Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  “Reese! Come over here.”

  He stood behind Molly and reached across the table to shake her hand. “Colonel Mayakenska. They finally let you fly one.” He’d only met her in person once before, but her photograph was well known at NASA. She was a well preserved fifty, tall and thin, each small muscle perfectly defined. She had been a body builder, Reese remembered, and evidently she’d kept it up. Even her face showed the effects of exercise, her cheeks hollow and her chin firm, despite the months of free-fall. Her brown, Mongol eyes had only a trace of puffiness and she’d left her khaki-colored hair long enough to curl under her chin.

  It was intimidating, Reese thought, to have somebody get off a spacecraft looking that good. He had no doubt she’d intended it just that way.

  “Why don’t you sit with us?” she said. “What we’re talking about concerns you, too.”

  Reese sat next to Molly, trying to pick up the mood of the table. Mayakenska exuded calm authority; Curtis and Molly seemed withdrawn and frightened, waiting for some figurative axe to fall. Blok was openly nervous, and Reese could feel the unspoken pressure the Russians were exerting on his loyalties.

  “I don’t see any need to talk around the edges of this thing,” Mayakenska said. “We know of your discoveries, at least some of them. Unfortunately, your political position is somewhat…tenuous. Neither the US nor the Soviet Union, um, I believe the exact language was, ‘makes, or recognizes any claims’ on other planets of the solar system. Since the population here is a mixture of Russian, Japanese and American—”

  Curtis cleared his throat. “Is there a point to this?”

  “These discoveries,” Mayakenska went on, “are clearly the property of all humankind. Therefore we have come to participate in a joint endeavor to develop and exploit this new technology.”

  “So,” Curtis said, “you’re a scientific expedition, then.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “And you thought you’d just drop in, like this was some kind of Video Expo, and take a look at the new gear? Come on. Let’s just move on along to the next tissue of lies.”

  “Do I understand,” Mayakenska said, “that you are refusing to share your knowledge?”

  “One,” Curtis said, “I don’t even know what knowledge it is that you’re so eager to get your hands on, and two—”

  “You know perfectly well what it is,” Mayakenska said. “Even Reese knows, don’t you Reese?”

  “Two,” Curtis said, nearly shouting now, “nobody asked you here. Where were you when your own people were hiking across the Sinai Planum in shuttle suits, for Christ’s sake? Where were you when we were trying to squeeze nitrogen out of a vacuum? Sorry, Mayakenska, I don’t buy it. I can’t believe for an instant you thought I would buy it.”

  “I don’t suppose I did,” Mayakenska said. “Okay, let’s try it this way.” She brought her wrist up dramatically and looked at her watch. “We all have these nice Seikos that keep time in sols rather than days.” Reese had one himself; the electronics of the watch allocated the extra 7 minutes of the Martian day over a 24-hour period, lengthening each second by a factor of .0257. “Right now mine says it’s 13:52 and a few seconds. Our ship is in synchronous orbit overhead, in continuous radio contact with us. They’re expecting to get a coded signal from us each hour. If they don’t get it, or if we don’t send another, very specific coded signal tonight at midnight, they’re going to open up with a narrow-beam heat laser. If you want a demonstration we can set one up for you.”

  She leaned back in her chair. The plastic creaked. Reese could hear his own breathing.

  He felt his fear as a hollow ache near his stomach, almost like hunger, except that it was vibrating, and the vibration was moving into his hands.

  When his brain began to function again, his first thought was, I was right, I was right to find a way out of this. This is a sickness, and now that there aren’t any countries to blow each other up, the corporations have caught it and now they’re going to finish the job.

  Mayakenska stood up. “You’ll need some time. Blok tells me there’s an empty house, S-23. We’ll be there when you’re ready to talk about this.”

  For a second Blok was the focus of Curtis’s hatred, and Reese wondered that the weight of it didn’t crush him flat. Then Blok got jerkily to his feet and followed Mayakenska and her silent countryman out of the room.

