by Larry Niven
CHAPTER 17
WATCHING RACHEL
ASTRONAUT SLIPPED EASILY into conversation with Gabriel. Controls muted the program’s ability to initiate action, but it was allowed conversation with anyone who would talk to it. When Gabriel froze himself or went to Selene, there was often no one to talk to. Clare, if she was warm, and sometimes other terraformers, like the woman in the garden, Treesa. It was easy to split attention and talk to Treesa and Gabriel at the same time—in fact, Astronaut enjoyed working them around into a resonance, a conversation they didn’t know they were having with each other.
But the woman seemed crazy, or partly crazy. Brilliant, but not quite balanced. Astronaut studied human psychological files. No one treated Astronaut as well as Gabriel did. No one else talked to it about feelings, or goals. Early in the building of Selene, years passed when Astronaut and Gabriel were the only entities awake.
“What do you think?” Gabriel asked. No subject needed.
“Everyone could be right. The situation is tricky. You need these Children, and then you don’t. Are they a danger to you? There isn’t enough data yet. The best course is to remain wary. I will watch and evaluate to the extent possible.”
Astronaut did not like Liren. She watched its behavior too closely, expecting treachery. It thought Gabriel was right, that Liren resented both the AI and the Children because each accosted her carefully maintained control and order by simply existing. Astronaut found Liren hard to predict—her decisions weren’t always logical.
“I know,” Gabriel replied, “and I know to agree with whatever High Council decides, but still something tells me that Kyu is right and we had better build trust as well as respect.”
“Can you be trusted?”
“. . . Damn.”
“Remain open to all possibilities. You know well that others can break your promises.”
“Some help you are,” Gabriel said, rounding the corner toward Rachel’s door. “And you—don’t go doing anything. Watch all you want, but if you do anything on your own besides watch and fly the ship, Liren will load your backup and I’ll have to spend two months explaining everything to your younger self.”
Rachel looked up, smiling broadly, as Gabriel entered her room. “Hi, Gabe,” she said, surprising Astronaut with her informality.
Gabriel returned her smile. “So,” he said, “Kyu seems to think you are doing pretty well so far. How do you feel?”
“Tired,” she said, “and excited. I’m so glad you brought me! There’s so much I could never have understood without being here. Already I can see Selene’s jungle when we’re done. I’ve put my whole weight onto lianas like the baby ones we’re planting. I love seeing the big versions of what we are growing. I’ll be a better designer now. I want to change some things in my plot.”
“Good. You’ll have to study extremely hard. These people already have a sense of what you can do, but this will be harder than any class I taught. You may feel like you have to prove yourself over and over.”
Astronaut watched the interaction carefully. Rachel nodded and promised she would work hard. Then she started pounding Gabriel with questions. She kept him interested for hours, questioning and probing and learning. He stayed until she could barely keep her eyes open.
As soon as he hit the corridor Astronaut said, “Now I understand what you are impressed with.”
“What?”
“She really is very quick. She followed a lot of what you said there, but almost all of the concepts must have been new.”
“I’m proud of her,” Gabriel said.
“I want to talk to her,” Astronaut said. But she had to ask.
“Not until she has full Library access.”
“Does she know I exist?”
“I’ve mentioned you a time or two.”
CHAPTER 18
TREESA
RACHEL WAVED AT Kyu as the High Councilwoman left for the morning. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and started looking under leaves for red-eyed tree frogs. Her assignment was to find as many frogs as she could and get DNA samples to compare to Earth stock records.
She imagined the frogs loose on Selene. Gloria would love them. She loved all bright-colored things, and the frog’s bright red eyes would fascinate her. Harry would like them too.
Rachel and Harry sent each other notes every day, but what she really wanted was to see him, hold him, bury her face in his shoulder, take him into her body. She wanted to see her father’s smile when he came in the door and found her home. She had lots of news from home: her dad twisted his ankle, Andrew was back, Ursula was having a hard time doing fieldwork; she loved planting but the machines still scared her. Sometimes when Rachel got back to her room after an exhausting day of lessons, she closed the door and just sat with her back against it, trembling, missing Selene.
Each day felt like a new test. Today, it was undoubtedly whether or not she could find enough frogs. They were hard to spot during the day—Kyu’s recommended strategy was to rustle leaves and scare them, watching for the telltale red eyes.
It was going to be a long morning.
At least she had something new to look forward to this afternoon. Gabriel had promised to connect her with the Library. Kyu even said, “Introduce her to the Library,” as if it were a person. So far, Rachel’s glimpse of the Library was in small downloads Kyu sent to her wrist pad. Some of the lessons Gabriel taught must have come from the Library. What else must be there? Kyu, Gabriel, Ali, they all knew so much!
She stepped gingerly along the thin jungle paths, careful not to crush any leaves or step into the planting medium. A stray footstep would be recorded, and Kyu would frown and make her repair the medium herself. Her thoughts jumped back and forth between being excited about the Library and missing Harry. If only he were here! Or even Ursula. One of them could flush the frogs out and the other could catch them.
Rachel was kneeling, her first catch of the morning held gently in her right hand, when footsteps with a slow unfamiliar rhythm sounded from behind her.
