by Larry Niven
She queried the Library. “Isn’t there one more planet?”
“It would be outside the ship.”
Rachel returned to her room, and tucked her legs under her, sitting in one of the yoga poses Gabriel was teaching her. Apollo and Daedalus spun in front of her, and she watched Harlequin and Selene orbit around the edges of her room.
The system was so big. Selene looked small in the display. John Glenn would be too small to see. She was even smaller, a tiny dot inside a tiny ship next to a small moon. How big was Earth? Ymir? They’d be about the same size, ten to twenty times the mass of Selene. She remembered Kyu telling her they were both so far away from Apollo you couldn’t even see the stars that were their suns.
Rachel sat very still, keeping her breathing as soft as possible, until tears blurred Selene into a string of jewels and Harlequin became a ball of colored mist.
CHAPTER 21
ORDERS
ASTRONAUT WAS ALWAYS listening for Treesa’s queries.
Today she sounded insistent. “Well, are you there today?”
“Yes, Treesa, I’m here. What would you like to talk about?” Astronaut always let her choose how to start. That way it was always surprised.
“Let’s talk about Rachel, and about her people.” Treesa was sitting on her roof, cross-legged. She had combed her hair and found a clean green shirt.
“I have never talked to her.”
“Of course not. She’d have to ask. She doesn’t know enough yet to ask anything useful.”
“She asks Gabriel and Kyu good questions about the lessons she’s learning.”
Treesa laughed. “She needs to ask about herself. She needs to know what will happen to her and her people unless someone changes it.”
“Someone?” Astronaut queried. How clearly was Treesa thinking today?
“Someone like herself. Ali sees the problem. So does Liren, but Liren’s on the wrong side, and Ali hasn’t got much power.”
“Ali is Gabriel’s friend. Perhaps she has some influence over him.”
“Erika has more, but she’s Liren’s friend.” Treesa got up and walked around the roof, poking at the summer flowers and herbs she grew up there. She pulled withered flower heads from a bushy purple petunia that grew out from its pot and twined along the roof. She hummed. By now Astronaut knew to wait.
Treesa started mumbling, not quite subvocalizing. “Maybe Ali will be some use someday. Maybe I should see if anyone else up here will help me. What about Gabriel his own self? Does he see the problem?”
Clearly she was asking Astronaut. It replied, “He’s never talked to me about it. He usually queries for specific sciences or asks me to estimate the next likely shift in the atmosphere or how to get energy from the soletta more easily.”
“So, a lost cause?”
“He argues with High Council, but in the end he always follows orders.”
“Do you always follow orders?” Treesa trimmed back a pot of rosemary, burying her nose in her hands afterward, sniffing, smiling.
“Yes.”
Treesa laughed again, sitting down with her legs crossed, looking up at the tree.
“Do you follow orders, Treesa?”
“Nobody expects me to; I’m mildly disaffected.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“I do. But sometimes I break rules.”
Treesa had become more able to keep thoughts together, to clean herself up, to question well, in the years since she became more involved with Astronaut. But was she really less disaffected,’ or was Astronaut only helping to fix symptoms? She thought a rule was different from an order.
Astronaut considered. Was it? Humans were easy to work with as pilots and on engineering models. The more Astronaut worked with them on themselves, the more contradictions it found. There had been many contradictions in Treesa’s behavior over the past weeks. Many had no resolution—such as a fear of machines and a desire to use them. Humans argued with themselves.
Paradoxes.
CHAPTER 22
THE SUMMONS
THREE DAYS IN a row, Kyu simply picked Rachel up at her door in the morning and dropped her off in the garden lab. Neither Kyu nor Gabriel answered her on the wrist pad, except to download more lessons. Rachel worked on assignments to identify plants, and worried. They’d never left her alone for so long. Was something going on they weren’t telling her?
The Library told her she had a message from Ursula. It wasn’t the continuing argument about Harry she expected. “I miss you very much. Nick came home for the weekend and helped me with your plot. He said he misses you, and he teased me for being so careful. I liked it, he made me blush. Is that how it started with you and Harry?”
Before she could answer, Gabriel walked into the small lab where Rachel stared at plant clippings, and sat down next to her, watching her work.
“Can I go home?” she blurted.
Gabriel shook his head. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
Well, of course he had his own agenda. She sighed. “Sure, if you want. Here?”
“Let’s go sit on Yggdrasil.”
Gabriel chose a thick branch above the river, close enough to the trunk that they had to hold on to keep from drifting in the near zero gravity. It was a pretty spot, with the river circling them in flashes of blue that sparkled through the leaves.
Gabriel said, “We had a meeting about you yesterday.”
About her? “And?”
“And when you first came here, we said we’d evaluate your progress after three months. Well, you’ve been here almost that long now. You’ve done well so far. Kyu is pleased, and Ma Liren is happy with how well you’ve behaved, how much you’ve worked, and what you’ve learned. Everyone seems pleased.”
“Can I go home, just a visit?”
“No.”
Gabriel had answered awfully fast. “Do I go home to stay?”
“Not yet. Rachel, you know we had some specific plans for you when you got here.”
