Permanence

18

RUE AWOKE TO the sound of birdsong.

It was something she had heard in recordings, or synthesized, many times. The first time she'd heard live birds was on Treya; the second time, on Chandaka.

Then this must be the planet Oculus, at Colossus. She opened her eyes.

A billowing canopy of pale blue silk hung over her bed, extravagant as something from history. The bed was a four-poster, strictly for use under gravity. Her head was embraced by a luxuriously soft pillow.

She stretched and yawned. Other than the birds, there was no sound; no fans, or pumps, or footsteps overhead. No wonder she had slept so well, despite the heat in this room.

Sitting up, Rue spotted her clothes neatly folded on a nearby chair. This was her first awakening at Colossus and yet she was not surrounded by doctors, nor was she shivering in a cold-sleep vat waiting to be tended to. She didn't feel a million years old like she had every other time she emerged from cold sleep— in fact, she felt great.

Her feet touched down in deep warm pile carpet. This room was at least seven meters on a side and almost that tall. One entire wall was taken up with high, leaded-glass windows; there were French doors there as well. Rue dressed without looking at her clothes; her eyes were fixed on the vista outside.

She needed to go to the bathroom, but there was no way she was doing that before she got past those windows. She turned the handle on the doors and they opened to let in a beautifully cool breeze. The air smelled of ice and bare rock, like the penumbral mountains at Treya. Eagerly Rue stepped out onto a wide balcony.

A quick glance told her she was halfway up the side of a gigantic building perched on an equally huge cliff. Then she turned her attention to what lay beyond.

The sky at Treya had been alive with clouds. This sky was alive in a completely different way. The whole firmament glowed with sunset mauve and peach, but these colors didn't radiate from the horizon the way sunset had on Chandaka. Rather, at the zenith hung a round golden disk, its edges perfectly sharp. She could look straight at it without difficulty. Near this disk the sky was a lovely peach color, becoming rose, purple, dark blue and finally black at the horizon.

A brilliant aurora danced throughout this beautiful sky. Wavering curtains of light at the horizon, the auroral bands became coiling serpents when directly overhead. The combination of firmament and aurora laid fairy light over a seascape that stretched away to incredible distance before her.

That golden disk must be the brown dwarf Colossus, she knew, but it was nothing at all like Erythrion. Neither was this place like Treya, or Chandaka, or any world she had seen in movies or sims.

A city brimmed over the cliff her building stood upon. Its walls and minarets gleamed like an hallucination in the sinuous light. The cliff itself was pearly white and was backed by ramparts of equally white mountains. It stretched off past the horizons to either side.

Rue had never seen a real ocean, but she knew that the one before her must be unique. Mountains reared out of it, white with emerald and turquoise highlights: icebergs. Smaller chunks of ice floated in the dark water, their sides licked by white foam. The air that blew back her hair was well below freezing— a perfect temperature, in fact. She leaned against the balustrade and closed her eyes, just breathing it in for a while.

Someone cleared their throat.

Rue turned, to find a tall man in the severe black uniform of the Cycler Compact standing at the French doors. "Captain Cassels," he said. "Welcome to Lux and the planet Oculus. I am glad to find you awake. I am Griffin, the abbot of this monastery."

"How long have we been here?" she asked. "Are the others awake?"

"You are the first, since you are the captain of the Jentry's Envy," he said with a bow. "You must tell us the order in which to awake the others."

"How long?" she asked again.

"A week since we recovered your shuttle," he said. "There was no indication of urgency in your messages, so we took the liberty of awaking you in a traditional way, more civilized than one finds in cycler travel lately, I'd wager."

Rue was at a loss as to what to say. She just nodded. "We've taken the liberty," Griffin said, "of tailoring you a uniform as befits your station." He gestured at a side table by the windows. Through the leaded glass, she saw folded black cloth.

"Oh. Well… thank you." She went to the doorway; he retreated and she went to the table.

"If you and your companions are willing, we would be pleased to give a banquet in your honor at second shift-over," he said. "In the Great Hall of the monastery, of course."

"Banquet?" Her head was spinning. "Sure." She unfolded part of the uniform. It was an absolute black, with silver epaulets and piping. Her heart flipped as she saw on the breast something she'd seen before only in movies and sims: the silver infinity symbol inside laurel leafs that signified the rank of cycler captain.

Rue dropped the uniform back on the table. A roaring filled her head and the world faded in and out for a moment.

"Are you all right?" Griffin was at her side, one hand just touching her elbow.

"No— I mean yes, I, I'll be all right." She turned away from him, so that he wouldn't see the tears starting in her eyes.

"I'd hoped to give you a tour of Lux this afternoon," said the abbot. "But I see you've not fully recovered from your flight."

"No, it's all right." She wiped her eyes and turned to smile at him. "Abbot Griffin, I would love a tour. Maybe, if you gave me an hour to freshen up? Please, I wouldn't miss it for the world."

He smiled graciously and bowed again. "Of course. One of the sisters will be waiting outside the door if you require anything. An hour then?"

She nodded. After he left Rue turned back to stare at the folded uniform. It seemed to draw light to itself, as if it were the magnetic focus of the room. Her hand hovered over the smooth cloth for long seconds before she summoned the courage to turn a fold aside and gaze again on the infinity symbol. That symbol was no doubt chiseled into the stones above this monastery's gate. It was the symbol of her civilization.

TWO HOURS LATER, Rue was high above the city in an aircar, staring down at the domed towers of Lux. Many of the buildings had atria or open shafts penetrating them; from above, the shafts made patterns of dots across the rooftops. The Abbot had explained that since Oculus was tidally locked, Colossus never moved from its position near the zenith. The builders of the city could put skylights and light-pipes in permanent place, confident that Colossus would throw its amber light deep into the heart of any building without pause.

For all its medieval appearance, Lux was built of plastics and ceramics, all based on minerals and chemicals mined from the ocean. The ocean was global, for Oculus was a Europan world, covered in continents of ice with a twenty-kilometer deep ocean beneath them. Only here at the point closest to Colossus was the water exposed, in a circular ocean two thousand kilometers across. Lux clung to the edge of this ocean, but most of Oculus's cities were dug deep under the ice, at its interface with the unfathomable depths of water.

"See down there," said the abbot. Rue followed his pointing finger to the base of the ice cliffs. There, dark archways opened into the white walls. As she watched, a large ship exited one archway. It cast wings of water up and behind it from small feet of some kind that it ran upon.

"Hydrofoils," said the abbot. Rue smiled politely, though she didn't understand. Now she saw there were many ships on the water, from very small sailing vessels to huge square things loaded with shipping containers.

"I hope you are with us long enough to go sailing," said the abbot. "The bergs are beautiful and home to many birds."

She nodded again. The view was spectacular, but by now Rue was so overwhelmed she was barely registering it. She was still trying to get over the experience of walking the halls of the monastery wearing a cycler captain's uniform.

Everyone who had seen her dressed this way had stopped. The men had bowed; the women curtsied. There was no irony to it. They were sincere in their respect. Rue kept wanting to say, "hang on, I'm not what you think I am" — but she was what they thought she was. The implications had just never registered with her until now.

Before they had entered cold sleep for the trip down here, Crisler had summoned everyone to a meeting and said, "Here are the things we can't talk about while we're at Colossus." He had spoken of the necessity of not revealing details about the nature of Jentry's Envy. "We have to claim ignorance of its origins and course for now," he had said with grim authority. At the time Rue had nodded with the others, but she knew that Crisler's priorities only made sense to those of her passengers who were from High Space. He couldn't be trusted anyway: Mike's discovery of the hidden photos proved that.

She felt she had managed to convince Crisler that she would adhere to his wishes. As soon as he awoke, though, he would realize that this was her world and she could and would say whatever she wanted to these people. There was no reason for her to keep the secrets of the Envy for his sake and no way he could enforce his wishes here. She was tempted to rub his nose in that fact.

Earlier, when the abbot had asked if she had a preference as to who to revive next, Rue had been strongly tempted to say, "Leave Crisler and his men in cold sleep." It would have been so easy. But she didn't know whether she had the authority to do that, now that they were all under the care of the monks. And also, the level of cold sleep they were under was light; it wouldn't be healthy to leave them in that state for much longer.

She no longer needed Crisler and he must know it. That was probably why he had come along personally on this expedition, but what could he do about it?

"Ma'am?" She blinked in surprise. The abbot had asked her something.

"I said, would you like to return? Your people should be awake now and you'll want to orient them before the banquet."

"Of course, Abbot. Forgive my inattention." I said that the way Grandma would have wanted, she thought to herself.

"You have much on your mind, no doubt," said the abbot neutrally. He steered the car back toward the massive monastery tower.

Rue sat back in the deep upholstery, no longer seeing the cliffs with their wheeling birds and overhanging towers. She was thinking that she could completely isolate herself from Crisler while they were here and there was nothing he could do about it. If she was truly a cycler captain, it was time for her to adopt the responsibilities to her own people that went with the title— far away from the grasping hands of the Rights Economy.

RUE AND MAX stared down at the Great Hall from behind an ornate carved screen. The place was packed with extremely rich looking people. "Oh, shit," said Rue. "What are we going to do?"

"Don't look at me, this was your idea," he said. Max was still annoyed that she'd had him decanted. The taste for adventure he'd had on Treya seemed entirely gone. Even the exotic wonders of Lux seemed to hold no fascination for him.

The monks had dressed him up in a gray cycler crew uniform and so far Max hadn't been able to muss up this suit. She knew he would before the evening was out, but at least he'd get through the reception line with his reputation intact. And he looked great just now.

She told him that and he shrugged. "I clean up well. Shall we do it?"

They walked down a long curving hallway that finally opened up on a gallery above the cavernous space of the hall. A sweeping limestone staircase dominated this end of the chamber and they were forced to walk down this, arm in arm, while everyone in the place watched. This was the idea, apparently; everybody else had done it.

They were met at the foot of the stairs by the abbot, who proceeded to introduce Rue to the mayor of Lux, several iron-haired industrialists with predatory eyes, the entire city council, some artists and musicians whose names or reputations she pretended to know, a famously charitable philanthropist, and a deep-diving adventurer invited to the party to add zest. This was before they'd gotten ten meters into the hall, which was forested with suits and gowns.

"Ah, yes, I'd forgotten why I became a recluse," said Max during a brief break. He smiled and nodded at someone in passing, then said, "Two rules: one, stay near the drinks table. Two: never agree to do anything with anybody, even if it sounds like fun. Hey, in fact, tell them I'm in charge of your schedule and they should come to me to arrange things."

"What are you talking about?" Nobody had done anything except say hello to her.

"You'll see."

They met Rebecca near the center of the scrum. Rue's doctor looked stunning in a long silver ball gown, her hair done up with amber pins. She hugged Rue and Max. "This place is wonderful! I'm so glad I came; I just wish we'd been able to bring Mina."

It had been something of a shock when Rebecca had taken up with one of the female officers on the Banshee. In retrospect, it had explained much to Rue— to her embarrassment she realized she should have known early on in her acquaintance with the doctor. "We'll have to take pictures to show her," said Rue to Rebecca now. "Where're the others?"

"Laurent and Mike are over there," she pointed.

"You see? The drinks table," said Max with a nudge.

"…And Crisler and his people are there."

The admiral was all decked out in full uniform and looked completely comfortable among the generals and flight jockeys who had surrounded his men. He seemed to be having a good time.

A succession of charming middle-aged men drifted past, all making invitations for Rue to join them for dinner, or golf (whatever that was), or a tour of the city. Max stood off to one side, imperceptibly shaking his head. She thanked them for their invitations and said she was booked up. She supposed they saw a business opportunity in her cycler.

Enthusiastic couples stopped her to ask about the Envy. She told them superficial things about the cycler, but by now her natural caution had asserted itself and she let out only the smallest bits of information she could get away with.

In truth, the new habitat was amazing and she was bursting to talk about it to somebody. A kind of cylindrical crystal palace lit from its axis, the habitat rotated to produce about one g, a rather dizzying spin considering its small size. Its interior was one open space, which over the first few days after its creation had sprouted a kind of grassy plant that could (Katz had discovered) be eaten.

The grass had more in common with human DNA than any Earthly plant. It was also an efficient recycler of gases, liquids, and solid waste. Katz estimated that it could support a population of well over a hundred humans, maybe indefinitely.

Orchestral music started up somewhere and Rue saw that couples were starting to waltz in a cleared area of floor. No sooner had she noticed this than a young man stepped up boldly and asked her to dance.

"Oh! Uh, no, thank you. But thank you, I mean…"

She fended off several more offers over the next minute. Dr. Herat and Mike were drifting over, occasionally pausing to talk to various bald, distracted looking men who were minimally well dressed and thus must be scientists.

"This place is amazing!" Herat was saying. "They say there's some kind of ruins in the ocean, but they're so far down nobody's been able to do more than map them by radar. I'd love to come back here when we're done with the Envy."

"Mr. Bequith," Rue said as they strolled over. "Do you know how to waltz?"

"Yes, I do," he said.

"Then perhaps you can teach me."

Rebecca grinned and tipped her glass to Max.

"I realize you're the captain, but I think you should let me lead," he said.

"Whatever you say."

He showed her the basic footwork. It was easy enough; they moved to the edge of the dance floor and Rue took a deep breath and let him pull her into the swaying throng. Michael Bequith put his hand on the small of Rue's back and she forgot everything else.

She stumbled a lot and laughed at herself, but Mike's strength literally pulled her through her missteps. It was thrilling and her only regret was that she wasn't decked out in one of those fantastic confections the other women were wearing. It must look odd, two uniformed figures dancing out here.

But no, there went two men, who were obviously into each other. To hell with it, it was time she just cut loose and enjoyed herself. Rue laughed again and let Mike twirl her around so that she almost lost her sunglasses.

The song ended and they danced another, then another. Just when she was getting giddy and tired, a strong voice behind her said, "May I have this dance?"

She turned. This man was unknown to her; he was probably in his forties and had strong, severe features and close-cropped gray hair. A gaudy ring through one ear spoiled the military effect.

He was dressed in a well-worn counterpart to the uniform she had on.

Mike bowed and let go of her hand. He had that mysterious smile on his face that he sometimes got— he seemed to be scoring some point in a game only he understood.

"R-Rue Cassels," she said as the cycler captain took her hand. "Captain of Jentry's Envy."

"Travis Li, captain of the Dauntless."

Somehow, they were dancing. She looked around for Mike, but he had vanished among the bodies. Rue tried to think of something clever to say to this captain Li. Her mind was a blank.

"I hear you've just returned from Chandaka," he said. "What's the situation there?"

She frowned. "…Situation?"

"You rode a beam into Chandaka. That must mean they're still maintaining their ties with the halo."

"Ah, I see." She was dancing with a dashing cycler captain and he wanted her opinion on something political! Where was Jentry when you needed to rub his nose in something?

"We were not welcomed with the same… enthusiasm as here, I'm afraid," she admitted. "The Compact maintains the monastery there, but I got the feeling… well, that they were going through the motions. They wouldn't have let us ride the beam in if it hadn't been a humanitarian situation."

"The Envy isn't ready to support full-time occupation, then?"

"It wasn't at that time." Was he grilling her about her ship, now?

"If you need appropriations for supplies, I know who to talk to locally," said Li. "This is my homeworld; that's why I'm visiting."

"Appropriations? Tell me more." The little Ediacaran still huddled against Rue's breast; she had been planning to see about selling it tomorrow. But of course, the monasteries of the Cycler Compact existed to maintain the fleet. Now that her cycler was officially part of that fleet, she must have access to all kinds of resources.

