The Highest Frontier (51 page)

Anouk stopped to stretch, patting her scarf. “Last night,” she demanded suddenly. “What Mary made. Was it?”

Jenny was embarrassed. “I don’t know. It sure looked real. The light was dim, and we’d all been drinking.”

Anouk drew herself up in third position. “I was not drinking, and
I
saw it.”

“So? What did you see?”

She hesitated. “It looked just like the other ultras. The ones in your cottage.”

“Mary’s cottage,” Jenny emphasized. Would she never shake her connection with that
compañera
? “
Vaya,
the college admitted her with all her problems. The admissions director says he’d admit even DIRGs. She’s half amyloid herself; so, she’s made an amyloid ultra.”

Anouk just tilted her high-bridged nose.

“You think it was real? Not just amyloid, like the dwarves?”

Anouk’s hand drooped upon the lab bench. “If it was real,” she reflected, “I suppose they’ll have to melt the whole castle.”

Desastre
. And much good it would do. Would the college end up melting down the whole hab?

“How could they admit her?” Jenny wondered aloud.

“They had to,” observed Anouk succinctly. “You and Mary were the last two they took, to fill the class.”

Jenny didn’t ask how she knew, but glared. “You must have been the third.”

“Precisely. I would
never
have come here, if I weren’t banned from Earth.”

Three broken toys, admitted to meet the college budget.
Dios mío,
why didn’t the college just take DIRGs? “You know,” Jenny reflected, “if scientists could ever make amyloid detailed enough … it wouldn’t matter, would it? I mean, we’re all made of protein, right? It would be the same as real. Someday, even amyloid people.”

“Not any time soon,” said Anouk. “Not in
this
lab.”

“What do you mean? Is something wrong with our experiment?” After all the work they’d put in—Jenny’s heart squeezed.

Anouk let out a breath and clasped her hands upon the bench. “I’ve been reading back, all the professor’s papers from the last twenty years.”

“I know, I have to catch up.”

“Do you realize, that the professor has accomplished nothing significant on ‘wisdom’ since Ng and Howell?”

Jenny fingered the sprayer. “She found other things. The find-your-mortarboard plant, and the praying plant.
Asombroso
—even Howell thought so.” Howell had sounded jealous, like he thought Abaynesh would get the Nobel.

“But never wisdom plants. Over and over again, students have assayed different combinations of genes, testing different neural networks for ‘wisdom.’ Still nothing.”

Jenny considered this. “It’s not like your MIT stuff, coding a new ghost every month. Plant development takes a while. The laughing plants; they worked.”

“Laughter is a simple reflex. Even rats can laugh. But ‘wisdom’—every religion in the world tries to solve that one. Do you think science will succeed?”

Another cart full of seedlings entered the lab room, accompanied by Mary Dyer. The two students startled at seeing her, but Mary took no notice. The enigmatic
compañera
approached at leisure, ignoring the two pairs of eyes that bored into her. Jenny had questions she scarcely dared think of, let alone ask aloud. Observing the pots on the cart, she swallowed. “Mary, what are those?”

Mary brought the cart over, and started arranging the pots in a row. “Reverse control.”

Jenny exchanged a long look with Anouk. Then Anouk turned to Mary. “Mary,
chérie,
” she said. “There is no such thing as a reverse control for wisdom.” No one knew a wisdom semiochemical for humans.

Mary set the last of her twenty potted seedlings alongside the experimental plants. “There is now.”

42

An ultra in the castle, and a wisdom control. Was it all real, or just more student follies? So much went spinning through her head that Jenny actually could not get herself to sleep, no matter how early she got to bed. Thank goodness for October break, she thought Friday afternoon as she took the space lift down and caught the heli to Westchester.

It was her first return to Somers since August. Looking out from the helicopter, the kudzu forest seemed a different color, faded yellow. At her home, all the leaves were drooped and shriveled, hanging from a tangled network of bleached vines.

“No rain since August.” Soledad held her hand, and they strolled down to the Somers intersection, just like the old days, the drone overhead and the white-faced DIRGs inconspicuously behind. “The reservoir is so low, you can see the foundations of the old flooded homes.” The reservoir was New York City’s water supply.

