Larry Niven - Building Harlequin's Moon

Building Harlequin's Moon

LARRY NIVEN

And

BRENDA COOPER

TOR

A Tom Doherty Associates Book

New York

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel

are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

BUILDING HARLEQUIN'S MOON

Book design by Jane Adele Regina

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Niven, Larry.

Building Harlequin's moon / Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper.-1st ed.

p. cm. "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN-13: 978-0765-31266-2 ISBN-10: 0-765-31266-2 1.

Space colonies-Fiction. 2. Space ships-Fiction. I. Cooper, Brenda, 1960-. II. Tide.

PS3564.I9B85 2005

813'.54-dc22

2004063766

First Edition: June 2005

Printed in the United States of America

0987654321

To THE MEMORY OF ROBERT FORWARD

From Brenda:

I'd like to thank Larry Niven for taking on this project with me. Larry has had a longtime rule against

collaborating with amateurs, and since this is my first novel-length work, I definitely qualified, at least

when we started. This has been a multiyear project. I'm sure there were times when he was ready to

throw away the manuscript, but instead he just pointed out ideas and characters that needed work, and

helped me through; most important, he always believed in me. His hands, ideas, and words are

throughout this novel, but like every good teacher, he made me write my way out of most of my messes.

Any messes left in here are mine alone. Thanks, Larry!

Personal thanks as well to my family: to my dad, who explained the concept of mass multiple times, and

asked about the book every time he talked to me (sure that I was doing great, even when I wasn't); to

my mom; my son, David; and daughter-of-the-heart Lisha; my partner, Toni; and to Cindy Ross and Joe

Green. Thanks also to Marilyn Niven, for being supportive of this project.

From Brenda and Larry:

Thanks to our agent, Eleanor Wood, for believing in this project, and for reviewing a very early draft and

providing excellent suggestions. Thanks to Bob Gleason from Tor, our editor.

Thanks to Yoji Kondo, the rocket scientist and science fiction writer who writes as Eric Kotani. We

needed a pair of stars to fit our story-to become Apollo and Ymir-and Yoji found them for us.

We'd both like to thank Steven Barnes, who introduced us, and has given us both many tools across

many years. The Fairwood Writers read the whole novel in draft, and made many excellent suggestions.

They are David Addleman, Darragh Metzger, John A. Pitts, Allan Rousselle, David R. Silas, Renee

Stern, and Patrick and Honna Swenson. The members of the LARRYNIVEN-L list helped out with

naming a planet. G. David Nordley spent time chatting with us about ship designs. We'd also like to

thank the late Bob Forward for chats about this book, and for inspiring early star drive designs.

PROLOGUE: Chaos

Year 894, John Glenn shiptime

Erika was cold and Gabriel was warm. She wouldn't have been interested in this stuff anyway.

Erika was one pilot of the carrier John Glenn. John Glenn was currently at rest, safely orbiting wide

around the gas giant planet Harlequin, and not in need of a pilot.

Gabriel headed the terraforming team, chartered to create a habitable moon from the jumble of raw

material that made up Harlequin's moon system. Four of the team were warm now, far too many in the

long term; but during these few decades they would accomplish most of what needed doing. Then they

would wait for the moon system to settle down again.

The Large Pusher Tugs, all three of them, were thrusting hard against Moon Ten. Their fusion engines

sprayed a trident of light across the sky. The lesser Moon Twenty-six was already in place, orbiting

Moon One since last year. That orbit wasn't stable-it shrank steadily within the cloud of impact debris

around Moon One-but that didn't matter. Moon Twenty-six would be gone in a few days.

Gabriel sent: "John Glenn calling LPT-1. Wayne, how you doing?"

"Nearly finished here, I think. Astronaut concurs. Check our orbit."

"I did that. Start shutting down the motors."

In four hours, Moon Ten was falling free.

When this phase was over, Harlequin's moons would have to be recounted. There would be fewer of

them.

