Synopsis:
One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.
The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk—a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside—more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.
Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.
Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun—and report back on what they find.
Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.
The locker was heating up fast. Sweat slicked my face, drenched my shirt, stung my eyes. I could hear myself breathing. I imagined the whole world could hear me breathing.
Nijon answered the policeman in deferential murmurs. The policeman barked back fresh questions.
"Be still now, just be still," Ina whispered urgently. En had been bouncing his feet against the thin mattress of the gurney, a nervous habit. Too much energy for a CVWS victim. I saw the tips of Ina's fingers splayed across the quarter-inch of light above my head, four knuckled shadows.
Now the rear doors of the ambulance rattled open and I smelled gasoline exhaust and rank noonday vegetation. If I craned my head—gently, gently—I could see a thin swath of exterior light and two shadows that might be Nijon and a policeman or maybe just trees and clouds.
The policeman demanded something from Ina. His voice was a guttural monotone, bored and threatening, and it made me angry. I thought about Ina and En, cowering or pretending to cower from this armed man and what he represented. Doing it for me. Ibu Ina said something stern but unprovocative in her native language. CVWS, something something something CVWS. She was exercising her medical authority, testing the policeman's susceptibility, weighing fear for fear.
The policeman's answer was curt, a demand to search the ambulance or see her papers. Ina said something more forceful or desperate. The word CVWS again.
I wanted to protect myself, but more than that, I wanted to protect Ina and En. I would surrender myself before I saw them hurt. Surrender or fight. Fight or flight. Give up, if necessary, all the years the Martian pharmaceuticals had pumped back into my body. Maybe that was the courage of the Fourth, the special courage Wun Ngo Wen had talked about.
They conquered death. But no: as a species, terrestrial, Martian, in all our years on both our planets, we had only engineered reprieves. Nothing was certain.
Footsteps, boots on metal. The policeman began climbing into the ambulance. I could tell he had come aboard by the way the vehicle sank on its shocks, rolling like a ship in a gentle swell. I braced myself against the lid of the locker. Ina stood up, screeching refusals.
I took a breath and got ready to spring.
But there was fresh noise from the road. Another vehicle roared past. By the dopplered whine of its straining engine, it was traveling at high speed—a conspicuous, shocking, fuck-the-law velocity.
The policeman emitted a snarl of outrage. The floor bounced again.
Scuffling noises, silence for a beat, a slammed door, and then the sound of the policeman's car (I guessed) revved to vengeful life, gravel snapping away from tires in an angry hail.
Ina lifted the lid of my sarcophagus.
I sat up in the stink of my own sweat. "What happened?"
"That was Aji. From the village. A cousin of mine. Running the roadblock to distract the police." She was pale but relieved. "He drives like a drunk, I'm afraid."
"He did that to take the heat off us?"
"Such a colorful expression. Yes. We're a convoy, remember. Other cars, wireless telephones, he would have known we had been stopped. He's risking a fine or a reprimand, nothing more serious."
I breathed the air, which was sweet and cool. I looked at En. En gave me a shaky grin.
"Please introduce me to Aji when we get to Padang," I said. "I want to thank him for pretending to be a drunk."
Ina rolled her eyes. "Unfortunately Aji wasn't pretending. He is a drunk. An offense in the eyes of the Prophet."
Nijon looked in at us, winked, closed the rear doors.
"Well, that was frightening," Ina said. She put her hand on my arm.
I apologized for letting her take the risk.
"Nonsense," she said. "We're friends now. And the risk is not as great as you might imagine. The police can be difficult, but at least they're local men and bound by certain rules—not like the men from Jakarta, the New Reformasi or whatever they call themselves, the men who burned my clinic. And I expect you would risk yourself on our behalf if necessary. Would you, Pak Tyler?"
"Yes, I would."
Her hand was trembling. She looked me in the eye. "My goodness, I believe that's true."
No, we had never conquered death, only engineered reprieves (the pill, the powder, the angioplasty, the Fourth Age)—enacted our conviction that more life, even a little more life, might yet yield the pleasure or wisdom we wanted or had missed in it. No one goes home from a triple bypass or a longevity treatment expecting to live forever. Even Lazarus left the grave knowing he'd die a second time.
But he came forth. He came forth gratefully. I was grateful.
I drove home after a late Friday session at Perihelion, keyed open the door of the house, and found Molly sitting at the keyboard of my PC terminal.
The desk was in the southwest corner of the living room against a window, facing away from the door. Molly half-turned and gave me a startled look. At the same time, deftly, she clicked an icon and exited the program she'd been running.
"Molly?"
I wasn't surprised to find her here. Moll spent most weekends with me; she carried a duplicate key. But she'd never shown any interest in my PC.
"You didn't call," she said.
I'd been in a meeting with the insurance reps who underwrote Perihelion's employee coverage. I'd been told to expect a two-hour session but it turned out to be a twenty-minute update on billing policy, and when it finished I thought it would be quicker to just drive on home, maybe even beat Molly to the door if she'd stopped to pick up wine. Such was the effect of Molly's long level gaze that I felt obliged to explain all this before I asked her what she was doing in my files.
She laughed as I came across the room, one of those embarrassed, apologetic laughs: Look at the funny thing you caught me doing. Her right hand hovered over the touchpad of the PC. She turned back to the monitor. On screen, the cursor dived for the shut-down icon.
"Wait," I said.
"What, you want on here?"
The cursor homed in on its target. I put my hand over Molly's hand. "Actually, I'd like to know what you were doing."
She was tense. A vein throbbed in the pinkness just forward of her ear. "Making myself at home. Um, a little too much at home? I didn't think you'd mind."
"Mind what, Moll?"
"Mind me using your terminal."
"Using it for what?"
"Really nothing. Just checking it out."
But it couldn't be the machine Moll was curious about. It was five years old, nearly an antique. She used more sophisticated gear at work. And I had recognized the program she'd been in such a hurry to close when I came through the door. It was my household tracker, the program I used to pay bills and balance my checkbook and Rolodex my contacts.
"Kind of looked like a spreadsheet," I said.
"I wandered in there. Your desktop confused me. You know. People organize things different ways. I'm sorry, Tyler. I guess I was being presumptuous." She jerked her hand out from under mine and clicked the shut-down tag. The desktop shrank and I heard the processor's fan noise whine down to silence. Molly stood up, straightening her blouse. Molly always gave herself a crisp little tuck when she stood up. Putting things in order. "How about I start dinner." She turned her back on me and walked toward the kitchen.
I watched her disappear through the swinging doors. After a ten count I followed her in.
She was pulling pans off the wall rack. She glanced at me and looked away.
"Molly," I said. "If there's anything you want to know, all you have to do is ask."
"Oh. Is that all I have to do? Okay."
"Molly—"
She put a pan on the burner of the stove with exaggerated care, as if it were fragile. "Do you need me to apologize again? Okay, Tyler. I'm sorry I played with your terminal without your permission."
"I'm not accusing you of anything, Moll."
"Then why are we talking about it? I mean, why does it look like we're going to spend the entire rest of the evening talking about it?" Her eyes grew moist. Her tinted lenses turned a deeper shade of emerald. "So I was a little curious about you."
"Curious about what, my utility bills?"
"About you." She dragged a chair away from the kitchen table. The chair leg caught against the leg of the table and Molly yanked it free. She sat down and crossed her arms. "Yes, maybe even the trivial stuff. Maybe especially the trivial stuff." She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I say this and it sounds like I'm some kind of stalker. But yes, your utility bills, your brand of toothpaste, your shoe size, yes. Yes, I want to feel like I'm something more than your weekend fuck. I confess."
"You don't have to go into my files for that."
"Maybe I wouldn't have, if—"
"If?"
She shook her head. "I don't want to argue."
"Sometimes it's better to finish what you start."
"Well, like that, for instance. Anytime you feel threatened, you do your detached thing. Get all cool and reserved and analytical, like I'm some nature documentary you're watching on TV. The glass screen comes down. But the glass screen's always there, isn't it? The whole world's on the other side of it. That's why you don't talk about yourself. That's why I spent a year waiting for you to notice I was more than a piece of office furniture. That big dumb endless cool stare, watching life like it's the evening news, like it's some sorry war on the other side of the planet where all the people have unpronounceable names."
"Molly—"
"I mean I'm aware that we're all fucked up, Tyler, every one of us born into the Spin. Pretraumatic stress disorder, or what was it you called us? A generation of grotesques. That's why we're all divorced or promiscuous or hyperreligious or depressed or manic or dispassionate. We all have a really good excuse for our bad behavior, including me, and if being this big pillar of carefully premeditated helpfulness is what gets you through the night, okay, I get it. But it's also okay for me to want more than that. It's okay, in fact, it's perfectly human, for me to want to touch you. Not just fuck you. Touch you."
She said all this and then, realizing she was done, unfolded her arms and waited for me to react.
I thought about making a speech back at her. I was passionate about her, I would say. It might not have been obvious, but I'd been aware of her ever since I came to work at Perihelion. Aware of the lines and dynamics of her body, how she stood or walked or stretched or yawned; aware of her pastel wardrobe and the costume-jewelry butterfly she wore on a skinny silver chain; aware of her moods and impulses and the catalog of her smiles and frowns and gestures. When I closed my eyes I saw her face and when I went to sleep that was what I looked at. I loved her surface and her substance: the salt taste of her throat and the cadence of her voice, the arch of her fingers and the words they wrote on my body.
I thought about all that but couldn't bring myself to say it to her.
It wasn't a lie exactly. But it wasn't exactly the truth.
In the end we made up with vaguer pleasantries and brief tears and conciliatory hugs, let the issue drop, and I played sous-chef while she composed a really very good pasta sauce, and the tension began to lift, and by midnight we had cuddled an hour in front of the news (unemployment up, an election debate, some sorry war on the other side of the planet) and we were ready for bed. Molly turned out the light before we made love, and the bedroom was dark and the window was open and the sky was blank and empty. She arched her back when she came and when she sighed her breath was sweet and milky. Parted but still touching, hand to thigh, we spoke in unfinished sentences. I said, "You know, passion" and she said, "In the bedroom, God, yes."
She fell asleep fast. I was still awake an hour later.
I climbed out of bed gently, registering no change in the pulse of her breathing. I slipped into a pair of jeans and left the bedroom. Sleepless nights like this, a little Drambuie usually helped shut down the nagging interior monologue, the petitions presented by doubt to the weary forebrain. But before I went into the kitchen I sat down at the terminal and called up my household tracker.
There was no telling what Moll had been looking at. But nothing had changed, as far as I could tell. All the names and numbers seemed intact. Maybe she had found something here that made her feel closer to me. If that was really what she wanted.
Or maybe it had been a futile search. Maybe she hadn't found anything at all.
* * * * *
In the weeks leading up to the November election I saw more of Jason. His disease was becoming more active despite the escalating medication, possibly due to the stress caused by the ongoing conflict with his father. (E.D. had announced his intention to "take back" Perihelion from what he considered a cabal of upstart bureaucrats and scientists aligned with Wun Ngo Wen—an empty threat, in Jason's opinion, but potentially disruptive and embarrassing.)
Jase kept me close in case it was necessary to dose him with antispasmodics at some critical moment, which I was willing to do, within the limits of the law and professional ethics. Keeping Jase functional in the short term was the most that medical science could do for him, and staying functional long enough to outmaneuver E. D. Lawton was, for the moment, all that mattered to Jase.
So I spent a lot of time in the V.I.P. wing at Perihelion, usually with Jason but often with Wun Ngo Wen. This made me an object of suspicion to the rest of Wun's handlers, an assortment of government subauthorities (junior representatives from the State Department, the White House, Homeland Security, Space Command, et cetera) and academics who had been recruited to translate, study, and classify the so-called Martian archives. My access to Wun, in the eyes of these people, was irregular and unwelcome. I was a hireling. A nobody. But that was why Wun preferred my company: I had no agenda to promote or protect. And because he insisted, I was from time to time ushered by sullen toadies through the several doors that separated the Martian ambassador's air-conditioned quarters from the Florida heat and all the wide world beyond.
On one of these occasions I found Wun Ngo Wen seated on his wicker chair—someone had brought in a matching footstool so his feet wouldn't dangle—gazing thoughtfully at the contents of a test tube-sized glass vial. I asked him what was inside.
"Replicators," he said.
He was dressed in a suit and tie that might have been tailored for a stocky twelve-year-old: he'd been doing show-and-tell for a congressional delegation. Although Wun's existence had not been formally announced there had been a steady traffic of security-approved visitors both foreign and domestic over the last few weeks. The official announcement would be made by the White House shortly after the election, after which time Wun would be very busy indeed.
I looked at the glass tube from a safe vantage point across the room. Replicators. Ice-eaters. Seeds of an inorganic biology.
Wun smiled. "Are you afraid of it? Please don't be. I assure you the contents are completely inactive. I thought Jason had explained this to you."
He had. A little. I said, "They're microscopic devices. Semi-organic. They reproduce in conditions of extreme cold and vacuum."
"Yes, good, essentially correct. And did Jason explain the purpose of them?"
"To go out and populate the galaxy. To send us data."
Wun nodded slowly, as if this answer were also essentially correct but less than satisfactory. "This is the most sophisticated technological artifact the Five Republics have produced, Tyler. We could never have sustained the kind of industrial activity your people practice on such an alarming scale—ocean liners, men on the moon, vast cities—"
"From what I've seen, your cities are fairly impressive."
"Only because we build them in a gender gravitational gradient. On Earth those towers would crumble under their own weight. But my point is that this, the contents of this tube, this is our equivalent of an engineering triumph, something so complex and so difficult to make that we take a certain perhaps justifiable pride in it."
"I'm sure you do."
"Then come and appreciate it. Don't be afraid." He beckoned me closer and I came across the room and sat on a chair opposite him. I guess we would have looked, from a distance, like any two friends discussing anything at all. But my eyes wouldn't leave the vial. He held it out, offered it to me. "Go on," he said.
I took the tube between thumb and forefinger and held it up to let the ceiling light shine through. The contents looked like ordinary water with a slightly oily sheen. That was all.
"To truly appreciate it," Wun said, "you have to understand what you're holding. In that tube, Tyler, are some thirty or forty thousand individual man-made cells in a glycerin suspension. Each cell is an acorn."
"You know about acorns?"
"I've been reading. It's a commonplace metaphor. Acorns and oaks, correct? When you hold an acorn you hold in your hand the possibility of an oak tree, and not just a single oak but all the progeny of that oak for centuries upon centuries. Enough oak wood to build whole cities… are cities made of oak?"
"No, but it doesn't matter."
"What you're holding is an acorn. Completely dormant, as I said, and in fact that particular sample is probably quite dead, considering the time it's spent at terrestrial ambient temperatures. Analyze it, and the most you might find would be some unusual trace chemicals."
"But?"
"But—put it in an icy, airless, cold environment, an environment like the Oort Cloud, and then, Tyler, it comes to life! It begins, very slowly but very patiently, to grow and reproduce."
The Oort Cloud. I knew about the Oort Cloud from conversations with Jason and from the speculative novels I still occasionally read. The Oort Cloud was a nebulous array of cometary bodies occupying a space beginning roughly at the orbit of Pluto and extending halfway to the nearest star. These small bodies were far from tightly packed—they occupied an almost unimaginably large volume of space—but their total mass equaled twenty to thirty times the mass of the Earth, mostly in the form of dirty ice.
Lots to eat, if ice and dust are what you eat.
Wun leaned forward in his chair. His eyes, couched in skin like crumpled leather, were bright. He smiled, which I had learned to interpret as a signal of earnestness: Martians smile when they speak from the heart.
"This was not uncontroversial for my people. What you hold in your hand has the power to substantially transform not only our own solar system but many others. And of course the outcome is uncertain. While the replicators are not organic in the conventional sense, they are alive. They're living autocatalytic feedback loops, subject to modification by environmental pressure. Just like human beings, or bacteria, or, or—"
"Or murkuds," I said.
He grinned. "Or murkuds."
"In other words, they might evolve."
"They will evolve, and unpredictably. But we've placed some limits on that. Or we believe we have. As I said, controversy abounds."
Whenever Wun talked about Martian politics, I envisioned wrinkly men and women in pastel togas debating abstractions from stainless steel podiums. In fact, Wun insisted, Martian parliamentarians behaved more like cash-strapped farmers bickering at a grain auction; and the clothing—well, I didn't even try to picture the clothing; on formal occasions Martians of both sexes tended to dress like the queen of hearts in a Bicycle deck.
But while the debates had been long and heartfelt, the plan itself was relatively simple. The replicators would be delivered scattershot into the far, cold extremities of the solar system. Some infinitesimally small fraction of those replicators would alight on two or three of the cometary nuclei that constitute the Oort Cloud. There they would begin to reproduce.
Their genetic information, Wun said, was encoded into molecules that were thermally unstable anywhere warmer than the moons of Neptune. But in the hypercold environment for which they had been designed, submicroscopic filaments in the replicators would begin a slow, painstaking metabolism. They grew at speeds that would make a bristle-cone pine look rushed, but grow they would, assimilating trace volatiles and organic molecules and shaping ice into cellular walls, ribs, spars, and joiners.
By the time the replicators had consumed a few hundred cubic feet of cometary nucleus, give or take, their interconnections would begin to complexify and their behavior would become more purposeful. They would grow highly sophisticated appendages, eyes of ice and carbon to sweep the starry darkness.
In a decade or so the replicator colony would have made of itself a sophisticated communal entity capable of recording and broadcasting rudimentary data about its environment. It would look at the sky and ask: Is there a planet-sized dark body circling the nearest star?
Posing and answering the question would consume more decades of time, and at least initially the answer was a foregone conclusion: yes, two worlds circling this star were dark bodies, Earth and Mars.
Nevertheless—patiently, doggedly, slowly—the replicators would collate this data and broadcast it back to their point of origin: to us, or at least to our listening satellites.
Then, in its senescence as a complex machine, the replicator colony would break down into individual clusters of simple cells, identify another bright or nearby star, and use accumulated volatiles mined from the host cometary nucleus to propel its seeds out of the solar system. (They would leave behind a tiny fragment of themselves to act as a radio repeater, a passive node in a growing network.)
These second-generation seeds would drift in interstellar space for years, decades, millennia. Most would eventually perish, lost on fruitless trajectories or drawn into gravitational eddies. Some, unable to escape the faint but distant pull of the sun, would fall back into the solar Oort Cloud and repeat the process, stupidly but patiently eating ice and recording redundant information. If two strains encountered each other they would exchange cellular material, average out copying errors induced by time or radiation, and produce offspring nearly but not exactly like themselves.
Some few would reach the icy halo of a nearby star and begin the cycle anew, this time gathering fresh information, which they would eventually send home in bursts of data, brief digital orgasms. Binary star, they might say, no dark planetary bodies; or they might say, White dwarf star, one dark planetary body.
And the cycle would repeat again.
And again.
And again, one star to the next, stepwise, centuries by millennia, agonizingly slowly, but speedily enough as the galaxy measures time—as we clocked the external universe from our entombment. Our days would encompass their years by the hundreds of thousands and a decade of our slow time would see them infest most of the galaxy.
Information passed at light-speed node-to-node would be forwarded, would modify behavior, would direct new replicators toward unexplored territory, would suppress redundant information so that core nodes were not overwhelmed. In effect we would be wiring the galaxy for a kind of rudimentary thought. The replicators would build a neural network as big as the night sky, and it would talk to us.
Were mere risks? Of course there were risks.
Absent the Spin, Wun said, the Martians would never have approved such an arrogant appropriation of the galaxy's resources. This wasn't just an act of exploration; it was an intervention, an imperial reordering of the galactic ecology. If there were other sentient species out there—and the existence of the Hypothetical had pretty much answered that question in the affirmative—the dispersal of the replicators might be misunderstood as aggression. Which might invite retaliation.
The Martians had only reconsidered this risk when they detected Spin structures under construction above their own northern and southern poles.
"The Spin renders objections moot," Wun said, "or nearly so. With luck the replicators will tell us something important about the Hypotheticals, or at least the extent of their work in the galaxy. We might be able to discern the purpose of the Spin. Failing that, the replicators will serve as a sort of warning beacon to other intelligent species facing the same problem. Close analysis would suggest to a thoughtful observer the purpose for which the network was constructed. Other civilizations might choose to tap into it. The knowledge could help them protect themselves. To succeed where we failed."
"You think we'll fail?"
Wun shrugged. "Haven't we failed already? The sun is very old now. You know that, Tyler. Nothing lasts indefinitely. And under the circumstances, for us, even 'indefinitely' isn't a very long time."
Maybe it was the way he said it, smiling his sad little Martian sincerity-smile and leaning forward in his wicker chair, hit the weight of the pronouncement was quietly shocking.
Not that it surprised me. We all knew we were doomed. Doomed, at the very least, to live out our lives under a shell that was the only thing protecting us from a hostile solar system. The sunlight that had made Mars habitable would cook the Earth if the Spin membrane was stripped away. And even Mars (in its own dark envelope) was rapidly slipping out of the so-called habitable zone. The mortal star that was the mother of all life had passed into bloody senescence and would kill us without conscience.
Life had been born on the fringe of an unstable nuclear reaction. That was true and it had always been true; it had been true before the Spin, even when the sky was clear and summer nights twinkled with distant, irrelevant stars. It had been true but it hadn't mattered because human life was short; countless generations would live and die in the span of a solar heartbeat. But now, God help us, we were outliving the sun. Either we would end up as cinders circling its corpse or we would be preserved into eternal night, encapsulated novelties with no real home in the universe.
"Tyler? Are you all right?"
"Yes," I said. Thinking, for some reason, of Diane. "Maybe the best we can hope for is a little understanding before the curtain comes down."
"Curtain?"
"Before the end."
"It's not much consolation," Wun admitted. "But yes, it may be the best we can hope for."
"Your people have known about the Spin for millennia. And in all that time you haven't been able to learn anything about the Hypotheticals?"
"No. I'm sorry. I don't have that to offer. About the physical nature of the Spin we have only a few speculations." (Which Jason had recently attempted to explain to me: something about temporal quanta, mostly mathematics and far beyond the reach of practical engineering, Martian or terrestial.) "About the Hypotheticals themselves, nothing at all. As for what they want from us—" He shrugged. "Only more speculation. The question we asked ourselves was, what was special about the Earth when it was encapsulated? Why did the Hypotheticals wait to spin Mars, and what made them choose this particular moment in our history?"
"You have answers to that?"
One of his handlers knocked at the door and opened it. A balding guy in a tailored black suit. He spoke to Wun but he looked at me: "Just a reminder. We have the EU rep coming in. Five minutes." He held the door wide, expectantly. I stood up.
"Next time," Wun said.
"Soon, I hope."
"As soon as I can arrange it."
It was late and I was done for the day. I left through the north door. On my way to the parking lot I stopped at the wooden hoarding where the new addition to Perihelion was under construction. Between gaps in the security wall I could see a plain cinder-block building, huge external pressure tanks, pipes as thick as barrels plumbed through concrete embrasures. The ground was littered with yellow PTFE insulation and coiled copper tubing. A foreman in a white hard hat barked orders at men pushing wheelbarrows, men with safety goggles and steel-toed boots.
Men building an incubator for a new kind of life. This was where the replicators would be grown in cradles of liquid helium and prepped for their launch into the cold places of the universe: our heirs, in a sense, bound to live longer and travel farther than human beings ever would. Our final dialogue with the universe. Unless E.D. had his way and canceled the project entirely.
* * * * *
Molly and I took a beach walk that weekend.
It was a cloudless late-October Saturday. We had hiked a quarter mile of cigarette-stub-littered sand before the day got uncomfortably warm and the sun grew insistent, the ocean giving back the light in dazzling pinpoints, as if shoals of diamonds were swimming far offshore. Molly wore shorts and sandals and a white cotton T-shirt that had begun to stick to her body in alluring ways, a visor cap with the bill pulled down to shade her eyes.
"I never did understand this," she said, swiping her wrist across her forehead, turning back to face her own tracks in the sand.
"What's that, Moll?"
"The sun. I mean the sunlight. This light. It's fake, everybody says, but God, the heat: the heat is real."
"The sun's not fake exactly. The sun we see isn't the real sun, but this light would have originated there. It's managed by the Hypotheticals, the wavelengths stepped down and filtered—"
"I know, but I mean the way it rides the sky. Sunrise, sunset. If it's only a projection, how come it looks the same from Canada and South America? If the Spin barrier is only a few hundred miles up?"
I told her what Jason had once told me: the fake sun wasn't an illusion projected on a screen, it was a managed replica of sunlight passing through the screen from a source ninety million miles away, like a ray-trace program rendered on a colossal scale.
"Pretty fucking elaborate stage trick," Molly said.
"If they did it differently we'd all have died years ago. The planetary ecology needs a twenty-four-hour day." We had already lost a number of species that depended on moonlight to feed or mate.
"But it's a lie."
"If you want to call it that."
"A lie, I call it a lie. I'm standing here with the light of a lie on my face. A lie you can get skin cancer from. But I still don't understand it. I guess we won't, until we understand the Hypotheticals. If we ever do. Which I doubt."
You don't understand a lie, Molly said as we paralleled an ancient boardwalk gone white with salt, until you understand the motivation behind it. She said this glancing sidelong at me, eyes shadowed under her cap, sending me messages I couldn't decipher.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in my air-conditioned rental, reading, playing music, but Moll was restless and I hadn't quite come to terms with her raid on my computer, another indecipherable event. I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.
What worried me was that she remained deeply unpredictable, as Spin-bent as the rest of us. I couldn't buy her gifts: there were things she wanted, but unless she had vocally admired something in a shop window I couldn't guess what they were. She kept her deepest needs deeply obscure. Maybe, like most secretive people, she assumed I was keeping important secrets of my own.
We had just finished dinner and started cleaning up when the phone rang. Molly picked it up while I dried my hands. "Uh-huh," she said. "No, he's here. Just wait a second." She muted the phone and said, "It's Jason. Do you want to talk to him? He sounds all freaked out."
"Of course I'll talk to him."
I took the receiver and waited. Molly gave me a long look, then rolled her eyes and left the kitchen. Privacy. "Jase? What's up?"
"I need you here, Tyler." His voice was tense, constricted. "Now."
"Got a problem?"
"Yes, I have a fucking problem. And I need you to come fix it."
"It's that urgent?"
"Would I be calling you if it wasn't?"
"Where are you?"
"Home."
"Okay, listen, it'll take some time if the traffic's bad—"
"Just get here," he said.
So I told Molly I had some urgent work to catch up on. She smiled, or maybe sneered, and said, "What work is that? Somebody missed an appointment? Delivering a baby? What?"
"I'm a doctor, Moll. Professional privilege."
"Being a doctor doesn't mean you're Jason Lawton's lap-dog. You don't have to fetch every time he throws a stick."
"I'm sorry about cutting the evening short. Do you want me to give you a lift somewhere, or—?"
"No," she said. "I'll stay here until you're back." Staring at me defiantly, belligerently, almost wanting me to object.
But I couldn't argue. That would mean I didn't trust her. And I did trust her. Mostly. "I'm not sure how long I'll be."
"Doesn't matter. I'll curl up on the sofa and watch the tube. If that's okay with you?"
"As long as you're not bored."
"I promise I won't be bored."
* * * * *
Jason's barely furnished apartment was twenty miles up the highway, and on the way there I had to detour around a crime scene, a failed roadside attack on a bank truck that had killed a earful of Canadian tourists. Jase buzzed me into his building and when I knocked at his door he called out, "It's open."
The big front room was as spare as it ever had been, a parquet desert in which Jase had set up his Bedouin camp. He was lying on the sofa. The floor lamp next to the sofa put him in a hard, unflattering light. He was pale and his forehead was dotted with sweat. His eyes glittered.
"I thought you might not come," he said. "Thought maybe your hick girlfriend wouldn't let you out of the house."
I told him about the police detour. Then I said, "Do me a favor. Please don't talk about Molly that way."
"Please don't refer to her as an Idaho shitkicker with trailer-park sensibilities? Sure enough. Anything to oblige."
"What's the matter with you?"
"Interesting question. Many possible answers. Look."
He stood up.
It was a poor, feeble, ratcheting process. Jase was still tall, still slender, but the physical grace that had once seemed so effortless had deserted him. His arms flailed. His legs, when he managed to bring himself upright, jittered under him like jointed stilts. He blinked convulsively. "This is what's wrong with me," he said. Then, the anger coming on in another convulsive movement, his emotional state as volatile as his limbs: "Look at me! F-fuck, Tyler, look at me!"
"Sit back down, Jase. Let me examine you." I had brought my medical kit. I rolled up his sleeve and wrapped a BP cuff around his skinny arm. I could feel the muscle contracting under it, barely controlled.
His blood pressure was high and his pulse was fast. "You've been taking your anticonvulsants?"
"Of course I've been taking the fucking anticonvulsants."
"On schedule? No double-dosing? Because if you take too many, Jase, you're doing yourself more harm than good."
Jason sighed impatiently. Then he did something surprising. He reached behind my head and grabbed a handful of my hair, painfully, and tugged it down until my face was close to his. Words came out of him, a raging river of them.
"Don't get pedantic on me, Tyler. Don't do that, because I can't afford it right now. Maybe you have issues about my treatment. I'm sorry, but this is no time to take your fucking principles out for a walk. Too much is at stake. E.D. is flying in to Perihelion in the morning. E.D. thinks he has a trump card to play. E.D. would rather shut us down than let me ascend to his fucking throne. I can't let that happen, and look at me: do I look like I'm in any condition to commit an act of patricide?" His grip tightened until it hurt—he was still that strong—then he let go and with his other hand pushed me away. "So FIX ME! That's what you're for, isn't it?"
I pulled up a chair and sat silently until he lapsed back into the sofa, exhausted by his own outburst. He watched me take a syringe out of my kit and load it from a small brown bottle.
"What's that?"
"Temporary relief." In fact it was a harmless B-complex vitamin shot laced with a minor tranquilizer. Jason looked at it suspiciously but let me deliver it into his arm. A tiny bead of blood followed the needle out.
"You already know what I have to tell you," I said. "There's no cure for this problem."
"No earthly cure."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know what it means."
He was talking about Wun Ngo Wen's longevity process.
The reconstruction, Wun had said, was also a cure for a long list of genetic disabilities. It would edit the AMS loop out of Jason's DNA, inhibiting the rogue proteins that were eroding his nervous system. "But that would take weeks," I said, "and anyway, I can't condone the idea of making you a guinea pig for an untested procedure."
"It's hardly untested. The Martians have been doing it for centuries, and the Martians are as human as we are. And I'm sorry, Tyler, but I'm not really interested in your professional scruples. They simply don't enter the equation."
"They do, though. As far as I'm concerned."
"Then the question is, how far are you concerned? If you don't want to be a part of it, step aside."
"The risk—"
"It's my risk, not yours." He closed his eyes. "Don't mistake this for arrogance or vanity, but it matters whether I live or die or even whether I can walk straight or pronounce my f-fucking consonants. It matters to the world, I mean. Be-cause I'm in a uniquely important position. Not by accident. Not because I'm smart or virtuous. I was appointed. Basically, Tyler, I'm an artifact, a constructed object, engineered by E. D. Lawton the same way he and your father used to engineer airfoils. I'm doing the job he built me to do—running Perihelion, running the human response to the Spin."
"The president might disagree. Not to mention Congress. Or the U.N., for that matter."
"Please. I'm not delusional. That's the point. Running Perihelion means playing to the interested parties. All of them. E.D. knows that; he's perfectly cynical about it. He turned Perihelion into a dollar windfall for the aerospace industry and he did it by making friends and forging political alliances in high places. By cajoling and pleading and lobbying and funding friendly campaigns. He had a vision and he had contacts and he was in the right place at the right time; he stepped forward with the aerostat program and rescued the telecom industry from the Spin, and that dropped him into the company of powerful people—and he knows how to exploit an opportunity. Without E.D., there wouldn't be human beings on Mars. Without E. D. Lawton, Wun Ngo Wen wouldn't even exist. Give the old fucker credit. He's a great man."
"But?"
"But he's a man of his time. He's pre-Spin. His motives are archaic. The torch has been passed. Or will be, if I have anything to do with it."
"I don't know what that means, Jase."
"E.D. still thinks there's some personal advantage he can wring out of all this. He resents Wun Ngo Wen and he hates the idea of seeding the galaxy with replicators, not because it's too ambitious but because it's bad for business. The Mars project pumped trillions of dollars into aerospace. It made E.D. wealthier and more powerful than he ever dreamed of being. It made him a household name. And E.D. still thinks that matters. He thinks it matters the way it used to matter before the Spin, when you could play politics like a game, gamble for prizes. But Wun's proposal doesn't have that kind of payoff. Launching replicators is a trivial investment compared to terraforming Mars. We can do it with a couple of Delta sevens and a cheap ion drive. A slingshot and a test tube is all it really takes."
"How is that bad for E.D. ?"
"It doesn't do much to protect a collapsing industry. It hollows out his financial base. Worse, it takes him out of the spotlight. Suddenly everyone's going to be looking at Wun Ngo Wen—we're a couple of weeks away from a media shit-storm of unprecedented proportions—and Wun picked me as frontman for this project. The last thing ED. wants is his ungrateful son and a wrinkly Martian dismantling his life's work and launching an armada that costs less to produce than a single commercial airliner."
"What would he prefer to do?"
"He's got a big-scale agenda worked out. Whole-system surveillance, he calls it. Looking for fresh evidence of activity by the Hypotheticals. Planetary surveyors from Mercury to Pluto, sophisticated listening posts in interplanetary space, fly-by missions to scout out the Spin artifacts here and at the Martian poles."
"Is that a bad idea?"
"It might yield a little trivial information. Eke out a little data and funnel cash into the industry. That's what it's designed to do. But what E.D. doesn't understand, what his generation doesn't truly understand—"
"What's that, Jase?"
"Is that the window is closing. The human window. Our time on Earth. The Earth's time in the universe. It's just about over. We have, I think, just one more realistic opportunity to understand what it means—what it meant—to have built a human civilization." His eyelids shuttered once, twice, slowly. Much of the wild tension had drained out of him. "What it means to have been singled out for this peculiar form of extinction. More than that, though. What it means… what it means…" He looked up. "What the fuck did you give me, Tyler?"
"Nothing serious. A mild anxiolytic."
"Quick fix?"
"Isn't that what you want?"
"I suppose so. I want to be presentable by morning, that's what I want."
"The medication isn't a cure. What you want me to do is like trying to repair a loose electrical connection by pushing more voltage through it. Might work, in the short term. But it's undependable and it puts unacceptable stress on other parts of the system. I would love to give you a good clean symptom-free day. I just don't want to kill you."
"If you don't give me a symptom-free day, you might as well kill me."
"All I have to offer you," I said, "is my professional judgment."
"And what can I expect from your professional judgment?"
"I can help. I think. A little. This time. This time, Jase. But there's not much room to maneuver. You have to face up to that."
"None of us has much room to maneuver. We all have to face up to that."
But he sighed and smiled when I opened the med kit again.
* * * * *
Molly was perched on the sofa when I got home, facing the TV square-on, watching a recently popular movie about elves, or maybe they were angels. The screen was full of fuzzy blue light. She switched it off when I came in. I asked her if anything had happened while I was gone.
"Not much. You got a phone call."
"Oh? Who was it?"
"Jason's sister. What's her name. Diane. The one in Arizona."
"Did she say what she wanted?"
"Just to talk. So we talked a little."
"Uh-huh. What did you talk about?"
Molly half turned, showing me her profile against the dim light from the bedroom. "You."
"Anything in particular?"
"Yeah. I told her to stop calling you because you have a new girlfriend. I told her I'd be handling your calls from now on."
I stared.
Molly bared her teeth in what I registered was meant to be a smile. "Come on, Tyler, learn to take a joke. I told her you were out. Is that all right?"
"You told her I was out?"
"Yes, I told her you were out. I didn't say where. Because you didn't actually tell me."
"Did she say whether it was urgent?"
"Didn't sound urgent. Call her back if you want. Go ahead—I don't care."
But this, too, was a test. "It can wait," I said.
"Good." Her cheeks dimpled. "Because I have other plans."
Jason, obsessed with E. D. Lawton's pending arrival, had neglected to mention that another guest was also expected at Perihelion: Preston Lomax, the current vice president of the United States and front-runner in the upcoming election.
Security was tight at the gates and there was a helicopter on the pad atop the hub of the Perihelion building. I recognized all these Code Red protocols from a series of visits by President Garland over the last month. The guard at the main entrance, the one who called me "Doc" and whose cholesterol levels I monitored once a month, tipped me off that it was Lomax this time.
I was just past the clinic door (Molly absent, a temp named Lucinda manning reception) when I got a paged message redirecting me to Jason's office in the executive wing. Four security perimeters later I was alone with him. I was afraid he'd ask for more medication. But last night's treatment had put him into a convincing if purely temporary remission. He stood up and came across the room with his tremorless hand extended, showing off: "Want to thank you for this, Ty."
"You're welcome, but I have to say it again—no guarantees."
"Noted. As long as I'm good for the day. E.D.'s due at noon."
"Not to mention the vice president."
"Lomax has been here since seven this morning. The man's an early riser. He spent a couple of hours conferencing with our Martian guest and I'm conducting the goodwill tour shortly. Speaking of which, Wun would like to see you if you have a few minutes free."
"Assuming national affairs aren't keeping him busy." Lomax was the man most likely to win the national vote next week—in a walkover, if the polls were to be trusted. Jase had been cultivating Lomax long before Wun's arrival, and Lomax was fascinated with Wun. "Is your father joining the tour?"
"Only because there's no polite way to keep him out."
"Do you foresee a problem?"
"I foresee many problems."
"Physically, though, you're all right?"
"I feel fine. But you're the doctor. All I need is a couple more hours, Tyler. I assume I'm good for that?"
His pulse was a little elevated—not surprisingly—but his AMS symptoms were effectively suppressed. And if the drugs had left him agitated or confused it didn't show. In fact he seemed almost radiantly calm, locked in some cool, lucid room at the back of his head.
So I went to see Wun Ngo Wen. Wun wasn't in his quarters; he had decamped to the small executive cafeteria, which had been cordoned off and encircled by tall men with coils of wire tucked behind their ears. He looked up when I came past the steam table and waved away the security clones who moved in to intercept me.
I sat down across a glass-topped table from him. He picked at a pallid salmon steak with a cafeteria fork and smiled serenely. I slouched in my chair to match his height. He could have used a booster seat.
But the food agreed with him. He had gained a little weight in his time at Perihelion, I thought. His suit, tailored a couple of months ago, was tight across his belly. He had neglected to button the matching vest. His cheeks were fuller, too, though they were as wrinkled as ever, the dark skin softly gullied.
"I hear you had a visitor," I said.
Wun nodded. "But not for the first time. I met with President Garland in Washington on several occasions and I've met with Vice President Lomax twice. The election is expected to bring him to power, people say."
"Not because he's especially well loved."
"I'm not in a position to judge him as a candidate," Wun said. "But he does ask interesting questions."
The endorsement made me feel a little protective. "I'm sure he's amiable when he wants to be. And he's done a decent job in office. But he spent a lot of his career as the most hated man on Capitol Hill. Party whip for three different administrations. Not much gets past him."
Wun grinned. "Do you think I'm naive, Tyler? Are you afraid Vice President Lomax will take advantage of me?"
"Not naive, exactly—"
"I'm a newcomer, admittedly. The finer political nuances are lost on me. But I'm several years older than Preston Lomax, and I've held public office myself."
"You have?"
"For three years," he said with detectable pride, "I was Agricultural Administrator for Ice Winds Canton."
"Ah."
"The governing body for most of the Kirioloj Delta. It wasn't the Presidency of the United States of America. There are no nuclear weapons at the disposal of the Agricultural Administration. But I did expose a corrupt local official who was falsifying crop reports by weight and selling his margin into the surplus market."
"A rake-off scheme?"
"If that's the term for it."
"So the Five Republics aren't free of corruption?"
Wun blinked, an event that rippled out along the convolute geography of his face. "No, how could they be? And why do so many terrestrials make that assumption? Had I come here from some other Earthly country—France, China, Texas—no one would be startled to hear about bribery or duplicity or theft."
"I guess not. But it's not the same."
"Isn't it? But you work here at Perihelion. You must have met some of the founding generation, as strange as that idea still seems to me—the men and women whose remote descendants we Martians are. Were they such ideal persons that you expect their progeny to be free of sin?"
"No, but—"
"And yet the misconception is almost universal. Even those books you gave me, written before the Spin—"
"You read them?"
"Yes, eagerly. I enjoyed them. Thank you. But even in those novels, the Martians…" He struggled after a thought.