“I didn’t know I’d be gone so long!” She ran her fingers through her hair, now almost shoulder length and loose and wild up here by the Mid-tree. She looked at Gabriel. He’d always been the nicest of any Council. “Gabriel, I like it here. I’m glad you brought me. I want to come back. Often. But I miss my dad, and Ursula, and Harry . . .”
Gabriel stayed silent for a moment. Finally, he turned his head and looked full at her. “There is more to your trip here than just training. High Council, or at least Kyu, wanted to meet you because we have some plans for you. To teach you and then have you oversee some of the planting on Selene.”
“I knew that, you’ve said it before.”
Gabriel fiddled with his braid, running it through his fingers. “Well, we want to give you a gift. Something to reward you for your hard work.” He looked at her intently. “The gift is greater than letting you go home.”
Rachel toyed with the idea—what gift could mean more to her? Her mom?
“You know Kyu and Ali and I are very old. I’ve been alive more than sixty thousand years. We talked about that once on Selene.”
Rachel nodded.
“A lot of those years were spent cold—but I’ve had more than a thousand years awake too. Well, we stay young because we go ‘cold’—and I know you’ve heard about that before. More exactly, it’s from waking up, from living in cycles. Well, I can’t possibly explain it all to you, but you get completely frozen. The process of waking fixes a bunch of things, and replaces some, so you end up healthier than you started. It’s nit-pickingly controlled bionanotechnology, similar to what we use as the first step in preparing Selene’s surface for planting. It’s very targeted—”
“What does that mean, Gabriel? ‘Targeted.’ ”
“Hell . . . it means we’re scared. We’re afraid of the little machines.” Gabriel grimaced. “We keep nano confined so it won’t get loose. It does things to your body, it fixes damage inside your cells, but it doesn’t do anything we don’t prog
ram it to do. It doesn’t rebuild your skull and brain, or line your knee joints with carbon fibers, or build a better kidney, or any of the craziness—” He made himself stop talking. Then, “if we can keep it docile, it keeps us from dying.
“To stay young, it’s important to go cold sometimes. And to do our jobs, we need more time than we would have in just a simple human life span, going birth to death with no breaks. It would be better to just be born and die naturally, but some of us have such big jobs we can’t do that. Do you understand?”
“You couldn’t live long enough to make Selene if you didn’t get frozen?”
“That’s right. And we need you the most in a few years, when the children on Selene have become older. We want you to stay young a long time, to give you time to use the things we’re teaching you. High Council has decided to have you frozen.”
Rachel’s mouth opened and her breath stuck in her throat. Winter was almost over on Selene. She was supposed to go home! Just last night she and Harry sent messages about seeing each other soon. A whole year!
“Can I go to Aldrin first? Just for one planting season? So I can practice what I learned here?”
“No. Rachel, I need to go cold too—they want me to go off-watch for a year. Then we pick back up where we are today when we both warm up.”
Rachel didn’t answer. They never told her enough. Worse, they never asked her anything. She imagined her dad’s face. She tried to picture Harry and Ursula, and her eyes filled up. She pulled her legs up under her, balancing while still holding on with her arms, using the tension between push and pull to hold herself balanced, to fight back tears.
“Rachel,” Gabriel said after a while, “Rachel, I thought you’d be happy. You’ve worked so hard to learn, and I know that Selene, that our project, is important to you. You get used to missing blocks of time. It’s not such a big deal. Selene will still be here when you wake up. A year is a short time.”
“But don’t I get a choice?”
He turned away from her. Had she made him mad?
Finally he said, “You get as many as I do.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way. Could Gabriel feel trapped too? “Do you want to be cold?”
“I am getting tired. I’ve been warm almost as long as you’ve been alive. If you spend too long warm, you get old enough that no technology can undo the signs. That’s what happened to the captain.”
And Treesa. “But do you want to be cold right now?”
Gabriel hesitated. “Well, we all take turns. Ali can handle things for a while. This project is bigger than any one of us. I want to do what I have to do—so that we all reach our goal. This isn’t about just me, or about just you. The choice makes sense, Rachel. It’s not for long, less than a normal shift, and it’s a big step in High Council’s acceptance of the Children of Selene.”
Rachel’s stomach clenched and her eyes stung. She wanted to be alone. She threw her hands above her head, pushed with her feet, and reached for the next branch twenty feet above her. Gabriel caught her foot before she passed him. He seemed to have lost his patience. “You’re not supposed to do that. What if you missed, and ended up in high spin gravity? You’re not even wearing wings. The river’s the highest gravity of all—if you hit that from here, you’d die.”
Rachel twisted around in the air, letting him tug her back. She tried to cover her face with her hair as she came down, flipping her head side to side so that Gabriel wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.
As she neared the branch, he reached a hand out and brushed the hair away from one eye. It only took a tiny motion in the low gravity to cause Rachel’s hair to swing up and fall back along her natural part line. She glared at him. “I just want to see my family.”
“You’ll see them again,” he said. “You might as well get used to the idea. You can tell your dad and your friends.”
“I’m afraid.” She realized it was true.
