Building Harlequin’s Moon (3 page)

A cloud obscured part of the surface. A cloud! He smiled broadly, then laughed in delight. He sat mesmerized, watching the cloud, until his tea bulb was empty.

Then he started barking out a list for Astronaut to read to him: precipitation measures, exact atmospheric composition, water loss, evaporation . . .

Within an hour, Gabriel confirmed they could walk on the moon. They could start to introduce life. They could . . . he gave instructions to wake Ali and Wayne, and went to get ready for them. He sang as he pulled himself down the corridor to Medical.

G
ABRIEL AND
A
LI WALKED
on the barren surface of the little moon. They started inside light pressure suits, taking readings and checking radiation levels, double-testing what they already knew from the tiny sensors that dotted Selene. Ali stripped first, all the way down to underwear and bra and shoes, oxygen tank and mask. Her olive skin dimpled in the cool air.

He laughed with pleasure watching her; a tiny half-naked woman climbing on rocks; jumping from one to the other, tossing stones and catching them.

Drawn by Ali’s antics, Gabriel stripped to his pants and shirt, mask and tank, and ran and cavorted and grinned while Ali knelt and touched the regolith, walked to a new place, and touched the surface again. He danced with her on the surface, seeing wonder and reverence in her eyes as she moved easily, gracefully.

Selene was still a touch unstable; it shivered twice with small quakes in the hours they were there. Ali came and stood beside him. “I like the silence—I like being away from that damned constant data flow. It feels more human here.”

Gabriel held her, not answering, just feeling the soft touch of her dark head in the hollow of his shoulder. He felt lost without the data, regardless of how ecstatic he was to be on Selene. On Selene!

“Someday,” he said, “Selene will be information rich like the ship. We’ll enhance the flows some here before we return—I’ll need it to monitor the next steps.”

She glared at him, a touch distant suddenly. “Be careful—you’ll need too much technology. Let’s keep Selene simple.”

Her face was bathed in Apollo’s light, her skin duskier than he remembered from the ship. They pulled their masks aside, and he gave her the first kiss on Selene. It was quick. Selene had just barely more oxygen, right now, than the top of Everest. It needed life to make a living atmosphere.

Thousands of years of shifts had taught them all to take intimacy where they found it, to appreciate it, and consider it friendship.

They flew happily back up to
John Glenn
. Gabriel returned with Wayne, and while Gabriel and Wayne walked Selene’s surface, Ali packed up cultures and genetic material so they could start seeding the regolith, eventually covering part of Selene with bacteria to begin the process of making soil.

When they warmed next, all of the bacteria were dead. So they stayed awake and watched the next attempt, killing time designing a huge tent. They would control the atmosphere inside the tent, and use it to build greenhouses and homes; a little city. The tent stood up well to the little earthquakes that came along. They dubbed the new town Aldrin, and stayed there from time to time.

It took four tries—twenty years—to get healthy cyanobacteria mats spread across the ground near Aldrin and have something like soil. Now it was time to wake the High Council.

Gabriel spent hours with each of them, running low on
sleep, talking excitedly. He had Astronaut play videos for the captain; lost moons dancing into each other. Gabriel watched the captain’s wrinkled face closely, saw how his deep-ocean-blue eyes tracked the flow of moons and proto-comets.

Captain John Hunter had stayed awake during the long crippled flight that took them to Gliese 876 after they nearly burned up in the interstellar wind. That trip was so long that no amount of post-ice rejuvenation treatments had removed the spots and lines and dark circles that transformed his face. Centuries of pain were etched in odd bends of his fingers and toes, in the hunch in his back, the folds over his eyes. But intelligence still lived in his eyes. If anything, the ravages his choices had created in his body made his will stronger. It mattered to Gabriel that John Hunter see the dream he’d helped design come alive.

It went well, except for the astonishing rapidity with which Council returned to the cryo-tanks. They wanted an easier world to oversee.

Once, Gabriel warmed Erika. By then, Wayne was building roads, using huge robotic machines to flatten the soil. Ali was cold. Gabriel was designing pipes to control the hydrology, and constructing a small factory by the Hammered Sea. Erika stayed warm for a year, giving Gabriel good advice, making a few mistakes they laughed at together, fretting about how long everything took. The plan was already foreshortened—Gabriel would never have forced so many processes if Selene wasn’t really just a way to escape to the stars again.

