The Highest Frontier (28 page)

“Only Homefair homes. The rest are amyloid.” Leora nodded slowly. “Dick would have wanted people to know about flooding.”

“Well, why don’t they all come?” Jenny blinked her announcement. “Here,” she offered. “You’re welcome to pass this on.”

Leora accepted the file, then popped a playmate request.

Jenny confirmed her playmate. “I’m sorry about your husband,” she added.

“Thanks,” said Leora. “It was a Wednesday,” she said. “So I come here now, every Wednesday. Just to get away.”

Jenny swallowed and nodded.

“I’m glad you joined EMS. They need people.” Suddenly Leora pressed Jenny’s hand. Then she slid from the stool and glided out, her long skirt brushing past a chair.

As Leora left, Tom sat down on the stool at Jenny’s right. “I saw you, but I didn’t want to interrupt,” he explained.

“That’s okay.” She smiled and closed her eyes, feeling warm all over and enjoying it. When her eyes opened, he flashed into view, blue-eyed and smiling, just like Newman in a toyflick.

A server approached, smoothing her overalls. “Can I tell you the specials? Hey, Jenny! How’re your thumbs?” It was Sherri-Lyn, the Homefair homeowner.

“
Bien.
How’s the home?” Jenny asked warily. “Still standing, I hope.”

“The home is fabulous. I’m just so glad to get this job right off—tide us over till our farm makes a living.”

Jenny picked from the menu in her toybox. “Hope we don’t mess up too bad.”

Sherri-Lyn nodded. “When I first arrived, they told me the college was all snooty faculty, and students tipping cows and getting their stomachs pumped out at the Barnside, but I’m sure glad to see it’s not true.” She blinked at her box. “Today’s special is the ribs. Fresh from the hog.”

When Sherri-Lyn had left with their orders, Jenny stole another look at Tom. She kept thinking how he had looked without his shirt. She reminded herself how back in high school, a
chico
who looked so good could suddenly do or say something incredibly disgusting.

“How is Priscilla?” Tom asked. “Is she okay?”

“She’ll wear a neck brace for a while, but she’s okay, thanks. How’s your café?”

Tom looked away, his face shut like a clam. “It’ll break even.”

Jenny thought she’d leave a bigger tip next time. “Teddy Roosevelt’s admirers once sent him a possum. He had it ‘well browned, with sweet potatoes.’”

Tom’s face softened. “I’ll put that on the menu.”

“How’s your art class?”

“
Chulo.
Dante and Donatello. Figures that step right out of stone.”

“Father Clare made his own stained-glass windows for the chapel.”

“Really. The professors here are amazing.”

“Are you sure you weren’t cultured?” she suddenly asked. “You look like a Newman.”

Tom laughed. “If only everyone thought that, I could sell my genes.” He added, “You look just like your great-grandmother. Even your expressions. Whenever someone mentions the ‘Firmament.’” He smiled slyly.

She looked away, abashed.

“How’s Life going for you?”

“Life? You mean, the class?” Jenny thought a moment. “It all … comes at you at once.”

“I’ll say. Have you started a laboratory project?”

“I have these laughing plants in the greenhouse. I’m supposed to train their neural networks.”

“Train them? To laugh at a joke?”

“When they detect a semiochemical,” Jenny said. “After I master that, we start the wisdom networks. That’s frontier research; no one really knows what’s going on.”

Tom nodded understandingly.

“So what kind of plants are you researching?”

“I’m not doing plants,” he said. “The combinatorics—I don’t yet have the math.”

“I don’t either,” Jenny admitted. “I’ve had two years of calculus, but none of this modeling. I’m depending on Anouk.” A good partnership.

“Charlie and I are doing pile worms.”

“I see.”

Sherri-Lyn brought their orders. The ribs tasted fresh, after Jenny pushed off the gravy.

Jenny asked, “What are pile worms?”

“Pile worms are these long, jointed invertebrates with over a hundred pairs of legs. They live in intertidal mud and eat detritus. They survive a wide range of salinity, up to sixty-five percent.”

“
Guao.
So what do you do with them?”

“DNA sequence,” Tom explained. “We explore their genomes.”

“That takes math too.”

“Statistics I can manage. Their genomes have some really weird genes.”

“Weird? Like what?”

“Like ultra.”

Jenny’s fork froze. “Ultraphyte genes? That can’t be.”

“The math says they are. Some of the pile worm DNA is from an ultraphyte.”

