Building Harlequin’s Moon

by Larry Niven

  “We’re losing time. I’ll send a team back.”

  She planted her feet and glared at him. “Didn’t you always tell us to fix things ourselves? Besides, from what Dad said, there’s not enough people to do all the work. We’re here now.”

  He laughed, and helped her figure out what nutrients to add.

  As they journeyed, Rachel surrounded herself with data windows from the Library and spent time handling plants—touching them and turning over leaves to look at them. Her focus was almost uncanny, and most of the time she hardly seemed to know he was with her. Her reactions to him had changed. Always before he had felt like she was looking for something from him, and now she didn’t seem to need anything except work. She was certainly still assimilating the changes in her life, and the work must be a welcome distraction. Once, when he came up on her from a distance, tears streaked her cheeks.

  The third day the sky cleared, but the air still dripped with humidity. Harlequin was due to eclipse Apollo. They located a bare spot with enough canopy to huddle under. The dusk of the eclipse closed around them, leaving the much dimmer light of Harlequin and the quivering glow of the lantern Gabriel set out. They shivered, their backs cold even while the lantern warmed their hands. Gabriel heated water for tea on top of the lamp.

  “What will I do when we get back to Aldrin?” Rachel asked.

  None of the Children had interesting jobs. They were all laborers. Gabriel had been working through this problem in his head, wanting to give her some responsibility. “There’s precedent for you teaching. You do it well.”

  She smiled at him. “I want to be out here. I want to take a small crew, all Moon Born, and be out here making things grow. I want to be here, in the wild, to make it all work. The jungle changed while you froze me, but Aldrin changed more, and worse.”

  He wanted her where she could be watched easily. “Start with teaching. You have new knowledge from John Glenn. You can use that to establish yourself. After all, you’re only a few effective years older than some of the students. Harry’s son for one.” He watched for her reaction.

  “He’s sharp enough I’d like to take him with me when we go on field trips.”

  She talked about the ants and other insects. She’d gotten the idea of planting directly from seed for large areas, and she went on about fixing soil with grasses: make large-scale savannah and then turn it to jungle. He recognized some strategies he had used on Earth. She must have been doing research he didn’t know about.

  After a while she was rambling, but it was smart rambling. It reminded Gabriel of his own musings, and he sat patiently and corrected her when her ideas were founded on poor assumptions. He enjoyed the conversation immensely, and was sorry when the tiny bright disk of Apollo broke around Harlequin and began to throw light back into the day.

  An hour later they surprised a group of Earth Born repairing a tilling machine. Gabriel spotted Nick bent over an axle, pulling on a wheel, and pointed him out to Rachel, who snuck up behind him and stood until he turned, whooped, and embraced her. The rest of the group glanced at them, but kept working, not leaving their posts. A short dark-haired man turned at the commotion. He frowned, and barked at Nick to get back to the work he was doing. Nick turned back to the tiller, and Rachel bent uncertainly over to help him. The man stepped toward Nick and Rachel, looking menacing, and Gabriel cleared his throat.

  The man turned, seeing Gabriel for the first time. “Who are you?”

  “Gabriel.” He said his name mildly, and at first it didn’t have the effect he expected. Then the man stopped and looked more closely, taking a moment to acknowledge that Gabriel was clearly Council. Gabriel continued mildly. “Do you perchance have someone else who can finish that task while my two friends visit?”

  The entire group was suddenly quiet.

  “Well?” Gabriel asked.

  “Ah . . . ah . . . but he’s . . . he’s just a Moon Born. He doesn’t get extra breaks. We’re already behind.” The man’s voice was respectful, but he stood with his feet planted, looking tense.

  “He’s a student of mine.” Gabriel felt his jaw clench. “You will do as I say.”

  “Well, he’s been on my crew for five years. But whatever you say must be true. Of course.” The man pursed his lips, but he gestured to another crew member, who walked over and took the wrench from Nick’s hand.

