Permanence

by Karl Schroeder

  When she was born the cyclers had still come, though fewer and fewer. As a child she hadn't associated their loss with the drop in immigration and rise in crime among the Stations. Cyclers didn't carry enough cargo to directly affect the economy or population of a developed colony like Erythrion.

  The effects of maintaining contact with other worlds might be subtler than money or birthrates could account for. Maybe they were no less important, though.

  "Damn the government," she said.

  Max laughed richly. "Spoken like a true Treyan," he said.

  They flew on and the glow of the sunlit lands gradually fell over the horizon behind them. Timidly at first, then with graceful confidence, the aurora revealed itself in the sky ahead. Behind the aurora, the stars attended like an enraptured audience.

  There was no shred of green left below. Rue's eyes adjusted quickly and she could soon make out the riot of color that had replaced Earthly tones on the land. Most of the grass was black and it rippled like velvet in the wind. The trees were dark shades of purple and red, but here and there furz and heather dominated and this was rainbowed with shades of lilac and lemon-yellow. These plants used a pigment more efficient than chlorophyll and tuned to the frequencies of light the aurora produced. They absorbed blue-green light, unlike chlorophyll which absorbed red. Hence, they appeared in any color but green itself. They normally grew with agonizing slowness, but whenever Erythrion flared they would undergo brief, explosive growth spurts.

  The aircar was still following the road, which snaked between low hills and past rivers but maintained a westward tendency. After a while Max pointed ahead. "I think that's it," he said.

  On the horizon Rue could make out a glittering building, tall as any she'd seen in the lighted country behind them. Rows of windows high on its flanks lit the hillsides around it and she could see that it sat on the edge of a cliff, above a lake or ocean that stretched out to the horizon. More than that she couldn't see, except that this building was the terminus of the road they had been following.

  Rue rehearsed the arguments she'd been preparing. She was the legal owner of the cycler; she must be given a chance to assert her ownership… she was good at defending herself verbally, she knew. She'd done it all her life.

  Beside her Max heaved a sigh and she was about to say something about his sounding relieved that they'd made it, when sparks flew up the canopy beside her. Rue shrieked and jumped back, catching up against her seat belt. The aircar dipped woozily.

  "What's happening?"

  A bright vertical line of light appeared, jittered around crazily outside, then vanished. It left spots in Rue's eyes.

  "Laser!" shouted Max. He put the car into a hard turn; light flashed outside again. "They hit one of the jets!"

  "Are we going down?" Rue figured she should be afraid— didn't objects pick up a lot of speed when they fell on a planet? The fear didn't come naturally, though; freefall was a sensation she associated with safety and stillness, not danger.

  "They build these things with multiple redundancy, so—" Sparks flew again and all kinds of inscape windows appeared around Max— most of them flashing red. "There goes another jet."

  Okay, now she was scared. There came another flash and then they were falling.

  Max sat numbly staring at the instruments, which were now complaining of a computer failure. Rue looked around herself. Freefall itself felt natural— it was the idea that they were being shot at that scared her.

  Off to the right was the sky and off to the left the planet was closing fast. Three of their jets were down, but according to Max's instruments they had a fourth.

  She reached past Max and hauled on the control stick. The aircar responded by flipping over several times. The rotation was very similar to the spins you did when playing freeball and she was good at freeball. Max was screaming now, but Rue had a good idea of how the aircar was responding to its only remaining jet. She put the car into a tight, blood-pounding spiral and threw all power into that jet.

  They seemed to be slowing down, but it was too late. The ground came whirling up at them and then everything flew apart.

  5

  "I DON'T BELIEVE it," she heard Max mutter. Rue seemed to be squashed between a number of giant pillows, which were making various rude noises as they deflated. She pulled herself free, to find herself standing in black grass, shaken but unhurt, next to the aircar's crash bags.

  Max clawed his way out from the bundle of neon-green balloons. "Don't believe it," he said again. Then he laughed. "Love the way they design these things."

