Building Harlequin’s Moon (20 page)

Her dad sent: “I’m going to miss you very much, honey. I already miss you. Harry and I are getting along, and I help him keep your plants up sometimes when nothing breaks around here that I have to fix. He’s a good young man, but it’s not like having you here. I’m pleased you’re learning so much. Don’t be scared, honey, it will be okay. Write to me as soon as you can.”

Harry’s answer took so long Rachel dozed fitfully while
she waited. When her pad chimed, his message was so
Harry
that she laughed. “Tell me what it feels like. Do they put you in a bed? Or something else? How do they wake you up? You’re so lucky. I wish I were there. I miss you very much. Tell me everything that happens. I’ll be waiting for you. I love you.”

That hurt even worse than the other two answers.

She checked on her readings from the grove. Based on the temperature, it might be morning there, with Apollo just brightening the leaves and warming the soil.

She looked up everything she could about the icing procedure. She learned she was poised to be destroyed and then resurrected, each cell healed by a combination of machines and bacteria smaller than the parts of plants she examined in the labs under microscopes. She stared at her hands and feet for a long time, imagining them rigid and frozen while tiny machines crawled through them, to make them somehow better than they were now.

A small part of her brain whispered,
You’re fine, exactly like you are
. She tried to think of a place to run, to hide.

G
ABRIEL CAREFULLY ADJUSTED
the pads and straps designed to hold Rachel’s body safely nestled in the contoured white couch. She lay nearly naked under the straps, limbs straight, hair bound back from her face. Her eyes fluttered and darted around the room, and her fingers clenched and unclenched as she lay on the gurney. He tried to remember the first time he had made this choice, but it happened so long ago he had no access to himself at that
age. He had been twenty-seven, ten years older than Rachel was now.

His pride in her rose as she stayed quiet, not voicing her fears even though they were clearly pushing her self-control. He put a hand on Rachel’s hand, quieting it, and spoke gently to her. “Breathe to relax. Remember the pranayama yoga breath I taught you? Fill your lower belly, then your lungs, then your chest. Hold. Release in reverse.” She nodded, and he watched her flat belly round up and fall more slowly. “That’s good. Keep it up.”

The small tremors in her muscles slowed. One theory suggested that the disaffected, the few Council and Colonists who woke insane, had gone into the cryotanks deathly afraid; that there existed a causal link between fear and madness. Another theory proposed that some people couldn’t absorb the shock of being in the wrong place and time. Others pointed to unidentified flaws in the technology.

Gabriel didn’t like giving Rachel no choice. Why do this to her so young? She wasn’t injured.

He finished the routine prep. Earplugs, face mask, a final check of body position and chin tilt.

The drugs flowing into her system slowed her breathing to a near stop. Her eyes calmed to a glassy stare, then closed. She looked very young, beautiful, and far more fragile than her waking self. The longer hair she had grown aboard
John Glenn
softened the angles of her face.

The medical system started dribbling nano into her blood. It would freeze as her blood froze, but the tiny machines would remember their programming as Rachel’s body warmed to just below normal body temperature next year.

Gabriel placed the clear lid over the couch and sealed it, then pushed it into the wall with the other ice trays. A soft sucking sound indicated a clean seal. The rest of the process was automatic. He put his hand briefly on the label, and whispered, “Good dreaming.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
he sat in the tiny kitchen, drumming his fingers on the table, waiting for Clare to speak. Clare had warmed that morning. “Coffee?” she asked.

He smiled, and went to the counter, fetching the bulb of coffee he had made when he came in. “So, boss, ready to take over for me?”

Clare reached for the bulb, wrapping her hands around it. “You always hate going off-shift.”

“I might miss something.”

Clare—his boss, the Chief Terraformer member of High Council—was a small blond woman, compact, square, and always purposeful. She let him run design work on Selene, choosing to stay on
John Glenn
to supervise and deal with policy. No High Council went to Selene often. Kyu, Liren, and Rich had never gone.

“It’s just a year. Liren briefed me . . . you’ve brought your protégé up here.” She sipped coffee and smiled broadly. “The first warm thing always tastes like life to me. Liren said you’ve been working hard, and that you’ve done a creditable job with Rachel. She didn’t sound exactly like she approved, though,” Clare mused.

“There are a few other things to worry about.” Gabriel filled her in on the situation with Andrew, and brought her up-to-date on the other students as well.

“So Andrew’s sentence is for life?”

“We let him think that. If it seems to be working as a deterrent, then, yes, we’ll leave it like that. Keep an eye on that situation, will you?”

“Of course.”

Ever since Selene came alive with plants and people, freezing was hard. Shift changes always happened in the middle of something he cared about. He stood up and started pacing. “You were right to worry about the Earth Born. Some of them are clamoring to be relieved. Others
want to stay with their young families and never return to the tanks.” He didn’t make suggestions about either situation; Clare could take care of them.

Clare watched him pace. “You’ve got the energy of a cat. Something else is bothering you.”

“It sure is. The flare cycle. Two years ago there was a really big one, and some of the students and I had to sit it out in a shelter. The one last week was nearly as bad. I put some resources into shelter maintenance. Statistically, Apollo is a little more active than we expected. In the early stages, when no one lived on the surface, we didn’t track small flares as carefully as we do now. As the population increases it will be harder to protect them. Can you please watch for trends?”

Clare nodded her head, a small smile creeping along her face. “Of course, chief worrier. I’d have watched anyway.”

“I know, but thanks. There’s more to protect there now.”

“A lot more plants.”

He smiled at her. She understood what he said the first time.

Clare finished her coffee. “I’ll take care of it. Good dreaming to you.” She got up and left.

