The Highest Frontier (12 page)

Jenny caught her face in her hands. “
¡Vaya!
Get out, or I’ll—” From her desk drawer she pulled a scissors. “I’ll slit my wrist.”

“That is why you need me.” The chin of the DIRG had just cleared the printer. Already the Monroe was moving, talking to her in its ghastly way. “After viewing the sim of your deceased brother, you always try to harm yourself.”

“Not this time.”

“This cottage was built to meet your needs. We need to keep you safe.”

The scissors softened and melted in an amyloid puddle. The whole room was amyloid, she realized. What if the power failed, and it melted around her? “I’ll quit college and go wait tables.”

“That would be a healthy choice, Jenny. In fact, we recommended that choice to your parents: Why not let her wait a year?”

“I’ll go live with my aunts.” Slapping the diad back on her forehead, Jenny blinked frantically to Sacramento.

The DIRG stopped at the waist, half emerged from the printer. “Really, Jenny.” The Monroe half pouted, half smiled. “You’d go help elect Aunt Meg? Who doesn’t believe in the universe?”

“She doesn’t believe in mentals either.”

Now the mental was stuck. Jenny was of age; she could go where she liked, even live with her Centrist aunts. Her mother would not stop her, would avoid a family row, but would vent her rage on the therapists. Jenny envisioned the entire team of them now, holding an emergency session, debating what to do about the troubled Ramos Kennedy
chica
. “It’s our job to keep you alive,” the mental said at last. “One way or another.”

“I didn’t hurt myself.”

“We didn’t give you the chance.”

“I did nothing wrong.”

“You know you’re not to revisit your deceased brother’s sim. You signed your outpatient behavior contract.”

Jenny was silent. She’d crossed her fingers on that one.

“We’ll give you one more chance. Remember, if you do harm yourself, it’s a trip back to the blue room.” The cuckoo’s nest. The horror ward she’d spent a month in.

9

At seven in the morning, munching amyloid toast after slanball, Jenny rushed to the toyroom for her first Tuesday class. The eight doors of her tree house spliced out to eight different students. Above and below were more rows of eight; she lost count. Most were set to a standard style, like hers. Charlie had the “little red schoolhouse” setting. He shared his toyroom with another
chico
who lacked a nose ring, tall with whipcord muscles. As tall as Jenny herself, she vaguely thought she’d seen him before. At her left appeared Anouk. Anouk’s toyroom was all black-and-white checkerboard; she must have made a fancy custom design that took extra time to splice. At last Anouk’s design came in, a multicolored tangle of numbered ribbons.
“Series World. Enter at Your Own Risk.”

In the middle, surrounded by the eight rooms, an endless cylinder rose from the depths to the heavens. The students exchanged uncertain looks. “What do you think?” muttered Charlie to his neighbor.

Anouk stepped forward, her eyebrows arched, the very portrait of nonchalance. As she reached the cylinder, she vanished.

Charlie took a sharp breath. In the circle above, another student stepped forward. Jenny figured, with time-honored classroom logic, that peers who seemed to know what they were doing probably did. Heart pounding, she stepped forward into the cylinder.

Within the cylinder, all the spliced toyrooms fell away. All around stretched a vast windswept savannah. The grass was dotted with dark scrub by the side of a lake. Before the lake rose a tall misshapen tree. The tree had a huge bottle-shaped trunk topped by branches extending at right angles. A baobab,
Adansonia digitata.
Beside the tree stood Professor Abaynesh.

A light breeze lifted a torn flap of the professor’s jeans. All around her, various students winked in one by one, about forty
chicas
and
chicos
in their svelte tops and trailing laces. Seeing the landscape, Jenny slapped on virtual hiking boots.

“Welcome to Life 101.” Abaynesh raised her arm and made a horizontal sweep. “Human life as we know it began here. Here on the Central African plain, amid the baobabs, something happened to DNA—the DNA of certain inquisitive apes. From these inquisitive mutants evolved the one being in the universe that can read its own DNA.”

Was that true? Jenny wondered. Might there be other DNA readers out there? She wondered about that other biosphere somewhere across the stars, the one ultraphytes came from.

