Building Harlequin’s Moon

by Larry Niven

“How?” Erika asked from behind him.

  “You know Selene has a higher oxygen mix?”

  “I thought the lower gravity compensated? The air mix is rarefied.”

  “It should. Something happened. This isn’t something anyone has done before, after all. Maybe enough plants drove the oxygen percentage up just enough, or maybe we guessed wrong at some initial parameter.” He slammed his fist down, carefully avoiding any control surface. “I need to be there.”

  “We’re too far away,” she said. “Relax.”

  “That’s my world burning up down there. I need to get to John Glenn. I can do some good from there.” And my students, he thought. Burning.

  She reached around him from behind and gave him a hug. “You’ve done the best you can with Selene, Gabe. You’ve done wonderfully. Let’s just hope this doesn’t put us off schedule.”

  Gabriel winced, but he put his hands over hers and squeezed. “I just . . . I hope . . . I hope it doesn’t all burn.”

  “I know. You’ve got hours to wait before you can even try for the ship.” Her eyes looked as worried as he felt.

  “You’ll finish bringing Refuge in?”

  “If you wait long enough to give me some safety margin before you leave me here. This is a lot of kinetic energy we’re playing with!”

  She isn’t landing the damn thing, he thought Refuge will have to be sterilized first. She’ll take it into close orbit. No big deal.

  There weren’t enough resources on Selene to fight a fire there. Gabriel watched for physical traffic between John Glenn and Selene; for some sign that Council had seen what had to be done and was going down to the surface to help. The fire looked tiny, but Gabriel measured it at three thousand acres or more. A tenth of the jungle planted so far. He hated the two-second communications delay: a universal stutter. He paced.

  There was a fast light Lander stored in a bay of the miner. Good enough to get him to John Glenn. It took a long time to get close enough to Harlequin, and Selene, to use it. Gabriel gave the commands that would release it and kissed Erika hard on the mouth. He strapped his suit closed with one hand as he pulled himself toward the bay.

  PART III: FIRE

  60,294 John Glenn shiptime

  CHAPTER 36

  FIRE

  THE BONES OF a cieba flashed eerily, a silhouette, black inside fire. Rachel crouched at the edge of a clearing, watching the tree burn. It was brighter in dying than in life. Then little remained for the flames to eat, and what crashed to the ground was white-hot, still shaped like a tree, still wreathed in bits of fire, until it was only white ash in the outline of a tree. Wind pulled at what remained, scattering once-solid trunk and branch.

  Fire advanced slowly toward Rachel, licking the low grass. Farther away, it rushed through the fuel-rich jungle on either side of the clearing. She kept looking back to watch. Run, pause, run. If she wasn’t careful, it would circle closed behind her.

  She ran.

  Heat was a physical force pushing Rachel from both sides, herding her. The smell of death and flame and smoky danger thickened the air. The fire was noisy: pops and flashes and keening chaotic winds.

  The sounds of fire fell behind her, obscured by straining engine noises and snapping tree trunks, and Rachel finally knew she had outrun immediate death. She stopped, panting, breathing sweet cool air deeply into her seared lungs. In front of her, a pair of fifty-foot-long planting machines crushed young trees, pushing them aside to make wide cleared spaces. Smoke curled everywhere.

  Justin, one of her half brothers, darted in and handed her water. Rachel drank deeply, watching the fire approach. Here, a hundred meters away, the heat was still palpable. Sweat ran down her bare skin. She shook a fist at the fire and turned, jogging to catch up with the trailing planter and join her crew returning to base.

  She’d never seen uncontained fire. There was no place for it on Selene nor aboard John Glenn. It tore her breath from her, filled her with adrenaline and fear, made her want to run, and run, and run. It was fast, hot enough to suck the moisture from trees as it approached, turning damp rain forest to tinder in the time it took to breathe.

  They had been too slow. The fire funneled through gaps, leaped over the second set of hard-won firebreaks. Rachel wiped sweat and tears away from her eyes as she jumped onto a maintenance shelf on one of the planters, holding on to a makeshift safety rope as the planter rumbled away from the fire line. Sweat poured down her face. Every vein and membrane was an internal desert. Her stomach hurt.

