Spin

"The so-called genius."

"Not just so-called. He's in Florida…"

"Doing something for the satellite people, you said."

"Turning Mars into a garden."

"That was in the papers, too. Is it really possible?"

"I have no idea. Jason seems to think so."

"But wouldn't it take a long time?"

"The clocks run faster," I said, "past a certain altitude."

"Uh-huh. So what's he need you for?"

Well, yeah, what? Good question. Excellent question. "They're hiring a physician for the in-house clinic at Perihelion."

"I thought you were just an ordinary GP."

"I am."

"So what makes you qualified to be an astronaut doctor?"

"Absolutely nothing. But Jason—"

"He's doing a favor for ah old buddy? Well, that figures. God bless the rich, huh? Keep it among friends."

I shrugged. Let her think so. No need to share this with Giselle, and Jase hadn't said anything specific…

But when we talked I had formed the impression that Jason wanted me not just as a house doctor but as his personal physician. Because he was having a problem. Some kind of problem he didn't want to share with the Perihelion staff. A problem he wouldn't talk about over the phone.

Giselle had run out of vodka but she rummaged in her purse and came up with a joint concealed in a box of tampons. "The pay is good, I bet." She clicked a plastic lighter and applied the flame to the twist of the joint and inhaled deeply.

"We didn't get into details."

She exhaled. "Such a geek. Maybe that's why you can stand thinking about the Spin all the time. Tyler Dupree, borderline autistic. You are, you know. All the signs. I bet this Jason Lawton is exactly the same. I bet he gets a hard-on every time he says the word 'billion.'"

"Don't underestimate him. He might actually help preserve the human race." If not any particular specimen of it.

"A geek ambition if I ever heard one. And this sister of his, the one you slept with—"

"Once."

"Once. She got religion, right?"

"Right." Got it and still had it, as far as I knew. I hadn't heard from Diane since that night in the Berkshires. Not entirely for lack of trying. A couple of e-mails had gone unanswered. Jase didn't hear much from her either, but according to Carol she was living with Simon somewhere in Utah or Arizona—some western state I'd never visited and couldn't picture—where the dissolution of the New Kingdom movement had stranded them.

"That's not hard to figure out either." Giselle passed the joint. I wasn't totally at ease with pot..But that "geek" remark had stung. I toked deeply, and the effect was exactly what it had been back in residence at Stony Brook: instant aphasia. "It must have been awful for her. The Spin happening, and all she wanted to do was forget about it, which was the last thing you or her family would let her do. I'd get religion too, in her place. I'd be singing in the fucking choir."

I said—belatedly, behind the buzz—"Is the world really so hard to look at?"

Giselle reached out and took back the joint. "From where I stand," she said, "yes. Mostly."

She turned her head, distracted. Thunder rattled the window as if it resented the dry warmth inside. Some serious weather was coming in across the Sound. "Bet it's gonna be one of those winters," she said. "The nasty kind. I wish I had a fireplace in here. Music would help. But I'm too tired to get up."

I went over to her audio rig and cued a download of a Stan Getz album, the saxophone warming the room the way no fireplace could have. She nodded at that: not what she would have picked, but yeah, good… "So he called you and offered you this job."

"Right."

"And you told him you'd take it?"

"I told him I'd think about it."

"Is that what you're doing? Thinking about it?"

She seemed to be implying something, but I didn't know what. "I guess I am."

"I guess you're not. I guess you already know what you're going to do. You know what I guess? I guess you're here to say good-bye."

I said I guessed that was possible.

"So at least come and sit next to me."

I moved to the sofa lethargically. Giselle stretched out and put her feet in my lap. She was wearing men's socks, a slightly ridiculous pair of fuzzy argyles. The cuffs of her jeans rode up her ankles. "For a guy who can look at a gunshot wound without flinching," she said, "you're pretty good at avoiding mirrors."

"What's that mean?"

"Means you're really obviously not finished with Jason and Diane. Her especially."

But it wasn't possible that Diane still mattered to me.

Maybe I wanted to prove that. Maybe mat's why we ended up stumbling together into Giselle's messy bedroom, smoking another joint, falling down on the Barbie-pink bedspread, making love under the rain-blinded windows, holding each other until we fell asleep.

But it wasn't Giselle's face that floated into my mind in the dreamy aftermath, and I woke a couple of hours later thinking: My god, she's right, I'm going to Florida.

* * * * *

In the end it took weeks to arrange, both at Jason's end and at the hospital. During that time I saw Giselle again, but only briefly. She was in the market for a used car and I sold her mine; I didn't want to risk the drive cross-country. (Road robbery on the interstates was up by double digits.) But we didn't mention the intimacy that had come and gone with the rainy weather, an act of slightly drunken kindness on someone's part, most likely hers.

Apart from Giselle there were few people in Seattle I needed to say good-bye to and not much in my apartment I needed to keep, nothing more substantial than some digital files, eminently portable, and a few hundred old discs. The day I left, Giselle helped me stack my luggage in the back of the taxi. "SeaTac," I told the driver, and she waved goodbye—not particularly sadly but at least wistfully—as the cab pulled into traffic.

Giselle was good person and she was leading a perilous life. I never saw her again, but I hope she survived the chaos that came later.

* * * * *

The flight to Orlando was a creaking old Airbus. The cabin upholstery was threadbare, the seatback video screens overdue for replacement. I took my place between a Russian businessman in the window seat and a middle-aged woman on the aisle. The Russian was sullenly indifferent to conversation but the woman wanted to talk: she was a professional medical transcriptionist bound for Tampa for a two-week visit with her daughter and son-in-law. Her name was Sarah, she said, and we talked medical shop while the aircraft lumbered toward cruising altitude.

Vast amounts of federal money had been pumped into the aerospace industry in the five years since the Chinese fireworks display. Very little of it had been devoted to commercial aviation, however, which was why these refurbished Airbuses were still flying. Instead the money had gone into the kind of projects E. D. Lawton was managing from his Washington office and Jason was designing at Perihelion in Florida: Spin investigations, including, lately, the Mars effort. The Clayton administration had shepherded all this spending through a compliant Congress pleased to appear to be doing something tangible about the Spin. It was good for public morale. Better still, no one expected immediate tangible results.

Federal money had helped keep the domestic economy afloat, at least in the Southwest, greater Seattle, coastal Florida. But it was a laggard and ice-thin prosperity, and Sarah was worried about her daughter: her son-in-law was a licensed pipe fitter, laid off indefinitely by a Tampa-area natural gas distributor. They were living in a trailer, collecting federal relief money and trying to raise a three-year-old boy, Sarah's grandson, Buster.

"Isn't that an odd name," she asked, "for a boy? I mean, Buster? Sounds like a silent-movie star. But the thing is, it kind of suits him."

I told her names were like clothes: either you wore them or they wore you. She said, "Is that right, Tyler Dupree?" and I smiled sheepishly.

"Of course," she said, "I don't know why young people want to have children at all these days. As awful as that sounds. Nothing against Buster, of course. I dearly love him and I hope he'll have a long and happy life. But I can't help wondering, what are the odds?"

"Sometimes people need a reason to hope," I said, wondering if this banal truth was what Giselle had been trying to tell me.

