The Highest Frontier (2 page)

“ToyNews—From our box to yours.” They were going live. The anchor put his hands at his sides and leveled his chin. “Clive Rusanov, here in Somers, New York, with an exclusive report from presidential granddaughter Jenny Ramos Kennedy.” And great-granddaughter of another, Jenny added to herself.

Clive hovered in the toybox, his view spliced next to hers, as if he were there on the spot with her instead of across the country in his L.A. studio. Jenny’s tall elfin form was the very image of her culture source, her mother’s grandmother, President Rosa Schwarz. In all, three presidents and four senators in her family tree. Only her eyes were her own, her own eyes dark and furtive as an ancient Arawak in the caverns of Cuba, her mother’s home state. At Jenny’s right ToyNews spliced a view of the downtown Somers elephant, Old Bet, atop her wrought-iron pedestal: the town’s famous statue of the first circus elephant in America. The little elephant perched high above, like a Manhattanite trying to escape the flood.

“Ms. Ramos, in the spirit of her presidential clone source, does her part to rid the Earth of our planet’s most toxic invader.” Actually, President Schwarz had banned carbon emissions and built the first spacehab. “Ms. Ramos, do you believe we’ve turned the corner in the War on Ultra?”

The press prompt scrolled:
As you know, Clive, my family
 …

“As you know…” Whispering would not do. Her stomach knotted, but she tried again. “As you know, Clive … my family has a long tradition of leadership protecting Earth’s precious global environment.”

The pollmeter, collecting brainstream from all the millions of listeners, rose a few tenths of a unit. People wanted to help the environment.

“And so … I will do any small part I can to help, like anyone in Somers would do.” Her eyes lost track of the prompt, and her long lashes fluttered. Jenny was no Rosa; a gene missed in the embryo made her freeze in public. “Public mutism,” on chromosome 18. The settlement had doubled her trust fund.

Clive’s immaculately combed head nodded knowingly. “Your last day on Earth, before heading up to college at the Firmament.” “Firmament” was the Centrist word for the sphere of the biblical heavens that centered on Earth. Centrists now held the Senate and the White House.

“College in orbit,” Jenny corrected. Of course Clive knew better, but he always gave equal time. “In orbit around Earth, third from Sol, Orion Arm, Milky Way.”

The pollmeter dipped precipitously. Clive smiled with a knowing nod. “The brightest star of two presidential clans.” Actually, three. “And here for comment is New York assemblyman Ned Tran.”

There stood Jenny’s suited neighbor, his height, like Clive’s, stretched to equal hers. Ned Tran had led the fight to make public schools teach that Earth went around the Sun. “Thanks, Jenny,” the assemblyman was saying, “for your contribution to Somers ultraphyte eradication.” Jenny had run Tran’s Unity campaign against the Centrists, had tied hundreds of purple balloons, had sent thousands of Toynet thank-yous. He’d won by four votes.

“Those ultras,” Tran went on, “destroyed our ozone and poisoned half our country.…” Actually, the seed from outer space had taken advantage of Earth’s own ozone loss to sprout on this planet and drink the UV, but
nunca lo corrijas
. “But thanks to the efforts of citizens like you, Jenny, this little Somers corner of the Milky Way is ninety percent ultra-free. Another victory in the War on Ultra. Another great reason to reside in Somers, convenient to the Big Apple yet a tidy distance from the next methane quake.” And, he might have added, still far from the parched Death Belt that stretched from Nevada to Tennessee.

The assemblyman faded out, presumably drawing less stream from the pollmeter than the Ramos Kennedy star. “Jenny,” observed Clive, “your family has made more than its share of sacrifices for the public good.” Old Bet now appeared, spliced next to the crowned head of La Liberté, whose feet had emerged just last spring thanks to new pumps at the seawall. Open water—the sight always hit Jenny in the gut. “Your late brother saved how many lives when the seawall broke? How does it feel, going off to college without him?”

Jordi Ramos Kennedy, the cultured likeness of his presidential grandfather, Joe Ramos, beneath whose desk George had played. His speeches already drawing crowds, Jordi was addressing a Unity rally in Battery Park when the methane quake hit. Ocean warming and deep-sea mining had destabilized the vast methane ice deposits on the sea floor. The crowd had ten minutes to empty the park and get upstairs before the waves breached the seawall and filled Manhattan like a bowl. Jordi had slipped the DIRGs and run along the beach, calling out, until he was swept out to sea.

