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Beyond the rift

By Sodapop
Created: 2021-07-16 21:31:33
Updated: 2021-03-29 09:50:25
Expiry: Never
anonocthrillerspaceapogeenasapone

  1. >Nasapone's with me when i pull apogee out of the surge tank.
  2. >"Why her?"
  3. "Because i want her out first"
  4. >I say this wondering if Nasapone is jealous. I don't blame her tho: Apogee's beautiful, but she's also smart. There isn't a better syntax runner in Equestria Industrial.
  5. >"What happened?" Apogee asks, when she's over the grogginess. "Are we back yet?"
  6. "What's the last thing you remember?"
  7. >"Customs" she says.
  8. >"Those pricks on Atlas"´
  9. "And after that? anything else? The runes? Do you remember casting them?"
  10. >"No..."
  11. >She then picks up something in my voice. The fact that i might not be telling the whole truth, or telling her all she needs to know
  12. >"Anon. I'll ask you again. Did we make it back?"
  13. "Yeah. We made it back"
  14. >Apogee looks back at the starscape, airbrushed across her surge tank in luminous violet and yellow paint. She had it customized on Carillon. It was against regs: something about the paint clogging intake filters.
  15. >Apogee didn't care. She told me it had cost her a week's bits, but it had been worth it to impose her own personality on the grey company architecture of the ship.
  16. >"Funny how I feel like I've been in that hing for months."
  17. >I shrug
  18. "That's the way it feels sometimes."
  19. >"Then nothing went wrong?"
  20. "Nothing at all."
  21. >Apogee looks at Nasapone
  22. >"Then who are you?"
  23. >"Nasapone says nothing. She just looks at me expectantly. I start shaking, and realize I can't go through with this. Not yet."
  24. "End it"
  25. >"Nasapone steps towards Apogee. Apogee reacts, but she isn't quick enough.
  26. >"Nasapone pulls something form her pocket and touches Apogee on the foreleg. Apogee drops like a puppet, out cold. We put her back into the surge tank, plumb her back in and close the lid.
  27. >"She won't remember anything"
  28. >"The conversation never left her short-term memory."
  29. "I don't know if I can go through with this"
  30. >Nasapone touches me with her other hoof
  31. >"No one ever said this was going to be easy"
  32. "I was just trying to ease her into it gently. I didn't want to tell her the truth right out"
  33. >"I know you're a kind man, Anon" Then she kisses me.
  34. ------------------------------------------------------------
  35. >I REMEMBER ATLAS as well. That was about where it all started to go wrong. We didn't know it then.
  36. >We missed our first take-off slot when customs found a discrepancy in the cargo waybill. It wasn't serious, but it took them a while to realize their mistake.
  37. >By the time they did, we knew we were going to be sitting on the ground for another eight hours, while inbound control processed a fleet of bulk carriers.
  38. >I told Apogee and Pleiades the news. Apogee took it pretty well, or about as well as she ever took that kind of thing.
  39. >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.
  40. >"Company authorized?" she asked
  41. "I don't care"
  42. >"What about Pleiades? Is he going to sit here drinking tea while i work for my pay?"
  43. >I smiled. They had a bickering, love-hate thing going on
  44. "No, Pleiades can do something useful as well. He can take a look at the q-planes."
  45. >"Nothing wrong with those planes" he said.
  46. >I took off my old Equestria Industrial bib cap, scratched my bald spot and turned to the jib pony
  47. "Right. Then it won't take you long to check them over, will it?"
  48. >"Whatever, Skip"
  49. >The thing i liked about Pleiades was that he always knew when he'd lost an argument. He gathered his kit and went out to check over the planes.
  50. >I watched him climb the jib ladder, tools hanging from his belt.
  51. >Apogee got her facemask, long, black coat, and left, vanishing into the vapour haze of the docks, boot heels clicking into the distance long after she'd passed out of sight
  52. >I left the Harmonia, walking in the opposite direction to Apogee
  53. >Overhead, the bulk carriers slid in on after the other. You heard them long before you saw them. Mournful, cetacean moans cut down through the piss-yellow clouds over the port.
  54. >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 undercarriages clutching down like talons.
  55. >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 their holding pens, some of them autonomous, some of them still being ridden by pony trainers.
  56. >There was a shocking silence as the engines cut, until the next carrier began to approach through the clouds.
  57. >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.
  58. >The Great rift is about as far as anyone ever goes. At median tunnel speeds, it's a year from the centre of the Local Bubble
  59. >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 far enough for me
  60. >When there was a lull in the landing patter, I ducked into a bar and found an Aperture Authority booth that took Bits. I sat in the seat and recorded a thirty-second message to Luna. I told her I was on my way back, but that we were stuck on Atlas for another few hours.
  61. >I warned her that the delay might cascade through to our tunnel routing, depending on how busy things were at the Authority's end. Based on past experience, an eight-hour ground hold might become a two-day hold at the surge point.
  62. >I Told her I'd be back, but she shouldn't worry if I was a few days late. I also told her that I loved her and couldn't wait to get back home.
  63. >While I walked back to the Harmonia, I thought of the message racing ahead of me. Transmitted at light-speed up system, then copied into the memory buffer of the next outgoing ship. Chances were, that particular ship wasn't headed to Equestria or anywhere near it.
  64. >The Aperture Authority would have to relay the message from ship to ship until it reached its destination.
  65. >I might even reach Equestria ahead of it, but in all my years of delays that had only happened once. The system worked all right.
  66. >Overhead, a white passenger liner had been slotted in between the bulk carriers. I lifted my custom mask to get a better look at it.
  67. >I got hit of ozone, fuel and dinosaur dung. That was Atlas alright. You couldn't mistake it for any other place in the Bubble.
  68. >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.
  69.  
  70. >"Anon?"
  71. >I followed the voice. It was Pleiades, standing by the dock
  72. "You finished checking those planes?"
  73. >Pleiades shook his head
  74. >"That's what I wanted to talk about you about. They were a little off-alignment, so...
  75. >"Seeing as we're sitting here for eight hours"
  76. >"I decided to run a full recalibration"
  77. "That's the idea. So what's the prob?"
  78. >"The "prob" is a slot just opened up. Tower says we can lift in thirty minutes"
  79. "Then we'll lift"
  80. >"I haven't finished the recal. As it is, things are worse than before I started. Lifting now would not be a good idea"
  81. "You know how the tower works. Miss two offered slots, you could be on the ground for days"
  82. >"No one wants to get back home sooner than I do..."
  83. "So cheer up"
  84. >"She'll be rough in the tunnel, It won't be a smooth ride home"
  85. "Do we care? We'll be asleep"
  86. >"Well, it's academic. We can't leave without Apogee"
  87. >I heard boots coming toward us. Apogee came out of the fog, tugging her own mask aside
  88. >"No joy with the rune monkeys. Nothing they were selling I hadn't seen a million times before. Fucking cowboys"
  89. "It doesn't matter. We're leaving anyways"
  90. >Pleiades swore
  91. >I pretended I hadn't heard him.