Gabriel considered a meal and sleep. The moons wouldn't collide for fifteen days yet... but he ordered a

squeeze of stew and stayed at his post. One loose moon wouldn't matter; there was no living thing to be

harmed in Harlequin's moon system, and minor accidents could be fixed. It was the LPTs he was worried

about. Lose his spacecraft and he'd lose the game.

The peppery smell of warming vegetables and broth made his stomach rumble.

So. Where to park the pusher tugs?

He smiled. They'd be passing very near Moon Forty-one.

"Wayne? Bust your LPTs loose and get them into orbit. Here are the specs. I'm working out your next

mission."

"When do we get some rest, boss?"

"I'll find you that too."

Gabriel ate slowly, savoring the celery and potatoes. John Glenn's internal garden was thriving. It had

been a water tank when they left Sol system, and their diet had palled rapidly.

He had a plan. He could start on it tomorrow. Thrust would take a few hundred days. Harlequin would

grow a little hotter; ultimately Moon One would too; and Erika, when she warmed, would love it.

Under Gabriel's guidance, Wayne's team lifted the Large Pusher Tugs from Moon Ten and set them

drifting toward a rarefied region within Harlequin's frantically busy moon system. Wouldn't want them

anywhere near the collision point.

It took him and the Astronaut program less than an hour to work up the next sequence.

The LPTs had tremendous acceleration when they weren't attached to larger masses. Their light outshone

the sun, Apollo, by a lot. By the end of the day they were in loose orbit around Moon Forty-one.

Gabriel ate at his post while Wayne guided the LPTs to the surface, one by one. The hard part came

next, as Wayne's team moored them against the bedrock core. The tugs were flattened structures, a

Tokamak-style fusion thruster ringing one side, a cage of shock absorbers and anchors at the other.

Placing anchors was tricky, because when the LPTs were set going, their thrust would start quakes.

Set them going on low thrust, let the blast backfire, they'd melt their way through volatiles down to

bedrock. Then close the insulation ports and wait while the molten rock solidified over the next century.

Gabriel's team would spend a hundred years cold, then warm again to finish the job.

But they'd finish adding volatiles and mass to Moon One before they went cold.

One OF THE LAST major movements of a complicated symphony was under way as Moon Ten

approached Moon Twenty-six, which was in motion retrograde above Moon One.

There had been other collisions. Moon One was already a dust ball surrounded by a flattened ring that

glowed in Apollo's light. It looked like Saturn in Sol system, with the ring system lightly twisted by

Harlequin's massive gravity.

The oblate spheroids drifted together like flaming taffy. Gabriel watched the two moons eat each other's

kinetic energy. Hot rock and volatiles churned in a twisting red-orange fireball and began to drift toward

Moon One.

A raw sense of power tugged at the edges of Gabriel's attention as he forced his focus to stay narrow.

He had to stay on top of this. Playing God carried awesome responsibility. His purpose was to create a

habitable world, a staging area for the antimatter generator that would refuel the carrier John Glenn.

That world, Selene, would need seas and gravity: more mass, more volatiles. Moon One must be built

up.

Selene also needed radiation shielding.

Gabriel had been bashing moons together for more than three hundred fifty years, after many more years

of research and simulation. Matters would have gone much faster in Ymir's system, he thought, a trace of

bitterness still edging his thoughts. John Glenn's equipment wasn't designed for Apollo system. He was

supposed to have two more carrier ships and all their resources to help him. Hell, he was supposed to be

someplace else entirely. Apollo's inner rocky worlds were all missing, eaten as the gas giant Daedalus

moved inward; anything he needed that wasn't among Harlequin's moons would have to be acquired

from the Kuiper Belt. Comets were as far apart as they had been in Sol system, generally as far apart as

the Sun from the Earth. Travel time expanded hugely. He was doing his damn best, but it was still taking

forever.

He stretched and twisted, working his body, pulling out as much tension as he could.

