The Highest Frontier (10 page)

“The first ultra picked a place on Earth salty enough to sprout. What do
you
think?” The professor gave her an unsettling stare. She added, “I won a grant to study ultra, but the college won’t sign.” Her gaze rose to the wall behind Jenny, the “blind wall” not shown where the office spliced a toyroom. Jenny turned to look. Half the wall was full of Great Bear slanball, coached by the professor’s husband, Alan Porat. Coach Porat was also the college rabbi; Frontera staff all seemed to hold two jobs. Gazelles grazing at the Tel Aviv Zoo, tokens from Towers and Quake, and a collection of crayon drawings. The drawings looked like various plants and monsters.

“My daughter Tova drew them,” said Abaynesh. “Tova loves invasive species.”

“I see.” A large warty frog; a Cuban tree frog, Jenny guessed, the kind that came from Cuba’s remaining forest and now ate squirrels in Somers. Bulbous green cells underwater: those were sea grapes,
Caulerpa racemosa,
which had taken over California’s coastal shelf.
Caulerpa
was terrestrial, although its giant complex cells resembled those of ultraphytes. Next, a monster with six crayon scrawls for legs and two long wings. “Mosquito?” Jenny recalled dengue fever all too well.

“
Aedes albopictus.
Tova drew that from a microscope; a fixed slide, of course, no live specimens allowed. The bushy sex combs—a male.”

From beneath the professor’s desk slid a large black snake. A toypet, Jenny thought, although it looked quite real, its stretched scales showing white in between. The toy had two heads, jutting at an angle away from each other, each flicking a red tongue.

“
Elaphe obsoleta,
black rat snake.”

Jenny startled. The snake was real enough to convince her taxa link. Not a python, but still—a real snake. With two heads.
Dios mío.
Jenny’s grip tightened on her chair, as the two-headed snake coiled itself around the professor’s seat.

The professor leaned forward and clasped her hands. “So, your courses. You’ve picked all the
chulo
professors, I see. All students rank their choices, and you each get one round at a time.
Chulo
courses fill on the first round.”

Jenny shook herself, looked away from the snake, and tried to answer what Abaynesh had just said. “Oh, but I picked yours first, Life Science 101.”

“You can put Life last; I let in everyone. But the frog seminars are limited. You might get one if you list it first.”

She thought it over. “Uncle Dylan, I mean President Chase, will save me a place.”

The professor’s eyes widened, appalled. “You’d pull strings?”

A misstep; she’d have to be careful. “I mean, I’ll … list the Roosevelt seminar first, then the Renaissance Art, with Tejedor as alternate; then last, Hamilton.” A lot of good that would do; it sounded like she’d get none of them. Jenny shifted uncomfortably in her chair. She’d call her mother, that’s what; Soledad always fixed things, at Somers High. No,
tonta,
this was college, not high school, and family ties were not
chulo
. “So what else can I take?”

“Whatever you like—toyclasses from any affiliated university. Harvard, if you wish.”

“I see.” Harvard, after all. She smiled to herself. Wait till Jordi heard that. Meanwhile, the two-headed snake had wrapped itself around a chair leg and was climbing into the professor’s lap.

“Your art class will cover one requirement,” said Abaynesh, “and Life, another. You’re running for president, aren’t you? Why not Speech 101?”

Jenny shook her head. “I have a disability,” she told her orchid. “I’m excused from oral reports.” The professor should have it on file, but she blinked to send a copy.

“A disability? Weren’t you cultured?”

“It was post-zygotic. In the embryo, a cell got a mutation on chromosome 18.”

“Really.” The professor sounded intrigued. “You’re not perhaps a pauline?”

Speechless, Jenny stared. She could not believe the rudeness of this professor with the two-headed snake, to ask if Jenny were made a pauline like one of those Centrist wives, bred to keep quiet according to Apostle Paul.

Abaynesh stroked the snake. “Don’t mind Meg and El, they won’t bother you.”

Jenny let out a breath. “You named the snake … after my aunts.”

“A dozen physicians cover the governor; I interned with them. Two-headed snakes are actually common, sometimes more than one in a clutch. I’ll show you my collection. Take off your diad. I don’t reveal this on Toynet; too many activists.”

Reluctantly Jenny peeled the diad off her forehead. Cut off from the world, stuck in an office with a professor and her two-headed snake.

