Building Harlequin’s Moon (31 page)

“Cut your hair,” he said to her retreating back. “You look almost like one of them. The only difference is that you’re taller.”

Her braid hung past her shoulders. She’d made today’s decoration for it herself, out of dried twigs and leaves. She brought a hand up and fingered the braid rings, and when she looked, he was gone. She liked her hair, and she wasn’t about to cut it because he said so. She answered him back, loud enough that if he was watching her from nearby he could hear. “No, Andrew, I won’t cut my hair.”

She had so many more questions. How long had he been watching her? How come she hadn’t seen him? How much did the Children listen to him?

T
HAT NIGHT
, at Harry and Gloria’s, she started telling Gloria and Harry and Dylan and Beth and Nick about history and rights. She touched on King, the American Black civil rights leader, and Gandhi who led India’s freedom movement from an oppressive and more technologically’
astute British society, Spartacus, the leader of the failed slave rebellion in Rome, and Agnes Redflower, who fought to save the Northwest forests in 2100. No one took notes. There was little discussion.

Afterward she sat out on the roof of her little house and wondered what Gabriel was doing, and if Kyu was flying through the garden aboard
John Glenn
, or frozen and lost to her. “Astronaut, Treesa,” she used her subvocal skills, “I’m going to tell Gabriel that I’m teaching more than he told me to. I won’t tell him everything.”

Astronaut replied, “It could be dangerous.”

“I know. But if I only tell him a little, then I won’t really be lying to him, and I won’t get in trouble if I get caught.”

“I advise against it,” the AI said.

Treesa chimed in. “Rachel, I think it would be better if you don’t tell him anything. Not yet. Wait awhile.”

Rachel stared up at the expanse of stars. She remembered looking into the same starscape with Ursula and Harry. Those nights might have happened to someone else entirely.

I might have married Harry
, she thought,
and then it would have all been so much easier, and there would be someone here to talk to
.

“I remember,” she said, “something about making my own decisions.”

I
T TOOK
G
ABRIEL
and Erika three years to choose their target. Selene itself was built from Harlequin’s moons and a handful of icy asteroids found in LaGrange orbits. Apollo’s inner system was nearly empty. All of the useful
masses were out beyond Harlequin’s orbit. That included three more gas giant worlds and their moons, a sparse scattering of asteroids, and the comets.

Gabriel’s probes had done their work tens of thousands of years ago. The most interesting bodies had drifted a bit. Gabriel sent four probes to the most likely asteroids. He wanted a metal mass with some carbonaceous material. Some bodies were no more than a jumble of loose gravel; best to avoid anything with too much ice. The machines circled them and sent back photos and spectroanalysis; landed, and analyzed what they landed on. The best choices were farther away than Council wanted, but everything else was too small, too big, too loose, too icy. In the end the probes fired nanobots into a dark nickel-iron lump.

High Council debated the wisdom of the trip. Even though the captain and Clare both supported the idea, the asteroid, already dubbed “Refuge,” would take a full Earth year of ship’s time to retrieve, and another to get back. Like everything else on the Selene project, necessity won over sentiment; delays were accepted. Shane and Star reluctantly agreed to stay on Selene still longer, although they barked about getting old.

Erika piloted; Gabriel crewed. They took one of the three huge pusher tugs, the
Diamond Mine
. The squat round tug was towed a distance away from
John Glenn
by one of the smaller ships in its class, the Medium Miner
Ruby Blues
. Wayne Narteau piloted the
Ruby Blues
, and wished them luck as they broke away and lit their fusion engine.
Diamond Mine
dove deep into Harlequin’s gravity well, made its burn, and was on its way toward Apollo.

Space flight offered privacy unknown aboard
John Glenn
itself. Communication was regular, but there would be no continuous stream of video unless the
Diamond Mine
or
John Glenn
declared an emergency. As they separated from
John Glenn
, the communications lag grew. Aboard
the
Diamond Mine
, Gabriel and Erika had more privacy than anyone except High Council ever experienced.