"I guess some of them are a little saintly…"
"Remote," he said. "Wise. Seemingly frail. Actually very powerful. The Old Ones. But to us, Tyler, you're the Old Ones. The elder species, the ancient planet. I would have thought the irony was inescapable."
I pondered that. "Even the H. G. Wells novel—"
"His Martians are barely seen. They're abstractly, indifferently evil. Not wise but clever. But devils and angels are brother and sister, if I understand the folklore correctly."
"But the more contemporary stories—"
"Those were deeply interesting, and the protagonists were at least human. But the truest pleasure of those stories is in the landscapes, don't you agree? And even so, they're transformative landscapes. A destiny behind every dune."
"And of course the Bradbury—"
"His Mars isn't Mars. But his Ohio makes me think of it."
"I understand what you're saying. You're just people. Mars isn't heaven. Agreed, but that doesn't mean Lomax won't try to use you for his own political purposes."
"And I mean to tell you that I'm fully aware of the possibility. The certainty would be more correct. Obviously I'll be used for political advantage, but that's the power I have: to bestow or withhold my approval. To cooperate or to be stubborn. The power to say the right word." He smiled again. His teeth were uniformly perfect, radiantly white. "Or not."
"So what do you want out of all this?"
He showed me his palms, a gesture both Martian and terrestrial. "Nothing. I'm a Martian saint. But it would be gratifying to see the replicators launched."
"Purely in the pursuit of knowledge?"
"That I will confess to, even if it is a saintly motive. To learn at least something about the Spin—"
"And challenge the Hypotheticals?"
He blinked again. "I very much hope the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they are, won't perceive what we're doing as a challenge."
"But if they do—"
"Why would they?"
"But if they do, they'll believe the challenge came from Earth, not Mars."
Wun Ngo Wen blinked several more times. Then the smile crept back: indulgent, approving. "You're surprisingly cynical yourself, Dr. Dupree."
"How un-Martian of me."
"Quite."
"And does Preston Lomax believe you're an angel?"
"Only he can answer that question. The last thing he said to me—" Here Wun dropped his Oxford diction for a note-perfect Preston Lomax impression, brusque and chilly as a winter seashore: "It's a privilege to talk to you, Ambassador Wen. You speak your mind directly. Very refreshing for an old DC. hand like myself."
The impression was startling, coming from someone who had been speaking English for only a little over a year. I told him so.
"I'm a scholar," he said. "I've been reading English since I was a child. Speaking it is another matter. But I do have a talent for languages. It's one of the reasons I'm here. Tyler, may I ask another favor of you? Would you be willing to bring me more novels?"
"I'm all out of Martian stories, I'm afraid."
"Not Mars. Any sort of novel. Anything, anything you consider important, anything that matters to you or gave you a little pleasure."
"There must be plenty of English professors who'd be happy to work up a reading list."
"I'm sure there are. But I'm asking you."
"I'm not a scholar. I like to read, but it's pretty random and mostly contemporary."
"All the better. I'm alone more often than you might think. My quarters are comfortable but I can't leave them without elaborate planning. I can't go out for a meal, I can't see a motion picture or join a social club. I could ask my minders for books, but the last thing I want is a work of fiction that's been approved by a committee. But an honest book is almost as good as a friend."
This was as close as Wun had come to complaining about his position at Perihelion, his position on Earth. He was happy enough during his waking hours, he said, too busy for nostalgia and still excited by the strangeness of what for him would always be an alien world. But at night, on the verge of sleep, he sometimes imagined he was walking the shore of a Martian lake, watching shore birds flock and wheel over the waves, and in his mind it was always a hazy afternoon, the light tinted by streamers of the ancient dust that still rose from the deserts of Noachis to color the sky. In this dream or vision he was alone, he said, but he knew there were others waiting for him around the next curve of the rocky shore. They might be friends or strangers, they might even be his lost family; he knew only that he would be welcomed by them, touched, drawn close, embraced. But it was only a dream.
"When I read," he said to me, "I hear the echo of those voices."
I promised to bring him books. But now we had business. There was a flurry of activity in the security cordon by the door of the cafeteria. One of the suits came across the floor and said, "They're asking for you upstairs."
Wun abandoned his meal and began clambering out of his chair. I told him I'd see him later.
The suit turned to me. "You too," he said. "They're asking for both of you."
* * * * *
Security hustled us to a boardroom adjoining Jason's office, where Jase and a handful of Perihelion division heads were facing a delegation that included E. D. Lawton and the likely next president, Preston Lomax. No one looked happy.
I faced E. D. Lawton, whom I hadn't seen since my mother's funeral. His gauntness had begun to look almost pathological, as if something vital had leaked out of him. Starched white cuffs, bony brown wrists. His hair was sparse, limp, and randomly combed. But his eyes were still quick. E.D.'s eyes were always lively when he was angry.
Preston Lomax, on the other hand, just looked impatient. Lomax had come to Perihelion to be photographed with Wun (photos for release after the official White House announcement) and to confer about the replicator strategy, which he was planning to endorse. E.D. was here on the weight of his reputation. He had talked himself into the vice president's pre-election tour and apparently hadn't stopped talking since.
During the hour-long Perihelion tour E.D. had questioned, doubted, derided, or viewed with alarm virtually every statement Jason's division heads made, especially when the junket wound past the new incubator labs. But (according to Jenna Wylie, the cryonics team leader, who explained this to me later) Jason had answered each of his father's outbursts with a patient and probably well-rehearsed rebuttal of his own. Which had driven E.D. to fresh heights of indignation, which in turn made him sound, according to Jenna, "like some crazed Lear raving about perfidious Martians."
The battle was still under way when Wun and I entered. E.D. leaned into the conference table, saying, "Bottom line, it's unprecedented, it's untested, and it embraces a technology we don't understand or control."
And Jason smiled in the manner of a man far too polite to embarrass a respected but cranky elder. "Obviously, nothing we do is risk-free. But—"
But here we were. A few of those present hadn't seen Wun before, and they self-identified, staring like startled sheep when they noticed him. Lomax cleared his throat. "Excuse me, but what I need right now is a word with Jason and our new arrivals—privately, if possible? Just a moment or two."
So the crowd dutifully filed out, including E.D., who looked, however, not dismissed but triumphant.
Doors closed. The upholstered silence of the boardroom settled around us like fresh snow. Lomax, who still hadn't acknowledged us, addressed Jason. "I know you told me we'd take some flak. Still—"
"It's a lot to deal with. I understand."
"I don't like having E.D. outside the tent pissing in. It's unseemly. But he can't do us any real harm, assuming…"
"Assuming there's no substance to what he says. I assure you, there's not."
"You think he's senile."
"I wouldn't go that far. Do I think his judgment has become questionable? Yes, I do."
"You know those accusations are flying both ways."
This was as close as I had been or would ever be to a sitting president. Lomax hadn't been elected yet, but only the formalities stood between him and the office. As V.P. Lomax had always seemed a little dour, a little brooding, rocky Maine to Garland's ebullient Texas, the ideal presence at a state funeral. During the campaign he had learned to smile more often but the effort was never quite convincing; political cartoonists inevitably accentuated the frown, the lower lip tucked in as if he were biting back a malediction, eyes as chilly as a Cape Cod winter.
"Both ways. You're talking about E.D.'s insinuations about my health."
Lomax sighed. "Frankly, your father's opinion on the practicality of the replicator project doesn't carry much weight. It's a minority point of view and likely to remain that way. But yes, I have to admit, the charges he made today are a little troubling." He turned to face me. "That's why you're here, Dr. Dupree."
Now Jason aimed his attention at me, and his voice was cautious, carefully neutral. "It seems E.D.'s been making some fairly wild claims. He says I'm suffering from, what was it, an aggressive brain disease—?"
"An unbeatable neurological deterioration," Lomax said, "which is interfering with Jason's ability to oversee operations here at Perihelion. What do you say to that, Dr. Dupree?"
"I guess I would say Jason can speak for himself."
"I already have," Jase said. "I told Vice President Lomax all about my MS."
From which he did not actually suffer. It was a cue. I cleared my throat. "Multiple sclerosis isn't entirely curable, but it's more than just controllable. An MS patient today can expect a life span as long and productive as anyone else's. Maybe Jase has been reluctant to talk about it, and that's his privilege, but MS is nothing to be embarrassed about."
Jase gave me a hard look I couldn't interpret.
Lomax said, "Thank you," a little dryly. "I appreciate the information. By the way, do you happen to know a Dr. Malmstein? David Malmstein?" Followed by a silence that gaped like the jaws of a steel trap.
"Yes," I said, maybe a tick too late.
"This Dr. Malmstein is a neurologist, is he not?"
"Yes, he is."
"Have you consulted him in the past?"
"I consult with lots of specialists. It's part of what I do as a physician."
"Because, according to E.D., you called in this Malmstein regarding Jason's, uh, grave neurological disorder."
Which explained the frigid look Jase was shooting me. Someone had talked to E.D. about this. Someone close. But it hadn't been me.
I tried not to think about who it might have been. "I'd do the same for any patient with a possible MS diagnosis. I run a good clinic here at Perihelion, but we don't have the kind of diagnostic equipment Malmstein can access at a working hospital."
Lomax, I think, recognized this as a non-answer, but he tossed the ball back to Jase: "Is Dr. Dupree telling the truth?"
"Of course he is."
"You trust him?"
"He's my personal physician. Of course I trust him."
"Because, no offense, I wish you well but I don't really give a shit about your medical problems. What concerns me is whether you can give us the support we need and see this project through to the end. Can you do that?"
"As long as we're funded, yes sir, I'll be here."
"And how about you, Ambassador Wen? Does this raise any alarms with you? Any concerns or questions about the future of Perihelion?"
Wun pursed his lips, three quarters of a Martian smile. "No concerns whatsoever. I trust Jason Lawton implicitly. I also trust Dr. Dupree. He's my personal physician as well."
Which caused both Jason and me to stifle our astonishment, but it closed the deal with Lomax. He shrugged. "All right. I apologize for bringing it up. Jason, I hope your health remains good and I hope you weren't offended by the tone of the questions, but given E.D.'s status I felt I had to ask."
"I understand," Jase said. "As for E.D.—"
"Don't worry about your father."
"I'd hate to see him humiliated."
"He'll be quietly sidelined. I think that's a given. If he insists on going public—" Lomax shrugged. "In that case I'm afraid it's his own mental capacity people will challenge."
"Of course," Jason said, "we all hope that's not necessary."
* * * * *
I spent the next hour in the clinic. Molly hadn't shown up this morning and Lucinda had been doing all the bookings. I thanked her and told her to take the rest of the day off I thought about making a couple of phone calls, but I didn't want them routed through the Perihelion system.
I waited until I had seen Lomax's helicopter lift off and his imperial cavalcade depart by the front gates; then I cleared my desk and tried to think about what I wanted to do. I found my hands were a little shaky. Not MS. Anger, maybe. Outrage. Pain. I wanted to diagnose it, not experience it. I wanted to banish it to the index pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
I was on my way past reception when Jason came through the door.
He said, "I want to thank you for backing me up. I assume that means you aren't the one who told E.D. about Malmstein."
"I wouldn't do that, Jase."
"I accept that. But someone did. And that presents a problem. Because how many people are aware I've been seeing a neurologist?"
"You, me, Malmstein, whoever works in Malmstein's office—"
"Malmstein didn't know E.D. was looking for dirt and neither did his staff. E.D. must have found out about Malmstein from a closer source. If not you or me—"
Molly. He didn't have to say it.
"We can't blame her without any kind of evidence."
"Speak for yourself. You're the one who's sleeping with her. Did you keep records on my meetings with Malmstein?"
"Not here in the office."
"At home?"
"Yes."
"You showed these to her?"
"Of course not."
"But she might have gained access to them when you weren't aware of it."
"I suppose so." Yes.
"And she's not here to answer questions. Did she call in sick?"
I shrugged. "She didn't call in at all. Lucinda tried to get hold of her, but her phone isn't answering."
He sighed. "I don't exactly blame you for this. But you have to admit, Tyler, you've made a lot of questionable choices here."
"I'll deal with it," I said.
"I know you're angry. Hurt and angry. I don't want you to walk out of here and do something that will make things worse. But I do want you to consider where you stand on this project. Where your loyalties lie."
"I know where they lie," I said.
* * * * *
I tried to reach Molly from my car but she still wasn't answering. I drove to her apartment. It was a warm day. The low-rise stucco complex where she lived was enshrouded in lawn-sprinkler haze. The fungal smell of wet garden soil infiltrated the car.
I was circling toward visitor parking when I caught sight of Moll stacking boxes in the back of a battered white U-Haul trailer hitched to the rear bumper of her three-year-old Ford. I pulled over in front of her. She spotted me and said something I couldn't hear but which looked a lot like "Oh, shit!" But she stood her ground when I got out of my car.
"You can't park there," she said. "You're blocking the exit."
"Are you going somewhere?"
Molly placed a cardboard box labeled dishes on the corrugated floor of the U-Haul. "What does it look like?"
She was wearing tan slacks, a denim shirt, and a handkerchief tied over her hair. I came closer and she took an equivalent three steps back, clearly frightened.
"I'm not going to hurt you," I said.
"So what do you want?"
"I want to know who hired you."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Did you deal with E.D. himself or did he use an intermediary?"
"Shit," she said, gauging the distance between herself and the car door. "Just let me go, Tyler. What do you want from me? What's the point of this?"
"Did you go to him and make an offer or did he call you first? And when did all this start, Moll? Did you fuck me for information or did you sell me out at some point after the first date?"
"Go to hell."
"How much were you paid? I'd like to know how much I'm worth."
"Go to hell. What does it matter, anyway? It's not—"
"Don't tell me it's not about money. I mean, is some principle involved here?"
"Money is the principle." She dusted her hands on her slacks, a little less frightened now, a little more defiant
"What is it you want to buy, Moll?"
"What do I want to buy! The only important thing anybody can buy. A better death. A cleaner, better death. One of these mornings the sun's going to come up and it won't stop coming up until the whole fucking sky is on fire. And I'm sorry, but I want to live somewhere nice until that happens. Somewhere by myself. Some place as comfortable as I can make it. And when that last morning arrives I want some expensive pharmaceuticals to take me over the line. I want to go to sleep before the screaming starts. Really, Tyler. That's all I want, that's the only thing in this world I really really want, and thank you, thank you for making it possible." She was frowning angrily, but a tear dislodged and slid down her cheek. "Please move your car."
I said, "A nice house and a bottle of pills? That's your price?"
"There's no one looking out for me but me."
"This sounds pathetic, but I thought we could look out for each other."
"That would mean trusting you. And no offense, but—look at you. Skating through life like you're waiting for an answer or waiting for a savior or just permanently on hold."
"I'm trying to be reasonable here, Moll."
"Oh, I don't doubt it. If reasonability was a knife I'd be losing blood. Poor reasonable Tyler. But I figured that out, too. It's revenge, isn't it? All that sweet saintliness you wear like your own suit of clothes. It's your revenge on the world for disappointing you. The world didn't give you what you want, and you're not giving anything back but sympathy and aspirin."
"Molly—"
"And don't you dare say you love me, because I know that's not true. You don't know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you're in love. It's nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another."
I turned and walked back to my own car, a little unsteadily, shocked less by the betrayal than by the finality of it, intimacies wiped out like penny stocks in a market crash. Then I turned back. "How about you, Moll? I know you were paid for information, but is that why you fucked me in the first place?"
"I fucked you," she said, "because I was lonely."
"Are you lonely now?"
"I never stopped," she said.
I drove away.
The federal election was coming up fast. Jason intended to use it for cover.
"Fix me," he had said. And, he insisted, there was a way to do that. It was unorthodox. It wasn't FDA-approved. But it was a therapy with a long and well-documented history. And he made it clear he meant to take advantage of it, whether I cooperated in the effort or not.
And because Molly had almost stripped him of everything that was important to him—and left me among the wreckage—I agreed to help. (Thinking, ironically, of what E.D. had said to me years ago: I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Was that what I was doing?)
In the days before the November election Wun Ngo Wen briefed us on the procedure and its attendant risks.
Conferring with Wun wasn't easy. The problem wasn't so much the web of security surrounding him, though that was difficult enough to negotiate, but the crowd of analysts and specialists who had been feeding at his archives like hummingbirds at nectar. These were reputable scholars, vetted by the FBI and Homeland Security, sworn to secrecy at least pro tem, mesmerized by the vast data banks of Martian wisdom Wun had carried with him to Earth. The digital data amounted to more than five hundred volumes of astronomy, biology, math, physics, medicine, history, and technology at a thousand pages per volume, much of it considerably in advance of terrestrial knowledge. Had the entire contents of the Library of Alexandria been recovered by time machine it could hardly have produced a greater scholarly feeding frenzy.
These people were under pressure to complete their work before the official announcement of Wun's presence. The federal government wanted at least a rough index to the archives (much of which was in approximate English but some of which was written in Martian scientific script) before foreign governments began to demand equal access to it. The State Department planned to produce and distribute sanitized copies from which certain potentially valuable or dangerous technologies had been excised or "presented in summary form," the originals to remain highly classified.
Thus whole tribes of scholars battled for and jealously guarded their access to Wun, who could interpret or explain lacunae in the Martian text. On several occasions I was chased out of Wun's quarters by frantically polite men and women from "the high-energy physics group" or "the molecular biology group" demanding their negotiated quarter hour. Wun occasionally introduced me to these people but none of them was ever happy to see me, and the medical sciences team leader was alarmed almost to the point of tachycardia when Wun announced he'd chosen me as his personal physician.
Jase reassured the scholars by hinting that I was part of the "socialization process" by which Wun was polishing his terrestrial manners outside the context of politics or science, and I promised the med team leader I wouldn't provide medical treatment to Wun without her direct involvement. A rumor spread among the research people that I was a civilian opportunist who had charmed his way into Wun's inner circle and that my payoff would be a fat book contract after Wun went public. The rumor arose spontaneously but we did nothing to discourage it; it served our purposes.
Access to pharmaceuticals was easier than I'd expected. Wun had arrived on Earth with an entire pharmacopoeia of Martian drugs, none of which had terrestrial counterparts and any of which, he claimed, he might one day need in order to treat himself. The medical supplies had been confiscated from his landing craft but had been returned once his ambassadorial status was established. (Samples having no doubt been collected by the government; but Wun doubted that crude analysis would reveal the purpose of any of these highly engineered materials.) Wun simply supplied a few vials of raw drug to Jason, who carried them out of Perihelion in an obscuring cloud of executive privilege.
Wun briefed me on dosage, timing, contraindications, and potential problems. I was dismayed by the long list of attendant dangers. Even on Mars, Wun said, the mortality rate from the transition to Fourth was a nontrivial 0.1 percent, and Jason's case was complicated by his AMS.
But without treatment Jason's prognosis was even worse. And he would go ahead with this whether I approved of it or not—in a sense, the prescribing physician was Wun Ngo Wen, not me. My role was simply to oversee the procedure and treat any unexpected side effects. Which soothed my conscience, although the argument would have been hard to defend in court—Wun might have "prescribed" the drugs, but it wasn't his hand that would put them into Jason's body.
It would be mine.
Wun Ngo Wen wouldn't even be with us. Jase had booked a three-week leave of absence for the end of November, early December, by which time Wun would have become a global celebrity, a name (however unusual) everyone recognized. Wun would be busy addressing the United Nations and accepting the hospitality of our planet's somewhat bloodstained collection of monarchs, mullahs, presidents, and prime ministers, while Jason sweated and vomited his way toward better health.
We needed a place to go. A place where he could be inconspicuously sick, a place where I could attend him without attracting unwanted attention, but civilized enough that I could call an ambulance if things went wrong. Somewhere comfortable. Somewhere quiet.
"I know the perfect place," Jason said.
"Where's that?"
"The Big House," he said.
I laughed, until I realized he was serious.
* * * * *
Diane didn't call back until a week after Lomax's visit to Perihelion, a week after Molly left town to claim whatever reward E. D. Lawton or his hired detectives had promised her.
Sunday afternoon. I was alone in my rental. A sunny day, but the blinds were pulled. All week, balancing time between patients at the Perihelion clinic and secretive tutorials with Wun and Jase, I'd been staring down the barrel of this empty weekend. It was good to be busy, I reasoned, because when you were busy you were awash in the countless but comprehensible daily problems that crowd out pain and stifle remorse. That was healthy. That was a coping process. Or at least a delaying tactic. Useful but, alas, temporary. Because sooner or later the noise fades, the crowds disperse, and you go home to the burned-out lightbulb, the empty room, the unmade bed.
It was pretty bad. I wasn't even sure how to feel—or rather, which of the several conflicting and incompatible modes of pain I ought to acknowledge first. "You're better off without her," Jase had said a couple of times, and that was at least as true as it was banal: better off without her, but better still if I could make sense of her, if I could decide whether Molly had used me or had punished me for using her, whether my chilly and perhaps slightly counterfeit love equaled her cold and profitable repudiation of it.
Then the phone rang, which was embarrassing because I was busy stripping the sheets from my bed, balling them up for a trip to the laundry room, lots of detergent and scalding hot water to bleach out Molly's aura. You don't want to be interrupted at a task like that. Makes you feel the tiniest bit self-conscious. But I'd always been a slave to a ringing phone. I picked up.
"Tyler?" Diane said. "Is that you, Ty? Are you alone?"
I admitted that I was alone.
"Good, I'm glad I finally got hold of you. I wanted to tell you, we're changing our phone number. Unlisting it. But in case you need to get in touch with me—"
She recited the private number, which I scribbled on a handy napkin. "Why are you unlisting your phone?" She and Simon had only a single static land line between them, but I guessed that was a devotional penance, like wearing wool or eating whole grains.
"For one thing we've been getting these odd calls from E.D. A couple of times he called late at night and started haranguing Simon. He sounded a little drunk, frankly. E.D. hates Simon, E.D. hated Simon from the get-go, but after we moved to Phoenix we never heard from him. Until now. The silence was hurtful. But this is worse."
Diane's telephone number might have been something else Molly filched from my household tracker and passed on to E.D. I couldn't explain that to Diane without violating my security oath, for the same reason I couldn't mention Wun Ngo Wen or ice-eating replicators. But I did tell her that Jason had been engaged in a struggle with his father over control of Perihelion, and Jason had come out on top, and maybe that's what was bothering E.D.
"Could be," Diane said. "Coming so soon after the divorce."
"What divorce? Are you talking about E.D. and Carol?"
"Jason didn't tell you? E.D.'s been living in a rental in Georgetown since May. The negotiations are still going on, but it looks like Carol gets the Big House and maintenance payments and E.D. gets everything else. The divorce was his idea, not hers. Which is maybe understandable. Carol's been just this side of an alcoholic coma for decades. She wasn't much of a mother and she can't have been much of a wife for E.D."
"You're saying you approve?"
"Hardly. I haven't changed my mind about him. He was an awful, indifferent parent—at least to me. I didn't like him and he didn't care whether I liked him. But I wasn't in awe of him, either, not the way Jason was. Jason saw him as this monumental king of industry, this towering Washington mover and shaker—"
"Isn't he?"
"He's successful and he's got some leverage, but this stuff is all relative, Ty. There are ten thousand E. D. Lawtons in this country. E.D. would never have gotten anywhere if his father and his uncle hadn't bankrolled his first business— which I'm sure they expected to function as a tax write-off, nothing more. E.D. was good at what he did, and when the Spin opened up an opportunity he took advantage of it, and that brought him to the attention of genuinely powerful people. But he was still basically nouveau riche as far as the big boys were concerned. He never had that Yale-Harvard-Skull-and-Bones thing going for him. No cotillion balls for me. We were the poor kids on the block. I mean, it was a nice block, but there's old money and there's new money, and we were definitely new money."
"I guess it looked different," I said, "from across the lawn. How's Carol holding up?"
"Carol's medicine comes out of the same bottle it ever did. What about you? How are things with you and Molly?"
"Molly's gone," I said.
"Gone as in 'gone to the store,' or—"
"Plain gone. We broke up. I don't have a cute euphemism for it."
"I'm sorry, Tyler."
"Thank you, but it's for the best. Everybody says so."
"Simon and I are doing all right," she said, though I hadn't asked. "The church thing is hard on him."
"More church politics?"
"Jordan Tabernacle's in some kind of legal trouble. I don't know all the details. We're not directly involved, but Simon's taking it pretty hard. You sure you're okay, though? You sound a little hoarse."
"I'll survive," I said.
* * * * *
The morning before the election I packed a couple of suitcases (fresh clothes, a brace of paperback books, my medical kit), drove to Jason's place, and picked him up for the drive to Virginia. Jase was still fond of quality cars, but we needed to travel inconspicuously. My Honda, therefore, not his Porsche. The interstates weren't safe for Porsches these days. The Garland presidency had been good times for anybody with an income over half a million dollars, hard times for everybody else. That was pretty obvious from the look of the road, a rolling tableau of warehouse retailers bookended by boarded-over malls, parking lots where squatters lived in tireless automobiles, highway towns subsisting on the income from a Stuckey's and a radar trap. Warning signs posted by the state police announced 'NO STOPPING AFTER DARK' or 'VERIFIED 911 CALL REQUIRED FOR PROMPT EMERGENCY RESPONSE'. Highway piracy had cut the volume of small-vehicle traffic by half. We spent much of the drive bracketed between eighteen-wheel rigs, some of them in conspicuously poor repair, and camo-green troop trucks servicing various military bases.
But we didn't talk about any of that. And we didn't talk about the election, which was in any case a foregone conclusion, Lomax outpolling any of the two major and three minor rival candidates. We didn't talk about ice-eating replicators or Wun Ngo Wen and we surely didn't talk about E. D. Lawton. Instead we talked about old times and good books, and much of the time we didn't talk at all. I had loaded the dashboard memory with the kind of angular, contrarian jazz I knew Jason liked: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins—people who had long ago fathomed the distance between the street and the stars.
We pulled up in front of the Big House at dusk.
The house was brightly lit, big windows butter yellow under a sky the color of iridescent ink. Election weather was chilly this year. Carol Lawton came down from the porch to meet the car, her small body shrouded in paisley scarves and a knitted sweater. She was nearly sober, judging by her steady if slightly overcalculated gait.
Jason unfolded himself slowly, cautiously from the passenger seat.
Jase was in remission, or as close as he came to remission these days. With a little effort he could pass for normal. What surprised me was that he stopped making the effort as soon as we arrived at the Big House. He careened through the entrance hall to the dining room. No servants were present— Carol had arranged for us to have the house to ourselves for a couple of weeks—but the cook had left a platter of cold meats and vegetables in case we arrived hungry. Jason slumped into a chair.
Carol and I joined him. Carol had aged visibly since my mother's death. Her hair was so fine now that the contours of her skull showed through it, pink and simian, and when I took her arm it felt like kindling under silk. Her cheeks were sunken. Her eyes had the brittle, nervous alacrity of a drinker at least temporarily on the wagon. When I said it was good to see her she smiled ruefully: "Thank you, Tyler. I know how awful I look. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Not quite ready for my close-up, thank you very effing much." I didn't know what she was talking about. "But I endure. How is Jason?"
"Same as always," I said.
"You're sweet for prevaricating. But I know—well, I won't say I know all about it. But I know he's ill. He told me that much. And I know he's expecting you to treat him for it. Some unorthodox but effective treatment." She took her arm away and looked into my eyes. "It is effective, isn't it, this medication you propose to give him?"
I was too startled to say anything but, "Yes."
"Because he made me promise not to ask questions. I suppose that's all right. Jason trusts you. Therefore I trust you. Even though when I look at you I can't help seeing the child who lives in the house across the lawn. But I see a child when I look at Jason, too. Vanished children—I can't think where I lost them."
* * * * *
That night I slept in a guest room at the Big House, a room I had only glimpsed from the hallway during the years I lived on the property.
I slept some of the night, anyway. Some of it I spent lying awake, trying to gauge the legal risk I had assumed by coming here. I didn't know exactly which laws or protocols Jase might have violated by smuggling prepared Martian pharmaceuticals off the Perihelion campus, but I had already made myself an accessory to the act.
Come the next morning Jason wondered where we ought to store the several vials of clear liquid Wun had passed on to him—enough to treat four or five people. ("In case we drop a suitcase," he had explained at the beginning of the trip. "Redundancy.")
"Are you expecting a search?"
I pictured federal functionaries in biohazard suits swarming up the steps of the Big House.
"Of course not. But it's never a bad idea to hedge a risk." He gave me a closer look, though his eyes jerked to the left every few seconds, another symptom of his disease. "Feeling a little apprehensive?"
I said we could conceal the spares in the house across the lawn, unless they needed refrigeration.
"According to Wun they're chemically stable under any condition short of thermonuclear warfare. But a warrant for the Big House would cover the entire property."
"I don't know about warrants. I do know where the hiding places are."
"Show me," Jason said.
So we trooped across the lawn, Jason following a little unsteadily behind me. It was early afternoon, election day, but in the grassy space between the two houses it might have been any autumn, any year. Somewhere off in the wooded patch straddling the creek a bird announced itself, a single note that began boldly but faded like a reconsidered thought. Then we reached my mother's house and I turned the key and opened the door into a deeper stillness.
The house had been periodically cleaned and dusted but essentially closed since my mother's death. I hadn't been back to organize her effects, no other family existed, and Carol had preferred to maintain the building rather than change it. But it wasn't timeless. Far from it. Time had nested here. Time had made itself at home. The front room smelled of enclosure, of the essences that seep out of undisturbed upholstery, yellow paper, settled fabric. In winter, Carol told me later, the house was kept just warm enough to prevent the pipes from freezing; in summer the curtains were drawn against the heat. It was cool today, inside and out.
Jason came across the threshold trembling. His gait had been ragged all morning, which was why he had let me carry the pharmaceuticals (apart from what I had already set aside for his treatment), a half pound or so of glass and biochemicals in a foam-padded leather overnight bag.
"This is the first time I've been here," he said shyly, "since before she died. Is it stupid to say I miss her?"
"No, not stupid."
"She was the first person I ever noticed being kind to me. All the kindness in the Big House came in the door with Belinda Dupree."
I led him through the kitchen to the half-size door that opened into the basement. The small house on the Lawton property had been designed to resemble a New England cottage, or someone's notion of one, down to the rude concrete-slab cellar with a ceiling low enough that Jason had to stoop to follow me. The space was just big enough to contain a furnace, water heater, washing machine and dryer. The air was even colder here and it had a moist, mineral scent.
I crouched into the nook behind the sheet-metal body of the furnace, one of those dusty cul-de-sacs even professional cleaners habitually ignore. I explained to Jase that there was a cracked slab of drywall here, and with a little dexterity you could pry it out to reveal the small uninsulated gap between the pine studs and the foundation wall.
"Interesting," Jason said from where he stood a yard behind me and around the angle of the quiescent furnace. "What did you keep in there, Tyler? Back issues of Gent?"
When I was ten I had kept certain toys here, not because I was afraid anyone would steal them but because it was fun knowing they were hidden and that only I could find them. Later on I stashed less innocent things: several brief attempts at a diary, letters to Diane never delivered or even finished, and, yes, though I wouldn't admit it to Jason, printouts of some relatively tame Internet porn. All these guilty secrets had been disposed of long ago.
"Should have brought a flashlight," Jase said. The single overhead bulb cast negligible light into this cobwebbed coiner.
"There used to be one on the table by the fuse box." There still was. I backed out of the gap long enough to take it from Jason's hand. It emitted the watery, pale glow of a dying battery pack, but it worked well enough that I could find the loose chunk of drywall without groping. I lifted it away and slid the overnight bag into the space behind it, then fitted the drywall in place and brushed chalky dust over the visible seams.
But before I could back out I dropped the flashlight and it rolled even farther into the spidery shadows behind the furnace. I grimaced and reached for it, following the flickery glow. Touched the barrel of it. Touched something else. Something hollow but substantial. A box.
I pulled it closer.
"You almost finished in there, Ty?"
"One second," I said.
I trained the light on the box. It was a shoe box. A shoe box with a dusty New Balance logo printed on it and a different legend written over that in fat black ink: mementos (school).
It was the box missing from my mother's étagčre upstairs, the one I hadn't been able to find after her funeral.
"Having trouble?" Jason asked.
"No," I said.
I could investigate later. I pushed the box back where I'd found it and crawled out of the dusty space. Stood up and brushed my hands. "I guess we're done here."
"Remember this for me," Jason said. "In case I forget."
* * * * *
That night we watched the election returns on the Lawtons' impressively large but outdated video rig. Carol had misplaced her corrective lenses and sat close to the screen, blinking at it. She had spent most of her adult life ignoring politics—"That was always E.D.'s department"—and we had to explain who some of the major players were. But she seemed to enjoy the sense of occasion. Jason made gentle jokes and Carol obliged him by laughing, and when she laughed I could see a little of Diane in her face.
She tired easily, though, and she had gone to her room by the time the networks began calling states. No surprises there. In the end Lomax collected all the Northeast and most of the Midwest and West. He did less well in the South, but even there the dissenting vote was split almost evenly between old-line Democrats and the Christian Conservatives.
We started clearing away our coffee cups about the time the last opposing candidate delivered a grimly polite concession.
"So the good guys win," I said.
Jase smiled. "I'm not sure any of those were running."
"I thought Lomax was good for us."
"Maybe. But don't make the mistake of thinking Lomax cares about Perihelion or the replicator program, except as a convenient way to lowball the space budget and make it look like a great leap forward. The federal money he frees up will be dumped into the military budget. That's why E.D. couldn't put together any real anti-Lomax sentiment from his old aerospace cronies. Lomax won't let Boeing or Lockheed Martin starve. He just wants them to retool."
"For defense," I supplied. The lull in global conflict that had followed the initial confusion of the Spin was long past. Maybe a military refit wasn't such a bad idea.
"If you believe what Lomax says."
"Don't you?"
"I'm afraid I can't afford to."
On that note I retired to bed.
In the morning I administered the first injection. Jason stretched out on a sofa in the Lawtons' big front room, facing the window. He wore jeans and a cotton shirt and looked casually patrician, frail but at ease. If he was frightened he wasn't showing it. He rolled up his right sleeve to expose the crook of his elbow.
I took a syringe from my kit, attached a sterile needle, and filled it from one of the vials of clear liquid we had held back from the hiding place. Wun had rehearsed this with me. The protocols of the Fourth Age. On Mars there would have been a quiet ceremony and a soothing environment. Here we made do with November sunlight and the ticking of expensive clocks.
I swabbed his skin prior to the injection. "You don't have to watch," I said.
"But I want to," he said. "Show me how it's done."
He always did like to know how things worked.
* * * * *
The injection produced no immediate effects, but by noon the next day Jason was running a degree of fever.
Subjectively, he said, it was no worse than a mild cold, and by midafternoon he was begging me to take my thermometer and my pressure cuff and—well, take them elsewhere, was the gist of it.
So I turned up my collar against the rain (a blank, dumbly persistent rain that had started during the night and persisted through the afternoon) and crossed the lawn once more to my mother's house, where I rescued mementos (school) from the basement and carried it up to the front room.
Rain-dim light came through the curtains. I switched on a lamp.
My mother had died at the age of fifty-six. For eighteen years I had shared this house with her. That was a little over one third of her life. Of the remaining two thirds I had seen only what she had chosen to show me. She had talked about Bingham, her home town, from time to time. I knew, for instance, that she had lived with her father (a Realtor) and stepmother (a daycare worker) in a house at the top of a steep, tree-lined street; that she had had a childhood friend named Monica Lee; that there had been a covered bridge, a river called the Little Wyecliffe, and a Presbyterian church she had stopped attending when she turned sixteen and to which she had not returned until her parents' funerals. But she had never mentioned Berkeley or what she had hoped to achieve with her M.B.A. or why she had married my father.
She had, once or twice, taken down these boxes to show me their contents, to impress on me that she had lived through the impossible years before I existed. This was her evidence, Exhibits A, B, and C, three boxes of mementos and odds & ends. Somewhere folded into these boxes were fragments of real, verifiable history: the toffee-brown front pages of newspapers announcing terrorist attacks, wars waged, presidents elected or impeached. Here too were the trinkets I had liked to hold in my hand as a child. A tarnished fifty-cent piece issued in the year of her father's birth (1951); four tan and pink seashells from the beach at Cobscook Bay.
Mementos (school) had been my least favorite box. It contained a campaign button for some evidently unsuccessful Democratic candidate for high office, which I had liked for its bright colors, but the rest of the space was taken up with her diploma, a few pages torn from her graduate yearbook, and a bundle of small envelopes none of which I had ever wanted (or been allowed) to touch.
I opened one of the envelopes now and sampled enough of the contents to register that it was: a) a love letter and b) in a handwriting not at all like my father's neat script from the missives in mementos: marcus.
So my mother had had a college sweetheart. This was news that might have discomfited Marcus Dupree (she had married him a week after graduation) but would hardly have shocked anyone else. Certainly it was no reason to conceal the box in the basement, not when it had been sitting in plain sight for years on end.
Had it even been my mother who had hidden it? I didn't know who might have been in the house between the time of her stroke and the time I arrived a day later. It was Carol who had found her collapsed on the sofa, and probably some of the Big House staff had helped clean up afterward, and there must have been EMS people in here prepping her for transport. But none of them would have had any remotely plausible reason to carry mementos (school) downstairs and slide it into the dark gap between the furnace and the basement wall.
And maybe it didn't matter. No crime had been committed, after all, only a peculiar displacement. Could have been the local poltergeist. In all likelihood I would never know, and there was no point dwelling on the question. Everything in this room, every object in the house including these boxes, would sooner or later have to be salvaged, sold, or discarded. I had been putting it off, Carol had been putting it off, but the work was overdue.
But until then—
Until then, I put mementos (school) back on the top shelf of the étagère between mementos (marcus) and odds & ends. And made the empty room complete.
* * * * *
The most troubling medical question I had raised with Wun Ngo Wen about Jason's treatment was the issue of drug-drug interactions. I couldn't discontinue Jason's conventional medications without throwing him into a disastrous relapse. But I was equally uneasy about combining his daily drug regimen with Wun's biochemical overhaul.
Wun promised me there wouldn't be a problem. The longevity treatment wasn't a "drug" in the conventional sense. What I was injecting into Jason's bloodstream was more like a biologically enabled computer program. Conventional drugs generally interact with proteins and cell surfaces. Wun's potion interacted with DNA itself.
But it still had to enter a cell to do its work, and it still had to negotiate Jason's blood chemistry and immune system on its way there—didn't it? Wun had said emphatically that none of this mattered. The longevity cocktail was flexible enough to operate through any kind of physiological condition short of death itself.
But the gene for AMS had never migrated to the red planet and the drugs Jase was taking were unknown there. And although Wun had insisted my concerns were unwarranted, I noticed he seldom smiled when he did so. So we hedged our bets. I had been backing off Jason's AMS meds for a week before the first injection. Not stopping them, just cutting back.
The strategy had seemed to work. By the time we arrived at the Big House Jason was exhibiting only minor symptomology while carrying a lighter drug load, and we began his treatment optimistically.
Three days later he was spiking fevers I couldn't knock down. A day after that he was semiconscious much of the time. Another day and his skin turned red and began to blister. That evening he began screaming.
He continued to scream despite the morphine I administered.
It was not a full-throated scream but a moan that periodically rose to high volume, a sound you might expect from a sick dog, not a human being. It was purely involuntary. When he was lucid he neither made the sound nor remembered having made it, even though it left his larynx inflamed and painful.
Carol made a brave show of putting up with it. There were parts of the house where Jason's keening was almost inaudible—the back bedrooms, the kitchen—and she spent most of her time there, reading or listening to local radio. But the strain was obvious and before long she started drinking again.
Maybe I shouldn't say "started." She had never stopped. What she had done was cut back to the minimum that allowed her to function, balancing between the very real terrors of sudden withdrawal and the lure of full-blown intoxication. And I hope that doesn't sound glib. Carol was walking a difficult path. She had stayed on it this long because of her love for her son, dormant as that love might have been these many years. The sound of his pain was what derailed her.
By the second week of the process Jase was hooked up to intravenous fluids and I was keeping an eye on his rising BR. He'd had a relatively good day despite his horrifying appearance, scabbed where he wasn't raw, eyes almost buried in the swollen flesh that surrounded them. He had been alert enough to ask whether Wun Ngo Wen had made his first television appearance. (Not yet. It was scheduled for the following week.) But by nightfall he had lapsed back into unconsciousness and the moaning, absent for a couple of days, started again, full-throated and painful to hear.
Painful for Carol, who showed up at the door of the bedroom with tear tracks down her cheeks and an expression of fierce, glassy anger. "Tyler," she said, "you have to stop this!"
"I'm doing what I can. He's not responding to the opiates. It might be better to talk about this in the morning."
"Can't you hear him?"
"Of course I can hear him."
