The Highest Frontier (48 page)

At practice, Coach was getting tenser by the day. The Whitcomb Angels at Rapture; the team they had to beat. “The Angels are the toughest team in our division. Above all, they are sure they’re right—they’ve got God’s will behind them. Ever since the Flood.” The center for baraminology. Coach jabbed a finger at Yola. “But they’re wrong.”

“Course they’re wrong,” said Yola. “We’ve got our secret weapon.”

Jenny didn’t look at Ken. After this Sunday, the truth would be out.

Coach looked around at the players. “So what’s the one thing you
all
need to do this week? For your brainstream?”

Jenny knew, she had to close her EMS window. But she remembered the nitrate baby, and Donna Matousek’s husband, and the student near-deaths every Wednesday.

Before Wednesday Politics, Jenny stopped by to see the chaplain. The reddish region in the puzzle seemed to be filling out, with a brown shade along its curve, where Jenny had placed her first piece. An apple? A bit of green leaf would do.

“I’ve looked into the local voter regulations.” Jenny leaned forward in her seat and streamed the document to Father Clare. “Frontera is classified as a county; and the county rule is, everyone must go to the courthouse to vote, between seven in the morning and seven at night.”

Father Clare nodded. “That’s how it’s always been.”

“But then it says everyone has to record their vote in ink, in a bound paper book.” Kind of like Aristotle’s codex. “They even specify the ink—something called uranyl acetate. Isn’t that weird?”

Father Clare grinned. “Sounds weird to me.”

“But—” She stopped. “Isn’t this unconstitutional?”

“Not really. The parties still have public primaries; there’s the Iowa caucus, where you not only have to declare your choice, you have to gather with like-minded electors at one side of the room.”

“But that’s party business. This is the federal election.”

“The local mayoral election,” he corrected. “Though it works the same in November. It’s an old American tradition. Colonial Virginia had public voting; the sheriff called each voter up to state their choice.”

“That’s in here too. If the vote gets challenged, they call in the DIRGs to make everyone state their choice.” Jenny frowned suspiciously. “Don’t you know all this? Don’t you vote every year?”

“I vote,” he admitted. “I just never tried to change the rules.”

“And nobody else does either?” If she did, Jenny thought, she’d be called a carpetbagger.

“Go check the rolls, and see who votes. It’s all in that book, in the courthouse.”

Jenny thought she’d take a look. But just as she left for class, there came a call from Anouk. “Jenny, can you sub for me this afternoon, for Developmental? Just this once,
chérie
?” Anouk’s face in the window looked flushed, preoccupied. “Something important I must attend to.”

“Substitute? For your tutoring?”

“It’s just arithmetic. You can handle it.”

Toymaker Valadkhani’s class, which satisfied the general math requirement, was held in Toy Land, in the big toy-half conference room. The class was for students with documented limits to their math ability, usually associated with a known gene, although others could talk their way in. The room filled with fifty students, each of whom got a mat to sit on the floor, plus a box of smartsand.

Up front with her jumpsuit full of pockets, the toymaker pointed to giant numerals in the toywall. “Today, we learn negative numbers.” With a shovel she scooped a hill of smartsand from a large sandbox. The scooped sand turned red. She dumped the red scoop on the surface, a little red hillock. “Here I have one scoop of sand. Plus One. Say that.”

Everyone said “Plus One.” Jenny noticed several students she knew, including Suze Gruman-Iberia, as well as Rafael. Suze’s face had a bored look, like she was just here for the easy A-triple-plus. Rafael looked rather uncomfortable, and not just at seeing Jenny, who hadn’t spoken to him since Monte Carlo Night.

“Now, let’s look at the hole we left behind.” There was a hole in the sand, the same size as the red hillock she’d removed. “But the hole is not sand—it’s where one scoop got removed.
Minus
One. Suppose we add two scoops of Plus One to a
Minus
One. What do we see?”

The students got busy scooping sand. Next, they were adding three to minus five, and subtracting nine from seven. A student texted Jenny to check her work. Pretty soon, her box filled with texted questions.

Rafael still looked lost. Jenny wandered over, casually.
“¿Qué pasa?”

“This is not for me,” he said.

