Permanence

1

RUE PAUSED JUST long enough to catch her breath. She had reached the outer station now, far from her bedroom and was breathing hard enough to use up a day's ration of oxygen. Add that to my bill, she thought sourly.

Jentry and the others couldn't be far behind. She had been unbelievably stupid, she knew; but this time Jentry had gone too far. She reached up and absently stroked the small stone disk that hung on a thong around her neck. Jentry could insult her; he could restrict her access to vital parts of the station; he could poison the minds of the workers against her. But to steal her birthright— no, if she had to do it again, she would still have gone to steal it back. Maybe more carefully, though…

Her uneven breath frosted in the dim weightless air. The outer shells of the spherical station were a maze of corridors and cells, relying on what little warmth trickled out of the Core for energy. This corridor was one of the rarely used ringways— a long hexagonal tunnel outside the Earth-G centrifuge, intermittently lit and lined with filmy shipfur. As she rapelled from handhold to frosted handhold she looked for signs. In the Core, especially the centrifuge, everything was labelled: Mom's poor substitute for the baroque carving that covered every surface of more wealthy stations. Out here, the only markings were the ones Rue had made for herself over the years, during the hours and days she spent hiding out from Father and Jentry and the others.

There— she spied interlinked triangles scratched near a bulkhead door. They glittered faintly with hoarfrost and for the first time she shivered. Rue knew that the temperature beyond that door was little more than 250 degrees Kelvin. She had come this way many times partly because she knew the others wouldn't venture down here. The halls beyond that bulkhead were unusually cold for this level and unless you knew to dress for it in advance, the cold would ward you away. She'd used that fact to her advantage many times.

The only problem was, she wasn't dressed for it herself tonight. She wore only the light thermals she had donned in her bedroom.

"There she is!" Despite her years and independence, Jentry's voice still had the power to freeze Rue. A flashlight beam jiggled crazily over the frost on the walls and blinded Rue for a second. She shook herself and spun away, groping for the handle of the bulkhead door.

"Come back here, you little leech!" Jentry had called her that for so long that the insult had lost its force years ago.

"Suck vacc!" she shot back.

Her knuckles rapped the door handle and she grabbed it. The cold hit her palm like fire, but she ignored it as she yanked on the door. It groaned open and the puff of air that emerged made her gasp. She let go of the handle, leaving skin behind and dove into the dark opening.

Talking back to her half-brother was the quickest way to a beating, but this time Rue had worse things to worry about. Mom was dead three weeks now; the last roadblock in Jentry's plan to sell Rue was removed. She knew a cometary cycler would be passing the station in two weeks time and Jentry had sneeringly told her that there was a man on it who needed laborers for his station. Allemagne's tiny ecology couldn't support Rue, he'd said. She just wasn't productive enough. She would have to go— one way or another.

There was no time to shut the bulkhead door behind her. Rue dove shuddering into the cold. Her thin shipfur jacket was no protection at all here. She clamped her mouth firmly shut and breathed through her nose, feeling a ring of fire around her nostrils every time she did so. A single full-mouthed intake of air could freeze your lungs here; she had to be careful. And she avoided touching the snow-covered walls with her skin, using taps of her boots to keep herself moving forward.

"She's crazy! Rue, get back here! You'll freeze your sorry little ass down there." Shadows from Jentry's head moving in the doorway loped ahead of her. He wasn't dressed for this part of the station either— her only advantage at this point.

"Rue, come back here this minute or I'll send the miners after you." He'd adopted Father's tone of authority of late and seemed to relish using it on Rue. She snarled but didn't succumb to the temptation to talk. The skin of her face and hands felt tight from the cold; the air here was perfectly dry and she'd start to dehydrate soon. Scraping snow off the walls would not satisfy that thirst; the finer whisks of that frost were made of carbon dioxide, not water.

At least her frost-burned hand no longer hurt. She came to the end of the long corridor, where another ringway started. The walls here were nearly cold enough to liquefy nitrogen. To breathe was to drink fire; she held a hand over her face so that the weak heat of her fingers would help warm the air. She probably had less then a minute to live if she didn't find what she was after.

Years ago, there had been an accident on a visiting rendezvous shuttle. It had slammed into the half-mined comet that loomed next to Allemagne and bits of hull and debris had flown everywhere. Jentry and the other favored lads had spent the better part of six months rounding up all the flotsam that had drifted away into interstellar blackness. Rue, who was never allowed outside, had instead used some miner robots— probably the same ones Jentry was about to send after her— to patrol the outer hull of the station looking for breaches.

She had found one— a hole punched by a section of the ship's hull. In the zigzagging lamp light of her miner's headlight, she had beheld a rough triangle of wall, torn and peeled along the edges, wedged into a gap of broken fullerene spars. Clouds of shipfur floated everywhere. In the very center of the triangle was an airlock door.

Before she reported her find, Rue had pried open that door, to find an almost intact cylindrical airlock beyond it. Its lockers were filled with treasures.

Now she raced down the leftward arm of the ringway, hands held in her armpits, breathing shallowly while her ears and face went numb from the gentle movement of air past her face. She was shivering uncontrollably now and her back was dangerously close to spasm. Rue tried to calm herself; she had calculated this distance quite carefully when she stashed her discoveries all those five years ago. She should have time.

She bounced herself to a stop over a frost-rimed door. The only illumination here was a single blue tube ten meters down the corridor, but Rue knew where the doorplate was and she used a corner of her jacket to wipe it free of frost. Then she breathed on her thumb to warm it and tapped the plate.

Nothing happened. Rue cursed; she didn't want to hold contact with the thing for more than a split second, or she would freeze to it. She prodded the plate again.

This time it flashed and the door grated open, light blooming from inside. She couldn't breathe and her hands had gone completely numb by the time she maneuvered herself around the icy metal doorjamb. Here, though, was her treasure: a storage room containing three EVA suits, reaction pistols, rolls of fullerene cable, and bundles of shipfur. Also, an addition that she had stolen from Father's stores a week after stashing this stuff: an emergency thermal pack.

She dove for the thermal pack and looped her unresponsive fingers through the big ring on its side. One good pull and it began to throb with warmth, stronger every second.

For a while she just huddled around it, soaking up the warmth. After a minute or two she heard a faint hissing coming from all around her: some of the frost on the walls was evaporating.

Rue had rehearsed her next moves a thousand times in hopeful daydreams. Her fingers were waking up and felt like they had been burned to the bone. Her ears were still numb, but her face was starting to hurt, too. As soon as she could move her fingers enough, she pressed the thermal pack against one of the EVA suits, then grabbed the warmed fabric and pulled it free of its hook. She worked in stages, putting the thermal pack against each item before she touched it: diagnostic panel, thermal controls, zips. She started the suit's heat cycle, then began attaching her meager supplies to its belt loops. When it was warm enough inside the suit, she wormed her way into it.

With the suit enfolding her like a second skin, Rue made herself stop and just breathe for a while. She had done it! From here things got easier. She popped open the door to the ringway and exited it hand over hand. The suit had been perfectly preserved in the cold and worked like new.

She pitched the nearly spent thermal pack down the corridor. Hopefully Jentry's miners would fixate on its infrared signature and go after it rather than her. The insulation in Rue's suit was efficient enough that her main problem was overheating. Back to the intersection, then past it, and soon she had reached another bulkhead door, beyond which the cold was an order of magnitude more deadly. She rapelled confidently down it and down two more as the outside temperature dropped closer and closer to absolute zero. By the time Rue reached the outside hatch she sought, all air had frozen out of the corridors and the meager heat radiating from her suit made the snow on the walls flash into vapor.

Her skin was all pins and needles; her hands ached and she curled them arthritically. It was a familiar pain. Rue had felt such cold many more times than Jentry, she'd bet. He never had any reason to lurk in the outer rings of the station, after all.

She pried open the outer hatch and for only the third time in her life, stood on the outside of Allemagne station. Starlight didn't illuminate the great black curve of the sphere; there were no running lights. She could see the station only by how it blotted the stars. Much clearer was the comet to which Allemagne was parasitically attached; it formed a bulky scab-colored mountain above the sphere's black horizon.

Rue was on a mission, but the temptation was too strong to look up. She thought only to glance at the stars to orient herself, but ended up gaping. They were brilliant points here, hard as diamond and so distinct as to be three dimensional— ranks and sheets of stars behind stars, clouds and swirls like the frozen breath of the unimaginably titanic All.

All her life, Rue had seen the stars on screens and twice in glimpses as she stood on the hull of Allemagne. They were the homes of wonders, those stars, and tonight she was finally on her way to visit them.

It took a while to psych herself up, but finally she kicked off from the hull. Long ago, when they were friends, Jentry had shown her how to maneuver using a reaction pistol and she blessed that memory now as she fired hers to wobble in a long loop around the station. After a few minutes the dark rectangle of the docks came into view. Long gantries jutted out into space and here the station's ships and shuttles were silhouetted against the stars. She picked out the largest of those black forms and jetted toward it.

Any second now miners would come out of the dark at her, claws out, carapaces shielding the nested purple curves of the camera eyes through which Jentry would be watching. She would fail and be dragged back— or he would just kill her on the spot. It didn't matter. She had made her bid and, for Rue, that was the first and last unshakable fact that declared who she was.

She grinned tightly when she found herself touching the hull of the cycler shuttle— safe and unsuspected. Maybe the miners were still rattling around in the ringways, thwarted. She would pretend they were, anyway, until rude reality stopped her.

The miners didn't arrive in time to stop her from locating the airlock to the cycler shuttle. They didn't reach to stop her from turning the emergency handle and nothing was waiting for her in the red-lit airlock that opened for her.

Rue entered the ship with a sense almost of disappointment; certainly of anticlimax. She had been afraid of Father and Jentry all her life; nothing that she'd done in defiance of them had ever gone unpunished, except for the tiny actions, like making her own safe refuges in the outer ringways, that were symbolic to her and utterly unimportant to the world at large.

She undogged the suit's helmet and said, "Ship, awake."

Light bloomed around her, inside a ship that was as much hers as Jentry's (according to the inheritance) but where she had been only a few times in her life. She quickly stripped off her gloves and reached to touch a tapestry on the wall. The walls and floors were done in complex, quilted fabrics in dark earth tones and crimson, lit by unobtrusive spotlamps. This airlock opened near the galley, which glowed with suspended holos; a central well with a ladder led up and down to sleeping quarters and games rooms. There was no control room; everything was voice and inscape-controlled. The shuttle was designed to keep its occupants comfortable— and amused— for the weeks that it might take to rendezvous with a passing cycler.

It was the most luxurious place Rue had ever been. No wonder Jentry had forbidden her to visit it. She remembered there were fish tanks and a tiny arboretum with green plants in it. There were lots of places she had never been, as well. She wanted to explore right now, but first she had to finish her escape. She dove down the central well of the ship.

As she entered the main cargo hold she shouted, "Ship, cast off. Set a course to rendezvous with the next cycler."

"Nice try, Sis."