They danced and Captain Li told her what was possible for her now.

MUCH LATER, AN exhausted Rue made her way to the drinks tables. Sure enough, there was Max, holding forth to a small crowd of matrons. Herat and Mike stood nearby, discussing something intensely with a bearded man and his wife.

She ran up and grabbed Mike's arm. "I'm so sorry!" she said. "I got caught up talking cycler talk with Captain Li. I didn't mean to abandon you."

Mike looked surprised, then pleased. "You look worn out."

"Well, I've never danced before, have I? But I had a good teacher." She smiled at him. "I promise I'm yours for the rest of the evening."

Herat looked over, raised an eyebrow, and turned back to his conversation.

"Am I to understand," said Mike as she steered them toward the drinks, "that this is a date?"

She stopped them and looked up at him, mock-serious. "Mr. Bequith, would you like to go to the ball with me?"

He grinned and offered her his arm.

Rue drank two tall glasses of something icy, then they went back to the others. They arrived in time to see Dr. Herat smack his forehead and say, "I don't believe it!"

Max glanced over. "Careful, Professor, you'll break your meal ticket."

"The autotrophs have a delegation here!" said Herat. "Bequith, this is Professor Waldt; he's met them. Can you believe it? We've been trying to talk to them for twenty years and here they are sneaking off to the halo to study us in secret."

"It's hardly a secret to us," said the bearded man.

"So they actually talk to you?" asked Michael.

"Well, not directly." Waldt sipped his drink. "They use intermediaries. There's a group of radical Buddhists who've had themselves genetically engineered to be phototrophs— they're green, if you can imagine that. Lost their stomachs, sealed up their anuses and adopted the autotroph way. They're ice-blind crazy, but the autotrophs do seem to accept them. They've got this little encampment on the edge of the 'troph cavern and they seem to come and go as they please."

"Bequith, this is too great an opportunity to pass up," said Herat.

"I thought you were on vacation," said Mike.

"What better place to spend it than on the shores of an autotroph oasis?"

Max sidled over to Rue as Mike and Herat were bickering. "Something about this doesn't add up," he said.

Rue knew Max's various tones of voice by now; he had been thinking (a quality of Good Max). This was to be encouraged. "What is it?"

"Well, only three of Crisler's guys are here. I see Barendts and Wallace and Manduba. Where are the other two?"

"In the washroom?"

"No, they never showed up. And Crisler's being awfully friendly with some of those industrialists."

"Why, Max, are you jealous of his charisma?"

"No, I just don't understand what he's up to. And this whole party… it's out of whack. I mean, Colossus is important, true, it's one of the biggest halo worlds— but am I just being a provincial bumpkin or is there ten times as much wealth and power sloshing about this room than we'd ever see on Treya?"

She looked through the crush of people. There were a lot of military people and many influential supporters of the Cycler Compact. "They're celebrating the discovery of the Envy."

"I'm not asking why they're here," said Max. "I'm asking why are they here. On Oculus."

She had no idea what he was talking about and said so.

"All right, I'll try one more time," he said. "Did you know that there's no less than three cycler captains here tonight, not counting you?"

"Three? That's impossible!" Most worlds couldn't expect more than ten cyclers to pass by in a single year. And their crews could never visit for more than a few weeks at a time.

"It's true. See?" He pointed out two black uniforms she hadn't seen before. Even now, Captain Li was walking in that direction.

"Maybe you should introduce yourself," said Max.

"I don't think so." Li had been quite enough for one evening.

"Well, there's something goin' on," said Max.

"All right. You tell Mike about it; between the two of you I'm sure you can figure it out."

THE BANQUETING AND dancing flowed on, in long stretches of conversation, moments of laughter and delirious spells of dancing. Many hours later, things began to wind down. Couples strolled up the stone steps and disappeared. Crisler's people left in a knot, several men in suits in tow. As Rue and her crew were drifting in the direction of the exit, Travis Li approached.

"Captain Cassels, we'd be honored if you'd attend a meeting of the Compact in two shifts' time, at one after shift-change," he said. "We'd like to talk to you about Jentry's Envy and about what it might mean to the local worlds to have a new cycler ring operating."

"I'd be delighted," she said. "Where?"

"Council Room Fifteen," he said. "The monks can give you directions. One after in two, then?"

"Ah, yes. Sure."

He walked away. Rue admired his military bearing; she wondered if she would ever walk that way.

They went up the stairs and to the elevators. "I'm not tired yet," she said impulsively to Mike. "Want to take a walk?"

"Sure. But where?"

"This place has a roof. Let's find it."

Despite the fact that they had lived in close proximity for some months now, this was the first time Rue had actually been alone with Mike Bequith. The only truly private spaces on Jentry's Envy were hostile to life. The halls of the great monastery seemed deserted, so she and Mike walked and talked, completely forgetting their surroundings or the various cares that had oppressed them.

Eventually, after wandering a labyrinth of carpeted hallways for a quarter hour, they found an exit onto a broad balcony that looked like it might wrap around the whole building. The roof sloped up steeply above them; it was festooned with gargoyles which, in true halo tradition, looked hand-carved.

The light was exactly the same here as when Rue had awoken. It was only night for one shift of workers; there were shutters over a third of the light wells of the city. She took off her sunglasses. "I suppose it looks dark here to you," she said.

Mike leaned on the balustrade. "Twilight," he said. "Very strange."

"Strange? Not beautiful?"

"Oh, very beautiful," he said, smiling at her. "I must confess I felt very underdressed when I saw you in that uniform earlier."

"I wanted a ball gown."

"Maybe next time."

There was an awkward pause. They stood very near to each other at the railing. Rue wanted to feel his hand on her back again, but what to say? He was always so polite, even distant, that she didn't know where to start with him.

"You've got a meeting tomorrow," he said.

"Yeah. Big time cycler captain stuff." She grinned.

"Dr. Herat wants to visit the autotrophs tomorrow. He will expect me to go."

"Oh… Well, I'm sure I'll be wrapped up all afternoon."

"You know, I've hardly ever seen your eyes."

Rue's heart started pounding. She looked up at him and bit her lip.

"You have beautiful eyes," he said, "but I can never tell what you're thinking, because they're always hidden."

"I'll have to make sure you see them more often," she said.

"Well," he said with an ironic smile, "I can only think of one way for that to happen— for us to be together with the lights off."

Why, the sly boy! She laughed. "I do believe you've just propositioned me, Mr. Bequith."

"Maybe." He took her hand and raised it to his lips. "I guess it was the eyes. What do you say?"

"I suppose the view will still be there tomorrow," she said and let him lead her back inside.

19

ICE RUSHED OVERHEAD. There were a million varieties of it— smooth and blue, white and decayed, soot-streaked, all whipping past just a few meters overhead. Michael stood on the top deck of the boat that Professor Waldt had provided and breathed deeply the scent of the ice.

Oculus had three levels of habitation: surface cities, like Lux; 'coastal' communities, which were really just caverns melted out of the glacial ice at its interface with the ocean; and 'deep' communities, which were similar but situated elsewhere on the planet where the bottom of the glacial continents lay kilometers below northern sea level. Luckily the autotroph settlement was not a deep community, because it would have taken them days of pressurization and acclimatization to be able to visit and days to depressurize, even with the help of their mesobots. The autotroph town was located just a few hours inland.

The network of tunnels they were skimming through was vast and mazelike; it helped that there were signs everywhere, saying things like KOROLEV 15 KM. or DRY-DOCK SIDING, NEXT STARBOARD. There was a lot of traffic, which was one of the reasons Michael was up top: Arcs of fizzing water from passing hydrofoils regularly drenched the lower decks. Herat didn't mind, of course; he and Professor Waldt were bundled in bright yellow rain-slickers. Herat kept leaning over the rail to stare into the quickly passing water.

The cold air was wonderful on Michael's face. More wonderful was to grip a rail that wasn't overlaid with the ghostly indicators of its ownership. Inscape was used in the halo, but sparingly. The manufactured objects here— buildings, cars, clothing— all seemed as feral and natural as the stone and ice to Michael, simply because he could see them without seeing ownership and ideology branded on them through inscape.

Rationally he knew he was more attuned to this reality today because of his new feelings for Rue. On the other hand, his depression since Dis seemed more and more like the result of his having cut himself off from the real world. It took an extraordinary person to be able to travel to the universe's most lonely spots and remain content. Dr. Herat might be able to do it, but it had never really been the life for Michael.

No. It wasn't that simple. The shadow of Dis was still on him and one night with Rue wasn't going to change the fact.

For now, though, just being with Rue was enough. She had a tendency to knock his mind off its tracks, which seemed to be a good thing. That 'supreme meme' idea of hers, for instance, kept coming back to him, like a rumor: How would you have to feel… He found he was half-thinking about that a lot of the time now.

A side-tunnel had appeared up ahead. Michael heard the engines throttle back and they began a turn toward the entrance. This tunnel was low and wide, recently rough-hewn into the turquoise wall of the main highway. Small white bergs bounced in the choppy water there and it was dark, unlike the highway which was lit by regular ceiling lamps.

For a few seconds it looked like they were going to scrape the ceiling; Michael actually had to duck as they slid into the opening. He found himself crouched within a boundary layer of freezing air that seemed to insulate the ice. It was tempting to try to reach up and catch a piece of that ice, which must be millions of years old; but they were moving too fast. He crab-walked back to the stairs and went down.

"Not long now," said Herat. "This was a good idea. It means we can expense this trip."

Michael had to laugh. Herat was so completely the academic. "Well, you're in a good mood this morning," said Herat.

He shrugged. "It's the fresh air."

"I see. No immediate plans to leave my employ, then? — say, to take up piloting a cycler?"

"No," said Michael curtly. He and Rue had talked for a long time after the banquet. She didn't know what she was going to do now that she had confirmed her ownership of the Envy. It was incredibly flattering to be considered a cycler captain and she felt very protective of her starship. At the same time, she longed to go home. She was in the grip of some internal conflict that she herself didn't completely understand; discussing the future simply made her unhappy right now. Since Michael didn't know himself what he was going to do after this expedition, he hadn't pressed the matter.

Herat turned back to ask Waldt something. Searchlights at the prow of the ship lit long fans of glittering ice on the tunnel walls, but the water was black and the glacial breath of the air had penetrated down here, too, so that both men shivered.

Michael moved nearer to the other two. "So it's not really the autotrophs we're dealing with?" Herat was asking.

Waldt shook his head, grinning. "No. It's the garbage-pickers. But they seem to have access to autotroph technology."

"Garbage-pickers?" asked Michael.

"You'll see."

"Do you really think they'll be able to translate the inscription?"

Waldt shrugged. "Even if they don't it's hardly a wasted trip."

Herat eyed Michael. "Linda Ophir?" he said.

Michael shrugged. Yes, he was still trying to find out who had killed her. Herat smiled, nodding in approval.

"Well, let's hope we get real answers from these garbage-pickers," said Herat. "The nearest human AI with a Chicxulub context is light-years away."

Far in the distance the tunnel seemed to end in daylight. As they approached, Michael could see that the waterway ended in a collection of docks. They were lit with solar-intensity lamps and he could see several human figures waiting on the platform.

"Ah well," said Waldt. "You'll know soon enough, it seems." He pointed.

Michael looked over, then did a double take. Three of the men standing there were ordinary enough in appearance, though they were stocky and grim, like professional security types. The other man, though…

He stood completely naked in the vaporous cold. His eyes seemed strange— wide and completely black— but that wasn't the strangest thing. For from toes to crown, his entire body was colored deep green.

The green man turned his face up and seemed to match Michael's gaze. He bared his teeth, in a way that didn't even begin to suggest a smile.

SO HERE RUE was, sitting in a room that was higher than it was wide, at a table that looked to have been made from real trees, with three cycler captains, a minister of foreign affairs, the abbot and several ministers visiting from different halo worlds. Rue felt like she was in court, about to be judged by a jury of strangers.

She missed her family. Just knowing Grandma or Mother were alive might have given her the courage she needed. But none of them would ever know how far she'd come, with the exception of Jentry whose opinions didn't count. Rue wanted desperately to be able to jump up and said, 'Hey, look what a Cassels woman did! But her grandmother was dead; so was Mother. There was no one to send excited messages home to.

"We've got a lot on the agenda today," said the minister, "so I'm not going to waste any time. You've all met Captain Cassels?" There were murmurs and nods around the table. "She's arrived after a tremendous adventure," said the minister. "We've only heard bits and pieces of the story. I hope you'll tell us more before the day's out," he said to her with a smoothly political smile. "But in the meantime, we need to focus on the future of Jentry's Envy as a functioning cycler in the Compact."

Rue nodded. She had anticipated this meeting. Li had filled her in on some of the obligations and powers of a cycler captain (including the ability to marry people) and he had shown her some surprising and exciting details about the worlds the Envy was to visit on its ring. The Envy's ring was priceless— but she knew from her own reading that cyclers had often been political and economic prizes and though the captain had final say on a cycler's course, the worlds of competing rings could tug it to and fro. The more cyclers you had passing your world, the greater your trade options, after all.

"It's no secret that the Compact is in trouble," said the abbot. "A lot of radical schemes have been bandied about to try to solve the problem of our ever-dwindling cycler supply. Before we get started I just want to make sure that everyone at this table is clear on one thing: Permanence was established to ensure the indefinite existence of the Compact. Our people will not cooperate with any plan that dissolves the current cycler system."

Rue saw a couple of shaking heads around the table. What possible alternative to cyclers could there be? she wondered. The abbot sat back. "Proceed," he said.

The minister addressed Rue. "How much do we know about Jentry's Envy? Do you have her complete ring mapped?"

"We think so," she said cautiously. She tapped out a command on the desk and a holo projection of the ring she'd seen at the Lasa habitat appeared.

"What we're really interested in, is her origin point," said the minister. "Which I believe you've determined."

"Yes. It's an uninhabited halo world that's next on the Envy's course after Maenad." She pointed to a small jewel of light in the display. "Osiris and Apophis."

There was a murmur around the table. "That's my point," said one of the visiting ministers, a short, heavy-set man named Mallory. "That's just a pair of brown dwarfs in close orbit— they have no planets. It's a well surveyed system. Your information must be wrong."

"It may well be," said Rue quietly. "But can we afford to ignore the possibility?"

"That's the crux of the matter," said the local minister with a nod. "You see, Captain Cassels, Mr. Mallory is from New Armstrong, which as you can see from the projection, is… here." He pointed.

Cycler rings were not exact circles. They had to take into account the random three-dimensional distribution of stars, brown dwarfs, and drifting superplanets; Jentry's Envy followed a twisting, jagged crown-shaped course that tried to maximize the number and proximity of worlds visited while still bending back on itself to form a rough circle. Drawing a line like this in three-dimensional space made for some tough choices of which worlds to visit; sometimes two or three equally good choices existed that would all permit the cycler to complete its course.

If all the cycler rings in this part of space were shown, Rue knew there would be dozens, with some overlaying one another and some tangential, meeting at key worlds like Colossus. Anywhere that more than a couple of rings met, commerce thrived.

New Armstrong, Mr. Mallory's home world, lay nearly the same distance from Maenad as Osiris and Apophis— but on a course sixty degrees divergent from the existing ring.

