Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  If anyone could have pulled them together it should have been Reese. Even Takahashi had been a little awed by him at first. They all carried in their memories the image of Reese planting the American flag on Mars, back when there had still been an America, back when Mars had seemed like something important to everybody, if only because the Russians had gotten there first.

  For Kane the memories had been even more potent, of adolescent weekends at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Morgan’s privilege as a major government contractor buying Kane a ride in the shuttle trainer, a front-row seat inside Mission Control, lunch at the Central Cafeteria with the astronauts. Reese had seemed more than human then, a transcendent being who had actually touched an alien world.

  Because of that Kane had expected some kind of spiritual leadership from him, a moral center that failed to materialize. Instead Reese had spent most of the nine months in his triangular sleeping area, floating in a lotus position, his circled thumb-and-forefingers just touching his knees. He never talked about his own reasons for going back to Mars, or why, at age 60, he was willing to risk aerobraking and NASA’s antique hardware for a man like Morgan, whom he clearly disliked.

  Kane’s own motives were nearly as difficult for him to put into words. At one time being part of the Mars expedition seemed an obvious career move, a theatrical gesture to regain some of the momentum he’d lost after the war. The timing was right; he was unmarried and uninvolved, the doctors had cleared him, and his position in Labor Relations at Pulsystems was far from crucial.

  Now it seemed a mistake, a costly retreat from the front line of the business, something near to professional suicide—or even a literal one.

  North Africa had been the beginning, his head wound the sharp dividing line that separated him from the obvious and natural course his life had been following. He was lucky to be alive at all, they told him, said the headaches and the dizziness and the occasional failure of a motor nerve were minor side effects of a brain lesion that should have been fatal. He’d been unconscious for a month and had been kept in a private ward at the Pulsystems clinic for over a year.

  What he couldn’t understand was the atrophy of his ambition, his sudden inability to reach a threshold of drive and desire that would bring him into the highest echelon of the company. His intelligence was unimpaired; his memory was perfect, frighteningly so at times. Yet in the three years that he’d been back at work, he’d hesitated over the smallest decisions, unable to focus his thoughts, intimidated by the endless chain of consequences that each one provoked.

  And in those years Morgan had seemed to lose interest in him, had become cool, preoccupied, indifferent. Before the war, before the wound, there had been a moment, an instant, when Kane had seen fear in Morgan’s eyes, fear of what Kane was becoming, of his growing power in the company, of the physical strength and competence he’d developed in basic training.

  But not since. Even when Morgan had first suggested the Mars mission, it was offhand, as if he didn’t care whether Kane went or not. Kane himself had brought it up the second time, and pursued it.

  And so, he thought, this was where it had brought him. Lying on a canvas sling, a sack of raw nerve endings and sublimated combat training, knowing that if they couldn’t come up with a working lander, if they had to turn around for another endless, horizonless, destinationless trip, he would be the first to crack.

  He closed his eyes again.

  Sometime during the two hours it took them to catch up to Deimos, Reese recovered. He said he was unhurt, but to Kane his voice sounded old and strained.

  Kane himself had developed a savage headache that burned the backs of his eyes and seemed to deform his skull. He’d had others like it over the past three years, but this was the worst yet. When he managed to find a few minutes of sleep, he was assailed by vivid dreams of a blue ocean and a hot wooden deck beneath his feet, the smells of salt and sunlight, a high murmuring of voices.

  The gentle tug of braking rockets finally brought him back. The gravity of the tiny moon was negligible, less than a thousandth that of Earth, and Takahashi had to guide them in with dozens of tiny course adjustments, more of a docking maneuver than a landing.

  Deimos occupied barely six cubic miles, and as they drifted toward the surface, Kane was reminded of the garbage dumps on the outskirts of Houston. With the exception of a melted patch near the domes and tunnels of the base, the entire visible surface was littered with cast-off technology. Propellant tanks, some empty, some fully charged, lay around like oversized soup cans. Abandoned shelter halves were scattered randomly among plastic bags, tripods, and scraps of crumpled foil. The conical outline of one complete lander and the ruins of a second were visible from the ship, the exposed metal sparkling cleanly in the faint sunlight.

  The ship bumped to a stop. For the first time in nine months, he was actually at rest compared to another object in the universe, but to Kane the change was imperceptible. It could have been no more than another trick of perspective, another elaborate simulation.

  Lena moved him gingerly to Health Maintenance while Reese and Takahashi started closing down the ship. The sickbay was not designed for even the minimal gravity of Deimos, and Kane had to lean against a suddenly vertical wall while Lena took X-rays and taped his ribs.

  “It’s not serious,” she said. “Comparatively. You’re going to be in a lot of pain, but it should heal up cleanly enough. I’d give you something for it if you didn’t still have all that Valium in your system.”

  “Right,” Kane said. His voice had turned scratchy and his face glowed with a light fever. He had become excruciatingly aware of the structure of his chest, of the muscular contractions that raised his ribs as he inhaled, the flattening of his diaphragm, the abrupt collapse as his breath spurted out again.