Her eyes found the prompt again. Emphasize the consonants, her mother always said. Jenny expelled each word. “I … am … proud to remember, Clive, that Jordi left his estate to the Manhattan restoration fund.”

The pollmeter rose cheerfully. Everyone liked a hero. Jordi, who’d lost his life saving others. And Jenny, the twin who lived.

Abruptly she pulled the diad off her forehead. Lights vanished and silence fell, while the diad lay buried in her clenched fist, its brainstream cut off. No more polls, EMS calls, or notes from her ten thousand playmates. Only the August sun shone, and cicadas keened in the kudzu jungle. Enough of Clive; he’d got what he needed, and he’d edit it to make the family look good. Jenny sprinted back into the house, dodging stray kudzu vines.

She passed the kitchen, where the salt was now kept in a locked safe; one shaker held enough of the limiting nutrient to grow a thirteen-cell ultra to twenty-nine. Then she mounted the stairs, step by step, each step a singular event in the silent world. She looked once more around the Lincoln Bedroom furniture she’d uploaded to college: her portrait of Rosa above the desk, her favorite cups and balls trick, her science fair prizes, and Jordi’s slanball trophies. In the spacehab, all her things would print out in amyloid, a bacterial protein that self-assembled any form. Amyloid desk, amyloid trophies, amyloid snacks for her fridge.

Live organisms would not yet print out; nothing more complex than a flu virus. But three of her orchids would join her on the space lift, up the anthrax to Frontera: her prize-winning Blood Star, the sweet-smelling vanilla, and the giant vanda with its plate-sized purple blooms. Frontera, the first college on the high frontier, with its own Olympic slanball court in micrograv. Frontera College might outlast life on Earth, with Earth’s methane quakes, death belts, and invading ultraphytes.

2

Early Sunday morning, Jenny rose in the lift climbing the anthrax bacteria from Earth to orbit. The bacteria with their nanotube cell walls had first been engineered at Fort Dietrich to test defenses against weapons-grade anthrax. Now the anthrax grew kilometers long out in space. Self-healing cables were just the thing to hoist freight up through Kessler debris, for growing cells soon replaced those severed. Jenny’s mother had managed the Anthradyne IPO, the first anthrax farm in outer space.

From the deck, Jenny stared down through the star-studded dark. Below lay the Pacific like a scoop of blueberry ice cream, the Galapagos sticking out. To the east, on the Americas, black solarplate marked the growing death belts of the Southwest and the Amazon. Where nothing could grow, build solarplate to power cities and spacehabs. But the solarplate absorbed light that would have been reflected, emitting heat, and accelerating the Death Belt’s creep.

Above, around the cords of anthrax, dots of light exploded as Homeworld Security lased bits of Kessler rubble, fragments of old spacecraft that had multiplied over the past century. Out of the dark grew a bright solid object, a cylinder with rounded ends like a medicine capsule: the spacehab Frontera. The capsule gleamed purple, its outer layer full of microbes that turned sunlight into power. A bright flash where something hit and vaporized. At the capsule’s midline gleamed an eagle feather, like the feather on her tax window. Every toybox was full of tax windows; some people played half their paycheck, the legal limit. But the more adventurous played off-world, where anything goes. Frontera’s feather marked the Shawnee casino that had financed the spacehab for the state of Ohio. Frontera was Ohio’s high frontier.

Jenny clutched her pot of Blood Star,
Cattleya stellarubra,
each flower a crimson trumpet with five white petals. She’d named it for Cuba’s state flag. The petals pressed against the isolation bag, required till the plant passed quarantine. After that, the Life professor had promised, Jenny could keep the plants in her room. Frowning, Jenny held the bag up for a closer look. The bag brushed her face, swollen by micrograv, while her hair floated up around her ears. She chewed her lip pensively, a habit she had planned to quit back in Somers High. But now high school was thirty thousand klicks below, and college lay straight ahead, within that microbial capsule.

“Docking in twenty minutes.” The diad was snug on her forehead, feeding her brainstream. “Please return to your seat.”

