The Highest Frontier (60 page)

“And for local color, I understand the debate stage was decorated with native Frontera plants, including the intriguing ‘wisdom plants’ bred here in your own college laboratory.”

Dylan’s heart sank. “The Reagan Hall of Science, yes. Unfortunately off-limits for interview. Ultra cleanout.”

“Ah, indeed,” observed Clive, reveling in the irony. “Even the wise spacehab cannot escape the war on ultra.”

“Claro,”
admitted Dylan miserably.

“Not to worry; as printouts we’re okay with the risk. The Reagan Hall of Science—first science lab built in a spacehab. You raised the funds for it, didn’t you?”

Suddenly Dylan’s guard was up. “That was ten years ago, yes.” He’d gone to Washington to pick up a congressman for a trip to the Lunar Circuit; the
casinadie
who ran the subcommittee on naming buildings for presidents.

“A nice bit for our academia window. We’ll have someone follow up.”

Dylan’s heart took another plunge. The last thing he wanted, on top of all else, was to resurrect the details of just how he’d spent that Washington trip ten years before.

*   *   *

The Clive printouts scoured the college interviewing every “friend of wisdom” they could find, for their clues to wisdom, or better yet folly. Quade Vincenzo at length, every incident ever recorded with the bears, the poison frogs, and the infamous elephants. They even dug up the time he’d spread an illegal insecticide to eliminate gypsy moth. “I have an inchworm phobia,” he told Clive. Then Orin Crawford was asked about the time he spent endowment to build the frogs’ dorm. And Luis Herrera-Smith admitted accepting students who’d avoided math since kindergarten. And Dean Helen Tejedor was asked how those faculty junkets to conferences in the Caribbean were financed out of student fees. Most interesting of all, Nora Kwon had to explain how Frontera handled student social follies, which were as frequent as at any earthly college. Records showed that every year for the past ten years—including just that month—certain motor club members had been eased out to avoid assault charges.

The students too faced relentless scrutiny. Their voting record—one percent in the mayoral election, barely ten percent for the last presidential. The Begonias’ gardener sold a story on the entertainment he’d provided them. The twins whose father had lost the family fortune at Rapture. The daughter of the Euro minister, a polymath and compulsive hacker. The Amish mutant who’d left his family. Overnight the entire community was spread under the same microscope where Jenny had found herself since the day she was born. In fact, she seemed to be the only one the Clives ignored, since they already had her whole life on file.

One did pop his bald head in her cottage door to ask about the stage decorations.

“The, um, wisdom plants,” Jenny admitted vaguely, looking aside. “Ask Professor Abaynesh—they’re her research.”

The printout Clive braved ultra contamination to investigate Reagan Hall. He gave Abaynesh a full-length interview.

“My students and I have studied plant wisdom for the past decade.” The Life professor waved her arm dramatically above the rows of plants, now arranged to take up maximum view in the window. “Five hundred and eighty-four different wisdom circuits, at last count.”

“And how exactly do these wisdom plants work?”

“Each pot has two different plants, with slightly different neuron circuits. Illyrian pairs, you might say. Each has to agree wisely to cooperate with the other against caterpillars.”

“Astonishing,” observed the printout. “Isn’t that like what our candidates learned to do?”

The professor shrugged. “I’d be delighted to share the seeds with any colleague.”

Jenny zoomed her window on the plant rows, and blinked for the labels. All were the neural combinations that had scored marginal results over the years. Mary’s reverse controls were nowhere to be seen. Aside from the two in Jenny’s own greenhouse.

*   *   *

At supper, Jenny asked Yola, “What do you think now?”

The pollmeters were all over the map, completely upended. Some states swung away, others came into play.

Yola looked up. She chewed her amyloid thoughtfully. “Okay, you win. I’m voting.”

Ken looked up at her, incredulous. “For what?”

“For the team,” she said. “Look, we’re kind of responsible, see? We made this happen.”

Charlie agreed. “The whole world’s eyes are on us now. We have to set the example.” His eyes widened. “Think of it—Our votes at Frontera could swing the entire election.”

52

Clare burst into the study. Dylan looked up from his grading.
“¿Qué pasa?”

“Hamilton’s gone, all right,” Clare told him. “Along with all the inventoried power stores.”

