Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  And then sometimes it seemed like leaving had been the only sane decision, that the rest of them were all crazy, from the borderline paranoids like Curtis with his shaved head and power obsessions to the extreme psychotics who were sent out to work the fields with their pre-frontal lobes chemically numbed.

  She stopped and put one hand on a crumbling wall of durofoam that had once twisted and curved in an ornate imitation of the onion domes of Moscow. These had been the last living modules to go up, back before the final ship to Earth and the casualties of the next two years, before Curtis put things back together. And after those years the survivors had lost their desire for durofoam crystals and Mayan pyramids and giant, abstract igloos. They’d pulled back to the center, to the comfortable cottages and geodesics that, whether they wanted to admit it or not, reminded them of Earth.

  Somebody had thrown a rock through the onion dome, maybe one of the Russians, maybe one of the normal kids who roamed the fields in packs, chafing at the limits of their existence. The morning condensation that fell from the inside of the dome, the local equivalent of rain, had started to rot the foam and nobody had bothered to stop it. The decay had been gradual enough that she hadn’t really noticed it before, but she was still seeing things through the eyes of the Earthmen who would be coming in through the south locks. Through Reese’s eyes.

  Forget it, she thought. By the time they’ve recovered enough to notice our slums or our kids they’re going to have other things to worry about.

  A pack of half a dozen five- to ten-year-old kids raced past her, following the dirt track around the inside walls of the dome. When they got bored enough, they would work for a while with their parents, helping out in the fields or the machine shops, studying at night on computers. Healthy, normal kids, except for a tendency towards fat—the Martian gravity never seemed to burn up the calories their appetites demanded—but Molly still found them strange. They had so little sense of history, such vague, contradictory notions of Earth that she wondered what they would pass on to their own children.

  She crossed the track and shut herself in the changing room, put on a suit and went outside.

  To her right, the great volcano Arsia Mons climbed gently into the sunrise. In the clear morning, she could see the lip of the caldera, twenty kilometers high and nearly a hundred kilometers away. She’d climbed it once; most of them had, at one time or another. It had taken her three days to reach the top, leaping over fissures in the rock with a recklessness unimaginable on Earth, climbing glacial sheets with only a rock hammer to support her, sliding down the shallower inclines on the hard plastic seat of her suit.

  The effort had been worth it. In those three days she had literally walked into outer space. She had stood on a knob of ragged brown basalt at midday, the sun blazing down on her, and looked up to see a sky of unwinking stars overhead.

  Curtis had been the first, of course, and he’d symbolized his conquest by draining his urine collection bag over the lip of the crater. That had been his “hero thing” in the tradition of the Antarctic explorers, and at least three of his subordinates had killed or crippled themselves trying to follow his example, skiing down a glacier or running naked between the garage and the air lock.

  She knew some kind of pressure valve was necessary, but the adolescent macho tone of it all offended her. Their current fad was the “sapping expedition,” where five or six of them would take off in jeeps and blow up underground ice deposits with lasers. Of course they were “releasing valuable volatiles” and “contributing to the density of the atmosphere,” but she knew they did it just to watch the ground explode.

  She started for the cave, watching a small pocket of ice glitter faintly from a rift high on the volcano’s flank. Curtis had promised they would melt that ice and be swimming in it within their lifetimes, back when people had wanted to hear that kind of thing.

  It could still happen, she thought. But it would be because of the kids, not Curtis.

  The entrance to the cave was invisible from the locks, a few hundred meters up the rocky slope and concealed behind a lip of frozen lava, bright orange with iron oxides and silica. The airlock was a cylindrical unit pulled off of one of the early mission modules, cemented in place with durofoam and painted to blend with the background. Molly and the other adults had to crawl on their hands and knees to get into the cave. The kids liked it that way.

  As she pushed the inner hatch open, a large white rat scrambled past her into the lock. It took her a minute to corner it and carry it back into the cave, by which time she felt her temper beginning to unravel.

  The room smelled of the lab animals they left running around, and looked even worse than it smelled. Reese, she thought, would not understand how it could have happened. The cave had been the first permanent habitation on Mars, used while Frontera was being built, and by all rights should have been some kind of monument..

  But they’d needed a physics lab, one far enough away that an accident wouldn’t take the entire dome with it. And maybe more importantly, they’d needed a place for the kids that couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in, the deformed, the strange, the unwanted. Friction had been building since the first years of the settlement, and the decision just seemed to happen, more and more of the kids spending the night in the lab, until a dozen or so of them were hardly home at all.

  This morning they had the red lights on, barely illuminating the distant corners where the durofoam floors and ceilings met the natural walls of the cave. The rats had dragged used computer paper across the floor for their nests, leaving what they didn’t need in crumpled heaps. Children slept on mattresses on the floor, in niches along the walls, some of them under the desks and tables in the front area of the huge room.

  “Verb?” she said. The girl had been named Sarah, once, but five years ago the children had come up with their own names for each other and had stopped answering to the ones their parents had given them. “Verb, are you here?”

  A head of close-cut blonde hair, just a little too large for the body it rested on, lifted itself from one of the desks. “Mom?”

