Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  “This isn’t just some intellectual exercise. I’ve been seeing all this, reliving it.”

  “Those dreams, you mean. Where you woke up screaming.”

  “More than dreams. It was like I was really there.”

  “Yeah, okay, that’s fine, but none of that is any reason for us staying here. As soon as I can get Takahashi off the computer in the sick bay, we should get the hell off this planet.”

  “Computer? He said something about that. What’s he doing?”

  “It looks innocent enough, but apparently he’s shuttling all the scientific data from their computer into a blind file where it’s being transmitted to the ship.”

  “Doesn’t he need some kind of access codes to get into their files?”

  “He’s got all the overrides. Who do you think built their computer?”

  “Oh,” Kane said. “Yeah. Morgan. Does everybody but me know what’s going on around here?”

  “Morgan had this all planned. Haven’t you got that figured out yet? He can trust Takahashi because Takahashi’s loyal to the company. You he doesn’t have to trust. He’s got you wired. He owns you.”

  “And you?”

  “I’m just desperate,” Lena said. “I don’t know enough to hurt him, and I don’t have anyplace else to go.”

  “And Reese? What about him?”

  “Reese is out of it.”

  Out of it, Kane thought. There had been something in that last dream, something about Reese. He’d called Reese’s name. His stomach squirmed with unease, and the adrenaline amplified it toward panic. “I have to find him,” he said. “Where is he?”

  “I haven’t seen him all day. I can’t tell you. But I think you should let him go. He’s off on some private trip of his own. Just let him play it out, and you and me and Takahashi will save ourselves.”

  Kane stood up. The adrenaline leveled the room and kept him on his feet. “We need him. Where’s this cave you were talking about? Could you find it?”

  “No way. And neither could you. There’s a dust storm blowing up out there. If we launch right now, we should still be okay. If we wait around we’re going to get stuck here.”

  Kane pushed past her into the empty living room and started to open the front door. The resistance against his pull reminded him that he needed a mask and he looked around for one.

  “Don’t do this, Kane.”

  He saw the tank lying in a corner by the door and slung it under his arm. “I’ll be back,” he said.

  Night had nearly fallen; a swollen, refracted sun oozed through a cloud that covered the horizon. Most of the window boxes along the west wall were occupied, but the colonists showed only a minimal interest in the approaching storm. They’d seen it all before, Kane thought. To them it would be as dull as rain in the tropics of Earth. At least half of them looked drunk or sedated, their faces slack and accepting. The adrenaline made Kane feel like a blur of light in a slow motion film.

  He followed his voices to the south airlock, moved in a near frenzy through the neatly stacked helmets and life-support packs. That afternoon he thought he’d seen an infrared helmet, the only sure way he had of tracking Reese through the dust and darkness.

  Assuming he was right, assuming Reese was with the kids in the cave. But he had to be. That was the Pattern.

  Some of the RX suits still lay sprawled on the floor like blast victims; under one of them, Kane found the helmet. He slipped it over his head and powered up. The room shifted into cool yellows and greens, Kane’s handprints showing like orange bruises on the suit he’d just turned over.

  He took off the helmet and suited up; the dexterity of his fingers unable to keep up with the urgency screaming in his brain. Finally, almost as an afterthought, he opened the locker where he’d left his hipari and took out the Colt .38.

  A gift from Morgan, he now realized, with a hypnotic or implanted instruction to forget it until the subliminals had turned on his software in Deimos space. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was to do with it, but that too, he felt confident, would come to him.

  This time he thought to check the cylinder of the gun; dull brass showed in five of the chambers, with the last, under the hammer, empty. Kane threw out a can of emergency rations and fitted the pistol into his chest pack, barely getting the velcro fasteners closed over it.

  He was raising the helmet into place when he saw the blood.

  Three coin-sized splatters lay on the floor under the airlock controls; a long smear, carrying a single thumbprint, stretched across the edge of the airlock door. Kane did not doubt for an instant that it was Reese’s.

