Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  BEYOND THE AQUILA RIFT

  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 she’s over the grogginess. ‘Did we make it back?’

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

  ‘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?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘We made it back.’

  Suzy looks back at the starscape, airbrushed across her surge tank in luminous violet and yellow paint. She’d had it customised on Carillon. It was against regs: something about the paint clogging intake filters. Suzy didn’t care. She told me it had cost her a week’s pay, but it had been worth it to impose her own personality on the grey company architecture of the ship.

  ‘Funny how I feel like I’ve been in that thing for months.’

  I shrug. ‘That’s the way it feels sometimes.’

  ‘Then nothing went wrong?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  Suzy looks at Greta. ‘Then who are you?’ she asks.

  Greta says nothing. She just looks at me expectantly. I start shaking, and realise I can’t go through with this. Not yet.

  ‘End it,’ I tell Greta.

  Greta steps towards Suzy. Suzy reacts, but she isn’t quick enough. Greta pulls something from her pocket and touches Suzy on the forearm. Suzy drops like a puppet, out cold. We return her to the surge tank, plumb her back in and close the lid.

  ‘She won’t remember anything,’ Greta says. ‘The conversation never left her short-term memory.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can go through with this,’ I say.

  Greta touches me with her other hand. ‘No one ever said this was going to be easy.’

  ‘I was just trying to ease her into it gently. I didn’t want to tell her the truth right out.’

  ‘I know,’ Greta says. ‘You’re a kind man, Thom.’ Then she kisses me.

  I remembered Arkangel as well. That was about where it all started to go wrong. We just didn’t know it then.

  We missed our first take-off slot when customs found a discrepancy in our cargo waybill. It wasn’t serious, but it took them a while to realise their mistake. By the time they did, we knew we were going to be sitting on the ground for another eight hours, while inbound control processed a fleet of bulk carriers.

  I told Suzy and Ray the news. Suzy took it pretty well, or about as well as Suzy ever took that kind of thing. I suggested she use the time to scour the docks for any hot syntax patches. Anything that might shave a day or two off our return trip.

  ‘Company authorised?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said.

  ‘What about Ray?’ Suzy asked. ‘Is he going to sit here drinking tea while I work for my pay?’

  I smiled. They had a bickering, love-hate thing going. ‘No, Ray can do something useful as well. He can take a look at the q-planes.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with those planes,’ Ray said.

  I took off my old Ashanti Industrial bib cap, scratched my bald spot and turned to the jib man.

  ‘Right. Then it won’t take you long to check them over, will it?’

  ‘Whatever, Skip.’

  The thing I liked about Ray was that he always knew when he’d lost an argument. He gathered his kit and went out to check over the planes. I watched him climb the jib ladder, tools hanging from his belt. Suzy got her facemask, long, black coat, and left, vanishing into the vapour haze of the docks, boot heels clicking into the distance long after she’d passed out of sight.

  I left the Blue Goose, walking in the opposite direction to Suzy. Overhead, the bulk carriers slid in one after the other. You heard them long before you saw them. Mournful, cetacean moans cut down through the piss-yellow clouds over the port. When they emerged, you saw dark hulls scabbed and scarred by the blocky extrusions of syntax patterning, jibs and q-planes retracted for landing and undercarriages clutching down like talons. The carriers stopped over their allocated wells and lowered down on a scream of thrust. Docking gantries closed around them like grasping skeletal fingers. Cargo-handling ’saurs plodded out of their holding pens, some of them autonomous, some of them still being ridden by trainers. There was a shocking silence as the engines cut, until the next carrier began to approach through the clouds.

  I always like watching ships coming and going, even when they’re holding my own ship on the ground. I couldn’t read the syntax, but I knew these ships had come in all the way from the Rift. The Aquila Rift is about as far out as anyone ever goes. At median tunnel speeds, it’s a year from the centre of the Local Bubble.

  I’ve been out that way once in my life. I’ve seen the view from the near side of the Rift, like a good tourist. It was far enough for me.

  When there was a lull in the landing pattern, I ducked into a bar and found an Aperture Authority booth that took Ashanti credit. I sat in the seat and recorded a thirty-second message to Katerina. I told her I was on my way back, but that we were stuck on Arkangel for another few hours. I warned her that the delay might cascade through to our tunnel routing, depending on how busy things were at the Authority’s end. Based on past experience, an eight-hour ground hold might become a two-day hold at the surge point. I told her I’d be back, but she shouldn’t worry if I was a few days late.