  It was the end of the second full day of firefighting. Order slowly rose out of chaos. Training happened in stolen moments of shift briefings. Firefighters rose and slashed and hacked and fled and started over. After each shift, they fell onto thin cots at base camp, asleep while their livelihoods burned around them.

  Rachel was responsible for a full crew. Nick was with Rachel; Harry and Gloria supported logistics at base camp. Star ran a team on the other shift. Shane commanded, using data feeds from John Glenn to visualize locations of fire and crew. Rachel didn’t think Shane slept.

  She half dozed as they rode to safety, so tired that even the whining of the engine faded behind the nightmares running through her head. Fire raced through trees, consuming them greedily, turning life to ash. The flash the first time flames jumped lines, hesitating for just a moment before leaping across the pitifully narrow road surface.

  Rachel had been first to see fire. Even from a distance, when it was a small thing, she knew it was bad. She’d sent panicked open messages to John Glenn, and after the first hour, Kyu’s voice was steady in her ear, relaying commands from Shane and urging calm. A lifesaving voice.

  Kyu involved Astronaut immediately. Astronaut calculated the inferno’s speed as it created its own terrible weather and ran through the dry underbrush fueled by Selene’s thick atmosphere. Astronaut’s predictions constantly ran behind the fire’s actual movement. Centuries of fighting fire on Earth hadn’t prepared anyone for a fire with ten percent more oxygen in the air.

  The planter bucked as they rolled over a rock, and she snapped awake. Her grip tightened on the rope. It cut into her hand, so she wrapped her handkerchief around her right palm with her teeth while her left hand clutched the rope. Then she switched hands. Her left hand curled into a claw from holding her body against the machine, but she was so tired she felt nothing.

  They pulled into base camp. Dylan ran toward her. He pulled her hand free of the rope, steadying her as she found her legs. She looked around and spotted Beth, Harry, and Gloria. She worked at her closed hand, and pain shot up her arm. She closed her eyes, swaying with exhaustion.

  Dylan supported her on the short walk to her tent. She squeezed his hand in thanks, and he put an arm around her. They watched the eerie jumping firelight for long silent moments before she crawled into her tent.

  Then she reached outside and pulled him in with her.

  She’d thought this through in such intricate detail, all the reasons not to, and firmly decided against.

  He wasn’t sure what she wanted and he didn’t want to ask. She showed him: kissed him hard, then stripped off his shirt. He bent double, cramped in the tiny tent, and they worked around each other to get their boots off, giggling softly. Dylan was willing . . . but he still wasn’t sure. She was an icon, and he might misinterpret. She crawled on top of him, long bodies in full contact.

  If there were cameras on the tent, what was happening inside would be pretty obvious.

  She was at the edge of sleep when she heard him say, “Dad’s not going to like this.”

  “No,” she said. Would Gabriel? And Council . . . what would they think, with their casual attitude toward age? Don’t tell, she thought, but cameras were watching the holocaust, and anyway, Dylan was out like a light.

  SIX HOURS LATER, Rachel sat with Star and Dylan and three other crew bosses while ash fell around them like snow, sticking in their hair until they were white and pale, blotched with the wrong colors in the bare dawn li
ght. Nearly a hundred firefighters made a loose circle around the crew chiefs. Most sat. A few stood and stamped their feet, or stretched tired arms. A hundred more were out fighting the fire. Children walked between the adults handing out water, bread, and fruit.

  She noticed that people grouped themselves randomly. All able hands were somehow involved. Even Andrew simply worked with a crew. He sat in the back, watching her. She sighed. He was always there, always wanting something. She took Dylan’s hand, making sure Andrew could see the gesture.

  There was no apparent separation between Earth Born and Moon Born. Shane and Star and three other Council sat with everyone else. It made Rachel smile, a tiny gain in the middle of the most horrible thing she had ever known.

  Shane addressed them all. “It will stop today,” he said. “You can’t see it yet, can’t feel it yet, but our victory is coming. The Sea Road will stop it. Everything on the other side will be safe.” The crowd went quiet, and Shane raised his voice. “So today, we have to save Aldrin and Teaching Grove.”

