process, but the man himself.
I'd seen him before. Another pond full of diseased carp. Another hotel.
Then I remembered Kolding's bad teeth, and recalled how they'd reminded me of another man I'd met long before. Except it wasn't another man at all. Different name, different context, but everything else the same. And when I looked at the other diners, really looked at them, there was no one I couldn't swear I hadn't seen before. No single face that hit me with the force of utter unfamiliarity.
Which left Greta.
I said to her, over wine, under the Milky Way: 'Nothing here is real, is it?'
She looked at me with infinite sadness and shook her head.
'What about Suzy?' I asked her.
'Suzy's dead. Ray is dead. They died in their surge tanks.'
'How? Why them, and not me?'
'Something about particles of paint blocking intake filters. Not enough to make a difference over short distances, but enough to kill them on the trip out here.'
I think some part of me had always suspected. It felt less like shock than brutal disappointment.
'But Suzy seemed so real,' I said. 'Even the way she had doubts about how long she'd been in the tank… even the way she remembered previous attempts to wake her.'
The glass mannequin approached our table. Greta waved him away.
'I made her convincing, the way she would have acted.'
'You made her?'
'You're not really awake, Thorn. You're being fed data. This entire station is being simulated.'
I sipped my wine. I expected it to taste suddenly thin and synthetic, but it still tasted like pretty good wine.
'Then I'm dead as well?'
'No. You're alive. Still in your surge tank. But I haven't brought you to full consciousness yet.'
'All right. The truth this time. I can take it. How much is real? Does the station exist? Are we really as far out as you said?'
'Yes,' she said. 'The station exists, just as I said it does. It just looks… different. And it is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and it is orbiting a brown dwarf star.'
'Can you show me the station as it is?'
'I could. But I don't think you're ready for it. I think you'd find it difficult to adjust.'
I couldn't help laughing. 'Even after what I've already adjusted to?'
'You've only made half the journey, Thom.'
'But you made it.'
'I did, Thom. But for me it was different.' Greta smiled.
'For me, everything was different.'
Then she made the light show change again. None of the other diners appeared to notice as we began to zoom in toward the Milky Way, crashing toward the spiral, ramming through shoals of outlying stars and gas clouds. The familiar landscape of the Local Bubble loomed large.
The image froze, the Bubble one among many such structures.
Again it filled with the violent red scribble of the aperture network. But now the network wasn't the only one. It was merely one ball of red yarn among many, spaced out across tens of thousands of light-years. None of the scribbles touched each other, yet-in the way they were shaped, in the way they almost abutted against each other- it was possible to imagine that they had once been connected. They were like the shapes of continents on a world with tectonic drift.
'It used to span the galaxy,' Greta said. 'Then something happened. Something catastrophic, which I still don't understand. A shattering, into vastly smaller domains. Typically a few hundred light-years across.'
'Who made it?'
'I don't know. No one knows. They probably aren't around anymore. Maybe that was why it shattered, out of neglect.'
'But we found it,' I said. 'The part of it near us still worked.'
'All the disconnected elements still function,' Greta said. 'You can't cross from domain to domain, but otherwise the apertures work as they were designed. Barring, of course, the occasional routing error.'
'All right,' I said. 'If you can't cross from domain to domain, how did Blue Goose get this far out? We've come a lot farther than a few hundred light-years.'
'You're right. But then such a long-distance connection might have been engineered differently from the others. It appears that the links to the Magellanic Clouds were more resilient. When the domains shattered from each other, the connections reaching beyond the galaxy remained intact.'
'In which case you can cross from domain to domain,' I said. 'But you have to come all the way out here first.'
'The trouble is, not many want to continue the journey at this point. No one comes here deliberately, Thorn.'
'I still don't get it. What does it matter to me if there are other domains? Those regions of the galaxy are thousands of light-years from Earth, and without the apertures we'd have no way of reaching them. They don't matter. There's no one there to use them.'
Greta's smile was coquettish, knowing.
'What makes you so certain?'
'Because if there were, wouldn't there be alien ships popping out of the aperture here? You've told me Blue Goose wasn't the first through. But our domain-the one in the Local Bubble-must be outnumbered hundreds to one by all the others. If there are alien cultures out there, each stumbling on their own local domain, why haven't any of them ever come through the aperture, the way we did?'
Again that smile. But this time it chilled my blood.
'What makes you think they haven't, Thom?'
I reached out and took her hand, the way she had taken mine. I took it without force, without malice, but with the assurance that this time I really, sincerely meant what I was about to say.
Her fingers tightened around mine.
'Show me,' I said. 'I want to see things as they really are. Not just the station. You as well.'
Because by then I'd realized. Greta hadn't just lied to me about Suzy and Ray. She'd lied to me about the Blue Goose as well. Because we were not the latest human ship to come through.
We were the first.
'You want to see it?' she asked.
'Yes. All of it.'
'You won't like it.'
'I'll be the judge of that.'
'All right, Thom. But understand this. I've been here before. I've done this a million times. I care for all the lost souls. And I know how it works. You won't be able to take the raw reality of what's happened to you. You'll shrivel away from it. You'll go mad, unless I substitute a calming fiction, a happy ending.'
'Why tell me that now?'
'Because you don't have to see it. You can stop now, where you are, with an idea of the truth. An inkling. But you don't have to open your eyes.'
'Do it,' I said.
Greta shrugged. She poured herself another measure of wine, then made sure my own glass was charged.
'You asked for it,' she said.
We were still holding hands, two lovers sharing an intimacy. Then everything changed.
It was just a flash, just a glimpse. Like the view of an unfamiliar room if you turn the lights on for an instant. Shapes and forms, relationships between things. I saw caverns, wormed-out and linked, and things moving through those caverns, bustling along with the frantic industry of moles or termites. The things were seldom alike, even in the most superficial sense. Some moved via propulsive waves of multiple clawed limbs. Some wriggled, smooth plaques of carapace grinding against the glassy rock of the tunnels.
