Building Harlequin’s Moon

by Larry Niven

  Her dad smiled softly and ruffled her short hair. “I think it will look great. Sometimes bad things turn out okay.”

  She didn’t answer.

  He helped her weed and rake until nearly dark, and they walked back down the path together holding hands.

  Rachel and Ursula worked together for days. Harry silently took care of Andrew’s plot as well as his own. He looked haunted. He didn’t spend much time with the girls, but he smiled at Rachel when Ursula wasn’t around, and sometimes they sat and talked or watched the clouds together.

  The days cooled. Harlequin’s dark ruby glow didn’t diminish, but Apollo’s light no longer reflected back from the gas giant, and at night Aldrin was turned away from both Apollo and Harlequin. Against the rich black sky Rachel could see twice the stars of high summer. She and Ursula made games of naming stars and constellations far into the night. Twice they passed through meteor showers, and streaks of light flamed the sky, some bright enough to illuminate Ursula’s fine hair.

  One night, when Harlequin eclipsed Apollo completely and the stars felt closer and thicker than ever, Harry joined them. Ursula excused herself. Rachel stayed, and she and Harry lay on their backs looking at the sky.

  “I talked to Andrew,” Harry said unexpectedly. “He was in town for a few hours today. He’s been out with an Earth Born planting crew. Told me he hated it. They treat him badly.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe he’s acting badly,” Rachel said.

  “I asked why he tore up your test planting.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said he’s in love with you.”

  Rachel shivered, pulling her knees in over her torso, wrapping her arms around them. “That’s love? He destroyed my plot, got himself in trouble, and didn’t even fix it afterward.”

  “Remember the tree he stuck up on the tool shed?”

  “Of course. I could have failed over that. I was so mad at him I wanted to hit him.”

  Harry sat up and looked down at her. “He thought you’d think it was cool. I mean, really, he said, why not grow trees on buildings?”

  “He’s not stupid. He knew it was my final exam.”

  “He wanted attention.”

  “Well, then he doesn’t understand me at all. I try to do a good job, but I stay inside the rules. It’s important.”

  “Shhhhh . . . your voice sounds funny. Don’t get mad. It wasn’t me.”

  “I know,” she said. “But still, couldn’t he see how important that tree was to the design?”

  “I could see it,” Harry said. A long silence. “I like you too.”

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “Look at the stars. Doesn’t that design look like the ships the Council comes down to us on?”

  She followed his pointing finger with her eyes. “That one? The bright star to the left, and follow it up—”

  “Yes . . . you see it.”

  They stayed out and named star systems for hours, shivering, not touching.

  CHAPTER 7

  ERIKA’S FOLLY

  THREE DAYS BEFORE Mid-Winter Week, Gabriel and Ali flew Harry, Rachel, Ursula, and a younger student, Gloria, to the second biggest crater on Selene. It was Gloria’s first flight, and her blue eyes were wide and wet and her lip quivered as they left the ground. Rachel chattered about the Hammered Sea and took her hand, distracting her from her fears.

  “Why’d you name it Erika’s Folly?” Harry asked.

  A wide grin split Gabriel’s face. “She missed. Her aim was off . . . bad arithmetic. She was trying to out-calculate Astronaut. There wasn’t supposed to be a huge crater here.”

  Ali laughed. “It’s a pretty mistake.”

  “I had to change the original plan for the collider path.” Gabriel was still smiling.

  Erika’s Folly sloped gently into a wide sea. Rocks protruded from the water and decorated the inner and outer sides of the crater—jumbled piles that had fallen from the sky during the rain of rocks and fire that built the world. A large promontory of rock flowed down from a break in the crater wall; it looked like someone had stepped on the upward rim and pushed piles of stones down. The crater was a quarter of the width of the Hammered Sea, but Rachel thought it might still take a full day to walk from rim to rim. The middle sea would have to be skirted, and piles of boulders on the lakeshore would be hard to navigate.

