Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  “I see you’ve all met my wife, Molly,” Curtis said. “I hope she’s taken care of your immediate needs.” Kane did not miss the brief glance of resentment that Molly turned on her husband.

  “Now,” Curtis said. “I know you’re all tired, but I’m sure you can see our position. We haven’t had any coherent information from Earth in eight years. We don’t know what’s going on there, or what you people’s intentions are.” He knitted his hands together in front of him and waited, but none of them showed any inclination to answer. Kane looked down the table and saw his own hostility reflected in Reese’s eyes.

  Curtis was sitting next to Lena, and Kane watched his right hand move within a fraction of an inch of hers. “We monitored some of your broadcasts as you came in. Kane and Reese we knew about, but I don’t know your name.”

  “Lena,” she said.

  Incredibly, to Kane, Curtis seemed to be taking up some sort of flirtation with Lena, within moments of having clearly branded Molly as his possession. Even more incredible was Lena’s obvious interest. She must have gone off suppressants too.

  “How about it?” he said to her. “What’s the story?”

  “Things on Earth,” she said, a little awkwardly. “I guess they’re okay. The big governments collapsed, and the corporations just sort of took up the slack…”

  “At the same time? Russia and America both?”

  “No,” she said, “not quite. Russia was worse off, with crop failures and revolts in the provinces. They must have gone down first, but nobody knew about it. Everybody was so used to not hearing about them, we just didn’t know. I guess the first time we really knew they were gone was during the North Africa thing. They would have sent troops, but obviously they didn’t have any to send.”

  “North Africa thing?” Curtis said.

  “Ask Kane about it,” Lena said. “He was there.”

  “Kane?”

  Kane shrugged. “Supposedly this UN group at Biotek Afrika—that was a big lab in Luxor—had made some kind of breakthrough in implant wetware. Biological circuitry, that kind of thing, tied right into the nervous system. The Red Chinese were almost as bad off as the Russians, all their ‘modernizations’ didn’t have enough public money behind them. So they made one last grab for world power and tried to take over the lab.”

  “And the US sent troops?”

  “The US didn’t have any troops,” Kane said. “The corporations sent their own armies. That was when everybody figured out that the governments were gone. There was a lot of rioting and all that, and finally the big companies just stepped in. Started policing the cities, paying welfare, reopening the hospitals and all.”

  “What happened in Africa?”

  “Nothing happened,” Kane said. “Everybody came home.”

  He didn’t want to talk about what had really happened, what it had really been like. It was still too soon, would always be too soon…

  Kane had thirty men and women under his command, part of a total Pulsystems force of nearly five thousand, veterans of mercenary firefights from Taiwan to Ecuador, from the rescue of company personnel to the quelling of riots on company property. But this time it was different, this time they were moving into a combat theater already occupied by armed forces of the largest corporations on Earth. And none of them was really sure what they were doing there.

  The decisions were all being made at computer consoles in air-conditioned offices halfway around the world, while Kane and five thousand others waited in tenuous pharmaceutical calm near the drowned city of Wadi Halfa, exposed again now since the Chinese sabotage of the Aswan High Dam. Their Mylar tents glittered between the melted mud bricks of the city like globs of mercury in a shattered sand castle. The air stank of rotting catfish and every day the enemy changed, from Hitachi on Friday to a Russian steel combine on Sunday, and still the only shots they had fired had been at cancerous Nile crocodiles where they lay stupefied in the sun.

  When the order came to move it took them all the way to Luxor, five thousand of them moving downstream in anything they could commandeer, from inflatable Zodiacs to crumbling feluccas, even a World War II landing craft that had been working as a ferry between the East and West Banks.

  Just before dawn Kane spotted the helicopters moving in from the west. He remembered wondering who they belonged to just before they opened fire, catching a glimpse in the sudden, harsh light of an exploding gasoline tank of the PEMEX logo, the Mexican oil cartel, wondering if they even knew who they were attacking, wondering if the raid had been launched by operator error five thousand miles away.