“Why not? Don’t you have to figure your car speed?”

“The toybox does that.” Rafael scooped a shovel full of sand, then put it back in the hole. “Zero is zero. How can something come of nothing?”

“Suppose you owe a debt; isn’t that a negative number?”

He shuddered. “Usury. Negative numbers are not in the Bible.”

Jenny thought this over. “We’re out in a spacehab. Try doing off-world arithmetic.”

*   *   *

After class there was still no word from Anouk. The northern light had gone red.

“ToyNews—From our box to yours.” Clive had a twist in his hair, the kind for a juicy scandal. “The FBI has opened an investigation into business partners of vice presidential nominee Sid Shaak, charged with financing an underage pornography toyworld including zoophily…”

Amid all her blinking windows, one had gone unnoticed. But Jenny saw it now. It was Mary’s Babynet text window.
“HELP ANOUK.”

That was odd. Why, Mary?
“WHAT IS WRONG?”

“HELP ANOUK.”

Anouk’s own window would not respond. Her coordinates were gone—she was nowhere to be found in the hab. Jenny called Security and Toy Land. Anouk was not in her cottage, nor her toyroom, nor any of the science labs. Yet she had to be somewhere. She could not access Toynet, but she still had her Babynet link to Mary.

From the Babynet connection, Valadkhani gradually short-listed the coordinates to a little-used toyroom on the third floor of the art building. The toyroom was somehow stuck closed. When they finally got the toyroom open, there lay Anouk, huddled on the floor with her head in her hands, in a state of shock.

Anouk went off to the Barnside, away for several hours. Upon her release, she begged Jenny to spend the night with her.

“So
horrible,
you cannot imagine,” she exclaimed, while Jenny sat cross-legged on the little Noah’s Ark sumak amid the Mandelbrot chairs. “I can’t remember a
thing.
”

“Tell me about it,” muttered Jenny.

“All I know is, I was getting so close—and when I tried to check it out at the source, they tricked me. Somehow they got me to go to that toyroom, and then—” She shuddered. “I didn’t know they could zap your mind long distance.”

Jenny shook her head. “You of all people should know better. What do you think? Where brainstream goes out, it can go in.”

“But I don’t
know
. What if they
dishonored
me?” With a shudder she wrapped her arms around herself.

“They didn’t steal your honor; they just borrowed it.”

Anouk clutched Jenny’s arm. “I do recall one thing. I wrote something here, on the sumak, where they couldn’t erase it.” She pulled up the edge of the carpet, beneath the flowered border. In black ink was some Arabic script. “What I wrote says, ‘Ultra at Naval Observatory.’”

“Naval Observatory? The residence of the vice president.”

“The Creep has ultra syndrome. Like Mary,” Anouk explained. “Security finds ultras at his residence—and his West Wing office. They even found one under the Teddy Roosevelt desk.”

“¡No puede ser!”

“Is it so surprising? When one is so obsessed with attacking a thing—”

“But not the West Wing!”

“Come on, Jenny, you know presidents can do anything; they sneak
chicas
half their age into the Oval Office. Your own great-grandfather sneaked elephants.”

Jenny put her hands to her ears.

“Sorry. But look, this is why Guzmán finally dumped the Creep,
n’est-ce pas
? Won’t your candidate like to know?”

39

So the Earth’s foremost superpower was run behind the scenes by an ultra nut like Mary, with hands that crept away like cells that might take off on their own. And look at his likely replacements. The vice presidential debate was on Thursday in Wisconsin. The candidates would probably stick this year; it was unlikely that the Creep could oust the governor of California. Still, Jenny thought, never underestimate him.

“Senator Shaak,” Clive asked, “do you believe the electorate will support a candidate under investigation for child pornography?”

Shaak had the dark suit, the Kennedy haircut, and the smile down pat. “Clive, as you know, public officials are always the target of insinuations and mudslinging, as well as nuisance lawsuits. The point is what we do in office. The last time Unity was in power, we passed the toughest child protection act in our nation’s history.” Rosa, again, another thing she’d got done her first year in office.

“And Governor Akeda,” Clive asked in turn. “Do you believe the electorate will support a candidate who can’t keep ultra off our shores?”

