Permanence

by Karl Schroeder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Where?"

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

  "What's the constellation?"

  "The Horologium."

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Strange," said Max.

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

  "What are you saying?"

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  "But it's there, Max. You saw it."

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

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

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

  "Max, we have no choice!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "This heirloom. It was worth a lot?"

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

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

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