"Stake me a claim! Right now! I don't want to risk a single second. If that thing is as big as you say it is, we've got it made!" She wouldn't have to sell the pendant— quite the contrary, she could buy a box full of fossils. Speaking of which, where was it? Rue dove across the room and retrieved the siltstone from where it had drifted against an air grate.
"Preparing the claim form, Rue… claim sent."
"That's it? That's all you have to do?" The ship said yes and Rue proceeded to turn somersaults through the galley, screaming her relief. When she finally settled down, she fell to waiting nervously for the reply from the Claims Bureau. By the time it came— seven hours later— she was frazzled with nervous exhaustion. But the message was clear:
New object verified. Designation number 2349#MRRC, staked by Meadow-Rue Rosebud Cassels July 23, 2445.
She had escaped. She was going to see civilized society for the first time in her life. And she was rich.
2
THE MATRONLY WOMAN in the inscape window smiled broadly. "Meadow-Rue, you don't know me, but I'm your mom's sister— your aunt Leda!"
"Yeah, right," muttered Rue. She could see the family resemblance— but Mom had never mentioned a sister. "We heard that you're coming to visit Erythrion," continued the matron, "and of course you're family, so you can stay with us! We don't have anything special in the way of houses, just a little place in Treya. Here's my number. Call me right away and we'll arrange things. Oh, you're going to have such a good time here! I can't wait to meet you after all these years."
Rue had been cynically examining the woman, noting her brow tattoos and the jewelry studded around the lobe of her ear— symbols of wealth, surely, but she could still be a scam artist. But when she heard the name Treya Rue's mind went blank. The name was almost mythical. It was the most amazing place in all Erythrion, or so she had heard. And here this woman— her aunt? — said as casually as anything that she lived there. And that Rue was invited!
If this woman was really a long-lost relative, Rue might finally find a real home— one where she was loved and accepted. She doubted that. On the other hand, if this woman wanted to scam her, Rue was confident she could take her on. She hadn't gotten an education from roughnecks for nothing.
Either way, her opening gambit was the same. As soon as the message ended Rue was composing a reply. Surely Mom must have had a good reason for not talking about sisters if they existed, she mused, even as she was saying, "Of course I'd love to come stay with you, auntie! I didn't even know I had relatives in Treya. Tell me all about the family. And where do you live? Is it a city? What's a house? Does Treya really have a sun, like they say? Can you look at it or is it too bright? Heh, listen to me. Hey, how did you hear I was coming?" She didn't have to fake the enthusiasm; it would be so wonderful if Leda turned out to be for real. And as she asked how they'd heard about her, Rue's heart flipped when she pictured Jentry calling long-lost relatives, spreading poisonous slander about her.
There was still a significant time-lag on messages to Erythrion, so while she waited Rue brooded over the other piece of news she had received this week. A museum at Treya had finally replied to her query about fossils. It was a fake. Apparently somebody had shipped in a cycler cargo of the things thirty years ago, along with gems and carved wood, all purported to be from Earth. The fellow who had ridden down the beam with the cargo had sold it all for a fabulous sum and left on the next cycler, rich. It wasn't until years later that it was revealed the fossils were fake and the stones came from an Earthlike but fallow minor world in High Space. To this day, despite the publicity, not everyone knew that what they owned was worthless.
The news had hit Rue hard— she had risked her whole future to recapture the thing, after all. She had cried and stuffed the pendant deep into her kit bag so she wouldn't have to see it anymore. She almost threw it out the airlock, but even if it wasn't real, it was still her last link to Grandma. It just hurt to think that Grandma could and had been deceived. Rue felt more vulnerable for knowing that.
This aunt, if she really was one, could be the real link Rue longed for. But she couldn't allow herself to believe it.
Aunt Leda's reply, when it came, was straightforward: "Of course we know you're coming, dear! Everyone in Erythrion knows about your claim. They're doing a parallax on it now and they've verified that it's there, but it's so far out and so faint they're having trouble resolving it. But if it's as big as the readings say, you're going to be rich! And when that happens all manner of bad people are going to be sticking their oars in" (a term that made no sense to Rue) "trying to wingle the wealth out of you. So we thought, you need allies. We don't care what you do with the money, dear, we just want to make sure you keep it!"
