Cái Beyond the Aquila Rift, ta vẫn nghĩ con quái đó là con Greta người yêu cũ của main. Vì nếu nó là 1 con quái bình thường, muốn mọi thứ êm đẹp, hoặc hút dưỡng chất, thì nó chỉ việc tạo ra một thực tại ảo khác là main vừa thức dậy rồi nhìn thấy một vũ trụ xa xôi hoang vắng là đủ dập tắt hi vọng của main rồi, chứ nó cho hiện hình thật làm gì, lỡ main lên cơn điên tấn công nó hay tìm cách thoát ra thì sao? Nên mình nghĩ đây là em Greta thật, bị hóa quái vật. Hoặc một cách nghĩ khác là cái cảnh của con quái cũng có thể chỉ là một cảnh ảo.
greta có đi cùng tàu hay đợt với nvc đâu mà gặp. Làm gì có sự ngẫu nhiên thế. Truyện gốc thì đây là tàu duy nhất của lòa người lạc vào đấy (chưa đọc thấy có cm như thế).
Sao ai cũng nghĩ con quái xấu thế nhỉ? Mình thấy nó chỉ là một sinh vật cô độc, sống lẻ loi tại rìa thiên hà. Đối với nó, những phi hành gia đi lạc là cơ hội để được nói chuyện, được yêu, được sống. Vì thế nó mới tạo ra thực tại ảo để giao tiếp với main là vậy
Có một cái không hiểu được ở Ep Beyond the rift là việc các phi hành gia sống sót kiểu gì ở cái chốn đấy. Chẳng nhẽ sinh vật lạ ở đó có khả ăng duy trì cả sự sống cho họ? Lúc Thom tỉnh dậy rõ ràng xung quanh không còn bất kỳ thiết bị duy trì sự sống nào còn hoạt động, cơ thể cũng rất già rồi.
mình không biết nó có cho ăn hay không, nhưng không có vẻ gì là thom đã ở đấy quá lâu cả, râu ria mọc ra thế kia chắc là do sau thời gian gặp sự cố rồi chế độ ngủ đông bị tạm dừng do vỡ cái kén chắc được vài tuần hay vài tháng, người teo tóp hết mỡ thì do đói ăn quá thôi qua 1 phần ngắn vậy thì cứ coi như con sinh vật đó chỉ muốn giúp những người gặp nạn có cái chết êm ái nhất có thể thôi, đoạn cuối nó mang lại vào giấc mơ cũng là điều tốt hơn
Cái beyond the rift làm animated Dead Space series là đúng bài Cái shaftshifter cũng ngon Con cáo máy concept lạ độc
Dùng cách bảo toàn động lượng, đáp 1 vật đi thì mình trôi về hướng ngược lại. Bộ quần áo kín nên rắm ko có td.
Mình thì nghĩ, đơn thuần con nhện bơm một kiểu drug để tạo thực tại ảo tùy theo mong muốn chủ quan của nạn nhân, rồi hút dần dưỡng chất. Ăn thịt con mồi còn tươi thì bao giờ cũng ngon hơn thịt chết lâu ngày.
Ai củng ấn tượng tâp Beyond nhỉ.mình xem mà cứ wtf.xem tiếng anh k hiểu hết nhưng con quái có vẻ rất yêu Thom.nếu nó có mục đích xấu thì đã giết ngay từ đầu. khúc Thom đòi tỉnh dậy Greta có nói câu gì như “ dù thế nào em củng là do quan tâm anh “ thì phải. Nó đang muốn làm 1 đều tốt gì đó cho Thom nhưng chưa đúng thời điểm để nói thật. Với lại lúc Thom tỉnh lại chưa chắc là thế giới thật,củng có thể đang trong 1 ảo ảnh nửa, và thực tại Greta vẫn chưa chết chỉ là tạo ra cái ảo ảnh đó cho Thom .cứ suy nghĩ sâu thêm bao nhiêu tuỳ thích và mình tin dụng ý của con quái hay Greta với Thom là tốt.