The souvenir wall slid up. Behind it were tanks full of snakes: black snakes, a garter snake, a king snake. Each had two heads with varying degrees of separation, the garter had two on short necks that swung apart, whereas the king snake’s two heads were fused.

“Are they … mutants?”

“Most are errors in development. My playmates find them in the woods, and ship them to me. A research question: What if we all had two heads?”

Jenny blinked. “I thought you studied plants.”

“The plant is my model system. Before that…” Abaynesh turned to the wall, the light shining beneath her arched hair. On the wall was a portrait of a woman, her hair in an elegant past-century coif, her smile slightly asymmetrical, and the most expressive eyebrows Jenny had ever seen.

Jenny blinked the image through her window. “Rita Levi-Montalcini. The Nobel Prize for nerve growth.”

“Precisely. Levi-Montalcini found the first protein to make nerves grow. In chick embryos. Today, we grow nerves in plants.”

On her desk was the pot of
Arabidopsis sapiens
. Jenny eyed the plant warily, its little leaves erect like mouse ears. “But plants are completely different … from…”

Abaynesh waved a hand. “Animals are just plants with wanderlust. Listen: Half a billion years ago the Cambrian explosion left polycephalic fossils, three-lobed creatures with five eyes and a long snake-like nose. Why do we vertebrates have it all in one head? Ever since we evolved, we pigheaded vertebrates have messed up the world, refusing to see anything outside our single heads. But Ari, here—”

The
Arabidopsis sapiens
strained two stems forward to listen.

“Ari has a nervous system with ten or twenty flower heads. Why not us? If we had two heads—might we see two points of view? Wisdom in stereo?” She turned to Jenny as if remembering something. “You wanted research. When can you start?”

8

After lunch, Toy Land sent her course schedule. Life Science came through, as promised, and Uncle Dylan’s Roosevelt seminar. No luck with Father Clare’s course, nor Tejedor, though she got a Cuba survey at Harvard. To her surprise, Hamilton’s Political Ideas came through, though she’d picked it last. How did that happen? Jenny wondered. Hamilton was the most popular professor. At any rate, her classes started bright and early Tuesday, with Life at seven.

She’d scarcely read the list when Kendall popped in her toybox, his long black hair floating in all directions. “Got your courses? Time for practice.”

“I thought practice was two o’clock.”

“Coach expects us a half hour early, warming up. Never be late. If you got your courses—as soon as kosher, get yourself up here.”

Jenny complied, though she wondered about the rules. This was a small college team, not Division One.

To reach the court, Jenny climbed the cloud ladder from Buckeye Trail. As she climbed, her weight ebbed away and with it, as always, her many mental burdens lifted; the best part of slanball. Below, the college shrank away to a cluster of residences south of Wickett Hall, notably the castle with its waving purple pennant. Farther north rose the jelly-beaned globe of the Reagan Hall of Science, followed by the Spanish and arts halls. The breeze from the south freshened, on its way north to the air filter at the Mound.

A ten-minute climb, the safety nets falling away, and there hung the cage of anthrax. The cage extended eighty feet, just shy of a basketball court, a tube with two hemispherical ends, each capped with a goal. Within the cage crawled the players in their Great Bear jerseys. One launched himself to zigzag across.

As she arrived, Jenny hooked her bag to the gate and took out her microgrip shoes and her slancap. The slancap fit snugly on her head, where it amplified her brainstream to broadcast the regulation slan signal. A pickup game was in progress, five players to each side plus a goalie, launching themselves back and forth across the court. One jittered a slanball, brainstreaming it to move forward and back, while setting up to slan. Near the equatorial line, Yola aimed herself north to intercept. Yola’s braids flexed unpredictably—a good distraction, Jenny thought. Invisibly Yola yanked the ball out. Then her brain focused and slanned the ball out toward the goal. Yola was the Bears’ top scorer.

But at the cap zone, just before the goal, the ball deflected. The goalie, Xiang Jones, must have great “reach” of his brainstream, as well as top reflexes. The ball bounced twice off the cage, until Xiang caught it; the only position allowed to physically touch the ball. He tossed the ball back in play.

