Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  The ship began to vibrate, massive bolts holding it to the pad while the pressure built to full thrust, 375,000 pounds from each engine, and then the Solid Rocket Boosters cut in with five million more, and then the bolts exploded, and Reese felt the thrust press him gently downward. The smoke from the exhaust, billowing up from the fire pits on either side of the pad, was visible through the front windows, shimmering in the blazing heat.

  The real view, Reese knew, was from the pursuit planes following them, planes that Morgan was sure to have laid on to get the maximum publicity from his expense. They would be shooting footage now of the launch pad, falling away until it became a neat gray hexagon against the greenish-brown land and the distant blue of the sea. The long teardrop of flame from the boosters would be too bright to watch with the naked eye, but Morgan’s cameras would get it all, piping it into the cable and onto TV screens around the world as soon as he decided they weren’t going to be consumed in a humiliating fireball.

  “Okay, Enterprise, we’ve got nominal performance.”

  Nominal being NASA-ese for letter-perfect, Reese thought. So far, so good.

  “Roger. Main throttle at 104 percent. All three main engines go at throttle up.”

  The sky deepened into violet and at 30 miles the exhausted SRBs were blown away, spattering brown film across the windows. “Christ,” the pilot complained, “where’s the windshield wipers?” The other pilot laughed, but Reese had misplaced his sense of humor. He glanced over at Takahashi, who was staring ahead out the windows, impassive.

  Eight minutes after launch, the external tank fell away, and the orbiter climbed the last few miles on the nitrogen and hydrazine in its own tanks. Night was falling across the Mediterranean below them, and bright, unwinking stars rose over the crescent Earth.

  “Holy Christ,” the first pilot said. Reese stripped the thick webbing away and floated out of his seat. The orbiter still flew on its back, the Earth directly overhead as Reese drifted up between the pilots’ seats for a look,

  Morgan’s presence seemed to have stayed behind on the planet, dropped away with the pull of gravity. Though he knew it was a simpleminded and even dangerous illusion, Reese felt as if his perspective was intact for the first time since he left Mexico.

  Lena and Kane rose through the hatch, Lena pale and unsteady. “Oh my God,” she said, at the sight of the blue slice of planet over her head.

  Kane strapped her in Reese’s seat and gave her a pill to swallow. “Stay put,” he said, “keep your eyes closed, and just concentrate on holding that down.”

  Space Adaptation Syndrome, NASA’s fancy term for space sickness. Reese could already feel his own facial tissues swelling and his inner ear sending garbled signals to the brain. If Lena was the only one incapacitated, they would be ahead of the percentages. But he couldn’t do anything more for her than Kane already had, and at the moment he was more interested in the tracking signal from the Mars Mission Module, less than an hour downrange of their current position.

  They spent a second long, frustrating hour as the novice pilot tried to dock with the MM. His instincts were useless; increased thrust moved them into a higher, slower orbit, and by dropping low enough to catch up they overshot, time and again. Reese finally went below decks and suited up to begin denitrogenating.

  And then they were docked, and Reese was finally through the airlock and out the open bay doors, strapped to an MS09 maneuvering unit, rising into the shadow of the Mission Module. The fifth booster stage lay in the orbiter’s payload bay; when it was in place the spacecraft would be nearly two hundred feet long, a tall, thin cylinder pointed into space. He squirted nitrogen from his jets and lifted to the top of the ship.

  “Reese?” Kane said. “How does it look?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Listen, can you leave me alone for a minute?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  Reese cut the radio off and watched the planet slowly turning beneath his feet. Looking down the ship gave him an eerie sense of perspective, as if it were a tower running all the way to the surface, flexing in the wind as the planet moved.

  There it is, he thought. A fragile accident of a world, the one place in the solar system, maybe in the universe, that is truly hospitable to the human race. Could you turn your back on it forever?

