by Larry Niven
He heard Rachel murmuring in the background. She wasn’t looking at him: she stared at the wall and spoke, as if to herself, so softly her actual words weren’t audible. He’d taught her that: a Library access trick. All the Council did it.
“She’s talking to Vassal right now,” he said.
Ali said, “Checking on her people.”
“Who? Her people?” How much had he missed? “Other Children?”
“Some Earth Born too. Let her check—it’s a damn good thing she’s not just catatonic after the last few days—and all of that—all of her pain—was because of us. We pushed Andrew, we didn’t allow good med tech for her dad, we killed Jacob outright. Bang.” Ali stood, pacing, agitated. “Jacob could have been saved if he wasn’t stunned into a pile of glass shards and left without our medical facilities. Rachel tried to save him. Rachel and Beth—using what they knew. But it wasn’t enough. Any of our med techs could have done it.”
Gabriel flicked his eyes at Rachel again.
“The power and knowledge balance is off here,” Ali said. “This is what she’s been fighting. We taught her nonviolence; even Astronaut and Treesa and Vassal supported nonviolence.”
A horrible thought ran through Gabriel’s mind. “So who taught Andrew?”
Ali looked at him, eyes narrowing. “You did. I did. Liren, mostly.” She licked her lips, twisting her hands in her braid. “We taught him that nonviolence doesn’t work.”
Gabriel glanced at the data window. The numbers glowed brighter. The flare was coming. He pulled himself back to the conversation. “Star said Andrew’s goal was to stop the antimatter generator. That was the only demand he made; the reason for the whole stupid trick he tried to pull.”
Ali swallowed. “I know he didn’t like any of us, ever. I didn’t know he worried about the antimatter.” Ali paused, her eyes flicking down, away from him. “I did know Rachel was scared silly.”
“Do you know Vassal didn’t give the information to him?”
Rachel spoke up from behind him. “Vassal isn’t afraid of the generator either, any more than you. I told him, Gabriel. It’s my fault.” He turned. She’d pushed the blanket away and her face looked miserable.
“It happened the night after you—after they killed Jacob. I was . . . in pain.” Rachel paused, her voice breaking. “I was so frustrated about everything, about Jacob, about Dad being sick, about the antimatter, I let it spill out all over Andrew.” She paused again. “I should never have done that. I might as well have killed Dylan myself.”
“It’s not your fault,” Ali said. “We—we should have listened to you more.” She walked over and sat close to Rachel.
Gabriel looked at Rachel’s tortured face. “You”—he stepped toward her, sat in the closest chair, and looked her directly in the eyes—”you are not responsible for Andrew. You’re not even responsible for Andrew’s death. He chose it. He chose all of this.”
Rachel looked down and away, nodded, and settled the blankets back over her legs. He wasn’t sure she believed them, and she clearly didn’t want to talk about it.
“Tell me about antimatter?” he asked.
Ali looked up. “About three months ago, Rachel figured out more about antimatter. She confronted us. She’s afraid there could be an accident here. She protested our plan to build the generator here—”
“That’s why we built Selene!” Gabriel interrupted, turning toward Rachel, struggling to speak softly. Of course she misunderstood. “Rachel, antimatter containment is a technique hundreds of years old. We know how to do it.”
Ali got back up and sat down at the table. “Treesa and I told her that too.” Ali turned her cup around and around in her hand, nervous. “And we were wrong.” She tugged on her braid, sighed, and then put her hand over Gabriel’s hand. “We made Selene, Gabriel, but Selene isn’t our home. John Glenn is. And maybe, someday, Ymir. But Selene is Rachel’s home. We didn’t hear that when she said it; we didn’t understand. She sees our choices as being willing to risk her home, as not caring.”
“That’s right,” Rachel said. She held her teacup out at arm’s length, in front of her. “This much, even if it wasn’t full, this could destroy Clarke Base.”
All three of them looked up as the door opened, and John and Treesa came in. They moved slowly, faces droopy with exhaustion, but they both smiled to see the three of them waiting.