He held Erika’s attention for a year before she insisted on going cold again.

Gabriel and Ali finished the little town of Aldrin. They laid pipes to carry water to a cistern, more pipes to make a rudimentary sewer and reclamation system, planted a grove of trees on a hill outside town, and filled greenhouses with seedlings. The night before they planned to wake
High Council again, Gabriel and Ali made love, alone on the surface of the moon they’d transformed. Their love-making started soft and slow, growing to a deep intimate conclusion. They stayed still for a long time, wrapped in each other’s arms, warm in that close place that follows on the heels of lovemaking. When she stopped trembling, Ali looked at Gabriel and said, “We’ve consecrated the ground here. Selene has been blessed. We blessed it together.”

Gabriel simply thought they’d enjoyed great sex, but it was a celebration, and so he didn’t contradict her. Rather, he held her tightly and began to work out hydrologic engineering problems in his head.

R
ACHEL REACHED FOR
the seedling. Her long fingers found the pliant trunk, thin as her pinkie, buried inside the furled branches. She unwrapped gauzy material from the root ball with her free hand, separating the roots by spreading them down and out in the air. Bits of soil fell through her hands as she settled roots and tree onto a mound of nutrient-enriched dirt. Still steadying the gangly cecropia, she swept anchor soil to cover the roots, tamped it down, and then tied the trunk very loosely to a long thin stake. Rachel sat back on her heels and admired the little tree. A warm breeze rustled its leaves and the smell of damp dirt filled the air.

A banana palm went in next, then a set of three heliconias near the path. Rachel’s crate stood empty. The distant sun, Apollo, hung low in the sky, illuminating beads of sweat as she stretched.

The other students had all finished more than twenty minutes ago. Rachel nodded to herself, checking to be sure the plot matched the picture in her head. Harry’s plot was well designed, and cleaner since he had gone back and raked the soil after watering. But she could do that too. Water first. She sighed and got up to get a rake.

“Nice job.” Gabriel’s voice behind her sounded flat, far away, even if the words approved.

Rachel turned around and looked back at him. Gabriel stood an inch taller than Rachel, but wider and stronger, carefully dressed in brown pants that tied at the ankles, high boots, and a tight-fitting shirt that showed muscles.
He looked serious, like he’d gotten lost in his head. She wrinkled her nose at him and smiled. He didn’t smile back. He looked outward, higher than the horizon, fingering the bright metal and bead sculptures twisted into the long red-brown braid of his hair.

Rachel ran her fingers through her own short red hair, wondering if such a long braid was heavy. And what was he looking at?

Diamond patterns in a thousand shades of white and red: a gibbous world, huge and fully risen, brilliant across more than half its arc, sullen red where the sunlight didn’t fall. Harlequin. A broad straight band ran blazing white across its face, and disappeared where Harlequin’s shadow fell across it. A ring, Gabriel called it, but nothing ever showed but that thick white slash.

What fascinated Gabriel about Harlequin and its ring? It was a feature of the sky, changeable, but not of great interest. Tiny fiery-looking storms on Harlequin might affect weather on Selene, Gabriel had said once, but (he admitted) not by much.

A mystery. Council was always a mystery. Rachel knew Gabriel would wait there until she finished. Another mystery—Council always knew where they were—they could see everything on Selene. So he didn’t have to stay.
Maybe I shouldn’t rake since I’m last
, she thought.
But the test is tomorrow
!

She watered and raked anyway, perversely determined to spend time with each tree as she finished for the evening. Perfect, it might please Gabriel. (He still hadn’t moved.)

She put the rake away and stood as near Gabriel as she dared, and looked up too. Harlequin rose as Apollo rode low in the sky and then disappeared. Softer illumination replaced the red-gold sunlight, tinged by the oranges and reds of the gas giant. The planet covered a huge portion of the sky. Rachel could cover Apollo, the distant sun, with
the width of her thumb held half an arm’s length in front of her. Harlequin took both palms to blot from view.

The gas giant made its own dim red light, shed by the intense heat in its constantly churning surface. Apollo’s reflection brightened Harlequin’s inner light, and the combined glow bathed Selene’s summer, making the night barely dusky.

