But the majority, she said, did eventually come to some kind of accommodation with the truth, however faltering and painful the process.
'Trust me, Thom,' she said. 'I know you now. I know you have the emotional strength to get through this. I know you can learn to live with it.'
'Why didn't you tell me straight away, as soon as I came out of the tank?'
'Because I didn't know if you were going to be able to take it.'
'You waited until after you knew I had a wife.'
'No,' Greta said. 'I waited until after we'd made love. Because then I knew Katerina couldn't mean that much to you.'
'Fuck you.'
'Fuck me? Yes, you did. That's the point.'
I wanted to strike out against her. But what I was angry at was not her insinuation but the cold-hearted truth of it. She was right, and I knew it. I just didn't want to deal with that, any more than I wanted to deal with the here and now.
I waited for the anger to subside.
'You say we're not the first?' I said.
'No. We were the first, I suppose - the ship I came in. Luckily it was well equipped. After the routing error, we had enough supplies to set up a self-sustaining station on the nearest rock. We knew there was no going back, but at least we could make some kind of life for ourselves here.'
'And after that?'
'We had enough to do just keeping ourselves alive, the first few years. But then another ship came through the aperture. Damaged, drifting, much like Blue Goose. We hauled her in, warmed her crew, broke the news to them.'
'How'd they take it?'
'About as well as you'd expect.' Greta laughed hollowly to herself. 'A couple of them went mad. Another killed herself. But at least a dozen of them are still here. In all honesty, it was good for us that another ship came through. Not just because they had supplies we could use, but because it helped us to help them. Took our minds off our own self-pity. It made us realise how far we'd come, and how much help these newcomers needed to make the same transition. That wasn't the last ship, either. We've gone through the same process with eight or nine others, since then.' Greta looked at me, her head cocked against her hand. 'There's a thought for you, Thom.'
'There is?'
She nodded. 'It's difficult for you now, I know. And it'll be difficult for you for some time to come. But it can help to have someone else to care about. It can smooth the transition.'
'Like who?' I asked.
'Like one of your other crew members,' Greta said. 'You could try waking one of them, now.'
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?'
A minute later we're putting Suzy back into the tank.
It hasn't worked first time. Maybe next try.
But it kept not working with Suzy. She was always cleverer and quicker than me; she always had been. As soon as she came out of the tank, she knew that we'd come a lot further than Schedar Sector. She was always ahead of my lies and excuses.
'It was different when it happened to me,' I told Greta, when we were lying next to each other again, days later, with Suzy still in the tank. 'I had all the nagging doubts she has, I think. But as soon as I saw you standing there, I forgot all about that stuff.'
Greta nodded. Her hair fell across her face in dishevelled, sleep-matted curtains. She had a strand of it between her lips.
'It helped, seeing a friendly face?'
'Took my mind off the problem, that's for sure.'
'You'll get there in the end,' she said. 'Anyway, from Suzy's point of view, aren't you a friendly face as well?'
'Maybe,' I said. 'But she'd been expecting me. You were the last person in the world I expected to see standing there.'
Greta touched her knuckle against the side of my face. Her smooth skin slid against stubble. 'It's getting easier for you, isn't it?'
'I don't know,' I said.
'You're a strong man, Thom. I knew you'd come through this.'
'I haven't come through it yet,' I said. I felt like a tightrope walker halfway across Niagara Falls. It was a miracle I'd made it as far as I had. But that didn't mean I was home and dry.
Still, Greta was right. There was hope. I'd felt no crushing spasms of grief over Katerina's death, or enforced absence, or however you wanted to put it. All I felt was a bitter-sweet regret, the way one might feel about a broken heirloom or long-lost pet. I felt no animosity towards Katerina, and I was sorry that I would never see her again. But I was sorry about not seeing a lot of things. Maybe it would become worse in the days ahead. Maybe I was just postponing a breakdown.
I didn't think so.
In the meantime, I continued trying to find a way to deal with Suzy. She had become a puzzle that I couldn't leave unsolved. I could have just woken her up and let her deal with the news as best as she could, but that seemed cruel and unsatisfactory. Greta had broken it to me gently, giving me time to settle into my new surroundings and take that necessary step away from Katerina. When she finally broke the news, as shocking as it was, it didn't shatter me. I'd already been primed for it, the sting taken out of the surprise. Sleeping with Greta obviously helped. I couldn't offer Suzy the same solace, but I was sure that there was a way for us to coax Suzy to the same state of near-acceptance.
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 deja 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 realised 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 could 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 towards the Milky Way, crashing towards 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 light-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 realised. 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.