“The kudzu always comes back.” Jenny stepped around a dead skunk covered with ants. There were other dead animals, a squirrel and a python overcome by the heat.

“Even kudzu won’t come back, once we become the Sahara.” Her mother squeezed her hand. “The hurricane may bring some rain up the coast.”

A reverse control for wisdom, Jenny wondered again. What if you really could make humans do the wise thing, like the way you could make them laugh?

“But where you are,” her mother added, “there are maples and coneflowers.”

“And peepers in the Indian grass. And bears and elephants.” Ahead rose the old redbrick Elephant Hotel, its front cleared of kudzu. The old trees where she used to play hide-and-seek with Jordi had long ago dried out. Old Bet atop the pillar, her metallic surface mottled as if with the residue of ancient floods; the old circus elephant looked squat and stolid, compared to the little live ones with their donkey tails. Across the street stood the white-painted gazebo, where Jordi always waited. Yet now it all felt small, like a doll’s house, the things of childhood left behind.

“The pollmeter is closing in,” her mother added. “Much closer than last time.” Last time they’d lost by two electoral votes. “Holding the final debate at Frontera could just make the difference for Ohio.” Soledad paused thoughtfully. “If Ohio looks good, we might vote in Wisconsin. Our cottage in the Dells,
recuerdas.
”

Back at the house, her father sat in an icosahedral toyroom with twenty spliced doors. His two wristwatches stretched on his arm, and his two Illyrian ties hung loose from his neck. “Could you use some change?” A stack of ten-dollar coins stood between two fingers. In a moment, they all fanned out, one balanced upon each fingertip. A flip of the wrist, and they vanished.

“Chulo.”
Jenny patted his knee and kissed his cheek. In some ways, he was still the boy that had peeped out from beneath his father’s desk in the Oval Office. “My friends liked that one too. How’s Toynet?”

“Eighty-six percent functional. Just now, when you asked.”

Her eyes scanned the triangular doors. One was draped with virtual bunting, red-white-blue. “Is ToyVote sorted out this year?”

“The committee of a hundred gets together.”

“So many. What do they talk about?”

“Change of residence times. Most states say noon on Election Day, but some say six in the morning, or seven that evening. Time zone effects. Electronic time delays; what constitutes a late vote.”

She grinned. “You should see our mayoral election. We all go to a courthouse and sign in a book.”

“The Iroquois meet in a longhouse, in winter. In summer, the councils meet outdoors.” The women’s council, and the men’s council. “The meeting takes many days.”

And it was almost time to play. “It can’t take days this time, Dad,” she warned. “I have to get back tomorrow, to check my plants.” Experimental plants, and their controls.

*   *   *

In the old second-floor toyroom, Jenny put up her arms to activate. It had been so long, she had to dig out her window into Iroquoia, which had receded behind a thousand windows she hadn’t used for two months. Through the doorway shone a forest of pines, a dark green mass of branches above a ground thick with pale dry fallen needles. Not a kudzu in sight; like Mohawk country would have looked in the nineteenth century. She took a deep breath and stepped in.

The toyworld applied her fringed deerskin skirt and tunic, moccasins beneath leggings up to the knee. “Sunflower Spirit” was her name, an herbalist. From her neck hung a pouch of dried plants, meadow-rue for nosebleed, wood nettle for loneliness. Ahead lay a clearing around a fire, blankets spread on the needles for other seated women of the council. About thirty women, most toy-construct. Those actually playing today had their names highlighted. The Chief Woman, Green Snake, turned and lifted her corn pounder.
“Onenh wegniserade.…”

Hurriedly Jenny switched on the translation. English text hovered below the names. She’d given up on the language years ago; the toyworld would convert as they played.

“Now, you startle me by your coming, Sunflower Spirit.” The Chief Woman, played by a Toynet coworker of her father’s, addressed her before the Council. “Think how many obstacles you must have overcome to travel so far, from your trials among the Salt Beings. Wild beasts have lain in ambush; trees could have fallen upon you; the floods could have drowned you; the deadly Rotting Face disease could have destroyed you. And along the way, you passed former habitations of our forebears; their ghostly footprints must have distressed you.” The preindustrial Iroquois used to leave their homes every few years to set up new villages on more fertile land. Sort of what the Centrists thought they could do, leave Earth behind. “With all that, we give thanks that you have safely arrived.”

