Building Harlequin’s Moon

Praise for Larry Niven, Brenda Cooper, and
Building Harlequin’s Moon

“Fans of both hard and softer, psychological SF will welcome veteran Niven and newcomer Cooper’s well-written tale of a 60,000-year layover in space. . . . Niven and Cooper provide complicated characters, particularly the AI, which struggle with realistic moral dilemmas.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Niven lifts the reader far from the conventional world—and does it with a dash.”

—
Los Angeles Times

“Great storytelling is still alive in science fiction because of Larry Niven.”

—Orson Scott Card

“Larry Niven’s and Brenda Cooper’s colonization novel is a hugely ambitious, meticulously rendered feast for both head and heart. I can’t wait to see what they do next!”

—Steven Barnes

“One of our finest . . . [Niven] jams ideas for several novels into each one he creates.”

—
Chicago Sun Times

“Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper have accomplished that most difficult of tasks, a novel full of real, hard science, but character-driven from the first page. The scope is enormous, but the focus is intimate, with characters who live and breathe. A marvelous read!”

—Louis Marley

“Niven and Cooper craft an entertaining epic with subtexts concerning cultural obsessiveness and the fear and worship of science.”

—
Booklist

“Building Harlequin’s Moon
is a big tale, well told. Wonderful world-building and characters you can care about.”

—Syne Mitchell

Tor Books by Larry Niven

N-Space
Playgrounds of the Mind
Rainbow Mars
Scatterbrain
Ringworld’s Children

WITH
S
TEVEN
B
ARNES
Achilles’ Choice
The Descent of Anansi
Saturn’s Race

WITH
J
ERRY
P
OURNELLE AND
S
TEVEN
B
ARNES
Destiny’s Road
Beowulf’s Children

WITH
B
RENDA
C
OOPER
Building Harlequin’s Moon

WITH
E
DWARD
M.L
ERNER
Fleet of Worlds
Juggler of Worlds*

*Forthcoming

L
ARRY
N
IVEN
AND
B
RENDA
C
OOPER

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

BUILDING HARLEQUIN’S MOON

Copyright © 2005 by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-5129-6
ISBN-10: 0-7653-5129-3

First Edition: June 2005
First Mass Market Edition: April 2006

Printed in the United States of America

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T
O THE MEMORY OF
R
OBERT
F
ORWARD

F
ROM
B
RENDA
:

I’d like to thank Larry Niven for taking on this project with me. Larry has had a longtime rule against collaborating with amateurs, and since this is my first novel-length work, I definitely qualified, at least when we started. This has been a multiyear project. I’m sure there were times when he was ready to throw away the manuscript, but instead he just pointed out ideas and characters that needed work, and helped me through; most important, he always believed in me. His hands, ideas, and words are throughout this novel, but like every good teacher, he made me write my way out of most of my messes. Any messes left in here are mine alone. Thanks, Larry!

Personal thanks as well to my family: to my dad, who explained the concept of mass multiple times, and asked about the book every time he talked to me (sure that I was doing great, even when I wasn’t); to my mom; my son, David; and daughter-of-the-heart Lisha; my partner, Toni; and to Cindy Ross and Joe Green. Thanks also to Marilyn Niven, for being supportive of this project.

F
ROM
B
RENDA AND
L
ARRY
:

Thanks to our agent, Eleanor Wood, for believing in this project, and for reviewing a very early draft and providing excellent suggestions. Thanks to Bob Gleason from Tor, our editor.

Thanks to Yoji Kondo, the rocket scientist and science fiction writer who writes as Eric Kotani. We needed a pair
of stars to fit our story—to become Apollo and Ymir—and Yoji found them for us.

We’d both like to thank Steven Barnes, who introduced us, and has given us both many tools across many years. The Fairwood Writers read the whole novel in draft, and made many excellent suggestions. They are David Addleman, Darragh Metzger, John A. Pitts, Allan Rousselle, David R. Silas, Renee Stern, and Patrick and Honna Swenson. The members of the LARRYNIVEN-L list helped out with naming a planet. G. David Nordley spent time chatting with us about ship designs. We’d also like to thank the late Bob Forward for chats about this book, and for inspiring early star drive designs.

B
UILDING
H
ARLEQUIN’S
M
OON

E
RIKA WAS COLD
and Gabriel was warm. She wouldn’t have been interested in this stuff anyway.

Erika was one pilot of the carrier
John Glenn. John Glenn
was currently at rest, safely orbiting wide around the gas giant planet Harlequin, and not in need of a pilot.

Gabriel headed the terraforming team, chartered to create a habitable moon from the jumble of raw material that made up Harlequin’s moon system. Four of the team were warm now, far too many in the long term; but during these few decades they would accomplish most of what needed doing. Then they would wait for the moon system to settle down again.

The Large Pusher Tugs, all three of them, were thrusting hard against Moon Ten. Their fusion engines sprayed a trident of light across the sky. The lesser Moon Twenty-six was already in place, orbiting Moon One since last year. That orbit wasn’t stable—it shrank steadily within the cloud of impact debris around Moon One—but that didn’t matter. Moon Twenty-six would be gone in a few days.

Gabriel sent:
“John Glenn
calling LPT-1. Wayne, how you doing?”

“Nearly finished here, I think. Astronaut concurs. Check our orbit.”

“I did that. Start shutting down the motors.”

In four hours, Moon Ten was falling free.

When this phase was over, Harlequin’s moons would have to be recounted. There would be fewer of them.

Gabriel considered a meal and sleep. The moons
wouldn’t collide for fifteen days yet . . . but he ordered a squeeze of stew and stayed at his post. One loose moon wouldn’t matter; there was no living thing to be harmed in Harlequin’s moon system, and minor accidents could be fixed. It was the LPTs he was worried about. Lose his spacecraft and he’d lose the game.

The peppery smell of warming vegetables and broth made his stomach rumble.

So. Where to park the pusher tugs?

He smiled. They’d be passing very near Moon Forty-one.

“Wayne? Bust your LPTs loose and get them into orbit. Here are the specs. I’m working out your next mission.”

“When do we get some rest, boss?”

“I’ll find you that too.”

Gabriel ate slowly, savoring the celery and potatoes.
John Glenn’s
internal garden was thriving. It had been a water tank when they left Sol system, and their diet had palled rapidly.

He had a plan. He could start on it tomorrow. Thrust would take a few hundred days. Harlequin would grow a little hotter; ultimately Moon One would too; and Erika, when she warmed, would love it.

U
NDER
G
ABRIEL’S GUIDANCE
, Wayne’s team lifted the Large Pusher Tugs from Moon Ten and set them drifting toward a rarefied region within Harlequin’s frantically busy moon system. Wouldn’t want them anywhere near the collision point.

It took him and the Astronaut program less than an hour to work up the next sequence.

The LPTs had tremendous acceleration when they weren’t attached to larger masses. Their light outshone the sun, Apollo, by a lot. By the end of the day they were in loose orbit around Moon Forty-one.