The Highest Frontier (30 page)

“Thanks, Alan.…” Flood Awareness Day? Dylan had not heard of any such thing. The last thing he wanted to hear at Frontera.

Then he recalled that he hadn’t yet gotten to Clare’s weekly report on student events. He blinked it now. What he read sounded even worse than he feared. He had to find Clare, and clear up this “Flood Day” business. He blinked the window that always connected them.
“Clare?”

“In the toyroom, sweet.”
Clare was in their home toyroom, playing golf with Dylan’s parents. The fairway stretched to the horizon with putrid-green grass, beneath an absurdly warm sun. Clare stood on the putting green with Dylan’s father, the close-shaved black patrician, both of them in impeccable white polos. Clare would look good in anything, but the towel around his neck was just the limit.

“Good putt,” Dylan’s father was telling Clare, as Dylan entered the toyroom. “You just made par. If only you’d practice more.”

“You’re right, Dad,” Clare was saying contritely. “I’ll practice more.” Clare hated golf.

“How did you like that latest Persian I sent you?”

“Outstanding aesthetic.” The rugs were collecting in their attic. “Such a fine knot count, and the design is clear and crisp.”

“Thanks, Clare. You’re the artist; I value your opinion.”

Dylan’s mother took a glass of sherry from a tray held by a DIRG in a white tuxedo. “I’ll look into that village in Guatemala,” she told Clare. “The one you said needs a new church.”

“Thanks, Mom. It’s so good of you, founding churches.”

“But Clare, you look overworked. You need to take better care of yourself.” She sipped the sherry. “I’ll send my beautician out on the next lift. He’s an excellent masseur—”

“No,” objected Dylan. “No masseur.” He bit his tongue. Why did he always have to come in on the wrong note.

His mother turned. “Why hello, Dylan. I hope you’re not neglecting Clare.”

“Of course not,” said Clare quickly. “Sorry, Dad, something’s up at the college.”

Dylan headed out from his office, grabbing an apple from his desk for a last spurt of late-afternoon energy. He met Clare on Buckeye Trail. They strolled south, the filtered afternoon light gilding the trees. A lizard skittered up a trunk, and a hummingbird dive-bombed a rival. “I won’t have masseurs, Clare. You’re just candy for them.”

Clare put an arm around him and crunched reassuringly. “How sweet of you. ‘Candy,’ at my age.”

“You’re spoiling my parents again.”

“I adore your parents.”

“You needn’t fawn on them so.”

“They could have checked that box.”

Dylan closed his eyes and sighed. That box on the gene form, before his conception; the one that would have assured a hetero offspring, instead of letting God’s will unfold. “Of course, everyone else checked the box. In middle school, I realized I was a freak—the only one of my kind in all of Westchester. People thought I was a—an accidental birth.”

“The natural way,” said Clare. “Like we do in Appalachia.” He added, “Do you wish they’d checked the box? As you and I did for Fritz?”

“What? No, of course not.” Dylan blinked rapidly, avoiding the precipice.

“You’d never have looked at me twice.”

Dylan stopped and turned to face Clare. “I detest biology,” he exclaimed. “I don’t believe in genetic determinism. I believe I was destined for you, no matter what my genes.”

Clare smiled. “The beauty of faith.”

They strolled on in silence. Dylan took the plunge. “Look, Clare—about this Flood Day.”

“So you finally read my report.”

“Flooding a student residence? Isn’t there enough of that already?”

“We consulted Alan and Nora, and various student groups. The New Yorkers are thrilled.”

“It’s a distortion,” Dylan insisted.

“Embarrassment, you mean.”

It was indeed embarrassing, a Frontera design flaw corrected in later habs. “The chance of actual flood is so low.”

“All it would take is a power outage.”

“Even then, it would take a full day for the water to percolate up. Whereas a dead space truck could hit us any time. And Homeworld Security just cut back on us again, from ninety-nine percent coverage to ninety-six.”

Clare absorbed this.

“That’s a four-fold increase in annual risk,” Dylan explained. “Within twenty years—”

“I can do the math.” Stopping, Clare looked reflectively toward the student residences. “There’s really not much students could do about a dead space truck.”

There was one thing, Dylan thought morosely. One thing students could do but rarely did.

“I don’t get it,” Clare exclaimed, as if to himself. “If the Centrists want us all to live in spacehabs someday, why do they leave us unprotected?”