She caught herself on a cargo net and looked around. Jentry hung in the open airlock that connected to the docking tube. "I thought you might try something like this," he said. "So while you were pulling maneuvers in deep space, I sailed up here. After all, the others could find you if you went anywhere else. This was your only option— too bad you're so predictable." He grinned insolently and launched himself at her.

Jentry had hit her so many times that Rue's instinct was to raise her hands when he came for her. This time, though, she found one of her gloves still held the reaction pistol.

The look on his face when he saw it was priceless; Jentry was in midflight and couldn't stop himself or turn away. She levelled the pistol and shot him in the face.

He vanished behind a puff of white vapor; the pistol kicked back, nearly tangling Rue in the cargo net. Jentry shrieked, limbs flailing as he tumbled past her and hit the wall.

His face red and blistered, Jentry groaned as he drifted back into the center of the hold. For a second Rue felt a deep pang of remorse, because she had never wanted to hate Jentry. He had driven her to it.

"I'm sorry, Jentry," she said and she meant it. She jumped, rolled in midair and planted her feet in his midriff. Kicking off, she ended up back at the cargo net while Jentry sailed precisely through the middle of the airlock door. She watched him recede down the docking tube for a moment, then dove to the doorway and pressed the close button.

"Ship! Cast off!"

"I recognize you, Meadow-Rue Rosebud Cassels," said the ship in its liquid voice. "Jentry Terrence Cassels has issued an order that I should remain in port."

Rue felt a shock run through her, like the premonition of a blow. "I have authority over you. Mom gave you to both of us."

"Yes, Meadow-Rue."

"So… what's it to be?"

"According to law, when equal ownership applies to a ship, authority is held first by the one who is physically aboard the ship. Your order takes precedence over his."

"Then go! Go, damn you!"

Then suddenly she was moving, drifting toward the floor— no, the floor was drifting up as the ship left dock. She alighted on the soft surface and gradually over the next few minutes her weight increased to full.

It took Rue a full hour to convince herself she was really on her way. When she finally believed it, she curled up in a corner and cried. Then she slept and didn't wake for almost a full day.

BEFORE CREEPING INTO Jentry's quarters to retrieve her heirloom, Rue had visited the few places in Allemagne that had meant something to her. She needed to say good-bye, but with Mom gone there were no people she wanted to say it to. But all her memories were here— her whole past— so she went to the gardens and sat for a while sniffing under the coal-black leaves of her favorite air tree. It was very bright here— as bright, Grandma had told her once, as a full-moon night on Earth. The black trees and black grasses were much more efficient light-gatherers than the green wildflowers Mom kept in her blinding hot terrarium. As a child Rue had lain back in the grass, feeling the faint heat of the ceiling lamps a dozen meters overhead, seeing a slight glow through her eyelids. She imagined she was on Earth or some exotic alien planet in High Space, baking in sunlight.

The gardens took up nearly a third of Allemagne's two hundred meter centrifuge; the rest of the circle was taken up with fish tanks and other recycling equipment and sleeping quarters for the hundred or so residents and transient workers who struggled to keep Allemagne livable. They were roughnecks— rejects of the cometary halo worlds, criminals, misfits, and failed profiteers. These men were Rue's «uncles» as she was growing up and a few had been kind. The rest had trained her to a caution and cunning that ran as deep as her marrow.

From the gardens she had gone to the observatory. Things here were shut down. Father had declared last year that every mineable object within half a light-year had been spotted and claimed, mostly by other stations with better telescopes. No scrap of ice bigger than a fist had escaped the prospectors' attention. Hence there was no reason to look outside anymore.

The observatory enchanted Rue, as it had when she first discovered the place. Although it was deep inside the station, outside the centrifuge and near the fusion generator at Core, a mirrored screen twenty meters across brought in the glow of the stars via light pipes. Rue loved to hang weightless in the center of the observatory, with her entire field of vision taken up by sky. The Milky Way was a ghostly band that twisted diagonally across the black. Everywhere were stars. She knew many of them by name. She could order the computer to rotate the view and look anywhere and by the time she was twelve Rue had learned to orient herself by merely glancing at those stars. Quite an accomplishment, she thought, since at that age she had never been outside the station.

After visiting the observatory she had rapelled her way to the newsroom. Information feeds too complex for inscape were presented here. Mom had shown Rue programs from many halo worlds in this place and even broadcasts from Earth. The big octagonal chamber flickered with multicolored holos, even now with no one present to see them.

Here she had learned to dream of faraway worlds, aliens and exotic men from High Space. When Jentry began to turn bad, she'd started coming here to launch herself into a universe of adventures and romance where he could never follow.

These rooms had been Rue's refuges. Jentry and the other station rats never visited them, preferring the telepresence locker where they operated mining robots and had them race or fight in off hours.

Finally she admitted to herself that she was procrastinating. It was a short run to the docks, there to steal a rendezvous shuttle and escape. Before she could go there, though, she had to rescue her heirloom.

She went back to the centrifuge and dawdled outside Jentry's apartment for a while. There was no traffic in the halls this late at night, nor any sound coming from inside his rooms. He always locked the door at night, but one of the first skills Rue had taught herself in idle hours was lock-picking. She had a small pad of shipfur on which she'd reproduced his thumbprint and after taking a deep breath she pressed this against the door plate and waited. The door slid aside without trouble.

Jentry's main room was dark; next to it were the head, his bedroom, and the kitchenette, all luxurious compared with her own single room with fold-down toilet. In theory Rue had never been here and would have no idea of the place's layout; in fact she had visited these rooms many times while Jentry was busy playing telepresence games or pursuing any women unfortunate enough to be visiting.

She walked quickly, sweeping her toes ahead of her to scan for unexpected obstacles. Here was the couch and here the dining table. Make a left turn, take four steps, reach out carefully… she felt the cool smoothness of the small display case where Jentry kept her inheritance. A pulse of anger burned in her as she pictured him impudently displaying what Grandma and Mom had declared to all was hers.

Lifting the glass cover off with both hands, she flipped it onto the palm of her left hand and lowered her right to the surface of the dais. The cool siltstone disk of the pendant was right where it should be. She scooped it up and turned back to the door in one motion.

"Whooz' ere?" — Jentry's voice, thick with sleep and in all likelihood drugs. Rue started involuntarily at the sound and dropped the glass cover.

It shattered. She cursed and ran to the door. Behind her Jentry swore too and she heard bedding being thrown aside. She was in the hall before he got the light on, but Rue knew he would know who had stolen the pendant. There was only one person in Allemagne who coveted it enough to risk his wrath.

"Come back here, you little beggar!" She made it to the elevator that led out of the centrifuge, but by the time Rue reached the weightless corridors outside Core, Jentry had roused the entire station and locked down the doors to the docks with the command codes he'd inherited from Father.

OF COURSE JENTRY had called: a little inscape diamond was hanging in the air above her when Rue awoke. She ignored it and went to freshen up. Her new quarters were sumptuous and she took full advantage of the water shower and sonic cleaners. She ordered a new fullerene EVA suit from the ship's assemblers and made herself eat a full and complete breakfast before she finally sat down to review his messages.

Never once in all his ranting did he ask her to come back. "You will come back, I'll make you," he said at first. Then, later, "I see you're trying to hook up with a cycler. Well, guess what? I've called them and told them you're a criminal— that you spaced a man here. The instant you board that cycler, you'll be arrested and they'll extradite you right back here. Enjoy your holiday while you can, you little shit. 'Cause the instant you get back you're dead."

She laughed at that— he'd given himself away. There was no way any legal body was going to believe his story over hers, once they reviewed the messages. It was quite possible, though, that his deal with the cycler was more pragmatic. He might just be buying her back from them.

Rue had heard stories— more and more of them in recent years. Anarchy and despair were leaking into the stations, year by year. One couldn't hang around the rough types who filled the labor force at Allemagne without listening to tales of cannibalism, neural-lock slavery and mass suicide from the far fringes of the cometary zone. Some of those stories had given her nightmares when she was younger. Some of them, she had later learned, were true.

Cometary cyclers were supposed to be above petty disputes. They made their slow rounds between places like Allemagne, gossamer magnetic sails turning them ever so gradually to a new heading every time they passed within ten billion kilometers of a station. Light cargo ships accelerated out from the stations, docked at the cycler and disembarked at later stops. The cyclers were supposed to be bastions of stability and civilization in the halos, like their cousins the great interstellar liners.

Well, when a cycler came within hailing distance of a major halo world such as Erythrion they sure acted civilized. But out here, beyond law and sanity, Rue knew they had begun to deal in slavery and vice— whatever their customers desired so long as they made the trades that kept the cyclers supplied.

Rue had been reviewing the messages in the galley, which might well become her favorite place in the shuttle. Now she gripped the table and stared into the starfield she'd called up in inscape. The stars shone in their indifferent millions and floating before them were hundreds of tiny strings of red numbers: all the stations, comets, and ice chunks within half a light year.

She still had plenty of fuel for the shuttle's fusion engine. Normally cyclers were the only practical way to ferry passengers the huge distances between the halo worlds, but that was partly because people tended to save their trips up and take them together. This shuttle had life support enough to keep a hundred people alive for a month. Rue used only a fraction of that and the life support system was designed to be scalable; only a little of it was switched on right now.

"Ship, how long can I stay alive without resupply?" she asked after a while. Her finger strayed from one little address to the next and mentally she put names and faces to some of them— considering, then rejecting each.

"I can keep you alive for two years, Rue," said the ship.

She took a deep breath. "How long would it take us to reach Erythrion?"

The ship's voice showed neither surprise nor concern. "Minimal or maximal-burn?"

"Maxi."

"Four months."

She started. "Is that all? Well, shiz, do it!"

The ship started a stomach-flipping turn. Four months. To someone else, sixteen weeks of solitary confinement might have seemed an awful prospect, but all Rue could think was, Peace and quiet for four months. It was perfect.

Exactly halfway into her journey, Rue received a hail from Erythrion. The shuttle had filed a flight plan unbeknownst to her and now the great halo world was replying. The reply was mostly numbers.

Navigation Fee40 dites

Docking Fees1500 dites/day

Oxy/Food Per Diem10 dites/day

Visitors' Card75 dites

Rue had no money on her at all.

The shuttle was worth a million dites easy, but selling it required both her and Jentry's thumbprint. She supposed she could sell some of its fittings and furniture, but when Rue totalled it all up her assets came to a meager two thousand dites, enough to let her dock for a day at one of Erythrion's colonies, but no more. She would have to set the shuttle on a slow-burn return flight to Allemagne and find work right away.

The prospect was depressing. She would have a few days at most before she was in debt and debt could mean deportation. Maybe Jentry would have the last laugh after all.

Finally, after considering all the angles, she reluctantly brought out her pendant and shone a little crafts light on it. It wasn't much to look at— just a dark gray disk five centimeters across. In the center of the disk was a slightly upraised circle with a rough three-armed spiral in it. She traced the arms of the spiral carefully with her fingertip.

"What's so special about that old rock?" she'd asked when Grandma first showed her the pendant.

