Rue supposed she was, or soon would be, such a captain. The idea was ludicrous. Still, here was her crew, all looking nervous in one way or another. She had intended to give a stirring speech to them before they all entered the cold sleep tanks. Now that they were here, though, her mouth was dry and she couldn't say a word, until Max came over and took her hand.

"It's real now, isn't it?" he asked. Rue nodded quickly.

The others gathered around. They looked expectant. Rue cleared her throat. She knew they could see the fear in her eyes and the knowledge shamed her. Indeed, her motley crew did not look like a band of adventurers, but like a random group of citizens pulled out of their ordinary lives and condemned by unknown powers to senseless exile.

"I'm scared," she said. Corinna and Evan glanced at one another. "But I'm only scared because I haven't done this before," Rue continued quickly. "We're doing something that our people have been doing for centuries. We're going out to meet a cycler. Nothing unusual there. We don't know what we'll find when we get to it, but we're well supplied and ready for a long trip." She wracked her brains, trying to think of something inspiring to add. "I–I'm glad you've put your faith in me and Max and…" Her mind went blank.

Rebecca came and took Rue's hand. "Let's focus on one thing at a time," she said gently. "What's next?"

Rue tried to pull herself together. "Cold sleep," she said. "Let's get ready for it."

Her crew went to check on the cold-sleep tanks, all except Blair, who stayed by her side. Rue tried not to cry, but she was really, really scared, in a way she had never been on Allemagne. And she couldn't hide it from these people who now depended on her for their lives.

C OLD SLEEP WAS not really sleep, but more like a long half-waking nightmare. Rue hadn't appreciated that before and nothing prepared her for the experience. She felt suspended in timelessness, comfortable and cocooned. Dreams came and went, some beautiful, some terrifying. Every now and then, a cold brittle voice she later realized belonged to the shuttle rattled off statistics. She would rise almost to waking, pondering those numbers until she realized that they represented the shuttle's status: acceleration, heading, integrity of the cold sleep capsules. When she knew all was well, she would drift away again.

Sometimes her body roused and she dimly knew she was flailing about, limbs under the control of a nervous system shunt. She was exercising. At other times she heard her own voice, croaking or singing aimlessly. It sounded like a stranger's voice.

There came a time when she really did sleep, then woke slowly to hear voices— real ones, this time, murmuring nearby. The feeling of huge weight that had pressed down on her for so long was gone. She had survived a month at three gravity's acceleration and they must now be approaching the Envy.

As this awareness dawned Rue struggled to sit up. It was surprisingly easy; she had expected stiff joints but everything seemed supple. Her eyes, though, wouldn't focus properly. A flesh-colored oval hovered in front of her. A familiar voice emerged from it. "Do you know who I am?"

"Re-Rebecca."

"Do you know where you are?"

Rebecca asked a few more questions, apparently satisfying herself that Rue was sane. Then she wrapped her captain in a blanket and towed her to the galley. "It'll take your eyes a few days to fully recover," she said as Rue groped for a coffee bulb she could dimly see floating in front of her. "You haven't used them for a month and the muscles have loosened up."

There was a gray bulk to Rue's left. She gradually realized it was Evan Laurel. He and Corinna had been roused before her, according to Rue's own instructions. Medical staff, engineering, and avionics first, that had been her decision. Blair and Max were being decanted now; all seemed well with them.

"Are we there?" Rue asked. After the health of the crew, it was the first and most important question on her mind.

The gray oval shook in a shrug. "Not sure," said Evan. "Corinna's checking now."

"I feel so…"

"Helpless, yes," said Evan. "It'll pass. I've done this a few times. It's always like this."

Another blob swam into sight, above and to her left. "Bad news," said Corinna.

Adrenaline had Rue instantly alert. "What?"

"The radar didn't make it through accel. We can grow new parts with the custom nano we brought, but it'll take weeks…"

"So we can't see where we are?"

"We've got the scopes," said Evan. "We'll manage. Right, Cor?"

"Yes," said Chandra in her usual neutral tone.

"Great," muttered Rue. As the adrenaline passed, she felt infinitely weary. She supposed that this weariness was on her now like a mantle; she was a captain, or at least had to pretend to be. The weariness was doubtless part of the job.

"We'll wait, then," she said. "When our eyes are up to it, we'll see where we are."

I T TOOK SEVERAL days before their eyesight came back. Evan stumbled around, his hair mussed, checking the stability of their life support and power. Every now and then he would glance out a window at the starry blackness and look longingly at the telescope. But the necessities of life had to be established before they could investigate where they were.

They huddled like invalids, growing stronger slowly; Blair was chatty as always and Rebecca efficient and kind, but Corinna maintained her aloof silence, Evan seemed perpetually nervous… and Max had sunk into himself. Rue was to learn that she had never before known him in his «normal» state— that is, surly and introspective. It was as though he had switched on some hyperactive part of himself in order to get them out here and once that was done he sank back into himself, reserves of charisma and genius exhausted. He hovered in a corner, blanket around his shoulders, playing Penrose Go with the computer. He seldom spoke.

Blair set about interviewing them on the third day and they perked up, all except Max. Blair started with Evan, sitting him in front of the window and chatting. The conversation became imperceptibly more focused and at a certain point Rue realized the interview had begun— but Evan himself either hadn't realized it, or was just very relaxed with the process. She smiled proudly at Blair's cleverness.

"I was born and raised in the Rights Economy," said Evan, "so I'd never been on anything like a cycler before I enlisted in the Cycler Order. A cycler's like a station, I guess, only moving. They're a lot like this shuttle, too. The first one I was on, the Martine, was pretty opulent, I guess— but small. There were fifty staterooms, a small garden, a banquet hall. It had several annexes which were separate balloon habitats floating next to it. One of those had a spherical swimming pool."

After several years with the Martine (amounting to three stops in its cycle) Evan had transferred to another cycler, the Xao Li, when for several months their circular but perpendicular cycles ran parallel.

"The Xao Li was amazing. It was an old cycler and I can see where you might get romantic ideas about them. Its main hab was in a bolo configuration— a crystal palace connected to a dead weight of supply sacks by a two-kilometer cable. The crystal palace was mostly one big garden, full of trees. Staterooms were under the garden, but you spent ninety percent of your time among the trees; some people even slept 'in the open. They had artificial rain and a little sun; in the very middle of the garden you could almost imagine you were on Earth."

To be a brother of the Cycler Order was to adopt an uncommon religion, one that had as its ideal Permanence: the creation and maintenance of a human civilization that could last a million years. The Order was all about discipline and spiritual purification, requirements for people who trained to plan operations that lasted centuries.