Building Harlequin’s Moon (38 page)

“Not anymore,” Rachel said.

Her mother twitched, then barked laughter.

“You didn’t think of that?”

“Of course I know that. I don’t want to be—now. Now is like living a nightmare. I want to sleep away this place and this time and wake on Ymir.”

Her mom had gotten better
before
she asked to stay on
John Glenn?
She didn’t have to stay? She just wanted to stay?

“So you stayed here because you missed your family?” Rachel couldn’t let that go. “Aren’t I family?”

Kristin didn’t answer.

A high sound chirped from her wrist, followed by a throaty frog’s croak. It was an alert from Ysabet to signal Rachel that Beth was about to wake. But she couldn’t leave—not yet.

Rachel thought about Treesa, and how she had talked of a fiancé” on another ship. Of her own losses. She said, “You know, you have to go on. They froze me—for twenty years—and I hated it. It wasn’t my choice. I got over it—I’m doing what I can for Selene, and for my family and friends there. But you . . . just . . . left us?”

Kristin shook her head. “If I had stayed on Selene, I would be getting old now. Council didn’t want us to stay anyway. They wanted us to have kids and come back. I was following orders. Ymir . . . Ymir is my . . . destiny. You can’t possibly understand.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“I’m sorry for that,” Kristin said.

The frog croak sounded from Rachel’s wrist pad again. She had to be there for Beth. “Mom? There’s something I have to do, and I can’t change it. I can’t miss it. I made a promise to a friend of mine—you see, she got hurt, and Council brought us here because of it, and I promised her I’d be with her when she wakes up.”

Kristin looked down at her fingers, flexing them carefully. She nodded, keeping her face turned toward her hands.

Rachel had other things to ask, but they all stuck in her throat, too small to say. Finally, she said, “Dad was yelling
for
you, not
at
you. I was there. I spent a long time looking
for
you. Even here. And now I have no idea why.”

Rachel didn’t let herself look back as she left to see her friend.

G
ABRIEL
, E
RIKA, AND
Ali sat in one of the small galleys drinking coffee and eating grapes and bananas after a run. They were still slick with sweat and smelled of exercise.

The door swung open, and Treesa walked into the room. Gabriel hadn’t seen her outside the garden for years. He blinked. She looked as old as Captain Hunter. Ex-captain Hunter.

“Good afternoon,” Treesa said. She dispensed a bulb of coffee casually, as if she visited the galley every day. She sat, ignoring Erika and Ali, and looked at Gabriel. “I’ve just come from Medical. I’ve gotten clearance and permission to join you in the Refuge project.”

Treesa was Council. His peer. She was also disaffected.

Wasn’t she? What had changed? She looked neater than he’d ever seen her. “What can you do?”

“I’m a communications officer. I can help you run communications at Clarke Base, and besides, I’ve been helping in the garden for a long time. Maybe Ali can use my help as well.” She smiled at Ali, looking for all the world like a doting grandmother.

Ali returned the smile. “Why sure, Treesa, I could use help. I plan to design a fish habitat at Erika’s Folly and the Hammered Sea.”

Treesa looked pleased. “You mean the Sea of Refuge?”

“Huh?” Gabriel grunted.

“Well, isn’t it the Sea of Refuge now? You’re putting Refuge there, right? It seems a bit—more—gentle.”

Ali grinned. “Hey, that’s a great idea! And sure, come on down.” She glanced over at Gabriel, saying, “We’ve been hoping more Council would
want
to go to Selene.”

Gabriel gave up. People were always the hardest part of a project. “It will be nice to have you.” Just what he needed, a Council member he had to watch closely for crazy behavior.

Treesa drained her coffee bulb, and headed for the door.

“Be ready to leave in a week,” Gabriel said to Treesa’s retreating back.

B
ETH COULD WALK.
She wobbled a little. The nerves were woven in a new pattern, and she was still learning it. It had only been two days, and already Beth could stay up on her healing legs for a whole hour.

Rachel poured Beth a glass of water, and sat down by the edge of the bed. “I’m so happy this worked. You’re walking great.”

Beth’s brows tugged together in a frown. “I want to go home.”

“Just be happy you weren’t iced. They’ll send us home when they’re ready. We don’t control the Council.”

