18
RUE AWOKE TO the sound of birdsong.
It was something she had heard in recordings, or synthesized, many times. The first time she'd heard live birds was on Treya; the second time, on Chandaka.
Then this must be the planet Oculus, at Colossus. She opened her eyes.
A billowing canopy of pale blue silk hung over her bed, extravagant as something from history. The bed was a four-poster, strictly for use under gravity. Her head was embraced by a luxuriously soft pillow.
She stretched and yawned. Other than the birds, there was no sound; no fans, or pumps, or footsteps overhead. No wonder she had slept so well, despite the heat in this room.
Sitting up, Rue spotted her clothes neatly folded on a nearby chair. This was her first awakening at Colossus and yet she was not surrounded by doctors, nor was she shivering in a cold-sleep vat waiting to be tended to. She didn't feel a million years old like she had every other time she emerged from cold sleep— in fact, she felt great.
Her feet touched down in deep warm pile carpet. This room was at least seven meters on a side and almost that tall. One entire wall was taken up with high, leaded-glass windows; there were French doors there as well. Rue dressed without looking at her clothes; her eyes were fixed on the vista outside.
She needed to go to the bathroom, but there was no way she was doing that before she got past those windows. She turned the handle on the doors and they opened to let in a beautifully cool breeze. The air smelled of ice and bare rock, like the penumbral mountains at Treya. Eagerly Rue stepped out onto a wide balcony.
A quick glance told her she was halfway up the side of a gigantic building perched on an equally huge cliff. Then she turned her attention to what lay beyond.
The sky at Treya had been alive with clouds. This sky was alive in a completely different way. The whole firmament glowed with sunset mauve and peach, but these colors didn't radiate from the horizon the way sunset had on Chandaka. Rather, at the zenith hung a round golden disk, its edges perfectly sharp. She could look straight at it without difficulty. Near this disk the sky was a lovely peach color, becoming rose, purple, dark blue and finally black at the horizon.
A brilliant aurora danced throughout this beautiful sky. Wavering curtains of light at the horizon, the auroral bands became coiling serpents when directly overhead. The combination of firmament and aurora laid fairy light over a seascape that stretched away to incredible distance before her.
That golden disk must be the brown dwarf Colossus, she knew, but it was nothing at all like Erythrion. Neither was this place like Treya, or Chandaka, or any world she had seen in movies or sims.
A city brimmed over the cliff her building stood upon. Its walls and minarets gleamed like an hallucination in the sinuous light. The cliff itself was pearly white and was backed by ramparts of equally white mountains. It stretched off past the horizons to either side.
Rue had never seen a real ocean, but she knew that the one before her must be unique. Mountains reared out of it, white with emerald and turquoise highlights: icebergs. Smaller chunks of ice floated in the dark water, their sides licked by white foam. The air that blew back her hair was well below freezing— a perfect temperature, in fact. She leaned against the balustrade and closed her eyes, just breathing it in for a while.
Someone cleared their throat.
Rue turned, to find a tall man in the severe black uniform of the Cycler Compact standing at the French doors. "Captain Cassels," he said. "Welcome to Lux and the planet Oculus. I am glad to find you awake. I am Griffin, the abbot of this monastery."
"How long have we been here?" she asked. "Are the others awake?"
"You are the first, since you are the captain of the Jentry's Envy," he said with a bow. "You must tell us the order in which to awake the others."
"How long?" she asked again.
"A week since we recovered your shuttle," he said. "There was no indication of urgency in your messages, so we took the liberty of awaking you in a traditional way, more civilized than one finds in cycler travel lately, I'd wager."
Rue was at a loss as to what to say. She just nodded. "We've taken the liberty," Griffin said, "of tailoring you a uniform as befits your station." He gestured at a side table by the windows. Through the leaded glass, she saw folded black cloth.
"Oh. Well… thank you." She went to the doorway; he retreated and she went to the table.
"If you and your companions are willing, we would be pleased to give a banquet in your honor at second shift-over," he said. "In the Great Hall of the monastery, of course."
"Banquet?" Her head was spinning. "Sure." She unfolded part of the uniform. It was an absolute black, with silver epaulets and piping. Her heart flipped as she saw on the breast something she'd seen before only in movies and sims: the silver infinity symbol inside laurel leafs that signified the rank of cycler captain.
Rue dropped the uniform back on the table. A roaring filled her head and the world faded in and out for a moment.
"Are you all right?" Griffin was at her side, one hand just touching her elbow.
"No— I mean yes, I, I'll be all right." She turned away from him, so that he wouldn't see the tears starting in her eyes.
"I'd hoped to give you a tour of Lux this afternoon," said the abbot. "But I see you've not fully recovered from your flight."
"No, it's all right." She wiped her eyes and turned to smile at him. "Abbot Griffin, I would love a tour. Maybe, if you gave me an hour to freshen up? Please, I wouldn't miss it for the world."
He smiled graciously and bowed again. "Of course. One of the sisters will be waiting outside the door if you require anything. An hour then?"
She nodded. After he left Rue turned back to stare at the folded uniform. It seemed to draw light to itself, as if it were the magnetic focus of the room. Her hand hovered over the smooth cloth for long seconds before she summoned the courage to turn a fold aside and gaze again on the infinity symbol. That symbol was no doubt chiseled into the stones above this monastery's gate. It was the symbol of her civilization.
TWO HOURS LATER, Rue was high above the city in an aircar, staring down at the domed towers of Lux. Many of the buildings had atria or open shafts penetrating them; from above, the shafts made patterns of dots across the rooftops. The Abbot had explained that since Oculus was tidally locked, Colossus never moved from its position near the zenith. The builders of the city could put skylights and light-pipes in permanent place, confident that Colossus would throw its amber light deep into the heart of any building without pause.
For all its medieval appearance, Lux was built of plastics and ceramics, all based on minerals and chemicals mined from the ocean. The ocean was global, for Oculus was a Europan world, covered in continents of ice with a twenty-kilometer deep ocean beneath them. Only here at the point closest to Colossus was the water exposed, in a circular ocean two thousand kilometers across. Lux clung to the edge of this ocean, but most of Oculus's cities were dug deep under the ice, at its interface with the unfathomable depths of water.
"See down there," said the abbot. Rue followed his pointing finger to the base of the ice cliffs. There, dark archways opened into the white walls. As she watched, a large ship exited one archway. It cast wings of water up and behind it from small feet of some kind that it ran upon.
"Hydrofoils," said the abbot. Rue smiled politely, though she didn't understand. Now she saw there were many ships on the water, from very small sailing vessels to huge square things loaded with shipping containers.
"I hope you are with us long enough to go sailing," said the abbot. "The bergs are beautiful and home to many birds."