"But then," she said, "many young people aren't having children, I mean deliberately not having them, as an act of kindness. They say the best thing you can do for a child is to spare it the suffering we're all in store for."

"I'm not sure anybody knows what we're in store for."

"I mean, the point of no return and all…"

"Which we've passed. But here we are. For some reason."

She arched her eyebrows. "You believe there are reasons, Dr. Dupree?"

We chatted some more; then Sarah said, "I must try to sleep," wadding the airline's miniature pillow into the gap between her neck and the headrest. Outside the window, partially obscured by the indifferent Russian, the sun had set, the sky had gone sooty black; there was nothing to see but a reflection of the overhead light, which I dimmed and focused on my knees.

Idiotically, I had packed all my reading material in my checked luggage. But there was a tattered magazine in the pouch in front of Sarah, and I reached over and snagged it. The magazine, with a plain white cover, was called Gateway. A religious publication, probably left behind by a previous passenger.

I leafed through it, thinking, inevitably, of Diane. In the years since the failed attack on the Spin artifacts the New Kingdom movement had lost whatever coherence it had once possessed. Its founding figures had disavowed it and its happy sexual communism had burned out under the pressure of venereal disease and human cupidity. No one today, even on the avant fringe of trendy religiosity, would describe himself simply as "NK." You might be a Hectorian, a Preterist (Full or Partial), a Kingdom Reconstructionist—never just "New Kingdom." The Ekstasis circuit Diane and Simon had been traveling the summer we met in the Berkshires had ceased to exist.

None of the remaining NK factions carried much demographic clout. The Southern Baptists alone outnumbered all the Kingdom sects put together. But the millenarian focus of the movement had lent it disproportional weight in the religious anxiety surrounding the Spin. It was partly because of New Kingdom that so many roadside billboards proclaimed tribulation in progress and so many mainstream churches had been compelled to address the question of the apocalypse.

Gateway appeared to be the print organ of a West Coast Reconstructionist faction, aimed at the general public. It contained, along with an editorial denouncing Calvinists and Covenanters, three pages of recipes and a movie review column. But what caught my eye was an article called "Blood Sacrifice and the Red Heifer"—something about a pure red calf that would appear "in fulfillment of prophecy" and be sacrificed at the Temple Mount in Israel, ushering in the Rapture. Apparently the old NK faith in the Spin as an act of redemption had grown unfashionable. "For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole Earth," Luke 21:35. A snare, not a deliverance. Better find an animal to burn: the Tribulation was proving more troublesome than expected.

I tucked the magazine back into the seat pouch while the aircraft bumped into a wave of turbulence. Sarah frowned in her sleep. The Russian businessman rang for the steward and ordered a whiskey sour.

* * * * *

The car I rented at Orlando the next morning had two bullet holes in it, puttied and painted but still visible in the passenger-side door. I asked the clerk if there was anything else. "Last one on the lot," he said, "but if you don't mind waiting a couple of hours—"

No, I said, it would do.

I took the Bee Line Expressway east and then turned south on 95. I stopped for breakfast at a roadside Denny's outside Cocoa, where the waitress, maybe sensing my essential homelessness, was generous with the coffeepot. "Long haul?"

"Not more than an hour to go."

"Well, then, you're practically there. Home or away?" When she realized I didn't have a ready answer she smiled. "You'll sort it out, hon. We all do, sooner or later." And in exchange for this roadside blessing I left her a silly-generous tip.

The Perihelion campus—which Jason had called, alarmingly, "the compound"—was located well south of the Canaveral/Kennedy launch platforms where its strategies were transformed into physical acts. The Perihelion Foundation (now officially an agency of the government) wasn't part of NASA, although it "interfaced" with NASA, borrowing and lending engineers and staff. In a sense it was a layer of bureaucracy imposed on NASA by successive administrations since the beginning of the Spin, taking the moribund space agency in directions its old bosses couldn't have anticipated and might not have approved. E.D. ruled its steering committee, and Jason had taken effective control of program development.

The day had begun to heat up, a Florida heat that seemed to rise from the earth, the moist land sweating like a brisket in a barbecue. I drove past stands of ragged palmettos, fading surf shops, stagnant green roadside ditches, and at least one crime scene: police cars surrounding a black pickup truck, three men bent over the hot metal hood with their wrists slip-tied behind their backs. A cop directing traffic gave my rental's license plate a long look and then waved me past, eyes glittering with a blank, generic suspicion.

* * * * *

The Perihelion "compound," when I reached it, was nothing as grim as the word suggested. It was a salmon-colored industrial complex, modern and clean, set into an immaculate rolling green lawn, heavily gated but hardly intimidating. A guard at the gatehouse peered inside the car, asked me to open the trunk, pawed through my suitcases and boxes of disks, then gave me a temporary pass on a pocket clip and directed me to the visitor's lot ("behind the south wing, follow the road to your left, have a nice day"). His blue uniform was indigo with perspiration.

I had barely parked the car when Jason came through a pair of frosted-glass doors marked all visitors must register and crossed a patch of lawn into the blistering desert of the parking lot. "Tyler!" he said, stopping a yard short of me as if I might vanish, a mirage.

"Hey, Jase," I said, smiling.

"Dr. Dupree!" He grinned. "But that car. A rental? We'll have somebody drive it back to Orlando. Set you up with something nicer. You have a place to stay yet?"

I reminded him that he'd promised to take care of that, too.

"Oh, we did. Or rather, we are. Negotiating a lease on a little place not twenty minutes from here. Ocean view. Ready in a couple of days. In the meantime you'll need a hotel, but that's easily arranged. So why are we standing out here absorbing UV?"

I followed him into the south wing of the complex. I watched the way he walked. I noted the way he listed a little to the left, the way he favored his right hand.

Air conditioning assaulted us as soon as we were inside, an arctic chill that smelled as if it had been pumped out of sterile vaults deep in the earth. There was a great deal of polished tile and granite in the lobby. More guards, these trained to an impeccable politeness. "So glad you're here," Jase said. "I shouldn't take the time but I want to show you around. The quick tour. I've got Boeing people in the conference room. Guy from Torrance and a guy from the IDS group in St. Louis. Xenon-ion upgrades, they're very proud, squeezing out a little more throughput, as if that mattered much. We don't need finesse, I tell them, we need reliability, simplicity…"

"Jason," I said.

"They—what?"

"Take a breath," I said.

He gave me a stiff, irritated look. Then he relented, laughed out loud. "I'm sorry," he said. "It's just, it's like— remember when we were kids? Any time one of us got a new toy we had to show it off?"

Usually it had been Jase who had the new toys, or at least the expensive ones. But yes, I told him, I remembered.

"Well, it would be flippant to describe it this way to anyone but you, but what we have here, Tyler, is the world's biggest toy chest. Let me show it off, okay? Then we'll get you settled. Give you time to adjust to the climate. If possible."

So I followed him through the ground floor of all three wings, duly admiring the conference rooms and offices, the huge laboratories and engineering bays where prototypes were devised or mission goals shuffled before plans and objectives were handed off to big-money contractors. All very interesting, all very bewildering. We ended up at the in-house infirmary, where I was introduced to Dr. Koenig, the outgoing physician, who shook my hand without enthusiasm and then shuffled off, saying "Good luck to you, Dr. Dupree" over his shoulder.

