Permanence

by Karl Schroeder

  Still, she needed to be present on this first sortie. Herat was on the EVA team, at his own insistence. So were Corinna and Evan. Three other scientists and two soldiers rounded out the team.

  "We're all set," Herat said sunnily. "The fellows on the EVA team are pacing like caged tigers."

  "Remember, anything you find that might be a way of controlling the Envy's course, you hand over to us. I invited your people on this trip to help me uphold my salvage claim."

  "Yes, I know. But may I point out, Ms. Cassels, that we may not be able to identify the controls when we see them. How can you tell an alien inscape crown from a toilet? It could take us months. Then to understand how it works—"

  She had learned to just interrupt him if she needed to get a point in. "I expect you to approve anything— but I also expect to understand everything you investigate. Look at it as a challenge; the fun part will be explaining it all to me in layman's terms."

  He laughed. "I usually get paid to do that."

  "You don't think having free rein on the Envy to be payment enough? When all your colleagues are sitting on their hands back at the Institute?" She smiled sweetly at him.

  He stammered something.

  "I'll see you gentlemen in the control room at ten o'clock," she said, then hurried on while she still had the momentum.

  "Oh, I'm sorry!" Michael Bequith had nearly run her down. He had a tray with two tiny bacon strips and a piece of toast on it.

  "How do you survive on that?" she asked.

  He blushed. He did that a lot, she'd found; she couldn't decide whether it was endearing or annoying. He was good looking, though, tall and lean, with dusky skin like Corinna and eyes so dark you usually couldn't see the pupils. He generally dressed severely and today was no exception: He was in a black jumpsuit with an equally black utility vest on it. A small, but not virtual, book lay on the tray next to his meager breakfast.

  "I never eat much before a space walk," he said. "It's a sensible precaution."

  "Oh, so you're on the team?" She already knew this, but wanted to keep the conversation going. Rue had a connection with him; they had both been there at the discovery of Linda Ophir's body, after all. She wasn't sure yet whether she liked Bequith, but she wanted to find out, and he seemed hard to get close to.

  He grimaced at her question. "I'll be in charge of enforcing the quarantine precautions," he said. "Dr. Herat gets the fun work; I do the digging, he picks up the treasure." He grinned almost imperceptibly.

  Interesting; she hadn't known he had a sense of humor at all.

  "So space walks make you nervous?" she asked.

  "Space Walks into alien spaceships do." He shrugged. "Shouldn't they?"

  "No, no, you're quite right. It's funny… nobody else is admitting to being nervous."

  He registered a faint smile. "That's because most of them haven't got the faintest idea where we are."

  "Oh? And you do?"

  He peered off into the middle distance for a moment. "One thing I've learned in this job is, we never get used to the alien. Looking at something that's of alien manufacture is like catching a glimpse of God— no, don't laugh. What I mean is— well, ask yourself this question: What's the difference between holding an object, say a cup, made by alien hands and a cup created out of nothing by the universe— by the ineffable?"

  Rue might indeed have laughed at this strange analogy, were it not that she remembered quite vividly how her scalp had prickled when she first looked through the telescope, saw one of the Envy's habitats, and knew it was not man-made.

  "An alien speaks, or a stone speaks— what's the difference?" said Mike. "The experience is similar."

  "Rocks speak to you?" she said in a mock-indulgent tone.

  "Not as such. Ask me about NeoShintoism sometime," he said.

  "Uh… okay." Bequith was religious! She should have realized it before; he was very much the priest type, now that she thought about it.

  "Don't worry," he said. "I don't bite."

  "So you're from, what, the Vatican?" she asked.

  "No, actually, I'm from Kimpurusha. It's not far from here—"

  Rue's stomach did a flip. "Oh. If you'll excuse me, my crew's expecting me."

  Even as she walked away, Rue was thinking, Go back— keep talking to him! She'd wanted to have some polite chitchat with the man and here she was running away instead. But if he really was from Kimpurusha, he was from one of the lit worlds that had betrayed the halo. In the years before she was born, there had been hundreds of embassies and trade centers around Erythrion, each representing one or another cycler ring. The jewels in the vast Cycler Compact were the lit worlds, places like Kimpurusha that had nearly Earthlike planets basking in the glow of G-, K-, or even M-class stars.