"Does that mean nothing? Does that sound mean nothing to you? My god!" she said. "He would have been better off in Mexico with some quack. He would have been better off with a faith healer. Do you actually have any idea what you've been injecting into him? Fucking quack! My god."
Unfortunately she was echoing questions I had already begun to ask myself. No, I didn't know what I was injecting into him, not in any rigorous scientific sense. I had believed the promises of the man from Mars, but that was hardly a defense I could lay at Carol's feet. The process itself was more difficult, more obviously agonizing, than I had allowed myself to expect. Maybe it was working incorrectly. Maybe it wasn't working at all.
Jase emitted a mournful howl that ended in a sigh. Carol put her hands over her ears. "He's suffering, you fucking quack! Look at him!"
"Carol—"
"Don't Carol me, you butcher! I'm calling an ambulance. I'm calling the police!"
I came across the room and took her by the shoulders. She felt frail but dangerously alive under my hands, a cornered animal. "Carol, listen to me."
"Why, why should I listen to you?"
"Because your son put his life in my hands. Listen. Carol, listen. I'm going to need someone to help me here. I've been running on no sleep for days. Before too long I'm going to need someone to sit with him, someone with real medical savvy who can make informed judgments."
"You should have brought a nurse."
I should have, but it hadn't been possible, and that was beside the point. "I don't have a nurse. I need you to do this."
That took a moment to sink in. Then she gasped and stepped back. "Me!"
"You still have a medical license. Last I heard."
"I haven't practiced for—is it decades? Decades…"
"I'm not asking you to perform heart surgery. I just want you to keep an eye on his blood pressure and his temperature. Can you do that?"
Her anger dissipated. She was flattered. She was frightened. She thought about it. Then she gave me a steely look. "Why should I help you? Why should I make myself an accomplice to this, this torture?"
I was still composing an answer when a voice behind me said, "Oh, please."
Jason's voice. One of the trademarks of this Martian drug regimen was the lucidity that came at random and left at will. Apparently it had just arrived. I turned around.
He grimaced and made an attempt, not quite successful, to sit up. But his eyes were clear.
He addressed his mother: "Really," he said, "isn't this a little unseemly? Please do what Tyler wants. He knows what he's doing and so do I."
Carol stared at him. "But I don't. I haven't. I mean I can't—"
Then she turned and walked unsteadily out of the room, one hand braced against the wall.
I sat up with Jase. In the morning Carol came to the bedroom looking chastened but sober and offered to relieve me. Jason was peaceful and didn't really need tending, but I put her in charge and went off to catch up on my sleep.
I slept for twelve hours. When I came back to the bedroom Carol was still there, holding her unconscious son's hand, stroking his forehead with a tenderness I had never seen in her before.
The recovery phase began a week and a half into the course of Jason's treatment. There was no sudden transition, no magic moment. But his lucid periods began to lengthen and his blood pressure stabilized somewhere near the nominal range.
On the night of Wun's speech to the United Nations I located a portable TV in the servants' part of the house and lugged it up to Jason's bedroom. Carol joined us just before the broadcast.
I don't think Carol believed in Wun Ngo Wen.
His presence on Earth had been officially announced last Wednesday. His picture had been on front pages for days now, plus live footage of him striding across the White House lawn under the avuncular arm of the sitting president. The White House had made it clear that Wun was here to help but that he had no instant solution to the problem of the Spin and not much new knowledge about the Hypotheticals. Public reaction had been cautious.
Tonight he mounted the dais in the Security Council chamber and stepped up to the podium, which had been adjusted to suit his height. "Why, he's just a tiny thing," Carol said.
Jason said, "Show some respect. He represents a single continuous culture that's lasted longer than any of ours."
"Looks more like he represents the Lollipop Guild," Carol said.
His dignity was restored in the close-ups. The camera liked his eyes and his elusive smile. And when he spoke to the microphone he spoke softly, which took the effective pitch of his voice down to a more terrestrial level.
Wun knew (or had been coached to understand) how unlikely this event seemed to the average Earthling. ("Truly," the secretary general had said in his introduction, "we live in an age of miracles.") So he thanked us all for our hospitality in his best mid-Atlantic accent and talked wistfully about his home and why he had left it to come here. He painted Mars as a foreign but entirely human place, the kind of place you might like to visit, where the people were friendly and the scenery was interesting, although the winters, he admitted, were often harsh.
("Sounds like Canada," Carol said.)
Then to the heart of the matter. Everyone wanted to know about the Hypotheticals. Unfortunately, Wun's people knew little more about them than we did—the Hypotheticals had encapsulated Mars while he was in transit to Earth, and the Martians were as helpless before it as we had been.
He couldn't guess the Hypotheticals' motives. That question had been debated for centuries, but even the greatest Martian thinkers had never resolved it. It was interesting,
Wun said, that both Earth and Mars had been sealed off when they were on the brink of global catastrophes: "Our population, like yours, is approaching the limit of sustainability. On Earth your industry and agriculture both run on oil, supplies of which are rapidly being depleted. On Mars we have no oil at all, but we depend on another scarce commodity, elemental nitrogen: it drives our agricultural cycle and imposes absolute limits on the number of human lives the planet can sustain. We've coped a little better than has the Earth, but only because we were forced to recognize the problem from the very beginning of our civilization. Both planets were and are facing the possibility of economic and agricultural collapse and a catastrophic human die-off. Both planets were encapsulated before that end point was reached."
"Perhaps the Hypotheticals understand that truth about us and perhaps it influenced their action. But we don't know that with any certainty. Nor do we know what they expect from us, if anything, or when or even whether the Spin will come to an end. We can't know, until we gather more direct information about the Hypotheticals."
"Fortunately," Wun said, the camera going close on him, "there is a way to gather that information. I've come here with a proposal, which I've discussed with both President Garland and President-elect Lomax as well as other heads of state," and he went on to sketch out the basics of the replicator plan. "With luck this will tell us whether the Hypotheticals have overtaken other worlds, how those worlds have reacted, and what the ultimate fate of the Earth might be."
But when he started talking about the Oort Cloud and "auto-catalytic feedback technology" I saw Carol's eyes glaze over.
"This can't be happening," she said after Wun departed the podium to dazed applause and the network pundits began to chew and regurgitate his speech. She looked genuinely frightened. "Is any of this true, Jason?"
"Most all of it," Jason said calmly. "I can't speak for the weather on Mars."
"Are we really on the brink of disaster?"
"We've been on the brink of disaster since the stars went out."
"I mean about oil and all that. If the Spin hadn't happened, we'd all be starving?"
"People are starving. They're starving because we can't support seven billion people in North American-style prosperity without strip-mining the planet. The numbers are hard to argue with. Yes, it's true. If the Spin doesn't kill us, sooner or later we'll be looking at a global human die-back."
"And that has something to do with the Spin itself?"
"Perhaps, but neither I nor the Martian on television know for sure."
"You're making fun of me."
"No."
"Yes you are. But that's all right. I know I'm ignorant. It's been years since I looked at a newspaper. There was always the risk of seeing your father's face, for one thing. And the only television I watch is afternoon drama. In afternoon drama there aren't any Martians. I guess I'm Rip van Winkle. I slept too long. And I don't much like the world I woke up to. The parts of it that aren't terrifying are—" She gestured at the TV. "Are ludicrous."
"We're all Rip van Winkle," Jason said gently. "We're all waiting to wake up."
* * * * *
Carol's mood improved in tandem with Jason's health and she began to take a livelier interest in his prognosis. I briefed her about his AMS, a disease that had not been formally diagnosed when Carol graduated from medical school, as a way to dodge questions about the treatment itself, an unspoken bargain which she seemed to understand and accept. The important thing was that Jason's ravaged skin was healing and the blood samples I sent to a lab in D.C. for testing showed drastically reduced neural plaque proteins.
She was still reluctant to talk about the Spin, however, and she looked unhappy when Jase and I discussed it in her presence. I thought again of the Housman poem Diane had taught me so many years ago: The infant child is not aware/He has been eaten by the bear.
Carol had been beset by several bears, some as large as the Spin and some as small as a molecule of ethanol. I think she might have envied the infant child.
* * * * *
Diane called (on my personal phone, not Carol's house phone) a few nights after Wun's U.N. appearance. I had retreated to my room and Carol was keeping the night watch. Rain had come and gone all November, and it was raining now, the bedroom window a fluid mirror of yellow light.
"You're at the Big House," Diane said.
"You talked to Carol?"
"I call her once a month. I'm a dutiful daughter. Sometimes she's sober enough to talk. What's wrong with Jason?"
"It's a long story," I said. "He's getting better. It's nothing to worry about."
"I hate it when people say that."
"I know. But it's true. There was a problem, but we fixed it"
"And that's all you can tell me."
"All for now. How are things with you and Simon?" Last time we talked she had mentioned legal trouble.
"Not too good," she said. "We're moving."
"Moving where?"
"Out of Phoenix, anyway. Away from the city. Jordan Tabernacle's been temporarily closed down—I thought maybe you'd heard about it."
"No," I said—why would I have heard about the financial troubles of a little southwest Tribulation church?—and we went on to discuss other matters, and Diane promised to update me once she and Simon had a new address. Sure, why not, what the hell.
But I did hear about Jordan Tabernacle the following night.
Uncharacteristically, Carol insisted on watching the late news. Jason was tired but alert and willing, so the three of us sat through forty minutes of international saber rattling and celebrity court cases. Some of this was interesting: there was an update on Wun Ngo Wen, who was in Belgium meeting with officials of the E.U., and good news from Uzbekistan, where the forward marine base had finally been relieved. Then there was a feature about CVWS and the Israeli dairy industry.
We watched dramatic pictures of culled cattle being bulldozed into mass graves and salted with lime. Five years ago the Japanese beef industry had been similarly devastated. Bovine or ungulate CVWS had broken out and been suppressed in a dozen countries from Brazil to Ethiopia. The human equivalent was treatable with modern antibiotics but remained a smoldering problem in third-world economies.
But Israeli dairy farmers ran strict protocols of sepsis and testing, so the outbreak there had been unexpected. Worse, the index case—the first infection—had been tracked to an unauthorized shipment of fertilized ova from the United States.
The shipment was back-traced to a Tribulationist charity called Word for the World, headquartered in an industrial park outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Why was WftW smuggling cattle ova into Israel? Not, it turned out, for particularly charitable reasons. Investigators followed WftW's sponsors through a dozen blind holding companies to a consortium of Tribulationist and Dispensationalist churches and fringe political groups both large and small. One item of Biblical doctrine shared by these groups was drawn from Numbers (chapter nineteen) and inferred from other texts in Matthew and Timothy—namely, that the birth in Israel of a pure red heifer would signal the second coming of Jesus Christ and the beginning of His reign on Earth.
It was an old idea. Allied Jewish extremists believed the sacrifice of a red calf on the Temple Mount would mark the coming of the Messiah. There had been several "red calf" attacks on the Dome of the Rock in prior years, one of which had damaged the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearly precipitated a regional war. The Israeli government had been doing its best to quash the movement but had only succeeded in driving it underground.
According to the news there were several WftW-sponsored dairy farms across the American Midwest and Southwest all quietly devoted to the business of hastening Armageddon. They had been attempting to breed a pure blood-red calf, presumably superior to the numerous disappointing heifers that had been presented as candidates over the last forty years.
These farms had systematically evaded federal inspections and feed protocols, to the point of concealing an outbreak of bovine CVWS that had crossed the border from Nogales. The infected ova produced breeding stock with plentiful genes for red-tinged coats, but when the calves themselves were born (at a WftW-linked dairy farm in the Negev) most died of respiratory distress at an early age. The corpses were quietly buried, but too late. The infection had spread to mature stock and a number of human farmhands.
It was an embarrassment for the U.S. administration. The FDA had already announced a policy review and Homeland Security was freezing WftW bank accounts and serving warrants on Tribulationist fund-raisers. On the news there were pictures of federal agents carrying boxed documents out of anonymous buildings and applying padlocks to the doors of obscure churches.
The news reader cited a few examples by name.
One of them was Jordan Tabernacle.
Outside Padang we transferred from Nijon's ambulance to a private car with a Minang driver, who dropped us off—me, Ibu Ina, En—at a cartage compound on the coast highway. Five huge tin-roofed warehouses sat in a black gravel plain between conical piles of bulk cement under tarps and a corroded rail tanker idle on a siding. The main office was a low wooden building under a sign that read 'Bayur Forwarding' in English.
Bayur Forwarding, Ina said, was one of her ex-husband Jala's businesses, and it was Jala who met us in the reception room. He was a beefy, apple-cheeked man in a canary yellow business suit—he looked like a Toby jug dressed for the tropics. He and Ina embraced in the manner of the comfortably divorced, then Jala shook my hand and stooped to shake En's. Jala introduced me to his receptionists as "a palm oil importer from Suffolk," presumably in case she was quizzed by the New Reformasi. Then he escorted us to his seven-year-old fuel-cell BMW and we drove south toward Teluk Bayur, Jala and Ina up front, me and En in back.
Teluk Bayur—the big deepwater harbor south of the city of Padang—was where Jala had made all his money. Thirty years ago, he said, Teluk Bayur had been a sleepy Sumatran sand-mud basin with modest port services and a predictable trade in coal, crude palm oil, and fertilizer. Today, thanks to the economic boom of the nagari restoration and the population explosion of the Archway era, Teluk Bayur was a fully improved port basin with world-class quays and mooring, a huge storage complex, and so many modern conveniences that even Jala eventually lost interest in tallying up all the tugs, sheds, cranes and loaders by tonnage. "Jala is proud of Teluk Bayur," Ina said. "There's hardly a high official there he hasn't bribed."
"Nobody higher than General Affairs," Jala corrected her.
"You're too modest."
"Is there something wrong with making money? Am I too successful? Is it a crime to make something of myself?"
Ina inclined her head and said, "These are of course rhetorical questions."
I asked whether we were going directly to a ship at Teluk Bayur.
"Not directly," Jala said. "I'm taking you to a safe place on the docks. It isn't as simple as walking onto some vessel and making ourselves comfortable."
"There's no ship?"
"Certainly there's a ship. The Capetown Maru, a nice little freighter. She's loading coffee and spices just now. When the holds are full and the debts are paid and the permits are signed, then the human cargo goes aboard. Discreetly, I hope."
"What about Diane? Is Diane at Teluk Bayur?"
"Soon," Ina said, giving Jala a meaningful look.
"Yes, soon," he said.
* * * * *
Teluk Bayur might once have been a sleepy commercial harbor, but like any modern port it had become a city in itself, a city made not for people but for cargo. The port proper was enclosed and fenced, but ancillary businesses had grown up around it like whorehouses outside a military base: secondary shippers and expediters, gypsy truck collectives running rebuilt eighteen-wheelers, leaky fuel depots. We breezed past them all. Jala wanted to get us settled before the sun went down.
Bayur Bay itself was a horseshoe of oily saltwater. Wharfs and jetties lapped at it like concrete tongues. Abutting the shore was the ordered chaos of large-scale commerce, the first- and second-line godowns and stacking yards, the cranes like giant mantises feasting on the holds of tethered container ships. We stopped at a manned guardpost along the line of a steel fence and Jala passed something to the security guard through the window of the car—a permit, a bribe, or both. The guard nodded him through and Jala waved amiably and drove inside, following a line of CPO and Avigas tanks at what seemed like reckless speed. He said, "I've arranged for you to stay here overnight. I have an office in one of the E-dock warehouses. Nothing in there but bulk concrete, nobody to bother you. In the morning I'll bring Diane Lawton."
"And then we leave?"
"Patience. You're not the only ones making rantau—just the most conspicuous. There might be complications."
"Such as?"
"Obviously, the New Reformasi. The police sweep the docklands every now and then, looking for illegals and archrunners. Usually they find a few. Or more than a few, depending on who's been paid off. At the moment there is a great deal of pressure from Jakarta, so who knows? Also there's talk of a labor action. The stevedores' union is extremely militant. We'll cast off before any conflict begins, with luck. So you sleep a night on the floor in the dark, I'm afraid, and I'll take Ina and En to stay with the other villagers for now."
"No," Ina said firmly. "I'll stay with Tyler."
Jala paused. Then he looked at her and said something in Minang.
"Not funny," she said. "And not true."
"What, then? You don't trust me to keep him safe?"
"What have I ever gained by trusting you?"
Jala grinned. His teeth were tobacco brown. "Adventure," he said.
"Yes, quite," Ina said.
* * * * *
So we ended up in the north end of a warehousing complex off the docks, Ibu Ina and I in a grimly rectangular room that had been a surveyor's office, Ina said, until the building was temporarily closed pending repairs to its porous roof.
One wall of the room was a window of wire-reinforced glass. I looked down into a cavernous storage space pale with concrete dust. Steel support beams rose from a muddy, ponded floor like rusted ribs.
The only light came from security lamps placed at sparse intervals along the walls. Flying insects had penetrated the building's gaps and they hovered in clouds around the caged bulbs or died mounded beneath them. Ina managed to get a desk lamp working. Empty cardboard boxes had been piled in one corner, and I unfolded the driest of them and stacked them to make a pair of crude mattresses. No blankets. But it was a hot night. Close to monsoon season.
"You think you can sleep?" Ina asked.
"It's not the Hilton, but it's the best I can do."
"Oh, not that. I mean the noise. Can you sleep through the noise?"
Teluk Bayur didn't close down at night. The loading and unloading went on twenty-four hours a day. We couldn't see it but we could hear it, the sound of heavy motors and stressed metal and the periodic thunder of multiton cargo containers in transit. "I've slept through worse," I said.
"I doubt that," Ina said, "but it's kind of you to say."
Neither of us slept for hours. Instead we sat close to the glow of the desk lamp and talked sporadically. Ina asked about Jason.
I had let her read some of the long passages I'd written during my illness. Jason's transition to Fourth, she said, sounded as if it had been less difficult than mine. No, I said. I had simply neglected to include the bedpan details.
"But about his memory? There was no loss? He was unconcerned?"
"He didn't talk much about it. I'm sure he was concerned." In fact he had come swimming out of one of his recurrent fevers to demand that I document his life for him: "Write it down for me, Ty," he had said. "Write it down in case I forget."
"But no graphomania of his own."
"No. Graphomania happens when the brain starts to rewire its own verbal faculties. It's only one possible symptom. The sounds he made were probably his own manifestation of it."
"You learned that from Wun Ngo Wen."
"Yes, or from his medical archives, which I had studied later."
Ina was still fascinated with Wun Ngo Wen. "That warning to the United Nations, about overpopulation and resource depletion, did Wun ever discuss that with you? I mean, in the time before—"
"I know. Yes, he did, a little."
"What did he tell you?"
This was during one of our conversations about the ultimate aim of the Hypotheticals. Wun had drawn me a diagram, which I reproduced for Ina on the dusty parquet floor: a horizontal and vertical line defining a graph. The vertical line was population, the horizontal line was time. A jaggedy trend line crossed the graph space more or less horizontally.
"Population by time," Ina said. "I understand that much, but what exactly are we measuring?"
"Any animal population in a relatively stable ecosystem. Could be foxes in Alaska or howler monkeys in Belize. The population fluctuates with external factors, like a cold winter or an increase in predators, but it's stable at least over the short term."
But then, Wun had said, what happens if we look at an intelligent, tool-using species over a longer term? I drew Ina the same graph as before, except this time the trend line curved steadily toward the vertical.
"What's happening here," I said, "is that the population— we can just say 'people'—people are learning to pool their skills. Not just how to knap a flint but how to teach other people to knap flints and how to divide labor economically. Collaboration makes more food. Population grows. More people collaborate more efficiently and generate new skills. Agriculture. Animal husbandry. Reading and writing, which means skills can be shared more efficiently among living people and even inherited from generations long dead."
"So the curve rises ever more steeply," Ina said, "until we are all drowning in ourselves."
"Ah, but it doesn't. There are other forces that work to pull the curve to the right. Increasing prosperity and technological savvy actually work in our favor. Well-fed, secure people tend to want to limit their own reproduction. Technology and a flexible culture give them the means. Ultimately, or so Wun said, the curve will tend back toward flat."
Ibu Ina looked confused. "So there is no problem? No starvation, no overpopulation?"
"Unfortunately, the line for the population of Earth is still a long way from horizontal. And we're running into limiting conditions."
"Limiting conditions?"
One more diagram. This one showed a trend line like an italic letter S, level at the top. Over this I marked two parallel horizontal lines: one well above the trend line, marked "A," and one crossing it at the upcurve, marked "B."
"What are these lines?" Ina asked.
"They're both planetary sustainability. The amount of arable land available for agriculture, fuel and raw materials to sustain technology, clean air and water. The diagram shows the difference between a successful intelligent species and an unsuccessful one. A species that peaks under the limit has the potential for long-term survival. A successful species can go on to do all those things futurists used to dream about—expand into the solar system or even the galaxy, manipulate time and space."
"How grand," Ina said.
"Don't knock it. The alternative is worse. A species that runs into sustainability limits before it stabilizes its population is probably doomed. Massive starvation, failed technology, and a planet so depleted from the first bloom of civilization that it lacks the means to rebuild."
"I see." She shivered. "So which are we? Case A or Case B? Did Wun tell you that?"
"All he could say for sure was that both planets, Earth and Mars, were starting to run into the limits. And that the Hypotheticals intervened before it could happen."
"But why did they intervene? What do they expect from us?"
It was a question for which Wun's people didn't have an answer. Nor did we.
No, that wasn't quite true. Jason Lawton had found a sort of an answer.
But I wasn't ready to talk about that yet.
* * * * *
Ina yawned, and I brushed away the marks on the dusty floor. She switched off the desk light. The scattered maintenance lamps cast an exhausted glow. Outside the warehouse there was a sound like the striking of an enormous, muted bell every five or so seconds.
"Tick tock," Ina said, arranging herself on her mattress of mildewy cardboard. "I remember when clocks ticked, Tyler. Do you? The old-fashioned clocks?"
"There was one in my mother's kitchen."
"There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It's hard to live in all those kinds of time. Easy to forget that you live in all of them."
The metronomic clanging went on.
"You sound like a Fourth," I said.
In the dim light I could just make out her weary smile.
"I think one lifetime is enough for me," she said.
* * * * *
In the morning we woke to the sound of an accordion door rolled back to its stops, a burst of light, Jala calling for us.
I hurried down the stairs. Jala was already halfway across the warehouse floor and Diane was behind him, walking slowly.
I came closer and said her name.
She tried to smile, but her teeth were clenched and her face was unnaturally pale. By then I had seen that she was holding a wadded cloth against her body above her hip, and that both the cloth and her cotton blouse were vivid red with the blood that had leaked through.
Eight months after Wun Ngo Wen's address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the hypercold cultivation tanks at Perihelion began to yield payload quantities of Martian replicators, and at Canaveral and Vandenberg fleets of Delta sevens were prepped to deliver them into orbit. It was about this time that Wun developed an urge to see the Grand Canyon. What sparked his interest was a year-old copy of Arizona Highways one of the biology wonks happened to leave in his quarters.
He showed it to me a couple of days later. "Look at this," he said, almost trembling with eagerness, folding back the pages of a photo feature on the restoration of Bright Angel trail. The Colorado River cutting pre-Cambrian sandstone into green pools. A tourist from Dubai riding a mule. "Have you heard of this, Tyler?"
"Have I heard of the Grand Canyon? Yes. I think most people have."
"It's astonishing. Very beautiful."
"Spectacular. So they say. But isn't Mars famous for its canyons?"
He smiled. "You're talking about the Fallen Lands. Your people called it Valles Marineris when they discovered it from orbit sixty years ago—or a hundred thousand years ago. Parts of it do look a lot like these photographs from Arizona. But I've never been there. And I don't suppose I ever will be there. I think I'd like to see the Grand Canyon instead."
"Then see it. It's a free country."
Wun blinked at the expression—maybe the first time he'd heard it—and nodded. "Very well, I will. I'll talk to Jason about arranging transportation. Would you like to come?"
"What, to Arizona?"
"Yes! Tyler! To Arizona, to the Grand Canyon!" He might have been a Fourth, but at that moment he sounded like a ten-year-old. "Will you go there with me?"
"I'll have to think about that"
I was still thinking about it when I got a call from E. D. Lawton.
* * * * *
Since the election of Preston Lomax, E. D. Lawton had become politically invisible. His industry contacts were still in place—he could throw a party and expect powerful people to show up—but he would never again wield the kind of cabinet-level influence he had enjoyed under Garland's presidency. In fact there were rumors that he was in a state of psychological decline, holed up in his Georgetown residence making unwelcome phone calls to former political allies. Maybe so, but neither Jase nor Diane had heard from him recently; and when I picked up my home phone I was stunned when I heard his voice.
"I'd like to talk to you," he said.
Which was interesting, coming from the man who had conceived and financed Molly Seagram's acts of sexual espionage. My first and probably best instinct was to hang up. But as a gesture it seemed inadequate.
He added, "It's about Jason."
"So talk to Jason."
"I can't, Tyler. He won't listen to me."
"Does that surprise you?"
He sighed. "Okay, I understand, you're on his side, that's a given. But I'm not trying to hurt him. I want to help him. In fact it's urgent. Regarding his welfare."
"I don't know what that means."
"And I can't tell you over the goddamn phone. I'm in Florida now, I'm twenty minutes down the highway. Come to the hotel and I'll buy you a drink and then you can tell me to fuck off face-to-face. Please, Tyler. Eight o'clock, the lobby bar, the Hilton on ninety-five. Maybe you'll save somebody's life."
He hung up before I could answer.
I called Jason and told him what had happened.
"Wow," he said, then, "If the rumors are true, E.D.'s even less pleasant to spend time with than he used to be. Be careful."
"I wasn't planning to keep the appointment."
"You certainly don't have to. But… maybe you should."
"I've had enough of E.D.'s gamesmanship, thanks."
"It's just that it might be better if we know what's on his mind."
"You're saying you want me to see him?"
"Only if you're comfortable with it."
"Comfortable?"
"It's up to you, of course."
So I got in my car and drove dutifully up the highway, past Independence Day bunting (the fourth was tomorrow) and street-corner flag merchants (unlicensed, ready to bolt in their weathered pickups), rehearsing in my mind all the go-to-hell speeches I had ever imagined myself delivering to E. D. Lawton. By the time I reached the Hilton the sun was lost behind the rooftops and the lobby clock said 8:35.
E.D. was at a booth in the bar, drinking determinedly. He looked surprised to see me. Then he stood up, grabbed my arm, and steered me to the vinyl bench across the table from him.
"Drink?"
"I won't be here that long."
"Have a drink, Tyler. It'll improve your attitude."
"Has it improved yours? Just tell me what you want, E.D."
"I know a man's angry when he makes my name sound like an insult. What are you so pissed about? That thing with your girlfriend and the doctor, what's his name, Malmstein? Look, I want you to know I didn't arrange that. I didn't even sign off on it. I had a zealous staff working for me. Things were done in my name. Just so you know."
"That's a poor excuse for shitty behavior."
"I guess it is. Guilty as charged. I apologize. Can we move on to other things?"
I might have walked out then. I suppose the reason I stayed was the aura of desperate anxiety seeping out of him. E.D. was still capable of that brand of thoughtless condescension that had so endeared him to his family. But he was no longer confident. In the silence between vocal outbursts his hands were restless. He stroked his chin, folded and unfolded a cocktail napkin, smoothed his hair. This particular silence expanded until he was halfway through a second drink. Which was probably more than his second. The waitress had cycled past with a breezy familiarity.
"You have some influence with Jason," he said finally.
"If you want to talk to Jason, why not do it directly?"
"Because I can't. For obvious reasons."
"Then what do you want me to tell him?"
E.D. stared at me. Then he looked at his drink. "I want you to tell him to pull the plug on the replicator project. I mean literally. Turn off the refrigeration. Kill it."
Now it was my turn to be incredulous.
"You must know how unlikely that is."
"I'm not stupid, Tyler."
"Then why—"
"He's my son."
"You figured that out?"
"Because we had political arguments he's suddenly not my son? You think I'm so shallow I can't make that distinction? That because I don't agree with him I don't love him?"
"All I know about you is what I've seen."
"You've seen nothing." He started to say something else, then reconsidered. "Jason is a pawn for Wun Ngo Wen," he said. "I want him to wake up and understand what's happening."
"You raised him to be a pawn. Your pawn. You just don't like seeing someone else with that kind of influence over him."
"Bullshit. Bullshit. I mean, no, all right, we're confessing here, maybe it's true, I don't know, maybe we all need some family therapy, but that's not the point. The point is that every powerful person in this country happens to be in love with Wun Ngo Wen and his fucking replicator project. For the obvious reason that it's cheap and it looks plausible to the voting public. And who cares if it doesn't work because nothing else works and if nothing works then the end is nigh and everybody's problems will look different when the red sun rises. Right? Isn't that right? They dress it up, they call it a wager or gamble, but it's really just sleight-of-hand for the purpose of distracting the rubes."
"Interesting analysis," I said, "but—"
"Would I be here talking to you if I thought this was an interesting analysis! Ask the appropriate questions, if you want to argue with me."
"Such as?"
"Such as, who exactly is Wun Ngo Wen? Who does he represent, and what does he really want? Because despite what they say on television he's not Mahatma Gandhi in a Munchkin package. He's here because he wants something from us. He's wanted it from day one."
"The replicator launch."
"Obviously."
"Is that a crime?"
"A better question would be, why don't the Martians do this launch themselves?"
"Because they can't presume to speak on behalf of the entire solar system. Because a work like this can't be undertaken unilaterally."
He rolled his eyes. "Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying 'I love you'—it serves to facilitate the fucking. Unless, of course, the Martians really are angelic spirits descended from heaven to deliver us from evil. Which I presume you don't believe."
Wun had denied it so often that I could hardly object.
"I mean look at their technology. These guys have been doing high-end biotech for something like a thousand years. If they wanted to populate the galaxy with nanobots they could have done it a long time ago. So why didn't they? Ruling out explanations that depend on their better nature, why? Obviously, because they're afraid of a reprisal."
"Reprisal from the Hypotheticals? They don't know anything about the Hypotheticals we don't know."
"So they claim. Doesn't mean they're not afraid of them. As for us—we're the assholes who launched a nuclear strike on the polar artifacts not that long ago. Yeah, we'll take the responsibility, why not? Jesus, look at it, Tyler. It's a classic setup. It could hardly be more slick."
"Or maybe you're paranoid."
"Am I? Who defines paranoia this far into the Spin? We're all paranoid. We all know there are malevolent, powerful forces controlling our lives, which is pretty much the definition of paranoia."
"I'm just a GP," I said. "But intelligent people tell me—"
"You're talking about Jason, of course. Jason tells you it'll all be okay."
"Not just Jason. The whole Lomax administration. Most of Congress "
"But they depend on the wonks for advice. And the wonks are as hypnotized by all this as Jason is. You want to know what motivates your friend Jason? Fear. He's afraid of dying ignorant. The situation we're in, if he dies ignorant, it means the human race dies ignorant. And that scares the living shit out of him, the idea that a whole arguably intelligent species can be erased from the universe without ever understanding why or what for. Maybe instead of diagnosing my paranoia you ought to think about Jason's delusions of grandeur. He's made it his mission to figure out the Spin before he dies. Wun shows up and hands him a tool he can use to that end and of course he buys it: it's like handing a matchbook to a pyromaniac."
"Do you really want me to tell him this?"
"I don't—" E.D. looked suddenly morose, or maybe it was just his blood alcohol peaking. "I thought, because he listens to you—"
"You know better than that."
He closed his eyes. "Maybe I do. I don't know. But I have to try. Do you see that? For the sake of my conscience." I was startled that he had confessed to having one. "Let me be frank with you. I feel like I'm watching a train wreck in slow motion. The wheels are off the track and the driver hasn't noticed. So what do I do? Is it too late to pull the alarm? Too late to yell 'duck'? Probably so. But he's my son, Tyler. The man driving the train is my son."
"He's in no more danger than the rest of us."
"I think that's wrong. Even if this thing succeeds, all we stand to get out of it is abstract information. That's good enough for Jason. But it's not good enough for the rest of the world. You don't know Preston Lomax. I do. Lomax would be more than happy to tag Jason with a failure and hang him for it. A lot of people in his administration want Perihelion closed down or turned over to the military. And those are best-case outcomes. Worst case, the Hypotheticals get annoyed and turn off the Spin."
"You're worried Lomax will shut down Perihelion?"
"I built Perihelion. Yes, I care about it. But that's not why I'm here."
"I can tell Jason what you said, but you think he'll change his mind?"
"I—" Now E.D. inspected the tabletop. His eyes went a little vague and watery. "No. Obviously not. But if he wants to talk… I want him to know he can reach me. If he wants to talk. I wouldn't make it an ordeal for him. Honestly. I mean, if he wants that."
It was as if he had opened a door and his essential loneliness had come spilling out.
Jason assumed E.D. had come to Florida as part of some Machiavellian plan. The old E.D. might have. But the new E.D. struck me as an aging, remorseful, newly powerless man who found his strategies at the bottom of a glass and who had drifted into town on a guilty whim.
I said, more gently, "Have you tried talking to Diane?"
"Diane?" He waved his hand dismissively. "Diane changed her number. I can't get through to her. Anyway, she's involved with that fucking end-of-the-world cult."
"It's not a cult, E.D. Just a little church with some odd ideas. Simon's more involved with it than she is."
"She's Spin-paralyzed. Just like the rest of your fucking generation. She took a nosedive into this religious bullshit when she was barely out of puberty. I remember that. She was so depressed by the Spin. Then suddenly she was quoting Thomas Aquinas at the dinner table. I wanted Carol to speak to her about it. But Carol was useless, typically. So you know what I did? I organized a debate. Her and Jason. For six months they'd been arguing about God. So I made it formal, like, you know, a college debate, and the trick was, they each had to take the side they didn't support—Jason had to argue for the existence of God, and Diane had to take the atheist's point of view."
They had never mentioned this to me. But I could imagine with what dismay they had approached E.D.'s educational assignment.
"I wanted her to know how gullible she was. She did her best. I think she wanted to impress me. She repeated back what Jason had been saying to her, basically. But Jason—" His pride was obvious. His eyes shone and some of the color crept back into his face. "Jason was absolutely brilliant. Just stunningly, beautifully brilliant. Jason gave back every argument she had ever offered him and then some. And he didn't just parrot this stuff. He'd read the theology, he'd read biblical scholarship. And he smiled through the whole thing, as if he was saying, Look, I know these arguments backward, I know them as intimately as you do, I can make them in my sleep, and I still think they're contemptible. He was absolutely fucking relentless. And by the end of it she was crying. She held out until the end, but the tears were streaming down her face."
I stared.
He registered my expression and winced. "Go to hell with your moral superiority. I was trying to teach her a lesson. I wanted her to be a realist, not one of these fucking Spin-driven navel gazers. Your whole fucking generation—"
"Do you care whether she's alive?"
"Of course I do."
"No one's heard from her lately. It's not just you, E.D. She's out of touch. I thought I might try to track her down. Do you think that's a good idea?"
But the waitress had come with another drink and E.D. was rapidly losing interest in the subject, in me, in the world around him. "Yeah, I'd like to know if she's all right." He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cocktail napkin. "Yeah, you do that, Tyler."
Which is how I decided to accompany Wun Ngo Wen to the state of Arizona.
* * * * *
Traveling with Wun Ngo Wen was like traveling with a pop star or a head of state—heavy on security and light on spontaneity, but briskly efficient. A neatly timed succession of airport corridors, chartered planes, and highway convoys eventually deposited us at the head of Bright Angel trail, three weeks before the scheduled replicator launches, on a July day hot as fireworks and clear as creek water.
Wun stood where the guardrail followed the canyon's rim. The Park Service had closed the trail and visitor center to tourists, and three of their best and most photogenic rangers were poised to conduct Wun (and a contingent of federal security guys with shoulder holsters under their hiking whites) on an expedition to the canyon floor, where they would camp overnight.
Wun had been promised privacy once the hike began, but right now it was a circus. Media vans filled the parking area; journalists and paparazzi leaned into the cordon ropes like eager supplicants; a helicopter swooped along the canyon rim shooting video. Nevertheless Wun was happy. He grinned. He sucked in huge gulps of piney air. The heat was appalling, especially, I would have thought, for a Martian, but he showed no signs of distress despite the sweat glistening on his wrinkled skin. He wore a light khaki shirt, matching pants, and a pair of children's-size high-top hiking boots he'd been breaking in for the last couple of weeks.
He took a long drink from an aluminum canteen, then offered it to me.
"Water brother," he said.
I laughed. "Keep it. You'll need it."
"Tyler, I wish you could make the descent with me. This is—" He said something in his own language. "Too much stew for one pot. Too much beauty for one human being."
"You can always share it with the G-men."
He gave the security people a baleful glance. "Unfortunately I can't. They look but they do not see."
"Is that a Martian expression, too?"
"Might as well be," he said.
* * * * *
Wun gave the press pool and the newly arrived governor of Arizona a few genial last words while I borrowed one of the several Perihelion vehicles and headed for Phoenix.
Nobody interfered, nobody followed me; the press wasn't interested. I may have been Wun Ngo Wen's personal physician—a few of the press regulars might even have recognized me—but in the absence of Wun himself I wasn't newsworthy. Not even remotely. It was a good feeling. I turned up the air-conditioning until the interior of the car felt like a Canadian autumn. Maybe this was what the media was calling "desperate euphoria"—the we're-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even un-likely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat?
E.D. had accused my generation of Spin paralysis, and maybe that was true. We'd been caught in the headlights for thirty-odd years now. None of us had ever shaken that feeling of essential vulnerability, that deep personal awareness of the sword suspended over our heads. It tainted every pleasure and it made even our best and bravest gestures seem tentative and timid.
But even paralysis erodes. Beyond anxiety lies recklessness. Beyond immobility, action.
Not necessarily good or wise action, however. I passed three sets of highway signs warning against the possibility of roadside piracy. The traffic reporter on local radio listed roads closed for "police purposes" as indifferently as if she'd been talking about maintenance work.
But I made it without incident to the parking lot in back of Jordan Tabernacle.
The current pastor of Jordan Tabernacle was a crew-cut young man named Bob Kobel who had agreed by phone to meet me. He came to the car as I was locking it and escorted me into the rectory for coffee and doughnuts and some hard talk. He looked like a high-school athlete gone slightly paunchy, but still full of that old team spirit.
"I've thought about what you said," he told me. "I understand why you want to get in touch with Diane Lawton. Do you understand why that's an awkward issue for this church?"
"Not exactly, no."
"Thank you for your honesty. Let me explain, then. I became pastor of this congregation after the red heifer crisis, but I was a member for many years before that. I know the people you're curious about—Diane and Simon. I once called them friends."
"Not anymore?"
"I'd like to say we're still friends. But you'd have to ask them about that. See, Dr. Dupree, Jordan Tabernacle has had a contentious history for a relatively small congregation. Mostly it's because we started out as a mongrel church, a bunch of old-fashioned Dispensationalists who came together with some disillusioned New Kingdom hippies. What we had in common was a fierce belief in the imminence of the end times and a sincere desire for Christian fellowship. Not an easy alliance, as you might imagine. We've been through our share of controversies. Schisms. People veering off into little corners of Christianity, doctrinal disputes that, frankly, were almost incomprehensible to much of the congregation. But what happened with Simon and Diane was, they aligned themselves with a crowd of hard-core post-Tribulationists who wanted to claim Jordan Tabernacle for themselves. That made for some difficult politics, what the secular world might even call a power struggle."
"Which they lost?"
"Oh no. They were firmly in control. At least for a while. They radicalized Jordan Tabernacle in a way that made a whole lot of us uncomfortable. Dan Condon was one of them, and he's the one who got us involved with that network of loose cannons trying to bring about the Second Coming with a red cow. Which still strikes me as grotesquely presumptuous. As if the Lord of Hosts would wait on a cattle-breeding program before gathering up the faithful."
Pastor Kobel sipped his coffee.
I said, "I can't speak for their faith."
"You said on the phone Diane's been out of touch with her family."
"Yes."
"That may be her choice. I used to see her father on television. He looks like an intimidating man."
"I'm not here to kidnap her. I just want to make sure she's all right"
Another sip of coffee. Another thoughtful look.
"I'd like to tell you she's fine. And probably she is. But after the scandals, that whole group moved out to the boonies. And some of 'em still have open invitations to speak to federal investigators. So visiting is discouraged."
"But not impossible?"
"Not impossible if you're known to them. I'm not sure you qualify, Dr. Dupree. I could give you directions, but I doubt they'd let you in."
"Even if you vouched for me?"
Pastor Kobel blinked. He appeared to think about it.