“Did everyone get here?” Gabriel asked.
John said, “There’s a nose count going.”
“Do you have any idea why Liren came down here at all?” Gabriel asked.
John busied himself at the tiny sink, pouring water for himself and Treesa, not showing his face. Then he spoke. “She believes that any deviation from our laws will kill us. She truly believes it. She is trying very hard to do her job. She just doesn’t understand what it is anymore.”
Gabriel frowned, wishing he could let his tired friend rest. “You need to hear about something. Treesa, you have some explaining—”
“I told Gabriel about Vassal,” Ali interrupted. “I had to. I was so afraid up there—Rachel was going after Dylan, and Gabriel figured out that she had help. He knew it had to be Council or an AI . . .”
Ali was defending herself to Treesa. Why? Gabriel looked closely at Treesa. Her gray hair stuck to her face: she’d worked on the boat that afternoon. Wrinkles surrounded her eyes and pulled her mouth inward. She looked elderly. And Ali treated her as if she were in charge. Even Rachel straightened in her seat, eyes on Treesa.
Treesa went to Rachel first, before responding at all to Gabriel’s question, and said, “It hurts, I know. I’m sorry. But it’s not your fault.”
Rachel reached up and buried her face in a hug from Treesa.
Captain John spoke. “I support all of the decisions Treesa and Ali made.” John’s words stunned Gabriel into silence. “In fact, they were Rachel’s decisions too.” His eyes were directly on Gabriel’s; implacable. Sixty thousand years of iron will stared directly into Gabriel’s eyes. “We worked together on this. I came down here partly to understand the Moon Born. There are more supporters too—more than you see here. Many people resented the High Council’s decisions—” The former captain looked down briefly, then back at Gabriel. “Even decisions I made. Rightly so. They were the wrong decisions.”
Gabriel realized his mouth was hanging open and he closed it. Words escaped him. He was the odd man out—he was the only one in the room not part of a conspiracy. He clamped his jaw shut and tried to assess his emotions. Anger—and separation.
John continued. “Don’t mistake me. It has been a terrible day. Death, particularly death based on stupid disagreements, is a waste.” He nodded at Treesa. “Maybe inevitable, though. Listen to Treesa’s story.”
Treesa sat next to Rachel, holding her hand. “I’ll give you the short version, and you can ask me questions if you want.”
Gabriel nodded, trying for patience, breathing into his belly. “Okay.”
Treesa spoke haltingly. “You know I woke up—in this system—disaffected. Something in the waking process, or the shock, the loss of it all, broke something in me. I didn’t have the presence of mind to be a good communications tech, to toe the line. I wasn’t—right. I didn’t want the oblivion of being cold, so I made a deal. Council let me live in the garden. You know that part. You helped me some, when we first woke. You remember?”
Gabriel did remember a younger Treesa. Long ago, in the earliest part of the town-building days, when Aldrin was still tented. She had been like a ghost in the garden, fading away whenever anyone approached her, left alone because she did useful work and caused no harm. They had all been too busy to solve nonproblems.
“Well, taking care of plants all day for years gives you a different perspective, a groundedness. Time to think. I may still be a bit touched, but I’ve had time to observe and to watch and to think about things. Everyone else was working as hard as they could, doing shift work, and I weeded and watered and watched.
/> “I still had my communications skills, so I eavesdropped on almost everything anyone said to anyone, from my little house in the garden. Either no one noticed, or no one cared. But that’s what I did for years—listen to everything, watch what I could. I hardly ever talked to a human being—I just watched them. Even . . . even High Council meetings.” She paused, eyes roaming the room, and Gabriel slowly absorbed how many lonely years she was speaking about.
“And then, eventually, I had to make contact with someone. I chose the AI. I didn’t know if I could really handle talking to people. That was before Rachel came up to John Glenn.