  Molly’s head sank onto her folded arms. “It’s all over,” she said, rubbing her forehead against the spherical bones of her wrist. “It’s finished. Let them have the damned thing. It’s not worth it.”

  “Right,” Curtis said, barely louder than a whisper. Against the darkness of his five o’clock shadow, his puffy lips were turning up at the ends. A stranger, Reese thought, might innocently mistake that look for a smile. “Then they’ll just go away and leave us alone. Right? Sure they will.” His arm blurred as he spun around and hurled the chair next to him the length of the room. It slid across a tabletop and banged into the wall with maniac force. The violence of it had brought him to his feet, but only a tiny tic in his left eye betrayed his emotions. “You just bet they will,” he said in the same even tone, and then he walked away.

  “I’m sorry,” Reese said to Molly.

  “I know you are,” she said. She sat up, brushed ineffectually at the tangles in her hair. There were fine, brittle lines of white now, Reese noticed, in the straw-colored mass. “It wasn’t your idea. Maybe it wasn’t anybody’s idea. Maybe it’s just the semiotics, you know? Once Verb built the machine, it changed our own ways of thinking about it.”

  “You can look at it that way,” Reese said. “If it’s easier.”

  “I don’t think it is.” She put her hands in her lap, as if they needed protective custody. “It’s Curtis I’m worried about. He’s not just going to lie down, and…” She trailed off into a shrug.

  “Fight him, then,” Reese said, feeling like a hypocrite. “You’ve fought for things before. You fought to get a place on the colony ships.”

  “Yeah, right. And look how that ended up.”

  “Would you rather have been stuck on Earth? Maybe gotten killed in the riots? Or spent three years in the breadlines like Lena did, because there wasn’t any work?”

  “Okay,” she said, letting her head fall back, taking in a noisy breath. “Things are tough all over. And what am I talking to you for, anyway? You’re the enemy too.”

  “I’m not the enemy.”

  “Aren’t you? Then what are you here for?”

  “For myself,” Reese said. “I’m neutral. I’m a bystander.”

  “There aren’t any bystanders,” Molly said. “What was it your father used to say? ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem?’“

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “I guess it was.”

  Reese started for the door.

  “Reese?” She was standing up, arms at her sides.

  He walked back to her and she put her arms around his chest. “You’re getting fat,” she said.

  “I’m getting old.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I said. I guess…I guess I just needed somebody to tell me everything’s going to be all right. It’s a father’s job, you know.”

  Reese smoothed back her hair.

  “Damn you,” she said. “Couldn’t you lie about it? Just this once?”

  TEN

  LEAVING BLOK AND VALENTIN in the kitchen, Mayakenska closed herself in the rear bedroom and unfolded her keyboard.

  The few pieces of yellow plastic furniture in the house were coated with dust. The air, newly pumped in on Blok’s instructions, had the metallic tang of the chemistry labs at the university. The keyboard hung over both sides of the flimsy desk, and she had to perch on a corner of the bed to play.

  Her brief spasms of guilt had given way to a sense of mortality. If the dome were destroyed, she would die with it, probably in a flash of light and pain as an expanding embolus of
nitrogen tore out a piece of her brain. Was that an excuse for her part in it?

  She plugged in her headphones and tried to capture the cool discipline of Brubeck’s “Picking Up Sticks.”

  A perfect world would not demand such decisions; but then, a perfect world would have given her longer fingers, a better ear, an earlier start, would have made her a real pianist instead of a clumsy imposter.

  When the second revolution came to Russia, Mayakenska had been in bed with Valentin, her cosmonaut lover. She had brought him to her Zhukovka dacha for the weekend, despite gossip that she was taking advantage of her position to prey on the young, politically susceptible men of the space program she controlled.

  The gossip failed to annoy her. There was nothing so sincere, she believed, as a fully erect penis.