Abaynesh turned toward the tree. “The baobab has its own DNA, as do the scrub grass and the fish in the lake. What separates us all from our common ancestor is just a few billion years of mutants.” As an afterthought, she looked over her shoulder and around at all the students. “Come along.”

At the base of the baobab was a dark opening. The professor went inside. Anouk immediately went after, and other students dutifully followed.

Inside the tree, a gigantic double helix extended to the heavens and down into the deep. The “atoms” were colored spheres the size of a slanball. Around the atoms, students stumbled, trying to figure out what they were standing on, if anything.

Abaynesh tapped an oxygen atom of a phosphate. “You all remember the phosphates in the DNA backbone,” she told them. “Remember their negative charge. They’re sticky. See?”

Jenny touched a phosphate oxygen atom. The red sphere stuck to her hand like a magnet.

“The backbone phosphates connect to what?”

The professor’s first question, in their first college class. Everyone straightened and tried to look as though, of course
they
knew the answer but they weren’t going to rob someone else of the chance to give it.

“Phosphate connects to a five-carbon sugar.” Anouk made her own model sugar appear, twirling between her hands.

“Thanks, Anouk. Sugar, phosphate, sugar. Now the sugars hold the base pairs, the ‘steps’ of DNA.” The professor climbed up over a phosphate and sat upon the round, black carbon atoms of the base pair. “There are four kinds of base pairs, making the four ‘letters’ of the DNA code.”

A student’s light blinked. It was the tall
chico
sharing Charlie’s toyroom. His name read
TOM YODER
. He said, “Aren’t there just two kinds of base pairs?”

Contradicting the professor. The other students, clinging to “sticky” phosphates, wondered what kind of inferior school this
chico
came from that he would miss something so basic and contradict the teacher on the first day of class. No one would dare help out with an answer, lest they reveal that they too came from such an inferior school.

Anouk said in a bored tone, “There are lots of kinds of bases. RNA has uracil and inosine.”

“Thanks, Anouk,” said the professor, “you may bring that up when we visit RNA.”

Jenny sent Tom a private text.
“Each base pair can face up or down.”

“That’s right, Jenny,” announced the professor at large. “If you take apart the DNA…”

Jenny’s stomach squeezed. Her message wasn’t so private as she thought. The teacher watched everyone.

“… you find only two kinds of base pair, AT and GC. But if you string them together in a duplex, they can face either way. So the DNA code has four letters.” The professor lifted her arms and slid down a “step.” “Now we’ll slide all the way down, reading the bases along one strand as we go. See how fast you can read A, T, C, G…”

Jenny stepped cautiously up onto a nitrogen of the base pair. The blue sphere of nitrogen was slippery, not at all sticky like the phosphate. Someone collided from behind; she found herself sliding even faster downward in the spiral. She fought the instinct to reach out and halt the toyroom; it couldn’t be as bad as it felt, it had to end sometime. All around her students were sliding down the spiral, some with looks of terror, others clutching their stomachs.

She landed with a bump at the bottom, a plain floor. She hurried to crawl out of the way, before someone’s image collapsed with her own. Charlie was sitting on the floor, his face white. Half the original students were missing; they had probably stopped their toyrooms and transferred to toyHarvard.

“Before you leave,” called the professor, “here’s your homework.”

A coin appeared in Jenny’s toybox.

“Review these three Nobel-winning experiments and come to class Thursday prepared to conduct them.”

Someone extended Jenny a hand. It was Tom Yoder, the
chico
who had asked the question. “You okay?”

She touched his hand, though her fingers felt only brainstreamed toyforce. She got up and faced him. Tom was just her height; their eyes met level. Blue eyes, a plain Euro face with no hint of fashion, yet there was something familiar about him.

“A, T, T, G, C,” announced Anouk from behind as she sedately slid to the floor. “Just keep your hands on the sticky phosphates to control your speed.”

Then Jenny recalled: The
chico
who’d given her his shirt for a pillow for Charlie, that night on the powwow ground after the bear attack. He’d looked
chulo
with his shirt off.

*   *   *

Returning to her cottage, Jenny paused. The bear gash was still full of muddy water. She wondered where the water came from, since the rain was so light and everything else was dry. Could there be a break in the water line? She’d noticed bits of maintenance that went undone, and no lasers trimmed the grass. The college appeared to skimp on landscaping.