  Lena pulled herself back up to the Command Center and a moment later Reese and Takahashi came down the same ladder, carrying their suits. Reese’s face was the color of dirty concrete and he lagged behind as Takahashi disappeared below the level of the deck.

  “You all night?” Reese asked.

  Kane nodded. “You?”

  “Sure.”

  “You look like hell, Reese. Angina?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “Get Lena to—”

  “No. I’m fine, dammit. I’m fine.”

  “At least rest a minute.”

  “There’s no time. I have to know if that lander is going to work. It’s important.”

  “To Morgan, yeah.”

  “It’s important to me,” Reese said. “Just leave it at that for now, okay?”

  “Sure,” Kane said.

  Reese dropped through the hatch. Kane worked his fingers nervously, feeling the tension again. The wails of the ship constricted him, seemed to be pressing in on his ribs. His head was all right now and the chest pain was nothing he couldn’t handle. If he didn’t get out of the ship he might explode.

  To hell with it, he thought. If Reese can keep going, so can I.

  He poked his head into the Command Center and said, “I’m going out.” He had to raise his voice to get it to carry in the low pressure of the ship.

  “You’re crazy,” Lena said. She seemed to push him away with the intensity of her stare.

  “That’s right,” Kane said. He let himself fall through the center of the ship, braking himself against the gentle pull of the moon with open hands on the sides of the ladder. There was a way to breathe, he was sure, that wouldn’t hurt so badly. He just had to find it, that was all.

  Takahashi was already in the airlock by the time Kane got to the quarters level. Reese was tightening the straps of his Portable Life Support System and reaching for his helmet. The atmosphere of the ship was pure oxygen, so they could use standard shuttle suits at 4 psi and not worry about nitrogen bubbles and the bends.

  Kane pulled the lower torso of a suit over his trousers and then squatted and stood up inside the upper half, which was still racked to the wall. Raising his arms
brought a new onslaught of pain, but Lena had said it wasn’t that serious, and he chose to believe her.

  “Are you sure you’re up to this?” Reese asked, still holding his helmet.

  “Yeah,” Kane said. He put on his black rubber gloves and locked the metal wrist-rings.

  “Do something for me?”

  “Like what?”

  “See if you can get into the base. Takahashi and I can check out the lander by ourselves.”

  “And if I can?”

  “Just wait there for me. All right?”

  “Sure.”

  Reese’s head disappeared under the helmet as the airlock light went green. Kane closed the hatch after him and got into his own PLSS and helmet and waited while Reese cycled through.

  Finally he was sealed into the narrow cylinder of the lock. The controls were clustered on a small box, painted off-white like every other inch of the room. Each switch was protected by an aluminum cap on a chain, and Kane screwed them back in place as he finished.

  The hatch opened, and he fell gently to the surface of Deimos, his legs flexing slightly to take up his momentum, then straightening to send him halfway back into the lock.

  He lowered himself more carefully and looked around.

  Outside the burned, khaki-colored slab where they’d landed, the entire surface of the moon was pocked with craters, some of them smaller than Kane’s thumbnail, some fresher than the oldest footprints, whose familiar wide bars overlapped each other in a heavy crosshatching. His visor cut down the glare of the sun on the metal and the white powder of the surface, but made the black of the shadows impenetrable.

  Lena’s voice cut into the silence. “Kane, uh, we’re showing the hatch still open…”

  Kane slammed the hatch and moved away from the ship. The drastically foreshortened horizon gave him the feeling that he was standing in a low spot in some terrestrial desert; at the same time the ground seemed to slope away from him, confusing his spatial perceptions.

  He took a few cautious steps toward the airlock of the base, then had trouble controlling his forward momentum. With a good run, he thought, he could probably jump into orbit.

  Puffs of dust hung around his feet with every step. Even in the negligible gravity the dust seemed to weigh him down. After-effects of the aerobraking, he realized. According to the book, none of them should even be moving around yet, let alone trying to work.

  He made it to the base entrance, a half-buried section of corrugated pipe that led to a cluster of metal and durofoam structures that looked as solidly built as a child’s tree house.

  He held on to the hatch valve to get his breath, then looked back toward the ship.

  Mars filled the sky.

  For an instant he felt he was falling into the vast dark side of the planet. He groped behind him, found the edge of the steel tunnel, and clung to it.

  He hung by his feet and hands over a brilliant yellow and white and orange crescent, suspended in absolute black. On the right-hand tip Kane could see the Argyre Planitia, white with frost; to the left was the great inflamed wound of the Valles Marinaris, torn from the upper right edge down to the center of the crescent, disappearing into the dawn along the Tharsis Ridge. Ascreus Mons, the only one of the Tharsis volcanoes touched by the rising sun, trailed a thick plume of ice crystals down toward the west. The Lunae and Chryse plains glowed ghostly white against the orange of the surrounding high ridges.

  If Kane stood there long enough, the sun would reach Pavonis and the third volcano, Arsia Mons. He wondered if the ruins of the base would be visible from this far away, if the great foil mirrors would catch the sunlight. He could point to the spot where they’d be, there, northeast of Arsia Mons, toward Pavonis, still in darkness.

  The speakers in his helmet buzzed and Reese said, “We’re inside. We’ve got power and the pressure’s coming up…looks good.”