“They seem to listen to you.”

Rachel threw back her head and laughed. “Less than you know.”

Ali stepped into the room, smiling. “How are you?”

Beth repeated, “I want to go home.”

Ali raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. “And miss seeing the mysteries of
John Glenn?
”

“How do I know you didn’t ice me? How do I know my friends are all still my age?” Beth pleaded.

“I can show you.” Ali tapped some commands into the display above Beth’s bed. “Let’s go. I’ve just cleared you for an hour in a magic room.”

Beth’s eyes lit up. “A magic room? Rachel told me about those. Really? You’ll take me to one?”

Ali laughed again, clearly in a good mood. Beth and Rachel followed her. It was Beth’s first trip outside Medical, and she flinched from the moving pictures on the walls. Shifts in gravity confused her. By the time they got to the magic room, sweat beaded her forehead and her breath came in fast gulps.

They settled into the chairs, and Ali did the same trick Gabriel had used on Rachel her first time here, floating them in a sea of stars. Beth clutched the edge of her seat and giggled nervously. Rachel started pointing out constellations, and Beth and Rachel shared their names for them with Ali: the Tree, Two Viaducts, and Children Playing. Next, Ali brought up a bird’s eye view of Aldrin on the wall in front of Beth.

“Show me my family.”

Ali brought a second data window, consulted it, and selected a camera. The view centered on the path outside the child care center, where Gloria held Beth’s younger sister, Miriam. Sound came up. Miriam cried into Gloria’s shoulder, and Gloria patted her child’s head, saying, “I know, I know. You’ll like our new home too. I promise. It’ll be okay.”

Miriam’s sobs intensified, and the camera angle showed Gloria’s face almost head-on. A tear streaked down her cheek. She turned, and carrying Miriam, started home.

Ali left the camera in place, frowning.

“What did she mean?” Beth asked.

Rachel knew. “They’re moving us. Everyone. Because of the fire, and because of the Refuge project.”

“They’re making us leave Aldrin?”

Ali spoke. “It has to happen. We built Aldrin a long way from the Hammered Sea because we didn’t know how stable the crater would be; we were worried about drowning our new city. But Refuge will be
in
the Hammered Sea—we’re calling it the Sea of Refuge now—and it’ll be a safer place. Refuge will keep everyone safe from flares—the water in the sea will be a shield.”

New implications hit Rachel. Her attention had been on her mom, and on Beth, and the Council. “What about the groves? Teaching Grove? The First Trees? Almost half are left.”

“I don’t know,” Ali said.

Rachel frowned.

Ali kept talking. “You’ll be there before they actually move. You’re going back in three days.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Rachel found a message from her mom: “I’m sorry for being rude. Will you meet me for breakfast in the garden cafeteria at ten?”

Rachel’s stomach fluttered. She was still angry with Kristin, but she wanted to understand. Needed to understand.
She hadn’t seen Kristin since she woke in Medical, but their conversation had turned over and over in her mind. If only she had been kinder.

“I’ll be there,” she sent back. She checked her watch—time to go.

Rachel found Kristin sitting at a table with a bag in front of her. Kristin looked up as her daughter entered and smiled softly. “Remember how I used to take you on picnics? I thought we’d go sit by the garden wall and share a picnic.”

Rachel smiled. She remembered the picnics. “Okay, let’s go.”

They spent the walk up-spiral talking stiltedly about inconsequential things like how Kristin felt after waking (fine) and how Rachel was doing (she’d stopped helping Ali for now, spending time showing Beth around the ship).

They settled on the lawn, and Kristin took her shoes off and ran her bare toes through the grass. She set out bread, juice, bananas, and protein bars. The air was heavy with the scent of blooming honeysuckle that wound up the river wall across the path from them.

“I thought, perhaps, I should tell you my story,” Kristin said. “You told me how you felt when I left you, but you don’t really know me. You were seven.”

Rachel nodded, peeling a banana. “All right.”

“You know why we left? How scary Earth was becoming for humans?”

Rachel grimaced. Every Council member she met wanted to tell her about Sol system.

