Alastair Reynolds - Century Rain

So it wasn’t immortality. But from where he was standing, it was a lot better than nothing.

He took his hand out of his pocket, leaving the vial where it was. “You have to go now, Auger.”

“What if I said I was staying?”

He smiled. She was putting on a brave face, but deep down he knew she had made her mind up. He just needed to make her feel better about it.

“You have a life back home.”

“This can be my home.”

“You know it can’t. Not now; not ever. It’s a nice dream, Auger. It was a nice vacation. But that’s all it was.”

She pulled him closer and kissed him. Floyd kissed her back, not letting her pull away, embracing her there in the fog as if by force of will he could hold back time, as if time itself might make a compassionate exception in their case.

Then, gently, he pulled away from her. She was crying. He wiped her tears away with his sleeve. “Don’t cry.”

“I love you, Floyd.”

“I love you too, Auger. But that doesn’t change anything.”

“I can’t just leave you like this.”

“You have no choice.”

She looked back at the waiting ship. He knew what she was thinking—how every second now counted against her escaping from the ALS. “You’re a good man, Floyd. I will see you again. I promise you that. We’ll find another way in, another way back to Paris.”

“Maybe there is no other way.”

“But I won’t stop looking for one. Not just for you, but for the other agents stuck here—the people you and I have never even met. They’re still out there, Floyd: still somewhere in the world, in America or Africa, unaware that there is no way home. Maybe some of them got enough of a warning to start their journeys back to Paris… but they won’t have got here yet. Some of them won’t arrive for weeks or months. When they do, they’ll make their way to Cardinal Lemoine, or Susan’s apartment… anywhere they think they might find an answer. They’ll be confused and scared, Floyd. They’ll need a friend, someone who can tell them what happened. They’ll need someone who cares, someone who can give them hope. Someone who’ll tell them we’re coming back, no matter how difficult it is, no matter how long it takes.” She pulled him closer, but it was just a hug this time. It was past the time for kisses.

“You should go,” he said at last.

“I know.” She let go of him and took one step on to the ramp. “I meant what I said, about not regretting a minute of this.”

“Not even the dirt, and the bruises, and the part where you got shot?”

“Not a damned minute.”

Floyd lifted a finger to his brow, in salute. “Good. That’s exactly how I feel. Now please—would you get the hell off my planet?”

She nodded, saying nothing more, and walked back up the ramp, keeping her face turned to him. Floyd took a step back, his eyes welling with tears now, not wanting her to see them. Not because of some stupid male pride in not crying, but because he didn’t want to make this any harder on the two of them than it already was.

“Floyd?”

“Yes?”

“I want you to remember me. Whenever you walk these streets… know that I’ll also be walking them. It may not be the same Paris, but—”

“It’s still Paris.”

“And we’ll always have it,” Auger said.

She stepped into the ship. He saw her face disappear, then her body, then her legs.

Then the ramp lifted up.

Floyd stepped back. The ship growled, spat fire and then slowly clawed its way back into the sky.

He stood there for many minutes, like a man who had lost his way in the fog. It was only when he heard a distant rumble of thunder that he turned around and began to make his way back to the city he knew; the city he felt some tenuous claim on.

Somewhere far above him, Auger was on her way home.

Tunguska had cleared a large area of wall and assigned it to display a visual feed—suitably doctored to bring out detail and colour—of the closing wound in the ALS. They were through it now and back into empty space, but the last hour of the escape had still been as anxious as any Auger could remember. The wound’s rate of closure had surged and decelerated with savage unpredictability, mocking any attempts to predict its future progress.

“Things might actually have been worse than I feared,” Tunguska said, his voice as slow and unperturbed as ever. “It might not just have been a question of our being trapped inside the sealed shell of the ALS. We don’t know what will happen when that wound closes itself.”

“I don’t follow,” Auger said. With Cassandra’s guidance, she had fashioned a stool for herself, next to Tunguska’s. “We’d have been trapped inside. That would have been bad, but it’s not the worst thing I could imagine happening. There’d have been people on the outside who knew we were there, trying to find a way to rescue us…”

They were free now and it was easy to talk of such things lightly, no matter how terrifying they had seemed at the time.

“There’s more to it than that,” Tunguska said gently. “The ALS is entering a new state we haven’t seen before, or at least one we haven’t witnessed directly.”

“Again,” she said, “I don’t—”

“For the last twenty-three years there’s been a connection between the interior matter of the ALS and the flow of time in the outside universe. I’m talking about the hyperweb link, of course. We know that it was activated—or brought to full functionality after a period of dormancy—during the Phobos occupation. Until then, Floyd’s world had been frozen at the instant of the quantum snapshot. Presumably, it was the establishment of the link that caused time to flow forwards at the normal rate. Twenty-three years in our world, twenty-three years in Floyd’s.”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “That much I get.”

“But now there is no hyperweb link. It hasn’t just been put into a state of dormancy, as was the case after the Phobos reoccupation until the rediscovery of the portal two years ago. It’s been completely destroyed. There is no longer any detectable portal machinery in Mars orbit.”

“But we’ve been inside the ALS since then,” Auger said. “We saw E2. We saw that it wasn’t frozen in time.”

Tunguska looked at her with infinite kindness and compassion in his heavily lidded eyes. “But that was before the closing of the wound,” he said gently. “Now we have no idea what will happen to E2. Events may continue to roll forward at the normal rate… or the matter inside the ALS may undergo a phase transition back to its frozen state, as it was for more than three hundred years.”

“No,” she said. “That can’t happen, because…” But even as she was speaking, she found herself unable to frame any plausible objection. Tunguska might be right, or Tunguska might be wrong. They simply didn’t know enough about the ALS or its functioning to work it out.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I felt I needed to mention the possibility, no matter how remote.”

“But if that’s the case,” she said, “then I’ve condemned—”

He placed his huge hand on hers. “You’ve condemned no one to anything. Even if the world freezes again, nothing inside it will have been lost. Three billion lives will just stall between one heartbeat and the next, as they did at the moment of the snapshot. They’ll feel nothing. It will be kinder than sleep. And perhaps one day something will happen that will enable that next heartbeat. The world will wake again. We can only hope that when that happens, wiser minds than ours will intervene from outside to assist the world towards its destiny.” He patted her hand. “But perhaps it won’t happen like that anyway. Perhaps the world won’t freeze. Perhaps, once awakened, it will always flow forward.”