Building Harlequin’s Moon (8 page)

Gabriel frowned and looked at Ali, who licked her lip and said, “We use nanocytes,” as if it were a dirty word. “Trillions of tiny machines. Just for raw materials,” she qualified. The children looked puzzled.

“Someday I’ll show you,” Gabriel said, turning toward Harry. “So, do you understand the basics of our hydrology?”

“It’s nice to
see
it. I understand it better than when you first told me.”

“The cycle will vary as we get more plant cover. That’s the beauty of a self-regulating system; we both watch for change and cause change. Terraforming is one long search for balance. We can tweak the system—generate wind if we need it over the lake, affect the surface temperature—there’s a soletta in geostationary orbit—”

Harry interrupted. “Soletta?”

“The soletta is a bank of mirrors that focuses light from Apollo onto Selene, increasing the insolation—the light level from Apollo. We can turn mirrors on or off to affect insolation and tweak the temperature and energy supply. It’s working so well it’s been virtually automatic longer than you’ve been alive.”

“Which isn’t very long,” Ali said dryly. “And it was a fight. Gabriel has had to rebuild the touchy thing twice so far. Once a single asteroid from a swarm got past our defenses and smashed the mirrors to shards. There wasn’t much atmosphere yet, so some of them made it to the surface. Wear shoes!”

Gabriel laughed. “You’d have to dig pretty far to find any remains of that glass.”

Ali went on, unfazed. “Oh, and the second time, it just disappeared. Just flat disappeared. We were all cold, one of our long down times. Astronaut woke me up to say there was nothing there. Astronaut didn’t see it happen: Selene was between
John Glenn
and the soletta when it disappeared. The soletta might be the single most fragile part of our whole system. But without it, we couldn’t regulate temperature, and Selene would get too cold to live on.”

“Did you help him rebuild it?” Ursula asked Ali.

“I was cold. Erika did that.”

“I haven’t met Erika,” Rachel observed. “Where is she?”

“Cold,” Gabriel muttered.

Rachel turned her eyes on Gabriel, and he saw pain flash across them. “Like Mom?” she asked.

Ali’s answer was sharp. “We don’t know about your mom. Be patient.”

Rachel’s jaws clenched. She looked down into the crater as if she could see the bottom.

They brought out water bottles and lapsed into uncomfortable silence. Harlequin was almost straight above them now. “Can you see the water rising?” Gabriel asked.

“At the edges?” Rachel replied.

“The whole sea will be affected. A tide is a response to gravity—all of Selene feels the pull of Harlequin; the elasticity of water illustrates it.”

Water crept up the sides of the great bowl below them. Rocks were slowly dampened by wind spray, and then submerged in rising waves.

Gabriel had seen this hundreds of times. He watched the children. He wanted them awed. Rachel and Harry stood side by side, both rapt and fully attentive. Ursula was on Rachel’s far side, farther back, still sitting, craning her neck to see into the crater without being near the edge.

Gabriel leaned back, looking up at the gas giant overhead. The ring, of course, was edge on to him, bisecting the planet. A huge storm tracked slowly across the surface, the fractal edges of its motion lulling him into a near trance state. Ali’s voice was backdrop; talk about tidal pulls and bulges. He heard her explain that most moons were tidally locked, that Selene’s core had been once, and Selene would be again. Finally, he heard Rachel point out that the water level was falling. He took a deep breath and stood up, strapping on his wings.

They all stood at the edge, backs to the sea, and looked down over the long slope of the outside crater rim between silver threads of waterfall. White and red rock filled with pillows of pumice crunched under their feet. Below them was rocky ledge after rocky ledge; then, starting nearly a third of the way down, a gentle slope turning greener as it flowed into checkered fields.

One by one they ran and leaped up, snapping wings open in time to start the long flight down to Clarke Base. The children rose high in the thermals, almost immediately, circling and swooping and chasing each other. Gabriel finessed his glide, letting his mind go completely into the flight, focusing on small muscles and tiny changes in air and wind. Calculations and vectors flowed in his head, and
he followed them as best he could, changing the tilt of his legs or arms to follow the places his mind said he could take the flight, working to gain the most lift and speed from minute motions. He laughed to hear Rachel taunting Ursula, driving her to reach higher, higher.

