Building Harlequin’s Moon Read online

  She smiled, thinking about Harry. She felt his kiss, the pressure of his arm on her shoulder, his weight on her stomach. Her breath came faster. She wanted to hold him, feel him near her, hear his voice. She rolled onto her stomach and cried, hoping no one would walk in the door. The only people she wanted to see were on Selene.

  Rachel dreamed she and Harry were looking all over the unfamiliar ship for Ursula and Andrew, and they couldn’t find either one.

  When she woke, sweaty and worried, all three of them had written back. She smiled and started scrolling through her messages.

  Her dad: “Hey, how are you? I’m glad you’re safe. I spent the day fixing a control out at the solar plant, and when I looked up at the sky I hoped to see you.”

  Ursula wrote paragraphs of remorse for arguing, and continued the argument. Rachel gave up before finishing and filed the message to be reread later. She opened the one from Harry last, afraid of it and longing for it. “I’m glad you are safe. I miss you already. Record everything. Harry.” That was so Harry.

  Before she had time to respond to Ursula, the door opened and Kyu Ho walked into the room, dressed all in blues and yellows, even to blue streaks of color in her hair. “Good morning, did you sleep well?”

  Rachel blinked at her, flipping the data window down and closed. “Yes.”

  “Join me for breakfast in the garden.”

  It wasn’t a question. Rachel had to work to push herself up from the soft bed.

  Kyu showed her a shower tucked into a wall behind a door, and pushed open a drawer that held soft green pants and a white shirt. Kyu sat on Rachel’s bed and waited silently while Rachel got ready to go. Rachel wished she’d go and come back, but Kyu ignored Rachel’s embarrassment and, in fact, just looked up at the wall and sometimes smiled or frowned. Rachel wondered if she was listening to voices inside her head.

  As they passed down the corridor outside Rachel’s room, her feet felt as if they wore brick shoes, and her lungs burned. Luckily, Kyu Ho walked more slowly than the night before. She didn’t offer Rachel a hand.

  The tiny woman glittered as faceted blue beads strung around her jumpsuit caught light. Black hair swung loose, with many thin, tight braids laced over the main fall of it. Kyu’s eyes were large and almond-shaped, as black as her hair, and rimmed with blues. Her voice had a wide range, lilting up and down as she explained directions and conventions of shipboard travel to Rachel. Rachel wanted to ask her a million questions, but they stuck behind her teeth as she tried to listen, to watch Kyu, to remember details to tell Harry, and to walk, all at the same time.

  The corridor ended in a boxy room. The door closed behind them and Rachel’s stomach rushed into her throat as the floor moved. She fell against the wall. Kyu Ho smiled a little, her only comment on Rachel’s predicament.

  The room had tilted, and was rising. Her weight eased to Selene levels, and grew lighter yet. When the room stopped moving, they were falling.

  The flight here had shown her free fall. She recognized it for what it was. She’d been tied down then, which made it tolerable. Now there was room to thrash. She held herself still, absorbing the sensation, remembering to breathe.

  She was not going to die.

  The door opened on a hallway. Kyu Ho stopped for a moment. “See that picture . . . the one with the little squares on it? If you push that, you’ll go back to the deck your room is on.”

  A row of ten symbols confronted Rachel. She pointed to a glowing dot. “That’s where we are now?”

  “Yes, good.” Kyu nodded approvingly.

  “Where do the rest of them go?”

  “To the rest of the ship. For now, those two are all you need to know.” Kyu turned and started down the hall.

  Rachel pushed herself into the hallway—and thrashed helplessly in midair.

  Kyu watched for a few seconds. She said, “You’ve had no training at all.”

  Embarrassment and anger made Rachel’s cheeks hot. “Of course not! Where would I have training in how to fall? I fly. If I fell, I’d be dead!”

  Kyu Ho nodded. She slowed while Rachel found ways to move. “Always know where your next handhold is. You’ll learn ways to jump down a hallway. For now, jump only toward handholds. Turn like this—” Kyo Ho jumped off center, then pulled her arms and legs inward and spun.” You try it.”