  He touched his gloved index fingers to his thumbs, closed his eyes, and waited until he could feel the stillness all the way through his lungs and stomach and heart. Here he could feel a deeper, slower rhythm, a music inaudible on Earth.

  One single world, no matter how rich or familiar, was not enough. He’d been stranded down there, rescued by circumstances he didn’t fully understand. Before he would let himself be trapped there again, he would risk anything.

  Anything.

  He opened his eyes and turned the radio on. “Let’s go to work,” he said.

  The pilots fitted the final stage into position with the orbiter’s manipulator arm. Lena, nearly recovered from her SAS, hovered outside with Takahashi and gave directions.

  Meanwhile Kane and Reese opened the Mission Module to hard vacuum. Then they blasted the inside surface clean with nitrogen jets and pumped in a fresh atmosphere. The module still smelled faintly of rotting food. In time, Reese thought, the Sabatier units would clean it up, or they would just get used to it.

  During the second day the abandoned Antaeus facility passed slowly overhead. Reese had spent three redundant weeks there after the first Mars landing, quarantined even though they’d been isolated for nearly ten months on the return trip. Later the station had been turned over to genetic engineers, then evacuated when the government fell.

  There had been rumors, doubtlessly exaggerated, of some strange experiments in the station, and it gave Reese a momentary chill to see, through the orbiter’s telescope, a light still burning in the lab.

  That afternoon Takahashi pronounced the ship’s computers functional, and the four of them said their goodbyes to Morgan’s pilots and watched the shuttle move slowly away. And then they stood in awkward silence in the Command Center of the Mission Module as the first stage ignited, building slowly to the one-G thrust that would ease them out of Earth orbit and into the long fall away from the sun.

  For nearly a month Reese kept them on a tight NASA schedule of exercise, EVA, and simulations. He watched with twinges of misplaced desire as Lena and Kane dabbled in zero-G sex, then settled into quiet antipathy. And when the schedules began to break down, he found himself unable to argue. He spent more time alone in his cabin or struggling with his personal demons in the midnight, hallucinatory silence of the command center, leaving Takahashi to his fanatical exercise and quiet arrogance.

  For Reese, familiarity reduced the trip to a few milestones: the passage of lunar orbit, shutdown of the last engine, the midpoint of the Hohmann ellipse; nothing else seemed real or significant. He had internalized the voice on the tape, and he lost any desire to talk about it, even though he was no longer afraid of Morgan.

  Only as they strapped themselves in for aerobraking did he realize that the time was coming when he would have to act, to try for the astrometry diskette on Deimos if he wanted it. There could be no second chance, no other way of giving the person named Verb “enough information about the terminus” for her to give him what he wanted.

  And then he realized that his mind was already made up.

  As the MEM sank toward the giant, striated flanks of Arsia Mons, he was a bullet that had been fired, mindless, unable to change his course. He watched the slow-falling dust as the lander bumped to a stop, his helmet seeming to find its own way into its socket, his legs taking him down the ladder after Takahashi. One of the colonists held out an arm to support him, and he took it, watching the figure by the airlock door that held her hand to her throat in an achingly familiar gesture.

  “Reese?” she said, and he nodded, let her help him inside and into a cot in sickbay. “Sleep,” she said, and he felt the needle go into his arm, the warmth of Butorphenol spre
ading through his jaw and the underside of his tongue, taking the gravity away again.

  FOUR

  KANE LOOKED INTO the greasy water and saw himself reflected, from his worn boots and woolen trousers to the crude leather helmet on his head. A cold wind blew off the ocean, its breath whistling past him with a faint, chilling melody. He shivered and stepped carefully around the tidal pool, the rocks painful to his feet.

  Through the fog a ship landed, its motion unaffected by the sea, drifting exactly to the shore and then pausing. Words were carved into the prow, and he could barely make them out:

  Thou man which shalt entir into thys shippe, beware that thou be in stedefaste beleve, for I am Faythe. And therefore beware how thou entirst but if thou be stedefaste, for and thou fayle therof I shall nat helpe the.

