"I know that newshound was poking about the hospital again today. Rue, he's bad news. The best thing for you right now is anonymity."
They had emerged onto a huge underground platform. She recognized it as a subway from movies. There was a train sitting there and people were cramming themselves into it. Chimes filled the air and Max dashed in its direction just as the doors closed.
"Damn! That was our train." He walked back. "You gotta understand, Rue, you can't trust anybody."
Another train was pulling in on the other track. Rue kept her face neutral, eyeing it as the doors opened and people poured out.
"How's the cool-suit?" asked Max after an awkward silence.
There was the chime; Rue spun on her heel and sprinted for the closing doors of the train. "You're right, Max!" she shouted back. "I don't trust anyone!"
She barely made it in as the doors hissed shut. Max pounded on the glass, but the car was already in motion. Rue stuck her tongue out at him, then they were in a tunnel painted blue and dotted with long lozenge-shaped beasts that could be fishes. Rue let out a shaky sigh and turned to catch about a dozen people looking away quickly.
"It's okay," she said, a bit loudly. They all studiously ignored her.
She groaned; Max had been nice and he'd paid her bills and bought her the cool suit. Maybe he really meant well— how was she to know? Jentry was the best example of the male species she knew and he'd sure sounded like Jentry there, ordering her not to talk to people. But how was she going to get anywhere if she couldn't trust anybody?
She wanted to cry, but she'd be damned if she would do it in front of an audience. Instead Rue took a seat demurely at the window and after watching the painted fish flit by for a while and calming her breathing, she phoned Rebecca.
* * *
THE APARTMENTHAD a window that opened on dusk. There was a lot of Rebecca's personal memorabilia scattered about: pictures on the walls, little sculptures she appeared to collect, and real folio-bound books. It was the window that attracted Rue, though. It faced the Penumbra, the edge of the sunlit realm of Treya. Rue thought the subtle fade of bright to dark blue toward the northern horizon was beautiful. She stood there for a while, impressed, until Rebecca told her, "This is what the poor people get to see." Rebecca's side of the building was much cheaper to rent than the south-facing side, precisely because of this view. On the other side of the building, the southern penumbra was over the horizon and so according to Rebecca the illusion of being on Earth was nearly complete, except for the fact that the sun never moved in the sky.
"If I had any money at all I'd be living on the south side." Rebecca plumped some pillows on her small couch. "You can sleep here tonight. I don't know what we'll do with you in the morning."
"I'm really sorry to impose on you," said Rue. She sat down.
Rebecca glanced at her, then did a double-take. "Rue, how did you come to be in space alone, in that shuttle?"
"I… sort of, well I didn't steal it, I half own it. But I ran away. From my brother."
The intern nodded slowly, looking at her. "I thought there was something like that. You've got the mannerisms of the abused, like the way you're sitting now scrunched into one corner of the couch."
"I wasn't abused," said Rue. "I always fought."
Rebecca didn't smile. "Is that why you ran away from Max? You thought he was like…?"
"Jentry. Yeah. That was it."
"You were probably wise to do so." Rebecca disappeared into the apartment's tiny galley kitchen. "Tea?"
"Sure." Rue fidgeted for a while. Her gaze kept returning to the window— an actual window! Such things didn't even exist on Allemagne; here it symbolized Rebecca's poverty.
"What about you?" she asked. "You're not so poor, surely. You're studying to be a doctor."
Rebecca poked her head around the corner. "To tell the truth, I don't know where I'm going from here," she said. "There've been no offers. You know, people from the stations who train here generally end up back on the stations. And you know why? It's because nobody'll hire them here on Treya."
"Oh." Rue thought for a while. "I guess it comes down to which do you want more: to be a doctor, or to live in Treya."
Rebecca muttered something. Then she said, "I want them both, Rue. Both."
"Oh. Um, listen, remember that guy I told you about? The newshound? He wants to interview me. Tonight. I'm, well, kind of nervous about it. Can I trust him?"
"Do you want me to go with you?"
"Um. Can we invite him here?"
