Building Harlequin’s Moon (21 page)

“Gabe, she was cold. We were busy.”

“Didn’t her family ask about her?”

“I don’t know.”

Gabriel wanted to keep arguing, but this was his captain. He swallowed and kept walking, staying ahead of the man so he wouldn’t see Gabriel’s anger. “I could have helped with the flare response,” he said quietly.

“Relax. You’re wound too damn tight. You can’t do everything,” the captain said, putting a hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “We did all right. It simply isn’t that big a deal. Get some perspective.”

G
ABRIEL SAT ALONE
in his office. Information streamed from
John Glenn’s
net into data windows surrounding Gabriel. One data stream displayed a summary med unit feed: Rachel was warming.

Watching the flow of data, he nodded. The girl was still far from conscious. Astronaut monitored the fine details of the med-flow. The AI said, “She’s waking slowly. Remember, this is a first time. Medical control is finding minor discrepancies with Earth Born design. Her bone structure and some glandular activity are adapted to low gravity. Adjustments are being made.”

Gabriel gave a curt nod. He wasn’t feeling particularly patient.

He switched one wall screen to a two-dimensional list—his and Astronaut’s jointly prepared recommendation of what to show Rachel as she woke. He added and subtracted small things by instinct, operating always by the cardinal rules: Without an emergency, never start with a shock, stay near to what the awakener loves, make sure that the jump from the subject’s last waking image to their first is not too great. The routine work left half of his attention free to gaze at the picture of Selene adrift on the ceiling.

Twenty years had made more of a difference than any since the asteroid-bashing early days. Almost five percent of the terraformed moon was green now, and another five had the color of fertile soil, the blended reddish brown of regolith coming alive. A camp had sprung up out in the plantings, named Gagarin, nearly as big as Aldrin had been the last time he’d seen it. Like the old Aldrin, Gagarin was a tent city with a community flare shelter.

“Astronaut—superimpose the collider’s path.”

A bright white line began five degrees south of Clarke Base, ran just north of Erika’s Folly, and then passed through much of the moonlet that Gabriel had left barren. When Gabriel zoomed in, he still saw a few dull greens and grays that might be lichens or mosses. He wasn’t particularly happy to see things growing on the far side of Selene, where he hadn’t planted them, but he and Ali had a running argument about how quickly unintended consequences would manifest on Selene. It looked like she was winning. Ali could never have built Selene, but she was a sweetheart of a biologist.

Let the plants run, then. They’d make soil for what he would grow someday.

The white line almost followed Selene’s equator. Gabriel followed the circle around to where the collider would close. Building pads were being prepared there, south of the base, for the big containment and materials warehouses and for scientific offices.

“Astronaut, erase the collider. Run up a detailed analysis of everything that’s been done in Aldrin in the last twenty years.”

Gabriel knew he needed to be the one to warm Rachel, to reorient her. It might be terribly difficult to gain her trust again. Guilt pulled at him even though he had been as cold as Rachel when the decision was made. He couldn’t complain about a High Council decision to a Moon Born teenager. But what could he say?

Astronaut called him, and Gabriel headed down the corridor toward the recovery room. By the time he arrived, Rachel’s eyes were open. Her red hair had been washed and dried by med staff, and lay unbound around her. Everywhere, her skin had the shine and tight glow of the newly awakened.

“Good morning, sleeper,” he murmured, surprised at how glad he was to see her. She tried to talk, managing
squeaks from her long-unused vocal cords. The med-feed suggested she sleep more, promised lubricants for her voice and an easier awakening soon.

He placed his thumbs on her shoulders, fingers in the hollow above her collarbone. Touch was part of returning an iced sleeper to life. As he worked at her neck muscles she eased back to sleep, smiling.

A half day passed before Astronaut called him back to her. He heard her voice again, perkier, almost herself already. “Good morning, Gabe. Nice nap.”

He smiled at her upbeat mood, hesitating to shatter it.

