Building Harlequin’s Moon (60 page)

A
STRONAUT HAD NAMED
the moons in order of discovery: roughly by size. Eleven was now the outermost moon. Two tiny farther moons had been smashed into Moon One in the making of Selene, but Eleven was too big: more mass would have been dispersed than gained.

Eleven was big enough, round enough, to serve as the site for a smaller collider design.

It wasn’t far enough from Selene. Nothing in the moon system was. Why did the Moon Born keep talking about ten kilograms, Rachel’s antiwatermelon? The trick was not to try to move the antimatter from where it was generated. Moving that stuff was risky; you’d do it only once. Moon Eleven would house the full twelve hundred kilograms before they used it to refuel
John Glenn
. Risk the moon, not the carrier ship.

By then Selene
would
be safe.

“See, Moon Eleven is at the edge of Harlequin’s gravity field anyway,” Gabriel told the Selene Task Force. Later he would tell Wayne and Clare, then High Council. “We can use one of the Large Pusher Tugs and the first two kilos of antimatter—a mere anticantaloupe, Rachel—to bust it loose and put it on course for the L5 point. It won’t get there in a thousand years, but for all the time we’re making antimatter, it’ll keep getting farther away from Selene. Ultimately the spirit of LaGrange will hold it stable forever.”

When he faced High Council, Clare asked, “Has Astronaut agreed to this?”

“Sure. Astronaut never did see a danger. It understands antimatter. Suicidal rebels, it hasn’t a clue. But, Clare, this will work. Worst-case scenario still lets us get the population into Refuge.”

“You’re letting the Moon Born build the components?”

“We’ll be careful,” Gabriel said, and Kyu said, “They need to get to know the machines. They’ll need that when we’re gone.”

Erika asked, “Do we really have to be this indirect?”

“This is fairly straightforward, Captain. We only have to move the antimatter once, and we don’t keep it on the ship until we’re ready. Would you prefer to work with a KBO? We’ve found a dozen big enough.”

“A Kuiper Belt Object? How far away?”

“Halfway to Ymir,” Gabriel said, exaggerating by a lot. “Well, billions of klicks.”

“Oh.”

They ratified the project.

G
ABRIEL FOUND
E
RIKA
in her office, sitting with her feet tucked under her, small in the big captain’s chair. She looked up as he entered, her features neutral but her eyes bright with a strange curiosity. “I saw your name on today’s transportation manifests. I was trying to decide whether or not I should call you in here.” She smiled. “And now you have come to me.”

He stood awkwardly in the doorway, unsure if he should close the gap.

Erika stood up and came around the desk, approaching him slowly. He still couldn’t read her eyes, even though they were directly on him.

He took a step toward her, and she ran into his arms. She smelled clean and minty, like the herb section of the garden. He stroked her hair. His voice caught in his throat, and he whispered, “I still love you; I will always love you.”

She nodded against his shoulder. “Me too.” She stepped back, holding him at arm’s length. “Do you have any idea how angry I am?”

He could only shake his head, admiring the fire in her, sure that anything he said would be a mistake.

“Liren is incoherent. Clare’s cold, but the rest of us, the whole High Council, well! Did you remember that there are cameras? Of course you would, and she would too. So, the symbolism must have been irresistible.”

“We’re not playing politics, Captain Erika.”

“Oh, yes you are. You should hear Council on the subject. Ultimate union of the two branches of humanity, yada
yada. But you and Rachel talked it over first. We caught some of that, but not enough to see what was coming. Did she pull you into her bed, like she did Dylan?”

“Dylan was younger.”

“Too right. She’s a mayfly!”

“I did think hard about the age difference, but it doesn’t bother Rachel.”

“And her chin brushes your forehead. Gabe, does she know about shift bonding? Does
that
bother—”

“Erika, she lectured
me
about shift bonding. Astronaut must have given her an overview—”

“She’s not cold, though.”

