'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