He took her to a magic room. She could walk, although hesitantly. Gabriel helped her settle down, brought her tea and a blanket, and took his own seat. He turned on the walls. An image of Harlequin as seen from an outer moon filled half the view; familiar patterns of red and gray swirled together like airbrushed paint. Tiny diamond shock waves danced in the cloud bands. Harlequin rotated in just under two hours. Rings extended beyond the ceiling, crawled down the walls and wrapped onto the floor, bent crazily, wide and flat and touched by brightness.

Rachel smiled for the first time. Good, he thought. A good start.

“This,” he started, “will take a few days. I’ll spend some time with you each day, highlighting changes since you went down. Even so short a span can be disorienting. First, there’s something you need to know about.”

She looked over at him curiously, the image of Harlequin’s rings spilling bands of light and dark across her face.

“Did everything go okay? I feel really wonderful—like I’m new.”

“You’re fine. Astronaut says the med tech needed some adjusting, but no big deal. That’s not it—you handled the process perfectly. Rachel, we were cold longer than we expected.” He swallowed. He couldn’t show his anger, and he felt like hiding it was a lie.

The color was draining from Rachel’s face.

Gabriel sought for something true to say. “The change will be hard. Nevertheless, recall that we only slept a short time by Council and High Council standards.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

“Ali would have said no to this, but she followed us into the cryotanks. I was cold too. No one else would have understood, not exactly. And so when some things made sense—from a project management viewpoint because there have been a lot of flares on Apollo—they were done. One of those things was letting you and me sleep until they thought we’d actually be needed.” There. He could believe those words, at least a little bit.

Rachel looked at her hands, turning them over and over, as if she were trying to identify them as hers. She swallowed, and then looked directly at him, fiercely afraid. “How long? A hundred years? A thousand?
Sixty thousand?
”

“No, no,
no
. Twenty years. And four months.”

She looked away from him, saying nothing, no movement giving away her feelings.

He watched the back of her head for a while, then centered the image of Harlequin directly in front of her eyes. He switched cams so Selene moved in from the left, biting a hole in Harlequin. Life showed as green and gray fractal masses gathered near the equator. Gabriel zoomed in on the moon, obscuring the gas giant Harlequin completely.

Details resolved. Aldrin now filled the screen. The edges of the town had grown; more housing, a lot more green of plantings. Trees filled parks, tents had transformed to structures.

He expected her to ask about Harry first. When she finally spoke, her voice had the measured slowness of the disaffected. “Gabriel,” she asked, “what about the grove?”

He panned the view away from Aldrin, followed a wide road that had once been a path. He hadn’t looked closely at this yet himself. The meadow in front of the First Trees was
dotted with yellow and white flowers—he looked to see what they were. Daisies. That meant it wasn’t as humid as he wanted. He started to talk about atmosphere and humidity, keeping a running dialogue at the back of Rachel’s head as he explored the First Trees. They were taller, wider, a riot of jungle canopy. Someone had been playing with birds while they slept. Finches and parakeets flashed here and there in the foliage, implying insects as well. Probably Clare. He realized he had never told Rachel about his High Councilwoman boss, so he rattled on about Clare for a while, attempting distraction. He had to talk, to keep her focused on his words rather than the twenty years. He ran out of words and his throat became too dry to form more.

He wished Rachel would turn around so he could see her face. It wasn’t wise to push her. The most disaffected, the craziest sleepers, had been pushed the hardest on wakening. Council had learned to give people time.

Her head moved slowly from right to left, watching. Selene roll past her. She said, “Show me my plot.”

Of course. Gabriel searched. Teaching Grove had grown. He had to cross-check. “It’s there.”

The cecropia tree that she had nurtured and planted identified it for sure. It stood taller than the other trees, bursting above the small canopy. The trees were healthy and vibrant, a chorus of greens, and the paths around them appeared carefully tended. Lianas threaded their way through the small jungle, and two tiny yellow and blue birds hopped about on a wide vine, chasing each other.

At last Rachel turned toward him, and just like the day he had told her they would be cold, she had tears in her eyes. He hated it.

“Gabriel, what about my family?”

“Not now. Wait.” This would be tricky.

“Has something bad happened?” She looked frightened. Why was he handling this so poorly? Because he felt so bad for Rachel?