“But—” Jenny looked around at the colonists, hoping no one overheard. They wouldn’t understand anyhow. She leaned closer and whispered, “Pile worms are terrestrial, right? Ultra comes from some other planet. Ultraphytes don’t even have DNA, they have RNA.”

“But their bases correspond to the four DNA bases,” Tom pointed out. “Comparing pile worm DNA with ultraphyte RNA, you find sequences that share an ancestor.”

She absorbed the implications. “So pile worms and ultraphytes have a common ancestor? A few billion years ago, on some other planet?”

“Maybe,” said Tom. “Or maybe they transferred genes more recently. Remember, ultraphytes grow in saltwater.”

“Not open ocean, it’s too dilute and lacks iron.” Ultraphytes preferred the saturated Salt Lake. They flourished there, even formed towering biofilms. How could they have got there by chance?

“Intertidal zones have plenty of iron; and when they dry out, the salt concentrates. Ultraphytes growing there could have put their genes into Earth creatures.”

“By accident? Or on purpose?”

“On purpose? How could that be?”

Earth creatures, Jenny wondered. What about humans? Human genomes were already full of parasitic DNA.

Sherri-Lyn returned with a bushel of string beans. “Thanks for the help, it was a busy morning. We had these extra; thought you could use them.” She left no bill. Tom had worked there that morning to pay for their lunch.

As they got down from the bar, Jenny brushed against Tom’s side. She felt lightened, like micrograv. She barely noticed how they left the diner. Her hand touched his hand, tentatively clasping two fingers. They held hands and walked together all the way home.

*   *   *

That evening the Ohioana crowd was thin. Charlie was gone, as well as all the scholarship students on the slanball team. “The dining hall might be more convenient,” Jenny suggested to Yola.

“I suppose,” Yola sighed. “I’m tired of gravy, anyhow. The dining hall serves amyloid crap, but at least it’s an infinite variety.”

“Where’s Ken?”

“The High Holidays start tonight, Rosh Hashanah. Ken is at service with Coach, along with David and Fran.”

The holidays would take extra time and energy for them, and Coach. Jenny resolved to be extra attentive, and get to practice well rested. “Do Quakers have holidays?”

Yola shook her head. “For Quakers, every day is holy.”

“Really. Are there special, like, observances for ‘everyday’ then? Like, things you don’t do?”

“Lots of things. No drinking, gambling, or voting.”

She blinked. “No voting?”

“The early Quakers abstained from ‘the infernal practice of elections.’ Politicians are so gross. Sorry,” Yola added.

“What about gambling? Do you play taxes?”

“Never,” said Yola shortly. “Ken and I, we fund a foundation for disappearing islands.”

“That’s a great idea. Wish my mother would let me do that.”

“Hey, you’re an
adulta
. Parents are idiots—do what you want.”

Mary Dyer was eating her pretzels. “Jenny, are we socializing tonight?” Dean Kwon’s voice again.

Yola gave Mary a look. “Not if she can help it.”

“So much work,” Jenny sighed. “I have to read the Northern Securities case, and Aristotle’s ‘Regime of the Spartans,’ and train plants to laugh.”

“Dean Kwon wants us to socialize,” Mary told them. “Is the ‘Midweek Melee’ socializing?”

The Red Bulls’ regular Wednesday party, for those without Thursday classes. This one promised bear pit wrestling. “Um, I wouldn’t go,” advised Jenny.

“You’re always welcome with us,” said Yola kindly. “Stick with our crowd.”

“Sure, Mary. Just go where we go.” Jenny smiled, feeling guilty that she wished she had a more normal
compañera.

*   *   *

A beeping alarm roused Jenny from deep sleep. Three
A.M.
, two hours till slanball. Struggling to rouse herself, Jenny slapped the diad on her forehead. The EMS snake was pulsing. Jenny blinked back.

Doc Uddin appeared, the thick gray braid down her back, hunched over a stretcher outside the red-shingled Barnside. “There’s another call, out on Buckeye Trail. Can you take it?”

Jenny blinked rapidly. “I have a morning class—and I haven’t yet had the EMS tutorial.” She thought she had shut off the call alarm.

“It’s you or the bot.”