  Rachel pictured it. The mature jungle between the fire and the meadow would bum easily. The meadow was nearly bare enough to be a firebreak, except flame could creep through the grass and run along the side through the First Trees and reach Teaching Grove. From there, it would lick down into Aldrin, stopping only when it encountered bare regolith on the far side of town.

  Shane continued. “We’re in the way. Base camp is moving in forty minutes. We need firebreaks to funnel the fire away from the First Trees, into the meadow, where we can stop it. We can stop it there. We will stop it there.”

  A smattering of applause rose up through the ranks. Shane nodded.

  “Dylan and Rachel—you cut the breaks like you did yesterday. Take crews of three each—we’ll need everyone else.” Four planters were still usable. They’d lost two to the fire on day one. The crews had gotten out with a lesson in how much heat the machines could stand. “Rachel,” Shane called, “you’re in charge. You did a good job yesterday.”

  Rachel and her crew filed out, clutching extra water, hearing Shane assign everyone else to moving base camp to the other side of the Sea Road. Dylan and his crew mixed with them as they went. Beth and Nick were with Dylan this morning, and another Earth Born named Richard. Rachel’s crew was Kyle, one of the students she’d taken on excursion a few times, and two Earth Born. Ariel was a woman Rachel’s age, and Bruce was an Earth Born who had stayed on the surface since the first seeding. He was older than Rachel’s father, nearly seventy, slower than the others, with a good head on his shoulders and a cheerful willingness to do what she asked. It was the first time Rachel had seen Earth Born reporting to Moon Born. Her own status was a necessity of the fire, and the earbud connection to Kyu that she alone had of all the Children, but still she was proud of leading that team.

  All four of the machines started. Rachel drove the lead planter, taking Bruce with her, and Kyle and Ariel followed in the second planter. As they neared the meadow, Rachel calculated directional headings for the two machines she commanded. “We’ll take the north route. Dylan can head south.”

  Shane agreed, followed by Kyu’s, “Good luck.”

  “Dylan,” Rachel said, “I’m leaving an open communications line. Keep talking. Tell me what you see.”

  “Aye, aye, ma’am.”

  The plan was to separate into sets of two, driving directly away from each other, making a firebreak twice the width of a planter. Then they’d come back toward each other, doubling the width. If there was time, they’d repeat, scraping closer to the bare dirt they needed. Finally, they’d join Shane’s other firefighters at the far edge of the meadow to help with a last battle across the treeless area if necessary. In low grass it would be easier to keep the flames at bay. If only they had an efficient way to carry more water.

  Rachel winced as they destroyed their own creation, snapping trunks and pushing the slash to the side. The noise of the planter’s engines overwhelmed voices, forcing radio conversations even when they were near each other. Ash changed the color of leaves and gathered in Rachel’s mouth so she had to spit it out. As they finished the first trip out and back, smoke began to blur the edges of the standing trees.

  Kyu’s voice sounded in her ear. “It’s moving slower today, but the front is wider. You’ll have to be careful not to get caught. One finger has reached the Sea Road, and it is stopping the flames.”

  Their first victory. Rachel smiled in spite of herself.

  She began to taste smoke, and her lungs burned. “Kyu—can we make a second pass?”

  “No—maybe half.”

  Rachel directed the combined crews to make half the pass together, toward the First Trees. “Drive in two lines, don’t try to widen the path. We have to move fast.” She looked back at Dylan, a dot driving a huge machine behind her. “We’ll keep our blades high. Dylan, you and Nick set yours lower, see if you can find dirt.”

  Halfway through, Kyle and Ariel’s planter gave out and the trailing planter failed to stop, tangling the two machines. With time, they could have freed them. Everyone scrambled onto the remaining two machines.

  Rachel was the only person besides Star and Shane with com directly from Kyu. Kyu’s voice buzzed firmly in Rachel’s ear, but she didn’t quite believe what she heard.

  “Come again?”

  “Take down the First Trees.”

  “Repeat?” She couldn’t have heard right. The First Trees were irreplaceable.

  “They’ll burn.”

  Shane’s voice: “Kyu’s right.”