Mallory stood. "I submit that Apophis and Osiris can't be the origin of your cycler, because it's a planetless system— as are three of the others on your existing ring. It's true that the Envy's ring cuts through the halo in a unique way and could unite several worlds that until now have been at least two rings distant from one another. This might be desirable, but the cost is too high; there's too many useless worlds on this ring. Your cycler would spend up to ten years at a time between habitable worlds. I propose that we alter its course at Maenad and establish a new ring— like this." He overlapped Rue's holo with his own. It was at a different angle, so it took some rotation and zooming to match the two images.

Mallory's proposed ring included both Colossus and New Armstrong— but it missed Erythrion. Rue sat back, arms crossed, and tried to cultivate a neutral expression.

Pleased expressions appeared up and down the table as Mallory waxed poetic about the new trade possibilities. But as he spoke, Captain Li caught Rue's eye and, almost imperceptibly, shook his head.

When Mallory was finished, Captain Li cleared his throat and said, "And what if Osiris and Apophis is the origin of Jentry's Envy?"

Mallory waved a hand negligently. "Well, clearly we need to determine that… but do we need to sacrifice an entire cycler to do it? Look at the chart. Once the Envy passes Osiris and Apophis it can't return to another viable ring without doing one hundred twenty degree turn— impossible for any massive cycler at that velocity. It'll be committed to visiting a series of empty worlds before it reaches port again. I suggest we outfit a scientific expedition to ride a small habitat on that course and survey the Twins on the way by."

Li shook his head. "They'll pass the system at nearly light-speed. There's no way they can do a proper survey without decelerating in. With no beam to ride, how are you going to get in and out?"

"We could do it with a self-powered ship like the Banshee," said Rue. "That's Admiral Crisler's ship," she explained. "It's a ramjet. It could take us in and out, but firstly, it's an R.E. ship and secondly, Crisler's already planning his own visit to Osiris and Apophis. Once he gets to Maenad he'll return to the R.E. and round up some supply ships. He'll take these and Banshee to the Twins. The Banshee will be used to ship them all out again when they're done exploring the place."

"How far is Maenad from the Envy's position?"

"About six light-months. Longer, granted that they have to decelerate in."

The captains glanced at one another. "We have time," said another of the captains, an old man named Serle. "But we'll be tipping our hand."

"It may not matter," said the minister. "I think it's a risk we have to take."

Mallory leaned forward. "What do you mean? Are you saying we can get there first?"

"Of course not," said the abbot— a little too adamantly, Rue thought. And the minister had an odd look on his face, as if he'd said something he shouldn't have said. Mallory obviously saw these things; he frowned and sat back.

Well, that was interesting! Too bad Max wasn't here. He was good at reading subtext.

"Let's restrict this discussion to the possible," said the minister. "We have to sacrifice a pawn by letting Crisler's supply ships get to the Twins first. Once there, they're trapped until the Banshee arrives."

"Any chance we can take the Banshee over?" asked Mallory.

Rue stared at him; he really seemed serious. "Uh… I don't think so," she said. "It's an antimatter-drive ship. Doesn't that mean it's got enough power to burn off a moon if it needs to?"

"Erm, yes," said Mallory. "But we could disable or destroy it fairly easily."

"I will not allow murderers on my ship!"

The abbot raised a hand. "That's not in the plan, Captain Cassels. Mr. Mallory, you're out of line. There'll be no military action against the Banshee. All we need to do is ship up a smaller, lighter ramjet of our own. The only problem is it will take almost all our beam power to do it."

"Well that is a problem," said Mallory. "My people and I are eager to return to New Armstrong. There's considerable cargo we need to take with us. The Envy would literally shave years off our schedule."

"Your schedule," said Rue coldly. "Is that what all this is about?" She looked around the table. "I appreciate the economic advantage that Colossus and New Armstrong stand to gain by altering my cycler's course. The ring you're proposing would pass a number of core systems and obviously it would make me unbelievably rich. But you've only told half the story, Mr. Mallory."

She tuned up the holo so that her ring glowed more brightly than Mallory's. "What you didn't say is that four of the 'empty' worlds on my ring were surveyed a hundred years ago and found to be prime locations for new colonies. Abbot Griffin began this meeting by telling us that the Compact is in trouble. That's because we're losing all the lit worlds that were once a part of it. Cyclers that once picked up and deposited cargoes at the lit worlds are passing them by— there are holes in our rings now. Distances between stops have increased for nearly all the cyclers because of this.

"I know we've been redrawing the rings to compensate, but more cyclers for fewer worlds is a false economy— and it means increasing isolation for the most distant halo worlds. Mr. Mallory's plan would be profitable in the short run, but have we completely lost sight of the long run here?" What about Erythrion? she wanted to shout. Captain Li had shown her plans for the new, smaller rings. There were no cyclers for Erythrion in that plan.

"I will not alter the course of the Envy," she said. As Mallory opened his mouth to speak she continued. "I have very good reasons not to. First, there may well be an alien cycler-building industry at Osiris and Apophis; we need to get to it before the R.E. does. The Envy is going there anyway. We need only tag along with the small ramjet the abbot mentioned. With the Envy as backup, the ship can do a quick insertion and return flight. Otherwise, you're contemplating a starship that has to carry as much resources as a cycler, because it'll have to be autonomous for years. It's not going to be a 'light' ramjet if it has to survive on its own all the way back here from the Twins.

"But the second reason's much more important. Is the Cycler Compact dead? Are we just marking time? Are we so demoralized by the loss of the lit worlds that we're going to withdraw from exploration and just get by with what we've got? Or are we going to seed the worlds along the Envy's existing route with beam-builder robots? In twenty years when we pass by again, the beams will be ready and we can begin dropping colonists on those worlds. Just think! Four new systems! How many new worlds among them? Ten? Twenty?"

Mallory and the Oculus minister were both glowering at her. Li was smiling and the abbot's face was neutral. Rue spread her hands and said, "It's the only reasonable course of action. My cycler is open to any legal cargo, naturally, but I'm keeping her on her present course and that means our best bet will be to ship up some beam-builders and a light ramjet or pion drive cutter to visit the Twins. I'm not qualified to figure out those details, but as to the course itself… that's set."

No one objected. In fact, to her surprise she saw they were nodding, all except Mallory. For Rue, something had crested and passed at this moment. She was no longer nervous; she no longer feared the men at this table.

The world was full of Jentries and Crislers and Mallories. But they could be opposed and beaten. This, she promised herself, she would remember.

"And what about your own course?" asked the abbot.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"You're in an unusual position," continued the abbot. "You're both a cycler captain and the cycler's owner. Most cyclers are commissioned by consortia or governments, then run by a captain chosen by the Compact. Since your salvage claim on the Envy has been upheld, you no longer need to reside on the vessel itself. You could choose to settle somewhere. Will you be returning to the Envy? Or returning to Erythrion— which will take years?"

"I… I don't know," she said, off balance again.

"I just wanted to say that you have a third choice," said the abbot. The others were smiling and nodding now.

"What choice?"

"You could settle here, with your crew. Colossus would be honored to accommodate a cycler owner of your stature. And we're wealthy as halo worlds go, Captain Cassels. You could live in luxury here— your whole crew could."

Rue's mind was a blank. Somehow she had never contemplated this possibility. She had been so focused on staking her claim on the Envy, for so long, that what came after had remained a blur in her imagination.

"Uh," she said after an awkward silence.

The abbot laughed. "Please, don't think you need to answer right now! Think about it. I just wanted to make sure you knew the offer was there."

The meeting continued, but Rue seemed to be floating above it somehow, watching herself debate and listen with the others.

Could it be that her long flight from Jentry's anger would end here?

MICHAEL KEPT SNEAKING glances at the green man as they walked. It wasn't as if someone had applied green paint to his body. The color had a depth to it, so that the contours of his body shone a deeper shade than the planes. Even his long tangled hair was green. He stalked rather than walked, balancing on the balls of his feet, nostrils flared, eyes wide. He looked ready to fight, or flee.

The strange man had not spoken at first, merely staring at Michael, Herat, and Waldt. Finally one of the other humans had introduced himself, as a Mr. Arless. "These are the ones you asked for," Arless had said to the green man.

"Phages in the house of God," said the green man. His voice was thin, as if he had to force the words past some obstruction. "This is a catastrophe."

"We were informed that the autotrophs will see us," said Herat.

"They see no phages," hissed the green man. Then he looked down at his feet. "But you may see them."

Arless hovered at Michael's shoulder. "We gave the monks of the Autotroph Way a hand when they were starting out," he whispered. "The 'trophs accept them and in turn they owe us big time. So trade happens."

"Who is 'we'?" asked Michael.

Arless shrugged. "Business people."

"Of course." Michael knew the R.E. would never tolerate such an arrangement. Genetic alteration of humans was illegal— as were the personal neural implants of NeoShintoism, he thought sourly. The R.E. was terrified that humanity would radiate into a thousand subspecies, as had happened to so many spacefaring civilizations in the past. That fear was one of the reasons they used to justify the tyranny of the Rights Owners.

"I can't believe the 'trophs have agreed to see you," said Arless. "You must really have something they want." He glanced at his men.

"It's nothing you could use," said Michael quickly. "You might say it's a shared hobby."

"Come," said the green man. He had turned and marched into the green mouth of a tunnel. For almost half an hour now Michael had let himself be drawn though a seemingly endless maze of corridors hacked out of crustal ice. The walls and ceiling of the tunnel were of deep blue, emerald where lights shone in nearby, hollowed-out chambers. Cables ran along the ceiling and the footing underneath was loose plastic plates.

Finally the green man stopped at a dead end. A ladder was set into the wall of the tunnel here. It led upward.

"We'll wait for you here," said Arless as Michael and the professors moved to the ladder. "Say hi to the 'trophs when you see 'em."

They followed their guide up the stairs, which rang loudly under their feet. Michael shaded his eyes and looked ahead to try to make out their destination. He could see a triangular network of girders, mist, and, somewhere in the distance, a rich red surface like a theater curtain. The light was too bright to make out more.

The steps passed through the girders and let onto a large concrete surface. To Michael's left, the geodesics of girder-work swept up and into obscurity, at least half a kilometer overhead. Blue and green ice brooded outside the triangles. Where sight foundered in dim mist overhead, the eye met glowing crimson, which swept down inside the geodesics to become a second wall to Michael's right. This space— outside a wall of girders and inside a wall of billowed crimson— curved away to either side. The girders must form a geodesic sphere and inside that sphere was another, this one of the red material. Michael and the others stood at the bottom, in between the two walls.

There were more green humans here, striding back and forth or riding small carts, carrying supplies and tools. A few stared in their direction. The concrete floor was a maze of stacked boxes and pillowed tarpaulins. It was damp in here, the air heavy, but no longer cold.

"Phages are not allowed beyond this point," said the guide. He scowled at Michael and the professor. "They must not know that you are here. Walk only where I say."

"Are the autotrophs afraid of us?" asked Herat casually. Michael stared at him— how could he be so tactless? But the guide simply shook his head.

"Fear is an emotion. Emotions are a pollution of phages, not autotrophs."

"That doesn't sound very attractive," said Herat. "Why do you admire them so much if they have no concept, say, of love?"

"There are… affects… that autotrophs have, but phages cannot." The guide was proving to be positively chatty. Michael was once again surprised at Herat's ability to ferret out information from seemingly impossible sources.

"But do these affects correspond to states like fear or attraction?"

"This way." The guide started walking again. In the distance, Michael could see a slit of bright light in the crimson wall.

They rounded a stack of huge crates and came to the slit in the curtain. The red material was at least two meters thick, Michael now saw, and rubbery. As they approached he put his hand out to touch it. It felt like a leaf— alive and delicate. He snatched his hand back.

The slit rose a good ten meters above them, narrowing gradually.

The green man gestured to a rack of pressure suits. "Dress." He picked one off its hangar and began suiting up. Michael grabbed another; it was an unfamiliar design, with markings in a language he had never seen before on its metal cuffs and wrist pad. He tried to imitate the green man's actions. Getting a suit properly sealed was a matter of life and death; because he couldn't read the suit's HUD display, he wasn't sure if he'd done it right. Did green lights mean safe or danger to these people?

Waldt had reached for a suit, but the green man stopped him. "Only three may safely enter at a time," he said. Waldt started to protest, then shook his head in obvious disappointment and stepped back.

The now-suited green man walked over and checked Michael's suit, then Herat's. Michael's earphones crackled and he heard the voice of the green man say, "Good. Come." Their guide walked over to the glowing slit in the wall and pressed himself into it. The material gave slightly. The suited man pushed and wriggled his way deeper into it.

"You don't suppose the whole place is like that?" asked Waldt. "Solid, I mean?"

"You don't know?"

Waldt shook his head. "I've never been allowed beyond this point," he said.

Michael went up to the slit and tentatively pressed his hand into it. It gave like rubber. He pressed forward into crimson glowing material; this was much less pleasant than the Lasa airlocks had been. Like being born, in reverse, he thought. He got about a meter in without difficulty; then he began to encounter a strong pressure. The light was changing, becoming brighter and what he could see of the arm extended ahead of him was beaded with moisture.

Abruptly his hand was free of the material and with relief he pushed himself out, into a realm of dazzling light and noise.

As his eyes adjusted he made out a vast space, at least a kilometer across, carved out of the ice and draped with the folds of this red stuff. No— not draped, he realized as he began to see more. The red material rose up in petals, like a cyclopean rose, with the glassed-over shaft leading down to icewater at its base. At its crown, banks of arc lights lit everything in shadowless, blue-white. The color of this light darkened the red of the huge flower to a bruised purple. The radiance was hot on Michael's skin even through the faceplate.

Narrow catwalks crossed the open space in a profusion of bright lines and rising up from around the circular water shaft were numerous scaffolds, upon which bright machines twirled and roared. The whole space echoed with noise, in fact— an industrial bedlam completely at odds with the strange and opulent flower that cradled the machinery.

Michael now stood on a nexus of scaffolds; five radiated away from this spot and ladders and odd spiral poles rose up from the railing. In the nearby air tiny black flecks— insects? — danced distractingly.

"One thing we do know," said Herat. "The autotrophs like a temperature of about a hundred Celsius, at high pressure. Their atmosphere is mostly compressed steam with a bit of nitrogen in it. Look— you can see the air ripple with the heat."

Michael looked about for some sign of the autotrophs. He saw things moving— strange, looping tetrahedrons that rolled to and fro, sometimes stopping to balance on two legs while the other two grabbed some piece of machinery or piping and passed it off to the spidery metal robots that swarmed over the scaffolds. At least he assumed they were robots.

"Are those the autotrophs?" he asked, pointing to the distant tripod shapes.

The guide simply gestured for them to follow. He headed out along one of the narrower catwalks, which passed over the dark pit of the water shaft.

Looking out, Michael could now see a few glassed-in platforms suspended over the shaft. One of them was a broad dome joined to the catwalk by an ordinary looking airlock. There were what looked like beds inside this dome and green forms on many of them. He did a double take and realized he was looking at almost a hundred green men and women, apparently asleep in the blazing light.

"We have provided an interface to the autotroph information net," said the green man. "You will use that to ask your questions." He pointed and Michael, following his gaze, at first could not see what he was pointing at. There was a thing like an inscape terminal, but it was covered with a dense crawling carpet of bugs.

Then he got it. The autotroph AI was a cloud of black metal beads, each about the size of a bee. They had wings and were distributed throughout the vast space of the enclave. Here, though, the green people had built a device to attract them. So were they going to speak to the autotrophs through this device— or only to it?

