Building Harlequin’s Moon by Larry Niven, Brenda Cooper Read Free Book Online

soil dropped into a cone-shaped pile next to a hole. The whole process took about five minutes.
    Rachel nudged her planter fifty yards past the waiting hole and shut it down, ears ringing in the sudden silence. As she clambered down the ladder on the side, she looked over her shoulder at Ursula and called, “Lunch after this planting.”
    The planters frightened Ursula. So Rachel rode and Ursula followed, doing the stooping and planting and watering. This was the last week of this season’s planting, and even working into the steadily duskier nights, they were ten percent behind their goal, muscles tired and sore from the extra work.
    Harry and Gabriel were already seated when Rachel joined them, choosing a rocky perch where she could look back across the field at the other ten teams. They were all Earth Born. Earth Born were shorter, wider, brawnier than Moon Born. She watched in silence, drinking water and letting a soft breeze cool her.
    “Your shadow is always slower than you are,” Harry said.
    “She’s careful.”
    “You’re careful.” He caught her glare and said, “Hey, hey, easy. Just noting the facts.”
    Ursula was just now unbending from watering the cieba tree she had just planted. Adult Moon Born were taller than most Council, and Ursula, the tallest teenager, was already taller than Gabriel. Her sun-silhouetted figure looked like two branches on a tall stick, topped with a halo of light broken by flyaway bits of her spiky hair.
    Ursula sat near Rachel, as far away from Harry as she could get and stay in the group. She blotted sweat from her forehead and high cheeks with a rag before reaching for water.
    “Hey, slow and thin, we saved you some food,” Harry teased.
    “Nice of you.” Ursula reached for the still untouched basket, extracting a bit of bread and a handful of berries.
    “Maybe it will make you move faster.”
    Ursula threw a berry at him, hard enough that it left a thin streak of juice on his cheek.
    “Ahhhh—quit wasting food.” Ali’s voice chided them as she came up on the group. “Ready for tomorrow?”
    “Do we still get to go flying?” Rachel asked.
    “Yes. We need to start tilling now if we want to plant next year. That means a ground survey. It will be hard work, even though we’ll use a plane to get from place to place. We’ll be gone three days.” Ali pulled up an aerial photo in a data window, tracing the path they’d fly over.
    “I’m tired,” Ursula said. “Can we have a rest day first?”
    “We’ll rest during the winter, when it’s raining more often. Selene is growing, and people need plants. Right now, there are hundreds of us. There will be thousands by the time we build up industry, and a bigger town,” Ali said.
    “You mean the antimatter generator,” Rachel said.
    “I mean the town. And after that we’ll build the collider.”
    Ursula broke in. “If there are so many people, how will you get them all to Ymir?”
    “John Glenn
carried two thousand of us here, all frozen,” Gabriel replied. “Let’s look at the near future, like tomorrow.”
    “But there’s going to be more than two thousand. There already are. You want us to help
John Glenn
leave us? For someplace nobody has ever even seen?” Rachel asked.
    “For a place where we were supposed to meet our friends a long time ago,” Ali said.
    “Your friends,” Rachel muttered under her breath. Harry must have heard her, since he shot a warning look her way.
    “How do you know Ymir’s still there?” Harry asked loudly. “Or that the other starships made it to the system?”
    Harry was covering for her thoughtless comment.
    Now Gabriel spoke. “It’s a planet. They don’t wander away from their suns. I have faith the other two colony ships got there.”
    “I still don’t see why one day off would make a difference,” Ursula said.
    Everyone ignored her.
    Rachel wanted to know more about
John Glenn
, but Gabriel’s face was closed tight. She gave up, sighing. “Go over