Moons Ten and Twenty-six were history, a fireball above Moon One. Impacting like that, they'd turned a

lot of their velocity into heat; but how much? The last time they tried this, with a different pair of moons,

most of the mass from the collision had just dissipated. He'd look again in a hundred years.

Time to go cold.

And WARM AGAIN, a hundred years later. He set to work.

Moon One was lightly ringed. Most of the mass of a double lunar impact was gone. He'd watch Moon

One for a while-or the Astronaut program would-and presently he'd know if its mass had grown enough.

John Glenn's frozen sleep system had been altered according to specs in their last message from Sol

system. This advanced process of being frozen didn't just retard entropy; it rejuvenated. Gabriel felt

wonderfully alive, though he sometimes pictured his life as a snake chopped up and scattered at random.

And Erika's life was scattered without regard for his or her own convenience. As a pilot, she would stay

frozen for most of the next sixty thousand years.

Meanwhile, Gabriel had work to do.

He revived his team. Moon Forty-one's surface had cooled around the three LPTs. Wayne set them to

thrusting against the moon's core.

The core wasn't as stable as Gabriel wanted-no iron ball, just a jumble of heavier stuff-and Wayne held

the thrust low. There were still tremors. Pumps fed dirty water ice from the moon into the tanks: reaction

mass for the LPTs' motors. Moon Forty-one wasn't large. This phase would be over in a few years.

Then-no point in going cold. He would wait out the next couple of years, and watch. Moon Forty-one

would graze Harlequin's atmosphere, turning vast kinetic energy into vast heat. The gas giant would eat

the moon. Some of its mass would undoubtedly form a broad ring of debris. It would be a hell of a sight,

and it would have other benefits.

Selene-the inhabited world that Moon One would become-would need shielding from Harlequin's

radiation output. The ring would be chaotic for a time, and during the next, oh, fifty thousand years, it

would block most of the gas giant planet from Moon One. But time and endless collisions would move

the ring particles toward a common orbital plane. In sixty thousand years-when Selene calmed enough to

be seeded with life-the ring would only block half the planet. A hundred thousand years later the ring

would be as thin as Saturn's, and nearly useless as a shield.

But John Glenn would be gone by then, on its way to Ymir.

Gabriel had decided to form the ring early. He'd give Selene sixty thousand years to lose some of its

surface radiation, and Harlequin itself would have time to settle down after impact. Harlequin would grow

hotter, of course. The sun Apollo was too far from the moon system to provide enough heat to warm

Moon One. Some of Selene's heat must come from a hotter Harlequin.

Harlequin's moon system had become a dangerously cluttered region, but that wouldn't last. When Erika

finally warmed, she would find fewer moons, a system thinned out except for an inner ring that had been

Moon Forty-one. Selene would be protected, to that extent, from giant meteoroid impacts.

And Harlequin's vast gaudy ring would be more than a match for Saturn's. Gabriel's gift to Erika! Playing

God had its moments.

"And why exactly are we doing this?" Wayne asked. He was shorter and stockier than Gabriel, and each

of his movements was deliberate.

Anger kept Gabriel from answering immediately. They were in the galley preparing an elaborate meal.

Windows hovered in the air, showing several views of chaos. Rings and clouds of dust and inner storms,

rainbows of light glaring through: chaos that would become Selene.

It wasn't pretty, but it was awesome. Wayne was one of the best engineers on the ship. He could fly

anything, figure out any logistical problem. Surely Wayne shared his fierce pride?

"Doing what?" Gabriel asked mildly. "We make Selene because we can.

"It's like this. I went cold knowing that they'd warm me when we got to Ymir-to Henry Draper Catalog

212776," Wayne said, being abnormally precise, no misunderstandings here, "and, and then we'd build

Ymir. They thawed me out centuries early, at the wrong star! Now you tell me-"

"They had to tell me first. Wayne, I was cold too. We're the terra-forming team, not ship's crew. And

ship's crew were worn-out, man! The captain looked like the walking dead. Erika was twitchy. I wasn't

ready to throw it in their faces."