"Visitors," said a voice in Michael's earphone. It seemed human, male, nondescript. Reluctantly, he admitted to himself that this was probably the voice of an AI, not that of an autotroph.

"Hello," continued the voice. "We are with you now."

"Who are you?" asked Herat. "Who speaks? The autotrophs? Or their agent?"

"I am the interface with God," said the voice.

Herat sent Michael one of his patented long-suffering glances.

"Why did you ask us to come here in person?" asked Herat. "We know we could have just transmitted you the text we wish you to translate."

"Our outside interface is untrustworthy," said the voice.

"Outside interface… you mean Arless and his people?"

"Yes. This information is not for them."

"Why not?" asked Herat.

The AI did not answer.

BY THE TIME Herat's investigations took them to Dis, Michael had come to believe he was an old hand when it came to aliens. True, he'd never met a live one, but for years he and the professor had rooted through the debris left by civilizations that had preceded humanity into space. So when he heard they were going to Dis, he was interested— but not apprehensive.

On the morning of their arrival he and Herat had ridden an elevator up from the spin-section of the opulent research ship they had brought and Michael suited up in freefall. He had seen photos of Dis during the trip out, but these were muddy and dark and he really didn't know what to expect. As the airlock opened, he found himself staring at a landscape— complete with hills, forests, and buildings— floodlit by their ship and hanging perpendicular to him like a wall. Everything was magically clear, as if this were a model suspended a meter away. He resisted the urge to reach out; he knew what he was seeing was kilometers away.

They jetted over and as they flew Michael began to feel a presentiment— an inkling that he should have prepared himself better for this place. The ruined landscape— large patches of which had drifted off into space leaving a mesh of girders behind— stretched off into darkness in every direction. He struggled to retain his impression that it was across from him, not down, but failed. In an instant he found himself descending, like some kind of hesitant angel, onto what appeared to be a frozen circle of Hell.

After that experience he was more judicious in his preparations for encountering the alien. He thought he'd done pretty well at Jentry's Envy. But since he had not expected to meet autotrophs here at a human world, he had not prepared himself for coming out here. The autotroph compound was nothing like Dis; it was, if anything, too inhabited. But as they stood next to the buzzing cloud that was the autotroph's artificial intelligence, he found himself struggling to keep his attention focused on the matter at hand.

The green people's AI was silent. They had shown it the Chicxulub writing and now it was querying the autotroph database. Apparently, there were several levels of connotation to Chicxulub writing. It wasn't simply a matter of surface meaning and implication; each word in effect punned off its neighbors and contained multiple allusions. Also, the primary physical metaphors of Chicxulub were inhuman: a metaphor using a galvanic proximity sense as its basis couldn't be simply converted into a visual or tactile equivalent. The AI might be laboriously changing its own mind into something like a Chicxulub/human hybrid. For a few minutes, it would become alien not only to Michael and Herat, but to its own creators.

Michael's attention kept drifting away from it to the chaos all around them. He had no doubt this was the equivalent of a bustling human town and he supposed such a place would look just as incomprehensible to the autotrophs. But he couldn't even tell which things were the aliens and which were machines or helper species.

There were things like big birds here. They circled up near the intense lights, above the flower. Were those the autotrophs? He'd noticed hundreds of odd oval pods, which hung from the inside folds of the red material. Most were still, but one or two thrashed like flies caught in a spider's web. The motion was unsettling; though he knew the autotrophs did not devour one another, or indeed anything living, he had to look away from those twitching bodies.

One of the tripod things wheeled by. It was really just four legs joined at a central pod; each leg was as loose as a tentacle and it tended to roll along on three while holding the fourth up like an attentive head. The tripod that passed stood a good three meters high. It didn't turn its leg/head as it went by and Michael didn't turn to watch it go; he knew it was still moving away because the catwalk bounced slightly with its movements.

"I have several translations," said the AI abruptly. Michael looked at the Herat, who grinned.

"Are they all true, or is one better than the others?" Herat asked the cloud. To one side, their guide had crossed his arms and was looking the other way.

"You must decide," said the bug-covered terminal. "I do not have the context to know.

"These are some translations into terms you may understand. Chicxulub language is self-modifying, so the best translation is one that uses what you call puns to convey the meaning:

"Self-containered: to evert, encome-pass farship's precreative behestination. Your orgasmasher's detournement is presended."

Michael and Herat exchanged glances.

"The Chicxulub were funny guys," said Herat after a moment.

"There is another translation that shows the allusive layer of the message," said the AI. "It could be translated into any number of human mythologies. This one is Greco-Roman:

"Daughter of Saturn, you may escape your devouring father's belly by wielding the bright sword that we have forged for you."

The words hit Michael like a shock of cold water— or the sudden presence of powerful kami. He didn't understand what he had just heard, but he felt there was a vast and authoritative mind behind the words.

"The most literal translation," continued the AI, "would be:

"To the Chicxulub or those like them: The Other you fought has become your Self. To resolve that crisis, follow this starship to its birthplace. There you will find a new use has been made of your ancient weapon."

Herat frowned. "This is a Lasa speaking."

Michael felt a sinking feeling. He knew what ancient weapon the Lasa referred to. There had been only one Chicxulub weapon that mattered: the self-reproducing starships that had fanned out across the galaxy sixty-five million years ago. They had visited millions of planets and obliterated any world that threatened to develop sentient life. They had visited Earth; it was their weapon that had caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The Chicxulub had wanted the galaxy to themselves. They got it— and were the galaxy's sole inhabitants for millions of years, until they died out.

Michael leaned against the catwalk's railing. He stared out over the busy autotroph amphitheater, not seeing it.

Herat was scowling. "But Jentry's Envy was not intended just for the Chicxulub," he muttered. "It's a gift for everyone or anyone who comes along."

"There's still something we're missing," admitted Michael. The translation that rang most loudly in his mind was the one that began, Daughter of Saturn…

"Saturn is Chronos— god of time," said Herat. "Saturn devoured his children. Like the Chicxulub destroyed all their potential successors?"

After studying the deep, misty well below them for a while, Michael said, "I think we're focusing on the wrong thing here."

"What do you mean?"

"It'll be great if we can figure out exactly what this means," Michael said reluctantly. "But more important right now, is to ask what this message has to do with the murder of Linda Ophir? And who concealed it from us and why?"

"Who?" Herat shrugged. "Only Crisler had the authority to spoof the inscape system. So he did it. That means he probably had the message translated before we arrived on the scene…"

Michael nodded. "And that he probably had Linda killed as well." They had discussed this possibility a number of times since they learned of the inscape spoofing. But the speculation had never led anywhere before.

He hesitated to say where his thoughts were going now. "If this message is a reference to a weapon— or even if Crisler only thinks it is," Michael said, "then maybe we have our motive. Crisler is after the Chicxulub weapon."

The Chixculub had built self-reproducing starships that fanned out across the galaxy, destroying any world that hinted at having or developing sentient life. Humanity had hitherto outlawed self-reproducing machines; there was no human research to which Crisler could turn to develop such a horrible weapon. And that was as it should be.

Herat cursed. "He wants to wipe out the rebels by creating weapons that can reproduce? Michael, that's crazy. How are his machines to distinguish between rebel and loyalist?"

There were hints in the archaeological record that the Chicxulub had been wiped out by their own machines, after inevitable genetic drift and social pressures had rendered them unrecognizable to those machines. The final era of the Chicxulub must have been a nightmare time: All innovation was outlawed, all social and genetic innovation crushed, and everything that could be done had been done. Everything that could be thought had been thought. Everything else was illegal, and lurking in deep space were the soulless executioners who would wipe away any group who tried to change things.

Herat was shaking his head. "Michael, I don't think this message really says that there's a weapon at the Twins. It's something else."

"It doesn't say that the Lasa made a weapon. But the technology behind it might be turned into one. I bet that's what Crisler's thinking."

Herat nodded sharply. "We'd best get this news to the local authorities. We need to have Crisler questioned. Think Rue's people would be up to it?"

"I don't know. Certainly the R.E.'s arm doesn't reach this far—"

"Leave now!"

They both turned. Their guide was walking back along the catwalk.

"Thank you," Michael said in the general direction of the AI as they clattered away after the green man. The swarming dots of the AI made no reply.

Herat told Professor Waldt what the message said, but Michael noticed he didn't mention Linda Ophir or anything else about the Envy. He had odd notions about discretion. Michael was thinking hard about the murder; he barely noticed their surroundings until they were back at the base of the ladder, where Arless waited.

Before the guide could escape back up the ladder, Michael turned to thank him for his help. "One more thing," he said as the green man turned indifferently away. "I know I'm unfamiliar with the autotrophs, but… we saw a lot of creatures and machines in the compound. Which ones were the autotrophs themselves? The tripod things?"

The guide shook his head.

"The bird things?"

The green man shook his head and this time he laughed, a harsh and contemptuous sound.

"They were all around you, but you did not know how to see them," he said.

"I don't understand."

The guide shrugged and began to climb. "You wouldn't," he said. "An autotroph is not a thing. An autotroph is a system."

Michael watched the green form recede up the shaft. He didn't understand— not even remotely. After a few moments Herat put a hand on his shoulder and returned his attention to the world of humanity and politics.

20

THEY HAD ONLY a few more days at Oculus. Jentry's Envy was still travelling at speed and in order to catch her Rue would need to gather her crew and passengers together in a new cargo magsail and ride the beam to rendezvous. If they missed this window, there would not be another one for years; no other cycler followed the Envy's route and without her Erythrion was inaccessible.

Though tired after her meeting, Rue was determined to make the most of her time here. Still, she dawdled as she made her way through the huge and bustling market of Lux. She wore her captain's uniform and felt eyes upon her wherever she went. She hadn't enjoyed the sensation on Treya, where she was more of a curiosity than a celebrity; here she reveled in it.

Most amazing was that she simply didn't need money. Some shopkeepers vied to give her wares for free, simply for the honor of being able to say that she had chosen goods from their establishment. They would have followed her, Max, and Rebecca out of the stores and down the street, were it not that the crew of the Envy was accompanied by a glowering security man from the monastery.

"I just can't believe we're really here," said Rebecca for the third time. Directly overhead, Colossus glowed placidly. All the towers of the city were built to twine like vines upward toward its fixed light. The palette of colors used in the street was complementary to that serene amber radiance; the street was thronged with colorful people, who in the distance faded into a kind of silken dream-landscape of pastels.

Rebecca held up a transparent bag that held a folded, shimmering gown. She was loaded down with such bags, but seemed to be enjoying the extra weight. "Corinna will never wear this!" she said with a grin.

"Because you were hoping she'd let you have it," laughed Rue. They had gifts for everyone: some recently imported R.E. movies for Evan and, in addition to the gown, some new Oculan symphonies for Corinna. There was much more to buy of course and everything they bought here would be worth a hundred times its price back on Erythrion. The most valuable trade items within the halo were, after all, hand-crafted works of art.

The better shops advertised their class with intricately carved and painted facades. Rue stopped indecisively between a jewelry store whose front was one gigantic jaguar's-head (door in the mouth) and an antiquities dealer whose storefront looked like the entrance of an Earth-Egyptian temple. "Ooh, where next?"

"Jewelry is light," Rebecca pointed out. "You can carry more of it on the trip." She strolled toward the jewelry store.

Max watched until she was inside the shop. "Remember how I said last night that there were too many politicos and ship captains around? I started nosing around. It seems there's a movement afoot to break up the Cycler Compact."

Although this didn't come as a complete surprise, Rue was still shocked. She had been about to follow Rebecca into the shop, but hesitated. "How?" she asked.

Max grimaced. "The line is that faster-than-light travel makes the cyclers obsolete. Too expensive. Instead, they want to ship cargoes directly to the lit worlds. From there they can go by FTL to any other halo world, after all."

"Or to any R.E. world," she pointed out, "and more cheaply."

"Exactly. If we dismantle the Compact, the halo worlds are at the mercy of the R.E. The idea's being sold as a way of bringing the far-flung parts of the Compact together through FTL, but in the long run it's still more expensive than travel between the lit worlds."

"We'll just wither and die," she said. "Like Erythrion is."

He nodded grimly. "The chief proponents of this new deal are a bunch of idiots from—"

She held up a hand. "Let me guess. New Armstrong? And their head man is named Mallory?"

"How'd you know that?"

"Just a guess."

"We'll completely lose our autonomy," Max went on. "The only way to get to another halo world will be through the R.E."

"I wonder how long this has been going on?" mused Rue. "Do you think New Armstrong's been siphoning off the remaining cyclers somehow?… That's not supposed to be possible, but maybe they got to one or two of the captains. That could explain why Erythrion hasn't seen a cycler in years." The very thought outraged her; could the decline of Erythrion and the coup at Treya and the lawlessness of the Stations that had led to her running away, have all had a common source?

"No place is free of politics," said Max in a tired voice. He had been enjoying the shopping, Rue knew, but he looked sad again now.

She bit her lip, wondering whether to tell him what she had been thinking. "Max… do you like it here?"

He shrugged. "It's way better than Treya."

"If you could settle down here… would you?"

He appeared surprised. "What are you saying?"

"Just that we've been offered a chance to do that. We could ship a new captain and crew up to the Envy. Buy houses here, live well… not worry about this political stuff anymore."

He shook his head. "But Evan and Corinna—"

"Could join us. We'd get them to disembark at Maenad and fly back here by FTL— or buy them tickets back to Erythrion. I think we're rich enough to do that."

Max scratched at his head. Clearly he hadn't thought of this possibility. Slowly, a smile spread across his face. "You know… I, yes. I think it would be good for me, being here. A place to rest, finally, away from Leda and Erythrion's silly excuse for society."

Rue was happy and simultaneously felt a flutter of anxiety. Had Max decided at this moment? And would that decision draw the rest of them along, just as his decision to go after the Envy had drawn her here?

She looked around at the market, speculating seriously for the first time about being able to return here— maybe as often as she wanted. Now that she was noticing details, a small, nondescript door caught her attention. It was sandwiched between the ostentatious facades and she wouldn't have given it a second glance were it not that a small neatly carved sign over it said, "NeoShintoist Chapter of Oculus."

"Don't tell Rebecca about this idea yet," she said to Max. "It's just an idea, so far." She eyed the door again. "Why don't you join her? I've got something to do; I'll be back in a minute."

"Hmm? Uh, okay," said Max, puzzled. "Suit yourself. But Rebecca's a good shopper. Don't be surprised if all the good stuff is gone when you get back!"

Her bodyguard followed as Rue gently knocked on the door, then, when there was no answer, eased it open. A set of stairs led up from the street. Apparently the NeoShintoists weren't wealthy or important enough to afford a storefront.

Rue felt slightly nervous as she mounted the stairs. She was invading Mike's territory, in a way, by coming in here. But as always, her curiosity was stronger than her caution.

The stairs let into a surprisingly sumptuous lounge that overlooked the street. An elderly man sat in a deep armchair by the window. As Rue entered the room he rose and bowed to her.

He was dressed in typical Oculus fashion, in a brocaded jacket over a tuned-down chameleon cloth shirt and loose leggings reminiscent of the practical cold weather gear the first settlers had made. He looked comfortable and a bit rumpled, like an older version of Max.

"Can I help you?"

"Yes, I…" She wasn't sure where to begin.

"Captain Cassels, isn't it?" he said before she could decide.

"Yes." Rue felt herself blushing. "Everybody seems to know me. I–I've come to ask you about NeoShintoism."

He showed no surprise. "What would you like to know?"