Mục đích cũng thịt hết thôi tốt lành mẹ gì, mà con kia tỉnh dậy là thấy hoảng chắc chả bị ảo ảnh gì thấy cảnh thật nên sợ teo chym... còn thằng thì, má thôi nhức đầu quá vậy đi
Spoiler: Truyện, down từ epdf.tips ko chắc chuẩn Beyond the Aquila Rift ALASTASR REYNOLDS From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006) Alastair Reynolds (www.members.tripod.com/~voxishj lives in Noordwijk, Holland, and worked for ten years for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer in 2004. He is one of the new British space opera writers to emerge in the mid and late 1990s, in the generation after Baxter and McAuley, and originally the most "hard SF" of them. His first novel, Revelation Space, was published in 1999. He is growing fast as an SF writer in this decade. His last two novels are Century Rain and Pushing Ice. His first short story collection, Galactic North, collecting pieces in the RS universe, is out in 2006. "Beyond the Aquila Rift" was published in Constellations. There is an echo of Philip K. Dick's classic, "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts." A ship is marooned outside the galaxy by an alien wormhole transportation system that everyone uses but no one really understands. Reality is not what it appears to be. 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 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. "Thorn. I'll ask you again. Did we make it back?" "Yeah," I say. "We made it back." Suzy looks back at the starscape, airbrushed across her surge tank in luminous violet and yellow paint. She 'd had it customized on Carillon. It was against regs: something about the paint clogging intake filters. Suzy didn't care. She told me it had cost her a week's pay, but it had been worth it to impose her own personality on the gray company architecture of the ship. "Funny how I feel like I've been in that thing for months." I shrug. "That's the way it feels sometimes." "Then nothing went wrong?" "Nothing at all." Suzy looks at Greta. "Then who are you?" she asks. Greta says nothing. She just looks at me expectantly. I start shaking, and realize I can't go through with this. Not yet. "End it," I tell Greta. Greta steps toward Suzy. Suzy reacts, but she isn't quick enough. Greta pulls something from her pocket and touches Suzy on the forearm. Suzy drops like a puppet, out cold. We put her back into the surge tank, plumb her back in and close the lid. "She won't remember anything," Greta says. "The conversation never left her short term memory." "I don't know if I can go through with this," I say. Greta touches me with her other hand. "No one ever said this was going to be easy." "I was just trying to ease her into it gently. I didn't want to tell her the truth right out." "I know," Greta says. "You're a kind man, Thorn." Then she kisses me. I remembered Arkangel as well. That was about where it all started to go wrong. We just didn't know it then. We missed our first take-off slot when customs found a discrepancy in our cargo waybill. It wasn't serious, but it took them a while to realize their mistake. By the time they did, we knew we were going to be sitting on the ground for another eight hours, while in-bound control processed a fleet of bulk carriers. I told Suzy and Ray the news. Suzy took it pretty well, or about as well as Suzy ever took that kind of thing. I suggested she use the time to scour the docks for any hot syntax patches. Anything that might shave a day or two off our return trip. "Company authorized?" she asked. "I don't care," I said. "What about Ray?" Suzy asked. "Is he going to sit here drinking tea while I work for my pay?" I smiled. They had a bickering, love-hate thing going. "No, Ray can do something useful as well. He can take a look at the q-planes." "Nothing wrong with those planes," Ray said. I took off my old Ashanti Industrial bib cap, scratched my bald spot and turned to the jib man. "Right. Then it won't take you long to check them over, will it?" "Whatever, Skip." The thing I liked about Ray was that he always knew when he'd lost an argument. He gathered his kit and went out to check over the planes. I watched him climb the jib ladder, tools hanging from his belt. Suzy got her facemask, long black coat and left, vanishing into the vapor haze of the docks, boot heels clicking into the distance long after she'd passed out of sight. I left the Blue Goose, walking in the opposite direction to Suzy. Overhead, the bulk carriers slid in one after the other. You heard them long before you saw them. Mournful, cetacean moans cut down through the piss-yellow clouds over the port. When they emerged, you saw dark hulls scabbed and scarred by the blocky extrusions of syntax patterning, jibs and q-planes retracted for landing and undercarriage clutching down like talons. The carriers stopped over their allocated wells and lowered down on a scream of