Then he smiled. He took a scrap of paper from the desk behind him and wrote an address and a few lines of directions on it. "That's a good idea, Dr. Dupree. You tell 'em Pastor Bob sent you. But be careful all the same."
* * * * *
Pastor Bob Kobel had given me directions to Dan Condon's ranch, which turned out to be a clean two-story farmhouse in a scrubby valley many hours from town. Not much of a ranch, though, at least to my untutored eyes. There was a big barn, in poor repair compared to the house, and a few cattle grazing on weedy patches of grama grass.
As soon as I braked a big man in overalls bounded down the porch steps, about two hundred fifty pounds of him, with a full beard and an unhappy expression. I rolled down my window.
"Private property, chief," he said.
"I'm here to see Simon and Diane."
He stared and said nothing.
"They're not expecting me. But they know who I am."
"Did they invite you? Because we're not big on visitors out here."
"Pastor Bob Kobel said you wouldn't mind me coming by."
"He did, huh."
"He said to tell you I was essentially harmless."
"Pastor Bob, huh. You got any identification?"
I took out my ID card, which he closed in his hand and carried into the house.
I waited. I rolled down the windows and let a dry wind whisper through the car. The sun was low enough to cast sundial shadows from the pillars of the porch, and those shadows lengthened more than a little before the man came back and returned my card and said, "Simon and Diane will see you. And I'm sorry if I sounded a little short. My name's Sorley." I climbed out of the car and shook his hand. He had a fierce grip. "Aaron Sorley. Brother Aaron to most people."
He escorted me through the wheezing screen door into the farmhouse. Inside, the house was summer-hot but lively. A child in a cotton T-shirt ran past us at knee-level, laughing. We passed a kitchen in which two women were collaborating on what looked like a meal for many people—gallon pots on the stove, mounds of cabbage on the chopping board.
"Simon and Diane share the back bedroom, top of the stairs, last door down on your right—you can go on up."
But I didn't need a guide. Simon was waiting at the top of the stairs.
The former chenille-stem heir looked a little haggard.
Which was not surprising given that I hadn't seen him since the night of the Chinese attack on the polar artifacts twenty years ago. He could have been thinking the same about me. His smile was still remarkable, big and generous, a smile Hollywood might have exploited if Simon had loved Mammon more than God. He wouldn't settle for a handshake. He put his arms around me.
"Welcome!" he said. "Tyler! Tyler Dupree! I apologize if Brother Aaron was a little brusque just now. We don't get many visitors, but you'll find our hospitality is on the generous side, at least once you're in the door. We would've invited you before this if we'd known there was a shadow of a chance you could make the trip."
"Happy coincidence," I said. "I'm in Arizona because—"
"Oh, I know. We do hear the news now and then. You came along with the wrinkled man. You're his doctor."
He led me down the hall to a cream-painted door—their door, Simon's and Diane's—and opened it.
The room inside was furnished in a comfortable if slightly time-warped style, a big bed in one corner with a quilted comforter over a billowing mattress, a window curtain of yellow gingham, a cotton throw rug on a plain plank floor. And a chair by the window. And Diane sitting in the chair.
* * * * *
"It's good to see you," she said. "Thank you for making time for us. I hope we haven't taken you away from your work."
"No more than I wanted to be taken away from it. How are you?"
Simon walked across the room and stood beside her. He put his hand on her shoulder and left it there.
"We're both fine," she said. "Maybe not prosperous, but we get by. I guess that's as much as anyone can expect in these times. I'm sorry we haven't been in touch, Tyler. After the troubles at Jordan Tabernacle it's harder to trust the world outside the church. I suppose you heard about all that?"
"A royal mess," Simon put in. "Homeland Security took the computer and the photocopy machine out of the rectory, took them away and never gave them back. Of course we didn't have anything to do with any of that red heifer nonsense. All we did was pass on some brochures to the congregation. For them to decide, you know, if this was the kind of thing they wanted to get involved with. That's what got us interviewed by the federal government, if you can imagine such a thing. Apparently that's a crime in Preston Lomax's America."
"Nobody arrested, I hope."
"Nobody close to us," Simon said.
"But it made everyone nervous," Diane said.
"You start to think about things you took for granted. Phone calls. Letters." I said, "I suppose you have to be careful."
"Oh, yes," Diane said.
"Really careful," Simon said.
Diane wore a plain cotton shift tied at the waist and a checkered red-and-white head scarf that looked like a down-home hijab. No makeup, but she didn't need it. Putting Diane in dowdy clothing was as futile as hiding a searchlight under a straw hat.
I realized how hungry I'd been for the simple sight of her. How unreasonably hungry. I was ashamed of the pleasure I took in her presence. For two decades we had been little more than acquaintances. Two people who had once known each other. I wasn't entitled to this speeding pulse, the sense of weightless acceleration she provoked just by sitting in that wooden chair glancing at me and glancing away, blushing faintly when our eyes met.
It was unrealistic and it was unfair—unfair to someone; maybe me, probably her. I should never have come here.
She said, "And how are you? Still working with Jason, I gather. I hope he's all right."
"He's fine. He sends his love." She smiled.
"I doubt that. It doesn't sound like Jase."
"He's changed."
"Has he?"
"There's been a lot of talk about Jason," Simon said, still gripping her shoulder, his hand calloused and dark against the pale cotton. "About Jason and the wrinkled man, the so-called Martian."
"Not just so-called," I said. "He was born and bred there."
Simon blinked. "If you say so then it must be true. But as I said, there's been talk. People know the Antichrist is walking among us, that's a given, and he may already be a famous man, biding his time, plotting his futile war. So public figures receive a lot of scrutiny around here. I'm not saying Wun Ngo Wen is the Antichrist, but I wouldn't be alone if I did make that assertion. Are you close to him, Tyler?"
"I talk to him from time to time. I don't think he's ambitious enough to be the Antichrist." Though E. D. Lawton might have disagreed with that statement.
"This is the kind of thing that makes us cautious, though," Simon said. "This is why it's been a problem for Diane to stay in touch with her family."
"Because Wun Ngo Wen might be the Antichrist?"
"Because we don't want to attract attention from powerful people, this close to the end of days."
I didn't know what to say to that.
"Tyler's been on the road a long time," Diane said. "He's probably thirsty."
Simon's smile flashed back. "Would you like a drink before dinner? We have plenty of soda pop. Do you like Mountain Dew?"
"That would be fine," I said.
He left the room. Diane waited until we heard his footsteps on the stairs. Then she cocked her head and looked at me more directly. "You traveled a long distance."
"There was no other way to get in touch."
"But you didn't have to go to all this trouble. I'm healthy and happy. You can tell that to Jase. And Carol, for that matter. And E.D., if he cares. I don't need a surveillance visit."
"That's not what this is."
"Just stopped by to say hello?"
"Actually, yes, something like that."
"We haven't joined a cult. I'm not under duress."
"I didn't say you were, Diane."
"But you thought about it, didn't you?"
"I'm glad you're all right."
She turned her head and the light of the setting sun caught her eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm just a little startled. Seeing you like this. And I'm glad you're doing well back east. You are doing well, aren't you?"
I felt reckless. "No," I said. "I'm paralyzed. At least that's what your father thinks. He says our whole generation is Spin-paralyzed. We're all still caught in the moment when the stars went out. We never made peace with it."
"And do you think that's true?"
"Maybe truer than any of us want to admit." I was saying things I hadn't planned on saying. But Simon would be back any minute with his can of Mountain Dew and his adamantine smile and the opportunity would be lost, probably forever. "I look at you," I said, "and I still see the girl on the lawn outside the Big House. So yeah, maybe E.D. was right. Twenty-five stolen years. They went by pretty fast."
Diane accepted this in silence. Warm air turned the gingham curtains and the room grew darker. Then she said, "Close the door."
"Won't that look unusual?"
"Close the door, Tyler, I don't want to be overheard."
So I shut the door, gently, and she stood up and came to me and took my hands in her hands. Her hands were cool. "We're too close to the end of the world to lie to each other. I'm sorry I stopped calling, but there are four families sharing this house and one telephone and it gets to be pretty obvious who's talking to who."
"Simon wouldn't allow it."
"On the contrary. Simon would have accepted it. Simon accepts most of my habits and idiosyncrasies. But I don't want to lie to him. I don't want to carry that burden. But I admit I miss those calls, Tyler. Those calls were lifelines. When I had no money, when the church was splitting up, when I was lonely for no good reason… the sound of your voice was like a transfusion."
"Then why stop?"
"Because it was an act of disloyalty. Then. Now." She shook her head as if she were trying to communicate a difficult but important idea. "I know what you mean about the Spin. I think about it, too. Sometimes I pretend there's a world where the Spin didn't happen and our lives were different. Our lives, yours and mine." She took a tremorous breath, blushing deeply. "And if I couldn't live in that world I thought I could at least visit it every couple of weeks, call you up and be old friends and talk about something besides the end of the world."
"You consider this disloyal?"
"It is disloyal. I gave myself to Simon. Simon is my husband in the eyes of God and the law. If that wasn't a wise choice it was still my choice, and I may not be the kind of Christian I ought to be but I do understand about duty and about perseverance and about standing by someone even if—"
"Even if what, Diane?"
"Even if it hurts. I don't think either one of us needs to look any harder at the lives we might have had."
"I didn't come here to make you unhappy."
"No, but you're having that effect."
"Then I won't stay."
"You'll stay for supper. It's only polite." She put her hands at her side and looked at the floor. "Let me tell you something while we still have a little privacy. For what it's worth. I don't share all of Simon's convictions. I can't honestly say I believe the world will end with the faithful ascending into heaven. God forgive me, but it just doesn't seem plausible to me. But I do believe the world will end. Is ending. It's been ending all our lives. And—"
I said, "Diane—"
"No, let me finish. Let me confess. I do believe the world will end. I believe what Jason told me years and years ago, that one morning the sun will rise swollen and hellish and in a few hours or days, our time on Earth will be finished. I don't want to be alone on that morning—"
"No one does." Except maybe Molly Seagram, I thought. Molly playing On the Beach with her bottle of suicide pills. Molly and all the people like her.
"And I won't be alone. I'll be with Simon. What I'm confessing to you, Tyler—what I want to be forgiven for—is that when I picture that day it isn't necessarily Simon I see myself with."
The door banged open. Simon. Empty-handed. "Turns out dinner's already on the table," he said. "Along with a big pitcher of iced tea for thirsty travelers. Come down and join us. There's plenty to go around."
"Thank you" I said. "That sounds nice."
* * * * *
The eight adults sharing the farmhouse were the Sorleys, Dan Condon and his wife, the McIsaacs, and Simon and Diane. The Sorleys had three children and the McIsaacs had five, so that made seventeen of us at a big trestle table in the room adjoining the kitchen. The result was a pleasant din that lasted until "Uncle Dan" announced the blessing, at which point all hands promptly folded and all heads promptly bowed.
Dan Condon was the alpha male of the group. He was tall and almost sepulchral, black-bearded, ugly in a Lincolnesque way, and by way of blessing the meal he reminded us that feeding a stranger was a virtuous act even if the stranger happened to arrive without an invitation, amen.
By the way conversation flowed I deduced that Brother Aaron Sorley was second in command and probably the enforcer when it came to disputes. Both Teddy McIsaac and Simon deferred to Sorley but looked to Condon for ultimate verdicts. Was the soup too salty? "Just about right," Condon said. The weather warm lately? "Hardly unusual in this part of the world," Condon declared.
The women spoke seldom and for the most part kept their eyes fixed on their plates. Condon's wife was a small, portly woman with a pinched expression. Sorley's wife was almost as big as he was and smiled prominently when the food drew compliments. McIsaac's wife looked barely eighteen to his morose over-forty. None of the women spoke directly to me nor were they introduced to me by their given names. Diane was a diamond among these zircons, conspicuously so, and maybe that explained her careful demeanor.
The families were all refugees from Jordan Tabernacle. They were not the most radical parishioners, Uncle Dan explained, like those wild-eyed Dispensationalists who had fled to Saskatchewan last year, but nor were they tepid in their faith, like Pastor Bob Kobel and his crew of easy compromisers. The families had moved to the ranch (Condon's ranch) in order to separate themselves by a few miles from the temptations of the city and await the final call in monastic peace. So far, he said, the plan had been successful.
The rest of the table talk concerned a truck with a bad power cell, a roof-repair job still in progress, and a looming septic-tank crisis. I was as relieved when the meal ended as the children evidently were—Condon directed a fierce look at one of the Sorley girls when she sighed too audibly.
Once the dishes had been cleared (women's work at the Condon ranch), Simon announced that I had to leave.
Condon said, "Will you be all right on the road, Dr. Dupree? There are robberies almost every night now."
"I'll keep the windows up and the gas pedal down."
"That's probably wise."
Simon said, "If you don't mind, Tyler, I'll ride with you as far as the fence. I like the walk back, warm nights like this. Even by lantern-light."
I agreed.
Then everyone lined up for a cordial good-bye. The children squirmed until I shook their hands and they were dismissed. When her turn came Diane nodded at me but lowered her eyes, and when I offered my hand she took it without looking at me.
* * * * *
Simon rode about a quarter mile uphill from the ranch with me, fidgeting like a man with something to say but keeping his mouth shut. I didn't prompt him. The night air was fragrant and relatively cool. I pulled over where he told me to, at the peak of a ridge by a broken fence and a hedge of ocotillo. "Thank you for the ride," he said.
When he got out he lingered a moment over the open door.
"Something you wanted to say?" I asked.
He cleared his throat. "You know," he said finally, his voice barely louder than the wind, "I love Diane as much as I love God. I admit that sounds blasphemous. It sounded that way to me for a long time. But I believe God put her on Earth to be my wife, that this is her entire purpose. So lately I think it's two sides of the same coin. Loving her is my way of loving God. Do you think that's possible, Tyler Dupree?"
He didn't wait for an answer but closed the door and switched on his flashlight, and I watched in the mirror as he ambled down the hill into darkness and the clatter of crickets.
* * * * *
I didn't run into bandits or road pirates that night.
The absence of stars or moon had made the night a darker and more dangerous place since the early years of the Spin. Criminals had worked out elaborate strategies for rural ambuscades. Traveling at night dramatically increased my chances of being robbed or murdered.
Traffic was therefore sparse during the drive back to Phoenix, mostly interstate truckers in well-defended eighteen-wheelers. Much of the time I was alone on the road, carving a bright wedge out of the night and listening to the grit of the wheels and the rush of the wind. If there's a lonelier sound I don't know what it is. I guess that's why they put radios in cars.
But there were no thieves or murderers on the road.
Not that night.
* * * * *
So I stayed in a motel outside Flagstaff and caught up with Wun Ngo Wen and his security crew in the executive lounge at the airport the following morning.
Wun was in a talkative mood on the flight to Orlando. He'd been studying the geology of the desert southwest and was particularly delighted by a rock he'd bought at a souvenir shack on the way back to Phoenix—forcing the entire cavalcade to pull over and wait while he picked through a bin of fossils. He showed me his prize, a chalky spiral concavity in a chunk of Bright Angel shale an inch on a side. The imprint of a trilobite, he said, dead some ten million years, recovered from these rocky, sandy wastes below us, which had once been the bed of an ancient sea.
He'd never seen a fossil before. There were no fossils on Mars, he said. No fossils anywhere in the solar system except here, here on the ancient Earth.
* * * * *
At Orlando we were ushered into the backseat of another car in another convoy, this one bound for the Perihelion compound.
We rolled out at dusk after a perimeter sweep held us up for an hour or so. Once we reached the highway Wun apologized for yawning: "I'm not accustomed to so much physical exercise."
"I've seen you on the treadmill at Perihelion. You do all right."
"A treadmill is hardly a canyon."
"No, I suppose it isn't."
"I'm sore but not sorry. It was a wonderful expedition. I hope you spent your time as happily."
I told him I'd located Diane and that she was healthy.
"That's good. I'm sorry I couldn't meet her. If she's anything like her brother she must be a remarkable individual."
"She is."
"But the visit wasn't all you'd hoped?"
"Maybe I was hoping for the wrong thing." Maybe I'd been hoping for the wrong thing for a long time.
"Well," Wun said, yawning, eyes half-closed, "the question… as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded."
I wanted to ask him what he meant, but his head had lolled against the upholstery and it seemed kinder to let him sleep.
* * * * *
There were five cars in our convoy plus a personnel carrier with a small detachment of infantrymen in case of trouble.
The APC was a boxy vehicle about the size of the armored cars used to ship cash to and from regional banks and easily mistaken for one.
In fact a Brink's convoy happened to be about ten minutes ahead of us until it turned off the highway toward Palm Bay. Gang spotters—placed on the road past major intersections and linked by phone—confused us with the Brink's shipment and marked us as a target for a band of strikers waiting up ahead.
The strikers were sophisticated criminals who had already emplaced surface mines at a stretch of the road skirting a swampy wilderness preserve. They also carried automatic rifles and a couple of rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and a Brink's convoy would have been no match for them: five minutes after the first concussion the strikers would have been deep in bog country, dividing the spoils. But their spotters had made a critical mistake. Taking on a bank delivery is one thing; taking on five security-modified vehicles and an APC full of highly trained military and security personnel is a different matter entirely.
I was gazing out the tinted window of the car, watching low green water and bald cypress slide past, when the highway lights went out.
A pirate had cut the buried power cables. Suddenly the dark was truly dark, a wall beyond the window, nothing looking back at me but my own startled reflection. I said, "Wun—"
But he was still asleep, his wrinkled face blank as a thumbprint.
Then the lead car hit the mine.
The concussion beat at our hardened vehicle like a steel fist. The convoy was prudently spaced, but we were close enough to see the point car rise on a gout of yellow flame and drop back to the tarmac burning, wheels splayed.
Our driver swerved and, despite what he had probably been taught, slowed down. The road was blocked ahead. And now there was a second concussion at the back of the convoy, another mine, blasting chunks of pavement into the wetlands and boxing us in with ruthless efficiency.
Wun was awake now, baffled and terrified. His eyes were as big as moons and almost as bright.
Small-arms fire rattled in the near distance. I ducked and pulled Wun down next to me, both of us folded double around our seat belts and prying frantically at the clasps. The driver stopped, pulled a weapon from somewhere under the dash, and rolled out the door.
At the same time a dozen men spilled out of the APC behind us and began to fire into the darkness, trying to establish a perimeter. Plainclothes security men from other vehicles began to converge on our car, looking to protect Wun, but gunfire pinned them before they reached us.
The quick response must have rattled the road pirates. They opened up with heavy weapons. One of them fired what I was later told was a rocket-propelled grenade. All I knew was that I was suddenly deaf and the car was rotating around a complicated axis and the air was full of smoke and pebbled glass.
* * * * *
Then, mysteriously, I was halfway out the rear door, face pressed into the gritty pavement, tasting blood, and Wun was next to me, a few feet ahead, lying on his side. One of his shoes—one of the child-size hiking boots he'd bought for the Canyon—was on fire.
I called his name. He stirred, feebly. Bullets battered the ruin of the car behind us, punching craters in steel. My left leg was numb. I pulled myself closer and used a torn hank of upholstery to smother the burning shoe. Wun groaned and lifted his head.
Our guys returned fire, tracers streaking into the wetlands on each side of the road.
Wun arched his back and rose to his knees. He didn't seem to know where he was. He was bleeding from his nose. His forehead was gashed and raw.
"Don't stand up," I croaked.
But he went on trying to gather his feet under him, the burned boot flopping and stinking.
"For god's sake," I said. I reached out but he scuttled away. "For god's sake, don't stand up!"
But he managed it at last, levered himself up and stood trembling, profiled by the burning wreckage. He looked down and seemed to recognize me.
"Tyler," he said. "What happened?"
Then the bullets found him.
* * * * *
There were plenty of people who had hated Wun Ngo Wen. They distrusted his motives, like E. D. Lawton, or despised him for more complex and less defensible reasons: because they believed he was an enemy of God; because his skin happened to be black; because he espoused the theory of evolution; because he embodied physical evidence of the Spin and disturbing truths about the age of the external universe.
Many of those people had whispered about killing him. Dozens of intercepted threats were recorded in the files of Homeland Security.
But he wasn't killed by a conspiracy. What killed him was a combination of greed, mistaken identity, and Spin-engendered recklessness.
It was an embarrassingly terrestrial death.
Wun's body was cremated (after an autopsy and massive sample-extraction) and he was given a full state funeral. His memorial service in Washington's National Cathedral was attended by dignitaries from all over the planet. President Lomax delivered a lengthy eulogy.
There was talk of sending his ashes into orbit, but nothing ever came of it. According to Jason, the urn was stored in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution pending final disposition.
It's probably still there.
So I spent a few days in a Miami-area hospital, recovering from minor injuries, describing events to federal investigators, and coming to grips with the fact of Wun's death. It was during this time I resolved to leave Perihelion and open a private practice of my own.
But I decided not to announce my intention until after the replicator launch. I didn't want to trouble Jason with it at a critical time.
* * * * *
By comparison with the terraforming effort of previous years, the replicator launch was anticlimactic. Its results would be, if anything, greater and more subtle; but its very efficiency—a mere handful of rockets, no clever timing required—failed as drama.
President Lomax was keeping this one close to home. In a move that had infuriated the E.U., the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians, Lomax had declined to share replicator technology beyond the must-know circles at NASA and Perihelion, and he had deleted all relevant passages in the publicly released editions of the Martian archives. "Artificial microbes" (in Lomax-speak) were a "high risk" technology. They could be "weaponized." (This was true, as even Wun had admitted.) The U.S. was thus obliged to take "custodial control" of the information in order to prevent "nanotech proliferation and a new and deadly arms race."
The European Union had cried foul and the U.N. was convening an investigatory panel, but in a world with brushfire wars burning on four continents Lomax's argument carried considerable weight. (Even though, as Wun might have countered, the Martians had successfully lived with the same technology for hundreds of years—and the Martians were no more or less human than their terrestrial ancestors.)
For all these reasons, the late-summer launch date at Canaveral drew minimal crowds and almost desultory media attention. Wun Ngo Wen was dead, after all, and the news services had exhausted themselves covering his murder. Now the four heavy Delta rockets set in their offshore gantries looked like little more than a footnote to the memorial service, or worse, a rerun: the seed launches retooled for an age of diminished expectations.
But even if it was a sideshow, it was still a show. Lomax flew in for the occasion. E. D. Lawton had accepted a courtesy invitation and by this time was willing to pledge good behavior. And so, on the morning of the appointed day, I rode with Jason to the V.I.P. bleachers at the eastern shore of Cape Canaveral.
We faced seaward. The old offshore gantries, still functional but gone a little ruddy with saltwater rust, had been built to hold the heaviest lifters of the seed-launch era. The brand-new Deltas were dwarfed by them. Not that we could see much detail from this distance, only four white pillars out at the misty limits of the summer ocean, plus the fretwork of other unused launch platforms, the rail connectors, the tenders and support vessels anchored at a safe perimeter. It was a clear, hot summer morning. The wind was gusty—not strong enough to scrub the launch but more than enough to snap the flag crisply and tousle the coifed hair of President Lomax as he climbed the podium to address the assembled dignitaries and press.
He delivered a speech, mercifully brief. He cited the legacy of Wun Ngo Wen and his faith that the replicator network about to be planted in the icy fringes of the solar system would soon enlighten us about the nature and purpose of the Spin. He said brave things about humanity leaving its mark on the cosmos. ("He means the galaxy," Jason whispered, "not the cosmos. And—leaving our mark? Like a dog peeing on a hydrant? Someone really ought to edit these speeches") Then Lomax quoted a poem by a nineteenth-century Russian poet named F. I. Tiutchev, who couldn't have imagined the Spin but wrote as if he had:
Gone like a vision is the external world
and Man, a homeless orphan, has to face
helpless, naked and alone,
the blackness of immeasurable space.
All life and brightness seem an ancient dream,
while in the substance of the night,
unraveled, alien, he now perceives
a fateful something that is his by right.
Then Lomax departed the stage, and after the prosaic business of backward counting, the first of the rockets rode its column of fire into the unraveling cosmos behind the sky. A fateful something. Ours by right.
While everyone else looked up, Jason closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap.
* * * * *
We adjourned to a reception room along with the rest of the invited guests, pending a round of press interviews. (Jason was scheduled for twenty minutes with a cable news network, I was scheduled for ten. I was "the physician who attempted to save the life of Wun Ngo Wen," though all I had done was extinguish his burning shoe and pull his body out of the line of fire after he fell. A quick ABC check—airway, breathing, circulation—made it abundantly clear that I couldn't help him and that it would be wiser simply to keep my head down until help arrived. Which is what I told reporters, until they learned to stop asking.)
President Lomax came through the room shaking hands before he was hustled away once more by his handlers. Then E.D. cornered Jason and me at the buffet table.
"I guess you got what you wanted," he said, meaning the comment for Jason but looking at me. "It can't be undone now."
"In that case," Jason said, "perhaps it's not worth arguing about."
Wun and I had made a point of keeping Jase under observation in the months after his treatment. He had submitted to a battery of neurological tests including another series of clandestine MRIs. None of the tests had revealed any deficiency, and the only obvious physiological changes were the ones connected with his recovery from AMS. A clean bill of health, in other words. Cleaner than I once would have imagined possible.
But he did seem subtly different. I had asked Wun whether all Fourths underwent psychological changes. "In a certain sense," he had answered, "yes." Martian Fourths were expected to behave differently after their treatment, but there was a subtlety embedded in the word "expectation"—yes, Wun said, it was "expected" (i.e., considered likely) that a Fourth would change, but change was also "expected of him" (required of him) by his community and peers.
How had Jason changed? He moved differently, for one thing. Jase had disguised his AMS very cleverly, but there was a perceptible new freedom in his walk and his gestures. He was the Tin Man, post-oilcan. He was still occasionally moody, but his moods were less violent. He swore less often—that is, he was less likely to stumble into one of those emotional sinkholes in which the only useful adjective is "fucking." He joked more than he used to.
All these things sound good. And they were, but they were also superficial. Other changes were more troubling. He had withdrawn from the daily management of Perihelion to such a degree that his staff briefed him once a week and otherwise ignored him. He had begun reading Martian astrophysics from the raw translations, skirting security protocols if not absolutely violating them. The only event that had penetrated his newfound calm was the death of Wun, and that had left him haunted and hurt in ways I still didn't quite understand.
"You realize," E.D. said, "what we just saw was the end of Perihelion."
And in a real sense it was. Apart from interpreting whatever feedback we received from the replicators, Perihelion as a civilian space agency was finished. The downsizing had already begun in earnest. Half the support staff had been laid off. The tech people were draining away more slowly, lured by universities or big-money contractors.
"Then so be it," Jason said, displaying what was either the innate equanimity of a Fourth or a long-suppressed hostility to his father. "We've done the work we needed to do."
"You can stand here and deliver that verdict? To me?"
"I believe it's true."
"Does it matter that I spent my life building what you just tore down?"
"Does it matter?" Jason pondered this as if E.D. had asked a real question. "Ultimately, no, I don't suppose it does."
"Jesus, what happened to you? You make a mistake of this magnitude—"
"I don't think it's a mistake."
"—you ought to assume the responsibility for it."
"I think I have."
"Because if it fails, you'll be the one they'll blame."
"I understand that."
"The one they'll burn."
"If it comes to that."
"I can't protect you," E.D. said.
"You never could," Jason said.
* * * * *
I rode back to Perihelion with him. Jase was driving a German fuel-cell car these days—a niche car, since most of us still owned gas-burners designed by people who didn't believe there was a future worth worrying about. Commuters burned past us in the speed lanes, hurrying home before dark.
I told him I meant to leave Perihelion and establish a practice of my own.
Jase was silent for a little while, watching the road, warm air boiling off the pavement as if the edges of the world had softened in the heat. Then he said, "But you don't have to, Tyler. Perihelion ought to struggle along for a few years yet, and I have enough clout to keep you on payroll. I can hire you privately, if need be."
"That's the point, though, Jase. There is no need. I was always a little underutilized at Perihelion."
"Bored, you mean?"
"It might be nice to feel useful for a change."
"You don't feel useful? If not for you I'd be in a wheelchair."
"That wasn't me. That was Wun. All I did was push the plunger."
"Hardly. You saw me through the ordeal. I appreciate that. Besides… I need someone to talk to, someone who isn't trying to buy or sell me."
"When was the last time we had a real conversation?"
"Just because I weathered one medical crisis doesn't mean there won't be another."
"You're a Fourth, Jase. You won't need to see a doctor for another fifty years."
"And the only people who know that about me are you and Carol. Which is another reason I don't want you to leave." He hesitated. "Why not take the treatment yourself? Give yourself another fifty years, minimum."
I supposed I could. But fifty years would carry us deep into the heliosphere of the expanding sun. It would be a futile gesture. "I'd rather be useful now."
"You're absolutely determined to leave?"
E.D. would have said, Stay. E.D. would have said, It's your job to take care of him.
E.D. would have said a lot of things.
"Absolutely."
Jason gripped the wheel and stared down the road as if he had seen something infinitely sad there. "Well," he said. "Then all I can do is wish you luck."
* * * * *
The day I left Perihelion the support staff summoned me into one of the now seldom-used boardrooms for a farewell party, where I was given the kind of gifts appropriate to yet another departure from a dwindling workforce: a miniature cactus in a terracotta pot, a coffee mug with my name on it, a pewter tie pin in the shape of a caduceus.
Jase showed up at my door that evening with a more problematic gift
It was a cardboard box tied with string. It contained, when I opened it, about a pound of densely printed paper documents and six unlabelled optical memory disks.
"Jase?"
"Medical information," he said. "You can think of it as a textbook."
"What kind of medical information?"
He smiled. "From the archives."
"The Martian archives?"
He nodded.
"But that's classified information."
"Yes, technically, it is. But Lomax would classify the phone number for 911 if he thought he could get away with it. There may be information here that would put Pfizer and Eli Lilly out of business. But I don't see that as a legitimate concern. Do you?"
"No, but—"
"Nor do I think Wun would have wanted it kept secret. So I've been quietly doling out little pieces of the archives, here and there, to people I trust. You don't have to actually do anything with it, Tyler. Look at it or ignore it, file it away—fine."
"Great. Thanks, Jase. A gift I could be arrested for possessing."
His smile widened. "I know you'll do the right thing."
"Whatever that is."
"You'll figure it out. I have faith in you, Tyler. Ever since the treatment—"
"What?"
"I seem to see things a little more clearly," he said.
He didn't explain, and in the end I tucked the box into my luggage as a kind of souvenir. I was tempted to write the word mementos on it.
* * * * *
Replicator technology was slow even by comparison with the terraforming of a dead planet. Two years passed before we had anything like a detectable response from the payloads we had scattered among the planetesimals at the edge of the solar system.
The replicators were busy out there, though, barely touched by the gravity of the sun, doing what they were designed to do: reproducing by the inch and the century, following instructions written into their superconductive equivalent of DNA. Given time and an adequate supply of ice and carbonaceous trace elements, they would eventually phone home. But the first few detector satellites placed in orbit beyond the Spin membrane dropped back to Earth without recording a signal.
During those two years I managed to find a partner (Herbert Hakkim, a soft-spoken Bengali-born physician who had finished his internship the year Wun visited the Grand Canyon), and we took over a San Diego practice from a retiring GP. Hakkim was frank and friendly with patients but he had no real social life and seemed to prefer it that way. We seldom got together outside office hours, and I think the most intimate question he ever asked me was why I carried two cell phones.
(One for the customary reasons; the other because the number assigned to it was the last one I'd given Diane. Not that it ever rang. Nor did I attempt to contact her again. But if I had let the number lapse she would have had no way of reaching me, and that still seemed… well, wrong.)
I liked my work, and by and large I liked my patients. I saw more gunshot wounds than I might once have expected, but these were the hard years of the Spin; the domestic trend-lines for murder and suicide had begun to arc toward vertical. Years when it seemed like everyone under thirty was wearing some kind of uniform: armed forces, National Guard, Homeland Security, private security; even Home Scouts and Home Guides for the intimidated products of a dwindling birth rate. Years when Hollywood began to churn out ultraviolent or ultrapious films in which, however, the Spin was never explicitly mentioned; the Spin, like sex and the words describing it, having been banned from "entertainment discourse" by Lomax's Cultural Council and the FCC.
These were also the years when the administration enacted a raft of new laws aimed at sanitizing the Martian archives. Wun's archives, according to the president and his congressional allies, contained intrinsically dangerous knowledge that had to be redacted and secured. Opening them to the public would have been "like posting plans for a suitcase nuke on the Internet." Even the anthropological material was vetted: in the published version, a Fourth was defined as "a respected elder." No mention of medically mediated longevity.
But who needed or wanted longevity? The end of the world was closer every day.
The flickers were evidence of that, if anyone needed proof.
* * * * *
The first positive results from the replicator project had been in for half a year when the flickers began.
I heard most of the replicator news from Jase a couple of days before it broke in the media. In itself, it was nothing spectacular. A NASA/Perihelion survey satellite had recorded a faint signal from a known Oort Cloud body well beyond the orbit of Pluto—a periodic uncoded blip that was the sound of a replicator colony nearing completion. (Nearing maturity, you might say.) Which appears trivial unless you consider what it means: The dormant cells of an utterly novel, man-made biology had alighted on a chunk of dusty ice in deepest space. Those cells had then begun an agonizingly slow form of metabolism, in which they absorbed the scant heat of the distant sun, used it to separate a few nearby molecules of water and carbon, and duplicated themselves with the resulting raw materials.
Over the course of many years the same colony grew to, perhaps, the size of a ball bearing. An astronaut who had made the impossibly long journey and knew precisely where to look would have seen it as a black dimple on the rocky/icy regolith of the host planetesimal. But the colony was fractionally more efficient than its single-celled ancestor. It began to grow more quickly and generate more heat. The temperature differential between the colony and its surroundings was only a fraction of a degree Kelvin (except when brief reproductive bursts pumped latent energy into the local environment), but it was persistent.
More millennia (or terrestrial months) passed. Subroutines in the replicators' genetic substrate, activated by local heat gradients, modified the colony's growth. Cells began to differentiate. Like a human embryo, the colony produced not merely more cells but specialized cells, the equivalent of heart and lungs, arms and legs. Tendrils of it forced themselves into the loose material of the planetesimal, mining it for carbonaceous molecules.
Eventually, microscopic but carefully calculated vapor bursts began to slow the host object's rotation (patiently, over centuries), until the colony's face was turned perpetually to the sun. Now differentiation began in earnest. The colony extruded carbon/carbon and carbon/silicon junctions; it grew monomolecular whiskers to join these junctions together, bootstrapping itself up the ladder of complexity; from these junctions it generated light-sensitive dots—eyes—and the capacity to generate and process microbursts of radio-frequency noise.
And as more centuries passed the colony elaborated and refined these capabilities until it announced itself with a simple periodic chirp, the equivalent of the sound a newborn sparrow might make. Which was what our satellite had detected.
The news media ran the story for a couple of days (with stock footage of Wun Ngo Wen, his funeral, the launch) and then forgot about it. After all, this was only the first stage of what the replicators were designed to do.
Merely mat. Uninspiring. Unless you thought about it for more man thirty seconds.
This was technology with, literally, a life of its own. A genie out of the bottle for good and all.
* * * * *
The flicker happened a few months later.
The flicker was the first sign of a change or disturbance in the Spin membrane—first, that is, unless you count the event that followed the Chinese missile attack on the polar artifacts, back in the earliest years of the Spin. Both events were visible from every point on the globe. But beyond that key resemblance they were not much alike.
After the missile attack the Spin membrane had seemed to stutter and recover, generating strobed images of the evolving sky, multiple moons and gyrating stars.
The flicker was different.
I watched it from the balcony of my suburban apartment. A warm September night. Some of the neighbors had already been outside when the flicker started. Now all of us were. We perched on our ledges like starlings, chattering.
The sky was bright.
Not with stars but with infinitesimally narrow threads of golden fire, crackling like heatless lightning from horizon to horizon. The threads moved and shifted erratically; some flickered or faded altogether; occasionally new ones flared into existence. It was as mesmerizing as it was frightening.
The event was global, not local. On the daylight side of the planet the phenomenon was only slightly visible, lost in sunlight or obscured by cloud; in North and South America and western Europe the dark-sky displays caused sporadic outbreaks of panic. After all, we'd been expecting the end of the world for more years than most of us cared to count. This looked like an overture, at least, to the real thing.
There were hundreds of successful or attempted suicides that night, plus scores of murders or mercy killings, in the city where I lived. Worldwide, the numbers were incalculably larger. Apparently there were plenty of people like Molly Seagram, people who chose to dodge the much-predicted boiling of the seas with a few lethal tablets of this or that. And spares for family and friends. Many of them opted for the final exit as soon as the sky lit up. Prematurely, as it turned out.
The display lasted eight hours. By morning I was at the local hospital lending a hand in the emergency ward. By noon I had seen seven separate cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, folks who had intentionally locked themselves in the garage with an idling car. Most were dead well before I pronounced them and the survivors were hardly better off. Otherwise healthy people, people I might have passed at the grocery store, would be spending the rest of their lives hooked up to ventilators, irreparably brain damaged, victims of a botched exit strategy. Not pleasant. But the gunshot wounds to the head were worse. I couldn't treat them without thinking of Wun Ngo Wen lying on that Florida highway, blood gouting from what remained of his skull.
Eight hours. Then the sky was blank again, the sun beaming out of it like the punchline to a bad joke.
It happened again a year and a half later.
* * * * *
"You look like a man who lost his faith," Hakkim once told me.
"Or never had one," I said.
"I don't mean faith in God. Of that you seem to be genuinely innocent. Faith in something else. I don't know what."
Which seemed cryptic. But I understood it a little more clearly the next time I talked to Jason.
He called me at home. (On my regular cell, not the orphan phone I carried with me like a luckless charm.) I said, "Hello?" and he said, "You must be watching this on television."
"Watching what?"
"Turn on one of the news networks. Are you alone?"
The answer was yes. By choice. No Molly Seagram to complicate the end of days. The TV remote was on the coffee table where I'd left it. Where I always left it.
The news channel showed a graph of many colors accompanied by a droning voice-over. I muted it. "What am I looking at, Jase?"
"A JPL press conference. The data set retrieved from the last orbital receiver."
Replicator data, in other words. "And?"
"We're in business," he said. I could practically hear his smile.
The satellite had detected multiple radio sources narrow-casting from the outer solar system. Which meant that more than one replicator colony had grown to maturity. And the data were complex, Jason said, not simple. As the replicator colonies aged, their growth rate slowed but their functions became more refined and purposeful. They weren't just leaning sunward for free energy anymore. They were analyzing starlight, calculating planetary orbits on neural networks made of silicon and carbon fibers, comparing them to templates etched into their genetic code. No less than a dozen fully adult colonies had sent back precisely the data they were designed to collect, four streams of binary data declaring:
1. This was a planetary system of a star with a solar mass of 1.0;
2. The system possessed eight large planetary bodies (Pluto falling under the detectable mass limit);
3. Two of those planets were optically blank, surrounded by Spin membranes; and
4. The reporting replicator colonies had shifted into reproductive mode, shedding nonspecific seed cells and launching them on bursts of cometary vapor toward neighboring stars.
The same message, Jase said, had been beamed at local, less mature colonies, which would respond by bypassing redundant functions and directing their energy into purely reproductive behavior.
In other words, we had successfully infected the outer system with Wun's quasi-biological systems.
Which were now sporulating.
I said, "This tells us nothing about the Spin."
"Of course not. Not yet. But this little trickle of information will be a torrent before long. In time we'll be able to put together a Spin map of all the nearby stars—maybe eventually the entire galaxy. From that we ought to be able to deduce where the Hypotheticals come from, where they've been Spinning, and what ultimately happens to Spin worlds when their stars expand and burn out."
"That won't fix anything, though, will it?"
He sighed as if I'd disappointed him by asking a stupid question. "Probably not. But isn't it better to know than to speculate? We might find out we're doomed, but we might find out we have more time left than we expected. Remember, Tyler, we're working on other fronts, too. We've been delving into the theoretical physics in Wun's archives. If you model the Spin membrane as a wormhole enclosing an object accelerating at near-light-speed—"
"But we're not accelerating. We're not going anywhere." Except headlong into the future.
"No, but if you do the calculation it yields results that match our observation of the Spin. Which might give us a clue as to which forces the Hypotheticals are manipulating."
"To what end, though, Jase?"
"Too soon to say. But I don't believe in the futility of knowledge."
"Even if we're dying?"
"Everyone dies."
"I mean, as a species."
"That remains to be seen. Whatever the Spin is, it has to be more than a sort of elaborate global euthanasia. The Hypotheticals must be acting with a purpose."
Maybe so. But this, I realized, was the faith that had deserted me. The faith in Big Salvation.
