Spin

4X109 A.D.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere. 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.

Nine hundred euros a night bought us privacy and a balcony view of the Indian Ocean. During pleasant weather, and there had been no shortage of that over the last few days, we could see the nearest part of the Archway: a cloud-colored vertical line that rose from the horizon and vanished, still rising, into blue haze. As impressive as this seemed, only a fraction of the whole structure was visible from the west coast of Sumatra. The Archway's far leg descended to the undersea peaks of the Carpenter Ridge more than a thousand kilometers away, spanning the Mentawai Trench like a wedding band dropped edge-up into a shallow pond. On dry land, it would have reached from Bombay on the eastern coast of India to Madras on the west. Or, say, very roughly, New York to Chicago.

Diane had spent most of the afternoon on the balcony, sweating in the shade of a faded striped umbrella. The view fascinated her, and I was pleased and relieved that she was— after everything that had happened—still capable of taking such pleasure in it.

I joined her at sunset. Sunset was the best time. A freighter heading down the coast to the port of Teluk Bayur became a necklace of lights in the offshore blackness, effortlessly gliding. The near leg of the Arch gleamed like a burnished red nail pinning sky to sea. We watched the Earth's shadow climb the pillar as the city grew dark.

It was a technology, in the famous quotation, "indistinguishable from magic." What else but magic would allow the uninterrupted flow of air and sea from the Bay of Bengal to the Indian Ocean but would transport a surface vessel to far stranger ports? What miracle of engineering permitted a structure with a radius of a thousand kilometers to support its own weight? What was it made of, and how did it do what it did?

Perhaps only Jason Lawton could have answered those questions. But Jason wasn't with us.

Diane slouched in a deck chair, her yellow sundress and comically wide straw hat reduced by the gathering darkness to geometries of shadow. Her skin was clear, smooth, nut brown. Her eyes caught the last light very fetchingly, but her look was still wary—that hadn't changed.

She glanced up at me. "You've been fidgeting all day."

"I'm thinking of writing something," I said. "Before it starts. Sort of a memoir."

"Afraid of what you might lose? But that's unreasonable, Tyler. It's not like your memory's being erased."

No, not erased; but potentially blurred, softened, defocused. The other side effects of the drug were temporary and endurable, but the possibility of memory loss terrified me.

"Anyway," she said, "the odds are in your favor. You know that as well as anyone. There is a risk… but it's only a risk, and a pretty minor one at that."

And if it had happened in her case maybe it had been a blessing.

"Even so," I said. "I'd feel better writing something down."

"If you don't want to go ahead with this you don't have to. You'll know when you're ready."

"No, I want to do it." Or so I told myself.

"Then it has to start tonight."

"I know. But over the next few weeks—"

"You probably won't feel like writing."

"Unless I can't help myself." Graphomania was one of the less alarming of the potential side effects.

"See what you think when the nausea hits." She gave me a consoling smile. "I guess we all have something we're afraid to let go of."

It was a troubling comment, one I didn't want to think about. "Look," I said, "maybe we should just get started." The air smelled tropical, tinged with chlorine from the hotel pool three stories down. Padang was a major international port these days, full of foreigners: Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, even stray Americans like Diane and me, folks who couldn't afford luxury transit and weren't qualified for U.N. approved resettlement programs. It was a lively but often lawless city, especially since the New Reformasi had come to power in Jakarta.

But the hotel was secure and the stars were out in all their scattered glory. The peak of the Archway was the brightest thing in the sky now, a delicate silver letter U (Unknown, Unknowable) written upside down by a dyslexic God. I held Diane's hand while we watched it fade.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked.

"The last time I saw the old constellations." Virgo, Leo, Sagittarius: the astrologer's lexicon, reduced to footnotes in a history book.

"They would have been different from here, though, wouldn't they? The southern hemisphere?" I supposed they would.

Then, in the full darkness of the night, we went back into the room. I switched on the room lights while Diane pulled the blinds and unpacked the syringe and ampoule kit I had taught her to use. She filled the sterile syringe, frowned and tapped out a bubble. She looked professional, but her hand was trembling. I took off my shirt and stretched out on the bed.

"Tyler—"

Suddenly she was the reluctant one. "No second thoughts," I said. "I know what I'm getting into. And we've talked this through a dozen times."

She nodded and swabbed the inside of my elbow with alcohol. She held the syringe in her right hand, point up. The small quantity of fluid in it looked as innocent as water.

"That was a long time ago," she said.

"What was?"

"When we looked at the stars that time."

"I'm glad you haven't forgotten."

"Of course I haven't forgotten. Now make a fist."

The pain was trivial. At least at first.

THE BIG HOUSE

I was twelve, and the twins were thirteen, the night the stars disappeared from the sky.

It was October, a couple of weeks before Halloween, and the three of us had been ordered to the basement of the Lawton house—the Big House, we called it—for the duration of an adults-only social event.

Being confined to the basement wasn't any kind of punishment. Not for Diane and Jason, who spent much of their time there by choice; certainly not for me. Their father had announced a strictly defined border between the adults' and the children's zones of the house, but we had a high-end gaming platform, movies on disk, even a pool table… and no adult supervision apart from one of the regular caterers, a Mrs. Truall, who came downstairs every hour or so to dodge canape duty and give us updates on the party. (A man from Hewlett-Packard had disgraced himself with the wife of a Post columnist. There was a drunken senator in the den.) All we lacked, Jason said, was silence (the upstairs system was playing dance music that came through the ceiling like an ogre's heartbeat) and a view of the sky.

Silence and a view: Jase, typically, had decided he wanted both.

Diane and Jason had been born minutes apart but were obviously fraternal rather than identical siblings; no one but their mother called them twins. Jason used to say they were the product of "dipolar sperm penetrating oppositely charged eggs." Diane, whose IQ was nearly as impressive as Jason's but who kept her vocabulary on a shorter leash, compared them to "different prisoners who escaped from the same cell."

I was in awe of them both.

Jason, at thirteen, was not only scary-smart but physically fit—not especially muscular but vigorous and often successful at track and field. He was nearly six feet tall even then, skinny, his gawky face redeemed by a lopsided and genuine smile. His hair, in those days, was blond and wiry.

Diane was five inches shorter, plump only by comparison with her brother, and darker skinned. Her complexion was clear except for the freckles that ringed her eyes and gave her a hooded look: My raccoon mask, she used to say. What I liked most about Diane—and I had reached an age when these details had taken on a poorly understood but undeniable significance—was her smile. She smiled rarely but spectacularly. She was convinced her teeth were too prominent (she was wrong), and she had picked up the habit of covering her mouth when she laughed. I liked to make her laugh, but it was her smile I secretly craved.

Last week Jason's father had given him a pair of expensive astronomical binoculars. He had been fidgeting with them all evening, taking sightings on the framed travel poster over the TV, pretending to spy on Cancun from the suburbs of Washington, until at last he stood up and said, "We ought to go look at the sky."

"No," Diane said promptly. "It's cold out there."

"But clear. It's the first clear night this week. And it's only chilly."

"There was ice on the lawn this morning."

"Frost," he countered.

"It's after midnight."

"It's Friday night."

"We're not supposed to leave the basement."

"We're not supposed to disturb the party. Nobody said anything about going outside. Nobody will see us, if you're afraid of getting caught."

"I'm not afraid of getting caught."

"So what are you afraid of?"

"Listening to you babble while my feet freeze."

Jason turned to me. "How about you, Tyler? Want to see some sky?"

The twins often asked me to referee their arguments, much to my discomfort. It was a no-win proposition. If I sided with Jason I might alienate Diane; but if I sided too often with Diane it would look… well, obvious. I said, "I don't know, Jase, it is pretty chilly outside…"

It was Diane who let me off the hook. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Never mind. I suppose a little fresh air is better than listening to him complain."

So we grabbed our jackets from the basement hallway and left by the back door.

The Big House wasn't as grandiose as our nickname for it implied, but it was larger than the average home in this middling-high-income neighborhood and it sat on a bigger parcel of land. A great rolling expanse of manicured lawn gave way, behind it, to an uncultivated stand of pines bordering a mildly polluted creek. Jason chose a spot for stargazing halfway between the house and the woods.

The month of October had been pleasant until yesterday, when a cold front had broken the back of Indian summer. Diane made a show of hugging her ribs and shivering, but that was only to chastise Jason. The night air was merely cool, not unpleasant. The sky was crystalline and the grass was reasonably dry, though there might be frost again by morning. No moon and not a trace of cloud. The Big House was lit up like a Mississippi steamboat and cast its fierce yellow glare across the lawn, but we knew from experience that on nights like this, if you stood in the shadow of a tree, you'd disappear as absolutely as if you had fallen into a black hole.

Jason lay on his back and aimed his binoculars at the starry sky.

I sat cross-legged next to Diane and watched as she took from her jacket pocket a cigarette, probably stolen from her mother. (Carol Lawton, a cardiologist and nominal ex-smoker, kept packs of cigarettes secreted in her dresser, her desk, a kitchen drawer. My mother had told me this.) She put it to her lips and lit it with a translucent red lighter—the flame was momentarily the brightest thing around—and exhaled a plume of smoke that swirled briskly into the darkness.

She caught me watching her. "You want a drag?"

"He's twelve years old," Jason said. "He has enough problems. He doesn't need lung cancer."

"Sure," I said. It was a point of honor now.

Diane, amused, passed me the cigarette. I inhaled tentatively and managed not to choke.

She took it back. "Don't get carried away."

"Tyler," Jason said, "do you know anything about the stars?"

I gulped a lungful of cold, clean air. "Of course I do."

"I don't mean what you learn from reading those paperbacks. Can you name any stars?"

I was blushing, but I hoped it was dark enough that he couldn't see. "Arcturus," I said. "Alpha Centauri. Sirius. Polaris…"

"And which one," Jason asked, "is the Klingon homeworld?"

"Don't be mean," Diane said.

Both the twins were precociously intelligent. I was no dummy, but they were out of my league, and we all understood that. They attended a school for exceptional children; I rode the bus to public school. It was one of the several obvious distinctions between us. They lived in the Big House, I lived with my mother in the bungalow at the east end of the property; their parents pursued careers, my mother cleaned house for them. Somehow we managed to acknowledge these differences without making a big deal of it.

"Okay," Jason said, "can you point at Polaris?"

Polaris, the North Star. I had been reading about slavery and the civil war. There had been a fugitive slave song:

When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,

Follow the Drinking Gourd.

The old man is waiting to carry you to freedom

When you follow the Drinking Gourd.

"When the sun comes back" meant after the winter solstice. Quail winter in the south. The gourd was the Big Dipper, wide end of the bowl pointed at Polaris, due north, the direction of freedom: I found the Dipper and waved my hand hopefully in that direction.

"See?" Diane said to Jason, as if I had proved a point in some argument they hadn't bothered to share with me.

"Not bad," Jason allowed. "You know what a comet is?"

"Yes."

"Want to see one?"

I nodded and stretched out next to him, still tasting and regretting the acrid tang of Diane's cigarette. Jason showed me how to brace my elbows on the ground, then let me hold the binoculars to my eyes and adjust the focus until the stars became blurred ovals and then pinpricks, many more than I could see with the naked eye. I panned around until I found, or guessed I had found, the spot to which Jason had directed me: a tiny node of phosphorescence against the merciless black sky.

"A comet—" Jason began.

"I know. A comet is a sort of dusty snowball falling toward the sun."

"You could say that." He was scornful. "Do you know where comets come from, Tyler? They come from the outer solar system—from a kind of icy halo around the sun that reaches from the orbit of Pluto halfway to the nearest star. Out where it's colder than you can possibly imagine."

I nodded, a little uncomfortably. I had read enough science fiction to grasp the sheer, unspeakable largeness of the night sky. It was something I sometimes liked to think about, though it could be—at the wrong time of night, when the house was quiet—a little intimidating.

"Diane?" Jason said. "You want to look?"

"Do I have to?"

"No, of course you don't have to. You can sit there fumigating your lungs and drooling, if you prefer."

"Smartass." She stubbed the cigarette into the grass and held out her hand. I passed over the binoculars.

"Just be careful with those." Jase was deeply in love with his binoculars. They still smelled of shrinkwrap and Styro-foam packing.

She adjusted the focus and looked up. She was silent for a time. Then she said, "You know what I see when I use these things to look at the stars?"

"What?"

"Same old stars."

"Use your imagination." He sounded genuinely annoyed.

"If I can use my imagination why do I need binoculars?"

"I mean, think about what you're looking at."

"Oh," she said. Then: "Oh. Oh! Jason, I see—"

"What?"

"I think… yes… it's God! And he has a long white beard! And he's holding up a sign! And the sign says… JASON SUCKS!"

"Very funny. Give them back if you don't know how to use them."

He held out his hand; she ignored him. She sat upright and aimed the binoculars at the windows of the Big House.

The party had been going on since late that afternoon. My mother had told me the Lawtons' parties were "expensive bull sessions for corporate bigshots," but she had a finely honed sense of hyperbole, so you had to take that down a notch or two. Most of the guests, Jason had said, were aerospace up-and-comers or political staffers. Not old Washington society, but well-heeled newcomers with western roots and defense-industry connections. E. D. Lawton, Jason and Diane's father, hosted one of these events every three or four months.

"Business as usual," Diane said from behind the twin ovals of the binoculars. "First floor, dancing and drinking. More drinking than dancing at this point. It looks like the kitchen's closing up, though. I think the caterers are getting ready to go home. Curtains pulled in the den. E.D.'s in the library with a couple of suits. Ew! One of them is smoking a cigar."

"Your disgust is unconvincing," Jason said. "Ms. Marlboro."

She went on cataloguing the visible windows while Jason scooted over next to me. "Show her the universe," he whispered, "and she'd rather spy on a dinner party."

I didn't know how to respond to that. Like so much of what Jason said, it sounded witty and more clever than anything I could come up with.

"My bedroom," Diane said. "Empty, thank God. Jason's bedroom, empty except for the copy of Penthouse under the mattress—"

"They're good binoculars, but not that good."

"Carol and E.D.'s bedroom, empty; the spare bedroom…"

"Well?"

But Diane said nothing. She sat very still with the binoculars against her eyes.

"Diane?" I said.

She was silent for a few seconds more. Then she shuddered, turned, and tossed—threw—the binoculars back at Jason, who protested but didn't seem to grasp that Diane had seen something disturbing. I was about to ask her if she was all right—

When the stars disappeared.

* * * * *

It wasn't much.

People often say that, people who saw it happen. It wasn't much. It really wasn't, and I speak as a witness: I had been watching the sky while Diane and Jason bickered. There was nothing but a moment of odd glare that left an afterimage of the stars imprinted on my eyes in cool green phosphorescence. I blinked. Jason said, "What was that? Lightning?" And Diane said nothing at all.

"Jason," I said, still blinking.

"What? Diane, I swear to God, if you cracked a lens on these things—"

"Shut up," Diane said.

And I said, "Stop it. Look. What happened to the stars?" They both turned their heads to the sky.

* * * * *

Of the three of us, only Diane was prepared to believe that the stars had actually "gone out"—that they had been extinguished like candles in a wind. That was impossible, Jason insisted: the light from those stars had traveled fifty or a hundred or a hundred million light-years, depending on the source; surely they had not all stopped shining in some infinitely elaborate sequence designed to appear simultaneous to Earthlings. Anyway, I pointed out, the sun was a star, too, and it was still shining, at least on the other side of the planet—wasn't it?

Of course it was. And if not, Jason said, we would all be frozen to death by morning.

So, logically, the stars were still shining but we couldn't see them. They were not gone but obscured: eclipsed. Yes, the sky had suddenly become an ebony blankness, but it was a mystery, not a catastrophe.

But another aspect of Jason's comment had lodged in my imagination. What if the sun actually had vanished? I pictured snow sifting down in perpetual darkness, and then, I guessed, the air itself freezing out in a different kind of snow, until all human civilization was buried under the stuff we breathe. Better, therefore, oh definitely better, to assume the stars had been "eclipsed." But by what?

"Well, obviously, something big. Something fast. You saw it happen, Tyler. Was it all at once or did something kind of move across the sky?"

I told him it looked like the stars had brightened and then blinked out, all at once.

"Fuck the stupid stars," Diane said. (I was shocked: fuck wasn't a word she customarily used, though Jase and I were pretty free with it now that both our ages had reached double digits. Many things had changed this summer.)

Jason heard the anxiety in her voice. "I don't think there's anything to be afraid of," he said, although he was clearly uneasy himself.

Diane just scowled. "I'm cold," she said.

So we decided to go back to the Big House and see if the news had made CNN or CNBC. The sky as we crossed the lawn was unnerving, utterly black, weightless but heavy, darker than any sky I had ever seen.

* * * * *

"We have to tell E.D.," Jason said.

"You tell him," Diane said.

Jase and Diane called their parents by their given names because Carol Lawton imagined she kept a progressive household. The reality was more complex. Carol was indulgent but not terribly involved in the twins' lives, while E.D. was systematically grooming an heir. That heir, of course, was Jason. Jason worshipped his father. Diane was afraid of him.

And I knew better than to show my face in the adult zone at the boozy tag-end of a Lawton social event; so Diane and I hovered in the demilitarized zone behind a door while Jason found his father in an adjoining room. We couldn't hear the resulting conversation in any detail, but there was no mistaking E.D.'s tone of voice—aggrieved, impatient, and short-tempered. Jason came back to the basement red-faced and nearly crying, and I excused myself and headed for the back door.

Diane caught up with me in the hallway. She put her hand on my wrist as if to anchor us together. "Tyler," she said. "It will come up, won't it? The sun, I mean, in the morning. I know it's a stupid question. But the sun will rise, right?"

She sounded absolutely bereft. I started to say something flippant—we'll all be dead if it doesn't—but her anxiety prompted doubts of my own. What exactly had we seen, and what did it mean? Jason clearly hadn't been able to convince his father that anything important had happened in the night sky, so maybe we were scaring ourselves over nothing. But what if the world really was ending, and only we three knew it?

"We'll be okay," I said.

She regarded me through pickets of lank hair. "You believe that?"

I tried to smile. "Ninety percent."

"But you're going to stay up till morning, aren't you?"

"Maybe. Probably." I knew I didn't feel like sleeping.

She made a thumb-and-pinky gesture: "Can I call you later?"

"Sure."

"I probably won't sleep. And—I know this sounds dumb-in case I do, will you call me as soon as the sun comes up?"

I said I would.

"Promise?"

"Promise." I was thrilled that she'd asked.

* * * * *

The house where I lived with my mother was a neat clapboard bungalow on the east end of the Lawton property. A small rose garden fenced with pine rails braced the front steps—the roses themselves had bloomed well into the fall but had withered in the latest gush of cold air. On this moonless, cloudless, starless night, the porch light gleamed like a beacon.

I entered quietly. My mother had long since retreated to her bedroom. The small living room was tidy save for a single empty shotglass on the side table: she was a five-day teetotaler but took a little whiskey on the weekends. She used to say she had only two vices, and a drink on Saturday night was one of them. (Once, when I asked her what the other one was, she gave me a long look and said, "Your father." I didn't press the subject)

I stretched out on the empty sofa with a book and read until Diane called, less than an hour later. The first thing she said was, "Have you turned on the TV?"