thrust. Docking gantries closed around them like grasping skeletal fingers. Cargo handling 'saurs plodded out of their holding pens, some of them autonomous, some of them still being ridden by trainers. There was a shocking silence as the engines cut, until the next carrier began to approach through the clouds. I always like watching ships coming and going, even when they're holding my own ship on the ground. I couldn't read the syntax, but I knew these ships had come in all the way from the Rift. The Aquila Rift is about as far out as anyone ever goes. At median tunnel speeds, it's a year from the center of the Local Bubble. I've been out that way once in my life. I've seen the view from the near side of the Rift, like a good tourist. It was about far enough for me. When there was a lull in the landing pattern, I ducked into a bar and found an Aperture Authority booth that took Ashanti credit. I sat in the seat and recorded a thirty-second message to Katerina. I told her I was on my way back but that we were stuck on Arkangel for another few hours. I warned her that the delay might cascade through to our tunnel routing, depending on how busy things were at the Aperture Authority's end. Based on past experience, an eight-hour ground hold might become a two day hold at the surge point. I told her I'd be back, but she shouldn't worry if I was a few days late. Outside a diplodocus slouched by with a freight container strapped between its legs. I told Katerina T loved her and couldn't wait to get back home. While I walked back to the Blue Goose, I thought of the message racing ahead of me. Transmitted at lightspeed up-system, then copied into the memory buffer of the next outgoing ship. Chances were, that particular ship wasn't headed to Barranquilla or anywhere near it. The Aperture Authority would have to relay the message from ship to ship until it reached its destination. I might even reach Barranquilla ahead of it, but in all my years of delays that had only happened once. The system worked all right. Overhead, a white passenger liner had been slotted in between the bulk carriers. I lifted up my mask to get a better look at it. I got a hit of ozone, fuel, and dinosaur dung. That was Arkangel all right. You couldn't mistake it for any other place in the Bubble. There were four hundred worlds out there, up to a dozen surface ports on every planet, and none of them smelled bad in quite the same way. "Thorn?" I followed the voice. It was Ray, standing by the dock. "You finished checking those planes?" I asked. Ray shook his head. "That's what I wanted to talk to you about. They were a little off-alignment, so—seeing as we're going to be sitting here for eight hours—I decided to run a full recalibration." I nodded. "That was the idea. So what's the prob?" "The prob is a slot just opened up. Tower says we can lift in thirty minutes." I shrugged. "Then we'll lift." "I haven't finished the recal. As it is, things are worse than before I started. Lifting now would not be a good idea." "You know how the tower works," I said. "Miss two offered slots, you could be on the ground for days." "No one wants to get back home sooner than I do," Ray said. "So cheer up." "She'll be rough in the tunnel. It won't be a smooth ride home." I shrugged. "Do we care? We'll be asleep." "Well, it's academic. We can't leave without Suzy." I heard boot heels clicking toward us. Suzy came out of the fog, tugging her own mask aside. "No joy with the rune monkeys," she said. "Nothing they were selling I hadn't seen a million times before. Fucking cowboys." "It doesn't matter," I said. "We're leaving anyway." Ray swore. I pretended I hadn't heard him. I was always the last one into a surge tank. I never went under until I was sure we were about to get the green light. It gave me a chance to check things over. Things can always go wrong, no matter how good the crew. The Blue Goose had come to a stop near the AA beacon which marked the surge point. There were a few other ships ahead of us in the queue, plus the usual swarm of AA service craft. Through an observation blister I was able to watch the larger ships depart one by one. Accelerating at maximum power, they seemed to streak toward a completely featureless part of the sky. Their jibs were spread wide, and the smooth lines of their hulls were gnarled and disfigured with the cryptic alien runes of the routing syntax. At twenty gees it was as if a huge invisible hand snatched them away into the distance. Ninety seconds later, there'd be a pale green flash from a thousand kilometers away. I twisted around in the blister. There were the foreshortened symbols of our routing syntax. Each rune of the script was formed from a matrix of millions of hexagonal platelets. The platelets were on motors so they could be pushed in or out from the hull. Ask the Aperture Authority and they'll tell you that the syntax is now