  He sealed the O-rings on his helmet and crossed through the airlock, into the desert. Heat puffed out in yellow clouds around him as he stepped out onto the dark green regolith. Arsia Mons was preternaturally clear in the infrared screen of the helmet, sharply profiled in shades of yellow-green. As he moved toward the mountain, he began to see Reese’s footprints as faintly lighter splotches on the cold green ground. Then, behind a tall vertical outcrop, he saw the edges of a metal airlock, glowing an inviting red.

  The wind around him was strong enough to lift particles of sand, meaning a wind velocity of close to a hundred miles an hour, but the air itself was so thin that he could barely feel its resistance. The electronics of his helmet divided the last blue-white light of the sunset into quantified brightness bands, the pattern distorted by the turbulence of the upper atmosphere.

  The eerie, digitally-processed beauty of the night had only a peripheral effect on Kane; it was a stage set, a cyclorama, for a play in which he had been completely consumed by his role.

  His voices sang to him as he climbed the shining mountain.

  TWELVE

  HIS LAST THROW of the I Ching had given Reese hexagram 56, La, the Wanderer. “Strange lands and separation are the wanderer’s lot.” “Fire on the mountain” was the image, and Reese pictured Arsia Mons blazing in volcanic splendor, the way it must have looked hundreds of thousands of years ago.

  He put the coins in the pocket of his pants, a final, sentimental gesture, and put the book into the duffel under his bed. He could not seem to get warm. He knew it was the hypothermia of dread, his central nervous system desensitizing him for imminent disaster.

  Takahashi sat in the next room, programming some complex swindle into the main computer. Reese didn’t want to interrupt, but time was running out.

  He stood behind Takahashi’s chair and watched the cursor shooting across lines of programming. “Listen, man,” he said. “There’s trouble.”

  “What kind?” Takahashi’s concentration did not waver; his fingers rattled the keyboard like a maraca.

  “Russians.”

  “Have they landed yet?”

  I shouldn’t be surprised, Reese thought. He’s known everything else. “Half of them here, half still in orbit, with a laser.”

  Takahashi nodded and fed his program to the compiler. “Are they going to use it, you think?”

  “Yeah,” Reese said. “I think they are. They gave Curtis until midnight, but I don’t think Curtis is going to play.”

  “Curtis is an asshole. What does this do to your plans?”

  “My plans?” Reese said.

  “I’m not stupid, Reese. I know what those kids have. I heard the same tape you did, and others besides. I know what was in that base camp on Deimos—an astrometry unit. I could see the diskette under your shirt yesterday and today it’s gone.”

  “Don’t try to stop me, Takahashi.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, turning back to scan for errors.

  “I don’t get you. If Morgan knew—”

  “Morgan doesn’t know. I didn’t send him any message last night. The last he heard we were heading down toward the surface yesterday morning.” Takahashi almost smiled. “I expect he’s half out of his mind.”

  “What kind of game are you playing? I thought you were Morgan’s man, all the way.”

  “I’m a company man,”
Takahashi said. “There’s a difference. But none of that is important now. You get on out of here, and I’ll do what I can about the Russians.”

  “Takahashi, I—”

  Takahashi shook his head. “Good luck,” he said.

  Reese took his hand. “Thanks,” he said, and left him there.

  In the long afternoon under the dome the Martians were carrying on with their fishbowl lives. By now Molly would be huddled with Curtis, no doubt trying to talk him out of some desperate cowboy-and-Indian shootout with the Russians. He’d already said goodbye to her anyway, as best he could. He would have liked to have seen Kane one more time, to somehow divest himself of the responsibility he felt for Kane’s being here, to shed the paternal role he’d never wanted.

  But maybe it would be easier this way.

