Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  “Crunch!”

  In the darkness between two arms of the galaxy, a cold, cloudy rectangle began to glow, then shimmered and fluoresced into an oily rainbow of colors. Reese took a halting step toward it, disoriented by the invisibility of the physical room. Large, soft hands moved over his injured arm, attaching the parachute and some kind of knapsack. He shrugged into the harness, wincing at the pressure over the wound, and tightened all the straps. He pushed his helmet back into place and switched the radio to EXT.

  “What do I do?” he asked, his mouth dry again.

  “You just walk through. The next thing you know you’ll be there. Even if you were conscious, which you won’t be, there’s no such thing as time when you’re moving that fast.”

  Reese felt himself nodding. He slid one foot forward, and his ankle brushed the edge of a desk; he felt his way around it with his good hand, never taking his eyes from the glistening doorway. He could see the hard metal edges now, could almost reach it if he stretched out his hand.

  The room flooded with light.

  He turned, saw a suited figure crawling out of the lock.

  “Reese,” said a droning, mechanical voice from the suit. “Reese, stop.”

  “Kane?”

  Kane pulled the helmet off. “Reese! For God’s sake, man, get away from there!” In the harsh light of the airlock Kane’s face was lunar white, his eyes luminous craters. Reese could read comprehension in his expression, but no understanding. Their eyes locked, and Reese felt the anguish of Kane’s rootlessness, the depth of his betrayal.

  Explain it to him, Reese thought. Tell him that you’re not some Greek hero, noble, selfless, dealing justice with swift, righteous arrows. Tell him he’s on his own. Tell him.

  The biggest of the children, a giant with the distorted jaw and fingers of acromegaly, put a hand against Kane’s chest, and Reese saw him flinch from the pain in his ribs.

  “I’m sorry,” Reese whispered, his suit radio turning the words flat and metallic. “I’m sorry, Kane. But you don’t need me anymore.” As he heard his own words, Reese realized they were true. “You never did,” he said.

  He raised one hand, the cold in his chest and testicles consuming him, robbing him of his voice. He turned away from Kane and walked slowly through the shimmering doorway.

  THIRTEEN

  “THREE HOURS,” Curtis said, “seven minutes, and about fifteen seconds left.”

  “Maybe they’re bluffing,” Molly said.

  She’d been through too much, too quickly, she thought: Dian’s murder, Kane’s arrest, the Russian threat, and now this, her first sight of Curtis’s inner sanctum. She’d seen the bank of monitors at his secretary’s desk, but nothing had prepared her for this, another entire room that opened out of the back of his office, lined on both sides with monitor screens.

  At the far end of the room sat one of Curtis’s lieutenants, a bearded, good-looking Brazilian named Alonzo who’d once made a rather blatant and unsuccessful pass at her. He’d been carrying on an obvious attempt to ignore her bickering with Curtis for over fifteen minutes now.

  “Russian technology, you know,” Molly went on. “It’s not exactly dependable.”

  Unlike this stuff, she thought. The cameras could be operated by remote control, and each held up to three hours of continuous updated information that could be replayed in programmable sequences. It shocked and frightened Molly that so many of the colony’s resources could have been diverted into such a comprehensive and insidious program of surveillance. They had let it happen, all of them had, and she was just as guilty as anyone else.

  “They offered us a demonstration,” Curtis said nastily. “You want to take them up on it? What would you like to lose? The ice reservoirs, maybe? How about the cave, and all the kids up there, and that goddamned secret project of yours? All we have to do is ask.”

  It seemed to Molly that he had been walking for some time now along the cliff-edge of some kind of epiphany, a revelation that would fuse the disparate aspects of his personality into a single, unified whole. Maybe, she thought, it would turn out to be a true apotheosis, that he would somehow save Frontera in a bare-chested act of heroism. More likely it would be a spectacular, shattering collapse. He was coming unraveled at an ever-increasing rate, caught in some kind of runaway neurogenic disaster.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay. They’re not bluffing. So how much longer are you going to just sit here?” His cameras had followed Mayakenska as she’d taken her walk, then followed her back to her room. The house was dark now, Valentin sitting on a spotlit stool in the kitchen to phone in the hourly codes. They now had three of those calls on tape.