The first weeks were simple, punctuated with few requirements except exercise and astronomical observations as they dove relentlessly, directly, at Apollo. Erika and Gabriel put the easy start to largely physical use, making love in every way they could remember.

Gabriel began to relax. The stress of running the Selene project slowly melted away, lost in the vast empty space between Harlequin and Daedalus. He was excited—even though he had flown this tricky path four times, every approach left him feeling some of the edgy fear that had defined his first fall toward Daedalus. Ten Jupiter masses and more than three times Jupiter’s volume, from this distance Daedalus remained no more than a dark red dot in front of Apollo. Dark lenses and a squint allowed it to look like a huge sunspot.

Orbiting just beyond the sun’s Roche limit, Daedalus destabilized the entire inner system. It snarled its magnetic webs with Apollo’s, drawing flare activity from the small sun, throwing great storms of plasma around, sometimes all the way past Harlequin. Daedalus had eaten every mass near it short of Apollo itself. There was rain on Daedalus—molten iron.

Still, for now it was far enough away that Gabriel could think of other matters: Erika, and Selene. The bloated gas giant would occupy him completely soon enough.

E
RIKA LIT THE FUSION
engines for the final burn.

During the next few weeks Daedalus’s image grew larger. It became distinct from Apollo, gained shape, gained size. Daedalus was bigger than Harlequin, and much hotter, almost a sun itself, with its own sluggish internal fusion reactions. Harlequin’s neat shock-wave diamond patterns were roiled to chaos in Daedalus’s storms.
They watched smaller storms nibbling at the edges of a whorl as big as Uranus.

Erika and Gabriel grew minutely but inexorably heavier as the ship’s acceleration increased. Gabriel hated this part—feeling slow and large and awkward while they rocketed toward something his hindbrain couldn’t identify as anything but a threat.

“We’re faster this time, aren’t we?” he asked.

“Medical said you could take six gee.”

“What are you taking us to?”

“Six point two.”

Gabriel snorted.

Hours before the closest approach to Daedalus, they suited up, installed filtered water and vitamin food mixes inside their psuits, and strapped themselves into viewing bay couches. Erika thought cabins were entirely too wimpy—and fear had always lured her, a magnet that pulled the best from her. She was enough the careful ship’s captain to have them in a safe place in case unexpected course corrections were needed, but crazy enough to love the danger. Gabriel watched her cheeks flush and her eyes brighten as they came closer. She’d piloted him around Daedalus twice before, and always she was daredevil happy, sharp, precise, and very alive. Even in a bulky suit, Erika had grace. But only her forearms and fingers moved, because thrust was flattening them both.

Erika filled the view screen with images of the gas giant, so it was all they could see, all of their world. This close, Daedalus dwarfed them to a sand grain blown past a fiery beach ball. The planet showed alarming detail, eddies visible inside storms inside bands of separated gases. A small mistake in trajectory would throw them into it, and the
Diamond Mine
would never crawl from the gravity well of the gas giant before it was torn apart.

Gabriel held his breath, only briefly afraid.

And at last, at peri-Daedalus, they blew the fireball in
their engine into space in one mighty puff. Six point two gee, and then they were falling free, almost weightless, the ship stressed a bit by Daedalus’s tides. They were in Daedalus’s shadow. The receding gas giant was a black circle behind them, rimmed with Apollo’s corona.

Their course gradually straightened, and Gabriel began to feel safe. Erika started the navigation program calculating the small course adjustments they’d need to intersect
Refuge
based on their actual trajectory after slinging away from Daedalus. The gas giant slowly stole back some of the speed it had given them.

I
N
S
OL SYSTEM THEY WOULD
have called it a KBO, a Kuiper Belt Object. The lump was a flattened and battered spheroid, black except for a shiny blister forming on one side. Invisibly small nanobots were spreading out across that face. Gabriel and Erika sprayed a barrier strip around the object’s waist, before they did anything more ambitious.

The barrier would deny the nanobots access to one side of Refuge: the “down” side. From this point
Diamond Mine
would work only with the “down” side.