  92. ----------------------------------------
  93. >I WAS ALWAYS the last one into the surge tank
  94. >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 are
  95. >The Harmonia had come to a stop near the AA beacon that marked the surge point. There were a few other ships ahead of us in the queue, plus the usual swarm of AA service craft.
  96. >Through an observation blister I was able to watch the larger ships depart one by one. Accelerating at maximum power, they seemed to streak towards a completely featurless part of the sky.
  97. >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
  98. >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 kilometres away.
  99. >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.
  100. >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
  101. >After two centuries of study, pony machines can now construct and interpret the syntaxt with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of runes that will almost always be accepted by the aperture's own machinery
  102. >Futhermore, they can almost always guarantee that the desired routing is the one that the aperture machinery will provide.
  103. >In short, you usually get where you want to go.
  104. >Take a simple point-to-point transfer, like the Twilight Sparkle run. In that case there is no real disadvantage in using automatic syntax generators.
  105. >But for longer trajectories, those that may involve six or seven transits between aperture hubs. machines lose the edge.
  106. >They find a solution, but usually it isn't the optimum one. That's where syntax runners come in.
  107. >Ponies like Apogee have an intuitive grasp of syntax solutions. They dream in runes. When they see a poorly constructed script, they feel it like toothace. It affronts them.
  108. >A good syntaxt runner can shave days off a route. For a company like Equestria Industrial, that can make a lot of difference.
  109.  
  110. >But I wasn't a syntax runner. I could tell when something had gone wrong with platelets, but I had to trust that Apogee had done her job. I had no other choice.
  111. >But I knew Apogee wouldn't screw things up.
  112. >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-metre-long jibs, like the arms of a grapple.
  113. >I checked that they were locked in their fully extended positions and that the status light were all green.
  114. >The jibs were Pleiades's area. He'd been checking the alignments of the ski-shaped q-planes when I ordered him to close up ship and prepare to lift.
  115. >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 Pleiades, who cared?
  116. >The Harmonia could take a little tunnel turbulence. It was built to.
  117.  
  118. >I checked the surge point again. Only three ships ahead of us
  119. >I went back to the surge tanks and checked that Apogee and Pleiades were all right. Pleiades's tank had been customized at the same time that apogee had had hers done.
  120. >It was full of images of what Apogee called the BLF: The Blessed Lauren Faust.
  121. >The BLF was always in a spacesuit, carrying a little spacesuited Princess Celestia
  122. >Their helmets were airbrushed gold halos. The artwork had a cheap, hasty look to it.
  123. >I assumed Pleiades hadn't spent as much as Apogee.
  124. >Quickly I stripped down to my underclothes. I plumbed into my own unpainted surge tank and closed the lid.
  125. >The buffering gel sloshed in. Within about twenty seconds I was already feeling drowsy
  126. >By the time traffic control gave us the green light I'd be asleep.
  127.  
  128. >I've done it a thousand times. There was no fear, no apprehension. Just a tiny flicker of regret.
  129. >I've never seen an aperture. Then again, very few people have.
  130. >Witnesses report a doughnut-shaped lump of dark chondrite asteroid, about two kilometres across. The entire middle section has been cored out, with the inner part of the ring faced by the quitoxic-matter machinery of the aperture itself.
  131. >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.
  132. >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.
  133. >I'ts enough to dream, and then awake, and know that you're somewhere else.
  134. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  135.  
  136. >"TRY A DIFFERENT approach" Nasapone says.
  137. >"Tell her the truth this time. Maybe she'll take it easier than you think."
  138. "There's no way i can tell her the truth"
  139. >Nasapone leans against the wall, one hoof close to her mouth
  140. >"Then tell her something halfway truthful"
  141. >We un-plumb Apogee and haul her out of the surge tank
  142. >"Where are we? Who are you?"
  143. >I wonder if some of the last conversation did make it out of Apogee short-term memory after all
  144. "Nasapone works here"
  145. >"Where's here?"
  146. >I remember what Nasapone told me
  147. "A station in Orion sector"
  148. >"That's not where we're meant to be, Anon"
  149. "I know. There was a mistake. A routing error"
  150. >Apogee's already shaking her head
  151. >"There was nothing wrong--"
  152. "I know. It wasn't your fault"
  153. >I help her into her ship clothes. She's still shivering, her muscles reacting to movement after so much time in the tank
  154. "The syntax was good"
  155. >"Then what?"
  156. "The system made a mistake, not you"
  157. >"Orion sector... That would put us about ten days off our schedule, wouldn't it?"
  158. >I try and remember what Nasapone said to me the first time. I ought to know this by heart, but Apogee's the routing expert, not me"
  159. "That sounds about right"
  160. >But Apogee shakes her head
  161. >"Then we're not in Orion sector"
  162. >I try to sound pleasantly surprised
  163. "We're not?"
  164. >"I've been in that tank for a lot longer than a few days, Anon. I know. I can feel it in every fucking bone in my body. So where are we?"
  165. >I turn to Nasapone. I can't believe this is happening again.
  166. "End it"
  167. >Nasapone steps towards apogee
  168. --------------------------------------------------
  169. >YOU KNOW THAT "as soon as I awoke I knew everything was wrong" cliché?
  170. >You've probably heard it a thousand times, in a thousand bars across the Bubble, wherever ship crews swap tall tales over flat, company-subsidized beer
  171. >The trouble is that sometimes that's exactly the way it happens. I never felt good after a period in the surge tank. But the only time I had ever come around feeling anywere near this bad was after that trip I took to the edge of the Bubble.
  172.  
  173. >Mulling this, but knowing there was nothing I could do about it until I was out of the tank, it took me half an hour of painful work to free myself from the connections.
  174. >Every muscle fibre in my body felt like it had been shredded. Unfortunately, the sense of wrongness didn't end with the tank.
  175. >The Harmonia was much too quiet. We should have been heading away from the last exit aperture after our routing. But the distant, comforting rumble of the fusion engines wasn't there at all
  176. >That meant we were in free-fall
  177. >Not good.
  178.  
  179. >I floated out of the tank, grabbed a handhold and levered myself around to view the other two tanks
  180. >Pleiades's largest BLF stared back radiantly from the cowl of his tank. The bio indices were all in the green.
  181. >He was still unconsious, but there was nothing wrong with him. Same story with Apogee.
  182. >Some automated system had decided I was the only one who needed waking.
  183. >A few minutes later I had made my way to the same observation blister I'd used to check the ship before the surge.
  184. >I pushed my head into the scuffed glass half-dome and looked around.
  185. >We'd arrived somewhere. The Harmonia was sitting in a huge, zero-cross section. The walls were a smear of service machinery: squat modules, snaking umbilical lines, the retracted cradles of unused docking berths.
  186. >Whichever way I looked I saw other ships locked onto cradles. Every make and class you could think of, every possible configuration of hull design compatible with aperture transitions.
  187. >Service light threw a warm golden glow on the scene. Now and then the whole chamber was bathed in the stuttering violet flicker of a cutting torch.
  188. >It was a repair facility.
  189.  
  190. >I was just starting to mull on that when I saw something extend itself from the wall of the chamber.
