Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  He is not, Reese thought, the clown he played for so many years. It was not just intensity that Morgan shared with Kane but an aura of danger, the dark, flat, predator’s eyes that were alert for the slightest weakness in their prey.

  “I can handle it,” Reese said.

  Morgan stood up, smiling, and stopped by the door. “Sleep on it. I’m sure you’ll come through for me.”

  In fact Reese cleared his mind and let himself sleep deeply and well. The phone woke him at 8:15, and he did a hundred sit-ups before he got dressed.

  At breakfast Kane introduced him to Lena, Takahashi, and the other two pilots: Walker, a thirtyish woman with hooded brown eyes and leonine hair, and Phut, a slight Vietnamese who took Reese’s hand with barely repressed hostility. Five of them, Reese thought, and only five places on the ship. I’m putting one of them out of a job.

  Theirs was the only occupied table in the long, sunlit room, and Morgan’s absence allowed Reese to eat in relaxed silence. As soon as he comfortably could, he excused himself and wandered through the room, ending up at the souvenir counter. Between the T-shirts and the plastic shuttles was a small hologram unit. Reese switched it on and saw himself in miniature, planting the American flag in the rusty soil where the Frontera dome would be built.

  That morning he put them on the wheel.

  The centrifuge had a building to itself, the Flight Acceleration Facility, just north of Building 5 and its Link Shuttle Trainer. Even after all these years, he still felt nauseated at the sight of the curved gray walls and the radial concrete struts across the roof. He thought of the Hotel Casino de la Selva as his footsteps echoed across the dusty, slick-troweled floor under the fifty-foot arm of the centrifuge.

  He remembered the techs talking about some trainee who’d ridden the wheel “eyeballs out,” lying on his belly, hemorrhaging all the capillaries in both eyes, turning the whites bright red for a month. He remembered his first sight of an Apollo spacecraft, how amazed he’d been by the sheer, clumsy, mechanical weight of switches and latches and levers and knobs. Then, as now, the very idea of space travel seemed ludicrous, beyond the capability of the equipment.

  But the power plant started, and the centrifuge turned, and one by one he took them up to five Gs and let Lena watch their signs. Then it was Lena’s turn, and then it was his, and he had to climb into the gondola and let Kane control the wheel, thinking, I can’t be afraid of him, I have to learn to trust him, I have to learn to trust them all.

  And after all, it was only five Gs, not even enough to bring out the purple splotches of petichiae on his back. He remembered the breathing technique, filling his lungs and sipping air off the top, not letting his chest muscles relax. And then it was over, almost before it started.

  Easy, he thought, no problem. But he knew that it didn’t get hard until it got over eight Gs, and he knew that ten Gs were going to be very hard indeed.

  In the afternoon he left them with Takahashi for a full workout and tried to round up the material he would need for the classroom work. Six weeks seemed pathetically short to teach them upper atmosphere physics, flight mechanics, guidance and navigation, systems and hardware, not to mention some kind of hands-on simulation and escape and contingency drills.

  Which left the outbound flight for all of the lander instruction and simulations, training on the onboard medical and science equipment, preparation and rehearsal of the Mars surface excursions, as well as diagnostics, housekeeping, communications and exercise.

  So many things, he thought, so many ways to go wrong.

  After supper he took them to the auditorium in the Visitor’s Center and ran them the films he’d been able to find, keeping the volume low, correcting the affable announcer’s voice on the soundtrack when he had to. Around eight o’clock, Morgan took a seat in the back row and stayed for the remaining two hours.

  In the flickering light of the projector, Reese watched the recruits. Kane and Takahashi were both impassive, Lena very serious-looking, and only Walker seemed openly enthusiastic. Phut was restless, bored, and seemed to fall asleep a little after nine.

  When the others had left, Reese sat back in a red-plush chair, one seat away from Morgan, and closed his eyes.

  “Well?” Morgan said.

  “Where did you find these guys?”