They hooked the object easily. It was a skill Gabriel and Ali had practiced over and over, bringing volatiles from dead comet heads, and minerals and more mass from chondrite asteroids, to blanket Selene. Erika too had helped, staying with him through two back-to-back shifts before plunging into a thousand-year sleep.

The body that would become Refuge was much bigger than even the huge
Diamond Mine
. Gabriel felt like a bacterium driving an ant home with a walnut clutched in. its pincers. The rock face of the asteroid—the side that would become Refuge’s underside—jutted across the space in front of them, a wall they butted against and held on to, directed and pushed. Regular slight adjustments gave
Diamond Mine
the queasy feel of a carnival ride.

On the unseen “up” face of the asteroid, nanobots worked tirelessly. Gabriel sent out an occasional probe to look. Erika preferred to ignore it all, as if the rock had developed an unsightly disease. She didn’t trust nanotechnology.

A glass pupil was forming on the up side of Refuge, larger every time he looked. Lumps and mounds and cracks and craters were disappearing into its edges. It all happened with excruciating slowness, but it happened. If it got out of hand, they’d drop the rock and start over elsewhere; but that could cost them a quarter century.

The worst problems were being cooped up with only each other for so long. Two years was a long time to be separated from the usual richness of data flow. Gabriel and Erika went from stormy and passionate to deep and soft, from lightly angry to charming, and back again. They’d done this before, and they pushed the cycles faster for fun, playing with the sweetness of being secure enough to argue. Still, they were long years.
Diamond Mine
was bigger outside than it was inside.

One morning as they neared Harlequin, they woke together from a rare shared nap: Erika looked Gabriel directly in the face and said, “This has been too easy.”

“I know.” Gabriel had learned to trust Erika’s gut feelings, and he immediately felt her unease.

They spent the whole day looking for problems. Everything was perfect. Gabriel sat up that night while Erika slept. He watched her toss and turn, and knew the day’s faultless results hadn’t stilled her fears. He made himself stop looking at readouts and just enjoy the star field. He stretched, letting himself fall into the vastness of their surroundings just as he did when he traveled to
John Glenn
from Selene.

Diamond Mine:
all systems nominal. Refuge: the nanos hadn’t touched the “down” face. The other side was rising as a smooth dome of carbon woven into diamond. The structure had become a flattened cone, honeycombed within.

As they neared Harlequin, Gabriel trained cameras on the asteroid defenses at Moon Fifteen. They were quiet, and everything looked normal. Robots moved around at the usual high speeds; routine. Programming recognized
Diamond Mine
even with Refuge attached, and responded. Check: they weren’t about to be fragged by a linear accelerator.

They were close enough to see Selene, but not to resolve details. He turned on various lenses and imaging types randomly, looking for anomalies. A message came from
John Glenn
before he knew what he was looking for, and then he went to thermal imaging and his breath slammed into his belly. A spot of brightness that shouldn’t be there glowed as Aldrin rotated into night.

Fire. He swore. He closed his eyes, and trembled, angry and afraid. Fire could devastate Selene.

“How?” Erika asked from behind him.

“You know Selene has a higher oxygen mix?”

“I thought the lower gravity compensated? The air mix is rarefied.”

“It should. Something happened. This isn’t something anyone has done before, after all. Maybe enough plants drove the oxygen percentage up just enough, or maybe we guessed wrong at some initial parameter.” He slammed his fist down, carefully avoiding any control surface. “I need to be there.”

“We’re too far away,” she said. “Relax.”

“That’s
my world
burning up down there. I need to get to
John Glenn
. I can do some good from there.” And my students, he thought. Burning.

She reached around him from behind and gave him a hug. “You’ve done the best you can with Selene, Gabe. You’ve done wonderfully. Let’s just hope this doesn’t put us off schedule.”

Gabriel winced, but he put his hands over hers and squeezed. “I just . . . I hope . . . I hope it doesn’t all burn.”

“I know. You’ve got hours to wait before you can even try for the ship.” Her eyes looked as worried as he felt.

“You’ll finish bringing Refuge in?”

“If you wait long enough to give me some safety margin before you leave me here. This is a lot of kinetic energy we’re playing with!”