  191. >It was a telescopic docking tunner, groping towards our ship. Through the window in the side of the tunnel I saw figures floating, pulling themselves along hoof over hoof
  192. >I sighed and started making my way to the airlock.
  193. -----------------------------------------------------------
  194. >BY THE TIME I reached the lock they were already through the first stage of the cycle.
  195. >Nothing wrong with that, there was no good reason to prevent foreign parties boarding a vessel, but it was a tiny bit impolite.
  196. >But perhaps, they'd assumed we were all asleep.
  197. >The door slip open
  198. >"You're awake" an unicorn said
  199. >"Captain Prince Anonymous of the Harmonia, isn't it?"
  200. "Guess so"
  201. >"Mind if we come in?"
  202. >There were about half a dozen of them, and they were already coming in. They al wore slightly timeworn ocher overalls, flashed with too many company sigils.
  203. >My hackles rose. I didn't really like the way they were barging in
  204. "What's up? Where are we?"
  205. >"Where do you think?" a pony said. He had a face full of stubble, with bad yellow teeth. I was impressed by that. Having bad teeth took a lot of work these days
  206. >It was years since I'd seen anyone who had the same dedication to the art.
  207. "I'm still hoping you're not going to tell me we're still stuck in Atlas system"
  208. >"No, you made it through the gate"
  209. "And?"
  210. >"There was a screw-up. Routing error. You didn't pop out of the right aperture"
  211. "Oh celestia"
  212. >I took off my bib cap
  213. "It never rains. Something went wrong with the insertion, right?"
  214. >"Maybe, Maybe now. Who know how these things happen? All we know is you aren't supposed to be here"
  215. "Right. And where is "here"?"
  216. >"Nereid Station. Orion sector"
  217. >He said it as though he was already losing interest, as if this was a routine he went through several times a day.
  218. >He might have been losing interest. I wasn't
  219. >I'd never heard of Nereid Station, but I'd certainly heard of Orion sector.
  220. >Orion was a K supergigant out toward the edge of the local Bubble. It defined one of the seventy-odd navigational sectors across the whole Bubble
  221. >Did I mention the Bubble already?
  222. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
  223. >YOU KNOW HOW the Milky Way Galaxy looks; you've seen it a thousand times, in paintings and computer simulations. A bright central bulge at the galactic core, with lazily curved spiral armas flung out from that hub, each arm composed of hundred of billions of stars, ranging from the dimmest, slow-burning dwarfs to the hottest supergigants teetering on the edge of supernova extinction.
  224. >Now zoom in one arm of the Milky Way. There's the sun, orange-yellow, about two-thirds out from the distances of tens of thousands of light-years.
  225. >Yet the sun itself is sitting right in the middle of a four-hundred-light-year-wide hole in the dust, a bubble of which the density is about a twentieth of its average value
  226. >That's the Local Bubble. I'ts as if some divine figure blew a hole in the dust just for us.
  227. >Except, of course, it wasn't some deity. It was a supernova, about a million years ago.
  228. >Look further out, and there are more bubbles, their walls intersecting and merging, forming vast froth-like structures tens of thousands of light-years across.
  229. >There are the structures of Loop I and Loop II and the Celestial Ring. There are even superdense knots where the dust is almost too thick to be seen through at all.
  230. >Black cauls like the Taurus or Ophiuchi dark clouds, or the Great Rift itself.
  231. >Lying outside the Local Bubble, the Rift is the furthest point in the galaxy we've ever travelled to.
  232. >It's not a question of endurance or whatever. There simply isn't a way to get beyond it, at least not within the faster-than-light network of the aperture links.
  233. >The rabbit-warren of possible routes just doesn't reach any further.
  234. >Most destinations, including most of those on the Harmonia's itinerary, didn't even get you beyond the Local Bubble.
  235. >For us, it didn't matter. There's still a lot of commerce you can do within a hundred light-years of Equestria. But Orion was right on the periphery of the Bubble, where dust density began to ramp up to normal galactic levels, two hundred and twenty-eight light years from Equestria.
  236. >Again: not good.
  237. >"I know this is a shock for you" another voice said "But it's not as bad as you think it is"
  238. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  239.  
  240. >I LOOKED AT the Pony that had just spoken. Normal height, White coat, with deep purple-magenta eyes and a bob of shoulder-lenght sky-blue with long a red streak mane.
  241. "It isn't?"
  242. >"I wouldn't say so, Anon" she smiled
  243. >"After all, it's given us the chance to catch up on old times, hasn't it?"
  244. "Nasapone?"
  245. >"For my sins" she nodded
  246. "My god. It is you, isn't it?"
  247. >"I wasn't sure you'd recognize me. Specially after all this time"
  248. "You didn't have much more trouble recognizing me"
  249. >"I didn't have to. The moment you popped out we picked up your recovery transponder. Told us the name of your ship, who owned her, who was flying it, what you were carrying, where you were supposed to be headed. Plus, you aren't a pony"
  250. >"When i heard it was you, I made sure I was part of the reception team. But don't worry. I'ts not like you've changed all that much"
  251. "Well, you haven't either"
  252. >It wasn't quite true. But who honestly wants to hear that hey look about ten years older than the last time you saw them, even if they still don't look all that bad with it?
  253. >I thought about how she had looked when we were.... together... Memories that I'd kept buried for a decade spooling into daylight.
  254. >It shamed me that they were still so vivid, as if some furtive part of my subconscious had been secretly hoarding them through years of marriage and fidelity
  255. >Nasapone half-smiled. It was as if she knew exactly what I was thinking.
  256. >"You were never a good liar, Anon"
  257. "Yeah. Guess I need some practice"
  258.  
  259. >There was an awkward silence. Neither of us seemed to know what to say next. While we hesitated the others floated around us, saying nothing.
  260. "Well. Who'd have guessed we'd end up meeting like this?"
  261. >Nasapone nodded and offered the frogs of her hoofs in a kind of apology
  262. >"I'm just sorry we aren't meeting under better circumstances"
  263. >"But if it's any consolation, what happened wasn't at all your fault. We checked your syntax, and there wasn't a mistake. It's just that now and then the system throws a glitch"
  264. "Funny how no one likes to talk about that very much"
  265. >"Could have been worss, Anon. I remember what you used to tell me about space travel"
  266. "Yeah? Which particular pearl of wisdom would that have been?"
  267. >"If you're in a position to moan about a situation, you've no right to be moaning"
  268. "Celestia. Did I actually say that?"
  269. >"Mm. And i bet you're regretting it now. But look, it really isn't that bad. You're only twenty days off-schedule"
  270. >Nasapone nodded towards the pony who had bad teeth.
  271. >"Alma says you'll only need a day of damage repair before you can move off again, and then another twenty, twenty-five days before you reach your destination, depending on routing patters"
  272. >"That's less than six weeks. So you lose the bonus on this one. Big deal. You're all in good shape, and your ship only need a little work. Why don't you just bite the bullet and sign the repair paperwork?"
  273. "I'm not looking forward to another twenty days in the surge tank. There's something else, as well"
  274. >"Which is?"
