Zima Blue and Other Stories

  '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 recognisable, 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 towards 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 tinges, 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 realised 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 arrived 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.'

  '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 wit
h 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 towards 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 towards 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 recognisable 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 outwards. 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.

  'Aperture connections,' I said.

  As shocked as I was by the fact that she had lied to me - and as fearful as I was about what the truth might hold - I couldn't turn off the professional part of me, the part that took pride in recognising such things.

  Greta nodded. 'Those are the main commerce routes, the well-mapped connections between large colonies and major trading hubs. Now I'll add all mapped connections, including those that have only ever been traversed by accident.'

  The scribble did not change dramatically. It gained a few more wild loops and hairpins, including one that reached beyond the wall of the Bubble to touch the sunward end of the Aquila Rift. One or two other additions pierced the wall in different directions, but none of them reached as far as the Rift.

  'Where are we?'

  'We're at one end of one of those connections. You can't see it because it's pointing directly towards you.' She smiled slightly. 'I needed to establish the scale that we're dealing with. How wide is the Local Bubble, Thom? Four hundred light-years, give or take?'

  My patience was wearing thin. But I was still curious.

  'About right.'

  'And while I know that aperture travel times vary from point to point, with factors depending on network topology and syntax optimisation, isn't it the case that the average speed is about one thousand times faster than light?'

  'Give or take.'

  'So a journey from one side of the Bubble might take - what, half a year? Say five or six months? A year to the Aquila Rift?'

  'You know that already, Greta. We both know it.'

  'All right. Then consider this.' And the view contracted again, the Bubble dwindling, a succession of overlaying structures concealing it, darkness coming into view on either side, and then the familiar spiral swirl of the Milky Way Galaxy looming large.

  Hundreds of billions of stars, packed together into foaming white lanes of sea spume.

  'This is the view,' Greta said. 'Enhanced of course, brightened and filtered for human consumption - but if you had eyes with near-perfect quantum efficiency, and if they happened to be about a metre wide, this is more or less what you'd see if you stepped outside the station.'

  'I don't believe you.'

  What I meant was I didn't want to believe her.

  'Get used to it, Thom. You're a long way out. The station's orbiting a brown dwarf star in the Large Magellanic Cloud. You're one hundred and fifty thousand light-years from home.'

  'No,' I said, my voice little more than a moan of abject, childlike denial.

  'You felt as though you'd spent a long time in the tank. You were dead right. Subjective time? I don't know. Years, easily. Maybe a decade. But objective ti
me - the time that passed back home - is a lot clearer. It took Blue Goose one hundred and fifty years to reach us. Even if you turned back now, you'd have been away for three hundred years, Thom.'

  'Katerina,' I said, her name like an invocation.

  'Katerina's dead,' Greta told me. 'She's already been dead a century.'

  How do you adjust to something like that? The answer is that you can't count on adjusting to it at all. Not everyone does. Greta told me that she had seen just about every possible reaction in the spectrum, and the one thing she had learned was that it was next to impossible to predict how a given individual would take the news. She had seen people adjust to the revelation with little more than a world-weary shrug, as if this were merely the latest in a line of galling surprises life had thrown at them, no worse in its way than illness or bereavement or any number of personal setbacks. She had seen others walk away and kill themselves half an hour later.