Hamilton’s backstory, too, had been unearthed by the Clives. There was quite another life to that professor, much of it on the moon. Debts to pay off in Mare Crisium, at some of those ungodly establishments that had revolved around Dylan’s car as it fell. Mare Crisium had its own take on rehab—exempt from Earth standards.

“Running the college is enough for me,” Dylan sighed. What a hornet’s nest that town was.

“Dylan, we have to send the students home.”

“What do you mean?”

“Homeworld gave you warning, didn’t they? They’re determined to shut us down.”

Clare had been on edge ever since Mary collapsed; who could blame him. “Clare, I know you had a terrible shock—”

“This is
not
about me. It’s about getting our students home safe.” Clare had never looked so agitated. “‘The air of Frontera’—Do you imagine the Centrists will let us off? Someone at Homeworld will do us in.”

“You can’t know that. The whole world is watching us now. How can we just up and leave?”

Clare leaned his arms on the desk. “The students; and all the children of Gilead. They have their individual lives ahead of them.”

“Are they any safer below?” The forests gone in smoke, the desert wasteland. “Didn’t they come here for the frontier?”

To that Clare said nothing. He stormed out the door. Dylan followed Clare’s window as he left, heading out to the Homefair shop. The students were hammering carboxyplast into lifeboats, crude boxy things like Michelangelo’s.

*   *   *

The next day Dylan hiked into Mount Gilead for an emergency session of the town council, of which he was a member ex officio. Clare wasn’t speaking, but at least he’d left his window open. Orin reported in his window. “Sorry how that old history came out,” Orin gruffly apologized. “You recall, back in the day, our survival mentality.”

“No problema,”
Dylan assured him. “We needed a frogs dorm; our donors understood.”

Then there was Nora, about all those quick expulsions. “It never occurred to me,” the dean of students reflected, “what we really were doing.”

“We did our best,” Dylan told her. “The evidence was always fuzzy, the lawyers expensive.”

“But over the years, we let go all those student rapists to prey on others elsewhere. Like the old Vatican with their priests.”

The town too had not passed unscathed. One of the Clives unearthed that busybody social worker’s survey of mini-animal abuse by colonial farm boys. Thirty-nine percent admitted experimenting.

The pigeon-thronged courthouse was draped in red, white, and blue bunting for the election a week off. Inside, at the council, the morality officer, Judge Baynor, presided in his robes, along with Frank Lazza and two other well-muscled farmers. “The mayor has his reasons, I’m sure.” The judge looked around the councilors as if defying a response.

Beneath the table, boots shifted position, and a power band squeaked. Frank drummed his fingers. “A lot of us want to know where those stores went.” The ones Hamilton had tallied, then disappeared with.

Another farmer nodded agreement. “We wear them bands day and night, all for a bit of extra juice at home. Where’d it all go?”

“I said, Phil has his reasons.” The judge’s voice rose.

“Sure, we know his ‘reasons.’”

Another farmer laughed. “A guy’s gotta do it somewhere.”

The judge sat up straighter. He pounded the table with his hand. “I will not hear our community disparaged by outsiders. Doing the devil’s work. Spreading dissent among the faithful.”

The testosterone level was palpable. “Excuse me,” Dylan interposed, “I believe the motion on the floor is to appoint a temporary mayor.”

No one spoke. Judge Baynor reluctantly nodded.

“Given the frequency of power-outs this year,” Dylan said, “would it not make sense to pick a mayor who knows the hab mechanics well? Someone who can fix a broken tile and keep things running?”

The judge said nothing.

“The widow Smythe,” muttered a farmer.

“Leora knows the hab inside and out,” agreed Frank.

“Well then,” said the judge, “you better get those
other
missing stores from her.”

Dylan avoided pointing out that had the Smythe Bank reserves appeared sooner, they too might have vanished with the errant professor-mayor. He had made some delicate inquiries of his own. Leora had some knowledge of Hamilton’s debts in Mare Crisium.

*   *   *

In Hamilton’s absence, Jenny now had a substitute politics course from toyHarvard. The class was a total bore. On her own, she leafed the pages of Aristotle, finding she actually missed Political Ideas. At least Priscilla or Enrico would come up with some novel remark. But Life class was on a new track with interactive models, like a Nobel prize kindergarten. And her Life lab had metastasized into the real world.

