Building Harlequin’s Moon (17 page)

A woman Rachel had never seen before stood on the path—thin as Ursula and oddly unkempt. Her tangled hair was streaked with gray and hung wild around her shoulders. The skin around her eyes and mouth was wrinkled. She wore green coveralls like Rachel’s, standard issue stuff, and the knees were nearly worn through. Was she Council? She had to be—she was here. Rachel had never seen anyone who looked so old except in pictures. And every Council and High Council person (except maybe Liren) wore decorations. Even the captain wore bright vests that he changed regularly. This woman looked very plain.

“You’re Rachel.” Her voice was scratchy, deeper than Kyu’s, less controlled than Ma Liren’s.

Of course she knew who Rachel was. Everyone knew her. Rachel sighed, tired of one-way acquaintances. “That doesn’t seem to be a secret,” she said. “I’m not a secret to anyone here. And you are?”

The woman looked at her appraisingly. “What were you thinking just then?”

“Huh?”

“Before I walked up, you were lost in thought. I can tell—I watch. It was as if you weren’t here.”

“I’m catching frogs.”

“And?”

“I was thinking about home.”

“Do you miss Selene?”

“Of course.” The frog in Rachel’s hand wiggled, and she cupped it more tightly.

“I miss my home too.”

“Don’t you live here?”

“Home is Earth.”

Was this woman crazy? “Gabriel said Earth is dead.”

“We don’t know that. We only know they don’t talk to us.” The woman looked away, up past Yggdrasil’s trunk to the plants hanging impossibly down over their heads. Her voice was soft as she continued. “But they must believe we are lost. There are so few of us anyway.”

Few of them? Rachel must have met at least thirty Council aboard
John Glenn
, and hundreds of people including Moon Children and Earth Born on Selene. Kyu told her once about almost two thousand ice cubes—people sleeping cold for a long time. That was a lot. “How many people were on Earth when you left?”

“Twelve billion, on Earth. Twenty billion, if you count people living in orbital housing and the rest of the system. And you can’t count the machine intelligences.”

“Why not?” Rachel asked. “What’s a . . . machine intelligence?” She took the DNA sample and tagged the little frog with a yellow dot so she’d recognize it if she caught it again.

“Too many. They don’t take up space. And they interface and interact, they share and merge minds, they bud subroutines. They were petitioning for citizenship! The number of votes would have changed every microsecond!”

“Votes?” Rachel had never heard the word.

“Input to a group decision. Never mind . . . it’s not important. Neither are the machines.”

“So they don’t matter?”

“Oh—they mattered. But let’s focus on people.”

“Twelve billion.” Twelve billion? Nine zeroes? Rachel set the tiny frog down on a broad leaf and watched it hop away. Everything in the Council’s world was so big. And if there were twelve
billion
people on Earth, then
John Glenn
was small! Whatever did they think of Aldrin? Of her? Really?

The woman asked, “Have you ever seen Earth?”

“How could I?”

“I can show you.”

Rachel felt as if she were in a guessing game with the strange woman. She did want to see Earth. How would this woman show her? “Okay.”

The woman turned around and walked away. Rachel hesitated, then tucked her one DNA sample carefully into a pocket and followed.

The backside of the woman’s pants was almost worn through. She walked slower than Rachel, even in this spot halfway along the curve between the aft tree base and the river. Here, the gravity was actually slightly lower than Selene’s. They were already off the main path, between two turns of the spiral, when they stopped in front of a large shed.

The woman held the door open, looking over her shoulder at Rachel. “They used to use this for tools, but I bargained to stay here. I do garden chores for them. So I’m a tool too, just like you.”

Rachel ducked into the shed. She didn’t think Kyu would like this. Was she making a mistake? “Will you tell me your name?”

“Yes.”

Rachel waited, but the woman didn’t give her name. She looked around. The shed was bigger than Rachel’s room. A cage in the far corner held two large parrots. They were far more vivid than the pictures Rachel had seen of such birds, with long red tails, blue-tipped wings, and yellow heads. They moved restlessly in the cage, and they smelled like ammonia and seeds. When Rachel started to walk up to the cage, the woman grabbed her arm and stopped her. “They’re not used to anyone but me. Better just look.”

