all I could offer.

  "Of course, it's faked," Greta said, her voice soft now that she was leaning closer. "The glass in the dome is smart. It exaggerates the brightness of the stars, so that the human eye registers the differences between them. Otherwise the colors aren't unrealistic. Everything else you see is also pretty accurate, if you accept that certain frequencies have been shifted into the visible band, and the scale of certain structures has been adjusted." She pointed out features for my edification. "That's the edge of the Taurus Dark Cloud, with the Pleiades just poking out. That's a filament of the Local Bubble. You see that open cluster?"

  She waited for me to answer. "Yes," I said.

  "That's the Hyades. Over there you've got Betelguese and Bellatrix."

  "I'm impressed."

  "You should be. It cost a lot of money." She leaned back a bit, so that the shadows dropped across her face again. "Are you all right, Thorn? You seem a bit distracted."

  I sighed.

  "I just got another prognosis from your friend Kolding. That's enough to put a dent in anyone's day."

  "I'm sorry about that."

  "There's something else, too," I said. "Something that's been bothering me since I came out of the tank."

  A mannequin came to take our order. I let Greta choose for me.

  "You can talk to me, whatever it is," she said, when the mannequin had gone.

  "It isn't easy."

  "Something personal, then? Is it about Katerina?" She bit her tongue "No, sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

  "It's not about Katerina. Not exactly, anyway." But even as I said it, I knew that in a sense it was about Katerina, and how long it was going to be before we saw each other again.

  "Go on, Thom."

  "This is going to sound silly. But I wonder if everyone's being straight with me. It's not just Kolding. It's you as well. When I came out of that tank I felt the same way I felt when I'd been out to the Rift. Worse, if anything. I felt like I'd been in the tank for a long, long time."

  "It feels that way sometimes."

  "I know the difference, Greta. Trust me on this."

  "So what are you saying?"

  The problem was that I wasn't really sure. It was one thing to feel a vague sense of unease about how long I'd been in the tank. It was another to come out and accuse my host of lying. Especially when she had been so hospitable.

  "Is there any reason you'd lie to me?"

  "Come off it, Thom. What kind of a question is that?"

  As soon as I had come out with it, it sounded absurd and offensive to me as well. I wished I could reverse time and start again, ignoring my misgivings.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "Stupid. Just put it down to messed up biorhythms, or something."

  She reached across the table and took my hand, as she had done at breakfast. This time she continued to hold it.

  "You really feel wrong, don't you?"

  "Kolding's games aren't helping, that's for sure." The waiter brought our wine, setting it down, the bottle chinking against his delicately articulated glass fingers. The mannequin poured two glasses and I sampled mine. "Maybe if I had someone else from my crew to bitch about it all with, I wouldn't feel so bad. I know you said we shouldn't wake Suzy and Ray, but that was before a one-day stopover turned into a week."

  Greta shrugged. "If you want to wake them, no one's going to stop you. But don't think about ship business now. Let's not spoil a perfect evening."

  I looked up at the stars. It was heightened, with the mad shimmering intensity of a Van Gogh nightscape. It made one feel drunk and ecstatic just to look at it. "What could possibly spoil it?" I asked.

  What happened is that I drank too much wine and ended up sleeping with Greta. I'm not sure how much of a part the wine played in it for her. If her relationship with Marcel was in as much trouble as she'd made out, then obviously she had less to lose than I did. Yes, that made it all right, didn't it? She the seductress, her own marriage a wreck, me the hapless victim. I'd lapsed, yes, but it wasn't really my fault. I'd been alone, far from home, emotionally fragile, and she had exploited me. She had softened me up with a romantic meal, her trap already sprung.

  Except all that was self-justifying bullshit, wasn't it? If my own marriage was in such great shape, why had I failed to mention Greta when I called home? At the time, I'd justified that omission as an act of kindness toward my wife. Ka-terina didn't know that Greta and I had ever been a couple. But why worry Katerina by mentioning another woman, even if I pretended that we'd never met before?

  Except—now—I could see that I'd failed to mention Greta for another reason entirely. Because in the back of my mind, even then, there had been the possibility that we might end up sleeping together.