"Should I?"

"Don't bother. There's nothing on."

"Well, you know, it is two in the morning."

"No, I mean absolutely nothing. There are infomercials on local cable, but nothing else. What does that mean, Tyler?"

What it meant was that every satellite in orbit had vanished along with the stars. Telecom, weather, military satellites, the GPS system: all of them had been shut down in the blink of an eye. But I didn't know any of that and I certainly couldn't have explained it to Diane. "It could mean anything."

"It's a little frightening."

"Probably nothing to worry about."

"I hope not. I'm glad you're still awake."

She called back an hour later with more news. The Internet was also missing in action, she said. And local TV had begun to report canceled morning flights out of Reagan and the regional airports, warning people to call ahead.

"But there have been jets flying all night." I'd seen their running lights from the bedroom window, false stars, fast-moving. "I guess military. It could be some terrorist thing."

"Jason's in his room with a radio. He's pulling in stations from Boston and New York. He says they're talking about military activity and airport lockdowns, but nothing about terrorism—and nothing about the stars."

"Somebody must have noticed."

"If they did they're not mentioning it. Maybe they have orders not to mention it. They haven't mentioned sunrise, either."

"Why would they? The sun's supposed to come up in, what, an hour? Which means it's already rising out over the ocean. Off the Atlantic coast. Ships at sea must have seen it. We'll see it, before long."

"I hope so." She sounded simultaneously frightened and embarrassed. "I hope you're right."

"You'll see."

"I like your voice, Tyler. Did I ever tell you that? You have a very reassuring voice."

Even if what I said was pure bullshit.

But the compliment affected me more than I wanted her to know. I thought about it after she hung up. I played it over in my head for the sake of the warm feeling it provoked. And I wondered what that meant. Diane was a year older than me and three times as sophisticated—so why did I feel so suddenly protective of her, and why did I wish she was close enough that I could touch her face and promise everything would be all right? It was a puzzle almost as urgent and nearly as disturbing as whatever had happened to the sky.

She called again at ten to five, when I had almost, despite myself, drifted off to sleep, fully dressed. I groped the phone out of my shirt pocket. "Hello?"

"Just me. It's still dark, Tyler."

I glanced at the window. Yes. Dark. Then the bedside clock. "Not quite sunrise, Diane."

"Were you asleep?"

"No."

"Yeah, you were. Lucky you. It's still dark. Cold, too. I looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen window. Thirty-five degrees. Should it be that cold?"

"It was that cold yesterday morning. Anyone else awake at your place?"

"Jason's locked in his room with his radio. My, uh, parents are, uh, I guess sleeping off the party. Is your mom awake?"

"Not this early. Not on a weekend." I cast a nervous glance at the window. Surely by this time there ought to be some light in the sky. Even a hint of daylight would have been reassuring.

"You didn't wake her up?"

"What's she going to do, Diane? Make the stars come back?"

"I guess not." She paused. "Tyler," she said.

"I'm still here."

"What's the first thing you remember?"

"What do you mean—today?"

"No. The first thing you can remember in your life. I know it's a stupid question, but I think I'll be okay if we can just talk about something else besides the sky for five or ten minutes."

"The first thing I remember?" I gave it some thought. "That would be back in L.A., before we moved east." When my father was still alive and still working for E. D. Lawton at their startup firm in Sacramento. "We had this apartment with big white curtains in the bedroom. The first thing I really remember is watching those curtains blow in the wind. It was a sunny day and the window was open and there was a breeze." The memory was unexpectedly poignant, like the last sight of a receding shoreline. "What about you?"

The first thing Diane could remember was also a Sacramento moment, though it was a very different one. E.D. had taken both children on a tour of the plant, even then positioning Jason for his role as heir apparent. Diane had been fascinated by the huge perforated spars on the factory floor, the spools of microthin aluminum fabric as big as houses, the constant noise. Everything had been so large that she had half expected to find a fairy-tale giant chained to the walls, her father's prisoner.

It wasn't a good memory. She said she felt left out, almost lost, abandoned inside a huge and terrifying machinery of construction.

We talked that around for a while. Then Diane said, "Check out the sky."

I looked at the window. There was enough light spilling over the western horizon to turn the blackness an inky blue.

I didn't want to confess to the relief I felt.

"I guess you were right," she said, suddenly buoyant. "The sun's coming up after all."

Of course, it wasn't really the sun. It was an impostor sun, a clever fabrication. But we didn't know that yet.

COMING OF AGE IN BOILING WATER

People younger than me have asked me: Why didn't you panic? Why didn't anyone panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?

Sometimes I say, But terrible things did happen.

Sometimes I say, But we didn't understand. And what could we have done about it?

And sometimes I cite the parable of the frog. Drop a frog into boiling water, he'll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, stoke the fire slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there's a problem.

The obliteration of the stars wasn't slow or subtle, but neither, for most of us, was it immediately disastrous. If you were an astronomer or a defense strategist, if you worked in telecommunications or aerospace, you probably spent the first few days of the Spin in a state of abject terror. But if you drove a bus or flipped burgers, it was all more or less warm water.

English-language media called it "the October Event" (it wasn't "the Spin" until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multi billion-dollar orbital satellite industry. Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weathersats. Repeated attempts to contact the International Space Station were uniformly unsuccessful. Commercial launches scheduled at Canaveral (and Baikonur and Kourou) were postponed indefinitely.

It meant, in the long run, very bad news for GE Americom, AT&T, COMSAT, and Hughes Communications, among many others.

And many terrible things did happen as a consequence of that night, though most of them were obscured by media blackouts. News stories traveled like whispers, squeezed through transatlantic fiber-optic cables rather than ricocheted through orbital space: it was almost a week before we learned that a Pakistani Hatf V missile tipped with a nuclear warhead, launched by mistake or miscalculation in the confusing first moments of the Event, had strayed off course and vaporized an agricultural valley in the Hindu Kush. It was the first nuclear device detonated in war since 1945, and, tragic as that event was, given the global paranoia ignited by the loss of telecommunications, we were lucky it only happened once. According to some reports we nearly lost Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Pyongyang.

* * * * *

Reassured by sunrise, I slept from dawn to noon. When I got up and dressed I found my mother in the living room, still in her quilted robe, staring into the television screen and frowning. When I asked her if she'd eaten breakfast she said she hadn't. So I fixed lunch for both of us.

She would have been forty-five years old that fall. If I had been asked to choose a word to describe her it might have been "solid." She was rarely angry and the only time in my life I had ever seen her cry was the night the police came to the door (this was back in Sacramento) and told her my father had died on the 80 near Vacaville, driving home from a business trip. She was, I think, careful to show me only this aspect of herself. But there were others. There was a portrait on a shelf in the etagere in the living room, taken years before I was born, of a woman so sleek, beautiful, and fearless before the camera that I had been startled when she told me it was a photo of herself.

Clearly she didn't like what she was hearing from TV. A local station was doing nonstop news, repeating shortwave and ham radio stories and fuzzy stay-calm statements issued by the federal government. "Tyler," she said, waving me to sit down, "this is hard to explain. Something happened last night—"

"I know," I said. "I heard about it before I went to bed."

"You knew about this? And you didn't wake me up?"

"I wasn't sure—"

But her annoyance waned as quickly as it had come. "No," she said, "it's all right, Ty. I guess I didn't miss anything by sleeping. It's funny… I feel like I'm still asleep."

"It's just the stars," I said, idiotically.

"The stars and the moon," she corrected me. "Didn't you hear about the moon? All over the world, nobody can see the stars and nobody can see the moon."

* * * * *

The moon was a clue, of course.

I sat awhile with my mom, then left her still fixed in front of the TV ("Back before dark this time," she said, meaning it) and walked to the Big House. I knocked at the back door, the door the cook and the day maid used, though the Lawtons were careful never to call it a "servant's entrance." It was also the door by which, on weekdays, my mother entered to conduct the Lawtons' household business.

Mrs. Lawton, the twins' mother, let me in, looked at me blankly, waved me upstairs. Diane was still asleep, the door of her room closed. Jason hadn't slept at all and apparently wasn't planning to. I found him in his room monitoring a short-wave radio.

Jason's room was an Aladdin's cave of luxuries I coveted but had given up expecting ever to own: a computer with an ultrafast ISP connection, a hand-me-down television twice as big as the one that graced the living room at my house. In case he hadn't heard the news: "The moon is gone," I told him.

"Interesting, isn't it?" Jase stood and stretched, running his fingers through his uncombed hair. He hadn't changed his clothes since last night. This was uncharacteristic absent-mindedness. Jason, although certifiably a genius, had never acted like one in my presence—that is to say, he didn't act like the geniuses I had seen in movies; he didn't squint, stammer, or write algebraic equations on walls. Today, though, he did seem massively distracted. "The moon's not gone, of course—how could it be? According to the radio they're measuring the usual tides on the Atlantic coast. So the moon's still there. And if the moon's still there, so are the stars."

"So why can't we see them?"

He gave me an annoyed look. "How should I know? All I'm saying is, it's at least partly an optical phenomenon."

"Look out the window, Jase. The sun's shining. What kind of optical illusion lets the sunshine through but hides the stars and the moon?"

"Again, how should I know? But what's the alternative, Tyler? Somebody put the moon and the stars in a sack and ran away with them?"

No, I thought. It was the Earth that was in the sack, for some reason not even Jason could divine.

"Good point, though," he said, "about the sun. Not an optical barrier but an optical filter. Interesting…"

"So who put it there?"

"How should I—?" He shook his head irritably. "You're inferring too much. Who says anybody put it there? It could be a once-in-a-billion-years natural event, like the magnetic poles reversing. It's a big jump to assume there's some controlling intelligence behind it."

"But it could be true."

"Lots of things could be true."

I had taken enough gentle ribbing about my science-fiction reading that I was reluctant to say the word "aliens." But of course it was the first thing that occurred to me. Me, and plenty of other people. And even Jason had to admit that the idea of intervening extraterrestrials had become infinitely more plausible over the course of the last twenty-four hours.

"But even so," I said, "you have to wonder why they'd do it."

"There are only two plausible reasons. To hide something from us. Or to hide us from something"

"What does your father think?"

"I haven't asked him. He's been on the phone all day. Probably trying to put in an early sell order on his GTE stock." This was a joke, and I wasn't sure what he meant by it, but it was also my first hint of what the loss of orbital access might mean for the aerospace industry in general and the Lawton family in particular. "I didn't sleep last night," Jase admitted. "Afraid I might miss something. Sometimes I envy my sister. You know, wake me when somebody figures it out."

I bristled at this perceived slight of Diane. "She didn't sleep either," I said.

"Oh? Really? And how would you know?"

Trapped. "We talked on the phone a little bit…"

"She called you?"

"Yeah, around dawn."

"Jesus, Tyler, you're blushing."

"No I'm not."

"Yes you are."

I was saved by a brusque knock at the door: E. D. Lawton, who looked like he hadn't slept much either.

Jason's father was an intimidating presence. He was big, broad shouldered, hard to please, easily angered; on weekends he moved through the house like a storm front, all lightning and thunder. My mother had once said, "E.D.'s not the kind of person you really want attention from. I never did understand why Carol married him."

He wasn't exactly the classic self-made businessman—his grandfather, retired founder of a spectacularly successful San Francisco law firm, had bankrolled most of E.D.'s early ventures—but he had built himself a lucrative business in high-altitude instrumentation and lighter-than-air technology, and he had done it the hard way, without any real industry connections, at least when he started out.

He entered Jason's room scowling. His eyes lit on me and flashed away. "Sorry, Tyler, but you'll have to go home now. I need to discuss a few things with Jason."

Jase didn't object and I wasn't especially eager to stay. So I shrugged into my cloth jacket and left by the back door. I spent the rest of the afternoon by the creek, skipping stones and watching squirrels forage against the coming winter.

* * * * *

The sun, the moon, and the stars.

In the years that followed, children were raised who had never seen the moon with their own eyes; people only five or six years younger than myself passed into maturity knowing the stars mainly from old movies and a handful of increasingly inapt cliches. Once, in my thirties, I played the twentieth-century Antonio Carlos Jobin song Corcovado— "Quiet nights of quiet stars"—for a younger woman, who asked me, eyes earnestly wide, "Were the stars noisy?"

But we had lost something more subtle than a few lights in the sky. We had lost a reliable sense of place. The Earth is round, the moon circles the Earth, the Earth circles the sun: that was as much cosmology as most people owned or wanted, and I doubt one in a hundred thought more about it after high school. But they were baffled when it was stolen from them.

We didn't get an official announcement about the sun until the second week of the October Event.

The sun appeared to move in its predictable and eternal manner. It rose and set according to the standard ephemeris, the days grew shorter in their natural precession; there was nothing to suggest a solar emergency. Much on Earth, including life itself, depends on the nature and amount of solar radiation reaching the planet's surface, and in most respects that hadn't changed. Everything about the sun we could see with the naked eye suggested the same yellow class-G star we'd been blinking at all our lives.

What it lacked, however, were sunspots, prominences, or flares.

The sun is a violent, turbulent object. It seethes, it boils, it rings like a bell with vast energies; it bathes the solar system in a stream of charged particles that would kill us if we weren't protected from it by the Earth's magnetic field. But since the October Event, astronomers announced, the sun had become a geometrically perfect orb of unwaveringly uniform and unblemished brightness. And news came from the north that the aurora borealis, product of the interaction of our magnetic field with all those charged solar particles, had shut down like a bad Broadway play.

Other lapses in the new night sky: no shooting stars. The Earth used to accrete eighty million pounds of spaceborne dust annually, the vast majority of it incinerated by atmospheric friction. But no more: no detectable meteorites entered the atmosphere during the first weeks of the October Event, not even the microscopic ones called Brownlee particles. It was, in astrophysical terms, a deafening silence.

Not even Jason could offer an explanation for that.

* * * * *

So the sun wasn't the sun; but it went on shining, counterfeit or not, and as the days passed, days layered and stacked on days, the bewilderment deepened but the sense of public urgency ebbed. (The water wasn't boiling, it was only warm.)

But what a rich source of talk it all was. Not just the celestial mystery but the immediate consequences of it: the telecom crash; the foreign wars no longer monitored and narrated by satellite; the GPS-guided smart bombs rendered irremediably stupid; the fiber-optic goldrush. Pronouncements were issued with depressing regularity from Washington: We have as yet no evidence of hostile intent on the part of any nation or agency and The best minds of our generation are working to understand, explain, and ultimately reverse the potential negative effects of this shroud that has obscured our view of the universe. Soothing word salad from an administration still hoping to identify an enemy, terrestrial or otherwise, capable of such an act. But the enemy was stubbornly elusive. People began to speak of "a hypothetical controlling intelligence." Unable to see past the walls of our prison, we were reduced to mapping its edges and corners.

Jason retreated to his room for most of a month after the Event. During this time I didn't speak to him directly, only caught glimpses of him when the twins were picked up by the Rice Academy minibus. But Diane called me on my cell almost every evening, usually around ten or eleven, when we could both count on a little privacy. And I treasured her calls, for reasons I wasn't quite ready to admit to myself.

"Jason's in a pissy mood," she told me one night. "He says if we don't know for sure if the sun is the sun, we don't really know anything at all."

"Maybe he's right."

"But it's almost a religious thing for Jase. He's always loved maps—did you know that, Tyler? Even when he was very little, he got the idea of how a map worked. He liked to know where he was. It makes sense of things, he used to say. God, I used to love to listen to him talk about maps. I think that's why he's so freaked now, even more than most people. Nothing's where it's supposed to be. He lost his map."

Of course, there were already clues in place. Before the week was out the military had begun to collect debris from fallen satellites—satellites that had been in stable orbits until that night in October but had plunged back to Earth before dawn, one and all, some leaving wreckage that was invested with tantalizing evidence. But it took time for that information to reach even the well-connected household of E. D. Lawton.

* * * * *

Our first winter of dark nights was claustrophobic and strange. Snow came early: we lived within commuting distance of Washington, D.C., but by Christmas it looked more like Vermont. The news remained ominous. A fragile, hastily brokered peace treaty between India and Pakistan teetered toward war and back again; the U.N.-sponsored decontamination project in the Hindu Kush had already cost dozens of lives in addition to the original casualties. In northern Africa, brushfire wars smoldered while the armies of the industrial world withdrew to regroup. Oil prices skyrocketed. At home, we kept the thermostat a couple of degrees under comfortable until the days began to grow longer (when the sun came back and the first quail called).

But in the face of unknown and poorly understood threats the human race managed not to trigger a full-blown global war, to our credit. We made our adjustments and got on with business, and by spring people were talking about "the new normal." In the long run, it was understood, we might have to pay a higher price for whatever had happened to the planet… but in the long run, as they say, we're all dead.

I saw the change in my mother. The passage of time calmed her and the warm weather, when it finally came, drew some of the tension from her face. And I saw the change in Jason, who came out of his meditative retreat. I worried, though, about Diane, who refused to talk about the stars at all and had lately begun to ask whether I believed in God— whether I thought God was responsible for what had happened in October.

I wouldn't know about that, I told her. My family weren't churchgoers. The subject made me a little nervous, frankly.

* * * * *

That summer the three of us rode our bikes to the Fairway Mall for the last time.

We had made the trip a hundred, a thousand times before. The twins were already getting a little old for it, but in the seven years we had all lived on the property of the Big House it had become a ritual, the summer-Saturday inevitable. We skipped it on rainy or swelteringly hot weekends, but when the weather was fine we were drawn as if by an invisible hand to our meeting point at the end of the long Lawton driveway.

Today the air was gentle and breezy and the sunlight infused everything it touched with a deep organic warmth. It was as if the climate wanted to reassure us: the natural world was doing all right, thank you, almost ten months after the Event… even if we were (as Jase occasionally said) a cultivated planet now, a garden tended by unknown forces rather than a patch of cosmic wildwood.

Jason rode an expensive mountain bike, Diane a less flashy girls' equivalent. My bike was a secondhand junker my mother had bought for me at a thrift shop. No matter. What was important was the piney tang of the air and the empty hours arrayed before of us. I felt it, Diane felt it, and I think Jason felt it, too, though he seemed distracted and even a little embarrassed when we saddled up that morning. I put it down to stress or (this was August) the prospect of another school year. Jase was in an accelerated academic stream at Rice, a high-pressure school. Last year he had breezed through the math and physics courses—he could have taught them—but next semester he was signed up for a Latin credit. "It's not even a living language," he said. "Who the hell reads Latin, outside classical scholars? It's like learning FORTRAN. All the important texts were translated a long time ago. Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god's sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?"

I didn't take any of this too seriously. One of the things we liked to do on these rides was practice the art of complaining. (I had no idea who Alan Dershowitz was; some kid at Jason's school, I guessed.) But today his mood was volatile, erratic. He stood up on his pedals and biked a little way ahead of us.

The road to the mall wound past deeply treed lots and pastel houses with manicured gardens and embedded sprinklers that marked the morning air with rainbows. The sunlight might be fake, filtered, but it still broke into colors when it cut through falling water and it still felt like a blessing when we rolled from under the shading oaks onto the glittering white sidewalk.

Ten or fifteen minutes of easy riding later the top of Bantam Hill Road loomed ahead of us—last obstacle and major landmark on the way to the mall. Bantam Hill Road was steep, but on the other side it was a sweet long glide to the mall's parking lot. Jase was already a quarter of the way up. Diane gave me a mischievous look.