Swallowing her disappointment, Rachel dragged her eyes away from the parrots. Long shiny blue and red parrot feathers decorated the walls, arranged in fans with fancy beaded handles. Otherwise, the room was brown and orange and yellow. Circular patterns covered the furnishings, wall hangings, and windows. Two comfortable blue cloth
chairs filled the middle of the room, but only one looked like it was ever used. The chairs faced a wall of the same shimmery substance that lined the corridor walls and the meeting room at the cafeteria. When Council ate in the cafeteria, the walls often showed pictures. When Rachel was alone, waiting for Kyu, it looked like this. It was bright and reflective, and currently silver. After sitting in the older chair, the woman gestured for Rachel to sit down.

“Treesa.”

Huh? Oh—“Nice to meet you, Treesa.”

“Watch.”

The wall went black, then filled with a green and blue globe, lights scattered in orbit around it like necklaces. It looked like Selene from space, only dressed up in bright colors like Kyu. The camera view raced toward the green and blue mass. Bigger, detailed,
falling
, and now her vision flew above a vast forest of trees. She forced her grip on the chair arms to relax.

The vegetation was so dense the only available view was from above.

Rachel couldn’t even see a path. It went on and on, the viewpoint sometimes shifting low as it followed a river. She loved it. Was that what they were making Selene into?

“That’s Earth?” she asked.

The picture changed to sand. Hills and dunes all one color, so alike she couldn’t judge their size, with no big impact rocks, and—no craters! “You must have worked hard to make all the craters go away.”

“No.” Treesa laughed. The parrots rustled in their cage.

And the view changed again—water. More water than the Hammered Sea—so much water Rachel couldn’t see edges at all. Water so blue it looked like infinity below, calm water, and then after a long time, expanses of greener water that frothed with white, rippling in wind. The view slipped across water for a long time, stopping where a great mountain came up out of the sea.

The sea had become calm and blue again in this place. The mountain was craggy, dark, sharp with glassy edges. Black cloud hung along the mountain’s top, boiling and dropping flecks of white into the ocean to disappear. A thin river of red liquid ran down a crevasse, and where the red river intersected water, steam boiled up and touched the bottom of the black cloud with white.

Rachel struggled to make sense of it. “Why design that? To heat the water?”

“No one designed it.”

“But—who made it?”

“Some people say God made it.”

Someone else she hadn’t met? “Was he like Gabriel?”

“I assure you, Gabriel is a man.” Treesa laughed again. Her voice was thin. “And even Gabriel could not create a planet as rich as Earth.”

Rachel gave up. Treesa’s laughter made her feel stupid. At least Treesa didn’t seem to be laughing
at
her. “I don’t understand.”

“No one has taught you history? We do not design every place we live. We, Council, you, we are not the center of everything. After all, we didn’t make Harlequin. We didn’t make the little moons we bashed together to forge Selene. Don’t just believe what you’re told—apply some critical thinking skills. And now, you need to go. Kyu will be looking for you.”

“But . . . but who made Earth?”

“Who made Harlequin? Or Apollo?”

“Ohhhh.” Rachel breathed the idea out slowly. There was someone above High Council? Then,
“TOM
made Selene. Gabriel made Selene.”

“With a little help from his friends.” Treesa was laughing again. “We—that’s you too—evolved—on Earth. Earth made us! The young Earth was as bare of life as Selene. What you saw coming from the volcano—the mountain in
the sea—was the blood of Earth. Selene is an attempt to bring life to a dead rock by adding a blanket to a place with no fire. And whatever we may have become, that’s no small task. Gabriel must find its heart. He doesn’t know that yet. It may be that you have a role to play in that.”

Earth made people? Evolved? She knew the term—Kyu talked about evolution when she talked about DNA drift. She shook her head, trying to assimilate the strange woman’s words.

Treesa looked intensely at Rachel. Whatever she saw, it caused her to shiver, then to shake her head sadly. The wall pictures faded away so only a soft shimmer remained. “That’s enough for now—go on with you.”

“Can I come back?”

“I don’t know. Can you?” Treesa asked.