All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.
Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn't the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.
* * * * *
The flicker came back the following winter, persisted for forty-four hours, then vanished again. Many of us began to think of it as a kind of celestial weather, unpredictable but generally harmless.
Pessimists pointed out that the intervals between episodes were growing shorter, the duration of the episodes growing longer.
In April there was a flicker that lasted three days and interfered with the transmission of aerostat signals. This one provoked another (smaller) wave of successful and attempted suicides—people driven to panic less by what they saw in the sky than by the failure of their telephones and TV sets.
I had stopped paying attention to the news, but certain events were impossible to ignore: the military setbacks in North Africa and eastern Europe, the cult coup in Zimbabwe, the mass suicides in Korea. Exponents of apocalyptic Islam scored big numbers in the Algerian and Egyptian elections that year. A Filipino cult that worshipped the memory of Wun Ngo Wen—whom they had reconceived as a pastoralist saint, an agrarian Gandhi—had successfully engineered a general strike in Manila.
And I got a few more calls from Jason. He mailed me a phone with some kind of built-in encryption pad, which he claimed would give us "pretty good protection against keyword hunters," whatever that meant.
"Sounds a little paranoid," I said.
"Usefully paranoid, I think."
Perhaps, if we wanted to discuss matters of national security. We didn't, though, at least not at first. Instead Jason asked me about my work, my life, the music I'd been listening to. I understood that he was trying to generate the kind of conversation we might have had twenty or thirty years ago— before Perihelion, if not before the Spin. He had been to see his mother, he told me. Carol was still counting out her days by clock and bottle. Nothing had changed. Carol had insisted on that. The house staff kept everything clean, everything in its place. The Big House was like a time capsule, he said, as if it had been hermetically sealed on the first night of the Spin. It was a little spooky that way.
I asked whether Diane ever called.
"Diane stopped talking to Carol back before Wun was killed. No, not a word from her."
Then I asked him about the replicator project. There hadn't been anything in the papers lately.
"Don't bother looking. JPL is sitting on the results."
I heard the unhappiness in his voice. "That bad?"
"It's not entirely bad news. At least not until recently. The replicators did everything Wun hoped they would. Amazing things, Tyler. I mean absolutely amazing. I wish I could show you the maps we generated. Big navigable software maps. Almost two hundred thousand stars, in a halo of space hundreds of light-years in diameter. We know more about stellar and planetary evolution now than an astronomer of E.D.'s generation could have imagined."
"But nothing about the Spin?"
"I didn't say that."
"So what did you learn?"
"For one thing, we're not alone. In that volume of space we've found three optically blank planets roughly the size of the Earth, in orbits that are habitable by terrestrial standards or would have been in the past. The nearest is circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The farthest—"
"I don't need the details."
"If we look at the age of the stars involved and make some plausible assumptions, the Hypotheticals appear to emanate from somewhere in the direction of the galactic core. There are other indicators, too. The replicators found a couple of white dwarf stars—burned-out stars, essentially, but stars that would have looked like the sun a few billion years ago—with rocky planets in orbits that should never have outlasted the solar expansion."
"Spin survivors?"
"Maybe."
"Are these living planets, Jase?"
"We have no real way of knowing. But they don't have Spin membranes to protect them, and their current stellar environment is absolutely hostile by our standards."
"Meaning what?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows. We thought we'd be able to make more meaningful comparisons as the replicator network expanded. What we created with the replicators is really a neural network on an unimaginably large scale. They talk to themselves the way neurons talk to themselves, except they do it across centuries and light-years. It's absolutely, stunningly beautiful, what they do. A network larger than anything humanity has ever built. Gathering information, culling it, storing it, feeding it back to us—"
"So what went wrong?"
He sounded as if it hurt him to say it. "Maybe age. Everything ages, even highly protected genetic codes. They might be evolving beyond our instructions. Or—"
"Yeah, but what happened, Jase?"
"The data are diminishing. We're getting fragmentary, contradictory information from the replicators that are farthest from Earth. That could mean a lot of things. If they're dying, it might reflect some emerging flaw in the design code. But some of the long-established relay nodes are starting to shut down, too."
"Something's targeting them?"
"That's too hasty an assumption. Here's another idea. When we launched these things into the Oort Cloud we created a simple interstellar ecology—ice, dust, and artificial life. But what if we weren't the first? What if the interstellar ecology isn't simple?"
"You mean there might be other kinds of replicators out there?"
"Could be. If so, they'd be competing for resources. Maybe even using each other for resources. We thought we were sending our devices into a sterile void. But there might be competitor species, there might even be predator species."
"Jason… you think something's eating them?"
"It's possible," he said.
* * * * *
The flicker came back in June and clocked nearly forty-eight hours before it dissipated.
In August, fifty-six hours of flicker plus intermittent telecom problems.
When it started again in late September no one was surprised. I spent most of the first evening with the blinds closed, ignoring the sky, watching a movie I'd downloaded a week before. An old movie, pre-Spin. Watching it not for the plot but for the faces, the faces of people the way they used to look, people who hadn't spent their lives afraid of the future. People who, every once in a while, talked about the moon and the stars without irony or nostalgia.
Then the phone rang.
Not my personal phone, and not the encrypting phone Jase had sent me. I recognized the three-tone ring instantly even though I hadn't heard it for years. It was audible but faint— faint because I'd left the phone in the pocket of a jacket that was hanging in the hallway closet.
It rang twice more before I fumbled it out and said, "Hello?"
Expecting a wrong number. Wanting Diane's voice. Wanting it and dreading it.
But it was a man's voice on the other end. Simon, I recognized belatedly.
He said, "Tyler? Tyler Dupree? Is that you?"
I had taken enough emergency calls to recognize the anxiety in his voice. I said, "It's me, Simon. What's wrong?"
"I shouldn't be talking to you. But I don't know who else to call. I don't know any local doctors. And she's so sick. She's just so sick, Tyler! I don't think she's getting better. I think she needs—"
And then the flicker cut us off and there was nothing but noise on the line.
Behind Diane came En and two dozen of his cousins and an equal number of strangers, all bound for the new world. Jala herded them inside, then slid shut the corrugated steel door of the warehouse. The light dimmed. Diane put her arm around me and I walked her to a relatively clean space under one of the high halide lamps. Ibu Ina unrolled an empty jute bag for her to lie on.
"The noise," Ina said.
Diane closed her eyes as soon as she was horizontal, awake but obviously exhausted. I unbuttoned her blouse and began, gently, to peel it away from the wound.
I said, "My medical case—"
"Yes, of course." Ina summoned En and sent him up the warehouse stairs to bring both bags, mine and hers "The noise—"
Diane winced when I began to pull the matted cloth from the caked blood of the wound, but I didn't want to medicate her until I'd seen the extent of the injury. "What noise?"
"Exactly!" Ina said. "The docks should be noisy this time of the morning. But it's quiet. There is no noise."
I raised my head. She was right. No noise, except the nervous talk of the Minang villagers and a distant drumming that was the sound of rain on the high metal roof.
But this wasn't the time to worry about it. "Go ask Jala," I said. "Find out what's happening."
Then I turned back to Diane.
* * * * *
"It's superficial," Diane said. She took a deep breath. Her eyes were clenched shut against the pain. "At least I think it's superficial."
"It looks like a bullet wound."
"Yes. The Reformasi found Jala's safe house in Padang. Fortunately we were just leaving. Uh!"
She was right. The wound itself was superficial, though it would need suturing. The bullet had passed through fatty tissue just above the hipbone. But the impact had bruised her badly where the skin wasn't torn and I worried that the bruising might be deep, that the concussion might have torn something inside her. But there had been no blood in her urine, she said, and her blood pressure and pulse were at reasonable numbers under the circumstances.
"I want to give you something for the pain, and we need to stitch this up."
"Stitch it if you have to, but I don't want any drugs. We have to get out of here."
"You don't want me suturing you without an anesthetic."
"Something local, then."
"This isn't a hospital. I don't have anything local."
"Then just sew it, Tyler. I can deal with the pain."
Yes, but could I? I looked at my hands. Clean—there was running water in the warehouse washroom, and Ina had helped me wrestle into latex gloves before I attended Diane. Clean and skilled. But not steady.
I had never been squeamish about my work. Even as a med student, even doing dissections, I'd always been able to switch off the loop of sympathy that makes us feel another's pain as if it were our own. To pretend that the torn artery demanding my attention was unconnected with a living human being. To pretend and for the necessary few minutes to really believe it.
But now my hand was shaking, and the idea of passing a needle through these bloody lips of flesh seemed brutal, cruel beyond countenance.
Diane put her hand on my wrist to steady it. "It's a Fourth thing," she said.
"What?"
"You feel like the bullet went through you instead of me. Right?"
I nodded, astonished.
"It's a Fourth thing. I think it's supposed to make us better people. But you're still a doctor. You just have to work through it."
"If I can't," I said, "I'll turn it over to Ina."
But I could. Somehow. I did.
* * * * *
Ina came back from her conference with Jala. "Today there was to be a labor action," she said. "The police and the Reformasi are at the gates and they mean to take control of the port. Conflict is anticipated." She looked at Diane. "How are you, my dear?"
"In good hands," Diane whispered. Her voice was ragged.
Ina inspected my work. "Competent," she pronounced.
"Thank you," I said.
"Under the circumstances. But listen to me, listen. We need very urgently to leave. Right now the only thing between us and prison is a labor riot. We have to board the Capetown Maru immediately."
"The police are looking for us?"
"I think not you, not specifically. Jakarta has entered into some sort of agreement with the Americans to suppress the emigration trade in general. The docks are being swept here and elsewhere, very publicly, in order to impress the people at the U.S. consulate. Of course it won't last. Too much money changes hands for the trade to be truly eliminated. But for cosmetic effect there's nothing like uniformed police dragging people out of the holds of cargo ships."
"They came to Jala's safe house," Diane said.
"Yes, they're aware of you and Dr. Dupree, ideally they would like to take you into custody, but that isn't why the police are forming ranks at the gates. Ships are still leaving the harbor but that won't last long. The union movement is powerful at Teluk Bayur. They mean to fight."
Jala shouted from the doorway, words I didn't understand.
"Now we really must leave," Ina said.
"Help me make a litter for Diane."
Diane tried to sit up. "I can walk."
"No," Ina said. "In this I believe Tyler is correct. Try not to move."
We doubled up more lengths of stitched jute and made a sort of hammock for her. I took one end and Ina called over one of the huskier Minang men to grab the other.
"Hurry now!" Jala shouted, waving us out into the rain.
* * * * *
Monsoon season. Was this a monsoon? The morning looked like dusk. Clouds like sodden bolts of wool came across the gray water of Teluk Bayur, clipping the towers and radars of the big double-hulled tankers. The air was hot and rank. Rain soaked us even as we loaded Diane into a waiting car. Jala had arranged a little convoy for his group of émigrés: three cars and a couple of little open-top cargo-haulers with hard rubber wheels.
The Capetown Maru was docked at the end of a high concrete pier a quarter mile away. Along the wharves in the opposite direction, past rows of warehouses and industrial godowns and fat red-and-white Avigas holding tanks, a dense crowd of dockworkers had gathered by the gates. Under the drumming of the rain I could hear someone shouting through a bullhorn. Then a sound that might or might not have been shots fired.
"Get in," Jala said, urging me into the backseat of the car where Diane bent over her wounds as if she were praying. "Hurry, hurry." He climbed into the driver's seat.
I took a final look back at the rain-obscured mob. Something the size of a football lofted high over the crowd, trailing spirals of white smoke behind it. A tear gas canister.
The car jolted forward.
* * * * *
"This is more than police," Jala said as we wheeled out along the finger of the quay. "Police would not be so foolish. This is New Reformasi. Street thugs hired out of the slums of Jakarta and dressed in government uniforms."
Uniforms and guns. And more tear gas now, roiling clouds of it that blurred into the rainy mist. The crowd began to unravel at its edges.
There was a distant whoomp, and a ball of flame rose a few yards into the sky.
Jala saw it in his mirror. "Dear God! How idiotic! Someone must have fired on a barrel of oil. The docks—"
Sirens bellowed over the water as we followed the quay. Now the crowd was genuinely panicked. For the first time I was able to see a line of police pushing through the gated entrance to the port. Those in the vanguard carried heavy weapons and wore black-snouted masks.
A fire truck rolled out of a shed and screamed toward the gate.
We rolled up a series of ramps and stopped where the pier was level with the main deck of the Capetown Maru. Capetown Maru was an old flag-of-convenience freighter painted white and rust orange. A short steel gangway had been emplaced between the main deck and the pier, and the first few Minang were already scurrying across it.
Jala leaped out of the car. By the time I had Diane on the quay—on foot, leaning hard into me, the jute litter abandoned—Jala was already conducting a heated argument in English with the man at the head of the gangway: if not the ship's captain or pilot then someone with similar authority, a squat man with Sikh headgear and a grimly clenched jaw.
"It was agreed months ago," Jala was saying.
"—but this weather—"
"—in any weather—"
"—but without approval from the Port Authority—"
"—yes but there is no Port Authority—look!"
Jala meant the gesture to be rhetorical. But he was waving his hand at the fuel and gas bunkers near the main gate when one of the tanks exploded.
I didn't see it. The concussion pushed me into the concrete and I felt the heat of it on the back of my neck. The sound was huge but arrived like an afterthought. I rolled onto my back as soon as I could move, ears ringing. The Avigas, I thought. Or whatever else they stored here. Benzene. Kerosene. Fuel oil, even crude palm oil. The fire must have spread, or the unschooled police had fired their weapons in an unwise direction. I turned my head to look for Diane and found her beside me, looking back, more puzzled than frightened. I thought: I can't hear the rain. But mere was another, distinctly audible, more frightening sound: the ping of falling debris. Shards of metal, some burning. Ping, as they struck the concrete quay or the steel deck of the Capetown Maru.
"Heads down," Jala was shouting, his voice watery, submerged: "Heads down, everybody heads down!"
I tried to cover Diane's body with mine. Burning metal fell around us like hail or splashed into the dark water beyond the ship for a few interminable seconds. Then it simply stopped. Nothing fell except the rain, soft as the whisper of brushed cymbals.
We lifted ourselves up. Jala was already pushing bodies across the gangway, casting fearful glances back at the flames. "That might not be the last! Get on board, all of you, go on, go on!" He steered the villagers past the Capetown's crew, who were extinguishing deck fires and casting off lines.
Smoke blew toward us, obscuring the violence ashore. I helped Diane aboard. She winced at every step, and her wound had started leaking into her bandages. We were last up the gangway. A couple of sailors began to draw the aluminum structure in behind us, hands on the winches but eyes darting toward the pillar of fire back ashore.
Capetown Maru's engines thrummed under the deck. Jala saw me and came to take Diane's other arm. Diane registered his presence and said, "Are we safe?"
"Not until we clear the harbor."
Across the green-gray water horns and whistles sounded. Every mobile ship was making for open ocean. Jala looked back at the quay and stiffened. "Your luggage," he said.
It had been loaded onto one of the small cargo-haulers. Two battered hard shell cases full of paper and pharmaceuticals and digital memory. Still sitting there, abandoned.
"Run that gangway back," Jala said to the deck hands.
They blinked at him, uncertain of his authority. The first mate had left for the bridge. Jala puffed up his chest and said something fierce in a language I didn't recognize. The sailors shrugged and reeled the extendable walk back to the quay.
The ship's engines sounded a deeper note.
I ran across the gangway, corrugated aluminum ringing underfoot. Grabbed the cases. Took a last look back. Down at the landward end of the quay a detachment of a dozen or so uniformed New Reformasi began to run toward the Capetown Maru. "Cast off," Jala was shouting as if he owned the ship, "cast off, quickly now, quickly!"
The scaffolding began to retreat. I threw the luggage onboard and scrambled after it.
Made the deck before the ship began to move.
Then another Avigas tank erupted, and we were all thrown down by the concussion.
The nightly battles between road pirates and the CHP made for difficult traveling at the best of times. The flicker made it worse. During a flicker episode any kind of unnecessary travel was officially discouraged, but that didn't stop people from trying to reach family and friends or in some cases simply getting in their cars to drive until they ran out of gas or time. I quick-packed a couple of suitcases with anything I didn't want to leave behind, including the archival records Jase had given me.
Tonight the Alvarado Freeway was clotted with traffic and I-8 wasn't moving much faster. I had plenty of time to reflect on the absurdity of what I was attempting to do.
Running to the rescue of another man's wife, a woman I had once cared about more than was really good for me. When I closed my eyes and tried to picture Diane Lawton there was no coherent image anymore, only a blurred montage of moments and gestures. Diane brushing back her hair with one hand and leaning into the coat of St. Augustine, her dog. Diane smuggling an Internet link to her brother in the tool shed where a lawn mower lay deconstructed on the floor. Diane reading Victorian poetry in a patch of willow shade, smiling at something in the text I hadn't understood: Summer ripens at all hours, or, The infant child is not aware…
Diane, whose subtlest looks and gestures had always implied that she loved me, at least tentatively, but who had always been restrained by forces I didn't understand: her father, Jason, the Spin. It was the Spin, I thought, that had bound us and separated us, locked us in adjoining but doorless rooms.
I was past El Centro when the radio reported "significant" police activity west of Yuma and traffic backed up for at least three miles at the state line. I decided not to risk the long delay and turned onto a local connector—it looked promising on the map—through empty desert north, meaning to pick up I-10 where it crossed the state border near Blythe.
The road was less crowded but still busy. The flicker made the world seem inverted, brighter above than below. Every so often an especially thick vein of light writhed from the northern to the southern horizon as if a fracture had opened in the Spin membrane, fragments of the hurried universe burning through.
I thought about the phone in my pocket, Diane's phone, the number Simon had called. I couldn't call back: I didn't have a return number for Diane and the ranch—if they were still on the ranch—was unlisted. I just wanted it to ring again. Wanted it and dreaded it.
The traffic was bad again where the road approached the state highway near Palo Verde. It was after midnight now and I was making maybe thirty miles per hour at best. I thought about sleeping. I needed sleep. Decided it might be better to sleep, to give up for the night and give the traffic time to clear. But I didn't want to sleep in the car. The only stationary cars I'd seen had been abandoned and looted, trunks agape like startled mouths.
South of a little town called Ripley I spotted a sun-faded and sand-blasted lodging sign, briefly visible in the headlights, and a two-lane, barely paved road exiting the highway. I took the turn. Five minutes later I was at a gated compound that was or once had been a motel, a strip of rooms two stories tall horseshoed around a swimming pool that looked empty under the flickering sky. I stepped out of the car and pushed the buzzer.
The gate was remote controlled, the kind you could roll back from a control panel safely distant, and it was equipped with a palm-sized video camera on a high pole. The camera swiveled to examine me as a speaker mounted at car-window height crackled to life. From somewhere, from the motel's bunker or lobby, I was able to hear a few bars of music. Not programmed music, just something playing in the background. Then a voice. Brusque, metallic, and unfriendly. "We're not taking guests tonight."
After a few moments I reached out and pushed the buzzer again.
The voice returned. "What part of that didn't you understand?"
I said, "I can pay cash if it makes a difference. I won't quibble about the price."
"No sale. Sorry, partner."
"Okay, hang on… look, I can sleep in the car, but would it be all right if I pulled in just to get a little protection? Maybe park around back where I can't be seen from the road?"
Longer pause. I listened to a trumpet chase a snare drum. The song was naggingly familiar.
"Sorry. Not tonight. Please move along."
More silence. More minutes passed. A cricket sawed away in the little palm and pea-gravel oasis in front of the motel. I pushed the buzzer again.
The proprietor came back quickly. "I gotta tell you, we're armed and slightly pissed off in here. It would be better if you just hit the road."
"'Harlem Air Shaft,'" I said.
"Excuse me?"
"The song you're playing. Ellington, right? 'Harlem Air Shaft.' Sounds like his fifties band."
Another long pause, though the speaker was still live. I was almost certain I was right, though I hadn't heard the Duke Ellington tune for years.
Then the music stopped, the thin thread of it cut off in mid-beat. "Anybody else in that car with you?"
I rolled the window down and switched on the overhead light. The camera panned, then swiveled back to me.
"All right," he said. "Okay. Tell me who plays trumpet on that cut and I'll spring the gate."
Trumpet? When I thought of Duke Ellington's midfifties band I thought of Paul Gonsalvez, but Gonsalvez played sax. There had been a handful of trumpeters. Cat Anderson? Willie Cook? It had been too long.
"Ray Nance," I said.
"Nope. Clark Terry. But I guess you can come in anyway."
* * * * *
The owner came out to meet me when I pulled up in front of the lobby. He was a tall man, maybe forty, in jeans and a loose plaid shirt. He looked me over carefully.
"No offense," he said, "but the first time this happened—" He gestured at the sky, the flicker that turned his skin yellow and the stucco walls a sickly ocher. "Well, when they closed the border at Blythe I had people fighting for rooms. I mean literally fighting. Couple guys pulled weapons on me, right there where you're standing. Any money I made that night I paid for twice over in maintenance. People drinking in the rooms, puking, tearing the shit out of things. It was even worse up on ten. Night clerk at the Days Inn out toward Ehrenberg was stabbed to death. That's when I installed the security fence, right after that. Now, soon as the flicker starts, I just turn off the vacancy light and lock up until it's over."
"And play Duke," I said.
He smiled. We went inside so I could register. "Duke," he said, "or Pops, or Diz. Miles if I'm in the mood for it." The true fan's first-name intimacy with the dead. "Nothing after about 1965." The lobby was a bleakly lit and generically carpeted room done up in ancient western motifs, but through a door to the proprietor's inner sanctum—it looked like he lived here—more music trickled out. He inspected the credit card I offered him.
"Dr. Dupree," he said, putting out his hand. "I'm Allen Fulton. Are you headed into Arizona?"
I told him I'd been bounced off the Interstate down by the border.
"I'm not sure you'll do any better on ten. Nights like this it seems like everybody in Los Angeles wants to move east. Like the flicker's some kind of earthquake or tidal wave."
"I'll be back on the road before long."
He handed me a key. "Get a little sleep. Always good advice."
"The card's okay? If you want cash—"
"Card's good as cash as long the world doesn't end. And if it does I don't suppose I'll have time to regret it."
He laughed. I tried to smile.
Ten minutes later I was lying fully clothed on a hard bed in a room that smelled of potpourri-scented antiseptic and too-damp air-conditioning, wondering whether I should have stayed on the road. I put the phone at the bedside and closed my eyes and slept without hesitation.
* * * * *
And woke less than an hour later, alert without knowing why.
I sat up and scanned the room, charting gray shapes and darkness against memory. My attention eventually settled on the pallid rectangle of the window, the yellow curtain that had been pulsing with light when I checked in.
The flicker had stopped.
Which should have made it easier to sleep, this gentler darkness, but I knew in the way one knows such things that sleep had become impossible. I had corralled it for a brief time but now it had jumped the fence, and there was no use pretending otherwise.
I made coffee in the little courtesy percolator and drank a cup. Half an hour later I checked my watch again. Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity. Might as well shower and get back on the road.
I dressed and walked down the silent concrete walkway to the motel lobby, expecting to drop the key in a mail slot; but
Fulton, the owner, was still awake, television light pulsing from his back room. He put his head out when he heard me rattle the door.
He looked peculiar. A little drunk, maybe a little stoned. He blinked at me until he recognized me. "Dr. Dupree," he said.
"Sorry to bother you again. I need to get back on the road. Thank you for your hospitality, though."
"No need to explain," he said. "I wish you the best of luck. Hope you get somewhere before dawn."
"I hope so, too."
"Me, I'm just watching it on television."
"Oh?"
Suddenly I wasn't sure what he was talking about.
"With the sound turned down. I don't want to wake Jody. Did I mention Jody? My daughter. She's ten. Her mom lives in La Jolla with a furniture repairman. Jody spends the summers with me. Out here in the desert, what a fate, huh?"
"Yeah, well—"
"But I don't want to wake her." He looked suddenly somber. "Is that wrong? Just to let her sleep through it? Or as long as she can? Or maybe I should wake her up. Come to think of it, she's never seen 'em. Ten years old. Never seen 'em. I guess this is her last chance."
"Sorry, I'm not sure I understand—"
"They're different, though. They're not the way I remember. Not that I was ever any kind of expert… but in the old days, if you spent enough nights out here, you'd kind of get familiar with 'em."
"Familiar with what?"
He blinked. "The stars," he said.
* * * * *
We went out by the empty swimming pool to look at the sky.
The pool hadn't been filled for a long time. Dust and sand had duned at the bottom of it, and someone had tagged the walls with ballooning purple graffiti. Wind rattled a steel sign (no lifeguard on duty) against the links of the fence. The wind was warm and from the east.
The stars.
"See?" he said. "Different. I don't see any of the old constellations. Everything looks kind of… scattered."
A few billion years will do that. Everything ages, even the sky; everything tends toward maximum entropy, disorder, randomness. The galaxy in which we live had been racked by invisible violence on a great scale over the last three billion years, had swirled its contents together with a smaller satellite galaxy (M41 in the old catalogs) until the stars were spread across the sky in a meaningless sprawl. It was like looking at the rude hand of time.
Fulton said, "You okay there, Dr. Dupree? Maybe you ought to sit down."
Too numb to stand, yes. I sat on the rubberized concrete with my feet dangling into the shallow-end declivity of the pool, still staring up. I had never seen anything as beautiful or as terrifying.
"Only a few hours before sunrise," Fulton said mournfully.
Here. Farmer east, somewhere over the Atlantic, the sun must already have breached the horizon. I wanted to ask him about that, but I was interrupted by a small voice from the shadows near the lobby door. "Dad? I could hear you talking." That would be Jody, the daughter. She took a tentative step closer. She was wearing white pajamas and a pair of unlaced sneakers to protect her feet. She had a broad, plain-but-pretty face and sleepy eyes.
"Come on over, darlin'," Fulton said. "Get on up on my shoulders and have a look at the sky."
She clambered aboard, still puzzled. Fulton stood, hands on her ankles, lifting her that much closer to the glittering dark.
"Look," he said, smiling despite the tears that had begun to track down his face. "Look there, Jody. Look how far you can see tonight! Tonight you can see all the way to the end of practically everything."
* * * * *
I stopped back at the room to check the TV for news—Fulton said most of the cable news stations were still broadcasting. The flicker had ended an hour ago. It had simply vanished, along with the Spin membrane. The Spin had ended as quietly as it had begun, no fanfare, no noise except for a crackle of uninterpretable static from the sunny side of the planet.
The sun.
Three billion years and change older than it had been when the Spin sealed it away. I tried to remember what Jase had told me about the current condition of the sun. Deadly, no question; we were out of the habitable zone; that was common knowledge. The image of boiling oceans had been mooted in the press; but had we reached that point yet? Dead by noon, or did we have until the end of the week?
Did it matter?
I turned on the motel room's small video panel and found a live broadcast from New York City. Major panic had not yet set in. Too many people were still asleep or had foregone the morning commute when they woke up and saw the stars and drew the obvious conclusions. The crew at this particular cable newsroom, as if in a fever dream of journalistic heroism, had set up a rooftop camera pointed east from the top of Todt Hill on Staten Island. The light was dim, the eastern sky brightening but still void. A pair of barely-holding-it-together anchors read to each other from freshly faxed bulletins.
There had been no intelligible link with Europe since the end of the flicker, they said. This might be due to electrostatic interference, the unmediated sunlight washing out aerostat-linked signals. It was too soon to draw dire conclusions. "And as always," one of the newscasters said, "although we don't have official reaction yet, the best advice is to stay put and stay tuned until we sort all this out. I don't think it would be inappropriate to ask people to remain in their homes if at all possible."
"Today of all days," his partner agreed, "people will want to be close to their families."
I sat on the edge of the motel-room mattress and watched until the sun rose.
The high camera caught it first as a layer of crimson cloud skimming the oily Atlantic horizon. Then a boiling crescent edge, filters sliding over the lens to stop down the glare.
The scale of it was hard to parse, but the sun came up (not quite red but ruddy orange, unless that was an artifact of the camera) and came up some more and kept coming up until it hovered over the ocean, Queens, Manhattan, too large to be a plausible heavenly body, more like an enormous balloon filled with amber light.
I waited for more commentary, but the image was silent until it cut to a studio in the Midwest, the network's fallback headquarters, and another reporter, too poorly groomed to be a regular anchor, who uttered more sourceless and futile cautions. I switched it off.
And took my med kit and suitcase to the car.
Fulton and Jody came out of the office to see me off. Suddenly they were old friends, sorry to see me go. Jody looked frightened now. "Jody's been talking to her mom," Fulton said. "I don't think her mom had heard about the stars."
I tried not to picture the early-morning wake-up call, Jody phoning from the desert to announce what her mother would have instantly understood as the approaching end of the world. Jody's mom saying what might be a final good-bye to her daughter while struggling not to scare her to death, shielding her from the onrushing truth.
Now Jody leaned into her father's ribs and Fulton put his arm around her, nothing but tenderness left between them.
"Do you have to go?" Jody asked.
I said I did.
"Because you can stay if you like. My dad said so."
"Mr. Dupree's a doctor," Fulton said gently. "He probably has a house call to make."
"That's right," I said. "I do."
* * * * *
Something near miraculous happened in the eastbound lanes of the highway that morning. Many people behaved badly in what they believed to be their final hours. It was as if the flickers had been merely a rehearsal for this less arguable doom. All of us had heard the predictions: forests ablaze, searing heat, the seas turned to scalding live steam. The only question was whether it would take a day, a week, a month.
And so we broke windows and took what appealed to us, any trinket life had denied us; men attempted to rape women, some discovering that the loss of inhibition worked both ways, the intended victim endowed by the same events with unexpected powers of eye-gouging and testicle-crushing; old scores were settled by gunshot and guns were fired on a whim. The suicides were legion. (I thought of Molly: if she hadn't died in the first flicker she was almost certainly dead now, might even have died pleased at the logical unfolding of her logical plan. Which made me want to cry for her for the first time in my life.)
But there were islands of civility and acts of heroic kindness, too. Interstate 10 at the Arizona border was one of them.
During the flicker there had been a National Guard detachment stationed at the bridge that crossed the Colorado River. The soldiers had disappeared shortly after the flicker ended, recalled, perhaps, or just AWOL, headed for home. Without them the bridge could have become a tangled, impassable bottleneck.
But it wasn't. Traffic flowed at a gentle pace in both directions. A dozen civilians, self-appointed volunteers with heavy-duty flashlights and flares out of their trunk emergency kits, had taken on the work of directing traffic. And even the terminally eager—the folks who wanted or needed to travel a long way before dawn, to reach New Mexico, Texas, maybe even Louisiana if their engines didn't melt first—seemed to understand that this was necessary, that no attempt to jump the line could possibly succeed and that patience was the only recourse. I don't know how long this mood lasted or what confluence of goodwill and circumstance created it Maybe it was human kindness or maybe it was the weather: in spite of the doom roaring toward us out of the east the night was perversely nice. Scattered stars in a clear, cool sky; a quickening breeze that carried off the stench of exhaust and came in the car window gentle as a mother's touch.
* * * * *
I thought about volunteering at one of the local hospitals— Palo Verde in Blythe, which I had once visited for a consultation, or maybe La Paz Regional in Parker. But what purpose would it serve? There was no cure for what was coming.
There was only palliation, morphine, heroin, Molly's route, assuming the pharmaceutical cupboards hadn't already been looted.
And what Fulton had told Jody was essentially true: I had a house call to make.
A quest. Quixotic now, of course. Whatever was wrong with Diane, I wouldn't be fixing that, either. So why finish the journey? It was something to do at the end of the world, busy hands don't tremble, busy minds don't panic; but that didn't explain the urgency, the visceral need to see her that had set me on the road during the flicker and seemed, if anything, stronger now.
Past Blythe, past the uneasy gauntlet of darkened shops and the fistfights brewing around besieged gas stations, the road opened up and the sky was darker, the stars sparkling. I was thinking about that when the phone trilled.
I almost drove off the road, fumbling in my pocket, braking, while a utility vehicle in back of me squealed past.
"Tyler," Simon said.
Before he went on I said, "Give me a call-back number before you hang up or we get cut off. So I can reach you."
"I'm not supposed to do that. I—"
"Are you calling from a private phone or the house phone?"
"Sort of private, a cell, we just use it locally. I've got it now but Aaron carries it sometimes so—"
"I won't call unless I have to."
"Well. I don't suppose it matters." He gave me the number. "But have you seen the sky, Tyler? I assume so, since you're awake. It's the last night of the world, isn't it?"
I thought: Why are you asking me? Simon had been living in the last days for three decades now. He ought to know. "Tell me about Diane," I said.
"I want to apologize for that call. Because of, you know, what's happening."
"How is she?"
"That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter."
"Is she dead?"
Long pause. He came back sounding hurt. "No. No, she's not dead. That's not the point."
"Is she hovering in midair, waiting for the Rapture?"
"You don't have to insult my faith," Simon said. (And I couldn't resist interpreting the phrase: my faith, he had said, not our faith.)
"Because, if not, maybe she still needs medical attention. Is she still sick, Simon?"
"Yes. But—"
"Sick how? What are her symptoms?"
"Sunrise is only an hour away, Tyler. Surely you understand what that means."
"I'm not at all sure what it means. And I'm on the road, I can be at the ranch before dawn."
"Oh—no, that's not good—no, I—"
"Why not? If it's the end of the world, why shouldn't I be there?"
"You don't understand. What's going on isn't just the world ending. It's a new one being born."
"How sick is she, exactly? Can I talk to her?"
Simon's voice became tremorous. A man on the brink. We were all on the brink. "She can only whisper. She can't get her breath. She's weak. She's lost a lot of weight."
"How long has she been like that?"
"I don't know. I mean, it started gradually…"
"When was it obvious she was ill?"
"Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well— months."
"Has she had any kind of medical attention?" Pause. "Simon?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"It didn't seem necessary."
"It didn't seem necessary?"
"Pastor Dan wouldn't allow it."
I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself? "I hope he's changed his mind."
"No—"
"Because, if not, I'll need your help getting to her."
"Don't do that, Tyler. It won't do anybody any good."
I was already looking for the exit, which I remembered only dimly but had marked on the map. Off the highway toward some bone-dry cienaga, a nameless desert road.
I said, "Has she asked for me?"
Silence.
"Simon? Has she asked for me?"
"Yes."
"Tell her I'll be there soon as I can."
"No, Tyler… Tyler, there are some troublesome things happening at the ranch. You can't just walk in here."
Troublesome things? "I thought a new world was being born."
"Born in blood," Simon said.
I came up toward the low ridge overlooking the Condon ranch and parked out of sight of the house. When I switched off the headlights I was able to see the predawn glow in the eastern sky, the new stars washed out by an ominous brightening.
That's when I started to shake.
I couldn't control it. I opened the door and fell out of the car and picked myself up by force of will. The land was rising out of the dark like a lost continent, brown hills, neglected pastureland returned to desert, the long shallow slope down to the distant farmhouse. Mesquite and ocotillo trembled in the wind. I trembled, too. This was fear: not the pinched intellectual uneasiness we had all lived with since the beginning of the Spin but visceral panic, fear like a disease of the muscles and the bowels. End of term on Death Row. Graduation day. Tumbrels and gallows approaching from the east.
I wondered if Diane was this frightened. I wondered if I could comfort her. If there was any consolation left in me.
The wind gusted again, washing sand and dust down the dry ridge road. Maybe the wind was the first harbinger of the bloated sun, a wind from the hot side of the world.
I crouched where I hoped I couldn't be seen and, still trembling, managed to peck out Simon's number on the keypad of the phone.
He picked up after a few rings. I pressed the receiver into my ear to block the sound of the wind.
"You shouldn't be doing this," he said.
"Am I interrupting the Rapture?"
"I can't talk."
"Where is she, Simon? What part of the house?"
"Where are you?"
"Just up the hill." The sky was brighter now, brighter by the second, a bruised purple on the western horizon. I could see the farmhouse clearly. It hadn't changed much in the few years since I'd visited. The outlying barn looked a little spruced up, as if it had been whitewashed and repaired.
Far more disturbingly, a trench had been dug parallel to the barn and covered in mounded earth.
A recently installed sewer line, maybe. Or septic tank. Or mass grave.
"I'm coming to see her," I said.
"That's just not possible."
"I'm assuming she's in the house. One of the upper-floor bedrooms. Is that correct?"
"Even if you see her—"
"Tell her I'm coming, Simon."
Down below, I saw a figure moving between the house and the barn. Not Simon. Not Aaron Sorley, unless Brother Aaron had lost about a hundred pounds. Probably Pastor Dan Condon. He was carrying a bucket of water in each hand. He looked like he was in a hurry. Something was happening in the barn.
"You're risking your life here," Simon said.
I laughed. I couldn't help it.
Then I said, "Are you in the barn or the house? Condon's in the barn, right? How about Sorley and McIsaac? How do I get past them?"
I felt a pressure like a warm hand on the back of my neck and turned.
The pressure was sunlight. The rim of the sun had crossed the horizon. My car, the fence, the rocks, the scraggy line of ocotillo all cast long violet shadows.
"Tyler? Tyler, there is no way past. You have to—"
But Simon's voice was drowned in a burst of static. The full light of the sun must have reached the aerostat that was relaying the call, washing out the signal. I hit redial instinctively, but the phone was useless.
I crouched there until the sun was three quarters up, glancing at it and glancing away, as mesmerized as I was frightened. The disc was huge and ruddy orange. Sunspots crawled over it like festering sores. Now and again, gouts of dust rose from the surrounding desert to obscure it.
Then I stood up. Dead already, perhaps. Perhaps fatally irradiated without even knowing it. The heat was bearable, at least so far, but bad things might be happening on the cellular level, X-rays needling through the air like invisible bullets. So I stood up and began to walk down the pressed-earth road toward the farmhouse in plain sight, unarmed. Unarmed and unmolested at least until I had nearly reached the wooden porch, until Brother Sorley, all three hundred pounds of him, came hurtling through the screen door and levered the butt of a rifle against the side of my head.
* * * * *
Brother Sorley didn't kill me, possibly because he didn't want to meet the Rapture with blood on his hands. Instead he tossed me into an empty upstairs bedroom and locked the door.
A couple of hours passed before I could sit up without provoking waves of nausea.
When the vertigo finally eased I went to the window and raised the yellow paper blind. From this angle the sun was behind the house, the land and the barn washed in a fierce orange glare. The air was already brutally hot, but at least nothing was burning. A barn cat, oblivious to the conflagration in the sky, lapped stagnant water from a shady ditch. I guessed the cat might live to see sunset. So might I.
I tried to lift the ancient window frame—not that I could exactly leap down from here—but it was worse than locked; the sashes had been cut, the counterweights immobilized, the frame painted in place years ago.
There was no furniture in the room apart from the bed, no tool but the useless phone in my pocket.
The single door was a slab of solid wood and I doubted I had the strength to break it down. Diane might be only yards away, a single wall separating us. But there was no way to know that and no way to find out.
Even trying to think coherently about any of this provoked a deep, nauseating pain where the butt of the rifle had bloodied my head. I had to lie down again.
* * * * *
By midafternoon the wind had stilled. When I staggered back to the window I could see the edge of the solar disc above the house and the barn, so large it seemed to be perpetually falling, almost near enough to touch.
The temperature in the upstairs bedroom had climbed steadily since morning. I had no way of measuring it, but I would have guessed at least an even hundred Fahrenheit and rising. Hot but not enough to kill, at least not at once, not immediately. I wished I had Jason here to explain that to me, the thermodynamics of global extinction. Maybe he could have drawn a chart, established where the trend lines converged on lethality.
Heat haze quavered up from the baked ground.
Dan Condon crossed to the barn and back a couple more times. He was easy to recognize in the sharp intensity of the orange daylight, something nineteenth-century about him, his squared beard and pocked, ugly face: Lincoln in blue jeans, long-legged, purposeful. He didn't look up even when I hammered on the glass.
Then I tapped the joining walls, thinking Diane might tap back. But there was no answer.
Then I was dizzy again, and I fell back on the bed, the air in the closed room sweltering, sweat drenching the bedclothes.
I slept, or lost consciousness.
* * * * *
Woke up thinking the room was on fire, but it was only the combination of stagnant heat and an impossibly gaudy sunset.
Went to the window again.
The sun had crossed the western horizon and was sinking with visible speed. High, tenuous clouds arched across the darkening sky, scraps of moisture drawn up from an already parched land. I saw that someone had rolled my car down the hill and parked it just left of the barn. And taken the keys, no doubt. Not that there was enough gas in the car to render it useful.
But I had lived through the day. I thought: We lived through the day. Both of us. Diane and I. And no doubt millions more. So this was the slow version of the apocalypse. It would kill us by cooking us a degree at a time; or, failing that, by gutting the terrestrial ecosystem.
