Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  Time after time we woke her and tried a different approach. Greta said there was a window of a few minutes before the events she was experiencing began to transfer into long-term memory. If we knocked her out, the buffer of memories in short-term storage was wiped before it ever crossed the hippocampus into long-term recall. Within that window, we could wake her up as many times as we liked, trying endless permutations of the revival scenario.

  At least that was what Greta told me.

  “We can’t keep doing this indefinitely,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Isn’t she going to remember something?”

  Greta shrugged. “Maybe. But I doubt that she’ll attach any significance to those memories. Haven’t you ever had vague feelings of déjà vu coming out of the surge tank?”

  “Sometimes,” I admitted.

  “Then don’t sweat about it. She’ll be all right. I promise you.”

  “Perhaps we should just keep her awake, after all.”

  “That would be cruel.”

  “It’s cruel to keep waking her up and shutting her down, like a toy doll.”

  There was a catch in her voice when she answered me.

  “Keep at it, Thom. I’m sure you’re close to finding a way, in the end. It’s helping you, focusing on Suzy. I always knew it would.”

  I started to say something, but Greta pressed a finger to my lips.

  GRETA WAS RIGHT about Suzy. The challenge helped me, taking my mind off my own predicament. I remembered what Greta had said about dealing with other crews in the same situation, before Blue Goose put in. Clearly she had learned many psychological tricks: gambits and short cuts to assist the transition to mental well-being. I felt a slight resentment at being manipulated so effectively. But at the same time I couldn’t deny that worrying about another human being had helped me with my own adjustment. When, days later, I stepped back from the immediate problem of Suzy, I realized that something was different. I didn’t feel far from home. I felt, in an odd way, privileged. I’d come further than almost anyone in history. I was still alive, and there were still people around to provide love and partnership and a web of social relations. Not just Greta, but all the other unlucky souls who had ended up at the station.

  If anything, there appeared to be more of them than when I had first arrived. The corridors—sparsely populated at first—were increasingly busy, and when we ate under the dome—under the Milky Way—we were not the only diners. I studied their lamp-lit faces, comforted by their vague familiarity, wondering what kinds of stories they had to tell; where they’d come from, who they had left behind, how they had adjusted to life here. There was time enough to get to know them all. And the place would never become boring, for at any time—as Greta had intimated—we could always expect another lost ship to drop through the aperture. Tragedy for the crew, but fresh challenges, fresh faces, fresh news from home, for us.

  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 couldn’t 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 toward the Milky Way, crashing toward 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 lig
ht-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 realized. 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 toward 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.”

  MINLA’S FLOWERS

  MISSION INTERRUPTED.

  Even now, I still don’t know quite what happened. The ship and I were in routine Waynet transit, all systems ticking over smoothly. I was deep in thought, a little drunk, rubbing clues together like a caveman trying to make fire with rocks, hoping for the spark that would point me towards The Gun, the one no one ever thinks I’m going to find, the one I know with every fibre of my existence is out there somewhere. I was imagining the reception I’d get when I returned to the Cohort with that prize, the slate of all my sins wiped clean when they saw that I’d actually found it, that it was real after all, and that finally we had something to use against the Huskers. In the pleasant mental haze brought on by the wine, it seemed likely that they’d forgive me anything.

  Then it happened: a violent lurch that sent wine and glass flying across the cabin, a shriek from the ship’s alarms as it went into panic-mode. I knew right away that this was no ordinary Way turbulence. The ship was tumbling badly, but I fought my way to the command deck and did what I could to bring her back under control. Seat-of-the-pants flying, the way Gallinule and I used to do it on Plenitude, when Plenitude still existed.

  That was when I knew we were outside the Waynet, dumped back into the crushing slowness of normal space. The stars outside were stationary, their colours showing no suggestion of relativistic distortion.

  “Damage?” I asked.

  “How long have you got?” the ship snapped back.

  I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still functional—I touched it and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet —but that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn’t been buckled or blown or simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.

  We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or months—however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it needed to fix itself—the search for my Gun would be on hold.

  That didn’t mean I was counting on a long stopover.

  THE SHIP STILL had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F- or early G-type. He thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close, too.

  “Tell me where we are.”

  “It’s called Calliope,” Tyrant told him. “G-type. According to the last Cohort census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials, four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth—the furthest from Calliope—was supposedly colonised by humans in the early Flourishing.”

  Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single moon.

  “Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?”

  “Difficult to say. A later C
ohort flyby failed to make contact with the settlement, but that doesn’t mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves against the aliens.”

  “So there could still be a welcoming committee.”

  “We’ll see. With your permission, I’ll use our remaining fuel to reach Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?”

  Merlin looked back at the coffin-like slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could skip over the days or weeks it would take to reach the planet, but that would mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep hibernation of frostwatch.

  “Pass on that, I think. I’ve still got plenty of reading to catch up on.”

  Later—much later—Tyrant announced that they had reached orbit around Lecythus. “Would you like to see the view?” the ship asked, with a playful note in its voice.

  Merlin scratched fatigue from his eyes. “You sound like you know something I don’t.”

  Merlin was at first reassured by what he saw. There was blue ocean down there, swatches of green and brown land mass, large islands rather than any major continental masses, cyclonic swirls of water-vapour clouds. It didn’t necessarily mean there were still people, but it was a lot more encouraging than finding a cratered, radioactive corpse of a world.

  Then he looked again. Many of those green and brown swatches of land mass were surrounded by water, as his first glimpse had indicated. But some of them appeared to be floating above the ocean completely, casting shadows beneath them. His glance flicked to the horizon, where the atmosphere was compressed into a thin bow of pure indigo. He could see the foreshortened shapes of hovering land masses, turned nearly edge-on. The land masses appeared to be one or two kilometres thick, and they all appeared to be gently curved. Perhaps half were concave in shape, so their edges were slightly upturned. The edges were frosted white, like the peaks of mountain ranges. Some of the concave masses even had little lakes near their centres. The convex masses were all a scorched tawny grey in colour, devoid of water or vegetation, save for a cap of ice at their highest point. The largest shapes, convex or concave, must have been hundreds of kilometres wide. Merlin judged that there must have been at least ten kilometres of clear airspace under each piece. A third of the planet’s surface was obscured by the floating shapes.