Building Harlequin’s Moon (2 page)

Gabriel ate at his post while Wayne guided the LPTs to
the surface, one by one. The hard part came next, as Wayne’s team moored them against the bedrock core. The tugs were flattened structures, a Tokamak-style fusion thruster ringing one side, a cage of shock absorbers and anchors at the other. Placing anchors was tricky, because when the LPTs were set going, their thrust would start quakes.

Set them going on low thrust, let the blast backfire, they’d melt their way through volatiles down to bedrock. Then close the insulation ports and wait while the molten rock solidified over the next century. Gabriel’s team would spend a hundred years cold, then warm again to finish the job.

But they’d finish adding volatiles and mass to Moon One before they went cold.

O
NE OF THE LAST
major movements of a complicated symphony was under way as Moon Ten approached Moon Twenty-six, which was in motion retrograde above Moon One.

There had been other collisions. Moon One was already a dust ball surrounded by a flattened ring that glowed in Apollo’s light. It looked like Saturn in Sol system, with the ring system lightly twisted by Harlequin’s massive gravity.

The oblate spheroids drifted together like flaming taffy. Gabriel watched the two moons eat each other’s kinetic energy. Hot rock and volatiles churned in a twisting red-orange fireball and began to drift toward Moon One.

A raw sense of power tugged at the edges of Gabriel’s attention as he forced his focus to stay narrow. He had to stay on top of this. Playing God carried awesome responsibility. His purpose was to create a habitable world, a staging area for the antimatter generator that would refuel the carrier
John Glenn
. That world, Selene, would need seas and gravity: more mass, more volatiles. Moon One must be built up.

Selene also needed radiation shielding.

Gabriel had been bashing moons together for more than three hundred fifty years, after many more years of research and simulation. Matters would have gone much faster in Ymir’s system, he thought, a trace of bitterness still edging his thoughts.
John Glenn’s
equipment wasn’t designed for Apollo system. He was supposed to have two more carrier ships and all their resources to help him. Hell, he was supposed to be someplace else entirely. Apollo’s inner rocky worlds were all missing, eaten as the gas giant Daedalus moved inward; anything he needed that wasn’t among Harlequin’s moons would have to be acquired from the Kuiper Belt. Comets were as far apart as they had been in Sol system, generally as far apart as the Sun from the Earth. Travel time expanded hugely. He was doing his damn best, but it was still taking forever.

He stretched and twisted, working his body, pulling out as much tension as he could.

Moons Ten and Twenty-six were history, a fireball above Moon One. Impacting like that, they’d turned a lot of their velocity into heat; but how much? The last time they tried this, with a different pair of moons, most of the mass from the collision had just dissipated. He’d look again in a hundred years.

Time to go cold.

A
ND WARM AGAIN
, a hundred years later. He set to work.

Moon One was lightly ringed. Most of the mass of a double lunar impact was gone. He’d watch Moon One for a while—or the Astronaut program would—and presently he’d know if its mass had grown enough.

John Glenn’s
frozen sleep system had been altered according to specs in their last message from Sol system. This advanced process of being frozen didn’t just retard entropy; it rejuvenated. Gabriel felt wonderfully alive,
though he sometimes pictured his life as a snake chopped up and scattered at random.

And Erika’s life was scattered without regard for his or her own convenience. As a pilot, she would stay frozen for most of the next sixty thousand years.

Meanwhile, Gabriel had work to do.

He revived his team. Moon Forty-one’s surface had cooled around the three LPTs. Wayne set them to thrusting against the moon’s core.

The core wasn’t as stable as Gabriel wanted—no iron ball, just a jumble of heavier stuff—and Wayne held the thrust low. There were still tremors. Pumps fed dirty water ice from the moon into the tanks: reaction mass for the LPTs’ motors. Moon Forty-one wasn’t large. This phase would be over in a few years.

Then—no point in going cold. He would wait out the next couple of years, and watch. Moon Forty-one would graze Harlequin’s atmosphere, turning vast kinetic energy into vast heat. The gas giant would eat the moon. Some of its mass would undoubtedly form a broad ring of debris. It would be a hell of a sight, and it would have other benefits.