It would have been a tough journey, all right, back in those days; a thirty-mile hike through the trees might have been riskier than thirty thousand klicks from a spacehab. Other women of the Council raised their corn pounders and echoed their thanks, weaving notes into their shell-bead recorders. Amongst them Jenny saw her mother, “Bean Planter.”

“Yet you come in good time,” the Chief Woman continued, “to share our deliberation of the weighty matter brought before us. Your Bear Clan has lost too many sons and daughters of late to the Rotting Face disease.” The smallpox that wiped out entire villages. “Your own brother Handsome River was among them. Before we could condole for him properly, the Men’s Council asked us to approve a Mourning War.”

At the edge of the gathering, two of the “women” in skirts were men. These men were Speakers the women appointed to hear and report their deliberations to the Men’s Council. The skirted men drew forward and listened intently, their shell-bead recorders weaving symbols in white and blue.

“Um—” Jenny knew she wasn’t to speak yet, but she preferred to head off the war talk. “After surviving so many, um, obstacles to get here I really feel ready for the Condoling Council for my brother.” The Condoling Council would last all day, with many colorful speeches and some not-so-bad poetry.

“You will speak in good time, my daughter. Since the time you last sojourned among us, the Women’s Council did call for a Mourning War upon the Salt Beings, those creatures who place unhealthy salt upon all their food.” The Europeans had been scorned for eating salt, just like ultra was today. A lot of good it had done. “The Mourning War has been waged and won, and prisoners taken. Now, we must decide how to have the prisoners: To feast, or to replace our lost offspring?”

New players, the standard routine. At least, Jenny hoped so; she really didn’t feel like playing cannibal today.

Her mother, “Bean Planter,” raised her corn pounder. “How can I feel at ease with my son’s place empty? Surely we need to adopt new offspring.”

Other clanswomen spoke in support of adoption. The agreement seemed general within the group. A rapid decision; such deliberations could go on for days or weeks, to get everyone to agree. Iroquoia, like Castle Cockaigne, did not necessarily follow a strict script.

“It is agreed,” spoke the Chief Woman. “We shall prepare the prisoners for adoption.
Hiro kone.
”

At the perimeter, the men in skirts jumped up with their corn pounders, eager to relay the women’s decision to the Men’s Council. Jenny “Sunflower Spirit” got up and followed, as did her mother and two other women. They in turn would get to hear the men respond.

The Men’s Council sat in another clearing amid the pine needles. They all wore trousers, feathered hair clips, and nose rings. The Chief Man was Jenny’s father, George Ramos, “Spreader of Data.” He spoke the pipe-friendly Iroquois language while virtual smoke curled above his head. As Chief Man, George puffed on his pipe in utter solemnity, but Jenny knew how he enjoyed himself. Imaginary though it was, Iroquoia was the place her father felt at home; the world he loved as his own. For a moment Jenny wondered: How many others were like that, today? How many people got through their daily life in the real world, living for those few cherished moments of their fantasy?

A male Speaker from the Women’s Council waved his corn pounder and excitedly reported all that had transpired, checking the blue and white pattern of his shell-bead recorder. Several men had to speak, each getting his turn to smoke the pipe. “Remember our need for meat. Our hunting has been unlucky. We could consume these prisoners and acquire their courage.”

“The Women’s Council chooses adoption,” responded “Chief Man” George. “Adoption fills gaps in our family. Family is the heart of all life. Without family, our people are like dust on the Earth; empty footprints and dissipated smoke from pipes long cooled.”

Jenny’s eyes filled; she brushed them hurriedly.

“
Onenh,
let us test the mettle of our prisoners for joining our family. Let the gauntlet begin.
Hiro kone.
”

Now all the men and women got up and began ordering about excitedly. The men went off to fetch the prisoners, while the women arranged the gauntlet. Bean Planter especially got into it, Jenny noticed. Even children appeared to join the gauntlet, though at Level Ten they could only be constructs. Bean Planter looked back over her shoulder at Jenny. “Come on, Sunflower Spirit,” she urged her daughter. “You can join the fun with your new siblings. No voting.”