Permanence

"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."

Cori

"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 Cori

"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 Cori

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, Cori

"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 Cori

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 Cori

"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."