Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  “We don’t know,” Reese said. He looked bad, she thought, necrotic, hypoxic. He needed sleep, not another crisis. But then the same was true of them all. “He woke up screaming and couldn’t seem to stop.”

  She picked up a used hypo from the table. “Valium?”

  “I gave it to him,” Lena said defensively. “It’s out of my medical kit.”

  Molly nodded and stood next to Kane. Even with his eyes closed, he had an intense, haunted look that attracted her. After ten years of the same faces, she thought, it’s such a pleasure to see a new one.

  She raised one eyelid. The pupil was dilated from the drug, but otherwise seemed to be responding normally to the light.

  “Did he say anything?” she asked. “Anything articulate?”

  “He said ‘no’ a lot,” Lena offered. “And something like ‘leave me alone’ or ‘get away’ or something like that.”

  Takahashi helped her roll Kane into the next room and shift him over to the holo scanner platform. She sensed that he was indifferent to Kane’s condition and was only demonstrating how well he’d recovered from the flight.

  She noticed Lena watching her as she connected the intake and outtake lines of the blood processor to an artery and vein on the inside of Kane’s thigh. Like a musician, Molly thought, watching somebody else on stage. “You want to start that for me?” she asked, nodding to the processor terminal.

  “Sure,” Lena said.

  Molly brought up the scanner and typed in a series of commands.

  “He’s anemic,” Lena said, watching the readings scroll up on the CRT. “The volume is low. Leucocytes up a little because of the ribs. As expected. But there’s nothing else wrong here. No alkaloids, no other apparent hallucinogens.”

  Molly watched a diagram of Kane’s body form on the scanner’s CRT, white lines on black background. The image of the body began to rotate on the long axis, the major organs appearing in green as the scanner worked in, the cracked ribs surrounded by the bright blue of damaged tissue.

  “What’s that?” Reese asked from behind.

  “Where?”

  “There. At the back of the skull. That yellow patch.”

  Molly called up an enlargement of the head and froze the posterior view. A small, flat rectangle of yellow was attached to the back of the right temporal lobe. “Jesus Christ,” Molly said.

  Lena came over to look. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A tumor?” Reese suggested.

  Molly shook her head. “Cancer cells are undifferentiated. This system shows them in red.”

  “What else could it be?” he asked.

  “Um,” Lena said. “You want a guess?”

  “Go,” Molly said. “We’re listening.”

  “What Kane said tonight about North Africa. He said nothing happened, that they all just came back. I don’t think that’s the way it was.”

  “What do you mean?” Molly said.

  Lena looked over at Takahashi. He was staring back at her coldly, impassively. “I heard rumors. They said before Biotek Afrika burned, Morgan’s people got what they were after. Implant wetware. Biological circuitry. Supposedly Pulsystems now has working organic ROMs.”

  “ROMs?” Molly said. “You mean there’s programming in that thing?”

  “I told you it was just a guess. But look where it is. Kane’s right-handed, so that’s the mirror image of Wernicke’s area in his left brain, his prime language center. The two lobes are connected, here, through the anterior commissures. So programming inserted where that thing is, in a basically unused part of the brain, would go straight over to the language center.”

  “And then?” Reese asked.

  “Well…stimulating that area of the right brain is supposed to cause hallucinations. Voices. People hear their dead parents talking to them.”

  “Morgan,” Reese said.

  “You—” Lena broke off, then started again. “Wait a minute. You think Morgan did this to him? To his own nephew?”

  “We went into Houston one afternoon. We brought back some kind of cylinder containing cryogenic material. Right after that he was gone for two days. That’s when they must have put it in him. Christ. He nearly killed a guy to keep it from being stolen. Do you believe that?”

  “You can treat it,” Lena said. “Stelazine or Thorazine or any of the anti-psychotics. It’s clinically similar to schizophrenia.”