fully understood. This is true, but only up to a point. After two centuries of study, human machines can now construct and interpret the syntax with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of runes which will almost always be accepted by the aperture's own machinery. Furthermore, they can almost always guarantee that the desired routing is the one that the aperture machinery will provide. In short, you usually get where you want to go. Take a simple point-to-point transfer, like the Hauraki run. In that case there is no real disadvantage in using automatic syntax generators. But for longer trajectories—those that may involve six or seven transits between aperture hubs—machines lose the edge. They find a solution, but usually it isn't the optimum one. That's where syntax runners come in. People like Suzy have an intuitive grasp of syntax solutions. They dream in runes. When they see a poorly constructed script, they feel it like a toothache. It affronts them. A good syntax runner can shave days off a route. For a company like Ashanti Industrial, that can make a lot of difference. But I wasn't a syntax runner. I could tell when something had gone wrong with the platelets, but otherwise I had no choice. I had to trust that Suzy had done her job. But I knew Suzy wouldn't screw things up. I twisted around and looked back the other way. Now that we were in space, the q-planes had deployed. They were swung out from the hull on triple hundred-meter long jibs, like the arms of a grapple. I checked that they were locked in their fully extended positions and that the status lights were all in the green. The jibs were Ray's area. He'd been checking the alignment of the ski-shaped q-planes when I ordered him to close-up ship and prepare to lift. I couldn't see any visible indication that they were out of alignment, but then again it wouldn't take much to make our trip home bumpier than usual. But as I'd told Ray, who cared? The Blue Goose could take a little tunnel turbulence. It was built to. I checked the surge point again. Only three ships ahead of us. I went back to the surge tanks and checked that Suzy and Ray were all right. Ray's tank had been customized at the same time that Suzy had had hers done. It was full of images of what Suzy called the B VM: the Blessed Virgin Mary. The BVM was always in a spacesuit, carrying a little spacesuited Jesus. Their helmets were airbrushed gold halos. The artwork had a cheap, hasty look to it. I assumed Ray hadn't spent as much as Suzy. Quickly I stripped down to my underclothes. I plumbed into my own unpainted surge tank and closed the lid. The buffering gel sloshed in. Within about twenty seconds I was already feeling drowsy. By the time traffic control gave us the green light, I'd be asleep. I've done it a thousand times. There was no fear, no apprehension. Just a tiny flicker of regret. I've never seen an aperture. Then again, very few people have. Witnesses report a doughnut shaped lump of dark chon-drite asteroid, about two kilometers across. The entire middle section has been cored out, with the inner part of the ring faced by the quixotic-matter machinery of the aperture itself. They say the q-matter machinery twinkles and moves all the while, like the ticking innards of a very complicated clock. But the monitoring systems of the Aperture Authority detect no movement at all. It's alien technology. We have no idea how it works, or even who made it. Maybe, in hindsight, it's better not to be able to see it. It's enough to dream, and then awake, and know that you're somewhere else. Try a different approach, Greta says. Tell her the truth this time. Maybe she 'II take it easier than you think. "There's no way I can tell her the truth." Greta leans one hip against the wall, one hand still in her pocket. "Then tell her something half way to it." We unplumb Suzy and haul her out of the surge tank. "Where are we?" she asks. Then to Greta: "Who are you?" I wonder if some of the last conversation did make it out of Suzy's short-term memory after all. "Greta works here," I say. "Where's here?" I remember what Greta told me. "A station in Schedar sector." "That's not where we're meant to be, Thorn." I nod. "I know. There was a mistake. A routing error." Suzy's already shaking her head. "There was nothing wrong…" "I know. It wasn't your fault." I help her into her ship clothes. She's still shivering, her muscles reacting to movement after so much time in the tank. "The syntax was good." "Then what?" "The system made a mistake, not you." "Schedar sector…" Suzy says. "That would put us about ten days off our schedule, wouldn't it?" I try to remember what Greta said to me the first time. I ought to know this stuff off by heart, but Suzy's the routing expert, not me. "That sounds about right," I say. But Suzy shakes her head. "Then we're not in Schedar sector." I try to sound pleasantly