Building Harlequin’s Moon (18 page)

Rachel nodded.

“Please verbalize.” Kyu sounded even more serious than usual.

“Yes, I understand.”

Gabriel picked up the thread. “Rachel, there is more. Access rights depend on performance. You will gain more as you learn more, and you can also lose access. You must promise to use this information to further the aims of the Council of Humanity.”

Rachel tried to understand what Gabriel meant. Finally Gabriel spoke into her silence, explaining, “We are the Council of Humanity, Ali and I and many of the others you’ve met here. Kyu and four others are the High Council, chosen by us before we left Earth to provide guidance until we get to Ymir. Our goal is to preserve humanity. For your purposes it means you’ll do what we ask, and you’ll work to make Selene habitable. You’re already doing that, and I believe you will continue, but it needs to be recorded now as a contract that covers your direct access rights.”

Preserve humanity from what? “Do I become a member of the Council of Humanity if I promise?”

Kyu said, “You get access to the Library.”

No
. Kyu’s tone said that Rachel was skirting an edge. “Of course,” Rachel said, then, “yes, I’ll work for what you want.” Like she had a choice!

Rachel recalled a conversation with her father two years ago. He had warned her not to trust Council. What would he think of her pledging loyalty to Council while knowing so little, but standing on stars?

Kyu fixed Rachel’s eyes with hers. “And if you break your contract, you will lose your data access rights. Do you understand?”

Rachel nodded, then she remembered, and said, “Like Andrew. Yes.”

Kyu and Gabriel both relaxed. “Good job,” Gabriel said. “The trick will be learning to use it.” The stars faded as the floor returned to opaque black. Surfaces filled with pictures of Selene. Gabriel fiddled until the Hammered Sea covered two walls, and the first trees and the meadow in front of them took two more. Gloria and Nick were playing a game of catch-the-disk in the meadow.

Rachel walked toward the images of her friends. Selene looked as real as the stars had a moment ago. She felt as if she could step into the game and pluck the disk from the air.

“This is one way we access data flows,” Kyu said. “We call this a ‘magic room,’ since it has significant built-in display technology. A few minutes ago, you were seeing stars through cameras on the outside of the ship. Now, you’re seeing from cameras on the surface of Selene, nearly in real time. There’s a few seconds’ delay, so—see—Gloria really missed that catch a few moments ago.”

The only noise so far had been the conversations in the room. Now, the familiar sounds of Selene merged into her reality, and she heard her friends’ laughter and the wind blowing tree branches against each other and rustling leaves.

This must be how everyone knew her so hauntingly well.

Rachel watched Gloria and Nick playing, and wanted to run into the game.

She asked to see her garden plot in the grove. Harry was there, weeding. It must be warm; he wore a light shirt open at the sleeves. His biceps bunched and released as he patiently
pulled errant plants and set them aside for composting. He was humming, and she ached to talk to him, to tell him that she could see him. She reached her hand out toward the picture, then pulled it back, wiping at her eye.

She took three deep trembling breaths.

“So . . . so how do I do that? Say what I want to see? Can I see it outside of here—like in the garden? What if I just have a question? Are there more magic rooms?” Questions tumbled out of her.

“You’ll have to be with one of us to access a magic room. But you can query the Library on your own,” Gabriel said.

Kyu added, “You won’t have access to feeds like you just saw unless you’re with us in a magic room.”

The walls changed to white. Gabriel said, “You’ll have to learn to talk to the Library. We use subvocals—you’ll have to learn to make words down in your throat, quietly—otherwise we’d all walk around talking to thin air, and it would be hard to access information in the middle of a meeting. But for now you can use your normal speaking voice. Kyu will start teaching you what we do during your lessons tomorrow. After you’ve practiced, others won’t really know that you are holding a conversation. The Library, or
we
, can pick up small movements and whispers low enough that others can’t hear them unless they have an ear to your mouth. You can direct feeds to your pad, where you can see them in data windows just like you can see lessons Ali or Kyu or I send you. Every Councilperson has these skills, but you are the first Moon Born. You must not tell others about it without our permission.”

She couldn’t tell Harry?