“Well, Astronaut became a good friend, and helpful too. Together we figured out how to get me—and it—more data. It . . . talked to me. For years. Worked on me, helped me get to where I could deal a little better with reality, accept my losses. It doesn’t understand emotions. I had to get past my feelings to talk to it, and I was so lonely I needed to talk.” Treesa reached for John’s hand, squeezed it. He stood up and got her a glass of water. She drank, then turned back to Gabriel. “So I ended up wanting to help you and the Children—us and our children—come to some better understanding. You were on a collision course. You couldn’t make Selene and not love it, you couldn’t make it safe, and you couldn’t allow too much of what you ran away from—what we all fled Earth from—to be loosed hereeither. There were no good choices, not after what we left in Sol. I didn’t know the answer. I still don’t. I think you have to find it—we all have to find it—and I had to help, at least help people see the challenges. Astronaut, and Vassal, have the same problem as the Moon Born. They don’t have a voice.”
Gabriel couldn’t listen any more. He wanted to move, to pace, but the little room was full now, and there was almost no room. He felt hemmed in. “We don’t give them voice for a reason! They have a place. A useful place. But not a free place. I work with Astronaut all the time. I like Astronaut. But a being who knows that much can cause too much damage. They don’t love us—they can’t.” He closed his eyes, unable to grasp the magnitude of their trust, their innocence. They’d released a full copy of an AI as a separate being. It lived in Water Bearer, but many communications channels blanketed Selene; large data streams flowed between Water Bearer and John Glenn. The whole system was its . . . its person.
He shuddered. “Don’t you remember how we let ourselves get dependent on them? They ran our life support on moons and starships and then . . . then they failed. How could you take such a risk and not involve us?”
John was watching him, his eyes measuring. “Those AIs went crazy. They were brilliant but flawed, and bored. I’ve been doing research. Here, our goals are aligned. Astronaut and Vassal both need us alive if they are to survive. I believe they are like us in that—they want to survive. Neither shows signs of insanity.”
“So why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” Gabriel asked.
Treesa smiled reassuringly. “You were already presenting our side to the High Council—saying it pretty well—even if your goals were wrong. You were trying to give the Moon Born more knowledge and a voice. Why increase the risk? We were afraid you’d report anything you thought was dangerous to the High Council. You’re so . . . so bound by tradition. The same thing that bound John at first.” Treesa looked over at her lover and smiled thinly. “We . . . we never expected anything like what happened today.”
“Why were my goals wrong?” Gabriel asked softly.
Treesa smiled at him again, gently, almost condescending, like a grandmother. He clamped his jaw shut as she said, “Let’s say different. You were trying to save the people for Ymir. Well, we were trying to save Selene for the Moon Born. We don’t have room for all the Moon Born, can’t take them all to Ymir any more than I can get my fiancé back from Leif Eriksson. There are some things that aren’t possible. But it is possible to make a better deal than we have.”
He remembered something else she’d said. “Who else?”
“Kyu. Bruce, although we didn’t tell him about Vassal. Kyu doesn’t know either.”
Kyu. Kyu and John—that was two High Council. Was. John had stepped down. Liren and Rich weren’t involved; Liren was part of the problem, and Rich stayed cold whenever he could. Gabriel’s head spun. “Clare?”
“She was too much Liren’s friend,” Treesa explained. “Same with Erika. But now maybe things will be different.”
Above the water, above Refuge, the flare raged.
CHAPTER 71
FLARE
TIME PLAYED TRICKS on Rachel, speeding up and then slowing down, a rhythm. Even while she talked with Vassal, and listened to Treesa’s story, death scenes played and replayed in her head. Dylan falling. Her father dying, his breath rattling into silence on the couch. Jacob with a long shard of glass buried in his neck. Blood on her hands.
She watched Gabriel widen his data window, positioning it so that everyone could see. Three other windows popped up around it; contributions from the others, she supposed. One monitored communications satellites, one looked down at Clarke Base, another at Aldrin.
Rachel winced: the skeleton crew at Aldrin might be in the usual flare shelters in the houses, or the old one under the town, from when they were tented. That might not be enough, not if she understood this flare. “Vassal,” she whispered, “where are the people in Aldrin?”
“In the old flare shelter.”