By this time Jason's pocket pager had buzzed so often he could no longer ignore it. "The Boeing people," he said. "Gotta admire their PPUs, or else they'll get sulky. Can you find your own way back to reception? I've got Shelly waiting there—my personal assistant—she'll set you up with a room. We can talk later. Tyler, it's really good to see you again!"

Another handshake, strangely weak, and then he was off, still listing to the left, leaving me to wonder not whether he was ill but how ill he was and how much worse it would get.

* * * * *

Jason was as good as his word. Within a week I had moved into a small furnished house, as apparently fragile as all these Florida houses seemed to my eyes, wood and lath, walls mostly windows, but it must have been expensive: the upstairs porch looked down a long slope past a commercial strip to the sea. During this time I was briefed on three occasions by the taciturn Dr. Koenig, who had clearly been unhappy at Perihelion but handed over his practice with great gravitas, entrusting me with his case files and his support staff, and on Monday I saw my first patient, a junior metallurgist who had twisted his ankle during a game of intramural football on the south lawn. Clearly, the clinic was "overengineered," as Jase might say, for the trivial work we did on a daily basis. But Jason claimed to be anticipating a time when medical care might be hard to come by in the world outside the gates.

I began to settle in. I wrote or extended prescriptions, I dispensed aspirin, I browsed the case files. I exchanged pleasantries with Molly Seagram, my receptionist, who liked me (she said) a lot better than she had liked Dr. Koenig.

Nights, I went home and watched lightning flicker from clouds that parked themselves off the coast like vast electrified clipper ships.

And I waited for Jason to call: which he didn't, not for most of a month. Then, one Friday evening after sunset, he was suddenly at the door, unannounced, in off-duty garb (jeans, T-shirt) that subtracted a decade from his apparent age. "Thought I'd drop by," he said. "If that's okay?"

Of course it was. We went upstairs and I fetched two bottles of beer from the refrigerator and we sat awhile on the whitewashed balcony. Jase started saying things like "Great to see you" and "Good to have you on board," until I interrupted him: "I don't need the fuckin' welcome wagon anymore. It's just me, Jase."

He laughed sheepishly, and it was easier after that.

We reminisced. At one point I asked him, "You hear much from Diane?"

He shrugged. "Rarely."

I didn't pursue it. Then, when we had both killed a couple of beers and the air was cooler and the evening had grown quiet, I asked him how he was doing, personally speaking.

"Been busy," he said. "As you may have guessed. We're close to the first seed launches—closer than we've let on to the press. E.D. likes to stay ahead of the game. He's in Washington most of the time, Clayton himself is keeping a close eye on us, we're the administration's darlings, at least for now. But that leaves me doing managerial shit, which is endless, instead of the work I want and need to do, mission design. It's—" He waved his hands helplessly.

"Stressful," I supplied.

"Stressful. But we're making progress. Inch by inch."

"I notice I don't have a file on you," I said. "At the clinic. Every other employee or administrator has a medical jacket. Except you."

He looked away, then laughed, a barking, nervous laugh. "Well… I'd kind of like to keep it that way, Tyler. For the time being."

"Dr. Koenig had other ideas?"

"Dr. Koenig thinks we're all a little nuts. Which is, of course, true. Did I tell you he took a job running a cruise-ship clinic? Can you picture that? Koenig in a Hawaiian shirt, handing out Gravol to the tourists?"

"Just tell me what's wrong, Jase."

He looked into the darkening eastern sky. There was a faint light hanging a few degrees above the horizon, not a star, almost certainly one of his father's aerostats.

"The thing is," he said, almost whispering, "I'm a little bit afraid of being sidelined just when we're starting to get results." He gave me long look. "I want to be able to trust you, Ty."

"Nobody here but us," I said.

And then, at last, he recited his symptoms—quietly, almost schematically, as if the pain and weakness carried no more emotional weight than the misfires of a malfunctioning engine. I promised him some tests that wouldn't be entered on my charts. He nodded his acquiescence, and then we dropped the subject and cracked yet another beer, and eventually he thanked me and shook my hand, maybe more solemnly than necessary, and left this house he had rented on my behalf, my new and unfamiliar home. I went to bed afraid for him.

UNDER THE SKIN

I learned a lot about Perihelion from my patients: the scientists, who loved to talk, more than the administrators, who were generally more taciturn; but also from the families of staff who had begun to abandon their crumbling HMOs in favor of the in-house clinic. Suddenly I was running a fully functional family practice, and most of my patients were people who had looked deeply into the reality of the Spin and confronted it with courage and resolve. "Cynicism stops at the front gate," a mission programmer told me. "We know what we're doing is important." That was admirable. It was also infectious. Before long I began to consider myself one of them, part of the work of extending human influence into the raging torrent of extraterrestrial time.

Some weekends I drove up the coast to Kennedy to watch the rockets lift off, modernized Atlases and Deltas roaring into the sky from a forest of newly constructed launch platforms; and occasionally, late that fall, early that winter, Jase would set aside his work and come with me. The payloads were simple ARVs, preprogrammed reconnaissance devices, clumsy windows on the stars. Their recovery modules would drift down (barring mission failure) into the Atlantic Ocean or onto the salt pans of the western desert, bearing news from the world beyond the world.

I liked the grandeur of the launches. What fascinated Jase, he admitted was the relativistic disconnect they represented. These small payload packages might spend weeks or even months beyond the Spin barrier, measuring the distance to the receding moon or the volume of the expanding sun, but would fall back to Earth (in our frame of reference) the same afternoon, enchanted bottles filled with more time than they could possibly contain.

And when this wine was decanted, inevitably, rumors would sweep the halls of Perihelion: gamma radiation up, indicating some violent event in the stellar neighborhood; new striations on Jupiter as the sun pumped more heat into its turbulent atmosphere; a vast, fresh crater on the moon, which no longer kept one face aligned with Earth but turned its dark side toward us in slow rotation.

One morning in December Jase took me across the campus to an engineering bay where a full-scale mockup of a Martian payload vessel had been installed. It occupied an aluminum platform in a corner of the huge sectored room where, around us, other prototypes were being assembled or rigged for testing by men and women in white Tyvek suits. The device was dismayingly small, I thought, a knobby black box the size of a doghouse with a nozzle fitted to one end, drab under the merciless high ceiling lights. But Jase showed it off with a parent's pride.

"Basically," he said, "it has three parts: the ion drive and reaction mass, the onboard navigational systems, and the payload. Most of the mass is engine. No communications: it can't talk to Earth and it doesn't need to. The nav programs are multiply redundant but the hardware itself is no bigger than a cell phone, powered by solar panels." The panels weren't attached but there was an artist's impression of the fully deployed vehicle pinned to the wall, the doghouse transformed into a Picasso dragonfly.

"It doesn't look powerful enough to get to Mars."

"Power isn't the problem. Ion engines are slow but stubborn. Which is exactly what we want—simple, rugged, durable technology. The tricky part is the nav system, which has to be smart and autonomous. When an object passes through the Spin barrier it picks up what some people are calling 'temporal velocity,' which is a dumb descriptor but gets the idea across. The launch vehicle is speeded up and heated up—not relative to itself but relative to us—and the differential is extremely large. Even a tiny change of velocity or trajectory during launch, something as small as a gust of wind or a sluggish fuel feed on the booster, makes it impossible to predict not how but when the vehicle will emerge into exterior space."