Gabriel and Ali lagged behind, evaluating the children’s flight.

The teens stopped halfway down the long slope. They hadn’t even bothered to tell Gabriel or Ali. Gabriel used his radio to talk to Ali. “Let’s lurk a bit behind them, and see if they get concerned.”

Ali landed just ahead of him, graceful and quick as she swept her wings closed. They settled above the children, out of sight, and Gabriel released a camera-bot with instructions to hover above and behind the kids.

Ali looked worried, a small frown furrowing her brow. He guessed at her worry. “Rachel asked about her mom after the flare. What’s this about Rachel’s mother? Why did you tell her you can’t find out what happened from here?”

“I checked the records.” Ali’s mouth was a tight line, and her eyes hugged the horizon.

“And?”

“She doesn’t want to come back.”

“We can’t tell Rachel that,” he said.

“You should,” Ali said quietly.

“When she’s older.”

“Why not now? The girl deserves some honesty—this is important to her.”

“This isn’t a good time to upset her,” Gabriel said.

“Better the sting of truth than a long painful uncertainty. Besides, we shouldn’t try to control her world. She has to hear hard things to grow. You can’t terraform people.”

Gabriel bit his tongue. “I’d like to talk to her mother first. Is she awake?”

“She’s cold.”

Gabriel changed the subject. “Have you checked on Andrew?”

“No new damage today.”

“We should never have given Andrew that second chance. It was a bad lesson for the others.”

He was surprised to feel Ali lean into him, laughing, her serious demeanor broken. His mood didn’t match hers, but he stripped wing gear from one arm anyway and laid it over her shoulders, asking, “What’s gotten into you?”

“You’re trying to control them. They’re people, not stones or air.”

“Picture . . . Andrew moving a little moon when he gets a temper tantrum.”

“Another sea in the wrong place? Andrew’s Hissy Fit?” She tugged his braid. “They’ll never get access to LPTs anyway. What about Andrew, though? Isn’t he just a teenager pushing boundaries?”

Gabriel had shown Ali Andrew’s destructive streak, what he’d done
after
they left. “He’s refusing to learn discipline. We can’t afford to let him run free—there’s no time to babysit him.”

“I mean, look, he’s just a kid. We were right to give him a chance; we’re right to limit him now. I meant it when I said I’d support you.” Ali’s black braid across his knees contrasted with the grays and reds of the slope as it fell away behind her. “But you still need to give them time to think for themselves. They have to be able to live after we’re gone.” Ali’s voice was angry again. “Why are we even doing this?”

“Ask the damned High Council. Remember, I argued to use nano to build the assembler in space.” Ali hated nano. She should remember that none of the choices were good.

R
ACHEL WATCHED OUT
the window as they flew into Aldrin early the next morning. They landed just outside the city, Apollo’s sunrise brightening the cloth tents just enough to make out color and shadow. She squeezed Ursula’s hand briefly and they darted down the path toward home together. It seemed to take a long time to get there. Ursula peeled off for her home, and Rachel ducked into her doorway, smelling warm rice and eggs as she buried herself in her father’s chest, filling his arms. She hadn’t been gone long, not really, but she felt taller, more his size.

He pushed her back from him, frowning. “You’d better go on up to the grove.”

“What? Why?”

“I think you’ll need to see for yourself.”

Gabriel stood by her final project. She ran up to him, then stopped, drew her breath in sharply. A broad swath of trees had been mowed down, driven over. Broken trunks littered the ground, dried and twisted, the life gone from them. It must have happened right after they left.

Almost half of Rachel’s project and a snippet of Ursula’s plot destroyed. Clearly someone had driven a work tractor through the grove. Tire tracks ran straight through, and in one place it looked like a blade had been let down and actually dug below ground. Pods and dirt and snapped seedlings mixed in a pile.

She knelt in the carnage, sweeping her hands back and forth through the dry dirt, picking out dead twigs and breathing in little gulps.

“Andrew,” she said, narrowing her eyes, fighting at the anger rising in her.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn’t need the distraction. We’ve taken care of the problem.”