  He recognized the dark clouds boiling out of the south and thought they could only make it easier for him to get away from the dome. He could feel his emotions pulling back deeper inside him, the way the heat of his body had pulled back toward the core, cutting him off from the rest of the world, severing the connections. Soon, he thought, he would look like one of the zombie farmers, with no recognition left in his eyes.

  He fought not to respond to the colors of the evening, so rich that he could almost smell them through his oxygen mask: the damp ground of the fields, the sharp yellows and browns of pineapples, the soft pinks of flowering cacti. All things are full of weariness, he told himself, a man cannot utter it. He thought instead of the narrow, filmy rings of Uranus, of the green, staring eye of the planetary nebula in Lyra.

  He went into the south changing room and closed the door.

  Something had happened here earlier today; the suits and helmets had been badly knocked around. Reese ignored the damage, took an extra large suit from the far end of the rack, and started to take his shoes off.

  “Reese.”

  He turned, saw Blok standing in the doorway.

  “What are you doing?” Blok said, his nervousness driving his voice even lower than its normal Slavic pitch.

  “I’m going up to the cave, Blok.” He wasn’t sure why the words came out. It seemed to him he might just as easily have said nothing at all.

  “I can’t let you do that,” Blok said. Reese looked up again, and this time Blok was holding a 7mm Luger.

  “So,” Reese said. “It’s Russia again. I thought you were beyond that. I thought you were part of the colony now.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Reese. What do you know about loyalties? Who do you have to be loyal to? Your fellow astronauts? Your family?”

  Reese flinched, his guilt at abandoning Jenny to her husband fresh in his mind again. He could have tried harder to get through to her, maybe won her away, and saved her life.

  Stop it, he told himself. There’s no point in torturing yourself. It’s too late for any of that.

  “You can’t even understand how I think,” Blok went on. “You can’t understand what rodina means to a Russian. You don’t even have the word in your language, just ghosts of it. ‘Homeland.’ What does that mean? You can’t even translate the idea.”

  “This isn’t to do with you,” Reese said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Russia or the US or Frontera or anything else. This is just for me.”

  “That’s naive, Reese. You know better. There is no such thing as a non-political act. Everything is political. And I cannot let you leave. Nobody leaves until this whole thing is sorted out.”

  Reese stood up. “You can’t use the gun in here, Blok. It’s too dangerous.”

  Blok steadied his right hand with his left. “Then don’t force me.”

  Reese took a step toward him, but Blok stood his ground.

  “Put it away,” Reese said. “Please. This is something I have to do.”

  They were less than six feet apart. Reese stared at the distorted proportions of the Luger, the swollen barrel, the arms stretching away forever behind it. It seemed to Reese that Blok would probably use the gun. It was like poker, he thought. There were times you paid to see the hole card, even when you already knew what it was going to be. Because, he thought, there were just certain hands you had to pay for.

  He took another step and Blok fired.

  For a second, Reese could not connect the loud, sharp snap of the pistol with the shove that rocked him back on his feet, with the point of heat in his left shoulder that was at the same time numbingly cold. Then his forebrain put it into one-syllable words for him: I’ve been shot.

  Before Blok could fire again, Reese stepped in and put his own, larger hands around the gun. His left arm was nearly useless, but with the strength of his right he began to crush Blok’s fingers, pushing the barrel of the gun up and back, until Blok whimpered and tried to let go, and Reese pushed the gun back hard, catching Blok across the bridge of his nose and down one cheek with the barrel.

  Blok slipped to his knees and Reese pulled the gun away with his left hand, the fingers stiff and desensitized, swinging his right fist around, trying for the jaw but bouncing painfully off the cheekbone instead. He stood back, breathing hard, and watched Blok sway for a second, then topple slowly forward onto his face.

  The bullet had torn through the trapezius muscle of Reese’s shoulder and dimpled the durofoam behind him, lodging in the structural plastic of the wall without cracking it. A good thing, he thought, I was there to slow it down.