Rebecca's head appeared again. "What? Have an actual man in my apartment? It'll be the talk of the corridor!"
"Come on, Rebecca."
She laughed. "Of course you can. I'll play mother hen just this once. Then tomorrow, you start looking for you own place. And a job. Deal?"
"Deal."
The water boiled and Rebecca carried out a little china teapot in the shape of a half-melted station. "Cute, ain't it?"
"Yeah."
"Rue, do you like this newshound?"
"Blair? Yeah. He's really cute."
"Ah." Rebecca nodded pensively. "Just wondering. Drink up."
* * *
AWAKE AGAIN. THIS was the third night in a row that Rue had awoken in darkness, unsure of where she was or what was happening. This time it only took her a minute or so to recognize the ruffling sound above her as the fabric of her tent rippling in the breeze. In the distance the wind made a soughing sound along the hillside. On the first night, she had been terrified by its lonely music— an alive but inhuman thing stalking the dark, unlike the wholly manmade sounds that permeated sleep-shift in Allemagne. Last night, she hadn't been afraid, but wonder had kept her awake. Both times, she had ended up sitting outside the tent for hours, staring up at the shimmering, restless aurora. Every now and then she could see stars through it and once or twice made out the cloud-smudged disk of Erythrion. She could feel the warmth of Erythrion on her face, even when she couldn't see it.
The publicity from Blair's interview had paid off in a modest way; the very day it was posted to the net, Rue had received nine job offers— plus a hurt-sounding message from Max to which she had not replied.
None of the jobs were high-paying, so she had chosen one that fit well with Rebecca's advice to her on how best to fulfil her eco responsibilities. She was planting trees.
Over the past few grueling days Rue had often thought of her mother; she would be so proud of her daughter. At the same time, whenever she paused to gaze out at the vista of hills and towering mountains that made up the North Penumbra, Rue felt a deep sorrow at the memory of her mother's tiny garden of green things. In retrospect, it was pathetic, that little terrarium. Here, Rue walked kilometers of rock near the alpine limit of the mountains, guiding the planting machines to pockets of soil and tiny barren meadows where trees might grow. The center of Treya's lit circle was all green, but neither green plants nor the aurora-adapted night grasses grew here in the twilight. The same wind that sighed around her tent tonight moved over a hundred kilometers of barrens and through rocky uplands where only lichens had taken hold. On the other side of these mountains was permanent night, where a man-made ecology of low-light plants covered the rest of the hemisphere. Seeds were regularly dumped from the air onto the penumbral lands, but in some environments this was a wasteful exercise; the vast majority of seeds that fell in Rue's zone landed on rock. Her job was to optimize the planting so that a true subalpine forest would grow here eventually.
She smiled and stretched. A week ago she'd never been in a true forest and certainly had no idea of the startling contrasts between the lush foliage of the valleys and the hardy, tiny plants that thrived up here. She had moments of acrophobia and agoraphobia as she walked the mountainsides, but so far she'd been able to transmute the fear into exhilaration.
She had also spent a fair amount of time worrying, because her pay wasn't enough to cover the docking costs of the shuttle; instead of saving to pay for her citi
zenship, she was getting further into debt. She might have done all right if she'd known who to bribe, but her skills in that area were minimal. Jentry had refused to send any money for the docking fees; she suspected he was planning to break her financially and get her deported back to Allemagne. Then he would pay the fees and recover both her and the shuttle. It was a grim prospect.
Because it was so grim, she had been refusing to dwell on the future. The mountains were gorgeous, all limpid shadow and fogbound majesty and she found it easy to forget her problems here. Sheer rock walls rose from the plains to ice-capped peaks, sunlit on one side during the artificial day, long shadows sloping into apparent nothingness on the other side. Half the sky was a gorgeous bright blue; the other half, azure fading to black. She could actually see the clean boundary of the gigantic shaft of light coming from the «sun»; it was as if she stood by the wall of a sky-sized glowing crystal, with bright clouds, forests, and towns embedded in it. Penumbra seemed like the end of the world in ancient myth; if she walked into the darkness, Rue fancied she might fall off the edge into space.