  When the Rights Economy burst into the galaxy, visitations from the lit worlds had dwindled. It took as much to maintain one cycler as it did to maintain ten thousand FTL ships. Kimpurusha, once the spiritual capital of the halo, had turned its back on Erythrion and the rest of the unlit worlds. Rue had seen the former Permanence monastery at Treya; it was now a sports facility.

  She was surprised that she felt so strongly about a decline that had begun before she was born. But then, this whole trip had been a series of revelations about just how much of a halo-worlder she really was.

  "Good morning!" Blair waved her to sit. Max was already tucking into his food; he acknowledged her indifferently. Corinna sat herself next to Blair, just as Rebecca entered the room and looked around. Rue waved vigorously; Rebecca grinned and headed over. She seldom ate breakfast.

  Max had focused his attention back on his meal and would probably not participate in the upcoming discussion; he was Bad Max again, after briefly being Good Max while they were on Chandaka. At times like these, Rue leaned heavily on Rebecca for support.

  Evan was the last to arrive, which was typical. It was hard for him to drag himself out of bed; she had come to realize that he had horrible self-esteem. Rue wasn't surprised that he'd signed on again after loudly protesting that he couldn't. The crew of the Envy gave him the only meaning in his life right now.

  "Sorry I'm late," he said, in exactly the tone he always used.

  "Let's get down to business," said Rue. "The EVA's in an hour. First things first. Did you guys find the cache?"

  Evan nodded. "It's right where we left it. Seems intact, from what I could see in the telescope."

  "Good. Blair?"

  "They don't know it's there. I checked the logs and talked to some of the techs. Like we predicted, the plow sail hasn't gone into ramjet mode since we left, so there's been no significant radiation on it. Parking it right next to the sail was a stroke of genius."

  "We'll leave it where it is for now. What Crisler's people don't know can't hurt us. Are they still doing the radar survey of the habitats?"

  Blair nodded. "It's supposed to wrap up tomorrow, though. Then they'll just do an occasional ping to make sure things don't move unexpectedly."

  "Crisler will lose it completely when he finds out we're holding out on him," said Rebecca.

  "Crisler is in charge of the Banshee, not the Envy," Rue said, with as much confidence as she could muster. "Leave him to me."

  They nodded. Everyone was looking alert, with an undercurrent of excitement— except for Bad Max, who was indifferently stuffing his face. Rue had to smile.

  "We're back!" she said. Everybody laughed; even Max grinned.

  "We're back and we're going to find out how to control the Envy," she continued. "We'll handle this bunch of space marines and mad scientists and send Envy on her way back 'round to Erythrion. Then we go home and we're going to be heroes. Is everybody up to that?"

  They all raised their glasses and cheered; the rest of the people in the galley turned to look. Rue laughed again.

  She was thinking, though, that she had told a little story to them: Capture the flag and return as heroes. It worked, it was a goal to shoot for.

  She couldn't help re
membering that they'd had no script to follow the first time they explored this place. Staring at the tiny dark crescent of an alien habitat through the scope, she had felt cold terror at facing a complete unknown. They had all felt it.

  In talking to Crisler's people about their first trip out here, Rue had not revealed that they had huddled inside their shuttle for a week, debating and staring at that little crescent, before they'd summoned the courage to explore the lake.

  It was so different this time around. But was it different only because, in bringing the Banshee, they had brought a comforting new set of stories to use in relating to this place?

  The idea was too abstract to hold her attention; she turned back to her grinning crew and set about discussing plans.

  * * *

  MICHAEL HAD TRIED five times to compose a letter to his scattered brothers; he had deleted each one before sending it and now that they were at the Envy he couldn't hope to send an encrypted message out. Nonetheless, this morning he had felt compelled to write, so after breakfast, but before suiting up for his first trip to Lake Flaccid, he sat down in his tiny wedge-shaped room to compose.