“Or you will lose it. We can turn it off from here, even while you are on Selene.”

Rachel shivered. She felt even further away from her family and friends. Now she had more secrets. Keeping Harry a secret had hurt Ursula.

“I’ll need to be able to use it to be effective. That means people will know.”

“They will know you can get information like we can. For now, don’t tell them about the Library, and don’t let anyone else query it through you. Understand?”

“I’ll try.”

“Don’t worry about it now,” Kyu said. “After we get back to your room, I’ll help you figure out how to do easy queries.”

“A
ZTEC ANTS, CECROPIA
.” After three weeks, Rachel had learned the trick of nearly silent queries. Her throat moved more than Kyu’s or Gabriel’s, and her lips still pursed on “p” sounds.

Data windows opened on both sides of her, instantly filling with content lists. Two hundred thirty-seven references. She sighed.

“Try again.” Kyu’s face had a serene look Rachel associated with patience. Rachel hated that look.

They were alone in the biggest lab, the one with the double doors and a full lock that separated it from the rest of the garden. The walls hummed constantly with machinery, and colored lights flashed over various experiment boxes. Brown Aztec ants crawled on a cecropia branch in a clear square container on the bench in front of her. Rachel sighed. “In results. Purpose.”

Now there were fifty references. The first three summaries she requested defined the purpose of specific research.
Not even close to her question. Was this ever going to get as easy for her as it was for Kyu and Gabriel?

Kyu shook her head, her yellow hair beads rattling against each other. “What do the ants do for the tree?”

Rachel watched a particular ant, which simply seemed to be walking aimlessly around. “Full. Cecropia. Aztec ants. Symbiosis.”

It took twenty minutes to determine the ants would protect the tree from vines.

Kyu smiled approvingly. “Now, how would you test it?”

Rachel walked over to the lab bench, picked up a long strand of flowering liana, and cut off a two-foot length. She opened the top of the clear box with the ants in it, dangling the vine against the cecropia branch. Almost immediately the bottom of the vine was covered by ants. The liana trembled as more ants poured from the branch and started climbing toward her hand. Rachel dropped the vine so it lay over the branch, and set up a microphone data flow, listening to the wet crisp sounds of ants chewing leaves and stems. When the severed vine thumped against the bottom of the enclosure, the ants almost immediately vanished back in the cecropia branch and stems, leaving just a few walking carefully across the bark and leaves like sentinels.

Kyu cleared her throat. “Why would we choose to put Aztec ants on Selene?”

“If we don’t, the cecropias will be overrun by lianas, assuming we put lianas there.”

“Why would we choose not to?”

“Ants or vines?”

“Ants. We’ve already introduced vines.”

On Selene, insects were being introduced into Teaching Grove very slowly. None had been allowed to establish working colonies. “Because we don’t understand the right mix of insects for our jungle yet?”

“Very good, Rachel. We need to keep testing the balance of predator and prey so nothing grows out of hand and takes
over the whole ecology. Once we have insects, the trees we plant will seed, and Selene will begin growing on its own.”

Rachel considered this. “Our plants are doing fine.”

“Yes,” Kyu responded, “but we must be the pollinators.”

“Some of the mosses don’t need us—we found them in Erika’s Folly. Gabriel didn’t like that.”

“Gabriel is an engineer. But now we’re past basic engineering on Selene and working on biology. Biology is messy.”

“Gabriel’s good at biology too! He’s the one who helped me design my plot in the grove.”

Kyu laughed softly. “Yes, Gabriel is good at a lot of things.” Kyu cocked her head to the side, a way she showed Rachel she was in another conversation and didn’t want to be disturbed. Kyu’s throat barely moved, but her eyes narrowed.

“I’ve got to go, Rachel. Time to exercise.”

“Can I fly?”

“If you run afterward.”

Rachel sighed.

“—and you clean up the lab first.”

“Do we keep the ants?”

Kyu was already turning away. “No. We’ll start some leaf-cutter ants tomorrow.”