Rachel looked behind her once. Treesa stood by the doorway, watching her. Was Treesa Council? Treesa was the most interesting person she’d met on the
John Glenn
, and while much that she said was confusing, she talked to Rachel as an equal.

Rachel hurried back to catching frogs. She’d have to be really good at finding them, since she’d lost so much time. Not lost, she corrected herself. Spent.

R
ACHEL HAD TAGGED
thirteen frogs when she caught a flash of grays and bright blues in the corner of her eye. Kyu Ho looked rushed as she came up the path.

Kyu tugged at her arm and asked, “Ready?”

“Oh . . .” How could she have forgotten about the Library? She’d wait awhile before talking about Treesa—if Kyu didn’t know, all the better. Rachel didn’t want Kyu mad just when she was going to see something else interesting. “Yes, but . . . if I can get the Library on my wrist pad, where are we going?”

Kyu grinned, grabbed half of Rachel’s tools and samples, and took off toward the lab to stow them.

Rachel tripped on the lab doorstep, and Kyu grabbed her hand and pulled her up, laughing, her eyes alight with excitement. She grinned as she led Rachel out of the garden. The elevator took them up past Rachel’s floor. They walked and turned, and walked and turned, and climbed ladders until Rachel was completely disoriented.

They entered a large square room. Three clear plastic chairs clustered together in the center of the room, attached to the floor. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all opaque white. The room held nothing else. Gabriel was already in one of the chairs. Rachel and Kyu sat down in the other two. Kyu and Gabriel looked so formal that Rachel wondered if they were angry with her for playing hooky.

Kyu spoke first. “The Library is our greatest asset, the one thing we must have to survive.”

The surfaces all turned black. The three of them floated on the clear chairs, suspended in blackness. Rachel clutched the edges of her chair. Stars faded into being until it was like riding up from Selene, only with
nothing
between her and the stars. Even though she knew that, really, this time, the bulk of
John Glenn
rested between the three of them and the universe outside, her eyes told her the ship had disappeared.

Kyu stepped toward Rachel, outlined in stars, looming over Rachel in her chair. “One of our—powers—is communication. We are about to gift you with better communication
than you have ever dreamed possible. Are you ready?”

Rachel nodded. Kyu reached out and placed her right fist against Rachel’s left ear. “This will feel a little strange, but relax, it isn’t very painful,” she said. “Look to your left.”

Rachel obliged, turning her head, and felt something tiny, like a seed, fall from Kyu’s cupped palm into her ear. Kyu flattened her hand against Rachel’s ear, holding the seed thing inside. Rachel’s ear buzzed, and she suddenly felt dizzy. Only Kyu’s strong hands holding her head kept her upright in the chair. The buzzing intensified, deepened farther into her ear, then ran into her jaw, stinging as if a thread of fire were being pulled along bone. Then it was over, and she felt nothing except a small tightness along her jawbone.

“What did you do to me?” she asked.

A voice, not Kyu’s or Gabriel’s, spoke inside her ear. “Welcome to Library Access Rights.”

Rachel started, almost falling out of her chair. “Whhh . . . what was that?”

“New user sequence,” Kyu said to the air, and then to Rachel, “Stand up.”

Rachel stood on stars and thankfully didn’t fall.

“Your name?” the voice asked. Rachel couldn’t tell if it was supposed to be a man or a woman talking.

“Rachel,” she said.

“Rachel Vanowen. Selene born.” Now it was Gabriel’s voice, not in her ear. “Rachel, meet the ship’s Library.”

“Rachel,” Kyu said, “Library access is a privilege. Access rights are granted as one matures, with more information available as people finish school or succeed at jobs. Additional specific deep rights, like the ability to add to the Library, are given as needed and approved. By adulthood, most people have query access to more information than they can use. Many subject areas are available to everyone. We are now granting you query-only access to
most common areas of the Library that will make sense to you. You are also granted basic terraformer’s access to records about Selene: horticulture, soil, history, plans, and current and past data flows. This will cross-reference to the other sciences—physics, geology, and astronomy. Much will be new, and so the translation is set to recognize that you do not speak the languages of these sciences. Even at the level we have set up for you, there is more information than you can possibly evaluate in your lifetime. You are the first person born on Selene to have these rights. Do you understand?”