Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  She had wanted to tell Verb that she was related to Reese, but Curtis had opposed it. There was enough gossip, he said, without dragging his own family through it. Molly hadn’t understood why it was so important to him, but she’d given in. She’d spent so much of her life keeping the secret that it had become second nature to her anyway.

  “But I do remember him,” Verb was saying. “I remember stuff you wouldn’t even believe. Sometimes I even think I remember being born, just the colors. Is that too weird? But that’s not the important thing. It’s the connections. The connections, don’t you see? That’s what the physics is all about.”

  Molly mixed a cup of instant coffee from the hot water dispenser. “And physics,” she said, “is everything. Right?”

  When she turned around the boy was staring at her, spoon poised halfway to his mouth. “Well?” Verb said. “Isn’t it?”

  They were scaring her, but only, she told herself, because she was letting them. The coffee seemed raw and bloody, as if she could taste her own nerve endings in it. “Forget it,” she said, pouring the coffee down the recycler. “Forget I said anything. Let’s get out of here.”

  In the fields outside, the first of the farm teams was already at work, six women, four men, two older children. Two of the women and one of the men were chemical lobotomies, apt to forget what they were doing and stand staring into the dazzling reflections in the mirror overhead. All of them wore goggles as well as the usual oxygen masks to cut the sting of the ammonia fertilizer they sprayed.

  They were being recorded by a video camera on a light pole overhead, one of thirty or more that Curtis had salvaged from various early probes or converted from the home units of his subordinates. They fed a control room in the Center, the heart of Curtis’s “electronic democracy.”

  As they passed the farmers, one of their children looked up and muttered, “Hey, freak.”

  “Hush!” one of the women scolded, but there were no apologies, no other reprimands, and Molly let it pass. Verb went on talking about some new mathematical model as if she’d never heard.

  It was all so fragile, the human chemistry as well as the inorganic. The ammonia, for example, came from Haber-Bosch catalysis of nitrogen and hydrogen that had been compressed, condensed, and filtered out of the Martian atmosphere. The same process gave them their oxygen and the nitrogen/argon buffer they breathed with it, and squeezed almost a pound of water out of 30 cubic meters of Martian air. Each piece fit snugly into place, endlessly recycled, without waste or inefficiency.

  Their society had worked that way too, at least for a while. The first hard years had provided the heat to fuse them all together, Russians, Americans, Japanese, in a proton-proton reaction that kept them all alive. It was only now that the energy of that fusion was burning out, leaving collapsing factions behind that could flare into violence at any moment.

  Through it all Curtis had kept his iron control, obsessed with his vision of a terraformed Mars, even after it became obvious that they didn’t have the resources to do it on their own. They needed help from Earth, the ships, the material to make huge solar mirrors, the mass drivers to bring them ice and asteroids.

  Curtis had been right the night before, of course. He didn’t know what Verb’s physics was capable of, or he would have moved in and taken it for himself long before.

  Because the new physics meant energy virtually without a price tag, energy for the taking, enough to make Curtis’s dreams into reality and solidify his vision of Mars forever. And no matter how much she wanted to see Mars bloom, she couldn’t let Curtis twist that garden into his own rigid image.

  She stopped outside the Center. “Stay here,” she said to the children. “If he’s up to it, I’ll send him out in a little bit.”

  All four of the astronauts were sleeping, and for an instant, barely long enough for the thought to register at all, it occurred to her how easy it would be to get rid of them now, to inject air bubbles into their veins or move them into the surgery and quietly gas them.

  Then Kane turned over, making a soft noise in his sleep, and she was back to normal.

  She knelt beside Reese’s cot, touching his forehead and testing the pulse in his carotid artery. He woke under her hand and said, “Hello,” his voice still thick with sleep.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Hungry,” he said, sitting up cautiously. “Hungry and…sort of stupid.”

  “Sarah’s outside,” she said. “Verb is what they call her now.”

