Permanence

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

"That's my girl!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sure."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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