Building Harlequin’s Moon (7 page)

Helga and Mary clenched fists and screamed triumph as Ali led the three Selene born into the stairway. Gabriel was the last one in, and as the door thumped closed, Helga and Mary smiled broadly at each other.

Liren closed her eyes. This wasn’t good—the crew couldn’t afford attachment to the Moon Born. “Okay,” she said, “they’re safe.” She looked directly at the two women. “Don’t you owe me a report on the savannah?”

Mary turned around. “Hey, lighten up.”

“It’s not as if we could have helped them from here anyway. Let them solve their own problems, and we’ll solve ours.”

“You know, Liren, not everything can be work.”

It was an old argument. Liren sighed. “Of course not. We provide you plenty of other entertainment.”

“Aren’t you even glad they’re safe?”

“Of course I am.” Liren clenched her teeth and headed for the refrigerator, rummaging for some synthed milk to calm her stomach. “We all know our jobs are here, and that’s where our focus should be—on keeping this damned ship running until the Selene project is
over
.”

“Maybe we should all help. The work down there would go faster.”

“We need to save your skills.”

Helga raised her soft voice. “Do you still think we’ll get to Ymir?”

“Not if we lose faith, we won’t. We need to stay pure, and keep our focus.” Liren poured the milk into a tall thin glass. “Now, don’t you all have
some
work to do?”

Mary threw her head back and laughed. “Still always work. Don’t worry, we’ll do what you want. We always do, don’t we?”

Liren bit back an angry reply. The crew was bored, and Selene provided fresh entertainment. “Just remember you have jobs to do here. Others are assigned to Selene. Let them do their work, and focus on yours.”

Liren hated Selene. She hated the compromises they made every day. Compromises were dangerous. They needed too much nanotech to change Selene into a world rich enough to support manufacturing and the civilization of thousands needed to build the collider. The Astronaut program had too much freedom and too much say. It was too easy—the AI could handle complex math and design more readily than a human or a standard computer program. Gabriel and Captain Hunter kept loosening the bonds that were supposed to keep Astronaut caged into its small world of interstellar navigation.

Liren walked down the corridor toward her office, still
lost in thought.
John Glenn
couldn’t orbit here forever. The ship’s sleek sides were dimpled with space-debris impact pits. They’d lost two Service Armor ships across the years. Terraformers had stolen sensors and materials to use on Selene. In-ship systems needed more regular repair. It was an ever-uphill battle to keep her small group of humans free from the twin temptations of technology and complacence. They couldn’t risk more technology. They had the ability; nano could make them gods. But what would wild nano do to Selene? To
John Glenn?
That was the path of poor, doomed Earth.

No matter how hard she tried, Liren couldn’t see a way to dampen the crew’s attachment to the Children. Council and Colonists on the surface needed the support of
John Glenn’s
resources. Warm bodies aboard
John Glenn
were bored enough to need entertainment. Circumstances trapped them.

Liren entered her office. The room was orderly, clear surfaces, black and white colors, and almost no decorations. She sat in her high-backed chair and stared at the wall. She thumbed up what she called her “reminders.” Articles and scenes flashed on the wall as a collage she’d spent years building.

On Phobos, AIs with more power than humans. News photos of crew members killed on their way to
John Glenn
. An asteroid turned to an Escher nightmare, all edges and angles, by wild nano, and no sign of the expedition that was supposed to be surveying it. Pictures of
John Glenn’s
two sister ships,
Leif Eriksson
and
Lewis and Clark
. Surely both ships had reached Ymir and were building a real world. Each new picture slammed into her, building her resolve to keep going. They also made her stomach cramp harder, and she tasted sour milk.

“Astronaut,” she commanded, “how bad is the flare? Give me damage estimates.”

A voice sounded in her ear. “Data streams indicate that everyone made it to shelter in time.”

“Get me a report on the plant damage as soon as you can.”

“It will take a few moments to assemble detailed information. Gabriel and Ali were lucky to get themselves and the students to the shelter. Perhaps more shelters should be built?”

“I asked for a report, not an opinion,” Liren barked.