  The rest of the aircar was a mangled wreck lying some meters away. The car must have ejected the cockpit at the very last second.

  "Gods and Kami, when we went into that death spiral I thought we were dead," said her cousin as he inspected himself for damage. "You okay?"

  The spiral had been deliberate: Rue had needed to stabilize the aircar so that she could keep their one remaining jet pointed down and that was the only way to do it. It seemed petty to bring that up now, though. "I'm okay," she said. "Have you called for help?"

  Max looked around himself uneasily. "I tried. I can't raise the inscape net out here. Signal's jammed… Look, we should get out of here. They'll come to make sure we're dead."

  "Then you're going the wrong way," she said, taking his hand. "The monastery's this way."

  His hand was shaking. He clasped hers tightly. "I can't see it," he said. "Too dark."

  "I can see perfectly well," she reassured him. The aurora lit the land with a flickering, inconstant ghost light. Still, Max wouldn't move until they'd rummaged through the wreck of the aircar and found a flashlight he kept stored there. "I know we don't dare use it," he said. "I just need to have it, that's all."

  They had crashed in an area of mixed grassland and thickets. In the light of a flare the tall bushes might have been a bright orange color; in this diffuse green glow they appeared deep brown. The air was warm; Rue could feel heat from Erythrion on her face when she looked to the east.

  Luckily the brown tangles were big enough that they afforded some cover. Rue and Max wove their way around them for a hundred or so meters. Then they had to stop, because an unmistakable sound reached them through the clear air.

  "It's an aircar," said Max. They both dove for cover among the thorny stalks of an orange bush tall as a house. "It's coming in low."

  Rue could see it now, a dark blot against the aurora. The car showed no running lights, which was supposed to be illegal. This had to be the people who'd shot them down.

  "But who are they?" she asked. She hadn't been afraid when their aircar went down; that had been more of an exercise in soft docking than anything frightening. This, though… that circling car reminded her of the brutal men who'd frequented the bar at Allemagne. She knew what such men were capable of. She kept very still as the car passed directly overhead, but her heart was pounding like it would burst.

  "It's landing at the crash site," said Max. "Quick, let's get some distance between us and them."

  "Yeah." They ran, with Rue leading, weaving a drunkard's path around the thickets, which blocked their way like the walls of a maze. Every now and then, Rue would catch a glimpse of the distant lights of the monastery. Several times when she did this, she found it was way off to the side and once, behind them. She suspected they were making little progress in its direction, but she didn't have the heart to tell Max.

  He was busy anyway, speculating about who their pursuers were. "Gotta be government thugs," he decided. "But which faction? The isolationists won't want anyone to catch the cycler. On the other hand, the generals at the core aren't isos, never have been. They're probably falling all over each other to go after the thing."

  Rue was panting from the heat and exhaustion of running. It was just lucky she'd spent all those days walking up and down mountains, otherwise she'd have collapsed after just a few minutes. Max wasn't looking so great, though. He had to stop more and more often.

&nbs
p; Every now and then they heard the aircar in the distance. Once it flew overhead again, but the thickets were good cover and their pursuers didn't seem to be using any sophisticated sensing gear.

  Just when Rue felt she was at the end of her strength, they crashed through a particularly tall and dense stand of orange bushes and found themselves at the base of a stone wall.

  "Safe!" cried Rue. "If we can find the door…"

  "Actually…" Max examined the dark stone doubtfully. Rue ignored him and ran along the wall. "I don't think we're there yet," said Max, just as Rue reached a spot where the lichen-encrusted wall had tumbled down, revealing a gap. She searched the sky for the aircar and when she didn't see it, clambered up the rock fall to look at what lay beyond.

  They were nowhere near the monastery. Its lights still glowed kilometers away and above them. Between her and it sprawled the dark and overgrown streets of an abandoned city.