  “What I want to know,” Molly said, “is what it’s doing to him. What’s it telling him? What’s it trying to make him do?” She glanced to her left, saw Takahashi leaning against one wall, his eyes narrowed as he watched the CRT display.

  He knows, she thought. Takahashi had said he was a vice president, and she suspected he was more than that. Pulsystems had always had major Japanese funding, and she had a suspicion that it had been a large infusion of New Yen that had held the company together through the collapse of the US government. Was Takahashi the watchdog for the Japanese faction? Just how important was he?

  Reese must have been thinking the same thing. “Okay, Takahashi. It’s too late to make any difference to anybody. What did Morgan do to him?”

  “Why are you asking me?” Takahashi said.

  “He wouldn’t risk sending Kane up here with an implant unless one of us knew about it. It’s not me and it’s not Lena. You might as well tell us.”

  Takahashi sighed. “All right. It’s pretty much the way Lena guessed it. But it was necessary. Morgan tried the new techniques on Kane to save his life. His skull was fractured in Luxor, not just cracked, but sliced wide open. Without the operation he would have been dead, at best a vegetable.”

  “What is that…thing?” Molly asked. “That yellow box?”

  “That’s the processor,” Takahashi said. “The programs are interchangeable. The first software they came up with was crude, barely let him function. When they get a more sophisticated implant, they can change it out, almost like changing a diskette. That’s what you saw Kane bringing from Houston. Just the latest update.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Lena said. “What do they need to put software in there for? That area has nothing to do with his motor control, or his language, or his memory, or anything.”

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” Takahashi said. “If you want to know that you’d better ask Morgan.”

  “Speaking of which,” Reese said. “Did you get through to him?”

  “I told him about the colony. He said to rest up and just play it as it comes.”

  “That’s it?” Lena asked. “Wasn’t he even surprised?”

  “Didn’t seem to be.”

  “‘Play it as it comes?’” Reese said. “That doesn’t sound like Morgan.”

  “Now what?” Takahashi said, flushing. “Do you think I’m lying about it?”

  “Why not?” Lena said. “You didn’t say anything about Kane all this time. That doesn’t really inspire a lot of trust.”

  “If you’d known Kane had a brain implant there would have been even more tension on the flight out than there already was. Weren’t things bad enough?”

  Lena walked out and Molly turned back to the scanner. She cut the power to both it and the blood processor and waited for the tubes to turn white before she pulled them from Kane’s leg. A single drop of dark red swelled up at the arterial puncture and she pressed a piece of gauze against it, feeling the tension in his sartoris muscle as his body resisted the Valium, aware of the heat of his half-erect penis, only a few centimeters away.

  “Takahashi?” she said, and he helped her move Kane back onto the gurney and from there back onto his cot. Most of the other patients in the sickbay had fallen back into sedated oblivion, but two of them were still awake, awake and staring with confusion and fear at the aliens from Earth.

  “Go to sleep,” she said to them, and the eyes closed. She turned back to Lena and said, “I’ll get you some Stelazine. In case he wakes up again.”

  Reese followed her b
ack to the pharmaceutical closet and blocked the doorway. In his black clothes he looked like an overgrown teenage thug, threatening but anachronistic, out of place.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “What about Sarah? Is she…?”

  “Still alive? Yeah, she’s alive.” Molly took a vial of Stelazine off the shelf and turned around. “It’s strange, Reese. It’s stranger than you can imagine.”

  “It’s not my fault,” Reese said. “I was coming back. You know I was. It just took me this long to get here. That’s all.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s not like there’s anything you could have done.” Her throat ached with an inappropriate desire to cry. “I didn’t mean it to sound like I was blaming you for anything.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “I know you do.” She’d expected this to happen, still had no easy answer for him. “I’m just not sure if it’s a good idea, that’s all. It’s like there’s nothing in her universe but physics. She won’t even let us call her Sarah anymore, did you know that? Of course you didn’t, how could…but…I mean, it’s all of them. All the…different ones, it’s like a badge or something. If you’ve got an extra finger or there’s a hole in your liver then you get to have a new name and then you’re in the club, and you get to live—” She broke off before she gave too much away.