surprised. "We're not?" "I've been in that tank for a lot longer than a few days, Thorn. I know. I can feel it in every fucking bone in my body. So where are we?" I turn to Greta. I can't believe this is happening again. "End it," I say. Greta steps toward Suzy. You know that "as soon as I awoke I knew everything was wrong" cliche? You've probably heard it a thousand times, in a thousand bars across the Bubble, wherever ship crews swap tall tales over flat company-subsidized beer. The trouble is that sometimes that's exactly the way it happens. I never felt good after a period in the surge tank. But the only time I had ever come around feeling anywhere near this bad was after that trip I took to the edge of the Bubble. Mulling this, but knowing there was nothing I could do about it until I was out of the tank, it took me half an hour of painful work to free myself from the connections. Every muscle fiber in my body felt as though it had been shredded. Unfortunately, the sense of wrongness didn't end with the tank. The Blue Goose was much too quiet. We should have been heading away from the last exit aperture after our routing. But the distant, comforting rumble of the fusion engines wasn't there at all. That meant we were in free-fall. Not good. I floated out of the tank, grabbed a handhold and levered myself around to view the other two tanks. Ray's largest BVM stared back radiantly from the cowl of his tank. The bio indices were all in the green. Ray was still unconscious, but there was nothing wrong with him. Same story with Suzy. Some automated system had decided I was the only one who needed waking. A few minutes later I had made my way to the same observation blister I'd used to check the ship before the surge. I pushed my head into the scuffed glass halfdome and looked around. We'd arrived somewhere. The Blue Goose was sitting in a huge zero-gravity parking bay. The chamber was an elongated cylinder, hexagonal in cross-section. The walls were a smear of service machinery: squat modules, snaking umbilical lines, the retracted cradles of unused docking berths. Whichever way I looked I saw other ships locked onto cradles. Every make and class you could think of, every possible configuration of hull design compatible with aperture transitions. Service lights threw a warm golden glow on the scene. Now and then the whole chamber was bathed in the stuttering violet flicker of a cutting torch. It was a repair facility. I was just starting to mull on that when I saw something extend itself from the wall of the chamber. It was a telescopic docking tunnel, groping toward our ship. Through the windows in the side of the tunnel I saw figures floating, pulling themselves along hand over hand. I sighed and started making my way to the airlock. By the time I reached the lock they were already through the first stage of the cycle. Nothing wrong with that—there was no good reason to prevent foreign parties boarding a vessel—but it was just a tiny bit impolite. But perhaps they'd assumed we were all asleep. The door slid open. "You're awake," a man said. "Captain Thomas Gundlupet of the Blue Goose, isn't it?" "Guess so," I said. "Mind if we come in?" There were about half a dozen of them, and they were already coming in. They all wore slightly timeworn ochre overalls, flashed with too many company sigils. My hackles rose. I really didn't like the way they were barging in. "What's up?" I said. "Where are we?" "Where do you think?" the man said. He had a face full of stubble, with bad yellow teeth. I was impressed with that. Having bad teeth took a lot of work these days. It was years since I'd seen anyone who had the same dedication to the art. "I'm really hoping you're not going to tell me we're still stuck in Arkangel system," I said. "No, you made it through the gate." "And?" "There was a screw-up. Routing error. You didn't pop out of the right aperture." "Oh, Christ." I took off my bib cap. "It never rains. Something went wrong with the insertion, right?" "Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows how these things happen? All we know is you aren't supposed to be here." "Right. And where is 'here'?" "Saumlaki Station. Schedar sector." He said it as though he was already losing interest, as if this was a routine he went through several times a day. He might have been losing interest. I wasn't. I'd never heard of Saumlaki Station, but I'd certainly heard of Schedar sector. Schedar was a K supergiant out toward the edge of the Local Bubble. It defined one of the seventy-odd navigational sectors across the whole Bubble. Did I mention the Bubble already? You know how the Milky Way galaxy looks; you've seen it a thousand times, in paintings and computer simulations. A bright central bulge at the Galactic core, with lazily curved spiral arms flung out from that hub, each arm composed of hundreds of billions of