The Highest Frontier (61 page)

Jenny said nothing. The power-out was a bad sign. But she couldn’t just give up and leave.

“Jenny, I want you home right away. You can take an early Thanksgiving break, and complete your papers on Toynet.”

“Mama,” Jenny said, “science doesn’t work that way. I have to check my plants.”

“Print out helpers.” Soledad added starkly, “If the hab goes, your science goes anyway.”

“And besides, I have to vote.”

“What—you haven’t voted yet? Just vote in Wisconsin, on your way down the anthrax.”

“But—our community. They made me a poll judge.” Why was it so important, Jenny wondered herself. For Father Clare? For Leora? “Look, Mama—the whole world is watching us now, on the highest frontier. Will they say the Ramos Kennedys cut and run?”

Soledad stood back. Her brow furrowed as she thought for a long time. “Very well,” she said slowly. “Your father and I will come up Monday and stay again at that Lazza’s. We’ll see firsthand how it goes. We’ll see if Ramos Kennedys cut and run.”

Dios mío,
thought Jenny.

*   *   *

Jenny met Anouk in her Mandelbrot room, which Anouk swore was the securest place on campus. “Do you still see Mary’s window?” ventured Jenny. “Is it there in your box?”

“But of course,
chérie.
”

“But—how can that be?” Only a diad on someone’s forehead out there could generate a window in active toyboxes.

“I asked Zari.”

“You
told
her? But Anouk—”

“Jenny,” she sighed, “the toymaker always knows all the secrets.”

Like Jenny’s father, it was true. “But how could this be?”

Anouk shrugged dramatically.

“But Mary … she dissolved and went down the drain.” Like an octopus through a crack. “What became of her diad?”

Anouk raised an eyebrow.

“No way,” Jenny said. “I’m the one in trouble now. You go ask the professor.”

Anouk blinked for Abaynesh. “Professor, can you tell us—we were just wondering. What became of Mary’s diad? Was it found, before the cleanout?”

The professor appeared in her window. “Maybe,” she observed. “And maybe not.”

Jenny shook with apprehension. She felt an impulse to pull off her own diad, contaminated as it was with the mystery window.

“Perhaps Tovaleh is playing tricks again,” Abaynesh suggested.

“Oh, of course,” Jenny breathed.

“So listen up, you two: If you ever read anything there, either of you, let me know immediately. Okay?”

Jenny closed her eyes, but the windows remained. She felt trapped in a toyworld she couldn’t escape. But this toyworld was bigger than herself, bigger even than Frontera. There was no “out” to escape to.

Yet, no matter how scary, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Over the weekend, as she plowed through her Teddy paper and her Cuba reading, Jenny’s eye kept straying to the empty Babynet window. At last, without really deciding to, she blinked.
“MARY?”

Her stomach did a somersault, but nothing happened. No response.

Every now and then, she typed something else.

“HUMOR?”

“WISDOM?”

“SALT?”

Sunday night was a long, hard slog to finish her Teddy paper. Back then, interstate commerce involved companies running choo-choo trains, like the one that chugged around the top of Wickett Hall. A holding company tried to control all the trains, from one state to the next, all across the country. That made sense—people loved one big system, plain and simple, to get from one shore to the other. But the plain and simple system snuffed out competitors. No Huria trains, only amyloid Clives. But was that so bad? Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes didn’t think so. It wasn’t enough to agree with Teddy; Uncle Dylan expected an argument, in her own words. “The forms of combination have been metamorphosed into new shapes…” Her eyes defocused.

In the morning, as Jenny negotiated the Weavers into Reagan Hall, her steps slowed at the door of physics professor Zhi-Li Zhang. Catching her eye, the egg-shaped man eagerly waved her over. “Look at my latest acquisition!”

Amid the angular brass instruments full of toothed gear wheels stood a square mirror upon a wooden tripod. The mirror was mounted to pivot up and down.

“A heliograph,” Zhang exclaimed. “U.S. army, from 1886. Used in the battle to capture Apache chief Geronimo.”

Jenny puzzled over the instrument. “What did it do?”

“It reflected sunlight, blinking up and down to send Morse code. It could reach an army camp fifty klicks away.”

Those clever Salt Beings. “So anyone with a mirror could ‘spread data.’”

