Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  Verb turned her back on both of them, silent sobs moving through her curved back and wattled neck. Molly felt herself slipping into the mindset of despair: if I ever get out of this…She and Curtis were finished; the truce that had been in effect since that afternoon was over. She thought she could kill him now, if she had to.

  At that moment Curtis stooped and picked something off the floor. It was the gun that Reese had been shot with, the one he’d brought with him from the dome. She saw how seductively the weapon fit into Curtis’s hand.

  Verb faced them again, her tears gone, her emotions back in harness. Her eyes registered the gun in Curtis’s hand, then moved slowly back to his face.

  “You won’t need that,” she said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

  FOURTEEN

  “HE SAYS IT’S IMPORTANT,” Valentin told her.

  Mayakenska shook her head, trying to come completely awake. So, she thought, I could sleep after all. “All right,” she said. “I’m coming.”

  She pulled on a pair of coveralls, wincing at their stale smell, and walked carefully into the living room. Her visitor was short, Japanese, wearing a sleeveless shirt that showed off his physique.

  “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “My name is Takahashi and I work for Chairman Morgan.” He frowned and corrected himself. “For Pulsystems, I should say.”

  “And what do you want with me?”

  “Curtis is not going to deal with you,” Takahashi said. “If your threats are genuine, that means I am scheduled to die with the rest of this settlement at midnight tonight.”

  “I see news travels quickly here.”

  Takahashi shrugged. “We both want the same thing. I’ve spent most of the day inside the main computer, and I’ve located the main source of computer time usage. That means I know what the project is and where it is. On the other hand, you can call off that laser. What say we make our own deal and cut Curtis out entirely?”

  She remembered who this Takahashi was, now. He didn’t just work for Pulsystems, he was a junior vice president and sat on the Board, representing the interests of the zaibatsu that controlled Pulsystems Tokyo.

  She distrusted him, in particular, and the Japanese in general. Ever since the Japanese sneak attack on Port Arthur in 1904, Russia and Japan had been enemies, Japan even choosing to side with America after World War II, despite the fact that American bombs had obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  “And your part in this would entitle you to a share in the knowledge, is that right?”

  “Of course.”

  “I fail to see why we need you.”

  “If you could locate the equipment—and even that is not going to be as easy as you might think—you don’t even know how to run it or what to do with it.”

  “And you do?”

  “The answers I don’t have, I can get.”

  The phone rang.

  “It seems to me you are trying to sell me your self-confidence and little else.” She held up her hand before Takahashi could answer her. “Excuse me.”

  She crossed the room and picked up the kitchen extension. “Mayakenska.”

  “This is Curtis. Can we talk?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. Let’s get some basic terms squared away, then, okay? Because a lot of this is new to me, too. The machine you’re interested in is a transporter, am I correct? Straight-line transmission and recovery of material at or near the speed of light?”

  She felt the first tinglings of a flood of relief and excitement. “Ah, yes, correct, that sounds like the equipment.”

  “Good. You should probably know that we also have the ability to produce rather large quantities of antimatter—in fact the power for the machine in question comes from antimatter.”

  Mayakenska glanced over at Takahashi and repressed a smile. “Curtis, if you want, we can wait and go over this with my people…”

  “I think you should hear me out. The antimatter is stored in Liedenfrost jars that use the energy of the antimatter decay to contain the antimatter itself. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yes.” She had to pull her right hand away from her mouth to answer him; she had found herself gnawing on the thumbnail without realizing it.

  “This decay is mediated by an electromagnetic field. That field may be turned off as the container is sent through that matter transmitter that we were just talking about. In that case the material of the container will be quickly eaten away. An explosion is the result. The explosion can be quite large, as I’m sure you can imagine. Are you still with me?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “My first thought was that we would drop a canister of this stuff into your Salyut and blow them out of the sky. But it occurred to me that the message might not be clear enough if I did that. So what I’m going to do is send a rather larger canister through the machine and deposit it in Red Square, just outside the walls of the Kremlin.”

