Lalji frowned and picked up a jar of corn. The kernels nestled tightly together, hundreds of them, each one unpatented, each one a genetic infection. He closed his eyes and in his mind he saw a field: row upon row of green rustling plants, and his father, laughing, with his arms spread wide as he shouted, 'Hundreds! Thousands if you pray!'
Lalji hugged the jar to his chest, and slowly, he began to smile.
The needleboat continued downstream, a bit of flotsam in the Mississippi's current. Around it, the crowding shadow hulks of the grain barges loomed, all of them flowing south through the fertile heartland toward the gateway of New Orleans; all of them flowing steadily toward the vast wide world.
Beyond the Aquila Rift by ALASTASR REYNOLDS
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006) and Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection (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.
