Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

“I didn’t take this, okay? We looked around and then went back outside.”

  “Sure, Reese. Whatever you say, man.” He pulled away and turned his radio back on. “The place needs some work.”

  Reese switched on. “Too much to do anything about it now. Let’s get back to the ship.” Reese slipped the diskette into a zip pocket on his thigh. “The lander looks tight. The computer came right up, and it seems to think it’s okay. There’s nothing it can’t check out better than we can anyway.”

  “A piece of luck, then,” Kane said. “We were about due for some.”

  “Not luck,” Reese said. “It’s a good piece of hardware. Takahashi’s gassing it up right now, and we’re going to go ahead and get out of here.”

  “Suits me,” Kane said, grateful not to have to spend another night in the Mission Module. It’s happening, he thought. In a few hours he would be on Mars.

  “Get your stuff together,” Reese told him, “and take it on over to the lander. Bring Lena with you. We should be ready to lift inside an hour.”

  He nodded, not caring that Reese couldn’t see it, and stayed behind to shut off the lights. Before he left, he put a fresh diskette into the astrometry processor and reloaded its program.

  Just in case, he thought, shutting the outer hatch of the base. In case we’re back this way some time.

  Back inside the ship, he hung his helmet on the wall outside the airlock and wore the rest of his suit into his quarters. Dirty clothes were slotted into neoprene knobs along the wall, and he wadded them into his fist, wondering what he should bother to bring. Somewhere in his overhead locker was a duffel bag that he’d unloaded when he first came aboard and hadn’t looked at since. He pulled it out and tore open the Velcro fasteners.

  A Colt .38 Police Positive, huge, steel-blue, and menacing, tumbled out of the bag.

  It spun end over end as it drifted toward the gridded floor, bounced once and hung there, the hammer snagged in a metal hexagon. The barrel of the gun slowly wobbled in a parabola and then stopped, the muzzle pointed accusingly at Kane’s chest. He jammed his palms into his temples and held on as a yellow beam of pain arced through his skull.

  “No,” he said out loud. It had to be a hallucination. It was the same gun he’d found in Houston, hidden underneath his cot in the Project Management Building. But he’d gotten rid of it then, put it in a dumpster or something…hadn’t he?

  Tiny hemispheres of sweat clung to his forehead. He bent over and touched the steel, its hardness palpable even through his thick gloves. Not an illusion, then. But he had no memory of packing it, would in fact have been insane to bring a gun into this fragile tin can of a ship.

  “Kane?” Takahashi’s voice came from just outside the cubicle. We’re closing the ship,” he said in Japanese. “Hurry up. Isoide kudasai!” The polite form, Kane noticed, but his use of Japanese instead of English was uncharacteristically rude.

  Kane’s hand closed over the pistol barrel, shoved it into the duffel bag, and pushed a layer of clothes in over it. “Yeah, okay, for Christ’s sake. Kite! I’m coming.”

  His hands shook. He felt an eerie, disembodied compulsion urging him to bring the gun along; at the same time he was terrified of bringing it, wanted somehow to break the chain of events already forming around it.

  He had no time left to decide. Takahashi, already suspicious and irritable, might take it on himself to search Kane’s quarters. Nearly frantic, Kane stuffed the rest of his clothes into the bag and ducked into the hallway to put on his helmet. He could see Takahashi’s feet through the open gridlock of the floor above him, making a last pass through the ship.

  He cycled through the airlock and followed Lena’s retreating suit toward the MEM.

  Without conscious intent, his eyes moved upward for another look at Mars. The sunrise had reached Pavonis Mons, to the north and east of the colony. Frontera.

  It had been ten years since the last ship had left there for Earth. Fifty-seven colonists ignored the recall order from the collapsing US government. For two years messages trickled out sporadically: grim stories of nitrogen shortfalls, radiation-induced cancers, famine, and suicide. One of the last told of the failure of the Russian settlement at Marsgrad, on Candor Mesa in the Valles Marineris. The survivors had arrived at Frontera over a period of weeks, starving, crippled, irradiated, and no one knew how long they’d last.

