Building Harlequin’s Moon (26 page)

For her part, she could hardly look at him. It hurt.

Gloria had changed far more than Harry. Rachel remembered the plucky young girl she had carried on her back; she saw a tall, sharp-edged woman with spiky hair and clear muscle definition. Her stomach protruded with pregnancy. Gloria was the first one to talk, “Rachel—oh, gosh. I thought you’d never come back. You . . . you . . . you look so much . . .”

“. . . the same? Yep. But you sure don’t—and you look great.” Words rushed out of Rachel in her confusion. “I’ve been sitting and talking with Dylan. You have a great son. I’m really very happy for you.” She couldn’t look at Harry as she said it. A young blond girl landed and stood behind Dylan. She looked almost thirteen. “And who is this?” She looked at the girl, who nodded once, and smiled shyly.

Dylan spoke for her. “This is my sister, Beth Rachel.” He emphasized the Rachel, but said, “We should call her Beth, since you’re here.”

Gabriel had said they’d named their girl after her. Rachel felt more goose bumps. She held her hand out. “Pleased to meet you, Beth. Have you helped too?”

“Sometimes,” Beth Rachel said.

“So much has happened; I don’t know how to catch up. And hey, I’m really grateful to you all for keeping this place up so well. It’s beautiful.” Rachel’s eyes stung, and she swallowed and blinked, taking three long pranayama breaths, using Gabriel’s techniques to calm her racing heart, control her fear.

Gloria looked down at the ground between her shoes. “We wanted to keep it right in case you ever came back.
It’s . . . it’s a family habit. We . . . we didn’t want to forget you. You meant so much to us.”

“Nick helps too sometimes,” Harry said. “And Sharon. All of us do; everyone who remembers you. And some others you haven’t met help; at least when the rest of us are gone or on extra shifts.”

Why would they do that? She was overwhelmed; she had steeled herself to a world gone on without her, forgetting her. She blinked back tears.

They toured the First Trees. Rachel was openmouthed with surprise at how big they’d grown. The large buttressing roots of a full jungle were beginning to appear, so they had to step up and over roots, or walk around them. Lianas ran overhead, and flowers filled the air with a sticky sweetness. Birds flashed in the trees.

“Hey, Dylan,” she said, “I don’t see any ants here.”

“Council never uses the First Trees for testing anymore.”

Gloria interrupted. “Dylan, Rachel—Beth Rachel that is—we need to go. I have to get to the schoolyard.” She looked at Rachel. “Being pregnant keeps me off the crews, so I do a half-shift babysitting every afternoon. The kids help me. Will you come to our house tonight? I’ll make dinner. Spaghetti?”

Rachel wasn’t sure she could be around them for a whole evening. “I promised my dad I’d eat at home. Sometime soon?”

Gloria looked disappointed, but she said, “I understand.” She kissed Harry on the cheek, and then turned and left. Beth and Dylan followed her.

Gloria was chattering to Beth, and Beth’s face was turned up toward Gloria’s, smiling. Dylan looked back over his shoulder once. Rachel watched them walk away until they were nearly at the far edge of the meadow. She should have been the one to herd Harry’s children home.

“Walk with me?” Harry asked, turning away.

Rachel just nodded, numb, and followed him. They walked silently for a long time, picking their way along a thin path that meandered just inside the First Trees. They were so close to the meadow that light streamed in and touched the tips of the ferns and lianas with gold, and sent spots of dappled light across Harry’s back. Rachel’s stomach heaved and she struggled not to cry out loud, then stumbled and stood next to a cieba, sobbing.

Harry stopped, and made a strangled sound in his throat, and reached for her. She stepped into his arms and cried on his shoulder. He held her softly, awkwardly, patting the back of her head. When she looked up, his eyes were red too. The lines around his eyes and small streaks of gray in his short hair made her dizzy. He pushed her back, and looked directly into her eyes. “I’m sorry it all turned out this way.”

“I know,” she said, “we were robbed. It wasn’t either of our faults.”

“It could have been changed.” Harry sounded bitter.

“Not anymore.” She sniffed, and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “You seem to be happy.”

He hesitated, then said, “I am. Things turned out well for me.” He smiled softly. “I love Gloria and the kids a lot. But I thought about you often, even after Gloria and I contracted.”