  Less than seven hundred of them survived, washed up at the Temple of Amen-Mut-Khonsu just outside Luxor. Kane, in agony from a laser burn across his left thigh, clutching his M37 so tightly he thought the plastic stock might shatter in his hand, lay and stared at the high-water lines on the columns of the temple, at the stylized beard of Ramses II, shattered by a high-caliber bullet, at the compelling and unintelligible hieroglyphics stained muddy red by the rising sun.

  Beyond the temple lay the fragrant, smoking ruins of the village where Biotek Afrika’s cooks and day laborers had lived, their cauterized bodies now scattered over a square mile of DMZ. Beyond that lay the walls of the Biotek compound, breached by mortar fire and melted by beam weapons, manned by frightened Europeans in lab coats or street clothes, their M16s and Ingrams chattering harmlessly into the dirt.

  Kane waited for orders to come through the receiver clamped to the mastoid bone behind his ear, the sunlight burning into his leg, the tension building in him, desperate with the need to turn his fear and pain and confusion into the clean lines of laser fire and the purifying glow of thermite.

  The sound of helicopters came to him there, freezing his blood. He could see the sickly green of their fuselages and knew they were the same PEMEX machines, knew that this time there was no escape, not inside this giant, roofless pachinko machine of ancient sandstone. He set his back against the swollen base of a column and raised his gun.

  What had happened to their communications? What sense was he to make of his own death when it came to him like this, anonymously out of the sky? He waited for a shot but the chance never came.

  Instead the copters veered wide around the Temple and began to rake the Biotek complex with withering fire. Kane rolled onto his elbows, blinking. He hadn’t been mistaken, he could see the PEMEX logo as the pilots swooped low over the burning buildings. A new deal, then, another turn of the wheel.

  In seconds the way was open. Kane’s last memory was of standing sentry duty inside a white tiled lab while one of Morgan’s techs dumped the Biotek computers in a continuous high-speed transmission, aimed at a relay satellite that would bounce it on to Houston, while the air around him steamed with CO2 from the chunks of dry ice that littered the floor, thrown out as the fragile living circuits were looted from the cryogenic vaults and stuffed into anything that would hold the cold.

  He never saw the explosion that split his skull, remembered only a flash of light and nausea that existed outside of time, a memory still in reach as he sat there in the Martian sickbay, staring at Curtis.

  “I don’t understand,” Curtis said. “If nothing happened there, why was it so important?”

  “It wasn’t what happened in North Africa that was important,” Takahashi said. “It was what happened afterward. In point of fact, a lot did come out of it—Pulsystems moved into a whole new field of technology, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is that North Africa showed the world where the real power lay.”

  “I didn’t get your name,” Curtis said.

  “Takahashi. Vice president at Pulsystems. I’m in charge of this mission.”

  “Not Reese?”

  “No,” Reese said. “I’m just here for the ride. It’s Morgan’s mission, and Takahashi is Morgan’s man.”

  “Then I guess I should be talking to you,” Curtis said. “You’re obviously the one to tell me what this is all about.”

 
; Takahashi shrugged. “It’s like Lena said. Things have stabilized with about fifty percent employment and a guaranteed income. The standard of living certainly isn’t what it was fifteen or twenty years ago, but it’s on the way up again. The worst is over, and a company the size of Pulsystems has to look for new opportunities for growth. The NASA hardware was on hand and it was the decision of the Chairman that we would take the first steps toward reopening space.”

  “More than that,” Lena said. “We had to see what had happened to you, to rescue any survivors—”

  “You’ve come to save us,” Curtis said.

  “Sure,” Reese said. “Why not? Don’t you need saving?”

  “As a matter of fact, no. But I would have thought a rescue mission would have at least two or three ships to bring back the rescuees. You didn’t even bring any supplies or special medical equipment.”

  “We didn’t know you were alive!” Lena said.

  Kane put his spoon on the table. “You’ve already been through the ship, then.”