A woman Rachel had never seen before stood on the path—thin as Ursula and oddly unkempt. Her tangled hair was streaked with gray and hung wild around her shoulders. The skin around her eyes and mouth was wrinkled. She wore green coveralls like Rachel’s, standard issue stuff, and the knees were nearly worn through. Was she Council? She had to be—she was here. Rachel had never seen anyone who looked so old except in pictures. And every Council and High Council person (except maybe Liren) wore decorations. Even the captain wore bright vests that he changed regularly. This woman looked very plain.
“You’re Rachel.” Her voice was scratchy, deeper than Kyu’s, less controlled than Ma Liren’s.
Of course she knew who Rachel was. Everyone knew her. Rachel sighed, tired of one-way acquaintances. “That doesn’t seem to be a secret,” she said. “I’m not a secret to anyone here. And you are?”
The woman looked at her appraisingly. “What were you thinking just then?”
“Huh?”
“Before I walked up, you were lost in thought. I can tell—I watch. It was as if you weren’t here.”
“I’m catching frogs.”
“And?”
“I was thinking about home.”
“Do you miss Selene?”
“Of course.” The frog in Rachel’s hand wiggled, and she cupped it more tightly.
“I miss my home too.”
“Don’t you live here?”
“Home is Earth.”
Was this woman crazy? “Gabriel said Earth is dead.”
“We don’t know that. We only know they don’t talk to us.” The woman looked away, up past Yggdrasil’s trunk to the plants hanging impossibly down over their heads. Her voice was soft as she continued. “But they must believe we are lost. There are so few of us anyway.”
Few of them? Rachel must have met at least thirty Council aboard John Glenn, and hundreds of people including Moon Children and Earth Born on Selene. Kyu told her once abo
ut almost two thousand ice cubes—people sleeping cold for a long time. That was a lot. “How many people were on Earth when you left?”
“Twelve billion, on Earth. Twenty billion, if you count people living in orbital housing and the rest of the system. And you can’t count the machine intelligences.”
“Why not?” Rachel asked. “What’s a . . . machine intelligence?” She took the DNA sample and tagged the little frog with a yellow dot so she’d recognize it if she caught it again.
“Too many. They don’t take up space. And they interface and interact, they share and merge minds, they bud subroutines. They were petitioning for citizenship! The number of votes would have changed every microsecond!”
“Votes?” Rachel had never heard the word.
“Input to a group decision. Never mind . . . it’s not important. Neither are the machines.”
“So they don’t matter?”
“Oh—they mattered. But let’s focus on people.”
“Twelve billion.” Twelve billion? Nine zeroes? Rachel set the tiny frog down on a broad leaf and watched it hop away. Everything in the Council’s world was so big. And if there were twelve billion people on Earth, then John Glenn was small! Whatever did they think of Aldrin? Of her? Really?
The woman asked, “Have you ever seen Earth?”
“How could I?”
“I can show you.”
Rachel felt as if she were in a guessing game with the strange woman. She did want to see Earth. How would this woman show her? “Okay.”
The woman turned around and walked away. Rachel hesitated, then tucked her one DNA sample carefully into a pocket and followed.
The backside of the woman’s pants was almost worn through. She walked slower than Rachel, even in this spot halfway along the curve between the aft tree base and the river. Here, the gravity was actually slightly lower than Selene’s. They were already off the main path, between two turns of the spiral, when they stopped in front of a large shed.
The woman held the door open, looking over her shoulder at Rachel. “They used to use this for tools, but I bargained to stay here. I do garden chores for them. So I’m a tool too, just like you.”
Rachel ducked into the shed. She didn’t think Kyu would like this. Was she making a mistake? “Will you tell me your name?”
“Yes.”
Rachel waited, but the woman didn’t give her name. She looked around. The shed was bigger than Rachel’s room. A cage in the far corner held two large parrots. They were far more vivid than the pictures Rachel had seen of such birds, with long red tails, blue-tipped wings, and yellow heads. They moved restlessly in the cage, and they smelled like ammonia and seeds. When Rachel started to walk up to the cage, the woman grabbed her arm and stopped her. “They’re not used to anyone but me. Better just look.”
Swallowing her disappointment, Rachel dragged her eyes away from the parrots. Long shiny blue and red parrot feathers decorated the walls, arranged in fans with fancy beaded handles. Otherwise, the room was brown and orange and yellow. Circular patterns covered the furnishings, wall hangings, and windows. Two comfortable blue cloth chairs filled the middle of the room, but only one looked like it was ever used. The chairs faced a wall of the same shimmery substance that lined the corridor walls and the meeting room at the cafeteria. When Council ate in the cafeteria, the walls often showed pictures. When Rachel was alone, waiting for Kyu, it looked like this. It was bright and reflective, and currently silver. After sitting in the older chair, the woman gestured for Rachel to sit down.
“Treesa.”
Huh? Oh—“Nice to meet you, Treesa.”
“Watch.”