  "What…" Streets, plazas, hundreds of tall dark towers and treed suburbs spread for kilometers around the base of the monastery's hill. The city was huge, but Rue saw no movement in its unlit streets. Grass sprouted through the sidewalks and vines were slowly covering the windows of the house nearest where she stood. A young tree arrogantly blocked its front door. Only at the far end of the city, near the monastery, did she see the twinkle of lights.

  "This is Thetis," said Max as he climbed up next to her. "The old capital. They abandoned it when the sun was built. Everybody moved into the light. Well, all except a few holdouts, hermits and assorted misfits. They live in the mansions on the slopes now." He pointed to the distant lights.

  "Why didn't they just aim the sun here?"

  "They had originally planned to build more suns— one for each of the big cities." He shook his head. "The one we've got now was originally an experiment."

  "What happened?"

  "We lost almost all our trade with Chandaka when the Rights Economy conquered it. No chance of attracting immigrants anymore, when they could go elsewhere faster than light. It was political bickering over things like the sun funds that finally led to the coup."

  "So." She waved at the broad streets. "How are we going to cross all that without being seen?"

  "I've got an idea." Max led the way into the deserted city. Rue wouldn't have taken a step into this place on her own; it was unbelievably creepy, like the graveyards she'd read about in old books. All desolate, the buildings like crystallized despair. Many of their windows were broken and some doors yawned open like waiting traps. She kept imagining she saw movement there— and maybe she did, maybe the killers who'd shot them down were closing in. She clutched Max's hand tightly as he pulled her along. He was looking for something.

  "There it is!" He broke into a run. Rue followed, groaning. As he reached a flight of stairs that led straight into the ground, she heard the rising whine of an approaching aircar behind them.

  "Hurry!" They stumbled down the overgrown steps and into a space so black even Rue couldn't see anything. Then Max clicked on his flashlight, revealing a long empty chamber with some kind of trench running down its center. With difficulty she deduced the place must be a subway station.

  Rue shied away from the black tunnel mouth that gaped at the end of the trench. "I don't know about this…"

  "No, look." Max pointed the light at a dusty map on the wall. He traced the routes with a finger. "We're here. All we have to do is go down Line Five, which is this one and it takes us straight to the monastery. They'll never find us."

  "Unless they saw us come in here."

  "In that case, we're out of luck anyway. Come on, couz, it's not much further."

  She sighed and followed him down onto the tracks and into the dark mouth of blackness.

  * * *

  "W ELL, I GUESS this makes sense," said Max an hour later. They were crouched in a narrow space under the ceiling of the tunnel. The way was completely blocked up ahead. "The rain must have been washing silt in here for years," he said. "It's a miracle we got this far."

  Rue was near tears. They had walked for ages through tomblike darkness, past side tunnels where the phosphorescent eyes of something glowed suspiciously; stepped over slick trails of slime that crisscrossed the floor and ran straight up the walls; kicked through weird pillars of fungi that stood as tall as a man and were twisted into tortured shapes that seemed to move in the weakening glow of the flashlight. Sighs of wind like distant voices echoed constantly through the long tunnel.

  "We'll have to go back to the last station," said Max. "I hope the flashlight lasts long enough." He put a hand on the slick wall of the tunnel and looked down miserably. "Rue, I am so, so sorry that I got you into this."

  "You got us into this?"

  "Yeah." He turned dejectedly and they began walking back down the tunnel. "I convinced you to go after the cycler."

  "Well maybe, but I could have changed my mind, couldn't I?"

  "Well, I suppose, but…"

  "I'm not a child, Max. It was my responsibility to say no and I didn't."

  He grimaced. "So now what? Do we hide out until they leave and then try to sneak home?"

  "No," she said hotly. "They're trying to steal my cycler."

  "Is it really that important to you, Rue? It wasn't before. Why the change?"

  She thought about it. "Maybe… it's because nobody was actually trying to take it away from me before."

  His look told her he didn't understand. "Look. If the government had offered me a finders' fee or something I would have jumped at it. But they didn't; Blair told me they didn't even try to find me through him. They figured that a woman like me would never be able to reach the cycler herself, so they just ignored me. Like Jentry used to. And now they're trying to use violence to beat me down— like Jentry used to."