  Then the messages had stopped altogether. NASA’s last official act had been the launch of a final shuttle, deploying a lightsail vehicle full of medicine, electronic components, food, and chemicals. But a solar flare had scrambled the drone’s guidance system and sent it hurtling off into the asteroid belt.

  The sight of the decaying Deimos base had turned Kane’s imagination loose, conjuring endless hideous details of the disaster on Mars: cryptic, desperate messages typed into video terminals, slaughtered livestock, tiny deformed skeletons.

  Sleep, he thought. Just get through these next few minutes and sleep.

  The entry module was only a little larger than the old Apollo spacecraft Kane had seen at NASA, but with its fuel tanks and conical shielding, the descent vehicle stood over thirty feet tall. Reese, who had obviously taken over for Takahashi, was uncoupling the FLOX hose that led to the tank of fluorine/liquid oxygen built into the base’s refinery complex. He held up one thumb and Kane managed to acknowledge him with a wave of the hand.

  A ramp led up inside the cowling, and from there Kane climbed three rungs to the open cockpit. He stowed his duffel under the canvas slings and then crawled in next to Lena. She didn’t ask how he was and he didn’t volunteer any conversation. It was enough to close his eyes for a few minutes.

  His nerves kept him from falling completely asleep. As Reese and Takahashi strapped themselves in, he gave up and opened his eyes again. He waited in cold silence while Lena and Takahashi ran through the pre-flight checklist, and then, with no more than a sort of throat-clearing “de wa,” Takahashi lifted them gently off Deimos’s surface and turned them toward the “high gate,” the point where they would hit the Martian atmosphere.

  Kane forced himself to focus on the pranayama exercises Reese had taught him, separating his breathing into outgoing, incoming, and the long kumbhaka between them.

  The shielded bottom of the capsule brushed the outer layers of the atmosphere and the screaming started again. Kane opened his eyes to columns of data scrolling down the screen in front of him. The capsule bucked as the braking rockets fired and Kane ground his teeth together. No more than two Gs this time, Kane told himself. It’s almost over.

  Within a minute or two, Kane could feel the pressure easing. As the MEM hit terminal velocity, the gravity stabilized at Mars normal and the module began to fall straight toward the caldera of Arsia Mons.

  When the soft, female voice came through his helmet speakers, Kane was too startled to manage a reaction.

  “This is Frontera Base. Since you’re obviously not going to turn around and go home, why don’t you set down southeast, repeat, southeast of the dome. We’ll send somebody out for you.”

  “Reese?” Lena said. “Reese, did you hear that?”

  Jesus Christ, Kane thought.

  They’re alive.

  TWO

  WITH A WHINE like a muezzin’s call to prayer, the eastern mirror opened to the light of the Martian dawn.

  After twelve years I should be used to it, Molly thought, holding a pillow over her ears against the noise, able to sleep right through it.

  She rolled onto her left side and watched a rectangle of muted light crawl across Curtis’s smooth, depilated scalp. He slept flat on his back, the breath rasping quietly in his open mouth. Nothing bothered him, not noises in the night or bad dreams or life-and-death decisions. She could remember when she used to admire him for it.

  She tried to go back to sleep but it was no use; she felt alternately like she was waiting for Christmas morning or for a final exam. It had been this way since they first picked up the signals from Reese’s ship
, and today was the worst. Today they would be landing.

  The phone rang and Molly got noiselessly out of bed to pick it up. “Yes?”

  “They’re coming in.” The awkward Slavic consonants told her it was Blok, on night duty at the monitors.

  “And the others?”

  “At least another day away. No signals.”

  “All right.” She looked down, saw that she had instinctively covered her breasts with one arm, as if she could feel a stranger’s eyes on her. It’s starting, she thought. Already they’re an alien presence, already they’re changing things, and they haven’t even landed yet. “I’ll be right there,” she said, and put the phone back on the table.

  She got into her T-shirt and her last, worn pair of jeans from the night before. Blue used to be my favorite color, she thought, and now look. No oceans, the sky a sickly orange on a clear day, and these jeans faded nearly white. Maybe, she thought, maybe they brought new blue jeans with them, like the tourists used to take to Russia.