  The plane’s reflection shadowed the calm sea. Water had etched its highest reach almost halfway between the current lake level and the lower sections of the crater’s perimeter. The rise from water to rim was far less dramatic than in the Hammered Sea. Boulder piles, fields of fist-sized rocks, and flat expanses of sand crept gently up the sides of the crater. All the reds and grays and whites of Selene’s stones showed here.

  Gabriel assigned Harry and Ursula to work together planting sensors at various heights around the crater to measure water levels. Ursula looked longingly back at Rachel as she trailed off behind Harry, toting a bulky box of sensors. Rachel shrugged her shoulders and pretended disgust; she’d have been happy to go off with Harry.

  Rachel took Gloria with her to gather rock samples and look for vegetation that might have crept here since the planting of Selene started. They were to meet back in two hours, long before the tide turned and sent water up toward the edges of the crater. Rachel and Gloria walked along the inside crater walls, feet slipping in loose sandy soil. Sometimes they had to scramble up over damp boulders.

  Gloria asked, “Why are we looking for plants here?”

  “Well, we want to control where things grow, to be sure we make a complete ecosystem,” Rachel answered. “But it’s important to see what’s happening that we didn’t plan.”

  “So do we pull up plants if we find them out here?”

  “No. We take samples. I think the soil is too sterile here to find actual plants anyway. We know there are microorganisms by now, so the regolith is turning into soil, but it hasn’t actually been prepared like the fields, so it won’t support higher order plant life. You won’t find a stray banana palm escaped to Erika’s Folly. We’re looking for mosses and simple structure plants.”

  Rachel knelt down and picked up a stone nearly the size of her fist. It was ringed with whitish green. “Hah! This could be a moss or an alga,” she said. “So we’ll take a sample back and analyze it.” Rachel carefully scraped a bit of the material loose from the stone with a small metal tool she carried in her pocket. The sample went into a little bag that sealed itself.

  “What if we don’t want it to grow here?”

  “I don’t know, Gloria . . . ask Gabriel.”

  “I will. How did you see that? I would have walked right by it.”

  “Just look carefully. Watch. Success in terraforming—it’s in the details—so here you’ll see subtle signs, like a rock that’s a slightly different color on one side. Sometimes it’s an instinct. Ali says your subconscious knows more than your forebrain.” Rachel reached down and picked up another stone. It too was edged with whitish green. “This looks like the same thing, but we’ll sample it anyway,” Rachel said.

  “Will we see bigger plants?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m looking carefully,” Gloria said, her voice sounding focused and very confident. “The tide comes up here—I can see where things are wet under rocks. Will it come up before we’re done?”

  Rachel looked at the sea of water in the center of the crater, hundreds of yards away from them. They stood only a little bit above it, and she thought there had been a little creep. Her wrist pad said they had ninety minutes. The high tide mark cut above them, a thick line carved into the rocks, maybe twenty minutes’ walk.

  “We’ll be all right. Tides here don’t go as far up the walls as they do at the Hammered Sea, but we’ll turn upward soon. Gabriel and Ali didn’t give us an exact path to follow.”

  “I’m okay,” Gloria said. “I trust you.”

  “Good noticing though,” Rachel said. “It’s important to
stay aware of what’s around you.” The word “leader” sounded good lately. She was growing into it.

  Rachel stopped to turn over a pile of rocks, finding more mossy substance, a deeper green than on the first rock. She rubbed it absently with her thumb, wondering what it was.

  The ground shook, almost enough to unbalance Rachel. Small rocks skittered around her ankles and she looked at the crater wall above her nervously.

  Gloria was a hundred yards ahead, clambering over rocks. She tottered, calling “Rachel!” then gave a thin cry and dropped from view.

  Rachel ran toward where she had last seen her.

  She heard noise, muffled, maybe almost a scream. She forced herself to slow down. The crater was still and silent again, the quake over. Rachel inched forward, her heart pounding. As light as Gloria was, Rachel could make out her footprints, becoming more distinct until they dropped down and out of sight. The sandy soil fell away into a fissure.

  “Gloria!” she called.

  A sound floated up to her—not a word, but a whimper.

