Spoiler: Truyện, phần còn lại "I thought it was faked." "Oh, it is," she said. "But don't let that spoil it for you." I settled in front of the camera and started speaking. "Katerina," I said. "Hello. I hope you're all right. By now I hope someone from the company will have been in touch. If they haven't, I'm pretty sure you'll have made your own inquiries. I'm not sure what they told you, but I promise you that we're safe and sound and that we're coming home. I'm calling from somewhere called Saumlaki station, a repair facility on the edge of Schedar sector. It's not much to look at: just a warren of tunnels and centrifuges dug into a pitch-black D-type asteroid, about half a light-year from the nearest star. The only reason it's here at all is because there happens to be an aperture next door. That's how we got here in the first place. Somehow or other Blue Goose took a wrong turn in the network, what they call a routing error. The Goose came in last night, local time, and I've been in a hotel since then. I didn't call last night because I was too tired and disoriented after coming out of the tank, and I didn't know how long we were going to be here. Seemed better to wait until morning, when we'd have a better idea of the damage to the ship. It's nothing serious—just a few bits and pieces buckled during the transit—but it means we're going to be here for another couple of days. Kolding—he's the repair chief—says three at the most. By the time we get back on course, however, we'll be about forty days behind schedule." I paused, eyeing the incrementing cost indicator. Before I sat down in the booth, I always had an eloquent and economical speech queued up in my head, one that conveyed exactly what needed to be said, with the measure and grace of a soliloquy. But my mind always dried up as soon as I opened my mouth, and instead of an actor I ended up sounding like a small time thief, concocting some fumbling alibi in the presence of quick-witted interrogators. I smiled awkwardly and continued: "It kills me to think this message is going to take so long to get to you. But if there's a silver lining, it's that I won't be far behind it. By the time you get this, I should be home in only a couple of days. So don't waste money replying to this, because by the time you get it I'll already have left Saumlaki Station. Just stay where you are, and I promise I'll be home soon." That was it. There was nothing more I needed to say, other than: "I miss you." Delivered after a moment's pause, I meant it to sound emphatic. But when I replayed the recording it sounded more like an afterthought. I could have recorded it again, but I doubted that I would have been any happier. Instead I just committed the existing message for transmission and wondered how long it would have to wait before going on its way. Since it seemed unlikely that there was a vast flow of commerce in and out of Saumlaki, our ship might be the first suitable outbound vessel. I emerged from the booth. For some reason I felt guilty, as if I had been in some way neglectful. It took me a while before I realized what was playing on my mind. I'd told Kate-rina about Saumlaki Station. I'd even told her about Kolding and the damage to the Blue Goose. But I hadn't told her about Greta. It's not working with Suzy. She's too smart, too well-attuned to the physiological correlatives of surge tank immersion. I can give her all the reassurances in the world, but she knows she's been under too long for this to be anything other than a truly epic screw-up. She knows that we aren't just talking weeks or even months of delay here. Every nerve in her body is screaming that message into her skull. "I had dreams," she says, when the grogginess fades. "What kind?" "Dreams that I kept waking. Dreams that you were pulling me out of the surge tank. You and someone else." I do my best to smile. I'm alone, but Greta isn't far away. The hypodermic's in my pocket now. "I always get bad dreams coming out of the tank," I say. "These felt real. Your story kept changing, but you kept telling me we were somewhere… that we 'd gone a little off course, but that it was nothing to worry about." So much for Greta's reassurance that Suzy will remember nothing after our aborted efforts at waking her. Seems that her short-term memory isn't quite as fallible as we'd like. "It's funny you should say that," I tell her. "Because, actually, we are a little off course." She's sharper with every breath. Suzy was always the best of us at coming out of the tank. "Tell me how far, Thorn." "Farther than I'd like." She balls her fists. I can't tell if it's aggression, or some lingering neuromuscular effect of her time in the tank. "How far? Beyond the Bubble?" "Beyond the Bubble, yes." Her voice grows small and childlike. "Tell me, Thorn. 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 'II 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 recognizable, 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, wondering 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 toward 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 kind of 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 smears, 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 im-pasto of oil colors; 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 spermlike 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 stop myself 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 realized 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 colors 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 Betelguese 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, Thorn? 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 came to take our order. I let Greta choose for me. "You can talk to me, 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 come out with 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 stars. 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. Ka-terina 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?" "Farther than you thought possible." The next question was obvious. "Beyond the Rift?" "Yes," she said, with the faintest of smiles, as if humoring 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 to attention with a napkin over one arm. She sat us at a table. "Do you want a drink, Thorn?" "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, Thorn." "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. "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 recognizing 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 toward you." She smiled slightly. "I needed to establish the scale that we're dealing with. How wide is the Local Bubble, Thorn? 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 optimization, 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 meter 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, Thorn. 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 time—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, Thorn." "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. 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 realize 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's she over the groggi-ness. "Did we make it back?" I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembered. "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 farther 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 bittersweet regret, the way one might feel about a broken heirloom or long-lost pet. I felt no animosity toward 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 this seemed cruel and unsatisfactory. Greta had broken it to me gently, giving me the 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 somethingl" 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 will 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, Thorn. 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 shortcuts to assist the transition to mental well-being. I felt 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 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 home, 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 challengers, 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, Thorn. 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 among 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 among 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 anymore. 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. 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 farther 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 Clouds 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, Thorn." "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 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 antlerlike 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, Thorn. Bang goes our bonus." In anger, I hammer the side of the surge tank. But Kate-rina 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."