"You must never tell anyone," said Grandma. "It's a secret, but this 'old rock' is the most precious thing I own."

"Why?" Jentry had asked belligerently. He had been sitting next to Rue on the floor of Grandma's apartment.

"Because," she had said, dangling the pendant for Rue to see, "this stone is from Earth!"

Rue picked it up and sniffed it. There was no smell, but she imagined she inhaled a few molecules of old Earth. Maybe there were dormant bacteria or spores trapped in the pores of the rock. Dropped on a fallow world, it might seed a whole new biosphere.

"But there's more," Grandma had said. "See this design?" She had held the siltstone so that the trefoil pattern caught the light.

"It's a galaxy," Jentry said. "Isn't it?"

Rue had reached out to trace the shape with her finger, just as she did now. "No it isn't. Is it a fossil?"

"Yes, Meadow, it's a fossil and not just any fossil, but the oldest kind of Earth fossil. This is an Ediacaran and it dates back to the very beginning of life. This is the first thing bigger than a microbe that lived. And it is ours."

"What's a fossil?" Jentry asked, annoyed.

Rue smiled at the memory. It was probably that single display of ignorance on Jentry's part that made Grandma decide to bequeath the pendant to her alone, instead of both of them.

It was all she had left of Grandma or her mom. And if she was going to make a life for herself in Erythrion, she was going to have to sell it.

Rue took a photo of the pendant and then sent a message ahead to inquire what a siltstone fossil from Earth, six hundred million years old, might be worth. She was pretty sure it would be a lot.

She traced her finger over the faint design on the stone. As an adolescent Rue had been sure the pendant held the key to understanding time. There was a mystery to the thing, because caressing it you could feel its age: life had turned to stone here without the intercession of Medusa, just by lying in deathly repose for sufficient aeons. Yet Rue could go outside Allemagne and scoop from their captured comet snowflakes that had formed three billion years before the little fluttering Ediacaran was born.

To have such a snowflake end its unimaginable life span by melting in your hand left no impression; somehow it still seemed younger than the pendant, since for over three billion years nothing whatsoever had happened to it or near it. The stars had changed. That was all.

During the ever-so-more-brief life of the Ediacaran fossil, on the other hand, comets had smashed into the Earth, trilobites and coelecanths had arisen. Mountains thrust up and wore down around the stone cocoon that held the Ediacaran. The planet's continents had collided and subducted numerous times. Dinosaurs had fought above the fossil's resting place; later men had missed it while blowing up cities and overturning mountains in their fight for resources. The Ediacaran had survived all these adventures unscathed, to be finally dug up and shot halfway across the universe. It was still in one piece.

Now that was time.

As Rue was turning the stone over in her hands, becoming increasingly depressed over losing it, the ship pinged to get her attention.

"What? Is it dinner time already?"

"The prospector scopes report an anomaly, Rue," said the ship.

She sat upright, forgetting she was in freefall. The pendant bounced through her fingers and drifted away.

"Show me!" She slammed her hand on the tabletop, bringing up the external view. There were the stars and the hundreds of little addresses; lately Erythrion had appeared among them. One of the little strings was flashing green.

"The prospecting scopes have spotted an object that is not registered with the Claims Bureau," said the ship.

"Is it a ship? A cycler?" For a moment she wondered if Jentry was following her— but that was preposterous. She had Allemagne's only shuttle.

"All ships in halo space are accounted for, and there are no more interstellar cyclers on this ring," said the ship. "This anomaly is not in the database."

"H-how big?"

"We will not know until we get a parallax view of it, Rue, but based on its spectral signature and occultation pattern it may be a kilometer or more in diameter."

"A kil-" She sputtered. There hadn't been a kilometer-sized comet discovered in the halos in half a century. "I'm rich! I don't believe— Wait, wait a sec, are you sure nobody else has staked a claim on this thing?"

"The maximal-burn course you asked me to take has brought us far from any stations. It is quite possible that their scopes have not picked it up, even though they are larger."

And if they're as gob-stupid as Jentry, they've all turned their scopes off to save power, since everybody knows all the ice in the area has already been found.

"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 overturned."

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.

Everything was huge and spaced far apart. A road ran by the building she had just exited and vehicles festooned with garish paintings and carved detail zipped past at reckless speeds. Everywhere there were green plants like the ones in Mom's terrarium only huge. There were many trees, real ones like she'd seen in books.

But the sun… Rue staggered and finally had to sit down. Nobody seemed to care; the only people standing on the steps were a dissolute looking fellow in rumpled clothing, who glanced at her sidelong but said nothing, and a woman in hospital greens who was talking on a ring phone. The light was blazing hot, the sun impossible to look at. The air was full of dust and other irritants; it was hard to breathe. Was this what Earth was like? How could these people stand it? And where was her welcoming party? Where was Leda? Oh yeah, they weren't coming. Rue was poor after all, they had no need of her now.

"Meadow-Rue Cassels?"

She looked up hopefully. A nattily dressed young man wearing a newsvid monocle stood several meters away. He smiled. "It is you, isn't it?"

"Rue. It's just Rue." She watched him step up and stick out his hand. She flinched, remembering Jentry, but when he just stood there, hand out, she realized he wasn't going to hit her. What was he doing, then?

"Help you up?" he said.

"Oh." She took his hand and he drew her to her feet.

"Would you like to comment on your discovery of the first cycler to visit Erythrion in ten years?" His voice had changed subtly; he was in newshound mode now. Suddenly self-conscious, Rue stammered and blushed.

"Don't worry," he said, "this isn't live. We can edit you however you want. If you don't want something to go out, just say, 'off the record. Is that okay?"

"I don't know," she said. "I just—"

"Get away from her, you parasite!"

It was the fellow in the rumpled clothes, who had approached and now waved at the news hound as if he were some kind of irritating insect. He was in his late thirties, had greasy hair and a paunch and dark circles under his eyes. His clothes were rumpled, Rue realized, because he had probably slept in them. "Shoo," he said to the news hound, "there's nothing for you here."

The newshound raised one eyebrow (the one opposite the monocle). "And who are you, sir?"

"Maximilian Cassels," said the rumpled man, drawing himself up to his full meter-and-a-half. "And I'll not have you leeching off my cousin."

"I just want an interview," said the newshound. "Look, all the other guys ran off to the Permanence monastery when they learned your comet's really a cycler. They're all trying to interview the abbot; a new cycler is a much bigger story than a new comet. But… I think there's a human-interest angle here, with her." He turned back to Rue. "I understand you're probably upset and tired right now. Can I leave you my number? You can call me later when you're ready for an interview. And listen, it'll probably be a good idea for you to do one. Get you the sympathy of the public, you know?"

"Well, I—"

"She doesn't need sympathy," growled Maximilian. "She needs her family." He went to take Rue's arm; she stepped away from him.

"What about my family!" she said. She took another two steps back. "They were supposed to meet me. Aunt Leda and the whole clan, she said. Not that I believed it really, but then… who the hell are you?"

The rumpled guy put his hands on his hips and cocked his head. "I really am your cousin," he said. "Leda really is your aunt and she did come to meet you. They all did. I came by myself since none of 'em will have anything to do with me. When the news came down that you'd staked a claim on a cycler, they all threw up their hands and left. No money in you, so why hang around?"

There it was. The humiliating truth. "And you stayed?"

"Damn right," said Maximilian. "You're family."

"Oh. I don't know what to…" Rue was seeing spots. Without warning she found herself on her knees. The sunglasses had flown off her face; blinded, she waved her hands and cried out. Everything was turning around her. She must be feeling Treya's rotation, she thought crazily.

"Hang on," said somebody, "I'm a doctor." She felt a hand on her shoulder. People were arguing over her head. One of them, she realized, was the woman in green who'd been talking on her phone a few minutes ago.

"She's got heatstroke," she said. "Probably lived her whole life in one of the stations. Never been above ten degrees before."

"She stays with me," said her cousin.

"We'll let her decide that," said the doctor. "Right now, the only place she's going is the hospital."

3

THE DOCTOR'S NAME was Rebecca France, though as she admitted, she wasn't quite a doctor. "An intern," she told Rue the next morning when she came to visit. "I was actually practising back on Terisia, but licensing is much stricter here. I had to go back to med school when I emigrated."

Terisia was a deep colony three light-days from Allemagne: Rebecca was from the stations too, which, she explained, was why she had known what was happening to Rue outside the elevator building.

"They're supposed to mail you a package on how to adapt to Treya. I take it you didn't get it."

Rue shrugged. "I missed a lot of important mail."

She had awoken to find herself in a hospital bed, dusk light brighter than Allemagne's gardens at mid-day glowing through heavy drapes. The nurse who came in when she buzzed had shivered. "I can't believe you need it this cold," she'd said.

The nurse, like Rebecca and everyone else here, was deeply tanned. "You'll get like this, too," said Rebecca now as she put her wrist next to Rue's for comparison. "After a year or two. Believe it or not, this is still considered pale by Earth standards." Rebecca had black hair like Rue, but she kept it up in a complex braid. She was slim like Rue as well, but much taller. They shared the wide gray eyes most station people had, but that hardly implied any family resemblance, as there was genetic engineering way back in most people's lines. Where Rue had an oval face that she considered far too fragile-looking, Rebecca had a square jaw and wide cheekbones, implying a different racial origin, though it was hard to tell nowadays.

Rue nodded absently. She thought it was probably gauche of her to ask, but she'd been brooding on a problem since she awoke. "Thanks for helping me out, Rebecca. But… who's paying for my stay here?"

Rebecca looked surprised. "I don't know. I assume they're charging it against your credit. — Except that you're still on a visitor's visa, I guess. I understand you thought you'd come into a lot of money and now it's all gone. Do you have any money?"

Rue shook her head. "No." she said. "But I can work. How soon can I start?"

Rebecca laughed. "You're getting ahead of yourself. First you have to adjust to the heat here. That'll take some time."

Rue opened her mouth to object that she wouldn't have that time if she got deported as a debtor, but decided it was too ugly a discussion to have with someone she'd just met. "Then how do I adjust as quick as possible?"

Rebecca sat back. "Well, there's three ways. First, you can buy a cool suit and go nocturnal. That's the easiest, but the only jobs you can get for that shift are service jobs. Not a good start. Or, you could move to the mountains at Penumbra North. It's much cooler in the alpine biomes; that's what I'd do if I were you."

"What's the third way?"

"Well, that would be to ingest some medical nano that can protect you while your body adjusts. It would fix you up instantly, but the problem is they're expensive."

Rue frowned at the beige ceiling. "The mountains it is, then."

"So, you're planning to settle down here?"

"Yeah. I guess so— I've got nowhere else to go."

Rebecca gnawed on a thumbnail for a while, then said, "Since the coup, they've raised the bar on citizenship requirements. You know, isolationists." She rolled her eyes. "Okay. Here's what you do. You've got to apply for citizenship and to do that you've got to put in your quota of eco-work. It's usually a minimum of planting twenty trees and seeing them through at least two seasons. There's always plenty of eco to do in Treya. Then, you've got to pay off your debt. That means getting a job, which will be hard to do while you're doing eco-work. So, you get something part-time to convince the bureaucrats that you're sincere in paying them back and spend the rest of your time on the eco. Make sense?" Rue nodded. "You'll also need bribe money from time to time," added Rebecca.