  The first time the phone rang she was preoccupied by the delicious anguish of Valentin’s teeth on her nipple. When it rang a second time, waking Valentin from a vodka stupor, she knew it had to be serious. Hardly anyone used the phone in Soviet Russia; because it was so little used, it was low on the government’s priority for repairs, perpetuating a vicious circle.

  She pushed Valentin aside and got to the phone by the fourth ring. “Allo?” she said, and a male voice at the other end echoed her, “Allo?’

  Fear of telephones, Mayakenska thought, will one day destroy us. “This is Mayakenska,” she said tiredly. “What do you want?”

  “Petrov here,” the voice said. “Listen, I thought you should know. Everything is…it’s crazy here. Novikov is dead.”

  “Dead?” she repeated. He’d been premier less than three weeks, not even long enough to solidify his power. “Assassinated?”

  “Arrested.”

  “You’ve got to be joking. Arrested by whom?”

  “The Army. He was charged with sedition and, uh, ‘shot while trying to escape’ or something. We think there was meant to be a trial and somebody just screwed it up. Everything’s changing so fast.”

  “What about the Cheka?” Mayakenska asked. It was unthinkable that the KGB could have allowed Novikov to be taken so easily.

  “Don’t you get it? There is no more Cheka. The Army is in. The Party is out. Everything is upside down. I just wanted you to know. Be ready for anything,” The line went dead.

  Outside the open window she could see a jay, shifting from one leg to the other on a narrow branch. She could smell pine needles and spring grasses and the cool dampness of the Moscow River, beyond the edge of the woods.

  And yet, she thought, less than 40 kilometers away, the entire world is coming apart.

  Just the day before she had been reading an article on Novikov in Literaturka. The illustration showed Novikov’s bald head and hollow cheeks defaced by a staff artist, with Stalinesque eyebrows, mustache, and monolithic hair crudely penciled in. The masses, Literaturka said, remembered Stalin only as the krepki khozyain, the firm master who brought discipline to the young and efficiency to the factories. Novikov had first called attention to himself with his zeal in exceeding the government’s Plan, in one case doubling December production in his entire district.

  The Army had been alarmed by his belligerence toward China, although the quantum leaps the Chinese had taken in biotechnology had frightened and embarrassed all the world powers. Literaturka had made cautious references to Stalin’s decimation of the military high command; the censors had passed them, probably because Novikov appreciated the importance of a well-placed threat.

  And so, Mayakenska thought, forcing a glass of hot tea into Valentin’s hand, the Army had taken Novikov seriously. Between Chinese threats of aggression in North Africa and the ongoing collapse of the Americans, there were ample opportunities for a war, but it was clearly a war the Army did not want to fight. Nothing had been said in the press about the mass desertions, mutinies, and racial tensions, but they were common knowledge among the military elite, even for someone like Mayakenska, whose rank was purely honorary.

  She had no way of judging what the news would mean to her career, but it would doubtless mean shortages and total confusion in her personal life.

  She hurried Valentin into his clothes, keeping the keys to his Zhiguli for herself. She forced herself not to hurry as she led Valentin, cursing and befuddled, out to the car; forced herself not to spray gravel as she pulled out of the driveway.

  At the cinderblock village store, called the Krushchev store as long as Mayakenska could remember, the black Zils and Zhigulis already filled the parking lot. The store was reserved for the nomenklatura, and access to information was the most valued privilege of the elite.

  I should have answered the phone, she thought, the first time it rang.

  In the end she did come away with some cheese, bread, and canned meat, but the news she’d learned was more important than steaks or vegetables.

  “Have you heard the latest?” someone she knew only vaguely asked her as they waited in the long queue at the cashier.

  “Which latest?”

  “The mutinies.” It was the first time Mayakenska had seen him in anything but a dark suit and tie. Rumor had it he was highly placed in the Cheka, and his sudden casual clothing seemed to confirm it. “All the non-Russians—the Uzbeks, the Yakuts, the Lithuanians, draftees, all of them—they’re refusing to fight.”

  Back in the car, Mayakenska let her head fall forward onto the wheel, unwilling even to start the motor until she could make a decision.