  Rachel bumped her knuckles on a handhold and her head knocked against the wall. Kyu caught her before she could hurt herself. “Again.”

  And finally, “Shall we go?”

  They negotiated another hallway, its walls littered with humming squares and round lines of piping, the floor a lacework of metal rather than a solid surface. Then a tube with handholds, a door, and Rachel gasped. To pass through that door was to leave cold mysterious metal for a riot of greens and brightness, exchanging hard lines and angles for leaves and curves.

  She floated in ahead of Kyu, into a maze of huge roots, and out into the open.

  Right in front of Rachel’s nose, close enough to make out the rough texture, she saw the bark of a tree. The trunk was so thick she couldn’t see around it.

  She looked up, following the trunk. The first few branches started very far above her head. The top of the tree was too distant for her to make out. It had to end short of the roof, she could see that, and it—she was in a bowl! No, a ball full of things she had never seen.

  Her stomach lurched as she noticed paths spiraling up away from her. The world was inside out. On Selene, the horizon curved away from her. Here, it encircled her, turning completely and returning to her in an arc. She blinked and stared, her mind racing as it tried to make sense of something that shouldn’t work. Vegetation and planter boxes climbed up the sides of the round garden when they should have been sliding down into a pile.

  It took a long time for details to resolve.

  Scents even richer than Selene’s assailed her, sweet flowery smells, like the greenhouse back home, only twice as strong and unfamiliar.

  There was only the one giant tree, right in the middle.

  Strung between the trunk and the—walls?—of the ball, lines of flowers fell away like spokes. The long strands of flowers near the trunk bore blossoms as tall as she was, dwarfing anything she had seen on Selene. Bright yellow strings held flowers in lines between the tree trunk and the walls. So maybe ropes held everything up? They’d have to be strong.

  Movement filled empty places. Wings flashed and spiraled, their shapes giving them away as human flyers. The wings reminded her of colorful butterflies from the lawn at Teaching Grove. Other shapes flew too; circles and squares and spindles and lines that must be machines.

  The lighting was strange—a bright light from above drove the shadows one way, and in places more lights made faint second or even third shadows, like Selene in summer, when Apollo and Harlequin both lit the surface. She had studied a hundred plants on Selene, loving the way they reached for light and the variation in leaf and stem and flower. Here were a hundred times a hundred plants, the pull of various lighting and shadows making them all fantastic, beautiful, and mysterious.

  “This will be your school.”

  Kyu Ho’s voice brought her awareness back. She was still falling, but Kyu Ho wasn’t. The smaller woman was on a pebbled path, a dozen meters out from the tree.

  Rachel pushed herself down, turned, and touched down with her feet. She was proud of that.

  And she was ravenous. Breakfast had been delayed by hours.

  Kyu Ho said, “That’s Yggdrasil, the Mid-tree. We designed it specifically to grow along the axis of rotation, and had to try twenty times to get one that stayed healthy and grew straight. This tree is over a thousand years old.”

  Rachel gulped. It seemed impossible.

  Kyu Ho led Rachel in a bounding walk along a wide path in the middle of a set of boxes that overflowed with green, starting as a rim around the base of the Mid-tree’s trunk, sloping gently up. The walkway was rough, a gray painted surface that made dull hollow sounds a
s they walked on it. It seemed pebbled, though there were no loose pebbles to turn into missiles when John Glenn maneuvered.

  They walked a spiral, and after two turns around the base of the giant tree, they came upon a rack of wings. Kyu handed a set to Rachel. They were similar to the wings she flew on Selene, except that every detail was perfect, metal polished, joints and straps glowing with quality.

  Kyu turned and looked at Rachel. “It is important for you to stay with me. Gravity here varies. It’s made by spin—and so the part of the sphere that would be an equator on a planet is the heaviest. We put the river there.” She laughed. “Or maybe the river put itself there. Spin gravity, centrifugal force, holds the water in place. The poles only have gravity equal to our thrust—that is, they only have gravity if our engines are pushing us. Right now, they’re not. You felt weightless at the tree. We were on the zero gee line in that tube—remember the tube?—and between us and the zero line there is storage, work labs, and the Mid-tree’s root system”—she pointed toward the huge central tree—“which you’re standing just above.”