“You can’t really know, though,” Kristin said. “It’s like yesterday for me. It was only eight years ago, as far as I remember. The sixty thousand years in between was ice time for me, and so I still remember how the AIs ran things, how people died right and left. Or got locked up. My older sister disappeared and never came back. They took her for ‘attempting to destroy an intelligence.’ I have no idea what she did, and neither did my parents. That’s why we came
here—why we left. I barely made it. My family had money, and Ma Liren wanted Mom’s medical skills so much, she got Rich to take me on as an assistant communications tech.” Kristin’s voice trailed off, and she took a bite of bread, looking at her bare feet and wriggling them in grass.

“Go on,” Rachel prompted, intensely curious. “Was it hard to leave home?”

“Home was scary. We wanted to leave. The AIs and the augmented were trying to pass laws to keep us from leaving, and we were demonstrating—oh—that doesn’t matter. We left, and I was so glad to get a berth at all I didn’t care that my parents were on
Leif
. I was the youngest Colonist they took—I was only thirty years old.”

Kristin looked at her toes again, then at Rachel. “This is the hard part—the part I need you to understand. Can you try to pretend you’ve been jerked away from everything you knew? That you had plans that got—stopped—before you knew it? Didn’t something like that happen to you when you were frozen?”

So her mom must have talked to someone about her. Probably Ali.

Kristin said, “For you it was an accident.

“We take orders from Council. We all do. We’re alive because of them; we got away because they financed this trip. Imagine you got an order to go live someplace you hated, and to share your bed with a man you didn’t know, who didn’t share any of your experiences or history. Your dad was only nineteen when they contracted us—younger than you are now. And I was thirty. I was awake—
thawed
—in the wrong place, separated from everyone I loved by too many years to count. My sister—her name was Rachel—I named you after her. I still don’t know if they killed her, or changed her, or just locked her up somewhere, or sent her somewhere . . . but no matter—she was long dead by the time I woke up. And my parents were gone too—far away, maybe still iced, waiting to help terraform Ymir, but more
likely warmed and long dead. Doesn’t matter. I knew then I’d never see them.”

Tears ran down her mom’s face, and Rachel reached out and put a hand on Kristin’s shoulder. Kristin shivered, but didn’t take Rachel’s hand.

“Let me finish. I need . . . I need for you to understand. What you said, when I woke up in Medical, it made me think about how you must have felt.”

Rachel squeezed her mother’s shoulder.

“They ordered us to contract. They ordered us to have children. I didn’t want to. I wasn’t ready. There was supposed to be a new world waiting for me. A place where we could be truly human, could build a home, like Earth, but where we didn’t have to make the same mistakes. We’d learned. We know . . . how dangerous the toys we make can be. That’s what it all was at first, stuff that did anything we told it to . . . until our creations outgrew us. Instead of waking at Ymir, a new paradise, I woke to a pitted moon! It’s nothing like Earth, Selene. It’s a struggling and sickly garden in a harsh place. Nothing to do—no proper games, no 3D video, no social life, no universities, nothing. We left the technology we loved too . . . of course.

“I hated being ordered around. But we’re alive because of Council. We signed on without any rights. There’s a contract we all signed . . .”

Kristin stopped for a minute, took a drink of juice. Rachel said, “You’re enslaved.”

“Yeah. Living on Selene was like living in jail. So when I could, I left. I wanted to be iced again, and not wake up. Since I was doing what they wanted—they wanted to save us for Ymir—Council said it was okay. Can’t you see how much I wanted that?”

Kristin looked beseechingly at Rachel. Rachel didn’t know what to say. Kristin’s abandonment had hurt. Now she understood that her mom too had been left alone.

Finally Rachel said, “Maybe we can start over. We are family.”

Kristin’s mouth drew into a thin line. “I don’t want to go back to Selene.”

“We can send messages. Maybe I’ll come back soon. I’m leaving in two days.”

“I know,” Kristin said. “That’s why I asked to see you. I don’t even know you—even though you’re my daughter. Maybe there will be time . . . maybe some time. But right now, I just want to do what I need to do to keep Council happy. I’ll stay here, and be a good communications tech.”

“All right, Mom. Maybe I’ll send you messages anyway.”

“I might not answer them.” Kristin put her head in her hands. “I don’t know.”

“I hope you do.”

“Do you forgive me?”