  “How’s it coming?” Molly asked, hearing the unnatural cadence of stress in her voice.

  “Okay. I’ve got some new math to show you.”

  Molly picked her way carefully to the desk. In a distant corner one of the children gave a brief, strangled scream in its sleep and then went quiet.

  On the girl’s CRT screen, Molly saw the calculation for quantum shifts in the apparent mass and charge of an electron in an electromagnetic field. In quantum mechanics the solution produced divergent integrals, but Verb’s equation balanced.

  There had been a time when Molly had to choose between the doctoral program at the University of Texas and a slot on one of the Mars missions. She opted for Mars because she thought it could give her science and adventure, and besides, grant money had dried up and universities, even state universities, were folding as fast as the steel mills. She couldn’t have guessed that she was going to end up at the cutting edge of a new physical theory.

  She watched the numbers scroll by. Like all the great ideas, she thought, the math was beautiful in itself, elegant, symmetrical, not just in the flow of logic but in the very patterns of the numbers.

  “Look Ma,” Verb said, “no infinities.”

  Molly smiled at the obscure, ingrown humor, resisted an impulse to touch her daughter’s hair. None of them liked to be touched, even by each other. Too much like sex, Molly thought, the imperfect chromosomal dance that had spawned them. “It’s beautiful,” Molly said. “It’s almost there, isn’t it?”

  “Almost,” the girl said.

  It had better be, Molly thought. For the thousandth time she almost said it, almost let the words out: Sarah, I have to talk to you. But they wouldn’t come. She’d waited too long, could not just blurt out the fact that her daughter was dying and that she had waited this long to tell her. Waited because she was afraid, waited because she’d kept hoping they were wrong, waited b
ecause she didn’t want to interfere with the work.

  She told herself it was for the girl’s sake, that the work meant so much to her. But it meant as much to Molly, to all of them, because if Verb really could harness antimatter, if she really could build a working transporter, then all their lives depended on her.

  Verb sat back, revealing the heavy, flat lines of her body, the stains on her dull yellow shift. “It’s almost finished. All but a few of the transitions. I can see where it’s going but I can’t always…can’t quite see how to get there. Why don’t you tell me what it is you’re afraid of?”

  The girl’s startling intuition of quantum physics seemed to be part of some larger, more general empathy. She can’t really read your mind, Molly told herself. She’s just reading your emotions.

  “Remember I told you about the ships from Earth?” It wasn’t the whole truth, maybe not even half, but it was the reason she’d come. “One of them is about to land.”

  “Is it the one with Reese?”

  “That’s right. It’s Reese.” Molly crouched beside the desk, putting both hands on the arm of the girl’s chair. “Listen. I know you don’t care much about this kind of stuff. But it’s very important to me and the rest of the grownups here. Okay? If the people from Earth find out what we’re doing up here, they’re going to try to take it away from us. It means people will get hurt, maybe even killed. So I want you to promise you won’t talk to anybody about the transporter, or about the antimatter, or any of that stuff. Will you do that?”

  The girl pushed the screen-erase key, and the equations vanished into blackness.

  “Please?”

  “Is this for Curtis?” Verb said at last. Molly at least she would call “Mom” but her father was always “Curtis.”

  “No,” Molly said. “It’s for me. And for your friends. I don’t want the Earth people to hurt your friends.” Christ, Molly thought, this is low. Why not tell her they have long, forked tails and eat babies?

  Verb pressed a function key, covering the screen with winking graphics. She stared at the shifting patterns as if she could read meaning in them, refusing to look at Molly. “All right. I won’t break it to anybody. Do we have to come back to the dome?”

  “That’s up to you. Reese is probably going to want to see you, sooner or later, but we can work that out. When you do come…”

  “Yeah, I get it. Don’t say anything about the cave.”

  “Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, it’s okay.”

  Molly stood up. It was the best she could hope for, really. “I’ll let you talk to the others. You’ll know how to explain it to them.” She worked with three or four of them every day, a boy with an uncanny knack for integrated circuit design, a girl who could think in hexadecimal machine code, but she couldn’t penetrate their rigid, exclusive culture.

  “Sure.” As Molly walked away, she could hear the girl’s fingers clicking over the keys again.

  She made it outside without any rats or monkeys following her. As she rounded the jut of rock that cut her off from the base, she saw the medics lining up at the south airlocks, stretchers ready.

  The MEM was a bright flare to the east, coming in out of the sun. She hurried down the slope, taking long, floating strides, and stood next to Blok as the lander made its final descent, lost in billowing dust.

  THREE

  FOR REESE it had started in Mexico.

  In the dead heat of the afternoon, even the birds had gone quiet. The swimming pool, deep blue and wide as a lake, threw blades of sunlight into Reese’s eyes. He drained the last flat, salty swallow of Bohemia and dropped the bottle in the sand next to the others.

  The Hotel Casino de la Selva was the end of the earth, the last place Reese ever expected to see. Some mornings he would walk down the Calle Carlos Fuero to the baranca, the steep-sided canyon full of garbage and blooming flowers that separated the eastern third of Cuernavaca from downtown. He could get as far as the narrow bridge, but he couldn’t seem to cross it.