In the sitting room, her
compañera
had yet to add anything to the décor. She noticed Mary’s bedroom door ajar. “Mary?” For safety, she should check, she told herself. She stepped inside.

The walls were bare as the day the students had moved in. “Mary?” Still no sign of luggage, only the bed with a bare mattress. On the windowsill was a bowl full of pearls, and on the floor a large box of pretzels. The giant aquarium bubbled, and light banks glowed purple overhead. But no sign of fish, nor of plants. Just sand with brownish scum. Poor Mary, she still had not got her fish back from quarantine. Around the tank was a crust of sea salt; a marine aquarium.

A window popped up, the dean of students, Nora Kwon. Jenny stumbled and rushed out of Mary’s room, closing the door behind her.

“Jenny?” Dean Kwon sounded solicitous, fully in control of everything for eight hundred students. “I’m just checking in with you, to see how things went, your first day of class.”

“No problem, thanks.” Jenny added, “The birds are beautiful.”

“We’re so proud of our birds. If you put up a sugar bottle, you’ll draw hummingbirds.”

“Guao.”
She ought to tell the dean about Mary, she thought, but what could she say? They must know what a mess the
chica
was.

“No problems with the grav? No headaches or balance trouble?”

“No, I’ve trained for years in micrograv.” Then she remembered. “There is this puddle outside that won’t go away.”

“Must be a leak in the water line. Maintenance will get right on it.” The dean nodded smartly. “Anything else, just let us know, okay?”

*   *   *

After lunch was her next class, President Chase’s history seminar. The frogs-only seminar met in a square room with amyloid wood panels and a toywall at one end. Jenny brought her Blood Star orchid and set the pot before her on the polished seminar table. The amyloid chairs around the table were just comfy enough to relax, but not fall asleep. Uncle Dylan towered over most of the students, greeting each with a handshake. “Reesie, from Sacramento—your team won the league tournament, didn’t you? Congratulations! Charlie, camp counselor at the Minneapolis Camp for the Junior Blind? A growing population, alas; so inspiring of you. And Jenny—the international science fair winner, here saving lives for us! Such an honor!” He tapped her flowerpot gracefully.

Jenny smiled, trying not to laugh. Somehow he would always sound like that; he made everybody feel he was their “Uncle Dylan.”

“Please—have a seat anywhere, put your feet up.” Uncle Dylan wore a rumpled brown jacket with patched elbows. Two
chicos
wore suit and tie, Ferrari-rushed frogs with twenty-four-carat double-X earrings who weren’t about to put their feet up anywhere. Others included Charlie, Reesie, and Ricky, but not Tom. Just fifteen in all—Jenny was indeed lucky to get in.

“If a nation may be known by the mark of its greatest leaders, as indeed it may, and by the courage and compassion of its grandest statesmen, as indeed it shall, then to know Teddy Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth president of the United States, is to know America. In the year 1901, Roosevelt was inaugurated after an assassin’s bullet. The youngest president ever— ‘A very heavy weight,’ the press observed, ‘for anyone so young as he.’”

Uncle Dylan looked around the table, giving each frog an earnest look in turn. “Roosevelt became our first ‘modern’ president, the first president to cross the whole country meeting fellow Americans, who reelected him with one of the widest margins. Our first ‘imperial president,’ the best herder of emperors since Napoleon. Won the Nobel Peace Prize. He conquered—and conserved—the West, a territory then as treacherous as our high frontier seems now. The most national parks to his name; and the most bears bagged by his own rifle.”

Dylan shrugged. “But you’re not here to listen to me. You’re here to ask questions—to think for yourselves. So let’s meet the great man in person.”

The toywall filled with light; Jenny covered her eyes. She breathed the sour salt smell of the sea. The sea; where her brother had vanished. Her grip tightened on the pot of her orchid.

As her eyes adjusted, a grassy slope rose up to a house with steep rooftops fronted by a broad porch. Roosevelt’s “summer White House” in Oyster Bay. Inside, there was some kind of commotion. A door banged open and a man in a black frock coat ran out onto the porch. Short as a Mount Gilead colonist, and rather stout, he bounded over the porch rail and ran halfway down the slope. Teddy Roosevelt’s fierce eyes behind pince-nez glared at the class. “How the devil did you fellows get here?”