Yola waved Jenny over to replace one of the five players on her side. Jenny crouched, then leaped out into the court. The other players on the north end included Charlie Itoh and Fran Pezarkar, a junior from Mumbai. Fran’s Illyrian twin David covered the south goal. Outside the court, the entire spacehab in its greenery, its patchwork farms and tiny block homes, appeared to rotate around the cage.

Charlie approached the ball, gamely ignoring his bear-torn ankle. He found himself blocked by Kendall. Kendall approached until his nose nearly brushed the ball, then it shot out across the equator to the south end. One-on-one defense. Jenny sized up the players; their teamwork looked rusty. When she saw an opening, she launched herself easily past her guard, Reesie Tsien, to intercept the ball.

The slanball gleamed silver in the light from the south solar. The trick was to let it come as close as possible without a foul, for the inverse square law meant that the closer it came, the more steeply one’s power rose.
Ping—
her brainstream slanned the ball.

The ball shot over to Charlie. Charlie hesitated just too long, startled perhaps by the speed of Jenny’s pass. The ball brushed his temple before he slanned it toward the goal.

“Foul,” called Yola. “Charlie out, Ricky in.”

Ricky Tsien launched himself in, while Charlie glided out, and Jenny landed opposite. Fran retrieved the ball and jittered it before taking a long-shot toward the goal; too tempting, Jenny thought, for most to manage. Out of nowhere, Kendall intercepted. He jittered the ball for just under the regulation three seconds, then slanned it back south, where a forward deflected it past David Pezarkar. The ball sailed into the goal.

“One point for North,” called Yola.

In Jenny’s toybox a window opened: Coach Porat. She looked down, slowly turning until she saw him at the ladder gate. Modest height, with compact features and crew-cut hair beneath his rabbi’s cap, the coach had come to Somers High to recruit her with his promises and penetrating questions. Jenny recalled Professor Abaynesh’s wall, with all the slanball loops and the crayon drawings. And here was Tova, the five-year-old invasive enthusiast, climbing the cloud ladder with her dad.

“Line up,”
the coach texted.

In an instant, all the players launched themselves toward the equator. About thirty students lined up all around, twice the regulation limit for a college team. How did Coach get away with that? Jenny wondered. A couple of late arrivals hovered outside the cage, trying to get in, but apparently the gate was closed. Everyone stilled. The “ground” was too far off to hear even a bird or a frog. Then the drumbeat of the Mound powwow rumbled in her ears. It was two o’clock.

“Welcome to slanball,” announced Coach Porat above the drums. “The game of mind force. Sport’s highest frontier.” He raised an arm. “Let’s welcome all our new players. Ricky Tsien from Sacramento Country Day School, where he broke the ten-year record for goals and assists…” A rousing cheer for each frog; it took a while to get through them all. Then Fran and David, and the other returning players. “Now, your team captains have some things to say.”

Kendall walked several steps north, his microgrips rasping with each step. Then he turned to face the students lining the equator. “Slanball is a tough game. You need your mind and body working at top capacity. ‘Nothing is so dark as enslavement of the human mind.’ So, rule number one: No mind-enslaving substance. Anything that takes the edge off—alcohol, stimulants, sleep loss—is out, till October break.”

A few frogs looked surprised. Reese raised her hand. “You mean, before a match?”

“I mean twenty-four/seven, all the weeks we’re in season. Patch test every morning. We can’t have hungover kids falling out of the sky. And by the way,” Ken added, “from now on, practice starts at five
A.M
. Great warm-up for class.” Life with Abaynesh at seven; how convenient, thought Jenny.

Yola trudged out beside her brother. “Rule number two is, we have fun. Having fun means teamwork—help your fellow player. You all were stars in high school. We’re a team, not a bunch of stars.” The ball flew up and jittered above her head. “And in October we take a break from it all for King Mark’s Feast of Fools—at Castle Cockaigne.”

“
El castillo mysterioso,”
someone texted.
“Orgies with knights in armor.”

Outside, in a safety harness, Tova was slanning balls into the cage, one for each player. Each player zigzagged across the cage, jittering the ball, keeping possession for just under three seconds, then slanned it across the court. Yola slanned fastest, although Charlie did better now that he relaxed. All balls eventually reached the far end, though none came near the goal; they’d need a forward to shove it in. The breeze freshened, tugging Jenny’s hair; she calculated the compensation factor. She launched her ball straight to the goal, though not as fast as Yola.