"Race you," she said.

That was dismaying. The twins had their birthdays in June. Mine was in October. Every summer they were not one but two years older than me: the twins had turned fourteen but I was still twelve for another frustrating four months. The difference translated into a physical advantage. Diane must have known I couldn't beat her up the hill, but she pedaled off anyway and I sighed and tried to pump my creaking old junker into plausible competition. It was no contest. Diane rose up on her gleaming contrivance of etched aluminum, and by the time she reached the upslope she had gained a ferocious momentum. A trio of little girls chalk-marking the sidewalk scurried out of her way. She shot a glance back at me, half encouraging, half taunting.

The rising road stole back her momentum, but she shifted gears deftly and put her legs to work again. Jason, at the peak, had stopped and balanced himself with one long leg, looking back quizzically. I labored on, but halfway up the hill my ancient bike was swaying more than moving and I was forced to sidle off and walk it the rest of the way up.

Diane grinned at me when I finally arrived.

"You win," I said.

"Sorry, Tyler. It wasn't really fair."

I shrugged, embarrassed.

Here the road ended in a cul-de-sac, where residential lots had been sketched with stakes and string but no houses built. The mall lay down a long, sandy decline to the west. A pressed-earth path cut through scrubby trees and berry bushes. "See you at the bottom," she said, and rolled away again.

* * * * *

We left our bikes locked to a rack and entered the glassy nave of the mall. The mall was a reassuring environment, chiefly because it had changed so little since last October. The newspapers and television might still be in high-alert mode, but the mall lived in blessed denial. The only evidence that anything might have gone askew in the larger world was the absence of satellite dish displays at the consumer-electronics chain stores and a surge of October-related titles on the bookstore display racks. Jason snorted at one paperback with a high-gloss blue-and-gold cover, a book that claimed to link the October Event to Biblical prophecy: "The easiest kind of prophecy," he said, "is the kind that predicts things that have already happened."

Diane gave him an aggravated look. "You don't have to make fun of it just because you don't believe in it."

"Technically, I'm only making fun of the front cover. I haven't read the book."

"Maybe you should."

"Why? What are you defending here?"

"I'm not defending anything. But maybe God had something to do with last October. That doesn't seem so ridiculous."

"Actually," Jason said, "yes, it does seem ridiculous."

She rolled her eyes and stalked ahead of us, sighing to herself. Jase stuffed the book back in its display rack.

I told him I thought people just wanted to understand what had happened, that's why there were books like that.

"Or maybe people just want to pretend to understand. It's called 'denial.' You want to know something, Tyler?"

"Sure," I said.

"Keep it secret?" He lowered his voice so that even Diane, a few yards ahead, couldn't hear him. "This isn't public yet."

One of the remarkable things about Jason was that he often did know genuinely important things a day or two in advance of the evening news. In a sense Rice Academy was only his day school; his real education was conducted under the tutelage of his father, and from the beginning E.D. had wanted him to understand how business, science, and technology intersect with political power. E.D. had been working those angles himself. The loss of telecom satellites had opened up a vast new civilian and military market for the stationary high-altitude balloons ("aerostats") his company manufactured. A niche technology was going mainstream, and E.D. was riding the crest of the wave. And sometimes he shared secrets with his fifteen-year-old son he wouldn't have dared whisper to a competitor.

E.D., of course, didn't know Jase occasionally shared these secrets with me. But I was scrupulous about keeping them. (And anyway, who would I have told? I had no other real friends. We lived in the kind of new-money neighborhood where class distinctions were measured out with razor-sharp precision: the solemn, studious sons of single working mothers didn't make anyone's A list.)

He lowered his voice another notch. "You know the three Russian cosmonauts? The ones who were in orbit last October?"

Lost and presumed dead the night of the Event. I nodded.

"One of them's alive," he said. "Alive and in Moscow. The Russians aren't saying much. But the rumor is, he's completely crazy."

I gave him a wide-eyed look, but he wouldn't say anything more.

* * * * *

It took a dozen years for the truth to be made public, but when it was finally published (as a footnote to a European history of the early Spin years) I thought of the day at the mall. What happened was this:

Three Russian cosmonauts had been in orbit the night of the October Event, returning from a housekeeping mission to the moribund International Space Station. A little after midnight Eastern Standard Time the mission commander, a Colonel Leonid Glavin, noted loss of signal from ground control and made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to reestablish contact.

Alarming as this must have been for the cosmonauts, it got worse fast. When the Soyuz crossed from the nightside of the planet into dawn it appeared that the planet they were circling had been replaced with a lightless black orb.

Colonel Glavin would eventually describe it just that way: as a blackness, an absence visible only when it occluded the sun, a permanent eclipse. The rapid orbital cycle of sunrise and sunset was their only convincing visual evidence that the Earth even existed any longer. Sunlight appeared abruptly from behind the silhouetted disc, cast no reflection in the darkness below, and vanished just as suddenly when the capsule slid into night.

The cosmonauts could not have comprehended what had happened, and their terror must have been unimaginable.

After a week spent orbiting the vacuous darkness beneath them the cosmonauts voted to attempt an unassisted reentry rather than remain in space or attempt a docking at the empty ISS—to die on Earth, or whatever Earth had become, rather than starve in isolation. But without ground guidance or visual landmarks they were forced to rely on calculations extrapolated from their last known position. As a result the Soyuz capsule reentered the atmosphere at a perilously steep angle, absorbed punishing G-forces, and lost a critical parachute during the descent.

The capsule came down hard on a forested hillside in the Ruhr Valley. Vassily Golubev was killed on impact; Valentina Kirchoff suffered a traumatic head injury and was dead within hours. A dazed Colonel Glavin, with only a broken wrist and minor abrasions, managed to exit the spacecraft and was eventually discovered by a German search-and-rescue team and repatriated to Russian authorities.

After repeated debriefings the Russians concluded that Glavin had lost his mind as a result of his ordeal. The colonel continued to insist that he and his crew had spent three weeks in orbit, but that was obviously madness…

Because the Soyuz capsule, like every other recovered piece of man-made orbital gear, had fallen back to Earth the very night of the October Event.

* * * * *

We ate lunch at the food court in the mall, where Diane spotted three girls she knew from Rice. These were older girls, to my eyes impossibly sophisticated, hair tinted blue or pink, wearing expensive bell-bottoms that rode low on their hips and tiny gold crosses on chains around their pale necks. Diane balled up her MexiTaco wrapper and defected to their table, where the four of them ducked their heads together and laughed. Suddenly my burrito and fries looked unappetizing.

Jason evaluated the look on my face. "You know," he said gently, "this is inevitable."

"What is?"

"She doesn't live in our world anymore. You, me, Diane, the Big House and the Little House, Saturday at the mall, Sunday at the movies. That worked when we were kids. But we're not kids anymore."

Weren't we? No, of course we weren't; but had I really considered what that meant or might mean?

"She's been getting her period for a year now," Jason added.

I blanched. This was more than I needed to know. And yet: I was jealous that he had known it and I had not. She hadn't told me about her period or her friends at Rice, either. All the confidences she had offered over the phone, I suddenly understood, had been kid confidences, stories about Jason and her parents and what she had hated at dinner. But here was evidence that she had hidden as much as she had shared; here was a Diane I had never met, blithely manifesting at a table across the aisle.

"We should go home," I told Jason.

He gave me a pitying look. "If you want to." He stood up.

"Are you going to tell Diane we're leaving?"

"I think she's busy, Tyler. I think she found something to do."

"But she has to come back with us."

"No she doesn't."

I took offense. She wouldn't just dump us. She was better than that. I stood and walked to Diane's table. Diane and her three friends gave me their full attention. I looked straight at Diane, ignoring the others. "We're going home," I said.

The three Rice girls laughed out loud. Diane just smiled embarrassedly and said, "Okay, Ty. That's great. See you later."

"But—"

But what? She wasn't even looking at me anymore.

As I walked away I heard one of her friends ask whether I was "another brother." No, she said. Just a kid she knew.

* * * * *

Jason, who had become annoyingly sympathetic, offered to trade bikes on the ride home. I didn't really care about his bike at that point, but I thought a bike trade might be a way to disguise what I was feeling.

So we worked our way back to the top of Bantam Hill Road, to the place where the pavement stretched like a black ribbon down into tree-shaded streets. Lunch felt like a cinder block embedded under my ribs. I hesitated at the end of the cul-de-sac, eyeballing the steep incline of the road.

"Glide on down," Jason said. "Go ahead. Get the feel of it."

Would speed distract me? Would anything? I hated myself for having allowed myself to believe I was at the center of Diane's world. When I was, in fact, a kid she knew.

But it really was a wonderful bike Jason had lent me. I stood on the pedals, daring gravity to do its worst. The tires gritted on the dusty pavement but the chains and derailleurs were silky, silent except for the delicate whir of the bearings. Wind sluiced past me as I picked up speed. I flew past primly painted houses with expensive cars parked in their driveways, bereft but free. Near the bottom I began to squeeze the hand brakes, bleeding momentum without really slowing down. I didn't want to stop. I wanted never to stop. It was a good ride.

But the pavement leveled, and at last I braked and keeled and came to rest with my left shoe on the asphalt. I looked back.

Jason was still at the top of Bantam Hill Road with my own clunky bike under him, so far away now that he looked like a lone horseman in an old western. I waved. It was his turn.

Jason must have taken that hill, upslope and down, a thousand times. But he had never taken it on a rusty thrift-shop bike.

He fit the bicycle better than I did. His legs were longer than mine and the frame didn't dwarf him. But we had never traded bikes before, and now I thought of all the bugs and idiosyncrasies that bike possessed, and how intimately I knew it, how I had learned not to turn hard right because the frame was a little out of true, how you had to fight the wobble, how the gearbox was a joke. Jason didn't know any of that. The hill could be tricky. I wanted to tell him to take it slow, but even if I had shouted he wouldn't have heard me; I had zoomed too far ahead. He lifted his feet like a big gawky infant. The bike was heavy. It took a few seconds to gather speed, but I knew how hard it would be to stop. It was all mass, no grace. My hands gripped imaginary brakes.

I don't think Jason knew he had a problem until he was three quarters of the way down. That was when the bicycle's rust-choked chain snapped and flailed his ankle. He was close enough now that I could see him flinch and cry out. The bike wobbled but, miraculously, he managed to keep it upright.

A piece of the chain tangled in the rear wheel, where it whipped against the struts, making a sound like a broken jackhammer. Two houses up, a woman who had been weeding her garden covered her ears and turned to watch.

What was amazing was how long Jason managed to keep control of that bike. Jase was no athlete, but he was at home in his big, lanky body. He stuck his feet out for balance—the pedals were useless—and kept the front wheel forward while the back wheel locked and skidded. He held on. What astonished me was the way his body didn't stiffen but seemed to relax, as if he were engaged in some difficult but engaging act of problem-solving, as if he believed with absolute confidence that the combination of his mind, his body, and the machine he was riding could be counted on to carry him to safety.

It was the machine that failed first. That dangerously flapping fragment of greasy chain wedged itself between the tire and the frame. The wheel, already weakened, bent impossibly out of true and then folded, scattering torn rubber and liberated ball bearings. Jason came free of the bike and tumbled through the air like a mannequin dropped from a high window. His feet hit the pavement first, then his knees, his elbows, his head. He came to a stop as the fractured bike rotated past him. It landed in the gutter at the side of the road, the front tire still spinning and clattering. I dropped his bike and ran to him.

He rolled over and looked up, momentarily bewildered. His pants and shirt were torn. His forehead and the tip of his nose had been brutally skinned and were bleeding freely. His ankle was lacerated. His eyes watered from the pain. "Tyler," he said. "Oh, uh, uh… sorry about your bike, man."

Not to make too much of this incident, but I thought of it occasionally in the years that followed—Jason's machine and Jason's body locked into a dangerous acceleration, and his unflappable belief that he could make it come out right, all by himself, if only he tried hard enough, if only he didn't lose control.

* * * * *

We left the hopelessly broken bicycle in the gutter and I walked Jason's high-end wheels home for him. He trudged beside me, hurting but trying not to show it, holding his right hand over his oozing forehead as if he had a bad headache, which I guessed he did.

Back at the Big House, both Jason's parents came down the porch steps to meet us in the driveway. E. D. Lawton, who must have spotted us from his study, looked angry and alarmed, his mouth puckered into a frown and his eyebrows crowding his sharp eyes. Jason's mom, behind him, was aloof, less interested, maybe even a little drunk by the way she swayed when she walked out the door.

E.D. examined Jase—who suddenly seemed much younger and less sure of himself—then told him to run in the house and clean up.

Then he turned to me.

"Tyler," he said.

"Sir?"

"I'm assuming you're not responsible for this. I hope that's true."

Had he noticed that my own bike was missing and that Jason's was unscathed? Was he accusing me of something? I didn't know what to say. I looked at the lawn.

E.D. sighed. "Let me explain something. You're Jason's friend. That's good. Jason needs that. But you have to understand, as your mother understands, that your presence here comes with certain responsibilities. If you want to spend time with Jason, I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Maybe he seems ordinary to you. But he's not. Jason's gifted, and he has a future ahead of him. We can't let anything interfere with that."

"Right," Carol Lawton chimed in, and now I knew for a fact that Jason's mom had been drinking. She tilted her head and almost stumbled into the gravel berm that separated the driveway from the hedge. "Right, he's a fucking genius. He's going to be the youngest genius at M.I.T. Don't break him, Tyler, he's fragile."

E.D. didn't take his eyes off me. "Go inside, Carol," he said tonelessly. "Do we understand each other, Tyler?"

"Yessir," I lied.

I didn't understand E.D. at all. But I knew some of what he had said was true. Yes, Jason was special. And yes, it was my job to look after him.

TIME OUT OF JOINT

I first heard the truth about the Spin, five years after the October Event, at a sledding party, on a bitterly cold winter night. It was Jason, typically, who broke the news.

The evening began with dinner at the Lawtons'. Jason was home from university for Christmas break, so there was a sense of occasion about the meal even though it was "just family"—I had been invited at Jase's insistence, probably over E.D.'s objections.

"Your mother should be here, too," Diane whispered when she opened the door for me. "I tried to get E.D. to invite her, but…" She shrugged.

That was okay, I told her, Jason had already stopped by to say hello. "Anyway, she's not feeling well." She was in bed with a headache, unusually. And I was hardly in a position to complain about E.D.'s behavior: just last month E.D. had offered to underwrite my med school tuition if I passed the MCAT, "because," he said, "your father would have liked that." It was a gesture both generous and emotionally false, but it was also a gesture I couldn't afford to refuse.

Marcus Dupree, my father, had been E. D. Lawton's closest (some said only) friend back in Sacramento, back when they were pushing aerostat monitoring devices to the weather bureau and the Border Patrol. My own memories of him were sketchy and had morphed into my mother's stories about him, though I did distinctly remember the knock at the door the night he died. He had been the only son of a struggling French-Canadian family in Maine, proud of his engineering degree, talented, but naive about money: he had lost his savings in a series of stock market gambles, leaving my mother with a mortgage she couldn't carry.

Carol and E.D. hired my mother as a housekeeper when they moved east, in what might have been E.D.'s attempt at a living memorial for his friend. Did it matter that E.D. never let her forget he'd done her this favor? That he treated her thenceforth as a household accessory? That he maintained a sort of caste system in which the Dupree family was conspicuously second class? Maybe, maybe not. Generosity of any kind is a rare animal, my mother used to say. So maybe I was imagining (or too sensitive to) the pleasure he seemed to take in the intellectual gap between Jason and myself, his apparent conviction that I was born to be Jason's foil, a conventionally normal yardstick against which Jason's specialness could be gauged.

Fortunately both Jase and I knew this was bullshit.

Diane and Carol were at the table when I sat down. Carol was sober tonight, remarkably, or at least not so drunk that it showed. She had given up her medical practice a couple of years back and these days tended to stick around the house in order to avoid the risk of DWI charges. She smiled at me perfunctorily. "Tyler," she said. "Welcome."

After a few minutes Jason and his father came downstairs together, exchanging glances and frowning: obviously something was up. Jase nodded distractedly when he took the chair next to mine.

Like most Lawton family occasions, dinner was cordial but strained. We passed the peas and made small talk. Carol was remote, E.D. was uncharacteristically quiet. Diane and Jason took stabs at conversation, but clearly something had passed between Jason and his father that neither wanted to discuss. Jase seemed so restrained that by dessert I wondered whether he was physically ill—his eyes seldom left his plate, which he had barely touched. When it was time to leave for the sledding party he stood up with obvious reluctance and seemed about to beg off until E. D. Lawton said, "Go ahead, take a night off. It'll be good for you." And I wondered: a night off from what?

We drove to the party in Diane's car, an unassuming little Honda, "a my-first-car kind of car," as Diane liked to describe it. I sat behind the driver's seat; Jase rode in the passenger seat next to his sister, his knees crowding the glove compartment, still glum.

"What'd he do," Diane asked, "spank you?"

"Hardly."

"You're acting like it."

"Am I? Sorry."

The sky, of course, was dark. Our headlights swept past snowy lawns, a wall of leafless trees as we turned north. We'd had a record snowfall three days ago, followed by a cold snap that had embalmed the snow under a skin of ice wherever the plows hadn't been. A few cars passed us at a cautious speed.

"So what was it," Diane asked, "something serious?"

Jason shrugged.

"War? Pestilence? Famine?"

He shrugged again and turned up the collar of his jacket.

* * * * *

He wasn't much better at the party. Then again, it wasn't much of a party.

It was a gathering of Jason and Diane's ex-classmates and acquaintances from Rice, hosted by the family of another Rice alumnus home from some Ivy League college. His parents had tried to arrange a dignified theme event: finger sandwiches, hot cocoa, and sledding on the mild slope behind the house. But for the majority of the guests—somber preppies who had skied at Zermatt or Gstaad long before their braces came off—it was just another excuse for clandestine drinking. Outside, under strings of colored lights, silver flasks circulated freely; in the basement a guy named Brent was selling gram weights of Ecstasy.

Jason found a chair in a corner and sat scowling at anyone who looked friendly. Diane introduced me to a big-eyed girl named Holly and then deserted me. Holly struck up a monologue about every movie she had seen in the last twelve months. She paced me around the room for most of an hour, pausing now and then to snatch California rolls from a tray. When she excused herself for a bathroom visit I scooted over to Jason's sulking place and begged him to go outside with me.

"I'm not in the mood for sledding."

"Neither am I. Just do me a favor, okay?"

So we put on our boots and jackets and trudged outside. The night was cold and windless. A half dozen Rice scholars stood huddled in a haze of cigarette smoke on the porch, glaring at us. We followed a path in the snow until we were more or less by ourselves at the top of a low hill, looking down on a few halfhearted sledders skidding through the circus glow of the Christmas lights. I told Jason about Holly, who had attached herself to me like a leech in Gap clothing. He shrugged and said, "Everybody's got problems."

"What the hell is wrong with you tonight?"

But before he could answer, my cell phone rang. It was Diane, back at the house. "Where'd you guys go? Holly's kind of pissed. Abandoning her like that. Very rude, Tyler."

