The Highest Frontier (15 page)

Clare looked up from his book, a well-worn tome that Dylan recognized, an exegesis of the Gospel of John. “Your day was that bad?”

“Disastrous.” The end table always held a bowl of apples; Dylan reached over and took one. As he munched, he glanced overhead. The ceiling projected the Sistine Chapel, zoomed to view panels which slowly cycled through. The Expulsion was just cycling out, poor Adam sheltering Eve from the angel’s sword. “Quade found a mosquito.”

“
¡Qué va!
Here in the hab?”

“No doubt about it.” Dylan took another bite and chewed thoughtfully.

Clare nodded slowly. “It had to come.”

“What do you mean, ‘had to come’?” His frustration boiled over. “We spend
millones
to keep the hab clean.”

Clare clasped his hands behind his neck and looked away, stretching his hammer-toned triceps. “Do you know how the first human-sucking mosquitoes reached the Americas?”

“From Africa?”

“On the slave ships.”

“We have no slaves here.”

“Only slaves to sin.”

Dylan pulled away. “This is serious. If mosquitoes could get in here, what else?”

“There was poison ivy. We survived that.”

“Mosquitoes are more personal. A direct hit on our brand.”

Clare stroked Dylan’s shoulder. Dylan’s arm went around him, feeling the taut ripples of his chest, always a comfort. His eyelids closed. Clare asked, “Have you talked to Sharon?”

Dylan’s eyes flew open. He would never forget his last encounter with Professor Abaynesh. He’d called her in, ever so nicely, right there in his own office, for just a chat about how she’d posted the college hepa-Q infection rates on Toynet. She had stormed out, with some rhetoric about free speech and “honest mating signals”—whatever that meant. Afterward a two-headed snake—a live one, no toy-thing—had emerged from beneath his desk.

“Sharon took care of the deer,” Clare reminded him.

The deer, the bears, and several other fecund species, were kept reasonably in check by Sharon’s genetic engineering. But mosquitoes—even one was too many. “The parents are clamoring about dengue fever. Don’t know how much longer I can put off Clive.”

Clare shrugged. “It could be worse. Could be flooding.”

Dylan frowned. “Clare, that’s no joke. Half our students are from New York.”

“Where d’you think I got it?”

Dylan tilted his head. “So how was your day? Counting nails for the blitz build?” The blitz build always attracted new frogs for Homefair, raising a home in Mount Gilead for penniless colonists. It brightened his day, that Frontera drew the kind of billionaires’ kids who’d dent their thumbs to help the homeless.

“We poured the foundation,” said Clare. “The rest of my day was about pachyderms.”

Dylan’s heart sank. “So I heard.” The ethics of molesting elephants. Thank goodness classes had started—the whole staff felt that way. “I just don’t understand this generation. Hitting on
chicas,
that’s been done since time immemorial. But elephants—these kids, from billion-dollar homes patrolled by DIRGs? It’s—it’s bestial.”

“A lot of things have been called bestial,” the chaplain pointed out. “The wrong chromosome, or the wrong melanin content.”

Dylan waved a hand. “Teddy nearly lost the election after Booker T. Washington dined with him at the White House.” So much for individuality. “That was then. This is now—this
is
bestial, literally.”

“Kids will be kids.”

“Clare, sometimes you’re just too forgiving.”

“Lucky for you.”

“That’s hardly fair. In my day, I stuck to guys.” In his first three years at college, before he met Clare, Dylan had managed to sample nearly all his house bros, and then some. Extremely nice memories; they remembered, when he came calling for donations. “Kids today—it’s beyond the pale. To say nothing of the infectious consequences.”

“I seem to recall a hepatic incident.”

Dylan shuddered; along with several bros, he’d undergone a liver transplant junior year. It wasn’t hepa-Q back then; a virus earlier in the alphabet. “At least we got human diseases. These kids need a veterinarian.”

In Frontera’s first year, the faculty had nixed the Greek system. After all Dylan’s courting his old bros, he’d naively assumed his charm would push it through the faculty. Surely the professors would understand how getting funds for their precious endowed chairs required alums who’d spent their four years having a good time, while helping hold down grade inflation. The faculty vote went down, and half a billion in gifts evaporated.

Then he’d come up with the scheme of motor clubs, named for his beloved Formula One teams. He’d gotten the scholarship boys to propose it, the ones from disappearing Pacific islands. The motion had passed the faculty by one vote.