The swollen sun finally disappeared. The air seemed instantly ten degrees cooler.
A few scattered stars showed through the gauzy clouds.
I hadn't eaten, and I was painfully thirsty. Maybe it was Gondon's plan to leave me here to die of dehydration… or maybe he had simply forgotten about me. I couldn't even begin to imagine how Pastor Dan was framing these events in his mind, whether he felt vindicated or terrified or some combination of both.
The room grew dark. No overhead light, no lamp. But I could hear a faint chugging that must be a gasoline-power generator, and light spilled from the first-floor windows and the barn.
Whereas I owned nothing in the way of technology except my phone. I took it out of my pocket and switched it on, idly, just to see the phosphorescence of the screen.
Then I had another thought.
* * * * *
"Simon?" Silence. "Simon, is that you? Can you hear me?"
Silence. Then a tinny, digitized voice:
"You nearly scared the life out of me. I thought this thing was broken."
"Only during daylight."
Solar noise had washed out transmissions from the high-altitude aerostats. But now the Earth was shielding us from the sun. Maybe the 'stats had sustained some damage—the signal sounded low-band and staticky—but the bounce was good enough for now.
"I'm sorry about what happened," he said, "but I warned you."
"Where are you? The barn or the house?"
Pause. "The house."
"I've been looking all day and I haven't seen Condon's wife or Sorley's wife and kids. Or McIsaac or his family. What happened to them?"
"They left."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Am I sure? Of course I'm sure. Diane wasn't the only one to get sick. Only the latest. Teddy McIsaac's little girl took ill first. Then his son, then Teddy himself. When it looked like his kids were—well, you know, obviously really sick, sick and not getting better, well, that was when he put them in his truck and drove away. Pastor Dan's wife went along."
"When did this happen?"
"Couple of months ago. Aaron's wife and kids took off by themselves not long after. Their faith failed them. Plus they were worried about catching something."
"You saw them leave? You're certain about that?"
"Yes, why wouldn't I be?"
"Trench by the barn looks a lot like something's buried there."
"Oh, that! Well, you're right, something is buried there— the bad cattle."
"Excuse me?"
"A man named Boswell Geller had a big ranch up in the Sierra Bonita. Friend of Jordan Tabernacle before the shake-up. Friend of Pastor Dan. He was breeding red heifers, but the Department of Agriculture started an investigation late last year. Just when he was making progress! Boswell and Pastor Dan wanted to breed together all the red cattle varieties of the world, because that would represent the conversion of the Gentiles. Pastor Dan says that's what Numbers nineteen is all about—a pure red heifer born at the end of time, from breeds on every continent, everywhere the Gospel's been preached. The sacrifice is literal and symbolic, both. In the biblical sacrifice the ashes of the heifer have the power to clean a defiled person. But at the end of the world the sun consumes the heifer and the ashes are scattered to the four compass points, cleansing the whole Earth, cleansing it of death. That's what's happening now. Hebrews nine—'For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?' So of course—"
"You kept those cattle here?"
"Only a few. Fifteen breeders smuggled out before the Department of Agriculture could claim them."
"That's when people started getting sick?"
"Not just people. The cattle, too. We dug that trench by the barn to bury them in, all but three of the original stock."
"Weakness, unsteady gait, weight loss preceding death?"
"Yes, mostly—how did you know?"
"Those are the symptoms of CVWS. The cows were carriers. That's what's wrong with Diane."
There was a long ensuing silence. Then Simon said, "I can't have this conversation with you."
I said, "I'm upstairs in the back bedroom—"
"I know where you are."
"Then come and unlock this door."
"I can't."
"Why? Is somebody watching you?"
"I can't just set you free. I shouldn't even be talking to you. I'm busy, Tyler. I'm making dinner for Diane."
"She's still strong enough to eat?"
"A little… if I help her."
"Let me out. No one has to know."
"I can't."
"She needs a doctor."
"I couldn't let you out if I wanted to. Brother Aaron carries the keys."
I thought about that. I said, "Then when you take dinner to her, leave the phone with her—your phone. You said she wanted to talk to me, right?"
"Half the time she says things she doesn't mean."
"You think that was one of them?"
"I can't talk anymore."
"Just leave her the phone, Simon. Simon?"
Dead air.
* * * * *
I went to the window, watched and waited.
I saw Pastor Dan carry two empty buckets from the barn to the house and travel back with the buckets full and steaming. A few minutes later Aaron Sorley crossed the gap to join him.
Which left only Simon and Diane in the house. Maybe he was giving her dinner. Feeding her.
I itched to use the phone but I had resolved to wait, let things settle a little more, let the heat go out of the night.
I watched the barn. Bright light spilled through the slat walls as if someone had installed a rack of industrial lights. Condon had been back and forth all day. Something was happening in the barn. Simon hadn't said what.
The small luminosity of my watch counted off an hour.
Then I heard, faintly, a sound that might have been a closing door, footsteps on the stairs; and a moment later I saw Simon cross to the barn.
He didn't look up.
Nor did he leave the barn once he'd arrived there. He was inside with Sorley and Condon, and if he was still carrying the phone, and if he'd been idiotic enough to set it for an audible ring, calling him now might put him in jeopardy. Not that I was especially concerned for Simon's welfare.
But if he had left the phone with Diane, now was the hour.
I pecked out the number.
"Yes," she said—it was Diane who answered—and then, inflection rising, a question, "Yes?"
Her voice was breathless and faint. Those two syllables were enough to beg a diagnosis.
I said, "Diane. It's me. It's Tyler."
Trying to control my own raging pulse, as if a door had opened in my chest.
"Tyler," she said. "Ty… Simon said you might call."
I had to strain to make out the words. There was no force behind them; they were all throat and tongue, no chest. Which was consistent with the etiology of CVWS. The disease affects the lungs first, then the heart, in a coordinated attack of near-military efficiency. Scarred and foamy lung tissue passes less oxygen to the blood; the heart, oxygen-starved, pumps blood less efficiently; the CVWS bacteria exploit both weaknesses, digging deeper into the body with every laborious breath.
"I'm not far away," I said. "I'm real close, Diane."
"Close. Can I see you?"
I wanted to tear a hole in the wall. "Soon. I promise. We need to get you out of here. Get you some help. Fix you up."
I listened to the sound of more agonized inhalations and wondered if I'd lost her attention. Then she said, "I thought I saw the sun…"
"It's not the end of the world. Not yet, anyway."
"It's not?"
"No."
"Simon," she said.
"What about him?"
"He'll be so disappointed."
"You have CVWS, Diane. That's almost certainly what McIsaac's family had. They were smart to get help. It's a curable disease." I did not add, Up to a certain point or As long as it hasn't progressed to the terminal stage. "But we have to get you out of here."
"I missed you."
"I missed you, too. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
"Yes."
"Are you ready to leave?"
"If the time comes…"
"The time is pretty close. Rest until then. But we might have to hurry. You understand, Diane?"
"Simon," she said faintly. "Disappointed," she said.
"You rest, and I—"
But I didn't have time to finish.
A key rattled in the door. I flipped the phone closed and pushed it into my pocket. The door opened, and Aaron Sorley stood in the frame, rifle in hand, huffing as if he'd run up the stairs. He was silhouetted in the dim light from the hallway.
I backed away until my shoulders hit the wall.
"Tag on your license says you're a doctor," he said. "Is that right?"
I nodded.
"Then come with me," he said.
* * * * *
Sorley marched me downstairs and out the rear door toward the barn.
The moon, stained amber by the light of the gibbous sun, scarred and smaller than I remembered it, had risen over the eastern horizon. The night air was almost intoxicatingly cool. I took deep breaths. The relief lasted until Sorley threw open the barn door and a raw, animal stench gushed out—a slaughterhouse smell of excrement and blood.
"Go on in," Sorley said, and he gave me a push with his free hand.
The light came from a fat halide bulb suspended by its power cord over an open cattle stall. A gasoline generator rattled from an enclosure out back somewhere, a sound like someone revving a distant motorcycle.
Dan Condon stood at the open end of the pen, dipping his hands in a bucket of steaming water. He looked up when we entered. He frowned, his face a stark geography under the glaring single-point light, but he looked less intimidating than I remembered. In fact he looked diminished, gaunt, maybe even sick, maybe in the opening stages of his own case of CVWS. "Close that door back up," he said.
Aaron pushed it shut. Simon stood a few paces away from Condon, shooting me quick nervous glances.
"Come here," Condon said. "We need your help with this. Possibly your medical expertise."
In the pen, on a bed of filthy straw, a skinny heifer was trying to birth a calf.
The heifer was lying down, her bony rump projecting from the stall. Her tail had been tied to her neck with a length of twine to keep it out of the way. Her amniotic sac was bulging from her vulva, and the straw around her was dotted with bloody mucus.
I said, "I'm not a vet."
"I know that," Condon said. There was a suppressed hysteria in his eyes, the look of a man who's thrown a party but finds it spiraling out of control, the guests gone feral, neighbors complaining, liquor bottles flying from the windows like mortar rounds. "But we need another hand."
All I knew about brood stock and birthing I had learned from Molly Seagram's stories about life on her parents' farm. None of the stories had been particularly pleasant. At least Condon had set himself up with what I recalled as the necessary basics: hot water, disinfectant, obstetrical chains, a big bottle of mineral oil already stained with bloody handprints.
"She's part Angeln," Condon said, "part Danish Red, part Belarus Red, and that's only her most recent bloodline. But crossbreeding's a risk for 'dystocia'. That's what Brother Geller used to say. The word 'dystocia' means a difficult labor. Crossbreeds often have trouble calving. She's been in labor almost four hours. We need to extract the fetus."
Condon said this in a distant monotone, like a man lecturing a class of idiots. It didn't seem to matter who I was or how I'd got here, only that I was available, a free hand.
I said, "I need water."
"There's a bucket for washing up."
"I don't mean for washing. I haven't had anything to drink since last night."
Condon paused as if to process this information. Then he nodded and said, "Simon. See to it."
Simon appeared to be the trio's errand boy. He ducked his head and said, "I'll fetch you a drink, Tyler, sure enough," still avoiding my eyes as Sorley opened the barn door to let him out.
Condon turned back to the cattle pen where the exhausted heifer lay panting. Busy flies decorated the heifer's flanks. A couple of them lighted on Condon's shoulders, unnoticed. Condon doused his hands with mineral oil and squatted to expand the heifer's birth canal, his face contorting with a combination of eagerness and disgust. But he had barely begun when the calf crowned in another gush of blood and fluid, its head barely emerging despite the heifer's fierce contractions. The calf was too big. Molly had told me about oversized calves—not as bad as a breech birth or a hiplock, but unpleasant to deal with.
It didn't help that the heifer was obviously ill, drooling greenish mucus and struggling for breath even when the contractions eased. I wondered whether I should say anything about that to Condon. His divine calf was obviously infected, too.
But Pastor Dan didn't know or didn't care. Condon was all that was left of the Dispensationalist wing of Jordan Tabernacle, a church unto himself, reduced to two parishioners, Sorley and Simon, and I could only imagine how muscular his faith must have been to sustain him all the way to the end of the world. He said in the same tone of suppressed hysteria, "The calf, the calf is red—Aaron, look at the calf."
Aaron Sorley, who was posted on the door with his rifle, came over to peer into the pen. The calf was indeed red. Doused in blood. Also limp.
Sorley said, "Is it breathing?"
"Will be," Condon said. He was abstracted, seemed to be savoring it, this moment on which he genuinely believed the world was about to pivot into eternity. "Get the chains around the pasterns, quickly now."
Sorley gave me a look that was also a warning—don't say a fucking word—and we did as we were instructed, worked until we were bloody up to our elbows. The act of birthing an oversized calf is both brutal and ludicrous, a grotesque marriage of biology and crude force. It takes at least two reasonably strong men to assist at an outsized calving. The obstetric chains were for pulling. The pulls had to be timed to the cow's contractions; otherwise the animal could be eviscerated.
But this heifer was weak unto death, and her calf—its head lolled lifelessly—was now obviously a stillbirth.
I looked at Sorley, Sorley looked at me. Neither of us spoke. Condon said, "The first thing is to get her out. Then we'll revive her."
There was a movement of cooler air from the barn door. That was Simon, back with a bottle of spring water, staring at us and then at the half-delivered stillbirth, his face gone startlingly pale.
"Got your drink," he managed.
The heifer finished another weak, unproductive contraction. I dropped the chain. Condon said, "You take that drink, son. Then we'll carry on."
"I have to clean up. At least wash my hands."
"Clean hot water in buckets by the hay bales. But be quick about it." His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.
I rinsed and disinfected my hands. Sorley .watched closely. His own hands were on the obstetrical chain, but his rifle was propped against a rail of the stall within easy reach.
When Simon handed me the bottle I leaned into his shoulder and said, "I can't help Diane unless I get her out of here. Do you understand? And I can't do that without your help. We need a reliable vehicle with a full tank of gas, and we need Diane inside it, preferably before Condon figures out the calf is dead."
Simon gasped, "It's truly dead?"—too loud, but neither Sorley nor Condon appeared to hear.
"The calf isn't breathing," I said. "The heifer's barely alive."
"But is the calf red? Red all over? No white or black patches? Purely red?"
"Even if it's a fucking fire engine, Simon, it won't do Diane any good."
He looked at me as if I'd announced his puppy had been run over. I wondered when he had traded his brimming self-confidence for this blank bewilderment, whether it had happened suddenly or whether the joy had drained out of him a grain at a time, sand through an hourglass.
"Talk to her," I said, "if you need to. Ask her whether she's willing to go."
If she was still alert enough to answer him. If she remembered that I'd spoken to her.
He said, "I love her more than life itself."
Condon called out, "We need you here!"
I drained half the bottle while Simon gazed at me, tears welling in his eyes. The water was clean and pure and delicious.
Then I was back with Sorley on the obstetric chains, pulling in concert with the pregnant heifer's dying spasms.
* * * * *
We finally extracted the calf around midnight, and it lay on the straw in a tangle of itself, forelegs tucked under its limp body, its bloodshot eyes lifeless.
Condon stood over the small body a little while. Then he said to me, "Is there anything you can do for it?"
"I can't raise it from the dead, if that's what you mean."
Sorley gave me a warning look, as if to say: Don't torture him; this is hard enough.
I edged to the door of the barn. Simon had disappeared an hour earlier, while we were still struggling with a flood of hemorrhagic blood that had drenched the already sodden straw, our clothing, our arms and hands. Through the open wedge of the door I could see movement around the car—my car—and a blink of checkered cloth that might have been Simon's shirt.
He was doing something out there. I hoped I knew what.
Sorley looked from the dead calf to Pastor Dan Condon and back again, stroking his beard, oblivious of the blood he was braiding into it. "Maybe if we burned it," he said.
Condon gave him a withering, hopeless stare.
"But maybe," Sorley said.
Then Simon threw open the barn doors and let in a gust of cool air. We turned to look. The moon over his shoulder was gibbous and alien.
"She's in the car," he said. "Ready to go." Speaking to me but staring hard at Sorley and Condon, almost daring them to respond.
Pastor Dan just shrugged, as if these worldly matters were no longer pertinent.
I looked at Brother Aaron. Brother Aaron leaned toward the rifle.
"I can't stop you," I said. "But I'm walking out the door."
He halted in midreach and frowned. He looked as if he were trying to puzzle out the sequence of events that had brought him to this moment, each one leading inexorably to the next, logical as stepping stones, and yet, and yet…
His hand dropped to his side. He turned to Pastor Dan.
"I think if we burned it anyway, that would be all right."
I walked to the barn door and joined Simon, not looking back. Sorley could have changed his mind, grabbed his rifle and taken aim. I was no longer entirely capable of caring.
"Maybe burn it before morning," I heard him say. "Before the sun comes up again."
* * * * *
"You drive," Simon said when we reached the car. "There's gas in the tank and extra gas in jericans in the trunk. And a little food and more bottled water. You drive and I'll sit in back and keep her steady."
I started the car and drove slowly uphill, past the split-rail fence and the moonlit ocotillo toward the highway.
A few miles up the road and a safe distance from the Condon farm I pulled over and told Simon to get out.
"What," he said, "here?"
"I need to examine Diane. I need you to get the flashlight out of the trunk and hold it for me. Okay?"
He nodded, wide-eyed.
Diane hadn't said a word since we'd left the ranch. She had simply lain across the backseat with her head in Simon's lap, drawing breath. Her breathing had been the loudest sound in the car.
While Simon stood by, flashlight in hand, I stripped off my blood-soaked clothing and washed myself as thoroughly as I could—a bottle of mineral water with a little gasoline to strip away the filth, a second bottle to rinse. Then I put on clean Levi's and a sweatshirt from my luggage and a pair of latex gloves from the medical kit. I drank a third bottle of water straight down. Then I had Simon angle the light on Diane while I looked at her.
She was more or less conscious but too groggy to put together a fully coherent sentence. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, almost anorexically thin, and dangerously feverish. Her BP and pulse were elevated, and when I listened to her chest her lungs sounded like a child sucking a milk shake through a narrow straw.
I managed to get her to swallow a little water and an aspirin on top of it. Then I ripped the seal on a sterile hypodermic.
"What's that?" Simon asked.
"General-purpose antibiotic." I swabbed her arm and with some difficulty located a vein. "You'll need one, too." And me. The heifer's blood had undoubtedly been loaded with live CVWS bacteria.
"Will that cure her?"
"No, Simon, I'm afraid it won't. A month ago it might have. Not anymore. She needs medical attention."
"You're a doctor."
"I may be a doctor, but I'm not a hospital."
"Then maybe we can take her into Phoenix."
I thought about that. Everything I'd learned during the flickers suggested that an urban hospital would be swamped at best, a smoldering ruin at worst. But maybe not.
I took out my phone and scrolled through its memory for a half-forgotten number.
Simon said, "Who're you calling?"
"Someone I used to know."
His name was Colin Hinz, and we had roomed together back at Stony Brook. We kept in touch a little. Last I'd heard from him he was working management at St. Joseph's in Phoenix. It was worth a try—now, before the sun came up and scrubbed telecommunications for another day.
I entered his personal number. The phone rang a long while but eventually he picked up and said, "This better be good."
I identified myself and told him I was maybe an hour out of town with a casualty in need of immediate attention— someone close to me.
Colin sighed. "I don't know what to tell you, Tyler. St. Joe's is working, and I hear the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale is open, but we both have minimal staff. There are conflicting reports from other hospitals. But you won't get quick attention anywhere, sure as hell not here. We've got people stacked up outside the doors—gunshot wounds, attempted suicides, auto accidents, heart attacks, you name it. And cops on the doors to keep them from mobbing Emerg. What's your patient's condition?"
I told him Diane was late-stage CVWS and would probably need airway support soon.
"Where the fuck did she pick up CVWS? No, never mind—doesn't matter. Honestly, I'd help you if I could, but our nurses have been doing parking-lot triage all night and I can't promise they'd give your patient any priority, even with a word from me. In fact it's pretty much a sure thing she wouldn't even be assessed by a physician for another twenty-four hours. If any of us live that long."
"I'm a physician, remember? All I need is a little gear to support her. Ringer's, an airway kit, oxygen—"
"I don't want to sound callous, but we're wading through blood here… you might ask yourself whether it's really worthwhile supporting a terminal CVWS case, given what's happening. If you've got what you need to keep her comfortable—"
"I don't want to keep her comfortable. I want to save her life."
"Okay… but what you described is a terminal situation, unless I misunderstood." In the background I could hear other voices demanding his attention, a generalized rattle of human misery.
"I need to take her somewhere," I said, "and I need to get her there alive. I need the supplies more than I need a bed."
"We've got nothing to spare. Tell me if there's anything else I can do for you. Otherwise, I'm sorry, I have work to do."
I thought frantically. Then I said, "Okay, but the supplies— anywhere I can pick up Ringer's, Colin, that's all I ask."
"Well—"
"Well, what?"
"Well… I shouldn't be telling you this, but St. Joe's has a deal with the city under the civil emergency plan. There's a medical distributor called Novaprod north of town." He gave me an address and simple directions. "The authorities put a National Guard unit up there to protect it. That's our primary source for drugs and hardware."
"They'll let me in?"
"If I call up and tell them you're coming, and if you have some ID to show."
"Do that for me, Colin. Please."
"I will if I can get a line out. The phones are unreliable."
"If there's a favor I can do in return…"
"Maybe there is. You used to work in aerospace, right? Perihelion?"
"Not recently, but yes."
"Can you tell me how much longer all this is going to last?" He half whispered the question, and suddenly I could hear the fatigue in his voice, the unadmitted fear. "I mean, one way or the other?"
I apologized and told him I simply didn't know—and I doubted anyone at Perihelion knew more than I did.
He sighed. "Okay," he said. "It's just galling, the idea that we could go through all this and burn out in a couple of days and never know what it was all about."
"I wish I could give you an answer."
Someone on the other end of the line began calling his name. "I wish a lot of things," he said. "Gotta go, Tyler."
I thanked him again and clicked off.
Dawn was still a few hours away.
Simon had been standing a few yards from the car, staring up at the starry sky and pretending not to listen. I waved him back and said, "We have to get going."
He nodded meekly. "Did you find help for Diane?"
"Sort of."
He accepted the answer without asking for details. But before he bent to get in the car he tugged at my sleeve and said, "There ... what do you suppose that is, Tyler?"
He was pointing at the western horizon, where a gently curving silver line arced through five degrees of the night sky. It looked as if someone had scratched an enormous, shallow letter C out of the blackness.
"Maybe a condensation trail," I said. "A military jet."
"At night? Not at night."
"Then I don't know what it is, Simon. Come on, get in— we don't have time to waste."
* * * * *
We made better time than I expected. We reached the medical supply warehouse, a numbered unit in a dreary industrial park, with time to spare before sunrise. I presented my ID to the nervous National Guardsman posted at the entrance; he handed me over to another Guardsman and a civilian employee who walked me through the aisles of shelving. I found what I needed and a third Guardsman helped me carry it to the car, though he backed off quickly when he saw Diane gasping in the backseat. "Luck to you," he said, his voice shaking a little.
I took the time to set up an IV drip, the bag jury-rigged to the jacket hanger in the car, and showed Simon how to monitor the flow and make sure she didn't snag the line in her sleep. (She didn't wake even when I put the needle in her arm.)
Simon waited until we were back on the road before he asked, "Is she dying?"
I gripped the wheel a little tighter. "Not if I can help it."
"Where are we taking her?"
"We're taking her home."
"What, all the way across country? To Carol and E.D.'s house?"
"Right."
"Why there?"
"Because I can help her there."
"That's a long drive. I mean, the way things are."
"Yes. It might be a long drive."
I glanced into the backseat. He stroked her head, gently. Her hair was limp and matted with perspiration. His hands were pale where he had washed off the blood.
"I don't deserve to be with her," he said. "I know this is my fault. I could have left the ranch when Teddy did. I could have gotten help."
Yes, I thought. You could have.
"But I believed in what we were doing. Probably you don't understand that. But it wasn't just the red calf, Tyler. I was certain we'd be raised up imperishable. That in the end we'd be rewarded."
"Rewarded for what?"
"Faith. Perseverance. Because from the very first time I set eyes on Diane I had a powerful feeling we'd be part of something spectacular, even if I didn't wholly comprehend it. That one day we'd stand together before the throne of God—no less than that. 'This generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled.' Our generation, even if we took a wrong turn at first. I admit, things happened at those New Kingdom rallies that seem shameful to me now. Drunkenness, lechery, lies. We turned our backs on that, which was good; but it seemed like the world got a little smaller when we weren't among people who were trying to build the chiliasm, however imperfectly. As if we'd lost a family. And I thought, well, if you look for the cleanest and simplest path, that should take you in the right direction. 'In your patience possess ye your souls.'"
"Jordan Tabernacle," I said.
"It's easy to set prophecy against the Spin. Signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, it says in Luke. Well, here we are. The powers of heaven shaken. But it isn't—it isn't—"
He seemed to lose the thought.
"How's her breathing back there?" But I didn't really need to ask. I could hear every breath she took, labored but regular. I just wanted to distract him.
"She's not in distress," Simon said. Then he said, "Please, Tyler. Stop and let me out."
We were traveling east. There was surprisingly little traffic on the interstate. Colin Hinz had warned me about congestion around Sky Harbor airport, but we'd bypassed that. Out here we'd encountered only a few passenger cars, though there were a good many vehicles abandoned on the shoulder. "That's not a good idea," I said.
I looked in the mirror and saw Simon knuckling tears out of his eyes. At that moment he looked as vulnerable and bewildered as a ten-year-old at a funeral.
"I only ever had two signposts in my life," he said. "God and Diane. And I betrayed them both. I waited too long. You're kind to deny it, but she's dying."
"Not necessarily."
"I don't want to be with her and know I could have prevented this. I would as soon die in the desert. I mean it, Tyler. I want to get out."
The sky was growing light again, an ugly violet glow more like the arc in a malfunctioning fluorescent lamp than anything wholesome or natural.
"I don't care," I said.
Simon gave me a startled look. "What?"
"I don't care how you feel. The reason you should stay with Diane is that we have a difficult drive ahead of us and I can't take care of her and steer at the same time. And I'm going to have to sleep sooner or later. If you take the wheel once in a while we won't have to stop except for food and fuel." If we could find any. "If you drop out it'll double the travel time."
"Does it matter?"
"She may not be dying, Simon, but she's exactly as sick as you think she is, and she will die if she doesn't get help. And the only help I know about is a couple of thousand miles from here."
"Heaven and earth are passing away. We're all going to die."
"I can't speak for heaven and earth. I refuse to let her die as long as I have a choice."
"I envy you that," Simon said quietly.
"What? What could you possibly envy?"
"Your faith," he said.
* * * * *
A certain kind of optimism was still possible, but only at night. It wilted by daylight.
I drove into the Hiroshima of the rising sun. I had stopped worrying that the light itself would kill me, though it probably wasn't doing me any good. That any of us had survived the first day was a mystery—a miracle, Simon might have said. It encouraged a certain rough practicality: I pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and tried to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the hemisphere of orange fire levitating out of the horizon.
The day grew hotter. So did the interior of the car, despite the overworked air-conditioning. (I was running it hard in an effort to keep Diane's body temperature under control.) Somewhere between Albuquerque and Tucumcari a great wave of fatigue washed over me. My eyelids drifted closed and I nearly ran the car into a mile marker. At which point I pulled over and turned off the engine. I told Simon to fill the tank from the jericans and get ready to take the wheel. He nodded reluctantly.
We were making better time than I'd anticipated. Traffic had been light to nearly nonexistent, maybe because people were afraid of being on the road by themselves. While Simon put gas in the car I said, "What did you bring for food?"
"Only what I could grab from the kitchen. I had to hurry. See for yourself."
I found a cardboard box among the dented jericans and packaged medical supplies and loose bottles of mineral water in the trunk. It contained three boxes of Cheerios, two cans of corned beef, and a bottle of Diet Pepsi. "Jesus, Simon."
He winced at what I had to remind myself he considered a blasphemy. "That was all I could find."
And no bowls or spoons. But I was as hungry as I was sleep deprived. I told Simon we ought to let the engine cool off, and while it did we sat in the shade of the car, windows rolled down, a gritty breeze coming off the desert, the sun suspended in the sky like high noon on the surface of Mercury. We used the torn-off bottoms of empty plastic bottles as makeshift cups and ate Cheerios moistened with tepid water. It looked and tasted like mucilage.
I briefed Simon on the next leg of the trip, reminded him to turn on the air-conditioning once we were underway, told him to wake me if there seemed to be trouble on the road ahead.
Then I tended to Diane. The IV drip and the antibiotics seemed to have bolstered her strength, but only marginally. She opened her eyes and said, "Tyler," after I helped her drink a little water. She accepted a few spoonfuls of Cheerios but turned her head away after that. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes listless and inattentive.
"Bear with me," I said. "Just a little longer, Diane." I adjusted her drip. I helped her sit up, legs splayed out of the car, while she passed a little brownish urine. Then I sponged her off and switched her soiled panties for a pair of clean cotton briefs from my own suitcase.
When she was comfortable again I stuffed a blanket into the narrow gap between the front and back seats to make a space where I could stretch out without displacing her. Simon had napped only briefly during the first leg of the trip and must have been as exhausted as I was… but he hadn't been beaten with a rifle butt. The place where Brother Aaron had clubbed me was swollen and rang like a bell when I put my fingers anywhere near it.
Simon watched all this from a couple of yards away, his expression sullen or possibly jealous. When I called him he hesitated and looked longingly across the salt-pan desert, deep into the heart of nothing at all.
Then he loped back to the car, downcast, and slid behind the wheel.
I compressed myself into my niche behind the front seat. Diane seemed to be unconscious, but before I slept I felt her press her hand against mine.
* * * * *
When I woke it was night again, and Simon had pulled over to trade places.
I climbed out of the car and stretched. My head still throbbed, my spine felt as if it had cramped into a permanent geriatric gnarl, but I was more alert than Simon, who crawled into the back and was instantly asleep.
I didn't know where we were except that we were on 1-40 heading east and the land was less arid here, irrigated fields stretching out on either side of the road under crimson moonlight. I made sure Diane was comfortable and breathing without distress and I left the front and rear doors open for a couple of minutes to air out the stink, a sickroom smell overlaid with hints of blood and gasoline. Then I took the driver's seat.
The stars above the road were distressingly few and impossible to recognize. I wondered about Mars. Was it still under a Spin membrane or had it been cut loose like the Earth? But I didn't know where in the sky to look and I doubted I'd know it if I saw it. I did see—couldn't help seeing—the enigmatic silvery line Simon had pointed out back in Arizona, the one I had mistaken for a contrail. It was even more prominent tonight. It had moved from the western horizon almost to the zenith, and the gentle curve had become an oval, a flattened letter O.
The sky I was looking at was three billion years older than the one I had last seen from the lawn of the Big House. I supposed it could harbor all kinds of mysteries.
Once we were in motion I tried the dashboard radio, which had been silent the night before. Nothing digital was coming in, but I did eventually locate a local station on the FM band—the kind of small-town station usually devoted to country music and Christianity, but tonight it was all talk. I learned a lot before the signal finally faded into noise.
I learned, for one thing, that we had been wise to avoid big cities. Major cities were disaster areas—not because of looting and violence (there had been surprisingly little) but because of catastrophic infrastructure collapse. The rising of the red sun had looked so much like the long-predicted death of the Earth that most people had simply stayed home to die with their families, leaving urban centers with minimally functioning police and fire departments and radically understaffed hospitals. The minority of people who attempted death by gunshot, or who dosed themselves with extravagant amounts of alcohol, cocaine, OxyContin, or amphetamines, were the inadvertent cause of the most immediate problems: they left gas stoves running, passed out while driving, or dropped cigarettes as they died. When the carpet began to smolder or the drapes burst into flames nobody called 911, and in many cases there would have been no one there to pick up. House fires quickly became neighborhood fires.
Four big plumes of smoke were rising from Oklahoma City, the newscaster said, and according to phone reports much of the south side of Chicago had already been reduced to embers. Every major city in the country—every one that had been heard from—was reporting at least one or two large-scale uncontrolled fires.
But the situation was improving, not deteriorating. Today it had begun to seem possible that the human race might survive at least a few days longer, and as a result more first-responders and essential-service personnel were back at their posts. (The downside was that people had begun to worry how long their provisions might last: grocery-store looting was a growing problem.) Anyone who was not an essential-service provider was being urged to stay off the roads—the message had gone out before dawn over the emergency broadcast system and through every radio and TV outlet still functioning, and it was being repeated tonight. Which helped to explain why traffic had been reasonably scarce on the interstate. I had seen a few military and police patrols but none of them had interfered with us, presumably because of the plates on my car— California and most other states had begun issuing EMS license plate stickers to physicians after the first flicker episode.
Policing was sporadic. The regular military remained more or less intact despite some desertions, but Reserve and National Guard units were at fractional strength and couldn't fill in for local authorities. Electrical power was sporadic, too; most generating stations were understaffed and barely functional, and blackouts had begun to cascade through the grid. There were rumors that nuclear plants at San Onofre in California and Pickering in Canada had come close to terminal meltdowns, though that was unconfirmed.
The announcer went on to read a list of designated local food depots, hospitals still open for business (with estimated waiting times for triage), and home first-aid tips. He also read a Weather Bureau advisory cautioning against prolonged exposure to the sun. The sunlight seemed not to be immediately deadly, but excessive UV levels could cause "long-term problems," they said, which was about as sad as it was funny.
* * * * *
I caught a few more scattered broadcasts before dawn, but the rising sun obscured them all with noise.
The day dawned overcast. I did not, therefore, have to drive directly into the glare of the sun; but even this muted sunrise was dauntingly strange. The entire eastern half of the sky became a churning soup of red light, as hypnotic in its way as the embers of a dying campfire. Occasionally the clouds parted and fingers of amber sunlight probed the land. But by noon the overcast had deepened and within the hour rain began to fall—a hot, lifeless rain that coated the highway and mirrored the sickly colors of the sky.
I had emptied the last jerican of gasoline into the tank that morning, and somewhere between Cairo and Lexington the needle on the gas gauge began to sag alarmingly. I woke Simon and explained the problem and told him I'd pull into the next gas station… and each one after that, until we found one that would sell us some fuel.
The next station turned out to be a little four-pump mom-and-pop gas-and-snack-food franchise a quarter mile off the highway. The store was dark and the pumps were probably dead, but I rolled up anyhow and got out of the car and took the nozzle off its hook.
A man with a Bengals cap on his head and a shotgun cradled in his arms came around the side of the building and said, "That's no good."
I put the nozzle back, slowly. "Your power out?"
"That's correct."
"No backup?"
He shrugged and came closer. Simon started to get out of the car but I waved him back in. The man in the Bengals cap—he was about thirty years old and thirty pounds overweight—looked at the Ringer's drip rigged up in the backseat. Then he squinted at the license plate. It was a California plate, which probably didn't win me any goodwill points, but the EMS sticker was plainly visible. "You're a doctor?"
"Tyler Dupree," I said. "M.D."
"Pardon me if I don't shake your hand. That your wife in there?"
I said yes, because it was simpler than explaining. Simon shot me a look but didn't contradict me.
"You have identification to prove you're a medical doctor? Because, no offense, there's been some auto theft happening these past couple of days."
I took out my wallet and tossed it at his feet. He picked it up and looked at the card folder. Then he fished a pair of eyeglasses out of his shirt pocket and looked at it again. Finally he handed it back and offered me his hand. "Sorry about that, Dr. Dupree. I'm Chuck Bernelli. If it's just gas you need, I'll turn on the pumps. If you need more than that, it'll only take me a minute to open the store."
"I need the gas. Provisions would be nice, but I'm not carrying a lot of cash."
"The heck with cash. We're closed to criminals and drunks, and there's no lack of those on the road right now, but we're open all hours to the military and the highway patrol. And medical men. At least as long as there's gas to pump. I hope your wife's not too badly off."
"Not if I can get where I'm headed."
"Lexington V.A.? Samaritan?"
"A little farther than that. She needs special care."
He glanced back at the car. Simon had rolled down the windows to let some fresh air in. Rain spackled down on the dusty vehicle, the puddled oily asphalt. Bernelli caught a glimpse of Diane as she turned and began to cough in her sleep. He frowned.
"I'll get the pumps going, then," he said. "You'll want to be on your way."
Before we left he put together some groceries for us, a few cans of soup, a box of saltine crackers, a can opener in a plastic display pack. But he didn't want to get close to the car.
* * * * *
A racking, intermittent cough is a common symptom of CVWS. The bacteria is almost canny in the way it preserves its victims, preferring not to drown them in a catastrophic pneumonia, though that's the means by which it eventually kills—that, or wholesale cardiac failure. I had taken an oxygen canister, bleeder valve, and mask from the wholesaler outside Flagstaff, and when Diane's cough began to interfere with her breathing—she was on the verge of panic, drowning in her own sputum, eyes rolling—I cleared her airway as best I could and held the mask over her mouth and nose while Simon drove.
Eventually she calmed down, her color improved, and she was able to sleep again. I sat with her while she rested, her feverish head nestled into my shoulder. The rain had become a relentless downpour, slowing us down. Big plumes of water rooster-tailed behind the car every time we hit a low place in the road. Toward evening the light faded to hot coals on the western horizon.
There was no sound but the beating of rain on the roof of the car and I was content to listen to it until Simon cleared his throat and said, "Are you an atheist, Tyler?"
"Pardon me?"
"I don't mean to be rude, but I was wondering: do you consider yourself an atheist?"
I wasn't sure how to answer that. Simon had been helpful—had been invaluable—in getting us this far. But he was also someone who had hitched his intellectual wagon to a team of lunatic-fringe Dispensationalists whose only argument with the end of the world was that it had defied their detailed expectations. I didn't want to offend him because I still needed him—Diane still needed him.
So I said, "Does it matter what I consider myself?"
"Just curious."
"Well—I don't know. I guess that's my answer. I don't claim to know whether God exists or why He wound up the universe and made it spin the way it does. Sorry, Simon. That's the best I can do on the theological front."
He was silent for another few miles. Then he said, "Maybe that's what Diane meant."
"Meant about what?"
"When we talked about it. Which we haven't done lately, come to think of it. We disagreed about Pastor Dan and Jordan Tabernacle even before the schism. I thought she was too cynical. She said I was too easily impressed. Maybe so. Pastor Dan had the gift of looking into Scripture and finding knowledge on every page—knowledge solid as a house, beams and pillars of knowledge. It really is a gift. I can't do it myself. As hard as I try, to this day I can't open the Bible and make immediate sense of it."
"Maybe you're not supposed to."
"But I wanted to. I wanted to be what Pastor Dan was: smart and, you know, always on solid ground. Diane said it was a devil's bargain, that Dan Condon had traded humility for certainty. Maybe that's what I lacked. Maybe that's what she saw in you, why she clung to you all these years—your humility."
"Simon, I—"
"It's not anything you have to apologize for or make me feel better about. I know she called you when she thought I was asleep or when I was out of the house. I know I was lucky to have her as long as I did." He looked back at me. "Will you do me a favor? I'd like you to tell her I'm sorry I didn't take better care of her when she got sick."
"You can tell her yourself."
He nodded thoughtfully and drove deeper into the rain. I told him to see if he could find any useful information on the radio, now that it was dark again. I meant to stay awake and listen; but my head was throbbing and my vision wanted to double, and after a while it seemed easier just to close my eyes and sleep.
* * * * *
I slept hard and long, and miles passed under the wheels of the car.
When I woke it was another rainy morning. We were parked at a rest stop (west of Manassas, I learned later) and a woman with a torn black umbrella was tapping on the window.
I blinked and opened the door and she backed off a pace, casting cautious looks at Diane. "Man said to tell you don't wait."
"Excuse me?"
"Said to tell you good-bye and don't wait for him."
Simon wasn't in the front seat. Nor was he visible among the trash barrels, sodden picnic tables, and flimsy latrines in the immediate neighborhood. A few other cars were parked here, most of them idling while the owners visited the potties. I registered trees, parkland, a hilly view of some rain-soaked little industrial town under a fiery sky. "Skinny blond guy? Dirty T-shirt?"
"That's him. That's the one. He said he didn't want you to sleep too long. Then he took off."
"On foot?"
"Yes. Down toward the river, not along the road." She peered at Diane again. Diane was breathing shallowly and noisily. "Are you two okay?"
"No. But we don't have far to go. Thank you for asking. Did he say anything else?"
"Yes. He said to say God bless you, and he'll find his own way from here."
I tended to Diane's needs. I took a last look around the rainy parking lot. Then I got back on the road.
* * * * *
I had to stop several times to adjust Diane's drip or feed her a few breaths of oxygen. She wasn't opening her eyes anymore—she wasn't just asleep, she was unconscious. I didn't want to think about what that meant.
The roads were slow and the rain was relentless and there was evidence everywhere of the chaos of the last couple of days. I passed dozens of wrecked or burned-out cars pushed to the side of the road, some still smoldering. Certain routes had been closed to civilian traffic, reserved for military or emergency vehicles. I had to double back from roadblocks a couple of times. The day's heat made the humid air almost unbearable, and although a fierce wind came up in the afternoon it didn't bring relief.
But Simon had at least abandoned us close to our destination, and I made it to the Big House while there was still some light in the sky.
The wind had grown worse, almost gale force, and the Lawtons' long driveway was littered with branches torn from the surrounding pines. The house itself was dark, or looked that way in the amber dusk.
I left Diane in the car at the foot of the steps and pounded on the door. And waited. And pounded again. Eventually the door opened a crack and Carol Lawton peered out.