  “Until I think of something,” Curtis said, “Like figure out the codes, or something.”

  “They’re using mission designations from the Salyut program,” Molly said. “I saw them in a book once. They probably have to be in chronological order or something. But I don’t see what that gives us.”

  Curtis looked startled, then embarrassed; “You’re probably right. It’s not much, but it’s a start. If we have to, now we can—”

  “Curtis,” Alonzo said. “You’d better look at this.”

  Molly spun around in her chair and followed his pointing finger. All she could see was an ordinary star field.

  “Christ!” Curtis shouted. “That’s the camera in the cave! Are they jamming us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Alonzo said. His nerves, Molly thought, were suffering too; she could see nasty red discolorations through the beard on the underside of his chin. ‘‘I think it’s some kind of holo projection in the cave itself.”

  “Back up the memory,” Curtis ordered, “and put it on another unit.” Molly watched as a second screen filled with the star field. Then the stars winked out, and she could see Verb bent over a suited figure.

  “Reese!” she said. Her chair shot away as she came to her feet. “He’s hurt. Back up the camera at the south lock, catch him on the way out.”

  Alonzo glanced at Curtis, who nodded. “Do it.”

  On a third screen Molly watched Reese move backward in time, backing out of the airlock, turning, lurching into Blok’s unconscious body as it rose from the floor. She watched a bullet dig itself out of the wall and suck a thin line of smoke into the barrel of Blok’s gun.

  “Oh my Christ,” Molly said.

  On the real-time screen an oily pool of light had formed in the center of the cave. A shadow moved across it: Reese, in his suit, silhouetted against the opalescent field of energy.

  “Stop him!” Molly shouted. “For God’s sake, somebody stop him!” She lunged for the microphone to radio the cave, but Curtis wrenched her away by one arm.

  “No,” he said. His head shone in the dim flickering light of the screens, reflected images distorting his features. “I want to see this.”

  “He can’t…they can’t let him go through there! It isn’t tested! He—”

  The milky glow touched the edges of Reese’s suit, flared, and consumed him.

  Curtis let go of her arm, and Molly sank into one of the chairs, feeling betrayed, frightened, on the verge of hysteria.

  “Well,” Curtis said. “This is getting really interesting. Do you want to tell me some more about how those kids are just playing around with theoretical physics? About how we should just let the Russians have anything they want? Jesus, Molly, I can’t believe you let things get this far without telling me.”

  My father, she thought. The words carried an eerie emotional weight. She’d always called him Reese, never Father, never Daddy. Daddy was the stranger who had lived with her mother and died with her on the Gerard K. O’Neill. There were no precut words that fit Reese and what he meant to her.

  What could have been so important to him that he thought he had to risk that weird machine? Where had Verb sent him? Not back to Earth, that made no sense at all.

  Outward, then. Like father, like daughter, both obsessed with the outward urge.

  Not that
it mattered, because now he was dead. Probably dead the instant he stepped into the energy field, but if not, then he’d be dead at the other end, was now only a probability wave whose value was death, death by explosion, by fire, cold, or vacuum.

  She tried to picture it, to use the pain to cauterize the wound.

  “Alonzo,” Curtis said. “Get three or four of your people, whoever you can find, and get them to the south airlock. We’ll meet you there.”

  Alonzo squeezed between Molly’s chair and the console, his eyes moving expressionlessly past her face.

  “Come on,” Curtis said. He pulled at her arm, trying to make her stand up. She stared at him blankly. “Come on!” he repeated.

  She got to her feet. “Where…?”

  “I’ve had it. Okay? I’ve had it. I’m through fucking around. It’s answer time.”

  “What do you mean? What are you doing?”

  She followed him down the stairs, stumbling a little in trying to match his pace. It wasn’t until they passed the last row of living modules that she realized where he was taking her.