"There must be someone else she can aim her conversation at"

"She's just nervous. She hardly knows anyone here."

"I'm sorry, but how is that my business?"

"I just thought you guys might hit it off."

I blinked. "Hit it off?" There was no good way to interpret that. "What are you saying, you set me up with her?"

She paused for an incriminating second or two. "Come on, Tyler… don't take it like that."

For five years Diane had been coming in and out of focus like an amateur movie, or so it seemed to me. There had been times, especially after Jason left for university, when I had felt like her best friend. She'd call, we'd talk; we shopped or saw movies together. We were friends. Buddies. If there was any sexual tension it appeared to be entirely on my side, and I was careful to keep it hidden, because even this partial intimacy was fragile—I knew that without having to be told. Whatever Diane wanted from me, it didn't include passion of any kind.

E.D., of course, would never have tolerated a relationship between me and Diane unless it was chaperoned, essentially infantile, and in no danger of taking an unexpected turn. But the distance between us seemed to suit Diane, too, and for months at a time I would hardly see her. I might wave at her while she waited for the Rice bus (when she was still at Rice); but during those lapses she wouldn't call, and on the rare occasions when I was brazen enough to phone her she was never in a mood to talk.

During these times I occasionally dated girls from school, usually timid girls who would (often explicitly) have preferred seeing a more conspicuously popular guy but who had resigned themselves to a second-string social life. None of these connections lasted long. When I was seventeen I lost my virginity to a pretty, startlingly tall girl named Elaine Bowland; I tried to convince myself I was in love with her, but we drifted apart with a combination of regret and relief after eight or nine weeks.

After each of these episodes Diane would call unexpectedly, and we'd talk, and I wouldn't mention Elaine Bowland (or Toni Hickock, or Sarah Burstein), and Diane would never quite get around to telling me how she'd spent her spare time during our hiatus, and that was okay because pretty soon we were back in the bubble, suspended between romance and pretense, childhood and maturity.

I tried not to expect more. But I couldn't stop wanting her company. And I thought she wanted mine. She kept coming back for it, after all. I had seen the way she relaxed when I was with her, her spontaneous smile when I came into a room, almost a declaration: Oh, good, Tyler's here. Nothing bad ever happens when Tyler's here.

"Tyler?"

I wondered what she'd said to Holly. Tyler's really nice, but he's been dogging my heels for years now… you two would be great together!

"Tyler?" She sounded distressed. "Tyler, if you don't want to talk—"

"Actually I don't think I do."

"Then put Jason on, would you please?"

I gave him the cell. Jason listened for a moment. Then he said, "We're up the hill. No. No. Why don't you come out here? It's not as cold as all that. No."

I didn't want to see her. I started to walk away. Jason tossed me the phone and said, "Don't be an asshole, Tyler. I need to talk to you and Diane both."

"About what?"

"About the future."

It was an annoyingly cryptic remark. "Maybe you're not cold, but I am." Freezing.

"This is more important than whatever problem you're having with my sister." He looked almost comically serious. "And I know what she means to you."

"She doesn't mean anything to me."

"That wouldn't be true even if you were just friends."

"We are just friends." I had never really talked to him about Diane; this was one of the places our conversations weren't supposed to go. "Ask her yourself."

"You're pissed because she introduced you to this Holly person."

"I don't want to discuss it."

"But that's just Diane being saintly. It's her new thing. She's been reading those books."

"What books?"

"Apocalyptic theology. Usually from the best-seller shelf. You know: C. R. Ratel, Praying in the Dark, the abnegation of the worldly self. You need to watch more daytime television, Tyler. She wasn't trying to insult you. It's some kind of gesture."

"That makes it okay?" I took a few more steps away from him, toward the house. I started wondering how to get home without a ride.

"Tyler," he said, and there was something in his voice that made me turn back. "Tyler. Listen. You asked what was bothering me." He sighed. "E.D. told me something about the October Event. It's not public yet. I promised I wouldn't talk about it. But I'm going to break that promise. I'm going to break it because there are only three people in the world who feel like family to me, and one of them is my father, and the other two are you and Diane. So could you possibly bear with me just for the next few minutes?"

I caught sight of Diane working her way up the slope, still struggling into her snowy white parka, one arm in, one arm out

I looked at Jason's face, grievously unhappy in the dim holiday light from below us. That frightened me, and despite what I was feeling I agreed to hear what he had to say.

* * * * *

He whispered something to Diane when she reached the gazebo. She looked at him wide-eyed and stood back from both of us. Then Jason began to talk, softly, methodically, almost soothingly, delivering a nightmare as if it were a bedtime story.

He had heard all this from E.D., of course.

E.D. had done well after the October Event. When the satellites failed, Lawton Industries had stepped forward with plans for an immediate, practical replacement technology: high-altitude aerostats, sophisticated balloons designed to hover indefinitely in the stratosphere. Five years later E.D.'s aerostats were carrying telecom payloads and repeaters, doing multipoint voice and data broadcasts, doing almost anything (apart from GPS and astronomy) a conventional satellite could have done. E.D.'s power and influence had grown apace. Lately he had formed an aerospace lobby group, the Perihelion Foundation, and he had consulted for the federal government on a number of less public projects—in this case, NASA's ARV (Automated Reentry Vehicle) program.

NASA had been refining its ARV probes for a couple of years now. The initial launches had been designed as investigations of the October shield. Could it be penetrated, and could useful data be retrieved from outside?

The first attempt was almost literally a shot in the dark, a simple ARV payload atop a refurbished Lockheed Martin Atlas 2AS, flung into the absolute darkness over Vandenberg Air Force Base. It had looked like a failure almost immediately. The satellite, which had been designed to spend a week in orbit, dropped into the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda moments after its launch. As if, Jason said, it had hit the Event boundary and bounced back.

But it hadn't bounced. "When they recovered it they downloaded a full week's worth of data."

"How is that possible?"

"The question isn't what's possible but what happened. What happened was, the payload spent seven days in orbit and came back the same night it left. We know that's what happened because it happened with every launch they tried, and they tried it repeatedly."

"What happened? What are you talking about, Jase? Time travel?"

"No… not exactly."

"Not exactly?"

"Just let him tell it," Diane said quietly.

There were all sorts of clues to what was really happening, Jason said. Ground-based observation seemed to suggest that the boosters actually accelerated into the barrier before they vanished, as if they had been drawn into it. But the recovered onboard data showed no such effect. The two sets of observations couldn't be reconciled. As seen from the ground, the satellites accelerated into the barrier and then dropped almost immediately back to Earth; the satellites themselves reported that they had progressed smoothly into their programmed orbits, remained there for the allotted span of time, and returned under their own power weeks or months later. (Like the Russian cosmonaut, I thought, whose story, never officially confirmed or denied, had become a sort of urban legend.) Assuming both sets of data were legitimate, there was only one explanation:

Time was passing differently outside the barrier.

Or, to turn the equation around, time on Earth was passing more slowly than in the universe at large.

"You understand what that means?" Jason demanded. "Before, it looked like we were in some kind of electromagnetic cage that was regulating the energy that reaches the surface of the Earth. And that's true. But it's really only a side effect, a small part of a much bigger picture."

"Side effect of what?"

"Of what they're calling a temporal gradient. You grasp the significance? For every second that passes on Earth, a whole lot more time passes outside the barrier."

"That doesn't make sense," I said immediately. "What the hell kind of physics would that involve?"

"People with a lot more experience than me are struggling with that question. But the idea of a time gradient has a certain explanatory power. If there's a time differential between us and the universe, ambient radiation reaching the surface of the Earth at any given moment—sunlight, X rays, cosmic radiation—would be speeded up proportionally. And a year's sunshine condensed into ten seconds would be instantly lethal. So the electromagnetic barrier around the Earth isn't concealing us, it's protecting us. It's screening out all that concentrated—and, I guess, blue-shifted—radiation."

"The fake sunlight," Diane said, getting it.

"Right. They gave us fake sunlight because the real thing would be deadly. Just enough of it, and appropriately distributed, to mimic the seasons, to make it possible to raise crops and drive the weather. The tides, our trajectory around the sun—mass, momentum, gravitation—all these things are being manipulated, not just to slow us down but to keep us alive while they do it."

"Managed" I said. "It's not an act of nature, then. It's engineering."

"I think we'd have to admit that," Jason said, "yes."

"This is being done to us."

"People are talking about a hypothetical controlling intelligence."

"But what's the purpose, what's it supposed to achieve?"

"I don't know. No one knows."

Diane stared at her brother across a gap of cold and motionless winter air. She hugged her parka and shivered. Not because of the temperature but because she had come to the fundamental question: "How much time, Jason? How much time is passing out there?"

Out there beyond the blankness of the sky.

Jason hesitated, visibly reluctant to answer her.

"A lot of time," he admitted.

"Just tell us," she said faintly.

"Well. There are all kinds of measures. But the last launch, what they did was bounce a calibration signal off the surface of the moon. The moon gets farther away from the Earth every year, did you know that? By some minuscule but measurable amount. If you measure that distance you have a kind of rough calendar, more accurate the more time has passed. Add that to other signifiers, like the motion of nearby stars—"

"How much time, Jason?"

"It's been five years and a couple of months since the October Event. Outside the barrier, that translates into a little over five hundred million years."

It was a breathtaking number.

I couldn't think of anything to say. Not a single word. I was rendered speechless. Thoughtless. At that moment there was no sound at all, nothing but the crisp emptiness of the night.

Then Diane, who had seen straight to the scary heart of the thing, said, "And how long do we have left?"

"I don't know that either. It depends. We're protected, to some degree, by the barrier, but how effective is that protection? But there are some unavoidable facts. The sun is mortal, like every other star. It burns hydrogen and it expands and gets hotter as it ages. The Earth exists in a sort of habitable zone in the solar system, and that zone is moving steadily outward. Like I said, we're protected, we're okay for the time being no matter what. But eventually the Earth will be inside the heliosphere of the sun. Swallowed up by it. Past a certain point there's simply no going back."

"How long, Jase?"

He gave her a pitying look. "Forty, maybe fifty years," he said. "Give or take."

4X109 A.D.

The pain was difficult to manage, even with the morphine Diane had purchased at ridiculous cost from a pharmacy in Padang. The fever was worse.

It wasn't continuous. It came in waves, clusters, bubbles of heat and noise bursting unexpectedly in my head. It made my body capricious, unpredictable. One night I groped for a nonexistent glass of water and smashed a bedside lamp, waking the couple in the next room.

Come morning, temporarily lucid again, I couldn't remember the incident. But I saw the congealed blood on my knuckles and I overhead Diane paying off the angry concierge.

"Did I really do that?" I asked her.

"Afraid so."

She sat in a wicker chair next to the bed. She had ordered up room service, scrambled eggs and orange juice, so I guessed it was morning. The sky beyond the gauzy drapes was blue. The balcony door was open, admitting wafts of pleasantly warm air and the smell of the ocean. "I'm sorry," I said.

"You were out of your mind. I'd tell you to forget about it. Except you obviously have." She put a soothing hand on my forehead. "And it's not over yet, I'm afraid."

"How long—?"

"It's been a week."

"Only a week?"

"Only."

I wasn't even halfway through the ordeal.

* * * * *

But the lucid intervals were useful for writing.

Graphomania was one of the several side effects of the drug. Diane, when she was undergoing the same ordeal, once wrote the phrase Am I not my brother's keeper in hundreds of nearly identical repetitions over fourteen sheets of foolscap. My own graphomania was at least a little more coherent. I stacked up handwritten pages on the bedside table while I waited for the fever to launch a renewed offensive, rereading what I'd written in an attempt to fix it in my mind.

Diane spent the day out of the hotel. When she came back I asked her where she'd been.

"Making connections," she told me. She said she'd contacted a transit broker, a Minang man named Jala whose import-export business served as cover for his more lucrative emigration brokerage. Everybody on the docks knew Jala, she said. She was bidding for berths against a bunch of crazy-utopian kibbutzim, so it wasn't a done deal, but she was cautiously optimistic.

"Be careful," I said. "There might still be people looking for us."

"Not as far as I can tell, but…" She shrugged. She glanced at the notebook in my hand. "Writing again?"

"It takes my mind off the pain."

"You can hold the pen okay?"

"It's like terminal arthritis, but I can deal with it." So far, I thought. "The distraction is worth the discomfort."

But it wasn't just that, of course. Nor was it simply graphomania. The writing was a way to externalize what felt threatened.

"It's really very well done," Diane said.

I looked at her, horrified. "You read it?"

"You asked me to. You begged me to, Tyler."

"Was I delirious?"

"Apparently… though you seemed fairly rational at the time."

"I wasn't writing with an audience in mind." And I was shocked that I had forgotten showing it to her. How much else might already have slipped away?

"I won't look at it again, then. But what you wrote—" She cocked her head. "I'm amazed and flattered you felt so strongly about me, way back then."

"It could hardly come as a surprise."

"More than you might think. But it's a paradox, Tyler. The girl on the page is indifferent, almost cruel."

"I never thought of you that way."

"It's not your opinion that worries me. It's mine."

I had been sitting up in bed, imagining this was an act of strength, evidence of my own stoicism. More likely it was evidence that the painkillers were temporarily in charge. I shivered. Shivering was the first sign of a resurgent fever. "You want to know when I fell in love with you? Maybe I should write about that. It's important. It was when I was ten—"

"Tyler, Tyler. Nobody falls in love when they're ten."

"It was when St. Augustine died."

St. Augustine was a lively black-and-white pedigreed springer spaniel who had been Diane's particular pet. "St. Dog," she had called him.

She winced. "That's just macabre."

But I was serious. E. D. Lawton had bought the dog impulsively, probably because he wanted something to decorate the hearth at the Big House, like a pair of antique andirons. But St. Dog had resisted his fate. St. Dog was decorative enough, but he was also inquisitive and full of mischief. In time E.D. came to despise him; Carol Lawton ignored him; Jason was fondly bemused by him. It was Diane, who had been twelve, who bonded with him. They brought out the best in each other. For six months St. Dog had followed her everywhere except the school bus. The two of them played together on the big lawn summer evenings, and that was when I first noticed Diane in a particular way— the first time I took pleasure in simply watching her. She would run with St. Dog until she was exhausted, and St. Dog was always patient while she got her breath back. She was attentive to the animal in ways none of the other Lawtons even tried to be—she was sensitive to his moods, as St. Augustine was to hers.

I couldn't have said why I liked this about her. But in the uneasy, emotionally charged world of the Lawtons it was an oasis of uncomplicated affection. If I'd been a dog, I might have been jealous. Instead it impressed on me that Diane was special, different from her family in important ways. She met the world with an emotional openness the other Lawtons had lost or never learned.

St. Augustine died suddenly and prematurely—he was still hardly more than a pup—that autumn. Diane was grief-stricken, and I realized I was in love with her…

No, that does sound macabre. I didn't fall in love with her because she mourned her dog. I fell in love with her because she was capable of mourning her dog, when everyone else seemed either indifferent or secretly relieved that St. Augustine was finally out of the house.

She looked away from the bed, toward the sunny window. "I was heartbroken when that animal died."

We had buried St. Dog in the wooded tract beyond the lawn. Diane made a little mound of stones as a monument, and she built it up again every spring until she left home ten years later.

She also prayed over the marker at every change of the seasons, silently, hands folded. Praying to whom, or for what, I don't know. I don't know what people do when they pray. I don't think I'm capable of it.

But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.

* * * * *

The fever came again that night. I remember nothing of it apart from a recurring dread (it came at hourly intervals) that the drug had blanked more memory than I would ever recover, a sense of irretrievable loss akin to those dreams in which one searches futilely for the missing wallet, watch, prized possession, or sense of self. I imagined I felt the Martian drug working in my body, making fresh assaults and negotiating temporary truces with my immune system, establishing cellular beachheads, sequestering hostile chromosomal sequences.

When I came to myself again Diane was absent. Insulated from the pain by the morphine she had given me, I got out of bed and managed to use the bathroom, then shuffled out onto the balcony.

Dinner hour. The sun was up but the sky had turned a duskier blue. The air smelled of coconut milk and diesel fumes. The Archway glimmered in the west like frozen quicksilver.

I found myself wanting to write again, the urge coming on like an echo of the fever. I carried with me the notebook I had half filled with barely decipherable scribbling. I'd have to ask Diane to buy me another one. Maybe a couple more. Which I would then fill with words.

Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.

RUMORS OF APOCALYPSE REACH THE BERKSHIRE

I didn't see Jason for several years after the sledding party, though I kept in touch. We met again the year I graduated from med school, at a summer rental in the Berkshires about twenty minutes from Tanglewood.

I had been busy. I had done four years of college plus volunteer time at a local clinic and had started prepping for the MCAT a couple of years ahead of writing it. My GPA, the MCAT results, and a sheaf of recommendation letters from undergraduate advisors and other venerable worthies (plus E.D.'s largesse) had bought me admission to the SUNY medical campus at Stony Brook for another four years. That was done, behind me, finished, but I was still looking at at least three more years of residency before I was ready to practice.

Which put me among the majority of people who continued to conduct their lives as if the end of the world had not been announced.

It might have been different if doomsday had been calculated down to the day and hour. We all could have chosen our motifs, from panic to saintly resignation, and played out human history with a decent sense of timing and an eye on the clock.

But what we were facing was merely the strong likelihood of eventual extinction, in a solar system rapidly becoming unfit for life. Probably nothing could protect us indefinitely from the expanding sun we had all seen in NASA images captured from orbital probes… but we were shielded from it for now, for reasons no one understood. The crisis, if there was a crisis, was intangible; the only evidence available to the senses was the absence of the stars—absence as evidence, evidence of absence.

So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction? The question defined our generation. It was easy enough for Jason, it seemed. He had thrown himself into the problem headlong: the Spin was rapidly becoming his life. And it was, I suppose, relatively easy for me. I had been leaning toward medicine anyway, and it seemed like an even wiser choice in the current atmosphere of simmering crisis. Maybe I imagined myself saving lives, should the end of the world prove to be more than hypothetical and less than instantaneous. Did that matter, if we were all doomed? Why save a life if all human life was due to be snuffed out? But physicians don't really save lives, of course, we prolong them; and failing that, we provide palliative care and relief from pain. Which might prove to be the most useful skill of all.

On top of that, college and med school had been one long, relentless, grueling, but welcome, distraction from the rest of the world's woes.

So I coped. Jason coped. But many people had a much rougher time. Diane was one of them.

* * * * *

I was cleaning out my one-bedroom rental at Stony Brook when Jason called.

It was early in the afternoon. The optical illusion indistinguishable from the sun was shining brightly. My Hyundai was packed and ready for the drive home. I had planned to spend a couple of weeks with my mother, then drive across country in a lazy week or two. This was my last free time before I started interning at Harborview in Seattle, and I intended to use it to see the world, or at least the part of it bracketed between Maine and the state of Washington. But Jason had other ideas. He barely let me get out a hello-how-are-you before he launched into his pitch.

"Tyler," he said, "this is too good to pass up. E.D. rented a summerhouse in the Berkshires."

"Did he? Good for him."