  In the mornings he drank beer, at night mescal. Once a week he would buy a few magic mushrooms, psilocybe cubensis, from the kid who trucked in fresh vegetables from town. The mushroom changed the decaying pleasure palace into a fairyland, made sense of the vines and wild grasses growing over the jai-alai courts, the crumbling concrete heliports, the circular casino like a stranded alien spacecraft awash with dust and splintered furniture.

  At night he could see Mars.

  He was beyond remembering how many nights he’d spent in the hotel, beyond caring about the expense. The money he’d milked out of his days as a public hero was secure, all of it invested in the multinationals that had succeeded the big governments. Enough, he figured, to drink himself to death or to sobriety, and he didn’t particularly care which it turned out to be.

  Footsteps crunched toward him across the sandbox, the artificial beach that was no more preposterous than any other of the hotel’s excesses. Reese, eyes closed, assumed it was the impassive waiter who seemed to be the only other inhabitant of the hotel. He extended his thumb and little finger in the time-honored Mexican signal for liquor and said, “Otra, por favor.”

  “Reese?”

  He forced his eyes open. A young Northamerican stood just out of arm’s reach, wearing a collarless blue shirt, khaki pants, and mirrored sunglasses. The man’s dark hair was razored within a quarter inch of his skull, and he stood with the unconscious tension of the corporate mercenary.

  “Jesus Christ,” Reese said, pushing himself to a higher center of gravity. “Kane? Is that you?”

  “It’s been a long time, Reese.” The man did not offer his hand or relax his expression.

  “Jesus Christ.” Reese felt addled and clownish, unprepared, a little frightened by Kane’s lack of emotion. “What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

  Kane shrugged. Smooth, Reese thought, professional. The last time Reese had seen him, Kane had been no more than sixteen, still in high school, full of inarticulate wonder at being inside the restricted areas of NASA. With an effort, Reese came up with other pieces of information, something about Kane’s father dying in a car wreck and Morgan, the boy’s uncle, adopting him. All of it seemed impossibly long ago.

  “I’m here on business,” Kane said. “I’ve got a proposition for you, if you want to listen to it.” Reese noticed that Kane had nervously chewed at his lips, leaving dry flecks of skin protruding over raw, red welts.

  “Okay,” Reese said. “Just give me a second.” He walked as steadily as he could to the edge of the pool and dove in. He swam the entire oversized length of it, and by the time he started back his lungs burned and his feet thrashed spasmodically at the water. Back at NASA he’d always had trouble with the weight limit because of his big bones and heavy build. Now he was just fat, out of shape.

  Swim, he told himself, and he cupped his hands and dug his strokes in deep, put his head down and his ass up and pumped with his legs. When he got back to the edge of the pool, he pushed himself up on his arms and swung his legs out and stood up.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  They moved into the bar. Reese had another Bohemia, and Kane ordered Tehuacan water. “You remember Pulsystems,” Kane said. “My uncle’s company.”

  “Of course,” Reese said. “I own a block of their stock. I consulted with them when they had the principal contract on the Mars hardware.”

  That was only part of it, and he didn’t volunteer the rest. In fact he had worked in Pulsystems’s downtown Houston office for a few months after the collapse of the government, looking for information. He’d used a phony identity to keep from attracting Morgan’s attention; with a full beard and long hair he’d felt reasonably inconspicuous.

  Houston had been the obvious step after Washington, where one job after another had disappeared as the government tried desperately to cut itself down to a size that its tiny budget could support. For two years he’d burrowed through the Washington undergro
und, searching for tapes or transcripts or some kind of communication from the colonists that had stayed behind at Frontera.

  He’d had no better luck in Houston, and after a few months he’d developed a paranoid fear of Morgan.

  During his NASA days he’d thought Morgan a posturing fool, the sort of clown that gravitated to public office to feed his ego on privilege and publicity. He remembered Morgan’s hearty backslapping in the VIP lounge at Mission Control in Houston, the load of lapel pins he’d pressured one of the astronauts into taking to Mars and back, his endless posing for photographs with NASA celebrities.

  But once inside Morgan’s home ground, Reese had seen another side to the man, a sense of destiny that he kept hidden from the rest of the world. From the moment Reese sat down at a terminal in a corner of the Quality Control department, he was inundated with company propaganda: how Pulsystems fed the unemployed, rebuilt public roads, brought law and order back to the city. In all of it Reese saw a sort of messianic madness that had no regard for individual lives, only for image, cash projections, and the vindication of history.

  What a wonderful piece of PR I would make for him, Reese had realized. Ex-astronaut brought low, rescued and sustained by the corporate dream. Within a few days of the thought he’d packed his clothes and moved on.

  “Right,” Kane said, “of course you know him. Well, when the government went under, Pulsystems was the major creditor against NASA. They bought off the other parties and ended up with the entire Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, two shuttles, launch privileges at the Cape, and certain specific hardware already in orbit.” Kane’s mineral water came and he used it to wash down a small green pill. “That hardware includes a working Mars spacecraft.”