Selene’s orbit around Harlequin defined seasons based on the amount of light available. “Summer” was the seven weeks when Selene orbited closest to Apollo, “winter” the seven weeks they were farthest away, and fall and spring filled in the time between. Summer hid most of the stars in its steady light. In full winter, night fell black enough to detail the galaxy spread around them.

Rachel watched her two shadows merge as Apollo set fully, and then put the tools away and strapped arm and leg sets on. She waved at Gabriel, and said “Good night” out loud, alert for a response from Gabriel. None came.

A few hundred yards from the edge of Teaching Grove, she pushed hard on the balls of her feet, straining upward with every step, taking ten-foot strides along the flat path back to Aldrin. She gained speed and height, finally leaping all-out. As she began the fall after the apogee of her leap, she snapped her leg and arm wings down just before the ground could catch her foot webs. Three strong kicks, a rhythm, and she was flying.

Rachel flew low in the treacherously soft light of Harlequin’s evening until she reached two tall poles that marked the outside of the colony’s first home. Her father had told her the poles once supported a great tent of air that Council built their first homes in. No longer needed, the tall stakes still marked the boundaries of home. She swung her legs from behind to just in front of her, braking, snapping her leg wings closed at exactly the right moment, landing with just one extra little hop that she expertly turned into a bounding walk as she folded her arm wings in.

Rachel followed a well-worn path past Council Row and its large lighted homes, sparing them hardly a glance. They were beautiful, iridescent, and closed to Moon Born. The faultless layout seemed like a wall to Rachel as she slipped along its outside edge toward the friendly chaos of tents she called home. The base color of the tents was a metallic shimmering light gray; fabric that repelled rain and heat alike. Colorful cloths were thrown and sewn onto the walls, covering and making windows, proclaiming family personalities. In the common areas between tents, children played skip-stones, studied, or sat in groups talking. Rachel waved at her friend Ursula’s brothers and some of the kids from her class.

In two more minutes she was truly home, ducking through a delicate blue fabric doorway. The inside of the tent was simple. Hangings divided it into four rooms—two sleeping rooms, a combination living room and kitchen, and a small workroom. They shared bathroom facilities with four other families.

Her father was already there, his boots off, his feet resting on an embroidered ottoman she had made him. Dark circles spread like stains under his eyes, and his long arms draped by his side.

“The other kids have been back more than an hour,” Frank said, smiling at her.

“I wanted my trees to be perfect.”

“Your work is always good.” Her father’s voice sounded warm, if tired. “I’ve got dinner on.”

Rachel went to the tiny kitchen and ladled vegetable soup into a smooth metal bowl. She’d cut the beans and carrots up that morning before going to the grove. “I’ll have to study.”

“You’ll pass,” Frank said. “Did you get any information about when they plan to start the planting for this season?”

“It’ll be soon. It has to be. Gabriel will be gone after the test, and I guess we’ll stay and take care of things at the
grove. Gabe downloaded a bunch of new stuff for us this afternoon, so I better study.”

“Better call him Gabriel,” Frank said.

“Yes, Daddy.”

“And you’d better get some sleep.”

“I know. I’ll sleep after I read the new stuff he beamed me.” Rachel flipped open the wrist pad she’d been given when Gabriel chose her for the planting class. She commanded it to create a window in front of her. Numbers and descriptions flowed through the air. When her eyes blurred and the data stopped making sense, she slipped off to sleep, snuggling deep into a nest of blankets and pillows.

Apollo’s rise woke her. Her father had already, gone. Rachel reviewed her notes again until she heard Ursula call from outside.

“Coming.” Rachel grabbed up some carrots and a hunk of bread for lunch, and grinned to see her willowy friend bouncing impatiently up and down in the path. Ursula was even thinner than Rachel, light-colored everywhere, with freckles and blue eyes. The light morning rain slicked the girls’ hair down so it hung in wet strings, and they shivered in the cool air. Ursula worried them up the path, keeping them from flying so she could practice vocabulary answers out loud until Rachel wanted to scream at her. If anyone besides Ursula babbled on so, Rachel would have stopped it, or walked ahead, but Ursula covered insecurities with noise. Ursula had been her friend as long as she could remember, the only other girl her age in the immediate circle of tents. They’d helped each other learn to walk, and then to fly.