The distinct snap of wings sounded over her head. Nick landed at the edge of the plot and quickly folded his gear away. He walked up to them with the harness still attached. His brow was creased and he looked down, watching the ground.

“I’m sorry. Gabriel said to leave it for you to see. But we kept the rest of your trees alive. We did okay, didn’t we?”

He looked so earnest she smiled a little. “Yes, Nick. Th . . . Thank you.”

Nick nodded.

“What . . . why? Why would he do this?” Rachel asked, turning back to Gabriel.

Gabriel looked off at the horizon. “I suspect he was angry with me.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s safe. And Selene is safe from him for the moment. He’s been stripped of his data rights.”

“Data rights?”

“We’re keeping him busy. His pad is locked out of the system, except for warnings. All he gets is one-way data.”

To lose net access? How would Andrew learn anything new? She shuddered. “You really cut him off?”

“It’s not your problem, or your fault. Still, you will have to clean up.” Gabriel turned toward Nick. “Show me what you’ve done on the meadow grass,” he suggested, walking away with Nick in tow.

Rachel glared at Gabriel’s receding back. Her fists balled at her side. Andrew wasn’t there, and she might as well be angry at a rock as at Gabriel. She paced around her plot, kicking at clods of disturbed dirt.

She gathered a pile of dead sticks, then sat at the edge of the ruin and simply stared at it for a long time, turning dry twigs in her hands. They were rough and sharp against her fingers, their torn edges scratching her palms.

Gabriel had no right to hide this until she got here. It wasn’t carelessness: he’d taken pains to be in the grove when she saw it. Another lesson? Another test?

She didn’t understand Council. But why had Andrew done this? To her? Why was she always his target?

Rachel spent the next two days replanting and tending. After carefully looking at how the remaining plants had grown, Rachel worked out some changes to her original placement. Seeing improvements raised her spirits some. She carefully set up a communications net from her plot to her wrist pad. Now she’d have real-time flows; she’d know about any new damage.

The next morning Rachel’s dad walked up to her plot with her. He’d never looked closely at her work before, contenting himself with her stories. She squeezed his hand and pointed to a wide border of young plants. “See—that’s where the worst damage was. I lined the path with heliconias. I wanted the bright reds.”

Her dad smiled softly and ruffled her short hair. “I think it will look great. Sometimes bad things turn out okay.”

She didn’t answer.

He helped her weed and rake until nearly dark, and they walked back down the path together holding hands.

Rachel and Ursula worked together for days. Harry silently took care of Andrew’s plot as well as his own. He looked haunted. He didn’t spend much time with the girls, but he smiled at Rachel when Ursula wasn’t around, and sometimes they sat and talked or watched the clouds together.

The days cooled. Harlequin’s dark ruby glow didn’t diminish, but Apollo’s light no longer reflected back from the gas giant, and at night Aldrin was turned away from
both Apollo and Harlequin. Against the rich black sky Rachel could see twice the stars of high summer. She and Ursula made games of naming stars and constellations far into the night. Twice they passed through meteor showers, and streaks of light flamed the sky, some bright enough to illuminate Ursula’s fine hair.

One night, when Harlequin eclipsed Apollo completely and the stars felt closer and thicker than ever, Harry joined them. Ursula excused herself. Rachel stayed, and she and Harry lay on their backs looking at the sky.

“I talked to Andrew,” Harry said unexpectedly. “He was in town for a few hours today. He’s been out with an Earth Born planting crew. Told me he hated it. They treat him badly.”

“Yeah, well, maybe he’s acting badly,” Rachel said.

“I asked why he tore up your test planting.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he’s in love with you.”

Rachel shivered, pulling her knees in over her torso, wrapping her arms around them. “That’s love? He destroyed my plot, got himself in trouble, and didn’t even fix it afterward.”

“Remember the tree he stuck up on the tool shed?”

“Of course. I could have failed over that. I was so mad at him I wanted to hit him.”

Harry sat up and looked down at her. “He thought you’d think it was cool. I mean, really, he said, why not grow trees on buildings?”

“He’s not stupid. He knew it was my final exam.”

“He wanted attention.”

“Well, then he doesn’t understand me at all. I try to do a good job, but I stay inside the rules. It’s important.”