Wayne wasn't being belligerent, he was plodding through a problem. "You tell me the interstellar drive

went wonky and we had to find a refuge before the interstellar wind fried us all. Gamma rays at six

percent of light-speed. We were lucky. Gliese 876 was almost in our path. We were down to the last

whiffs of antimatter fuel when we made orbit here.

"Now, I can buy all that. We can't get to Ymir until we've made more fuel. Right. Why not just go for it?

Build a collider and make twelve hundred kilos of antimatter and go."

"First off, you'll notice that there's no inner solar system." Gabriel waved at the windows, though no such

thing was obvious to the naked eye. "No asteroids, no rocky worlds like Earth or Mars, nothing until you

get down to Daedalus, a mucking great gas giant world huddled right up against its sun. Daedalus ate

everything as it moved inward. There's only Harlequin, out here where Saturn would be if this were Sol

system, and three more gas giants and the Kuiper Belt.

"So all the distances out here are huge. Any resource we need has to come from Harlequin's moons or

the Kuiper Belt, where the little Kuiper Belt bodies are just as sparse as in Sol system. It takes forever to

get anywhere.

"We looked... the High Council looked at the problem," Gabriel said carefully, "and the Astronaut

program verifies. To build an antimatter generator, we need manpower. We'd have to warm half the ship.

The garden wouldn't feed them or recycle enough air, and we don't have the room either. They'd use up

all our resources. We'd die.

"Second possibility is to build habitats like the asteroid civilizations in Sol system. What's wrong with

that?"

Wayne snorted, though he knew he was being tested. "The Belt cities needed too much Artificial

Intelligence, too much nanotech, too much of everything we're running away from. AIs wound up running

it all."

Gabriel nodded. "So we can't do that. And we could build nanos and let them build a collider and run it

for antimatter, with Astronaut running it all. Only we deliberately forgot most of what we need to build

tailored nanotech, and Astronaut is another AI. By now it looks like Earth and Sol really have gone down

the recycler, and if it wasn't the AIs taking over, it must have been nanos turning everything to sludge. At

any rate, Sol system isn't talking.

"So what's left? We came here with gear to make Ymir habitable-a rocky world about the size of Earth,

with a reducing atmosphere. We can make a world! It's just a little bit tougher job."

Wayne said, "Sure. Where are you going to put the Beanstalk?"

Gabriel finished his last bite of stew. He asked, "Your point?"

"We stored this massive tether-making system. Ymir could have had two hundred thousand kilometers of

an orbital tether standing up from the equator, all made of carbon nanotubes. Every bit of nanotechnology

we permit ourselves is a compromise, and that was one of them. Ground to orbit transport. We'd have

an elevator to the nearby planets. Go anywhere you want in Ymir's inner system and only pay for the

electricity. What would happen if-"

"Selene would be whipping it around in Harlequin's gravity field. The tides would tear it apart. We can't

give Selene a Beanstalk. What's your point? Because I know we brought the wrong equipment for this!"

"Exactly. We don't 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 confirmed they could walk on the moon. They could start to introduce life. They

could ... he gave instructions to wake Ali and Wayne, and went to get ready for them. He sang as he

pulled himself down the corridor to Medical.

GABRIEL AND ALI WALKED on the barren surface of the little moon. They started inside light

pressure suits, taking readings and checking radiation levels, double-testing what they already knew from

the tiny sensors that dotted Selene. Ali stripped first, all the way down to underwear and bra and shoes,

oxygen tank and mask. Her olive skin dimpled in the cool air.

He laughed with pleasure watching her; a tiny half-naked woman climbing on rocks; jumping from one to

the other, tossing stones and catching them.

Drawn by Ali's antics, Gabriel stripped to his pants and shirt, mask and tank, and ran and cavorted and

grinned while Ali knelt and touched the regolith, walked to a new place, and touched the surface again.

