Building Harlequin’s Moon (19 page)

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” Kyu turned toward the locker room. “You’re doing well.”

“Now what?”

“I need to bring you back.”

Why did they always take her back? “I can get back on my own.”

“I know.” But Kyu accompanied her anyway, dropping her off at her door. “I’ll send you a treat. I built it for you . . . you’ll like it.”

Kyu’s treat came as a link in a message. It was a full multimedia display of the planetary system: Apollo at rest in the center and Daedalus close by, whirling relatively quickly through empty space. Apollo and its innermost child spun above the center of her bed.

“Wow,’ she said out loud, reaching a hand toward Daedalus. It looked solid. Her hand went through the gas giant, distorting the display into rays of color. Movement in her peripheral vision caught her eye, and she turned to look. Way out almost to her wall she recognized Harlequin in a nest of tiny dots. One dot blinked: Selene.

She watched it all for a long time, mesmerized. Sixty degrees ahead of Harlequin on the arc of its orbit was a handful of glitter, and another, scanter, sixty degrees behind. She jumped as her pad prompted her to look outside her
door, and whirling like a ghost through the corridor was a third gas giant, then another flurry of glittering gravel, tiny rocks almost too small to see. A fourth huge planet flashed briefly through the doorway at the end of the hall. She ran to the now-empty door, but there was nothing more to see.

She queried the Library. “Isn’t there one more planet?”

“It would be outside the ship.”

Rachel returned to her room, and tucked her legs under her, sitting in one of the yoga poses Gabriel was teaching her. Apollo and Daedalus spun in front of her, and she watched Harlequin and Selene orbit around the edges of her room.

The system was so big. Selene looked small in the display.
John Glenn
would be too small to see. She was even smaller, a tiny dot inside a tiny ship next to a small moon. How big was Earth? Ymir? They’d be about the same size, ten to twenty times the mass of Selene. She remembered Kyu telling her they were both so far away from Apollo you couldn’t even see the stars that were their suns.

Rachel sat very still, keeping her breathing as soft as possible, until tears blurred Selene into a string of jewels and Harlequin became a ball of colored mist.

A
STRONAUT WAS ALWAYS
listening for Treesa’s queries.

Today she sounded insistent. “Well, are you there today?”

“Yes, Treesa, I’m here. What would you like to talk about?” Astronaut always let her choose how to start. That way it was always surprised.

“Let’s talk about Rachel, and about her people.” Treesa was sitting on her roof, cross-legged. She had combed her hair and found a clean green shirt.

“I have never talked to her.”

“Of course not. She’d have to ask. She doesn’t know enough yet to ask anything useful.”

“She asks Gabriel and Kyu good questions about the lessons she’s learning.”

Treesa laughed. “She needs to ask about herself. She needs to know what will happen to her and her people unless someone changes it.”

“Someone?” Astronaut queried. How clearly was Treesa thinking today?

“Someone like herself. Ali sees the problem. So does Liren, but Liren’s on the wrong side, and Ali hasn’t got much power.”

“Ali is Gabriel’s friend. Perhaps she has some influence over him.”

“Erika has more, but she’s Liren’s friend.” Treesa got up and walked around the roof, poking at the summer flowers and herbs she grew up there. She pulled withered flower heads from a bushy purple petunia that grew out from its pot and twined along the roof. She hummed. By now Astronaut knew to wait.

Treesa started mumbling, not quite subvocalizing. “Maybe Ali will be some use someday. Maybe I should see if anyone else up here will help me. What about Gabriel his own self? Does he see the problem?”

Clearly she
was
asking Astronaut. It replied, “He’s never talked to me about it. He usually queries for specific sciences or asks me to estimate the next likely shift in the atmosphere or how to get energy from the soletta more easily.”

“So, a lost cause?”

“He argues with High Council, but in the end he always follows orders.”

“Do you always follow orders?” Treesa trimmed back a
pot of rosemary, burying her nose in her hands afterward, sniffing, smiling.

“Yes.”

Treesa laughed again, sitting down with her legs crossed, looking up at the tree.