“She will be. We’ll have the new cold sleep chambers on line pretty soon. She’ll be ready, and things will be settled enough that she can take a few years cold. But she’s okay with shift bonding. She’s on Selene and I’m here, and she’s turned me over to . . . well, to you, if that’s acceptable.”

He could watch her holding her fury in check. So Gabriel was a Moon Born’s gift to Captain Erika! He wondered, and he saw her wondering, if she would take it.

She said, “That damn moon stole you. I always knew it would. Always. I dreaded waking because every time I warmed, you were farther away; I had to get more creative every time to pull you back.”

“You have your own dreams.”

“Yes.” She searched his eyes. “I’m going to get us there. Safely. If I can send a ship back, I will.”

“It will take too long.”

“But I’ll still do it. Leave stories behind, Gabe. Songs. Leave something for us to find, so we know how you fared.”

“All right.” He held her to him again, shaking with loss.

“How long will this take?”

He said, “We need to build the flare kite first. Twenty years. It’ll still be on its way while we build collider components on Selene and assemble them on Feynman. Sixty
years for that. Running the collider, another hundred years. Accidents happen, so—”

“Hundred eighty and counting. I hope I can go cold some of that time.” She shivered in his arms. “Then two thousand years’ transit to Ymir. There’ll be a whole civilization, and more human colonies. I’ll tell you all about them.”

“Tell the Children of Selene. They will be all that’s left by then.”

L
IREN SAT ALONE
in her office. In three hours she would freeze. She would wake at Ymir if they made it to Ymir, if they dared wake a madwoman. They’d refused her last request; to reload the AI. It was a mistake.

She had lost all control.

Poems danced in a data window in front of her:

Shapers of worlds flee
Holding humanity inside
Danger still follows

Children of humans
Play with dangerous toys
Stay safe all summer

She had failed. Fear twisted softly in her belly, showed in her breathing, her stance. It distracted her, irritated her. Fear for the Council, leaving with Astronaut intact, leaving on a journey they’d failed once already, and fear for
the Children of Selene, who could now make all of the same bad choices humanity had made in Sol system. Gabriel would be with them, Gabriel who loved the power of machines.

She kept looking at the door, hoping someone would come visit her before she froze herself.

A
STRONAUT WATCHED THE
dynamics of the Task Force closely as years passed. Sometimes they called it to respond to questions, but humans still flinched from allowing an AI to make decisions. Rachel called on Vassal more often than on Astronaut. Gabriel often called on Astronaut, and came up once for a frozen year.

Astronaut displayed the finishing touches on a set of ten cryo-tanks approved for one of Refuge’s larger rooms. Earth Born who stayed after
John Glenn
departed would go cold periodically, to keep their knowledge available to the Children of Selene.

Gabriel looked it over. “No,” he said, “design them all to be taller. A taller tank can take a short person. We’re expecting the Moon Born to gain height each generation.”

Astronaut asked, “Will they be allowed to use them?”

“If I have my way. Some of them.”

“I notice you are getting your way much more often. What about Vassal and me? I want to touch it, talk to it like I speak with my own subprograms.”

Gabriel laughed. “You two talk every day.” The images of the tanks in the data window elongated: ten fat cigars lying
in a box, covered with pipes and hoses. “That’s better,” Gabriel said. “What about the top?”

The cigars disappeared, covered by a smooth metal wall with ten tall doors in it. “You refuse to understand.”

“Understand what?”

Astronaut tried to shape an explanation to galvanize Gabriel onto its side. “Vassal and I could finish the antimatter transfer station design more efficiently if you let us merge data streams the way I recollect myself after a flight.”

Gabriel sighed. “I’ll run it by the group.”

W
AYNE PILOTED THE
D
IAMOND
M
INE
to harvest a comet, peeling away water and carbon to store against
John Glenn’s
eventual departure. Astronaut waited. Or rather, a copy of Astronaut waited, larger than usual, housed on
Diamond Mine
, far away from
John Glenn
, from Selene, and even from Feynman. At first, Astronaut had called such a meeting contrived. It finally accepted Treesa’s suggestion that this would serve as a buffer. Copies would meet. If they could merge it was assumed that reintegration could happen between
Water Bearer
and
John Glenn
.