  Caxton’s Mallory, a distant part of his brain told him, but the words had no relevance to what he was seeing.

  The ship rode low in the water, low enough that a dozen steps across the rotted pier took him onto its deck. He breathed the salt, stinking air and then climbed down creaking steps into the hold.

  As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he made out a crude bed in one corner. On it lay a silver serving tray that held a silver goblet, a half-drawn broadsword etched with runes, and a long-bladed pike.

  The sight of the objects filled him with terror.

  He woke with a scream gurgling in his throat and his hands clutching at his face for a beard that wasn’t there. Even when his conscious brain recognized the glazed walls of the Martian sickbay, his body, down to the cellular level, felt displaced, disoriented.

  He had never dreamed so intensely before, felt so clearly that he had been transported through time, or into some parallel universe.

  A sharp spasm of hunger brought him to a sitting position. Gravity clung to him like mud and the effort of fighting it made him dizzy, nauseated. The pain in his ribs awoke with a dull throbbing, and he touched his chest, finding a tight lattice of surgical tape.

  He didn’t hurt as badly as he thought he would, but then again, when he’d felt that second rib crack he’d thought he was going to die. He sat with his feet off the edge of the cot and drank a little water. Compared with the brownish, alkaline water of the ship it tasted impossibly sweet and pure.

  As long as he kept still, both his stomach and ribs were all right. Turning his head slightly, he could count twenty beds in the sickbay, all of them in use. Takahashi slept peacefully across the room; next to him Lena kicked and moaned softly. Reese was off to Kane’s left, pale but breathing.

  A row of windows above Lena and Takahashi’s cots showed a twilit garden and squat, distant houses. The dazzling reddish light from overhead faded as Kane watched, giving way to the sudden Martian night and the colorless glow of fluorescents.

  Almost immediately he felt a slow, distant rumbling in the walls. He gripped the sides of the cot, afraid of a tremor, and then saw a silvery line rising slowly across the open section of the dome.

  “They’re just raising the mirror,” a voice said, and Kane recognized it as the one that had come over his headphones. He turned slowly and saw a very tall, intense-looking woman standing behind him. She had tangled, dark blonde hair to her shoulders and the beginnings of intriguing lines around her eyes and mouth. Her scent, compounded of strong soap and mild exertion, alerted Kane on a primitive level. He felt a surge of almost impersonal longing, an upwelling of his imbalanced hormones.

  “They close both sides at night. During the day one side is always open to the sun. Are you all right?”

  “Okay, I guess,” Kane said. As she moved, her breasts turned under her T-shirt in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in Earth’s gravity.

  “Do you want to try and stand up?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why not?” She helped him to his feet, carefully avoiding his ribs. She was an inch or so taller than Kane and had to bend her knees in order to slide one of his arms around her shoulders. The pleasure of touching her was muddled for him by vertigo and a sensation that his intestines were going to spill out of his body.

  “My name is Molly,” the woman said.

  “Kane,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “The others…are they okay? How’s Reese?”

  “He’s the worst off, but he’ll get over it. He’s been through this before.”

  They made it twice around the room. Only once, when he stumbled, did Kane have a serious vestibular problem. The worst part was seeing the faces of the other patients, most of them in their fifties and sixties, their sunken eyes, gray skin, hollow necks ringed with bowstring muscles.

  He lay back down on his cot, exhausted, his shrunken heart hammering and his ribs aching dully. “These others,” he said, with a limp gesture, “what’s wrong with them?”

  Molly’s mouth stretched out into a hard line. “Cancer, most of them,” she said. “We’re what you call a high risk up here. The dome cuts out most of the hard radiation, but enough still gets through…” She trailed off, started again. “Get some rest. I’ll come back with some broth or something in a little bit.”

  “Molly?”

  “Yes?”

