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?'