  “What?”

  “I told you, they have their own names for each other. Verb is what they call her now.”

  “Verb. No kidding.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “She’s outside now. She’ll take you to breakfast, if you want.”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s not beautiful, Reese. I just want you to be prepared for that. There’s not anything beautiful about her. I don’t even know if there’s anything there to love. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He stood up and she helped him as far as the sick bay door, and then she handed him an oxygen mask from the rack on the wall. He put it on and walked out of the Center on his own, Molly just behind him.

  He stood there for a long moment, and Molly watched him take it all in, knowing that as sick as she was of this fishbowl city, as much as she missed the luxuries of Earth, as much as she wanted even more to be further, deeper, faster, that she would be homesick for this place if she’d been stranded the way Reese had, not knowing if he would ever get this far again.

  Then Verb came up to them, leaving E17 sitting a dozen meters away with his back to them. She took Reese’s left arm in both her hands and quietly said, “Grandpa?”

  SIX

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, after Molly left, Reese had lain in the darkness, trying to second-guess Morgan’s plan.

  He tried to leave his emotions out of it. That he’d been swindled was no surprise, set up for some kind of complicated snatch-and-run by Morgan’s promises of new frontiers; what hurt was the knowledge that it might all end here, not just for himself but for the entire human race, as if the only fish ever to crawl onto land had lasted ten years and then died with no offspring.

  And surely he was not exaggerating. Whatever Morgan had programmed Kane to do would be devastating, might bring the entire colony down in the process.

  Don’t kid yourself, he thought. You know what Morgan wants. The transporter, the one that’s good for ten or twenty light-years.

  The very thing you want for yourself.

  Someone at the far end of the sickbay groaned in her sleep, the whimper of the fly being sucked dry by the spider, a tiny, apologetic cry for help when there was no help to be given.

  He knew his odds: his father had died of cancer, he himself had made two round trips to Mars and then this last run, had poisoned his body with alcohol and drugs. Given enough time, cancer was a virtual certainty.

  Not me, Reese thought. Not that way.

  He thought about Sarah.

  She was alive, Molly had said, alive but strange, stranger than he would be able to imagine. Strange enough, he wondered, to build a matter transporter? The voice on the tape had said it was a kid, female, and then Molly had told him they had new names now. He remembered the last time he’d seen her, only two years old, already pacing herself through the elementary math and logic tutorials on Molly’s computer, sketching from memory a diagram of a hypercube.

  If it was Sarah, and it almost had to be, the irony was compelling, the grandchild become mother to the man…

  The sight of her the next morning was more than he could have prepared himself for: her pale flabbiness, her stringy hair and lopsided eyes. And then she called him grandfather.

  “Molly?” he said. “You told her?”

  “No. I had no idea she even knew. Not until now.”

  “It’s no big deal,” the girl said, turning her oversized head at an angle to look at
Molly, as if it weighed too much even for her thick, wrinkled neck. “I can use a computer, you know. I’ve looked up your genetics and they’re a lot closer to Reese’s than to the guy that was supposed to be your father.”

  “Jesus,” Molly said. “She was talking about connections this morning. I should have seen this coming.”

  “I don’t suppose it matters,” Reese said. “Not anymore.”

  “It shouldn’t,” Molly said. “Not to any rational person. But it’s liable to put Curtis over the edge. It’s not like you guys are Damon and Pythias to start with.”

  “I never told anybody,” the girl said. “I don’t have to tell anybody now.”

  Reese looked at her again, tried to see past the distorted body to something more spiritual, and failed. “Molly said you might take me to breakfast,” he said at last.

  Sarah—Verb—nodded, and Molly said, “I’ll catch up to you later. Be careful, will you? And keep a low profile. Curtis isn’t going to want you walking around.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What about Kane and the others? What happens to them?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and walked away.

