The Highest Frontier (58 page)

“Father Clare,” began Jenny, keeping her eye on Mary, “those people with the syndrome who think they’re John the Baptist. What if one of them actually were? How would you know?”

Father Clare glanced uncertainly at her, then at the professor, who stood there in stony silence, her arms crossed.

“My mental saw it too, okay?”

He sighed to himself. “That will make this week’s third mental gone bad.”

“If you don’t believe me, and you don’t believe my mental, what do you believe in?”

Father Clare straightened himself and turned to Mary. “Mary, tell us who you are, and why you came here.”

“We are scouts,” Mary said. “To learn to live like natives.”

To live like humans—by “borrowing” their DNA? By becoming part human?
Dios mío y todos los santos.
“Show us what you really are.”

The hands. Jenny’s pulse raced.
“Anouk, grab her hand.”

From behind, Anouk grabbed Mary’s left hand. Jenny lunged forward to grab the right. “Your hand, Mary. Give it to me.”

Mary did not resist; she never did. “Be careful. This is stressful.”

The air vents hissed; Jenny hoped they were good. Holding her breath, she yanked Mary’s hand with all her strength.

The hand came off. The cell congealed into a blob, which Jenny hurriedly dropped on the floor. She let out her breath, and touched the cross at her neck.

The former hand crawled away rapidly, climbing up the tank in search of salt. Meanwhile, the rest of Mary collapsed into a snake form, stunned. The larger form trembled for another minute, then pinched off another “hand.” Now restored to an odd cell number, the body began to reform. A ghastly approximation of Mary’s head rose from the floor. “Humans … are … beautiful … but poisonous…” Her opposite end was re-forming a snake, starting to creep purposefully along the floor. The head started to collapse. The snake end found the edge of a floor drain. It shaped itself into a thin file and started to flow through.

Professor Abaynesh sprang forward. “Come back—you’ll get trapped down there!”

From outside sounded an alarm.

“Damn—they broke the seal. It met all Homeworld specifications.”

49

That night Dylan met with his staff. The terrestrial visitors from the cut-off debate had all returned safely home, and the ToyNet connection was getting restored. The coincidence with the debate troubled Zari. The DIRGs were tight-lipped, but Dylan wanted answers. He filed a terror report. It was about time Homeworld gave the struggling spacehab better protection.

Whatever the cause, this time, the cutoff had damaged the transponder and fried half the network—more than any brownout before. Zari had to order parts from Earth. In the meantime, another blow like that, and the backup might not kick in.

As power was restored, so was news of the bizarre turn in the presidential campaign. The two candidates had suspended their campaigns and retreated in seclusion; with what end, no one could say. The election was twelve days off.

But none of that had anything to do with the dilemma the college now faced. The kind of crisis that was the true test of a college president.

Orin wore his most skeptical look. “Are we really sure what happened? Amyloid can play all sorts of tricks.”

“The readings are clear,” Quade assured him. “The laboratory recorded the whole transformation. The quasispecies development is fascinating.…”

Poor Clare, to have witnessed such a horrible thing; a “student” he’d worked with. And the students present, even Jenny; they’d all need counseling. Nora looked grim; she’d spent weeks trying to train an ultra to act like a human being.

“What if there’ve been other cases?” wondered Helen. “Those ‘mandrakes.’”

“She used Babynet,” pointed out Zari. “Text only, but still. That means she had some kind of human-like brainstream coming out. How could a ‘mandrake’ imitate that?”

The staff pondered this.

Dylan added, “The omniprosthesis institute who claimed responsibility for her does not return calls.” The one with ties to the vice president.

“I’ve suspended all classes in Reagan,” Helen added.

“And the laboratory?”

Quade said, “Homeworld DIRGs cleaned out the basement lab and posted guard around Reagan Hall. But the ultraphytes are out in the hab. For that matter, they were before.”

“But
how
?” demanded Dylan. “Look, a DIRG is one thing—” How they’d laughed at Amherst. “But how could our college have admitted an ultraphyte?”

Everyone turned to the admissions director. Recruiting in South Africa, Luis stood out in his spliced wedge atop Table Mountain, an island whose cliffs dramatically overlooked Cape Town. The beach was a surfers’ paradise, especially in winter when the temperature was habitable.

Luis tossed his wind-blown hair back above his sunglasses. “It’s not in our questionnaire.”

