The Highest Frontier (44 page)

He nodded slightly, as if unsurprised. “I can’t not be Christian,” he said. “Does that make sense?”

“But look at everything people do in the name of Christ. Lying to children about the age of the Earth, and the span of the stars. Leading our planet to death.”

“I could say that not all Christians do that,” the chaplain reflected. “And not only Christians. But that would be no answer.” He sat up and took the dog-eared ancient book off his desk. Its cover was blackened, moldy in appearance, with an end torn off. “This is a replica of the
Codex Anaxagoras,
the sole surviving work of a pre-Socratic philosopher. Anaxagoras was the first to define a concept of mind, as an organizing principle of the universe.” The book fell open. The vellum inside was full of faded medieval script. “But what became of his work? Most of the pre-Socratics are lost to history. This codex was saved because a medieval cleric took the parchment to reuse for writing prayers. He washed out the original, wrote his prayers over, then left the prayer book in a monastery. But the washing was incomplete. Centuries later, scientists used X-rays and ultraviolet to reveal the original.”

The book snapped shut. Father Clare put it aside, then leaned forward on his desk, hands clasped before him. “That’s what most preaching is—mine, and everyone else’s. We preserve the word of God by scribbling prayers over something infinitely more valuable. It’s up to you to find the original.”

*   *   *

Jenny had to rush to class, potted plant in one arm and Aristotle in the other. All the students sat around the ornate oval table, while Hamilton paced as usual. Mary sat at the far end, with her usual vacant look. A playmate button lit up from Enrico, pleading to restore his window. Ignoring him, Jenny hurried to find her place in the book.

“Now, Aristotle finds important difficulties with Plato’s idea of common property, in particular the idea of owning women and children in common.” Hamilton turned to face the table. “What difficulties does Aristotle raise?”

Enrico said, “If you don’t know your true father, it’s hard to avoid incest.”

Claro,
thought Jenny with a yawn.

“Enrico,” observed Hamilton as if intensely interested in this new thought. “You’ve truly hit upon a key point. Avoiding incest is a pillar of civilization, don’t we agree?” He looked around the table.

“Friendship is watered down,” observed Ricky Tsien, reading from the text: “‘Like wine mixed with water.’”

Hamilton’s eyes widened. “Friendship, Ricky. Where would we be without friendship? If all are owned by all, how can one have a special friend?”

Someone giggled. It was Priscilla Cho.

“Other problems?” continued the professor. “What other problems does Aristotle raise with Plato’s utopian ideal?” In Hamilton’s class, utopias were invariably bad, whereas dystopias were a necessary compromise with human nature.

Priscilla giggled again, louder. Hamilton paced in the other direction, but Priscilla raised her hand. “Aristotle says—” She could scarcely contain herself. “That keeping away from someone else’s woman is a noble deed, and that owning women in common deprives us of this virtue.”

At that, Enrico chuckled, then was still.

Ricky burst out laughing. “That’s really good.” Another student next to Jenny laughed, then another nearby.

“Yes, yes,” observed Hamilton. “Any other … issues raised?”

“It says here,” Ricky began, “that when the Spartans came home from war, they listened to Lycurgus; but when Lycurgus told women to obey the laws, they resisted, and so he gave up.”

Priscilla threw back her head laughing, and there was general laughter around the table. Even Jenny couldn’t help it; the picture of all the women being ungovernable, while their soldier men did as they were told, was too precious.

“And here,” added Priscilla, “Aristotle says that in warring nations, all warriors are conspicuously obsessed with sexual relations—either with men or with women!” She could barely get the last word out, and collapsed under the table. Hamilton was left trying to speak. The only student not laughing was Mary.

“REVERSE CONTROL WORKED.”

Jenny’s eyes flew open at Mary’s message. She quit laughing. She stared at Mary, then at the plant on the table, surrounded by laughing students. Her heart beat so fast she thought it would burst. Scooping up the plant and her book, she left the table and ran from the room. She ran all the way to Reagan Hall, to Abaynesh’s office.

“Professor!” She stopped to catch her breath. “Professor, this plant—Mary did something, and—”

Professor Abaynesh was feeding headless mice to her two-headed snakes, their tanks all stacked on the far wall. “Diad off, please.”

