Karl Schroeder - Permanence

There was still a significant time-lag on messages to Erythrion, so while she waited Rue brooded over the other piece of news she had received this week. A museum at Treya had finally replied to her query about fossils. It was a fake. Apparently somebody had shipped in a cycler cargo of the things thirty years ago, along with gems and carved wood, all purported to be from Earth. The fellow who had ridden down the beam with the cargo had sold it all for a fabulous sum and left on the next cycler, rich. It wasn't until years later that it was revealed the fossils were fake and the stones came from an Earthlike but fallow minor world in High Space. To this day, despite the publicity, not everyone knew that what they owned was worthless.

The news had hit Rue hard— she had risked her whole future to recapture the thing, after all. She had cried and stuffed the pendant deep into her kit bag so she wouldn't have to see it anymore. She almost threw it out the airlock, but even if it wasn't real, it was still her last link to Grandma. It just hurt to think that Grandma could and had been deceived. Rue felt more vulnerable for knowing that.

This aunt, if she really was one, could be the real link Rue longed for. But she couldn't allow herself to believe it.

Aunt Leda's reply, when it came, was straightforward: "Of course we know you're coming, dear! Everyone in Erythrion knows about your claim. They're doing a parallax on it now and they've verified that it's there, but it's so far out and so faint they're having trouble resolving it. But if it's as big as the readings say, you're going to be rich! And when that happens all manner of bad people are going to be sticking their oars in" (a term that made no sense to Rue) "trying to wingle the wealth out of you. So we thought, you need allies. We don't care what you do with the money, dear, we just want to make sure you keep it!"

And: "Your Mom and I had a terrible fight when we were young, dear. It's sad that she never mentioned me in all those years. I don't know what to think. But it was certainly my fault, you know and I don't blame her. I've regretted the things we said every day ever since— but I never got a chance to tell her so! And now she's passed on. All I can say is that I'm terribly, terribly sorry and sad that we never got a chance to make up. But clearly, any fights we might have had were between us. You're my niece, Rue! How could I turn you away for something that happened between your Mom and me years ago?"

At this point Rue's cynical inner voice said, Then why didn't Grandma mention you either? She wanted to ignore that voice, but decided, to be at least partially sensible, that she wouldn't say a word about Grandma until Leda had talked about her— just to see what she would say.

Caution aside, the idea that she had family waiting for her was a great comfort to Rue as the days of her journey passed. Feeling more settled and confident now, she caught up on local news and played some of the latest books from the halo world. She consulted the fashion newsgroups and tried to get the ship's assemblers to reshape her clothes so they looked a little less provincial. She even tried out the Erythrion accent, with some success.

Occasionally she called up an inscape view of the outside. Erythrion itself was visible now, a gigantic red eye in the night. The halo world was a brown dwarf, sixty Jupiters in mass, too small to be a sun and too big to be a planet. Like countless billions of others it moved through the galaxy alone in the spaces between the lit stars. So small and invisible were the halo worlds that they hadn't even been known to exist until the end of the twentieth century. But to Rue, Erythrion was huge and magnificent and all the civilization she hoped to ever see.

There were three major nations at Erythrion, one of them in the oceans under the ice surface of the Europan planet Divinus, one visible as scattered sparkles of light— orbital habitats scattered throughout the system— and one on Treya. As Rue's ship made its final approach through Erythrion's radiation fields, she swung the prospecting scope around to look for Divinus and Treya. Erythrion's dull red glow wasn't enough to make them shine; she spotted Divinus after long searching when it eclipsed a star. That absence was a planet. Treya, though— she could actually see it, a diffuse oval of light, like a fuzzy star. She stared at it until her eyes were sore.

Closer to hand, brilliant filaments of light illuminated dozens of O'Neill cylinders. Each cylinder was twenty or more kilometers long, home to nearly a million people. They utterly dwarfed the tiny station where she was born and raised and she gaped at them as they slid silently by.

Even the colonies were dwarfed by their surroundings. They swarmed like insects around incandescent filaments hundreds of kilometers in length. Each filament was a fullerene cable that harvested electricity from Erythrion's magnetic field. They were kept in orbit by vast infrared sails, visible only as a shimmer of reflected stars. The power running through the cables made them glow in exactly the same way that tungsten had glowed in light bulbs for billions of people on twentieth-century Earth. These cables were vastly bigger, of course; the colonies concentrated the light to provide «daylight» for whole populations with the waste product of electricity production.

The glowing cables had been built to provide power for launching starship cargoes. To see them serving merely as lamps was somehow saddening.

Erythrion flared one morning; Rue watched in wonder as the whole planetary system blossomed with light. While there was no nuclear fire powering the dwarf's internal heat, its prodigious magnetic fields occasionally kinked together and created vast arches of brilliant fire that overwhelmed its normal dull glow. The flare was just over the dwarf's horizon, so for a few hours Erythrion became a crescent of royal purple and mauve, from which sprang an incandescent filament of white. Now Rue had no trouble finding Divinus, bathed as it was in this temporary radiance.

She really wished there were somebody on board with her to share these sights with. Time and again she would go, "Oh!" and want to say, "Look at that!" to someone next to her. She even caught herself longing to know what Jentry would make of things.

She and Aunt Leda spoke regularly now that the time-lag from distance had reduced to nearly nothing. Leda told Rue about the «house» and sent photos when Rue had a hard time understanding her. It was the sort of structure she'd seen in books and movies about Earth— ancient, simple, and perfect. Leda continued to assure Rue that the family didn't need her money, they were just happy to see her. Rue wanted to believe her and despite herself, she found that her hopes were growing by the hour. When she went to bed she imagined living in a house, with dozens of people, all her relatives, breathing the night air in neighboring rooms. A family.

Leda was not the only one calling, though. She had received mail from all over Erythrion, from government bureaus and lawyers, tour guides and investment counselors. Now that she was on final approach to Treya the news hounds started phoning, too. She had nothing to say to any of them, so she eventually told the ship to screen all calls except those from Leda. The only indication of the incoming stream of messages became a flashing counter in the corner of the inscape window.

All those messages did point out a central problem, though: If she couldn't trust Leda, who else could she trust here? The thought made her laugh. Oh, the problems of the rich!

After several days' travel through the system she finally reached the orbit of Treya, the greatest and most troubled nation of Erythrion. There had been a coup recently, she knew; the place was in the hands of isolationists and had she not had family waiting, Rue might not have been able to even land.