  Rachel shifted her feet. Her body was light, and she felt like a push would send her flying.

  Kyu continued. “This is aft. We usually come in ‘fore’—above the tree, but then you have to deal with zero gee, and the Sun Lamp. The Lamp rotates twenty degrees aft of fore, and you need dark glasses to come in fore. Besides, it’s farther from the cafeteria. See the river?”

  Rachel squinted. A broad ribbon of blue divided the sphere in half along the inside-out equator. Half of it was simply blue, and half shimmered in light that was whiter and more intense than high summer in Aldrin.

  “There’s full gravity—Earth gravity—at the river. But we’ll save that for another day. Today, we’ll have breakfast at the main kitchen and get you oriented. Now, Gabriel says flight on Selene is easy compared to this—so don’t think you know anything. Here we have to adjust for varying gravity, wind schedules, and for airborne machines like monitoring bots. If you go fast enough, you’ll feel a stinging. That’s nanotech air scrubbers that don’t get out of your way fast enough. They won’t hurt you. You won’t see them. Don’t fly alone until you get used to it, and for now, follow me.” Kyu took three steps to gather speed, and arced into the air. Her wings were blue and yellow, shining and glittering as light hit them, matching her hair and clothes.

  Rachel’s three steps and a leap catapulted her past Kyu on the first try. Startled, out of control, she spread her wings and floated down. She improved, and followed the graceful High Councilwoman a short distance to set down on a large empty patio right in front of an unusually tall boxy planter. Vines covered the outside of the planter, falling from above Rachel’s head almost to her feet, covered in tiny yellow flowers. They shelved the flying gear, and Kyu pulled open a door at the base of the big planter.

  The door opened into a big room full of light and people.

  A large table was piled with fruit and bread. Round bulbs with nipples held juice and water. Nearly a dozen people sat in small groups at round tables. None were as tiny or brightly dressed as Kyu. Everyone was shorter than Rachel. Every head turned toward Rachel and Kyu as silence fell. Two women came over to them. Kyu introduced them. “These are Mary and Helga—they work on the garden here.”

  The taller woman, Mary, nodded and said, “Hello, Rachel.”

  Kyu hadn’t mentioned her name. Rachel, puzzled, said, “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Can we join you?” Helga addressed Kyu.

  Kyu shook her head. “Perhaps another time.”

  Kyu led Rachel to the food table, and helped her select berries and bread and strips of something odd: artificial bacon, she said. Rachel liked it.

  “How did they know me?” Rachel asked.

  “We watch what happens on Selene.” Kyu led them to a table.

  “So we, we’re another experiment?”

  “Not exactly. You are . . . let me try again. We limit the kinds of tools we use. Certain things need to be done by humans. We could have shaped Selene with nothing but machines, but we would have had to use machines smarter than we wanted them to be. Machines that are too smart are dangerous.”

  Rachel thought about it. “Well, the planters are pretty smart.”

  “They need humans to run them. Besides, humans adapt to change better than the level of machines we authorize for Selene. There’s more to intelligence than doing complex tasks. Adapting is, in fact, your real job. That’s why humans work so much better than robots.” Kyu twisted her hands through her hair, fingernails flashing glittery light. “I have high hopes for you. Selene is changing as we make it—and we’re learning too. This is the biggest terraforming project anyone has ever done, anywhere. Mars was nothing compared to this. People react to the unexpected better than machines. The only program that might be better at that than us is an AI, but AI goals aren’t human goals.”

  Rachel nodded (AI?) and Kyu continued. “You know we need to build industry here? It takes a lot of people to build an antimatter collider. There aren’t enough Council to do that, or even Colonists.”

  Rachel saw the opportunity to learn one thing she and Harry wanted to know. “What’s the difference between Council and Colonists?”

