Permanence

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

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

The last dim band fell behind and they entered a land of permanent night. Here, in the deep twilight, someone had built a glittering glass-and-wood house on the top of an escarpment. White fungus grass grew long in the yard and no vehicles sat on the overgrown landing pad out front. It gave Rue a fu

When she was born the cyclers had still come, though fewer and fewer. As a child she hadn't associated their loss with the drop in immigration and rise in crime among the Stations. Cyclers didn't carry enough cargo to directly affect the economy or population of a developed colony like Erythrion.

The effects of maintaining contact with other worlds might be subtler than money or birthrates could account for. Maybe they were no less important, though.

"Damn the government," she said.

Max laughed richly. "Spoken like a true Treyan," he said.

They flew on and the glow of the sunlit lands gradually fell over the horizon behind them. Timidly at first, then with graceful confidence, the aurora revealed itself in the sky ahead. Behind the aurora, the stars attended like an enraptured audience.

There was no shred of green left below. Rue's eyes adjusted quickly and she could soon make out the riot of color that had replaced Earthly tones on the land. Most of the grass was black and it rippled like velvet in the wind. The trees were dark shades of purple and red, but here and there furz and heather dominated and this was rainbowed with shades of lilac and lemon-yellow. These plants used a pigment more efficient than chlorophyll and tuned to the frequencies of light the aurora produced. They absorbed blue-green light, unlike chlorophyll which absorbed red. Hence, they appeared in any color but green itself. They normally grew with agonizing slowness, but whenever Erythrion flared they would undergo brief, explosive growth spurts.

The aircar was still following the road, which snaked between low hills and past rivers but maintained a westward tendency. After a while Max pointed ahead. "I think that's it," he said.

On the horizon Rue could make out a glittering building, tall as any she'd seen in the lighted country behind them. Rows of windows high on its flanks lit the hillsides around it and she could see that it sat on the edge of a cliff, above a lake or ocean that stretched out to the horizon. More than that she couldn't see, except that this building was the terminus of the road they had been following.

Rue rehearsed the arguments she'd been preparing. She was the legal owner of the cycler; she must be given a chance to assert her ownership… she was good at defending herself verbally, she knew. She'd done it all her life.

Beside her Max heaved a sigh and she was about to say something about his sounding relieved that they'd made it, when sparks flew up the canopy beside her. Rue shrieked and jumped back, catching up against her seat belt. The aircar dipped woozily.

"What's happening?"

A bright vertical line of light appeared, jittered around crazily outside, then vanished. It left spots in Rue's eyes.

"Laser!" shouted Max. He put the car into a hard turn; light flashed outside again. "They hit one of the jets!"

"Are we going down?" Rue figured she should be afraid— didn't objects pick up a lot of speed when they fell on a planet? The fear didn't come naturally, though; freefall was a sensation she associated with safety and stillness, not danger.

"They build these things with multiple redundancy, so—" Sparks flew again and all kinds of inscape windows appeared around Max— most of them flashing red. "There goes another jet."

Okay, now she was scared. There came another flash and then they were falling.

Max sat numbly staring at the instruments, which were now complaining of a computer failure. Rue looked around herself. Freefall itself felt natural— it was the idea that they were being shot at that scared her.

Off to the right was the sky and off to the left the planet was closing fast. Three of their jets were down, but according to Max's instruments they had a fourth.

She reached past Max and hauled on the control stick. The aircar responded by flipping over several times. The rotation was very similar to the spins you did when playing freeball and she was good at freeball. Max was screaming now, but Rue had a good idea of how the aircar was responding to its only remaining jet. She put the car into a tight, blood-pounding spiral and threw all power into that jet.

They seemed to be slowing down, but it was too late. The ground came whirling up at them and then everything flew apart.

5

"I DON'T BELIEVE it," she heard Max mutter. Rue seemed to be squashed between a number of giant pillows, which were making various rude noises as they deflated. She pulled herself free, to find herself standing in black grass, shaken but unhurt, next to the aircar's crash bags.

Max clawed his way out from the bundle of neon-green balloons. "Don't believe it," he said again. Then he laughed. "Love the way they design these things."

The rest of the aircar was a mangled wreck lying some meters away. The car must have ejected the cockpit at the very last second.

"Gods and Kami, when we went into that death spiral I thought we were dead," said her cousin as he inspected himself for damage. "You okay?"

The spiral had been deliberate: Rue had needed to stabilize the aircar so that she could keep their one remaining jet pointed down and that was the only way to do it. It seemed petty to bring that up now, though. "I'm okay," she said. "Have you called for help?"

Max looked around himself uneasily. "I tried. I can't raise the inscape net out here. Signal's jammed… Look, we should get out of here. They'll come to make sure we're dead."

"Then you're going the wrong way," she said, taking his hand. "The monastery's this way."

His hand was shaking. He clasped hers tightly. "I can't see it," he said. "Too dark."

"I can see perfectly well," she reassured him. The aurora lit the land with a flickering, inconstant ghost light. Still, Max wouldn't move until they'd rummaged through the wreck of the aircar and found a flashlight he kept stored there. "I know we don't dare use it," he said. "I just need to have it, that's all."

They had crashed in an area of mixed grassland and thickets. In the light of a flare the tall bushes might have been a bright orange color; in this diffuse green glow they appeared deep brown. The air was warm; Rue could feel heat from Erythrion on her face when she looked to the east.

Luckily the brown tangles were big enough that they afforded some cover. Rue and Max wove their way around them for a hundred or so meters. Then they had to stop, because an unmistakable sound reached them through the clear air.

"It's an aircar," said Max. They both dove for cover among the thorny stalks of an orange bush tall as a house. "It's coming in low."

Rue could see it now, a dark blot against the aurora. The car showed no ru