  He was more restless and unhappy than ever. Herat had forbidden him from performing any of the domestic duties he had always given himself. Those duties had been a kind of devotion for Michael— a palpable form of Service. Herat, the old bastard, knew that Michael needed to confront his demons, so had taken Michael out of his safe routines. Michael spent long hours in the gym and when he wasn't doing that he was getting to know the Banshee's crew and Crisler's staff. He was now on a first-name basis with everyone except the enigmatic halo-worlders, who mostly kept to themselves. Michael could joke with the highest and the lowest and everybody thought he was a nice guy.

  When he sat by himself in his cabin, he felt a black depression he'd not felt since the insurrection on Kimpurusha. It was as if the past five years had not happened.

  He moved a private inscape window to easy view and subvocalized words: a greeting, a short summary of his expedition to Kadesh. He would not speak of Jentry's Envy here; it wasn't yet time and the risk was too great even if this message was encrypted.

  "I have told you that something happened to me on Dis, but have not answered your inquiries as to what it was. I won't describe the actual events here, because they wouldn't convey to you the magnitude of the experience. Our goal has always been to become one with our environment— to absorb its particular character, which we call the kami or spirit of a place. That experience is always an experience of union, of joining with the world that we're otherwise alienated from. I've experienced it on a hundred worlds, in places humans can only timidly tread. On Dis, though… On Dis I experienced not union but annihilation: my consciousness expanded and at first it was ecstatic, but the kami of the place were too alien and too strong. I could see myself, infinitely small and vulnerable, a stranger to this place and then even that was gone; I was swept away, becoming one with Dis and lost to my Self.

  "I tried frantically to find my way back, but I was lost in the vision. Dr. Herat found me and shook me awake, but the kami were still there, like a ringing in my ears, denying me my own reality.

  "We have always believed that our religion was a real union of the transient individual soul with the eternal Absolute of the universe. But the kami of Dis are dying, slowly, in a paroxysm that will take a trillion years. Their light is fading; all light will fade, they tell me, and no one can hold back the darkness of individual and species extinction for long.

  "What I am saying to you is that on Dis, I became one with the world and remained in that vision and am there still. And the vision is not what we thought it was; I am lost in it. I am truly lost."

  He closed the window and rubbed his eyes. Beyond his little cabin, he could hear people moving up the stairs nearby; the Banshee's balloon habitat was so small that the whole place bounced whenever anyone took a step. Michael knew he should be getting ready for the upcoming EVA, but he was so weary; all he wanted to do was sleep.

  He popped the window open and reviewed what he had written. His brothers might understand his imagery, but to anyone else it would sound crazy— wacko, his friends back home would call it. Bitterly, he snapped the window closed. Enough self-indulgence. There was work to do. He stood and stretched and began to inventory his tools for the EVA.

  11

  "N O, THERE'S NO chance this thing could be two billion years old," said Dr. Katz to one of the marines. "It would have eroded in this environment long ago."

  They were all crammed into an inflatable airlock at the axis of the spinning habitats. The lock was transparent. Michael had trouble focusing on his suit checklist, because his gaze kept drifting to the infinite expanse of stars surrounding them. It was nothing he hadn't seen before— but to say that was to completely miss the point. There were few sights more awesome than space itself, devoid of worlds.

  He tried to concentrate on the nasal twang of Katz's voice. "Any dust and debris we encounter comes at us as high-energy cosmic radiation. A few thousand years of that and even the best structure will deteriorate. No, this ship can't be more than a century or two old, if that."

  "Yeah, what about this radiation thing," said another marine. "We're going so fast now, if we hit anything bigger'n a pin, we're vapor, right?"

  "Maybe so," said Katz, "but you and I can't begin to comprehend just how empty it is out here. Every second each one of us is passing through about a million and a half times our own body's volume worth of space. In all that volume, we're only hitting a few stray particles— the rest have been cleared out of the way by the plow sail and there weren't that many to begin with."

  The marine didn't look reassured. Michael couldn't say he blamed him.