  “We can’t go out there,” she said. “The storm—”

  “Fuck the storm,” Curtis said. “We know the way.”

  Molly didn’t answer. The danger was not in getting lost, and certainly not in being blown around by the wind, which didn’t have the friction velocity to lift anything larger than a pebble. The danger came from the sheer quantity of fine particles in the air, particles that could clog or abrade the worn, delicate mechanisms of their suits.

  Molly stripped off her foolish orange suit and put on a pair of recycled cotton pants and a T-shirt from her locker. As she was getting into the bottom half of the suit, Alonzo came in with three reinforcements: a young woman named Hanai, one of Curtis’s sapping partners named Iain, and Lena.

  “She was wandering around downstairs,” Alonzo said. “She wanted to come.”

  “Fine,” Curtis said.

  Molly watched the thin black woman get into a suit. Kane had slept with her, she decided, feeling a morbid sort of curiosity about it, a slight, illogical pang of jealousy.

  They dressed in silence, Curtis ready before any of the others and pacing out his anger in front of the lockers. Then they crowded into the airlock and passed through into the night. Molly kept her head down as they crossed the plains to the cave, seeing only the swirling dust and the rise and fall of Curtis’s boots in the circle of light in front of her.

  The cave was spotlit again as they slithered in, two at a time. The vivid, dizzying hologram starfields had disappeared. At the dim edge of one cone of brightness she could see Verb’s transporter gate, a steel door frame connected to kilometers of fiber optic cables. Depression spread through her like a cloud of ink, and only then did she realize that she’d still been hoping to find Reese alive, saved by a blown fuse or a last-second failure of nerve.

  No, she thought, not a failure of nerve. Not Reese.

  Curtis stripped off his suit as he waited for the others, but Molly left hers on. Insulation, she thought, against the unpleasantness to come. When the last of his people came through, Curtis locked the inner hatch open to keep anyone else from using it.

  “Spread out,” he told them. “Just stay out of the way for right now.” Molly noticed a look passing between Curtis and Lena, Lena questioning, Curtis distracted and vaguely irritated. Lena moved off with the others.

  “Verb?” Molly said. “Verb, where are you?”

  Finally she saw the girl coming toward her out of the shadows, her eyes shining with a joy that was still not enough to transform her face. “I did it, mother, I sent him. He already knew about the machine, I wasn’t the one who told him about it. I didn’t break my promise.”

  “I know you didn’t,” Molly said.

  “He wanted it, he wanted it so much, and so I sent him.”

  “I know,” Molly said. She reached out a hand and Verb took it, carefully, and held on.

  Then Curtis moved into the light and Verb pulled away. “So he is here,” she said, as if some dire prediction had just come true. “What does he want?”

  “I want to talk to you,” Curtis said.

  “No,” Verb said. Her massive head, on its trunk-like neck, rolled back and forth. “No.”

  “You’ve really got yourselves quite a setup,” Curtis said, ignoring her. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been up here. Too long. How about a little light, and then you can show me around.”

  Verb stared at him in rigid defiance.

  “I know where the controls are,” Curtis said. “Either you can do it yourself, or I’ll go over there and do it for you.”

  “Crunch, turn on the lights,” she said, and Molly saw that the girl had taken her first step backward, that ultimately she would not be able to resist him.

  The lights faded up to the level of a cloudy morning.

  “Good. Now let’s have a look at your machine, okay?”

  “No,” Verb said. “It’s my machine. I don’t have to show it to you.”

  “You’re not a baby anymore,” Curtis said. “Don’t overplay the role, okay? You’re a part of this society as long as you use up our resources, and you’ve used up a hell of a lot of them here. I represent that society and I have the right to know what you’re doing.”

  Verb’s head swiveled to face Molly.