  “No,” Mayakenska whispered.

  “I make it to be about ten minutes before ten, let’s see, that’s 21 hours 50 minutes. Your deadline was midnight, so I’m going to make mine a half hour earlier. I want to see your Salyut performing a Transearth Injection burn by 23:30 hours or you lose Moscow.”

  “You’re bluffing,” Mayakenska said, though she didn’t believe he was.

  “Put on your mask,” Curtis said. “Turn right as you walk out your front door, and walk clear out to the edge of the dome. There’s a phone mounted on the wall there. I’ll ring it in three minutes.” The receiver went dead in her hand.

  “Curtis?” Takahashi said politely. Of course he had heard.

  She nodded. Her legs felt weak, and she had to perch on the edge of a kitchen stool for a moment before she could walk. “You might as well come along,” she said.

  His eyebrows came together and he shook his head slightly, not understanding her.

  “You’ll want to see this,” she said. “It’s the beginning of the end.”

  It took a little over a minute to find the wall-mounted phone in one of the observation alcoves. It occupied one edge of a panel that included three shielded buttons labeled Emergency, Abandon, and Shutdown. The sight filled her with anger and sadness. That’s the enemy, she thought, looking out at the dimly floodlit Martian night, at the ocean of blowing sand. And yet we persist in doing the enemy’s work.

  The directors should have known this would happen, should have foreseen this contingency. It was too much like the way Kennedy had humiliated that peasant Krushchev. Brinksmanship and blackmail, weapons too powerful to be used, vicious circles of terror. Was there no way to break the pattern?

  The phone rang and she snatched it up. “Go ahead.”

  “Tell me what you see outside the dome,” Curtis said.

  “Not much. There’s a lot of dust. There are some good-sized rocks.”

  “Okay. Can you see four of them sort of together there?”

  “Yes, okay.”

  “Pick one.”

  I hate this, Mayakenska thought. But what else am I supposed to do? “There’s a low rock shelf about a hundred meters past those four…”

  “Fine,” Curtis said, and hung up on her again.

  Maybe, she thought, it won’t work. Maybe it will blow up in his face. And maybe Uncle Lenin will come rescue us all.

  “We’re going to get a demonstration, then,” Takahashi said.

  She turned, startled. He’d been so quiet she’d forgotten he was there. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Beating the proverbial plowshare into a sword?”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s not important,” Takahashi said. “Will there be a flash? Should I be looking the other way?”

  “Gamma rays, I think. This is outside my experience.” She sat down on one of the cast concrete benches, then stood up again. “Maybe it’s not—”

  The flash was bright enough that she turned instinctively away, covering her eyes with her hands. Th
e sound followed instantaneously, rising with the shockwave through her feet, pitching her to her knees, a booming peal of thunder so loud she felt something tearing in her ears. She reached out for the bench and felt it shaking too, closed her eyes and bent her head to her knees, still hearing a ghostly feedback whine behind the thudding of rocks and dirt against the dome.

  The phone began to ring.

  “All right, I hear you,” she said, crawling onto the bench. “Yob tvoyu mat’, I hear you.” The explosion had torn dirty white chunks out of the dome’s plastic, but had somehow not cracked it. Nothing remained of the shelf of land but a thickening in the cloud of red brown dust.

  She thought of the importniye leather coats in the window of GUM; the somber red granite of Lenin’s mausoleum, just across the cobblestone street; the riotous colors of the domes of St. Basil’s at the south end of the square; the contrived Byzantine opulence of the Historical Museum at the north end. In an hour and a half they too would be dust.

  The phone kept ringing.

  “Are you all right?” Takahashi asked her. A thin line of blood ran from one of his nostrils. She nodded at him, looked past him to the crowd that had come to stare at the dome.

  “You,” someone shouted, a woman’s voice, the owner anonymous. “Is that your work?”