The prospect was daunting. "Um, Rebecca… could you help me with that stuff? Just a wee bit?"

The intern laughed. "Sure. Look, I've got to go, but I'll pick up a reader and find pointers to some immigration brochures and maybe stop by later?"

"Yeah!"

Rebecca rose and walked to the door. "Why?" Rue asked impulsively.

"What?"

"Why are you helping me?"

Rebecca made a moue and shrugged. "I'm from the stations too. It's hard here for us outsiders. We have to stick together."

Rue nodded and lay back. She soon slept again.

When she awoke it was to find the newshound sitting in the corner of her room, reading. He wasn't wearing his monocle today. Out of the light of the blinding sun, she could see he wasn't much older than she was, though it was hard to tell since his skin was so dark. He was dressed perfectly, though, in a burgundy suit that must have cost a small fortune. Even his hair was perfect.

He looked up, saw she was awake and said, "Hello again. I'm Blair Genereaux, we met at the elevator yesterday?" His voice was smooth and pleasant, like an announcer's.

Rue nodded guardedly.

He cleared his throat. "We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot somehow," he said. "You see, I didn't know… that you didn't know… about the cycler. I guess it was an awful shock for you."

"Yeah." Despite her natural caution, Rue felt grateful that he should be sensitive enough to notice. Or comment. Not at all like Jentry, this one. "Thanks."

"You'd become something of a cause celebre before you docked," he continued. "I thought it would be fun if I could get an interview, so I came down. The other hounds were all after the smell of money. I wanted to know how it had all affected you. That's why I was still there when you came down."

Rue's caution reasserted itself. Nice story. "But why? I'm just a girl from the stations."

"Well." For the first time he looked uncomfortable. "The fact is, Rue, I'm new at this. I don't have a byline or good representation on the Web. I've been breaking in slowly by doing pieces that… well, frankly, that nobody else bothers with."

Rue laughed.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"I'm relieved, that's all." He stared at her in obvious puzzlement.

"Sorry," said Rue. "Look, the last thing I want is publicity. You scared the crap out of me when you popped up begging for an interview yesterday. You were the first sign other than messages on the screen that this fortune thing was real. And then… I'd just had the fortune taken away before I even got to it. So why should you be interested? I know I'm a nobody without it."

Now it was his turn to grin. "Fame doesn't work that way, Ms. Cassels. There's probably a million people out there today wondering how they would feel if they were in your shoes. Yesterday they were all daydreaming they were you. Now they have a chance to contemplate the twists of fate that fortune brings us, using you as the exemplar. I think they'll want to hear the story and I think both you and I could make some money off it."

Money. There was that…

"I'm not going to say yes," she said at last. "But I'm not saying no either. Can I think about it?"

"Sure. You've got about a day before this becomes stale news." He rose and came over to the bed, extending his hand. She shook it, surprised by the warmth of his skin.

"You're like ice," he said, concerned. "They told me outside that you're doing fine…"

"I am. Thank you, B— Mr. Genereaux. I'll seriously consider your offer."

"Good. I'll call you again tonight."

He left and Rue snuggled back into the covers, thinking about the interview, then thinking about Blair Genereaux's pleasant face and the warmth of his hand.

"ARE YOU PACKED?" These were the first words cousin Max spoke as he strode into her room after dinner that evening. Rue was sitting in a chair by her bed, reading the brochures Rebecca had brought and waiting for Mr. Blair Genereaux to call.

"Packed? Why?"

Max looked like the bouncer at Allemagne's bar had shaken him down for contraband. He was carrying a large plastic-wrapped bundle under his arm. His hair was matted as if he hadn't combed it since he'd slept and the heel of his left shoe flapped open as he paced to the closet.

"It's checkout time, couz," he said. "They say you're fine."

Indeed, the doctor had told her that at lunch time, but Rue had put off thinking about it. "I don't have anywhere to go," she said. "Except back to the ship."

He smiled brightly. "You can stay with me."

"What about the hospital fees?"

"Paid." He shrugged. "It was the least I could do and never let it be said that I didn't do the least I could do. Ha. This yours?" He held out her bag.

"Give me that."

"Put this on," he said, tossing her the package he'd entered with. Rue puzzled over it; it appeared to be clothing, but all wrapped up and folded for some reason.

"It comes like that," he said. "From the store."

"Oh." She fumbled for an opening; there was none. After a moment Max came over and unceremoniously tore the plastic open.

"Oh," she said, "How…" Thoughtful? He seemed to have bought her some spacesuit underwear.

"It's a cool suit," he said. "Top of the line. You'll want to have it on when we go out; it's still about twenty-six out there and muggy."

"Oh." She went to the bathroom to change and there she anxiously examined her own face in the mirror. She looked every bit as worried as she felt. She wanted to tell Max to go away, but she'd never had the power to do that with Jentry and truth be told, she didn't know what control Max might have over her here on Treya. Helplessness was a familiar sensation; she let it guide her hands as she dressed, then emerged to find Max stuffing the last of her things into a bag.

"Ready?" He grinned at her.

She was frightened. Was he abducting her? What did he want?

From somewhere Rue summoned the memory of herself shooting Jentry with the reaction pistol. She was not helpless. She wouldn't let herself be.

Still… she had no where else to go, unless she phoned Rebecca, but she didn't want to impose on her either…

She sighed. "Okay, Max."

"Great! These are yours," he said, handing her a small card and a ring phone. The card had a hologram of her on it and proclaimed her to be a probationary citizen. The phone consisted of two rings, a big one worn on the wrist and a small one, the speaker, which went over her middle finger. "Keep the card close to your skin for the next couple of days; it has to learn your scent. I've put a hundred dites in it for you." Without another word he left the room. She hurried after him.

"Thank you, Max. But how did you get the card?" It was very bright here in the hall so she put on her sunglasses. They still felt weird, like having a tiny clamp around her temples.

"Your aunt Leda had it made up," he said as they entered an elevator packed with serious-looking people. "I stole it from her last night."

Rue tilted down the sunglasses and looked him in the eye. "You really are a Cassels," she said.

He laughed. "Oh, Leda hates me! But she'd never deny me the hospitality of her home."

"Why not?"

"Because she's my mother."

The doors opened and people surged out while Rue was trying to think of something to say. Max hurried her through the lobby and out into roaring heat. The light was a bit more tolerable now. Diffuse, somehow… She looked up and shrieked.

"What! What is it?" Max clamped a hand on her arm and stared hectically around.

"Rainbow! That's a real rainbow!"

He groaned and put a hand over his face. "My cousin, the rube. Come on."

"But Max, I've never seen a rainbow before."

"Yes and now everybody within earshot knows it." He towed her along the roadway toward a large flight of stairs that led into the ground. Rue didn't want to go underground, she was too busy cataloguing all the strange and wonderful objects in the near and far distance: trees, grass, hills, buildings, many of them familiar through inscape or movies, but all wonderful.

"You've got to get a grip," Max grated. "We've got a lot to do and you're going to have to have your head screwed on right for it."

"What are you talking about?"

He let go of her arm. "This is the way to the subway. We need to get you home; all this exposure isn't a good idea. Listen, haven't you been paying attention to the news?"

"No. Should I?"

"Yes! Your cycler is the talk of Treya."

"My cycler?" She allowed the bitterness to show in her voice. "It's not my cycler, Max. And I don't want to hear another thing about it."

"But couz, it's not responding to hails! And it's coming in from a very strange direction; there's no known cycler ring on that radiant."

People were funneling down the stairs into the subway. The press carried Rue and Max along. People were dressed in all kinds of ways, with way more variety than she'd expected from her investigations aboard the shuttle. The walls of the stairwell were festooned with garish screens advertising all manner of wonders; the people behind her were discussing a publishing venture of some kind. Compared to this, Max's news was just a bothersome reminder of things past.

"I do not want to hear any more about the cycler! Is that clear?"

"But until they've got a positive I.D. on the thing, you've got to be circumspect, Rue, don't you understand? That means no going out without an escort for now; you can't look for work yet and most of all, no talking to anybody! Especially the media."

Rue stopped walking, but was immediately pushed by somebody behind her. "What are you talking about?"

"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 citizenship, 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.

Max pumped a fist in the air. "Yes! I am so good." He banged open his door and hopped out. Rue followed reluctantly. This was not the sort of place where one just dropped in; even a bumpkin like her could recognize that.

"Max, whose house is this?"

He was halfway around the pool. Glass doors were sliding open before him. Max turned, scratched his head and said, "Well, whose place do you think it is? It's mine, Rue."

He went in, while she stood there with her kit bag at her feet.

"THERE IS ABSOLUTELY nothing like a good drink at times like this," said Max. He handed her a tumbler with some dark liquor in it.

"Times like this?" Rue could hear a slight tinge of hysteria in her own voice, but there was nothing she could do about it. "You've had other days like this, then?" She stood in a living room of such opulence that she was sure the characters of her favorite star serial would emerge from the corridors at any second. The carpet was a self-cleaning bio-mimic, the walls held paintings on real canvas and there was even a little fountain in the corner. At the same time, there was no possible way Max could have been lying about owning the place, because every surface was covered with gaming scrip, empty bottles, dirty laundry, and ragged balls of plastic packaging. One of the paintings was askew and some sort of primitivist electronic device, with vacuum tubes and knobs, was upended in the fountain.

"You'll be safe here," declared Max as he turned and let himself collapse onto a sock-festooned couch. "Drink up."

Rue took a sip, then a stiff shot of the scotch, which tasted like soil and smoke. She kicked a shoe off the armchair opposite the couch and sat down, back straight.

"Oh, I've had days like this," said Max. "The first was when I was sixteen and I won the Treya lottery. Didn't that newshound friend of yours tell you? I won twenty-seven million dites. It tore my life apart. Mother would have taken it all, you know… The second time was when I won my first Penrose Go tournament. I'm the world champion. Shit, I just started playing because I was bored." He threw an arm across his face, seemingly intent on sleeping here with one foot on the couch and one on the floor.

Overwhelmed, she just sat and drank until the scotch was all gone and she felt ten kilos lighter. Max began to snore.

"What do I do?" she blurted.

"Wha?" Max blinked and sat up. "You get a good night's sleep, that's what. Tomorrow we have to face the wolves."

"What do you mean? I'm a billionaire now, aren't I? Doesn't that give me… anything?"

Max scowled. "Not really. You see, according to the laws of the Cycler Compact, you own the salvage rights to this starship— provided you can take possession of the cycler."

She remembered now— there had been all kinds of legal stuff when that shuttle collided with Allemagne. Rue had been more focused on what she could get out of it herself, but her brother had talked about the salvage rights. "You normally establish your salvage on a wreck by going out to get it," Jentry had gloated. "But this time it came to us!"

