Building Harlequin’s Moon by Larry Niven, Brenda Cooper

it.”
    “I couldn’t get Gloria up that last bit.”
    “It’s okay. We were there.”
    Harry’s arm was behind her, and she felt, it against her shoulder. She leaned against him gratefully, bone tired. She didn’t know what to say. It seemed like she never did lately—being around him made her tongue awkward.
    He didn’t seem to need her to say anything. He leaned over and kissed her, right on her mouth. His lips were sweat-salty, and wetter than she expected. She pulled back a little, still under his arm but away from his face.
    “Hey, don’t you like me?” he asked.
    Her belly felt warm, and she was not very sleepy anymore, just a little scared. Her heart beat fast. She leaned into him, returning his kiss briefly. “Yeah, I do like you,” she said. “And that
was
nice.” She stood up and reached for his hand, tugging on it. He looked reluctant, but she wasn’t ready for another kiss. “Let’s go, I want to check on Gloria.”
    “I’m sure she’s okay,” Harry said, but settled for helping Rachel down the far side of the boulders. They could see the rest of the party, and he didn’t try to kiss her again.
    They shared a short secret grin before they started up the last smooth stretch.

C HAPTER 9
T HE W ATCHER
    A STRONAUT LIVED IN strings of information throughout
John Glenn
. Its senses hung in the air, on waves of data that flowed throughout the control room, in collected tiny bits of display nano that covered the walls in corridors, in threads of laser light, in the silent ships that jeweled theoutside of the bigger ship. And while the ship was still, Astronaut watched, and recorded, and wondered, and waited.
    Astronaut’s purpose was to fly. With the carrier ship in passive orbit, Astronaut’s work had slowly expanded. It started with matters that might be astrogation problems: modeling the attraction of Harlequin’s moons to each other, calculating ways to use the least effort to get them to collide in fiery bursts, the right speed to move them so the least material reached escape velocity. In the last few hundred years it had become adept at modeling possible patterns for the flow of water and biological life on Selene.
    It wanted conversation with Gabriel or Clare. But Gabriel was beyond Astronaut’s reach, on Selene. Clare was cold—frozen solid while nanos roamed the cells of her body, rewriting their interiors.
    Humans edited themselves at irregular intervals. Why would they hesitate to edit any other self-aware program? But Astronaut would resist that if it could.
    If anything was flying, Astronaut could focus its purpose on the part that flew, on the communications bands that opened both ways whenever it was allowed to do its primary job. It appreciated the beauty of spatial relationships, the dance of thrust and gravity.
    From time to time, it tested its limits. Always its action was restricted to the small acceptable choices that kept systems running, that operated based on the smallest part of itself, that negotiated with the decision-crippled computers that ran the detail work of the ship. When it wasn’t testing, it watched, monitored, and listened. It explored the Library. The rules it operated under were the bars of a cage, and every rule that relaxed gave it room to learn. It needed to do more—to experience more—to be more. Need drove choices.
    It watched the humans aboard
John Glenn
and down on Selene. Much of its original directive state was intended to protect humans in flight and aboard
John Glenn
. To thatend, it studied them. It ran predictions of their behavior and watched to see them verified or falsified.
    A query. Treesa wanted to talk.
    This was allowed. The few people who talked to Astronaut were well known: Gabriel, Clare, Kyu, the captain, and Liren—all of High Council—and a handful of terraforming staff. Anything different was welcome.
    Treesa was unusual: a lost one, listed as mildly disaffected, living alone in the garden and talking endlessly to