"Why does that matter?"

"It matters because Mars and Earth are both in elliptical orbits, circling the sun at different speeds. There's no reliable way to precalculate the relative positions of the planets at the time the vehicle achieves orbit. Essentially, the machine has to find Mars in a crowded sky and plot its own trajectory. So we need clever, flexible software and a rugged, durable drive. Fortunately we've got both. It's a sweet machine, Tyler. Plain on the outside but pretty under the skin. Sooner or later, left to its own devices and barring disaster, it'll do what it's designed to do, park itself in orbit around Mars."

"And then?"

Jase smiled. "Heart of the matter. Here." He pulled a series of dummy bolts from the mock-up and opened a panel at the front, revealing a shielded chamber divided into hexagonal spaces, a honeycomb. Nestled in each space was a blunt, black oval. A nest of ebony eggs. Jason drew one of these from its resting place. The object was small enough to hold in one hand.

"It looks like a pregnant lawn dart," I said.

"It's only a little more sophisticated than a lawn dart. We scatter these into the Martian atmosphere. When they reach a certain altitude they pop out vanes and spin the rest of the way down, bleeding off heat and velocity. Where you scatter them—the poles, the equator—depends on each vehicle's particular payload, whether we're looking for subsurface brine slurries or raw ice, but the basic process is the same. Think of them as hypodermic needles, inoculating the planet with life."

This "life," I understood, would consist of engineered microbes, their genetic material spliced together from bacteria discovered inside rocks in the dry valleys of Antarctica, from anaerobes capable of surviving in the outflow pipes of nuclear reactors, from unicells recovered from the icy sludge at the bottom of the Barents Sea. These organisms would function mainly as soil conditioners, meant to thrive as the aging sun warmed the Martian surface and released trapped water vapor and other gasses. Next would come hyper-engineered strains of blue-green algae, simple photosynthesizers, and eventually more complex forms of life capable of exploiting the environment the initial launches helped to create. Mars would always be, at best, a desert; all its liberated water might create no more than a few shallow, salty, unstable lakes… but that might be enough. Enough to create a marginally habitable place beyond the shrouded Earth, where human beings might go and live, a million centuries for each of our years. Where our Martian cousins might have time to solve puzzles we could only grope at.

Where we would build, or allow evolution to build on our behalf, a race of saviors.

"It's hard to believe we can actually do this—"

"If we can. It's hardly a foregone conclusion."

"And even so, as a way of solving a problem—"

"It's an act of teleological desperation. You're absolutely right. Just don't say it too loudly. But we do have one powerful force on our side."

"Time," I guessed.

"No. Time is a useful lever. But the active ingredient is life. Life in the abstract, I mean: replication, evolution, complexification. The way life has of filling up cracks and crevices, surviving by doing the unexpected. I believe in that process: it's robust, it's stubborn. Can it rescue us? I don't know. But the possibility is real." He smiled. "If you were chairing a congressional budget committee I'd be less equivocal."

He handed me the dart. It was surprisingly light, no weightier than a Major League baseball. I tried to imagine hundreds of these raining out of a cloudless Martian sky, impregnating the sterile soil with human destiny. Whatever destiny was left us.

* * * * *

E. D. Lawton visited the Florida compound three months into the new year, the same time Jason's symptoms recurred. They had been in remission for months.

When Jase had come to me last year he had described his condition reluctantly but methodically. Transient weakness and numbness in his arms and legs. Blurred vision. Episodic vertigo. Occasional incontinence. None of the symptoms were disabling but they had become too frequent to ignore.

Could be a lot of things, I told him, although he must have known as well as I did that we were probably looking at a neurological problem.

We had both been relieved when his blood tests came back positive for multiple sclerosis. MS had been a curable (or containable) disease since the introduction of chemical sclerostatins ten years ago. One of the small ironies of the Spin was that it had coincided with a number of medical breakthroughs coming out of proteinomic research. Our generation—Jason's and mine—might well be doomed, but we wouldn't be killed by MS, Parkinson's, diabetes, lung cancer, arteriosclerosis, or Alzheimer's. The industrialized world's last generation would probably be its healthiest.

Of course, it wasn't quite that simple. Nearly five percent of diagnosed cases of MS still failed to respond to sclerostatins or other therapy. Clinicians were starting to talk about these cases as "poly-drug-resistant MS," maybe even a separate disease with the same symptomology.

But Jason's initial treatment had proceeded as expected. I had prescribed a minimum daily dose of Tremex and he had been in full remission ever since. At least until the week E.D. arrived at Perihelion with all the subtlety of a tropical storm, scattering congressional aides and press attaches down the hallways like wind-blown debris.

E.D. was Washington, we were Florida; he was administration, we were science and engineering. Jase was poised a little precariously between the two. His job was essentially to see that the steering committee's dictates were enforced, but he had stood up to the bureaucracy often enough that the science guys had stopped talking about "nepotism" and started buying him drinks. The trouble was, Jase said, E.D. wasn't content to have set the Mars project into motion; he wanted to micromanage it, often for political reasons, occasionally handing off contracts to dubious bidders in order to buy congressional support. He was sneered at by the staff, though they were happy enough to shake his hand when he was in town. This year's junket culminated in an address to staff and guests in the compound auditorium. We all filed in, dutiful as schoolchildren but more plausibly enthusiastic, and as soon as the audience was settled Jason stood up to introduce his father. I watched him as he mounted the risers to the stage and took the podium. I watched the way he kept his left hand loose at thigh-level, the way he turned, pivoting awkwardly on his heel, when he shook his father's hand.

Jase introduced his father briefly but graciously and melted back into the crowd of dignitaries at the rear of the stage. E.D. stepped forward. E.D. had turned sixty the week before Christmas but could have passed for an athletic fifty, his stomach flat under a three-piece suit, his sparse hair cut to a brisk military stubble. He gave what might as well have been a campaign speech, praising the Clayton administration for its foresight, the assembled staff for their dedication to the "Perihelion vision," his son for an "inspired stewardship," the engineers and technicians for "bringing a dream to life and, if we're successful, bringing life to a sterile planet and fresh hope to this world we still call home." An ovation, a wave, a feral grin, and then he was gone, spirited away by his cabal of bodyguards.

I caught up with Jase an hour later in the executive lunchroom, where he sat at a small table pretending to read an offprint from Astrophysics Review.

I took the chair opposite him. "So how bad is it?"

He smiled weakly. "You don't mean my father's whirlwind visit?"

"You know what I mean."

He lowered his voice. "I've been taking the medication. Clockwork, every morning and evening. But it's back. Bad this morning. Left arm, left leg, pins and needles. And getting worse. Worse than it's ever been. Almost by the hour. It's like an electric current running through one side of my body."

"You have time to come to the infirmary?"

"I have time, but—" His eyes glittered. "I may not have the means. Don't want to alarm you. But I'm glad you showed up. Right now I'm not certain I can walk. I made it in here after E.D.'s speech. But I'm pretty sure if I try to stand up I'll fall over. I don't think I can walk. Ty—I can't walk."