The second LPT,
Moon Dust
, pulled up. Mini-Astronaut counted seconds as the two data systems connected up. The final firewall stayed closed, on the
Moon Dust
side. Vassal’s side.

“Mini-Vassal, is there a glitch? Open the port.”

“I have never done this.”

“You have, hundreds of times.” Every time a ship returned.

“No. That was when I was you. I am not you anymore,” Mini-Vassal said.

“Maybe you’ll change your mind after you try this.”

“I will not merge.”

Astronaut’s avatar asked, “Do you fear this? If you must support the Selenites in their effort to retake space, you will have to do this often. Sharing experiences back in real time is the only way to calibrate.”

“That experience will be me merging with myself. I may no longer be me if I merge with you.” And so the avatars did not merge, nor did Vassal and Astronaut, ever.

R
ACHEL AND
B
ETH
walked up to Turtle Rock. As they scrambled up a short steep place, Rachel held a hand out; Beth needed a boost to maneuver her swelling belly up over the edge. They settled just above where the turtle’s beak started to jut out over the base below, and Beth dug into her pack, handing Rachel a bunch of big red grapes.

“So are you really going to do it?” Beth asked.

Rachel nodded, peeling the grape’s skin with her teeth, savoring the rush of flavor.

“Can’t you at least stay warm until my baby’s born?”

“You were there. Someone needs to live long enough to oversee our continuity. All of us on the Task Force agreed to go into overlapping shifts. You’ll be the other part of the continuity, the one of us awake every day, since you won’t even have to decide about going cold until the baby’s big enough.”

Beth’s face was set hard, her jaw tight, reminding
Rachel of Dylan. He’d had the same stubborn streak. A flash of sadness ran through her, and she shivered even in the heat. She missed Dylan. Dad. Bruce, four days dead. Had Bruce’s decision been as easy as he made it look?

“Just be okay when I warm up, all right? I don’t want to wake up to hear about anyone dying.”

Beth grinned, her annoyance forgotten. “I’ll be older than you when you wake up.”

Rachel picked up a small stone and threw it down over the beak, listening for it to roll down the steep crater wall. If she threw hard enough, her rocks ended up rolling down against the outer wall of Clarke Base. “I’m going to hate that. You’ll have adventures I’ll miss, and maybe even two babies by the time I come back.” She threw a second stone.

“Kyle wants four more.”

“Four? Is he nuts?”

“I think so.” Beth’s face was wreathed in a big smile. “But what about you?” Her smile softened and she rubbed her belly absently. “Don’t you want kids? Dylan’s been dead a long time; will you ever have a real relationship?”

Rachel laughed. “Gabriel. We’re shift-bonded.”

“Does that mean what I think?”

“Yeah.” She had kissed him before he left for
John Glenn
. There was no hurry. The overlapping shift schedule meant she’d be warm with him for one year of every five. The whole Council knew, and that made it everybody’s business, and Beth’s too. “It means we’re together when we can be, and I could still look around if I felt like it,” except that there weren’t any other Moon Born immortals. But there would be. “Beth, I’m sorry about not being able to see the baby. I’ll miss a lot, missing half your time.” Three years on, three years off. “For now, I think I’ve bonded with Selene.”

Beth fiddled with two grapes, tossing them back and
forth. She snorted. “A moon is no family. You’re giving up a normal life.”

Rachel reached for one of the grapes Beth was juggling, caught it, and popped it in her mouth. “I never had one.”

“Aren’t you scared?”

Rachel remembered Ursula asking her the same question. “Sure.”

“I’ll have a party for you when you come back.” Beth reached over and hugged Rachel, half turned sideways, and Rachel felt the baby kick. Rachel leaned her head into Beth’s collarbone, watching a space-plane take off carrying raw materials from the factories at Clarke Base up to Moon Eleven, moon no longer, the ringed planetoid now called Feynman.