Đúng 2 cái mình thích nhất luôn thì ra cùng 1 người,khi nào netflix có sub việt sẽ xem lại 2 cái này nhất là zima.tiếng anh kém nên zima ko hiểu rõ lắm.
mới coi hết tối qua, tập mấy anh Nga vs đám ghouls coi phê quá giống như game gì đấy 18.... cái gì đấy quên mẹ tên, phê lòi Zima Blue vậy mà hay
Đến đoạn anh main nhìn được thực tại thì truyện nó lại skip luôn đến việc anh main thấy được một happy ending, vậy là những con sinh vật lạ vẫn đang chăm sóc những "lost souls" này túm lại là tốt hay xấu nhỉ?
Nó ko skip mà tả cũng ngắn bác ạ. Vì theo truyện nó chỉ cho main xem sự thật trong khoảng thời gian ngắn ngủi thôi. “ something that had been waiting here for eternities, something that wanted nothing more than to care for the souls of the lost.” Nói chung confirm là nó tốt. 2 đứa trong phi hành đoàn chết trong pod ngủ đông chứ ko phải bị giết. Tàu của main là tàu đầu tiên của loài người, còn lại là của các giống alien khác cũng mắc kẹt lại chỗ này Truyện hay thật, giải thích rát kĩ tại sao tàu lạc đến chỗ củ lìn này, chứ xem phim thấy ú ớ vì ngắn quá
Đây có mỗi đoạn này tả thực tại nhưng ngắn quá, mỗi đoạn bôi đậm lại là cảm tưởng cá nhân của main. Việc Suzy và phi hành đoàn chết trong kén ngủ đông cũng do sinh vật này kể cho main chứ không xác thực là họ có bị tác động nào khác không. Nên nếu suy nghĩ trái chiều thì vẫn không loại trừ được việc chúng có mục đính khác.
Làm như phim cũng được rồi, kết thúc mở, nhiều hướng thảo luận. Chứ cứ rõ trắng đen thì chả còn gì hay.
Truyện ngắn thì ko đầu ko cuối để khán giả tự hiểu là hay nhất. Nhắc đến truyện ngắn viễn tưởng lại nhớ đến 1 tập truyện ngắn của Nga mà mình đọc hồi xưa. "Đường đi Amantê" là tàu mang tiếp tế đến vệ tinh sao Mộc, "Nhà du hành vũ trụ" là đi đến sao Bácna, "Phương trình Mác xoen" là điều khiển sóng não để kích hoạt siêu trí tuệ. Truyện hay mà chả thấy ai tái bản, chỉ có mỗi bản giấy nâu cũ rích, chả mấy chốc mà nát. Ông nào nhìn thấy quyển này chắc già cmnr. Chính ra hồi trước đọc nhiều truyện chữ hơn bây giờ. Có cái truyện Nga mà về ông khoa học gia tự thu nhỏ bản thân sống với côn trùng mấy chục năm cũng rất hay, rồi truyện về ông già Khốt ta bít nữa.
Hình như tập phim When the Yogurt Took Over có cùng người thiết kế nhân vật trong phim Up nhỉ? Style gần y chang
À nhân việc đọc truyện rồi thì cũng giải thích cho mọi người hiểu tại sao tàu lại lạc đến cái tổ nhện này. Công nghệ dịch chuyển này do 1 giống alien cổ xưa tạo ra, bao gồm nhiều cổng kết nối với nhau thành mạng, cho phép du hành với tốc độ gấp nghìn lần tốc độ ánh sáng. Mạng lưới này chia ra làm nhiều domains. Vì lý do nào đó giống loài này biến mất ko dấu vết dẫn đến việc mạng lưới dịch chuyển này bị hỏng, nên về cơ bản tuy vẫn hoạt động nhưng việc di chuyển giữa các domain gần như là ko thực hiện đc. Sau này con người tìm đc các cổng nhảy này, và sau hơn 200 năm nghiên cứu đá tìm ra cách sử dụng để dịch chuyển trong domain nơi hệ mặt trời ở đó. Việc điều hướng do máy tính hoặc hoa tiêu (Suzy) thực hiện. Tuy con người dùng đc nhưng hiểu sâu thì chưa, có tỉ lệ xảy ra lỗi nhưng ở mức chấp nhận đc ( cụ thể bao nhiêu ko rõ) Tuy nhiên tàu trong phim lúc dịch chuyển bị dính glitch, nên dạt sang domain khác cách trái đất hơn một trăm nghìn năm ánh sáng. Ước tính thời gian dạt trong vũ trụ là hơn chục năm, bằng khoảng 130 năm trên trái đất. Ngoài tàu của main là tàu đầu tiên của con người, thì trong cái tổ này còn rất nhiều tàu của các giống alien khác cũng kẹt do dịch chuyển từ các domain khác xa hơn. P/S: trong phim có đoạn con nhện Greta thừa nhận là main bị dạt quá cái Aquila rift, khiến main choáng luôn vì đây là điểm xa nhất mà loài người có thể đến, vì sau đó đơn giản là ko du hành qua đó đc. Nhưng thực tế ko chỉ dạt qua điểm này, mà còn xa vãi cả lol luôn ấy. Nên việc trở về là vô vọng kể cả tàu có chạy đc đi chăng nữa.
Theo suy nghĩ tích cực của mình là có,vì con quái đó thật sự yêu Tom và nó đang làm 1 đều gì đó cho Tom nhưng chưa đúng lúc,nếu nó hại nó đã ko tìm cách giữ Tom cho đến bây giờ.chắc có lẽ chờ đúng lúc nó sẽ thành Greta thật,nó có nói với Tom là linh hồn lạc lối nào nó củng quan tâm như vậy nhưng sao nó lại để những người kia chết còn Tom thì sống và nó đang kiên nhẫn làm đều gì đó. Mà lúc lia qua 2 cái xác là Suzy và người còn lại là ai đó ko phải Greta vì Greta đâu có đi chung chuyến với Tom.