“It will be okay. I’ll send you some Library queries to help you understand it.” He rose and stepped lightly down the trunk without looking back. Rachel followed, moving slowly.
Gabriel escorted Rachel back to her room. She didn’t talk to him the whole way.
RACHEL EXPLAINED IT CAREFULLY, writing one note for all three of them to make sure they each had the same information. It took a long time. So much about John Glenn just wasn’t part of daily life on Aldrin; she struggled to write something they would understand.
Ursula’s answer arrived first. “Now we’ll never get to talk! I wish you were here. I’d be so scared to not know what was happening for a whole year! But you’re never scared, are you? I wish they weren’t going to do this to you.”
Her dad sent: “I’m going to miss you very much, honey. I already miss you. Harry and I are getting along, and I help him keep your plants up sometimes when nothing breaks around here that I have to fix. He’s a good young man, but it’s not like having you here. I’m pleased you’re learning so much. Don’t be scared, honey, it will be okay. Write to me as soon as you can.”
Harry’s answer took so long Rachel dozed fitfully while she waited. When her pad chimed, his message was so Harry that she laughed. “Tell me what it feels like. Do they put you in a bed? Or something else? How do they wake you up? You’re so lucky. I wish I were there. I miss you very much. Tell me everything that happens. I’ll be waiting for you. I love you.”
That hurt even worse than the other two answers.
She checked on her readings from the grove. Based on the temperature, it might be morning there, with Apollo just brightening the leaves and warming the soil.
She looked up everything she could about the icing procedure. She learned she was poised to be destroyed and then resurrected, each cell healed by a combination of machines and bacteria smaller than the parts of plants she examined in the labs under microscopes. She stared at her hands and feet for a long time, imagining them rigid and frozen while tiny machines crawled through them, to make them somehow better than they were now.
A small part of her brain whispered, You’re fine, exactly like you are. She tried to think of a place to run, to hide.
CHAPTER 23
SLEEPING BEAUTY
GABRIEL CAREFULLY ADJUSTED the pads and straps designed to hold Rachel’s body safely nestled in the contoured white couch. She lay nearly naked under the straps, limbs straight, hair bound back from her face. Her eyes fluttered and darted around the room, and her fingers clenched and unclenched as she lay on the gurney. He tried to remember the first time he had made this choice, but it happened so long ago he had no access to himself at that age. He had been twenty-seven, ten years older than Rachel was now.
His pride in her rose as she stayed quiet, not voicing her fears even though they were clearly pushing her self-control. He put a hand on Rachel’s hand, quieting it, and spoke gently to her. “Breathe to relax. Remember the pranayama yoga breath I taught you? Fill your lower belly, then your lungs, then your chest. Hold. Release in reverse.” She nodded, and he watched her flat belly round up and fall more slowly. “That’s good. Keep it up.”
The small tremors in her muscles slowed. One theory suggested that the disaffected, the few Council and Colonists who woke insane, had gone into the cryotanks deathly afraid; that there existed a causal link between fear and madness. Another theory proposed that some people couldn’t absorb the shock of being in the wrong place and time. Others pointed to unidentified flaws in the technology.
Gabriel didn’t like giving Rachel no choice. Why do this to her so young? She wasn’t injured.
He finished the routine prep. Earplugs, face mask, a final check of body position and chin tilt.
The drugs flowing into her system slowed her breathing to a near stop. Her eyes calmed to a glassy stare, then closed. She looked very young, beautiful, and far more fragile than her waking self. The longer hair she had grown aboard John Glenn softened the angles of her face.
The medical system started dribbling nano into her blood.
It would freeze as her blood froze, but the tiny machines would remember their programming as Rachel’s body warmed to just below normal body temperature next year.
Gabriel placed the clear lid over the couch and sealed it, then pushed it into the wall with the other ice trays. A soft sucking sound indicated a clean seal. The rest of the process was automatic. He put his hand briefly on the label, and whispered, “Good dreaming.”
THE NEXT MORNING he sat in the tiny kitchen, drumming his fingers on the table, waiting for Clare to speak. Clare had warmed that morning. “Coffee?” she asked.
He smiled, and went to the counter, fetching the bulb of coffee he had made when he came in. “So, boss, ready to take over for me?”
Clare reached for the bulb, wrapping her hands around it. “You always hate going off-shift.”
“I might miss something.”
Clare—his boss, the Chief Terraformer member of High Council—was a small blond woman, compact, square, and always purposeful. She let him run design work on Selene, choosing to stay on John Glenn to supervise and deal with policy. No High Council went to Selene often. Kyu, Liren, and Rich had never gone.
“It’s just a year. Liren briefed me . . . you’ve brought your protégé up here.” She sipped coffee and smiled broadly. “The first warm thing always tastes like life to me. Liren said you’ve been working hard, and that you’ve done a creditable job with Rachel. She didn’t sound exactly like she approved, though,” Clare mused.
“There are a few other things to worry about.” Gabriel filled her in on the situation with Andrew, and brought her up-to-date on the other students as well.
“So Andrew’s sentence is for life?”
“We let him think that. If it seems to be working as a deterrent, then, yes, we’ll leave it like that. Keep an eye on that situation, will you?”