stars, ranging from the dimmest, slow-burning dwarfs to the hottest supergiants teetering on the edge of supernova extinction. Now zoom in on one arm of the Milky Way. There's the sun, orange-yellow, about two-thirds out from the center of the Galaxy. Lanes and folds of dust swaddle the sun out to distances of tens of thousands of light-years. Yet the sun itself is sitting right in the middle of a four-hundred-light-year-wide hole in the dust, a bubble in which the density is about a twentieth of its average value. That's the Local Bubble. It's as if God blew a hole in the dust just for us. Except, of course, it wasn't God. It was a supernova, about a million years ago. Look farther out, and there are more bubbles, their walls intersecting and merging, forming a vast froth-like structure tens of thousands of light-years across. There are the structures of Loop I and Loop II and the Lindblad Ring. There are even super-dense knots where the dust is almost too thick to be seen through at all. Black cauls like the Taurus or Rho-Ophiuchi dark clouds or the Aquila Rift itself. Lying outside the Local Bubble, the Rift is the farthest point in the galaxy we've ever traveled to. It's not a question of endurance or nerve. There simply isn't a way to get beyond it, at least not within the faster-than-light network of the aperture links. The rabbit-warren of possible routes just doesn't reach any farther. Most destinations—including most of those on the Blue Goose's itinerary—didn't even get you beyond the Local Bubble. For us, it didn't matter. There's still a lot of commerce you can do within a hundred light-years of Earth. But Schedar was right on the periphery of the Bubble, where dust density began to ramp up to normal galactic levels, two hundred and twenty-eight light-years from Mother Earth. Again: not good. "I know this is a shock for you," another voice said. "But it's not as bad as you think it is." I looked at the woman who had just spoken. Medium height, the kind of face they called "elfin," with slanted ash-gray eyes and a bob of shoulder-length chrome-white hair. The face hurtingly familiar. "It isn't?" "I wouldn't say so, Thom." She smiled. "After all, it's given us the chance to catch up on old times, hasn't it?" "Greta?" I asked, disbelievingly. She nodded. "For my sins." "My God. It is you, isn't it?" "I wasn't sure you'd recognize me. Especially after all this time." "You didn't have much trouble recognizing me." "I didn't have to. The moment you popped out, we picked up your recovery transponder. Told us the name of your ship, who owned her, who was flying it, what you were carrying, where you were supposed to be headed. When I heard it was you, I made sure I was part of the reception team. But don't worry. It's not like you've changed all that much." "Well, you haven't either," I said. It wasn't quite true. But who honestly wants to hear that they look about ten years older than the last time you saw them, even if they still don't look all that bad with it? I thought about how she had looked naked, memories that I'd kept buried for a decade spooling into daylight. It shamed me that they were still so vivid, as if some furtive part of my subconscious had been secretly hoarding them through years of marriage and fidelity. Greta half smiled. It was as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. "You were never a good liar, Thorn." "Yeah. Guess I need some practice." There was an awkward silence. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. While we hesitated, the others floated around us, saying nothing. "Well," I said. "Who'd have guessed we'd end up meeting like this?" Greta nodded and offered the palms of her hands in a kind of apology. "I'm just sorry we aren't meeting under better circumstances," she said. "But if it's any consolation, what happened wasn't at all your fault. We checked your syntax, and there wasn't a mistake. It's just that now and then the system throws a glitch." "Funny how no one likes to talk about that very much," I said. "Could have been worse, Thorn. I remember what you used to tell me about space travel." "Yeah? Which particular pearl of wisdom would that have been?" "If you're in a position to moan about a situation, you've no right to be moaning." "Christ. Did I actually say that?" "Mm. And I bet you're regretting it now. But look, it really isn't that bad. You're only twenty days off schedule." Greta nodded toward the man who had the bad teeth. "Kolding says you'll only need a day of damage repair before you can move off again, and then another twenty, twenty-five days before you reach your destination, depending on routing patterns. That's less than six weeks. So you lose the bonus on this one. Big deal. You're all in one shape, and your ship only needs a little work. Why don't you just bite the bullet and sign the repair paperwork?" "I'm not looking forward to another