She started walking, leading him this time, choosing a wide path that wound away from student plots, through community jungle that was old enough to rise above their heads. She didn’t trust herself to say anything. In a few places tiny saplings struggled up right in the path. Rachel was surprised to see them; they would have been pulled up as seedlings when she was here before. She stepped carefully around them, even though surely they’d be removed eventually.

“Aldrin is different now,” Harry said, his voice floating up from behind her.

“Dad and I talked about that last night. He looks tired. I think they’re making him work too hard. He says that Council is much tougher. I really hope Gabriel being back makes a difference.”

“It’s not likely to. The rules are different, and there’s the Earth Born . . . a lot of them don’t like us much.”

“Yeah, I met Kara last night. I feel like an unwelcome stranger in my own house. Only it’s not even my house. I feel like I walked into someone else’s life.” Rachel tripped over a long thin root, nearly falling, and Harry caught up with her.

“You were gone a long time.”

“I don’t even know what Council expects of me anymore. I did learn a lot on the ship, and I very much want to use some of what I learned.” She thought about Astronaut, and Treesa. She couldn’t tell Harry about them.

“Do you feel like that, even after all Council did to you?”

“It wasn’t ‘Council’ that made that choice. It was Ma Liren, and High Council. There’s a High Council that makes choices for us, even for Gabriel and Ali.”

“But you aren’t Council, you’re one of us.”

“I meant for all of us, Harry. Council, Earth Born, Children. All of us. We don’t choose the important stuff.”

He didn’t reply. They walked without talking for a while, feet scratching through deadfall on the path. Rachel smelled flowers that she couldn’t even see, and damp mosses, and the light healthy rot of the deadfall. She cleared her throat. “Tell me about Andrew.”

“He’s strange, Rachel. He runs with a crowd of younger people in Aldrin, and they answer to him for things, and he keeps them angry with Council. I think that’s how he gets his information since he still can’t have direct data. Oh, they all still do what they’re told, but they do it like they want to see how far they can push Council and Earth Born. He’s going to get in more trouble. He was my best friend once, but I’m actually glad that my kids don’t hang out with him.”

“Trust Andrew to be stupid. We can’t fight Council. We need them—we just have to find a way to make them let us help them so we learn more. Either that, or find a way to make them stay here on Selene, or at least in Apollo system. But I don’t know how to do that.”

Harry walked faster to catch up with her. “Watch for a while. And be careful, Rachel. Last week one of the guys on Nick’s crew, one of the young ones that hangs around with Andrew, got in trouble for talking back and he disappeared for a few days. He said they kept him in a locked room.” Harry put a hand on her arm. “I don’t agree with Andrew exactly, and I don’t like his ideas, and I hope we don’t have to fight Council or Earth Born. I don’t want to, because of the kids. But if they keep making us work so hard and giving us so little, it may come down to a fight someday.”

Rachel blinked and stumbled, unsure what to think of this new Aldrin, this new Harry. She pulled ahead of him, and stopped out in the clear meadow, then turned toward him, so he stopped, facing her. How could she share some of what she’d learned? “You should see Selene from space; it’s beautiful. It’s like a jewel we’re making, the water shines out and sparkles, and the edges of the craters are shadowed and beautiful. It’s small, Harry, too small for us to fight over. It’s fragile. And the
John Glenn
, it’s huge, but it’s still fragile too. Did you know Sol system had billions of people, and they lived all over the system, not just on one tiny moon? And some of the Council think they all died. This is a smaller and more fragile place than we think it is.”

Harry looked at the ground and shuffled his feet. Then he looked up and smiled. “Gabriel was right, you’re a natural leader.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t take any more—there was so much wrong with this older Selene. “Harry,” she said, “I have to go. I need to get back home, and first, I
need to fly some. The garden is so cramped. I need to feel some space.”

Harry looked startled. “Would you like me to fly with you?”

“No. I need to be alone. I’ll come over some night soon and talk with you, I promise. You can start sending me questions and notes again if you want.”

“No, I can’t. They don’t let us use much extra communication anymore.”

Rachel drew her lips tight. “Okay, we’ll talk. I need you.”