Selene—the inhabited world that Moon One would become—would need shielding from Harlequin’s radiation output. The ring would be chaotic for a time, and during the next, oh, fifty thousand years, it would block most of the gas giant planet from Moon One. But time and endless collisions would move the ring particles toward a common orbital plane. In sixty thousand years—when Selene calmed enough to be seeded with life—the ring would only block half the planet. A hundred thousand years later the ring would be as thin as Saturn’s, and nearly useless as a shield.

But
John Glenn
would be gone by then, on its way to Ymir.

Gabriel had decided to form the ring early. He’d give Selene sixty thousand years to lose some of its surface radiation,
and Harlequin itself would have time to settle down after impact. Harlequin would grow hotter, of course. The sun Apollo was too far from the moon system to provide enough heat to warm Moon One. Some of Selene’s heat must come from a hotter Harlequin.

Harlequin’s moon system had become a dangerously cluttered region, but that wouldn’t last. When Erika finally warmed, she would find fewer moons, a system thinned out except for an inner ring that had been Moon Forty-one. Selene would be protected, to that extent, from giant meteoroid impacts.

And Harlequin’s vast gaudy ring would be more than a match for Saturn’s. Gabriel’s gift to Erika! Playing God had its moments.

“And why exactly are we doing this?” Wayne asked. He was shorter and stockier than Gabriel, and each of his movements was deliberate.

Anger kept Gabriel from answering immediately. They were in the galley preparing an elaborate meal. Windows hovered in the air, showing several views of chaos. Rings and clouds of dust and inner storms, rainbows of light glaring through: chaos that would become Selene.

It wasn’t pretty, but it was awesome. Wayne was one of the best engineers on the ship. He could fly anything, figure out any logistical problem. Surely Wayne shared his fierce pride?

“Doing what?” Gabriel asked mildly. “We make Selene because we can.”

“It’s like this. I went cold knowing that they’d warm me when we got to Ymir—to Henry Draper Catalog 212776,” Wayne said, being abnormally precise, no misunderstandings here, “and, and then we’d build Ymir. They thawed me out centuries early, at the wrong star! Now you tell me—”

“They had to tell me first. Wayne, I was cold too. We’re the terraforming team, not ship’s crew. And ship’s crew were worn-out, man! The captain looked like the walking
dead. Erika was twitchy. I wasn’t ready to throw it in their faces.”

Wayne wasn’t being belligerent, he was plodding through a problem. “You tell me the interstellar drive went wonky and we had to find a refuge before the interstellar wind fried us all. Gamma rays at six percent of light-speed. We were lucky. Gliese 876 was almost in our path. We were down to the last whiffs of antimatter fuel when we made orbit here.

“Now, I can buy all that. We can’t get to Ymir until we’ve made more fuel. Right. Why not just go for it? Build a collider and make twelve hundred kilos of antimatter and
go
.”

“First off, you’ll notice that there’s no inner solar system.” Gabriel waved at the windows, though no such thing was obvious to the naked eye. “No asteroids, no rocky worlds like Earth or Mars, nothing until you get down to Daedalus, a mucking great gas giant world huddled right up against its sun. Daedalus ate everything as it moved inward. There’s only Harlequin, out here where Saturn would be if this were Sol system, and three more gas giants and the Kuiper Belt.

“So all the distances out here are huge. Any resource we need has to come from Harlequin’s moons or the Kuiper Belt, where the little Kuiper Belt bodies are just as sparse as in Sol system. It takes forever to get anywhere.

“We looked . . . the High Council looked at the problem,” Gabriel said carefully, “and the Astronaut program verifies. To build an antimatter generator, we need manpower. We’d have to warm half the ship. The garden wouldn’t feed them or recycle enough air, and we don’t have the room either. They’d use up all our resources. We’d die.

“Second possibility is to build habitats like the asteroid civilizations in Sol system. What’s wrong with that?”

Wayne snorted, though he knew he was being tested. “The Belt cities needed too much Artificial Intelligence,
too much nanotech, too much of everything we’re running away from. AIs wound up running it all.”

Gabriel nodded. “So we can’t do
that
. And we could build nanos and let them build a collider and run it for antimatter, with Astronaut running it all. Only we deliberately forgot most of what we need to build tailored nanotech, and Astronaut is another AI. By now it looks like Earth and Sol really have gone down the recycler, and if it wasn’t the AIs taking over, it must have been nanos turning everything to sludge. At any rate, Sol system isn’t talking.