"Well, I have a friend. He's a NeoShinto monk. He's told me a little bit about it, but I… just want to know more."

The old man nodded. "You're Michael Bequith's captain."

"You know him?"

"In a way." The old man smiled enigmatically. "We've never met. Oh— where are my manners. My name is Vogel." He held out his hand to shake.

"Come with me," said Vogel. "I'll show you what we're all about." He led Rue and her guards through a side door into another lounge, this one windowless. The walls were covered in shelves, like an old-style library. Instead of books, the shelves held black data storage units. They looked familiar.

She walked over to the shelves and drew out one of the units. "Mike totes one of these around."

Vogel nodded. "These are containers for kami. Most of them are kami from our own world— primarily the kami of the glaciers and deep ocean. Very prosaic, from our point of view. But some! Some of these units hold kami from other worlds and the best, the very best of those, are the ones captured for us by Michael Bequith."

He went to the back of the room. There, a broad set of shelves sat nearly empty, except for a line of about a dozen data units. "These are his," said Vogel, running his finger along the units' spines. "I've entered their presence many times, Captain Cassels. They have brought more hope and inspiration to our order than the whole of this library."

"Why?" She came to stand by him. Her Mike a religious celebrity? It was hard to picture. "What's so special about Mike?"

"Brother Bequith has had opportunities the rest of us only dream of," said Vogel. "He has been able to capture the kami of the most exotic places in the galaxy. We have learned more about the limits of human reverence from his recordings than from any one else's."

Rue frowned at the data units, then said, "I guess I just don't understand what it is about these things that's so precious."

Vogel chuckled quietly. "You're seeing only their shells. You have to experience the kami directly to understand. That's the whole point."

"How can I do that?"

"With these." Vogel pointed to the armchairs scattered about the lounge. On each rested a fine, filigree cap, attached by data ribbons to a dock just the right size to hold one of the data units. "Michael would have no use for these, any more than I do," said Vogel. "Our implants allow us to meet the kami directly. These headsets are for people who don't have the implants. You can use one of these to experience what he's experienced."

"And that is what, exactly?"

"Transcendence of life, death… time itself," said Vogel without irony. "Truth."

Rue smiled, a little sadly. Her mother had warned her about movements like this. Transcendence, mother had said, is another word for escape. But escape to where? This life is all we have. To desire escape from life is to desire death.

"It sounds wonderful," she said wistfully. "I wish I could believe in it."

Vogel laughed. "Belief is entirely unnecessary," he said. "None of us believe anything. NeoShinto is a method, not an ideology."

"Huh?"

"NeoShinto is part of the philosophy of Permanence," said Vogel. "Permanence is the attempt to create a human culture that can survive indefinitely here in deep interstellar colonies. NeoShinto is a Permanence program that explores the limits of human neurological programming.

"Humans think metaphorically. Most of our thoughts are built up of more primitive metaphors. Our most atomic metaphors are hard-wired in as a result of where we evolved. One of those hardwired metaphors is something we commonly call 'I. It's the metaphor of self-as-object.

"Religions throughout history have tried to replace this primary metaphor with self-as-world, but it's very difficult unaided. Takes years of effort by specialists, because you're operating on basic neurological programming. By the twentieth century they had drugs that could explode the 'I' metaphor, but they didn't have the conceptual framework to understand what they were doing. We have it.

"NeoShinto is just a technology for replacing your 'I' with a perceived Other— what we call the kami. We attach no mythology or dogma to the experience. You're free to interpret it however you'd like." There was irony in his smile now.

"I don't understand," she confessed.

"Of course not," said Vogel. "You can't until you've met the kami. Would you like to try?" He gestured to the armchairs.

She didn't like the idea of undergoing some procedure here, under this man's power. But… "Can I take one of these headsets with me? And… a kami to try?"

"Of course. You can take a headset now. I'll have some kami copied for you— including the best of Brother Bequith's. That will take some hours; I'll have them delivered to your suite."

"Thank you."

"But tell me," said Vogel. "Why has Brother Bequith not come to visit us yet? We've received no communication from him since he arrived."

"I… I don't know," she said sincerely. "But I will ask him."

Vogel's question stayed with her as she rejoined Rebecca in the street and it distracted her from the rest of day's shopping.

"RUE, WHERE ARE you?" asked Michael.

She smiled to hear his voice. Through inscape, it seemed to thrum inside her head, nice and intimate. "I'm in the city," she said, looking around for a landmark. There were too many of them— minarets, domes, faery bridges between glittering towers. "How did your meeting go?"

"That's what I'd like to talk about. Listen, we're still in the ice caves, we should be back in the city in half an hour. Can you meet us at Pier 47?"

"Well, if it's urgent…"

"It's very urgent. I think we've found evidence of what Crisler is up to. We translated the Chicxulub message and, well— I'll tell you when we meet."

"Um, all right."

Michael disconnected. Well, that was odd, she thought. Rue was suddenly aware of her guard, who scanned the crowd unceasingly. The bustling streets didn't look so peaceful as they had moments ago.

"Rebecca, could you head back to the keep? Max and I are going to meet the boys at the docks."

The doctor was visibly tired from hiking around all day. "Sure," she said. "Want me to take this stuff?"

"If you could."

They went their separate ways, Rebecca toward the distant monastery and Rue and Max through narrow streets in the direction of the docks.

At the center of Lux, roads and maglev tracks entered into a whirlpool-like spiral that led down. They walked through underpasses and over bridges as traffic zipped by and finally reached the edge of an immense, round shaft that punctured the ice. The roads spiraled down its outer walls, then disappeared as the shaft opened out into a gigantic domelike cavern half a kilometer below. As their elevator fell past the roof of this dome, the roads reappeared, hugging the curve of the roof as they continued their way down to the dark ocean water below.

Dozens of warehouses and docks clung to the base of the cavern walls. Trucks and maglev cars were loading and unloading cargo within clusters of freighters at the docks. Dark cave entrances opened off the cavern at intervals and ships came and went through these.

It was a long walk from the elevators to Pier 47. Rue was tired and the crowds and growling machinery that raced back and forth here began to give her a headache. She sat down gratefully on a bench and rummaged through the one bag she hadn't given to Rebecca. This held some jewelry and the NeoShinto headset Vogel had given her. She toyed with this as she waited.

"Think that's them?" asked Max. He had become positively jovial in the past few minutes. As if new possibilities had opened for him, she thought. Where he pointed, a rust-streaked freighter was edging its way toward their pier. The only other vessel here was a battered looking lozenge-shaped thing that she thought might be a submarine.

Rue was not so happy. She found herself dwelling on the idea that the man Mallory could himself be responsible for the abuses of her past. And the idea that this place might become her home was equally disquieting, though she couldn't have said why. She didn't snap back to attention until she heard a gangplank thump down, and Mike ran up to her. Herat was sauntering down the gangplank behind him.

"Oh!" She leaped to her feet and hugged Mike. "How did it go?" she asked.

The freighter pulled away from the docks. Professor Waldt was still aboard; he waved from the deck, then turned to go inside.

Michael waved back and laughed. "We had as much fun as alien-hunters are likely to have. But listen, we know what the message on the Lasa habitat says. We've got to inform the abbot as soon as possible; can you get us in to see him as soon as we get back?"

"Sure, but what—?"

Rue stumbled over the words and stopped. Something weird had just happened; she shook her head, thinking for a second that her ears had popped.

The sounds of the crowds and machinery had stopped, as though cut off by a switch.

She started to say something about it to Mike, but he was staring past her open-mouthed. Rue turned.

The docks were empty. Not just their pier, but all the other piers as well. And the freighters, roadways, the maglev tracks, and the distant elevators. In a split-second and with no warning, the thousand or more people sharing the docks with them had vanished.

So had their bodyguard. The only people in this gigantic cavern, it seemed, were Rue, Mike, Max, and Herat.

"Oh shit," said Mike, "they've messed with the ins—"

"Get down!"

The figure appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the pier: a running man, his arms cradling a large laser gun. "Get down!" he shouted again. "Ambush!"

Now Rue heard the vicious hissing that accompanied laser fire. She threw herself to the ground and Mike landed on top of her.

"It figures." It was Max's voice. Rue looked up.

He stood there with a vaguely disappointed expression on his face. He was looking at the black-edged hole that had appeared magically in the center of his chest. He started to say something else, but blood suddenly gouted from his mouth and he crumpled to the ground. His head hit the bench on the way down, but he didn't make another sound.

The man who had shouted wavered and disappeared, reappeared a few meters away. He was aiming his laser somewhere down the pier. "Get moving!" he yelled.

His words made no real impression on Rue; she was staring at Max. Her cousin lay on his side, his face turned toward her. His eyes were open, but she knew he couldn't see her. Still, she started to crawl toward him. He couldn't be comfortable in that position, she needed to help him lie more comfortably…

Hands clamped around her wrists and Rue was dragged away from Max. She screamed and fought to get away. He needed her, she wasn't going to abandon him.

Words fluttered around her: "Can't keep the system frozen for long. You've got to get out before they get it—"

"Professor! Are you okay?"

"It's just a singe. Where are we going to—"

"Down there!"

Rue was thrown over somebody's shoulder. Dimly, she realized it was Michael who was carrying her. She didn't care. Every step he took put her farther away from her cousin.

Why was Mike jumping off the pier? Rue went flying and landed on her back. Her head bounced off something really hard and she tasted blood in her mouth.

The pain made her mad and she rolled to her feet, narrowly missing a tumble into dark waters. She found herself standing on a long, rounded gray thing barely above the level of the waves. Mike was a few meters away, trying to open some kind of hatch. Herat sat next to him, his left hand clutching his right arm.

The man who had yelled at them was still crouched on the pier. He was shooting at something. Flames burst out of the concrete next to him and he rolled out of the way, then fired again. "Is it open?" he yelled over his shoulders.

"No… Yes!" Mike raised the metal hatch and gestured to Herat. The professor needed no urging, but almost fell into the opening.

"Come on, Rue!"

She staggered over to Mike. Before she reached him, the man with the gun cursed and rolled backward off the pier. Rue smelled burning cloth and then he'd hit the icy water and splashed her.

She knelt down and put out her hand, even as Mike did the same. The man floundered for a moment, abandoned his gun to the water and reached out.

She found herself staring into the face of Barendts, one of Crisler's marines.

"Come on!" urged Mike. They hauled Barendts out of the water and all three threw themselves at the hatchway. Rue went down first, lost her footing and banged her chin against a rung of the ladder before hitting the deck below.

Barendts was the last in. He stayed on the ladder to close the door. "Can you lock it?" asked Mike.

"Don't know. Have to override the ship's system." The marine reached into his sleeve, bringing out a tangle of wires. He pressed these against the door control and they writhed into life, twining themselves into the cracks around the door mechanism.

Footsteps thudded through the ceiling. "They're here," muttered Barendts. "Think I've got it, though." He withdrew the wires and stepped down off the ladder.

"Can we call for help?" asked Herat. He was slumped against one wall of the narrow space they were in.

"No, the whole area's jammed. It'll take them a while to burn through that, though," said the marine.

Herat laughed. "They won't burn through it at all, young man. If this is a deep-dive sub, then its walls are made of diamond."

Barendts brightened. "Good."

"Of course, they can always put explosives against the hull and kill us with the shockwave," pointed out Herat.

Rue turned away from the discussion. This place was more cramped than any shuttle she'd ever been in. Its ceiling was low and pipes ran everywhere. She stalked past the men to the nose, where big windows showed a view of rich blue water flecked with drifting motes. Several comfortable-looking couches faced these windows. She dropped into one of them and just sat there.

"Got to get command of this thing…"

"They won't answer? You're sure?"

Max was dead.

"— They can't keep the system hacked for long. The local police will be down here any minute."

He had been all she had of family and home. If he was gone, so were they, forever.

"What's that!"

A smell of burning wafted up from behind Rue. She craned her head around the side of the seat.

A roving patch of fire was moving in loops and arcs across the ceiling. Behind it, charred paint dropped to the floor and what was left behind glowed with outside light, like foggy glass.

"Or they could do that," said Herat. "Shine the lasers right through the hull. It's transparent, after all."

"We have to get out of here!" shouted Mike. "Take control of this sub, now!"

"I'm trying," snapped the marine. The smoke was everywhere.

Rue leaned back and shut her eyes. Maybe it didn't matter anymore. They were all about to die.

Something exploded with a bang!; she jerked in surprise and pain spiked her ears from sudden overpressure. Now she heard sizzling sparks and a cracking sound.

"I've got partial control," said Barendts. "Taking us down." The decking lurched under Rue. She kept her eyes closed, her fists balled at her ears. One last bang sounded and Barendts cursed lividly.

The seconds dragged and no new sounds issued from the back. After a while she opened her eyes, found thick, smarting smoke in them and turned to look behind her.

The three men were all alive. They were sitting on the deck looking at one another grimly. Herat coughed once or twice and shut his eyes. "Gotta rest," he said.

Rue cleared her throat. "What's happening?" she asked.

Barendts glanced at Mike, then gestured to a blackened, half-melted box against the wall. "That's the ship's computer," he said and coughed. "I told it to dive just before the boys upstairs got a lucky shot and took it out. We're still diving and we're out of touch with anybody."

Rue looked around herself. "Aren't there manual controls?" she asked.

"Maybe. Yeah, there must be," said the marine without much optimism. He came forward and eased himself into the seat next to hers. "These look like they might be…" He pulled on a joystick that jutted up next to the seat. Nothing happened. "Well, that's great."

The blue light outside was rapidly fading to black. Barendts fiddled with some switches and succeeded in turning on some internal lights and external floodlights. These showed an irregular wall of ice some meters away, rising steadily out of darkness below and into darkness above.

Darkness… Rue shut her eyes and let herself cry.

21

RUE AND PROFESSOR Herat were resting on cots at the back of the sub. Michael sat next to Barendts, watching the wall of ice slide inexorably upward.

They'd been dropping for nearly an hour. Every now and then the sub creaked from the pressure; every time it did Michael tensed, waiting for the walls to collapse around them. The walls of the sub were icy cold now; little heaters under the seats were working overtime, but without much success, to keep the cold at bay.

Michael and Barendts had been trying to slow their descent, with even less success. They'd gone over every instrument and switch in the narrow space, finding nothing that might help. They had control of a set of manipulator arms outside the craft, but there was nothing for them to grab onto. It seemed as if the sub's cruising controls were centralized through the computer. With it gone, they were helpless.

They weren't falling very fast, luckily. They'd only dropped four or five kilometers and so far, the sub shrugged the pressure off. If they were five kilometers down, there were still fifteen kilometers of empty water to fall through before they hit bottom. Michael had no illusions that the sub would survive those depths. Thousands of atmospheres of pressure awaited them at the bottom of the abyss.

After yet one more run-through of their checklist of possible fixes, Barendts sat back with a frustrated sigh. "I should have acted earlier," he said.

Michael looked at him appraisingly. "You're the saboteur," he said. He didn't mean it as an accusation, just a statement of fact.

The marine shrugged. "Card-carrying member of the rebels, that's me."

Michael seized on the distraction. "Tell me about that."

"I had been ordered into deep cover two years ago. Told to get close to Crisler, which I did." Barendts seemed relieved to be talking. "When the Envy showed up, it seemed like a pointless distraction. I didn't pay much attention until Crisler moved us all to Chandaka and hired Linda Ophir. He needed some Chicxulub inscriptions translated. She agreed to that and then the whole matter was dropped. That's the way it looked, anyway.