“This is enough to absorb for now,” he said a little too forcefully. He slowed down. “Changes in people you know are harder than changes in places. Trust me—awakening always starts with the general, then the specific.”

“Why doesn’t my Library bud work? Where’s my wrist pad?”

“You can have it all back soon,” he said.

She sighed and leaned back. She closed her eyes and said nothing, looking almost asleep, her awareness obvious only in the broken rhythm of her breathing. After a while, Gabriel took her to her room. He commanded the med-feed to put her to sleep until the next morning.

G
ABRIEL LAY PRONE
on a bench in the garden, near a fountain that used a combination of spin gravity, magnetic fields, and momentum to run water in a bounded infinity pattern. He focused on the water, struggling for calm, trying to let the sound of the water run through him and clean his emotions.

The captain’s voice startled him so he almost fell off the bench. “So, did she take it as hard as you thought?”

“She’s angry. All I’ve told her so far is how much time passed while she slept. She wants to know everything at once.”

“Of course she does.”

Gabriel stood and started walking. The captain followed. “Liren should have wakened me when the flares kept going.”

“You said that,” the captain replied dryly. “She’s not warm to fuss about it to.”

“It wouldn’t do any good anyway. I am worried about the flares.”

“Yes. There are more shelters, and people are more careful. We handled it.”

“I talked to Astronaut, and it thinks bigger flares might happen. I need to work on that flare kite I talked about. We might need to give Selene a thicker shield somehow—thicken the atmosphere even more, or build some kind of shield around it, or maybe just a safer place . . .” Gabriel was lost in the problem . . . “If we brought in another comet, that would add—”

“Easy, Gabriel. We should talk about it.” The captain laid a hand on his shoulder. “But first, why don’t you go to Selene and see what we’ve done so far?”

“Huh? Oh, yes. But I have to take Rachel.”

“So take her.”

Gabriel could hardly wait to get off the ship.

R
ACHEL FELT VIVIDLY
alive: remade. Every sense was a flood. Her fingernails were hard and round, her hair shone, colors were bright and distinct from one another, and even sounds had an amazing clarity. Her body wanted to get up and dance and run and go to the garden and fly.

Her heart wanted to flee back to sleep, back to the peaceful blankness of the cryotanks where the nightmare wasn’t real, where she would wake up and go back to Aldrin and find Harry waiting for her and continue her last argument with Ursula. She wanted to lie on her bed in her tent and smell dinner as her father cooked it.

Her body won. The new energy kept her from sleep. No matter about the time, she wanted to see her dad and Harry and Ursula. Her dad needed to know she was all right. He
must be so worried. Ursula was already suspicious of Council; what must she think now? And Harry; there were a million things she couldn’t think about a Harry twice her age.

She had surrendered her wrist pad when she went cold. She tried some Library queries again, and heard only silence. So she remained cut off, whispering to emptiness. Like Andrew.

Rachel had to talk Gabriel into telling her what had happened, and into returning her wrist pad and communication. She had to get home. She wouldn’t stay here, not now. She wouldn’t let them make her stay. Too many unexpected things had happened. She did yoga, trying to prepare herself for seeing Gabriel. Even as she balanced on one leg, her mind ran scenarios: what had twenty years done to her friends?

Was Harry waiting for her? He couldn’t be. Her breath caught and she fell sideways, hopping to keep her balance. What about Ursula? Did she make the planting teams? Was she still afraid of the big planters? She tightened her thigh to give her balancing leg strength and reached back. Her hand easily held her foot and she pulled up on it, stretching so the back of her foot approached the back of her head.

Dad! Surely he knew she didn’t mean
this
. She wobbled, and straightened the arm that was in front of her, reaching to retain balance. She needed to be strong to talk Gabriel into letting her go home.

Rachel sat cross-legged on the bed when he finally stood in her doorway. She blinked, looking past him, not sure she could meet his eyes and stay calm. He balanced a tray of bread and apple slices and tea in his right hand, and he was dressed formally. His long hair was carefully combed so it flowed to his waist. He smiled, and in spite of herself, her own smile flickered awake.