"But—" She got up unsteadily and headed for the bar. "That's crazy. I can't claim salvage unless I fly out to the thing."

To her dismay Max nodded. "You've got to physically visit the wreck to establish your claim. If you don't within a reasonable amount of time, it'll go to whoever gets there first. And that is why you are in trouble. The cycler's going to be beyond our reach in a matter of days or weeks. Anything that's done has to be done now.

"It gets worse, too. Think of it— this is a cycler! A cycler! We haven't seen one in… what? Twenty years? If it really is a ghost ship, its value is incalculable. Since the lit worlds abandoned us, the Compact is in trouble anyway; but as long as the remaining cyclers are loyal, it controls travel between the halo worlds. A cycler in the control of the Treya government means they could challenge the Compact itself. In other words, this cycler is valuable enough to kill for.

"Since you're completely impoverished, there's two possibilities: either somebody funds an expedition for you— and uses you as a powerless figurehead— or they block you from going somehow, leave you scrabbling in the muck— or dead— and go out there themselves. Which is by far the better option from almost anybody's point of view. That's why they were converging on you earlier— the wolves smell blood and it's more likely to be yours than anybody's.

"So drink up. Tomorrow's going to be a mess."

Rue had uncorked a bottle of sherry, hoping it would taste better than the scotch. She resealed it and put her glass down. "This somebody who's going to fund the expedition," she said. "Would that happen to be you?"

Max scratched under his chin. "Maybe."

"So I'd be your 'powerless figurehead, then?"

"Oh, look around you, Rue. I have money. I don't do anything with it. Why should I want more? Truth is, I've never found much worth taking it out of the bank for."

"Then why help me?"

Max didn't answer for a long time; he just sat on the couch like a broken doll, staring straight ahead. Finally he said, "Mother has started a court case against me. She claims I was still a minor when I won my money. It's not strictly true, but true enough… This time she's got the best lawyers and… I don't think I can win. You see, Rue, I expect I'm going to lose all of this to her and sooner rather than later. So it's a case of using it while I've got it.

"And frankly, I can't think of a better way to thwart Mother than by making you rich beyond your wildest dreams."

RUE HAD STAGGERED off to sleep shortly after Max made his proposal. She lay in bed for a while thinking about what was involved in catching a ghost cycler and concluded that the whole thing was impossible. First, the starship was retreating almost as fast as light itself and for all they knew it was just a tangle of dead radioactive metal— except for the plow sail, which was an electromagnetic ramjet and presumably too hot to get near anyway.

Whatever expedition was able to catch up with the thing would need to bring it under control and turn it. She wasn't too clear on how starships turned, but knew it was a gradual thing. It might be thirty years before they «cycled» back to Erythrion. She'd have to be crazy to throw away the best part of her life sitting in a cold metal can in the middle of nowhere; that was the existence she'd just come from, after all.

No, it would never happen. Consoled by this thought, Rue found sleep came easily at last.

Morning was different. She awoke to find Max already up and bustling about. He wore the same clothes as last night and hadn't showered, but otherwise he was being frighteningly efficient.

"I've verified that there's an emergency shipbuilding order been put through by the Treya Provisional Government," he said as Rue came into the kitchen, knuckling her eyes. "They've applied to the Order for power to accelerate a cargo to point eight-five light-speed. Seems they're acting already."

"Oh," said Rue as she peered into the fridge. "I guess that settles it, then. They got to the Compact first."

"Doesn't work that way. Your claim has priority. If you apply to the Order for beam power, you'll get it."

"How much would that cost?" she asked as she reached for some fruit juice.

"Four million dites, I reckon."

Rue nearly dropped the juice container. "Four million! You can't be serious!"

Max looked insulted. "I'm good for it. Besides, you're going to pay me back."

"No. No, Max, this is crazy. I just got here, I'm not going back to deep space and exile myself for half my life just to get rich. If that cycler can't sustain life anymore it would be suicide to go there anyway! Let's just drop it."

"Admittedly we need to send a bigger than usual cargo," said Max. "Life support for several years, tools, repair equipment… But it's still doable. And what's this about exiling yourself for half your life? Look, the cycler's going to pass Chandaka in two years— that's one year cycler time. All we have to do is alter the cycler's course to bring it back past Erythrion, then climb back in our cargo magsail and coast to Chandaka. Then we're in FTL space. A holiday among the lit worlds, just think about it! You'll have enough credit at that point to afford an FTL ship to come back here. So you could be home and rich in two years, Rue!"

"Oh." She hadn't considered such an option. "And if I can't change its course?"

"Well, shucks, then we're just stuck in FTL space, on a Rights Economy world. We'll get by."

"You said 'we. Are you coming on this… hypothetical expedition?"

For the first time since she had met him, her cousin looked completely serious. "I wouldn't send you into something I'd be afraid to do myself," said Max.

"Think of it this way," he went on. "I'm proposing we visit the stars. That's a once in a lifetime offer, Rue, you're not going to get it again. We'll just happen to be riding alongside, or maybe in, a cycler we've found."

"When you put it that way…" Of course she had dreamed of visiting FTL space all her life, like anybody else. A realm where people could travel freely between the stars at unbelievable speeds, leaving the crawling cyclers of the halos behind… You could see a hundred different worlds in your life, even visit Earth. It was an unreachable fantasy for almost anyone in the halo; and the Rights Economy was nominally the enemy— it had abandoned the halo worlds, because travelling to them was so expensive. Still, the allure was intoxicating. Rue had never expected to be able to go anywhere except Erythrion, unless she emigrated to another of the orphan planets drifting in interstellar space between Erythrion and Chandaka.

She still didn't really believe what Max was saying; maybe because of this, she said, "Okay. Why not? Let's go to Chandaka."

"That's my girl!"

She held up a finger. "One condition. The cycler is mine." She pointed the finger at herself. "My cycler. Mine mine mine. And my expedition. I'm the captain."

"Fine by me. I'm not the leader type."

"Okay." She was being reckless; it felt good. "Shake?"

Solemnly, Max held out his hand. "Shake."

" F IRST THING I guess we do is apply for the beam power, right?"

"No. Rue, that would tip our hand. Hopefully they don't know where you are right now and I don't want to let them in on it until the last minute. We do all the other essentials before they know you're even in the game. Then we pop it on them."

Rue watched as Max transfered an unbelievable amount of money into the accounts of a dormant, numbered company he'd created years before. With a casual shrug he erased the debt Rue had accumulated for docking her shuttle and sent an offer to Jentry to buy the shuttle. Jentry would jump at it, Rue knew; the offer was absurdly high. Max's logic was that they would do best with a proven shuttle, rather than something right off the shipyard. After all, there would be no shakedown cruise for this expedition.

This activity took most of a day; Rue might have thought it a sufficiently huge accomplishment for that amount of time, but Max had compiled a long list of things to do. By the time Jentry accepted the offer it was after six in the evening, but Max had already hired a crew to gut the shuttle and refit it for interstellar service. "Double pay if you get it done in forty-eight hours," he barked into his phone. "Rue, we need schematics and repair histories for all the major cycler designs. Download 'em out of inscape, could you? Also, we need to know how to turn a cycler if it's unpowered. If we have to separate the cycler from the plow sail, so be it. A smaller cycler is still a cycler."

The Allemagne shuttle wasn't designed for interstellar use, but as a deep-range craft it was the next best thing. Interstellar shuttles were built as lightweight as possible, so much of what they had to do was strip mass out of Rue's, while beefing up the life support system. Among other things, this meant removing the engines and most of the fuel tanks and installing a plasma sail loop. All they would have left were some small maneuvering rockets. They would be at the mercy of the Cycler Order's particle beam launch and capture system for acceleration and braking. This was normal for interstellar travel, because a little shuttle like Rue's could never accelerate to eighty percent light-speed on its own, no matter how much fuel it carried.

Max spent a great deal of money keeping mouths shut at the shipyard; he seemed quite adept at this sort of thing. When Rue asked him about it, he looked pensive for a while, then said, "I used to trust people. Implicitly. It's still a hard habit for me to break. But I learned to cultivate suspicion, after I got money." He didn't elaborate.

Rue understood somewhat, because Max's mother Leda had started nosing around, being quite solicitous and friendly toward Max. Rue kept out of sight during those visits.

Lying in Max's guestroom, she stared at the ceiling and daydreamed about cyclers.

R EBECCA OPENED HER door and blinked in surprise. She was dressed in a housecoat and her hair was frazzled.

"Aren't you going to invite me in?" teased Rue.

Rebecca laughed and embraced her. "Come in, come in, I'm just so surprised, you dropped out of sight and the rumors!" Rebecca closed her apartment door and leaned on it. "Do you think you were followed?"

They both laughed. "Probably," Rue said. "But it doesn't matter. I'm leaving in a couple of days."

"So it's true. You're going after the cycler."

She nodded. "What about you? How's the job hunt going?"

Rebecca grimaced. "Not great. But I'll survive. Tea?"

"Sure."

They sat for a while and got caught up. Rue spun stories of her time as a tree planter and others about Max. "Ah, I thought he might be your anonymous benefactor!" Rebecca exclaimed when Rue told where she had been staying.

"So we're not committed to staying with the cycler for its whole cycle," Rue finished. "All we have to do is set its course and then disembark at Chandaka. If we can prove the cycler's following our course, we're rich. We should be able to afford to fly directly back here. Max thinks we could be back in two years!"

"Incredible. Oh! The tea!" Rebecca jumped up to get it. "I'm insanely envious," she said from the kitchen.

This was the opening Rue had been waiting for. "You don't need to be, you know," she said as distinctly as she could.

Silence— then Rebecca poked her head out. "What?"

"I said you don't need to be envious. I didn't come here to say good-bye, Rebecca."

Tea forgotten, Rebecca came and stood over her. "Don't be coy, Rue. I hate that. What are you saying?"

She smiled. "We're going to need a doctor. What if one of us gets sick a year from Chandaka? I also need somebody I can trust. I want to get to Chandaka alive, Rebecca, not die conveniently so that somebody else can take the claim. If I'm going to do this at all, I have to have a doctor. And you're the doctor I want."

"But… I don't have my license yet! It wouldn't be legal for me to practice—"

Rue waved a hand negligently. "I'm prepared to fund you getting your license at Chandaka. Do you think they'd refuse you a position here if you had that?"

Rebecca sat down, hands clenched in her lap. So this is what power feels like, Rue thought as she watched the flight of emotions across the other woman's face. It was delicious.

"Hey, you know this makes sense," she continued. "You grew up in the stations, you'd make a far better cycler crewman than any of these pudgy Treya types. You won't be afraid of the emptiness or the cold. I need that. And I need a friend."

Rebecca looked down. "You don't know what you're asking."

"I think I do. Will you come with me to Chandaka? I've thought about this a lot and I want you to come."

When Rebecca looked up her eyes were shining. "Well, yes, Rue. I'll do it."

" I THINK WE'VE covered our tracks pretty well," said Max as he banked the aircar in the direction of Penumbra West. "There's nothing we've bought in the last few days that wouldn't be normal for a comet-mining company that's come into town to restock. It's not like you need anything special to rendezvous with a cycler."