  Rachel and Nick came over to Gabriel. Nick’s hands were callused, and his shoulders stooped a little. His hair was graying slightly at the temples. Gabriel shook his head to clear it of the odd image; people shouldn’t age this fast. The reminder of Rachel’s long sleep, and his own, made him acutely uncomfortable. He held his hand out to Nick. “Good to see you, Nick. I’m sorry about Ursula.”

  “Thank you,” Nick said. “She was trying very hard to do a good job. I really don’t know how it happened.” His voice broke. “One moment she was there . . . and the next . . . the next she was just gone.”

  Rachel buried her head in Nick’s shoulder while Nick looked away. Gabriel was sorry he had brought up the subject.

  It was Rachel who found a way out for them, asking Nick about the tiller and placing the conversation firmly on technical grounds. When the men finished the work and the broken tiller rumbled back to life, Rachel looked over at Gabriel. “Can Nick go with us? We could use the hand.”

  Before Gabriel could reply Nick shook his head. “No—I’ll be in enough trouble for this. You’ll be going back to Aldrin, right? I’ll see you there.” Nick gave Rachel a brief hug, turned, and walked away, trailing the others down the road.

  The next few days were sunny and bright, and the surveying went easier. The last day they were back near the Sea Road when they had to duck a flare. They sat it out in a shelter and did yoga and talked about the chaotic nature of weather patterns. They had been sleeping in separate tents. The tiny flare shelter was only one room with enough floor space for them to sleep. Lying close to Rachel, Gabriel slept badly and longed for Erika. When he woke up, one of his arms was lying over Rachel’s shoulder. Carefully, he moved his arm, then woke her and hurried them out of the shelter to the surface of the moonlet, and home.

  It took two days to install Rachel as a teacher starting new classes. Shane and Star were dubious, but Gabriel overrode them.

  On the flight back up to John Glenn, the sight of Selene pulled at him. He turned all of his window views toward John Glenn and focused his energy forward. His heart leaped at the thought of seeing Erika. He would feel clearer when they were together again.

  CHAPTER 32

  REUNITED

  ERIKA WAS WARM!

  As soon as the med techs set her free, he folded her in his arms, and kissed her, over and over. Then he led her to Yggdrasil, now twice as big as when she’d last seen it. When Erika went cold, Aldrin and Clarke Base were still tented for atmosphere, and the First Trees were seedlings. She held him tightly in the light gravity, looking up the huge trunk, smiling so deeply it looked like every part of her was happy.

  She scampered up the ropes that ringed the trunk, looking back at him and laughing. Her long blond hair was caught in a loose ponytail that flapped up and down as she moved. Even though he still felt strong and new from his time iced, she was lithe enough to outfox him twice, going around the trunk ahead of him and dropping back a rope rung when she was out of sight, surprising him by suddenly being beside him. Each time she slid one leg around his waist, and pulled him near for a kiss. The second time, he pivoted, pinned her with his knee, and kissed her deeply, tasting her, smelling her, laying his cheek across her head and running his hand along her backside. He shook as he pushed himself away.

  Erika found a thick, slightly flattened branch far enough from the trunk to make a comfortable seat. They sat close, feeling the slight centrifugal force of the garden’s spin as a wind blowing gently against their faces and a slight tug outward. Their feet floated over grasses and small shrubs that made up the savannah.

  Erika leaned into him and whisper
ed, “When I go cryogenic, I’m always afraid I’ll never wake up. Or that when I do wake up, everything will be so different I won’t fit in anymore.”

  Gabriel held on to the tree with one hand, and crunched her close to him with the other. “I think we just gave someone that opportunity.” He told her about Rachel’s unexpected sleep. “I think she’ll be okay.” He finished. “By the time I left, she was treating me almost normally again.”

  “What an initiation to cold sleep,” Erika said. “You said you were training her to lead. Is she still loyal enough to do that?”