  “Easy,” Reese said, putting a hand behind her neck and squeezing gently. The familiar gesture, taking her back to her childhood, made her feel instantly calm.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Really. I need to talk to you, too. There’s just been so much…” She was suddenly aware of the open door, of the others waiting outside it. “Tomorrow,” she said. “When you’re rested. We’ll talk some more.”

  “And Sarah?”

  “I’ll see. I’ll talk to her.”

  She pushed past him, handed the Stelazine to Lena, locked the closet and put the key away. “Tomorrow,” she said to Reese again, and then she walked back out into the fluorescent night of the dome. A sudden, powerful urge to see the stars sent her past the animal pens and into an observation bubble in the side wall. Here, in the shadows, she could see the lifeless plains outside and the deeper, colder darkness above them. This was normal. This was the way things were. How could she put that into words that Reese would understand? Because until he understood that much, he had no hope of understanding Verb, or Zeet, or Pen-of-my-Uncle, or any of the others. Having been the first man to set foot here wasn’t enough, the few months he’d spent in the dome weren’t enough, not even sympathy and love and gallows humor were enough.

  The lights were off in their surreal, high-tensile styrofoam cottage. She undressed and got into bed, hoping that Curtis was already asleep. He let her get settled and comfortable and then he said, “Well?”

  She jumped a little, in spite of herself. “We sedated him,” she said.

  “That’s all? I mean, you were gone a long time to just administer a sedative.”

  “For God’s sake, Curtis, I’m fully grown. I don’t have to account to you for everything I do.”

  “I guess that depends on what you were doing. I mean, if you found out something that was important to the future of the colony, that would be my business, wouldn’t it?”

  “You were listening, weren’t you?”

  “Not me personally. But I suppose it comes down to the same thing.”

  “So what do you want? A tribunal? Shoot me at dawn?”

  He came up on one elbow and dug his fingers into her arm. “Do you have the slightest fucking idea of what’s going on around here or not? Are you actually pretending you don’t know why those people are here?”

  “I know what they told me. But I suppose that’s not germane.”

  He let her go and rolled onto his back. “There’s a leak, Molly. We have to assume they know everything. Everything. And you know what pisses me off? What pisses me off is that I don’t think I know everything. I don’t even think I know as much as Morgan’s stooges about what those kids of yours and Dian’s are up to. Now isn’t that a kick in the ass?”

  “Theoretical physics,” Molly said. “I could write some of the equations out for you. Would that make you feel better? Because you wouldn’t get anything out of them.”

  “Quantum mechanics was a physical theory and it wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What are they doing out there? What are they building?” When she didn’t answer he sighed dramatically. “You really see me as some petty little Hitler, don’t you? Power crazy. You can’t even trust me with the discoveries those kids are making right under my nose.”

  Yes, she thought, that’s true. That just about sums it up. But she didn’t let the words out, afraid they might take on a life of their own, that they might betray her too, just as Curtis had.

  “You’re wrong,” he said. “You’re more wrong than you know. I still love you. Did you know that? You’ve made it where it’s almost impossible to get those words out without choking on them. But they’re true. And I care about this colony. The lives of everyone here are my responsibility.”

  Was it possible? she wondered. Could it be that he did still love her, that this was all her fault somehow?

  Then she remembered Curtis in the sickbay, his hand just millimeters from Lena’s, the sick knowledge that the new woman had aroused his curiosity, that he would pursue her and have her if he could, the way he’d pursued and had the others.

  Not for the first time she wondered what the word love meant to him, if it had a one-to-one semantic correspondence to a repeatable phenomenon, mental or physical, or if the word itself was everything, a self-defining verbal gesture. In physics, she thought, the first test is falsifiability. If you can’t prove it wrong, you can’t prove it right, either.

