Free Zima Blue and Other Stories by Alastair Reynolds Page B

out of kindness. I couldn't break the truth to you in one go.'

    Sharply I withdrew my hand. 'Shouldn't I be the judge of that? So what is the truth, exactly?'

    'It's not good, Thom.'

    'Tell me, then I'll decide.'

    I didn't see her do anything, but suddenly the dome was filled with stars again, just as it had been the night before.

    The view lurched, zooming outwards. Stars flowed by from all sides, like white sleet. Nebulae ghosted past in spectral wisps. The sense of motion was so compelling that I found myself gripping the table, seized by vertigo.

    'Easy, Thom,' Greta whispered.

    The view lurched, swerved, contracted. A solid wall of gas slammed past. Now, suddenly, I had the sense that we were outside something - that we had punched beyond some containing sphere, defined only in vague arcs and knots of curdled gas, where the interstellar gas density increased sharply.

    Of course. It was obvious. We were beyond the Local Bubble.

    And we were still receding. I watched the Bubble itself contract, becoming just one member in the larger froth of voids. Instead of individual stars, I saw only smudges and motes, aggregations of hundreds of thousands of suns. It was like pulling back from a close-up view of a forest. I could still see clearings, but the individual trees had vanished into an amorphous mass.

    We kept pulling back. Then the expansion slowed and froze. I could still make out the Local Bubble, but only because I had been concentrating on it all the way out. Otherwise, there was nothing to distinguish it from the dozens of surrounding voids.

    'Is that how far out we've come?' I asked.

    Greta shook her head. 'Let me show you something.'

    Again, she did nothing that I was aware of. But the Bubble I had been looking at was suddenly filled with a skein of red lines, like a child's scribble.

    'Aperture connections,' I said.

    As shocked as I was by the fact that she had lied to me - and as fearful as I was about what the truth might hold - I couldn't turn off the professional part of me, the part that took pride in recognising such things.

    Greta nodded. 'Those are the main commerce routes, the well-mapped connections between large colonies and major trading hubs. Now I'll add all mapped connections, including those that have only ever been traversed by accident.'

    The scribble did not change dramatically. It gained a few more wild loops and hairpins, including one that reached beyond the wall of the Bubble to touch the sunward end of the Aquila Rift. One or two other additions pierced the wall in different directions, but none of them reached as far as the Rift.

    'Where are we?'

    'We're at one end of one of those connections. You can't see it because it's pointing directly towards you.' She smiled slightly. 'I needed to establish the scale that we're dealing with. How wide is the Local Bubble, Thom? Four hundred light-years, give or take?'

    My patience was wearing thin. But I was still curious.

    'About right.'

    'And while I know that aperture travel times vary from point to point, with factors depending on network topology and syntax optimisation, isn't it the case that the average speed is about one thousand times faster than light?'

    'Give or take.'

    'So a journey from one side of the Bubble might take - what, half a year? Say five or six months? A year to the Aquila Rift?'

    'You know that already, Greta. We both know it.'

    'All right. Then consider this.' And the view contracted again, the Bubble dwindling, a succession of overlaying structures concealing it, darkness coming into view on either side, and then the familiar spiral swirl of the Milky Way Galaxy looming large.

    Hundreds of billions of stars, packed together into foaming white lanes of sea spume.

    'This is the view,' Greta said. 'Enhanced of course, brightened and filtered for human consumption - but if you had eyes with near-perfect quantum efficiency, and if they happened to be about a metre wide, this is more or less what you'd