"But he can't use it. Last week he was touring an aluminum extrusion plant in Michigan and he fell off a loading platform and cracked his hip."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"It's not serious, he's recovering, but he's on crutches for a while and he doesn't want to ferry himself all the way to Massachusetts just so he can sit around and suck Percodan. And Carol wasn't that enthusiastic about the idea to begin with." Not surprisingly. Carol had become a career drunk. I couldn't imagine what she would have done in the Berkshires with E. D. Lawton, except drink some more. "The thing is," Jase went on, "he can't back out of the contract, so the house is empty for three months. So I thought, with you finishing med school and all, maybe we could get together for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe talk Diane into joining us. Take in a concert. Walk in the woods. Be like old times. I'm headed there now, actually. What do you say, Tyler?"

I was about to turn him down. But I thought about Diane. I thought about the few letters and phone calls we had exchanged on the predictable occasions and all the unanswered questions that had stacked up between us. I knew the wise thing would be to beg off. But it was too late: my mouth had already said yes.

* * * * *

So I spent another night on Long Island; then I crammed the last of my worldly possessions into the trunk of the car and followed the Northern State Parkway to the Long Island Expressway.

Traffic was light and the weather was ridiculously pretty. It was a tall blue afternoon, just pleasantly warm. I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second. I felt as stupidly, corporeally happy as I'd been in a long time.

Then I turned on the radio.

I was old enough to remember when a "radio station" was a building with a transmitter and a tower antenna, when radio reception flooded and ebbed from town to town. Plenty of those stations still existed, but the Hyundai's analog radio had died about a week out of warranty. Which left digital programming (relayed through one or more of E.D.'s high-atmosphere aerostats). Usually I listened to twentieth-century jazz downloads, a taste I'd picked up rummaging through my father's disc collection. This, I liked to pretend, was his real legacy to me: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, music that had been old even when Marcus Dupree was young, passed down surreptitiously, like a family secret. What I wanted to hear right now was "Harlem Air Shaft," but the guy who serviced the car before the trip had dumped my presets and programmed a news channel I couldn't seem to lose. So I was stuck with natural disasters and celebrity misbehavior. There was even talk of the Spin.

We had begun calling it the Spin by then.

Even though most of the world didn't believe in it.

The polls were pretty clear about that. NASA had released data from their orbital probes the night Jason broke the news to Diane and me, and a flurry of European launches confirmed the American results. But still, eight years after the Spin had been made public, only a minority of Europeans and North Americans considered it "a threat to themselves or their families." In much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, sturdy majorities considered the whole thing a U.S. plot or accident, probably a failed attempt to create some kind of SDI defense system.

I had once asked Jason why this was. He said, "Consider what we're asking them to believe. We're talking about, globally, a population with an almost pre-Newtonian grasp of astronomy. How much do you really need to know about the moon and the stars when your life consists of scrounging enough biomass to feed yourself and your family? To say anything meaningful about the Spin to those people you have to start a long way back. The Earth, you have to tell them, is a few billion years old, to begin with. Let them wrestle with the concept of 'a billion years,' maybe for the first time. It's a lot to swallow, especially if you've been educated in a Moslem theocracy, an animist village, or a public school in the Bible Belt. Then tell them the Earth isn't changeless, that there was an era longer than our own when the oceans were steam and the air was poison. Tell them how living things arose spontaneously and evolved sporadically for three billion years before they produced the first arguably human being. Then talk about the sun, how the sun isn't permanent either but started out as a contracting cloud of gas and dust and will one day, some few more billion years from now, expand and swallow the Earth and eventually blow off its own outer layers and shrink to a nugget of superdense matter. Cosmology 101, right? You picked it up from all those paperbacks you used to read, it's second nature to you, but for most people it's a whole new worldview and probably offensive to a bunch of their core beliefs. So let that sink in. Let that sink in, then deliver the real bad news. Time itself is fluid and unpredictable. The world that looks so ruggedly normal—in spite of everything we just learned—has recently been locked up in a kind of cosmological cold storage. Why has this been done to us? We don't exactly know. We think it's caused by the deliberate action of entities so powerful and inaccessible they might as well be called gods. And if we anger the gods they might withdraw their protection, and pretty soon the mountains will melt and the oceans will boil. But don't take our word for it. Ignore the sunset and the snow that comes to the mountain every winter same as always. We have proof. We have calculations and logical inferences and photographs taken by machines. Forensic evidence of the highest caliber." Jason had smiled one of his quizzical, sad smiles. "Strangely, the jury is unconvinced."

And it wasn't only the ignorant who weren't convinced. On the radio, an insurance industry CEO began to complain about the economic impact of "all this relentless, uncritical discussion of the so-called Spin." People were starting to take it seriously, he said. And that was bad for business. It made people reckless. It encouraged immorality, crime, and deficit spending. Worse, it screwed up the actuary tables. "If the world doesn't come to an end in the next thirty or forty years," he said, "we may be facing disaster."

Clouds began to roll in from the west An hour later that gorgeous blue sky was flatly overcast and raindrops began spattering the windshield. I put the headlights on.

The news on the radio progressed from actuary tables. There was much talk of something else from recent headlines: the silver boxes, big as cities, hovering outside the Spin barrier, hundreds of miles above both poles of the Earth. Hovering, not orbiting. An object can hang in a stable orbit over the equator—geosynchronous satellites used to do that—but nothing, by the most elementary laws of motion, can "orbit" in a fixed position above the planet's pole. And yet here these things were, detected by a radar probe and lately photographed from an unmanned fly-by mission: another layer of the mystery of the Spin, and just as incomprehensible to the untutored masses, in this case including me. I wanted to talk to Jason about it. I think I wanted him to make sense of it for me.

* * * * *

It was raining full-out, thunder rumbling through the hills, when I finally pulled up at E. D. Lawton's short-term rental outside Stockbridge.

The property was a four-bedroom English country-style cottage, the siding painted arsenic green, set into a hundred acres of preserved woodland. It glowed in the dusk like a storm lantern. Jason was already here, his white Ferrari parked under a dripping breezeway.

He must have heard me pull up: he opened the big front door before I knocked. "Tyler!" he said, grinning.

I came inside and set my single rain-dampened suitcase on the tiled floor of the foyer. "Been a while," I said.

We had kept in touch by e-mail and phone, but apart from a couple of brief holiday appearances at the Big House this was the first time we'd been in the same room in nearly eight years. I suppose the time showed on both of us, a subtle inventory of changes. I had forgotten how formidable he looked. He had always been tall, always at ease in his body; he still was, though he seemed skinnier, not delicate but delicately balanced, like a broomstick standing on end. His hair was a uniform layer of stubble about a quarter-inch long. And although he drove a Ferrari he remained unconscious of personal style: he wore tattered jeans, a baggy knit sweater pocked with balls of unraveling thread, discount sneakers.

"You ate on the way down?" he asked.

"Late lunch."

"Hungry?"

I wasn't, but I admitted I was craving a cup of coffee. Med school had made a caffeine addict of me. "You're in luck," Jason said. "I bought a pound of Guatemalan on the way here." The Guatemalans, indifferent to the end of the world, were still harvesting coffee. "I'll put on a pot. Show you around while it's brewing."

We trekked through the house. There was a twentieth-century fussiness about it, walls painted apple green or harvest orange, sturdy barn-sale antique furniture and brass bed frames, lace curtains over warped window glass down which the rain streamed relentlessly. Modern amenities in the kitchen and living room, big TV, music station, Internet link. Cozy in the rain. Downstairs again, Jason poured coffee. We sat at the kitchen table and tried to catch up.

Jase was vague about his work, out of modesty or for security reasons. In the eight years since the revelation of the true nature of the Spin he had earned himself a doctorate in astrophysics and then walked away from it to take a junior position in E.D.'s Perihelion Foundation. Perhaps not a bad move, now that E.D. was a ranking member of President Walker's Select Committee on Global and Environmental Crisis Planning. According to Jase, Perihelion was about to be transformed from an aerospace think tank into an official advisory body, with real authority to shape policy.

I said, "Is that legal?"

"Don't be naive, Tyler. E.D.'s already distanced himself from Lawton Industries. He resigned from the board and his shares are being administered by a blind trust. According to our lawyers he's conflict-free."

"So what do you at Perihelion?"

He smiled. "I listen attentively to my elders," he said, "and I make polite suggestions. Tell me about med school."

He asked whether I found it distasteful to see so much of human weakness and disease. So I told him about my second-year anatomy class. Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility. But it was also a marker, a passage. Beyond this point there was nothing left of childhood.

"Jesus, Tyler. You want something stronger than coffee?"

"I'm not saying it was a big deal. That's what's shocking about it. It wasn't a big deal. You walk away from it and you go to a movie."

"Long way from the Big House, though."

"Long way. Both of us." I raised my cup.

Then we started reminiscing, and the tension drained out of the conversation. We talked about old times. We fell into what I recognized as a pattern. Jason would mention a place—the basement, the mall, the creek in the woods—and I would supply a story: the time we broke into the liquor cabinet; the time we saw a Rice girl named Kelley Weems shoplift a pack of Trojans from the Pharmasave; the summer Diane insisted on reading us breathless passages from Christina Rossetti, as if she had discovered something profound.

The big lawn, Jason offered. The night the stars disappeared, I said.

And then we were quiet for a while.

Finally I said, "So… is she coming or not?"

"She's making up her mind," Jase said neutrally. "She's juggling some commitments. She's supposed to call tomorrow and let me know."

"She's still down south?" This was the last I'd heard, the news relayed from my mother. Diane was at some southern college, studying something I couldn't quite remember: urban geography, oceanography, some other unlikely -ography.

"Yeah, still," Jason said, shifting in his chair. "You know, Ty, a lot of things have changed with Diane."

"I guess that's not surprising."

"She's semi-engaged. To be married."

I took this pretty gracefully. "Well, good for her," I said. How could I possibly be jealous? I had no relationship with Diane anymore—had never had one, in that sense of the word "relationship." And I had almost been engaged myself, back at Stony Brook, to a second-year student named Candice Boone. We had enjoyed saying "I love you" to each other, until we got tired of it. I think Candice got tired first.

And yet: semi-engaged? How did that work?

I was tempted to ask. But Jason was clearly uncomfortable with the whole drift of the conversation. It called up a memory: once, back at the Big House, Jason had brought a date home to meet his family. She was a plain but pleasant girl he'd met at the Rice chess club, too shy to say much. Carol had remained relatively sober that night, but E.D. had clearly disapproved of the girl, had been conspicuously rude to her, and when she was gone he had berated Jase for "dragging a specimen like that into the house." With great intellect, E.D. said, comes great responsibility. He didn't want Jason to be shanghaied into a conventional marriage. Didn't want to see him "hanging diapers on the line" when he could be "making a mark on the world."

A lot of people in Jason's position would have stopped bringing home their dates.

Jason had just stopped dating.

* * * * *

The house was empty when I woke up the next morning.

There was a note on the kitchen table: Jase had gone out to pick up provisions for a barbecue. Back noon or later. It was nine-thirty. I had slept luxuriously late, summer-vacation languor creeping over me.

The house seemed to generate it. Last night's storms had passed and a pleasant morning breeze came through the calico curtains. Sunlight picked out imperfections in the grain of the butcher-block kitchen counters. I ate a slow breakfast by the window and watched clouds like stately schooners sail the horizon.

A little after ten the doorbell rang, and for a second I was panicked by the thought that it might be Diane—had she decided to show up early? But it turned out to be "Mike, the landscape guy," in a bandanna and sleeveless T-shirt, warning me that he was going to do the lawn—he didn't want to wake anybody up but the mower was pretty loud. He could come back this afternoon if it was a problem. No problem at all, I said, and a few minutes later he was riding the contours of the property on an ancient green John Deere that smudged the air with burning oil. Still a little sleepy, I wondered how this yard work would look to what Jason was fond of calling the universe at large. To the universe at large, Earth was a planet in near-stasis. Those blades of grass had arisen over centuries, as stately in their motion as the evolution of stars. Mike, a force of nature born a couple of billion years ago, scythed them with a vast and irresistible patience. The severed blades fell as if lightly touched by gravity, many seasons between sun and loam, loam in which Methuselah worms slid while elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps, empires rose and fell.

Jason was right, of course: it was a difficult thing to believe in. Or, no, not to "believe in"—people believe all kinds of implausible things—but to accept as a fundamental truth about the world. I sat on the porch of the house, on the side away from the roaring Deere, and the air was cool and the sun felt fine when I turned my face to it even though I knew it for what it was, radiation filtered from a star in full-out runaway Spin, in a world where centuries were squandered like seconds.

Can't be true. Is true.

I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancee, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit… not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.

But the world is what it is and won't be bargained with. I had said as much to Candice.

She told me I was "cold." But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.

* * * * *

The morning rolled on. Mike finished the lawn and drove off, leaving the air full of humid silence. After a time I stirred myself and telephoned my mom in Virginia, where the weather, she said, was less inviting than in Massachusetts: still cloudy after a storm last night that had brought down a few trees and power lines. I told her I'd made it safely to E.D.'s summer rental. She asked me how Jason seemed, though she had probably seen him more recently than I had, during one of his visits to the Big House. "Older," I said. "But still Jase."

"Is he worried about this China thing?"

My mom had been a news junkie since the October Event, watching CNN not for pleasure or even information but mainly to reassure herself, the way a Mexican villager might keep an eye on a nearby volcano, hoping not to see smoke. The China thing was only a diplomatic crisis at this stage, she said, though sabers had been gently rattled. Something about a controversial proposed satellite launch. "You should ask Jason about it."

"Has E.D. been worrying you about this stuff?"

"Hardly. I do hear things from Carol every once in a while."

"I don't know how much of that you should trust."

"Come on, Ty. She drinks, but she's not stupid. Neither am I, particularly."

"I didn't mean that."

"Most of what I hear about Jason and Diane these days I get through Carol."

"Did she say whether Diane was coming up to the Berkshires? I can't get a straight answer out of Jase."

My mother hesitated. "Diane's been a little unpredictable the last couple of years. I guess that's what it's all about."

"What does 'unpredictable' mean, exactly?"

"Oh, you know. Not much success at school. A little trouble with the law—"

"With the law?"

"No, I mean, she didn't rob a bank or anything, but she's been picked up a couple of times when NK rallies got out of hand."

"What the hell was she doing at NK rallies?"

Another pause. "You should really ask Jason about that."

I intended to.

She coughed—I pictured her with her hand over the phone, her head turned delicately away—and I said, "How are you feeling?"

"Tired."

"Anything new with the doctor?" She was being treated for anemia. Bottles of iron tablets.

"No. I'm just getting old, Ty. Everybody gets old sooner or later." She added, "I'm thinking of retiring. If you call what I do work. Now that the twins are gone it's just Carol and E.D., and not much E.D. since this Washington business started up."

"Have you told them you're thinking of leaving?"

"Not yet."

"It wouldn't be the Big House without you."

She laughed, not happily. "I think I've had about enough of the Big House for one lifetime, thanks."

But she never mentioned the move again. It was Carol, I think, who convinced her to stay.

* * * * *

Jase came in the front door midafternoon. "Ty?" His over-large jeans hung on his hips like the rigging of a becalmed ship, and his T-shirt was spackled with the ghosts of gravy stains. "Give me a hand with the barbecue, can you?"

I went out back with him. The barbecue was a standard propane grill. Jase had never used one. He opened the tank valve, pushed the lighter button and flinched when the flames blossomed up. Then he grinned at me. "We have steaks. We have three-bean salad from the deli in town."

"And hardly any mosquitos," I said.

"They sprayed for them this spring. Hungry?"

I was. Somehow, dozing through the afternoon, I had worked up an appetite. "Are we cooking for two or three?"

"I'm still waiting to hear from Diane. Probably won't know until this evening. Just us for dinner, I think."

"Assuming the Chinese don't nuke us first."

This was bait.

Jason rose to it. "Are you worried about the Chinese, Ty? That's not even a crisis anymore. It's been settled."

"That's a relief." I had heard about the crisis and the resolution all in the same day. "My mom mentioned it. Something on the news."

"The Chinese military want to nuke the polar artifacts. They have nuclear-tipped missiles sitting on pads in Jiuquan, ready to launch. The reasoning is, if they can damage the polar devices they might take down the entire October shield. Of course there's no reason to believe it would work. How likely is it that a technology capable of manipulating time and gravitation would be vulnerable to our weapons?"

"So we threatened the Chinese and they backed down?"

"A little of that. But we offered a carrot, too. We offered to take them onboard."

"I don't understand."

"To let them join us in our own little project to save the world."

"You're scaring me a little here, Jase."

"Hand me those tongs. I'm sorry. I know this sounds cryptic. I'm not supposed to be talking about these things at all. With anyone."

"You're making an exception in my case?"

"I always make an exception in your case." He smiled. "We'll discuss it over dinner, okay?"

I left him at the grill, shrouded in smoke and heat.

* * * * *

Two consecutive American administrations had been scolded by the press for "doing nothing" about the Spin. But it was a criticism without teeth. If there was anything practical that could be done, no one seemed to know what it was. And any clearly retaliatory action—like the one the Chinese had proposed—would have been prohibitively dangerous.

Perihelion was pushing a radically different approach.

"The governing metaphor," Jase said, "isn't combat. It's judo. Using a bigger opponent's weight and momentum against him. That's what we want to do with the Spin."

He told me this laconically while he cut up his grilled steak with surgical attention. We ate in the kitchen with the back door open. A huge bumblebee, so fat and yellow it looked like an airborne knot of woolen threads, bumped against the bug screen.

"Try to think about the Spin," he said, "as an opportunity rather than an assault."

"An opportunity to do what? Die prematurely?"

"An opportunity to use time for our own ends, in a way we never could before."

"Isn't time what they took away from us?"

"On the contrary. Outside our little terrestrial bubble we have millions of years to play with. And we have a tool that works extremely reliably over exactly those spans of time."

"Tool," I said, bewildered, while he speared another cube of beef. The meal was straight to the point. A steak on a plate, bottle of beer on the side. No frills, barring the three-bean salad, of which he took a modest helping.

"Yes, a tool, the obvious one: evolution."

"Evolution."

"We can't have this talk, Tyler, if you just repeat everything back to me."

"Okay, well, evolution as a tool… I still don't see how we can evolve sufficiently in thirty or forty years to make a difference."

"Not us, for god's sake, and certainly not in thirty or forty years. I'm talking about simple forms of life. I'm talking about eons. I'm talking about Mars."

"Mars." Oops.

"Don't be obtuse. Think about it."

Mars was a functionally dead planet, even if it may once have possessed the primitive precursors to life. Outside the Spin bubble, Mars had been "evolving" for millions of years since the October Event, warmed by the expanding sun. It was still, according to the latest orbital photographs, a dead, dry planet. If it had possessed simple life and a supportive climate it could have become, I guessed, a lush green jungle by now. But it didn't and it wasn't.

"People used to talk about terraforming," Jason said. "Remember those speculative novels you used to read?"

"I still read them, Jase."

"More power to you. How would you go about terraforming Mars?"

"Try to get enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to warm it up. Release its frozen water. Seed it with simple organisms. But even with the most optimistic assumptions, that would take—"

He smiled.

I said, "You're kidding me."

"No." The smile went away. "Not at all. No, this is quite serious."

"How would you even begin—?"