"I'll call for help."

He straightened in his chair. "You'll do no such thing. I can sit here until there's nobody around except the night guard, if necessary."

"That's absurd."

"Or you can discreetly help me stand up. We're what, twenty or thirty yards from the infirmary? If you grab my arm and look congenial we can probably get there without attracting too much attention."

In the end I agreed, not because I approved of the charade but because it seemed to be the only way to get him into my office. I took his left arm and he braced his right hand on the table edge and levered himself up. We managed to cross the cafeteria floor without weaving, though Jason's left foot dragged in a way that was hard to disguise—fortunately no one looked too closely. Once we reached the corridor we stayed close to the wall where his shuffling was less conspicuous. When a senior administrator appeared at the end of the hallway Jason whispered, "Stop," and we stood as if in casual conversation with Jason braced against a display case, his right hand gripping the steel shelf so fiercely that his knuckles turned bloodless and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. The exec passed with a wordless nod.

By the time we made the clinic entrance I was bearing most of his weight. Molly Seagram, fortunately, was out of the office; once I closed the outer door we were alone. I helped Jase onto a table in one of the examination rooms, then went back to the reception desk and posted a note for Molly to make sure we wouldn't be disturbed.

When I returned to the consultation room Jason was crying. Not weeping, but tears had streaked his face and lingered on his chin. "This is so fucking awful." He wouldn't meet my eyes. "I couldn't help it," he said. "I'm sorry. I couldn't help it."

He had lost control of his bladder.

* * * * *

I helped him into a medical gown and rinsed his wet clothes in the consulting room sink and put them to dry next to a sunny window in the seldom-used storage room beyond the pharmaceutical cupboards. Business was slow today and I used that excuse to give Molly the afternoon off.

Jason recovered some of his composure, though he looked diminished in the paper gown. "You said this was a curable disease. Tell me what went wrong."

"It is treatable, Jase. For most patients, most of the time. But there are exceptions."

"And what, I'm one of them? I won the bad news lottery?"

"You're having a relapse. That's typical of the untreated disease, periods of disability followed by intervals of remission. You might just be a late responder. In some cases the drug needs to reach a certain level in the body for an extended length of time before it's fully effective."

"It's been six months since you wrote the prescription. And I'm worse, not better."

"We can switch you to one of the other sclerostatins, see if that helps. But they're all chemically very similar."

"So changing the prescription won't help."

"It might. It might not. We'll try it before we rule it out."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"Then we stop talking about eliminating the disease and start to talk about managing it. Even untreated, MS is hardly a death sentence. Lots of people experience full remission between attacks and manage to lead relatively normal lives." Although, I did not add, such cases were seldom as severe or as aggressive as Jason's seemed to be. "The usual fallback treatment is a cocktail of anti-inflammatory drugs, selective protein inhibitors, and targeted CNS stimulants. It can be very effective at suppressing symptoms and slowing the course of the disease."

"Good," Jason said. "Great. Write me a ticket."

"It's not that simple. You could be looking at side effects."

"Such as?"

"Maybe nothing. Maybe some psychological distress— mild depression or manic episodes. Some generalized physical weakness."

"But I'll pass for normal?"

"In all likelihood." For now and probably for another ten or fifteen years, maybe more. "But it's a control measure, not a cure—a brake, not a full stop. The disease will come back if you live long enough."

"You can give me a decade, though, for sure?"

"As sure as anything is in my business."

"A decade," he said thoughtfully. "Or a billion years. Depending on how you look at it. Maybe that's enough. Ought to be enough, don't you think?"

I didn't ask, Enough for what? "But in the meantime—"

"I don't want a 'meantime,' Tyler. I can't afford to be away from my work and I don't want anyone to know about this."

"It's nothing to be ashamed of."

"I'm not ashamed of it." He gestured at the paper gown with his right hand. "Fucking humiliated, but not ashamed. This isn't a psychological issue. It's about what I do here at Perihelion. What I'm allowed to do. E.D. hates illness, Tyler. He hates weakness of any kind. He hated Carol from the day her drinking became a problem."

"You don't think he'd understand?"

"I love my father, but I'm not blind to his faults. No, he would not understand. All the influence I have at Perihelion flows through E.D. And that's a little precarious at the moment. We've had some disagreements. If I became a liability to him he'd have me relegated to some expensive treatment facility in Switzerland or Bali before the week was out, and he'd tell himself he was doing it for my sake. Worse, he would believe it."

"What you choose to make public is your business. But you need to be seeing a neurologist, not a staff GP."

"No," he said.

"I can't in good conscious continue to treat you, Jase, if you won't talk to a specialist. It was dicey enough putting you on Tremex without consulting a brain guy."

"You have the MRI and the blood tests, right? What else do you need?"

"Ideally, a fully equipped hospital lab and degree in neurology."

"Bullshit. You said yourself, MS is no big deal nowadays."

"Unless it fails to respond to treatment."

"I can't—" He wanted to argue. But he was also obviously, brutally tired. Fatigue might be another symptom of his relapse, though; he had been pushing himself hard in the weeks before E.D.'s visit. "I'll make a deal with you. I'll see a specialist if you can arrange it discreetly and keep it off my Perihelion chart. But I need to be functional. I need to be functional tomorrow. Functional as in walking without assistance and not pissing myself. The drug cocktail you talked about, does it work fast?"

"Usually. But without a neurological workup—"

"Tyler, I have to tell you, I appreciate what you've done for me, but I can buy a more cooperative doctor if I need one. Treat me now and I'll see a specialist, I'll do whatever you think is right. But if you imagine I'm going to show up at work in a wheelchair with a catheter up my dick, you're dead wrong."

"Even if I write a script, Jase, you won't be better overnight. It takes a couple of days."

"I might be able to spare a couple of days." He thought about it. "Okay," he said finally. "I want the drugs and I want you to get me out of here inconspicuously. If you can do that, I'm in your hands. No arguments."

"Physicians don't bargain, Jase."

"Take it or leave it, Hippocrates."

* * * * *

I didn't start him on the whole cocktail—our pharmacy didn't stock all the drugs—but I gave him a CNS stimulant that would at least return his bladder control and the ability to walk unassisted for the next few days. The downside was an edgy, icy state of mind, like, or so I'm told, the tail end of a cocaine run. It raised his blood pressure and put dark baggage under his eyes.

We waited until most of the staff had gone home4X109 A.D. and there was only the night shift at the compound. Jase walked stiffly but plausibly past the front desk to the parking lot, waved amicably to a couple of late-departing colleagues, and sank into the passenger seat of my car. I drove him home.

He had visited my little rental house several times, but I hadn't been to his place before. I had expected something that reflected his status at Perihelion. In fact the apartment where he slept—clearly, he did little else there—was a modest condo unit with a sliver of an ocean view. He had furnished it with a sofa, a television, a desk, a couple of bookcases and a broadband media/Internet connection. The walls were bare except for the space above the desk, where he had taped a hand-drawn chart depicting the linear history of the solar system from the birth of the sun to its final collapse into a smoldering white dwarf, with human history diverging from the line at a spot marked the spin. The bookcases were crowded with journals and academic texts and decorated with exactly three framed photographs: E. D. Lawton, Carol Lawton, and a demure image of Diane that must have been taken years ago.

