Frontera

by Lewis Shiner

  “You’re losing me,” Reese said.

  “Okay, an example. In a vacuum you get spontaneous pair production, a particle and an antiparticle. Like an electron and a positron. Virtual quanta, they’re called. Happens at random, they annihilate each other, and that’s it. But what if it’s not random? What if there’s a pattern, but it’s fourth-dimensional? What if you could quantify that pattern? Then chance is working for you, making random antimatter, but it’s not random to you anymore. It’s all the antimatter you need, free energy.”

  “What about conservation laws?”

  “I’m a conservation lawyer,” she said. Reese attempted a smile, but her humor only made him more uncomfortable. “It’s like potential and kinetic energy,” she said, “everything evens out when you annihilate the stuff again.”

  Reese badly wanted to go somewhere and think this out. Did Morgan know what Verb had found up here? Dian’s taped messages hadn’t really talked about the antimatter, but Morgan had obviously seen the implications. Why else risk millions on a flimsy one-shot mission, plant weird circuitry in Kane’s skull, rush the project into such a tight schedule? What had Morgan said? Something about Aeroflot wanting Mars as well?

  Of course the Russians would want in. If their espionage was even mediocre they would know, and they had probably decoded and translated the same radio messages Morgan had gotten. So how far ahead of the Russians were they? Months? Days? Hours?

  Reese took the diskette out from under his shirt, where he’d been hiding it since they landed. “What I heard is that your transporter needs information. It has to know exactly where it’s supposed to send something.”

  “How did—”

  He waved his hand at her. “Never mind how. I told you, the leak has already happened. The information is out there. Now. This is the map from the telescope on Deimos. It has the state vectors for every celestial object within a five-parsec radius, accurate within a couple of kilometers.”

  Verb took the diskette, turned it so the light glinted dully on its black surface. “What do you want me to do with it?”

  “Send me to Barnard’s Star.”

  SEVEN

  KANE COULD FEEL the lingering caress of the Valium in his veins, the long half-life of the drug still whispering assurances to his jangled nerves.

  He sat up in bed, relishing the pain in his chest, pushing back the skin of his face with both hands until his eyes burned and his cheekbones ached.

  The air was charged with information. A faint, hazy loop of melody seemed to be coming from somewhere to his left, high voices in a minor key, without words that he could decipher. He turned his head and the music moved with him.

  He was still confused, weak and disoriented. But his sense of purpose had reawakened, and for the first time since North Africa he felt he had a simple, straightforward series of actions to perform. The first was to find this woman, Dian, and make her tell him what she knew. Then he had to find the…the…

  He shook his head. The magic sword. The grail. The object, whatever it was. That was the Pattern. The woman would make it all clearer.

  Reese was gone. The others were asleep or sedated, except for a young Japanese woman in a chair by the door. A guard, Kane thought. He slumped down in the bed and carefully took the pistol out of the mattress and hid it in the back waistband of his trousers, pulling his hipari closed over it and tying the belt in a loose knot. Then he swung his legs over the side of the cot and sat up.

  “Ohayo gozaimasu,” the woman said.

  “Yeah,” Kane said. “Good morning.” So, he wondered, how’s it going to be? Is Curtis going to drop the pretenses and hold us under guard, or is he going to be subtle? “Do you think I could get something to eat? I’m starving.”

  “Sure. You’re Kane, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m Hanai.” She was thin, with the sort of round face that was more prized by Eastern aesthetics than Western. Kane returned her short, stiff bow, conscious of the pistol moving against his waist. “Let me get somebody else in here and we’ll find you some food.” She punched a four-digit number on the wall phone and said, “I’m taking Kane to breakfast.” She got some sort of answer and hung up. “Come on,” she said to Kane.

  He followed her into a hallway, admiring the graceful economy of her walk but unable to duplicate it. She led him into a wide, circular dining room supported by arching precast members along the walls. At one time it had been meant as some sort of communal gathering place; obviously the need no longer existed. The space had been broken down with Japanese screens or telescoping plastic baffles, isolating the areas around individual widescreen-video monitors mounted into the walls. Most of them were in use, filling the air with the clash of old-fashioned orchestrated cartoon music, synthesizers, droning voices.