"One night my contact at Chandaka called me. Ophir had been trying to get out, he said. She had some kind of information about the Envy— something that had scared the hell out of her. That was two days before you and Herat showed up.

"I didn't get a chance to find out what she'd discovered. She was murdered— well, you know about that. Crisler went into overdrive. I guess he looked calm in public, but boy he was on the edge the last day or so. Wanted us to get the hell off Chandaka in a hurry.

"And that's why the rebels attacked the city," said Michael. "But not the Redoubt. Why?"

Barendts grinned mirthlessly. "They did. You didn't see that attack, and you weren't told, on Crisler's orders. The attack failed. Crisler put a lockdown on all news about the war after we left. Well, he got those orders from higher up, I guess. The fact is, the R.E.'s losing."

Michael put his head back and stared out at the dark water. "Unbelievable," he muttered. He was remembering the riot he'd been caught in during the attack. Years ago, he had helped instigate such chaos. Was Kimpurusha still part of the R.E.? Or had it been liberated while he was away? The thought filled him with a pang of something— regret, loss, he wasn't sure. He scowled at the dumb metal of the sub's controls. Maybe if he'd stayed there, he might have been able to help…

"What do you think that is?" Barendts was pointing through the window.

Something long and threadlike rose past the sub. It couldn't have been more than a few millimeters thick and when the floodlights hit it, it shone pale white. But outside the lights, it glowed pale green against the darkness.

"Is there supposed to be indigenous life here?" asked Barendts.

"I have no idea. We never got to that part of the tour." They watched as more of the threadlike things passed. They seemed benign enough.

"Anyway," said Barendts, "The R.E.'s taking a beating. They can't exempt their own ships from the economy, after all: even the Banshee has to keep up her micropayments for all the shipboard systems. They're living on credit right now, but if the ship stays here in slow space too long, they'll run out of credit… and the whole ship'll just shut down."

Michael stared at him. "You're joking."

"If a ship can operate without oversight from the Economy, it can be used to set up an independent colony," said Barendts with a shrug. "Lots of military ships would join us in a second, if they weren't utterly dependent on the Economy."

Michael laughed without humor. It made sense, in a sick sort of way. "They used to say, back home, that the R.E. only survives by continuing to expand. The core worlds are utterly dependent on revenue from the colonies to function."

"Yeah. An ecologically sustainable economy can't require surpluses. The R.E. does. So it has to keep growing to exist. If places like Chandaka join us, the core worlds stop dead just like the Banshee would. The Rights Owners would either have to give up their franchises, which they won't do, or else… no money, no transactions, no operating machinery."

"Billions would die," said Michael.

"If we don't get to them in time, yes." Barendts didn't look too concerned. "They made their bed, they'll have to lie in it. But you see, that's what Crisler's trying to prevent. If we win, everything unravels. The R.E. will collapse more completely than Rome.

"But Crisler seems to think he's discovered a secret weapon to beat us with."

"He has," said Michael. "Or he may have, anyway." He told Barendts about the von Neumann machines of the Chicxulub. The marine's eyes widened as the implications sank in.

"But how are the things supposed to recognize rebel worlds? We all use alien technology, we have to until we set up our own industries…"

Michael nodded. This was the conclusion he had come to on the way back to the city; it had fuelled his urgent need to collect Rue and the others and go straight to the authorities. "It all depends on how the Chicxulub systems identify ships and worlds. Herat thinks they would have to be sneaky, nosing around the outskirts of a system and sniffing out enemy action. Because they can't get in close, they have to rely on fairly crude detection methods to tell who's who. Basically, anything that's not broadcasting R.E. integration codes would be suspect. Presumably the rebels encrypt all their transmissions, so the von Neumann's couldn't even tell if those were of human origin or not.

"So because you use alien technology, the von Neumann machines would have to treat all alien worlds as possible rebel worlds. The only worlds that would pass muster would be those using nanotags and Rights payments— those inside the Economy. Everyone else— everyone— would be suspicious."

"So," said Barendts, "in order to guarantee wiping out the rebels, Crisler's machines would have to wipe out every alien world."

Michael nodded. "We just found this out. We were on our way to tell the Compact when the ambush happened."

For once, Barendts looked abashed. "I'm really sorry I didn't get to you guys sooner. I wasn't sure whether you were sympathizers or what. I was basically on my own when we were at the Envy," he said disconsolately. "I wanted to force the Banshee to turn around, so I blew the life-support stacks. Of course, Captain Cassels turned out to be a lot more resourceful than I'd counted on." He grimaced.

"When we got here to Oculus, it took us totally by surprise when it turned out there were autotrophs here. And then you and the professor lit out for autotroph territory… Crisler went ballistic. I gather you went to get the Chicxulub stuff translated?"

Michael nodded.

"We got our orders an hour ago," Barendts went on. "It was all I could do to set up a hack on the inscape spoofers, so that the other guys' aim would be off for a few minutes. That's why you're still alive: I ghosted you, threw their aim off."

"Except for Max."

"Yeah… a lucky shot, I guess."

They were silent for a while.

Michael frowned out at the dark water. "We seem to be slowing down." The giant wall of ice was passing at a slower rate now. It was also sloping away from them, an uneven inverted landscape.

"You're not telling me everything," said Michael. "There's something else going on: Crisler didn't just come along on this trip to chaperone Rue, did he? He had people to meet at Colossus. For instance, why weren't all of you at the ball the other night?"

"Oh, that. There's a local politician, Mallory, who wants to bring the halo worlds into the R.E. It'll never work, but that's why Crisler had us ride the beam down here; some big political maneuvering's going on here between his supporters and the Compact. Mallory wanted the Envy's ring changed to pass by his home world…" Barendts glanced over his shoulder. "You think she refused? And Mallory got Crisler to order the hit?"

Michael nodded. "Crisler might be taking us out of the picture so he can control the Envy directly and throw Mallory a bone," Michael said. "But it hardly matters at this point."

"There's some consolation," said Barendts. "For you guys, anyway."

Michael laughed humorlessly. "Oh, yeah? What's that?"

"The Envy was designed for slower-than-light travel. The original Chicxulub ships must have been designed for FTL and Crisler's going to want the new ones to be built that way too. His enemies are all in High Space; he doesn't care about the halo worlds, so odds are his von Neumann machines won't be visiting the halo."

Small consolation. Still, as Michael sat back and listened to the creaking of the sub, he found himself wondering whether the Chicxulub had held the same attitude sixty-five million years ago. Had they exempted the halo worlds from their genocide?

The idea seemed important somehow, but he was too exhausted to think about it. He leaned forward and stared at the spare instrumentation that dotted the nose of the sub. "Why don't we run through this stuff one more time," he suggested. "Maybe we missed something last time."

"And the time before that?" Barendts sighed, but nodded. "Okay. Starting with this panel…"

IT WAS RUE'S turn to sit in the command chair and stare out at the ice, which was now passing overhead in a slow procession of bizarre forms. Mike and the marine had gone to the back to snatch some sleep; Herat was under the influence of some healing nano from the sub's first-aid kit and slept soundly in the chair beside hers. Rue was alone with her thoughts.

It was unbelievable that Max was dead. She made herself face the fact, though doing so brought all kinds of really bad conclusions home.

She shouldn't have taken Max up on his mad plan to chase the Envy. He'd given her a chance to play cycler captain and she'd taken it up eagerly, not realizing what it meant. Max obviously hadn't realized either; he was dead now and it was all her fault.

Rue knew she had willfully ignored the danger when they'd set out to catch the Envy. Even at the time, she hadn't been able to explain why to herself or anyone else. All her explanations had been excuses, really. Why had she knowingly embarked on a suicidal quest?

The ice passing overhead reminded Rue of stories she'd heard of the boatman who transported the dead to the underworld. Here they were. She hugged herself and looked down.

The bag she'd brought with her from the marketplace lay crumpled at her feet. Absently she picked it up and rummaged through it. Jewelry— how pathetic, she thought.

She was about to drop it when her fingers touched the NeoShinto headset. She'd forgotten all about it. Now Rue drew it out, turning it over in her hands.

Religion had never interested her. She had accepted the simple message of the Supreme Meme: no matter how infinite the universe, time circles back around to here and now, to this very second. No matter where you went after you died, you'd end up back in this life again. Paradise was no more permanent than this very second. So your responsibility was to this life, not any afterlife.

But where did that leave Max? Was he fixed like a bug in amber, forever living out a life of depression and disappointment, dying again and again in the same pointless way? The thought filled her with horror.

And for herself? Rue had always felt herself swept through life by currents of incident way out of her control. When had she ever owned her own life? Certainly not when she'd been growing up on Allemagne.

Her eyes blurred with tears as Rue realized that it had been that control she had been fleeing when she agreed to go after the Envy. She wasn't used to running her own affairs; when she walked the hills of Penumbra North, sowing seeds, she had been a completely independent woman. And the experience was foreign to her, strange and threatening. She had leaped at the chance to throw away her options.

By committing to chasing the Envy, she'd deliberately thrown away her freedom. From the moment they embarked, she had been swept up again by forces beyond her control. That was what she was used to and she was happy in it.

She put her hands over her mouth, afraid she was going to throw up. Shame burned so deeply in her that she doubted she could ever face Michael Bequith, or even Dr. Herat again. And her willingness to throw away her own freedom had doomed Max and probably all of them.

The minutes dragged on. Nothing was happening except that the ice continued to pass overhead: the visible underside of the world-spanning glacial continent of Oculus. Occasionally, long tendrils of something organic-looking drifted by.

She had to do something— anything, to escape her own thoughts. A faint notion at the back of Rue's mind was growing in volume, steadily more and more loudly: This botched life was hers, infinitely. She would live the same mistakes over and over and there was no escape and nothing she could do to prevent the repetition. Even if over the aeons, a billion versions of Rue lived and died— some triumphant, some wise— given enough time this one would always return. She would always be here, in this crippled vessel, drifting slowly into the darkness.

Rue stood up and stared around at the interior of the sub. Maybe she could raid the rations in the meager galley— fix breakfast for the men. Anything to keep her hands and mind busy.

Her gaze fell on Mike's sleeping form and Rue felt a pang of regret and guilt. He shouldn't be here, he was an innocent in so many ways. Then she noticed his beltpack, which lay on the deck below the cot.

Jutting from the pack was one corner of a datapack. Of course; he always carried that thing with him. She hadn't really understood its significance until her visit to Vogel.

Rue wiped at her eyes and knelt next to the cot. She wanted to throw herself onto Mike and cry, but his sleep was precious. She took out the datapack and crept back to her seat in the front.

This was completely stupid, she thought as she connected the leads from the headset to the datapack. Then she slipped the headset over her ears.

A simple inscape menu blossomed into being in front of her. It listed several titles:

Kimpurusha Dawn

Kadesh Sea Gods

Dis

Spirits of Ember

Voice of the Cataract

Only the name Kimpurusha was familiar. Rue hesitated, then reached out and tapped the half-real words Kimpurusha Dawn.

The sub disappeared. Disoriented, she felt weightless for a second and relaxed into it. Then Rue was standing on a high mountain slope.

This place was not like the Penumbral mountains of Treya. These peaks reared thousands of meters into the predawn sky and were clothed in virginal snow along their flanks. Strong black rock patched the night-blue of the snow. The simulation was so complete that Rue felt the thin cold air in her lungs and shivered at the icy breeze that flowed down to her from the peaks. She stood on a spur of rock jutting out from a cliff. How had Michael gotten to this place?

The silence and height were awe-inspiring, but Rue was disappointed. Was this all that the famed kami were: postcards of particularly beautiful places? How could Mike have devoted his life to simple virtual realities like this?

Then she heard a distant rumble. Rue turned and saw that a jagged line of peaks in the distance were glowing with a gorgeous rose light. The rising sun had touched them and the echoing thunder that rolled up and down between the peaks came from six or seven avalanches that the hot light had touched off.

She watched the tumbling snow, enrapt, and the sound seemed to swirl around her and pick her up and then with a jolt Rue was gone. There was only the peaks and the avalanche and where she had been there was a great clap of sound that raced from peak to peak.

The sound stood up over the mountains and felt their shapes, their ancient solidity, in the standing waves of echo that crashed between them. Each peak proclaimed its millennial sovereignty to the others.

She rose, trembling, to touch the lower clouds. The reality of this place, this moment, was so overwhelming it erased any doubt. A million years these peaks had stood and in a million more they would still be here. Years nor light-years could erase them.

And way down there, all the parts of the mountains were as real: the tumbled rocks, the straggling trees, the lichen, and, on a jut of stone halfway up one peak, a standing woman— a woman as real as the mountains and as much a part of them as the stone and ice. They, as much a part of her.

The sound broke and fell back to sleep in the stones and snow. Rue blinked, felt herself spinning and then she was sitting in the sub again.

The echoes went on and on in her head. She reached out a trembling hand and touched the cold wall of the sub. It was hard to say what was her and what was outside her. For a few seconds, Rue had the hallucinatory sense that she was both herself and the ocean around her. The distinction between the two had been shattered.

The sensation faded gradually, but Rue sat still, in shock, for a long time. Then, half in fear and half in eagerness, she summoned up the menu again.

None of the other names on the menu were familiar, so she chose one at random.

She tapped the word Dis and blackness and stars bloomed around her.

MICHAEL AWOKE FEELING groggy. Somewhere nearby, he heard Herat talking. He opened his eyes; metal pipes formed a bizarre ceiling above his head.

Rolling over, he found there was no more bed under him suddenly and he crashed to the floor— to the deck, rather, for he was still in the submarine. Remembering that brought everything else back to him.

"Rue?" He stood up, rubbing his shoulder. She sat facing away from him in one of the two chairs at the front of the sub. The marine, Barendts, sat next to her and Herat was leaning over his seat and pointing out into the dark water.

Michael went to crouch next to Rue's chair. She looked up and smiled wanly. Putting her hand on his, she turned away again. She was turning her little medallion over and over in her fingers, touching it and examining it as though it held some secret.

Keeping hold of her hand, Michael turned to the others. "But why would they grow so long?" Barendts was asking.

Herat shrugged. "A very long organism might be able to trap the electrical current that Colossus pumps through this planet. Maybe that's their alternative to photosynthesis."

"What's happening?" asked Michael. There was nothing visible below them except darkness. Above, ice moved past at what looked like a walking pace. Some of the long threadlike things he'd seen earlier were passing by; they seemed to be undulating under their own power.

"We're caught in a current," said Herat. "It's probably one of the thermals that circulates between the exposed ocean and the far side of the planet. The sub's working fine and has plenty of power and life support left. We just don't have control."

"So we're headed for the coldest spot on Oculus," said Michael.

"It's not as bad as it seems," said Herat. The laser burn on his arm seemed to be healing; he was alert and in no apparent pain. "Remember, there are cities down here. At places where the glacial ice is thinner— higher above us— there's giant caverns, much bigger than the autotroph compound. With luck we'll drift past one of those."

"And then what?"

Barendts laughed. "Professor Herat spotted something we'd overlooked." He pointed through the diamond window.

Michael could dimly make out some of the sub's manipulator arms. They were mostly out of sight below his feet and were silhouetted by the floodlamps in front of them. One arm appeared to be holding something.

"See it?" asked Herat. "No? Well, it took us a while to figure it out ourselves, but one of those arms snagged the strap of Barendts's laser rifle after he dropped it jumping onto the sub. See it now?"

Now that he knew what he was looking for, Michael could plainly see the shape of the weapon, dangling from one of the larger arms. "What good does that do us?" he asked.