And: "Your Mom and I had a terrible fight when we were young, dear. It's sad that she never mentioned me in all those years. I don't know what to think. But it was certainly my fault, you know and I don't blame her. I've regretted the things we said every day ever since— but I never got a chance to tell her so! And now she's passed on. All I can say is that I'm terribly, terribly sorry and sad that we never got a chance to make up. But clearly, any fights we might have had were between us. You're my niece, Rue! How could I turn you away for something that happened between your Mom and me years ago?"
At this point Rue's cynical inner voice said, Then why didn't Grandma mention you either? She wanted to ignore that voice, but decided, to be at least partially sensible, that she wouldn't say a word about Grandma until Leda had talked about her— just to see what she would say.
Caution aside, the idea that she had family waiting for her was a great comfort to Rue as the days of her journey passed. Feeling more settled and confident now, she caught up on local news and played some of the latest books from the halo world. She consulted the fashion newsgroups and tried to get the ship's assemblers to reshape her clothes so they looked a little less provincial. She even tried out the Erythrion accent, with some success.
Occasionally she called up an inscape view of the outside. Erythrion itself was visible now, a gigantic red eye in the night. The halo world was a brown dwarf, sixty Jupiters in mass, too small to be a sun and too big to be a planet. Like countless billions of others it moved through the galaxy alone in the spaces between the lit stars. So small and invisible were the halo worlds that they hadn't even been known to exist until the end of the twentieth century. But to Rue, Erythrion was huge and magnificent and all the civilization she hoped to ever see.
There were three major nations at Erythrion, one of them in the oceans under the ice surface of the Europan planet Divinus, one visible as scattered sparkles of light— orbital habitats scattered throughout the system— and one on Treya. As Rue's ship made its final approach through Erythrion's radiation fields, she swung the prospecting scope around to look for Divinus and Treya. Erythrion's dull red glow wasn't enough to make them shine; she spotted Divinus after long searching when it eclipsed a star. That absence was a planet. Treya, though— she could actually see it, a diffuse oval of light, like a fuzzy star. She stared at it until her eyes were sore.
Closer to hand, brilliant filaments of light illuminated dozens of O'Neill cylinders. Each cylinder was twenty or more kilometers long, home to nearly a million people. They utterly dwarfed the tiny station where she was born and raised and she gaped at them as they slid silently by.
Even the colonies were dwarfed by their surroundings. They swarmed like insects around incandescent filaments hundreds of kilometers in length. Each filament was a fullerene cable that harvested electricity from Erythrion's magnetic field. They were kept in orbit by vast infrared sails, visible only as a shimmer of reflected stars. The power running through the cables made them glow in exactly the same way that tungsten had glowed in light bulbs for billions of people on twentieth-century Earth. These cables were vastly bigger, of course; the colonies concentrated the light to provide «daylight» for whole populations with the waste product of electricity production.
; The glowing cables had been built to provide power for launching starship cargoes. To see them serving merely as lamps was somehow saddening.
Erythrion flared one morning; Rue watched in wonder as the whole planetary system blossomed with light. While there was no nuclear fire powering the dwarf's internal heat, its prodigious magnetic fields occasionally kinked together and created vast arches of brilliant fire that overwhelmed its normal dull glow. The flare was just over the dwarf's horizon, so for a few hours Erythrion became a crescent of royal purple and mauve, from which sprang an incandescent filament of white. Now Rue had no trouble finding Divinus, bathed as it was in this temporary radiance.
She really wished there were somebody on board with her to share these sights with. Time and again she would go, "Oh!" and want to say, "Look at that!" to someone next to her. She even caught herself longing to know what Jentry would make of things.