  The stucco walls between the columns, what Kane could see of them through the tangle of dividers, alternated neutral colors with bright oranges, yellows, and blues, the paint now chipped and beginning to fade. The ceiling was rendered in a Maxfield Parrish cloudscape, depressing Kane with its transparent and rather pathetic nostalgia for Earth.

  “Communal kitchen through there,” Hanai said. “There’s usually plenty of eggs and vegetables. The good stuff people tend to keep at home.”

  Kane nodded. After nine months of solitary, introverted free fall, he found himself intimidated by the social normalcy of the three occupied tables in the middle of the room, by the seven or eight colonists drinking coffee and juice, lingering over their eggs and toast. He would have to walk past them, to pretend he belonged here, when in fact he felt hideously out of place.

  I didn’t ask for this, he thought. He walked into the kitchen, aware of eyes following him across the room, and put together a bowl of cereal, fruit, and goat’s milk. Then he went back and sat down across from Hanai at an unused table.

  She didn’t say anything as he began to eat. He was having trouble reading her attitude; she was polite enough, but at the same time she seemed intent on demonstrating the imposition he was putting on both her and the colony.

  Between bites he asked, “Do you know a woman named Dian?”

  “The physicist?”

  Kane nodded. A physicist? It made as much sense as anything, he supposed.

  “Sure. Everybody knows everybody around here. Why?”

  Earlier he had thought through a number of excuses, but he didn’t know enough about Dian to lie convincingly. He ignored the question and asked, “Could I talk to her?”

  Apparently she was not ready to abandon her ruthless politeness. “I don’t see why not. I can take you to her.”

  That would have to do, Kane thought. He had no doubt that Hanai reported directly to Curtis, but even so he could learn where Dian lived, find out something about her, maybe set up a meeting for later on. “What about these?” Kane asked, pointing to his empty dishes.

  “In the vats beside the sink,” Hanai said.

  When he came back from the kitchen, Hanai was standing by another of the wall phones. “You’re in luck,” she said. “She’s usually working with Molly but this is her menials week and she’s farming up in the Bronx.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The northeast section. I’ll take you over there.”

  At the outer door Hanai handed him an oxygen mask without explanation and he watched her to see what she did with the straps and valves. Then she opened the door and motioned him out.

  He’d been nearly unconscious when they brought him from the ship to the infirmary, and now, stepping out under the dome for his first real look at the colony, Kane felt only dismay. He’d expected something that looked like the future, and what he saw reminded him of a shopping mall in decay: cramped, faded, lived-in.

  “Is there someplace we can see out?” he asked Hanai.

  “Over there.”

  It was getting easier to move around. His ribs hurt, but the ache was constant, controllable. The only problem came if he moved his head too quickly, baffli
ng his inner ear and making his stomach lurch with vertigo.

  Hanai led him on a curving path around the central building, past two long structures near the edge of the dome. Through dull plastic windows, bowed outward slightly from positive pressure, he could see a small herd of goats, the females diapered to conserve their milk. The animals didn’t seem to mind the crowded conditions, bumping into each other, stumbling through the marble-sized pellets of their own dung.

  “There it is,” Hanai said.

  Kane caught up to her, stood beside her in an oversized window box built out between two of the bulkheads that supported the dome. Concrete benches had been set up along the sides, and the ground was planted in flowering cactus and yucca. Beyond the window, Kane could see huge chunks of ice, wrapped in green plastic and shaded by aluminum ramadas: the colony’s water supply. And beyond that lay the vast Zen rock garden of Mars.

  The land was more subtly alien than the cold white dust of Deimos, warmer, more like the deserts of northern New Mexico or Arizona. But the sand was too red, the rocks too dark and porous, the horizon closer but without promise, a desolation that went on endlessly beyond the reach of his eyes.