Jenny pulled off her diad, to avoid alerting the Toynet animal activists. By the desk, Tova sat on the floor with the blacksnake, Meg-El. At Jenny’s entrance, Tova got up and ran across to her, a crayon drawing in one hand, a book in the other. The book,
The Diary of Anne Frank,
fell from Tova’s hand so she could point professorially at her drawing. She craned her neck up at Jenny. “Kudzu now grows in Yukon,” she hyperventilated. “Kudzu makes long purple flowers with a pleasant sweet smell.”

“Enough, Tovaleh,” said her mother. “Go play with Meg-El.” She turned to Jenny questioningly.

Jenny swallowed. “What is a ‘reverse control’?”

The professor took the plant from her and snipped a piece for the analyzer. “I told Mary not to do it already,” she muttered. “Students never listen.”

“What is it?”

“The plant expresses a human semiochemical,” Abaynesh explained, still watching the analyzer. “One of several discovered in the last decade. They bind receptors deep inside your nose.” She turned to Jenny. “Did you ever know someone who invariably makes people laugh, and no one can quite say why?”

“Sure.” Mimi, Rosa’s first lady, was known for making everyone laugh. It was part of her charm.

“It’s genetic; they express a high level of laughter-enhancing semiochemical. Now, Mary sees you and Anouk as part of the experiment. So when you applied jasmonate to the plants, to make them laugh harder, Mary made the reverse. She made the RNA switch turn on the human pheromone, cloned on a plasmid. To make you humans laugh.”

“But—” Jenny’s thoughts spun. “We only laughed in Hamilton’s class. And he didn’t laugh.”

“It’s not laughing gas; it doesn’t make you laugh at nothing. It only amplifies what you find funny already.”

Jenny shook her head. “Well, it’s
not
funny.” In fact, it was like what those Ferraris had done to her—a chemical altering her brain, without consent.

“Certainly not. In fact, it’s illegal.” Abaynesh frowned at the plant. “Premeds. All they want to work on is humans. They want me to spend class dissecting a cadaver.”

“Professor, Mary is no ordinary premed.”

“True.” The professor gave her a hard stare. “Are you?”

“Me? I keep up four classes and don’t nearly kill someone.”

“The rape gas could have killed you. Luckily you got just a whiff before the bros fled. Mary saved your life.”

“With cyanide? She has ultra syndrome.”

The professor threw up her hands. “What shall I do with her? She has no other home on Earth. And now I’ve said too much already.”

Twenty illegal plants in Jenny’s greenhouse. For sure, Mary’s health was none of her business, but here she’d got Jenny in trouble again. The
compañera
from hell.

“I made a mistake,” the professor admitted. “I should never have sent those plants home with you. Bring them all back, and we’ll set you up with lab space, where I have the proper permits. The air is filtered, so any semiochemicals won’t affect you.”

A key code opened in Jenny’s toybox.

“Laboratory access,” the professor added. “You can get in anywhere, any time of day or night.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “Access to your lab? That’s a big responsibility.”

“All the research students have access. It’s important, especially when the power fails and I can’t get here in time to check.”

She thought this through. “I don’t want to be here alone.”

“Of course not; bring your partner. By the way, how did your experiment work?”

“The experimental plants laughed significantly more than the negative control.” It hardly seemed important now.

“So you’re done with that exercise, the test that’s been done a hundred times. That was just practice. Now you’re ready for a project that’s never been done before. The wisdom circuit. Can we construct a plant whose nervous system guides it to do the right thing?” Abaynesh blinked rapidly, downloading papers for Jenny to read.

The wisdom plant, Jenny recalled, the plant with all the flower heads. Two heads might be wiser than one, although not for snakes. For her aunts, maybe.

Then she thought of something. “Professor? Is there a … ‘reverse control’ for wisdom?”

“None that I know of,” said Abaynesh in a low voice. “More’s the pity.”

*   *   *

At supper, Jenny barely followed the banter amongst her teammates as she tried to read her homework in her toybox while dutifully consuming her amyloid. Teddy Roosevelt had just established the Census Bureau and bid for a canal in Panama. The class went well—Uncle Dylan truly was a first-rate professor. By contrast, her toyHarvard class dragged. Cuba had just been invaded by Columbus.

“We built another lifeboat today.”
Charlie smiled from across the table.