"Except the G-beds," Rue pointed out absently. She was watching the ground go by; it wasn't frightening, just bewilderingly detailed; she knew she would never get used to the sight.

He shrugged. "By this time tomorrow everybody's going to know."

The visible wall of shadow that was the Penumbra reared up ahead of them like a translucent cliff. Bright clouds drifted into it and turned gray, then black as they merged with the eternal night beyond. Far away in that night was the monastery of Permanence. Such monasteries could be found on every halo world; they were owned by the great religious order who controlled the launch and return mechanisms for the interstellar cyclers.

The western Penumbral lands weren't mountainous like the north. Way down below, where shadow met rolling fields, Rue could make out wide bands of alternating light and darkness. "What're those?"

"Interference pattern. You probably didn't notice it when you were standing under them; they're pretty wide. But they shift back and forth during the day."

She nodded. That explained why the light had brightened and faded in ripples as she'd walked the hillsides doing her tree planting.

"You want to see closer up?" Max put the aircar into a dizzying dive. He followed a strip of highway as it exited the green splendor of sunlight. In the shadowlands, houses still dotted the sides of the road, but they became fewer and fewer as the interference bands became sparser and fainter.

"The strange thing is," said Max, "that the houses start up again about fifty kilometers along. Not too many, mind you, but they're there. They belong to people like you who're sensitive to the light and heat. Some people just prefer the aurora light."

The last dim band fell behind and they entered a land of permanent night. Here, in the deep twilight, someone had built a glittering glass-and-wood house on the top of an escarpment. White fungus grass grew long in the yard and no vehicles sat on the overgrown landing pad out front. It gave Rue a funny feeling to realize she was seeing a real abandoned building. Historically, the only abandoned structures in the halo were in colonies that had failed. Treya was such a vibrant, exciting place— was it possible that the seeds of collapse had been sown here?

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.

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 hands 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."

Rue opened her eyes a squint. They stood at one end of a long corridor that stretched away, apparently to infinity. Chandra grinned at her; Rue was amazed at what she saw. If not for the catsuit and the pistol, Corinna Chandra might have been anybody's aunt or older friend. She had iron-gray hair, and the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth suggested she was in her late forties. She looked like she would have been at home in a library— certainly not in a gunfight.

"Come," she said, gesturing down the tunnel. "These utility ways don't go all the way to the keep. We'll have to rendezvous with our team and get up there before the soldiers find out we've taken this way." She started to jog away down the tunnel.

The lights overhead flickered; a cloud of dust suddenly appeared far away down the long tunnel and moments later a loud bang! left Rue's ears ringing. Then the lights went out completely.

Another series of loud reports made Rue crouch with her hands over her ears. Then bright lights reached through swirling dust and pinioned her and the others.

"Hands up!" shouted a man from somewhere behind those lights. Rue saw Chandra reluctantly drop her pistol and raise her hands.

THEY WERE MARCHED back into the courtyard, where at least a dozen men dressed as soldiers waited. Rue, Max, and Corinna Chandra were ordered to kneel, their hands clasped behind their heads. The whole scene seemed a bit unreal to Rue; it was like something out of a movie.

The leader of the squad walked up and inspected each of them in turn. Satisfied, he nodded to his men. "It's them. Let's make this quick and get out of here." He stepped aside and the men raised their weapons.

"Remember, this is live!" said a strangely familiar voice from somewhere overhead. The soldiers reacted to the words as though they'd been shocked, jumping back and raising their lights and weapons.

Rue craned her neck to look up and behind her. Perched on the wall of the courtyard, monocle gleaming in his eye, was Blair Genereaux. Beside him on the wall sat a powerful looking portable inscape transmitter. Its indicators glowed warmly.

"Yes, folks, it's a real paramilitary execution and it's happening live and on the inscape net!" continued the newshound, seemingly unperturbed at all the guns aimed in his direction. "If you're really lucky, you'll get to see this reporter killed as well. But before this happens, let's shed a little light on the killers. Let me open up our recently declassified military personnel database…"

Rue glanced back down in time to see the blood drain from the squad leader's face. Then the man cleared his throat, turned to his men and said in a stilted voice, "These are not the criminals we are after." A moment later he was fast-walking out of the courtyard. His men stared after him for a moment, then followed in confused haste.

Blair hopped down off the wall and brushed dust off his pant leg. He grinned as Rue ran over to hug him.

"Well, folks, seems there's no story here after all," he continued in his announcer's voice. "But stay tuned to the visual feed, just in case.

"Hi," he said in a more normal tone. "Glad I found you guys."

"But how?" asked Max.

"It wasn't hard, actually. I've been camped out in the monastery for days now. I figured you'd have to come here eventually, so I'd wait and interview you when you arrived." He grinned. "When the alarms went off and a bunch of people dressed in black started running out the gates… well, let's just say I came to a logical conclusion and followed some of them."

"Well, good for you!" She kissed him on the cheek. Blair's smile grew even broader.

"I can't believe they just left," said Corinna Chandra, staring after the departing troops.

Blair laughed. "Power of the press. The provisional government couldn't get away with overt murder. These guys know they'd have been the patsies if they'd gone through with it and it got onto the net."

"Come on," said Max. "Let's get to the monastery before those goons come back." They left the courtyard and began marching up the road to the distant, open doors of the giant building.

Blair matched his pace to Rue's. "So, you'll give me another interview before you leave?"

Rue laughed. "I'll do better than that! How would you like to be the official chronicler of the adventure?"

"You mean…"

"I mean crew! I mean come with us. We haven't got all our crew together. You too, Ms. Chandra."

Blair looked stunned. "I… I yes, that would be… Rue, this story would make my career."

Corinna Chandra appeared to be thinking. Finally she smiled. "I would be honored," she said.

"Then it's settled."

Blair had seemed calm staring down the barrels of a dozen guns. Now he looked dazed. "Blair Genereaux, author of The Chronicles of—" He frowned. "Chronicles of what?"

"Huh?"

"Rue, haven't you even named your cycler?"

Rue pretended to think about it, but a name for the cycler had popped unbidden into her head the instant Blair asked and she knew it was right. "You want a name? How 'bout Jentry's Envy?"

Max laughed. "If you want. You're the captain."

Yes, I am, Rue thought and then she had to stop and sit down for a while.

6

RUE KNEW ALL about cyclers.

She had read cycler romances, watched movies about cycler captains, participated in sims about them ever since she could remember. They were a matter of practical fact in her life. They were also unbelievably romantic.

In sims, she had walked the decks of interstellar cyclers that were more like grand hotels, some even modelled on old Earth styles, with sweeping staircases and statues in niches and stained-glass windows that looked out on Mother Night. Only the richest, most important, or most talented could afford to travel between the stars: delegations of diplomats, eccentric billionaires, mad scientists, and artists from many different worlds were thrown together here and asked to get along for months or years at a time. Naturally, there was intrigue.

How you got to and from cyclers was itself a study in legend. So when Rue awoke on her last morning on Treya, grabbed her carefully packed bag and dumped it in the back of Max's aircar, she had all kinds of embarkation stories in mind. You rode particle beams or microwaves, or used a pion drive to rendezvous with passing cyclers; that was the trite truth. But there were thousands of gripping tales of how that rendezvous might be accomplished. One that was on her mind as she waved away the column of midges flittering above Max's car and watched him lock up his house, was a movie where some bad guys inserted their magsail into the beam behind the hero's. This cut off his acceleration and boosted theirs; they had stolen his beam and would reach the cycler while leaving him stranded. This kind of piracy was known as beam-stealing and it had been known to happen. The monks couldn't turn off the beams if it happened without dooming both crews to die adrift.

The various envious powers of Erythrion— ranging from Max's mom to the government— seemed to have decided on letting them go, which considering recent events seemed very suspicious. As they flew out to the orbital elevator she constructed frightening scenarios for herself about the government secretly beam-stealing their power and riding out to claim Jentry's Envy while they died in interstellar space.

She had barely shaken hands with the last member of their crew, a shy man named Evan Laurel, before they were all shooting to orbit. Her dark fantasies had no time to properly germinate.

As they rode up the elevator, Rue stayed glued to the window, watching the people, then the streets, buildings, and towns, dwindle below. The world resolved itself as a giant sunlit disk with blackness beyond it, and they ascended the center of a well of light that descended from impossibly far above. Clouds drifted to the wall of this well, faded and vanished. Beside Rue, Blair was doing a report, describing the crew and their impending adventure. He seemed so serene and engaging when he talked, it both calmed and infuriated her. Did he not realize what they were getting themselves into?

They managed to avoid several ships' worth of other newshounds and made it to her modified cycler shuttle. She barely recognized it; Max had removed nearly everything made of metal, even the hull, replacing it all with lightweight alternatives. It was a testament to his fanaticism that what little metal had been in the shuttle before had been lightweight beryllium alloys; even that was too much for him in his determination to cut mass. The hull was now a balloon-skin coated with shipfur, pale against the black sky. Several windows gleamed in the short cylinder; that was all. Nearby, Max's second shuttle hung like a brooding cloud. That one held life-support stacks and supplies. It was all they could afford to bring— and the total mass of both shuttles was under sixty tonnes.

The shuttles had small nuclear power packs which doubled as maneuvering engines. They had no other drive source, but coiled around their waists were some kilometers of superconducting cable. Charged, they would spring out to form rigid magnetized rings attached to the ships by tethers: plasma sails, they were called. Rue knew the principle, but wouldn't get to see the famous acceleration aurora those wire sails would kick up; she would be asleep in a life-support tank when the million or so particle-beam accelerators orbiting Erythrion turned their baleful gazes on these two little ships and pushed them at three gravities' acceleration on their way. For a few weeks, a significant portion of Erythrion's immense magnetosphere would be tapped and transmuted into these beams and yet those tens of trillions of watts were barely sufficient to boost sixty tonnes up to relativistic velocity. Halo worlds like Erythrion had power to spare for their colonies, but couldn't afford to launch something so gigantic as an interstellar cycler. Only the lit worlds could muster that kind of energy, and the lit worlds had abandoned the halo. Since its colonization, Rue's world had maintained its tenuous contact with the rest of the universe only through cargo packets and the rendezvous shuttles that met passing cyclers. The cyclers were gone; only the occasional packet came and went. Hers would be the first passenger shuttle to rendezvous with a cycler in twenty years.

Beyond the halo, millions of FTL ships of the R.E. might be winging to and fro between the lit stars. Perhaps— but no one at Erythrion could know, except from the evidence that there was less contact with the lit worlds every year, as their economies shifted away from launching expensive cyclers. As existing cyclers were decommissioned, they were not being replaced. It was becoming impossible for humans to travel between the halo worlds. It was this fact that made Jentry's Envy priceless.

They cycled through the airlock; when the inner door opened, Rue said, "Shit," very quietly. She had been expecting the familiar, cozy interior of the shuttle— but the interior had been gutted.

"We've got everything we could possibly need," said Max, waving expansively. "Even a few kitchen sinks thrown in for thoroughness."

