Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

They got in the copter. Kane started the motor, then took his hands off the controls. They were shaking.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Kane said. “Fine. Shit. I hate this. I asked for it, carrying something valuable around on the streets at night. Begging for trouble because my uncle pissed me off. Now that kid is dead, or worse, and it’s my fault.” He held his hands out in front of him until they were steady again. “It just pisses me off, is all. I’m fine.” He put the rotor in gear and they lifted off.

  Reese saw that the entire evening had been meant as a humanizing gesture on Kane’s part, an attempt to bridge some sort of gap between Reese and himself. But the attempted mugging had soured it, and Reese could feel Kane’s disappointment.

  But I can’t do it, Reese wanted to tell him. I can’t be your father, I can’t be responsible for what you are or for what you want to be.

  For the next two weeks Reese pushed them harder than before. At night, before sleeping, he focused his mind on a memory of Earth from shuttle orbit, 115 miles up, the cities reduced to simple color and geometry.

  Kane missed two days in the second week for an “unavoidable” medical checkup. Reese assumed it had something to do with the wound Kane had received in North Africa; his suspicions were borne out by a freshly shaved patch on the back of Kane’s skull when he returned to training. “I’m clean,” was all he would tell Reese about it. “Everything checked out okay.” For a couple of days he seemed sluggish and a bit confused, but Reese didn’t have time to worry about him.

  With nine days left until the launch, Reese could feel the tension start to build in his chest, like the pressure inside a rocket engine between ignition and the time they blew the bolts that held it onto the pad. It was shakti, spiritual thrust, and he’d felt it rush out of him every time he’d gone up.

  That was the night Walker came to him where he sat under the SIV-B, the third stage of the Saturn V booster, now rotting in drydock by the visitor’s parking lot. He’d brought his last bottle of Gusano Rojo mescal, Red Worm brand—though the traditional worm floating near the bottom of the bottle was yellow. He remembered how the mescal could work on the brain’s color map like a psychedelic drug, until the sky and the grass and the inside of his own eyelids turned flaming crimson.

  He’d been remembering his early days in NASA, the parties in sprawling, tasteless mansions along Memorial Drive, the perfumed and tinted society wives with hairline surgical scars on the undersides of their breasts, the cable interviews and charity luncheons and expensive scotch in plastic motel glasses.

  “You come out here a lot?” she asked him.

  “Just restless,” he said, and offered her the mescal.

  “That’s awful,” she said, tasting it. “Like a bile-and-vodka cocktail.”

  He literally could not remember the last time he’d been alone with a woman. Even the professionals had avoided the Hotel Casino and its deserted bar, and before that he’d just been traveling aimlessly, by bus and train, hardly speaking to anybody. He felt a sudden, familiar stab of desire and chased it with the mescal.

  “Were you looking for me?” Reese asked. “Or just passing by?” The words came out more dismissively than he’d intended, but he let them stand.

  “Wandering. I don’t sleep much. I’m out a lot at night.” She leaned back, her mane of dark hair catching the moonlight, tension bringing out the clean lines of the muscles in her neck. “I heard somebody over here and thought it might be you. So it seemed like a good chance to talk to you about something, something I didn’t want Morgan to overhear.”

  “You don’t think we’re going to make it, is that it? I don’t blame you. I feel that way myself about half the time.”

  “It’s not that. It’s something I found.” Her eyes were nervous, her mouth a thin, hard line. “Like I said, I’m out a lot at night. There’s a lot of history here, stuff Morgan keeps locked up, stuff I wanted to look at. Like the moon rocks over at the Lunar Receiving Lab, and that big padded room—”

  “The anechoic chamber. Where they test the communication stuff.”

  “Yeah. And Mission Control. He’s got some kind of recorder there, and it’s still running.”

  “What?” Reese could still taste the bitter oiliness of the mescal, but his brain was suddenly clear.

  “A tape recorder, it looks like. You want to see it?”

  “Show me,” Reese said.

  She led him across the courtyard to Mission Control. She looked good, wearing loose trousers and a delta top that left her sides bare instead of the baggy coveralls from training, but Reese’s heart was no longer in it. She hesitated at the corner of the north wing, and Reese walked past her, eager to get inside.

