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 aperture 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.'
'Who made it?'
'I don't know. No one knows. They probably aren't around any more.
Maybe that was why it shattered, out of neglect.'
'But we found it,' I said. 'The part of it near us still worked.'
'All the disconnected elements still function,' Greta said. 'You can't cross from domain to domain, but otherwise the apertures work as they were designed to. Barring, of course, the occasional routing error.'
'All right,' I said. 'If you can't cross from domain to domain, how did
Blue Goose
get this far out? We've come a lot further than a few hundred light-years.'
'You're right. But then such a long-distance connection might have been engineered differently from the others. It appears that the links to the Magellanic Cloud were more resilient. When the domains shattered from each other, the connections reaching beyond the galaxy remained intact.'
'In which case you
can
cross from domain to domain,' I said. 'But you have to come all the way out here first.'
'The trouble is, not many want to continue the journey at this point. No one comes here deliberately, Thom.'
'I still don't get it. What does it matter to me if there are other domains? Those regions of the galaxy are thousands of light-years from Earth, and without the apertures we'd have no way of reaching them. They don't matter. There's no one there to use them.'
Greta's smile was coquettish, knowing.
'What makes you so certain?'
'Because if there were, wouldn't there be alien ships popping out of the aperture here? You've told me
Blue Goose
wasn't the first through. But our domain - the one in the Local Bubble - must be outnumbered hundreds to one by all the others. If there are alien cultures out there, each stumbling on their own local domain, why haven't any of them ever come through the aperture, the way we did?'
Again that smile. But this time it chilled my blood.
'What makes you think they haven't, Thom?'
I reached out and took her hand, the way she had taken mine. I took it without force, without malice, but with the assurance that this time I really, sincerely meant what I was about to say.
Her fingers tightened around mine.
'Show me,' I said. 'I want to see things as they really are. Not just the station. You as well.'
Because by then I'd realised. Greta hadn't just lied to me about Suzy and Ray. She'd lied to me about the
Blue Goose
as well. Because we were not the latest human ship to come through.
We were the first.
'You want to see it?' she asked.
'Yes. All of it.'
'You won't like it.'
'I'll be the judge of that.'
'All right, Thom. But understand this. I've been here before. I've done this a million times. I care for all the lost souls. And I know how it works. You won't be able to take the raw reality of what's happened to you. You'll shrivel away from it. You'll go mad, unless I substitute a calming fiction, a happy ending.'
'Why tell me that now?'
'Because you don't have to see it. You can stop now, where you are, with an idea of the truth. An inkling. But you don't have to open your eyes.'
'Do it,' I said.
Greta shrugged. She poured herself another measure of wine, then made sure my own glass was charged.
'You asked for it,' she said.
We were still holding hands, two lovers sharing an intimacy. Then everything changed.
It was just a flash, just a glimpse. Like the view of an unfamiliar room if you turn the lights on for an instant. Shapes and forms, relationships between things. I saw caverns, wormed-out and linked, and things moving through those caverns, bustling along with the frantic industry of moles or termites. The things were seldom alike, even in the most superficial sense. Some moved via propulsive waves of multiple clawed limbs. Some wriggled, smooth plaques of carapace grinding against the glassy rock of the tunnels.
The things moved between caves in which lay the hulks of ships, almost all too strange to describe.
And somewhere distant, somewhere near the heart of the rock, in a matriarchal chamber all of its own, something drummed out messages to its companions and helpers, stiffly articulated, antler-like forelimbs beating against stretched tympana of finely veined skin, something that had been waiting here for eternities, something that wanted nothing more than to care for the souls of the lost.
Katerina's with Suzy when they pull me out of the surge tank.
It's bad - one of the worst revivals I've ever gone through. I feel as if every vein in my body has been filled with finely powdered glass. For a moment, a long moment, even the idea of breathing seems insurmountably difficult, too hard, too painful even to contemplate.
But it passes, as it always passes.
After a while I can not only breathe, I can move and talk.
'Where--'
'Easy, Skip,' Suzy says. She leans over the tank and starts unplugging me. I can't help but smile. Suzy's smart - there isn't a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial - but she's also beautiful. It's like being nursed by an angel.
I wonder if Katerina's jealous.
'Where are we?' I try again. 'Feels like I was in that thing for an eternity. Did something go wrong?'
'Minor routing error,' Suzy says. 'We took some damage and they decided to wake me first. But don't sweat about it. At least we're in one piece.'
Routing errors. You hear about them, but you hope they're never going to happen to you.
'What kind of delay?'
'Forty days. Sorry, Thom. Bang goes our bonus.'
In anger, I hammer the side of the surge tank. But Katerina steps towards me and places a calming hand on my shoulder.
'It's all right,' she says. 'You're home and dry. That's all that matters.'
I look at her and for a moment remember someone else, someone I haven't thought about in years. I almost remember her name, and then the moment passes.
I nod. 'Home and dry.'
Like two other stories in this collection, 'Beyond the Aquila Rift' owes its existence to that excellent and energetic editor, Peter Crowther. In 2003, Pete announced that he was putting together a book entitled
Constellations
, which would be a logical follow-on from his earlier anthologies
Moon Shots
and
Mars Probes.
I was pleased to be asked to contribute a story, but time was pressing on with my novel deadline, and I didn't feel that I had any story ideas that were suitable for the theme. Still, it never pays to make snap judgments, and by the time I got back from lunch in town, I
thought
I had enough of an idea to start work on this story. That's the way I usually work, by the way: I don't wait until I've got the fully formed architecture of a story clear in my head before starting. I need some idea of where things are going, but I generally only have a very vague notion of how a particular piece is going to end. (And if I do know the ending with any certainty, I write it first and then work backwards from that point.)
With 'Beyond the Aquila Rift', I just knew that it was going to be about being stranded, with the exact nature of that stranding not being fully revealed until the end of the story. The structure of the story only became clear as I got into its innards. As for the title, well, there really is a feature in space known as the Aquila Rift, and it always seemed to me to be crying out to be used in the title of a story. I mean, how space-operatic does that sound? In any case I had a lot of fun trying to work some real astronomy into this one, and I hope it goes some way to conveying that mingled impression of wonder and terror that I know
I
get when looking into the night sky, trying to imagine just how incomprehensibly far away all those little dots of light are . . . while knowing that the visible stars are barely any distance away at all compared to the nearest galaxies. Science fiction has many strategies for evoking 'sense of wonder', but the dizzying shift of scale must still count as one of the most effective. The working title for this story, incidentally - before I settled on the Aquila Rift as a point of reference - was 'Under the Milky Way Tonight'. Which may or may not mean something to readers of a certain age.
ENOLA
Lucky Kodaira worked days in the stalls and bazaars of Cockatoo's Crest. There she sold trinkets gathered during the winter months, when the Kodaira family travelled north into the great deserts of the Empty.
The trinkets were small things, relics fashioned hundreds of years earlier by the folk who had lived before the silver light of the Hour. Some trinkets spoke in shrill voices, frequently in the languages of the northern islands. Others were valuable merely for their antique charm. Some showed images of the dead, like the hologram faces she wore in a chain around her neck. There were syrinx-boxes that sang without ever repeating a single refrain. Others were mere curios: a paperweight fashioned in the shape of Broken Bridge, standing intact. Liquid metal in the flashing glass-labyrinth of a toy bagatelle board, like a chromed slug. A tiny globe, showing the world as it appeared from space, marked darkly against sepia parchment. Lucky Kodaira liked that one so much that she hid it at the back of her tray.