Working in such an Olympian landscape might have made her lonely, but Rue's supervisor kept tabs on her. He phoned once an hour to monitor her progress and that of the other planters working other slopes. In between times he e-mailed spirit-building slogans like KEEP UP THE ADEQUATE WORK and WE ARE ALL COGS IN THE WHEELS OF INDUSTRY. It was all in fun and when she wasn't chatting with him, Rue often spoke to Rebecca and even Blair.
Blair had taken her out to dinner two days ago; who knew where this might lead? If she only had a month or two before she had to leave… No, the money would come, she would think of something. Rue snuggled down into her sleeping bag and let herself dream about Blair and his ready grin, hoping the nice thoughts would let her get back to sleep.
The distant wind called out her name.
Rue opened her eyes wide. She saw nothing but the billowing blackness of the tent above her. It must have been her imagination.
"Rue…"
She sat up, heart pounding. Now she could see a faint glimmer of light through the tent wall. It came from downslope.
"Oh, shit!" She fought her way out of the sleeping bag and dressed hurriedly. It was cool but not cold; the nights here hovered around freezing, which to Rue felt just fine. She unzipped the tent flap and stepped out into muttering wind and the distant cracking noise of a glacial avalanche.
Some kind of air car was parked about two hundred meters down the valley. Between it and her was a little bobbing light.
"Rue!"
"Max?" She could see pretty well by auroral light, so Rue jogged down to him without bothering to get out her own flashlight. Her cousin was waving a lantern around, peering myopically into the gloom; he jumped when she padded out of the dark to stand before him.
"Max, what are you doing here?"
"Thank Permanence I found you," he said. He was panting, probably from the thinness of the air. "Your phone was turned off."
"No…" But it was probably buried under clothing and gear; Rue's tent was pretty small.
He waved a hand. "It doesn't matter. They'll be here any minute, we've got to go."
"They? Who's they?"
"The government— military types who work for the generals of the Coup. They're about ten minutes behind me— look!" He pointed at the sky. Sure enough, a little knot of lights way up there was drifting in their direction.
"Come on! Grab your gear and let's get out of here!"
"I don't understand. What—"
"The cycler! It's the cycler, Rue, don't you get it? Your claim has been upheld. The cycler's a ghost ship, or nonhuman, which means your mining rights are automatically converted to salvage rights."
"Salvage rights…" She stared at the incoming air cars.
"Rue, if you thought everybody wanted a piece of you before, just wait! As of this moment, cousin, you are the only person in Erythrion to own a starship!"
4
RUE CLUTCHED HER kit bag and watched the mountain slope fall away below them. Max was apparently piloting the air car himself, because he held a control stick and as he moved it the car swooped and dove. "Wish we could turn off the running lights," he muttered. "Maybe if we stay low they won't see us." They shot over a mountain saddle and Rue's stomach flipped as they dropped to nearly treetop level over the slope below. She felt giddy, but wasn't sure whether this was due to Max's piloting or the news he had just dropped on her.
"Who are those people?" She pointed to the aircraft that were even now touching down on the black soil below her newly abandoned tent. "Newshounds?"
"The newshounds are the least of your problems," said Max. "Believe me, I know."
"Then… Max, talk to me."
He glanced sidelong at her. "You're not still mad at me?"
"Max, I was never mad at you. I just needed to do things on my own. I–I'm really grateful for your generosity and of course I'll pay you back for the hospital fees and the cool suit and all, it's just you were taking over the way my brother used to. Oh, I can't explain! You were pushing. I had to get away."
"I just wanted to protect you," he said sullenly.
"I see that now. Now, please tell me who those people are and why they're all coming after me in the middle of the night."
Max let out a long sigh. He looked like he hadn't slept and his clothes were disheveled as always.