  CHAPTER 8

  WILD WATER

  RACHEL SQUATTED ON the edge of the drop, inches to the right of Gloria’s dragging foot tracks, and one long dragging handprint in the dust. Rachel’s feet were on hard rock, solid, crumbling away almost immediately past her, falling to nothing, and rising as a hard edge again just twenty feet away—with a run, she could jump to the other side.

  Water gurgled below her. This wasn’t the Hammered Sea; there was no water engineering in Erika’s Folly that Rachel knew of. A wild stream? Flowing into the crater?

  “Gloria, can you hear me?”

  “Yyy . . . yow. Yesss.”

  “Be calm. I can’t see you. You’re not far down; I can hear you pretty clearly.”

  “I . . . I fell. The quake came . . . and I lost my balance, and I . . . I just slid down. The ground went away right under my feet. Rachel . . . I’m scared. It hurts.”

  “What hurts?”

  “My . . . my ankle.” Rachel heard choking sobs.

  “Are you standing on something? Is the ground good?”

  “I’m okay, I think. There’s water, and it’s running down, and it’s rocky down here and darker. I can see, but the light is thin.”

  Thin light? “Is it a cave?”

  “I can see under where you are. I can’t tell how far it goes.”

  Rachel took a step to look, and the edge crumbled under her. She tried to slide back, failed, and fell. She was right over where Gloria had fallen! She twisted, trying to angle her fall away from the girl. A thump, and she felt something under her—long, so it must be a leg or an arm. There was a sound of pain. So she hadn’t killed her, or buried her.

  “Gloria?’

  “That hurt too.” Gloria’s voice was small.

  “Yeah, well, now we’re both down here,” Rachel said dryly, trying to make it into a joke.

  She’d landed on sand on top of rocks, Gloria’s right leg under her thigh. She pushed herself back. Gloria was holding the ankle of the leg Rachel had missed; it was at least twice its normal size.

  Some leader she was. Why hadn’t she called for help? They’d be hard to find in this hole. She should have told the others right away, but she’d gotten caught up in the moment. Gabriel will be mad at me. She pushed the thought away, afraid it would paralyze her.

  Climbing out the way they fell in looked impossible. They’d fallen at the edge of a wide underground riverbed. Still water puddled in the center of the rocky riverbed, and water stains showed clearly the fissure walls, high up, above her head. The walls curved above her, narrowing to the slim crack they’d fallen through. High tide would drown them.

  It was only ten feet to where Rachel had just been sitting, but it might as well have been orbit. They needed another way.

  The fissure stretched up and down the crater, stream-cut, thin, and full of jumbled rocks. Rachel stood, testing. Her limbs worked. The stream floor was clearly too narrow and uneven for a girl with a sprained ankle to walk through.

  She broadcast their problem to the others while Gloria leaned into her and moaned softly. The other four were together by the flier, above the tide line, almost twenty degrees around the crater from them. It took ten precious minutes to get a plan they all understood. Ali and Ursula would stay with the plane, and look for a good place to land it away from the water system. Gabriel and Harry would come on foot, following tracks, roped together to guard against dangerous footing. Rachel and Gloria were to look for a way out.

  Harlequin pulled the sea toward them. Her wrist pad showed less than half an hour until high tide. She sighed and helped Gloria up. Gloria couldn’t put any weight on the bad ankle. Rachel’s own leg, the leg she had landed on, was sore, with dark splotches of bruising already flushing the back of her thigh. Gloria was only half Rachel’s height, so Rachel knelt down and helped Gloria climb onto her back. The girl winced and cried out; she had to let her ankle flop loosely and hold onto Rachel’s shoulders with both of her small hands.

  For a while Rachel was able to walk up a loose grade at the edge of the stream, and they gained some height. Water stains showed they were still below tide line. Gloria’s weight pushed down on Rachel’s hips. The walls narrowed in on them, and Rachel reached and pulled and scrambled up big boulders, panting and straining. Gloria’s weight slowed her down. Instead of jumping as she would have by herself, she had to climb, pulling them up by grabbing sharp edges of boulders. Rachel’s hands grew tender from the rough rocks, and the heel of her right palm bled. They climbed almost straight up now; pull and step, pull and reach, step. Twice, Gloria’s foot swung against stone and the girl cried out sharply. Otherwise Gloria was silent, but rigid, a difficult burden to balance. Sometimes Rachel felt her shake. “We can’t stop,” she said after a third accidental brush of Gloria’s foot against rock.

