The Highest Frontier (38 page)

Anouk shrugged delicately. “I don’t know. Jenny, I do know something else. I’m very near getting to the Creep.”

“What? Anouk, you promised.”

“I promised not to hack my friends anymore. But your friends—they dared me to do it.”

“Look, the Creep is more than just the—the opposition. He’s like a black hole, somewhere in the government.”

“Precisely,” said Anouk. “Don’t you wish to know where he’s gone; and why? They say he’s planning a new operation. A push across the Transantarctic Mountains.”

“All the more dangerous.”

“As I said, I’m nearly there. What I lack is this certain handshake file, just to see the pattern.” She blinked the file type over to Jenny. “Perhaps your father could locate it.”

“If it’s legal, any teddy could get it for you. If not—go back to Developmental Math.”

Candidate Carrillo’s window was blinking. “Jenny,” said Anna, “I want you to be one of the first to know.” One of about a hundred firsts. “My choice for future vice president is Sid Shaak.”

“Congratulations.” They could only hope most people voted before more scandals came out from Connecticut.

“You know, Jenny, some day it’ll be your turn. You can always call on Sid and me.”

After the candidate had departed, Jenny was silent. “How can I ever support Shaak?”

“It’s a pity,” agreed Anouk.

“How do you think such smart people like Anna and Glynnis could make such choices that so lack…”

“Wisdom.” Anouk gave a delicate shrug. “It’s a mystery. We long ago gave up expecting wisdom from
les américains.
”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me the French are any better.”

“True,” she admitted. “
C’est la condition humaine.
What to do?”

A flock of starlings took flight from a naked maple.
“
Sturnus vulgaris.
”
The birds rose and dipped, their mass swelling and flexing like a unified living thing. Like black stars they crossed the light of the north solar. Couldn’t humans do better than a flock of birds? Jenny smiled at something. “Two heads. That’s what the professor thinks we need.”

“Just like her snake?”

“No. Like
Arabidopsis.
”

At Reagan Hall, though, the professor was not in the plant lab.

“We’re in the basement,” Abaynesh called in Jenny’s box. “Mind the doors.”

The students now had to pass through three sealed doors in order to reach the basement lab, with its incessant whoosh of air. They found the professor with Mary, who was standing on a footstool with her water bottle, leaning over an earth-filled tank. There were now six separate tanks, some filled with water, others with earth. Some ultras were swimming, others growing stalks shaped like celery. All were the same yellow-brown hue, except for one celery shape that had darkened purple. Jenny’s hair stood on end. “Are you sure this is … safe?”

“The room is sealed, and filtered, with continuous flow of anticyanide.” A hiss of air sounded in the background. “So? You look like Abraham watching all the new baramins appear.”

“You don’t really believe in baramins?”

“Like a hole in the head,” exclaimed the professor. “For the post-Flood emergence of ‘kinds,’ there exists not a shred of evidence on Earth. Zippo.
Nada.
” She looked away, thoughtful. “But the idea of a ‘kind’ that mutates fast—that’s not a bad model for RNA viruses. An RNA virus like hepa Q brings ‘hidden’ abilities that can be released by mutation. The mutant progeny adapt to different niches in the host.” She glanced at the tank of ultraphytes. “From outside Earth, the seed fell in Salt Lake. Who sent it? What was their plan? Could it perhaps make a whole new ecosystem?”

Anouk was inspecting each tank, and counting the eyespots. “Forty-three cells,” she concluded. “You let them multiply?”

“Not to worry, their growth is salt limited. So let’s see your
terrestrial
results.”

Jenny glanced resentfully at Mary, who was getting to study ultra despite her late start at Life 101. Anouk streamed the complete record of their trials with
Arabidopsis sapiens,
the plant with the nervous system. “You see, we got them all to laugh at the inverted light spectrum. And the laugh rate declined, as you’d expect, with adaptation.”

The graph marched across Jenny’s toybox. Anouk had made it extra fancy, with custom colors and symbols that winked across the grid. Dr. Levi-Montalcini’s tumor mouse came over to sniff.

“So you repeated the original already,” observed Abaynesh. “Did you devise a new stimulus?”

“Well…”

Jenny said, “That’s what we wanted to ask you.” They had tried but could not find anything else to make the plants laugh. It was tough to imagine what would look funny to a plant.

