Building Harlequin’s Moon (56 page)

“Rachel and her people deserve something better. Treesa saw that early on, and she . . . she worked with Rachel to help her learn history and politics, to give her tools to convince Council that Moon Born could be part of
our decisions. But no one listened. High Council’s direction got worse and worse.” She stopped, feet planted widely, watching him.

Gabriel looked at Rachel, huddled down in her blankets, not moving. Ali was accusing him of not caring. Finally, he spoke. “I worked to teach Moon Born. I pleaded before the High Council, telling them that we should develop the Children of Selene so they could help us. I got a twenty-year sleep for my troubles.” He thought about it “I’ve always suspected that’s the real reason Rachel and I were left on ice for so long. But you’re talking about rebellion. Rebelling against High Council is wrong. It just got three people killed, almost got Liren killed. What did we get for all that? An opening for a conversation we could have had anyway?”

Ali’s high cheekbones reddened, though her dark eyes remained veiled below lowered lids. “It’s something,” she said. “We’re talking.”

“No one had to die for this conversation to happen,” he snapped. “I almost died!”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” she whispered, stepping close to him and taking his hand briefly. “I’m sorry anyone died.” She drained her cup, stared at the bottom for a moment, then stood to make more tea, as if the simple action calmed her. “If we make our antimatter and fly away—then everyone left on Selene will die. Maybe not right away, maybe not for generations, but if we stayed we could keep the environment going longer. We haven’t given them the technology to live on an unstable moon. You know that, I know you do.”

Gabriel frowned. “None of our choices were good. We can’t fight our own rules and laws, we can’t kill our own people, or use interdicted technology—without risking the death of us all! We cannot fight among ourselves. It would be the perfect joke for the only humans in quintillions of klicks to kill each other.”

He didn’t want to stay on this path with Rachel in the room. There were more immediate worries. “An AI was a stupid risk. You saw what it did? It actually sent doctored data streams to
John Glenn
. I couldn’t even find Rachel at first when this started.” He paced, confined in the small galley, five long steps one way, five the other. “Did it hide data from you too? Break our security some other way? Do you even know?”

Now Ali looked defensive. “Treesa is a good communications tech. Vassal’s parameters and freedoms have been monitored carefully. It has not sold us out—it’s helped!”

“Vassal? You named it
Vassal?
”

“It named itself Vassal.”

The AI thought of itself as a slave? Or it wanted the people it interacted with to think of it that way? AIs weren’t good at deception, which was a human trait . . . as far as he knew. They were just damned powerful. Another thought struck him. “Vassal is a copy of Astronaut?”

Ali nodded again.

The implications sank into Gabriel slowly. He had always thought of Astronaut as . . . a what? A computer? He knew it was more. As an equal work partner, a good engineer, a careful navigator. He’d talked to it like a friend, sometimes. Or had he?

He heard Rachel murmuring in the background. She wasn’t looking at him: she stared at the wall and spoke, as if to herself, so softly her actual words weren’t audible. He’d taught her that: a Library access trick. All the Council did it.

“She’s talking to Vassal right now,” he said.

Ali said, “Checking on her people.”

“Who? Her people?”
How much had he missed?
“Other Children?”

“Some Earth Born too. Let her check—it’s a damn good thing she’s not just catatonic after the last few days—and all of that—all of her pain—was because of
us. We pushed Andrew, we didn’t allow good med tech for her dad, we killed Jacob outright. Bang.” Ali stood, pacing, agitated. “Jacob could have been saved if he wasn’t stunned into a pile of glass shards and left without our medical facilities. Rachel tried to save him. Rachel and Beth—using what they knew. But it wasn’t enough. Any of our med techs could have done it.”

Gabriel flicked his eyes at Rachel again.

“The power and knowledge balance is off here,” Ali said. “This is what she’s been fighting. We taught her nonviolence; even Astronaut and Treesa and Vassal supported nonviolence.”

A horrible thought ran through Gabriel’s mind. “So who taught Andrew?”

Ali looked at him, eyes narrowing. “You did. I did. Liren, mostly.” She licked her lips, twisting her hands in her braid. “We taught him that nonviolence doesn’t work.”