He danced with her on the surface, seeing wonder and reverence in her eyes as she moved easily,

gracefully.

Selene was still a touch unstable; it shivered twice with small quakes in the hours they were there. Ali

came and stood beside him. "I like the silence-I like being away from that damned constant data flow. It

feels more human here."

Gabriel held her, not answering, just feeling the soft touch of her dark head in the hollow of his shoulder.

He felt lost without the data, regardless of how ecstatic he was to be on Selene. On Selene!

"Someday," he said, "Selene will be information rich like the ship. We'll enhance the flows some here

before we return-I'll need it to monitor the next steps."

She glared at him, a touch distant suddenly. "Be careful-you'll need too much technology. Let's keep

Selene simple."

Her face was bathed in Apollo's light, her skin duskier than he remembered from the ship. They pulled

their masks aside, and he gave her the first kiss on Selene. It was quick. Selene had just barely more

oxygen, right now, than the top of Everest. It needed life to make a living atmosphere.

Thousands of years of shifts had taught them all to take intimacy where they found it, to appreciate it, and

consider it friendship.

They flew happily back up to John Glenn. Gabriel returned with Wayne, and while Gabriel and Wayne

walked Selene's surface, Ali packed up cultures and genetic material so they could start seeding the

regolith, eventually covering part of Selene with bacteria to begin the process of making soil.

When they warmed next, all of the bacteria were dead. So they stayed awake and watched the next

attempt, killing time designing a huge tent. They would control the atmosphere inside the tent, and use it

to build greenhouses and homes; a little city. The tent stood up well to the little earthquakes that came

along. They dubbed the new town Aldrin, and stayed there from time to time.

It took four tries-twenty years-to get healthy cyanobacteria mats spread across the ground near Aldrin

and have something like soil. Now it was time to wake the High Council.

Gabriel spent hours with each of them, running low on sleep, talking excitedly. He had Astronaut play

videos for the captain; lost moons dancing into each other. Gabriel watched the captain's wrinkled face

closely, saw how his deep-ocean-blue eyes tracked the flow of moons and proto-comets.

Captain John Hunter had stayed awake during the long crippled flight that took them to Gliese 876 after

they nearly burned up in the interstellar wind. That trip was so long that no amount of post-ice

rejuvenation treatments had removed the spots and lines and dark circles that transformed his face.

Centuries of pain were etched in odd bends of his fingers and toes, in the hunch in his back, the folds

over his eyes. But intelligence still lived in his eyes. If anything, the ravages his choices had created in his

body made his will stronger. It mattered to Gabriel that John Hunter see the dream he'd helped design

come alive.

It went well, except for the astonishing rapidity with which Council returned to the cryo-tanks. They

wanted an easier world to oversee.

Once, Gabriel warmed Erika. By then, Wayne was building roads, using huge robotic machines to flatten

the soil. Ali was cold. Gabriel was designing pipes to control the hydrology, and constructing a small

factory by the Hammered Sea. Erika stayed warm for a year, giving Gabriel good advice, making a few

mistakes they laughed at together, fretting about how long everything took. The plan was already

foreshortened-Gabriel would never have forced so many processes if Selene wasn't really just a way to

escape to the stars again.

He held Erika's attention for a year before she insisted on going cold again.

Gabriel and Ali finished the little town of Aldrin. They laid pipes to carry water to a cistern, more pipes to

make a rudimentary sewer and reclamation system, planted a grove of trees on a hill outside town, and

filled greenhouses with seedlings. The night before they planned to wake High Council again, Gabriel and

Ali made love, alone on the surface of the moon they'd transformed. Their lovemaking started soft and

slow, growing to a deep intimate conclusion. They stayed still for a long time, wrapped in each other's

arms, warm in that close place that follows on the heels of lovemaking. When she stopped trembling, Ali

looked at Gabriel and said, "We've consecrated the ground here. Selene has been blessed. We blessed it

together."

Larry Niven - Building Harlequin's Moon

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