  For the first time he understood, not just intellectually, but viscerally, that this was all there was. No ancient races and lost civilizations, no canals, no hidden valleys with jungles and perpetual clouds. Just the dry, empty husk of a planet and the few fragile lives clustered under the dome.

  A gust of wind wrinkled the nearest plastic sheet and Kane, warmed by second-hand sunlight in the still air of the dome, shivered.

  “A little bleak for you?” Hanai asked. “There’s more interesting places. Like the Valles Marineris. But you wouldn’t want to live there.”

  “No,” Kane said, “I guess you wouldn’t.”

  He turned away and followed Hanai through the zigzagged paths between the fields. As they came up on a strip planted in beans, a dozen workers straightened up and stared at Kane, some with a distant, dreamy expression, others with obvious recognition.

  They know who I am, Kane thought.

  “Where’s Dian?” Hanai asked.

  The woman who answered her was short and thick-waisted, with limp brown hair cut to her jawline. “She didn’t show this morning.” The woman never took her eyes off Kane, even when talking to Hanai.

  “Goddammit,” Hanai said. “Why didn’t you report it?”

  Slowly the woman turned to face Hanai. “Hey, bag it, will you? I don’t give a fuck why she ain’t here. You want to phone it in to Curtis, you can fucking phone it in.” She bent over and jerked a clump of grass from between the orderly rows.

  The underbelly of Utopia, Kane thought. One or two of the others went back to work, but most of them stood and stared at Kane. Hanai blinked, twice, and said, “Okay, Kane, let’s go.” She broke into her smooth, gliding walk again, and this time Kane couldn’t keep up.

  In less than a minute she gained a dozen yards on him and Kane stopped, the pain in his chest glowing brighter like a coal under the bellows. “Hey,” he shouted, the amplifier chip in his mask clipping the high end from his voice. “I thought you were supposed to be watching me.”

  Hanai looked back and said, “If you can’t keep up, just wait there for me.”

  “What’s the matter with you all of a sudden? A little backtalk from one of the peasants and you come flying off the handle.”

  “Look, Kane, I’m not here to argue politics with you, okay? Just mind your own business and everything will go a lot better for you.”

  “What’s politics got to do with anything?” Kane said. And then he answered himself. “Curtis. You think he did something to her.”

  Hanai was already moving again, ignoring him. She ran up to the front steps of one of the maddeningly identical houses between the fields and pounded on the door. As Kane caught up with her he heard a low whistling noise, realized that it came from the edges of the door, which were bowing inward.

  “Look out!” Kane shouted as Hanai reached for the handle of the door. “It’s going to—”

  The door seemed to leap backward, jerking Hanai with it. Air rushed into the vacuum of the house with a roar that numbed Kane’s ears: The mask was nearly pulled from his face, and he fell to his knees, hunching over to protect himself.

  He knew then what they were going to find, but he wasn’t prepared for the sheer quantity of blood.

  It had pooled around Dian’s head as she lay in bed, face down, dead in the act of trying to crawl toward the floor. The inrush of air had blown crusts and spatters of it onto the far wall in a complex pointillist pattern, and in it Kane could read the message that Curtis had left for him.

  There were other ways that Curtis could have killed her. He could have poisoned her, could have stabbed her, clubbed her, dissected her with a laser. Instead he’d given her a uniquely Martian death, a death that showed Kane that even the air he breathed was under Curtis’s command.

  “Okay,” Kane said out loud. He folded his hands into tight hammers, the first two knuckles standing out in high, calloused relief.

  Hanai turned Dian onto her back, exposing runnels of dried blood that met at her lips and spread in a chocolate smear across one cheek. “What?” Hanai asked belligerently. “You say something?” Her eyes locked on Kane’s tightly clenched hands.

  Kane straightened his fingers and brushed them against his thighs. “This was meant for me,” he said.