  Outside a diplodocus slouched by with a freight container strapped between its legs.

  I told Katerina I loved her and couldn’t wait to get back home.

  While I walked back to the Blue Goose, I thought of the message racing ahead of me. Transmitted at light-speed up-system, then copied into the memory buffer of the next outgoing ship. Chances were, that particular ship wasn’t headed to Barranquilla or anywhere near it. The Aperture Authority would have to relay the message from ship to ship until it reached its destination. I might even reach Barranquilla ahead of it, but in all my years of delays that had only happened once. The system worked all right.

  Overhead, a white passenger liner had been slotted in between the bulk carriers. I lifted up my mask to get a better look at it. I got a hit of ozone, fuel and dinosaur dung. That was Arkangel all right. You couldn’t mistake it for any other place in the Bubble. There were four hundred worlds out there, up to a dozen surface ports on every planet, and none of them smelled bad in quite the same way.

  ‘Thom?’

  I followed the voice. It was Ray, standing by the dock.

  ‘You finished checking those planes?’ I asked.

  Ray shook his head. ‘That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. They were a little off-alignment, so - seeing as we’re going to be sitting here for eight hours - I decided to run a full recalibration.’

  I nodded. ‘That was the idea. So what’s the prob?’

  ‘The prob is a slot just opened up. Tower says we can lift in thirty minutes.’

  I shrugged. ‘Then we’ll lift.’

  ‘I haven’t finished the recal. As it is, things are worse than before I started. Lifting now would not be a good idea.’

  ‘You know how the tower works,’ I said. ‘Miss two offered slots, you could be on the ground for days.’

  ‘No one wants to get back home sooner than I do,’ Ray said.

  ‘So cheer up.’

  ‘She’ll be rough in the tunnel. It won’t be a smooth ride home.’

  I shrugged. ‘Do we care? We’ll be asleep.’

  ‘Well, it’s academic. We can’t leave without Suzy.’

  I heard boot heels clicking toward us.
Suzy came out of the fog, tugging her own mask aside.

  ‘No joy with the rune monkeys,’ she said. ‘Nothing they were selling I hadn’t seen a million times before. Fucking cowboys.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘We’re leaving anyway.’

  Ray swore. I pretended I hadn’t heard him.

  I was always the last one into a surge tank. I never went under until I was sure we were about to get the green light. It gave me a chance to check things over. Things can always go wrong, no matter how good the crew.

  The Blue Goose had come to a stop near the AA beacon that marked the surge point. There were a few other ships ahead of us in the queue, plus the usual swarm of AA service craft. Through an observation blister I was able to watch the larger ships depart one by one. Accelerating at maximum power, they seemed to streak towards a completely featureless part of the sky. Their jibs were spread wide, and the smooth lines of their hulls were gnarled and disfigured with the cryptic alien runes of the routing syntax. At twenty gees it was as if a huge invisible hand snatched them away into the distance. Ninety seconds later, there’d be a pale-green flash from a thousand kilometres away.

  I twisted around in the blister. There were the foreshortened symbols of our routing syntax. Each rune of the script was formed from a matrix of millions of hexagonal platelets. The platelets were on motors so they could be pushed in or out from the hull.

  Ask the Aperture Authority and they’ll tell you that the syntax is now fully understood. This is true, but only up to a point. After two centuries of study, human machines can now construct and interpret the syntax with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of runes that will almost always be accepted by the aperture’s own machinery. Furthermore, they can almost always guarantee that the desired routing is the one that the aperture machinery will provide.

  In short, you usually get where you want to go.

  Take a simple point-to-point transfer, like the Hauraki run. In that case there is no real disadvantage in using automatic syntax generators. But for longer trajectories - those that may involve six or seven transits between aperture hubs - machines lose the edge. They find a solution, but usually it isn’t the optimum one. That’s where syntax runners come in. People like Suzy have an intuitive grasp of syntax solutions. They dream in runes. When they see a poorly constructed script, they feel it like toothache. It affronts them.

  A good syntax runner can shave days off a route. For a company like Ashanti Industrial, that can make a lot of difference.

  But I wasn’t a syntax runner. I could tell when something had gone wrong with the platelets, but I had to trust that Suzy had done her job. I had no other choice.

  But I knew Suzy wouldn’t screw things up.