"We would begin with a series of synchronized launches containing payloads of engineered bacteria. Simple ion engines and a slow glide to Mars. Mostly controlled crashes, survivable for unicells, and a few larger payloads with bunker-buster warheads to deliver the same organisms below the surface of the planet where we suspect the presence of buried water. Hedge our bets with multiple launches and a whole spectrum of candidate organisms. The idea is to get enough organic action going to loosen up the carbon locked into the crust and respirate it into the atmosphere. Give it a few million years—months, our time—then survey the planet again. If it's a warmer place with a denser atmosphere and maybe a few ponds of semiliquid water we do the cycle again, this time with multicelled plants engineered for the environment. Which puts some oxygen into the air and maybe cranks up the atmospheric pressure another couple of millibars. Repeat as necessary. Add more millions of years and stir. In a reasonable time—the way our clocks measure time—you might be able to cook up a habitable planet."

It was a breathtaking idea. I felt like one of those sidekick characters in a Victorian mystery novel—"It was an audacious, even ludicrous, plan he had contrived, but try as I might, I could find no flaw in it!"

Except one. One fundamental flaw.

"Jason," I said. "Even if this is possible. What good does it do us?"

"If Mars is habitable, people can go there and live."

"All seven or eight billion of us?"

He snorted. "Hardly. No, just a few pioneers. Breeding stock, if you want to be clinical about it."

"And what are they supposed to do?"

"Live, reproduce, and die. Millions of generations for each of our years."

"To what end?"

"If nothing else, to give the human species a second chance in the solar system. In the best case—they'll have all the knowledge we can give them, plus a few million years to improve on it. Inside the Spin bubble we don't have time enough to figure out who the Hypotheticals are or why they're doing this to us. Our Martian heirs might have a better chance. Maybe they can do our thinking for us."

Or our fighting for us?

(This was, incidentally, the first time I had heard them called "Hypotheticals"—the hypothetical controlling intelligences, the unseen and largely theoretical creatures who had enclosed us in their time vault. The name didn't catch on with the general public for a few more years. I was sorry when it did. The word was too clinical, it suggested something abstract and coolly objective; the truth was likely to be more complex.)

"There's a plan," I said, "to actually do these things?"

"Oh yes." Jason had finished three quarters of his steak. He pushed his plate away. "It's not even prohibitively expensive. Engineering extremely hardy unicells is the only problematic part. The surface of Mars is cold, dry, virtually airless, and bathed in sterilizing radiation every time the sun comes up. Even so, we have whole rafts of extremophiles to work with—bacteria living in Antarctic rocks, bacteria living in the outflow from nuclear reactors. And everything else is fully proven technology. We know rockets work. We know organic evolution works. The only really new thing is our perspective. To be able to get extremely long-term results literally days or months after we launch. It's… people are calling it 'teleological engineering.'"

"It's almost like," I said (testing the new word he had given me), "what the Hypotheticals are doing."

"Yes," Jason said, raising his eyebrows in a look I still found flattering after all these years: surprise, respect. "Yes, in a way I guess it is."

* * * * *

I had once read an interesting detail in a book about the first manned moon landing back in 1969. At that time, the book said, some of the very elderly—men and women born in the nineteenth century, old enough to remember a world before automobiles and television—had been reluctant to believe the news. Words that would have made only fairy-tale sense in their childhood ("two men walked on the moon tonight") were being offered as statements of fact. And they couldn't accept it. It confounded their sense of what was reasonable and what was absurd.

Now it was my turn.

We're going to terraform and colonize Mars, said my friend Jason, and he wasn't delusional… or at least no more delusional than the dozens of smart and powerful people who apparently shared his conviction. So the proposition was serious; it must already have been, at some bureaucratic level, a work in progress.

I took a walk around the grounds after dinner while there was still a little daylight.

Mike the yard guy had done a decent job. The lawn glowed like a mathematician's idea of a garden, the cultivation of a primary color. Beyond it, shadows had begun to rise in the wooded acreage. Diane would have appreciated the woods in this light, I thought. I thought again of those summer sessions by the creek, years ago now, when she would read to us from old books. Once, when we talked about the Spin, Diane had quoted a little rhyme by the English poet A. E. Housman:

The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;

He has devoured the infant child.

The infant child is not aware

He has been eaten by the bear.

* * * * *

Jason was on the phone when I came back through the kitchen door. He looked at me, then turned away and lowered his voice.

"No," he said. "If it has to be that way, but—no, I understand. All right. I said all right, didn't I? All right means all right."

He pocketed the phone. I said, "Was that Diane?"

He nodded.

"She's coming?"

"She's coming. But there are a couple of things I want to mention before she gets here. You know what we talked about over dinner? We can't share that with her. Or, actually, anyone. It's not public information."

"You mean it's classified."

"Technically, I suppose so, yes."

"But you told me about it."

"Yes. That was a federal crime." He smiled. "Mine, not yours. And I trust you to be discreet about it. Be patient—it'll be all over CNN in a couple of months. Besides, I have plans for you, Ty. One of these days, Perihelion is going to vet candidates for some extremely rugged homesteading. We'll need all kinds of physicians on site. Wouldn't it be great if you could do that, if we could work together?"

I was startled. "I just graduated, Jase. I haven't interned."

"All things in time."

I said, "You don't trust Diane?"

His smile collapsed. "No, frankly. Not anymore. Not these days."

"When will she get here?"

"Before noon tomorrow."

"And what is it you don't want to tell me?"

"She's bringing her boyfriend."

"Is that a problem?"

"You'll see."

NO SINGLE THING ABIDES

I woke up knowing I wasn't ready to see her again. Woke up in E. D. Lawton's plush summerhouse in the Berkshires with the sun shining through filigreed lace blinds thinking, Enough bullshit. I was tired of it. All the self-serving bullshit of the last eight years, up to and including my affair with Candice Boone, who had seen through my own wishful lies sooner than I had. "You're a little bit fixated on these Lawton people," Candice had once said. Tell me about it.

I couldn't honestly say I was still in love with Diane. The connection between us had never been as unambiguous as that. We had both grown in and out of it, like vines weaving through a latticework fence. But at its best it had been a real connection, an emotion almost frightening in its gravity and maturity. Which was why I had been so eager to disguise it. It would have frightened her, too.

I still found myself conducting imaginary conversations with her, usually late at night, offering asides to the starless sky. I was selfish enough to miss her but sane enough to know we had never really been together. I was fully prepared to forget about her.

I just wasn't prepared to see her again.

* * * * *

Downstairs, Jason sat in the kitchen while I fixed myself breakfast. He had propped open the door. Sweet breezes swept the house. I was thinking seriously of throwing my bag into the back of the Hyundai and just driving away. "Tell me about this NK thing," I said.

"Do you read the papers at all?" Jason asked. "Do they keep med students in isolation up at Stony Brook?"

Of course I knew a little bit about NK, mostly what I'd heard on the news or picked up from lunchroom conversation. I knew NK stood for "New Kingdom." I knew it was a Spin-inspired Christian movement—at least nominally Christian, though it had been denounced by mainstream and conservative churches alike. I knew it attracted mainly the young and disaffected. A couple of guys in my freshman class had dropped out of school and into the NK lifestyle, trading shaky academic careers for a less demanding enlightenment.

"It's really just a millenarian movement," Jase said. "Too late for the millennium but right on time for the end of the world."

"A cult, in other words."

"No, not exactly. 'NK' is a catchphrase for the whole Christian Hedonist spectrum, so it's not a cult in itself, though it does include some cultlike groups. There's no single leader. No holy writ, just a bunch of fringe theologians the movement is loosely identified with—C. R. Ratel, Laura Greengage, people like that." I'd seen their books on the drugstore racks. Spin theology with question-mark titles: Have We Witnessed the Second Coming? Can We Survive the End of Time? "And not much agenda, beyond a kind of weekend communalism. But what draws crowds isn't the theology. You ever see footage of those NK rallies, the kind they call an Ekstasis?"

I had, and unlike Jase, who had never been much at home with matters of the flesh, I could understand the appeal. What I had seen was recorded video of a gathering in the Cascades, summer of last year. It had looked like a cross between a Baptist picnic and a Grateful Dead concert. A sunny meadow, wildflowers, ceremonial white robes, a guy with zero-percent body fat blowing a shofar. By nightfall a bonfire was burning briskly and a stage had been set up for musicians. Then the robes began to drop and the dancing started. And a few acts more intimate than dancing.

For all the disgust evinced by the mainstream media it had looked winsomely innocent to me. No preaching, just a few hundred pilgrims smiling into the teeth of extinction and loving their neighbors like they'd like to be loved. The footage had been burned onto hundreds of DVDs and passed from hand to hand in college dorms nationwide, including Stony Brook. There is no sexual act so Edenic that a lonely med student can't whack off to it.

"It's hard to picture Diane being attracted to NK."

"On the contrary. Diane's their target audience. She's scared to death of the Spin and everything it implies about the world. NK is an anodyne for people like her. It turns the thing they're most afraid of into an object of adoration, a door into the Kingdom of Heaven."

"How long has she been involved?"

"Most of a year now. Since she met Simon Townsend."

"Simon's NK?"

"Simon, I'm afraid, is hard-core NK."

"You met this guy?"

"She brought him to the Big House last Christmas. I think she wanted to watch the fireworks. E.D., of course, doesn't approve of Simon. In fact his hostility was pretty obvious." (Here Jason winced at the memory of what must have been one of E. D. Lawton's major tantrums.) "But Diane and Simon did the NK thing—they turned the other cheek. They practically smiled him to death. I mean that literally. He was one gentle, forgiving look away from the coronary ward."

Score one for Simon, I thought. "Is he good for her?"

"He's exactly what she wants. He's the last thing she needs."

* * * * *

They arrived that afternoon, sputtering up the driveway in a fifteen-year-old touring car that appeared to burn more oil than Mike-the-yard-guy's tractor. Diane was driving. She parked and climbed out on the far side of the car, obscured by the luggage rack, while Simon stepped into full view, smiling bashfully.

He was a good-looking guy. Six feet tall or a little over; skinny but not a weakling; a plain, slightly horsey face offset by his unruly golden-blond hair. His smile showed a cleft between his upper front teeth. He wore jeans and a plaid shirt and a blue bandanna tied around his left biceps like a tourniquet; that was an NK emblem, I learned later.

Diane circled the car and stood beside him, both of them grinning up the porch stairs at Jason and me. She was also decked out in high NK fashion: a cornflower-blue floor-sweeper skirt, blue blouse, and a ridiculous black wide-brimmed hat like the kind Amish men wear. But the clothes suited her, or rather they framed her in a pleasing way, suggested rude health and hayseed sensuality. Her face was as alive as an unplucked berry. She shaded her eyes in the sunlight and grinned—at me in particular, I wanted to believe. My god, that smile. Somehow both genuine and mischievous.

I began to feel lost.

Jason's phone trilled. He pulled it out of his pocket and checked the caller ID.

"Gotta take this one," he whispered.

"Don't leave me alone here, Jase."

"I'll be in the kitchen. Right back."

He ducked away just as Simon lofted his big duffel bag onto the wooden planking of the porch and said, "You must be Tyler Dupree!"

He stuck out his hand. I took it. He had a firm grip and a honeyed Southern accent, vowels like polished driftwood, consonants polite as calling cards. He made my name sound positively Cajun, though the family had never been south of Millinocket. Diane bounded up after him, yelled, "Tyler!" and grabbed me in a ferocious embrace. Suddenly her hair was in my face and all I could register was the sunny, salty smell of her.

We backed off to a comfortable arm's length. "Tyler, Tyler," she exclaimed, as if I had turned into something remarkable. "You're looking good after all these years."

"Eight," I said stupidly. "Eight years."

"Wow, is it really?"

I helped drag their luggage inside, showed them to the parlor off the porch, and hurried away to retrieve Jason, who was in the kitchen interacting with his cell. His back was turned when I came in.

"No," he said. His voice was tense. "No… not even the State Department?"

I stopped in my tracks. The State Department. Oh my.

"I can be back in a couple of hours if—oh. I see. Okay. No, it's all right. But keep me informed. Right. Thanks."

He pocketed the phone and caught sight of me.

"Talking to E.D.?" I asked.

"His assistant, actually."

"Everything okay?"

"Come on, Ty, you want me to let you in on all the secrets?" He attempted a smile, not too successfully. "I wish you hadn't overheard that."

"All I heard was you offering to go back to D.C. and leave me here with Simon and Diane."

"Well… I may have to. The Chinese are balking."

"What's that mean, balking!"

"They refuse to entirely abandon their planned launch. They want to keep that option open."

The nuclear attack on the Spin artifacts, he meant. "I assume somebody's trying to talk them out of it?"

"The diplomacy is ongoing. It's just not exactly succeeding. Negotiations seem to be deadlocked."

"So—well, shit, Jase! What's it mean if they do launch?"

"It means two high-yield fusion weapons would be detonated in close proximity to unknown devices associated with the Spin. As for the consequences… well, that's an interesting question. But it hasn't happened yet. Probably won't."

"You're talking about doomsday, or maybe the end of the Spin…"

"Keep your voice down. We have guests, remember? And you're overreacting. What the Chinese have in mind is rash and probably futile, but even if they go ahead with it it's not likely to be suicidal. Whatever the Hypotheticals are, they must know how to defend themselves without destroying us in the process. And the polar artifacts aren't necessarily the devices that enable the Spin. They could be passive observational platforms, communications devices, even decoys."

"If the Chinese do launch," I said, "how much warning do we get?"

"Depends what you mean by 'we.' The general public probably won't hear anything until it's over."

This was when I first began to understand that Jason wasn't just his father's apprentice, that he had already begun to forge his own connections in high places. Later I would learn a great deal more about the Perihelion Foundation and the work Jason did for it. For now it was still part of Jason's shadow life. Even when we were children Jase had had a shadow life: away from the Big House he'd been a math prodigy, breezing through an elite private school like a Masters titleist playing a mini-golf course; home, he was just Jase, and we had been careful to keep it that way.

It was still that way. But he was casting a bigger shadow now. He didn't spend his days impressing calculus instructors at Rice. He spent his days positioning himself to influence the course of human history.

He added, "If it happens, yes, I'll have some warning. We'll have some warning. But I don't want Diane worrying about it. Or Simon, of course."

"Great. I'll just put it out of my mind. The end of the world."

"It's no such thing. Nothing's happened yet. Calm down, Tyler. Pour drinks if you need something to do."

As nonchalant as he was trying to sound, his hand trembled as he took four tumblers out of the kitchen cupboard.

I could have left. I could have walked out the door, hustled into my Hyundai and been a long way down the road before I was missed. I thought about Diane and Simon in the front parlor practicing hippie Christianity and Jase in the kitchen taking doomsday bulletins on his cell phone: did I really want to spend my last night on Earth with these people?

Thinking at the same time: but who else? Who else?

* * * * *

"We met in Atlanta," Diane said. "Georgia State hosted a seminar on alternative spirituality. Simon was there to hear C. R. Ratel's lecture. I just sort of found him in the campus cafeteria. He was sitting by himself reading a copy of Second Coming, and I was alone, so I put down my tray and we started talking."

Diane and Simon shared a plush yellow dust-scented sofa by the window. Diane slouched against the armrest. Simon sat alertly upright. His smile had begun to worry me. It never went away.

The four of us sipped drinks while the curtains wafted in the breeze and a horsefly mumbled at the window screen. It was hard to sustain a conversation when there was so much we weren't supposed to talk about. I made an effort to duplicate Simon's smile. "So you're a student?"

"Was a student," he said.

"What are you doing lately?"

"Traveling. Mostly."

"Simon can afford to travel," Jase said. "He's an heir."

"Don't be rude," Diane said, the edge in her voice signifying a real warning. "This once, please, Jase?"

But Simon shrugged it off. "No, it's true enough. I have some money set aside. Diane and I are taking the opportunity to see a little bit of the country."

"Simon's grandfather," Jason said, "was Augustus Townsend, the Georgia pipe cleaner king."

Diane rolled her eyes. Simon, still imperturbable—he was beginning to seem almost saintly—said, "That was in the old days. We aren't even supposed to call them pipe cleaners anymore. They're 'chenille stems.'" He laughed. "And here I sit, heir to a chenille stem fortune." Actually it was a gifts-and-notions fortune, Diane explained later. Augustus Townsend had started in pipe cleaners but made his money distributing tin-press toys, charm bracelets, and plastic combs to five-and-dime stores throughout the South. In the 1940s the family had been a big presence in Atlanta social circles.

Jason pressed on: "Simon himself doesn't have what you'd call a career. He's a free spirit."

"I don't suppose any of us is truly a free spirit," Simon said, "but no, I don't have or want a career. I guess that makes me sound lazy. Well, I am lazy. It's my besetting vice. But I wonder how useful any career will be in the long run. Considering the state of things. No offense." He turned to me. "You're in medicine, Tyler?"

"Just out of school," I said. "As careers go—"

"No, I think that's wonderful. Probably the most valuable occupation on the planet."

Jason had accused Simon of being, in effect, useless. Simon had replied that careers in general were useless… except careers like mine. Thrust and parry. It was like watching a bar fight conducted in ballet shoes.

Still, I found myself wanting to apologize for Jase. Jason was offended not by Simon's philosophy but by his presence. This week in the Berkshires was supposed to be a reunion, Jason and Diane and me, back in the comfort zone, childhood revisited. Instead we were being treated to confinement at close quarters with Simon, whom Jason obviously regarded as an interloper, a sort of southern-fried Yoko Ono.

I asked Diane how long they'd been traveling.

"About a week," she said, "but we'll be on the road most of the summer. I'm sure Jason's told you about New Kingdom. But it's really pretty wonderful, Ty. We have Internet friends all across the country. People we can crash with a day or two. So we're doing conclaves and concerts from Maine to Oregon, July through October."

Jason said, "I guess that saves on accommodation and clothing expenses."

"Not every conclave is an Ekstasis," Diane shot back.

"We won't be doing much traveling at all," Simon said, "if that old car of ours falls apart. The engine misfires and we're getting lousy mileage. I'm not much of a mechanic, unfortunately. Tyler, do you know anything about automobile engines?"

"A thing or two," I said. I understood this was an invitation to step outside with Simon while Diane tried to negotiate a cease-fire with her brother. "Let's have a look."

The day was still clear, waves of warm air rippling up from the emerald lawn beyond the driveway. I listened with, I admit, partial attention, as Simon opened the hood of his old Ford and recited his problems. If he was as wealthy as Jase had implied, couldn't he buy himself a better car? But I guessed it was a dissipated fortune he had inherited, or maybe it was tied up in trust funds.

"I guess I seem pretty stupid," Simon said. "Especially in the company I'm keeping. I never much grasped scientific or mechanical things."

"I'm no expert either. Even if we get the motor running a little smoother you ought to have a real mechanic look at it before you start driving cross-country."

"Thank you, Tyler." He watched with a sort of goggle-eyed fascination as I inspected the engine. "I appreciate that advice."

The most likely culprit was the spark plugs. I asked Simon whether they had ever been replaced. "Not to my knowledge," he said. The car had 60,000-plus miles on it. I used the ratchet set from my own car to pull one of the plugs and showed it to him: "Here's most of your trouble."

"That thing?"

"And its friends. The good news is it's not an expensive part to replace. The bad news is, you're better off not driving until we replace it."