  “What’s going on?” Valentin asked.

  “It’s over,” she said. “It’s all over. All that’s left is to save what we can. Whatever we think is important enough.” That put it in focus for her. She turned east, toward Moscow.

  “Where are you going? Are you crazy? Aren’t you going back to the dacha?”

  “No time,” Mayakenska said. “We’re going to Zvezdagrad.”

  “And we’re going to drive there? You are crazy.” The Russian secret launch complex was in Kazakhstan, thousands of kilometers from Moscow.

  “No,” Mayakenska said. “We take a helicopter from Kaliningrad.”

  “That’s on the other side of Moscow. We don’t know how bad it is in the city. They could be rioting there.”

  In Valentin’s groping for excuses she saw the weakness of the age. It was the legacy of the west, this loss of moral certainty. Mayakenska had never understood it or had any patience with it. For her the difficulty lay in finding the correct path to follow. Once the choice was made, the required actions were mindless and simple. What difference did a little hardship make, if hardship was what was required?

  “Rioting?” she teased him. “Are you implying the masses are not happy with the socialist state?”

  Valentin stared at her for an instant with bloodshot eyes, then turned away to watch the thick pine forest whip past the car. “That’s really funny,” he said, eventually. “Sometimes you really make me laugh.”

  He was married, Mayakenska suddenly remembered. No children, she was fairly sure, and he’d never mentioned his wife, but it was possible he was concerned for her.

  “I can let you off in the city,” she told him, “if you want. Otherwise I’ll go around, stay off the highways.”

  He was silent so long she thought he might not have heard her at all. Then, finally, he shook his head. “Go on. I’m with you.”

  Once they left the main highway, they were confined to dirt and gravel roads. A month earlier they would have been axle-deep in red mud, but spring was giving way to summer, the roads were dry, and the entire countryside was in flower. This is what it’s like, Mayakenska thought, to truly be Russian; even now, with chaos closing in, she wanted to stop the car and bury her face in the sweet, fertile earth of rodina, Mother Russia. It was a love that never conflicted with her other single greatest desire: to touch the red soil of Russia’s furthest colony,

  She was too valuable, the Party had told her, to be risked in the cosmonaut program. There were simply not enough high-ranking women to serve as examples of the P
arty’s mythical lack of sexism, and far too many disasters in space. They didn’t care that the promise of Mars had lured her into the Army from her engineering career in the first place; they assumed a promotion and authority over the program would be enough.

  What the Party didn’t know was that she had trained alongside the cosmonauts, studied all their textbooks, sat through all their lectures, sculpted her body into better condition than those of women half her age. It brought her the respect of her students, and when her moment came, she knew she would be ready.

  She never got the chance. By the time the Americans sent their last expedition to shut down the Frontera base, the Soviet Union was overextended at home. Crop failures and famine were more important than prestige in space, and Marsgrad was left to find its own way.

  That had been five years ago. Mayakenska had not even heard of the Marsgrad fire from her own people, but read about it in the New York Times. Her friends, cosmonauts she had trained, had been abandoned there; she had no way of knowing which of them had survived the fire and made it to the American base. Not that it mattered, for surely the Americans were dead now as well.

  So why was Zvezdagrad so important to her? It was a question she hardly needed to ask herself. Without Zvezdagrad, Russia would not go into space again, not within her lifetime. And if she didn’t save it, no one would.

  She parked the Zhiguli outside Mission Control in Kaliningrad as the sun was beginning to set. The base was an anthill that had been kicked to pieces: abandoned vehicles blocked the streets, civilians and soldiers swarmed over the grounds without apparent purpose. Holding her embossed red work pass in front of her, Mayakenska began shouting orders to anyone who would listen. Within minutes she had the base sealed off; by the time it was fully dark she and Valentin were on a helicopter headed for Tyuratam. On her instructions the big Kama trucks were already carrying every piece of space hardware she had been able to locate toward the Central Asian steppes.