Gabriel sat in the empty room and wrote a message to Erika. If an emergency forced her to warm before him, he wanted her to have a last message from right before he went cold, to know he loved her.

G
ABRIEL STRETCHED AND
blinked. He lay in the warming room, on a soft bed. His eyes took in the captain and Clare standing together, looking serious. That wasn’t right. The captain never met him on waking.

His body felt normal; he hadn’t been given an emergency wakeup cocktail.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Well, there’ve been some . . . problems . . . on Selene,” Clare said. “You were right.”

Did they wake him early? Energy surged up his spine, an adrenaline push. “I hate it when I’m right. What’s—”

“Flares. They’ve picked up—and so we decided to fortify. We didn’t even lose many plants; the antiradiation gene modifications have been working.”

That didn’t sound too bad. “What else?”

The captain’s craggy face looked stern. “It took us twenty years.”

Huh? Well, he’d been through—Rachel! “How’s Rachel? Who woke her up? How did she—”

“She’s still cold,” Clare said.

Gabriel struggled to sit up, his spine complaining.

The captain held out a hand. “Hey, calm down. It’s not so bad.” He always argued for calm. Whatever had happened to him in the lonely years while he flew his crippled starship to Gliese 876 had stripped him of any fire for
fights that didn’t matter or matters that couldn’t be changed. It was cold water on Gabriel’s anger, and he hated it while knowing he needed it.

G
ABRIEL HAD BEEN RUNNING
around the river for two hours straight. Be damned to the rules about how to treat a just-warmed body. As he ran, he saw Ma Liren’s face in front of him. Liren was stubborn and shortsighted, but not even Liren could possibly be so out of touch as to think
this
a good idea. Could she? Or did High Council really make the decision together?

Three times as many flares as they’d expected. An excuse—not a reason to leave him an icicle! He was chief planet designer; the one they’d chosen to warm in cycles for all of the moon’s long painful birth, the one who warmed over and over to an empty ship with just an AI for company. Every several centuries, to check chemistry and volatiles and Selene’s overall stability and . . . and what about Rachel? His feet pounded on the track under him. His breath started to get ragged, and his chest to hurt. Were they thinking of Rachel
at all?
He didn’t slow down. The medical monitoring system flashed a yellow light in his peripheral vision. His body wasn’t cleared for such vigorous exercise yet.

It
was
a short sleep for him; he’d been cold for hundreds of years at a time. But then, shipmates he cared about were cold too. For Rachel it represented her lifetime once over. Her friends were now twice her age. He’d given her his goddamned word.

Liren was cold. Given how Gabriel felt, that was good, even if it left him nobody to scream at. Worse, Ali was cold, and he couldn’t talk to her or get her help with Rachel. Erika was still cold, due to finally warm this year, but not today. He’d ranted at Astronaut, for what that was worth. No AI dealt well with deep human emotions. Even
the AIs they’d fled on Earth didn’t understand emotions. Astronaut had been frustratingly unconcerned.

He heard footsteps behind him on the track. The captain easily outpaced him. “Trying to outrun decisions you can’t change?”

“Maybe.”

“You know better.”

Gabriel nodded, managing to force out a single word. “So?”

“You’re going to have to accept it.”

“I know.” Gabriel looked for a burst of speed, but his tired legs just wouldn’t respond well enough to run away from the older man. He slowed to a walk and shook his head. When his breath returned he asked, “How did you let it happen?”

The captain slowed too, matching Gabriel’s pace. “Mad at me too?” The captain arched an eyebrow at him.

“Sure, why not? Liren had to get—permission for such a—long shift change.”

“It wasn’t a big deal. You’ve had shifts changed before. Now we’re ready to resume work toward the collider. We didn’t need you to make flare-hardened buildings.”

They walked in silence, and then Gabriel said, “Captain, I think I can stop the flares.”

“Yeah?”

“Build the orbital tether. We can’t use it to move around among the Harlequin moons, but we can still build it, and it’s designed as a superconductor—”

“Is it? I didn’t know that.”

“The elevator cars would ride it using magnetic fields, wouldn’t they? Direct contact would be at meteor speeds. That’d be crazy. The orbital tethers in Sol system were all superconductors. I could use the Beanstalk as sort of a lightning rod. Make a stretch of superconducting cable; the design is for two hundred thousand kilometers; that’s enough. One end on Daedalus—”

“In.”

“Yeah, in. Daedalus doesn’t have a surface. It’s not spinning fast enough either, so we won’t have an actual orbital tether. I’ll have to put a solar sail on the far end, and the near end doesn’t have to reach down to Daedalus . . . Hell, that’s a nasty erosive environment. So. When Apollo’s magnetic field knots around Daedalus, the cable will bleed out the charge.”

“That’s a lot of superconductor,” the captain said.

“Sure, megatons, but we already need megatons of superconductor for the collider. We’ll have the equipment.”

They walked a few hundred more yards, and then the captain said, “If your light-sail falls in Daedalus’s shadow, the whole cable will just collapse.”

“Yeah, so I won’t let it.”

“You haven’t checked the numbers with Astronaut?”

“No, I just thought this up while I was running. We’ve
got
to stop the flares.”

“Okay, do that, and then submit it to us for the next High Council meeting. You might look for some less time-intensive ideas while you’re at it.”

“Yes sir. You do expect me to wake Rachel now?”

“Liren thought you’d want to be able to pick up where you left off, and resume her training.”

Gabriel remembered how much Rachel had wanted to go home before he’d frozen her. “First I have to stop her from committing suicide. She had a boyfriend down there. Now he’s twice her age! They don’t see time like we do—how could they? Did anyone ask her?”