“I will produce a report about the efficacy of more shelters,” the voice said, “and a better design for the door.”

“I asked for a report on plant damage. Gabriel can tell me about the shelters. It’s high time he was here anyway.” Gabriel was way too attached to Selene.

“What worries you, Liren?”

“Ask Gabriel to come up for the next High Council meeting. And be quiet until I speak to you.”

The silence was immediate. If Astronaut were human, she would think it was miffed. She
would not
worry about an AI’s feelings.

She needed a distraction.

She’d left so much behind on Earth! At least the arts had come with them. Gabriel sang. Ali wove. Kyu decorated herself. Sculptures dotted the garden and common areas of the ship. Liren approved of art. She pulled out her journal, and worked long into the night, writing a story about Ymir, hoping to keep her people’s attention on the real goal. Her stomach wouldn’t settle. The right words refused to find their way into her data window.

She tried for haiku. The spare lines often centered her. Tonight, even simple poetry refused to blossom for her. She curled up onto her white couch, covering herself with a black blanket.

She twisted and turned, falling into a familiar dream.
John Glenn
, still parked in Earth orbit, waited to leave for a base near Uranus, to join sister ships
Leif
and the
Lewis and Clark
. They’d financed it themselves, High Council,
fifteen members of the Council of Humanity. Spent savings, sold conglomerates. In her dream their little ship approached the big carrier, dodging a cadre of man/machine hybrids flying agile space-planes, intent on forcing berths aboard the first interstellar ships ever built. Ma Liren as copilot pitted her human ingenuity against their pursuers. One ship was already behind, ten people who wouldn’t make it to
John Glenn
. In her dream, she watched the doors slam shut against the locks she had been angling for, shutting her out.

A
DAY AND
a half after the flare, Gabriel stood with Ali and the students at the edge of the crater that cupped the Hammered Sea. The horizon was almost a flat line of water—the tallest edges of the far crater wall peeked above the sea like teeth, jagged and far away. He loved this place. It was a wild machine, much more controlled than it looked, often surprising.

The rim was unstable. Ten degrees away from them, inside the crater wall, a rock worked loose and fell. Ursula pointed, her finger shaking. He watched it bounce slowly, exaggeratedly, down the jagged incline and splash into the bright water below; a tiny ball, graceful in the low gravity. “That was beautiful,” Ursula said.

“Those rocks,” Gabriel said, “are the size of the planting machines you hate to drive.”

Ursula’s eyes widened and she stepped back, losing her balance and falling onto the soft powdered rock that covered
the rim of the crater. A fog of dust rose around her, changing the color of her skin.

Gabriel laughed. Harry laughed too, standing at the edge, toes lined up with the end of a rock. In a few moments, Ursula’s laugh followed theirs, a nervous trill. She moved away from the rim.

Rachel leaned forward, eyes pinned to the sea. She pointed toward water stains below them. “Does the water really get that high?”

Ali smiled. “Yes, Rachel. Just watch. Gabriel had to make the crater taller and thicker twice just to contain the force of the water and tides.”

“You made this? I thought you oversaw the planting.”

“I do oversee the planting. But first I designed Selene. Someone had to bring water in for the plants.”

“Duh,” Harry said.

“So you just . . . made . . . the Hammered Sea? All by yourself?” Rachel was eyeing the far side, looking between Gabriel and the huge sea in front of her.

Ali laughed again, louder, her head thrown back. “I wouldn’t underestimate Gabriel if I were you, Rachel.”

Gabriel tried to look stern. It had been
hard
to shape this sea. He was proud enough to babble some. “I had help, of course. Mostly from a really smart program named Astronaut.”

Ali glared at him. Her parents had died on Jupiter Station when the AI that ran it lost interest. Ali didn’t like AIs.

“Ali helped too.” He sighed. Time to teach. They only knew part of the story. “There wasn’t any Selene when we came here. There was an oversized gas giant planet, Harlequin, and almost a hundred moons. We picked a big moon for a foundation. It had no spin—no day or night with reference to Harlequin. We made that, hitting it over and over in the same place, from the same angle, making tilt and spin. Days and seasons. Building Selene. Then we—
went—cold—for a long time, to let the whole system stabilize and cool.

