And stepped into the past. I've been here, thought Sarah Tyrell. The smell of ocean water, the salt of invisible tears, drifted through the canned atmosphere. A snake of water, a leak curling underneath one of the rubber-flanged seals, threaded down the corridor extending in front of her. The metal door closed behind her with a sigh, its security mechanisms sealing her with the interstellar ship's world. A world she didn't recognize from memory but from dreams. Long, slow, empty dreams, from which she had always awakened trembling, gazing up at the nightbound ceilings, blue light of moon and stars like ice upon the skin of a frightened child. There were no stars here. No skies but the rust-streaked silver metal above, that could almost be touched by her fingertips if she reached as high as she could. If there was any memory of that, it would be as a child's remembering. It must've looked like a real sky to me-as far away as any of the Earth on which her parents had been born, cloudless and unmarked by time and the enveloping ocean's decay.