  I was already covering myself when I called Katerina. Already making sure there wouldn't be any awkward questions when I got home. As if I not only knew what was going to happen but secretly yearned for it.

  The only problem was that Greta had something else in mind.

  "Thom," Greta said, nudging me toward wakefulness. She was lying naked next to me, leaning on one elbow, with the sheets crumpled down around her hips. The light in her room turned her into an abstraction of milky blue curves and deep violet shadows. With one black-nailed finger she traced a line down my chest and said: "There's something you need to know."

  "What?" I asked.

  "I lied. Kolding lied. We all lied."

  I was too drowsy for her words to have much more than a vaguely troubling effect. All I could say, again, was: "What?"

  "You're not in Saumlaki Station. You're not in Schedar sector."

  I started waking up properly. "Say that again."

  "The routing error was more severe than you were led to believe. It took you far beyond the Local Bubble."

  I groped for anger, even resentment, but all I felt was a dizzying sensation of falling. "How far out?"

  "Farther than you thought possible."

  The next question was obvious.

  "Beyond the Rift?"

  "Yes," she said, with the faintest of smiles, as if humoring a game whose rules and objectives she found ultimately demeaning. "Beyond the Aquila Rift. A long, long way beyond it."

  "I need to know, Greta."

  She pushed herself from the bed, reached for a gown. "Then get dressed. I'll show you."

  I followed Greta in a daze.

  She took me to the dome again. It was dark, just as it had been the night before, with only the lamp-lit tables to act as beacons. I supposed that the illumination throughout Saumlaki Station (or wherever this was) was at the whim of its occupants and didn't necessarily have to follow any recognizable diurnal cycle. Nonetheless, it was still unsettling to find it changed so arbitrarily. Even if Greta had the authority to turn out the lights when she wanted to, didn't anyone else object?

  But I didn't see anyone else to object. There was no one else around; only a glass mannequin standing to attention with a napkin over one arm.

  She sat us at a table. "Do you want a drink, Thorn?"

  "No, thanks. For some reason I'm not quite in the mood."

  She touched my wrist. "Don't hate me for lying to you. It was done out of kindness. I couldn't break the truth to you in one go."

  Sharply I withdrew my hand. "Shouldn't I be the judge of that? So what is the truth, exactly?"

  "It's not good, Thorn."

  "Tell me, then I'll decide."

  I didn't see her do anything, but suddenly the dome was filled with stars again, just as it had been the night before.

  The view lurched, zooming outward. Stars flowed by from all sides, like white sleet. Nebulae ghosted past in spectral wisps. The sense of motion was so compelling that I found myself gripping the table, seized by vertigo.

  "Easy, Thom," Greta whispered.

  The view lurched, swerved, contracted. A solid wall of gas slammed past. Now, sudden
ly, I had the sense that we were outside something—that we had punched beyond some containing sphere, defined only in vague arcs and knots of curdled gas, where the interstellar gas density increased sharply.

  Of course. It was obvious. We were beyond the Local Bubble.

  And we were still receding. I watched the Bubble itself contract, becoming just one member in the larger froth of voids. Instead of individual stars, I saw only smudges and motes, aggregations of hundreds of thousands of suns. It was like pulling back from a close-up view of a forest. I could still see clearings, but the individual trees had vanished into an amorphous mass.

  We kept pulling back. Then the expansion slowed and froze. I could still make out the Local Bubble, but only because I had been concentrating on it all the way out. Otherwise, there was nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of surrounding voids.

  "Is that how far out we've come?" I asked.

  Greta shook her head. "Let me show you something."

  Again, she did nothing that I was aware of. But the Bubble

  I had been looking at was suddenly filled with a skein of red lines, like a child's scribble.

  "Aperture connections," I said.

  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 recognizing 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 toward you." She smiled slightly. "I needed to establish the scale that we're dealing with. How wide is the Local Bubble, Thorn? 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 optimization, 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 meter 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, Thorn. 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, Thorn."

  "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 realize 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's she over the groggi-ness. "Did we make it back?"

  I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembered.

  "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 farther 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 sure."

  "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 bittersweet regret, the way one might feel about a broken heirloom or long-lost pet. I felt no animosity toward 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 this seemed cruel and unsatisfactory. Greta had broken it to me gently, giving me the 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.