The Highest Frontier (11 page)

The players drilled, one ball after another. Meanwhile Coach Porat drifted casually along the equator, making a private comment now and then. When he reached Jenny, he planted his feet on the cage and stayed for the next five minutes, watching her slan after slan. Feeling nervous, she stopped.
“Hello, Coach.”

“Jenny Ramos,” the coach said aloud. “What’s keeping you?”

Surprised, Jenny’s lips parted and she stared. What was wrong?

Seeing something was up, Yola came over. “Jenny’s good,” she said. “A good team player.”

“Too good.” The coach nodded. “Jenny, we had a good talk back in Somers last year, didn’t we?”

She nodded.

“Can you tell us: What is the job of every player?”

Her throat dried up.
“To do your best,”
she texted.
“To be the best player you can be.”

“That’s right. Go do that, now. Or you’re off the team.”

Yola stared in surprise. “Coach, what’s up? It’s her first day.”

Jenny stared without seeing, her heart pounding. Shock, and anger, and above all turmoil inside; what to do … She looked back over her shoulder, but Jordi wasn’t there. Nobody would disrespect her like that in front of Jordi. Jenny paused a moment, then trudged slowly along the equator, past the players jittering their slanballs. As she approached Kendall, she paused. Ken’s jaw was set fierce with concentration, his hair streaming around, while the slanball hung before him, moving ever so slightly.

The ball shot out. It sailed forever, past the quarter line and the goal zone. It did not stop in the goal zone but flew straight into the goal.

The players cheered and hugged Kendall.

“What the—” Kendall shook his head. “I did nothing.”

“Sure you did,” said the coach. “Time out. Ken, Yola, Jenny—All of you, over here.”

An umbrella-like shelter ballooned out of the cage. The players floated inside with the coach. “Caps off, bands and diads too. Other teams scout us,” Porat explained.

Yola nodded. “Tourists in Mount Gilead; it’s easy enough.”

“Who did it?” demanded Kendall. “Who’s the sleeper?”

“Ask Jenny.”

Jenny looked away.

“You did it all those years,” said the coach more softly. “Your team must have known, but no one let on.”

Kendall’s eyes widened. “You mean all those goals that Jordi Ramos—”

Yola elbowed him. “Shush, Kennie-boy. Hey, Jordi was the greatest.”

Jenny had started young, at her father’s knee, before most people even heard of brainstream. Kids who started young overtrained certain parts of the brain. Nowadays, at Tova’s age they all did, but in Jenny’s cohort, her brainstream ranked two standard deviations above average. She could brush past Jordi, and no one could tell who’d slanned the ball. It was common for a new player to slan for a forward, the first couple of games, until opponents caught on. But Jenny and Jordi were such a tight pair, and Jordi was a natural star; for years they’d played as one, like her aunts on the bicycle, and nobody cared to know.

“Jordi is still the all-time great,” Coach promised. “None of those records will change. But now it’s our turn. Jenny, we need you.” He paused to let her think. “Suppose you go ahead and slan for Ken.”

“What?” exclaimed Kendall. “No way I’ll take credit for a frog’s slan.”

“Just for now. Just till we play Whitcomb. Their goalie, remember, is impossible; he gave up no goal for three games straight.”

“Hey, this trick’s in the playbook,” said Yola. “Play number twenty-nine. Why not? A great idea—really throw off those Centrist suckers.”

“Then she can slan for you,” said Kendall.

“Fine with me,” said Yola. “I’ll be the ‘star’ for the next two games. What a hoot.”

Coach shook his head. “Yola slans hard enough already.”

The players held their breath and looked away. Kendall’s brainstream ranked below average; his strength was defense, where he took more hits than any other player.

Jenny swallowed. “I’ll do it. For the team.”

“That’s the spirit, Jenny,” said Coach. “We’ll have to practice that move in secret. The first couple of games, you go in once or twice and nail the goal for Ken—not too often to raise suspicion. But if we pull it off, then for Whitcomb you’ll go in and slan for yourself. To shake the devil into them. Understand?”

*   *   *

To avoid the cafeteria, Jenny tried the Ohioana Country Diner, a Mount Gilead franchise just north of Wickett. A twelve-point buck loomed over the dimly lit table, a slab of wood with genuine splinters. Colonists in power bands served up sliced turkey covered with gravy, with tomatoes actually grown in the spacehab. Students crowded around, knocking elbows, and voices could barely be heard.