“So what’s left? We came here with gear to make Ymir habitable—a rocky world about the size of Earth, with a reducing atmosphere. We can make a world! It’s just a little bit tougher job.”

Wayne said, “Sure. Where are you going to put the Beanstalk?”

Gabriel finished his last bite of stew. He asked, “Your point?”

“We stored this massive tether-making system. Ymir could have had two hundred thousand kilometers of an orbital tether standing up from the equator, all made of carbon nanotubes. Every bit of nanotechnology we permit ourselves is a compromise, and that was one of them. Ground to orbit transport. We’d have an elevator to the nearby planets. Go anywhere you want in Ymir’s inner system and only pay for the electricity. What would happen if—”

“Selene would be whipping it around in Harlequin’s gravity field. The tides would tear it apart. We can’t give Selene a Beanstalk. What’s your point? Because I
know
we brought the wrong equipment for this!”

“Exactly. We don’t know if it’s good enough,” Wayne said.

“That’s the other side of it. Wayne, we’re making mistakes where it won’t matter. It’s a dry run. When we get to Ymir we’ll know more about our equipment and techniques.”

“Won’t matter? Boss, what about all these people we’ll need to build the collider?”

That was something Gabriel tried not to think about. He said, “I’m not on the High Council, you know.”

Wayne sighed. “Okay, boss.”

“Wayne, have you talked like this with Ali?”

“No.”

“Don’t.”

When Gabriel warmed, there was only the AI to talk to. Humans were
supposed
to wake to human warmth, to hands and smiles and talk. But sixty thousand years was no time frame to thread a live person or set of people through, not when your population totaled only two thousand, and only a few hundred you wanted to warm at all before you could reach your true home. So
John Glenn
had orbited in silence, its huge garden mostly composted, its people frozen. The only aware beings were the AI, Astronaut, and periodically Gabriel; or on good shift breaks, Gabriel and Wayne; or on better ones, Gabriel and Ali.

This was a good break. He’d wake, and then he’d warm Ali, and then . . . then they’d touch down on Selene. He glanced at the chronometer. He was waking on schedule. So nothing horrible had happened during this sleep. His senses rushed alert, smelling medicines and water, feeling the dry cool ship’s air. What Earth had sent them—new programming for nanotechnological cell repair under cold sleep—still acted perfectly.

Gabriel wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Nanotechnology was one of the things they had run away from.

It almost never got said.

There would come a day when Ymir was perfected. On that day all this nonsense of medical nanotech would stop.
The long-lived travelers would age naturally, and die naturally. Their planet would follow its own destiny, and none would use his power to change the weather or stop an encroaching desert. They’d made that agreement, all of them, before they boarded the carrier ships.

They’d wondered about each other since, and they’d wondered about themselves. How could they not? Which of them would fail to give up longevity and the power to shape a world?

“Astronaut?”

“Hello, Gabriel!”

“Any word from Earth?” Gabriel already knew the answer.

“Not since Year 291, shiptime.”

“From Ymir?”

“Nothing, Gabriel.”

It might be that Gabriel was the only human heartbeat in the entire universe.

He flinched from that thought. Surely there were humans at Ymir. Surely
Leif Eriksson
and
Lewis and Clark
had reached Ymir, safe, and thousands or millions of humans now populated a rebuilt planet. Or billions? Ymir was to have been made a second Earth, and Earth had housed tens of billions, sixty thousand years ago. They’d sent message probes, traveling at a tenth light-speed at best, at the highpoint of their journey. A hundred forty-eight light-years distanced them, at Gliese 876, from Ymir at HDC 212776. That was a lot of distance for fragile probes to travel.

Gabriel wiggled his toes, stretched his fingers, and bounced his calves lightly on the bed.

Two hours later, he pushed himself to standing and went to the galley to make tea infused with vitamins and mint, easy for a rejuvenated and rebuilt body to accept. He took the tea to his office, wrinkling his nose at the medicinal smell, and ordered Astronaut to pull up views of Selene.

Bad smelling or not, the first sip of tea sat warm and perfect in his belly as images of the little moon filled his walls.