  “You knew we were coming. We signaled you all the way here. There must have been broadcasts from Earth at least every couple of months for the last nine years. Why didn’t you ever answer?”

  She sat on the edge of the cot, one hip a distracting pressure against his leg. “Do you really need an answer to that? We didn’t want you to come. You people, you and the Russians both, you pulled out and left us here and that was the end of it. You’ve been through your problems, apparently, or you wouldn’t be here. Well, we’ve been through our problems too, only they’re not the same. We don’t want your help, and we don’t want to belong to anybody anymore.”

  “Well,” Kane said. “At least I know where we stand.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against you personally, and I don’t even care if you stay here for a week or two or whatever. But there are people here who are going to care. Curtis, for one, and he’s the governor. Then there’s about thirty people who survived the Marsgrad disaster. They wouldn’t want to see anybody waving an American flag around here.”

  “Nobody’s going to wave any flags, if that matters. There isn’t even a US anymore.”

  “We kind of figured that out. We got your broadcasts, saying you were a Pulsystems expedition. I’ve got nothing against corporatocracy myself, but nationalism doesn’t die out overnight. We’ve seen that here, and we don’t want it starting again.”

  Kane raised his hands, palm out. “Truce,” he said. “As far as I knew, we were only coming here to sift through the ruins. Nobody’s told Morgan that there’s anybody alive up here yet.” He gave in to a yawn. “Besides, we’re not really in any condition to overthrow your way of life.”

  “Granted,” she said, and stood up. “I’ll get you some soup.”

  After she left, he sat propped up in bed, reluctant to let himself sleep again. What, he asked himself, could have been so frightening about the dream? As far as he could tell it was no more than a scene from Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, left over from his college mythology courses. Nothing particularly sinister in that. Yet he knew it wasn’t the events, but the consciousness in the dream that had frozen him, a medieval terror of the gods and their instruments.

  Takahashi woke, sat up, and took a few clumsy steps away from his bed. Kane watched him with a cold, grudging respect as he forced himself to walk, his face as immobile as during his interminable hours of exercise on the ship. Lena had opened her eyes, but lay quietly, making no effort to join him.

  By the time Molly came back with a tray of food, Takahashi was already sitting at the long Formica table in the next room. Kane joined him under his own power, but both Lena and Reese needed help. Molly passed around bowls of steaming chicken broth and glasses of ice water. Kane took a long drink and then let go of the glass. He watched in embarrassment as it f
ell to the floor, spattering his trousers.

  “Gravity,” Reese said, with a weak, gray smile. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Kane realized that his instincts were no longer trustworthy, had altered in free fall to the point that he was unsuited for the simplest behavior. He lifted a spoonful of soup, the muscles of his hand and arm unconsciously accelerating it as it rose, to keep it from wobbling off into space. No, he thought. He stopped his arm, watched a drop stretch downward from the spoon and fall gently into his lap.

  The stock was rich with globules of yellow fat, and Kane’s hunger won out over his feelings of clumsiness and shame. He bent over the bowl and slurped it up, amazed how the reduced swelling in his face was allowing him to taste things for the first time in months.

  When he looked up again someone else had come into the room.

  “Don’t stand up,” the man said, walking quickly to the table.

  Kane stared at him, a slow, psychic tremor moving through his brain.

  “I’m Curtis, and I’m the governor here. Reese, of course, I already know, but I look forward to meeting the rest of you. Welcome to Frontera.”

  Kane, paralyzed, heard something that was not quite a voice speak to him. It spoke inside his head, with the voice of authority. It said, “This man is your enemy.”

  The paralysis broke, and Kane let out a trembling sigh. He continued to stare at Curtis, as if fixing his image on a photographic plate in his memory: bald, shining head, short-sleeved dress shirt with threadbare collar and seams, forearms matted with black hair, the lower half of his face darkened by a half-day’s growth of stubble.

  Anybody, Kane thought, who shaves his head and doesn’t think it’s weird is kidding himself.