  Mayakenska could only stare. Takahashi moved in front of her. “No,” he said. “Curtis did that. Your own boy did it. But it’s over now. Everything’s okay.”

  “It’s not over,” Mayakensaka said, but no one heard her. When she looked up again the crowd had dissolved into confused, frightened individuals, moving randomly under the artificial twilight.

  She stood up. “I’ve got to stop this. I’ll call the ship.”

  “I’m going to the cave,” Takahashi said.

  “Cave?”

  “Where Curtis is. The first settlement. The computer shows a phenomenal amount of usage up there. That’s where they have to be.”

  Mayakenska looked at the phone, which had finally stopped ringing. “All right,” she said. She stood up. Her legs were shaky, but she could walk. “I’m going to stop this,” she said. “I promise.”

  The house—living module, the Americans called it—at S-23 looked like something out of one of their TV comedies from half a century ago, a “cottage in the suburbs,” if she remembered the vocabulary. The front of the house was weakened by large panes of clear plastic, and the surrounding land was planted with useless, ornamental shrubs.

  Lying next to one of the shrubs was a body.

  “Blok?” she asked, approaching him cautiously.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s me.” His mask was crooked, and his eyes seemed swollen. “Reese is gone. He’s gone up to the cave.”

  “The cave where the transporter is. You didn’t tell me about that, Blok.”

  “Just…kids up there. Didn’t want them hurt.”

  “Come on inside,” she said. “There’s not much time.”

  She helped him into the house and put him in one of the bedrooms. He was bruised and embarrassed, but not critically hurt.

  “Valentin?” He had been sitting in the living room watching her, wide-eyed, his right leg jiggling nervously. Amphetamines, Mayakenska thought. “Come with me. You need to hear this.”

  She called the orbiter from her bedroom. “Twenty-two hundred hours, code Pamir, repeat Pamir. Give me a relay to Dawn.” Dawn was Mission Control at Kaliningrad, and now that Frontera Base had turned away from the sun she would have to bounce her signal off a worn American comsat orbiting the far side of Mars.

  “Okay,” Chaadayev said. “What’s going on down there? We saw some kind of explosion a few minutes ago. Is everything all right?”

  “No,” she said. “Everything is wrong…”

  FIFTEEN

  KANE PULLED FREE of the giant just as Reese flickered and vanished. He ran toward the glowing doorway, throwing away the infrared helmet as he ran. “No!” he screamed. He tripped over something in the darkness and lunged headlong toward the wall of incandescent particles.

  His right hand stretched toward the fiery wall, came close enough for Kane to feel the hairs on the back of it tingle and flutter. Then he found himself sprawled across the spongy durofoam floor of the cave, the metal frame of the doorway arching over him, the power shut down.

  Reese was gone.

  Kane got onto all fours and looked around. Pockets of light held various CRTs and scientific instruments; green digital readouts blinked at him from every corner of the room. The illusion of stars and infinite space that he’d seen from the airlock had disappeared, leaving no clue as to whether it had been a hologram or just another product of his implant.

  Like the voices, whose high, pure harmony still rang in his skull.

  Slowly the children moved out of the darkness, some in rags, some wearing braces on their limbs, some with the glittering eyes of fierce curiosity, some with the slack, moist lips of brain damage. One of them came to within a few feet of him and stopped, her heavy, malformed head turned on its side.

  “Welcome to Synchron City,” she said. Kane thought perhaps she was smiling. “Are you Kane?”

  “Where’s Reese?” Kane said. “What did you do to him?”

  The hideous little girl leaned from side to side, almost dancing with pleasure and excitement. “We transcribed him,” she said. “We transcribed him and then we broadcast him.”

  “Broadcast him?” Kane sat back on his heels, bringing himself further away from the girl. “You’re crazy.”

  “Do you think so?” she said, and Kane saw that he had carelessly opened an old wound. “Well, I did broadcast him. I gave him the one thing he wanted in the entire universe.”