The wall went black, then filled with a green and blue globe, lights scattered in orbit around it like necklaces. It looked like Selene from space, only dressed up in bright colors like Kyu. The camera view raced toward the green and blue mass. Bigger, detailed, falling, and now her vision flew above a vast forest of trees. She forced her grip on the chair arms to relax.
The vegetation was so dense the only available view was from above.
Rachel couldn’t even see a path. It went on and on, the viewpoint sometimes shifting low as it followed a river. She loved it. Was that what they were making Selene into?
“That’s Earth?” she asked.
The picture changed to sand. Hills and dunes all one color, so alike she couldn’t judge their size, with no big impact rocks, and—no craters! “You must have worked hard to make all the craters go away.”
“No.” Treesa laughed. The parrots rustled in their cage.
And the view changed again—water. More water than the Hammered Sea—so much water Rachel couldn’t see edges at all. Water so blue it looked like infinity below, calm water, and then after a long time, expanses of greener water that frothed with white, rippling in wind. The view slipped across water for a long time, stopping where a great mountain came up out of the sea.
The sea had become calm and blue again in this place. The mountain was craggy, dark, sharp with glassy edges. Black cloud hung along the mountain’s top, boiling and dropping flecks of white into the ocean to disappear. A thin river of red liquid ran down a crevasse, and where the red river intersected water, steam boiled up and touched the bottom of the black cloud with white.
Rachel struggled to make sense of it. “Why design that? To heat the water?”
“No one designed it.”
“But—who made it?”
“Some people say God made it.”
Someone else she hadn’t met? “Was he like Gabriel?”
“I assure you, Gabriel is a man.” Treesa laughed again. Her voice was thin. “And even Gabriel could not create a planet as rich as Earth.”
Rachel gave up. Treesa’s laughter made her feel stupid. At least Treesa didn’t seem to be laughing at her. “I don’t understand.”
“No one has taught you history? We do not design every place we live. We, Council, you, we are not the center of everything. After all, we didn’t make Harlequin. We didn’t make the little moons we bashed together to forge Selene. Don’t just believe what you’re told—apply some critical thinking skills. And now, you need to go. Kyu will be looking for you.”
“But . . . but who made Earth?”
“Who made Harlequin? Or Apollo?”
“Ohhhh.” Rachel breathed the idea out slowly. There was someone above High Council? Then, “TOM made Selene. Gabriel made Selene.”
“With a little help from his friends.” Treesa was laughing again. “We—that’s you too—evolved—on Earth. Earth made us! The young Earth was as bare of life as Selene. What you saw coming from the volcano—the mountain in the sea—was the blood of Earth. Selene is an attempt to bring life to a dead rock by adding a blanket to a place with no fire. And whatever we may have become, that’s no small task. Gabriel must find its heart. He doesn’t know that yet. It may be that you have a role to play in that.”
Earth made people? Evolved? She knew the term—Kyu talked about evolution when she talked about DNA drift. She shook her head, trying to assimilate the strange woman’s words.
Treesa looked intensely at Rachel. Whatever she saw, it caused her to shiver, then to shake her head sadly. The wall pictures faded away so only a soft shimmer remained. “That’s enough for now—go on with you.”
“Can I come back?”
“I don’t know. Can you?” Treesa asked.
Rachel looked behind her once. Treesa stood by the doorway, watching her. Was Treesa Council? Treesa was the most interesting person she’d met on the John Glenn, and while much that she said was confusing, she talked to Rachel as an equal.
Rachel hurried back to catching frogs. She’d have to be really good at finding them, since she’d lost so much time. Not lost, she corrected herself. Spent.
CHAPTER 19
THE LIBRARY
RACHEL HAD TAGGED thirteen frogs when she caught a flash of grays and bright blues in the corner of her eye. Kyu Ho looked rushed as she came up the pat
h.
Kyu tugged at her arm and asked, “Ready?”
“Oh . . .” How could she have forgotten about the Library? She’d wait awhile before talking about Treesa—if Kyu didn’t know, all the better. Rachel didn’t want Kyu mad just when she was going to see something else interesting. “Yes, but . . . if I can get the Library on my wrist pad, where are we going?”
Kyu grinned, grabbed half of Rachel’s tools and samples, and took off toward the lab to stow them.
Rachel tripped on the lab doorstep, and Kyu grabbed her hand and pulled her up, laughing, her eyes alight with excitement. She grinned as she led Rachel out of the garden. The elevator took them up past Rachel’s floor. They walked and turned, and walked and turned, and climbed ladders until Rachel was completely disoriented.
They entered a large square room. Three clear plastic chairs clustered together in the center of the room, attached to the floor. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all opaque white. The room held nothing else. Gabriel was already in one of the chairs. Rachel and Kyu sat down in the other two. Kyu and Gabriel looked so formal that Rachel wondered if they were angry with her for playing hooky.
Kyu spoke first. “The Library is our greatest asset, the one thing we must have to survive.”
The surfaces all turned black. The three of them floated on the clear chairs, suspended in blackness. Rachel clutched the edges of her chair. Stars faded into being until it was like riding up from Selene, only with nothing between her and the stars. Even though she knew that, really, this time, the bulk of John Glenn rested between the three of them and the universe outside, her eyes told her the ship had disappeared.