  275. >I was about to tell her about Luna, how she'd have been expecting me back already
  276. "I'm worried about the others, Apogee and Pleiades. They've got families expecting them. They'll be worried"
  277. >"I undestand, Apogee and Pleiades. They're still asleep, aren't they? Still in their surge tanks?"
  278. "Yes..."
  279. >"Keep them that way until you're on your way. There's no sense worrying them about their families, either. It's kinder"
  280. "If you say so"
  281. >"Trust me on this one. Anon. This isn't the first time I've handled this kind of situation. Doubt it'll be the last, either"
  282. -------------------------------------------------------
  283.  
  284. >I STAYED IN a hotel overnight, in another part of Nereid. The hotel was an echoing, multileveled prefab structure, sunk deep into bedrock. It must have the capacity for hundreds of guests, but at the moment only a handful of the rooms seemed to be occupied. I slept fitfully and got up early.
  285. >In the atrium, i saw a bib-capped worker in rubber "gloves" removing diseased carp from a small ornamental pond.
  286. >Watching him pick up the ailing, metallic-organic fish, I had a flash of déjá vu, What was it about dismal hotels and dying carp?
  287. >Before breakfast, bleakly alert, even though I didn't really feel as if I'd had good night's sleep, I visited Alma and got a fresh update on the repair schedule
  288. >"Two, three days"
  289. "It was a day last night"
  290. >"You've got a problem with the service, find someone else to fix your ship" Alma shrugged
  291. >Then he stuck part of his hoof into the corner of his mouth and began to dig between his teeth
  292. "Nice to see someone who really enjoys his work"
  293. >I left Alma before my mood worsened too much, making my way to a different part of the station.
  294. >"Nasapone has suggested we meet for breakfast and catch up on old times. She was there when I arrived, sitting at the table in an "outdoor" terrace, under a red-and-white-striped canopy, sipping orange juice.
  295. >Above us was a dome several hundred metres wide, projecting cloudless holographic sky. It had the hard, enamelled blue of midsummer
  296. >"How's the hotel?"
  297. >I ordered a coffee
  298. "Not bad. No one seems very keen on conversation, though. Is it me or does that place have all the cheery ambience of a sinking ocean liner?"
  299. >"It's just this place. Everyone who comes here is pissed off about it. Either they got transferred here and they're pissed off about that, or they ended up here by routing error and they're pissed off about that instead. Take your pick"
  300. "No one's happy?"
  301. >"Only the ones who know they're getting out of here soon"
  302. "Would that include you?"
  303. >"No. I'm more or less stuck here. But I'm OK about it. I guess I'm the exception that proves the rule"
  304. >The waters were glass mannequins, the kind that had been fashionable in the core worlds about twenty years ago. One of them placed a croissant in front of me, then poured scalding black coffee into my cup
  305. "Well, it's good to see you"
  306. >"You too, Anon"
  307. >Nasapone finished her orange juice and then took a corner of my croissant for herself, without asking
  308. >"I heard you got married"
  309. "Yes"
  310. >"Well? Aren't you going to tell me about her?"
  311. >I drank some of my coffee
  312. "Her name's Luna"
  313. >"Nice name"
  314. "She "works" in the Royal administration of Canterlot"
  315. >"Kids?"
  316. >I looked at her funny
  317. "Well, not yet. It wouldn't be easy, the amount of time we both spend away from home"
  318. >"Mm. But one day you might think about it"
  319. "Nothing's ruled out"
  320. >As flattered as I was she was taking such interest in me, the surgical precision of her questions left me slightly uncomfortable. There was no thrust and parry; no fishing for information. That kind of directness unnerved. But at least it allowed me to ask the same questions.
  321. "What about you, then?"
  322. >"Nothing very exciting. I got married a year or so after I last saw you. An earth pony called Duska"
  323. "Duska.."
  324. >I said, ruminatively, as if the name had cosmic significance.
  325. "Well, I'm happy for you. I take it he's here, too?"
  326. >"No, Our work took us in different directions. We're still married, but..."
  327. "It can't be easy"
  328. >"If it was meant to work, we'd have found a way. Anyways, don't feel too sorry for either of us. We've both got our work. I wouldn't say I was any less happy than the last time we met"
  329. "Well, that's good"
  330. >Nasapone leaned over and touched my had. Her hoof had a particular shine to it
  331. >"Look. This is really presumptuous of me. It's one thing asking to meet up for breakfast. It would have been rude not to. But how would you like to meet again later? It's really nice to eat here in the evening. They turn down the lights. The view through the dome is really something"
  332. >I looked up into that endless holographic sky
  333. "I thought it was faked"
  334. >"Oh, it is. But don't let that spoil it for you"
  335. -----------------------------------------------
  336. >I SETTLED IN front of the camera and started speaking.
  337. "Luna"
  338. "Hello. I hope you're all right. By now I hope someone from the company will have been in touch. If they haven't, I'm pretty sure you'll have made your own enquiries. I'm now sure what they told you, but i promise you that we're safe and sound and that we're coming home. Im calling from somewhere called Nereid Station, a repair facility on the edge of the Oreon sector. I'ts not much to look at: just a warren of tunnels and centrifuges dug into a pitch-black, D-type asteroid, about half a light-year from the nearest star. The only reason it's here at all is because there happens to be an aperture next door. That's how we got here in the first place. Somehow the Harmonia took a wrong turn in the network, what they call a routing error. The Harmonia came in last night, local time, and I've been in a hotel since then. I didn't call last night because I was too tired and disorientated after coming out of the tank, and I didn't know how long we were going to be here. Seemed better to wait until morning, when we'd have a better idea of the damage of the ship. It's nothing serious, just a few bits and pieces buckled during the transit, but it means we're going to be here for another couple of days."
  339. "Alma, he is the repair chief, says three at most. By the time we get back on course, however, we'll be about forty days behind schedule."
  340. >I paused, eyeing the incrementing cost indicator. Before I sat down in the booth I always had an eloquent and economical speech queued up in my head, one that conveyed exactly what needed to be said, with the measure and grace of a soliloquy. But my mind always dried up as soon as I opened my mouth, and instead of an actor I ended up sounding like a small-time thief, concocting some fumbling alibi in the presence of quick-witted interrogators-
  341. >I smilled awkwardly and continued
  342. "It kills me to thing this message is going to take so long to get to you. But if there's a silver lining it's that I won't be far behind it"
  343. "By the time you get this, I should be home only a couple of days later. So don't waste bits replying to this, because by the time you get this I'll already have left Nereid Station. Just stay where you are and I promise I'll be home soon"
  344. >That was it. There was nothing more I needed to say, other than "I miss you"
  345. >Delivered after a moment's pause, I meant it to sound more empathic. But when i replayed the recording it sounded more like and afterthought.
  346. >I could have recorded it again, but I doubted that I would havee been any happier. Instead I just committed the existing message for transmission and wondered how long it would have to waitr before going on its way
  347. >Since it seemed unlikely that there was a vast flow of commerce in and out of Nereid station.
  348. >I'd even told her about Alma and the damage to the Harmonia. But I hadn't told her about Nasapone
  349. ---------------------------------------
  350. >IT’S NOT WORKING with Apogee.