  “I’m not sure anymore,” he mused. “I wanted at least crew leaders. That plan seems to have been aborted while Rachel and I were cold. I don’t think any of the Children hated me before, except Andrew, but I’m sure some of them hate Star and Shane. I met two kids in Teaching Grove who seemed to be afraid of me. They wouldn’t even come close to me. That worries me. And the Colonists—the Children call them ‘Earth Born’—they resent us and lord it over the Moon Born.” He pursed his lips. “Most of them, anyway. No one seems happy.”

  “Andrew?” She narrowed in on the part of his story that could be a personal threat to him.

  “A crazy boy. Destructive. He vandalized things twice. We stripped him of his data rights, but we left him on Selene.”

  “Was that a good idea?”

  Gabriel shrugged. “Ali and I talked about it, and decided it was better than the alternatives: killing him, I mean, or freezing him, or locking him up. I don’t think Liren agreed, although she went along. But if we have to ice everyone who misbehaves, then we’ll be using cryotanks for the wrong reasons. Liren has a different idea—she actually built a jail.”

  “A what?” Erika pulled away and swung around to where she could look directly at him. “Did she put Andrew in it?”

  “No—we’d already passed sentence. People can’t do much worth getting, put in jail. Hell, we’ve got cameras everywhere. But Shane says they have used it for brawling a few times—both Moon Born and Earth Born. I guess it’s mostly a deterrent.”

  “Do we need a deterrent? Has it gotten that bad?”

  “We didn’t when I went off-shift. But Ma Liren’s gone a tad control crazy; it’s worse every time she’s on-shift. I know she’s your friend. She was our best politician once—without her, we might never have gotten away from Sol system. Hell, she fought her way to John Glenn at the end. But we don’t have any business being an oppressive government, and Liren’s forgotten . . . historically; oppression’s never worked. It’s like she thinks everything we fled, all the AIs and all the augmented, like it’s all right at her shoulder.”

  “I’ll talk to her.” Erika leaned so close to him it felt as if she were trying to join him in his skin, and then she asked, “How about the timeline? I was really hoping we would be further along. I know the collider isn’t supposed to be finished yet, but it was supposed to be started! As far as I can tell, it’s still on the drawing boards. How long do we have to diddle with this moon before we do what we stopped here for? Do I still get to fly this ship away from here in a few decades?”

  Gabriel sighed. “Maybe a few more than we first thought,” he said. “There’s quakes, and flares, and something else I’ve decided we have to do, although it will add time as well. It’s starting to feel like it might take forever to get to where we can safely build the collider.”

  “Well, I’m still Second. The captain will fly us away, I’m sure.”

  “He’s been warm even more since you went down,” Gabriel said. “He may be too old to fly again.”

  “He was supposed to sleep!”

  “Have you ever tried to tell him what to do?”

  Erika’s laugh tickled his shoulder. “Well, whoever flies the John Glenn away from here, I still want oblivion through most of this nightmare project.”

  “You don’t get older anymore, the new tech changes that. This is the second time you’ve warmed to it—don’t you feel better?”

  “It doesn’t make this project end any faster, or help me get away from here. I want to spend my life between the stars, and at Ymir.”

  “Me too. But Ymir seems far away lately—like a childhood dream drifting far away.” He made a face at her.

  Anxiously, “You still want to go?”

  “Yes, I do. I want to be on Ymir. I want a planet that’s nearly perfect to set deer and horses free on.” Gabriel looked up at the tree, searching for the top, but the sunlight was so bright it stung his eyes. “I’d like to ride a horse again. At least once.” A flying bot passed between him and the light, and he blinked and then pulled back to look directly into her eyes. “We knew after we decided to stay true to our rules about tech—we knew that we would be using the Children. But we didn’t know it. Not the way I know it, working with them every day. And we can’t stay here, we calculated that as well. Not enough variety, and no way to stabilize Selene’s atmosphere enough for the really long haul. Not unless we become what we fled from, or worse. Erika, I have to look in their eyes, every day I’m on Selene. Sometimes I think it’s cowardice that keeps us stuck to our fear of tech; then I remember Earth. But we can’t do what we’re doing now either. We just can’t.” Gabriel searched Erika’s face for a response.