He smiled at her and stroked her face as if she were a child. “I do have a lot more questions for you.”

Rachel pulled back. “I bet you do.” She turned away. “I have to go. I have to think about all of you being older.”

“I understand.” Harry turned and walked away in the same direction Gloria and the kids had gone.

Rachel realized she didn’t even know where they lived.

G
ABRIEL FLEW A
criss-cross pattern over Selene’s jungle, trying out a new plane, staying high, eyeing the changes in Selene from an eagle’s viewpoint. Green squares covered the ground, riots of greens competing in the older plantings, sienna sprinkled with green in newer fields. Snakes of dirt road crossed the older green squares. Long rectangles of landing strip interrupted the patterns in the newer jungle. A few of the landing strips were dotted with people and small flyers.

What he saw pleased him; the old plantings looked established.
New lines of green pushed out along the old Sea Road. Here and there brown sticks attested to flare damage, but most of the trees looked healthy. Fifty percent of the intended jungle was planted. Already there was nearly enough diversity to sustain the planned five thousand population. They
were
behind their goal for square kilometers planted. The numbers sat on the tail end of the pessimistic side of his and Ali’s original models. Still, he grinned to see that even the unexpected flares hadn’t dropped production below the slop they’d programmed into the model for chaos effects. They were good at this.

Gabriel landed the little plane smoothly, and taxied to a parking spot by the runway. In the sudden silence as he switched off the engines, he heard himself humming. He realized he had been humming for some time, an old song his mother used to sing. Why was he singing? It felt good to be alone, to be back on Selene.

Visits to
John Glenn
lately had been . . . uncomfortable.

The next visit would be good. Erika would be warm! Ten days. He switched to humming a love song as he patted the plane on the nose and headed for Council Home.

In contrast to the rest of Selene, Council Home looked familiar. The structures were all hard-surfaced now, of course, but not really bigger. It had always been well designed and well cared for. The flares, though. They shouldn’t have been so surprising. His imagination drew pictures in his mind, magnetic fields reaching out from Apollo, twisting round Daedalus the sun-hugging gas giant planet and its metallic hydrogen core. Field lines knotting, until they exploded in flares of energy and trapped protons. Why hadn’t he seen it from the beginning? The hard-shelled houses weren’t enough protection.

He grimaced, remembering the hurried meeting he’d had with Council before he brought Rachel down yesterday. He was still stinging from Council’s rejection of his flare kite. Only the captain had supported him. They were
afraid it would take too much time to develop and test. He’d had a backup idea. At least they’d approved of that one. Building the undersea refuge would be fun, and he would only have to leave Selene once. But they wouldn’t need a refuge if they just fixed the problem. The flare kite would make Selene truly safe.

Gabriel checked into an empty house and showered, dressed carefully in belted and ankle-tied brown pants and a long-sleeved deep blue shirt. He clipped the star and planet symbols that identified his terraforming affiliations into his braid. Every minute since he’d warmed had been spent with High Council or tending Rachel. Star had promised to whip up a decent meal, something she called Mariner Stew, and Gabriel was ready for anything that wasn’t standard ship food.

He had to search for his locker. He could only hope that whoever had moved his few belongings here had been careful. He pulled out a long rectangular case and opened it slowly, smiling at what he saw. The guitar lay neatly nestled in cloth packing, the wood glowing as light hit it from above. He had built it by hand over three winters, using wood from a pruned branch of Yggdrasil, carefully seasoned while he was iced and then brought here to Selene. One entire season’s spare time had gone into hand-shaping the neck and fitting it to the hollow body. He ran his hands over the smooth surfaces, then pulled out the new strings he’d brought from the ship and sat alone for twenty minutes, stringing and tuning the instrument before walking over to meet Shane and Star.

He was humming again as he rang the bell.

The door swung open and Gabriel was engulfed by a blond girl nearly his height, all legs and curves. Star planted a kiss on his cheek. He laughed, holding her around the waist, slapping Shane’s shoulder in greeting.

“Hey, old man,” Shane teased, “you had her once. She’s mine now.”

“And what harm in an old friend flirting?” Star said. “It’s not like Gabriel has eyes for anyone but Erika anyway.”