  "The stars don't look any different," said the first marine, who now had his suit check completed and his helmet dogged. Michael was still struggling with his gloves. "Isn't there supposed to be some kind of 'starbow' thing happening?"

  "Popular misconception," said Katz. "Nope; you'd need a spectrograph to figure out our velocity. We might as well be standing still as far as I can tell."

  Michael glanced behind him. Rue Cassels was already in her suit and was chatting with one of her crew. There were three of the halo-worlders on this jaunt, plus two marines and four scientists, Michael included. His scientific qualifications were pretty thin compared to some of the others, but he did have the benefit of five years spent with Dr. Herat.

  The professor was suited up too. "Snap to it, Bequith. Here, let me help you." Dr. Herat settled the helmet on his head. "Nervous?"

  "Of course. What kind of a fool do you take me for?"

  Herat laughed. "There! You're all set. Not a second too soon, too— they're evacuating the airlock."

  Michael looked around, expecting to see the transparent balloon crumpling in around them. It took him a few moments to figure out that since there was no air pressure outside it, it wouldn't collapse even when all the air inside was removed.

  "Load up! Four to a cart!" shouted the lead marine. Space suited figures began jumping up to the waiting EVA carts; these were little more than I-beams with clips, spare oxygen, and supply nacelles and a motor at the back. Michael clipped his safety line to one and found himself face-to-face— or more properly, faceplate-to-faceplate— with Rue Cassels.

  "Mr. Bequith," she said brightly. "I'm sorry for my behavior in the cantina this morning. It was rude."

  "No offense taken," he said, a little stiffly to his own hearing.

  "It just threw me when you said you were from Kimpurusha," she said. The cart lurched into motion and Michael grabbed for a handhold. Without missing a beat, Rue continued, "I didn't realize I felt so strongly about it."

  Michael tried not to look beyond her to where the translucent habitats were rapidly receding. They seemed the only objects in all of space.

  "I feel pretty strongly about it, too," he said. He quickly checked to ensure that she had opened a private channel between the
m; then he said, "I was involved in a rebellion against the R.E. when I was seventeen."

  He couldn't see her face now; she was a silhouette against the diamond-hard stars. She didn't say anything for a moment and he thought he must have revealed too much. Then she said, "I feel like an idiot."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Here I go knowing just how different all us halo-worlders are from each other and it never occurred to me that people from High Space might be diverse, too. I just assumed you were all one big happy family."

  "I remember before the Reconquista," he said. "It was only twenty years ago."

  "I guess so," she said. "We only heard about Kimpurusha four years ago. I grew up thinking that of all the worlds, it, at least, would never give over to the R.E."

  Now that he thought about it, it was plain that news about Kimpurusha's fall would not even now have reached the farthest outposts of the Cycler Compact. Dispatches from his brothers at the monastery, sermons, and theological abstracts were still winging their way at light-speed to the struggling colonies around isolated Jovian planets and methane dwarfs hanging in the silent darkness between the lit worlds. For them, the events of his childhood had not yet occurred.

  "Turnover in five seconds," said the marine flying the cart.

  "Hang on," said Rue. "No, like this." She drew his hand to a ring he hadn't known was there. "And watch the stars— it'll keep you from throwing up."

  There was a stomach-lurching moment as the cart flipped over; watching the stars turn seemed to work, though, since that way Michael knew the feeling was real and not the phantom-falling sensation that he always had when weightless. "Deceleration in five," said the marine.

  "There it is," said Rue. Her silhouetted arm pointed almost straight down. "Lake Flaccid."

  Somebody had a floodlight and was roving it over the structure; there was no way to tell where the light was coming from, of course, since there was no air here to show a beam. Michael could see a disembodied oval of illuminated metal, which zipped to and fro dizzyingly, sometimes sliding off the giant sphere and disappearing completely. The first time that happened, he thought the light had been switched off, the effect was so total. It didn't help that the habitat rotated, so the vision of metal sliding through the spotlight made it seem as though the beam itself was moving, even when it wasn't.