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, Thom.”
“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, Thom. 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’ll 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, and wondered 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 approached 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 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 impasto of oil colours; 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 sperm-like 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 prevent myself from falling into the infinite depths of the view.
“Yes, it has that effect on people,” Greta said.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“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 colours 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 Betelgeuse 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, Thom? 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 about it, whatever it is,” she said, when the mannequin had gone.
“It isn’t easy.”