  Curtis ignored both of them. “In fact, you didn’t even have enough propellant to slow yourselves down. We tracked you all the way through that aerobraking stunt. My guess is you didn’t have enough stages for the ship. Which tells me that your man Morgan isn’t building any new hardware, just using up the leftovers. Now tell me, does that sound like an ongoing space program to you?”

  The worst part of this, Kane thought, is that he’s right. Just what the hell are we doing here?

  “As far as Chairman Morgan is concerned,” Takahashi said, “he undertook the entire expense of this mission himself. If it’s successful, he should be able to get funding from some of the other majors. When that happens, there will be time for fabricating new hardware.”

  “And what,” asked Curtis, “constitutes a successful mission?”

  “We found a surviving colony up here,” Reese said. “I’d call that a pretty big success in itself. Wouldn’t you?”

  Curtis stood up. “I’m sure you all need some rest.” He looked at Lena. “We’ll talk more later. If there’s anything you need, just let me know.” Kane wasn’t sure if the offer was for Lena alone or extended to all of them. “Molly?” Curtis said. “Are you coming?”

  “I’ll be along,” she said, and Curtis left.

  She stood behind Reese and put one hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. He’s gotten worse, hasn’t he?”

  “I never knew him all that well,” Reese said, “but yeah, he seems to be losing whatever he had. Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know. He’s changed. I don’t think he ever meant to put himself in a position of power. But once he got there—it’s like he can’t do without it now.”

  “Of course he’s got a point,” Lena said. “This whole thing is suspicious. I mean, if Morgan somehow knew they were alive, it would explain why he was so desperate to get here. But why us? What does he expect us to do without ships to evacuate them or supplies or anything else?”

  “Ask Morgan,” Reese said. “I don’t know.” He took Molly’s hand and held on to it.

  Kane wondered if the warmth between Reese and Molly was the remnant of something sexual. It seemed unlikely; she would have been barely twenty the last time Reese saw her, less than half his age. Kane found himself resenting the intimacy, partially from sexual attraction to Molly, partially because of the distance he still felt between himself and Reese. And then there was the overwhelming sense of alienation that Curtis had given him. He not only didn’t belong here, but his connection with Morgan made him an object of suspicion and anger.

  “You’d better get some rest,” Molly said to Reese, squeezing his hand and letting it go. Then she turned and smiled at Kane. “Take care,” she said. Kane nodded and watched her walk away.

  “We have to get back to the ship,” Kane said. “We need to tell Morgan what’s happening.”

  Reese shrugged.

  “I’ll go,” Takahashi said. “I’m in the best shape for it, and it’s my job.” Kane didn’t argue with him, and neither did Lena or Reese. “The question is, what are we going to tell him?”

  “Tell him they don’t want us,” Kane said. “Tell him we might as well pull out.”

  “We don’t know that,” Reese said. “The only one we’ve really heard from is Curtis. He doesn’t speak for the whole colony, regardless of what he thinks.” He stood up, steadied himself for a moment on the edge of the table, then walked cautiously back to his cot.

  “Lena?” Kane asked.

  “I don’t know. All I know is I don’t want to go back on that ship again. Right now it feels like I never want to go, and I expect I’m going to feel that way for a while.”

  “I’ll tell him we’re okay,” Takahashi said. “I’ll say the colony’s functional, I’ll say we’ll get back to him. If he wants any more than that, I’ll tell him he’ll have to wait.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Kane said. He finished Reese’s soup and drank most of his water. Nine months of zero-G had cost him a tenth of his blood plasma, and it had left him enormously thirsty.

  On his way back to the cot he dialed the lights down to a pale glow. He was exhausted; whether he wanted to or not, he was going to have to sleep again. He closed his eyes, felt the soft texture of the darkness.

  He couldn’t remember having dreamed, wasn’t sure if he’d actually been asleep or not. The hand shook him gently by the arm again and the voice whispered, “Kane?”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Quiet, now. Don’t wake the others.”

