Free The Highest Frontier by Joan Slonczewski Page A

struggled to extricate her legs, her bare skin in the moonholes peeling off the bench. One shoelace had caught beneath, and she yanked it out. Just in time, she remembered the green jello.
    In the toywall Jenny’s image appeared, carrying the plate of green jello. The moonholes in her black pants were filled in, and her laces were neatly tied.
    “Jenny.” Within her toybox Clive addressed her, while in the toywall his image spliced with hers, heights even. “Tell our audience what it’s like for a presidential scion on her first day at college. You’ve already managed to save a life, haven’t you?”
    Jenny smiled, keeping her eyes wide. “Well, Clive, I’ve made so many wonderful friends already.” She blinked at her namelist. “There’s my ‘owl,’ Rafael, and my best friend Anouk from Paris. My fantastic team captains, Yola and Kendall; my fellow ‘frogs,’ Ricky and Reesie, and my welcoming upperclass friends Viv and Fritz. And my compañera Mary, and brave Charlie, and there’s—” That tall chico who’d given his shirt for the pillow, what was his name?
    “A wonderful first day,” concluded Clive. “I’m sure, Jenny, you’ll be leading the local campaign for Carrillo.”
    “As a first-year student, Clive, I’ll be too busy with my studies to lead anything. But—”
    “And the food.” Clive nodded confidentially. “Tell us—how’s the cafeteria, compared to home?”
    Jenny held out her plate. “They make the best green jello I’ve had outside Utah.”
    *   *   *
    Above Buckeye Trail, as new students followed their owls south for the Frogs Chorus, the lights of Mount Gilead made a cluster of stars. The north solar had deepened to twilight purple, like the purple of the light-drinking microbes in the saltwater that filled the spacehab’s outer shell. As the hab rotated, all sides of its marine shell received light. Solar microbes now provided a quarter of the spacehab’s electricity and hydrogen, while recycling its waste into amyloid. Another fifty percent came from solarray, an array of solar collectors in space; impressive, though not yet enough to survive without Earth. Farther “south,” the farmlands gave way to forest, naked trees discreetly screening the homes of those who could afford their own plot, reserved for the day when Frontera was independent and Earth too hot to handle. Even her parents now had their “safe home” here, Jenny realized with a twinge. Todos se van. But everyone from Earth couldn’t fit here.
    “Slanball starts tomorrow,” Yola reminded Jenny, “as soon as you hear from Toy Land.” Toy Land was the school’s Toynet hub, which distributed all the course lists after sorting requests approved by the faculty. Jenny had to meet her advisor Abaynesh first thing in the morning.
    The woods now filled with a chorus of crickets and peeper frogs. The frogs were deafening; there must be thousands. “Are they always this loud?”
    Yola grinned. “Just wait till you join them. My year, our owl made us peep till we tossed him in the river.”
    Anouk sniffed. “Frogs call in the spring.” Her Hermès headscarf displayed seashells on the beach.
    Yola shrugged. “Animals can’t tell the seasons out here. They just breed all the time.”
    “Don’t you entrain them by timing the daylight?” Anouk must have had an advanced Life class. Jenny wondered if her own public school had been a mistake.
    “Their circadian clock genes were adjusted. Ask Elephant Man,” said Yola. “That’s Quade Vincenzo, the ecoengineer. He stocks all the wildlife in the hab.”
    Rafael appeared, nodding courteously to Jenny and Anouk. “The Frogs Chorus is a harmless tradition,” he assured them.
    “‘Tradition’?” Anouk raised an eyebrow. “What ‘tradition’ can such a young school have?” Frontera had just passed its tenth anniversary.
    “You shall be amused,” Rafael promised in a tone that managed to take charge while disowning responsibility.
    The Monroe