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.'