  There was a good deal of blood. He touched the hole in his shoulder and had to steady himself against the doorframe, leaving a trail on the enameled metal. He found a first aid kit and sprayed both sides of the wound with K platelets, feeling the skin prickle and tighten as the tangle of fibrin formed quickly into a scab.

  He had to put the Luger down to get into the gloves of the suit; when he was finished, he fitted the gun back into the limp fingers, not knowing what else to do with it. A sizzling ache spread through the muscles of his back, making his throat tighten and his eyes water. The first aid kit contained a vial of Butorphanol, but Reese closed the cover before the temptation got the better of him. He was not going to stagger through this in an analgesic haze.

  He had to start moving. He cycled through the lock and walked toward the setting sun, watching the south wind pump billows of dust into the twilight. The kids’ cave had been the first permanent outpost on Mars; his feet knew the way, even if shock had left him a little faint and clumsy. He crawled into the airlock and lay still as the atmosphere blew in around him, reality flickering on and off as he fought to get his breath.

  “He’s hurt,” somebody said, and the helmet came off his head. Somebody else handed him a dish of beet sugar and a glass of water, and he lapped up the sugar with his tongue, the taste of it alternating between nauseating sweetness and the bitterness of sand.

  “How bad is it?” Verb asked, squatting in front of him.

  He blinked. He sat propped against one wall, looking out on a room of endless darkness, punctuated by cones of intense white light. Under two of the cones he could see children typing rapidly into CRTs; under a third, a Rhesus monkey ate popcorn out of a wastebasket. Verb’s slightly pop-eyed stare was centered on the blood at the edge of his neck.

  “Not…serious,” he said. “Just let me get my wind back, I’ll be okay.” He saw the gun still clinging to his useless left hand and shook it loose, pushing it away from him across the floor.

  “You’re bleeding,” Verb said. “You don’t look good.”

  “It’s superficial,” Reese said. “I sprayed it, it’s okay. Really.”

  “Don’t fool around with me,” Verb said. “Okay? Because this is important to me, too. I can’t have you dying on me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Okay, then. Because it looks good. It looks really good.” Her face shone with a thin film of sweat, and her body gave off a sharp odor of excitement. “Crunch, do the lights, okay?” One by one the spots blinked off, and Reese felt his pulse skittering away from the totality of the darkness, the
darkness like a sensory dep tank, like blindness, like death.

  “Crunch has got a program,” Verb said. “You run that map you gave us through a hologram projector, and set it for a very small scale…”

  Pinpoints of light appeared in the darkness, not giving off enough illumination to locate the walls or floor, instead creating the illusion of stars in infinite space. And then, gradually, they began to move. A trinary system spun past his face, and below his legs he could see the dense exploding gas at the heart of the galaxy. In the distance floated the purple smears of the great nebulas, and beyond them tiny quasars spat high-intensity radiation out through the tornadoes at their poles. All of them visible at once, crammed together, blazing with life.

  Reese felt the hard, hot kernel of despair that had brought him this far begin to melt, to transform itself back into its original components of wonder, awe, and burning ambition.

  “You’ll go through in your suit,” Verb said. “We’ve got a parachute and some survival gear just in case, including some food and water and extra air. There’s a transmitter that will let us know if you made it. Eventually, that is. About twelve years from now, for the round trip.”

  “Okay,” Reese said.

  “We’re shooting for a kilometer above what we think is the surface of an Earth-size planet. We could screw up and put you underground, in which case you explode, or we may put you so far out you’ll burn up on the way down. There may not be any air for the chute to grab. It could be a gas planet, in which case none of this matters anyway. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Reese said.

  “It may not work at all.”

  “Do it,” Reese said. “Let’s go.” He didn’t know if it was the sugar, the aftereffects of circulatory shock, or Verb’s dazzling light show, but he was euphoric, nearly manic. He got to his feet, felt like he was flying through the universe without a ship.