  “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Walker and Takahashi seem okay. But Lena doesn’t know a damn thing outside her specialty, Kane is probably a borderline psychotic, and Phut thinks I’m here to do him out of his job, which in a way I guess I am. What happened to the NASA people? They can’t all be too old.”

  “The best ones I need for my shuttle pilots. Don’t forget, you can’t even get to the spacecraft without a shuttle ride. And the short-range economy is going to be in Earth orbit for a while.”

  “So these are the dregs, in other words.”

  “As a matter of fact, Takahashi is a pretty high-ranking officer of this company, and the oldest son of the head of the Tokyo office. His loyalty is impeccable, and he’s one of my strongest and smartest people. Kane is family, and there is nothing wrong with his mind. He and Phut both showed great loyalty and courage in the war, and they’re two of the best helicopter pilots in Texas. Lena and Walker are strong, capable, bright, and physically fit.”

  “But the risks involved…”

  “We’ve been over that. You said we were in an adversarial position, and this is an example. Some of the decisions you’re unhappy about may be company decisions, which is to say decisions made in a larger framework than the one you’re responsible for. Those are the kind of decisions you’re just going to have to live with.”

  “Even if it jeopardizes the mission?”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage,” Morgan said. “I have every confidence in you.”

  On the third day, Reese took them to 15 Gs. Phut’s trachea blocked with vomit and Lena had to clear it with her finger and give him mouth-to-mouth. Morgan had been watching from the doorway, lurking, Reese thought, just like he did in the old days.

  “I’m washing him out,” Reese said, and Morgan only nodded.

  Phut’s dismissal broke the tension in the crew, and for the first time Reese began to think they might make it. That afternoon he let them on the Mars Mission Module in Building Five. Reese had asked Morgan to have it fixed, and Morgan had done so, quietly and invisibly, taking away the blue painted exterior stairs that the tourists had used, stripping out the plastic sheets that sealed off the Command Center, patching the cutaway sections of the hull.

  Reese watched them crawling through the four hideously familiar levels, quarters at the bottom, then Wardroom, Health Maintenance, and Command, each just twelve feet in diameter, knowing how soon they would all learn to detest the sight of the light-brown walls, the gridded metal floors. Reese had spent three years of his life, nine months at a time, in various duplicates of the Mission Module, and still at least three or four times a month he had claustrophobic, slow-motion dreams of drifting between the levels.

  At the end of the second week, exhausted by the fourteen-hour days, Reese gave them the evening off. They could only learn so much, he told himself, and even Takahashi was starting to show signs of stress, confusing his right and left hands while running the shuttle trainer, questioning the relevance of graviton theory in the classroom.

  Reese was collapsed sideways across his bed when Kane knocked on his door. “I’m going in to town,” Kane said. “You want to come along?” He was back behind his mirrorshades, as close to relaxed as Reese had seen him in the last two weeks, wearing a loose cotton-knit pullover and fatigue pants.

  “Sure,” Reese said impulsively. “What are we doing?”

  “Bringing in some stuff from the downtown office. Maybe get a bite to eat while we’re down there.”

  They took the elevator to the roof, where a late-model four-seat helicopter was moored.

  “You fly these?” Kane asked, and Reese shook his head. “It’s nice,” Kane said. �
��A real power trip. Planes just go fast. This’ll do anything you want it to.”

  Kane took them up smoothly into the fading sunlight. Gray, four-lane highways squared the JSC; beyond it, Clear Lake’s muddy water picked up muted blues from the sky. As Kane heeled the copter over, Reese could finally see what happened to Clear Lake City. The residential areas were mostly burned to the ground, and the storefronts were glassless and hollow.

  “I didn’t know the riots spread this far,” Reese shouted, over the thudding of the rotors.

  “Used to be a rich neighborhood. That’s all it took. Somebody finally figured out that nobody gave a shit if the people who were starving just burned down their own houses. This piece of work got them a lot of attention, but no food. By that time the government didn’t have any money to give them.”

  “What’s the population now?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. Probably around a million five or so.”

  “Jesus.”

