by Larry Niven
“Of course.”
Ever since Selene came alive with plants and people, freezing was hard. Shift changes always happened in the middle of something he cared about. He stood up and started pacing. “You were right to worry about the Earth Born. Some of them are clamoring to be relieved. Others want to stay with their young families and never return to the tanks.” He didn’t make suggestions about either situation; Clare could take care of them.
Clare watched him pace. “You’ve got the energy of a cat. Something else is bothering you.”
“It sure is. The flare cycle. Two years ago there was a really big one, and some of the students and I had to sit it out in a shelter. The one last week was nearly as bad. I put some resources into shelter maintenance. Statistically, Apollo is a little more active than we expected. In the early stages, when no one lived on the surface, we didn’t track small flares as carefully as we do now. As the population increases it will be harder to protect them. Can you please watch for trends?”
Clare nodded her head, a small smile creeping along her face. “Of course, chief worrier. I’d have watched anyway.”
“I know, but thanks. There’s more to protect there now.”
“A lot more plants.”
He smiled at her. She understood what he said the first time.
Clare finished her coffee. “I’ll take care of it. Good dreaming to you.” She got up and left.
Gabriel sat in the empty room and wrote a message to Erika. If an emergency forced her to warm before him, he wanted her to have a last message from right before he went cold, to know he loved her.
CHAPTER 24
WAKING RACHEL
60,290 John Glenn shiptime
GABRIEL STRETCHED AND blinked. He lay in the warming room, on a soft bed. His eyes took in the captain and Clare standing together, looking serious. That wasn’t right. The captain never met him on waking.
His body felt normal; he hadn’t been given an emergency wakeup cocktail.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Well, there’ve been some . . . problems . . . on Selene,” Clare said. “You were right.”
Did they wake him early? Energy surged up his spine, an adrenaline push. “I hate it when I’m right. What’s—”
“Flares. They’ve picked up—and so we decided to fortify. We didn’t even lose many plants; the antiradiation gene modifications have been working.”
That didn’t sound too bad. “What else?”
The captain’s craggy face looked stern. “It took us twenty years.”
Huh? Well, he’d been through—Rachel! “How’s Rachel? Who woke her up? How did she—”
“She’s still cold,” Clare said.
Gabriel struggled to sit up, his spine complaining.
The captain held out a hand. “Hey, calm down. It’s not so bad.” He always argued for calm. Whatever had happened to him in the lonely years while he flew his crippled starship to Gliese 876 had stripped him of any fire for fights that didn’t matter or matters that couldn’t be changed. It was cold water on Gabriel’s anger, and he hated it while knowing he needed it.
GABRIEL HAD BEEN RUNNING around the river for two hours straight. Be damned to the rules about how to treat a just-warmed body. As he ran, he saw Ma Liren’s face in front of him. Liren was stubborn and shortsighted, but not even Liren could possibly be so out of touch as to think this a good idea. Could she? Or did High Council really make the decision together?
Three times as many flares as they’d expected. An excuse—not a reason to leave him an icicle! He was chief planet designer; the one they’d chosen to warm in cycles for all of the moon’s long painful birth, the one who warmed over and over to an empty ship with just an AI for company. Every several centuries, to check chemistry and volatiles and Selene’s overall stability and . . . and what about Rachel? His feet pounded on the track under him. His breath started to get ragged, and his chest to hurt. Were they thinking of Rachel at all? He didn’t slow down. The medical monitoring system flashed a yellow light in his peripheral vision. His body wasn’t cleared for such vigorous exercise yet.
It was a short sleep for him; he’d been cold for hundreds of years at a time. But then, shipmates he cared about were cold too. For Rachel it represented her lifetime once over. Her friends were now twice her age. He’d given her his goddamned word.