  Sure they did. Blue jeans and French wines and Vogue magazines. They don’t even know we’re alive.

  She slid her feet. into moccasins and debated, just for a second, waking Curtis and letting him deal with it. But they’d been over it and over it, and there was nothing he could do that she couldn’t. He’d be furious, of course, but he’d survive.

  She closed the bedroom door behind her and took her mask and oxygen tank off the hook by the front door. She stifled a yawn behind the mask and stepped out into the warm CO2 under the dome.

  The clear plastic walls rose over her like the sides of a giant bottle buried in the sand. The components of the western mirror, like huge foil shades pulled down the curvature of the dome, scattered morning sunlight into the gardens below. To her left and right, durofoam living modules alternated with fields of crops in various stages of ripeness. The corn outside her bedroom window stood two meters tall, ready for harvest, and the fields behind her kitchen had just been sown with sugar beets.

  She squatted for an instant on the dirt path, trying to really see the colony, to reduce it to some kind of single, simple image, but the vision eluded her. She had been here too long, become too bogged down in the details. She could only find distance through an effort of will, putting herself, for example, in Reese’s position, coming in from above.

  First there would be the volcano, leveling off to no more than a persistent slope of the rocky land. Then his eyes would find the dome, a cylindrical bubble half a kilometer long and over two hundred meters wide, capped at the southern end by the main airlock and garage, and at the northern end by the greater thickness of the machine shops and the compressors and solar furnaces that mined the Martian atmosphere.

  Closer still and he could see the land under the dome divided into two chessboards, one due north of the other, with ten squares on a side instead of eight. What would have been the white squares held the houses, the living modules, one- and two-bedroom cottages sculpted from durofoam at the whim of the original occupant. The black squares were green, most of them anyway, planted with wheat or cotton or pineapples and not, thank God, with radishes anymore. In the beginning, radishes had been the only crop that would grow in the salty Martian soil, and they had always tasted to Molly of failure.

  Between the two chessboards lay the inverted bowl of the Center, bracketed by the animal pens where the colony’s goats and chickens fought for their few centimeters of space. The Center was the only two-story building under the dome. Some well-intentioned planner back on Earth had meant for it to be the focus of the colony’s bustling social life, a shopping mall in space complete with video theaters, a bar, a gym, and a row of shops where the docile colonists were supposed to sell their handicrafts to each other.

  The problem was the colony’s social life didn’t bustle, and the one thing most of them wanted was a little privacy, a little time completely alone.

  Molly herself was not immune to the feeling; as she looked around she felt crowded, constricted by the half-dozen people around her, just off the late shift at the Industrial Complex, or watching the sunrise from a bench along the wall of the dome, or still drunk from the night before and wandering aimlessly. Arctic syndrome, the psychologists called it: the sense of lost privacy that came from the knowledge that there was nowhere else to go, no chance to get away from the structures of the society, except in the confines of a rigid pressure suit.

  Or, of course, in one of the isolation tanks.

  They’d started building them two years after the break with Earth, heavy cellulose coffins made of processed leaves and stalks. The upper floor of the Center, with its Nautilus machines and ping pong tables and basketball hoops, had been walled off down the middle and. the tanks lined up and filled with ten-percent magnesium sulfide solution.

  Molly had tried a few hours in the warm darkness, but she couldn’t deal with the disorientation afterward, the luminescent colors and undulating walls. She wanted a solid reality, unlike the others, like Curtis, who couldn’t get enough time in isolation, who claimed it purified and crystallized their thoughts.

  As far as she could tell, it had only made Curtis stranger.

  She stood up and shuffled toward the Center, ignoring the people she passed. The years had taught them a kind of Japanese politeness that retreated from physical existence, that tried not to intrude with meaningless conversation.

  The concrete walls of the Center were a dirty reddish-gray, cast from Martian sand mixed with salty contaminants from the fields. A long time ago somebody had painted Tharsis Hilton across the front of the building. Molly went through the double doors just under the faded letters and pulled her mask down around her neck.

