Building Harlequin’s Moon Read Free

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.”
Year 60,201,
John Glenn
shiptime
    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.
    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