On the way back from Wednesday class, Tom’s window was blinking. He appeared at the Homefair shop with Charlie and Priscilla, and the Pezarkar twins. “We’ve just completed the lifeboats for the frog and sophomore dorms.” He sent her a long brainkiss.

Jenny closed her eyes and enjoyed it. She sent one back.

The rest of her windows revealed a tectonic shift in allegiance. Among students, purple-lined windows now outnumbered golds ten to one. But her town contacts had shifted the other way. Even Frank Lazza, with all his EMS calls, had gone gold—that hurt to see.

“ToyNews Local. The town council announces the appointment of an interim mayor, Leora Smythe. In other news, the missing reserve units of the Smythe Power Bank have turned up. A custodian discovered them in the attic of First Firmament Church, stacked neatly beneath the Easter service.”

Leora was the mayor—an intriguing turn in the town soap opera. Jenny blinked her congratulations.

The new mayor shortly returned her call. “Jenny, the town is working on our new voting system.”

“I see.” Jenny’s lawyer’s appeal had been denied by the state court, and the Supreme Court turned down the case. Apparently off-world communities had wide latitude to specify any form of ballot that preserved privacy, even radioactive ink. So the uranyl acetate stayed, though there would have to be a secret ballot.

“What do you think of this ballot form?” Leora blinked it over. The new form looked clear enough, a list of candidates with boxes to check. The few local seats—morality officer, sewage director, town council reps—were uncontested, and the rest were based in Ohio thirty-six thousand klicks away. No senator was up that year. Carrillo-Guzmán versus Akeda-Creep; to see it in print startled her. It was truly for real.

“The ballot looks good to me.” She’d write in Father Clare for morality officer.

Leora hesitated. “We need to get more students voting.”

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “You think so?” There was a change.

“The students are really citizens of our town. They bus tables at Lazza’s, assist the one-room schoolteacher, and run EMS.” Which ToyNews report might she be quoting? “The town thinks it might help to have student pollworkers processing voters at the courthouse. Could you perhaps serve as a poll judge?”

Guao.
“Sure, I could do that.”

“We’ll need a second student,” Leora reminded her. “Someone from the other party.”

Jenny searched her windows; there were so few Golds left. “Rafael Marcaydo.”

*   *   *

As she approached her cottage, someone was sitting in the porch swing. Like Mary before—Jenny’s hair stood on end.

The visitor wasn’t Mary. It was Lane Mfumo, from HuriaNews. The reporter waited patiently, pumping the floor with her foot. Her cornrows swept up in a spiral, like Abaynesh’s style. “It’s me, all right,” Mfumo assured her. “In the flesh.”

Jenny took a breath, and tried to collect her thoughts. “You’re not printout?”

“I rode the anthrax up. My spent ticket.” She blinked it over.

Jenny pulled out her scanscope. Mfumo held out her arm, and the scope clicked. The readings scrolled down, a standard blood workup. “Okay,” Jenny said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Look, Jenny, I know there’s a story here—and you’ve got it.” Mfumo rose from the swing. “Why won’t you let it out? Don’t you want the world to know the truth? How everything could change for the better?”

That was precisely what Jenny had asked herself, since the debate. But all her life since the cradle, Jenny knew only one thing for sure about the media: Never trust them. “Suppose the wrong side wins.” If Centrists found out, she’d end up in prison, or the blue room.

Mfumo nodded. “I understand. But this is the big story. The frontier air—the wised-up future leaders of the free world—the fate of the Earth. I’ve got my job to do,” she warned. “I’ll keep digging.”

Jenny looked away, her gaze sweeping the hundreds of windows in her toybox. Then she froze. There amongst the windows was the Babynet window. The one Mary had used. Yet Mary was gone. Wasn’t she?

53

Jenny’s mother called every day now with poll updates. The states were swinging wild in all directions, and the operatives were in a frenzy to pull them back. Invariably Soledad was blinking away the whole time, multitasking one campaign director or another. But Sunday night she was all business. “Jenny—I hear alarming things about Frontera.”

“Really, Mama?” Jenny crossed her mental fingers.

“We know what happened—and the other side doesn’t like it. Your hab is breaking down—it could fall apart any day now.”