  351. >She's too smart, too well attuned to the physiological correlatives of surge tank immersion.
  352. >I can give her all the reassurances in the world, but she knows she's been under too long for this to be anything other than a truly epic screw-up.
  353. >She knows that we aren't just taking weeks or even months of delay here. Every nerve in her body is screaming that message into her skull
  354. >"I had dreams" she says, when the grogginess fades
  355. "What kind?"
  356. >"Dreams that I kept waking. Dreams that you were pulling me out of the surge tank. You and someone else"
  357. >I do my best to smile. I'm alone, but Nasapone isn't far away. The hypodermic's in my pocket now
  358. "I always get bad dreams coming out of the tank"
  359. >"These felt real. Your story kept chaning, but you kept telling me we were somewhere....that we'd gone a little off course, but that it was nothing to worry about"
  360. >So much for Nasapone reassurance that Apogee will remember nothing after our aborted efforts at waking her.
  361. >Seems that her short-tem memory isn't quite as fallible as we'd like
  362. "It's funny you should say that. Because, actually, we are a little off course"
  363. >She's sharper with every breath. Apogee was always the best of us at coming out of the tank
  364. >"Tell me how far, Anon"
  365. "Farther than I'd like"
  366. >She presses her hooves on the tank. I can't feel if it's aggression, or some lingering neuromuscular effect of her itme in the tank
  367. >"How far?, Beyond the Bubble?"
  368. "Beyond the Bubble, yes."
  369. >Her voice grows small and childlike.
  370. >"Tell me, Anon. Are we out beyond the Rift?"
  371. >I can hear the fear. I understand what she's going through. It's the nightmare that all ship crews live on every trip. That something will go wrong with the routing, something so severe that they'll end up on the very edge of the network. That they'll end up so far from home that getting back will take years, not months. And that, of course, years will haave already passed, even before they being the return trip.
  372. >That loved ones will be years older when they reach home.
  373. >If they're still there. If they still remember you, or want to remember. If they're still recognizable, or alive
  374. >Beyond the Great Rift. It's shorthand for the trip no one ever hopes to make by accident. The one that will screw up the rest of your life, the one that creates the ghosts you se haunting the shadows of company bars across the whole Bubble.
  375. >Stallions and mares ripped out of time, cut adrift from families and lovers by an accident of an alien technology we used but barely comprehend.
  376. "Yes... We're beyond the Rift"
  377. >Apogee screams, kitting her face into a mask of anger and denial. My hand is cold around the hypodermic. I consider using it.
  378. ---------------------------------------------------------
  379. >A NEW REPAIR estimate from Alma. Five, six days.
  380. >This time I didn't even argue. I just shrugged and walked out, and wondered how long it would be next time.
  381. >That evening I sat down at the table where Nasapone and I had met over breakfast.
  382. >The dinning area had been well lit before, but now the only illumination came from the table laps and the subdued lighting panels set into the paving.
  383. >In the distance, a glass ponnequin stood on a small stand, playing "asturias" on a glass piano. There were no other patrons dining tonight.
  384. >I didn't have long to wait for Nasapone
  385. >"Im sorry I'm late, Anon"
  386. >I turned to her as she approached the table. I liked the way she walked in the low gravity of the station, the say the subdued lighting traced the arc of her hips and loin.
  387. >She eased into her seat and leaning towards me in the manner of a conspirator. The lamp on the table threw red shadows and gold highlights across her face. It took ten years off her age.
  388. "You aren't late. And anyway, I had the view"
  389. >"It's an improvement, isn't it?"
  390. "That wouldn't be saying much. But yes, it's definitely and improvement"
  391. >"I could sit out here all night and just look at it. In fact sometimes that's exactly what I do. Just me and a bottle of wine"
  392. "I don't blame you"
  393. >Instead of the of the holographic blue, the dome was now full of stars. It was like no view I'd ever seen from another station or ship.
  394. >There were hard gold gems and soft red smears, like finger smears in pastel. There were strams and currents of fainter stars, like a myriad neon fish caught in a snapshot of frozen motion. There were vast billowing backdrops of red and green cloud, veined and flawed by filaments of cool black.
  395. >There were bluffs and promontories of ochre dust, so rich in three-dimensional structure that they resembled an exuberant impasto of oil colours; contours light-years thick laid on with a trowel. Red or pink stars burned through the dust like lanterns
  396. >Orphaned worlds were caught erupting from the towers, little sperm-like shapes trailing viscera of dust. Here and there I saw the tiny eyelike knots of birthing solar systems.
  397. >There were pulsars, flashing on and off like navigation beacons, their differing rhythms seeming to set a stately tempo for the entire scene, like a deathly slow waltz.
  398. >There seemed too much detail for one view, and overhwlming abundance of richness, and yet no matter which direction I looked, there was yet more to see, as if the dome sensed my attention and concentrated its efforts on the spot where my gaze was directed.
  399. >For a moment I felt a lurching sense of dizziness, and, though I tried to stop it before I made a fool for myself, I found myself grasping the side of the table, as if to prevent myself from falling into the infinite depths of the view.
  400. >"Yes, it has that effect on people"
  401. "I'ts beautiful"
  402. >"Do you mean bautiful, or terrifying?"
  403. "It's big"
  404. >"Of course, it's faked"
  405. >"The glass in the tome is smart, it exaggerates the brightness of the stars, so that the human eye registers the differences bewtween them. Otherwise the colours aren't unrealistics. Everything else you see is also pretty accurate, if you accept that certain frequencies have been shifted into the visible band, and the scale of certain structures has been adjusted"
  406. >She pointed out features for my edification
  407. >"That's the edge of the Taurus Dark cloud, with the Pleiades just poking out. That's a filament of the Local Bubble. You see that open cluster?"
  408. "Yes."
  409. >"That's the Hyades. Over there you've got Betelgeuse and Bellatrix"
  410. "I'm impressed"
  411. >"You should be. It cost a lot of money"
  412. >"Are you alright, Anon? you seem a bit distracted"
  413. >I sighed
  414. "I just got another prognosis from your friend Alma. That's enought to put a dent in anyone's day"
  415. >"I'm sorry about that"
  416. "There's something else, too. Something that's been bothering me since I came out of the tank"
  417. >A ponniquin came to take our order. I let Nasapone choose for me
  418. >"You can talk to me about it, whatever it is"
  419. "It isn't easy"
  420. >"Something personal, then? Is it about Luna?" She bit her tongue.
  421. >"No, sorry. I shouldn't have said that"
  422. "It's not about Luna. Not exactly, anyways"
  423. >But even as I said it, I knew that in a sense it was about Luna, anod how long it was going to be before we saw each other again
  424. >"Go on, Anon"
  425. "This is going to sound silly. But I wonder if everyone's being straight with me. It's not just Alma. It's you as well"
  426. "When I came out of that tank I felt the same way I felt when I'd been out to the Rift. Worse, if anything. I felt like I'd been in the tnak for a long, long time"
  427. >"It feels that way sometimes"
  428. "I know the difference, Nasapone. Trust me on this"
  429. >"So what are you saying?"