Anouk tried the salad, with a nod of approval. “Life at seven—see you there,
chérie
.” She added thoughtfully, “President Chase—he’s not bad, for an American. As for Hamilton—” Her eyes rolled, and her perfectly spaced fingers spread dramatically. “Hamilton thinks the sky is a ceiling,” she whispered condescendingly. “It’s a Christian thing.” The Firmament movement had begun at Whitcomb, based on Genesis: “And God made the firmament … and called the firmament Heaven.” But the notion had since spread from Christians to conservative sects of Moslems, Hindus, even Wiccans.

How did Anouk know all Jenny’s courses? Jenny had raised her toyguard to the highest level, but Anouk seemed to know everything.

“Of course, all my math courses are at MIT. The grad school,” Anouk emphasized.

Jenny wondered again why Anouk had come to Frontera. At her right sat Yola, squeezed in with Kendall, who ordered plankton stew. A “microvore,” Ken never ate plants, let alone animals. Next to Ken sat Charlie, while Mary showed up at the far end. Mary had only her water bottle and a bowl of pretzels.

On the windowsill perched one of those blue-tailed lizards, trying to consume a beetle. The lizard kept biting and swallowing; its teeth were dull.

“A lizard—indoors,” someone exclaimed.

Charlie shot his arm forward and snatched at the lizard. He caught it by the tail, but the blue tail came away in his hand and fell to the table, still writhing.

“Ooh, how gross!” A student squealed and backed away.

Yola shook her head. “The tail will grow back.”

Reesie yawned. “August seems awfully early. Couldn’t classes wait till Labor Day?” Ricky was out at rush with the motor clubs. “The no drinks thing, when does that start?”

“Yesterday,” said Yola. “From now till mid-season. See you at five in the morning.”

Kendall nodded sagely, chewing a yeast cake. “‘When your opponent rises against you in the morning, rise up and get him first.’”

“Hombre,”
muttered Reesie. “My school had no such rule, and we won the league title.”

Charlie seemed more relaxed since the slanball workout. “Jenny, you sure slan hard. Where’d you train?”

“At Towers.” Two weeks for slan camp every summer, then the Somers PTA funded the team travel to New York’s spacehab. It was
chulo,
training in view of the storied towers as they collapsed and grew back every day. At night, you could take in a symphony or a show from Up-Broadway. Jenny turned to Anouk. “Could you join me at the Bulls pig roast Wednesday night? I won’t drink, but I’ll need to stop by.” To support the Unity voters drive.

“I’ll neither drink nor eat,” Anouk emphasized. “But of course, I’ll accompany you.” She patted Jenny’s arm. “And Berthe will stand by.”

The DIRG. Jenny’s heart sank; she wished she hadn’t asked. Meanwhile, her head was spinning over all the day’s events. The Life prof with her two-headed snake, and the coach who’d found her out. Nobody had challenged the Jordi-Jenny combo, all those years. And now—she had to find Jordi.

*   *   *

In her sitting room, the printer had formed a delicate pink rose in a vase. It was from Charlie. Jenny smiled; a good-hearted
chico,
but she wouldn’t encourage him too much. She went upstairs to check her orchids, now installed in their new home. The vanilla smelled sweet, and the Blood Star’s white petals spread from the red trumpets. She brainstreamed the mister to set its timer. The mister began to spray; she moved the vanda closer. The vanda even had new buds opening—that Abaynesh must have done something right.

She headed downstairs to the toyroom. The toyroom closed around her, cutting out the nightly racket from the spring peepers. The tree house appeared, Jenny’s default world, with the eight doors placed all around. She could not call up Jordi straight off; that would draw her mental right away. She stepped forward and opened one of the doors. “China.”

Eight new doors appeared—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangjou. Shanghai offered a long virtual tour; she went in, zigzagging amid the early-morning crowds on Nanjing Road. She lost herself amongst the tall bright-lettered signs, the shoppers loaded with shoes, chickens, and sewing-bots, the commuters trudging to work; the scent of juniper and peonies and crispy rice cakes, and of the sea from beyond the world’s tallest seawall. Above all, the acrid odor of newly poured carboxyplast from the factories that had packed carbon dioxide to build Frontera’s shell.

After jogging for some minutes past signs and shoppers, she called back the doors. The doors now shone as eight blue outlines hovering in virtual space.

