The Highest Frontier (52 page)

Jenny’s jaw fell. “Wait—no—” Of course, that’s who those new prisoners would be. “No,
wait,
I said! The—the spirit forces are out of balance; the ceremonies have been neglected. Call it off!
Hiro kone!
”

None of the other players took notice. Jenny tried to reach them in her windows, but there was no response. Helpless, she hung back and watched the gauntlet form, the two lines of women and construct children with sticks and knives to beat and stab the prisoners. At Level Ten, they would feel the pain.

There was cheering and shouting as the prisoners were delivered at the other end. She could just make them out, Ken and Yola with their faces painted red; black would have meant torture and feast. But the adoption gauntlet was bad enough. The shouts went on, and a cheer went up for a particularly sharp blow. Jenny could no longer see her friends amid the torturers, but she marked their progress down the line. At last they appeared, smeared with blood and dirt, virtual fingernails pulled. Their faces registered shock, but they had managed to hold themselves together.

“They didn’t cry once,” observed the male Speaker admiringly.

“Welcome, offspring of the Salt Beings,” said Bean Planter. “You have now become our own offspring of the Bear Clan. Welcome to No Voting Land, Iroquoia.”

*   *   *

Unlike most students, who’d be gone till Tuesday, Jenny headed back up to Frontera to record the wisdom plants. That was it with experiments; you had to keep them going. The college was a ghost town. Buckeye Trail was deserted, and the Ohioana closed for business.

She had barely returned, when EMS was blinking already. A new Ebola strain had struck Huron dorm again, sent by malicious “salt beings” through the printer. The colonial volunteers were overstretched; even Frank Lazza was consumed with setting up his hotel. Fortunately most of the dorm residents were home, but like Jenny, a few always stayed, “dworks” catching up on work, or those who could not afford the trip home. One who’d stayed was Tom.

With the medibot, she combed Huron for sick students, suiting up each for quarantine and scooting them to the Barnside. Huron housed frogs six to a room, in two banks of three, adjoined to a shared toyroom. The rooms were so narrow the medibot could scarcely fit inside. The beds were like turned-up shoe box tops, barely long enough for someone of average height. When she reached Tom’s room, her skin crawled. “Tom?” She could barely get her voice to work. She climbed one ladder, her isolation suit twisting around her legs. The third bunk was empty. On the other side, she climbed the other ladder. There was Tom, feverish and breathing unevenly, red swollen spots appearing on his face and arms.

“Antivirals ready,” called the medibot.

Jenny’s head broke out in a sweat beneath her hood, and her gloved hand shook so she could scarcely fit the scanscope. But she had to get the antiviral injected, and get him and three other victims out to the Barnside.

43

Over the weekend, Jenny camped out at the Barnside, hovering over the patients and checking out their signals to adjust the antiviral. All were isolated beneath an amyloid bell jar. Tom was barely conscious, and Jenny did not try to speak to him. Enveloped in her safety suit she felt like a monster. Doc Uddin had to push out an extra room for the patients; to save on amyloid, she lowered the ceiling. This made it hard for Jenny to stand straight. “You’re too tall for a colonist,” joked the doctor.

“Do I really need the suit?” Jenny asked. “I don’t get Ebola; I’ve got HIV.”

“Human improvement vector protects you from casual exposure, but here we take no chances.” The doctor opened a new box of meds.

“Are those the regenerators?” After the antivirals got rid of the virus, in the next twenty-four hours, the body cells had to be repaired right away. Unlike an ultraphyte, a human body contained trillions of cells, of which billions had been blown by the virus; a billion holes poked in the blood vessels. Microscopic regenerators could plug them all, and rebuild the tissues—if added in time.

Doc Uddin shook her head. “No word from the supplier.” A hurricane was churning through the Carolinas, and the country’s medical service was preoccupied. “We may have to try Shanghai. It’ll blow my budget for the year.”

“Why can’t we stop these epidemics?”

“It’s not our problem; it’s Toynet.” Doc Uddin stuck another scanscope onto the recharger. That reminded Jenny to hand over the power bands she had worn in Mount Gilead. Every bit of juice was a few dollars more for those who couldn’t pay.

“Why can’t Toynet be filtered? With antivirals?”