Jenny stumbled to get some clothes on, no time to print out fresh, grabbing her scanscope on the way out. Outside waited the heli, beneath the lights of Mount Gilead and the church spire pointing down from the darkened curve of the spacehab. She got into the waiting heli with the medibot. Her window reported three calls in progress, two at the Bulls’ clubhouse and this latest out on Buckeye Trail. Her EMS window showed a
chico
sprawled facedown, one arm at an odd angle, laces dragged in the mud.

As the heli landed, the door opened and she followed the medibot out. A whiff of ethanol and vomit. His headband was inactive, a worrisome sign.

The medibot shined a light on his face. “Luke Reid, first-year.” A Bulls pledge from Hocking. Jenny pushed aside his hair. “Can you hear me?” Face pale and cool. No use asking his name, or the president for that matter. She pulled his eyelid open; the dilated pupil showed no reaction. She dragged his wrist from the mud: pulse low, respiration faint. Jenny gave the medibot an uncertain look, hoping she missed nothing in the local routine.

“Run the scanscope,”
texted the medibot.

Jenny worried about his breathing. “Could I have a tube first?” She gently turned his head aside, concerned as well for his neck after the fall. The medibot snaked a breathing tube down the
chico
’s throat. Then at last she clicked the scanscope rings around his wrist.

A dozen columns of numbers flowed down her scan window: oxygen low-normal, glucose low, ethanol 400 mg percent. “
Guao.
He may need dialysis.”

The medibot, receiving the same stream, was already back to the heli, returning with the dialysis rig.

By now, several other students had collected round, evidently returning late from the Melee. One knelt anxiously at his side, Enrico Peña, the well-spoken
chico
from Politics class. “Is he okay? I’m his roommate, I’ll help him home.”

Jenny shook her head. “Thanks, but he won’t go home for a while.”

Another partygoer came by, his body pitching unsteadily. “Hey, total wipeout. That’s what you get from 24-24.” Twenty-four shots in twenty-four hours, a common pledge prank. “That’s the way—filter and back for more.” The unsteady one half fell, just missing the medibot bringing the backboard.

“You can take
that
one home,” Jenny told Enrico.

From the unconscious student, the scanscope showed no signal of broken bones. The medibot deftly slid the backboard under him, and the amyloid molded to his form, holding him still.
“Take him to the Barnside.”

“He needs glucose, and thiamine.”
At such a high dose, Jenny wanted these treatments just in case. The medibot deftly inserted the patient into the heli, with breathing tube, dialysis rig, and all. Well built for these functions, Jenny was relieved to see.

The Barnside clinic had several treatment modules, including detox and surgery. Doc Uddin was there, with two other students stabilized. A nurse in power bands was setting an IV. “Good job,” Doc Uddin told Jenny. “Next time, check the blood for bone signals before moving him. But you’re right, he did need the tube. It’s touch-and-go when they’re this intoxicated.”

Four fifteen, Jenny checked. Her teammates would be rising soon. The sleep test—she dreaded to see Coach’s face. “May I go now?”

“Nick and Travis are tied up at the college, and we just got two more calls. One fell out of Ferrari’s second-floor window. The other, a blue baby in Mount Gilead.”

“A blue baby? Newborn?”

“It’s not congenital, I delivered her four months ago. She was healthy last week.”

Jenny swallowed hard.

“I can’t take either call; the one you brought is still critical.” Doc Uddin looked her in the eye.

She swallowed again. “I’ll take the baby.”

Out she went in the heli with a medibot, while another medibot headed alone back to Buckeye Trail. She found herself shaking, at the verge of tears.
Hola,
she thought, pull yourself together; this is no way to be a first responder.

*   *   *

Jenny peered into the dark interior of the amyloid kitchen. A single dim light revealed a cross above the mantel, a pot simmered on the stove. Like in a Rembrandt, the light illuminated the face of a woman in a pioneer dress and cap cradling a baby, her face creased with fear. “She was fine this morning. What’s wrong with her? Is she going to—” The mother stopped her mouth with her hand.

“She’ll be all right,” Jenny said soothingly, hoping it was true. Beside her, the medibot turned on an examination lamp. The baby was limp and drooling excessively, fingers grayish with blue nail beds, like the pale blue of blank windows. But what could bring on cyanosis so quickly? Some clue pricked her mind, just out of reach.

“I’m so glad you came,” the mother told her. “Leora told us, never get sick on Wednesday night; the squad is always stuck at the college.”

Jenny sized down the scanscope to fit the baby’s leg. “Has she been feeding?”

“She feeds well,” said the mother. “I’m weaning her to the formula Doc Uddin recommended.”