Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift

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Beyond the Aquila Rift

ALASTASR REYNOLDS

From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (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.

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

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