"I'm not sure, but no doubt an opportunity will present itself."

He was too tired to indulge Herat's usual optimism, so he turned back to Rue. "How are you doing?" he asked her gently.

She looked down at him again; she seemed very far away. "I'm good," she said, almost inaudibly.

"You don't look good," he said. She seemed stunned. "Did you take something from the medkit?"

Rue smiled sadly. "No." She stood up, a bit stiffly. Michael had to stand and back up to give her space. "Professor, do sit down," she said.

"Thanks." He plonked himself into the seat she'd vacated and Rue stretched, then went to sit on the edge of one of the cots. Michael sat opposite her.

"I've been thinking," she said listlessly. "I've been very stupid."

"What do you mean? You can't blame yourself for Max's death," he said, reaching out to take her hand.

"It's not that— I mean, I was, I was blaming myself. It's so awful, what happened." She wiped tears away from her eyes with a fist, then opened her fingers to reveal the pendant. "And I was blaming myself. Until… Mike, I met your kami. They told me to stop blaming myself."

Met the kami? The statement was so totally unexpected that for a moment Michael couldn't make sense of it. "How… how did you…"

Rue looked down, seemingly embarrassed. "I went to the local NeoShinto… temple, or whatever, before we met at the docks. They gave me a headset and, uh, while you were sleeping, I borrowed your datapack."

She shrugged awkwardly. "I needed to do something, to take my mind off Max. And I was hurting so much. But I met the kami and I feel… different, now."

He held her hand tightly and fixed his eyes on hers. "Which kami?" he demanded.

"All of them," she said, "but especially the ones from Dis."

Michael felt like someone had punched him in the stomach. He sagged back against the cold wall of the sub. He should have erased that kami long ago. Just thinking about it brought back the sense of hollow emptiness to him. "Oh, Rue," he said. "I'm so sorry."

She chewed on her lip, absently brushing her hair back from her eyes. "Yes, well, I know you would never have pushed me to meet them. You were good that way."

To have lost her cousin and then to have faced the soul-destroying kami of Dis… He was amazed Rue could still function. "I'm sorry," he croaked again.

Now she looked puzzled. "What? Why? I was falling apart, Mike. I miss Max so much and I was blaming myself for his death. Everything looked so dark and pointless, I could have died. Your kami saved me."

"What?"

She nodded. "I saw Dis. It's such a cold and lonely place. But when the kami appeared, I–I disappeared! I became the universe itself, staring down at this one little place in the cosmos. I turned away and Dis disappeared, Rue was gone, and there was only the stars. And, at that moment, I was ancient, so ancient, Mike! Older than humanity, or even this little fellow." She smiled fondly at the galaxy-shaped ediacaran. "All the cares and responsibilities of Rue Cassels seemed infinitely small. And Max… well, he was a part of me then. Max was a part of the universe, a part I loved. I'll mourn and always miss him, but it would just be so self-absorbed of me to blame myself."

Michael started to speak, stopped and finally said, "The kami of Dis showed you that?"

"I've been going like crazy since I left Allemagne," she said quietly. "I couldn't explain why before. Now I know I was running away, all that time. Even going after the Envy, I was running away from having to face myself. I was eager to panic about Crisler, you know to go from crisis to crisis because that meant I could make other people, or just the situation, responsible for what I was doing. Now that I see it, I'm not going to let myself get away with it anymore."

"Rue, you're being unfair to yourself," he said. "You've been a voice of reason all through this expedition. You found out how to control the Envy! You've taken good care of your crew. I think you've acted responsibly all along."

She grimaced. "I did okay. But it was all reacting. Max was the one who planned things. I just went along for the ride. Not anymore, though. Crisler's killed Max. He and that bastard Mallory have a lot to answer for. I'm going to stop them, Mike." Her gaze was level and serious now; the pendant was forgotten in her hand. "We're going to bring them down."

Michael stared at her. This Rue was a person he had never seen before. She had always shown hints of iron strength, in her determination and unwavering focus on her goals. She had been charismatic, before. Now, she seemed unstoppably sure of herself.

She hung the pendant around her neck. "We need to plan what we'll do when we get back," she said. "You're good at politics. Who do you see as the most influential people in the Compact now?"

He started to protest— she must need his comfort, he was sure of it. No one could have faced the kami of Dis and come out intact. And yet it seemed she had.

Seeing her calm alertness, all sense of shock and fear gone, the words died on his lips. He had thought he knew the mind behind her face; now he had to admit he didn't understand her at all. Even if she was wearing a mask over her emotions, it was seamless. She had work to do, it seemed, and nothing was going to dissuade her from it— not even the kami of Dis.

He knew of no way to respond other than to accept the mask for what it appeared to be.

Michael took a deep breath. "First of all," he said, "you need to tell me how your meeting went yesterday afternoon…"

22

ALL THE BAD feelings remained: guilt, grief, a sense of horror at how senselessly life could end. Rue would not let them prevent her from acting, now or ever again.

The others were not so easily entertained. Rue knew her responsibilities, so she convened strategy sessions with Mike and Barendts. At the first one she started off by saying, "How was Crisler going to explain our deaths? Or were we to disappear?"

"Disappear," said Barendts. "I don't know how he was going to explain it."

"He wouldn't," said Mike. "If none of you were seen and if the inscape spoofing worked, there would be no evidence to point at him."

"Rebecca would finger him," Rue pointed out.

"Maybe, but would she be heard? And what proof would she have? I think Crisler's working with some of the pro-R.E. factions here. They would lend support," said Mike. "What they would do is put a spin on the whole event— blame it on some rival faction, produce a patsy even."

"So we'll nail him as soon as we get back," said Rue. "After all, we have the proof." She nodded at Barendts.

Michael sat back, shaking his head. "Except that the assassination didn't go off as he'd planned. He knows Barendts botched the inscape spoofing. If that was detected, suspicion will point straight at Crisler, because the R.E. military has the most sophisticated inscape technology. Hell, he might have been arrested already. Even if he hasn't been, he can't be sure we're dead, unless the other marines lied about what they saw when the sub sank."

Barendts shook his head. "They wouldn't lie. It's their necks on the line too."

"So he's on the hotseat," said Mike. "What's the best thing he could do now?"

"Retreat to the Envy," said Rue bitterly.

"Yes. He'll probably take your man Mallory with him. The deal would be Mallory helps Crisler out here on Oculus and in return Crisler publicly pledges the R.E.'s support for the plan to integrate the halo with the R.E. In your absence, Mallory takes command of the Envy and when they get there Crisler lets Mallory take the Envy away to form the new cycler ring he's been wanting. Meanwhile Crisler himself takes the Banshee and heads for the Twins."

Rue cursed. It made an awful kind of sense. The worst part was, trapped as they were, there was nothing she could do about it.

Well, that might be true. But she'd be damned if she would let herself be bullied anymore.

"We need to plan our response," she said. "How are we going to head Crisler off, assuming we get out of here?"

Mike and Barendts glanced at one another; she saw a faint smile hover around the marine's lips for an instant. Then they leaned forward and started scheming.

TWO MORE DAYS passed before they got the opportunity they were looking for. By that time the air in the submarine was growing stale, the recyclers pushed to their limits. There were signs that the ship's power was fading. Herat said it had a typical muon-catalyzed fusion reactor, little more than a tank of hot hydrogen gas surrounded by muon-generators. Not much could go wrong with the generator itself; power must be bleeding off into the water around them. The oxygen recycling system also worked well; its pedigree was hundreds of years of closed system spaceship design.

More immediate was the fact that they were out of food. The sub continued to drift under the vast ice-sheets of Oculus. Rue watched that strange ceiling pass overhead for hours at a time, feeling frustrated and angry beyond any means of description. She felt now like anger was all she would ever feel. Mike's presence was comforting, but until all of this was over, she couldn't let herself give over to grief. She held his hand and drew on his silent strength, but that was as much as she would allow for now.

In turn, he seemed to be keeping her at a distance. He seemed guarded, as though she had offended him somehow. Once she saw him holding his offline datapack, contemplating it as though debating what to do with it. When he saw her looking, he quickly put it down with a hurried smile.

Strangely, it was Herat whose conversation helped pass the time best during the long hours of waiting. It was now clear that a whole ecology flourished down here and he was studying it as best he could in the illumination of their dimming floodlights. At its base were kilometers-long filaments, rich in metals, that drew electricity from the global currents that the magnetic field of Colossus sent through Oculus's oceans. The filaments used electricity the way plants elsewhere used light, so they formed a robust basis for the flourishing of thousands of species of plant and animal. Herat could sit rapt for hours, staring at the clouds of krill and the icicle-like holdfasts that hung from the glacial ceiling.

Naturally, then, it was he who first saw the lights in the deep.

"I knew there'd be something," he said, after calling them all to the front of the vessel. Where he pointed, Rue could see a deep, diffuse blue, radiating up from the depths. They had switched off the external floodlights to conserve power, so the light could not be reflecting back from some submerged mountain.

"Why is it below us and not above?" asked Barendts. Herat shrugged.

"Mining, maybe? The only way to get many minerals and metals on this planet is to dredge the bottom."

The lights slowly resolved, like waking ghosts, into spotlights that illuminated giant gantries. Taut cables hung from the gantries, disappearing into the gloom below. The gantries were mounted into the glacial ceiling, but they could see no sign of control stations or submarine docks there. What exactly these cables did remained a mystery.

"Should we try it?" asked Barendts, gesturing to the laser rifle still held in the sub's metal arms.

Rue pictured them bickering while their only chance drifted away behind them. "Let's do it."

Barendts sat down in the copilot's chair, rubbing his hands. "Action at last," he muttered, setting his hands on the controls for the manipulator arms. He had been practicing over the past days, learning how the limbs amplified his own movements. Once he'd gained confidence, he and Herat had gingerly transferred the laser rifle from the large arm it was hanging off to a small set more suited to fine work. Then they'd fired a test shot with the laser, just to make sure it would work.

Herat's plan was brutally simple. The front part of the sub was an egg made of transparent diamond-matrix. Behind that was more ordinary machinery, made of metallic hydrogen impervious to almost any pressure. The lasers of Barendts's former friends had wreaked havoc amid this machinery. It was dead weight now: ballast. Herat proposed to cut it away.

Rue kept watching the gantries slide by while they maneuvered the arms around to aim the rifle at the back of the sub. Suddenly she saw a glimmer of bright light ahead and above— a line on the ice ceiling that rapidly grew into an oval of glowing green. "Look!"

It might have been a natural formation— a weaker and softer core of ice that had melted upward, forming a natural dome in the ceiling kilometers across. One or two nukes could have carved it out in seconds. As the highest point for many kilometers around, such a dome would naturally pool any gases that bubbled up from the ocean depths. Humans could as easily have pumped nitrogen and oxygen into it, until now there was a round cathedral of ice, hundreds of meters of airspace above the ocean, lit with floodlamps and with many buildings bolted to the ice around its periphery. Rue stared, fascinated, at spindle-shapes bobbing in the water that must be the hulls of boats or subs like the one they were in now.

The whole cavern was only a few kilometers across. "Hurry, or we'll miss it!" Rue said. Barendts was frowning, obviously trying to decide what structural members of the sub to cut first.

"Fuck it," he said. A line of bright blue light suddenly joined the laser to the back of the sub. Bubbles shot up in a row from a centimeter or so above this line and bright flares of light splashed out from the back. Barendts waggled his hands and the bright line zipped back and forth, impossibly fast.

The sub lurched. Rue watched a large piece of machinery plummet into darkness. "Good," she said. "I think we're rising."

"Just to be sure," said Barendts and waved the beam again. Bright sparks flew and abruptly the cabin lights went out and the noise of fans that had been omnipresent for days, ceased.

"Oops," said the marine. "I guess we're committed now." Rue could barely see his shrug in the blue glow from the approaching cavern.

They were rising, but not fast enough. Rue watched in frustration as bright water began to scroll past overhead. She saw catwalks, boats tied up just meters above them.

"Maybe we should swim for it," she suggested hesitatingly. Herat shook his head.

"We'd freeze to death or drown— or both," he pointed out. "Listen, Barendts, does that laser have a flashlight setting? Maybe we can get someone's attention."

"Good thought." The marine pointed the laser upward and fired it. The bright blue light jutted up, throwing wild shadows across the wavering image of the cavern's ceiling.

"No flashlight setting, by the way," said Barendts, just before a huge chunk of ice slammed into the water meters away. "But that ought to get their attention."

They were barely a meter below the surface now, but the current had taken them almost all the way across the cavern. She saw the ice ceiling coming up again ahead of them.

Suddenly light flooded the cabin. Underwater spotlights had come on around the periphery of the cavern. Now the sleek shapes of divers appeared in the water, wrapped in bubbles like spiraling wings. Six or seven of them swam after the sub.

"Here we go," said Barendts. The lines of blue light shot out from the vicinity of the divers and sparks flew right below where Rue was standing. She jumped in surprise.

The sub's manipulator arms, including the laser rifle, sank quickly out of sight. One of the divers approached them, his own rifle held out prominently.

Barendts grinned. "This is the part where we put our hands up," he said, demonstrating.

Three of the other divers were towing lines. They attached these to the sub and soon they were on the surface, being towed toward a set of docks where a number of other subs lay at berth.

"Let's get out of here," said Rue. She headed for the hatch. Herat laughed and shook his head.

"We never equalized pressure, at least not as far as I can tell from our busted instruments," he said. "The air out there will crush you like a grape if you open that hatch."

"Oh." She pointed at the divers now squatting atop their hull. "Do they know that?"

"Let's hope so." The divers hopped off, into the water, and their sub was hoisted out of the water. As it slowly turned, water rolling down the sides, Rue got a good look at the cavern they had come to.

Halfway up the blue wall of the cavern, a huge opening gave onto an even larger space, this one well above the waterline. The cavern they were in was just a lower dock area for what looked like an entire city carved out of the ice.

"What are those?" Tall shapes like smooth stalagmites stood in bright glimmering ranks under the lights of that other cavern. Rue pressed her nose against the diamond hull and peered at them. As the water stopped running past her eyes, she got a good look, but still couldn't figure out what she was seeing.

"They look big, but what are they?"

"Autotroph technology?" asked Mike. Barendts shook his head, pointing down at the docks below. Men in uniform were running about there; none were the conspicuous green of the fanatical humans who had seemed to worship the autotrophs.

"Hey, what are they doing?" protested Rue. The sub was being lowered into what looked like a giant trash compactor. It was a heavy cube with airlock hatches on the sides and top. It was attached to a larger, windowless cube. Their view of the cavern beyond was cut off as the cube's walls rose around them; then they were grounded with a thud. Fit-looking young men with buzzcut hair hopped into the cube and proceeded to roll the sub on its side. Stuff fell about the cabin and Rue found herself skidding over to sit on the wall.

Now their airlock was right next to a door that led into the larger cube. The fit young men clambered out of the cube and its walls started closing in, accompanied by a deep throbbing of motors somewhere. This is it, thought Rue incredulously, they're going to squash us.

The sides of the door to the large cube flattened and deformed around the sub's hatch, as though it were made of rubber. The sub settled a bit, creaked and then someone was undogging their hatch from the other side.

A little puff of air came in. A man-sized robot stood there, little laser lenses aiming at them from its hips. It stepped back with a clank and gestured in a very manlike way. "Come in," it said.

Rue and the others climbed out of the sub, finding themselves in a large cube-shaped room with bunks along the walls and a small partition behind which there was a toilet. There were no windows.