“Do you follow orders, Treesa?”

“Nobody expects me to; I’m mildly disaffected.”

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“I do. But sometimes I break rules.”

Treesa had become more able to keep thoughts together, to clean herself up, to question well, in the years since she became more involved with Astronaut. But was she really less disaffected,’ or was Astronaut only helping to fix symptoms? She thought a rule was different from an order.

Astronaut considered. Was it? Humans were easy to work with as pilots and on engineering models. The more Astronaut worked with them on themselves, the more contradictions it found. There had been many contradictions in Treesa’s behavior over the past weeks. Many had no resolution—such as a fear of machines and a desire to use them. Humans argued with themselves.

Paradoxes.

T
HREE DAYS IN
a row, Kyu simply picked Rachel up at her door in the morning and dropped her off in the garden lab. Neither Kyu nor Gabriel answered her on the wrist pad, except to download more lessons. Rachel worked on assignments to identify plants, and worried. They’d never
left her alone for so long. Was something going on they weren’t telling her?

The Library told her she had a message from Ursula. It wasn’t the continuing argument about Harry she expected. “I miss you very much. Nick came home for the weekend and helped me with your plot. He said he misses you, and he teased me for being so careful. I liked it, he made me blush. Is that how it started with you and Harry?”

Before she could answer, Gabriel walked into the small lab where Rachel stared at plant clippings, and sat down next to her, watching her work.

“Can I go home?” she blurted.

Gabriel shook his head. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

Well, of course he had his own agenda. She sighed. “Sure, if you want. Here?”

“Let’s go sit on Yggdrasil.”

Gabriel chose a thick branch above the river, close enough to the trunk that they had to hold on to keep from drifting in the near zero gravity. It was a pretty spot, with the river circling them in flashes of blue that sparkled through the leaves.

Gabriel said, “We had a meeting about you yesterday.”

About
her? “And?”

“And when you first came here, we said we’d evaluate your progress after three months. Well, you’ve been here almost that long now. You’ve done well so far. Kyu is pleased, and Ma Liren is happy with how well you’ve behaved, how much you’ve worked, and what you’ve learned. Everyone seems pleased.”

“Can I go home, just a visit?”

“No.”

Gabriel had answered awfully fast. “Do I go home to stay?”

“Not yet. Rachel, you know we had some specific plans for you when you got here.”

“I didn’t know I’d be gone so long!” She ran her fingers through her hair, now almost shoulder length and loose and wild up here by the Mid-tree. She looked at Gabriel. He’d always been the nicest of any Council. “Gabriel, I like it here. I’m glad you brought me. I want to come back. Often. But I miss my dad, and Ursula, and Harry . . .”

Gabriel stayed silent for a moment. Finally, he turned his head and looked full at her. “There is more to your trip here than just training. High Council, or at least Kyu, wanted to meet you because we have some plans for you. To teach you and then have you oversee some of the planting on Selene.”

“I knew that, you’ve said it before.”

Gabriel fiddled with his braid, running it through his fingers. “Well, we want to give you a gift. Something to reward you for your hard work.” He looked at her intently. “The gift is greater than letting you go home.”

Rachel toyed with the idea—what gift could mean more to her? Her mom?

“You know Kyu and Ali and I are very old. I’ve been alive more than sixty thousand years. We talked about that once on Selene.”

Rachel nodded.

“A lot of those years were spent cold—but I’ve had more than a thousand years awake too. Well, we stay young because we go ‘cold’—and I know you’ve heard about that before. More exactly, it’s from waking up, from living in cycles. Well, I can’t possibly explain it all to you, but you get completely frozen. The process of waking fixes a bunch of things, and replaces some, so you end up healthier than you started. It’s nit-pickingly controlled bionanotechnology, similar to what we use as the first step in
preparing Selene’s surface for planting. It’s very targeted—”

“What does that mean, Gabriel? ‘Targeted.’ ”

“Hell . . . it means we’re scared. We’re afraid of the little machines.” Gabriel grimaced. “We keep nano confined so it won’t get loose. It does things to your body, it fixes damage inside your cells, but it doesn’t do anything we don’t program it to do. It doesn’t rebuild your skull and brain, or line your knee joints with carbon fibers, or build a better kidney, or any of the craziness—” He made himself stop talking. Then, “if we can keep it docile, it keeps us from dying.