  Astronomy was the first office on the left. The walls inside were covered with printouts, charts, and notes thumbtacked directly to the durofoam. Dirt and shreds of paper had been ground into the carpet beyond the saturation point.

  Blok didn’t look up as she sat in the swivel chair next to his. “They came through the high gate about two minutes ago,” he said. “They’re headed right for us.”

  His eyes were bloodshot over his heavy mustache and stubbled chin. Many of the Russians from Marsgrad had hair all the way down their backs, the men growing thick beards and the women experimenting with permanents and peroxide. But Blok had kept his hair short and his chin shaved, almost as if he expected the Party to check in with him any day.

  Molly patched in a microphone, then hesitated. She had too many questions: what were they after, how had Morgan talked Reese into working for him, what condition were they in, how long were they planning to leach off the colony’s meager resources? Static popped on the line, making her jump. Say something, she thought.

  She switched the mike on, gave them landing instructions, then pulled the plug. The rest could wait.

  “Get sickbay mobilized, will you?” she asked Blok, rubbing her forehead, trying to plan the contingencies. “We’ll probably need some stretchers to bring them in, depending on how beat up they are.”

  “This is the biggest thing that’s happened in eight or ten years,” Blok said, his hands stretched like talons. “Don’t you even care?”

  “I care,” she said. “I care so much I hope they burn up on re-entry, even with Reese on board. We don’t need them, not any more. Haven’t you thought it through? They want something from us, and they’re coming here to get it. Whatever it is.” She was a poor liar, she knew, and she was afraid Blok would see through her, through to her knowledge of the machine in the cave, the thing the Earthmen wanted. “Can’t you see that? Do you think this is going to be some kind of high school reunion or something?”

  “I just want things to be different,” Blok said. “I don’t even care how, anymore. I’m sick of that plastic sky overhead, of goat meat and goat milk and goat cheese, sick of wearing a mask every time I go out of my own house—”

  “They’re not going to change any of that. What, do you think they’re going to take you back to Earth with them?
Forget it. You know better than that. Earth’s gravity would kill you, cripple you at the very least. You’ve been here too long.”

  “You don’t have to remind me.”

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said, and she was. “I know how you feel. It’s just…not the answer, that’s all. It’s going backwards, looking for help from Earth. We have to find our own way, by ourselves.”

  “Eight years ago, when I came in out of the desert, I might have believed that. I would have looked for a Martian flag to wave and I would have waved it. But I don’t believe it any more.”

  How many others were like him, she wondered? Most of them seemed to feel the way she did: bitter, betrayed, abandoned. But was she just seeing what she wanted to see?

  She stood up. “I have to go talk to the kids,” she said.

  “The kids,” Blok said, nodding, knowing which kids she meant. And then, a little hesitantly, he added, “Good luck.”

  She shrugged, taking extra care not to slam the door on her way out. Diplomacy was a survival trait here, and she refused to let him know how much his attitude hurt and angered her. As far as she knew he’d never had any children of his own; afraid, probably, they’d turn out like Molly’s daughter and so many of the others.

  It was the risk you took when you got out from under the barriers of Earth’s atmosphere and left yourself open to the hard radiation of space: the cosmic primaries, the solar flare protons, the solar X-rays, doses of ten to thirty rads a year. The dome cut out the worst here on Mars, but during solar maximum or heavy flares they had nowhere to hide.

  The adults paid for it with cancer and miscarriages, and the kids paid for it with birth defects and the rarest, strangest price of all: genetic change.

  Of the nearly fifty children born on Mars, the ones who made it all the way to term, most were perfectly normal. Of the fifteen or so who weren’t, the damage was usually insignificant or easily correctable—a vestigial sixth toe, cleft palate, malfunctioning kidney.

  Usually.

  What Blok would never understand was what it felt like to carry a child for nine months and feed her with your breasts and diaper her and love her and still not be able to look at her without a shadow of fear and sadness and even, on the worst days, just the slightest trace of hatred. It changed you. Even though you were one of the top fraction of a percentile that had been judged stable enough to be here in the first place, let alone one of the tough ones who had stayed behind when the failures shipped back to Earth.