The Highest Frontier (9 page)

“Frogs!” Fritz called out to the new students. “Time to join the chorus, frogs. ‘Peep, peep.’”

One of the new frogs tried a half-hearted “peep.” Others joined in.

Jenny hated group icebreakers. She took another step backward, tripping against Charlie with his foot bandaged from the bear attack. She caught his arm. “Sorry.”

Charlie smiled, a tough-guy smile like he was still in pain but wouldn’t let on. One of Uncle Dylan’s Chase Scholars, he came from Minnesota, with no twin. “Hey, Jenny, that’s okay. ‘Peep, peep.’”

“Oo-oo-oo
oo-aw
.” From the sky something swooped down to the ground, then back up again. A bird? Now that she’d seen it, her eye caught sight of another, and another one swooping to the ground. She aimed her window and zoomed.
Strix varia,
barred owl.
The owl had swooped down and caught something, then flitted back up to a tree where it perched, fluffing its brown-striped feathers. Now the owl had something in its mouth to feed its nestlings. It was a frog. Like all tranquil nature scenes, the river bank was a killing field. The barred owls were swooping down all over, feasting on the thousands of tasty spring peepers.

7

Jenny awoke Monday in her printout Lincoln bed, thirty-six thousand klicks from home. Her head was a jumble of dreams, so many new faces that she barely recalled Jordi. She took an R-patch from the familiar shelf, and slapped the diad on her forehead.

In her toybox loomed the pouting Monroe. “Good morning, Jenny,” purred the husky voice of the mental. “Do we need any help today?”

“Go away.” She called up Frontera’s course list to fill the toybox, overlaying the mental. The mental departed, letting her off more easily than usual. Jenny really hadn’t dreamt much of Jordi. Still, she would visit him, perhaps that evening when she could sneak in the toyroom. The toyroom—that would be nearly as good as having him alive.

In her bedroom, everything was a middling amyloid copy, not quite her bed from home, not quite the same blue coverlet with gold flowers, a bit stiffer material; nearly the same dresser, almost like oak. But there was exactly the portrait she’d carried up, Great-Grandma Rosa Schwarz smiling from the Oval Office. Jenny smiled back wistfully. Rosa had swept into office after the first methane quake swamped the East Coast. Her wife Mimi had said, “This mess needs more than a woman—it needs two.” Rosa had put the jobless to work building windmills, and convinced the UN to ban carbon emissions, earning a Peace Nobel. She’d built a hundred solarrays, and the first space habitat. And got swept out after one term.

The sitting room now displayed Jenny’s favorite Kahlos, especially
The Two Fridas,
the two women joined by a vein of blood. She recycled her nightgown and printed out clothes for the day. The printer printed out yogurt and grapefruit, all amyloid. Jenny wondered about that café Anouk had found.

“ToyNews—From our box to yours. Good morning!” Clive looked even perkier than usual. Spliced next to him, President Bud congratulated candidate Gar Guzmán on his wife’s performance. “Gar, your Betty did one heck of a job.”

Clive temporized, “The pollmeters show that Glynnis and Betsy came out even; a dead heat.” The anchor nodded for emphasis. “Looks like we’re in for a long, hard-fought election; a real cliffhanger.” The kind ToyNews loved best. The last election had been so tight it drove Jenny’s father to the blue room, trying to sort out every last stray ballot through ToyVote. Court challenges took up the next two years. Yet the Centrists had won three presidentials in a row, no matter how close.

Jenny recalled the water boiling on the hotplate. She swallowed hard. What if this were it—their last chance to turn back? She barely heard as Clive cycled through the rest of the morning news, how Congress planned to solarplate a Nevada-sized expansion of the Death Belt, and Earth’s population had declined again that year. At last she blinked him out and turned with relief to the
Orchid Times.
Someone had bred a
Trichoglottis
to look like a hummingbird. The cross diagram was a marvel, with a triple hybrid. She couldn’t wait to get her Blood Star back from quarantine.

“Good morning, Jenny.” Her mother’s window popped open. “Did you get back to your cottage all right? No more bears?”

Jenny wished she could give her mother a hug. “No more bears. And you, back to Earth?”

“
Perfecto.
I just got due diligence from a hurricane start-up that needs launch fuel. Hurricane power is just the thing. Don’t you have class this morning?”

“My classes have to get approved first. I have to see my advisor.” In person, at her advisor’s office, a quaint college custom. “Mama, I’m worried. My friends know so much more than I do.”