She and Aunt Leda spoke regularly now that the time-lag from distance had reduced to nearly nothing. Leda told Rue about the «house» and sent photos when Rue had a hard time understanding her. It was the sort of structure she'd seen in books and movies about Earth— ancient, simple, and perfect. Leda continued to assure Rue that the family didn't need her money, they were just happy to see her. Rue wanted to believe her and despite herself, she found that her hopes were growing by the hour. When she went to bed she imagined living in a house, with dozens of people, all her relatives, breathing the night air in neighboring rooms. A family.
Leda was not the only one calling, though. She had received mail from all over Erythrion, from government bureaus and lawyers, tour guides and investment counselors. Now that she was on final approach to Treya the news hounds started phoning, too. She had nothing to say to any of them, so she eventually told the ship to screen all calls except those from Leda. The only indication of the incoming stream of messages became a flashing counter in the corner of the inscape window.
All those messages did point out a central problem, though: If she couldn't trust Leda, who else could she trust here? The thought made her laugh. Oh, the problems of the rich!
After several days' travel through the system she finally reached the orbit of Treya, the greatest and most troubled nation of Erythrion. There had been a coup recently, she knew; the place was in the hands of isolationists and had she not had family waiting, Rue might not have been able to even land.
Rue didn't care about the coup; she could hardly contain her excitement and spent the entire morning on the scope staring at the place. Treya was about Earth-sized and had an atmosphere, oceans, and tectonic plates like Earth. There the similarity ended, because Treya had never known the light of a real sun. It orbited just outside the Roche limit of Erythrion, and kept one face turned toward Erythrion at all times, just as Luna did for Earth. Enough infrared leaked out of Erythrion to heat the surface of Treya to livable temperature, and tidal and induction heating kept it volcanically active. But without a sun, life had never developed here— or rather it had developed and died out a number of times. When humans came to the Erythrion system Treya was in a lifeless phase, its dark oceans lit only by the constant surging aurora from Erythrion's radiation belt, and by an occasional flare.
As she orbited it now Rue could see a faint filigree, red-black on black, that might be a coastline. Smudged clouds overlaid it. Every now and then long bands of iridescent color flowed past, but the aurora wasn't strong enough to show the planet's surface. Dark though it was, Treya was the most hospitable world Rue ever expected to visit. After all, it had an oxygen atmosphere, though that was artificial, not the product of life as on Earth.
The atmosphere was the least of Treya's wonders, as far as Rue was concerned. She held her breath as a glow appeared on the horizon. Any minute now Treya's new sun would rise.
As she was waiting, Leda called. "You're due to dock in three hours, Rue! We'll all be there— the whole clan. We've got your landing ETA from the flight controllers, so don't you worry about a thing. Oh, I'm so looking forward to seeing you!"
A pinprick of light appeared on the limb of Treya and quickly grew into a brilliant white star. This seemed to move out and away from Treya, which was an illusion caused by Rue's own motion. Treya's artificial sun did not move, but stayed at the Lagrange point, bathing an area of the planet eighty kilometers in diameter with daylight. The sun was a sphere of tungsten a kilometer across. It glowed with incandescence from concentrated infrared light, harvested from Erythrion by hundreds of orbiting mirrors. If it were turned into laser power, this energy could reshape Treya's continents— or launch interstellar cargoes.
A flat line of light appeared on Treya's horizon. It quickly grew into a disk almost too bright to look at. When Rue squinted at it she could make out white clouds, blue lakes, and the mottled ochre and green of grassland and forests. The light was bright enough to wash away the aurora and even make the stars vanish. Down there, she knew, the skies would be blue.
She could have stared at that beautiful circle of earth and sea all day. Reluctantly, Rue closed the inscape window, which was flashing to show yet more messages received. She needed to rest, she knew, so she strapped herself into bed and turned out the light for a while. She couldn't sleep, but at least felt slightly refreshed when they finally landed at a beanstalk dock three hundred kilometers above the clouds.