  I twisted around and looked back the other way. Now that we were in space, the q-planes had deployed. They were swung out from the hull on triple hundred-metre-long jibs, like the arms of a grapple. I checked that they were locked in their fully extended positions and that the status lights were all in the green. The jibs were Ray’s area. He’d been checking the alignment of the ski-shaped q-planes when I ordered him to close up ship and prepare to lift. I couldn’t see any visible indication that they were out of alignment, but then again it wouldn’t take much to make our trip home bumpier than usual. But as I’d told Ray, who cared? The Blue Goose could take a little tunnel turbulence. It was built to.

  I checked the surge point again. Only three ships ahead of us.

  I went back to the surge tanks and checked that Suzy and Ray were all right. Ray’s tank had been customised at the same time that Suzy had had hers done. It was covered with images of what Suzy called the BVM: the Blessed Virgin Mary. The BVM was always in a spacesuit, carrying a little spacesuited Jesus. Their helmets were airbrushed gold halos. The artwork had a cheap, hasty look to it. I assumed Ray hadn’t spent as much as Suzy.

  Quickly I stripped down to my underclothes. I plumbed into my own unpainted surge tank and closed the lid. The buffering gel sloshed in. Within about twenty seconds I was already feeling drowsy. By the time traffic control gave us the green light I’d be asleep.

  I’ve done it a thousand times. There was no fear, no apprehension. Just a tiny flicker of regret.

  I’ve never seen an aperture. Then again, very few people have.

  Witnesses report a doughnut-shaped lump of dark chondrite asteroid, about two kilometres across. The entire middle section has been cored out, with the inner part of the ring faced by the quixotic-matter machinery of the aperture itself. They say the q-matter machinery twinkles and moves all the while, like the ticking innards of a very complicated clock. But the monitoring systems of the Aperture Authority detect no movement at all.

  It’s alien technology. We have no idea how it works, or even who made it. Maybe, in hindsight, it’s better not to be able to see it.

  It’s enough to dream, and then awake, and know that you’re somewhere else.

  Try a different approach, Greta says. Tell her the truth this time. Maybe she’ll take it easier than you think.

  ‘There’s no way I can tell her the truth.’

  Greta leans one hip against the wall, one hand still in her pocket. ‘Then tell her something halfway truthful.’

  We un-plumb Suzy and haul her out of the surge tank.

  ‘Where are we?’ she asks. Then to Greta: ‘Who are you?’

  I wonder if some of the last conversation did make it out of Suzy’s short-term memory after all.

  ‘Greta works here,’ I say.

  ‘Where’s here?’

  I remember what Greta told me. ‘A station in Schedar Sector.’

  ‘That’s not where we’re meant to be, Thom.’

  I nod. ‘I know. There was a mistake. A routing error.’

  Suzy’s already shaking her head. ‘There was nothing wrong—’

  ‘I know. It wasn’t your fault.’ I help her into her ship clothes. She’s still shivering, her muscles reacting to movement after so much time in the tank. ‘The syntax was good.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘The system made a mistake, not you.’

  ‘Schedar sector ...’ Suzy says. ‘That would put us about ten days off our schedule, wouldn’t it?’

  I try and remember what Greta said to me the first time. I ought to know this stuff by heart, but Suzy’s the routing expert, not me. ‘That sounds about right,’ I say.

  But Suzy shakes her head. ‘Then we’re not in Schedar Sector.’

  I try to sound pleasantly surprised.

  ‘We’re not?’

  ‘I’ve been in that tank for a lot longer than a few days, Thom. I know. I can feel it in every fucking bone in my body. So where are we?’

  I turn to Greta. I can’t believe this is happening again.

  ‘End it,’ I say.

  Greta steps towards Suzy.

  You know that ‘as soon as I awoke I knew everything was wrong’ cliche’? You’ve probably heard it a thousand times, in a thousand bars across the Bubble, wherever ship crews swap tall tales over flat, company-subsidised beer. The trouble is that sometimes that’s exactly the way it happens. I never felt good after a period in the surge tank. But the only time I had ever come around feeling anywhere near this bad was after that trip I took to the edge of the Bubble.

  Mulling this, but knowing there was nothing I could do about it until I was out of the tank, it took me half an hour of painful work to free myself from the connections. Every muscle fibre in my body felt like it had been shredded. Unfortunately, the sense of wrongness didn’t end with the tank. The Blue Goose was much too quiet. We should have been heading away from the last exit aperture after our routing. But the distant, comforting rumble of the fusion engines wasn’t there at all. That meant we were in free-fall.