Corinna Chandra and Evan Laurel were the least known of Rue's new crew. She watched them as they settled in; they had similar appraising looks in their eyes as they went through the supplies, occasionally tossing questions back at Max. Rebecca had gone to put her luggage in her little stateroom; Blair drifted around, recording everything.

In cycler romances, the key figure was always the captain. The cycler captain was the prime mover of many stories; he or she was the epicenter of intrigue, the judge, jury, and executioner of villains. He was frequently a rogue, or a perfect gentleman— but the captain in his jet-black uniform was always in godlike control of events.

Rue supposed she was, or soon would be, such a captain. The idea was ludicrous. Still, here was her crew, all looking nervous in one way or another. She had intended to give a stirring speech to them before they all entered the cold sleep tanks. Now that they were here, though, her mouth was dry and she couldn't say a word, until Max came over and took her hand.

"It's real now, isn't it?" he asked. Rue nodded quickly.

The others gathered around. They looked expectant. Rue cleared her throat. She knew they could see the fear in her eyes and the knowledge shamed her. Indeed, her motley crew did not look like a band of adventurers, but like a random group of citizens pulled out of their ordinary lives and condemned by unknown powers to senseless exile.

"I'm scared," she said. Corinna and Evan glanced at one another. "But I'm only scared because I haven't done this before," Rue continued quickly. "We're doing something that our people have been doing for centuries. We're going out to meet a cycler. Nothing unusual there. We don't know what we'll find when we get to it, but we're well supplied and ready for a long trip." She wracked her brains, trying to think of something inspiring to add. "I–I'm glad you've put your faith in me and Max and…" Her mind went blank.

Rebecca came and took Rue's hand. "Let's focus on one thing at a time," she said gently. "What's next?"

Rue tried to pull herself together. "Cold sleep," she said. "Let's get ready for it."

Her crew went to check on the cold-sleep tanks, all except Blair, who stayed by her side. Rue tried not to cry, but she was really, really scared, in a way she had never been on Allemagne. And she couldn't hide it from these people who now depended on her for their lives.

C OLD SLEEP WAS not really sleep, but more like a long half-waking nightmare. Rue hadn't appreciated that before and nothing prepared her for the experience. She felt suspended in timelessness, comfortable and cocooned. Dreams came and went, some beautiful, some terrifying. Every now and then, a cold brittle voice she later realized belonged to the shuttle rattled off statistics. She would rise almost to waking, pondering those numbers until she realized that they represented the shuttle's status: acceleration, heading, integrity of the cold sleep capsules. When she knew all was well, she would drift away again.

Sometimes her body roused and she dimly knew she was flailing about, limbs under the control of a nervous system shunt. She was exercising. At other times she heard her own voice, croaking or singing aimlessly. It sounded like a stranger's voice.

There came a time when she really did sleep, then woke slowly to hear voices— real ones, this time, murmuring nearby. The feeling of huge weight that had pressed down on her for so long was gone. She had survived a month at three gravity's acceleration and they must now be approaching the Envy.

As this awareness dawned Rue struggled to sit up. It was surprisingly easy; she had expected stiff joints but everything seemed supple. Her eyes, though, wouldn't focus properly. A flesh-colored oval hovered in front of her. A familiar voice emerged from it. "Do you know who I am?"

"Re-Rebecca."

"Do you know where you are?"

Rebecca asked a few more questions, apparently satisfying herself that Rue was sane. Then she wrapped her captain in a blanket and towed her to the galley. "It'll take your eyes a few days to fully recover," she said as Rue groped for a coffee bulb she could dimly see floating in front of her. "You haven't used them for a month and the muscles have loosened up."

There was a gray bulk to Rue's left. She gradually realized it was Evan Laurel. He and Corinna had been roused before her, according to Rue's own instructions. Medical staff, engineering, and avionics first, that had been her decision. Blair and Max were being decanted now; all seemed well with them.

"Are we there?" Rue asked. After the health of the crew, it was the first and most important question on her mind.

The gray oval shook in a shrug. "Not sure," said Evan. "Corinna's checking now."

"I feel so…"

"Helpless, yes," said Evan. "It'll pass. I've done this a few times. It's always like this."

Another blob swam into sight, above and to her left. "Bad news," said Corinna.

Adrenaline had Rue instantly alert. "What?"

"The radar didn't make it through accel. We can grow new parts with the custom nano we brought, but it'll take weeks…"

"So we can't see where we are?"

"We've got the scopes," said Evan. "We'll manage. Right, Cor?"

"Yes," said Chandra in her usual neutral tone.

"Great," muttered Rue. As the adrenaline passed, she felt infinitely weary. She supposed that this weariness was on her now like a mantle; she was a captain, or at least had to pretend to be. The weariness was doubtless part of the job.

"We'll wait, then," she said. "When our eyes are up to it, we'll see where we are."

I T TOOK SEVERAL days before their eyesight came back. Evan stumbled around, his hair mussed, checking the stability of their life support and power. Every now and then he would glance out a window at the starry blackness and look longingly at the telescope. But the necessities of life had to be established before they could investigate where they were.

They huddled like invalids, growing stronger slowly; Blair was chatty as always and Rebecca efficient and kind, but Corinna maintained her aloof silence, Evan seemed perpetually nervous… and Max had sunk into himself. Rue was to learn that she had never before known him in his «normal» state— that is, surly and introspective. It was as though he had switched on some hyperactive part of himself in order to get them out here and once that was done he sank back into himself, reserves of charisma and genius exhausted. He hovered in a corner, blanket around his shoulders, playing Penrose Go with the computer. He seldom spoke.

Blair set about interviewing them on the third day and they perked up, all except Max. Blair started with Evan, sitting him in front of the window and chatting. The conversation became imperceptibly more focused and at a certain point Rue realized the interview had begun— but Evan himself either hadn't realized it, or was just very relaxed with the process. She smiled proudly at Blair's cleverness.

"I was born and raised in the Rights Economy," said Evan, "so I'd never been on anything like a cycler before I enlisted in the Cycler Order. A cycler's like a station, I guess, only moving. They're a lot like this shuttle, too. The first one I was on, the Martine, was pretty opulent, I guess— but small. There were fifty staterooms, a small garden, a banquet hall. It had several annexes which were separate balloon habitats floating next to it. One of those had a spherical swimming pool."

After several years with the Martine (amounting to three stops in its cycle) Evan had transferred to another cycler, the Xao Li, when for several months their circular but perpendicular cycles ran parallel.

"The Xao Li was amazing. It was an old cycler and I can see where you might get romantic ideas about them. Its main hab was in a bolo configuration— a crystal palace connected to a dead weight of supply sacks by a two-kilometer cable. The crystal palace was mostly one big garden, full of trees. Staterooms were under the garden, but you spent ninety percent of your time among the trees; some people even slept 'in the open. They had artificial rain and a little sun; in the very middle of the garden you could almost imagine you were on Earth."

To be a brother of the Cycler Order was to adopt an uncommon religion, one that had as its ideal Permanence: the creation and maintenance of a human civilization that could last a million years. The Order was all about discipline and spiritual purification, requirements for people who trained to plan operations that lasted centuries.

"You have to understand, the Order was a lifesaver to somebody like me from High Space, where everything's disposable. And being a part of it had meaning while I was in flight. But I made the mistake of volunteering to accompany a cargo down to Erythrion. We got… stranded. I thought I was stuck in the halo forever. Things got bad; I left the Order… And then I heard about you and posted my résumé to the net on spec, thinking what the hey, they might be putting a crew together… and Max called me."

Corinna came next, but she was much less forthcoming than Evan. She had been an engineer, she said; her husband and children had died; after that she had entered the Order, to try to find some sense in life. Her voice was flat as she related these facts. A little animation entered her eyes when Blair asked her what she expected to find at Jentry's Envy.

"Another life," she said firmly. "A new life."

There was nothing more to be said after that. Blair thanked her and Rebecca took her place. Rue watched with satisfaction; Blair was distracting them from their isolation and uncertainty and bringing them together at the same time. This was great team-building.

"You come from the stations, like Rue," he said to Rebecca. "She's told us all about Allemagne. Did you grow up in a comet like her?"

"Next to one. No, actually my station was totally different from hers. For one thing, it had a population of almost a thousand; for another, we had trees and grass and stuff; the whole habitat was lit up by starlight."

"Starlight? You don't wear sunglasses all the time like Rue."

"No, this was concentrated starlight— gathered in a molecule-thick mirror the size of a continent. Bright as a sun. When you looked up at the axis mirror," she said, waving up at the plastic ceiling as if to indicate a window there, "you saw the Milky Way like a blazing bar across the sky. It was almost too intense to look at, but the overall effect was a soft, shadowless light, not like the harsh pinpoint they say you get at a place like Chandaka."

Rue thought about it and found the image utterly enchanting: a garden lit by the Milky Way.

"We mined gas straight from empty interstellar space, using some low-powered ramscoops." These giant wire wheels were invisibly far from Rebecca's home cylinder, but she described how the laborers at Terisia would clip themselves to a cable and leap out, flying thousands of kilometers into darkness to where the cable joined with a collecting tank, there to reap a harvest of hydrogen, helium, and other frozen elements.

"We made money by firing cans of frozen gas on trajectories that cyclers and other passing ships would intersect. We had a lot less raw material to work with than Allemagne, but Terisia's better placed, so we did good business."

One thing that Rue would always remember about Rebecca's home was her description of vacuum painting. It seemed that a talented vacuum painter lived at Terisia and every now and then he would unveil a new masterpiece. He used tiny drones carrying canisters of garbage material, such as argon, and these he would send back and forth and back and forth, drawing a complicated grid pattern in three dimensions in some far distant region of space. The volume would be huge, thousands of kilometers on a side; and in that volume his drones would deposit small frozen beads, one every kilometer or so.

After a few weeks the whole ensemble would drift between Terisia and its colossal mirror— and the little beads would vaporize, at different rates according to their sizes and composition.

"Then," Rebecca said, "we would all gather around and look at the sky mirror. The Milky Way would dissolve into something else— a beautiful face, maybe, or an animal like a horse. And it would move, because his little beads were vaporizing in sequence and diffracting the light from the mirror as they did it. For a while our little colony cylinder would be lit by the glow of dancing angels, or swarming bees, or the cloudy gates of heaven. It was the most gorgeous thing I ever saw, more gorgeous than anything I've seen since, even on Treya."

The interviews dissolved into an impromptu party. Max perked up a bit and they told each other stories and laughed until they were all exhausted and then they went to bed. Rue hung weightless in her sleeping bag listening to their various snores, thinking that they were her family now and, in a new cocoon of faintly heard breaths, she slipped into her best sleep in months.

The next day, everyone's eyes were pretty much back to normal and Evan eagerly turned to the telescope.

Rue hovered at the table, eating breakfast with Blair and Rebecca. They tried to ignore Evan, but all knew how much was riding on what he saw in the scope. Conversation started out jovial, but eventually trailed off as Evan hid behind the scope's inscape display for one hour, then another, making noncommittal grunts whenever anyone asked how things were going. Finally he said, "Damn," and kicked himself away from it to the real window. He hung there staring.