“Entertainment—Strings.” The doors opened to eight different stringed instruments, the two-stringed
erhu,
the
guqin
zither, the
pipa
lute. The lute door opened virtual seating for a concert in Hubei, seven performers in pink robes with bright-colored sashes. Then eight doors to concert programs in eight different countries: the Vienna Symphony, the Sydney Opera, the São Paulo Symphony. No sign of her mental; hopefully the virtual team of therapists would lag a few doors behind. The São Paulo Symphony had an oboist from New York. The New York oboist had once performed in Somers, a chamber concert in Bailey Park. A door to Bailey Park opened the Somers Historical Society archive. Jenny plowed through town governance minutes on child safety, kudzu control, and the summer concert series. The events calendar included speeches and rallies from the midterm election. The final door opened.

There stood Jordi’s sim, like Newman or Monroe for the toyflicks, only so much more accurate, since practically every moment of Jordi’s life had been recorded. Jordi was there for all the public to “meet and greet,” at a Unity rally in Bailey Park, the summer before senior year. Morning light glinted off random kudzu leaves, streaked by a laser to cut back the day’s growth from the white gazebo. Beneath the roof hung a white placard, Hachaliah Bailey Memorial, flanked by two elephant silhouettes. Jordi leaned over the white picket fence rail between the columns, and faced the surrounding crowd in their folding chairs.

“And so I say to you, from my generations of family service to this nation: No matter how dark the hour, no matter how late the moment of truth, it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Just as we chose to bury our carbon in carboxyplast, we can choose now. We can choose to save our water and shrink the Death Belt. We can choose to build ships to Jupiter, a boundless source of fuel.” Hydrogen planet—the ultimate gas tank.

The cheers of the crowd threatened to drown his voice. Jordi spoke quietly, and the crowd quieted again. “We must make our sacrifice now, not wait until the menace of global drought appears. If we hesitate, it will be too late.” He took a breath. “We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we all are mortal.”

The crowd erupted from their seats. Purple balloons, hats, and
TO JUPITER—AND BEYOND!
signs flew into the air. Then gradually the crowd faded away, into history. Only Jordi remained, the archival Jordi, in his starched white suit leaning over the white fence rail. The Jordi Ramos Kennedy who lived on forever in the Toynet archive.

Jenny came forward, her heart beating too fast. Seeing her, Jordi smiled, the old smile that used to say, “It was all for you.” His features had that square Mount Rushmore look, like his grandfather’s; his eyes expressive though just a bit flat, already the seasoned pol. “How’d I do, sis?”

“Fantastic, as always.” She swallowed. “The Jupiter line always drives them wild.”

“Jupiter. We’ll get there,” he said with the trademark Jordi conviction. “It won’t be easy.”

“It will be hard. It was hard enough for me, going to…” She mustn’t mention Frontera; Jordi hadn’t lived to know about that, and if he’d lived she wouldn’t be here. “Jordi, I’m taking a Harvard course. About Cuba.”

He grinned. “That beats Somers High, I’m sure. I’m off to Havana next week; you can draw up my talking points.”

“Jordi—I have to ask you something.” Her voice rushed on; the mental could crash through any moment. “Coach wants me to assist someone else; another … team captain. Do you mind?”

“Another captain … not sure what you’re driving at, but of course, whatever Coach says goes. You know that.”

“Yeah, I do.” She’d known he would say that, but still she needed to hear it.

“You’re the best operative there is.” His eye glinted. “Today, the Somers town board. Tomorrow, the universe.”

“Yeah.” She looked away. “The week after, in New York. I’ll be there with you.”

“Of course you will. I have this new angle I want to try out on you; my plan for inner-city education.”

“Although I wish you wouldn’t go at all, Jordi … not to Battery Park.”

Jordi froze. The entire landscape froze, the kudzu leaves, the shadow flickering across the fence rail. The scene faded away. In its place was the giant up-close face of Monroe, taking up the entire toyroom. The six-foot-wide lips pouted in displeasure.

Jenny screamed. She extended both arms straight to touch the walls. The walls turned gray, and she rushed out the door. Tearing across the hall, she raced into the living room and pulled the diad off her forehead. The room was dark and still, the only sound her frantic breathing.

But it was too late. The printer glowed, the unearthly glow of a processor working overtime. An object pushed slowly up from the glow, the top of a head. The head of a DIRG, printing out with the face of her dreaded mental.