“It’s like monoculture. There’s only one Toynet; it’s grown like kudzu for the past decade. You grew up with it, the direct brainstream plug-in. Tova was born with it. Those born with it, their brains expand in ways we don’t yet understand. But there’s only one code. If anyone anywhere in the world subverts it, it spans the globe within minutes.”

Her eyes widened. “You mean, other Tovas in other places…”

“Kudzu is the least of it.” She adjusted the window that enclosed one of the worse-off patients to breathe oxygen and epithelial stabilizers. “Always the children get there first. In the early twentieth century, children could not even keyboard. But once they learned, they invented everything.”

The twentieth century. That came after the shell-bead recorders, and before the networks. Jenny thought back to first grade. “I remember
gafas,
eyeglass windows—we all wore them.” Lasers onto the retina; she’d seen one in the physics museum. It felt odd to think of, a part of her childhood gathering dust in a glass case.

“The first
gafas
were for cartoon worlds. A convenient babysitter. Then they were everywhere; at your age, I loved my
gafas
. But now it’s Toynet—it exploded overnight, and it’s all one thing.” She shrugged, and shoved a wisp of blond hair back into her braid. “Hey, that’s Zari’s problem; I’ve got my plate full.”

So Jenny stayed on to help the nurse, keeping an eye on Tom and the other patients. In her toybox she caught up on the Northern Securities Case, the decision for which Roosevelt had compared Justice Holmes to a banana. The Northern Securities company had combined three crosscountry railroads, despite a law prohibiting any combination “in restraint of trade among the several states.” A good thing Roosevelt never lived to see Toynet straddle the world’s countries, moon, and satellites.

As she sat in her suit at Tom’s bedside, Yola’s window lit up. Yola greeted her from the Tasmanian coast, where she went shark watching with her hunky
novio
from Melbourne. “We saw a Great White—the real thing, no toyworld.
Hiro kone!
”

Jenny smiled and caught her up on the Ebola epidemic. A while later Ken appeared on a beach in Eilat, resting up with his
novia
on army leave. The beach was refrigerated beneath an amyloid bubble against the hundred-fifty-degree heat. “Say, I found this thousand-year-old menorah in the Old City. Just in time for Festival of Lights.”

“Um, did you get a permit?”

His
novia
punched him in the arm. “I told him it was a knock-off.”

There was the mayoral race, the last weekend before the Tuesday special election. Time for “get out the vote.” Jenny hadn’t heard much lately from Fritz Hoffman or the other Bulls campaigners; they’d had their share of work to catch up. Still, she had the list of registered voters, annotated where contacts had been made. She started blinking down the list, reminding them to vote at the courthouse. The Mount Gilead contacts went fast; those she’d met with Tom seemed likely to vote. Then she started blinking students.

“My cousin’s getting married. I’ll vote online. No? Why not?”

“My mom reserved my return shuttle months ago, before we knew.”

“I have no Wednesday class, I’m coming back then.”

“There’s a vote Tuesday? For what?”

Exasperated, Jenny wondered what had happened. Didn’t they hear all the candidates, including Father Clare’s last speech from out in space? Didn’t the Bulls canvass the dorms? Finally she reached Fritz Hoffman, the Bulls’ pledge educator and campaign director, out at Suzuka Circuit for the Japanese Grand Prix. “Look,” he said, “I’ll get back if I can, but it’s
totalmente loco
to have to vote in some amyloid shack in a spacehab.”

Suddenly she remembered Tom, in the bell jar. She looked over at him, breathing calmly, still covered in red spots. She blinked Doc Uddin, out on call. “When will the students get out of quarantine?”

“Goodness, a week at least. They’ll have to do classes by Toynet; they can use our toyroom.”

She looked over again through the amyloid at Tom. He breathed easily, his face no longer contorted with pain. Swollen, but saved from rotting. Jenny opened her mouth, then closed it and swallowed twice. “Tom?” She spoke up a bit louder. “Can you hear me?”

Tom’s head turned on the pillow. Then he nodded.

Jenny nodded back. “Do you … need anything?”

Tom’s lips opened as he tried to talk. “Water.”

Jenny pushed her suited arm into the amyloid. Recognizing her, the amyloid molded in, allowing her hand to reach the water line and pull it up by Tom’s face.