  He blinked, focused on a tall, tanned woman with dust-colored hair. “Who are you?”

  “Dian,” she said, staring at him intently, as if the name should mean something to him. “You are Kane, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Listen, we need to get on with this thing. I’m starting to get really paranoid.”

  “Paranoid?”

  “Curtis is suspicious. We’ve got to move soon. And I for one want to get the hell out of here.”

  Kane was fully awake now. “Maybe there’s some kind of misunderstanding here. Am I supposed to know you?”

  The woman rocked back on her heels. Her eyebrows were so light that Kane had trouble reading her expression. “Okay,” she said, tilting her head and raising one hand apologetically. “If that’s the way you want to play it. It’s your show. But for God’s sake don’t wait around too long, okay? Before this whole thing falls apart on us.” She stood up smoothly, blending in with the shadows, and Kane was left with nothing but a faint afterimage on his retinas.

  He got shakily to his feet and moved to the pile of belongings that they’d brought from the ship. His bag was in the middle, and as he lifted it he could feel the weight of the pistol inside. He carried it back to the cot and spread it open on the floor beneath his feet.

  He was not hallucinating. Something was going on that no one had told him about; the gun, and Morgan’s subliminals, and the woman named Dian were part of it. He took the pistol out, repelled by its dark gleam and oily scent, wrapped it in a dirty T-shirt, and stuffed it under the mattress of his cot. Curtis had searched the ship; apparently they hadn’t gone through the bags yet but it would only be a matter of time before they did.

  Kane lay back, conscious of the bulk of the gun against his left hip. The princess, he thought bitterly, and the pea.

  Dian obviously had at least some of the story. In the morning he would get what he could from her. For the moment he was too tired even to put his duffel away. He closed his eyes, drifted.

  A cool breeze swept down out of the pines. He stood for a moment on the narrow path and savored the paradox of the sun’s warmth and the air’s chill. The Shinto temple stood only a few yards away, its long, low walls no more than a palisade of bamboo, the thatch of its roof brown and in need of replacement.

  The name of the temple was Atsuta. He was here on the instructions of his dying father, stopping on his way east before confronting the Ainu aborigines who were said to b
e as fierce as the bears they raised from cubs and then strangled, smearing themselves with the blood, even drinking it. The impurity of it nauseated him.

  With manicured, tattooed hands, he removed his sandals and entered the temple. The air inside, musty and chill, made him draw his robe closed over the tattooed serpent that wound its way around his chest. He could feel the spirits of the kami moving through the ancient, gnarled trees around the temple, whispering to him in an indecipherable language.

  He squatted in front of the shrine itself, a wooden box the size of a child’s coffin, its shelves containing the heads of snakes, bottles of pink and scarlet dyes, and a crude painting of a waterfall. The shrine was dedicated to Susa-no-wo, god of the plains of the seas, born from the snot of Izanagi, the last of the first gods. He began to pray, as his father had instructed him.

  The screeching of a hawk shattered his concentration. He looked, saw the hawk flying straight at him through the open door of the temple, wings back, talons extended. At the last possible moment, the bird veered up and burst through the rotten thatch of the roof, releasing a cascade of ill-smelling straw.

  A single shaft of light fell into the shrine.

  He put out one hand and touched the dried yellow monkey skull that lay in the circle of light. He felt a latch click. The shrine trembled for an instant, and then a side panel fell away, and a long, narrow object fell into his lap.

  A sword.

  He saw the eight-headed snake, as big around as a grown man, its fangs dripping venom, saw Susa-no-wo slashing the monster to pieces, saw him taking the sword, Kusa-nagi, from the tail of the snake.

  He saw again the hold of the ship, the tray, the goblet, the pike.

  He screamed.

  FIVE

  BY THE TIME Molly got to the sickbay, they had Kane sedated and strapped to a gurney. The room stank of fatigue and worn tempers. Reese sat on the edge of his cot, head down, arms on his thighs; Lena and Takahashi were at the table, not looking at each other.

  “What happened?” she asked.