"You'll be fine, you'll be fine," she told herself as the airlock slid open. She was dressed in a skirt for only the second time in her life, had her kit bag firmly over her shoulder, and had rehearsed a dozen opening lines to use on Leda, depending on what happened. Light speared her, she squinted behind the «sunglasses» the assemblers had built her, took one last deep breath, and stepped out.
Rue was momentarily blinded by the brightness; she hadn't counted on that. "H-hello?"
No one answered.
After her eyes had adapted enough that she could make out shapes, she looked around herself. She stood in a round windowed lounge about twenty meters across, paneled with eye-hurting colors and ringed by elevators. The windows gave glimpses of gantries and catwalks suspended in space above the azure horizon of Treya. Cables stretched above her all the way to the «sun» and below her all the way to the surface of the planet. Through the windows she could see other round lounges like her own, most of them swirling with people greeting or parting. The one she was in was empty.
Leda had been very precise about the lounge number and had said she'd be waiting. She'd also warned that reporters and camera crews might be there, since Rue was famous now. All Rue saw was a single humanoid serling, which flickered insouciantly behind a counter near the elevators. The silence was complete.
Rue dropped her bags, chewed her lip, and after a minute walked over to the serling.
It bowed to her. "Meadow-Rue Cassels?"
"Yes. Where is everybody?"
"I'm sorry, I can't answer that. I have some forms for you to fill out. Docking fees, stowage, per diem… How long are you planning to stay?"
"Um… I'm not sure. Listen, was my flight plan changed? I'm not sure I've landed at the right dock."
"Let me check." The serling paused for a moment, then said, "Your flight plan was finalized one week ago, Ms. Cassels. There have been no changes."
Maybe they're waiting below, she told herself. "Where are these forms?"
The serling pointed her to some inscape windows where she was to place her hand for signing. She read them carefully. "Wait— I thought my credit was good. This says there's a lien on the shuttle if I'm not able to pay within sixty days."
"That is correct. You have no other collateral."
"Yes I do. I have a whole comet's worth!"
The serling smiled. She could see the wall through its holographic face. "I'm sorry, but I have no record of that."
"Wait. I arranged to pay the docking fees on loan against my claim on comet… um, 2349-hash-MRRC. Right?"
The serling nodded. "Ah, yes, I see the cause of the confusion. That claim has been overtur
ned."
Rue suddenly felt sick. "Overturned? How? Why?" A prior claim? But surely they'd have told me…
"Apparently the object you staked your claim against is not a comet after all," explained the serling.
"Then what is it?"
"According to my news feed, it is a ship. An interstellar cycler, to be exact."
She stood there for a while, unable to think. The serling waited patiently, inscape forms gently bobbing in front of it. Eventually Rue stuck out her hand and the red forms turned green. So much for the ship, she thought. Jentry's going to come out here and personally kill me for this.
The serling directed her to an elevator and she went without speaking. Throughout the long descent she kept her eyes shut against the light. Her head hurt.
When the elevator doors opened Rue found herself in the tall glass lobby of some kind of house. Building, she corrected herself, since this was obviously not a residence. People were bustling to and fro, ignoring her which was good because there must be hundreds of them here and she had never seen that many people in one place before. Rue stood there for a while, totally derailed. She had been all ready for a verbal fencing match with strangers who claimed to be kin and now she had no idea what to do.
The air was thick with water and scents. And it was very warm here— hot, in fact, and brighter than she had imagined any place could be. Rue took a few steps, but had to stop as a wave of dizziness assaulted her.
She took a few deep breaths and started walking again. The kit bag was heavy on her shoulder and she was sweating by the time she had passed through the huge archway at the end of the lobby. The heat enfolded her with as much intensity as the cold in the ringways of Allemagne. She forgot about it as soon as she looked up, though. For the first time in her life, Rue stood under a sky.
It went on forever, bigger and more beautiful it seemed than the stars. Gigantic white clouds were piled up all over. She craned her neck back and saw that one sat directly overhead. It must be kilometers away, because she saw the threadlike black lines of elevator shafts pierce it before disappearing in the blue.
Permanence Page 3