  That reason seemed petty; it wasn't right. "But that's not actually it, either," she admitted. "I guess there's two things. The night before I ran away from Allemagne, I had this bad moment when I thought: I can live like this. Allemagne's not too bad. I can cope. I'm an adult now, I can learn to stand up to Jentry. I can carve out my own life like Mom did."

  It was pretty hard to resist that urge.

  "It's the same now. We could sneak away. Let the government have the cycler. Just make do. And Treya's not terrible, like Allemagne, even with the provisional government and all. I might never have much here, but I would have enough.

  "You know what?" She grinned at him. "I resisted that urge on Allemagne. I took the mad chance and here I am! And now, another mad chance comes along. I could resist. Or I could jump."

  They had reached the platform. Dim auroral light glowed at the top of the steps. They went up cautiously, watching the skies for any sign of the aircar. Nothing was visible; there was no sound except the sighing of the wind through the streets.

  When they reached the top of the stairs, Max said, "Maybe we won't have to turn tail after all." They stood at the foot of the hill upon which perched the monastery. From here the place appeared mountainously huge and Rue could see that nearly all its windows were dark. Only a band near the top shone defiantly. Once, Rue supposed, when the cyclers came every few weeks, this would have been a very busy place.

  They jogged through the shadows toward the long sweeping roadway that ran up to the monastery's gates. Max pulled Rue into a doorway just before they reached the road. "I don't like it," he said. "This is too perfect a place for an ambush."

  "Well, what do we do?"

  "Watch and wait, I think. What we need is to find cover where we can see if anybody's moving down here."

  "How about there?" She pointed to a building across the street. It had wide archways leading into a courtyard and a tower with prominent balconies. Max squinted through the gloom at it. "Perfect. You'll have to be our eyes and ears, though."

  They checked the road; nothing was moving so they darted across and into the courtyard.

  "Right," said Max. "Now all we have to do is—"

  "Don't move! Put your hand
s up." It was a woman's voice and it came from behind them.

  Rue's heart sank. She exchanged a stricken look with Max, then they both raised their hands.

  "Turn around."

  The woman who stepped out of the courtyard's shadow was dressed in a black skinsuit; her hair was tied back to cascade down her shoulders. She was pointing a snubnosed pistol in their direction.

  "Who are you?" she asked. "Answer quick."

  "Uh, we live here," said Max.

  "That's not what I asked."

  "Look, we don't want any trouble," said Max. "I—"

  "Kami!" shouted the woman. She levelled her pistol and then Max was tackling Rue and they went down as she heard the pistol fire. "Run!" Max shouted in her ear, as Rue tried to get to her feet.

  Rue stood up and practically ran into the dark-clothed woman. "This way!" the woman said, grabbing Rue's arm.

  "Wha—"

  "Do you want them to kill you? Come on!" Then Rue was being hauled into the darkness of the building. Max stood gaping for a second, then jumped when another shot sounded from somewhere nearby. He ran inside too.

  Only now did Rue realize that the woman had fired past them, not at them.

  "You're the two whose aircar got shot down east of here," said the woman.

  "Yeah…" They were moving deeper into the place and it was now too dark for Rue to make out more than an outline of the stranger. Max's hand found Rue's shoulder and he held on tightly as they went. Behind them light welled up in the outer rooms.

  "My name's Corinna Chandra," said the woman. "I'm with the search team that's looking for you."

  "Who do you work for?" asked Max suspiciously.

  "I'm a nun with the Permanence Order," she said. "I work for the compact."

  They found some steps and went down them. When they reached the bottom, Chandra let Rue and Max go by, then closed and barred a heavy door behind them. There was a moment's silence, then bright overhead lights flicked on. Rue had to close her eyes against the glare. She heard Chandra saying, "This is Green Two. I've got them. We're coming in."