beyond the aquila rift the best of alastair reynolds

We missed our first take-off slot when customs found a discrepancy in our cargo waybill. That was about where it all started to go wrong. 'You're a kind man, Thorn.' Then she kisses me. I didn't want to tell her the truth right out.' 'I know,' Greta says.

'No one ever said this was going to be easy.' 'I was just trying to ease her into it gently. 'The conversation never left her short term memory.' 'I don't know if I can go through with this,' I say. 'She won't remember anything,' Greta says. We put her back into the surge tank, plumb her back in and close the lid. Greta pulls something from her pocket and touches Suzy on the forearm. I start shaking, and realize I can't go through with this. 'That's the way it feels sometimes.' 'Then nothing went wrong?' 'Nothing at all.' Suzy looks at Greta. 'Funny how I feel like I've been in that thing for months.' I shrug. 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. It was against regs: something about the paint clogging intake filters. 'We made it back.' Suzy looks back at the starscape, airbrushed across her surge tank in luminous violet and yellow paint. The fact that I might not be telling the truth, or telling her all she needs to know. '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. 'Did we make it back?' I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembered. 'What happened? ' Suzy asks, when she's over the groggi-ness. There isn't a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial. I don't blame her: Suzy's beautiful, but she's also smart. 'Because I want her out first,' I say, wondering if Greta's jealous. Greta's with me when I pull Suzy out of the surge tank. 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. 'Beyond the Aquila Rift' was published in Constellations. His first short story collection, Galactic North, collecting pieces in the RS universe, is out in 2006. His last two novels are Century Rain and Pushing Ice. He is growing fast as an SF writer in this decade. His first novel, Revelation Space, was published in 1999. 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. Beyond the Aquila Rift ALASTASR REYNOLDS From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006) Alastair Reynolds (lives in Noordwijk, Holland, and worked for ten years for the European Space Agency before becoming a full-time writer in 2004.

Beyond the aquila rift the best of alastair reynolds