  “Was it? Well I hope to hell you got the point, whatever it was. I hope it was worth it to you. Because it’s not worth it to me. I didn’t know her, not that well, but she was one of us and you’re not. It’s because of you she’s dead, you say. Well, that’s great. As far as I’m concerned that’s the same thing as if you killed her with your own hands. We don’t want you here, none of us do. We don’t need you, we don’t need anything you could possibly give us. All we want is for you to go away and stay the hell away.”

  She was close to tears or violence, Kane saw, and she could go either way. This too was Curtis’s fault, like the tension between Hanai and the farmer. “It’s not up to me,” Kane said, aware of too many levels in what he was saying.

  “I don’t want your excuses, either. What good are excuses to her?”

  “Stop it,” Kane said. “Wake up. Curtis killed her, not me. He’s trying to protect something, and I don’t even—”

  “Kane?” Takahashi stood in the open doorway, his eyes narrowed against the shadows.

  Hanai turned on him fiercely. “What are you doing here?” she demanded in Japanese. “Why are you by yourself?”

  “I followed you,” Takahashi said in English, with an innocence that failed to convince Kane. “No one stopped me.” He looked at the dead woman and then back at Kane, nodding slightly. He recognized her, Kane realized. He must have seen her last night. Just how much did Takahashi know?

  “Aren’t you going to call somebody?” Kane asked Hanai. “Or are you just going to leave her there?”

  Hanai glared at him, then snatched the phone from the wall. She listened for a second and then dropped it in disgust. The receiver battered the wall and then spun on the tightly coiled cord. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll have to find another phone.”

  “No,” Kane said.

  “What?”

  “I’m not coming,” Kane said. “Are you going to force me? Do your orders go that far? I don’t think so.”

  “You’re a visitor here,” Hanai said, the words squeezed flat by the pressure of her teeth. “There are courtesies…”

  “I’m walking out,” Kane said. From the way she moved he knew she could handle him easily if she chose to, would probably have been dangerous even if he’d been in peak condition and used to the lighter gravity. He was conscious once again of the weight of the gun in the back of his trousers, even though he dared not use it. He walked toward the door.

  “Kane…” Hanai’s voice was indecisive and Kane kept walking.

  A few seconds later Takahashi cau
ght up with him. “You took a big risk.”

  “You don’t approve, of course.”

  “Maybe I just don’t understand.”

  “It’s the way of the warrior, Takahashi. When there’s a choice, you choose death. You should know that. It’s bushido.”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke? You’re a two-bit mercenary and a corporate flunky, not without your uses, perhaps, but you’re no samurai.”

  “If that’s all you see, then that’s all my uncle has let you see. The view’s not that good when you spend your life behind a desk, anyway.”

  “You’re in over your head,” Takahashi said. “I wonder if you’re going to find your way back out.”

  “So that’s the way it is,” Kane said. “How much do you know about what’s going on? How deep are you?”

  Takahashi shook his head, It could have meant anything.

  “I had to get away from there,” Kane said. “Curtis is hiding something and I want to know what it is.”

  “And you think he’ll tell you?”

  “I don’t know. But I have to try.”

  They were back at the central complex. Kane stopped a boy of about ten and said, “Curtis. Where is he? Has he got an office?”

  “Upstairs,” the boy said. The pressure of Kane’s fingers seemed to frighten the boy more than hurt him, as if the mere threat of physical injury was shattering, unheard of.

  Kane was beyond local taboos. He climbed the stairs inside the center and opened a door labeled “Governor” in English, Russian, and Japanese. A man behind a desk looked up from his bank of monitors.

  “I’m looking for Curtis,” Kane said. “Is he here?”

  The man shook his head. Again Kane saw recognition and curiosity, tinged with fear: “I haven’t seen him. You could try him at home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Center house, first row south of here.” The man’s eyes swept over the dozens of screens, as if for some kind of reassurance. Kane left without shutting the door, taking the stairs two at a time, barely in control of his balance. Takahashi stepped out of his way at the bottom, and Kane steadied himself against the braised aluminum railing.