Rachel bagged all the biomass and dropped it into a disposal cube, pushing the button that would turn it all, even the ants, into compost. Everything from the lab was recycled, broken into constituent parts to become new things in the future. While the chute made soft sucking noises, she wiped down the counters.

She checked her wrist pad. The next open flight window was a whole half hour away. Twice each day, the floating lights and tenders were programmed to leave large areas of airspace clear, so that Yggdrasil and the flyers shared nearly empty spaces. Council could fly anytime. Kyu let Rachel go only when the busy airspace inside the garden
was cleared. There were days she didn’t get to fly at all.

She looked around the lab. It was clean enough to satisfy even Kyu.

“Message check.” The simplest useful thing about the Library was that she could check messages verbally. Harry and Ursula. Ursula would want a long answer; she’d wait until she was alone in her room. “First message.”

A data window described itself in the air in front of her, filling with Harry’s message. “Hi, Rachel. I miss you too. It rained yesterday, and Ali had us work anyway—we’re behind schedule. Like always. It was easier when you were here. There’s nobody much fun to talk to on my crew now. I wish you were here to go walking with.

“What have you learned about your mom?”

Rachel dictated her reply. “There are two thousand Colonists, and seventeen hundred sixty-three are cold. There are two hundred Council, and one hundred seventy are cold right now. Five High Council, two cold.” She wished she could tell Harry about the Library. It would be so much easier if she could tell him that queries on names of cold persons got refused and queries on her mom’s name produced lists of some communications jobs she did before she came to Selene, records of her contract with Rachel’s dad, and of Rachel’s birth. But she didn’t dare tell Harry. “If I ask Kyu about my mom, or about the cold people, she changes the subject. I miss you. I wish you were here. I’ve been studying ants today.”

She sent Harry the message, composed a short one about her day that she sent to her dad, Harry, and Ursula all together, and went to find her favorite set of wings: blue and yellow with fractal designs.

Rachel stood aft, in the lowest gravity of the garden. When she opened her wings, the small amount of lift provided by simply bringing them down gently raised her feet. She was almost as good at this trick as Kyu . . . at taking off from a standing start. She laughed, increasing her
speed quickly with a series of sweeping wing beats, the kind that made her arms feel extra-long.

Halfway across the sphere, branches began to spring out from the trunk. At their bases they reached directly away, and then began a lazy spiral: the tree was spinning and the branches were scarves floating in circles around it. Gabriel once explained to Rachel that the turning of the sphere, which gave it centrifugal force, pulled leaves and branches in its wake as the cellular structure of the tree reached for what it thought was gravity. Rachel loved flying in and out of the branches, ducking up and down.

Two other fliers pushed off aft, spiraling gently up together—a pair of red wings and a set of yellow ones banded with black. She swooped over a branch, coming near the red wings. The man stalled in the air and ducked below her. The woman in the yellow wings followed him. They wheeled, turning around, keeping their distance. She flew straight at them again. Before she’d gotten halfway, the fliers had turned and put Yggdrasil between her and them. She just wanted some attention! Council were all faster fliers than she was, and none of them let her catch them. Nobody but Kyu and Gabriel would let her fly near them. What kept them away from her? They watched her everywhere she went, and if she came close to any, they greeted her politely and continued about their business.

Green and brown flashed in her peripheral vision. She was too close to a branch. She corrected, and dipped down into clearer airspace above the track. Two runners chased each other near the river, dressed in tight black suits.

Rachel landed aft of the track, in the six-tenths gravity belt that mimicked Selene. She racked the wings and walked to the gym room, where she pulled on bright blue running clothes from her locker, then started down-spiral toward the river, hoping to see the runners she’d spotted from the air. The track was empty. She was surprised at how tense she was, and even more surprised to find that
halfway around she wasn’t even tired yet. The empty track and the stony faces of Council ran through her mind, making her stomach knot.

When would Gabriel let her go home?

Even watching Selene from the magic rooms had become hard. It was like being on the ship—people going about their business as if she weren’t there.

She half expected Kyu to meet her on the track. Instead, she was standing at the end of the run, watching. “Good job. Six minutes per kilometer. That’s your best so far.” Kyu easily ran a five-minute pace, even with her shorter legs.