  “A lot of that’s because of people moving out to Smithville and LaGrange and getting the hell away from here. There’s farmland out there and cattle and it’s a lot easier to get by. I mean, a million people didn’t die here. A lot, but less than a million.”

  Kane tilted the rotors into the wind, and the copter shot forward, making for the cluster of reflective-glassed buildings to the north and west. Underneath them flowed a procession of warehouses, factories, and swamps, all of them flanked by scraggly pines and scrub brush.

  “Looks like Morgan’s the only corporation in town.”

  “There are others,” Kane said. “The worst part was currency—nobody wanted dollars and we had to get changed over to an electronic transfer system before things could get rolling again. Of course, we make the computers to handle those transfers.”

  The “we” surprised Reese, giving him a sudden insight into Kane’s character. Kane might be the only one of the crew, he realized, who saw Pulsystems as more than just Morgan.

  “A lot of these places,” Kane went on, waving his hand, “belong to the majors now. They’ll be up and running again in a couple years.”

  The industrial wasteland gave way to poorer neighborhoods, the hulks of rusting cars cluttering the streets or sitting up on blocks in front yards, icons of an obsolete god. A few trash fires smoldered weakly, spreading a faint haze through the evening and blurring the knots of people on the corners who drank from refillable beer bottles and leaned against light poles that had lost any other usefulness.

  On the average, Reese knew, less than half of them had jobs and the rest collected what Pulsystems and the other major corporations euphemistically called a “pension,” paid out of a fund that all the corporations supported. During his days on the line at Pulsystems, Reese had heard one management trainee refer to it as the “riot prevention tax.”

  The result was a supposedly temporary phase of cable TV addiction that would eventually give way to a new age of cottage industry and informed consumerism. Reese did not expect the new age in his lifetime, not on Earth. The entire planet seemed in decay and he wanted away from it, back into space where he belonged.

  As they began to thread their way into downtown Houston through the jungle of gold- and blue- and brown-tinted glass, Reese noticed that only the smaller buildings were missing panes, that the largest were clean and intact. Kane brought the helicopter down onto a yellow-painted target on the roof of one of the nearly identical towers in the center of the city.

  Reese waited while Kane called the elevator, using both a laser key and a combination typed into the elevator console. When they finally got inside they dropped to the second floor quickly enough to simulate low gravity.

  Morgan’s’ office seemed cluttered and lived-in, with no sign of imposed aesthetics. The wooden desk was old and stained, while the chair behind it was a modern sculpture of chrome and steel. One set of bookshelves had been built into the wall while another was bolted together from perforated metal.

  The paneled walls were hung with framed photographs, most of them the obvious shots of Morgan with assorted celebrities; a few of them, though, showed a clear mountain stream with a cabin in the background. They seemed to go with a shelf of books on fly-fishing. The other shelves held bound printouts, self-help books from Machiavelli to Dale Carnegie, biographies of astronauts, the usual dictionaries and references. Most of the books were paperbacks, with broken spines and dogeared pages, victims of hard use.

  Kane dropped into the desk chair and propped his feet on the oversized blotter. “He’s got another office, all steel and glass. That’s where he cultivates the image.”

  Reese noticed that the early photographs of Morgan showed him in a somber suit and short hair. “Morgan’s not even from Texas, is he?” he asked.

  “That’s right. Born in Detroit. The accent comes and goes, you probably noticed that. All part of the protective coloring.”

  Reese sat by the door, trying to reconcile this image of Kane with the others: the eager teenager, the detached mercenary, the makeshift astronaut. “It’s funny,” Reese said. “You look like you belong here.”

  “I’m the crown prince,” Kane said, with an irony that Reese couldn’t quite believe in. “I was brought up to do just this. Sit behind this desk.”

  “Instead you’re going to Mars.”

  “Yeah, well. The crown prince is out of favor at the moment. I could use a few points with the Board. I could use something.” He pushed a button that brought a console up from the desk top. He punched in a complex sequence of numbers and a moment later a large portion of the wall to Reese’s left swung out into the office. “Et voila,” Kane said.