  Oh God, she thought, this is it. What in Christ’s name am I going to say to her? “He’s right,” she said hesitantly. “I mean, he’s right that he represents the society, and you have to account to him for what you’re doing.” She took a breath and looked over at Curtis, who nodded with a smug self-assurance that infuriated her. She could see a thin, dark line where he’d cut himself shaving his head; he could have used a depilatory cream, she thought, it was crazy to shave your head with a blade…

  She turned back to Verb. “But you also have to account to yourself. You’re responsible for what you create, do you understand? If somebody is going to use what you’ve made for something bad—”

  “That’s enough, Molly,” Curtis said.

  “—that makes you responsible for what they do, too. You can’t let your work be perverted—”

  “Shut up!” He didn’t need to raise his voice; the violence screamed from the angles of his wrists and legs. She let herself trail off.

  Verb seemed to be physically shrinking, as if the psychological pressure were crushing her body as well. Dear God, Molly thought, the future of the human race may be riding on this little girl. And I think she knows it.

  “Listen to me,” Curtis said to the girl. “You care for your mother, don’t you? When she talks about loyalty and betrayal and taking responsibility and that kind of thing, you believe her, don’t you?”

  Molly saw it coming and could not get out of the way, like an animal trapped in the lights of a car.

  “You trust her, don’t you? You want to believe she’s noble and brave and loving, but suppose she knew something important and didn’t tell you about it because she was afraid it might hurt this project?”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Verb said.

  “I think she would. Suppose it was something about you that might upset you so much that you couldn’t work anymore?”

  “What?” Verb whispered. “Go on, say it.”

  “Ask your mother,” Curtis said, and folded his arms in front of him.

  “Well?”Verb said. “Is there something?”

  “Yes,” Molly said. Her throat was blocked and it came out as a glottal hiss.

  “Then tell me now.”

  “We thought…oh God, we thought we could find something. We didn’t want to frighten you…”

  “You think this isn’t frightening?”

  “There’s something called Turner’s syndrome. It’s not what you have, but it’s similar. In Turner’s, you only have one X chromosome instead of two, and the ovaries never form.”

  “Are you saying I can’t have any kids? Because I don’t care about that. Why
should I want to have kids?”

  Molly shook her head. “No. You’ve got both X chromosomes, but they’re full of what they call nonautonomous elements that inactivate the genes. When you get to puberty—” Molly started to cry. She tried to make the words come out, but they couldn’t get past the blockage in her throat. I’ve been holding them back so long, she thought, and now they just won’t come.

  “Tell me,” she said to Curtis.

  “It’s going to kill you,” Curtis said. “High blood pressure, edema, protein in the urine. Convulsions. Coma. Death.”

  Verb nodded. She was still staring at Molly and Molly couldn’t look away from her. React, she ordered her silently. Cry, hit me, for God’s sake do something.

  “We’ve known since you were three or four,” Molly said. The tears ran down her face and neck past the collar of her suit and down the channel between her breasts. “It’s…it’s like a part of whatever it was that gave you your intellect. It’s like prodigy burnout or one of those things where…you just burn all of yourself up at once.”

  “You could have told me.”

  “I know,” Molly said. “But there was nothing you could do…”

  “What the hell,” Verb said, her face suddenly red, her fists clenched, “does that have to do with it? I know it’s hopeless, I’ve known for three years.”

  Molly looked at Curtis, whose expression seemed frozen in place. “You…knew?” she said.

  “Of course I knew. I’ve been into all the medical records, even the ones you tried to hide. How do you think it felt to learn it that way, sitting alone up here, watching it come up in little green letters on a black screen? And then after I tried to give you chances to tell me, I did everything but bring it up myself, because I wanted to hear it from you.

  “But you never told me, and you know why? Because you don’t care about me. I’m not really human to you, I never have been. If your dog has a terminal disease, well, you just give her a warm place to sleep and all the food she wants and then you cry when she goes.”

  “Sarah…” Molly held out her hand but the girl looked at it with contempt. Was it true? Molly wondered. If Sarah had been more loving, more…normal looking, would it have made a difference? Would she have fought harder when Curtis said not to tell her?