“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 said 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 starscape. 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. Katerina 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?”
“Further than you thought possible.”
The next question was obvious.
“Beyond the Rift?”
“Yes,” she said, with the faintest of smiles, as if humouring me in 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 at attention with a napkin over one arm.
She sat us at a table. “Do you want a drink, Thom?”
“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, Thom.”
“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, suddenly, 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.