  “Wait!” she whispered, and he stopped.

  “What’s the—”

  “Camera!” she said, and he looked up to see the eye of a video recorder sweeping toward him. He ducked back out of sight, wondering if he’d been quick enough.

  “This way,” Walker said, and took him around the side to a fire exit. She pulled a folding knife from her pants pocket and slid back the tongue of the lock. “Watch your step,” she said. “It’s dark in here.”

  Every fifty feet or so a single fluorescent light burned; fire regulations, Reese remembered. They took stairs to the second-floor mission operations room, and Reese switched on a single bank of lights by the door.

  The outlines of the continents were just visible on the darkened mission board, navy blue against a black-on-black grid. The rows of CRTs were gray-faced and silent, the film of dust on the floor hardly visible.

  Except, Reese noticed, where a path was worn through it, leading to the communications station at the back of the room. He hurried to the console, afraid to hope, staring at the frequency on the digital display, the band reserved for incoming broadcasts from Frontera Base, not sure if he was really seeing it or just imagining it so strongly that even his eyes were deceived.

  “Do you know what it is?” Walker asked him. “What does it mean?”

  “It means,” Reese said, ejecting the cassette that was locked in the mechanism, already half recorded, “it means maybe, possibly, somebody is still alive up there.” He put a fresh cassette into the receiver and fed the other one into a playback unit in the next console. He backed it up, pushed PLAY, listened to the tape shriek and squeal.

  “From some satellite?” Walker asked.

  “It’s from Mars,” Reese said. “From Frontera. It has to be. They’re using some kind of high-speed dump.” Reese found the dial that controlled the tape speed and spun it down from 1-7/8 to 5/16 ips.

  The scream dropped to a woman’s voice: “need to change our schedule on the reply to fit with the new shifts up here…” Reese pushed the REWIND button and wound the tape all the way back. He knew the voice, the soft, breathless whisper. He shut his eyes and could see her face, lean and tanned, with hair a colorless shade between brown and blonde. “Dian,” he said. She was one of the physicists working with Molly, with engineering expertise that let her turn abstract ideas into physical reality.

  “You know her?”

  “Yeah. She’s one of them. They’re alive, and Morgan knew about it!” He forced down his excitement and started the tape, pulling up a rolling armchair and easing down into it.

  The tape ran for nearly fifteen minutes.

  There were six different transmissions, probably boring to Morgan and barely comprehensible to Walker, who paced back and forth tirelessly while it played. But to Reese they were maddening glimpses of a world he’d given up for dead years before, enigmatic references that sent his imagination spinning. And the names—names he’d thought he’d never hear again.

  “Molly’s alive,” he said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Who’s she? Old girlfriend?”

  “No,” Reese said. “She’s my daughter.” He looked up at her quickly. “Jesus, that slipped right out, didn’t it? It’s not something I ever told any
body before. Except Molly. Her mother was married to somebody else.”

  Not just somebody else, of course, but to one of the other astronauts, compulsively unfaithful while Jenny, with her physics degree and her national recognition, her red-gold hair and freckled shoulders, had nothing left but an empty Houston apartment and a stable of quarter horses in a pine forest outside Clear Lake.

  That was where Molly had been conceived, on a red plaid blanket spread over pine needles, a thick Gulf mist dripping from the branches overhead, a week before Reese’s first shuttle flight. Their hot, guilty desire had built through an afternoon of riding and gentle, brushing contact, culminating in the electric touch of her fingernails on his nipples, the smell of leather and horses still on them as he buried himself in her body, promising himself that this first time would be the last, not dreaming the promise would come true.

  Jenny’s husband had transferred out of NASA, and Reese found out about Jenny’s pregnancy in a scrawled note on the bottom of their Christmas card, a note that told him the child was his. There was no return address.

  It had taken him two years to find them again, another year of phone calls to persuade Jenny to let him see the child. In stolen meetings, he had watched Molly grow up, a chubby little girl with calm eyes and an amused tolerance for the affection of this large, awkward man that her mother watched on television. And through it all Jenny had been cold, distant, with no more for him than a tired smile or the gentle pressure of her arms around his back.