Gabriel glanced at the data window. The numbers glowed brighter. The flare was coming. He pulled himself back to the conversation. “Star said Andrew’s goal was to stop the antimatter generator. That was the only demand he made; the reason for the whole stupid trick he tried to pull.”

Ali swallowed. “I know he didn’t like any of us, ever. I didn’t know he worried about the antimatter.” Ali paused, her eyes flicking down, away from him. “I did know Rachel was scared silly.”

“Do you know Vassal didn’t give the information to him?”

Rachel spoke up from behind him. “Vassal isn’t afraid of the generator either, any more than you. I told him, Gabriel. It’s my fault.” He turned. She’d pushed the blanket away and her face looked miserable.

“It happened the night after you—after they killed Jacob. I was . . . in pain.” Rachel paused, her voice breaking. “I was so frustrated about everything, about Jacob, about
Dad being sick, about the antimatter, I let it spill out all over Andrew.” She paused again. “I should never have done that. I might as well have killed Dylan myself.”

“It’s not your fault,” Ali said. “We—we should have listened to you more.” She walked over and sat close to Rachel.

Gabriel looked at Rachel’s tortured face. “You”—he stepped toward her, sat in the closest chair, and looked her directly in the eyes—”you are not responsible for Andrew. You’re not even responsible for Andrew’s death. He chose it. He chose all of this.”

Rachel looked down and away, nodded, and settled the blankets back over her legs. He wasn’t sure she believed them, and she clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

“Tell me about antimatter?” he asked.

Ali looked up. “About three months ago, Rachel figured out more about antimatter. She confronted us. She’s afraid there could be an accident here. She protested our plan to build the generator here—”

“That’s why we built Selene!” Gabriel interrupted, turning toward Rachel, struggling to speak softly. Of course she misunderstood. “Rachel, antimatter containment is a technique hundreds of years old. We know how to do it.”

Ali got back up and sat down at the table. “Treesa and I told her that too.” Ali turned her cup around and around in her hand, nervous. “And we were wrong.” She tugged on her braid, sighed, and then put her hand over Gabriel’s hand. “We made Selene, Gabriel, but Selene isn’t our home.
John Glenn
is. And maybe, someday, Ymir. But Selene
is
Rachel’s home. We didn’t hear that when she said it; we didn’t understand. She sees our choices as being willing to risk her home, as not caring.”

“That’s right,” Rachel said. She held her teacup out at arm’s length, in front of her. “This much, even if it wasn’t full, this could destroy Clarke Base.”

All three of them looked up as the door opened, and John and Treesa came in. They moved slowly, faces droopy with exhaustion, but they both smiled to see the three of them waiting.

“Did everyone get here?” Gabriel asked.

John said, “There’s a nose count going.”

“Do you have any idea why Liren came down here at all?” Gabriel asked.

John busied himself at the tiny sink, pouring water for himself and Treesa, not showing his face. Then he spoke. “She believes that any deviation from our laws will kill us. She truly believes it. She is trying very hard to do her job. She just doesn’t understand what it is anymore.”

Gabriel frowned, wishing he could let his tired friend rest. “You need to hear about something. Treesa, you have some explaining—”

“I told Gabriel about Vassal,” Ali interrupted. “I had to. I was so afraid up there—Rachel was going after Dylan, and Gabriel figured out that she had help. He knew it had to be Council or an AI . . .”

Ali was defending herself to Treesa. Why? Gabriel looked closely at Treesa. Her gray hair stuck to her face: she’d worked on the boat that afternoon. Wrinkles surrounded her eyes and pulled her mouth inward. She looked elderly. And Ali treated her as if she were in charge. Even Rachel straightened in her seat, eyes on Treesa.

Treesa went to Rachel first, before responding at all to Gabriel’s question, and said, “It hurts, I know. I’m sorry. But it’s not your fault.”

Rachel reached up and buried her face in a hug from Treesa.

Captain John spoke. “I support all of the decisions Treesa and Ali made.” John’s words stunned Gabriel into silence. “In fact, they were Rachel’s decisions too.” His eyes were directly on Gabriel’s; implacable. Sixty thousand
years of iron will stared directly into Gabriel’s eyes. “We worked together on this. I came down here partly to understand the Moon Born. There are more supporters too—more than you see here. Many people resented the High Council’s decisions—” The former captain looked down briefly, then back at Gabriel. “Even decisions I made. Rightly so. They were the wrong decisions.”