I could barely make out her features through that crevice: one pale blue eye, a wedge of wrinkled cheek. But she recognized me.
"Tyler Dupree!" she said. "Are you alone?"
The door opened wider.
"No," I said. "Diane's with me. And I might need some help getting her inside."
Carol came out onto the big front porch and squinted down at the car. When she saw Diane her small body stiffened; she drew up her shoulders and gasped.
"Dear God," she whispered. "Have both my children come home to die?"
Wind rattled the Big House all that night, a hot salt wind stirred out of the Atlantic by three days of unnatural sunlight. I was aware of it even as I slept: it was what I rose to in moments of near-wakefulness and it was the soundtrack for a dozen uneasy dreams. It was still knocking at the window after sunrise, when I dressed myself and went looking for Carol Lawton.
The house had been without electrical power for days. The upstairs hallway was dimly illuminated by the rainy glow from a window at the end of the corridor. The oaken stairway descended to the foyer, where two streaming bay windows admitted daylight the color of pale roses. I found Carol in the parlor, adjusting an antique mantel clock.
I said, "How is she?"
Carol glanced at me. "Unchanged," she said, returning her attention to the clock as she wound it with a brass key. "I was with her a moment ago. I'm not neglecting her, Tyler."
"I didn't think you were. How about Jason?"
"I helped him dress. He's better during daylight. I don't know why. The nights are hard on him. Last night was… hard."
"I'll look in on them both." I didn't bother asking whether she had heard any news, whether FEMA or the White House had issued any fresh directives. There would have been no point; Carol's universe stopped at the borders of the property. "You should get some sleep."
"I'm sixty-eight years old. I don't sleep as much as I used to. But you're right, I'm tired—I do need to lie down. As soon as I finish this. This clock loses time if you don't tend to it. Your mother used to adjust it every day, did you know that? And after your mother died Marie wound it whenever she cleaned. But Marie stopped coming about six months ago. For six months the clock was stuck at a quarter after four. As in the old joke, right twice a day."
"We should talk about Jason." Last night I had been too exhausted to do more than learn the basics: Jason had arrived unannounced a week before the end of the Spin and had fallen ill the night the stars reappeared. His symptoms were an intermittent, partial paralysis and occluded vision, plus fever. Carol had tried calling for medical help but circumstances had made that impossible, so she was caring for him herself, though she hadn't been able to diagnose the problem or provide more than simple palliative care.
She was afraid he was dying. Her concern didn't extend to the rest of the world, however. Jason had told her not to worry about that. Things will be back to normal soon, he said.
And she had believed him. The red sun held no terrors for Carol. The nights were bad, though, she said. The nights took Jason like a bad dream.
* * * * *
I looked in on Diane first
Carol had put her in an upstairs bedroom—her room from the old days, done over as a generic guest bedroom. I found her physically stable and breathing without assistance, but there was nothing reassuring in that. It was part of the etiology of the disease. The tide advanced and the tide ebbed, but each cycle carried away more of her resilience and more of her strength.
I kissed her dry, hot forehead and told her to rest. She gave no sign of having heard me.
Then I went to see Jason. There was a question I needed to ask.
According to Carol, Jase had come back to the Big House because of some conflict at Perihelion. She couldn't remember his explanation, but it had something to do with Jason's father ("E.D. is behaving badly again," she said) and something to do with "that little black wrinkly man, the one who died. The Martian."
The Martian. Who had supplied the longevity drug that had made Jason a Fourth. The drug that should have protected him from whatever was killing him now.
* * * * *
He was awake when I knocked and entered his room, the same room he had occupied thirty years ago, when we were children in the compassed world of children and the stars were in their rightful places. Here was the rectangle of subtly brighter color where a poster of the solar system had once shaded the wall. Here was the carpet, long since steam-cleaned and chemically bleached, where we had once spilled Cokes and scattered crumbs on rainy days like this.
And here was Jason.
"That sounds like Tyler," he said.
He lay in bed, dressed—he insisted on dressing each morning, Carol had said—in clean khaki pants and a blue cotton shirt. His back was propped against the pillows and he seemed perfectly alert. I said, "Not much light in here, Jase."
"Open the blinds if you like."
I did, but it only admitted more of the sullen amber daylight. "You mind if I examine you?"
"Of course I don't mind."
He wasn't looking at me. He was looking, if the angle of his head meant anything, at a blank patch of wall.
"Carol says you've been having trouble with your vision."
"Carol is experiencing what people in your profession call denial. In fact I'm blind. I haven't been able to see anything at all since yesterday morning."
I sat on the bed next to him. When he turned his head toward me the motion was smooth but agonizingly slow. I took a penlight from my shirt pocket and flashed it into his right eye in order to watch the pupil contract.
It didn't.
It did something worse.
It glittered. The pupil of his eye glittered as if it had been injected with tiny diamonds.
Jason must have felt me jerk back.
"That bad?" he asked.
I couldn't speak.
He said, more somberly, "I can't use a mirror. Please, Ty. I need you to tell me what you see."
"This… I don't know what this is, Jason. This isn't something I can diagnose."
"Just describe it, please."
I tried to muster a clinical detachment. "It appears as if crystals of some kind have grown into your eye. The sclera looks normal and the iris doesn't seem to be affected, but the pupil is completely obscured by flakes of something like mica. I've never heard of anything like this. I would have said it was impossible. I can't treat it."
I backed away from the bed, found a chair and sat in it. For a while there was no sound but the ticking of the bedside clock, another of Carol's pristine antiques.
Then Jason draw a breath and forced what he seemed to imagine was a reassuring smile. "Thank you. You're right. It isn't a condition you can treat. But I'm still going to need your help during—well, during the next couple of days. Carol tries, but she's way out of her depth."
"So am I."
More rain beat at the window. "The help I need isn't entirely medical."
"If you have an explanation for this—"
"A partial one, at best."
"Then please share it with me, Jase, because I'm getting a little scared here."
He cocked his head, listening to some sound I hadn't heard or couldn't hear, until I began to wonder whether he had forgotten me. Then he said, "The short version is that my nervous system has been overtaken by something beyond my control. The condition of my eyes is just an external manifestation of it."
"A disease?"
"No, but that's the effect it's having."
"Is this condition contagious?"
"On the contrary. I believe it's unique. A disease only I can develop—on this planet, at least."
"Then it has something to do with the longevity treatment."
"In a way it does. But I—"
"No, Jase, I need an answer to that before you say anything else. Is your condition—whatever it is—a direct result of the drug I administered?"
"Not a direct result, no… you're not at fault in any way, if that's what you mean."
"Right now I couldn't care less who's at fault. Diane is sick. Didn't Carol tell you?"
"Carol said something about flu—"
"Carol lied. It's not flu. It's late-stage CVWS. I drove two thousand miles through what looks like the end of the world because she's dying, Jase, and there's only one cure I can think of, and you just threw that into doubt."
He rolled his head again, perhaps involuntarily, as if he were trying to shake off some invisible distraction.
But before I could prompt him he said, "There are aspects of Martian life Wun never shared with you. E.D. suspected as much, and to a certain extent his suspicions were well founded. Mars has been doing sophisticated biotechnology for centuries. Centuries ago, the Fourth Age was exactly what Wun told you it was—a longevity treatment and a social institution. But it's evolved since then. For Wun's generation the Fourth was more like a platform, a biological operating system capable of running much more sophisticated software applications. There isn't just a four, there's a 4.1, 4.2—if you see what I mean."
"What I gave you—"
"What you gave me was the traditional treatment. A basic four."
"But?"
"But… I've supplemented it since."
"This supplement was also something Wun transported from Mars?"
"Yes. The purpose—"
"Never mind the purpose. Are you absolutely certain you're not suffering from the effects of the original treatment?"
"As certain as I can be."
I stood up.
Jason heard me moving toward the door. "I can explain," he said. "And I still need your help. By all means take care of her, Ty. I hope she lives. But keep in mind… my time is also limited."
* * * * *
The case of Martian pharmaceuticals was where I had left it, unmolested, behind the broken wallboard in the basement of my mother's house, and when I had retrieved it I carried it across the lawn through the gusting amber rain to the Big House.
Carol was in Diane's room administering sips of oxygen by mask.
"We need to use that sparingly," I said, "unless you can conjure up another cylinder."
"Her lips were a little blue."
"Let me see."
Carol moved away from her daughter. I closed the valve and set the mask aside. You have to be careful with oxygen. It's indispensable for a patient in respiratory distress, but it can also cause problems. Too much can rupture the air sacs in the lung. My fear was that as Diane's condition worsened she would need higher doses to keep her blood levels up, the kind of oxygen therapy generally delivered by mechanical ventilation. We didn't have a ventilator.
Nor did we have any clinical means of monitoring her blood gases, but her lips looked relatively normal when I took the mask away. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, however, and though she opened her eyes once she remained lethargic and unresponsive.
Carol watched suspiciously as I opened the dusty case and extracted one of the Martian vials and a hypodermic syringe. "What's that?"
"Probably the only thing that can save her life."
"Is it? Are you sure of that, Tyler?"
I nodded.
"No," she said, "I mean, are you really sure? Because that's what you gave Jason, isn't it? When he had AMS."
There was no point in denying it. "Yes," I said.
"I may not have practiced medicine for thirty years, but I'm not ignorant. I did a little research on AMS after the last time you were here. I looked up the journal abstracts. And the interesting thing is, there isn't a cure for it. There is no magic drug. And if there were it would hardly be cross-specific for CVWS. So what I'm assuming, Tyler, is that you're about to administer a pharmaceutical agent probably connected with that wrinkled man who died in Florida."
"I won't argue, Carol. You've obviously drawn your own conclusions."
"I don't want you to argue; I want you to reassure me. I want you to tell me this drug won't do to Diane what it seems to have done to Jason."
"It won't," I said, but I think Carol knew I was editing out the caveat, the unspoken to the best of my knowledge.
She studied my face. "You still care for her."
"Yes."
"It never fails to astonish me," Carol said. "The tenacity of love."
I put the needle into Diane's vein.
* * * * *
By midday the house was not merely hot but so humid I expected moss to be hanging from the ceilings. I sat with Diane to make sure there were no immediate ill effects from the injection. At one point there was a protracted knocking at the front door of the house. Thieves, I thought, looters, but by the time I got to the foyer Carol had answered and was thanking a portly man, who nodded and turned to leave. "That was Emil Hardy," Carol said as she pulled the door closed. "Do you remember the Hardys? They own the little colonial house on Bantam Hill Road. Emil printed up a newspaper."
"A newspaper?"
She held up two stapled sheets of letter-sized paper. "Emil has an electrical generator in his garage. He listens to the radio at night and takes notes, then he prints a summary and delivers it to local houses. This is his second issue. He's a nice man and well meaning. But I don't see any point in reading such things."
"May I look at it?"
"If you like."
I took it upstairs with me.
Emil was a creditable amateur reporter. The stories mainly concerned crises in D.C. and Virginia—a list of official no-go zones and fire-related evacuations, attempts to restore local services. I skimmed through these. It was a couple of items lower down that caught my attention.
The first was a report that solar radiation recently measured at ground level was heightened but not nearly as intense as predicted. "Government scientists," it said, "are perplexed but cautiously optimistic about chances for long-term human survival." No source was credited, so this could have been some commentator's fabrication or an attempt to forestall further panic, but it jibed with my experience to date: the new sunlight was strange but not immediately deadly.
No word on how it might be affecting crop yields, weather, or the ecology in general. Neither the pestilential heat nor this torrential rain felt especially normal.
Below that was an item headlined lights in sky sighted WORLDWIDE.
These were the same C- or O-shaped lines Simon had pointed out back in Arizona. They had been seen as far north as Anchorage and as far south as Mexico City. Reports from Europe and Asia were fragmentary and primarily concerned with the immediate crisis, but a few similar stories had slipped through. ("Note," Emil Hardy's copy said, "cable news networks only intermittently available but showing recent video from India of similar phenomenon on larger scale." Whatever that meant.)
* * * * *
Diane woke for a few moments while I was with her.
"Tyler," she said.
I took her hand. It was dry and unnaturally warm.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"You have nothing to be sorry about."
"I'm sorry you have to see me like this."
"You're getting better. It might take a while, but you'll be all right."
Her voice was soft as the sound of a falling leaf. She looked around the room, recognizing it. Her eyes widened. "Here I am!"
"Here you are."
"Say my name again."
"Diane," I said. "Diane. Diane."
* * * * *
Diane was gravely ill, but it was Jason who was dying. He told me as much when I went to see him.
He hadn't eaten today, Carol had informed me. Jase had taken ice water through a straw but otherwise refused liquids. He could barely move his body. When I asked him to raise his arm he did so, but with such exquisite effort and torpid speed that I pressed it down again. Only his voice was still strong, and he anticipated losing even that: "If tonight is anything like last night I'll be incoherent until dawn. Tomorrow, who knows? I want to talk while I still can."
"Is there some reason your condition deteriorates at night?"
"A simple one, I think. We'll get to that. First I want you to do something for me. My suitcase was on the dresser: is it still there?"
"Still there."
"Open it. I packed an audio recorder. Find it for me."
I found a brushed-silver rectangle the size of a deck of playing cards, next to a stack of manila envelopes addressed to names I didn't recognize. "This it?" I said, then cursed myself: of course he couldn't see.
"If the label says Sony, that's it. There ought to be a package of blank memory underneath."
"Yup, got it."
"So we'll have a talk. Until it gets dark, and maybe a little after. And I want you to keep the recorder running. No matter what happens. Change the memory when you have to, or the battery if the power gets low. Do that for me, all right?"
"As long as Diane doesn't need urgent attention. When do you want to start?"
His turned his head. The diamond-specked pupils of his eyes glittered in the strange light.
"Now would not be too soon," he said.
The Martians, Jason said, were not the simple, peaceful, pastoral people Wun had led (or allowed) us to believe they were.
It was true that they weren't especially warlike—the Five Republics had settled their political differences almost a millennium ago—and they were "pastoral" in the sense that they devoted most of their resources to agriculture. But nor were they "simple" in any sense of the word. They were, as Jase had pointed out, past masters of the art of synthetic biology. Their civilization had been founded on it. We had built them a habitable planet with biotech tools, and there had never been a Martian generation that didn't understand the function and potential uses of DNA.
If their large-scale technology was sometimes crude— Wun's spacecraft, for instance, had been almost primitive, a Newtonian cannonball—it was because of their radically constrained natural resources. Mars was a world without oil or coal, supporting a fragile water- and nitrogen-starved ecosystem. A profligate, lush industrial base like the Earth's could never have existed on Wun's planet. On Mars, most human effort was devoted to producing sufficient food for a strictly controlled population. Biotechnology served this purpose admirably. Smoke-stack industries did not.
"Wun told you this?" I asked, as rain fell continuously and the afternoon ebbed.
"He confided in me, yes, though most of what he said was already implicit in the archives."
Rust-colored light from the window reflected from Jason's blind, altered eyes.
"But he could have been lying."
"I don't know that he ever lied, Tyler. He was just a little stingy with the truth."
The microscopic replicators Wun had carried to Earth were cutting-edge synthetic biology. They were fully capable of doing everything Wun promised they would do. In fact they were more sophisticated than Wun had been willing to admit.
Among the replicators' unacknowledged functions was a hidden second subchannel for communicating among themselves and with their point of origin. Wun hadn't said whether this was conventional narrowband radio or something technologically more exotic—the latter, Jase suspected. In any case, it required a receiver more advanced than anything we could build on Earth. It required, Wun had said, a biological receiver. A modified human nervous system.
* * * * *
"You volunteered for this?"
"I would have. If anyone had asked. But the only reason Wun confided in me was that he feared for his life from the day he arrived on Earth. He harbored no illusions about human venality or power politics. He needed someone he could trust to take custody of his pharmacopoeia, if anything happened to him. Someone who understood the purpose of it. He never proposed that I become a receiver. The modification only works on a Fourth—remember what I said? The longevity treatment is a platform. It runs other applications. This is one of them."
"You did this to yourself on purpose?"
"I injected myself with the substance after he died. It wasn't traumatic and it had no immediate effect. Remember, Tyler, there was no way for communication from the replicators to penetrate a fully functioning Spin membrane. What I gave myself was a latent ability."
"Why do it, then?"
"Because I didn't want to die in a condition of ignorance. We all assumed, if the Spin ended, we'd be dead within days or hours. The sole advantage to Wun's modification was that in those last days or hours, as long as I lasted, I would be in intimate contact with a database almost as large as the galaxy itself. I would know as nearly as anyone on Earth could know who the Hypothetical were and why they had done this to us."
I thought, And do you know that now? But maybe he did. Maybe that was what he wanted to communicate before he lost the ability to speak, why he wanted me to make a recording of it. "Did Wun know you might do this?"
"No, and I doubt he would have approved… although he was running the same application himself."
"Was he? It didn't show."
"It wouldn't. Remember: what's happening to me—to my body, to my brain—that's not the application." He turned his sightless eyes toward me. "That's a malfunction."
* * * * *
The replicators had been launched from Earth and had flourished in the outer solar system, far from the sun. (Had the Hypotheticals noticed this, and had they blamed the Earth for what was in fact a Martian intervention? Was that, as E.D. had implied, what the sly Martians had intended all along? Jason didn't say—I presumed he didn't know.)
In time the replicators spread to the nearest stars and beyond… eventually far beyond. The replicator colonies were invisible at astronomical distances, but if you had mapped them onto a grid of our local stellar neighborhood you would have seen a continually expanding cloud of them, a glacially slow explosion of artificial life.
The replicators were not immortal. As individual entities they lived, reproduced, and eventually died. What remained in place was the network they built: a coral reef of gated, interconnected nodes in which novel data accumulated and drained toward the network's point of origin.
"The last time we talked," I reminded Jase, "you said there was a problem. You said the replicator population was dying back."
"They encountered something no one had planned for."
"What was that, Jase?"
He was silent a few moments, as if gathering his thoughts.
"We assumed," he said, "that when we launched the replicators we were introducing something new to the universe, a wholly new kind of artificial life. That assumption was naive. We—human beings, terrestrial or Martian—weren't the first sentient species to evolve in our galaxy. Far from it. In fact there's nothing particularly unusual about us. Virtually everything we've done in our brief history has been done before, somewhere, by someone else."
"You're telling me the replicators ran into other replicators?"
"An ecology of replicators. The stars are a jungle, Tyler. Fuller of life man we ever imagined."
I tried to picture the process as Jason described it:
Far beyond the Spin-sequestered Earth, far beyond the solar system—so deep in space that the sun itself is only one more star in a crowded sky—a replicator seed alights on a dusty fragment of ice and begins to reproduce. It initiates the same cycle of growth, specialization, observation, communication, and reproduction that has taken place countless times during its ancestors' slow migrations. Maybe it reaches maturity; maybe it even begins to pump out microbursts of data; but this time, the cycle is interrupted.
Something has sensed the replicator's presence. Something hungry.
The predator (Jase explained) is another kind of semiorganic autocatalytic feedback system—another colony of self-reproducing cellular mechanisms, as much machine as biology—and the predator is plugged into its own network, this one older and vastly larger than anything the terrestrial replicators have had time to construct during their exodus from Earth. The predator is more highly evolved than its prey: its subroutines for nutrient-seeking and resource-utilization have been honed over billions of years. The terrestrial replicator colony, blind and incapable of fleeing, is promptly eaten.
But "eaten" carries a special meaning here. The predator wants more than the sophisticated carbonaceous molecules of which the replicator's mature form is composed, useful as these might be. Far more interesting to the predator is the replicator's meaning, the functions and strategies written into its reproductive templates. It adopts from these what it considers potentially valuable; then it reorganizes and exploits the replicator colony for its own purposes. The colony does not die but is absorbed, ontologically devoured, subsumed along with its brethren into a larger, more complex, and vastly older interstellar hierarchy.
It is not the first nor the last such device to be so absorbed.
"Replicator networks," Jason said, "are one of the things sentient civilizations tend to produce. Given the inherent difficulty of sublight-speed travel as a way of exploring the galaxy, most technological cultures eventually settle for an expanding grid of von Neumann machines—which is what the replicators are—that costs nothing to maintain and generates a trickle of scientific information that expands exponentially over historical time."
"Okay," I said, "I understand that. The Martian replicators aren't unique. They ran into what you call an ecology—"
"A von Neumann ecology." (After the twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann, who first suggested the possibility of self-reproducing machines.)
"A von Neumann ecology, and they were absorbed by it. But that doesn't tell us anything about the Hypotheticals or the Spin."
Jason pursed his lips impatiently. "Tyler, no. You don't understand. The Hypotheticals are the von Neumann ecology. They're one and the same."
* * * * *
At this point I had to step back and reconsider exactly who was in the room with me.
It looked like Jase. But everything he'd said was casting that into doubt.
"Are you communicating with this… entity? Now, I mean? As we speak?"
"I don't know if you'd call it communication. Communication works two ways. This doesn't, not in the sense you're implying. And real communication wouldn't be quite so overwhelming. This is. Especially at night. The input is moderated during daylight hours, presumably because solar radiation washes out the signal."
"At night the signal is stronger"
"Maybe the word 'signal' is misleading, too. A signal is what the original replicators were designed to transmit. What I receive is coming in on the same carrier wave, and it does convey information, but it's active, not passive. It's trying to do to me what it's done to every other node in the network. In effect, Ty, it's trying to acquire and reprogram my nervous system."
So there was a third entity in the room. Me, Jase—and the Hypotheticals, who were eating him alive.
"Can they do that? Reprogram your nervous system?"
"Not successfully, no. To them I look like one more node in the replicator network. The biotechnology I injected into myself is sensitive to their manipulation, but not in the ways they anticipate. Because they don't perceive me as a biological entity, all they can do is kill me."
"Is there any way to screen this signal or interfere with it?"
"None that I know of. If the Martians had such a technique they neglected to include the information in their archives."
The window in Jason's room faced west. The roseate glow now penetrating the room was the waning sun, obscured by clouds.
"But they're with you now. Talking to you."
"They. It. We need a better pronoun. The entire von Neumann ecology is a single entity. It thinks its own slow thoughts and makes its own plans. But many of its trillions of parts are also autonomous individuals, often competing with each other, quicker to act than the network as a whole and vastly more intelligent than any single human being. The Spin membrane, for instance—"
"The Spin membrane is an individual?"
"In every important sense, yes. Its ultimate goals are derived from the network, but it evaluates events and makes autonomous choices. It's more complex than we ever dreamed, Ty. We all assumed the membrane was either on or off, like a light switch, like binary code. Not true. It has many states. Many purposes. Many degrees of permeability, for instance. We've known for years that it can transit a spacecraft and repel an asteroid. But it has subtler capabilities even than that. That's why we haven't been overwhelmed with solar radiation in the last few days. The membrane is still giving us a certain level of protection."
"I don't know the casualty numbers, Jase, but there must be thousands of people in this city alone who have lost family since the Spin stopped. I would be very reluctant to tell them they're being 'protected.'"
"But they are. In general if not in particular. The Spin membrane isn't God—it can't see the sparrow fall. It can, however, prevent the sparrow from being cooked with lethal ultraviolet light."
"To what end?"
At that he frowned. "I can't quite grasp," he began, "or maybe I can't quite translate—"
There was a knock at the door. Carol entered with an armful of linen. I switched off the recorder and set it aside. Carol's expression was grim.
"Clean sheets?" I asked.
"Restraints," she said curtly. The linen had been cut into strips. "For when the convulsions start."
She nodded at the window, the lengthening daylight.
"Thank you," Jason said gently. "Tyler, if you need a break, this would be the time. But don't be too long."
* * * * *
I looked in on Diane, who was between episodes, sleeping. I thought about the Martian drug I had administered to her (the "basic Fourth," as Jase had called it), semi-intelligent molecules about to do battle with her body's overwhelming load of CVWS bacteria, microscopic battalions mustering to repair and rebuild her, unless her body was too weakened to withstand the strain of the transformation.
I kissed her forehead and said gentle words she probably couldn't hear. Then I left her bedroom and went downstairs and out onto the lawn of the Big House, stealing a moment for myself.
The rain had finally stopped—abruptly, completely—and the air was fresher than it had been all day. The sky was deep blue at the zenith. A few tattered thunderheads cloaked the monstrous sun where it touched the western horizon. Raindrops stood on every blade of grass, tiny amber pearls.
Jason had admitted that he was dying. Now I began to admit it to myself.
As a physician I had seen more of death than most people ever see. I knew how people died. I knew that the familiar story of how we face death—denial, anger, acceptance—was at best a gross generalization. Those emotions might evolve in seconds or might never evolve at all; death could trump them at any instant. For many people, facing death was never an issue; their deaths arrived unannounced, a ruptured aorta or a bad decision at a busy intersection.
But Jase knew he was dying. And I was bewildered that he seemed to have accepted it with such unearthly calm, until I realized that his death was also an ambition fulfilled. He was on the brink of understanding what he had struggled all his life to understand: the meaning of the Spin and humanity's place in it—his place in it, since he had been instrumental in the launch of the replicators.
It was as if he had reached up and touched the stars.
And they had touched him in return. The stars were murdering him. But he was dying in a state of grace.
* * * * *
"We have to hurry. It's almost dark now, isn't it?" Carol had gone off to light candles throughout the house. "Almost," I said.
"And the rain stopped. Or at least, I can't hear it."
"Temperature's dropping, too. Would you like me to open the window?"
"Please. And the audio recorder, you turned it back on?"
"It's running now." I raised the old frame window a few inches and cool air infiltrated the room.
"We were talking about the Hypotheticals…"
"Yes." Silence. "Jase? Are you still with me?"
"I hear the wind. I hear your voice. I hear…"
"Jason?"
"I'm sorry… don't mind me, Ty. I'm easily distracted right now. I—uh!"
His arms and legs jerked against the restraints Carol had tied across the bed. His head arched into the pillow. He was having what looked like an epileptic seizure, although it was brief: over before I could approach the bed. He gasped and took a deep lungful of air. "Sorry, I'm sorry…"
"Don't apologize."
"Can't control it, I'm sorry."
"I know you can't. It's all right, Jase."
"Don't blame them for what's happening to me."
"Blame who—the Hypotheticals?"
He attempted a smile, though he was clearly in pain. "We'll have to find a new name for them, won't we? They're not as hypothetical as they used to be. But don't blame them. They don't know what's happening to me. I'm under their threshold of abstraction."
"I don't know what that means."
He spoke rapidly and eagerly, as if the talk were a welcome distraction from the physical distress. Or another symptom of it. "You and I, Tyler, we're communities of living cells, yes? And if you damaged a sufficient number of my cells I would die, you would have murdered me. But if we shake hands and I lose a few skin cells in the process neither of us even notices the loss. It's invisible. We live at a certain level of abstraction; we interact as bodies, not cell colonies. The same is true of the Hypotheticals. They inhabit a larger universe than we do."
"That makes it all right to kill people?"
"I'm talking about their perception, not their morality. The death of any single human being—my death—might be meaningful to them, if they could see it in the correct context. But they can't."
"They've done this before, though, created other Spin worlds—isn't that one of the things the replicators discovered before the Hypothetical shut them down?"
"Other Spin worlds. Yes. Many. The network of the Hypothetical has grown to encompass most of the habitable zone of the galaxy, and this is what they do when they encounter a planet that hosts a sentient, tool-using species of a certain degree of maturity—they enclose it in a Spin membrane."
I pictured spiders, wrapping their victims in silk. "Why, Jase?"
The door opened. Carol was back, carrying a tea candle on a china saucer. She put the saucer on the sideboard and lit the candle with a wooden match. The flame danced, imperiled by the breeze from the window.
"To preserve it," Jason said.
"Preserve it against what?"
"Its own senescence and eventual death. Technological cultures are mortal, like everything else. They flourish until they exhaust their resources; then they die."
Unless they don't, I thought. Unless they continue flourishing, expand into their solar systems, transplant themselves to the stars…
But Jason had anticipated my objection. "Even local space travel is slow and inefficient for beings with a human life span. Maybe we would have been an exception to the rule. But the Hypotheticals have been around a very long time. Before they devised the Spin membrane they watched countless inhabited worlds drown in their own effluvia."
He drew a breath and seemed to choke on it. Carol turned to face him. Her mask of competence slipped, and in the moment it took him to recover she was plainly terrified, not a doctor but a woman with a dying child.
Jase, perhaps fortunately, couldn't see. He swallowed hard and began to breathe normally again.
"But why the Spin, Jase? It pushes us into the future, but it doesn't change anything."
"On the contrary," he said. "It changes everything."
* * * * *
The paradox of Jason's last night was that his speech grew awkward and intermittent even as his acquired knowledge seemed to expand exponentially. I believe he learned more in those few hours than he could begin to share, and what he did share was momentous—sweeping in its explanatory power and provocative for what it implied about human destiny.
Pass over the trauma, the agonized groping after appropriate words, and what he said was—
Well, it began with, "Try to see it from their point of view."
Their point of view: the Hypotheticals.
The Hypotheticals—whether considered as one organism or many—had evolved from the first von Neumann devices to inhabit our galaxy. The origin of those primal self-replicating machines was obscure. Their descendants had no direct memory of it, any more than you or I can "remember" human evolution. They may have been the product of an early-emerging biological culture of which no trace remains; they may have migrated from another, older galaxy. In either case, the Hypotheticals of today belonged to an almost unimaginably ancient lineage.
They had seen sentient biological species evolve and die on planets like ours countless times. By passively transporting organic material from star to star they may even have helped seed the process of organic evolution. And they had watched biological cultures generate crude von Neumann networks as a byproduct of their accelerating (but ultimately unsustainable) complexity—not once, but many times. To the Hypotheticals we all looked more or less like replicator nurseries: strange, fecund, fragile.
From their point of view this endless stuttering gestation of simple von Neumann networks, followed by the rapid ecological collapse of source planets, was both a mystery and a tragedy.
A mystery, because transient events on a purely biological time scale were difficult for them to comprehend or even perceive.
A tragedy, because they had begun to conceive of these progenitor cultures as failed biological networks, akin to themselves—growing toward real complexity but snuffed out prematurely by finite planetary ecosystems
For the Hypotheticals, then, the Spin was meant to preserve us—and dozens of similar civilizations that had arisen on other worlds before and since—in our technological prime. But we weren't museum pieces, frozen in place for public display. The Hypotheticals were reengineering our destiny. They had suspended us in slowtime while they put together the pieces of a grand experiment, an experiment formulated over billions of years and now nearing its ultimate goal: to build a vastly expanded biological landscape into which these otherwise doomed cultures could expand and in which they would eventually meet and intermingle.
* * * * *
I didn't immediately grasp the meaning of this: "An expanded biological environment? Bigger than the Earth itself?"
We were courting full darkness now. Jason's words were interrupted by convulsive movements and involuntary sounds, edited out of this account. Periodically I checked his heartbeat, which was rapid and growing weaker.
"The Hypotheticals," he said, "can manipulate time and space. The evidence of that is all around us. But creating a temporal membrane is neither the beginning nor the end of their abilities. They can literally connect our planet through spatial loops to others like it… new planets, some artificially designed and nurtured, to which we can travel instantaneously and easily … travel by way of links, bridges, structures, structures assembled by the Hypotheticals, assembled from—if this is truly possible—the matter of dead stars, neutron stars… structures literally dragged through space, patiently, patiently, over the course of millions of years—"
Carol sat beside him on one side of the bed and I sat on the other. I held his shoulders when his body convulsed and Carol stroked his head during the intervals in which he could not speak. His eyes sparked in the candlelight and he stared intently at nothing at all.
"The Spin membrane is still in place, working, thinking, but the temporal function is finished, complete… that's what the flickers were, the byproduct of a detuning process, and now the membrane has been made permeable so that something can enter the atmosphere through it, something large.…"
Later it became obvious what he meant. At the time I was bewildered and I suspected he might have begun to pass into dementia, a sort of metaphorical overload governed by the word "network."
I was, of course, wrong.
Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.
But the other memory that sprang to mind, as the substance of Jason's nervous system was transformed and eroded by the Hypotheticals in a way they could not have known was lethal to him, was of that afternoon, long ago, when he had ridden my thrift shop bicycle down from the top of Bantam Hill Road. I thought of how adroitly, almost balletically, he had controlled that disintegrating machine, until there was nothing left of it but ballistics and velocity, the inevitable collapse of order into chaos.
His body—and he was a Fourth, remember—was a finely tuned machine. It didn't die easily. Sometime prior to midnight Jason lost the ability to speak, and that was when he began to look both frightened and no longer entirely human. Carol held his hand and told him he was safe, he was at home. I don't know if that consolation reached him in the strange and convolute chambers his mind had entered. I hope it did.
Not long after that his eyes rolled upward and his muscles relaxed. His body struggled on, drawing convulsive breaths almost until morning.
Then I left him with Carol, who stroked his head with infinite gentleness and whispered to him as if he could still hear her, and I failed to notice that the sun when it rose was no longer bloated and red but as bright and perfect as it had been before the end of the Spin.
I stayed on deck as the Capetown Mam left its berth and made for the open sea.
No less than a dozen container ships abandoned Teluk Bayur while the oil fires were burning, jostling for position at the harbor mouth. Most of these were small merchant ships of dubious registry, probably bound for Port Magellan despite what their manifests said—vessels whose owners and captains had much to lose from the scrutiny that would follow an investigation.
I stood with Jala and we braced ourselves against the rails, watching a rust-spackled coastal freighter veer out of a bank of oil-fire smoke alarmingly close to the Capetown's stern. Both ships sounded alarms and the Capetown's, deck crew looked aft apprehensively. But the coastal freighter sheered off before it made contact.
Then we were out of the protection of the harbor into high seas and rolling swells, and I went below to join Ina and Diane and the other émigrés in the crew lounge. En sat at a trestle table with Ibu Ina and his parents, all four of them looking unwell. In deference to her injury Diane had been given the only padded chair in the room, but the wound had stopped bleeding and she had managed to change into dry clothes.
Jala entered the lounge an hour later. He shouted for attention and delivered a speech, which Ina translated for me: "Setting aside his pompous self-congratulation, Jala says he went to the bridge and spoke to the captain. All deck fires are out and we're safely underway, he says. The captain apologizes for the rough seas. According to forecasts we ought to be out of this weather by late tonight or early tomorrow. For the next few hours, however—"
At which point En, who was sitting next to Ina, turned and vomited into her lap, effectively finishing her sentence for her.
* * * * *
Two nights later I went up on deck with Diane to look at the stars.
The main deck was quieter at night than at any time during the day. We found a safe space between the exposed forty-foot containers and the aft superstructure, where we could talk without being overheard. The sea was calm, the air was pleasantly warm, and stars swarmed over the Capetown's stacks and radars as if they had tangled in the rigging.
"Are you still writing your memoir?" Diane had seen the assortment of memory cards I was carrying in my luggage, alongside the digital and pharmaceutical contraband we had brought from Montreal. Also various paper notebooks, loose pages, scribbled notes.
"Not as often," I said. "It doesn't seem as urgent. The need to write it all down—"
"Or the fear of forgetting."
"Or that."
"And do you feel different?" she asked, smiling.
I was a new Fourth. Diane was not. By now her wound had closed, leaving nothing but a strip of puckered flesh that followed the curvature of her hip. Her body's capacity for self-repair still struck me as uncanny. Even though, presumably, I shared it.
Her question was a little mischievous. Many times I had asked Diane whether she felt different as a Fourth. The real question, of course, was: did she seem different to me?
There had never been a good answer. Obviously she was a different person after her near-death and resurrection at the Big House—who wouldn't be? She had lost a husband and a faith and had awakened to a world that would make even the Buddha scratch his head in perplexity.
"The transition is only a door," she said. "A door into a room. A room you've never been in, though you might have caught a glimpse of it from time to time. Now it's the room where you live; it's yours, it belongs to you. It has certain qualities you can't change—you can't make it bigger or smaller. But how you furnish it is up to you."
"More a proverb than an answer," I said.
"Sorry. Best I can do." She turned her head up toward the stars. "Look, Tyler, you can see the Arch."
We call it an "arch" because we're a myopic species. The Archway is really a ring, a circle a thousand miles in diameter, but only half of it rises above sea level. The rest of it is underwater or buried in the crust of the Earth, perhaps (some have speculated) exploiting the suboceanic magma as a source of energy. But from our ant's-eye point of view it was indeed an arch, the peak of which extended well above the atmosphere.
Even the exposed half of it was completely visible only in photographs taken from space, and even those photographs were usually doctored to emphasize detail. If you could take a cross-section of the ring material itself—in effect, the wire that bends into a hoop—it would be a rectangle a quarter mile on its short side and a mile on the long. Immense, but a tiny fraction of the space it enclosed and not always easy to see at a distance.
Capetown Mam's route had taken us south of the ring, parallel to its radius and almost directly beneath its apex. The sun was still shining on that peak, no longer a bent letter U or J but a gentle frown (a Cheshire frown, Diane called it) high in the northern sky. Stars rotated past it like phosphorescent plankton parted by the prow of a ship.
Diane put her head against my shoulder. "I wish Jason could have seen this."
"I believe he did see it. Just not from this angle."
* * * * *
There were three immediate problems at the Big House following Jason's death.
The most pressing was Diane, whose physical condition remained unchanged for days following the injection of the Martian drug. She was nearly comatose and intermittently feverish, her pulse beating in her throat like the flutter of an insect wing. We were low on medical supplies and I had to coax her to take an occasional sip of water. The only real improvement was in the sound of her breathing, which was incrementally more relaxed and less phlegmatic—her lungs, at least, were mending.
The second problem was distasteful, but it was one we shared with too many other households across the country: a family member had died and needed burying.
A great wave of death (accidental, suicidal, homicidal) had swept over the world in the last few days. No nation on Earth was equipped to deal with it, except in the crudest possible fashion, and the United States was no exception. Local radio had begun to announce collection sites for mass burials; refrigerated trucks had been commandeered from meat packing plants; there was a number to call now that phone service had been restored—but Carol wouldn't hear of it. When I broached the subject she drew herself into a posture of fierce dignity and said, "I won't do that, Tyler. I will not have Jason dumped into a hole like a medieval pauper."
"Carol, we can't—"
"Hush," she said. "I still have a few contacts left from the old days. Let me make some calls."
She had once been a respected specialist and must have had an extensive network of contacts before the Spin; but after thirty years of alcoholic seclusion, whom could she possibly know? Nevertheless she spent a morning on the phone, tracking down changed numbers, reintroducing herself, explaining, coaxing, begging. It all sounded hopeless to me. But not more than six hours later a hearse pulled into the driveway and two obviously exhausted but relentlessly kind and professional men came inside and put Jason's body on a wheeled stretcher and carried him out of the Big House for the last time.
Carol spent the rest of the day upstairs, holding Diane's hand and singing songs she probably couldn't hear. That night she took her first drink since the morning the red sun rose—a "maintenance dose," she called it.
Our third big problem was E. D. Lawton.
* * * * *
E.D. had to be told that his son had died, and Carol steeled herself to perform that duty, too. She confessed she hadn't talked to E.D. except through lawyers for a couple of years now and that he had always frightened her, at least when she was sober—-he was big, confrontational, intimidating; Carol was fragile, elusive, sly. But her grief had subtly altered the equation.
It took hours, but she was finally able to reach him—he was in Washington, within commuting distance—and tell him about Jason. She was carefully vague about the cause of his death. She told him Jason had come home with what looked like pneumonia and that it had turned critical shortly after the power died and the world went berserk—no phone, no ambulance service, ultimately no hope.
I asked her how E.D. had taken the news.
She shrugged. "He didn't say anything at first. Silence is E.D.'s way of expressing pain. His son died, Tyler. That might not have surprised him, given what's happened in the last few days. But it hurt him. I think it hurt him unspeakably."
"Did you tell him Diane's here?"
"I thought it would be wiser not to." She looked at me. "I didn't tell him you're here, either. I know Jason and E.D. were at odds. Jason came home to escape something that was happening at Perihelion, something that frightened him. And I assume it's connected somehow with the Martian drug. No, Tyler, don't explain it to me—I don't care to hear and I probably wouldn't understand. But I thought it would be better if E.D. didn't come bulling out to the house, trying to take charge of things."
"He didn't ask about her?"
"No, not about Diane. One odd thing, though. He asked me to make sure that Jason… well, that Jason's body is preserved. He asked a lot of questions about that. I told him I'd made arrangements, there would be a funeral, I'd let him know. But he didn't want to leave it at that. He wants an autopsy. But I got stubborn." She regarded me coolly. "Why would he want an autopsy, Tyler?"
"I don't know," I said.
But I set about finding out. I went to Jason's room, where his empty bed had been stripped of sheets. I opened the window and sat in the chair next to the dresser and looked at what he'd left behind.