“We woke up to a pockmarked ball covered in regolith. There was a little ice, a few small pockets of underground water, and the beginnings of an atmosphere, but humans need lots of easy-to-reach water, and thick atmosphere to shield us from space. So we brought in comets. Then we went cold again. Then we brought in more comets. The comets gave us the water you see here.”

“So the water is from space?” Rachel asked.

“Isn’t everything? This deep sea is the motor that drives Selene’s hydrology. We need this much water for the humidity to grow tropical plants rather than cactus. But we had to contain most of the water to limit the effect of the tides, which are worse here than on Earth, because of Harlequin.” He pointed at the gas giant, which hung just off center in the sky. “Gravity pulls the water toward Harlequin. If we didn’t contain it, Selene would be flooded with every high tide. We could have made hundreds of small seas instead of what we did make; the Hammered Sea and Erika’s Folly, but they would have been harder to manage. Oh, lots of craters have a little water in them, but over half our water is right here.” He paused, and said, “Besides, I wanted to make a real sea.” That made him feel giddy still: to build a sea because he wanted to! “Feel the damp wind on your face, Rachel?”

She nodded, holding her arms over the sea below them.

“It blows up the crater walls, carrying water vapor. It’s cooler than the air it meets on the far side. It would stay inside the crater and rain here, except we’ve built paths for it to funnel through. So we drive the rain to fall mostly outside the Hammered Sea, where it fills streams. We have pumps that take care of it when Selene doesn’t, a backup system that sends water through the crater walls to fill the streams. We used the out-pumps a lot, early on. But we haven’t had to use them for years—we test them every
month, but I dunk we could turn them off if we wanted to.” Gabriel waited a bit for the children to find one of the huge pipes. They were hard to spot, colored like the crater for camouflage. Erika had insisted on that. He and Erika had argued for months over the costs and time involved, but now, with this view, he was glad Erika had won.

“That’s brute force engineering—the pipes. Real terraforming, with a whole planet and tectonics, would use temperature and humidity and wind. Selene doesn’t have the raw materials to do it right.” He turned around and pointed down slope behind them. “The gentle angle of the outside walls, here, what we just climbed, drains the water to the plains you see below, and there some of it subducts. We capture that water and pump it back into the sea. The remaining water moves through surface streams, some of which we channel into engineered viaducts, like the Aldrin viaduct. The water we use in Aldrin comes from here. Other viaducts carry water back here eventually. That’s the hard part—we may never get the water back into the Hammered Sea without the in-pumps.” He paused to let the children absorb the beauty of Selene’s hydrological engineering.

“Some of the viaducts are open. You made those deep enough that the water stays in,” Harry said. “I saw some on the way over here.”

Harry would make a good engineer someday. “I like the open design. It encourages water evaporation, increases humidity.”

Ali picked up where Gabriel left off. “It’s the water cycle that determines where we live and plant, where we place our cities. The first engineering we do anywhere is for water. We picked Aldrin for a major base because it is far from here. That makes it safer. Imagine a quake big enough to break down a crater wall and let the water loose? All the water in the Hammered Sea? Remember, it’s kilometers deep.”

“So why did you build Clarke Base?” Ursula asked.

“So they can make what they need to keep the Hammered Sea working,” Harry said.

Ursula stuck her tongue out at Harry’s back.

Gabriel grinned. “Largely right, Harry. Think of it as a huge dam.” He noticed the puzzled looks on their faces. “Okay—a huge machine. It needs people to maintain it, to fix it if it breaks, and even more, to be sure it doesn’t break. We grow fruit and vegetables here on the plain, where there’s water. So Clarke Base is a food production plant and a maintenance shop. This is also where we make the planters and planes and some of the other machines you see and use.”

“Don’t you make almost everything on
John Glenn?
” Ursula asked.

“Well, when we started,” Ali said. “But even
John Glenn
is too small to make everything we need for Selene. It’s hard to move heavy things between the ship and here—and we don’t need to.”

“How do you make so many miles of pipe?” Harry asked.