  “I know,” Gloria whispered back.

  After ten minutes Rachel stopped. Her arms had no strength left, and she was afraid she’d drop Gloria, who seemed to be getting heavier and sticking out more with every step. The walls were only six feet apart here, and they’d climbed above the stream. Water still made a quiet rushing sound, flowing many feet below their perch on unsteady wedged boulders.

  Rachel leaned forward, weight across a large rounded stone, seeking temporary rest for her back muscles. Gloria managed to stay mounted, taking some of her own weight by resting her hands and one knee against rock. Rachel’s back was starting to feel better when Gloria whispered, “Water.”

  Rachel shot up, grabbing Gloria, and turned to look. It was there, rising below them. It had swallowed the place where they fell, and was eating the tracks Rachel had made in the first easier steps. She started moving again, working her way up. A cliff loomed ahead—a massive rock face, twenty feet high, with no easy steps or handholds. A wide vertical crack bisected the face, smooth and featureless.

  A camera-bot buzzed around them. Gabriel knew where they were. He and Harry were closer now, staying away from the fissure, but climbing up. They’d chosen a place to start angling over.

  “I’m looking down at water and up at a cliff,” she told Gabriel.

  “I know. Hang on, Rachel; we’re nearby. A few minutes.”

  She glanced behind them. It would be close. “I’m putting Gloria down to see if I can use this crack and my weight and get up there. I’m not willing to risk it with her on my back, not until I see what it’s like. After I do it once on my own, I’ll go back for her.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m going now.” She knelt down and helped Gloria off her back, wincing at the little cry of pain Gloria made as she settled onto the stone. “That’s a brave girl,” Rachel said, turning to wedge hands, arms, and shoulders into the wide crack and inch her body up the rough wall. It was slow going. Her hands shook with pain, and her biceps and calves quivered with the strain of holding her weight up just by pushing. She left skin and blood from her palm on the rocks. She looked back once, and the
height made her dizzy with fear. The stones below her looked like sharp teeth. Water licked up the rocks, urging her to keep going up. Gloria was too close to the water, and that scared her. “It will be okay, Gloria,” she called, terribly afraid that it wouldn’t.

  As she inched toward the top she heard a voice, close, just overhead. “Rachel, we’re here.” It was Gabriel.

  A rope dangled in front of her. There was no way to grab it. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Carefully,” Gabriel said softly. “Find a way to get the rope.”

  She reached, fingers not quite touching the rope, felt the fall below her and pulled her hand back. “Swing the rope,” she called up.

  She shifted her feet, managing enough balance to grab the rope with one shaking hand and pull it in to her, knotting it around her chest. She let out a long cry of relief as they pulled her up the last few yards of cliff face. In mere steps she was in Gabriel’s arms, and then Harry’s.

  Harry set her down and handed her the butt end of the rope, telling her to run it around her back and brace her feet. She did, and Gabriel went down the face for Gloria while she and Harry belayed. The rope hurt her raw hands and pulled tightly against her back. It was surprisingly fast given how long the climb up the fissure had seemed—in just moments Gabriel was back, Gloria tucked in front of him, her arms around his neck.

  “You girls did well,” he said.

  Rachel smiled. “I was really glad to see you.”

  “All in a hero’s day.” Gabriel grinned, wide and silly, hardly looking like a Council member at all. Rachel smiled back—giddy with success. Harry was grinning as widely.

  Gloria spoke up. “Did you bring medicine to make my ankle stop hurting?”

  Gabriel donned his Council face again, but stayed light-voiced as he answered. “We’ve got a splint and bandage in the plane—Ali and Ursula are bringing it around. The bruise is something you’ll have to deal with. We’ll get your ankle up and cold as soon as we get to the plane.”

  “Okay.” Gloria managed a momentary smile although pain shone brightly in her eyes. “Can we go now?” she asked.