  The three inside walls of the vault held three further doors. Kane stood inside the cubicle and entered another combination, opening one of the doors to a thin cloud of steam. Slipping one hand into an insulated mitten, he pulled out a small gray cylinder labeled “Cryogenic Material” in red letters. He put the cylinder into an insulated carrier that looked like an ordinary briefcase, then resealed both doors.

  “This’ll keep for a couple of hours,” Kane said. “Can I buy you a beer?”

  “Sure. What’s in there?”

  “Christ knows. Something Morgan wants. I didn’t even bother to ask him—he would have lied to me anyway.”

  They took the elevator down to the basement and followed signs saying “To The Tunnels.” They came out in a tiled, fluorescent-lit underground mall full of travel agencies and boutiques.

  Reese had to hurry to keep up with Kane’s natural pace. “Is it safe to be carrying that around?”

  “No,” Kane said.

  Reese shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”

  “It’s simple. This is Morgan’s. If something happens to it, I don’t really care. He should have sent one of his couriers after it if he was that worried. Not me.”

  Kane seemed nearly irrational on the subject of Morgan, and Reese decided to let it go. In fact he could see too many similarities between them, from their chameleon qualities to their flat, deadly eyes.

  The bar Kane took them to was aboveground, converted from a parking garage. A ramp at one end led to a crude cement patch; the low ceiling and huge floor space made Reese feel disoriented and out of proportion. An autosynth at the far end of the club played neowebern at high volume, the repetitious, atonal phrases adding to his unease. Most of the other customers were young, poor, and faddishly dressed in hiparis or full Arab drag, complete with black-rimmed sunglasses.

  Kane ordered sushi and Tsing-Tao beer for both of them, talking easily about the woman who owned the bar and the details of its renovation. Reese watched the tension in Kane’s fingers as he raised his glass, the pressure of his ankle that held the briefcase against a leg of the table.

  When the fish came, Reese couldn’t eat it, repelled by the oily sheen of the skin on a piece of tuna belly, the insectile curl of the shrimp. Kane speared the pieces with a recklessness that seemed exaggerated, inappropriate, but it was only when h
e finished eating, as Kane paid with his plastic Pulsystems ID and they stepped outside, that Reese understood.

  Night had transformed the city. Here in the heart of the business district there were streetlights, but they only deepened the shadows on the high, tan walls of concrete. People moved in the darkness with carnivorous stealth, and Reese could feel their attention concentrate on the two of them, on the briefcase in Kane’s hand, the potent symbol of affluence and oppression. Reese loosened his shoulders reflexively, clearing his mind and speeding his pulse rate.

  Something brushed him, knocking him off balance. He saw Kane spin halfway around, saw a shadow reaching for the briefcase, speared and flung away by a lightening movement of Kane’s knee. Then the briefcase was in Reese’s hands and Kane was using both of his, throwing the broken body of a teenage boy into the wall. The boy hit face first and slowly slid to the ground.

  “Kane?” Reese said. He held the briefcase with both hands, expecting another attack, waiting for the flash of gunfire. Instead a blinding spotlight swept over them and stopped, freezing them in position.

  “Hands straight up and away from your bodies. Drop that case.”

  Reese set the briefcase at his feet and then straightened slowly, still unable to see where the voice came from.

  “ID?” it said, and Kane took out the same card he’d used in the bar, making careful, broad gestures.

  As Reese went for his own NASA ID, Kane said, “Don’t bother.” He handed the bit of plastic to a bulky silhouette in the spotlight and said, “Kane. Pulsystems.”

  The cop did something with the card, then handed it crisply back. “Very good, sir. I’ll take care of this for you. Are both of you okay?”

  “Fine,” Kane said. “Thanks.”

  On the elevator to the roof Reese asked, “Doesn’t it scare you?”

  “What?”

  “The cop. How did he know you weren’t just working over some innocent kid?”

  “He didn’t. But he works for us. It’s not his job to ask us a lot of annoying questions.” Kane’s voice was flat, unemotional.