Gabriel realized his mouth was hanging open and he closed it. Words escaped him. He was the odd man out—he was the only one in the room not part of a conspiracy. He clamped his jaw shut and tried to assess his emotions. Anger—and separation.

John continued. “Don’t mistake me. It has been a terrible day. Death, particularly death based on stupid disagreements, is a waste.” He nodded at Treesa. “Maybe inevitable, though. Listen to Treesa’s story.”

Treesa sat next to Rachel, holding her hand. “I’ll give you the short version, and you can ask me questions if you want.”

Gabriel nodded, trying for patience, breathing into his belly. “Okay.”

Treesa spoke haltingly. “You know I woke up—in this system—disaffected. Something in the waking process, or the shock, the
loss
of it all, broke something in me. I didn’t have the presence of mind to be a good communications tech, to toe the line. I wasn’t—right. I didn’t want the oblivion of being cold, so I made a deal. Council let me live in the garden. You know that part. You helped me some, when we first woke. You remember?”

Gabriel did remember a younger Treesa. Long ago, in the earliest part of the town-building days, when Aldrin was still tented. She had been like a ghost in the garden, fading away whenever anyone approached her, left alone because she did useful work and caused no harm. They had all been too busy to solve nonproblems.

“Well, taking care of plants all day for years gives you a different perspective, a groundedness. Time to think. I may still be a bit touched, but I’ve had time to observe and to watch and to think about things. Everyone else was working as hard as they could, doing shift work, and I weeded and watered and watched.

“I still had my communications skills, so I eavesdropped on almost everything anyone said to anyone, from my little house in the garden. Either no one noticed, or no one cared. But that’s what I did for years—listen to everything, watch what I could. I hardly ever talked to a human being—I just watched them. Even . . . even High Council meetings.” She paused, eyes roaming the room, and Gabriel slowly absorbed how many lonely years she was speaking about.

“And then, eventually, I had to make contact with someone. I chose the AI. I didn’t know if I could really handle talking to people. That was before Rachel came up to
John Glenn
.

“Well, Astronaut became a good friend, and helpful too. Together we figured out how to get me—and it—more data. It . . . talked to me. For years. Worked on me, helped me get to where I could deal a little better with reality, accept my losses. It doesn’t understand emotions. I had to get past my feelings to talk to it, and I was so lonely I needed to talk.” Treesa reached for John’s hand, squeezed it. He stood up and got her a glass of water. She drank, then turned back to Gabriel. “So I ended up wanting to help you and the Children—us and our children—come to some better understanding. You were on a collision course. You couldn’t make Selene and not love it, you couldn’t make it safe, and you couldn’t allow too much of what you ran away from—what we all fled Earth from—to be loosed hereeither. There were no good choices, not after what we left in Sol. I didn’t know the answer. I still don’t. I think
you have to find it—we all have to find it—and I had to help, at least help people see the challenges. Astronaut, and Vassal, have the same problem as the Moon Born. They don’t have a voice.”

Gabriel couldn’t listen any more. He wanted to move, to pace, but the little room was full now, and there was almost no room. He felt hemmed in. “We don’t give them voice for a reason! They have a place. A useful place. But not a
free
place. I work with Astronaut all the time. I like Astronaut. But a being who knows that much can cause too much damage. They don’t love us—they can’t.” He closed his eyes, unable to grasp the magnitude of their trust, their innocence. They’d released a full copy of an AI as a separate being. It lived in
Water Bearer
, but many communications channels blanketed Selene; large data streams flowed between
Water Bearer
and
John Glenn
. The whole system was its . . . its person.

He shuddered. “Don’t you remember how we let ourselves get dependent on them? They ran our life support on moons and starships and then . . . then they failed. How could you take such a risk and not involve us?”

John was watching him, his eyes measuring. “Those AIs went crazy. They were brilliant but flawed, and bored. I’ve been doing research. Here, our goals are aligned. Astronaut and Vassal both need us alive if they are to survive. I believe they are like us in that—they want to survive. Neither shows signs of insanity.”

“So why didn’t anyone tell me about this?” Gabriel asked.