"Hmm," Simon said.

"We can go into town in my car and pick up replacements if you're willing to wait till morning."

"Well, surely. That's very kind. We weren't planning to leave right away. Ah, unless Jason insists."

"Jason will calm down. He's just—"

"You don't have to explain. Jason would rather I wasn't here. I understand that. It doesn't shock or surprise me. Diane just felt she couldn't accept an invitation that made a point of disincluding me."

"Well… good for her." I guess.

"But I could just as easily rent a room somewhere in town."

"No need for that," I said, wondering exactly how it had come to pass that I was pressing Simon Townsend to stay. I don't know what I had expected from a reunion with Diane, but Simon's presence had aborted any nascent hopes. For the best, probably.

"I suppose," Simon said, "Jason's talked to you about New Kingdom. It's been a point of contention."

"He told me you guys were involved in it."

"I'm not about to make a recruiting speech. But if you have any anxiety about the movement maybe I can put it to rest."

"All I know about NK is what I see on television, Simon."

"Some people call it Christian Hedonism. I prefer New Kingdom. That's the idea in a nutshell, really. Build the chiliasm by living it, right here and now. Make the last generation as idyllic as the very first."

"Uh-huh. Well… Jase doesn't have much patience with religion."

"No, he doesn't, but you know what, Tyler? I don't think it's the religion that upsets him."

"No?"

"No. In all honesty I admire Jason Lawton, and not just because he's famously smart. He's one of the cognoscenti, if you'll pardon a ten-dollar word. He takes the Spin seriously. There are, what, eight billion people on Earth? And pretty much each and every one of them knows, at the very least, that the stars and moon have disappeared out of the sky. But they go on living in denial. Only a few of us really believe in the Spin. NK takes it seriously. And so does Jason."

This was almost shockingly like what Jason himself had said. "Not in the same… style, though."

"That's the crux of the matter. Two visions competing for the public mind. Before long people will have to face up to reality whether they want to or not. And they'll have to choose between a scientific understanding and a spiritual one. That worries Jason. Because when it comes down to matters of life and death, faith always wins. Where would you rather spend eternity? In an earthly paradise or a sterile laboratory?"

The answer didn't seem as clear-cut to me as it evidently did to Simon. I recalled Mark Twain's reply to a similar question:

Heaven, for the climate. Hell, for the company.

* * * * *

There was some audible arguing from inside the house— Diane's voice, scolding, and her brother's sullen, uninflected replies. Simon and I pulled a couple of folding chairs out of the garage and sat in the shade of the carport waiting for the twins to finish. We talked about the weather. The weather was very nice. We reached a consensus on that point.

The noise from the house eventually settled down. After a while a chastened-looking Jason came out and invited us to help him with the barbecue. We followed him around back and made more nice talk while the grill warmed up. Diane stepped out of the house looking flushed but triumphant. This was the way she used to look whenever she won an argument with Jase: a little haughty, a little surprised.

We sat down to chicken and iced tea and the remains of the three-bean salad. "Do y'all mind if I offer a blessing?" Simon asked.

Jason rolled his eyes but nodded.

Simon bent his head solemnly. I braced myself for a sermon. But all he said was, "Grant us the courage to accept the bounty You have placed before us this and every other day. Amen."

A prayer expressing not gratitude but the need for courage. Very contemporary. Diane smiled at me across the table. Then she squeezed Simon's arm, and we proceeded to dig in.

* * * * *

It was early when we finished, sunlight still lingering, the mosquitos not yet at their evening frenzy. The breeze had died and there was a softness in the cooling air.

Elsewhere, things were happening fast.

What we didn't know—what even Jason, for all his vaunted connections, hadn't yet been told—was that somewhere between that first bite of chicken and that last spoonful of three-bean salad the Chinese had pulled out of negotiations and ordered the immediate launch of a brace of modified Dong Feng missiles armed with thermonuclear warheads. The rockets might have been rising in their arcs even as we pulled Heinekens out of the cooler. Icy green rocket-shaped bottles dripping summer sweat.

We cleared the patio table. I mentioned the worn spark plugs and my plan to drive Simon into town in the morning. Diane whispered something to her brother, then (after a pause) nudged him with her elbow. Jase finally nodded and turned to Simon and said, "There's one of those automotive superstores outside Stockbridge that's open till nine. Why don't I drive you over there right now?"

It was a peace offering, however reluctant. Simon recovered from his initial surprise and said, "I'm not about to turn down a ride in that Ferrari, if that's what you're offering."

"I can put it through its paces for you." Mollified by the prospect of showing off his car, Jason went into the house to fetch his keys. Simon shot back a well-gosh expression before following him. I looked at Diane. She grinned, proud of this triumph of diplomacy.

Elsewhere, the Dong Feng missiles approached and then crossed the Spin barrier en route to their programmed targets. Strange to think of them streaking over a suddenly dark, cold, motionless Earth, operating solely on internal programming, aiming themselves at the featureless artifacts that drifted in suspension hundreds of miles over the poles.

Like a drama without an audience, too sudden to see.

* * * * *

The educated consensus—afterward—was that the detonation of the Chinese warheads had no effect on the differential flow of time. What was affected (profoundly) was the visual filter surrounding the Earth. Not to mention the human perception of the Spin.

As Jase had pointed out years ago, the temporal gradient meant that massive amounts of radically blue-shifted radiation would have bathed the surface of our planet had that radiation not been filtered and managed by the Hypotheticals. More than three years of sunlight for every second that passed: enough to kill every living thing on Earth, enough to sterilize the soil and boil the oceans. The Hypotheticals, who had engineered the temporal enclosure of the Earth, had also shielded us from its lethal side effects. Moreover, the Hypotheticals were regulating not only how much energy reached the static Earth but how much of the planet's own heat and light was radiated back into space. Which was perhaps why the weather these last few years had been so pleasantly… average.

The sky over the Berkshires, at least, was as cloudless as Waterford crystal when the Chinese payloads reached their targets, 7:55 Eastern time.

* * * * *

I was with Diane in the front room when the house phone rang.

Did we notice anything before Jason's call? A change in the light, something as insignificant as the feeling that a cloud might have passed in front of the sun? No. Nothing. All my attention was on Diane. We were drinking coolers and talking about trivia. Books we'd read, movies we'd seen. The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange. What we said was trite and conventional, but the undertalk was deep and occasionally treacherous.

And pretty soon we were flirting with each other, as if Simon Townsend and the last eight years signified nothing. Joking at first, then maybe not joking. I told her I'd missed her. She said, "There were times I wanted to talk to you. Needed to talk to you. But I didn't have your number, or I figured you were busy."

"You could have found my number. I wasn't busy."

"You're right. Actually it was more like… moral cowardice."

"Am I that frightening?"

"Not you. Our situation. I suppose I felt as if I ought to apologize to you. And I didn't know how to begin to do that." She smiled wanly. "I guess I still don't."

"There's nothing to apologize for, Diane."

"Thank you for saying so, but I happen to disagree. We're not kids anymore. It's possible to look back with a certain amount of insight. We were as close as two people can be without actually touching. But that was the one thing we couldn't do. Or even talk about. As if we had taken an oath of silence."

"Since the night the stars disappeared," I said, dry-mouthed, aghast at myself, terrified, aroused.

Diane waved her hand. "That night. That night—you know what I remember about that night? Jason's binoculars. I was looking at the Big House while you two stared off into the sky. I really don't remember the stars at all. What I remember is catching sight of Carol in one of the back bedrooms with somebody from the catering service. She was drunk and it looked like she was making a pass." She laughed bashfully. "That was my own little apocalypse. Everything I already hated about the Big House, about my family, it was all summed up in one night. I just wanted to pretend it didn't exist. No Carol, no E.D., no Jason—"

"No me?"

She moved across the sofa and, because it had become that kind of conversation, put a hand on my cheek. Her hand was cool, the temperature of the drink she'd been holding. "You were the exception. I was scared. You were incredibly patient. I appreciated that."

"But we couldn't—"

"Touch."

"Touch. E.D. would never have stood for it."

She took her hand away. "We could have hidden it from him if we'd wanted to. But you're right, E.D. was the problem. He infected everything. It was obscene, the way he made your mother live a kind of second-class existence. It was debasing. Can I confess this? I absolutely hated being his daughter. I especially hated the idea that if anything, you know, happened between us, it might be your way of taking revenge on E. D. Lawton."

She sat back, a little surprised at herself, I think.

"Of course," I said carefully, "it wouldn't have been."

"I was confused."

"Is that what NK is for you? Revenge on E.D.?"

"No," she said, still smiling, "I don't love Simon just because he makes my father angry. Life's not that simple, Ty."

"I didn't mean to suggest—"

"But you see how insidious it is? Certain suspicions come into your head and get stuck there. No, NK isn't about my father. It's about discovering the divinity in what's happened to the Earth and expressing that divinity in daily life."

"Maybe the Spin isn't that simple, either."

"We're either being murdered or transformed, Simon says."

"He told me you're building heaven on Earth."

"Isn't that what Christians are supposed to do? Make the Kingdom of God by expressing it in their lives?"

"Or at least dancing to it."

"Now you sound like Jason. Obviously I can't defend everything about the movement. Last week we were at a conclave in Philadelphia and we met this couple, our age, friendly, intelligent—'alive in the spirit,' Simon called them. We went out to dinner and talked about the Parousia. Then they invited us up to their hotel room, and suddenly they were laying out lines of coke and playing porn videos. All kinds of marginal people are attracted to NK. No question. And for most of them the theology barely exists, except as a fuzzy image of the Garden of Eden. But at its best the movement is everything it claims to be, a genuine living faith."

"Faith in what, Diane? Ekstasis? Promiscuity?"

I regretted the words as soon as I'd said them. She looked hurt. "Ekstasis isn't about promiscuity. Not when it succeeds, anyway. But in the body of God no act is prohibited as long as it isn't vengeful or angry, as long as it expresses divine as well as human love."

The phone rang then. I must have looked guilty. Diane saw my expression and laughed.

Jason's first words when I picked up: "I said we'd have some warning. I'm sorry. I was wrong."

"What?"

"Tyler… haven't you seen the sky?"

* * * * *

So we went upstairs to find a window facing the sunset.

The west bedroom was generously large, equipped with a mahogany chifferobe, a brass-railed bed, and big windows. I drew the curtains wide. Diane gasped.

There was no setting sun. Or, rather, there were several.

The entire western sky was alight. Instead of the single orb of the sun there was an arc of reddish glow that stretched across at least fifteen degrees of the horizon, containing what looked like a flickering multiple exposure of a dozen or more sunsets. The light was erratic; it brightened and faded like a distant fire.

We gaped at it for an endless time. Eventually Diane said, "What's happening, Tyler? What's going on?"

I told her what Jason had told me about the Chinese nuclear warheads.

"He knew this might happen?" she asked, then answered herself: "Of course he did." The strange light gave the room a roseate hue and fell on her cheeks like a fever. "Will it kill us?"

"Jason doesn't think so. It'll scare the hell out of people, though."

"But is it dangerous? Radiation or something?"

I doubted it. But it wasn't out of the question. "Try the TV," I said. There was a plasma panel in each bedroom, framed in walnut paneling opposite the bed. I figured any kind of remotely lethal radiation would also screw up broadcasting and reception.

But the TV worked well enough to show us news channel views of crowds gathering in cities across Europe, where it was already dark—or as dark as it was going to get that night. No lethal radiation but plenty of incipient panic. Diane sat motionless on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, clearly frightened. I sat beside her and said, "If any of this was going to kill us we'd be dead by now."

Outside, the sunset stuttered toward darkness. The diffuse glow resolved into several distinct setting suns, each ghostly pale, then a coil of sunlight like a luminous spring that arced across the whole sky and vanished just as suddenly.

We sat hip to hip as the sky grew darker. Then the stars came out.

* * * * *

I managed to get hold of Jase one more time before the bandwidth was overwhelmed. Simon had just finished paying for the plug set for his car, he said, when the sky erupted. The roads out of Stockbridge were already crowded and the radio reported scattered looting in Boston and stalled traffic on every major route, so Jase had pulled into a parking lot behind a motel and rented a room for the night for himself and Simon. In the morning, he said, he would probably have to head back to Washington, but he'd drop Simon at the house first.

Then he passed his phone to Simon and I passed mine to Diane and left the room while she talked to her fiance. The summerhouse seemed ominously huge and empty. I walked around turning on lights until she called me back.

"Another drink?" I asked her.

"Oh yes," she said.

* * * * *

We went outside a little after midnight.

Diane was putting on a brave face. Simon had given her some kind of New Kingdom pep talk. In NK theology there was no conventional Second Coming, no Rapture or Armageddon; the Spin was all these things put together, all the ancient prophecies obliquely fulfilled. And if God wanted to use the canvas of the sky to paint us the naked geometry of time, Simon said, He would do so, and our awe and fear were entirely appropriate to the occasion. But we shouldn't be overwhelmed by these feelings because the Spin was ultimately an act of salvation, the last and best chapter in human history.

Or something like that.

So we went outside to watch the sky because Diane thought it was a brave and spiritual thing to do. The sky was cloudless and the air smelled of pine. The highway was a long way off, but we heard occasional faint sounds of car horns and sirens.

Our shadows danced around us as various fractions of the sky lit up, now north, now south. We sat on the grass a few yards from the steady glow of the porch light and Diane leaned into my shoulder and I put my arm around her, both of us a little drunk.

Despite years of emotional chill, despite our history at the Big House, despite her engagement to Simon Townsend, despite NK and Ekstasis and despite even the nuke-inspired derangement of the sky, I was exquisitely conscious of the pressure of her body next to mine. And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.

The sky sparked with strange light. Not the unadulterated light of the Spinning universe, which would have killed us on the spot. Instead it was a series of snapshots of the sky, consecutive midnights compressed into microseconds, afterimages fading like the pop of a flashbulb; then the same sky a century or a millennium later, like sequences in a surreal movie. Some of the frames were blurred long-exposures, starlight and moonlight become ghostly orbs or circles or scimitars. Some were crisp and quickly fading stills. Toward the north the lines and circles in the sky were narrower, their radii relatively small, while the equatorial stars were more restless, waltzing over huge ellipses. Full and half and waning moons blinked from horizon to horizon in pale orange transparencies. The Milky Way was a band of white fluorescence (now brighter, now darker) lit by flaring, dying stars. Stars were created and stars were demolished with every breath of summer air.

And it all moved.

Moved in vast shimmerings and intricate dances suggesting ever-greater, still-invisible cycles. The sky beat like a heart above us. "So alive," Diane said.

There is a prejudice imposed on us by our brief window of consciousness: things that move are alive; things that don't are dead. The living worm twines under the dead and static rock. Stars and planets move, but only according to the inert laws of gravitation: a stone may fall but is not alive, and orbital motion is only the same falling indefinitely prolonged.

But extend our mayfly existence, as the Hypotheticals had, and the distinction blurs. Stars are born, live, die, and bequeath their elementary ashes to newer stars. The sum of their various motions is not simple but unimaginably complex, a dance of attraction and velocity, beautiful but frightening. Frightening because, like an earthquake, the writhing stars made mutable what ought to be solid. Frightening because our deepest organic secrets, our couplings and our messy acts of reproduction, turn out not to be secrets after all: the stars are also bleeding and laboring. No single thing abides, but all things flow. I couldn't remember where I had read that.

"Heraclitus," Diane said.

I wasn't aware that I'd said it aloud.

"All those years," Diane said, "back at the Big House, all those fucking wasted years, I knew—"

I put my finger on her lips. I knew what she had known.

"I want to go back inside," she said. "I want to go back to the bedroom."

* * * * *

We didn't pull the blinds. The spinning, kinetic stars cast their light into the room and in the darkness the patterns played over my skin and Diane's in focusless images, the way city lights shine through a rain-streaked window, silently, sinuously. We said nothing because words would have been an impediment. Words would have been lies. We made love wordlessly, and only when it was over did I find myself thinking, Let this abide. Just this.

We were asleep when the sky once more darkened, when the celestial fireworks finally dimmed and disappeared. The Chinese attack had amounted to little more than a gesture. Thousands had died as a result of the global panic, but there had been no direct casualties on Earth—or, presumably, among the Hypotheticals.

The sun rose on schedule the next morning.

The buzz of the house phone woke me. I was alone in bed. Diane took the call in another room and came in to tell me it was Jase, he said the roads were clear and he was on his way back.

She had showered and dressed and she smelled like soap and starched cotton. "And that's it?" I said. "Simon shows up and you drive away? Last night means nothing?"

She sat down on the bed next to me. "Last night never meant that I wouldn't leave with Simon."

"I thought it meant more."

"It meant more than I can possibly say. But it doesn't erase the past. I've made promises and I have a faith and those things put certain boundaries on my life."

She sounded unconvinced. I said, "A faith. Tell me you don't believe in this shit."

She stood up, frowning.

"Maybe I don't," she said. "But maybe I need to be around someone who does."

* * * * *

I packed and loaded my luggage into the Hyundai before Jase and Simon got back. Diane watched from the porch as I closed the lid of the trunk.

"I'll call you," she said.

"You do that," I told her.

4X109 A.D.

I broke another lamp during one of my fits of fever. This time Diane managed to conceal it from the concierge. She had bribed the housekeeping staff to exchange clean for dirty linen at the door every second morning rather than have a maid make up the room and risk finding me delirious. Cases of dengue, cholera, and human CVWS had cropped up at the local hospital within the last six months. I didn't want to wake up in an epidemiological ward next to a quarantine case.

"What worries me," Diane said, "is what might happen when I'm not here."

"I can take care of myself."

"Not if the fever spikes."

"Then it's a matter of luck and timing. Are you planning to go somewhere?"

"Only the usual. But I mean, in an emergency. Or if I can't get back to the room for some reason."

"What kind of emergency?"

She shrugged. "It's hypothetical," she said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but.

* * * * *

But I didn't press her about it. There was nothing I could do to improve the situation except cooperate.

I was beginning the second week of the treatment, approaching the crisis. The Martian drug had accumulated to some critical level in my blood and tissues. Even when the fevers subsided I felt disoriented, confused. The purely physical side effects were no fun either. Joint pain. Jaundice. Rash, if by "rash" you mean the sensation of having your skin slough off, layer by layer, exposing flesh almost as raw as an open wound. Some nights I slept for four or five hours—five was my record, I think—and woke in a slurry of dander, which Diane would clean from the blood-pocked bed while I shifted arthritically to a bedside chair.

I came to distrust even my most lucid moments. Just as often what I felt was a purely hallucinatory clarity, the world overbright and hyperdefined, words and memory cogged like gears in a runaway engine.

Bad for me. Maybe worse for Diane, who had to do bedpan duty during the times I was incontinent. In a way she was returning a favor. I had been with her when she endured this phase of the struggle herself. But that had been many years ago.

* * * * *

Most nights she slept beside me, though I don't know how she stood it. She kept a careful distance between us—at times just the pressure of the cotton sheet was painful enough to make me weep—but the almost subliminal sense of her presence was soothing.

On the really bad nights, when in my thrashing I might have thrown out an arm and hurt her, she curled up on the flower-print settee by the balcony doors.