Liren was cold. Given how Gabriel felt, that was good, even if it left him nobody to scream at. Worse, Ali was cold, and he couldn’t talk to her or get her help with Rachel. Erika was still cold, due to finally warm this year, but not today. He’d ranted at Astronaut, for what that was worth. No AI dealt well with deep human emotions. Even the AIs they’d fled on Earth didn’t understand emotions. Astronaut had been frustratingly unconcerned.
He heard footsteps behind him on the track. The captain easily outpaced him. “Trying to outrun decisions you can’t change?”
“Maybe.”
“You know better.”
Gabriel nodded, managing to force out a single word. “So?”
“You’re going to have to accept it.”
“I know.” Gabriel looked for a burst of speed, but his tired legs just wouldn’t respond well enough to run away from the older man. He slowed to a walk and shook his head. When his breath returned he asked, “How did you let it happen?”
The captain slowed too, matching Gabriel’s pace. “Mad at me too?” The captain arched an eyebrow at him.
“Sure, why not? Liren had to get—permission for such a—long shift change.”
“It wasn’t a big deal. You’ve had shifts changed before. Now we’re ready to resume work toward the collider. We didn’t need you to make flare-hardened buildings.”
They walked in silence, and then Gabriel said, “Captain, I think I can stop the flares.”
“Yeah?”
“Build the orbital tether. We can’t use it to move around among the Harlequin moons, but we can still build it, and it’s designed as a superconductor—”
“Is it? I didn’t know that.”
“The elevator cars would ride it using magnetic fields, wouldn’t they? Direct contact would be at meteor speeds. That’d be crazy. The orbital tethers in Sol system were all superconductors. I could use the Beanstalk as sort of a lightning rod. Make a stretch of superconducting cable; the design is for two hundred thousand kilometers; that’s enough. One end on Daedalus—”
“In.”
“Yeah, in. Daedalus doesn’t have a surface. It’s not spinning fast enough either, so we won’t have an actual orbital tether. I’ll have to put a solar sail on the far end, and the near end doesn’t have to reach down to Daedalus . . . Hell, that’s a nasty erosive environment. So. When Apollo’s magnetic field knots around Daedalus, the cable will bleed out the charge.”
“That’s a lot of superconductor,” the captain said.
“Sure, megatons, but we already need megatons of superconductor for the collider. We’ll have the equipment.”
They walked a few hundred more yards, and then the captain said, “If your light-sail falls in Daedalus’s shadow, the whole cable will just collapse.”
“Yeah, so I won’t let it.”
“You haven’t checked the numbers with Astronaut?”
“No, I just thought this up while I was running. We’ve got to stop the flares.”
“Okay, do that, and then submit it to us for the next High Council meeting. You might look for some less time-intensive ideas while you’re at it.”
“Yes sir. You do expect me to wake Rachel now?”
“Liren thought you’d want to be able to pick up where you left off, and resume her training.”
Gabriel remembered how much Rachel had wanted to go home before he’d frozen her. “First I have to stop her from committing suicide. She had a boyfriend down there. Now he’s twice her age! They don’t see time like we do—how could they? Did anyone ask her?”
“Gabe, she was cold. We were busy.”
“Didn�
��t her family ask about her?”
“I don’t know.”
Gabriel wanted to keep arguing, but this was his captain. He swallowed and kept walking, staying ahead of the man so he wouldn’t see Gabriel’s anger. “I could have helped with the flare response,” he said quietly.
“Relax. You’re wound too damn tight. You can’t do everything,” the captain said, putting a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “We did all right. It simply isn’t that big a deal. Get some perspective.”
GABRIEL SAT ALONE in his office. Information streamed from John Glenn’s net into data windows surrounding Gabriel. One data stream displayed a summary med unit feed: Rachel was warming.
Watching the flow of data, he nodded. The girl was still far from conscious. Astronaut monitored the fine details of the med-flow. The AI said, “She’s waking slowly. Remember, this is a first time. Medical control is finding minor discrepancies with Earth Born design. Her bone structure and some glandular activity are adapted to low gravity. Adjustments are being made.”
Gabriel gave a curt nod. He wasn’t feeling particularly patient.