Jase stretched out on the sofa. He looked like a study in paradox, his body in repose, his eyes bright with drug-induced hyperalertness. I went to the small adjoining kitchen and scrambled eggs (neither of us had eaten since breakfast) while Jason talked. And talked some more. And kept on talking. "Of course," he said at one point, "I know I'm being way too verbal, I'm conscious of that, but I can't even think about sleeping—does this wear off?"

"If we put you on the drug cocktail long-term, then yes, the obvious stimulant effect will go away." I carried a plate to the sofa for him.

"It's very speedy. Like one of those cramming-for-the-finals pills people take. But physically, it's calming. I feel like a neon sign on an empty building. All lit up but basically hollow. The eggs, the eggs are very good. Thank you." He put the plate aside. He had eaten maybe a spoonful.

I sat at his desk, glancing at the Spin chart on the opposite wall. Wondering what it was like to live with this stark depiction of human origins and human destiny, the human species rendered as a finite event in the life of an ordinary star. He had drawn it with a felt-tip pen on a scroll of ordinary brown wrapping paper.

Jason followed my look. "Obviously," he said, "they mean for us to do something …"

"Who does?"

"The Hypotheticals. If we must call them that. And I suppose we must. Everyone does. They expect something from us. I don't know what. A gift, a signal, an acceptable sacrifice."

"How do you know that?"

"It's hardly an original observation. Why is the Spin barrier permeable to human artifacts like satellites, but not to meteors or even Brownlee particles? Obviously it's not a barrier; that was never the right word." Under the influence of the stimulant Jase seemed particularly fond of the word obviously. "Obviously," he said, "it's a selective filter. We know it filters the energy reaching the surface of the Earth. So the Hypotheticals want to keep us, or at least the terrestrial ecology, intact and alive, but then why grant us access to space? Even after we attempted to nuke the only two Spin-related artifacts anyone has ever found? What are they waiting for, Ty? What's the prize?"

"Maybe it's not a prize. Maybe it's a ransom. Pay up and we'll leave you alone."

He shook his head. "It's too late for them to leave us alone. We need them now. And we still can't rule out the possibility that they're benevolent, or at least benign. I mean, suppose they hadn't arrived when they did. What were we looking forward to? A lot of people think we were facing our last century as a viable civilization, maybe even as a species. Global warming, overpopulation, the death of the seas, the loss of arable land, the proliferation of disease, the threat of nuclear or biological warfare…"

"We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault."

"Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first: When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you're at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return."

"Is it better, being consumed by the sun?"

"That hasn't happened yet. And we aren't the first star to burn out. The galaxy is littered with white dwarf stars that might once have hosted habitable planets. Do you ever wonder what happened to them?"

"Seldom," I said.

I walked across the bare parquet floor to the bookcase, to the family photos. Here was E.D., smiling into the camera— a man whose smiles were never entirely convincing. His physical resemblance to Jason was marked. (Was obvious, Jase might have said.) Similar machine, different ghost.

"How could life survive a stellar catastrophe? But obviously it depends on what 'life' is. Are we talking about organic life, or any kind of generalized autocatalytic feedback loop? Are the Hypothetical organic? Which is an interesting question in itself…"

"You really ought to try to get some sleep." It was past midnight. He was using words I didn't understand. I picked up the photo of Carol. Here the resemblance was more subtle. The photographer had caught Carol on a good day: her eyes were open, not stuck at half-mast, and although her smile was grudging, a barely perceptible lift of her thin lips, it was not altogether inauthentic.

"They may be mining the sun," Jason said, still talking about the Hypotheticals. "We have some suggestive data on solar flares. Obviously, what they've done to the Earth requires vast amounts of usable energy. It's the equivalent of refrigerating a planet-sized mass to a temperature close to absolute zero. So where's the power supply? Most likely, the sun. And we've observed a marked reduction in large solar flares since the Spin. Something, some force or agency, may be tapping high-energy particles before they crest in the heliosphere. Mining the sun, Tyler! That's an act of technological hubris almost as startling as the Spin itself."

I picked up the framed photo of Diane. The photograph predated her marriage to Simon Townsend. It had captured a certain characteristic disquiet, as if she had just narrowed her eyes at a puzzling thought. She was beautiful without trying but not quite at ease, all grace but at the same time just slightly off balance.

I had so many memories of her. But those memories were years old now, vanishing into the past with an almost Spinlike momentum. Jason saw me holding the picture frame and was silent for a few blessed moments. Then he said, "Really, Tyler, this fixation is unworthy of you."

"Hardly a fixation, Jase."

"Why? Because you're over her or because you're afraid of her? But I could ask her the same question. If she ever called. Simon keeps her on a tight leash. I suspect she misses the old NK days, when the movement was full of naked Unitarians and Evangelical hippies. The price of piety is steeper now." He added, "She talks to Carol every now and then."

"Is she at least happy?"

"Diane is among zealots. She may be one herself. Happiness isn't an option."

"Do you think she's in danger?"

He shrugged. "I think she's living the life she chose for herself. She could have made other choices. She could, for instance, have married you, Ty, if not for this ridiculous fantasy of hers—"

"What fantasy?"

"That E.D. is your father. That she's your biological sister."

I backed away from the bookcase too hastily and knocked the photographs to the floor.

"That's ridiculous."

"Patently ridiculous. But I don't think she entirely gave up on the idea until she was in college."

"How could she even think—"

"It was a fantasy, not a theory. Think about it. There was never much affection between Diane and E.D. She felt ignored by him. And in a sense, she was right. E.D. never wanted a daughter, he wanted an heir, a male heir. He had high expectations, and I happened to live up to them. Diane was a distraction as far as E.D. was concerned. He expected Carol to raise her, and Carol—" He shrugged. "Carol wasn't up to the task."

"So she made up this—story?"

"She thought of it as a deduction. It explained the way E.D. kept your mother and you living on the property. It explained Carol's constant unhappiness. And, basically, it made her feel good about herself. Your mother was kinder and more attentive to her than Carol ever was. She liked the idea of being blood kin to the Dupree family."

I looked at Jason. His face was pale, his pupils dilated, his gaze distant and aimed at the window. I reminded myself that he was my patient, that he was exhibiting a predictable psychological response to a powerful drug; that this was the same man who, only a few hours ago, had wept at his own incontinence. I said, "I really have to leave now, Jason."

"Why, this is all so shocking? You thought growing up was supposed to be painless?" Then, abruptly, before I could answer, he turned his head and met my eyes for the first time that evening. "Oh dear. I begin to suspect I've been behaving badly."

I said, "The medication—"

"Behaving monstrously. Tyler, I'm sorry."

"You'll feel better after a night's sleep. But you shouldn't go back to Perihelion for a couple of days."

"I won't. Will you stop by tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"Thank you," he said.

I left without replying.

CELESTIAL GARDENING

That was the winter of the gantries. New launch platforms had been erected not just at Canaveral but across the desert Southwest, in southern France and equatorial Africa, at Jiuquan and Xichang in China and at Baikonur and Svobodnyy in Russia: gantries for the Martian seed launches and larger gantries for the so-called Big Stacks, the enormous booster assemblies that would carry human volunteers to a marginally habitable Mars if the crude terraforming succeeded. The gantries grew that winter like iron and steel forests, exuberant, lush, rooted in concrete and watered with reservoirs of federal money.