  430. >The problem was that I wasn't really sure. It was one thing to feel a vague sense of unease about how long I'd been in the tank. It was another to come out and accuse my host of lying. Especially when she had been so hospitable.
  431. "Is there any reason you'd lie to me?"
  432. >"Come off it, Anon. That kind of question is that?"
  433. >As soon as I said it, it sounded absurd and offensive to me as well. I wished i could reverse time and star again, ignoring my misgivings
  434. "I'm sorry. Stupid. Just put it down to messed-up biorythms, or something"
  435. >She reaches across the table and took my hand, as she had done at breakbast. This time continued to hold it.
  436. >"You really feel wrong, don't you?"
  437. "Alma's games aren't helping, that's for sure.
  438. >The waiter brought our wine, setting it down, the bottle levitating with some kind of technomagic. The mannequin poured two glasses and I sampled mine.
  439. "Maybe if I had someone else from my crew to bitch about it all with, I wouldn't feel so bad. I know you said we shouldn't wake Apogee and Pleiades, but that was before a one-day stopover turned into a week"
  440. >Nasapone shrugged
  441. >"If you want to wake them, no one's going to stop you. But don't think about ship business now. Let's not spoil a perfect wevening"
  442. >I looked up at the starscape. It was heightened, with the mad shimmering intensity of a Van Gogh nightscape. It made me feel drunk and ecstatic just to look at it
  443. "What could possibily spoil it?"
  444. --------------------------------------------------------
  445. >WHAT HAPPENED IS that i drank too much wine and ended up sleeping with Nasapone
  446. >I'm not sure how much of a part the wine played in it for her. If her relationship with Duska was in as much trouble as she'd made out, then obviously she had less to lose than I did.
  447. >Yes, that made it all right, didn't it? She the seductress, her own marriage a wreck, me the hapless victim. I'd lapsed, yes, but it wasn't really my fault. I'd been alones, far from home, emotionally fragile, and she had exploited me. She had softened me up with a romantic meal, her trap already sprung.
  448. >Except all that was just self-justifying bullshit, wasn't it? If my own marriage was in such great shape, why had I failed to mention Nasapone when I called home?
  449. >At the time, I'd justified that omission as an act of kindness towards my wife. Luna didn't know that Nasapone and I had ever been a couple. But why worry Luna by mentioning another mare, even if I pretended that we'd never met before?
  450. >Except, now, I could see that I'd failed to mention Nasapone for another reason entirely. Because in the back of my mind, even then, there had been the possibility that we might end up sleeping together.
  451. >I was already covering myself when I called Luna. Already making sure there wouldn't be any awkward questions when I got home. as if I not only knew what was going to happen but secretly yearned for it
  452. >The only problem was that Nasapone had something else in mind
  453. -----------------------------------------
  454. >"ANON" Nasapone said, nudging me towards wakefulness.
  455. >She was lying naked next to me, leaning on one knee, with the sheets crumpled down around her flanks.
  456. >The light in her room turned her into an abstraction of milky blue curves and deep violet shadows. With one hoof she traced a line down my chest
  457. >"There's something you need to know"
  458. "What?"
  459. >"I lied. Alma lied. We all lied"
  460. >I was too drowsy for her words to have much more than a vaguely troubling effect. All I could say, again, was: "What?"
  461. >"You're not in Nereid Station. You're not in Orion sector"
  462. >I started waking up properly
  463. "Say that again"
  464. >"The routing error was more severe than you were led to believe. It took you far beyond the Local Bubble"
  465. >I groped for anger, even resentment, but all I felt was a dizzying sentation of falling
  466. "How far out?"
  467. >"Further than you thought possible"
  468. >The next question was obvious
  469. "Beyond the Rift?"
  470. >"Yes" she said, with the faintest of smiles, as if humouring me in a game whose rules and objectives she found ultimately demeaning
  471. >"Beyond the Great Rift. A long, long way beyond it"
  472. "I need to know, Nasapone"
  473. >She pushed herself from the bed, reached for her suit
  474. >"Then get dressed, I'll show you"
  475. --------------------------------------------------------
  476. >I FOLLOWED NASAPONE in a daze
  477. >She took me to the dome again. It was dark, just as it had been the night before, with only the lamp-lit tables to act as beacons.
  478. >I supposed that the illumination throughout Nereid Station (or wherever this was) was at the whim of its occupants, and didn't necessarily have to follow any recognizable diurnal cycle.
  479. >Nonetheless it was still unsettling to find it changed so arbitrarily. Even if Nasapone had the authority to turn out the lights when she wanted to, didn't anyone else object?
  480. >But I didn't see anyone else to object. There was no one else around; only a glass ponniquin standing at attention with napkin over his torso.
  481. >She sat us at a table.
  482. >"Do you want a drink, Anon?"
  483. "No, thanks. For some reason I'm not quite in the mood"
  484. >She touched my wrist.
  485. >"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"
  486. >Sharply I withdrew my hand
  487. "Shouldn't I be de judge of that? So what is the truth exactly?"
  488. >"It's not good, Anon"
  489. "Tell me, then I'll decide"
  490. >I didn't see her do anything, but suddenly the dome was filled with stars again, just as it had been the night before
  491. >The view lurched, zooming outward. Stars flowed by from all sides, like white sleet.
  492. >Nebulae ghosted past in spectral wisps.
  493. >The sense of motion was so compelling that I found myself gripping the table, seized by vertigo.
  494. >“Easy, Anon," Nasapone whispered.
  495. >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.
  496. >Of course. It was obvious. We were beyond the Local Bubble.
  497. >And we were still receding. I watched the Bubble itself contract, becoming just one member of 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
  498. >I could still see clearings, but the individual trees had vanished into an amorphous mass
  499. >We kept pulling back. Then the expansion slowed and froze. I still could 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 dozen of surronding voids
  500. "Is that how far out we've come?
  501. >"Let me show you something"
  502. >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
  503. "Aperture connections"
  504. >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.
  505. >Nasapone nodded.
  506. >"Those are the main commerce routes, the well-mapped connections bewtween large colonies and major trading hubs. Now I'll add all mapped connections, including those that have been traversed by accident"
  507. >The scribble did not change dramatically. It gained a few wild loops and hairpins, including one that reached beyond the wall of the Bubble to touch sunwards end of the Great Rift. One or two other additions pierced the wall in different directions, but none of them reached as far as the Rift
  508. "Where are we?"
  509. >"We're at one end of those connections. You can't see it because it's pointing directly towards you"
  510. >She smiled slightly
  511. >"I needed to establish the scale that we're dealing with. How wide is the Local Bubble? Anon? Four hundred light-years, give or take?"
  512. "About right"
  513. >"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?"
  514. "Give or take"
  515. >"So a journey from one side of the Bubble might that, what, half a year? say five or six months? A year to the Great Rift?"
  516. "You know that already, Nasapone. We both know it"
  517. >"Alright. Then consider this"
  518. >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
  519. >Hundreds of billions of stars, packed together into foaming white lanes of sea spume.