  Molly was thirteen when Jenny and her husband died in the fire in the Gerard K. O’Neill orbiting colony. He didn’t see her again until she showed up at NASA ten years later, transformed somehow into graceful womanhood, applying for a slot on the next colony ship to Mars.

  Their first meeting was an uncomfortable mixture of Molly’s childhood memories and Reese’s guilty search for traces of Jenny in her daughter. But within days they found themselves locked in a sudden, genuine friendship that surprised them both. They’d flown to Mars together on that colony mission, a crowded, hectic nine months that were the happiest Reese ever spent in space.

  Curtis had been part of that mission, of course, a younger, more dynamic Curtis, and Reese had watched with more than a hint of jealousy as Molly fell in love with him. Reese had been best man at their wedding, only days before he had to return to Earth.

  Curtis’s name was on the tape as well. Reese rewound the cassette and started listening to it again.

  “Uh, listen,” Walker said. “Shouldn’t we be getting out of here?”

  “This is unbelievable,” Reese said. “Something’s going on, something really big.”

  The first message made guarded reference to it. “Verb is toying around with some kind of matter transporter. She’s got a couple of the other kids working on it, and Molly and I are getting pieces for her out of the machine shop. I’d think it was a joke, but she’s already accomplished so much.”

  The second message didn’t add anything, but the third said that Curtis was “getting suspicious.” Dian went on to say, “The political situation up here is getting weird. Curtis is coming down on everybody, and we’re now smuggling stuff up here from the machine shop. Molly doesn’t want him to know what we’ve got going, and I think she’s right.”

  Reese had never liked Curtis; he was too self-consciously good looking, too much like Jenny’s husband. He didn’t like the idea of Curtis being in a position of power at Frontera, was desperate to know what was happening there, who this Verb person was.

  The next transmission had more details: “…she thinks it’s really going to work. With enough information about the terminus, she’s going to be able to deliver anyplace within ten or twenty light years. If it works, it could be a way out of here for all of us.”

  But by the next broadcast, a week later, something had gone wrong. Dian sounded drunk, despondent. “The first test was a flop, and Verb doesn’t seem as interested as she was…She doesn’t care how much it means to the rest of us…Christ, I want out of here. When are you going to start keeping up your end of this? Curtis would kill me if he knew I was leaking this stuff to you. I want a ship out of here…”

  The tape had run into the last message, something about shift changes and a detailed description of the power panel for the transporter, when Morgan’s voice came from the door.

  “Heard enough?” he said. He flicked on the overheads, and Reese blinked in surprise. “This is certainly cozy,” Morgan went on. “Sneaking around in the dark, spying—”

  “Cut the bullshit,” Reese said. “They’re alive. You’ve known all along and still you lied to me about it.” Walker moved away from Reese, her frightened eyes fixed on Morgan.

  “We’ve been over this, Reese,” Morgan said. “That was a management decision.”

  “Goddamn it!” Reese shouted. “Those are my friends up there! It was just bad luck I was on rotation when the recall came or I’d still be with them, right now. And I wouldn’t be putting up with your bullshit counterplots and corporate images and lies.”

  “That’s enough, Reese.”

  “It is fucking well not enough! I want to know what’s going on. I want to know everything you can tell me about Frontera and what’s happening up there. I want to know what this matter transporter is they were talking about.”

  “Or?” Morgan said.

  Reese took a breath. “Or I’m finished here.” Morgan turned his head, a quick, predatory movement like a bird’s or a lizard’s. His eyes locked on Walker and she stepped forward. “Get the tape,” he told her, and she ejected it from the deck. “Bring it,” he said, and she did. Her helplessness made Reese feel a little sick.

  “Think about it,” Morgan said, one hand on the woman’s upper arm. “If you walk out, the mission goes without you. You lose your last chance to get back to Mars, and all I lose are a few percentage points on the odds of this thing working.” He turned to go, then stopped in the doorway.