“Didn’t you win the Science Talent Search? The ‘Baby Nobel,’ they call it. I told you, don’t let anyone put down your public school.” Her mother had refused private school; the Ramos Kennedy twins had to grow up knowing their electorate.

George Ramos appeared in Iroquoia, as a smooth-chested Mohawk elder with two heron feathers in his long lock of hair.
“Nyawenha skanonh.”
The Haudenosaunee greeting rolled sonorously from his lips around the ceremonial pipe.

“Good morning, Dad. ‘Thanks for the gifts of life.’” The Haudenosaunee translation went out to him. If only she could be there to pat his arm, and her mother to touch up her hair.

Soledad asked, “Are you taking Dylan’s class?”

“His frog seminar on Teddy Roosevelt.”

“The Salt Beings,”
warned her father,
“always spoke bitter words about the People.”

“And there’s Father Clare’s Renaissance Art.” At least two profs she knew she could talk to; a new teacher could just make her freeze. “And Life Science 101, with Sharon Abaynesh. Then there’s Helen Tejedor’s Cuba seminar, and Political Ideas, with Hamilton.”

“Phil Hamilton,”
texted her father.
“A good man.”

“You know Hamilton?” That was curious. She’d never heard her parents mention the politics professor.

“Learn your Cuban roots,” advised Soledad. “We’ve got to clear out the Guzmáns and the Creep, and get Cuba purple.” The “Creep” was the vice president, a secretive “ultra warrior” not seen in public since the last election. “Jenny, dear, you wouldn’t miss our Aspen chalet too badly, would you? You never were much of a skier.”

Jenny frowned anxiously. “Is the market that bad?”

“We’ve done less badly than most.
Ahora,
Colorado’s no longer the swing state it used to be.” They kept a home in every swing state, then decided where to vote at the last minute.

After her parents winked out, Jenny left to meet her advisor. The air breathed of fresh-mown grass, and the cardinals chirped, “What cheer, what cheer.” The tree-lined carpet rolled up in the distance to Mount Gilead, where the little homes shone like rows of lollipops, and the Ohio River flowed overhead, a gleaming thread of silver across the quilt of farmlands. By her wall outside, the bear’s hole had filled with water. The water shimmered in the mud, reflecting the bright gold of the south solar and the branches of the maple. Jenny frowned, puzzled. The spacehab “rained” at four in the afternoon, then again at night, on Vincenzo’s schedule. Yet everywhere else was dry by now, just this one muddy dent full of water.

From her cottage, an elephant squealed. The donkey-tailed elephant had got up on the porch, its trunk sneaking some kind of treat from her
compañera
Mary, who was seated in the porch swing with her water bottle. Beyond her, two more little elephants trotted up, squealing with interest.

“Mary,
¡vaya!
Remember what the dean said.”

Mary’s glowing face seemed to look beyond the elephants. “What did the dean say?”

“The dean said to stay away from elephants.
Oye,
you’ll just attract a whole troupe of them.”

“She wants to go to class.”

“What? Mary, elephants
nunca
go to class.”

Mary thought this over. “Are we an elephant?”

“No, Mary. We are students; we go to class.” Aspie or not, this Mary wouldn’t last long. Then Jenny thought of her own R-patch and the mental. Caught off guard, her memory of Jordi hit her just so, flooding her with pain. How long would she last herself?

Something twined around her leg. It was the trunk of one of the elephants attracted to Mary’s food. “
Vaya—
get off me!” Jenny tugged at the trunk, disgusted by its squishy feel. She had never had live pets; she’d been kept away from animals all her life. In her toybox, she blinked her “safe” button. The elephant squealed in pain at the mild electric shock.

Just then, her aunts called.

“Good morning,
sobrina.
” California Governor Meg Akeda, the Centrist primary runner-up, grinned from her toybox. “Glynnis did well last night,” she graciously allowed. “How’s college?”

“
Chulo,
thanks, Aunt Meg.”

“It seems only yesterday you were the birthday girl, showing us all the cups and balls, and the disappearing coins.”

“How’s the Firmament?” asked Aunt El, the other head on her aunts’ shared body.

Jenny returned, “How’s the Milky Way?”

Peering beyond her, Aunt El’s head gasped with pretended shock. “Really, Jenny, not there a day, and already molesting elephants.”