"Pressure equalization will commence now," said the robot. It slammed the inside door of the cube and stood in front of it, arms crossed.

Herat went over to it. "Please don't equalize the pressure," he said. "We need to get back to the surface as soon as possible!"

The robot said nothing. It seemed to have shut itself off.

HOURS PASSED. RUE'S sinuses hurt and her ears kept popping painfully. Her private inscape told her she was being subjected to mounting air pressure that her circulatory nano were having a tough time compensating for. They kept popping up windows in the corner of her vision, asking whether she could please eat some silicon and iron so that they could start building more units. They anticipated a need to protect her from the bends at a later time. There was nothing to eat in the cube, so she ignored them.

She and Herat continued to plead with the robot to let them talk to someone in authority, but it continued to ignore them. Mike sat on the sidelines, looking despondent; he was polite but not warm when she spoke to him. It was frustrating to face walls of silence on two sides.

Just when Rue was eyeing one of the cots in resigned exhaustion, the robot jerked and stepped forward. "Apologies," it said. "Our apologies."

Rue's ears popped and simultaneously an inscape window appeared. Her nano were telling her that the air pressure was dropping again.

"What the hell is going on here?" demanded Herat.

A new inscape window opened in the center of the room— a public one, obviously, from the way the others looked at it.

The abbot of the monastery of Permanence, Griffin, stood there. He held out his hands in a supplicatory gesture. "We are so sorry, gentlemen, captain. We just found out about your rescue. It seems the military police who fished you out of the ocean had some trouble ascertaining your identity, because the I.D. tags of your sub had been lasered off."

Barendts grinned sheepishly and shrugged.

"We've been talking ourselves hoarse for hours," said Herat. "Wasn't anybody listening?"

Griffin looked, if possible, even more embarrassed. "There's a local human rights policy that forbade the police from taking a deposition from you without a human physically present. It comes from an old case of long-distance interrogation, the ugly details of which I won't go into. And there were… further complications… due to where you chose to be rescued."

"What complications?" asked Rue. She was rapidly tiring of Oculus and all its political mazes.

"It appears you've stumbled on a military secret that no one, least of all citizens of the Rights Economy, is supposed to know about."

"What secret?" But even as she said this, Rue remembered the strange spikelike things they had seen in the cavern above.

"Please, this is a very sensitive matter. We're reversing your pressure equalization and will have you shipped topside immediately. These are matters that we cannot discuss through inscape, due to," the abbot coughed politely, "certain parties' uncomfortable skills with inscape hacking." His image looked directly at Barendts.

"Hey, don't look at me," said Barendts. "I'm just here for the food."

TWELVE HOURS LATER Rue stood in the lavish council chamber of the Permanence monastery. Once again she faced an array of faces around the oak table that dominated the room. The faces were different this time and Rue suspected that these men and women were the real powers of the Cycler Compact.

The politician Mallory was conspicuously missing.

Rue had been separated from the others early on their journey up here. She was assured that Mike, Herat, and Barendts were safe and were being taken care of. They were citizens of a foreign power, however, and it was time to discuss matters that they should not know about.

She resented the implication; as soon as Rue saw Mike and Herat again, she was going to fill them in on the situation, no matter what was said in this council chamher. She trusted them. Of course, there was no way she was going to tell that to the military police who had escorted her here.

Captain Li was present. He stood up as she entered; the others followed suit. "Captain Cassels," he began gravely, "let me express my deepest condolences on the loss of your cousin."

Rue had been all business, but this simple gesture stopped her. She felt her eyes filling with tears and wiped them angrily away.

"Yes, well," she said, as she dropped herself into an empty chair. "Thank you. But let's get on with things, shall we?"

Li nodded and sat, as did the others. Rue tried to still the quivering of her lip by biting it.

"You've been briefed on the overall situation," said a woman Rue did not recognize. "After the murder of your cousin and your disappearance, Admiral Crisler exercised diplomatic immunity and retreated to your magsail with his people. You had already secured beam time from the monastery and with the help of Mallory's people, Crisler got the schedule moved up. They left two days ago and are now nearing the outskirts of the Colossus system."

"Rebecca went with them?" asked Rue for the tenth time. She couldn't understand why her doctor and friend had deserted her.

"She did," said Travis Li. "We spoke before she left; she genuinely believed you were dead. She told me that she wanted to defend the Envy from Mallory's people— first of all by making sure crew members Laurel and Chandra learned, as she put it, 'what really happened on Oculus. »

"I see. Thank you, Captain." This time, she held her expression completely neutral.

Captain Li continued. "We know now that Crisler has committed high crimes, but it is absolutely forbidden to withdraw beam power from a cycler cargo once it's on its way," he said. "You understand the sanctity of the Compact's laws? We have to honor our commitments regardless of local consequences." She nodded.

"We'll be questioning your companions about Crisler and the rebellion against the Rights Economy," said Griffin. "Don't worry, it won't be an interrogation. But we want to get your impressions most of all, as a citizen of the halo. We know Mallory's people have cut a deal with the R.E.; they want to abolish the Compact and make us dependent on the R.E." The abbot scowled, shaking his head. "They paint it as an opportunity, but it's really a power grab; we think Mallory and his cabal have been promised rights to all commercial travel between the lit worlds and the halo. As Rights Owners, they'd become fabulously wealthy…"

"And we'd be paying them to communicate with our own people," finished Rue. The prospect was appalling, but had its own sick logic.

She told the assembly the scenario she had worked out with Mike and Barendts, wherein Mallory got the Envy and Crisler whatever treasure lay at Apophis and Osiris. "Crisler is looking for some ultimate weapon he can use against the rebels and he thinks it's to be found at the Twins. We have to head him off."

"Why?" asked an elderly woman. "What does it matter to us if the R.E. tears itself apart? In fact, why shouldn't we just sit back and let them do it?"

Rue told them about the probability that Crisler's von Neumann machines would have to target alien worlds as well as human in order to guarantee wiping out the rebels. "This would amount to humanity declaring war against all other sentient life," she said. "I don't believe we could be neutral and I don't believe we could let it happen without being party to genocide beyond anything we've ever witnessed before. Do you really want that on your hands?"

They shifted uncomfortably; she could see they did not relish the prospect.

"But if you need a reason that's more… self-interested…" she said slowly, "think about this: If we're right and Crisler certainly believes as we do… if we're right, then what is waiting for us at Apophis and Osiris is some kind of technology that would make it easier for us to produce cyclers. Maybe they would produce themselves, we don't know. If Crisler gets his hands on it, we lose…" She shrugged. "Well, we lose everything. I think it's fair to say we lose the Compact. After all, who's building new cyclers these days?" She looked around the table.

"That's why we have to stop Crisler. We need to signal the Envy, get Evan and Corinna to break her free of the Banshee at any cost and head straight for the Twins. Think of what it would mean to the halo if we found, not just one new cycler, but a whole line of them!"

Even as she said this, Rue knew it was useless. They might agree with her, but Crisler held all the cards. Even if they sent a message to the Envy, Evan and Corinna had no way to stop the Banshee from going to the Twins. It, on the other hand, could blast the Envy to smithereens without a second thought. More to the point, Evan and Corinna could be rounded up at any time by the marines aboard the Banshee.

Even now, messages to that effect must be winging ahead of Crisler's magsail. By the time he rendezvoused with the ships, the Envy would be his. And no other ship from the halo could hope to get to the Twins first.

One of the people at the table was a government minister whom Rue remembered from her first meeting, lo those distant several days ago. He leaned forward now and called up a holographic starmap above the tabletop.

"Don't worry," he said, "this image is isolated from the inscape system. I just want us to be clear on the logistics before we make the next decision."

He pointed at the center of the display. "Apophis and Osiris. And here is Maenad, the Envy's next destination after Colossus. Crisler will arrive there, return to the R.E. and round up some extra ships. Then he'll fly to Apophis and Osiris. Captain Cassels, what do you think the likelihood is that Admiral Crisler will forego the extra ships and simply jump straight to the Twins from Maenad?"

She thought about it. Crisler was a control freak, but he was also cautious and thorough. He already had a complete scientific team aboard the Banshee, but he had no idea what he might find at the Twins. He might need more ships and if he discovered that too late, it would take years for him to return to High Space and gather them. She shook her head. "No. He'd want to have everything he needs before going in."

Nods up and down the table. "Right," said the minister. "Maenad is a light-year from us. Crisler will reach it in about fourteen months. Then he has to round up his new team— which may involve politics and we all know how slow that can be. When he's got the ships, he can fly out to the Twins in essentially no time at all. Call it… sixteen months."

"Sixteen months." It was the older captain, Serle. He was shaking his head in disbelief. "There's no way we can be ready in that time."

"We're going to have to be," countered Captain Li.

"Ready?" Rue put her hand up, looking ironically meek. "Ready for what?"

The minister glanced around the table, nodded. "Rue, what we're about to tell you cannot be spoken about outside this room. After our experience with Crisler's men hacking into our inscape system, we no longer trust public communications systems for this kind of thing. We know we were not compromised before his arrival, but now that the R.E.'s ties to Mallory's people are exposed, security is more vital than ever.

"You are now a captain of the Cycler Compact. You have certain rights and powers, including a security clearance high enough for you to hear what we're about to tell you. First, however, we need your solemn assurance that you will not tell your travelling companions, the professor and this NeoShintoist, Bequith, anything that we reveal to you now."

Rue chewed her lip, thinking. It was astonishing; from being a rejected kid on a cometary station, she had arisen to cycler captain. One small step remained to be taken and she would be in the central circle of power for the Compact itself, so far above where her ambitions had lain that she had no idea what it would mean for her.

"No," she said curtly. "I trust those men with my life, sir. They have my confidence."

Travis Li leaned forward. "They are citizens of the Rights Economy," he said. "We can't permit the R.E. to know—"

"They're my crew," she interrupted.

Li sat back, obviously startled. "Crew? But they were hired by Admiral Crisler to do research for him."

"Ask them," she said, though her heart was pounding. "One of the rights of a cycler captain, as you explained to me so kindly at the ball the other night, is to confer citizenship. I hereby say that Laurent Herat and Michael Bequith are citizens of the Compact, in my eyes, if they choose to be. Ask them. But I won't swear to you that I won't tell them whatever secrets you're offering me."

The powers of the Compact muttered among themselves and Rue sat with her face hot, feeling like she'd blown it for good this time. And what was this secret, anyway?

Travis Li was frowning. "You realize that as captain, you will be responsible for their conduct and if they betray the Compact, you will bear the consequences?" She nodded.

Then the abbot clapped his hands sharply and everyone turned to him. "This is Compact Law," he said. "She has the right to what she proposes. And since Apophis and Osiris lie along her ring, Captain Cassels must be informed of any actions the Compact takes toward any worlds on that ring. It seems, gentlemen and ladies, that we are at an impasse."

He stood and bowed to Rue. "We will ask your friends if they will forego their citizenship in the Rights Economy to become sons of the Compact. If they do, they may continue to fraternize with you and may be party to our plans. If not, we must ask you to end your association with them, at least for now— lest they should leave Colossus by cycler and communicate what they know to the R.E."

And the meeting broke up, simple as that.

I'VE DONE IT this time, Rue told herself for the tenth time. She was being escorted down a corridor hacked into the ice deep beneath the city. Eight hours had passed since the strange meeting and she'd had just enough time to ponder things and get very depressed. It was late in the shift now, she was tired, and way out in space, Crisler must be laughing himself sick as he and Mallory winged their way toward the Envy.

Two military policemen were escorting Rue to the cells (they called them apartments) where Mike and Herat were being held. Apparently they had been asked the question Rue, in her stupidity, had maneuvered them all into. Give up the R.E.? A world where they could traverse the galaxy in weeks? When both men's lives revolved around the hunt for alien intelligence? No. Why would they voluntarily remain in the halo, when they had that to return to?

This whole fiasco threw her relationship with Michael Bequith into sharp relief. It had been ridiculous for her to hope he might stay with her, she saw now. She hadn't even dared to fantasize that he might— but the hope had been there, underlying all her thoughts and actions these past few weeks.

She was a girl from the stations, after all, her eyes too weak to stand the sunlight of Mike's world. The dark was her home and the cold of the orphan worlds between the stars. He lived in the light and he would be returning to it as soon as he could.

She bit back tears as the MPs barged through one last set of metal doors and into some sort of waiting room. There were benches on the floor and a podium at one end, behind which the infinity symbol of the Compact was etched on the wall. Travis Li was here, seated on one of the benches. To her surprise, so was the abbot. He smiled at her kindly and handed her a thick book.

She stared at it. The abbot coughed politely, so Rue made to sit on one of the back benches. The abbot took her arm, shaking his head and gestured forward. She walked to a front bench and started to sit. He shook his head again; both he and Li were smiling now, damn them. The abbot gestured forward again.

But there was nothing up there except… Oh, the podium. Rue walked up to it hesitantly and laid the heavy book down on it. There was a ribbon bookmark in the center of it, so she opened the book out to that page and made to return to the benches. But the title on the page of the book caught her eye.

Ceremony of Citizenship in the Cycler Compact

"All rise!" shouted one of the marines suddenly. Travis and the abbot stood, grinning, and the doors at the back opened. In stepped Laurent Herat— alone.

Rue felt nauseated. She was sure she would faint at any second, and barely registered Herat's presence as the man came to stand at the front of the room, right before the podium. When she finally did look into his face, she saw the apologetic expression there, and that just made her feel worse.

"Why?" she croaked, almost inaudibly.

Herat shrugged. "My career was in its twilight anyway— the whole Panspermia Institute is on its way out. My wife is dead, my children grown. And my people… you know, years of investigating the ruins of alien civilizations have taught me a lot about what makes a healthy one, and which ones are doomed to fail.

"It's all about time, Rue— a species' attitude to time, I mean. The problem with faster-than-light travel is that it promises instant escape from any problem. The Rights Economy is proof of that: We expand and expand, with no thought to limits or tomorrow. Meanwhile, we rot from within.

"The Envy, and you, and this place have convinced me that there's another way. Maybe that's the secret of the Lasa— maybe they turned their back on FTL and conducted their civilization at a slower rhythm…. Anyway, if you'd asked me twenty years ago which of our cultures had more potential, yours or mine, I'd have said the R.E. But I don't believe that any longer.

"You've allowed me to see what it was we nearly destroyed when we took the lit worlds away from the halo. For that, I'll be eternally grateful to you."

His expression became more sober. "I have the benefit of my years. Bequith… Michael gave me a message for you," he said. "He told me to tell you that he cannot abandon his people— those on Kimpurusha or elsewhere in the Rights Economy. He said that while he is a citizen of the R.E. by conquest, still he can't abandon his world while it's under the kind of threat that Crisler represents. He wishes to find a way to go home as soon as possible, to warn people about Crisler's plans."

You fool! Rue wasn't sure if she was angry at herself or at Mike. She should not have created this dilemma for him. Mike didn't know why she had asked him to take citizenship; as far as he knew, Crisler had cleanly escaped, and even now Rue herself didn't know how the powers of the Compact might catch him. For Mike, this ceremony must seem like an admission of defeat— an attempt by her to get him to abandon the chase, and settle down on Colossus.

She blinked until she could see the words on the page before her, and began speaking past a dry and tight throat:

"Whereas it is in the nature of human beings to grow and accept new conditions; and whereas it is in the nature of our great society to welcome into its bosom those who have embraced our principles and customs…"