He switched one wall screen to a two-dimensional list—his and Astronaut’s jointly prepared recommendation of what to show Rachel as she woke. He added and subtracted small things by instinct, operating always by the cardinal rules: Without an emergency, never start with a shock, stay near to what the awakener loves, make sure that the jump from the subject’s last waking image to their first is not too great. The routine work left half of his attention free to gaze at the picture of Selene adrift on the ceiling.
Twenty years had made more of a difference than any since the asteroid-bashing early days. Almost five percent of the terraformed moon was green now, and another five had the color of fertile soil, the blended reddish brown of regolith coming alive. A camp had sprung up out in the plantings, named Gagarin, nearly as big as Aldrin had been the last time he’d seen it. Like the old Aldrin, Gagarin was a tent city with a community flare shelter.
“Astronaut—superimpose the collider’s path.”
A bright white line began five degrees south of Clarke Base, ran just north of Erika’s Folly, and then passed through much of the moonlet that Gabriel had left barren. When Gabriel zoomed in, he still saw a few dull greens and grays that might be lichens or mosses. He wasn’t particularly happy to see things growing on the far side of Selene, where he hadn’t planted them, but he and Ali had a running argument about how quickly unintended consequences would manifest on Selene. It looked like she was winning. Ali could never have built Selene, but she was a sweetheart of a biologist.
Let the plants run, then. They’d make soil for what he would grow someday.
The white line almost followed Selene’s equator. Gabriel followed the circle around to where the collider would close. Building pads were being prepared there, south of the base, for the big containment and materials warehouses and for scientific offices.
“Astronaut, erase the collider. Run up a detailed analysis of everything that’s been done in Aldrin in the last twenty years.”
Gabriel knew he needed to be the one to warm Rachel, to reorient her. It might be terribly difficult to gain her trust again. Guilt pulled at him even though he had been as cold as Rachel when the decision was made. He couldn’t complain about a High Council decision to a Moon Born teenager. But what could he say?
Astronaut called him, and Gabriel headed down the corridor toward the recovery room. By the time he arrived, Rachel’s eyes were open. Her red hair had been washed and dried by med staff, and lay unbound around her. Everywhere, her skin had the shine and tight glow of the newly awakened.
“Good morning, sleeper,” he murmured, surprised at how glad he was to see her. She tried to talk, managing squeaks from her long-unused vocal cords. The med-feed suggested she sleep more, promised lubricants for her voice and an easier awakening soon.
He placed his thumbs on her shoulders, fingers in the hollow above her collarbone. Touch was part of returning an iced sleeper to life. As he worked at her neck muscles she eased back to sleep, smiling.
A half day passed before Astronaut called him back to her. He heard her voice again, perkier, almost herself already. “Good morning, Gabe. Nice nap.”
He smiled at her upbeat mood, hesitating to shatter it.
He took her to a magic room. She could walk, although hesitantly. Gabriel helped her settle down, brought her tea and a blanket, and took his own seat. He turned on the walls. An image of Harlequin as seen from an outer moon filled half the view; familiar patterns of red and gray swirled together like airbrushed paint. Tiny diamond shock waves danced in the cloud bands. Harlequin rotated in just under two hours. Rings extended beyond the ceiling, crawled down the walls and wrapped onto the floor, bent crazily, wide and flat and touched by brightness.
Rachel smiled for the first time. Good, he thought. A good start.
“This,” he started, “will take a few days. I’ll spend some time with you each day, highlighting changes since you went down. Even so short a span can be disorienting. First, there’s something you need to know about.”
She looked over at him curiously, the image of Harlequin’s rings spilling bands of light and dark across her face.
“Did everything go okay? I feel really wonderful—like I’m new.”
“You’re fine. Astronaut says the med tech needed some adjusting, but no big deal. That’s not it—you handled the process perfectly. Rachel, we were cold longer than we expected.” He swallowed. He couldn’t show his anger, and he felt like hiding it was a lie.