Orin was incredulous. “You mean, you don’t ask if they’re
human
?”

“We can’t even ask if they’re alcoholic or schizophrenic. They have to self-disclose.”

“Well, what did you think? Didn’t you even wonder?”

Luis hesitated. His eyes beneath his glasses could not be read. “I did wonder.”

“You
wondered
if she was human?”

“Look,” said Nora, “there are lots of students I wonder about, every day. Especially after Amherst. This could turn into a witch-hunt.”

Dylan nodded thoughtfully. “
Ahora,
what do we do now? A student disappears, and the hab is full of ultra. Do we send everyone home, close the college, and clean out the hab?”

Orin snorted. “Show me a home free of ultra.”

Helen added, “Mount Gilead and the Mound would have a say.”

“What, then? Do we tell the world our student turned into an ultraphyte and vanished?” Lurking somewhere, down in the salty substratum.

The staff flexed their fingers.

“You can’t tell the world about Mary,” Nora exclaimed. “FERPA regulation.”

A window blinked in Dylan’s box. Someone from Homeworld expected him in the toyroom,
ahora.

*   *   *

The dark glasses and the gray suit faced Dylan again, out of some undisclosed Homeworld location. Dylan’s hair stood on end; he rarely felt claustrophobic, but alone in a toyroom with Homeworld was not somewhere he wished to be.

“The cause of your disruption is clear,” spoke the mouth beneath the dark glasses. “A momentary transit of an Antarctic space drone crossed the path of your solarray power beam.”

Dylan stared. “An Antarctic drone? Isn’t that rather … far off course?”

The speaker went on as if he had not heard. “So your power goes out again, and your student goes ultra.” The dark glasses didn’t sound particularly surprised. “Such signs of instability have not escaped our attention.”

Dylan clenched his teeth. “Our toymaker has good evidence the shutoff was deliberate. There must be an investigation.”

“Terror, you say. And alien invasion? All in one day?” The head slowly shook. “On top of that, the debate was sabotaged by an illegal substance. From your students.”

Illegal substance? The frontier air?
Dios,
thought Dylan, another bombshell. But the vague phrase tripped his suspicion. “If that’s true, we’ll take appropriate measures,” he parried. “And we reported a new kind of ultra threat: Ultra can mimic a person.”

The glasses said, “This was an isolated incident. It won’t happen again. And it’s classified.”

Dylan’s thoughts whirled. “Won’t happen again? How do you know that?”

“It won’t happen outside your unstable habitat. I can tell you, Homeworld is concerned about your whole management—the town, the taxplayer site, and the college. We may shut you down any day now. A buyout is on the table; we advise you to cooperate.”

The Centrists wanted Rapture to buy out Frontera, the last heathen-owned spacehab. But where did Mary fit in? The ultra-
chica
who came recommended by the vice president’s own doctors? Dylan’s head spun; he had to break through somehow. “We can’t just keep quiet about Mary.” He took a breath. “People are concerned. They want to know.”

A line appeared in the forehead above the glasses. “No one needs to know.”

“Her aunt does.” Dylan swallowed. “Mary texted her aunt every day. Her aunt wants to know where she’s gone.” Dylan stared down the glasses as hard as he could, the pulse throbbing in his ears. He was bad at lying, a trait that had ruled out for him many occupations outside academia.

The seconds ticked by. Dylan saw a shift in the jaw, an expression that reminded him of someone, the Ferrari club president after the incident at the Mound. At last the glasses said, “You are mistaken.”

Dylan thought he’d gone too far out on a limb to stop now. “Mary’s aunt wants to know some other things,” he said quietly. “She wants to know why there is ultra at the White House.”

The toyroom burst into white, and Dylan lost consciousness.

*   *   *

He awoke to find Zari and Eppie Uddin looking down at him, the doctor’s scanscope clamped on his arm.

“Dylan,” called Zari, “do you remember?”

His head ached like the devil. “I remember enough,” he said, wincing as speech made his head worse.

“I cut the connection just in time,” Zari told him. “Before they did what happened to Anouk.”

“Nothing else from them? No other message?”

Zari exchanged a look with her wife. “I think we got the message.”

Eppie stuck a line into the scanscope on his arm, and Dylan’s head began to ease. “Ultra in the White House,” he mused. “How can it be?”