  If he could write out the math for her, she thought, then she’d know.

  “I believe,” she said slowly, “that you mean what you’re saying. But it’s going to take more than words to convince me.”

  “You don’t understand me at all, do you? You’ve got all your feelings so pushed back and under control that you think everybody else is the same way. Well, we’re not. What do you think it’s like for me? Eight years ago we pulled ourselves back from the edge of something that would have killed us all, and the only way we did it was by believing we could be more than some dying ghost town on the edge of space. The next two years were the best years of my life, and yours too, if you had the heart to admit it. Everybody’s. We were all working hard, and we could see the results right in front of us, hold them in our hands. To see those first crops coming in, the kid being born…”

  “Yeah, okay. I was there.”

  “Yeah. Well, I was there too. Do you think I haven’t noticed how different it is now? Alcohol consumption up about 50 percent every year, every year more Thorazine cases out in the fields, people late to work, people not coming to work at all, almost half the female kids showing some symptoms of anorexia—”

  “Right,” Molly said, wanting to hurt him, “and then there’s the people that spend all their time in the isolation tanks, tripping out, running away from the things that scare them.”

  “Okay,” Curtis said, “I’m not going to argue that right now. Maybe all this is just inevitable. Maybe it’s the human condition. But that doesn’t make it hurt me any less, make me feel any less responsible for it.”

  “Look,” Molly said, “we may be close to something, okay? But we don’t have it yet. It’s going to take a few more months.”

  “We haven’t got a few more months. They’re here, it’s happening now.”

  “We can handle them,” Molly said. “It’s going to work out.” Come on, she told herself. Can’t you be any more convincing than that? Even if you don’t believe it yourself?

  “It had better,” Curtis said. He turned away from her and was asleep in seconds.

  She wished she could escape into sleep that easily, the way she had all through adolescence. But more an
d more she was turning into her mother, who had roamed the house late at night and then been up again before dawn, always, in Molly’s memory, dressed in a faded blue cotton kimono and clumsy house shoes. Heredity, Molly thought. It’s not even the anger and frustration keeping me up, it’s simple heredity.

  She slept fitfully until dawn and then came finally, violently awake as the east mirror rumbled open. Her heart pounded, the noise of the hydraulics sounding this morning like the crack of literal doom, like the shattering of the plastic sky overhead, the end of the world.

  She hunched fetally under the sheet, her back to Curtis, telling herself it wasn’t really that bad. But her arguments lacked force. The order of her existence was collapsing—Kane hallucinating and under Morgan’s control, Reese evasive and cold, Curtis convinced of betrayal.

  Not to mention the second ship from Earth, a further, unknown disaster, still waiting in the wings.

  It’s bad, she thought. Genuinely bad.

  She put on a tattered NASA Constant Wear Garment and went into the kitchen, shutting Curtis behind the bedroom door. The light over the counter was on, silhouetting Verb and one of her friends as they ate .breakfast.

  Empathy again? Molly wondered. Or one of those synchronistic events that her physics is supposed to predict?

  “Good morning,” Molly said. The boy was about eleven, apparently normal, just sociopathic enough to prefer living in the cave with the more visibly strange. He was obsessed with electronics, and Molly and Dian used him in the construction of Verb’s devices. E17, she remembered, was what he was calling himself this week.

  “Is he all right?” Verb asked.

  “Reese, you mean?” Molly said, and the girl nodded. “He’s okay. They used aerobraking instead of rockets, and it was hard on him, but he’ll get over it.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “He wants to see you, too,” Molly said. Was something up? The boy stared down into a bowl of cereal and goat’s milk, pretending to ignore them. She had Verb’s promise not to talk about her work, and she had to trust her. There simply wasn’t anything else she could do. “Why is it so important to you? You weren’t but two years old when he left. I don’t see how you can even remember him.”