  “Oh, man,” Lena said. “Oh, man. I’m just starting to figure out how scared I’ve been.”

  “Don’t break out any champagne,” Reese said. “There’s a ways still to go.”

  Kane himself felt the first stirrings of relief, the easing of a knot of tension in his stomach that had been there so long he’d lost his awareness of it.

  He turned his back on Mars and concentrated on the mechanics of the hatch. The station’s power was on standby and none of the automatic controls functioned. He finally found the manual release set into the recessed spokes of the cover, the flat of the handle barely wide enough to grip with his fingertips. The lever resisted the strength of his hands, but he finally forced the toe of his boot into the opening and threw the mass of his body against it.

  The hatch swung open, and Kane scrambled to hold on to the lip of the tunnel above it.

  Just a few more minutes, he thought, and I can go sleep this off. The light on his chest pack revealed the standard switches inside the airlock, with an additional set for bringing the main power on line. He ran through the sequence, and a moment later the caged bulb overhead came to life.

  “Reese,” he said. “I’ve got power up in here, too. Now what?”

  “Go on in,” Reese said. “Check it out.”

  “What’s going on?” Takahashi broke in. “Kane? Where are you? Are you inside the base?”

  Kane lied without stopping to think about it, instinctively protecting Reese. “Morgan wanted to know if it was still habitable.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me about it.”

  “Come off it, Takahashi,” Kane said. “What difference does it make who he told?”

  Takahashi let the silence drag on for a few seconds, and then said, “All right. But be careful. And you can make your report to me, and I’ll pass it on. Understood?”

  “Sure,” Kane said.

  The telltales for internal pressure all showed green, so Kane gave his helmet a quarter-turn and pulled it off. With the servos operating, the inner hatch swung open easily, and Kane stepped inside.

  The auxiliary generators had kept the air above freezing, but only slightly. Kane’s breath puffed out in thick clouds, and it took a second or two for the smell to penetrate. When it did, he fumbled his helmet back into the collar and turned the PLSS up to high.

  Beneath the odors of rot and decay had been a dry, alkaline smell like moldy bread. As he coughed the last of the foul air out of his lungs, he saw that it was mold, thick and bluish gray, growing up to shoulder height on the foam walls. Oily water dripped from the ceiling and pooled on the floor, which felt spongy under Kane’s feet.

  He slogged through the tunnel and crossed a bulkhead into the Control Center. At first glance the damage didn’t seem so bad, but Kane found rust on the chrome surfaces and greenish corrosion on the solder points. He brought up the drives on the main computer and tried booting an operating system, but nothing came up on the lead CRT. It could have been anything from ROM failure to bad cabling, and Kane didn’t see the value of trying to pinpoint it.

  The astrometry processor, attached to a wire grid telescope on the far side of the moon, was still running, its red map lights still winking into new patterns as Kane watched. The gauges on the little fusion pile were stable as well, and with a little work the place could be used again. But it would be a long time before the smell was gone.

  Kane turned back to the astrometry unit. It was one of Pulsystems’s most sophisticated computers, designed to measure the universe with a combination of light, radio, and neutrino detectors, so sensitive that it could calculate the motion of planets around nearby stars.

  As a teenager he’d seen it being tested in the basement of the company’s downtown Houston office, encased in glittering black aluminum and plastic, promising answers to questions that no one had even thought of asking. Now it lay in the ruins of a deserted outpost, part of another era. Kane felt like a Goth at the sack of Rome, watching his stream of piss wash the delicate paints from a piece of Grecian marble.

  No, he thought, not as bad as that. The fact that he was standing the
re at all proved that it hadn’t been completely forgotten, that the riots and hunger and brutality of the last ten years might be no more than a temporary setback. Now that the worst of it was over, the human race had a genuine chance to start fresh, to make a blind, quantum leap into an unimaginable future.

  Maybe it was already happening; maybe this expedition of Morgan’s would be the first step. For once Morgan might have seen past his anachronistic squabbling over the division of the world’s spoils, but Kane found it hard to believe. For Morgan, self-interest was everything, and sooner or later Kane expected to find the short-term payoff that Morgan was counting on.

  A shame, Kane thought. Once he’d seen himself as the answer to Morgan’s greed, a new program for a new age, but now he wondered if he had the conviction to bring it off.

  He was pulling a clogged filter from the ventilator when Reese broke in on the radio. “I’m in the airlock. How bad is it?”

  “Not good. Leave your helmet on.”

  A few seconds later, Reese came through the bulkhead. Kane noticed the gray stains on his suit where surface dust had turned to mud in the hallway. Reese clicked his radio off and waited for Kane to do the same. Then he crouched in front of the astrometry unit and pulled a diskette out of the drive.

  Kane stood next to him so they could touch helmets. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I need this.”

  “That’s the map, isn’t it?” Kane asked.

  “Yeah,” Reese said. “It’s the map.” For twelve years the processor had been updating and refining the state vectors of every object it could perceive, storing not only position but direction and speed of relative motion.

  “What for?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Maybe later, but I can’t tell you right now.”

  “Okay, Reese. If that’s how you want it.”