"I've been following the attempts to contact the cycler," he said. "Which you should have been doing, too. Between times I talked to my lawyer and verified that if it proved to be a relic, that you would have salvage rights according to the laws of the Cycler Compact. Well, they won't announce it officially, but a guy I'd been paying off at the ministry just told me that they can't raise anyone on the cycler. Long-range telescopes show minimal energy signature except from the plow sail, so either it's a very efficient heat radiator or it's dead."
"Dead? But it's moving fast, isn't it?"
Max grunted a laugh. "Fast, yeah— point eight five light-speed. It'll pass Erythrion in a little over two days. If it was manned, we would have received a message from it months ago offering cargos and asking if any passengers wanted to rendezvous with it. Takes that long to set up the braking beams and allocate power for acceleration beams, normally. So normally speaking, 'round about now there'd be a magsail or two braking into the system with passengers and cargo and the monks at Permanence would be getting ready to send an outbound magsail to catch up to it on the way out. There's none of that."
"So maybe it's a cargo packet, not a cycler." Cargo packets were small, weighing only a few tonnes; they were used to send nonliving cargoes between adjacent stars or halo worlds. Even they were rare, these days— and nobody launched a cargo packet without first arranging for its deceleration and capture at its destination. Max confirmed that none of Erythrion's neighboring colonies had announced that they were sending a packet. Anyway, whatever it was that was coming was far larger than any packet.
They swung out over the foot hills and Max leaned back from the controls. He slumped back in his seat. "It looks like we lost them."
"Max! Lost who?"
He glanced behind them. "Government officials, newshounds, the military… who knows? Whoever they are, they're after you for the same reason I came: the cycler."
"But… they don't even know it's a cycler," she said incredulously. "Maybe it's a ship from High Space. They don't use cyclers because they've got faster-than-light ships, right? So if they visit us in the halos, they do a direct flight."
Max shook his head. "Yeah, but when they visit, they come in faster than light. They can come here that fast, Rue, they just can't start the FTL engine again for the trip home; halo worlds like Erythrion don't have enough mass for that. Anyway, this thing's not on a direct trajectory to us; it's nudging itself into a course correction. It's not stopping here, it's using a ramscoop to bend its trajectory, like any cycler would. It's come from nowhere, Rue and where it's going we don't know— though
if its new course holds, it'll be passing close by Chandaka in about two years."
"Chandaka!" She had often gazed at that star in the observatory at Allegmagne. It was the nearest star in High Space— once part of the Cycler Compact, now a habitation of the mysterious, despised Rights Economy.
"The point is, Rue, the thing behaves like a cycler; it's alive but seems to have no life support right now."
The last cycler to pass Erythrion had come twenty years ago; once, Rue knew, there had been at least one every month. But that was fifty years before, when all inhabited worlds— lit stars and brown dwarfs alike— were part of the Compact.
Then faster-than-light travel was discovered; unfortunately it only worked between massive enough worlds. Chandaka and the other lit stars had joined the FTL Rights Economy and stopped maintaining their parts of the cycler rings. Cycler traffic to Erythrion had dwindled over the years and finally stopped.
Cut off from the rest of the universe, Erythrion was turning in on itself. The coup at Treya was the latest symptom of the slide.
"That cycler may not be manned," Max continued, "but it's at least partly operational, because its plow sail is doing a course correction.
"And you, cousin of mine, own it."
The aircar skimmed above fields and forests and a black snaking river. Auroral light reflected off the water. In the distance inhabited hillsides glittered with lights, the way the docks of Allemagne had. As they approached Rue made out dozens of huge, sprawling mansions— not mere houses, certainly— each with its own grounds and pool. Private roads snaked through the forest. Private air cars sat on pads or roofs.
"I'm a billionaire," she whispered.
"Multi multi," observed Max laconically. "But it's not a done deal yet. The next few days will be critical."
"Why?"
Max didn't answer; he was concentrating on spiralling them down toward a big sprawling villa with red roofs. He hovered the car over a broad landing pad, hit a switch and lights bloomed around the pad. Apparently on automatic pilot now, the car settled slowly down, landing with the barest thump.
Permanence Page 5