The color was draining from Rachel’s face.
Gabriel sought for something true to say. “The change will be hard. Nevertheless, recall that we only slept a short time by Council and High Council standards.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“Ali would have said no to this, but she followed us into the cryotanks. I was cold too. No one else would have understood, not exactly. And so when some things made sense—from a project management viewpoint because there have been a lot of flares on Apollo—they were done. One of those things was letting you and me sleep until they thought we’d actually be needed.” There. He could believe those words, at least a little bit.
Rachel looked at her hands, turning them over and over, as if she were trying to identify them as hers. She swallowed, and then looked directly at him, fiercely afraid. “How long? A hundred years? A thousand? Sixty thousand?”
“No, no, no. Twenty years. And four months.”
She looked away from him, saying nothing, no movement giving away her feelings.
He watched the back of her head for a while, then centered the image of Harlequin directly in front of her eyes. He switched cams so Selene moved in from the left, biting a hole in Harlequin. Life showed as green and gray fractal masses gathered near the equator. Gabriel zoomed in on the moon, obscuring the gas giant Harlequin completely.
Details resolved. Aldrin now filled the screen. The edges of the town had grown; more housing, a lot more green of plantings. Trees filled parks, tents had transformed to structures.
He expected her to ask about Harry first. When she finally spoke, her voice had the measured slowness of the disaffected. “Gabriel,” she asked, “what about the grove?”
He panned the view away from Aldrin, followed a wide road that had once been a path. He hadn’t looked closely at this yet himself. The meadow in front of the First Trees was dotted with yellow and white flowers—he looked to see what they were. Daisies. That meant it wasn’t as humid as he wanted. He started to talk about atmosphere and humidity, keeping a running dialogue at the back of Rachel’s head as he explored the First Trees. They were taller, wider, a riot of jungle canopy. Someone had been playing with birds while they slept. Finches and parakeets flashed here and there in the foliage, implying insects as well. Probably Clare. He realized he had never told Rachel about his High Councilwoman boss, so he rattled on about Clare for a while, attempting dis
traction. He had to talk, to keep her focused on his words rather than the twenty years. He ran out of words and his throat became too dry to form more.
He wished Rachel would turn around so he could see her face. It wasn’t wise to push her. The most disaffected, the craziest sleepers, had been pushed the hardest on wakening. Council had learned to give people time.
Her head moved slowly from right to left, watching. Selene roll past her. She said, “Show me my plot.”
Of course. Gabriel searched. Teaching Grove had grown. He had to cross-check. “It’s there.”
The cecropia tree that she had nurtured and planted identified it for sure. It stood taller than the other trees, bursting above the small canopy. The trees were healthy and vibrant, a chorus of greens, and the paths around them appeared carefully tended. Lianas threaded their way through the small jungle, and two tiny yellow and blue birds hopped about on a wide vine, chasing each other.
At last Rachel turned toward him, and just like the day he had told her they would be cold, she had tears in her eyes. He hated it.
“Gabriel, what about my family?”
“Not now. Wait.” This would be tricky.
“Has something bad happened?” She looked frightened. Why was he handling this so poorly? Because he felt so bad for Rachel?
“This is enough to absorb for now,” he said a little too forcefully. He slowed down. “Changes in people you know are harder than changes in places. Trust me—awakening always starts with the general, then the specific.”
“Why doesn’t my Library bud work? Where’s my wrist pad?”
“You can have it all back soon,” he said.
She sighed and leaned back. She closed her eyes and said nothing, looking almost asleep, her awareness obvious only in the broken rhythm of her breathing. After a while, Gabriel took her to her room. He commanded the med-feed to put her to sleep until the next morning.
GABRIEL LAY PRONE on a bench in the garden, near a fountain that used a combination of spin gravity, magnetic fields, and momentum to run water in a bounded infinity pattern. He focused on the water, struggling for calm, trying to let the sound of the water run through him and clean his emotions.
