Free Building Harlequin’s Moon by Larry Niven, Brenda Cooper Page B

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    The plane’s reflection shadowed the calm sea. Water had etched its highest reach almost halfway between the current lake level and the lower sections of the crater’s perimeter. The rise from water to rim was far less dramatic than in the Hammered Sea. Boulder piles, fields of fist-sized rocks, and flat expanses of sand crept gently up the sides of the crater. All the reds and grays and whites of Selene’s stones showed here.
    Gabriel assigned Harry and Ursula to work together planting sensors at various heights around the crater to measure water levels. Ursula looked longingly back at Rachel as she trailed off behind Harry, toting a bulky box of sensors. Rachel shrugged her shoulders and pretended disgust; she’d have been happy to go off with Harry.
    Rachel took Gloria with her to gather rock samples and look for vegetation that might have crept here since the planting of Selene started. They were to meet back in two hours, long before the tide turned and sent water up toward the edges of the crater. Rachel and Gloria walked along the inside crater walls, feet slipping in loose sandy soil. Sometimes they had to scramble up over damp boulders.
    Gloria asked, “Why are we looking for plants here?”
    “Well, we want to control where things grow, to be sure we make a complete ecosystem,” Rachel answered. “But it’s important to see what’s happening that we didn’t plan.”
    “So do we pull up plants if we find them out here?”
    “No. We take samples. I think the soil is too sterile here to find actual plants anyway. We know there are microorganismsby now, so the regolith is turning into soil, but it hasn’t actually been prepared like the fields, so it won’t support higher order plant life. You won’t find a stray banana palm escaped to Erika’s Folly. We’re looking for mosses and simple structure plants.”
    Rachel knelt down and picked up a stone nearly the size of her fist. It was ringed with whitish green. “Hah! This could be a moss or an alga,” she said. “So we’ll take a sample back and analyze it.” Rachel carefully scraped a bit of the material loose from the stone with a small metal tool she carried in her pocket. The sample went into a little bag that sealed itself.
    “What if we don’t want it to grow here?”
    “I don’t know, Gloria . . . ask Gabriel.”
    “I will. How did you see that? I would have walked right by it.”
    “Just look carefully. Watch. Success in terraforming—it’s in the details—so here you’ll see subtle signs, like a rock that’s a slightly different color on one side. Sometimes it’s an instinct. Ali says your subconscious knows more than your forebrain.” Rachel reached down and picked up another stone. It too was edged with whitish green. “This looks like the same thing, but we’ll sample it anyway,” Rachel said.
    “Will we see bigger plants?”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I’m looking carefully,” Gloria said, her voice sounding focused and very confident. “The tide comes up here—I can see where things are wet under rocks. Will it come up before we’re done?”
    Rachel looked at the sea of water in the center of the crater, hundreds of yards away from them. They stood only a little bit above it, and she thought there had been a little creep. Her wrist pad said they had ninety minutes. The high tide mark cut above them, a thick line carved into the rocks, maybe twenty minutes’ walk.
    “We’ll be all right. Tides here don’t go as far up the wallsas they do at the Hammered Sea, but we’ll turn upward soon. Gabriel and Ali didn’t give us an exact path to follow.”
    “I’m okay,” Gloria said. “I trust you.”
    “Good noticing though,” Rachel said. “It’s important to stay aware of what’s around you.” The word “leader” sounded good lately. She was growing into it.
    Rachel stopped to turn over a pile of rocks, finding more mossy substance, a deeper green than on the first rock. She rubbed it