She didn't say much about her trips into Padang. I knew approximately what she was doing there: making connections with pursers and cargo masters, pricing out options for a transit of the Arch. Dangerous work. If anything made me feel worse than the effects of the drug it was watching Diane walk out the door into a potentially violent Asian demimonde with no more protection than a pocket-sized can of Mace and her own considerable courage.

But even that intolerable risk was better than getting caught.

They—and by "they" I mean agents of the Chaykin administration or their allies in Jakarta—were interested in us for a number of reasons. Because of the drug, of course, and more important the several digital copies of the Martian archives we were carrying. And they would have loved to interrogate us about Jason's last hours: the monologue I had witnessed and recorded, everything he had told me about the nature of the Hypotheticals and the Spin, knowledge only Jason had possessed.

* * * * *

I slept and woke, and she was gone.

I spent an hour watching the balcony curtains move, watching sunlight angle up the visible leg of the Arch, daydreaming about the Seychelles.

Ever been to the Seychelles? Me neither. What was running in my head was an old PBS documentary I had once seen. The Seychelles are tropical islands, home to tortoises and coco de mer and a dozen varieties of rare birds. Geologically, they're all that remains of an ancient continent that once linked Asia and South America, long before the evolution of modern humans.

Dreams, Diane once said, are metaphors gone feral. The reason I dreamed about the Seychelles (I imagined her telling me) was because I felt submerged, ancient, almost extinct.

Like a drowning continent, awash in the prospect of my own transformation.

* * * * *

I slept again. Woke, and she still wasn't there.

* * * * *

Woke in the dark, still alone and knowing that by now too much time had passed. Bad sign. In the past, Diane had always come back by nightfall.

I'd been thrashing in my sleep. The cotton sheet lay puddled on the floor, barely visible in the light reflected by the plaster ceiling from the street outside. I was chilly but too sore to reach over and retrieve it.

The sky outside was exquisitely clear. If I gritted my teeth and inclined my head to the left I could see a few bright stars through the glass balcony doors. I entertained myself with the idea that in absolute terms some of those stars might be younger than I was.

I tried not to think about Diane and where she might be and what might be happening to her.

And eventually I fell asleep with the starlight burning through my eyelids, phosphorescent ghosts floating in the reddish dark.

* * * * *

Morning.

At least I thought it was morning. There was daylight beyond the window now. Someone, most likely the maid, knocked twice and said something testy in Malay from the hall. And went away again.

Now I was genuinely worried, though in this particular phase of the treatment the anxiety came through as a muddled peevishness. What had possessed Diane to stay away so intolerably long, and why wasn't she here to hold my hand and sponge my forehead? The idea that she might have come to harm was unwelcome, unproven, inadmissible before the court.

Still, the plastic bottle of water by the bed had been empty since at least yesterday or longer, my lips were chapped to the point of cracking, and I couldn't remember the last time I had hobbled to the toilet. If I didn't want my kidneys to shut down altogether I'd have to fetch water from the bathroom tap.

But it was hard enough just sitting up without screaming. The act of levering my legs over the side of the mattress was nearly unendurable, as if my bones and cartilage had been replaced with broken glass and rusty razors.

And although I tried to distract myself by thinking of something else (the Seychelles, the sky), even that feeble anodyne was distorted by the lens of the fever. I imagined I heard Jason's voice behind me, Jason asking me to get him something—a rag, a chamois; his hands were dirty. I came out of the bathroom with a washcloth instead of a glass of water and was halfway back to bed before I realized my mistake. Stupid. Start again. Take the empty water bottle this time. Fill it all the way up. Fill it to brimming. Follow the drinking gourd.

Handing him a chamois in the garden shed behind the Big House where the landscapers kept their tools.

He would have been about twelve years old. Early summer, a couple of years before the Spin.

Sip water and taste time. Here comes memory again.

* * * * *

I was surprised when Jason suggested we try to fix the gardener's gas mower. The gardener at the Big House was an irritable Belgian named De Meyer, who chain-smoked Gauloises and would only shrug sourly when we spoke to him. He had been cursing the mower because it coughed smoke and stalled every few minutes. Why do him a favor? But it was the intellectual challenge that fascinated Jase. He told me he'd been up past midnight researching gasoline engines on the Internet. His curiosity was piqued. He said he wanted to see what one looked like in vivo. The fact that I didn't know what in vivo meant made the prospect sound doubly interesting. I said I'd be happy to help.

In fact I did little more than watch while he positioned the mower over a dozen sheets of yesterday's Washington Post and began his examination. This was inside the musty but private tool shed at the back of the lawn, where the air reeked of oil and gasoline, fertilizer and herbicide. Bags of lawn seed and bark mulch spilled from raw pine shelves among the spavined blades and splintered handles of garden tools. We weren't supposed to play in the tool shed. Usually it was locked. Jason had taken the key from a rack inside the basement door.

It was a hot Friday afternoon outside and I didn't mind being in there watching him work; it was both instructive and oddly soothing. First he inspected the machine, stretching his body along the floor beside it. He patiently ran his fingers over the cowling, locating the screw heads, and when he was satisfied he removed the screws and set them aside, in order, and the housing next to them when he lifted it off.

And so into the deep workings of the machine. Somehow Jason had taught himself or intuited the use of a ratchet driver and a torque wrench. His moves were sometimes tentative but never uncertain. He worked like an artist or an athlete— nuanced, knowing, conscious of his own limitations. He had disassembled every part he could reach and laid them all out on the grease-blackened pages of the Post like an anatomical illustration when the shed door squealed open and we both jumped.

E. D. Lawton had come home early.

"Shit," I whispered, which won me a hard look from the senior Lawton. He stood in the doorway in an immaculately tailored gray suit, surveying the wreckage, while Jason and I stared at our feet, as instinctively guilty as if we'd been caught with a copy of Penthouse.

"Are you fixing that or vandalizing it?" he asked finally, his tone conveying the mixture of contempt and disdain that was E. D. Lawton's verbal signature, a trick he had mastered so long ago it was second nature to him now.

"Sir," Jason said meekly. "Fixing it."

"I see. Is it your lawn mower?"

"No, of course not, but I thought Mr. De Meyer might like it if I—"

"But it's not Mr. De Meyer's lawn mower, either, is it? Mr. De Meyer doesn't own his own tools. He'd be collecting welfare if I didn't hire him every summer. It happens to be my lawn mower." E.D. let the silence expand until it was almost painful. Then he said, "Have you found the problem?"

"Not yet."

"Not yet? Then you'd better get on with it."

Jason looked almost supernaturally relieved. "Yes, sir," he said. "I thought after dinner I'd—"

"No. Not after dinner. You took it apart, you fix it and put it back together. Then you can eat." E.D. turned his unwelcome attention my way. "Go home, Tyler. I don't want to find you in here again. You ought to know better."

I scurried out into the afternoon glare, blinking.

He didn't catch me in the shed again, but only because I was careful to avoid him. I was back later that night—after ten, when I looked out my bedroom window and saw light still leaking from the crevice under the shed door. I took a leftover chicken leg from the refrigerator, wrapped it in tinfoil, and hustled over under cover of darkness. Whispered to Jase, who doused the light long enough for me slip inside unseen.

He was covered in Maori tattoos of grease and oil, and the mower engine was still only halfway reassembled. After he'd wolfed down a few bites of chicken I asked him what was taking so long.

"I could put it back together in fifteen minutes," he said. "But it wouldn't work. The hard part is figuring out exactly what's wrong. Plus I keep making it worse. If I try to clean the fuel line I get air inside it. Or the rubber cracks. Nothing's in very good shape. There's a hairline fracture in the carburetor housing, but I don't know how to fix it. I don't have spare parts. Or the right tools. I'm not even sure what the right tools are." His face wrinkled, and for a moment I thought he might cry.

"So give up," I said. "Go tell E.D. you're sorry and let him take it out of your allowance or whatever."

He stared at me as if I had said something noble but ridiculously naive. "No, Tyler. Thanks, but I won't be doing that."

"Why not?"

But he didn't answer. Just set aside the chicken leg and returned to the scattered pieces of his folly.

I was about to leave when there was another ultraquiet knock at the door. Jason gestured at me to douse the light. He cracked the door and let his sister in.

She was obviously terrified E.D. would find her here. She wouldn't speak above a whisper. But, like me, she'd brought Jase something. Not a chicken leg. A wireless Internet browser the size of her palm.

Jason's face lit up when he saw it. "Diane!" he said.

She shushed him and gave me a nervous sideways smile.

"It's just a gadget," she whispered, and nodded at us both before she slipped out again.

"She knows better," Jason said after she left. "The gadget's trivial. It's the network that's useful. Not the gadget but the network."

Within the hour he was consulting a group of West Coast gearheads who modified small engines for remote-control robotics competitions. By midnight he had rigged temporary repairs for the mower's dozen infirmities. I left, snuck home, and watched from my bedroom window when he summoned his father. E.D. traipsed out of the Big House in pajamas and an open flannel shirt and stood with his arms crossed while Jason powered up the mower, the sound of it incongruous in the early-morning dark. E.D. listened a few moments, then shrugged and beckoned Jason back in the house.

Jase, hovering at the door, saw my light across the lawn and gave me a little covert wave of his hand.

Of course, the repairs were temporary. The Gauloises-smoking gardener showed up the following Wednesday and had trimmed about half the lawn when the mower seized and died for good and all. Listening from the shade of the treeline we learned at least a dozen useful Flemish curses. Jason, whose memory was very nearly eidetic, took a shine to God-verdomme min kloten miljardedju!—literally, "God damn my balls a million times Jesus!" according to what Jason pieced together from the Dutch/English dictionary in the Rice school library. For the next few months he used the expression whenever he broke a shoelace or crashed a computer.

Eventually E.D. had to ante up for a whole new machine. The shop told him the old one would cost too much to fix; it was a miracle it had worked as long as it did. I heard this through my mother, who heard it from Carol Lawton. And as far as I know E.D. never spoke to Jason about it again.

Jase and I laughed over it a few times, though—months later, when most of the sting had gone out of it.

* * * * *

I shuffled back to bed thinking about Diane, who had given her brother a gift that was not just conciliatory, like mine, but actually useful. So where was she now? What gift could she bring me that would lighten my burden? Her own presence would do.

Daylight flowed through the room like water, like a luminous river in which I was suspended, drowned in empty minutes.

Not all delirium is bright and frantic. Sometimes it's slow, reptilian, cold-blooded. I watched shadows crawl like lizards up the walls of the hotel room. Blink, and an hour was gone. Blink again and night was falling, no sunlight on the Archway when I inclined my head to look at it, dark skies instead, tropical stormclouds, lightning indistinguishable from the visual spikes induced by fever, but thunder unmistakable and a sudden wet mineral smell from outside and the sound of raindrops spitting on the concrete balcony.

And eventually another sound: a card in the doorlock, the squeal of hinges.

"Diane," I said. (Or whispered, or croaked.)

She hurried into the room. She was dressed for the street, in a leather-trimmed jumper and broad-brimmed hat dripping rainwater. She stood by the side of the bed.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't have to apologize. Just—"

"I mean, I'm sorry, Tyler, but you have to get dressed. We have to leave. Right away. Now. There's a cab waiting."

It took me some time to process this information. Meanwhile Diane started throwing stuff into a hard shell suitcase: clothes, documents both forged and legitimate, memory cards, a padded rack of small bottles and syringes. "I can't stand up," I tried to say, but the words wouldn't come out right.

So a moment later she started dressing me, and I salvaged a little dignity by lifting my legs without being asked and gritting my teeth instead of screaming. Then I sat up and she made me take more water from the bottle by the bedside. She led me to the bathroom, where I emitted a sludgy trickle of canary-yellow urine. "Oh hell," she said, "you're all dried out." She gave me another mouthful of water and a shot of analgesic that burned in my arm like venom. "Tyler, I'm so sorry!" But not sorry enough to stop urging me into a raincoat and a heavy hat.

I was alert enough to hear the anxiety in her voice. "What are we running from?"

"Just say I had a close encounter with some unpleasant people."

"Where are we going?"

"Inland. Hurry."

So we hustled along the dim corridor of the hotel, down a flight of stairs to ground level, Diane dragging the suitcase with her left hand and supporting me with her right. It was a long trek. The stairs, especially. "Stop moaning," she whispered a couple of times. So I did. Or at least I think I did.

Then out into the night. Raindrops bouncing off muddy sidewalks and sizzling on the hood of an overheated twenty-year-old taxi. The driver looked at me suspiciously from the shelter of his cab. I stared back. "He's not sick," Diane told him, making a bottle-to-the-mouth gesture, and the driver scowled but accepted the bills she pressed into his hand.

The narcotics took effect while we drove. The night streets of Padang had a cavernous smell, of dank asphalt and rotting fish. Oil slicks parted like rainbows under the wheels of the cab. We left the neon-lit tourist district and entered the tangle of shops and housing that had grown around the city in the last thirty years, makeshift slums giving way to the new prosperity, bulldozers parked under tarps between tin-roofed shacks. High-rise tenements grew like mushrooms from a compost of squatters' fields. Then we passed through the factory zone, gray walled and razor wired, and I slept, I think, again.

Dreaming not of the Seychelles but of Jason. Of Jason and his fondness for networks ("not a gadget but a network"), of the networks he had created and inhabited and the places those networks had taken him.

UNQUIET NIGHTS

Seattle, September, five years after the failed Chinese missile attack: I drove home through a rainy Friday rush hour and as soon as I was inside the door of my apartment I switched on the audio interface and cued a playlist I had put together labeled "Therapy."

It had been a long day in the Harborview ER. I had attended two gunshot wounds and an attempted suicide. Hovering in back of my eyelids was an image of blood sluicing from the rails of a gurney cart. I changed out of my rain-dampened day clothes into jeans and a sweatshirt, poured a drink, and stood by a window watching the city simmer in the dark. Somewhere out there was the lightless gap of Puget Sound, obscured by rolling clouds. Traffic was almost static on 1-5, a luminous red river.

My life, essentially, as I had made it. And it was all balanced on a word.

Pretty soon Astrud Gilberto was singing, wistfully and a little off-key, about guitar chords and Corcovado, but I was still too wired to think about what Jason had said on the phone last night. Too wired even to hear the music the way it deserved to be heard. "Corcovado,"

"Desafinado," some Gerry Mulligan tracks, some Charlie Byrd. Therapy. But it all blurred into the sound of the rain. I microwaved dinner and ate it without tasting it; then I abandoned all hope of karmic equanimity and decided to knock on Giselle's door, see if she was home.

Giselle Palmer rented the apartment three doors down the hall. She opened the door wearing ragged jeans and an old flannel shirt that announced an evening at home. I asked her if she was busy or if she felt like hanging out.

"I don't know, Tyler. You look pretty gloomy."

"More like conflicted. I'm thinking about leaving town."

"Really? Some kind of business trip?"

"For good."

"Oh?" Her smile faded. "When did you decide that?"

"I haven't decided. That's the point."

She opened the door wider and waved me in. "Seriously? Where are you going?"

"Long story."

"Meaning you need a drink before you talk about it?"

"Something like that," I said.

* * * * *

Giselle had introduced herself to me at a tenants' meeting in the basement of the building last year. She was twenty-four years old and about as tall as my collarbone. She worked days at a chain restaurant in Renton, but when we started getting together for coffee Sunday afternoons she told me she was "a hooker, a prostitute, it's my part-time job."

What she meant was that she was part of a loose group of female friends who traded among themselves the names of older men (presentable, usually married) who were willing to pay generously for sex but were terrified of the street trade. As she told me this Giselle had squared her shoulders and looked at me defiantly, in case I was shocked or repelled. I hadn't been. These were, after all, the Spin years. People Giselle's age made their own rules, for better or worse, and People like me abstained from passing judgment.

We continued to share coffee or an occasional dinner, and I had written requisitions for blood work for her on a couple of occasions. As of her last test Giselle was HTV-free and the only major communicable disease for which she carried antibodies was West Nile virus. In other words, she had been both careful and lucky.

But the thing about the sex trade, Giselle had told me, was that even at the semi-amateur level it begins to define your life. You become, she said, the kind of person who carries condoms and Viagra in her purse. So why do it, when she could have taken, say, a night job at Wal-Mart? That was a question she didn't welcome and which she answered defensively: "Maybe it's a kink. Or maybe it's a hobby, you know, like model trains." But I knew she had run away from an abusive stepfather in Saskatoon at an early age, and the ensuing career arc wasn't difficult to imagine. And of course she had the same ironclad excuse for risky behavior all of us of a certain age shared: the near-certainty of our own mass extinction. Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality.

She said, "So how drunk do you need to get? Tipsy or totally fucked? Actually we may not have a choice. Liquor cabinet's a little bare tonight."

She mixed me something that was mostly vodka and tasted like it had been drained from a fuel tank. I cleared the daily paper off a chair and sat down. Giselle's apartment was decently furnished but she kept house like a freshman in a dorm room. The newspaper was open to the editorial page. The cartoon was about the Spin: the Hypotheticals portrayed as a couple of black spiders gripping the Earth in their hairy legs. Caption: do we eat them now or wait for the election?

"I don't get that at all," Giselle said, slumping onto the sofa and waving at the paper with her foot.

"The cartoon?"

"The whole thing. The Spin. 'No return.' Reading the papers, it's like… what? There's something on the other side of the sky, and it's not friendly. That's all I really know."

Probably the majority of the human race could have signed off on that declaration. But for some reason—maybe it was the rain, the blood that had been spilled in my presence today—what she said made me feel indignant. "It's not that hard to understand."

"No? So why's it happening?"

"Not the why. Nobody knows the why. As for the what—"

"No, I know, I don't need that lecture. We're in a sort of cosmic baggie and the universe is spinning out of control, yada yada yada."

Which irked me again. "You know your own address, don't you?"

She sipped her own drink. "Course I do."

"Because you like to know where you are. A couple of miles from the ocean, a hundred miles from the border, a few thousand miles west of New York City—right?"

"Right, but so what?"

"I'm making a point. People don't have any trouble distinguishing between Spokane and Paris, but when it comes to the sky all they see is a big amorphous mystery blob. How come?"

"I don't know. Because I learned all my astronomy from Star Trek reruns? I mean, how much do I really have to know about moons and stars? Things I haven't seen since I was a little kid. Even the scientists admit they don't know what they're talking about half the time."

"And that's okay with you?"

"The fuck difference does it make if it's okay with me? Listen, maybe I should turn on the TV. We can watch a movie and you can tell me why you're thinking about leaving town."

Stars were like people, I told her: they live and die in predictable spans of time. The sun was aging fast, and as it aged it burned its fuel faster. Its luminosity increased ten percent for every billion years. The solar system had already changed in ways that would render the raw Earth uninhabitable even if the Spin stopped today. Point of no return. That's what the newspapers were talking about. It would not have been news, except that President Clayton had made it official, admitted in a speech that according to the best scientific opinion there was no way back to the status quo ante.

And she gave me a long unhappy stare and said, "All this bullshit—"

"It's not bullshit."

"Maybe not, but it's not doing me any good."

"I'm just trying to explain—"

"Fuck, Tyler. Did I ask for an explanation? Take your nightmares and go home. Or else settle down and tell me why you want to leave Seattle. This is about those friends of yours, isn't it?"

I had told her about Jason and Diane. "Mostly Jason."