twenty days in the surge tank. There's something else, as well." "Which is?" I was about to tell her about Katerina, how she'd have been expecting me back already. Instead I said: "I'm worried about the others. Suzy and Ray. They've got families expecting them. They'll be worried." "I understand," Greta said. "Suzy and Ray. They're still asleep, aren't they? Still in their surge tanks?" "Yes," I said, guardedly. "Keep them that way until you're on your way." Greta smiled. "There's no sense worrying them about their families, either. It's kinder." "If you say so." "Trust me on this one, Thorn. This isn't the first time I've handled this kind of situation. Doubt it'll be the last, either." I stayed in a hotel overnight, in another part of Saumlaki. The hotel was an echoing multilevel prefab structure, sunk deep into bedrock. It must have had a capacity for hundreds of guests, but at the moment only a handful of the rooms seemed to be occupied. I slept fitfully and got up early. In the atrium, I saw a bib-capped worker in rubber gloves removing diseased carp from a small ornamental pond. Watching him pick out the ailing metallic-orange fish, I had a flash of deja vu. What was it about dismal hotels and dying carp? Before breakfast—bleakly alert, even though I didn't really feel as if I'd had a good night's sleep—I visited Kolding and got a fresh update on the repair schedule. "Two, three days," he said. "It was a day last night." Kolding shrugged. "You've got a problem with the service, find someone else to fix your ship." Then he stuck his little finger into the corner of his mouth and began to dig between his teeth. "Nice to see someone who really enjoys his work," I said. I left Kolding before my mood worsened too much, making my way to a different part of the station. Greta had suggested we meet for breakfast and catch up on old times. She was there when I arrived, sitting at a table in an "outdoor" terrace, under a red-and-white striped canopy, sipping orange juice. Above us was a dome several hundred meters wide, projecting a cloudless holographic sky. It had the hard, enameled blue of midsummer. "How's the hotel?" she asked after I'd ordered a coffee from the waiter. "Not bad. No one seems very keen on conversation, though. Is it me or does that place have all the cheery ambience of a sinking ocean liner?" "It's just this place," Greta said. "Everyone who comes here is pissed off about it. Either they got transferred here and they're pissed off about that, or they ended up here by routing error and they're pissed off about that instead. Take your pick." "No one's happy?" "Only the ones who know they're getting out of here soon." "Would that include you?" "No." she said. "I'm more or less stuck here. But I'm OK about it. I guess I'm the exception that proves the rule." The waiters were glass mannequins of a kind that had been fashionable in the core worlds about twenty years ago. One of them placed a croissant in front of me, then poured scalding black coffee into my cup. "Well, it's good to see you," I said. "You too, Thorn." Greta finished her orange juice and then took a corner of my croissant for herself, without asking. "I heard you got married." "Yes." "Well? Aren't you going to tell me about her?" I drank some of my coffee. "Her name's Katerina." "Nice name." "She works in the department of bioremediation on Ka-gawa." "Kids?" Greta asked. "Not yet. It wouldn't be easy, the amount of time we both spend away from home." "Mm." She had a mouthful of croissant. "But one day you might think about it." "Nothing's ruled out," I said. As flattered as I was that she was taking such an interest in me, the surgical precision of her questions left me slightly uncomfortable. There was no thrust and parry, no fishing for information. That kind of directness unnerved. But at least it allowed me to ask the same questions. "What about you, then?" "Nothing very exciting. I got married a year or so after I last saw you. A man called Marcel." "Marcel," I said, ruminatively, as if the name had cosmic significance. "Well, I'm happy for you. I take it he's here too?" "No. Our work took us in different directions. We're still married, but…" Greta left the sentence hanging. "It can't be easy," I said. "If it was meant to work, we'd have found a way. Anyway, don't feel too sorry for either of us. We've both got our work. I wouldn't say I was any less happy than the last time we met." "Well, that's good," I said. Greta leaned over and touched my hand. Her fingernails were midnight black with a blue sheen. "Look. This is really presumptuous of me. It's one thing asking to meet up for breakfast. It would have been rude not to. But how would you like to meet again later? It's really nice to eat here in the evening. They turn down the lights. The view through the dome is really something." I looked up into that endless holographic sky.