Tom drank from the tube, his throat moving as he swallowed. Then his mouth opened, but he could not speak. He swallowed and tried again. “Will I … live?”

“Of course you’ll live. The doctor told you.” The pain he must be feeling, blood vessels leaking throughout the body. “You’ll be feeling a lot better tomorrow, as the antivirals kick in. But you have to stay in quarantine for the week.”

“Can I get out to vote?”

His window was back. Jenny felt a rush of good; it was wonderful to connect again. Then she felt sad, remembering.
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

She found the courthouse window and blinked a message: What did they do for a voter in quarantine?

“The pie with flying birds was
chulo,
”
Jenny told him.

“Thanks. So were the puzzle jugs.”

Suddenly, half her windows disappeared. All her Earth windows, gone.

Outside, the light dimmed throughout the hab. Another brownout. A notice read that Frontera’s supplemental power from Earth had been redirected to fight the hurricane that devastated the Atlantic coast. Maryland’s Chesapeake seawall might not hold.

*   *   *

There was no word from the courthouse, and the hab stayed dim through Sunday. Jenny joined the EMS crew flipping backup switches, powering down elevators and printer nodes, and posting signage for potable water. Then, left alone with her orchids, Jenny found herself wondering. Like, how could Earth just commandeer Frontera’s power; and what if they didn’t give it back? And what was in Mary’s mysterious reverse control plants for wisdom, the shoots just starting to sprout leaves?

With the power partly down, she checked the lab twice a day now, making sure the backup generator kept running when the professor had to be out. Most times, though, Abaynesh was there.

“Mary thinks she knows a semiochemical for human wisdom.” In the Reagan basement, Abaynesh’s voice rose above the hiss of ventilation. The ultraphyte quasispecies continued to grow, their tanks now surrounded by those of rats and chickens. “A combination of chemicals, in fact. Her sense of smell is finer than ours.”

“The omniprosthesis?” Omniprosthetics could be designed for special abilities.

“If Mary’s right, it suggests a different approach to our research. But we’d need human subjects. I don’t have a permit.”

Whereas she did have a permit for ultra. “Have the ultraphytes done anything to the rats and chickens?”

“Not that I can tell,” said the professor. “But they seem to notice the animals. Those kept in an adjacent tank develop creeping forms; whereas those next to a plant develop stalks.”

Jenny looked. She saw a mixture of stalks and creeping forms in both tanks.

“Statistically different, anyway.”

Mary had gone upstairs to the plant lab to study Earth creatures. “The castle,” blurted Jenny. “What happened there?”

Abaynesh shrugged. “I can’t tell you. I ran an inventory here that night, and none of mine were missing.”

*   *   *

Jenny tried to reach Uncle Dylan about the quarantined voters. But his window was blocked. He must be dealing with the brownout, or an important donor. Jenny’s eye fell upon Leora’s window. She blinked to ask for help.

“We’ve never had a voter in quarantine.” Leora seemed more comfortable with her private window than in public. “What could we do about it?”

“Record the person’s vote online.”

“So it wouldn’t go in the book?”

“You could still put it in the book. But really, votes ought to be secret.”

Jenny stared hard, wondering how the pauline would take that. Beneath her bonnet Leora stared back, with a look as if she had something else on her mind. “You can ask Judge Baynor.” She added, “Let me know what you find out.”

Unlike Leora, Judge Baynor had not opened his window. The only way to ask the judge at present was to find him out in the soy field. By the time she got there it was Monday afternoon. The hab was still dim, and the temperature had fallen; Jenny shivered in her sweater. The combine was churning, kicking up dust so she coughed.

“So your client admits to tipping a cow into the stream?” As the judge drove his combine, he appeared to be conducting a virtual court session. “A mini-cow, sure, correct the record. So he tipped the mini-cow in broad daylight? Out in an open field? Where anyone across the hab can see?” The judge braked and the combine hissed quiet. “Are you telling me your client is a total idiot?”

A long pause while the judge listened to his toybox. Jenny wondered if she’d have to come back later.

The judge wiped his brow and replaced his power band with a new one to fill. “Well, I believe in giving a total idiot a second chance. Guilty as charged, sentence suspended.” He turned to Jenny. “I’ve read your complaint. If you can make it to the courthouse door, and sign your name, you can vote. That’s the law.”