The motor clubs went off well enough, no more than their share of drunk runs and parental lawsuits. But then came those zoophile initiations. How could he have imagined? At least the greeks had standards.

Clare looked overhead. Noah’s ark was receding in the distance; interesting, how Michelangelo had focused on all those left behind, clinging to tree trunks with their doomed children. “Why does Student Affairs send them my way?”

“Kids trust you, Clare. They see you on a rooftop, hammering slates. They know you’re for real, not just some toy-shrink.”

“Just for once, couldn’t they ask me something really controversial. Like, ‘Is the Word truly God, or only
with
God?’”

Dylan smiled. “Which is it?” he asked softly.

“Ask me on our next vacation.”

There was a hint. “Winter break. How about Lila’s Beach?” Gil’s private island in the Maldives; it had maybe twenty years left.

“No,” said Clare firmly. “Not Lila’s.”

“Just for once? No clothes and no cameras—Gil promised.”

Clare gave him a look. “No cameras—on Gil Wickett’s island? You sweet innocent.”

A shaft of light flooded Dylan’s toybox. “ToyNews—From our box to yours.” Clive Rusanov grinned triumphantly, smoothing his oily black hair. “And here we are, at last, live from ‘Ohio-in-the-Firmament.’” Clive’s most irritating epithet for Frontera, his revenge for getting put off all day. “President Chase comments on our breaking news: bugs in paradise.”

11

In the office of Professor Abaynesh, Jenny and Anouk hovered over the crushed insect. Dengue fever—all Jenny could think of was eye-breaking pain, pain in the bones, delirium. She zoomed her toybox. Each of the long legs had three little white segments near the tip. The dorsal side had prominent white stripes.

The professor nodded. “Distinctive, I’d say.” She glanced over by the window, where her daughter Tova sat on a carpet square playing with blocks and casino souvenirs. Meg-El glided lazily over the child’s leg, the late-afternoon light glinting on the snake’s scales. “Tovaleh? Come give us your expert opinion.”

The five-year-old got up and came over, carrying a Twin Towers with the two planes stuck in, the kind you could win at the kids’ level. “The two towers—they were not the same.” Full of nervous energy, Tova hyperventilated as she talked. “The second tower had warning.” She pointed her finger like a miniature professor. “But a voice told them all to go back up.”

“Yes, Tovaleh, that’s another invasive species. Now give a look here. What is this?”

Tova leaned over and stuck her eye close to the insect. “A tiger mosquito. No bushy antennae—it’s a girl.”

“Indeed.” The professor looked at Jenny, almost accusingly. “Did you have to kill it?”

Jenny blinked, then exchanged a look with Anouk.

“Professor,” observed Anouk, “these mosquitoes carry every plague you can name, especially chikungunya.” A viral fever like dengue, with higher mortality, chikungunya had spread throughout Europe.

“I have a license for invasives,” said Abaynesh. “Whenever they show up here, I remediate them. I can’t very well breed dead ones.”

Before Anouk could reply, Jenny quickly asked, “What other invasives are here?”

“
None
is what there should be.” Anouk sounded like a customer demanding her money back. “Not as advertised, this school.”

“What in life is as advertised?”

Anouk’s eyes widened at the disdain in the professor’s voice, then narrowed, simmering with displeasure.

“There’s poison ivy,” Abaynesh went on. “We bred a form that doesn’t make the allergen. Then there are Quade’s poison frogs; still on my list, remind me.”

Jenny asked, “Don’t the DIRGs control what comes in?”

“If it slips through, what can you do? To destroy a species is a crime against science.”

Another look exchanged with Anouk. Endangered species were one thing, but mosquitoes?

The professor probed the insect with her dissecting needle. “If you find any live ones, let me know. I’ll breed them to avoid humans. Or you could do it, as your research project.” The intro lab course was all virtual, but Honors students could start research their frog year.

“Thanks,” said Jenny politely, “though I prefer plants.”

“Then you’ll like Ari.” Abaynesh waved her hand over the little plant. The stalk swayed, and at its base the leaves lifted. Behind it, in the toywall, a virtual stalk expanded to giant size, its color seeping away, a transparent tube. Within the stalk grew lollipop cells, each extending a long axon. “The leaves secrete nerve growth protein. The nerve growth protein induces neurons. The neurons interconnect, and undergo Darwinian selection. That means the ones with active synapses survive; those with nonworking synapses wither.” The lollipop cells ramified and connected like interlocking fingers. One cell turned red and failed to connect, then it withered away.