  It was morning under the dome. To his left, high up on the open expanse of plastic, Reese could see a suited figure, hanging on the outside of the cylinder, polishing away the minute scratches left by windblown dust, scratches that could eventually turn the dome opaque. Beyond, the pale pink of the sky shaded upward to a blue flecked with stars and lit by the bright point of Deimos.

  In front of him the fields and houses alternated in a checkerboard that covered more than three acres of land between the Center and the south wall. Reese remembered the work that had gone into making that soil arable, filtering out the salt and sulphur and lime, enriching it with treated sewage and nitrogen wrung out of the thin Martian air, remembered the first crops, the endless radishes.

  Then everything had been new, bright, and hard-edged, a planned subdivision just poured out of the developer’s truck. In twelve years it had already passed into middle age, a Martian equivalent of rocking chairs on the porches and weeds in the yards, only here the faces sat behind pressurized windows, without even a highway to focus their attention on.

  “Are you hungry?” Verb asked, and Reese nodded. “We can go to his place,” she said, and pointed to the boy sitting on a concrete bench a few yards away. “His mother’s working.” In the sudden awkwardness of her hands he saw unspoken messages, a need to communicate something whose words were denied her. He knew then intuitively what his rational brain had already determined. She was the one with the answers.

  She called the boy over and introduced him. Reese shook his hand, wondering where the boy had unearthed the cliché of eyeglasses with electrician’s tape wound over the bridge, an obvious affectation when surgery or contact lenses were so easily available.

  The three of them followed the red gravel walkway around the Center. Reese stopped at the east animal pen and stared through the pressurized plastic bubble at the goats, their brown eyes shifting past him with animal indifference. Beyond them were the crowded chicken cages, and Reese could almost smell their sour odor through the double insulation of the plastic and his own oxygen mask.

  “How many goats are there now?” he asked.

  “Goats?” The girl looked at him as if he’d asked her about dinosaurs. “I don’t do goats.”

  “It’s not important,” Reese said, remembering Molly’s warning. Stranger than you can imagine. Not so strange, really, he thought. More as if they belonged here, as if Reese were the alien and they were the wise and mysterious lost race that everyone had dreamed of finding.

  They led Reese across a newly mown alfalfa field and up to a pale yellow box, its durofoam shaped into ridges simulating clapboard, and through a swinging door with wire mesh set into its clear plastic panels. What a waste of ingenuity, he thought, to imitate a screen door between hundreds of millibars difference in air pressure.

  He sat at a green Formica table in the kitchen, suddenly grateful to be off his feet. They felt swollen and undoubtedly were.

  “There’s not a lot of stuff,” the boy said. “Eggs all right?”

  “Eggs would be great,” Reese said. “You want me to fix them?”

  “Maybe you better.”

  Reese scrambled three eggs in a frictionless electric pan, keeping Verb in his peripheral vision. “Do you guys go to school or anything?”

  After an awkward silence Verb said, “Not exactly. We study with the computers and stuff like that.”

  “What are you interested in? Physics? Your mom was always into physics.”

  “Lots of stuff.”

  “You ever…build things? Like maybe some kind of transporter that could move things around over really large distances? Like light-year distances?”

  The girl’s voice dropped to a whisper. “How much do you know?”

  “Verb?” the boy said. “Hey, Verb, man, you said we weren’t supposed to talk about any of this.”

  “I know what I said. Shut up, will you?” She looked back at Reese. “I made a promise, you understand? I promised I wouldn’t leak it to anybody.”

  “It’s already leaked,” Reese said. “It’s too late to stop it now. Dian radioed stuff about it to Morgan, back on Earth, and that’s why he sent us here. I think Kane and maybe Takahashi know about it too. And I don’t know for sure whose side they’re on. But I don’t like Morgan and I’m not going to help him.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should talk to Mom first.”