The first seed rockets were in a way less spectacular than the launch facilities built to support them. They were assembly-line boosters mass-produced from old Titan and Delta templates, not an ounce or a microchip more complicated than they needed to be, and they populated their pads in startling numbers as winter advanced into spring, spaceships like cottonwood pods, poised to carry dormant life to a distant, sterile soil.

It was also, in a sense, spring in the solar system at large, or at least a prolonged Indian summer. The habitable zone of the solar system was expanding outward as the sun depleted its helium core, beginning to encompass Mars as it would eventually encompass the watery Jovian moon Ganymede, another potential target for late-stage terraforming. On Mars, vast tonnages of frozen C02 and water ice had begun to sublimate into the atmosphere over millions of warming summers. At the beginning of the Spin the Martian atmospheric pressure at ground level had been roughly eight millibars, as rarified as the air three miles above the peak of Mount Everest. Now, even without human intervention, the planet had achieved a climate equivalent to an arctic mountaintop bathed in gaseous carbon dioxide—balmy, by Martian standards.

But we meant to take the process further. We meant to lace the planet's air with oxygen, to green its lowlands, to create ponds where, now, the periodically melting subsurface ice erupted in geysers of vapor or slurries of toxic mud.

We were perilously optimistic during the winter of the gantries.

* * * * *

On March third, shortly before the first scheduled wave of seed launches, Carol Lawton called me at home and told me my mother had suffered a severe stroke and wasn't expected to live.

I made arrangements for a local medic to cover for me at Perihelion, then drove to Orlando and booked the first morning flight to D.C.

Carol met me at Reagan International, apparently sober. She opened her arms and I hugged her, this woman who had never displayed more than a puzzled indifference toward me during the years I had lived on her property. Then she stood back and put her tremorous hands on my shoulders. "I'm so sorry, Tyler."

"Is she still alive?"

"She's hanging on. I have a car waiting. We can talk while we drive."

I followed her out to a vehicle that must have been dispatched by E.D. himself, a black limo with federal stickers. The driver barely spoke as he put my luggage in the trunk, tipped his hat when I thanked him, and climbed into a driver's seat meticulously isolated from the plush passenger compartment. He headed for George Washington University Hospital without being asked.

Carol was skinnier than I remembered her, birdlike against the leather upholstery. She took a cotton handkerchief out of her tiny purse and dabbed her eyes. "All this ridiculous crying," she said. "I lost my contacts yesterday. Just sort of cried them away, if you can imagine that. There are some things a person takes for granted. For me it was having your mother in the house, keeping things in order, or just knowing she was nearby, there across the lawn. I used to wake up at night—I don't sleep soundly, which probably doesn't surprise you—I used to wake up feeling like the world was fragile and I might fall through it, fall right through the floor and keep on falling forever. Then I would think of her over there in the Little House, sound asleep. Sleeping soundly. It was like courtroom evidence. Exhibit A, Belinda Dupree, the possibility of peace of mind. She was the pillar of the household, Tyler, whether you knew it or not."

I supposed I had known it. Really it had all been one household, though as a child I had seen mainly the distance between the two estates: my house, modest but calm, and the Big House, where the toys were more expensive and the arguments more vicious.

I asked whether E.D. had been to the hospital.

"E.D.? No. He's busy. Sending spaceships to Mars seems to require a great many dinners downtown. I know that's what's keeping Jason in Florida, too, but I believe Jason deals with the practical side of the matter, if it has a practical side, while E.D. is more like a stage magician, pulling money out of various hats. But I'm sure you'll see E.D. at the funeral." I winced, and she gave me an apologetic look. "If and when. But the doctors say—"

"She's not expected to recover."

"She's dying. Yes. As one physician to another. Do you remember that, Tyler? I had a practice once. Back in the days when I was capable of such a thing. And now you're a doctor with a practice of your own. My God."

I appreciated her bluntness. Maybe it came with her sudden sobriety. Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.

We arrived at George Washington University Hospital. Carol had already introduced herself to the nursing staff on the life-support floor, and we proceeded directly to my mother's room. When Carol hesitated at the door I said, "Are you coming in?"

"I—no, I don't think so. I've said good-bye several times already. I need to be where the air doesn't smell like disinfectant. I'll stand out in the parking lot and smoke a cigarette with the gurney-pushers. Meet me there?"

I said I would.

My mother was unconscious in her room, embedded in life support, her breathing regulated by a machine that wheezed as her rib cage expanded and relaxed. Her hair was whiter than I remembered it being. I stroked her cheek, but she didn't respond.

Out of some misbegotten doctorly instinct I raised one of her eyelids, meaning, I suppose, to check the dilation of her pupils. But she had hemorrhaged into the eye after her stroke. It was red as a cherry tomato, flushed with blood.

* * * * *

I rode away from the hospital with Carol but turned down her invitation to dinner, told her I'd fix myself something. She said, "I'm sure there's something in the kitchen at your mother's place. But you're more than welcome to stay in the Big House if you like. Even though it's a bit of a mess these days without your mother to boss the help. I'm sure we can scare up a passable guest bedroom."

I thanked her but said I'd prefer to stay across the lawn.

"Let me know if you change your mind." She gazed from the gravel drive across the lawn to the Little House as if she were seeing it clearly for the first time in years. "You still carry a key—?"

"Still do," I said.

"Well, then. I'll leave you to it. The hospital has both numbers if her condition changes." And Carol hugged me again and walked up the porch stairs with a resoluteness, not quite eagerness, that suggested she had postponed her drinking long enough.

I let myself into my mother's house. Hers more than mine, I thought, though my presence had not been expunged from it. When I left for university I had denuded my small bedroom and packed whatever was important to me, but my mother had kept the bed and filled the blank spaces (the pine shelving, the windowsill) with potted plants, rapidly drying in her absence; I watered them. The rest of the house was equally tidy. Diane had once described my mother's housekeeping as "linear," by which I think she meant orderly but not obsessive. I surveyed the living room, the kitchen, glanced into her bedroom. Not everything was in its place. But everything had a place.

Come nightfall I closed the curtains and turned on every light in every room, more lights than my mother had ever deemed appropriate at any given time, a declaration against death. I wondered if Carol had noticed the glare across the winter-brown divide, and if so whether she found it comforting or alarming.

E.D. came home around nine that night, and he was gracious enough to knock at the door and offer his sympathy. He looked uncomfortable under the porch light, his tailored suit disheveled. His breath smoked in the evening chill. He touched his pockets, breast and hip, unconsciously, as if he had forgotten something or simply didn't know what to do with his hands. "I'm sorry, Tyler," he said.

His condolences seemed grossly premature, as if my mother's death were not merely inevitable but an established fact. He had already written her off. But she was still drawing breath, I thought, or at least processing oxygen, miles away, alone in her room at George Washington. "Thank you for saying so, Mr. Lawton."

"Jesus, Tyler, call me E.D. Everybody else does. Jason tells me you're doing good work down there at Perihelion Florida."

"My patients seem satisfied."