  Rachel took a deep breath. Of course Kyu was right. There was no choice. She hated the words as she said them, “We have new orders. Knock down the First Trees, starting in the middle. Build a wide enough break the fire won’t jump it.”

  Beth cried out, “No!”

  Dylan understood right away. “No choice. Better than Aldrin.”

  “Let’s go. Keep some distance—I don’t want to drop trees onto you.”

  Ten minutes later, they were plowing the big machines directly into the First Trees.

  Rachel cried; deep dry sobs. The First Trees! Gabriel had planted these. She made herself focus, seeing only the next trunk, the next branch, the next vine. She let Bruce drive, and she walked, using a machete to strike through lianas, branches, and low-plants. Sometimes the vines were so strong they alone held trees that had been pushed aside by the planters, and when she split the vines, they snapped and the trees fell wildly, crashing down into the underbrush.

  Dylan’s planter became too tangled in the jungle to move forward. He and his crew let Rachel know they were doing what they could by hand. Ten minutes later, screeching sounds of metal on metal began deep inside the planter Rachel’s crew rode, and it rumbled to a stop.

  All six of them were on the ground, hacking, chopping, smelling smoke. Time seemed to stretch, actions happened in slow motion. Rachel’s back and bicep muscles ached. Her shoulder blades screamed and her calves trembled. She swung the machete wildly.

  She finally stopped, realizing that she didn’t know where anyone was. The heat had increased, and she heard the pop of fire and calls of Shane’s crew from close by, out in the meadow. She started moving as fast as she could through the mangled forest, calling for Dylan and Nick and Beth. They needed to get out into the open.

  Smoke obscured her vision, slowing her and ruining her sense of distance. She heard the crack of falling trees and the unwelcome sound of wind, but nothing from a human. Then Bruce’s voice ripped through her radio, almost a scream, “Beth! Richard!”

  Rachel couldn’t tell if he was yelling to find them or yelling about them. “Where are you?”

  Kyu’s voice: “Go to your right,” and then “Rachel—turn right—they need you.” Rachel had turned already, and the two-second delay between the surface and the ship was driving her nuts. She couldn’t see anything but trees, but she kept going. Bruce’s voice croaked in her ear, not talking to her, talking to Dylan, “Pull it off, be
slow.”

  She stepped between two standing tree trunks. One of the tallest trees lay directly across Richard. He was crushed, his back and neck broken, eyes open. And empty. Dead. Her eyes scanned the long trunk. Dylan stood farther up, desperately pulling on a branch, trying to move the huge tree. Beth Rachel was under it, lying on her stomach, her legs pinned. Rachel ran toward Dylan, reaching for a hold on the branch, noticing that Bruce too was down. He sat to the side. His right leg was at an odd angle. He moaned and tried to stand.

  A great unfamiliar noise came from almost directly above them. Rachel looked up at an hallucination. A spaceship—she’d seen several like it hanging neatly on the side of John Glenn. Spaceships glided. This one jerked and yawed. She couldn’t take time to understand.

  Her hands wrapped tight around the branch, tugging with Dylan, adding her strength to his. The tree moved an inch. Not enough. Beth screamed.

  The sound of the ship above them took over, drowning the fire sounds, killing communication.

  Rachel planted her feet, reached farther down on the branch, closer to the trunk. They pulled again. The downed tree shivered without moving. Its branches were tangled with other branches, with vines.

  She heard another sound just barely as loud as the spaceship, audible because it was close. A lake falling. Dylan called, “Rachel—look!” and she did—she saw a great bladder of water, bigger than a hundred houses. It bled water in a river over the rest of the First Trees, and over the meadow. Steam hissed along the south edge, where water met fire directly. It was mesmerizing.

  She heard Bruce’s voice in her ear. “Now, pull!”

  Somehow he was standing on one leg, face screwed up tightly with pain, grabbing a branch just above them.

  They pulled.

  The tree moved.

  Water fell from the sky near them, a torrent, a hundred feet away. Branches snapped under the sudden force of water.

  Beth pulled with her arms, inching herself away from the tree trunk. She was using her torso, eeling forward like a baby, teeth clenched.