Jenny smiled back.
“Thanks.”

“We’ll build the
sukkah
Wednesday,” announced Ken. “Be there with your space suits down south at the circuit, at four o’clock sharp.”

“¡Oye!”
cried goalie Xiang Jones. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Way to go,” said Iris Ortega. “We get to shake the whatchamacallit.”

Fran Pezarkar held up a bunch of palm fronds plus what looked like a large wrinkled lemon. “
Lulav
and
etrog
.”
“
Citrus medica,
citron,”
added Jenny’s taxon window.

Yola jogged Jenny’s arm. “Dwork, are you awake?”

“I heard everything you said,” she insisted.

“You know about Sukkot?”

“Of course.” Grandma Rosa and Mimi had celebrated the harvest festival.

“They build this hut called a
sukkah
outdoors, beneath the stars. Out of tree branches and symbolic fruits.”

“So Ken and Coach will be busy again.” And Fran and David, the Jews from Mumbai. But why would Yola be interested?

“Aren’t you listening?
The stars.
You have to see the stars through the branches—with nothing in between. Get it?”

Jenny thought. “You mean … outside the spacehab?”

“Up on the polar cap,” Ken explained. “The only place where we won’t fly off the rotating hab.”

Yola nodded. “We all go out for a look. It’s not every day you walk in space to see the stars.”

35

Wednesday morning, Jenny met Tom after politics to go canvassing in Mount Gilead. Holding hands, they swung their arms as they headed out Raccoon Run alongside the creek, alone except for a mother teddy bear trotting across with her cub. Far ahead, the down-pointing First Firmament steeple grew and rotated up. Tom wore his Homefair hard hat and nail pockets, and Jenny carried her scanscope. She noticed what looked like a burn on his arm. “Did you have an accident?”

“Not in Homefair,” he told her. “Art class. Got some wet lime on my arm, and it burned.”

“That’s too bad. How is your fresco?”

“I finally got the paint to stay,” said Tom said, “without running down the wall.”

She squeezed his hand. “I’m sure it’s
chulo.
When can I see it?”

“The others are much better.”

“ToyNews—From our box to yours.” Clive in the window, with his hair back to his everyday style ten. “All eyes and ears await tomorrow night’s first presidential debate, on foreign affairs. Candidates Anna Carrillo and Gar Guzmán square off directly for the first time.”

Now,
por último,
having won the primary, Anna could come out strong and promise to save the world. Here at Frontera, Father Clare would do the same. Jenny swung Tom’s hand happily. “You know what Father Clare said? He said that preachers preserve the word of God by scribbling prayers over something infinitely more valuable.”

Tom took a breath. “Really.” He let out a long sigh. “That sure helps.”

“What do you mean?”

He smiled as if watching something far off, beyond the hab. “They used to drive me out to service on Sunday mornings, in a windowless wagon. The horse clopping ahead; I still dream of the sound. The service was in somebody’s home, not a church. Benches and chairs all around a living room. The sermon, and the hymns.” He nodded. “I still miss the hymns.”

By the road, the creek foamed, worse than usual, thought Jenny. “Father Clare should give a speech on pollution, don’t you think?”

“Good idea.”

Jenny smiled; she could only feel cheerful, holding Tom’s hand. “Are you going out this afternoon to build the
sukkah
?” She hadn’t space-walked since sophomore year, with Jordi.

“I don’t know. I don’t have a space suit.”

Jenny started to offer him one, but thought better of it. “How’s Sherri-Lyn’s house?”

“The punch list’s nearly done. The housewarming’s next Saturday. You’re invited.”

“Thanks.” She tilted her head. “Would you like to see more magic?”

“Sure thing. Cups and balls?”

Jenny shook her head. “Coin and nails. You got some?”

Tom fished three nails out of his pocket, then dug deeper for a ten-dollar dime. Jenny produced a round box with holes. “Put the coin inside.” She capped it with the cover. “Now the nails.”

Each nail poked straight through the box, all the way out the other side. The solid coin was inside; it must have been pierced.

“
Guao.
The coin must be amyloid.”

“Your own coin?” At his look, Jenny laughed.

Tom fingered the nail tips, then pulled them out one by one, finally opening the box to retrieve his dime. “How do you do these things?”