Permanence

4

RUE CLUTCHED HER kit bag and watched the mountain slope fall away below them. Max was apparently piloting the air car himself, because he held a control stick and as he moved it the car swooped and dove. "Wish we could turn off the ru

"Who are those people?" She pointed to the aircraft that were even now touching down on the black soil below her newly abandoned tent. "Newshounds?"

"The newshounds are the least of your problems," said Max. "Believe me, I know."

"Then… Max, talk to me."

He glanced sidelong at her. "You're not still mad at me?"

"Max, I was never mad at you. I just needed to do things on my own. I–I'm really grateful for your generosity and of course I'll pay you back for the hospital fees and the cool suit and all, it's just you were taking over the way my brother used to. Oh, I can't explain! You were pushing. I had to get away."

"I just wanted to protect you," he said sullenly.

"I see that now. Now, please tell me who those people are and why they're all coming after me in the middle of the night."

Max let out a long sigh. He looked like he hadn't slept and his clothes were disheveled as always.

"I've been following the attempts to contact the cycler," he said. "Which you should have been doing, too. Between times I talked to my lawyer and verified that if it proved to be a relic, that you would have salvage rights according to the laws of the Cycler Compact. Well, they won't a

"Dead? But it's moving fast, isn't it?"

Max grunted a laugh. "Fast, yeah— point eight five light-speed. It'll pass Erythrion in a little over two days. If it was ma

"So maybe it's a cargo packet, not a cycler." Cargo packets were small, weighing only a few to

They swung out over the foot hills and Max leaned back from the controls. He slumped back in his seat. "It looks like we lost them."

"Max! Lost who?"

He glanced behind them. "Government officials, newshounds, the military… who knows? Whoever they are, they're after you for the same reason I came: the cycler."

"But… they don't even know it's a cycler," she said incredulously. "Maybe it's a ship from High Space. They don't use cyclers because they've got faster-than-light ships, right? So if they visit us in the halos, they do a direct flight."

Max shook his head. "Yeah, but when they visit, they come in faster than light. They can come here that fast, Rue, they just can't start the FTL engine again for the trip home; halo worlds like Erythrion don't have enough mass for that. Anyway, this thing's not on a direct trajectory to us; it's nudging itself into a course correction. It's not stopping here, it's using a ramscoop to bend its trajectory, like any cycler would. It's come from nowhere, Rue and where it's going we don't know— though if its new course holds, it'll be passing close by Chandaka in about two years."

"Chandaka!" She had often gazed at that star in the observatory at Allegmagne. It was the nearest star in High Space— once part of the Cycler Compact, now a habitation of the mysterious, despised Rights Economy.

"The point is, Rue, the thing behaves like a cycler; it's alive but seems to have no life support right now."

The last cycler to pass Erythrion had come twenty years ago; once, Rue knew, there had been at least one every month. But that was fifty years before, when all inhabited worlds— lit stars and brown dwarfs alike— were part of the Compact.

Then faster-than-light travel was discovered; unfortunately it only worked between massive enough worlds. Chandaka and the other lit stars had joined the FTL Rights Economy and stopped maintaining their parts of the cycler rings. Cycler traffic to Erythrion had dwindled over the years and finally stopped.

Cut off from the rest of the universe, Erythrion was turning in on itself. The coup at Treya was the latest symptom of the slide.

"That cycler may not be ma

"And you, cousin of mine, own it."

The aircar skimmed above fields and forests and a black snaking river. Auroral light reflected off the water. In the distance inhabited hillsides glittered with lights, the way the docks of Allemagne had. As they approached Rue made out dozens of huge, sprawling mansions— not mere houses, certainly— each with its own grounds and pool. Private roads snaked through the forest. Private air cars sat on pads or roofs.

"I'm a billionaire," she whispered.

"Multi multi," observed Max laconically. "But it's not a done deal yet. The next few days will be critical."

"Why?"

Max didn't answer; he was concentrating on spiralling them down toward a big sprawling villa with red roofs. He hovered the car over a broad landing pad, hit a switch and lights bloomed around the pad. Apparently on automatic pilot now, the car settled slowly down, landing with the barest thump.

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

"Max, whose house is this?"

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

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

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

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