Jenny gave a pained smile and turned to the head of the governor. “Thanks, Aunt Meg. Sorry you lost the nomination.” Meg had lost a close primary fight with Gar.

“That’s nice of you to say so.” Meg and El Akeda had no chromosome deletion, nor were they bred that way like “paulines” bred to keep quiet. Natural twins, their condition, like Jenny’s mutation, was unplanned. The first conjoined person to govern a state, Meg’s head stood nearly straight whereas El’s jutted to the side, her hair aslant across her face. Each head controlled half their body. In a campaign commercial, they rode a bicycle down Lombard Street.

Aunt El told her sister, “She thinks you’d have been easier to beat.”

“No, honest,” Jenny protested.

Meg sighed. “El, I can’t take you anywhere.” Their standard tagline—El could say anything the governor’s head couldn’t. Californians loved it.

“I would have voted for you, Aunt Meg,” said Jenny sincerely. “If I were Centrist.” Both heads professed belief in the Firmament.

“Really,” said Meg. “We may take you up on that someday.”

“We sure will.” El smiled. “Played your taxes yet? Or made them ‘disappear’?”

Jenny was silent. President Ramos had replaced the tax system with taxplayers. He was still the most popular Unity president.

“I just vetoed a bill,” Meg reminded her. “It would have let someone marry a dog.”

“Man’s best friend,” added El. President Ramos had been carnally challenged. “You see,” El went on, reading Jenny’s face, “you’re more Centrist than you think.”

“El, don’t pick on our niece, or you’ll get banned from Sacramento.”

El rolled her eyes. “Please. Sacramento is death.”

“Jenny,” said Meg, “if you ever need help, remember us, okay?”

“That’s right,
sobrina,
” said El with a wink. “Blood is thicker than politics.”

*   *   *

Professor Sharon Abaynesh had her office on the ground floor of the Ronald Reagan Hall of Science, beneath the outsized jelly beans. When Jenny first entered, the professor was not there. Above her desk the giant DNA spiraled upward as far as the eye could see. The desk was sprinkled with potting soil. By the desk stood a smartcart carrying Jenny’s Blood Star, its red trumpets still blooming, along with the purple vanda and the vanilla. The sweet vanilla fragrance made Jenny sigh with relief.

Abaynesh came in from the laboratory, the rows of
Arabidopsis
. She wiped her hands on her jeans. “There you go,” she told Jenny’s orchids. “You all can go home already.”

Jenny pressed the soil around the vanda. The new soil had been packed carefully around each root by someone who knew what they were doing. “Thanks for all your trouble.” She spoke toward the plant, not meeting the professor’s eye. It took her a while to face a new person. “I brought my course list.” She blinked the list over.

The professor picked the pot of “Ari” off her chair and sat, clasping her hands, her skin as brown as the potting soil, her shirt Milena. Above her desk hung the mortarboard that Ari had pointed out, next to an MIT diploma. Like her father, Jenny thought, feeling more at home. In the side wall loomed various virtual models of plant semiochemicals, signal molecules labeled
PRIDE
,
RELIEF
, and
ANGER
. Each tagged a stick molecule full of carbons and nitrogens. The tag
WISDOM
was blank.

Ari’s stalk waved again. The professor looked up as if she’d just remembered something. “I’m supposed to offer you those printout brownies. How about some baobab fruit? It’s real,” she assured her.

“Thank you.” The baobab fruit had a thick yellow pulp. It tasted like grapefruit from another planet.

The professor’s head tilted, and the braided arches of her hair twisted like DNA. “So why’d you come to Frontera?”

Jenny blinked. Why indeed? Because Frontera was safe, above any flood zone; because the school was small and protective for a brotherless
chica
; because her mother’s best friend ran the place; because the slanball team was hot; and besides all that, what an adventure to live off Earth in a spacehab. She cleared her throat. “I came to study plants.”

The professor nodded. “You’ve come to the right place.” She tapped a finger absently on the edge of Ari’s pot, and two leaflets leaned forward as if to examine Jenny. “Your ultra project wasn’t bad,” Abaynesh added. “We knew that ultraphyte genes were not DNA, but RNA.” On Earth, only viruses had genes of RNA. Living cells used RNA for copies, like printout. “But how could ultraphyte RNA survive space flight, with the cosmic rays? You found the RNA-binding proteins that protect it. Quite elegant.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Jenny frowned. “Space flight?” The original seed was said to have drifted at random through space until it landed in Great Salt Lake.