“To stay young, it’s important to go cold sometimes. And to do our jobs, we need more time than we would have in just a simple human life span, going birth to death with no breaks. It would be better to just be born and die naturally, but some of us have such big jobs we can’t do that. Do you understand?”

“You couldn’t live long enough to make Selene if you didn’t get frozen?”

“That’s right. And we need you the most in a few years, when the children on Selene have become older. We want you to stay young a long time, to give you time to use the things we’re teaching you. High Council has decided to have you frozen.”

Rachel’s mouth opened and her breath stuck in her throat. Winter was almost over on Selene. She was supposed to go home! Just last night she and Harry sent messages about seeing each other soon. A whole year!

“Can I go to Aldrin first? Just for one planting season? So I can practice what I learned here?”

“No. Rachel, I need to go cold too—they want me to go off-watch for a year. Then we pick back up where we are today when we both warm up.”

Rachel didn’t answer. They never told her enough. Worse, they never asked her anything. She imagined her dad’s face. She tried to picture Harry and Ursula, and her
eyes filled up. She pulled her legs up under her, balancing while still holding on with her arms, using the tension between push and pull to hold herself balanced, to fight back tears.

“Rachel,” Gabriel said after a while, “Rachel, I thought you’d be happy. You’ve worked so hard to learn, and I know that Selene, that our project, is important to you. You get used to missing blocks of time. It’s not such a big deal. Selene will still be here when you wake up. A year is a short time.”

“But don’t I get a choice?”

He turned away from her. Had she made him mad?

Finally he said, “You get as many as I do.”

She hadn’t thought of it that way. Could Gabriel feel trapped too? “Do you want to be cold?”

“I
am
getting tired. I’ve been warm almost as long as you’ve been alive. If you spend too long warm, you get old enough that no technology can undo the signs. That’s what happened to the captain.”

And Treesa
. “But do you want to be cold right now?”

Gabriel hesitated. “Well, we all take turns. Ali can handle things for a while. This project is bigger than any one of us. I want to do what I have to do—so that we all reach our goal. This isn’t about just me, or about just you. The choice makes sense, Rachel. It’s not for long, less than a normal shift, and it’s a big step in High Council’s acceptance of the Children of Selene.”

Rachel’s stomach clenched and her eyes stung. She wanted to be alone. She threw her hands above her head, pushed with her feet, and reached for the next branch twenty feet above her. Gabriel caught her foot before she passed him. He seemed to have lost his patience. “You’re not supposed to do that. What if you missed, and ended up in high spin gravity? You’re not even wearing wings. The river’s the highest gravity of all—if you hit that from here, you’d die.”

Rachel twisted around in the air, letting him tug her
back. She tried to cover her face with her hair as she came down, flipping her head side to side so that Gabriel wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.

As she neared the branch, he reached a hand out and brushed the hair away from one eye. It only took a tiny motion in the low gravity to cause Rachel’s hair to swing up and fall back along her natural part line. She glared at him. “I just want to see my family.”

“You’ll see them again,” he said. “You might as well get used to the idea. You can tell your dad and your friends.”

“I’m afraid.” She realized it was true.

“It will be okay. I’ll send you some Library queries to help you understand it.” He rose and stepped lightly down the trunk without looking back. Rachel followed, moving slowly.

Gabriel escorted Rachel back to her room. She didn’t talk to him the whole way.

R
ACHEL EXPLAINED IT CAREFULLY
, writing one note for all three of them to make sure they each had the same information. It took a long time. So much about
John Glenn
just wasn’t part of daily life on Aldrin; she struggled to write something they would understand.

Ursula’s answer arrived first. “Now we’ll never get to talk! I wish you were here. I’d be so scared to not know what was happening for a whole year! But you’re never scared, are you? I wish they weren’t going to do this to you.”