Rue flew over to him. "What is it?" she asked quietly.

"I can't find it," he said. "It's the damn scope— it's the wrong type."

"Explain. — Wait," she added as he opened his mouth, "everyone should hear."

Rue whistled, a sound she'd discovered would immediately bring people from the far corners of the shuttle. Max and Corinna appeared from their staterooms and sailed over.

"The scopes at Erythrion picked up several cargos attached to the plow sail," said Evan when they were all there. "I can't find them." He held up a hand as Corinna and Blair both started to speak. "Just because we can't see them right now doesn't mean we're not close. You installed the wrong kind of telescope," he said to Max.

Max huffed indignantly. "This scope's got ten times the power of the one she had before," he said. "I bought the top of the line."

"Top of the line for distance viewing," said Evan. "That's part of the problem." Beside him, Corinna rolled her eyes.

"How much of the sky is the scope looking at?" asked Rue.

Evan frowned. "At any given time?… half a degree." This wasn't the prospecting scope that had originally been installed and which had first seen Jentry's Envy. Max had upgraded it, something Rue had given no thought to at the time. A true prospecting scope could scan at least twenty degrees at a time.

"So the problem isn't that there's no cycler out there," said Rue. "The problem is, it might be right beside us, but we can't see it. Is that correct?"

"Yeah. That's right." Evan fidgeted as he talked, like he did constantly. It didn't fill Rue with confidence about anything he said.

"So what're we going to do?" Max asked.

Rue looked around, thinking. Despite yesterday's closeness, everybody's nerves were frayed, except perhaps Corinna's, as she didn't seem to have any.

Rue thought about it for a minute, then smiled as she realized what to do. "It's not a big problem. Back home, Jentry and the other boys used to take some of the mining bots out and play hide-and-seek with them around the comet. They wouldn't usually hide on the comet, because they'd be visible there. They'd just drift off into space and try to present as small a cross-section as possible. Jentry'd have to shine a light out and look for a reflection, or wait for an eclipse."

"Eclipse?" said Blair. "What do you mean?"

Rue jumped away from the table and rapelled her way over to the airlock. "I'll show you," she said. They watched as she pulled her suit out of its locker.

"Ah," said Corinna, dead-pan. "I get it."

"Get what?" Evan seemed insulted. Rebecca had settled back, smiling secretively.

"Come on," said Rue. Evan didn't move. "Suit up! That's, uh, an order. We're going to find out where we are. Why don't you come too, Blair? You'll like this."

She waited as the two went through their suit checks, then cycled them through the airlock into a yawning abyss of stars.

"Gods and kami," said Blair. He backed up. "Gods and kami."

Rue was a bit surprised by his reaction. "Here, I'll clip a line to you," she said. Evan was a bit bolder, but he kept one hand on the edge of the airlock. Rue simply turned and stepped into the darkness.

It was just like the night at Allemagne, the billion angelic stars in their wreaths and coils. As soon as she was out here, in fact, Rue calmed right down. What had she been so worried about? This was just like home— only moving ten thousand times faster, a fact that the eye could not discern.

"It's beautiful," she said. "Look at it."

"Great Rue, now can I go back in?" said Blair.

"Okay, I want you guys to each pick a part of the sky and watch it," she said. "You don't have to leave the airlock— just look around."

"What are we looking for?" asked Blair. His breathing was shallow, but he seemed to have gotten control of himself. These guys were from planets, she reminded herself. They weren't used to being out in the real world.

"Just rest your eyes and watch," she said. "You're looking for a star to wink at you."

This was just basic prospecting technique, though usually done by automated full-sky telescopes. Rue hadn't realized when she let Max upgrade the scope that he would replace it with an instrument more suited to delving deeply in one narrow field of view. No wonder they couldn't see where they were.

Hanging in space and watching the stars was very calming. Soon, both Blair and Evan were into it; they began chatting in a more friendly way than they had to date. Rue looked for familiar constellations— they weren't that far from Erythrion yet— and then just let her eyes rest on the scene. Waiting for one of those billion stars to blink. The problem was, the eye played tricks. Things on her peripheral vision were constantly shifting. There were lots of false alarms over the next hour.

At last Evan said, "I think… I think I see it."

"Where?"

He pointed. "Four or five stars have disappeared over there."

"What's the constellation?"

"The Horologium."

"Okay. Corinna? Did you hear that? Aim the scope at the Pendulum Clock."

Ten minutes later, they had a confirmation: something was occluding the stars of the Horologium, in a line that paralleled their own course. When Corinna broke the news, they all cheered and Rue allowed herself a little grin of satisfaction. She had not let them down.

"N OW THAT WE know where to look, it should get easier," said Evan. "We can aim spotlights at the Horologium and see how many habitats we're dealing with."

"What do you mean?" asked Blair. "We found the ship, didn't we?"

"Yes and no." Evan summoned the telescope window and began adjusting controls. "Most cyclers are built as constellations; you never keep all your life support in one basket, so to speak. If a cycler habitat hits a rock going at point-eight light-speed, the whole thing'll vaporize. The plow sail takes care of gas and small particles, but there's no way to avoid anything big. So we distribute the living quarters and cargo among several independent habitats and separate them by up to thousands of kilometers. We use jumpers to travel between them. So if I'm right," he said as he made a final adjustment, "the spot should find at least one more object out there."

Everyone gathered around and watched. The spotlight was programmed to track lines across the sky like an old-style cathode-ray tube. It had only been on for a few seconds before there was a pinprick flash of light in the window. "Got one!" shouted Evan. He reversed the spot and increased the magnification. And there it was.

Rue had studied cycler designs in the days leading up to their departure. What she saw looked a bit like Allemagne and didn't surprise her; a sphere was the best shape for retaining heat, an important consideration in interstellar space. Still, she felt her heart leap as she saw a silvery ball swim into focus, framed in stars.

"It's real," she whispered. All this time, she had been afraid to believe it.

"I'm fixing the distance," said Evan. "Then we'll move on to the next one…. Sixty thousand kilometers. We're practically on top of it!"

The sphere disappeared as the spotlight moved on. Another sphere appeared, then a rusty cylindrical shape. "There's no lettering," said Corinna. "Or painting. Cyclers are often covered in murals," she explained. "These habitats are plain."

"It's new?" speculated Evan. "Look, there's another! How many habitats are there?"

They counted eight more. Then, the spotlight found something odd— a dim red glow. "Magnify that," said Corinna. Evan fiddled with the controls. Some blurry red lines filled the window, faded in and out and resolved into…

"Words. There's something written on that one."

The sphere itself was black, but scrawled across it was spikey lettering utterly unfamiliar to Rue. There were about a hundred words, she guessed, in a discrete paragraph. No way to tell how big the letters were, although the scope indicated the object they were written on was thirty thousand kilometers away.

"Do a capture and run it through the computer," said Corinna. "I don't recognize the language."

They waited while Evan did as she'd suggested. After a while he looked up. His face had gone pale.

"The computer doesn't recognize it either," he said.

"Strange," said Max.

"More than strange." Evan took a shaky breath. "The computer knows every human script in the halo or High Space. This isn't any of them; it's not even derived from any of them."

"What are you saying?"

"All I'm saying," said Evan, "is that this isn't a known human language."

That wasn't all Evan was saying and they all knew it.

"Gods and Kami," breathed Corinna. "It's an alien ship."

THEY'D ARGUED BACK and forth all day, while Evan exercised the scope and mapped out the dozen visible habitats of Jentry's Envy. Now, exhausted, they retreated to their staterooms. Rue and Max were in his; he was drinking, as usual.

"We should have guessed," she said. "It came from an area of space we haven't colonized."

He shrugged angrily. "I still don't believe it. All the aliens we've heard about use the FTL drive. There's no such thing as an alien cycler."

"But it's there, Max. You saw it."

"I saw something. I don't know what."

"So what are we going to do? We can't go home," she said. "We'll have to try to make contact."

Max put the heel of his hand to his forehead. "No. We're just not in a position to do that. We've got no defenses, no recourse—"

"Max, we have no choice!"

He glared at her. "Do you know anything at all about how to do a first contact? I know I don't. No, Rue, we're totally out of our depth here. I still say we lay low, don't approach and just ride until we get to Chandaka. If they come to us, well then, there's nothing we can do about that. But we can't go out to them. It'd be suicide."

She turned away. There was no discussing this any further today. She would have to wear Max down— or else finally act like a cycler captain and just command it to be done. Rue wasn't ready for that yet.

"What have we gotten ourselves into," she murmured. Rue's gaze fell on the public inscape images Max had arranged on his wall. These were the same photos he'd had at home— family and friends, mostly, plus a few landscapes of Treya.

They all looked so homey and sensible; how could they be light-months behind, inaccessible now for years? Rue rubbed her eyes, fighting weariness and fear.

She looked up— and her grandmother looked back at her from one of the photos.

"Max, are these of the family? Hey, there's my mom!"

"Yeah, I brought everything in my data accounts…. I've got more pictures, if you want to see them; I guess we've been too busy, I should have shown them to you."

"Oh, that's okay, I…" Rue peered more closely at the photo. "What's that?"

"What?" Max joined her. She pointed to the little dot on the throat of the woman standing next to grandma.

"Ah, the famous lost heirloom. There's quite a story to that," said Max distractedly.

Rue felt a flush spread from her toes up through her scalp. "Heirloom?"

"Yeah. An ancient fossil— from Earth, no less. Worth millions. It was brought out on the first cycler by your great-great-grandfather. Mother expected to inherit it, but when your grandmother disappeared she took it with her. Nobody knows what became of it."

"Oh." Rue had never told Max that Grandma had lived with them on Allemagne, simply because they hadn't had a chance to really talk about family. Neither had she told Aunt Leda, out of suspicion. Her omissions had been well-chosen, she thought wonderingly.

"This heirloom. It was worth a lot?"

"Priceless, really. Mother was always going on about it, that if only she'd gotten it like she was supposed to, she could have been the lady she was destined to be. Not like she isn't well off anyway, but that's my dear old ma, never satisfied."

"Hm. Interesting. 'Scuse me, I have to go to the bathroom." Rue sailed away, not too quickly she hoped and when she was safely inside the shuttle's tiny bathroom, she strapped herself onto the toilet and started to shake.

Then she got up and went to her own stateroom and dug through her pack. There it was, the little brown-black disk with its embossed galaxy-shape. The delicate little Ediacaran, who really had journeyed through a billion years of adventure to nestle now in her hand.

Rue began to laugh. Oh no, it would not do to tell Max that this whole trip had been unnecessary, that she had been rich all along and not known it. Still, she looped the heirloom around her neck and let it nestle out of sight inside her blouse. Then she wiped her eyes, coughed past the lump in her throat and flew back to Max's room. She had to tell him that, fearful though he might be, they could not hide here, but tomorrow would announce themselves to whatever waited at Jentry's Envy.