  “One more thing. You’re now in possession of stolen information, whether you stay or not. The gold standard is dead, and we’re on the data standard now. That means that what you’ve got is extremely valuable and if you try to pass it on to anybody, and I mean Kane or Lena or anybody, then you die. You and anybody you tell it to.”

  It had started in Mexico and it changed that night, changed the moment that Reese tried to bluff his way past Morgan and lost. He’d gone back to the mescal but been unable to finish it, its brutal anesthesia too much like the dark, slick edge of a long fall into nothingness.

  Walker, of course, was gone the next day. Dead, brainwashed, or transferred; Reese never knew which. The four of them, Morgan said, would be perfectly adequate to fly the ship.

  For the next eight days Reese worked them with cold precision, his brain shut down during the day, at night replaying the soft, breathless voice he’d heard on the tapes. “Ten or twenty light years,” she’d said, “with enough information.”

  He slept badly. Faceless shadows dodged through his dreams while he flailed at gelatinous air. In the training sessions, his concentration faltered and his reflexes turned erratic. On the last morning of instruction, he crashed the MEM simulator, and as he walked away he could feel waves of doubt and hostility move through the crew.

  But none of it mattered. That afternoon they took one of Morgan’s private jets to Cocoa Beach, with Kane as co-pilot and Lena in the left seat, claiming it would help her nerves. Morgan had his own cabin in the rear of the plane and stayed in it for the entire flight; Takahashi slept, or at least pretended to. That left Reese to stare out the window by himself, watching the fertile soil of Earth turn under the plane, wondering if he would ever see it again.

  At five the next morning they drove from the Sands Motel to the Cape, Reese in one car with Lena and Takahashi, Kane and Morgan alone in the second. By six o’clock they had changed to blue coveralls and were walking out to the shuttle on pad 39A.

  The sky over the ocean was turning gray; overhead Reese co
uld still see Vega and Altair. His stomach had the light, quivering feeling of hunger, excitement, and too little sleep. The Cape had barely changed, had been built to stand up under the exhaust of a Saturn V, and against its solidity he felt like a pretend astronaut, an astronaut who’d just spent the night in a motel, an astronaut who was being laughed at somewhere, by somebody, as he stopped at the foot of the service and access tower for a last look.

  The orange shell of the shuttle’s external tank seemed unlucky to him; the orange girders of the floodlit tower were harsh and jangling. He pushed past the others into the pad elevator, and together they rode up to the white room, where Morgan’s shuttle pilots were waiting.

  Reese nodded to the pilots and they gave him a thumbs-up signal and crawled through the small, square hatch into the orbiter. A technician fitted Reese with a soft white flight helmet, the dark ovals of the inset speakers protruding like cartoon ears. Then he swung into the middle deck of the ship.

  The orbiter was designed for level flight and now, sitting on end on the launch pad, everything was on its side. Reese climbed awkwardly up to the flight deck and into one of the two seats in the back of the module, just in front of the on-orbit station. Takahashi, the mission commander, would take the other one, and Lena and Kane would ride out the takeoff from the middle deck. The gray-green nylon seat covers reminded Reese of army surplus air mattresses; the four separate seat belts and buckles were clumsy and oversized beyond any necessity.

  He plugged in his headphones and they filled instantly with the jabbering of Morgan’s imported technicians, flown in from Houston two weeks before, less than half of them with any real launch experience. He wanted to pull the plug out again, knew it instantly for a disturbed and dangerous impulse, yet still had to struggle to resist it.

  Only the pilots had window seats. Through the front of the spacecraft Reese could see nothing but the reds and grays of the Florida dawn. He listened to the pilots move through the pre-flight check, relieved that he wasn’t having to gamble on his own nerves and reflexes.

  At T minus three minutes they switched onto internal fuel tanks, and at minus two minutes they cleared the warning memory. At minus one minute 20 seconds they had flight pressure on the liquid hydrogen. Eyes closed, Reese followed them through the sequence from memory. At T minus 55 seconds the hydrogen igniters were armed and at minus 30 the hydraulics went on. Then the long count, and at minus five seconds the main engines ignited.