  “Where?” Kane said. “Where did you send him?”

  “He brought me a data base that showed maybe a habitable planet around Barnard’s Star. He should reassemble there, if everything works.”

  The diskette, Kane thought. So that’s what it was for. That meant that Reese had known about all of this before they’d landed, probably known before they left Earth. One more betrayal. “Barnard’s Star?”

  “He’ll know in about 5.868 years. Of course, it won’t be that long for him.”

  “Jesus,” Kane said. This was it, then, the source of power, of more power than he had imagined. The electricity that had charged his hand at Reese’s gateway was all around him; he stood in the Omphalos, the navel of this world. The roots of the tree of life grew under his feet, and from here the waters could be freed, releasing grace, nourishment, and light to transform the universe.

  He stood and let the awareness electrify him like current charging a capacitor.

  Suddenly the girl jerked her head around, and Kane followed her gaze to the lights over the airlock, which had just shifted from green to red.

  “Somebody’s coming,” Kane said.

  “Curtis.”

  “How do you know?”

  She shook her head and pointed to a ladder along the nearest wall. “There’s a catwalk up there. You can watch without them seeing you.” Kane hesitated and she said, “You’d better go.”

  Kane climbed, the strain on his arms sending waves of pain through his pectorals and deep into his chest. At the top he found a perforated aluminum walkway that circled the cave. It was barely a yard wide and less than six feet from the ceiling, forcing Kane to walk with bent legs and cling to the handrail.

  He circled toward the front of the cave, then froze as his foot touched yielding flesh.

  “Hello,” said a voice. “Are you from Earth?”

  Kane squinted. A boy of about eight or nine clung to the railing, staring intently back at him. A clumsily repaired cleft palate had left the boy with a scar that ran through his upper lip and along the entire left side of his nose.

  “That’s right. My name is Kane.”

  “Avec plaisir. I am Pen of My Uncle. Do you speak French?”

  Fifteen feet below them the airlock door swung open and they began comin
g in, two at a time: first Curtis and Molly, then Lena and Hanai, then two of Curtis’s shock troops. Seeing Molly gave him a pang of lust and sorrow that quickly gave way to alarm. Something major, something pivotal was happening; Curtis was making his move. Kane could barely concentrate on what the boy was saying to him. “No,” he said. “English, Japanese, a little Russian.”

  “Practical,” the boy said. “French is stupid, nearly useless, except for the existentialists. Russians are good, though. Do you read Ouspensky?”

  “I don’t read much,” Kane said. The girl with the swollen head was talking to Curtis and Molly now. The low air pressure kept the sound from reaching him and he could only tell that an emotional storm was building; tears ran from Molly’s eyes.

  “Ouspensky is Verb’s favorite. That’s where she got the idea for her physics.” Overhead lights came on and Kane moved further into the shadows.

  “Who’s Verb?” he asked.

  “That’s her down there. Did you know she was Curtis and Molly’s kid?”

  Kane shook his head. “That’s weird. It’s like everything is tied to everything else, all these lines of force…”

  “Ouspensky says, ‘Every separate human life is a moment of the life of some great being, which lives in us.’”

  The boy’s words staggered Kane, parted for an instant the membrane that separated his dream personalities from his waking existence. He could feel them watching behind his eyes: Percival, maddened by his imperfection and loss of the Grail, Yamato-Takeru of the shattered spirit, Jason, the fanatic sailor who had failed to intuit the Pattern.

  “The Pattern,” Kane said.

  “Sure, that’s it, a pattern. That’s all we are in space-time, you know. Just a pattern. In seven years you don’t even have any of the same cells you used to have. There’s only the pattern left. The pattern survives.”

  “Yeah,” Kane said. The fever swept over his brain like a brushfire. His neurons all seemed to be firing at once; he rode the tide of electric potential to a psychedelic level of consciousness. “The Pattern of the hero survives.”