Jenny turned her head, and her hair swung around her face. She pressed the orchid to her chest, where the smartgrip held it fast. One handgrip to the next, she floated back down the rabbit hole, the Frontera capsule floating ahead in her toybox. Along either side sat the passengers: new students playing a Phaistos disk, while their anxious parents finished their breakfast; colonial farmers a head shorter than she, their arms strapped with power bands to harvest their body motion; and taxplayers in head feathers glowing red, green, and blue, ready to hit the slots at the Mound. You could tell who was new to micrograv, those who flailed their limbs and spun around helplessly, then reached for their sick bags. Jenny had years of practice from slanball. Slanball in micrograv; the top high schools and colleges sent teams to practice in spacehabs, like the New York–based Towers. Only Frontera College had its own slanball court, with a spectacular view, a full kilometer “down” all around.

“ToyNews—From our box to yours.” Her toybox opened a window at upper right. ToyNews was set to her profile: The national and state races, the Antarctic war, ultraphytes, orchids, and any mention of the so-called “firmament.” No ads, just the unseen sensors that tapped your response.

The anchor appeared with his broad smile and hairstyle sixteen: emerging tragedy. This time, Jenny was just a listener. “Breaking news: A Formula One crew on their way to the Lunar Circuit has crashed.” A sickening view, as the ship exploded into blackness.

“Kessler debris,” explained a spokesman with a French accent. “A piece of an old transport shuttle.” Homeworld Security swept the skies for such fragments, like the chunk that had aborted the Jupiter launch. Even so, chunks fell to Earth daily.

Clive nodded. “According to NASA, the doomed ship crashed into the Firmament.”

“Tonterías.”
Firmament, indeed. Jenny brainstreamed her protest, knowing her slanball training focused ten times the intensity of the average listener. She’d add a good dose to the pollmeter. Then she squeezed her eyes shut until the box vanished. Her hand let go of the rails and her body hung by itself.

“Are you okay, Jenny?” her mental aide whispered in her head.

Jenny’s eyes flew open. “Okay.”

A disembodied face loomed before her, the image of Marilyn Monroe. The mental had only virtual existence on Toynet, a team of physicians to keep the Ramos Kennedy girl sane. The Monroe’s pink lips pouted. “Are you sure, Jenny?”

“Seguro.”

The Monroe-faced mental must have detected her plunging neurotransmitters. The last thing she needed was for it to alert her mother and make a scene. She slapped an R-patch behind her neck to send stabilizers into her brain. “Just answering my playmates.” A couple thousand unanswered notes had accumulated.
“
¡Hola
, Jenny! How’s outer space?”
Tusker-12, her best friend from Somers High; Jenny blinked back a quick
“Earth in space looks
chulo.
”
Around her head, all the passengers’ feet hung upward from below, and the ceiling lights shone up beneath her rotating feet. A trail of water led to some newbie’s open drink.

“
Chulo,
”
echoed her friend from Somers High.
“Wherever you go, you’ll always be a Tusker.”
The Tuskers, their old slanball team.

“Are you quite sure?” The mental always thought she’d start cutting herself again.

“I’m fine.” As fine as she could be, going to college without Jordi. “Go away.” To right herself, Jenny stretched her legs and arms till her hand caught a grip. She snapped herself around, then glided forward past the heads of floating hair, back toward her own seat. A glowing scarlet feather floated, until the taxplayer’s brainstream retrieved it. The Shawnee Mound Casino and Worship Center still financed the spacehab and a good part of the college, as well as the Ohio Statehouse and the IRS. President Ramos had founded the taxplayer system.

At last she saw coming up the two heads she knew best: her mother’s smartcomb, and her father’s brush cut. Holding hands; it was cute to have parents who still did that. Above her parents’ seats were tucked the other two bagged orchids, filling the bulk of her ten-kilo allowance. Jenny eased herself past her father into her own seat, affectionately patting down his two floating ties, red dots and red squares.

Her mother nodded to an unseen client.
“Sí,”
Soledad whispered to her toybox. “I know you could use an angel right now.” She brushed Jenny’s hair and inserted a smartcomb. “But an angel expects forty percent return with a three-year exit. And you tell me your Death Belt reclamation scheme will break even in forty years?” Soledad shook her head. “You don’t get it: Space is the only place left to build. Almost there,” she told Jenny. “Imagine. Don’t chew your lip,
hijita
.
No te preocupes
—everything will be fine.”

“Yes, Mama, everything will be fine.” Jenny gripped the orchid pot in her lap until her knuckles ached.