Aunt Meg smiled, and Aunt El kept decorously quiet. “As you know, Clive, ultraphytes have now spread through all fifty states, and to countries on all continents. But of course, that’s no excuse for us to give up. I’ve activated my state’s National Guard to protect our homeland and drive ultra into the sea.”

Not much new from either would-be vice president. It was especially depressing to hear her aunt reduced to platitudes. Jenny wished she’d spent the time on her homework about the colonial Spanish massacres in Cuba.

The next day, curious, she checked what HuriaNews made of the debate. Since her interview about the ultraphytes, she’d found that Lane Mfumo often had a different take. To her surprise, HuriaNews actually reported some parts of the debate that Jenny had missed on ToyNet. An audience member had asked the candidates about voter fraud; about reports that ToyVote could be penetrated. “A study showed that ToyVote tallies of votes could be intercepted, decoded, and altered without detection.”

To that, Shaak had said, “Unity has always demanded a physical record of every vote. Unfortunately, the current administration abolished the physical vote requirement, and not all states maintain it. Carrillo’s first act as president will be to reinstate the requirement of a physical record for every vote.”

Aunt Meg, of course, had a different view. “To preserve our freedom, we must stop voter fraud. Why, in some of our polling places, in the old days”—before Centrists won three terms—“security was so lax even an ultra could come in and vote.” Laughter from the audience. “But then ToyVote instituted a multiple redundant system of checks. They make absolutely sure that only qualified American citizens can vote, and vote only once.”

The argument was an old one. Perhaps signing a book in uranyl acetate had some advantages. But why had the entire exchange gone missing in ToyNews? Clive’s office did not respond to her call, but Mfumo did.

“ToyNews has a new policy,” Mfumo told her. “Their policy is they will report no stories on voter fraud within the six months preceding an election.”

“What? Why not?”

“To avoid being manipulated into undermining confidence in the election results. That’s what they say.”

It was true that months of challenges ate into the term of many elected officials. “But still, that’s censorship.”

“Self-censorship. HuriaNews offers a different view.” For those who listened. “Say, Jenny, have you got anything more on ultra? Your last interview played well.”

*   *   *

She was helping set the tables for Tom’s Friday night crowd at the café; Uncle Dylan had a Board committee meeting. “What do you think, Tom,” she asked. “What do you think of having to go in and record your vote in public?”

Tom brought out the pitchers of fresh flowers. “That should decrease turnout.”

“That’s how they did it in colonial Virginia.”

“Back then only a few white landowners voted.” He adjusted a salad fork here, a butter plate there.

“
Imagíne.
The Creep has ultra syndrome.” Jenny shook her head. “Anouk says I should tell Glynnis. But Sid is no better—he’s just been charged with running child porn. Everyone knew that already; how could they have picked such a person?”

“Beats me. How are your orchids?”

“
Muy bien.
Well, this is the last week for Father Clare’s campaign. After the Rapture game, I can spend afternoons knocking on the last few doors—”

Tom crossed his arms and slammed his elbows on the table. “What’s got into you? Is that all it is—election this, election that?”

She stopped short. “What do you mean?”

“I thought you were into chemistry. You haven’t mentioned the daily molecule all week.”

“Oh, right.” There was always another one.

“Like, the one I posted?”

“I see. I’m sorry.” Her face went hot.
Qué lío,
what a thing to miss. “Well, this is just till November, then it’s done.” For this year.

“It feels like forever to me.” Tom looked away. It had been a while since he looked like that, one of his moods; she’d forgotten. Finally he looked back. “What did your mother say about me?”

Her eyelids fluttered. “What do you mean?”

“I just want to know. She was here; she saw me. What did she say?”

“Nothing much.”

“She must have said something. What?”

Her hands uneasily gripped the tablecloth. “She said you were very nice.”

“What else?”

“She said you would live half as long as—” She broke off.

Tom said nothing. He exhaled thoughtfully. “That’s okay. After I’m gone someday, you can marry a First Lady. And run for president, like your great-grandmother.”

Her lips parted, but she could think of nothing to say. Before she could think, Tom had turned and strode back to the kitchen. The door slammed behind him.