“Actually,” recalled Anouk, “there was one other thing they laughed at.”

Jenny gave her a look. It wasn’t polite to say, with Mary right there.

“Mary helped us,” Anouk said.

“Really,” said the professor. “Mary, did you hear that? Can you see our data?”

“But,” said Jenny, “she can’t use—”

Mary’s forehead wore a diad.

“I’ve got her to detect brainstream,” the professor explained. “That is, Tovaleh got it to work. Tova downloaded a free brainware called Babynet that makes one window at a time. It shows only text, but Mary can read it.”

A crude pixilated window opened.
“HELLO.”
Primary-colored block print letters, like a baby’s alphabet.
“WE PLAYMATES.”

“Guao.”
So now Mary could use a toybox. Just a window, but still.

Suddenly Mary looked up and came over. “Terrestrial life. That is what we need to study.”

“Well, be patient,” said the professor, “you’ve a lot of Life 101 to make up. Mary, why do you think the plants laughed?”

“We are still investigating this question.”

“A good question,” added Anouk, who was taking notes on the purple celery tower. It looked familiar—Jenny recalled seeing thousands of them, in the ToyNews from Salt Lake. “An inverted photosynthetic spectrum doesn’t seem funny to me. But then, I’ve never understood American humor, let alone that of plants.”

Jenny thought of something. “Why not show Mary an inverted
ultra
spectrum?”

Abaynesh tilted her head. “I’ve heard worse.” She brainstreamed to the overhead light source, a panel that covered most of the ceiling. The light dimmed, then turned a dull red.

Mary looked up, and she stepped back, her tie-dyed skirt swishing around her legs. Then she began to laugh. A strange descending laughter that Jenny had never heard before. At last the laughter trailed off.

“Was it all that funny?” asked Abaynesh drily.

“Thank you very much,” said Mary in Dean Kwon’s voice. “We never realized how funny humans are.”

“Ultra syndrome,”
Jenny texted to Anouk.
“She thinks she’s an ultra.”
If Mary were in Jerusalem, she’d be wearing a goat skin.

“Congratulations,” observed the professor. “You can see how much there is to learn from plants.”

“I thought your ultras were humorless,” observed Anouk suspiciously.

Mary said, “We didn’t understand. Of course, we have an analogous system.” She added, “We can make plants with a much better sense of humor.”

Anouk and Jenny exchanged startled looks.

“What did you think?” demanded Abaynesh. “That humans are the only humorous life-form in the universe? To improve the plants’ humor, you have all the genetic tools. The gene sorter will make whatever DNA you need.”

*   *   *

Tuesday morning, as expected, Anna announced her running mate. Jenny tried to ignore the news and follow-up calls on her speech, and think about Father Clare’s campaign. She and Tom joined the chaplain at the Bulls’ table for lunch to draw up plans. It felt odd to be sitting in the dining hall with all the red-shirted
chicos,
their scarlet diads on each forehead, their loose laces all scrambled in a heap beneath their table by the toywall, food scraps still plastered to the ceiling. She hoped none of her teammates noticed.

Fritz Hoffman blinked a sign-up form into everyone’s toybox. “The first thing is to raise funds. Everyone here—get your friends and family to chip in a few bucks. We need to buy ads on Toynet Local.”

Heads nodded all round. Father Clare nodded too. He seemed content to be educated on the niceties of campaigning.

“Yard signs,” Fritz ticked off. “We need to print out yard signs, and get them all over campus. Print out twice as many—the opposition always steals them.”

Someone laughed and made a rude noise. Hands went up to volunteer.

“Mount Gilead,”
texted Jenny.

Fritz looked up vaguely. “Right. I suppose they have a few voters too.”

“I suppose they do,” agreed Father Clare.

“A speech,” exclaimed Fritz, pounding the table. “We need to schedule a speech at the Powwow Ground.”

“We could amp it up and reach the whole hab.”

A chorus of approvals; everyone liked that. Jenny winced.

“Message,”
she texted.

“Of course—we need a message of hope and change.” Fritz turned to Father Clare. “What’s our message?”

“Well, now,” said Father Clare. “You’re the campaign manager. What kind of message do you think will win?”

“More beer,” said someone. Others laughed as if this were an enormously original remark.