Jason had asked me to record his final insights into the nature of the Hypotheticals and their manipulation of the Earth. He had also asked me to include a copy of that recording in each of a dozen or so fat padded envelopes, stamped and addressed for mailing if and when mail service was restored. Clearly Jase had not expected to produce such a monologue when he arrived at the Big House a few days before the end of the Spin. Some other crisis had been dogging him. His deathbed testament was a late addendum.
I leafed through the envelopes. They were addressed, in Jason's hand, to names I didn't recognize. No, correct that; I did recognize the name on one of the envelopes.
It was mine.
Dear Tyler,
I know I've burdened you unconscionably in the past. I'm afraid I'm about to burden you again, and this time the stakes are considerably higher. Let me explain. And I'm sorry if this seems abrupt, but I'm in a hurry, for reasons that will become clear.
Recent episodes of what the media call "the flicker" have set off alarm bells in the Lomax administration. So have several other events, less well publicized. I'll cite just one example: since the death of Wun Ngo Wen, tissue samples taken from his organs have been under study at the Animal Disease Center on Plum Island, the same facility where he was quarantined when he arrived on Earth. Martian biotechnology is subtle, but modern forensics is stubborn. It recently became clear that Wun's physiology, particularly his nervous system, had been altered in ways even more radical than the "Fourth Age" procedure outlined in his archives. For this and other reasons, Lomax and his people have begun to smell a rat. They invited E.D. out of his reluctant retirement and they're giving new credence to his suspicions about Wun's motives. E.D. welcomed this as an opportunity to reclaim Perihelion (and his own reputation), and he's wasting no time capitalizing on the paranoia in the White House.
How have the authorities chosen to proceed? Crudely. Lomax (or his advisors) conceived a plan to raid the existing facilities at Perihelion and seize whatever we had retained of Wun's possessions and documents, as well as all our records and working notes.
E.D. hasn't yet connected the dots between my recovery from AMS and Wun's pharmaceuticals; or, if he has, he's kept it to himself. Or so I prefer to believe. Because if I fall into the hands of the security services the first thing they'll do is a blood assay, rapidly followed by making me a captive science experiment, probably in Wun's old cell at Plum Island. And I don't believe E.D. actually wants that to happen. As much as he may resent me for "stealing Perihelion" or collaborating with Wun Ngo Wen, he's still my father.
But don't worry. Even though E.D. is very much back in the loop at Lomax's White House, I have resources of my own. I've been cultivating them. These are generally not powerful people, though some are powerful in their own way, but bright and decent individuals who choose to take a longer view of human destiny, and thanks to them I was warned in advance of the raid on Perihelion. I've effected my escape. Now I'm a fugitive.
You, Tyler, are merely a suspected accessory, though it may come to the same thing.
I'm sorry. I know I bear some responsibility for putting you in this position. Someday I'll apologize face-to-face. For now all I can offer is advice.
The digital records I put into your hands when you left Perihelion are, of course, highly classified redactions from the archives of Wun Ngo Wen. For all I know you may have burned them, buried them, or tossed them into the Pacific Ocean. No matter. Years designing spacecraft taught me the virtue of redundancy. I've parceled out Wun's contraband wisdom to dozens of people in this country and across the world. It hasn't been posted on the Internet yet—no one is that feckless—but it's out there. This is no doubt a profoundly unpatriotic and certainly criminal act. If I'm captured I'll be accused of treason. In the meantime I'm making the most of it.
But I don't believe knowledge of this kind (which includes protocols for human modifications that can cure grave diseases, among other things, and I should know) ought to be corralled for national advantage, even if releasing it poses other problems.
Lomax and his tame Congress clearly disagree. So I'm dispersing the last fragments of the archive and making myself scarce. I'm going into hiding. You might want to do the same. In fact you may have to. Everyone at the old Perihelion, anyone who was close to me, is bound to fall under federal scrutiny sooner or later.
Or, contrarily, you may wish to drop in at the nearest FBI office and hand over the contents of this envelope. If that's what you think is best, follow your conscience; I won't blame you, though I don't guarantee the outcome. My experience with the Lomax administration suggests that the truth will not, in fact, set you free.
In any case, I regret putting you in a difficult position. It isn't fair. It's too much to ask of a friend, and I have always been proud to call you my friend.
Maybe E.D. was right about one thing. Our generation has struggled for thirty years to recover what the Spin stole from us that October night. But we can't. There's nothing in this evolving universe to hold on to, and nothing to be gained by trying. If I learned anything from my "Fourthness," that's it. We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.
Fall freely, Tyler. Use the enclosed documents if you need them. They were expensive but they're absolutely reliable. (It's good to have friends in high places!)
The "enclosed documents" were, in essence, a suite of spare identities: passports, Homeland Security ID cards, driver's licenses, birth certificates, Social Security numbers, even med-school diplomas, all bearing my description but none bearing my correct name.
* * * * *
Diane's recovery continued. Her pulse strengthened and her lungs cleared, although she was still febrile. The Martian drug was doing its work, rebuilding her from the inside out, editing and amending her DNA in subtle ways.
As her health improved she began to ask cautious questions—about the sun, about Pastor Dan, about the trip from Arizona to the Big House. Because of her intermittent fever, the answers I gave her didn't always stick. She asked me more than once what had happened to Simon. If she was lucid I told her about the red calf and the return of the stars; if she was groggy I just told her Simon was "somewhere else" and that I'd be looking after her a while longer. Neither of these answers—the true or the half-true—seemed to satisfy her.
Some days she was listless, propped up facing the window, watching sunlight clock across the valleyed bedclothes. Other days she was feverishly restless. One afternoon she demanded paper and a pen… but when I gave it to her all she wrote was the single sentence Am I not my brother's keeper, repeated until her fingers cramped.
"I told her about Jason," Carol admitted when I showed her the paper.
"Are you sure that was wise?"
"She had to hear it sooner or later. She'll make peace with it, Tyler. Don't worry. Diane will be all right. Diane was always the strong one."
* * * * *
On the morning of the day of Jason's funeral I prepared the envelopes he had left, adding a copy of his last recording to each one, stamped them, and dropped them into a randomly selected mailbox on the way to the local chapel Carol had reserved for the service. The packages might have to wait a few days for pickup—mail service was still being restored—but I figured they'd be safer there than at the Big House.
The "chapel" was a nondenominational funeral home on a suburban main street, busy now that the travel restrictions had been lifted. Jase had always had a rationalist's disdain for elaborate funerals, but Carol's sense of dignity demanded a ceremony even if it was feeble and pro forma. She had managed to round up a small crowd, mostly longtime neighbors who remembered Jason as a child and who had glimpsed his career in TV sound bites and sidebars in the daily paper. It was his fading celebrity status that filled the pews.
I delivered a brief eulogy. (Diane would have done it better, but Diane was too ill to attend.) Jase, I said, had dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge, not arrogantly but humbly: he understood that knowledge wasn't created but discovered; it couldn't be owned, only shared, hand to hand, generation to generation. Jason had made himself a part of that sharing and was part of it still. He had woven himself into the network of knowing.
E.D. entered the chapel while I was still at the pulpit.
He was halfway down the aisle when he recognized me. He stared at me a long minute before he settled into the nearest empty pew.
He was more gaunt than I remembered him, and he had shaved the last of his white hair into invisible stubble. But he still carried himself like a powerful man. He wore a suit that had been tailored to razor-tight tolerances. He folded his arms and inspected the room imperially, marking who was present. His gaze fingered on Carol.
When the service ended Carol stood and gamely accepted the condolences of her neighbors as they filed out. She had wept copiously over the last few days but was resolutely dry-eyed now, almost clinically aloof. E.D. approached her after the last guest had left. She stiffened, like a cat sensing the presence of a larger predator.
"Carol," E.D. said. "Tyler." He gave me a sour stare.
"Our son is dead," Carol said. "Jason's gone."
"That's why I'm here."
"I hope you're here to mourn—"
"Of course I am."
"—and not for some other reason. Because he came to the house to get away from you. I assume you know that."
"I know more about it than you can imagine. Jason was confused—"
"He was many things, E.D., but he was not confused. I was with him when he died."
"Were you? That's interesting. Because, unlike you, I was with him when he was alive."
Carol drew a sharp breath and turned her head as if she'd been slapped.
E.D. said, "Come on, Carol. I was the one who raised Jason and you know it. You may not like the kind of life I gave him, but that's what I did—I gave him a life and a means of living it."
"I gave birth to him."
"That's a physiological function, not a moral act. Everything Jason ever owned he got from me. Everything he learned, I taught him."
"For better or worse…"
"And now you want to condemn me just because I have some practical concerns—"
"What practical concerns?"
"Obviously, I'm talking about the autopsy."
"Yes. You mentioned that on the telephone. But it's undignified and it's frankly impossible."
"I was hoping you'd take my concerns seriously. Clearly you haven't. But I don't need your permission. There are men outside this building waiting to claim the body, and they can produce writs under the Emergency Measures Act."
She took a step back from him. "You have that much power?"
"Neither you nor I have any choice in the matter. This is going to happen whether we like it or not. And it's really only a formality. No harm will be done. So for god's sake let's preserve some dignity and mutual respect. Let me have the body of my son."
"I can't do that."
"Carol—"
"I can't give you his body."
"You're not listening to me. You don't have a choice"
"No, I'm sorry, you're not listening to me. Listen, E.D. I can't give you his body."
He opened his mourn and then closed it. His eyes widened.
"Carol," he said. "What have you done?"
"There is no body. Not anymore." Her lips curled into a sly, bitter smile. "But I suppose you can take his ashes. If you insist."
* * * * *
I drove Carol back to the Big House, where her neighbor Emil Hardy—who had given up his short-lived local news sheet when the power was restored—had been sitting with Diane.
"We talked about old times on the block," Hardy said as he was leaving. "I used to watch the kids ride their bikes. That was a long time ago. This skin condition she's got—"
"It's not contagious," Carol said. "Don't worry."
"Unusual, though."
"Yes. Unusual it is. Thank you, Emil."
"Ashley and I would love to have you over for dinner sometime."
"That sounds lovely. Please thank Ashley for me." She closed the door and turned to me. "I need a drink. But first things first. E.D. knows you're here. So you have to leave, and you have to take Diane with you. Can you do that? Take her somewhere safe? Somewhere E.D. won't find her?"
"Of course I can. But what about you?"
"I'm not in danger. E.D. might send people around to look for whatever treasure he imagines Jason stole from him. But he won't find anything—as long as you're thorough, Tyler— and he can't take the house away from me. E.D. and I signed our armistice a long time ago. Our skirmishes are trivial. But he can hurt you, and he can hurt Diane even if he doesn't mean to."
"I won't let that happen."
"Then get your things together. You may not have much time."
* * * * *
The day before Capetown Maru was due to cross the Archway I went up on deck to watch the sun rise. The Arch was mostly invisible, its descending pillars hidden by horizons east and west, but in the half hour before dawn its apex was a line in the sky almost directly overhead, razor sharp and gently glowing.
It had faded behind a haze of high cirrus cloud by mid-morning, but we all knew it was there.
The prospect of the transit was making everyone nervous—not just passengers but the seasoned crew, too. They went about their customary business, tending to the needs of the ship, mending machinery, chipping and repainting the superstructure, but there was a briskness in the rhythm of their work that hadn't been there yesterday. Jala came on deck lugging a plastic chair and joined me where I sat, protected from the wind by the forty-foot containers but facing a narrow view of the sea.
"This is my last trip to the other side," Jala said. He was dressed for the warmth of the day in a billowing yellow shirt and jeans. He had opened the shirt to expose his chest to the sunlight. He took a can of beer from the topside cooler and cracked it. All these actions announced him as a secularized man, a businessman, equally disdainful of Muslim sharia and Minang adat. "This time," he said, "there's no coming back."
He had burned his bridges behind him—literally, if he'd had anything to do with orchestrating the riot at Teluk Bayur. (The explosions had made a suspiciously convenient cover for our getaway, even if we had almost been caught in the conflagration.) For years Jala had been running an emigrant-smuggling brokerage trade far more lucrative than his legitimate import/export business. There was more money in people than in palm oil, he said. But the Indian and Vietnamese competition was stiff and the political climate had soured; better to retire to Port Magellan now than spend the rest of his life in a New Reformasi prison.
"You've made the transit before?"
"Twice."
"Was it difficult?"
He shrugged. "Don't believe everything you hear."
By noon many of the passengers were up on deck. In addition to the Minangkabau villagers there were assorted Acehnese, Malay, and Thai emigrants aboard, perhaps a hundred of us in all—far too many for the available cabins, but three aluminum cargo containers in the hold had been rigged as sleeping quarters, carefully ventilated.
This wasn't the grim, often deadly, human-smuggling trade that used to carry refugees to Europe or North America. Most of the people who crossed the Arch every day were overflow from the feeble U.N.-sanctioned resettlement programs, often with money to spend. We were treated with respect by the crew, many of whom had spent months in Port Magellan and who understood its blandishments and pitfalls.
One of the deck hands had set aside part of the main deck as a sort of soccer field, marked off with nets, where a group of children were playing. Every now and then the ball bounced past the nets, often into Jala's lap, much to his chagrin. Jala was irritable today.
I asked him when the ship would make the transit.
"According to the captain, unless we change speed, twelve hours or so."
"Our last day on Earth," I said.
"Don't joke."
"I meant it literally."
"And keep your voice down. Sailors are superstitious."
"What will you do in Port Magellan?"
Jala raised his eyebrows. "What will I do? Fuck beautiful women. And quite possibly a few ugly ones. What else?"
The soccer ball bounced past the net again. This time Jala scooped it up and held it against his belly. "Damn it, I warned you! This game is over!"
A dozen children promptly pressed against the nets, shrieking protest, but it was En who summoned the courage to come around and confront Jala directly. En was sweating, his rib cage pumping like a bellows. His team had been five points ahead. "Give it back, please," he said.
"You want this back?" Jala stood up, still clutching the ball, imperious, mysteriously angry. "You want it? Go get it." He kicked the ball in a long trajectory that took it past the deck rails and out into the blue-green immensity of the Indian Ocean.
En looked astonished, then angry. He said something low and bitter in Minang.
Jala reddened. Then he slapped the boy with his open hand, so hard that En's heavy glasses went skittering across the deck.
"Apologize," Jala demanded.
En dropped to one knee, eyes squeezed shut. He drew a few sobbing breaths. Eventually he stood up. He walked a few steps across the deck plates and collected his eyeglasses. He fumbled them into place and walked back with what I thought was an astonishing dignity. He stood directly in front of Jala.
"No," he said faintly. "You apologize."
Jala gasped and swore. En cringed. Jala raised his hand again.
I caught his wrist in midswing.
Jala looked at me, startled. "What is this! Let go."
He tried to pull his hand away. I wouldn't let him. "Don't hit him again," I said.
"I'll do what I like!"
"Fine," I said. "But don't hit him again."
"You—after what I've done for you—!"
Then he gave me a second look.
I don't know what he saw in my face. I don't know exactly what I was feeling at that moment. Whatever it was, it appeared to confuse him. His clenched fist went slack. He seemed to wilt.
"Fucking crazy American," he muttered. "I'm going to the canteen." To the small crowd of children and deck hands that had gathered around us: "Where I can have peace and respect!" He stalked away.
En was still staring at me, gap-jawed.
"I'm sorry about that," I said.
He nodded.
"I can't get your ball back," I said.
He touched his cheek where Jala had slapped him. "That's okay," he said faintly.
Later—over dinner in the crew mess, hours away from the crossing—I told Diane about the incident. "I didn't think about what I was doing. It just seemed… obvious. Almost reflexive. Is that a Fourth thing?"
"It might be. The impulse to protect a victim, especially a child, and to do it instantly, without thinking. I've felt it myself. I suppose it's something the Martians wrote into their neural rebuild… assuming they can really engineer feelings as subtle as that. I wish we had Wun Ngo Wen here to explain it. Or Jason, for that matter. Did it feel forced?"
"No…"
"Or wrong, inappropriate?"
"No… I think it was exactly the right thing to do."
"But you wouldn't have done it before you took the treatment?"
"I might have. Or wanted to. But I probably would have second-guessed myself until it was too late."
"So you're not unhappy about it."
No. Just surprised. This was as much me as it was Martian biotech, Diane was saying, and I supposed that was true… but it would take some getting used to. Like every other transition (childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood) there were new imperatives to deal with, new opportunities and pitfalls, new doubts.
For the first time in many years I was a stranger to myself again.
* * * * *
I had almost finished packing when Carol came downstairs, a little drunk, loose-limbed, carrying a shoebox in her arms.
The box was labeled mementos (school).
"You should take this," she said. "It was your mother's."
"If it means something to you, Carol, keep it."
"Thank you, but I already took what I wanted from it." I opened the lid and glanced at the contents. "The letters."
The anonymous letters addressed to Belinda Sutton, my mother's maiden name.
"Yes. So you've seen them. Did you ever read them?"
"No, not really. Just enough to know they were love letters."
"Oh, God. That sounds so saccharine. I prefer to think of them as tributes. They're quite chaste, really, if you read them closely. Unsigned. Your mother received them when we were both at university. She was dating your father then, and she could hardly show them to him—he was writing her letters of his own. So she shared them with me."
"She never found out who wrote them?"
"No. Never."
"She must have been curious."
"Of course. But she was already engaged to Marcus by that time. She started dating Marcus Dupree when Marcus and E.D. were setting up their first business, designing and manufacturing high altitude balloons back when aerostats were what Marcus called 'blue sky' technology: a little crazy, a little idealistic. Belinda called Marcus and E.D. 'the Zeppelin brothers.' So I guess we were the Zeppelin sisters, Belinda and I. Because that's when I started flirting with E.D. In a way, Tyler, my entire marriage was nothing more than an attempt to keep your mother as a friend."
"The letters—"
"Interesting, isn't it, that she kept them all these years? Eventually I asked her why. Why not just throw them away? She said, 'Because they're sincere.' It was her way of honoring whoever had written them. The last one arrived a week before her wedding. None after that. And a year later I married E.D. Even as couples we were inseparable, did she ever tell you that? We vacationed together, we went to movies together. Belinda came to the hospital when the twins were born and I was waiting at the door when she brought you home for the first time. But all that ended when Marcus had his accident. Your father was a wonderful man, Tyler, very earthy, very funny—the only person who could make E.D. laugh. Reckless to a fault, though. Belinda was absolutely devastated when he died. And not just emotionally. Marcus had burned through most of their savings and Belinda spent what was left servicing the mortgage on their house in Pasadena. So when E.D. moved east and we made an offer on this place it seemed perfectly natural to invite her to use the guest house."
"In exchange for housekeeping," I said.
"That was E.D.'s idea. I just wanted Belinda close by. My marriage wasn't as successful as hers had been. Quite the opposite. By that time Belinda was more or less the only friend I had. Almost a confidante." Carol smiled. "Almost."
"That's why you want to keep the letters? Because they're part of your history with her?"
She smiled as if at a slow-witted child. "No, Tyler. I told you. They're mine." Her smile thinned. "Don't look so dumbfounded. Your mother was as uncomplicatedly heterosexual as any woman I have ever met. I simply had the misfortune to fall in love with her. To fall in love with her so abjectly that I would do anything—even marry a man who seemed, even in the beginning, a little distasteful—in order to keep her close. And in all that time, Tyler, in all those silent years, I never told her how I felt. Never, except in these letters. I was pleased she kept them, even though they always seemed a little dangerous, like something explosive or radioactive, hidden in plain sight, evidence of my own foolishness. When your mother died—I mean the very day she died—I panicked a little; I tried to hide the box; I thought about destroying the letters but I couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to do it; and then, after E.D. divorced me, when there was no one left to deceive, I simply took them for myself. Because, you see, they're mine. They've always been mine."
I didn't know what to say. Carol saw my expression and shook her head sadly. She put her fragile hands on my shoulders. "Don't be upset. The world is full of surprises. We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced."
* * * * *
So I spent four weeks in a motel room in Vermont nursing Diane through her recovery.
Her physical recovery, I should say. The emotional trauma she'd suffered at the Condon ranch and after had left her exhausted and withdrawn. Diane had closed her eyes on a world that seemed to be ending and opened them on a world without compass points. It was not in my power to make this right for her.
So I was cautiously helpful. I explained what needed to be explained. I made no demands and I made it clear that I expected no reward.
Her interest in the changed world awoke gradually. She asked about the sun, restored to its benevolent aspect, and I told her what Jason had told me: the Spin membrane was still in place even though the temporal enclosure had ended; it was protecting the Earth the way it always had, editing lethal radiation into a simulacrum of sunlight acceptable to the planet's ecosystem.
"So why did they turn it off for seven days?"
"They turned it down, not entirely off. And they did it so something could pass through the membrane."
"That thing in the Indian Ocean."
"Yes."
She asked me to play the recording of Jason's last hours, and she wept as she listened. She asked about his ashes. Had E.D. taken them away or had Carol kept them? (Neither. Carol had pressed the urn into my hands and told me to dispose of them any way I deemed appropriate. "The awful truth, Tyler, is that you knew him better than I did. Jason was a cipher to me. His father's son. But you were his friend.")
We watched the world rediscover itself. The mass burials finally ended; the bereaved and frightened survivors began to understand that the planet had reacquired a future, however strange that future might turn out to be. For our generation it was a stunning reversal. The mantle of extinction had fallen from our shoulders; what would we do without it? What would we do, now that we were no longer doomed but merely mortal?
We saw the video footage from the Indian Ocean of the monstrous structure that had embedded itself in the skin of the planet, seawater still boiling to steam where it came into contact with the enormous pillars. The Arch, people began to call it, or the Archway, not only because of its shape but. because ships at sea had returned to port with stories of lost navigational beacons, peculiar weather, spinning compasses, and a wild coastline where no continent should have been. Various navies were promptly dispatched. Jason's testament hinted at the explanation, but only a few people had the advantage of having heard it—myself, Diane, and the dozen or so who had received it in the mail.
She began to exercise a little every day, jogging a dirt path behind the motel as the weather cooled, coming back with the scent of fallen leaves and woodsmoke in her hair. Her appetite improved, and so did the menu in the coffee shop. Food delivery had been restored; the domestic economy was creaking back into motion.
We learned that Mars, too, had been un-Spun. Signals had passed between the two planets; President Lomax, in one of his rally-'round-the-flag speeches, even hinted that the manned space program would be resumed, a first step toward establishing ongoing relations with what he called (with suspicious exuberance) "our sister planet."
We talked about the past. We talked about the future.
What we did not do was fall into each other's arms.
We knew each other too well, or not well enough. We had a past but no present. And Diane was wracked with anxiety by Simon's disappearance outside Manassas.
"He very nearly let you die," I reminded her.
"Not intentionally. He's not vicious. You know that."
"Then he's dangerously naive."
Diane closed her eyes meditatively. Then she said, "There's a phrase Pastor Bob Kobel liked to use back at Jordan Tabernacle. 'His heart cried out to God.' If it describes anyone, it describes Simon. But you have to parse the sentence. 'His heart cried out'—I think that's all of us, it's universal. You, Simon, me, Jason. Even Carol. Even E.D. When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it's a shout of joy: I think that's what it was for Jason; I think that's what I didn't understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it's a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence." She brushed her hair away from her forehead and I saw that her arm, which had been so perilously thin, was round and strong once more. "I think the cry that rose up from Simon's heart was the purest human sound in the world. But no, he's not a good judge of character; yes, he's naive; which is why he cycled through so many styles of faith, New Kingdom, Jordan Tabernacle, the Condon ranch… anything, as long as it was plainspoken and addressed the need for human significance."
"Even if it killed you?"
"I didn't say he's wise. I'm saying he's not wicked." Later I came to recognize this kind of discourse: she was talking like a Fourth. Detached but engaged. Intimate but objective. I didn't dislike it, but it made the hair on my neck stand up from time to time.
* * * * *
Not long after I declared her completely healthy Diane told me she wanted to leave. I asked her where she meant to go.
She had to find Simon, she said. She had to "settle things," one way or another. They were, after all, still married. It mattered to her whether he had lived or died.
I reminded her she didn't have money to spend or a place of her own to stay. She said she'd get by somehow. So I gave her one of the credit cards Jason had supplied me, along with a warning that I couldn't guarantee it—I had no idea who was paying the premium, what the credit limit might be, or whether someone might eventually track it to her.
She asked how she could get in touch with me.
"Just call," I said. She had my number, the number I had paid for and preserved these many years, attached to a phone I had carried even though it seldom rang.
Then I drove her to the local bus depot, where she vanished into a crowd of displaced tourists who had been stranded by the end of the Spin.
* * * * *
The phone rang six months later, when the newspapers were still running banner headlines about "the new world" and the cable channels had begun to carry video footage of a rocky, wild headland "somewhere across the Archway."
By this time hundreds of vessels large and small had made the crossing. Some were big-science expeditions, I.G.Y. and U.N. sanctioned, with American naval escorts and embedded press pools. Some were private charters. Some were fishing trawlers, which came back to port with their holds full of a catch that could pass for cod in a dim light. This was, of course, strictly forbidden, but "arch cod" had infiltrated every major Asian market by the time the ban came down. It proved to be edible and nutritious. Which was, as Jase might have said, a clue: when the fish were subjected to DNA analysis their genome suggested a remote terrestrial ancestry. The new world was not merely hospitable, it seemed to have been stocked with humanity in mind.
"I found Simon," Diane said.
"And?"
"He's living in a trailer park outside Wilmington. He picks up a little money doing household repairs—bikes, toasters, that kind of thing. Otherwise he collects welfare and attends a little Pentecostal church."
"Was he happy to see you?"
"He wouldn't stop apologizing for what happened at the Condon ranch. He said he wanted to make it up to me. He asked if there was anything he could do to make my life easier."
I gripped the phone a little more tightly. "What did you tell him?"
"That I wanted a divorce. He agreed. And he said something else. He said I'd changed, that there was something different about me. He couldn't put his finger on it. But I don't think he liked it."
A whiff of brimstone, perhaps.
"Tyler?" Diane said. "Have I changed that much?"
"Everything changes," I said.
* * * * *
Her next important call came a year later. I was in Montreal, thanks in part to Jason's counterfeit ID, waiting for my immigrant status to be officialized and assisting at an outpatient clinic in Outremont.
Since my last conversation with Diane, the basic dynamics Of the Arch had been worked out. The facts were confounding to anyone who conceived of the Archway as a static machine or a simple "door," but look at it the way Jason had—as a complex, conscious entity capable of perceiving and manipulating events within its domain—and it made more sense.
Two worlds had been connected through the Arch, but only for manned ocean vessels transiting from the south.
Consider what that means. For a breeze, an ocean current, or a migrant bird the Arch was nothing more than a couple of fixed pillars between the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. They all moved unimpeded around and through the Arch space, as did any ship traveling from north to south.
But cross the equator by ship from the south at ninety degrees east of Greenwich and you'd find yourself looking back at the Arch from an unknown sea under a strange sky, untold light-years from the Earth.
In the city of Madras an ambitious if not quite legal cruise service had produced a series of English-language posters announcing easy travel to friendly planet! Interpol closed the business down—the U.N. was still trying to regulate passage in those days—but the posters had it just about right. How could such things be? Ask the Hypotheticals.
Diane's divorce had been finalized, she told me, but she was out of work and out of prospects. "I thought if I could join you…" She sounded tentative and not at all like a Fourth, or what I imagined a Fourth ought to sound like. "If that would be all right. Frankly I need a little help. Finding a place and, you know, getting settled."
So I arranged a clinic job for her and submitted the immigration paperwork. She joined me in Montreal that autumn.
* * * * *
It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned (or semi-Martian, perhaps), during which Diane and I discovered each other in wholly new ways. We were no longer straitjacketed by the Spin nor were we children blindly seeking solace. We fell in love, finally, as adults.
These were the years when the global population topped out at eight billion. Most of that growth had been funneled into the expanding megacities: Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, coastal China; Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo; Caracas, La Paz, Tegucigalpa—all the firelit, smog-shrouded warrens of the world. It would have taken a dozen Archways to dent that population growth, but crowding drove a steady wave of emigrants, refugees, and "pioneers," many of them packed into the cargo compartments of illegal vessels and more than a few of them delivered to the shores of Port Magellan already dead or dying.
Port Magellan was the first named settlement in the new world. By now much of that world had been at least crudely mapped, largely by air. Port Magellan was at the eastern tip of a continent some were calling "Equatoria." There was a second and even larger land mass ("Borea") that straddled the northern pole and extended into the temperate zone of the planet. The southern seas were rich with islands and archipelagos.
The climate was benign, the air was fresh, the gravity was 95.5 percent of Earth's. Both continents were bread-baskets-in-waiting. The seas and rivers teemed with fish. The legend circulating in the slums of Douala and Kabul was that you could pick dinner from the giant trees of Equatoria and sleep among their sheltering roots.
You couldn't. Port Magellan was a U.N. enclave policed by soldiers. The shantytowns that had grown up around it were un-governed and unsafe. But functional fishing villages dotted the coastline for hundreds of miles; there were tourist hotels under construction around the lagoons of Reach Bay and Aussie Harbor; and the prospect of free fertile land had driven settlers inland along the White and New Irrawaddi river valleys.
But the most momentous news from the new world that year was the discovery of the second Arch. It was located half a world away from the first, near the southern reaches of the boreal land mass, and beyond it there was yet another new world—this one, according to first reports, a little less inviting; or maybe it was just the rainy season there.
* * * * *
"There must be other people like me," Diane said, five years into the post-Spin era. "I'd like to meet them."
I had given her my copy of the Martian archives, a first-pass translation on a set of memory cards, and she had pored over them with the same intensity she'd once brought to Victorian poetry and New Kingdom tracts.
If Jason's work had been successful, then, yes, there were surely other Fourths on Earth. But announcing their presence would have been a first-class ticket to a federal penitentiary. The Lomax administration had put a national security lid on all things Martian, and Lomax's domestic security agencies had been granted sweeping police powers in the economic crises that followed the end of the Spin.
"Do you ever think about it?" she asked, a little shyly.
Becoming a Fourth myself, she meant. Injecting into my arm a measured dose of clear liquid from one of the vials I kept in a steel safe at the back of our bedroom closet. Of course I'd thought about it. It would have made us more alike.
But did I want that? I was aware of the invisible space, the gap between her Fourthness and my unmodified humanity, but I wasn't afraid of it. Some nights, looking into her solemn eyes, I even treasured it. It was the canyon that defined the bridge, and the bridge we had built was pleasing and strong.
She stroked my hand, her smooth fingers on my textured skin, a subtle reminder that time never stood still, that one day I might need the treatment even if I didn't especially want it.
"Not yet," I said.
"When?"
"When I'm ready."
* * * * *
President Lomax was succeeded by President Hughes and then by President Chaykin, but they were all veterans of the same Spin-era politics. They saw Martian biotech as the new atomic bomb, at least potentially, and for now it was all theirs, a proprietary threat. Lomax's first diplomatic dispatch to the government of the Five Republics had been a request to withhold biotech information from uncoded Martian broadcasts to Earth. He had justified the request with plausible arguments about the effect such technology might have on a politically divided and often violent world—he cited the death of Wun Ngo Wen as an example—and so far the Martians had been playing along.
But even this sanitized contact with Mars had sewn some discord. The egalitarian economics of the Five Republics had made Wun Ngo Wen a sort of posthumous mascot to the new global labor movement. (It was jarring to see Wun's face on placards carried by garment workers in Asian factory zones or chipsocket fillers from Central American maquiladoras— but I doubt it would have displeased him.)
* * * * *
Diane crossed the border to attend E.D.'s funeral eleven years almost to the day after I rescued her from the Condon ranch.
We had heard of his death in the news. The obituary mentioned in passing that E.D.'s ex-wife Carol had predeceased him by six months, another sad shock. Carol had stopped taking our calls almost a decade ago. Too dangerous, she said. It was enough just knowing we were safe. And there was nothing, really, to say.
(Diane visited her mother's grave while she was in D.C. What saddened her the most, she said, was that Carol's life had been so incomplete: a verb without an object, an anonymous letter, misunderstood for the want of a signature. "I don't miss her as much as I miss what she might have been.")
At E.D.'s memorial service Diane was careful not to identify herself. Too many of E.D.'s government cronies were present, including the attorney general and the sitting vice president. But her attention was drawn to an anonymous woman in the pews, who was sneaking reciprocal glances at Diane: "I knew she was a Fourth," Diane said. "I can't say exactly how. The way she held herself, the sort of ageless look she had—but more than that; it was like a signal went back and forth between us." And when the ceremony was over Diane approached the woman and asked how she had known E.D.
"I didn't know him," the woman said, "not really. I did a research stint at Perihelion at one time, back in Jason Lawton's day. My name is Sylvia Tucker."
The name rang a bell when Diane repeated it to me. Sylvia Tucker was one of the anthropologists who had worked with Wun Ngo Wen at the Florida compound. She had been friendlier than most of the hired academics and it was possible Jase had confided in her.
"We exchanged e-mail addresses," Diane said. "Neither of us said the word 'Fourth.' But we both knew. I'm certain of it."
No correspondence ensued, but every once in a while Diane received digital press clippings from Sylvia Tucker's address, concerning, for instance:
An industrial chemist in Denver arrested on a security writ and detained indefinitely.
A geriatric clinic in Mexico City closed by federal order.
A University of California sociology professor killed in a fire, "arson suspected."
And so on.
I had been careful not to keep a list of the names and addresses to which Jason had addressed his final packages, nor had I memorized them. But some of the names in the articles seemed plausibly familiar.
"She's telling us they're being hunted," Diane said. "The government is hunting Fourths."
We spent a month debating what we would do if we attracted the same kind of attention. Given the global security apparatus Lomax and his heirs had set up, where would we run?
But there was really only one plausible answer. Only one place where the apparatus failed to operate and where the surveillance was wholly blind. So we made our plans—these passports, that bank account, this route through Europe to South Asia—and set them aside until we needed them.
Then Diane received a final communication from Sylvia Tucker, a single word:
Go, it said.
And we went.
* * * * *
On the last flight of the trip, coming into Sumatra by air, Diane said, "Are you sure you want to do this?"
I had made the decision days ago, during a layover in Amsterdam, when we were still worried that we might have been followed, that our passports might have been flagged, that our supply of Martian pharmaceuticals might yet be confiscated.
"Yes," I said. "Now. Before we cross over."
"Are you sure?"
"As sure as I'll ever be."
No, not sure. But willing. Willing, finally, to lose what might be lost, willing to embrace what might be gained.
So we rented a room on the third floor of a colonial-style hotel in Padang where we wouldn't be noticed for a while. We all fall, I told myself, and we all land somewhere.
Half an hour before the transit of the Arch, an hour after dark, we came across En in the crew dining room. One of the crewmen had given him a sheet of brown paper and a few stubby crayons to keep him busy.
He seemed relieved to see us. He was worried about the transit, he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose—wincing when his thumb brushed the bruise Jala had left on his cheek—and asked me what it would be like.
"I don't know," I said. "I've never crossed."
"Will we know when it happens?"
"According to the crew, the sky gets a little strange. And just when the crossing happens, when we're balanced between the old world and the new world, the compass needle swings around, north for south. And on the bridge they sound the ship's horn. You'll know."
"Traveling a long way," En said. "In a short time."
That was undeniably true. The Arch—our "side" of it, anyway—had been physically dragged across interstellar space, presumably at something less than the speed of light, before it was dropped from orbit. But the Hypotheticals had had eons of Spin time to do the dragging. They could conceivably have bridged any distance shy of three billion light-years. And even a fraction of that would be a numbing, barely comprehensible distance.
"Makes you wonder," Diane said, "why they went to so much trouble."
"According to Jason—"
"I know. The Hypotheticals want to preserve us from extinction, so we can make something more complex of ourselves. But it just begs the question. Why do they want that? What do they expect from us?"
En ignored our philosophizing. "And after we cross—"
"After that," I told him, "it's a day's cruise to Port Magellan."
He smiled at the prospect.
I exchanged a look with Diane. She had introduced herself to En two days ago and they were already friends. She had been reading to him from a book of English children's stories out of the ship's library. (She had even quoted Housman to him: The infant child is not aware … "I don't like that one," En had said.)
He showed us his drawing, pictures of animals he must have seen in video footage from the plains of Equatoria, long-necked beasts with pensive eyes and tiger-striped coats.
"They're beautiful," Diane said.
En nodded solemnly. We left him to his work and headed up on deck.
* * * * *
The night sky was clear and the peak of the Arch was directly overhead now, reflecting a last glimmer of light. It showed no curvature at all. From this angle it was a pure Euclidean line, an elementary number (1) or noun (I).
We stood by the railing as close as we could get to the prow of the ship. Wind tugged at our clothes and hair. The ship's flags snapped briskly and a restless sea gave back fractured images of the ship's running lights.
"Do you have it?" Diane asked.
She meant the tiny vial containing a sample of Jason's ashes. We had planned this ceremony—if you could call it a ceremony—long before we left Montreal. Jason had never put much faith in memorials, but I think he would have approved of this one. "Right here." I took the ceramic tube out of my vest pocket and held it in my left hand.
"I miss him," Diane said. "I miss him constantly." She nestled into my shoulder and I put an arm around her. "I wish I'd known him as a Fourth. But I don't suppose it changed him much—"
"It didn't."
"In some ways Jase was always a Fourth."
As we approached the moment of transit the stars seemed to dim, as if some gauzy presence had enclosed the ship. I opened the tube that contained Jason's ashes. Diane put her free hand on mine.
The wind shifted suddenly and the temperature dropped a degree or two.
"Sometimes," she said, "when I think about the Hypotheticals, I'm afraid…"
"What?"
"That we're their red calf. Or what Jason hoped the Martians would be. That they expect us to save them from something. Something they're afraid of."
Maybe so. But then, I thought, we'll do what life always does—defy expectations.
I felt a shiver pass through her body. Above us, the line of the Arch grew fainter. Haze settled over the sea. Except it wasn't haze in the ordinary sense. It wasn't weather at all.
The last glimmer of the Arch disappeared and so did the horizon. On the bridge of the Capetown Maru the compass must have begun its rotation; the captain sounded the ship's horn, a brutally loud noise, the bray of outraged space. I looked up. The stars swirled together dizzyingly.
"Now," Diane shouted into the noise.
I leaned across the steel rail, her hand on mine, and we upended the vial. Ashes spiraled in the wind, caught in the ship's lights like snow. They vanished before they hit the turbulent black water—scattered, I want to believe, into the void we were invisibly traversing, the stitched and oceanless place between the stars.
Diane leaned into my chest and the sound of the horn beat through our bodies like a pulse until at last it stopped.
Then she lifted her head. "The sky," she said.
The stars were new and strange.
* * * * *
In the morning we all came up on deck, all of us: En, his parents, Ibu Ina, the other passengers, even Jala and a number of off-duty crewmen, to scent the air and feel the heat of the new world.
It could have been Earth, by the color of the sky and the heat of the sunlight. The headland of Port Magellan had appeared as a jagged line on the horizon, a rocky promontory and a few lines of pale smoke rising vertically and tailing to the west in a higher wind.
Ibu Ina joined us at the railing, En in tow.
"It looks so familiar," Ina said. "But it feels so different."
Clumps of coiled weeds drifted in our wake, liberated from the mainland of Equatoria by storms or tides, huge eight-fingered leaves limp on the surface of the water. The Arch was behind us now, no longer a door out but a door back in, a different sort of door altogether.
Ina said, "It's as if one history has ended and another has begun."
En disagreed. "No," he said solemnly, leaning into the wind as if he could will the future forward. "History doesn't start until we land."
I invented a couple of diseases for dramatic purposes in Spin. CVWS is an imaginary cattle-borne disease with no real-world counterpart. AMS is also wholly imaginary, but its symptoms mimic the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, unfortunately a very real disease. Although MS is not yet curable, a number of promising new therapies have been introduced or are on the horizon. Science fiction novels shouldn't be mistaken for medical journals, however. For readers concerned about MS, one of the best Web sources is www.nationalmssociety.org.
The future I extrapolated for Sumatra and the Minangkabau people is also very much my own invention, but the matrilineal Minangkabau culture, and its coexistence with modern Islam, has attracted the attention of anthropologists—see Peggy Reeves Sanday's study, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.
Readers interested in current scientific thought about the evolution and future of the solar system might want to check out The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee or Our Cosmic Origins by Armand Delsemme for information not refracted through the lens of science fiction.
And once again, of all the folks who helped make possible the writing of this book (and I thank them all), the MVP award goes to my wife, Sharry.
Version Information
October 2006: v1.0 Spell checked, formatted, most major errors removed.
November 2006: v2.0 Full read through, some broken paragraphs joined and more OCR errors fixed. The text should now be 99.9% true to the treeware.