“If the sun were shining.” Zhang grinned. “But then, people invented this.” He held up a disk sliced from a bundle of metal bars. “A chunk of the first transatlantic telegraph cable.”

“Transatlantic? Strung above the ocean?”

“Below,” he corrected. “In the deep.”

“Guao.”
Talking along a wire, amongst the deep-sea fishes; that was hard to imagine. “So then, was the cable a monopoly, like the railroad?”

“The voice phone was a monopoly, for a while, until there were satellites. Then the Internet, the first full network. And then Gafanet.” The
gafas
on everyone’s eyes.

“And now Toynet.”

“Toynet, the first brainstream,” concluded Zhang.

“Toynet is all one grid. What’s wrong with that? I mean, isn’t it efficient to have all one system?”

The professor hesitated. “Sure, it’s efficient. Of course, like the heliograph, all the infrastructure starts with the government.”

“So the government reads all our brainstream?”

“They could. To find ultra, remember; everytime you see an ultra, they want to know. The Alien Intelligence Act.”

Her scalp prickled; she never liked to think of that. “Can they see how everyone votes?”

“Not if you shut your windows. But users forget.” Zhang shrugged his shoulders. “What does it matter? Voting for president is just tradition.”

“What do you mean?”

The professor glanced up at the Seldon poster, the psychohistorian under a bell jar. “Today, anyone with a pollmeter is a Seldon. Any candidate can predict the vote, and calibrate one’s response.”

“It didn’t work for me.”

“The mayor’s race? Your candidate didn’t use a pollmeter,” he reminded her. “For the past five presidential races, the number of votes was a statistical tie.” President Ramos, then the four Centrists who followed. “The difference lay within the range of counting error.”

She hadn’t thought of it that way. All her life, the vote had been close, and there were riots for months afterward. “Well, this year it’s different. Everything got shaken up—a candidate even switched parties, just days before the vote. Who can predict now?” New York and Kentucky were suddenly swing states, while Michigan and Maryland had swung off the map.

Professor Zhang grinned. “We’ll see.”

Jenny’s eye glimpsed the Babynet window. The window was no longer empty.
“SALT. LIGHT.”

For a moment she stopped breathing. She stood transfixed.

“Something wrong?”

She shook herself. “Excuse me.” She hurried on to the plant lab.

Anouk was there, inserting the assay probes and tallying responses. Jenny asked, “Where would Mary find both salt and light?”

Anouk thought a moment. “The purple microbes, out in the shell.”

The purple microbes, the ones that swam through the saltwater shell of Frontera. The ones that drank sunlight to help power the hab.

*   *   *

The night before Election Day, Dylan came home late from an exhaustive faculty meeting. Frog seminars, Antarctic studies, the orating still swam through his skull. In the end, he’d pulled off what he hoped for: the frog seminars. But Quade’s news was more worrisome. The hab’s control circuits had sustained damage from two recent power-outs; next time, a backup switch might fail. And in the phototrophic zone, the purple bugs that pumped amyloid and yielded a quarter of the hab’s power showed some kind of contaminant. A brownish muck was spreading, something resistant to the usual antibiotics. If Quade didn’t find a cure, they’d have to tell Mount Gilead to expect a deep-freeze winter while they tossed in chlorine and restarted the culture. The Mound wouldn’t mind, they’d put up a ski slope. But the colonists—that would do wonders for town-gown.

Yet none of that was his main worry just now.

Clare looked better rested than usual, and more attentive. He’d actually come home for dinner instead of building lifeboats till all hours with barely a word to say. Clare sat on the couch next to him, reading Aquinas. “What is it, sweet?” He clasped Dylan’s hand. “Tough faculty meeting?”

Dylan held Clare’s hand tight, the way he used to back at college, a senior still fearful the frog would run off with some well-built guy who hadn’t already lost a liver. Above sailed Michaelangelo’s
Last Judgment,
Christ separating the saved from the damned.

“The frog seminars,” Clare asked. “Did it finally pass?”

Dylan smiled, still looking away. “It passed. With an unconscionable amendment on staffing. Orin blew a coronary.”

Clare stroked Dylan’s arm. “I knew you’d set your heart on frog seminars.”

“Don’t you know it.” As a senior, he’d talked a professor into letting him audit a frog seminar on early American religion just so he could see Clare every day. After class the two of them had lovely walks along the river.