A thought nagged at her. “Would they be safer in the ship—in Water Bearer? Aren’t parts of it shielded like John Glenn?’
“That would work more reliably. Water Bearer’s life-support area is very well shielded.”
She relayed the conversation to Gabriel, and then watched the data window as people bolted across the meadow into the broken ship.
She turned her attention to the window on Clarke Base. She could see the warehouse. Tiny broken bodies lay scattered on the roof. A scrap of yellow from one of her broken wings fluttered in the wind. She wanted to close her eyes and pretend none of this was happening. It couldn’t be, not really. Everything had changed. She had changed.
There was nothing personal she wanted to think about—nothing that really mattered. Even Justin was just a small issue; he wasn’t even dead, unlike Dylan, Jacob, and her dad. And Andrew. She flinched. Don’t focus on Andrew.
Rachel thought about what Treesa had said just then, about having a purpose, helping the others. Treesa had helped lead Rachel to a place where she had nearly as little family left as Treesa did. Except now Treesa had John. Rachel breathed into her gut, using techniques Gabriel had taught her. She found loneliness first, rising up with her breath, followed by a cool anger that straightened her spine. Resentment boiled after anger, and she breathed it out. It took a lot of breaths, and finally she was empty, turning her awareness inside her, pulling for her purpose behind the anger. Treesa had talked to her about purpose that first day in the garden. Treesa had told her, “I know the role you have to play—you have to be a bridge for us all.” It was, really, the only thing left that Rachel cared about. She pictured a bridge running between John Glenn and Selene, from Council Aerie to Refuge, a bridge circling the moon instead of the antimatter generator.
She wasn’t clear about how to build such a thing, except that it was a bridge of relationships. Liren had always opposed it, stood in her way, holding all of the High Council with her. What could Rachel do about that now? She had help on her side, she had saved Liren’s life. She frowned, thinking about Liren, about finding her scared and crying after the High Council meeting when John tried to depose her. Seeing Liren’s face, angry but contrite, when Gabriel told her to leave, to follow the two Council and Justin and return to John Glenn. Liren had done what Gabriel asked, even though Liren was High Council. Did that signal enough change?
The two AIs also had a place on the bridge, somewhere. What else had Treesa said? Something about Gabriel needing to learn as well, about giving Selene a heart.
She barely followed the conversation around her as the others track
ed the flare. “Geomagnetic storm—worst ever.”
“Watch the cameras north and south—there should be a spectacular aurora.”
“Lost a satellite.”
“Radiation readings from the surface are high. Will it be bad enough to affect food stores?”
“We finished the extra shielding for them last month.”
“Might affect the plants.”
She stirred herself. She knew John Glenn would be okay. The ship—Water Bearer? Was it safe where Vassal was? She asked.
Vassal answered, “The place where I reside is safe. So are the people from Aldrin who came here. We might lose communication for a time. It depends on how much gets through the atmosphere.”
“Okay.”
She perked her ears up, tried to listen more carefully to the assessments of the others, to work out how bad the danger was to Selene. There would be time to think about bridges later. After the flare. She yawned.
Ten minutes later, communications from Aldrin winked out, the data window darkening. Clarke Base followed moments after. It was eerie, being down under the sea with no pictures of the land above, no connection to Selene.
It made Rachel think about the bodies. Dylan and Andrew were beyond caring, but they should have been moved. Why hadn’t she insisted on that? She should have insisted. At least they wouldn’t rot. Radiation would mummify them.
Talk swirled around her; speculation and worry. Gabriel had stopped fussing about Vassal and Astronaut, but she sensed that that topic wasn’t closed.
She had trouble focusing; her thoughts were fuzzy and indistinct.
An hour passed. The group had gone almost as silent as the data windows that surrounded them. Rachel could no longer get answers from Vassal.
Ali worked on Gabriel’s shoulders, whispering, “Rest. You can’t do anything now, and you’ve only just been warmed.”
“I’ll try. But weren’t you awake even before I was, flying to John Glenn and then back here?”