  “There are two hundred Council. We are collectively responsible for the ship. We financed it—” Kyu shook her head. “Sorry—we made it possible to build John Glenn. We planned this trip. Five of us are High Council, and have ultimate responsibility for everyone. There are a lot of Colonists—people picked to come because they have specific knowledge we will need when we get to Ymir. And we can’t afford to wake them all up here—we’ll need them on Ymir. It would be horrible to risk everyone from Earth someplace as dangerous as Selene when we’ll need their-genes and Earth-educated minds more later.”

  Rachel swallowed. “So you risk us instead?”

  Kyu didn’t answer.

  “And so you really will leave?” Rachel asked.

  “We can’t live here forever—we don’t have enough resources. Have you seen pictures of Ymir?”

  Rachel shook her head. “Gabriel talked about it once.”

  “Ymir is his dream. Some of us dream of Earth. . . .” Kyu’s voice trailed off. “But it’s not there anymore.”

  “How could a planet not be there? Gabriel says that’s impossible!”

  “Selene wasn’t here before we got here. Eat.”

  Obediently, gratefully, Rachel bit into the bread and found it tasted tangy, like citrus, and so soft it melted away as soon as she ate it.

  Kyu Ho continued. “We grow a number of things here that you don’t yet have on Selene. Some will never grow there—they need different gravity, or different lighting, or are just too hard to alter for a semitropical environment like Selene’s. You’ll be here at least three months—you’ll study in a jungle area we’ve designed as close to what we’re trying for on Selene as we can get in this small a space.”

  Small? Rachel thought. This place is huge. Where the river runs, it must be as wide as the whole ship!

  A tall dark-haired man came in the door and Kyu excused herself. Rachel sat at the table and experimented with the melty bread. Even berries were fatter and juicier here. Where was Gabriel? Why did Kyu seem so interested in her? If she was above even Gabriel (even Gabriel!), why was she spending time with Rachel? What did they really want? Why bring Rachel here?

  Rachel’s speculation was interrupted as a slender woman nearly Rachel’s height sat down opposite her. She was formally dressed, white pants and a white shirt, with long straight black hair and flat-oval brown eyes. Her clothes had no decorations at all. Her stare made Rachel feel as if she had done something wrong. Instinctively, Rachel looked for Kyu Ho. She was still involved in an animated conversation with the tall man, her back to Rachel.

  “So . . . a child appears,” the woman said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A Child of Selene. Now we’ll see what we made.”

  Rachel
didn’t like the woman’s tone. She reached a hand out. “I’m Rachel.”

  “High Councilwoman Ma Liren.” The woman did not take her hand. “I’ve been looking forward to the opportunity to study you.”

  Another High Council member? “Everyone seems to study me.”

  “Hasn’t anyone told you anything? You are the ambassador for the Children of Selene.” Her eyes narrowed. “My job will be to evaluate you—to see if you can, in fact, help us. So I’ll be watching you. Be sure you mind what you’re told.”

  Something about Ma Liren made Rachel’s skin crawl. How to respond? “I will. I work hard.” Did Council always test? Kyu Ho hadn’t been so direct.

  “I’ve seen that. But what are you made of? How much do you understand of why you were born?”

  Rachel’s tongue knotted around her words. “Well, first, I like Selene. What I want to do is plant. I love working—”

  Rachel felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned her head to find Kyu Ho standing stiffly behind her.

  “Hello, Liren,” Kyu said. “There will be time for interviews later on. This is only Rachel’s first day, and we agreed I would orient her for her first week.”

  “Well, see that she learns well.” Ma Liren stood up and walked away.

  “She’s always like that,” Kyu said. “I think that’s enough new sights for one morning. Let’s get you back to your room.”

  Rachel followed Kyu back through the garden, struggling to see enough to get her bearings. She did remember the symbol that marked her floor. The door to her room was a welcome sight.

  Kyu looked up at her. “You did well. Your med readings are still stable, but your fatigue toxins are showing high. Rest. Don’t wander around. I’ll be back to take you to Medical in a few hours. We’ll work on your adjustment to Earth gravity.”