  520. >"This is the view. Enhanced of course, brightened and filtered for us mortals consumption, but if you had eyes with near perfect quantum efficiency, and if they happened to be about a metre wide, this is more or less what you'd see if you stepped outside the station"
  521. "I don't believe you"
  522. >I didn't WANT to believe her
  523. >"Get used to it, Anon. 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"
  524. "No..."
  525. >My voice little more than a moan of abject, childlike denial
  526. >"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 has passed back home, is a lot clearer."
  527. >"It took the Harmonia on hundred and fifty years to reach us. Even if you turned back now, you'd have been away for three hundred years, Anon"
  528. "Luna..."
  529. ---------------------------------------------------------------
  530. >HOW DO YOU adjust to something like that?
  531. >The answer is that you can't count on adjusting to it at all. Not everyone does.
  532. >Nasapone 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
  533. >She had seen ponies 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 of bereavement or many number of personal setbacks.
  534. >She had seen others walk away and kill themselves half an hour later.
  535. >But the majority, she said, did eventually come to some kind of accommodation with the truth, however faltering and painful the process.
  536. >"Trust me, Anon. I know you now. I know you have the emotional strenght to get through this. I know you can learn to live with it"
  537. "Why you didn't tell me straight away, as soon as I came out of the tank?"
  538. >"Because I didn't know if you were going to be able to take it"
  539. "You waited until after you knew I had a wife"
  540. >"No. I waited until after we'd make love. Because then I knew Luna couldn't mean that much to you"
  541. "Fuck you."
  542. >"Fuck me? Yes, you did. That's the point"
  543. >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.
  544. >I waited for the anger to subside
  545. "You say we're not the first?"
  546. >"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"
  547. "And after that?"
  548. >"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 the Harmonia. We hauled her in, warmed her crew, broke the news to them"
  549. "How'd they take it?"
  550. >"About as well as you'd expect. A couple of them went mad. Another killed herself. But at least a dozen of them are still here"
  551. >"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."
  552. >"That wasn't the last ship, either. We've gone through the same process with eight or nine others, since then"
  553. >Nasapone looked at me, her head cocked against her hoof
  554. >"There's a thought for you, Anon"
  555. "There is?"
  556. >"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 somone else to care about. It can smooth the transition"
  557. "Like who?"
  558. >"Like one of your other crew members. You could try waking one of them, now"
  559. -------------------------------------------------------------------
  560. >NASAPONES'S WITH me when I pull Apogee out of the surge tank
  561. >"Why her?"
  562. "Because I want her out first"
  563. >I say this wondering if Nasapone is jealous. I don't blame her tho: Apogee's beautiful, but she's also smart. There isn't a better syntax runner in Equestria Industrial.
  564. >"What happened?" Apogee asks, when she's over the grogginess.
  565. >"Did we make it back?"
  566. >I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembers.
  567. >"Customs" she says
  568. >"Those pricks on Atlas"´
  569. "And after that? anything else? The runes? Do you remember casting them?"
  570. >"No..."
  571. >She then picks up something in my voice. The fact that i might not be telling the whole truth, or telling her all she needs to know
  572. >"Anon. I'll ask you again. Did we make it back?"
  573. >A minute later we're putting Apogee back into the Tank
  574. >It hasn't worked first time. Maybe next try.
  575. ------------------------------------------------------------------
  576. >BUT IT KEPT not working with Apogee. She was always cleverer and quicker than me; she always had been.
  577. >As soon as she came out of the tank, She knew that we'd come a lot further than Orion sector. She was always ahead of my lies and excuses.
  578. "It was different when it happened to me"
  579. >I told Nasapone, when we were lying next to each other again, days later, with Apogee still in the tank
  580. "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"
  581. >Nasapone nodded. Her mane fell across her face in dishevelled, sleep-matted curtains. She had a strand of it between her lips
  582. >"It helped, seeing a friendly face?"
  583. "Took my mind off the problem, that's for sure"
  584. >"You'll get there in the end. Anyway, from Apogee's point of view, aren't you a friendly face as well?"
  585. "Maybe. But she'd been expecting me. You were the last person in the world I expected to see standing there"
  586. >Nasapone touched her hoof against the side of my face. Her smooth coat slid against stubble.
  587. >"It's getting easier for you, isn't it?"
  588. "I don't know
  589. >"You're a strong man, Anon. I knew you'd come through this."
  590. "I haven't come through it yet"
  591. >I felt like a tightrope walker halfway across Neighagra Falls. It was a miracle I'd made it as far as I had.
  592. >But that didn't meant I was home and dry.
  593. >Still, Nasapone was right. There was hope. I'd felt no crushing spasms of grief over Luna. All I felt was a bittersweet regret, the way one might feel about a broken heirloom or long-lost pet.
  594. >I felt no animosity towards Luna, and I was sorry that I would never see her again. Or at least what she was. 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.
  595. >I didn't think so.
  596. >In the meantime, I continued trying to find a way to deal with Apogee. 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 that seemed cruel and unsatisfactory.
  597. >Nasapone had broken it to me gently, giving me time to settle into my new surroundings and take that necessary step away from Luna. 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.
  598. >Sleeping with Nasapone obviously helped. I couldn't offer Apogee the same solace, but I was sure that there was a way for us to coax Apogee to the same state of near-acceptance.
  599. >Time after time we woke her and tried a different approach. Nasapone 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 crosses the hippocampus into long-term recall.
  600. >Within that window, we could wake her up as many times as we liked, trying endless permutations of the revival scenario.
  601. >At least that was Nasapone told me
  602. "We can't keep doing this indefinitely"
  603. >"Why not?"
  604. "Isn't she going to remember something?"
  605. >"Maybe. But I doubt that she'll attach any significance to those memories. Haven't you ever had vague feeling of déjà vu coming out of the surge tank?"
  606. "Sometimes"
  607. >"Then don't sweat about it. She'll be all right. I promise you"
  608. "Perhaps we should just keep her awake, after all"
  609. >"That would be cruel"
  610. "It's cruel to keep waking her up and shutting her down, like a toy doll"
  611. >There was a catch in her voice when she answered me.
  612. >"Keep at it, Anon. I'm sure you're close to finding a way, in the end. I'ts helping you, focusing on Apogee. I always knew it would"
  613. >I started to say something, but Nasapone pressed here hoof to my lips
  614. -------------------------------------------------------------
  615. >NASAPONE WAS RIGHT about Apogee. The challenge helped me, taking my mind off my own predicament. I remembered what Nasapone had said about dealing with other crews in the same situation, before the Harmonia put in.
  616. >Clearly she had learned many psychological tricks: gambits and short cuts to assist the transition to mental well-being.
  617. >I felt a slight resentment at being manipulated so effectively. But at the same time I couldn't deny that worrying about someone else had helped me with my own adjustment.
  618. >When, days later, I stepped back from the immediate problem of Apogee, 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.
  619. >Not just Nasapone, but all the other unlucky souls who had ended up at the station.
  620. >If anything, there appeared to be more of them than when I had first arrived.
  621. >The corriedors, sparsely populated at first, were increasingly busy, and when we ate under the dome, under the Milky Way, we were not the only diners.