She looked up with a shrug. “Back when there were Arab terrorists, their cousins sold oil in the White House.”

The world’s greatest democracy, the pride of Teddy Roosevelt, had come down to this. With Homeworld against them, what could Frontera do? Could they get by till the election? Dylan raised himself upright. “We need to make sure Mary has an ‘aunt.’ Someone down on Earth … needs to know everything that happened here.”

50

At supper Friday, Ken and Yola silently spooned their amyloid. Yola had skipped practice to study for an exam. Tom had closed the café for another weekend; he was rattled and exhausted, and still getting his energy back. Jenny knew how badly he needed the money. She’d purchased some of the Kearns-Clarks’ vintage wines, on which Tom would get the commission and Ken and Yola would get the rest. Anouk sat with her usual ballet posture, no sign of strain that she shared the terrible secret of the
compañera.
She’d managed to drag Rafael away from his motor club table. His eyes sleepless, Rafael had that lost-in-a-toyworld look.

Jenny looked around at the amyloid forks picking up amyloid food. “So, um.” She swallowed a forkful. “Any thoughts on the debate?”

Yola’s fork paused in mid-air. She glanced at Ken. Ken kept on eating. He’d agreed to stay at Frontera, at Lazza’s with Yola, but kept to himself. “They said,” Yola began, “something about ‘the air of Frontera.’ The candidates said.”

Jenny quickly looked at her plate. Then she looked at Rafael. “What did you think?”

Rafael’s face struggled with itself, trying to look owlish.
“Tonterías,”
he said at last. “That woman said what everyone knows already—the Unity ‘big tent’ will take in anyone, even child molesters. Whereas Guzmán forgot himself and destroyed the Centrist vision.”

Yola’s eyebrows rose. “What vision is that?”

“The spacehabs change everything.” He sounded agitated. “Look, the Bible doesn’t say anything about what you do on a spacehab. Off-world casinos, zooparks, whatever. Why did he have to disrespect that?”

“So the Bible only applies to Earth?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” Rafael appealed to Anouk. “You play the numbers too.”

“I break rules,” Anouk admitted. “But I know what the rules are.”

Rafael took a breath. “What’s wrong with solarplate anyway? Why does it have to be off-world like a casino? Does that make sense?”

“It’s all in the numbers,” Anouk patiently explained. “Solar energy comes to Earth; but most of it reflects out. The difference between in-flow and out—the negative number—that sets our Earth’s temperature. If the Earth traps too much more of the sunlight—as in solarplate—it overheats.”

He blinked several times as if seeking one of his lost windows. “What about windfarms?” Marcaydo Windfarms.

“Windfarms just capture heat that’s here already. But it will never be enough for a hungry world.”

Yola looked away. “I felt sorry for both candidates,” she said. “It’s like, they each woke up and saw what a jerk they are, in front of the whole world.”

“Don’t feel sorry,” grumbled Ken. “Like drunks that sleep it off, they’ll forget soon enough.”

*   *   *

That weekend Reagan Hall swarmed with DIRGs and Homeworld drones, the kind Jenny had called down at her home in Somers, to hunt ultra. Still, her experimental plants had to get checked. Showing up at the lab, she found Anouk and Tom waiting outside facing a Weaver DIRG. Tom had his pile worms to check too. “What’s going on?”

“Only humans allowed,” said the Weaver in her firm contralto.

“That’s us,” Jenny affirmed.

“Prove it.”

Jenny shared a look with Tom. Anouk gave a delicate shrug, as if to say, “These
americains,
they cannot even tell what’s human.”

Jenny blinked for Dean Kwon. The dean looked at her with haggard, sleepless eyes, the look of a refugee who’d escaped untold horrors. “I told you, class is canceled. What do you want in that lab?”

“But we have to check our experiment. You can’t stop science!”

Kwon’s look turned suspicious. “Only a mandrake would go in there.”

“But—” In consternation, Jenny looked back at her friends. “You know who we are.”

“Do I? You were her
compañera
…” The dean looked more suspicious than ever.

“Look—let the DIRG scope us and see.”

Dean Kwon considered this, and the other students agreed to be screened. The DIRG got out her scanscope, similar to Jenny’s, only more advanced. “Very well,” Kwon grimly concluded. “You’re
adultos
. Enter at your own risk.”