  “Look,” Reese said. He could feel the desperation building up inside him, wanted to keep the girl from seeing it. “You care about physics, right? I mean, it’s the most important thing in your life.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Suppose they took that away from you. Took your computers away and made you do something else.” The girl stared at him, blinking, and didn’t answer. “That’s what it’s like for me. I put a US flag into the ground here twenty years ago, and that was the high point of my life. Back then we thought we’d be going on to Ganymede and Titan at least, and all of us deep down thought somebody would come up with an antimatter drive or something, something that would get us out of this one crummy system and into the galaxy.

  “But instead everything just fell apart. It’s like…it’s like somebody locked you in a closet in this big, beautiful house, and outside the house there’s trees and hills and rivers and cities and the rest of the world, and you can’t get to it.”

  “You’re going to burn those eggs,” the boy said.

  Reese put the food on a plate and forced himself to take a bite, even though his stomach was rollercoastering. You didn’t waste anything on Mars, especially real food.

  He looked up at Verb. She was combing through her dirty, tangled hair with the fingers of one hand. “Well,” she said, “somebody did come up with an antimatter drive. We’ll have it, anyway, in a couple of years.”

  “But there’s more, isn’t there?”

  “The transporter, you mean. It’s a toy. It may not even work. We can’t be sure.”

  “I can’t wait for an antimatter drive,” Reese said. His chest felt cold and the words came out without his thinking about them, because if he stopped to think he wouldn’t let them out at all. “If anything ever starts up again, I’m going to be too old. I’m already too old. If Morgan wasn’t desperate he wouldn’t have let me on this flight.”

  “What do you want? What are you asking me?”

  “I want to keep going,” Reese said. “A one-way ticket out.”

  “We sent a couple of mice,” Verb said. “We sent them from…from where the machine is to my bedroom. One came through. The other one didn’t. Everything was the same both times. We don’t know what happened. We don’t know why. We’re out on the edge here, do you understand? This is crazy stuff, like part physics and part zen philosophy. Do you know anything about quantum theory?”

  “A little, I guess.
”

  “Well, there’s stuff in it that doesn’t work. There’s the EPR experiment and Bell’s Theorem that seem to imply action at a distance, and there’s nothing in quantum mechanics to explain it. It’s mechanics, see? It requires a mechanism.”

  “And your physics doesn’t?”

  “Mechanism is an assumption. So is cause and effect. People believe in them because they can explain most things that way, and the things they can’t explain they can forget about. We’ve got different assumptions. Quantum field theories get imbalanced at high momentum levels. They have to ‘renormalize’ the equations to get them to work. I don’t, because I’ve added another variable that they didn’t have. The objectivists used to believe there could be a ‘hidden variable’ that would complete quantum mechanics, and it turned out there was. A fourth-dimensional one.”

  “Like time, you mean?”

  “Not necessarily. It’s perpendicular to everything, that’s all. Time is a dimension, not necessarily the fourth one. Do you see?”

  Reese shook his head.

  “It would be easier to show you the math,” Verb went on, “but for sure you wouldn’t understand that. Parts of it I don’t understand. But I can see it sometimes, like a flickering just at the corner of my eyes, like I could almost see curves and angles where the desert out there is intersecting with fourth-dimensional space…I mean, if you had to use a word, it would be…synchronicity.”

  Sometimes, Reese thought, she looked like an old man, or maybe the words coming out of her just made it seem that way. She’s twelve? he asked himself. At first she sounded merely brilliant, precocious, but then he began to see hints of an alien, frightening perspective that twisted his understanding of reality. He didn’t know whether to just let her talk, or make a real attempt to understand her.

  “Coincidence,” he said.

  “Pavel—he’s one of the Russians—he gave me this book when I was eight. Tertium Organum, by this Russian, Ouspensky, from the early nineteen hundreds. He quotes Hinton in there, saying, ‘the laws of our universe are the surface tensions of a higher universe.’ I just read that, and I mean, there it was, you know? I mean, that’s like a gauge field theory, except it comes out of philosophy, and everything just clicked.”