  622. >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, who they had left behind, how they had adjusted to life here.
  623. >There was time enough to get to know them all. And the place would never become voring, for at any time, as Nasapone had intimate, we could always expect another lost shop to drop through the aperture
  624. >Tragedy for the crew, but fresh challenges, fresh faces, fresh news from home, for us.
  625. >All in all, it wasn't really so bad.
  626. >Then it clicked
  627. >It was the pony cleaning out the fish that did it, in the lobby of the hotel.
  628. >It wasn't just the familiarity of the process, but the pony himself.
  629. >I'd seen him before. Another pond full of diseased carp. Another hotel.
  630. >Then I remembered Alma's bad teeth, and recalled how they'd reminded me of another pony I'd met long before.
  631. >Except it wasn't another pony at all. Different name, different context, but everything else the same.
  632. >And then 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.
  633. >Which left Nasapone.
  634. "Nothing here is real, is it?"
  635. >She looked at me with infinite sadness and shook her head
  636. "What about Apogee?"
  637. >"Apogee's dead. Pleiades is dead. They died in their surge tanks"
  638. "How? Why them, and not me?"
  639. >"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"
  640. >I think some part of me always suspected. It felt less like a shock than brutal disappointment
  641. "But Apogee seemed so real. 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"
  642. >The glass ponniquin approached our table. Nasapone waved him away
  643. >"I made her convincing, the way she would have acted"
  644. "You made her?"
  645. >"You're not really awake, Anon. You're being fed data. This entire station is being simulated"
  646. >I sipped my wine. I expected it to taste suddenly thin and synthetic, but it still tasted like pretty good wine
  647. "Then I'm dead as well?"
  648. >"No. You're still alive. Still in your surge tank. But I haven't brought you to full consciousness yet"
  649. "All right. The truth this time. I can take it. How much is real? Does the station exist? Are we really far out as you said?"
  650. >"Yes. 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"
  651. "Can you show me the station as it is?"
  652. >"I could. But I don't thin you're ready for ti. I think you'd find it difficult to adjust"
  653. >I couldn't help laughing
  654. "Even after what I've already adjusted to?"
  655. >"You've only made half the journey, Anon"
  656. "But you made it"
  657. >"I did, Anon. But for me it was different". Nasapone smilled "For me, everything was different"
  658. >Then she made the light show change again. None of the other diners appeared to notice as we began to zoom in towards the Milky way, crashing towards the spira, ramming through shoals of outlying starts and gas clouds.
  659. >The familiar landscape of the Local Bubble loomed large.
  660. >The image froze, the Bubble one amongst many such structures.
  661. >Again it filled with violent red scribble of the aperture network. But now the network wasn't the only one. It was merely one ball of red yarn amongst 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.
  662. >They were like the shapes of continents on a world with tectonic drift.
  663. >"It used to span the galaxy. Then something happened. Something catastrophic, which I still don't understand. A shattering, into vastly smaller domains. Typically a few hundred light-years across"
  664. "Who made it?"
  665. >"I don't know. No one knows. They probably aren't around any more. Maybe that was why it shattered, out of neglect"
  666. "But we found it. The part of it near us still worked"
  667. >"All the disconnected elements still function. You can't cross from domain to domain, but otherwise the apertures work as they were designed to. Barring, of course, the occasional routing error"
  668. "All right. If you can't cross from domain to domain, how did the Harmonia get this far out? We've come a lot further than a few hundred light-years"
  669. >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 Cloud were more resilient. When the domans shattered from each other, the connections reaching beyond the galaxy remained intact"
  670. "In which case you can cross from domain to domain. But you have to come all the way out here first"
  671. >"The trouble is, not many want to continue the journey at this point. No one comes here deliberately, Anon"
  672. "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 form 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"
  673. >Nasapone's smile was coquettish, knowing
  674. >"What makes you so certain?"
  675. "Because if there were, wouldn't there be alien ships popping out of the aperture here? You've told me the Harmonia 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?"
  676. >Again that smile. But this time it chilled my blood
  677. >"What makes you think they haven't, Anon?"
  678. >I reached out and took her hoof, the way she had taken my hand. I took it without force, without malice, but with the assurance that this time I really, sincerely meant what I was about to say
  679. "Show me. I wan't to see things as they really are. Not just the station. You as well"
  680. >Because by then I'd realized. Greta hadn't just lied to me about Apogee and Pleiades. She'd lied to me about the Harmonie as well. Because we were not the latest ponykind ship to come through
  681. >We were the first
  682. >"You want to see it?"
  683. "Yes. All of it"
  684. >"You won't like it"
  685. >"I'll be the judge of that"
  686. >"All right, Anon. 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 hapenned to you. You'll shrivel away from it. You'll go mad, unless I substitute a calming fiction, a happy ending"
  687. "Why tell me that now?"
  688. >"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"
  689. "Do it"
  690. >Nasapone shrugged. She poured herself another measure of wine, then made sure my own glass was charged"
  691. >"You asked for it"
  692. >We were still holding hands, two lovers sharing an intimacy. Then everything changed.
  693.  
  694. >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 bewtween 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.
  695. >Some moved via propulsive waves of multiple clawed limbs. Some wriggled, smooth plaques of caparace grinding against the glassy rock of the tunnels.
  696. >The things moved between caves in which lay the hulks of ships, almost all too strange to describe.
  697. >And somewhere distant, somewhere near the heart of the rock, in a matriarchal chamber all of its own, something drummed out messages to its companions and helpers, stiffly articulated, antler-like forelimbs beating against stretched tympana of finely veined skin, something that had been waiting here for eternities, something that wanted nothing more than to care for the souls of the lost.
  698. -----------------------------------------------------------------
  699. >LUNA'S WITH APOGEE when they pull me out of the surge tank.
  700. >It's bad, one of the worst revivals I've ever gone through. I feel as if every vein in my body has been filled with finely powdered glass. For a moment, a long moment, even the idea of breathing seems insurmountably difficult, too hard, too painful even to contemplate.
  701. >But it passes, as it always passes
  702. >After a while I can not only breathe, I can move and talk
  703. "Where-"
  704. >"Easy, Skip." Apogee says.
  705. >She leans over the tank and starts unplugging me. I can't help but smile. Apogee's smart, there isn't a better syntax runner in Equestria Industrial, but she's also beautiful. It's like being nursed by an angel
  706. >I wonder if Luna's jealous
  707. "Where are we? Feels like I was in that thing for an eternity. Did something go wrong?"
  708. >"Minor routing error. We took some damage and they decided to wake me first. But don't sweat about it. At least we're in one piece"
  709. >Routing errors. You hear about them, but you hope they're never going to happen to you
  710. "What kind of delay?"
  711. >"Forty days. Sorry, Anon. Bang goes our bonus"
  712. >In anger, I hammer the side of the surge tank. But Luna steps towards me and places a calming hoof over my shoulder
  713. >"It's all right. You're home and dry. That's all that matters"
  714. >I look at her and for a moment remember someone else, someone I haven't thought about in years. I almost remember her name, and then the moment passes.
  715. "Yeah. Home and dry."

A message to all horsefuckers

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