“I guess I’m the only guy who ever got seduced through Jonathan Edwards’s sermons.”

“‘Corruption of the heart of man is boundless in its fury.’” With a laugh, Dylan finally dared to face him. “Guess I’ve been burning in brimstone again.”

“So, what?”

He took a breath. “The Clives finally dug up something.”

“Well?”

“It was ten years ago, for God’s sake—my one slip. I was in Washington making the big ask for the Ronald Reagan building.”

“I remember,” said Clare.

“It was stupid. I was jet-lagged, and a bit rattled; we’d blown a tire on the Lunar Circuit.” Clinched the deal, though; to this day, the congressman bragged of it, as if he’d driven the car himself. “Afterward, I lost my head and made a fool of myself. With some guy I met in the hotel gym.”

Clare thought a moment, then nodded. “I guessed as much.”

“You guessed? You never said anything.”

“Why let you confess? You burned in your own brimstone.”

Dylan sighed. “I was miserable. I always wanted to be clean with you.” The last thing he wanted to be was some aging guy who couldn’t keep his pants on. “It never happened again.”

“I know, sweet. You’ve always been good to me.”

“How those printouts dug it up after all these years—”

“In Washington everything gets dug up. Just forget it.” Clare fell back on the couch, suddenly short. He looked away as if preoccupied.

Dylan studied his face. “So what did they get on you?”

The chaplain crossed his arms. “Telling you won’t help.”

“What could you possibly do that I couldn’t forgive?” More curious by the minute, Dylan pressed his shoulder, but Clare pulled away. “Except maybe donate to Williams. You didn’t, did you?”

“Oh, hush.”

They sat in silence. How God set them in slippery places, sang the Psalmist.

“You’ll hear soon enough,” observed Clare at last. “My photos, after high school. They’re up on Toynet.”

“Photos? Of you?”

“My final summer, I needed to complete my tuition payment.”

“But your scholarship—”

“There’s always the work contribution, as you well know. I modeled for two weekends. The first was with clothes. They promised anonymity but—”

“Photos? Goodness, Clare, where
are
they?”

“Will you shut your toybox and
listen
?”

“Of course, dear.” Clare exposed, back in high school; the thought was overpowering. “Look, anyone would understand; you were a scholarship boy, you needed the money.”

Clare shook his head. “I didn’t
need
the money; I could have spent the summer caddying ten hours a day. Instead I worked two weekends, then spent the summer reading Aquinas.”

Dylan glanced overhead at a passing
ignudo
. “The Church fathers thought well enough of the male form.”

Clare started to get up from the couch. “If you won’t listen, I’m going to bed.”

“I’m listening, Clare; really I am. Please.”

“Don’t you see—I spend all my days counseling students
not
to sell themselves. What will they think of me, when they see myself out there?” Clare shook his head. “A hooker sells himself for a price. These students—they sell their health for nothing. For laughs at the motor club.”

Dylan winced at that, but kept quiet.

“How can I ever look them in the eye again?”

They sat on together in silence. Slowly Dylan shook his head. “You know, Clare, this is why I can never believe like you do. One narrow way to heaven, and a million ways to hell. A God who truly loved His children would not set them in a minefield.”

Clare caught his arm, just like he used to that year, after class. “Dylan, you’ve got it all wrong. There’s a million ways to heaven. A mother raising four children; a toymaker connecting half a planet; even, God knows, a college president serving young billionaires.”

“You don’t say.” Dylan smiled ironically.

“There’s only one way to hell.”

“Which one?”

“Separation. Turning away God’s grace. Refusing to be forgiven. That’s the only hell there is, Dylan.”

54

Before the south solar dawned Tuesday, the courthouse pigeons cooed and huffed into the air a few feet, disturbed by the sleepless Clives. Lane Mfumo leaned against a pillar blinking at her toybox. As Jenny arrived, Mfumo stood and extended a hand. “Jenny Ramos Kennedy. We have a date in your greenhouse.”

Jenny looked her in the eye. “After the race is called.”

Rafael was there already, nodding and bowing like the experienced owl. “A fine day for voting.”

A line of students had formed already, many bleary-eyed from staying up all night with excitement. This was Frontera’s day. “Hope they’ve practiced their handwriting.”