“We’re pagans, remember.” The only hab outside Heavenly control.

“‘Pagans,’ thanks for reminding me.” Clare shook his head. His eyes took on a faraway look. “If only the students would vote.”

For most students, politics was a spectator sport. Actual voting wasn’t
chulo,
never had been. And the Mount Gilead settlers made sure to keep it that way. Their one guy in Congress kept business regs down and schools teaching the sky was a bowl.

In Dylan’s toybox, Gil’s window opened. “Dillie, are you there? I’m on my way to Mare Crisium.”

“I’ll be there tomorrow, Gil—but keep quiet.”
Dylan had booked the Lunar Circuit and had practiced discreetly in his toyworld. Frog seminars—and maybe Gil could influence Homeworld Security. Feeling bad for Clare, he silently vowed this would positively be his last lunar drive.

23

By the time Jenny got home, she had barely time to change and grab a snack before Life lab. Letting down the team—would Coach cut her? She tried not to think about it.

After the Nobel experiments the previous week in the Cushite toyworld, this week was devoted to their research project: plant laughter. Jenny now had her experimental neural-network plants in her own greenhouse, so Anouk joined her there. “Will twenty replicates be enough?” Jenny asked.

“Too few,” Anouk observed disapprovingly. “The reported variance is so high.”

“Well, it’s a start,” said Jenny, trying not to yawn after her disastrous night. “Let’s see how consistent they are.” Nearby stood a black box printed out from the Research Methods. The box contained the test chamber for the plants.

Footsteps sounded behind. Startled, Jenny wheeled around. It was Mary, in her same old tie-dyed dress; she must print out the same one every morning. Jenny let out a breath. “Mary, what is it?”

“Are we socializing?”

“We’re doing homework,” Jenny sighed. “You can watch,” she added, avoiding Anouk’s eye. “Just don’t touch anything.” She opened a door to the box. “The ‘humor’ signal turns on in here. An inverted light spectrum—peaks in the red and blue, dips in the green, just the inverse of natural light. I guess a plant would think that’s funny,” she concluded dubiously.

Anouk tapped the box with her finger. “This humor concept is mechanical: an inverted spectrum. It contradicts an established norm, that of the solar spectrum. It invokes light, a substance crucial to the plant; yet it’s harmless, no ultraviolet or X-rays here. It’s straightforward enough to engage the thousand-neuron intellect. So yes, I suppose a plant might find that humorous.”

One plant started to shake its leaves. Anouk frowned. “What was that for?”

“I don’t know, they just laugh spontaneously now and then. Perhaps it thought of its own joke.”

“Background noise. We’ll have to subtract that.”

Jenny opened the door to the box. The interior was completely dark, with no crevice admitting light. She placed one of the plants inside, then sealed it up. A window appeared in her toybox, an infrared signal revealing the plant inside. She blinked the switch. A pale violet light appeared. Within five seconds, the plant began to shake.

“So that one has a sense of humor,” observed Anouk. “Five seconds to respond—not bad for a plant.” She started to open the box.

“Wait,” Jenny remembered. “Don’t we have to try it again? If it’s really humor, it won’t be half so funny the second time.”

“Adaptation,” agreed Anouk. “We should repeat the stimulus until the response disappears below noise level.”

“I’ll print out some more test boxes.” The twenty plants would take a while.

Suddenly all the plants were shaking.

“Hey, what’s that?” Jenny watched in alarm. “If they all adapt, we’ll have to wait another day.”

“Our results won’t be consistent. I wonder why they…” Anouk looked curiously at Mary, who had come over beside the plants. Was there something about Mary, something straightforward and obvious to the thousand-neuron intellect, that made the plants laugh? Mary leaned over the plants, as if trying to sniff.

“Mary, what are you doing?” asked Jenny.

“What is ‘humor’?” Mary asked in her own voice.

Jenny exchanged a look with Anouk.

“Humor is distinctly terrestrial,” Mary added. “Only Earth life-forms have humor.”

Anouk looked at her curiously, with a hint of disdain. “How do you know that?”

“We ran an experiment.”

“Experiment? On what?”

“On our plants.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “Your aquarium plants? Did you get them through quarantine?”

“Indeed,” said Anouk. “I’d like to see these humorless plants.”

Mary hesitated. “Not enough replicates.”

“That’s all right,” said Jenny. “We’d still like to see them.” She’d been wondering about that aquarium ever since Mary arrived.