  Her jaw was set tight. She finally said. “I’m sorry, love. I really am. We had hard choices to make. That’s all. Every choice had its dangers.”

  It was little comfort. Gabriel frowned at himself, not wanting to ruin their first day together. “I just wish it were different—that we’d made it to Ymir. I’m tired of hard things.”

  “You are an old man,” she teased.

  “Hmmmm. I’m older than you are now.”

  “Effectively. But I’ll always be a month older in real time.”

  “How do you know what’s real?” he asked.

  “You’ve been talking to Astronaut again.”

  “And who else am I supposed to talk to?”

  “Me.” She wrinkled her nose at him.

  “I do—when you’re receiving. Besides, Astronaut’s moved on. When you went to sleep it was stuck in quantum physics as a sideline. I’m pretty sure the current interest is human psychology.”

  Erika threw her head back and laughed. “We might drive it crazy. And as fast as it thinks and learns, if it’s been on psychology long enough for you to notice, it must be mighty confused.” In a typical lightning change, she asked, “Can we go?”

  “Go?” Gabriel said innocently, watching the line of her jaw, the way her cheeks curved gracefully.

  “It’s time to fly.”

  Gabriel shook his head at her. “Surely you remember the rules?” he said dryly. “Tomorrow. Unless you want to sit still while I fly.”

  “I’ll sit here,” she said, snuggling breast to breast, legs wrapped around his waist to keep her from drifting, her head buried in his shoulder. It left Gabriel with all the work of anchoring them to the tree.

  Gabriel sighed with pleasure and sat quietly, lips resting on her light hair, right hand roaming her thigh and the soft place behind her knee, both of his calves hooked under the branch to hold them on. He whispered into her ear. “Ready to go to bed?”

  She snuggled closer and ran her fingers through his hair. “Wait a bit. Let me get used to you. You’ve changed a lot this time.”

  Gabriel frowned, and stroked her hair. “I still love you.”

  “I love you too.” After a while she asked, “You said we had to do something else. What is it? And why do we have to do it?”

  “It’s the damned flares. Daedalus gets all wrung up with Apollo, and they tangle their magnetic fields, and make flares. We knew that. You knew that. But they’re worse than we thought. The blasts are directed. The whole project could be stopped dead if a strong enough flare hits at the wrong time. The Sol-based flare categorization system stopped at X—an X-class flare is the worst that happens in Sol system. We’ve added Y and Z here. We’ve seen two Y-class flares in the time we’ve been monitoring. Ne
ither of them hit Selene, and of course, most won’t. But it would only take one. Astronaut ran the probabilities, and they’re too damned high. So we have to make a safe place—use the water in the Hammered Sea as a buffer and build a flare shelter the likes of which we never even thought of.”

  She looked him in the eyes. “You’re sure it’s not just because you love this kind of engineering so much? You’re sure we really need to do this?”

  “I had another idea too. A flare kite . . .” Did she think he loved building Selene so much he’d stall to stay? The question bothered him, and he made sure to answer her firmly. “Yes, I’m sure we need to do this.”

  “So how much time will it add?” Erika demanded.

  “Two or three years. Not much in the overall scale of things.”

  “It’s still a long time.”

  “I know. There’s nothing to be done. You’ll just be cold longer—it won’t change the effective time you’re awake. At least, not by much. But it will adjust what you do this shift.” He tried to make light of the delay. “At least, if you want to go with me. It means a swing out to get a big rock.”

  “Again? I thought we were done throwing big rocks!”

  “Hey—I made you some rings with one rock throw. This time I’ll make you something safe in case you’re on Selene when the big one hits.”

  “Make me some antimatter!”

  “I know.” He tickled her, working to get her mood back up. “Let’s go look around, get you used to the changes on the ship. I didn’t mean to dump my frustrations.”

  They flew through the garden, Gabriel pointing out changes, and Erika appreciating and questioning and probing. She found a new sculpture that surprised them both; a set of strings suspended from clear material edged in nanopaint that glittered with color, hues changing with the shifting sounds the manufactured wind made as it played the strings.