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LA FRONTERA
The Galápagos Rift System, Latitude 0.55° N
The frontier is the outer edge of the wave -- the meeting-point between savagery and civilization. . .the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist.
-- Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History
Promptly at 1700 hours, the expeditionaries boarded their electric buses. They were loaded with handouts and booklets and notebooks numbered and marked Classified, and were sporting pieces of Helios clothing. The black SWAT-style caps had proved especially popular, very menacing. Ali contented herself with a T-shirt with the Helios winged sun logo printed on the back. With scarcely a purr, the buses eased from the walled compound out onto the street.
Declassified maps showed boom cities like Nazca as veritable nerve cells reaching tendrils out into the surrounding space. The attractions were simple: cheap land, mother lodes of precious minerals and petroleum, freedom from authority, a chance to start over. Ali had come expecting glum fugitives and desperadoes with no other place to go. But these were the faces of college-educated office workers, bankers, entrepreneurs, a motivated service sector. As a port city of the future, Nazca City was said to have the potential of San Francisco or Singapore. In four years it had become the major link between the equatorial sub-planet and coastal cities up and down the western side of the Americas.
Ali was relieved to see that the people of Nazca City looked normal and healthy. Indeed, because the sub-planet attracted younger, stronger workers, the population abounded in good health. Most of the station cities like Nazca had been retrofitted with lamps that simulated sunlight, and so these bicyclists were as tan as beachcombers. Practically everyone had seen soldiers or workers who had returned to the surface several years ago suffering bone growths and enlarged eyes or strange cancers, even vestigial tails. For a while, religious groups had blamed hell itself for the physical spoliation, calling it proof of God's plan, a vast gulag where contact meant punishment. But as she looked around, it seemed the research labs and drug companies really had mastered the prophylaxis for hell. Certainly these people exhibited no deformities. Ali realized that her subconscious fears of turning into a toad, monkey, or goat had been for nothing.
The city was a vast indoor mall with potted trees and flowering bushes, clean, with the latest brand names. There were restaurants and coffee bars, along with brightly lit stores selling everything from work clothes and plumbing supplies to assault rifles. The neatness was slightly marred by beggars missing limbs and sidewalk merchants hawking contraband.
At one intersection an old Asian woman was selling miserable puppies lashed alive to sticks. "Stew meat," one of the scientists told Ali. "They sell it by the catty, 500 grams, a little more than a pound. Beef, chicken, pork, dog."
"Thanks," said Ali.
Obviously it intrigued him. "I went exploring yesterday. Anything that moves goes into the pot. Crickets, worms, slugs. They even eat dragons, xiao long, their snakes."
Excerpted from The Descent by Jeff Long. Copyright © 1999 by Jeff Long. Excerpted by permission of Crown, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Copyright © 1999, Random House, Inc.