Mary’s face shifted and contorted as if arguing with herself. She’s more than Aspie, Jenny thought with sudden conviction. There’s something else about her. “All right,” Mary said at last. “But the vote was close.”

Downstairs in the sitting room, the door opened to Mary’s room. Jenny’s heart sank, embarrassed for Anouk to see the state of Mary’s room. Empty pretzel boxes were strewn everywhere, and there was a faint odor of marine decay. The window was closed, and the only light came from purple-tinted light banks above the large salt-encrusted aquarium. Within the aquarium undulated a snake-like form, a filament of large round cells with eyespots. The color of the creature could not be seen clearly, but Jenny well knew the general shape of an ultraphyte.

She gripped Anouk’s arm. The ceiling seemed to turn over slowly; she realized she was holding her breath. Catching herself, she let out the air and breathed deeply.

Her mental popped up. “Jenny, dear,” purred the Monroe. “We seem to be having—”

“Go away.” Jenny squeezed her eyes shut to block out the scene of the tank. Turning around, she blinked in Anouk’s code to evade the mental. Who should she call? Clive? Homeworld Security? To shut down the college?
Tonto,
they didn’t shut down Somers for one ultra. But then, Somers was no spacehab. The EMS squad?

“Call the professor,”
texted Anouk.
“She’ll know what to do.”

Jenny blinked for Abaynesh. “Professor? We found—that is, my
compañera
found something.”

The professor took in the scene from Jenny’s window. “I should say you have. Don’t move; I’ll be right there.” She rose hastily from her desk. Then she stopped in mid-stride. “And this time, don’t kill it already.”

*   *   *

The creature was soon ensconced in a large invader-proof amyloid tank in the basement of Reagan Hall. A continual rush of air sounded from the ventilator, to draw off any cyanide. The professor skipped about, brainstreaming this or that connection, while the three students looked on apprehensively. “You’re right,” she concluded, “it’s an ultraphyte. The thirteen cells, the eyespots.”

Jenny said, “I’ve never seen one swim before.”

“That’s because you avoid water,” Abaynesh replied with her usual tact. “Some swim, some don’t. Some build towers in Great Salt Lake.”

“How can that be?” Anouk wanted to know. “How can one species show so many different forms?”

“Ultraphyte is not a regular species. Even a single individual within several generations forms a quasispecies.”

Anouk scanned her toybox to look that up.

“A quasispecies,” explained Abaynesh, “starts with one genome, one RNA sequence. But RNA replication makes lots of mistakes—mutations. Much more than DNA would. So the offspring evolve quickly into many forms.”

“Viruses do that,” added Anouk. “RNA viruses, like hepatitis Q.”

“That’s right,” said the professor, “on Earth, only RNA viruses make a quasispecies. The RNA virus mutates so fast that its variants infect different body parts in different ways. But all forms of the quasispecies keep key traits in common.” Her eyes suddenly scanned back and forth, brainstreaming some complex operation.

Within the tank, the amyloid wall extruded a manipulator. The manipulator formed a hand, which reached for the ultra and grabbed it by one end. Caught in the hand, the ultra waved in a whiplike motion for several seconds. Then abruptly it broke off from the trapped cell. Once separate, the single cell squeezed itself out of the manipulator and swam away, zipping around the tank. The remaining body, however, stretched rigid as if stunned. The stunned form vibrated but made no headway.

Anouk recoiled. “
Zut,
just like the lizard.”

“Not quite,” warned the professor. “The lizard’s tail twitches, then it’s done. But the lost ultra cell grows and doubles.”

They absorbed the implications. Jenny asked, “Can they escape?”

“Certainly not. My facility is licensed for ultra and other invasives. Yet the college still won’t sign off on my grant,” muttered the professor.

“Why is the larger one stunned?” Jenny had seen that before, in Somers.

Mary said, “The vote was tied.”

The other two students stared at her.

“She’s right.” Abaynesh looked at Jenny. “How many cells did the ultra have before?”

“Thirteen.” Jenny had counted them, as she always did. “And now, twelve.”

“They’re not simple cells, of course; more like ‘citizens’ of a colony. A colonial organism, in which each individual casts a ‘vote.’ The whole group takes a vote, a hundred times a second. So, an even number of ‘cells’ is bound to reach a tie vote soon. Then they’re paralyzed.”