Anouk took a step closer. “Is the neuron selection entirely stochastic?”

“With a built-in bias for receiver inputs. See this paper by my grad-school mentors, Ng and Howell.” The link for Ng and Howell appeared in Jenny’s toybox.

Jenny eyed the swaying stalk. “What is the aim of your research?”

“We build models for human cognition. Human complexity arose from simpler models. For example, simple eyespots formed the basis of eyes; startle-laughter originated the sense of humor, and so forth. Calculation ability, there’s something easy to measure. Intelligence—everyone wants to increase it. But where did intellect get us? Destroying our planet.” Abaynesh shook her head. “My project addresses something tougher: wisdom.” She tapped the plant’s stalk. “Call it wisdom, judgment, the ability to make ‘the right choice.’ It’s one thing for Ari to find my mortarboard when I need it. It’s quite another to know, is it right for me to go out and wear it today?”

Jenny avoided looking at Anouk. “Is this related to, um, your two-headed project?”

“Another approach to the same end. A two-headed person might be twice as wise.”

“Or twice as foolish,”
Anouk texted Jenny.

“True,” admitted the professor, “that’s how it works in snakes.”

Anouk startled, caught out for once.

*   *   *

As Jenny returned south with Anouk, three goldfinches took off from a maple, while overhead a hawk soared. Anouk’s DIRG kept to the side, in the shadow of the trees.

“Mosquitoes,” exclaimed Anouk. “How shall I sleep at night?” She wiped her arms as if brushing off insects. “That professor—because of my religion, she treats me so rudely.”

“I don’t think so,” said Jenny. “She talks like that to everyone. She’s just … socially challenged.” Aspie, for sure.

“American,” Anouk sighed. “One must make allowances.”

“What do the other Life professors work on?”

“Professor Semerena studies the DNA of pile worms, which burrow in the sand off San Francisco. Professor Needham studies the ecology of liverworts. Of course, you can always work at a Harvard lab.” Anouk smirked. “I’m doing cryptography at MIT.”

From between the trees a deer leapt out across the trail, tail flashing and hindquarters pumping up and down with every leap. Shrieks split the air, as two mini-elephants trotted after, one followed by a baby struggling to catch up. The donkey-tailed elephants seemed to amuse themselves by flushing the deer. Now, mosquitoes would hunt them both. Jenny shuddered.

“ToyNews—From our box to yours.” The anchor was back, his black hairstyle slick as always. “Clive Rusanov for ToyNews, live from Frontera, the world’s first college at the Firmament.…” Jenny brainstreamed her dose to the pollmeter. “Attended by such celebs as the Anthradyne heir and the surviving Ramos Kennedy twin. Now joined by a less welcome guest—the
Aedes
mosquito.”

An outsized mosquito filled the window, spliced with Uncle Dylan’s smiling face. “No cause for alarm. We find isolated individuals, no breeding population. None of the pathogens that mosquitoes could carry. Nonetheless, it’s a good reminder for students to make sure your HIV is up to date. As a precaution, your room will print out repellent patches until further notice.”

Jenny eyed her mother’s window, but restrained herself. She had sworn she would not call home at every mishap.

Clive then turned to Professor Abaynesh in her laboratory. “Professor, as Frontera’s expert on invasive species, can you tell our ToyNews audience how the college will cope?”

“Biocontrol,” said Abaynesh. “We’ll release terminal reproductives, that is, male individuals engineered to propagate Super-X females which mate only with females in the next generation, thus failing to reproduce.”

“My, these scientists use long words,” observed Clive with his most winning “don’t click out yet” smile. “And now for the college ecoengineer…”

Quade Vincenzo, with his elephantine face that never cracked a smile. In his hand squeaked a furry brown creature. “Bats,” he offered. “A single brown bat consumes a thousand insects per day—”

A window opened, amid the student windows announcing new parties or seeking lost nose rings. It was Rafael. “Jenny, how are your classes? I hope you got the professors you desired.”

“Yes, thanks. The Roosevelt class is
chulo.
”

“Excellent. May I have the pleasure of your company for dinner? Please join us this evening at the Ferrari club.”