Fritz pounded the table. “Grow up, men; if you want more beer, just print it out. We need a winning agenda. Change we can believe in. A new day will dawn for our fair spacehab.”

Father Clare nodded. “What needs to change?”

“EMS.”

Fritz snapped his fingers. “Of course: medical help. Help for Doc Uddin; she sure needs it.”

“Does she ever.” Heads nodded, and others murmured around the table. “That Barnside—
¡Oye!
Scary place.”

“Space security,” added Tom.

“Space security.” Fritz looked to Father Clare. “Is that really a problem? I mean, doesn’t Homeworld shield us?”

“Remember the blackout last spring, during exam week?” said Father Clare. “From a piece of junk the size of a trash can.” President Chase had never mentioned that one. “Within twenty years, the odds of a catastrophic collision are even.”

Fritz whistled. “This campaign could mean life or death. With that in mind, who’s willing to put in time? Door to door, visit every dorm room, get out the vote.”

“Mount Gilead,”
Jenny texted again.

“Mount Gilead.” Fritz looked at Jenny and Tom. “You both are clean-cut kids. You’ll look great going door to door in the Gilead.”

In Jenny’s toybox, the news window flashed urgently. Something important, too important to wait. She blinked to see.

Gar Guzmán hadn’t waited till Wednesday to announce the Centrist running mate, as they traditionally did. Instead, he announced his own, just an hour after Sid Shaak. His handlers had timed it to bury the Unity convention and draw momentum for Gold. His choice was California governor Meg Akeda.

30

Tuesday night Jenny was up till all hours, working a heart attack at a homestead and a diabetic shock in a first-year dorm where they slept four to a room in bunk beds. The Barnside was scary, she had to agree. Rain dripped through the ceiling, and power surges reset the instruments. All the while her toybox lit up about the first conjoined person nominated for vice president, and how the governor had run a country-sized state for years without raising the house edge. Jenny thought that since she was banned from practice next morning, at least she could sleep in.

But she woke early anyway, and went out to meet Yola at the public slanball cage. The town cloud ladder was less well maintained than at the college, swaying in the wind, while the distant farms and Scioto Creek swirled above her and below. Halfway up the ladder, her toybox called.

It was Glynnis, Anna’s wife, the solarray engineer who’d brought the oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and boiled the ice for the First Lady debate. Now Glynnis looked up at her from a toilet seat in a primary school restroom. “Jenny,” she whispered. “Are you alone?”

A sudden gust caught the cloud ladder. The south solar swung crazily, momentarily blinding her. Her stomach heaved. “Um, yes. I’ll catch you later—”

“Jenny, this is vital.” Glynnis ducked her head out of the stall, then back. “I’m on in five minutes, reading
My Pet Frog
to a kindergarten class. Then an art show in Philly, to snip the ribbon for a Mapplethorpe retrospective; then back to the convention. Listen, Jenny:
How did you know?
”

Jenny swallowed. “My Centrist professor. He’s connected somehow.”

“More than that. All our intel said the veep would be—well,
nada más
. Now everything’s up in the air. They can’t replace Meg, that’s for sure.”

“Claro.”

“But what’s with the Creep? Is he really done—or is it just a feint? Will he actually come out gunning the Transantarctic? Right before Election Day?”

Jenny shook her head, her eyes tearing in the wind. “I’m sorry, I don’t know.”

“Please,” urged Glynnis. “It’s vital. We’ve got to know how to play this. Do what you can to find out.”

*   *   *

That afternoon, she saw Professor Hamilton for her speech practice. Baramins—the model kind of worked for hepa Q, and maybe ultra. Who would have thought? A stopped clock is right twice a day.

“What a magnificent performance,” he rhapsodized over her convention appearance. “Ingenious. Heart-stopping. I’ll bet they wish they had ten of you.”

“Then I’d be worth nothing.”

He grinned. “Supply and demand; you know your economics too. Poor Aunt Meg, on the other side.” He gave her a wink. “What do you think of that?” Behind him the faces of Meg and El smiled out from the picture as they shook his hand.

Jenny nodded. “Meg has been a fine governor.”

“Honorable, and incorruptible,” he reminded her. “Family values. Balanced budget for over a decade.”

“While expanding the solarplate.” There was her aunt’s weakness—so smart about the present, but she ignored the ticking bomb that lay ahead. Like the Firmament, she kept her time horizon small.