"Great. Every contribution counts, no matter how small. Listen, did Carol put you out here? Because we have a guest bedroom ready if you want it."

"I'm fine right where I am."

"Okay. I understand that. Just knock if you need anything, all right?"

He ambled back across the winter-brown lawn. Much had been made, in the press and in the Lawton family, of Jason's genius, but I reminded myself that E.D. could claim that title, too. He had parlayed an engineering degree and a talent for business into a major corporate enterprise, and he had been selling aerostat-enabled telecom bandwidth when Americom and AT&T were still blinking at the Spin like startled deer. What he lacked was not Jason's intelligence but Jason's wit and Jason's deep curiosity about the physical universe. And maybe a dash of Jason's humanity.

Then I was alone again, at home and not at home, and I sat on the sofa and marveled for a while at how little this room had changed. Sooner or later it would fall to me to dispose of the contents of the house, a job I could barely envision, a job more difficult, more preposterous, than the work of cultivating life on another planet. But maybe it was because I was contemplating that act of deconstruction that I noticed a gap on the top shelf of the etagere next to the TV.

Noticed it because, to my knowledge, the high shelf had received no more than a cursory dusting in all the years I had lived here. The top shelf was the attic of my mother's life. I could have recited the order of the contents of that shelf by closing my eyes and picturing it: her high school yearbooks (Martell Secondary School in Bingham, Maine, 1975, '76, '77, '78); her Berkeley grad book, 1982; a jade Buddha book-end; her diploma in a stand-up plastic frame; the brown accordion file in which she kept her birth certificate, passport, and tax documents; and, braced by another green Buddha, three tattered New Balance shoeboxes labeled mementos (school), mementos (marcus), and odds & ends.

But tonight the second jade Buddha stood askew and the box marked mementos (school) was missing. I assumed she had taken it down herself, though I hadn't seen it elsewhere in the house. Of the three boxes, the only one she had regularly opened in my presence was odds & ends. It had been packed with concert playbills and ticket stubs, brittle newspaper clippings (including her own parents' obituaries), a souvenir lapel pin in the shape of the schooner Bluenose from her honeymoon in Nova Scotia, matchbooks culled from restaurants and hotels she had visited, costume jewelry, a baptismal certificate, even a lock of my own baby hair preserved in a slip of waxed paper closed with a pin.

I took down the other box, the one marked mementos (marcus). I had never been especially curious about my father, and my mother had seldom spoken about him apart from the basic thumbnail sketch (a handsome man, an engineer, a jazz collector, E.D.'s best friend in college, but a heavy drinker and a victim, one night on the road home from an electronics supplier in Milpitas, of his own fondness for speedy automobiles). Inside the shoebox was a stack of letters in vellum envelopes addressed in a curt, clean handwriting that must have been his. He had sent these letters to Belinda Sutton, my mother's maiden name, at an address in Berkeley I didn't recognize.

I removed one of those envelopes and opened it, pulled out the yellowing paper and unfolded it.

The paper was unlined but the handwriting cut across the page in small, neat parallels. Dear Bel, it began, and continued, I thought I said everything on the phone last night but can't stop thinking about you. Writing this seems to bring you closer tho not as close as I'd like. Not as close as we were last August! I play that memory like videotape every night I can't lie down next to you.

And more, which I did not read. I folded the letter and tucked it into its yellowed envelope and closed the box and put it back where it belonged.

* * * * *

In the morning there was a knock at the door. I answered it expecting Carol or some amanuensis from the Big House. But it wasn't Carol. It was Diane. Diane in a midnight-blue floor-sweeper skirt and high-collared blouse. Her hands were clasped under her breasts. She looked up at me, eyes sparkling. "I'm so sorry," she said. "I came as soon as I heard."

But too late. The hospital had called ten minutes earlier. Belinda Dupree had died without regaining consciousness.

* * * * *

At the memorial service E.D. spoke briefly and uncomfortably and said nothing of significance. I spoke, Diane spoke; Carol meant to speak but in the end was too tearful or inebriated to mount the pulpit.

Diane's eulogy was the most moving, cadenced and heartfelt, a catalogue of the kindnesses my mother had exported across the lawn like gifts from a wealthier, kinder nation. I was grateful for it. Everything else about the ceremony seemed mechanical by comparison: half-familiar faces bobbed out of the crowd to utter homilies and half-truths, and I thanked them and smiled, thanked them and smiled, until it was time for the walk to the graveside.

* * * * *

There was a function at the Big House that evening, a post-funeral reception at which I was offered condolences by E.D.'s business associates, none of whom I knew but some of whom had known my father, and by the household staff at the Big House, whose grief was more authentic and harder to bear.

Caterers slid through the crowd with wineglasses on silvered platters and I drank more than I should have, until Diane, who had also been gliding among the guests, tugged me away from yet another round of so-sorry-for-your-loss and said, "You need air."

"It's cold out."

"If you keep drinking you'll get surly. You're halfway there already. Come on, Ty. Just for a few minutes."

Out onto the lawn. The brown midwinter lawn. The same lawn where we had witnessed the opening moments of the Spin almost twenty years ago. We walked the circumference of the Big House—strolled, really, despite the stiff March breeze and the granular snow still inhabiting every sheltered or shaded space.

We had already said all the obvious things. We had compared notes: my career, the move to Florida, my work at Perihelion; her years with Simon, drifting out of NK toward a blander orthodoxy, welcoming the Rapture with piety and self-denial. ("We don't eat meat," she had confided. "We don't wear artificial fibers") Walking next to her, lightheaded, I wondered whether I had become gross or repugnant in her eyes, whether she was conscious of the ham-and-cheese aperitifs on my breath or the cotton-poly jacket I was wearing. She hadn't changed much, though she was thinner than she used to be, maybe thinner than she ought to be, the line of her jaw a little stark against the high, tight collar.

I was sober enough to thank her for trying to sober me up.

"I needed to get away, too," she said. "All those people E.D. invited. None of them knew your mother in any important way. Not one. They're in there talking about appropriations bills or payload tonnage. Making deals."

"Maybe it's E.D.'s way of paying tribute to her. Salting the wake with political celebrities."

"That's a generous way of interpreting it."

"He still makes you angry." So easily, I thought.

"E.D.? Of course he does. Though it would be more charitable to forgive him. Which you seem to have done."

"I have less to forgive him for," I said. "He's not my father."

I didn't mean anything by it. But I was still too aware of what Jason had told me a few weeks ago. I choked on the remark, reconsidered it even before the sentence was out of my mouth, blushed when I finished. Diane gave me a long uncomprehending look; then her eyes widened in an expression that mingled anger and embarrassment so plainly that I could parse it even by the dim glow of the porch light.

"You've been talking to Jason," she said coldly.

"I'm sorry—"

"How does that work exactly? Do the two of you sit around making fun of me?"

"Of course not. He—anything Jason said, it was because of the medication."

Another grotesque faux pas, and she pounced on it: "What medication?"

"I'm his GP. Sometimes I write him prescriptions. Does it matter?"

"What medication makes you break a promise, Tyler? He promised he would never tell you—" She drew another inference. "Is Jason sick! Is that why he didn't come to the funeral?"

"He's busy. We're just days away from the first launches."

"But you're treating him for something."

"I can't ethically discuss Jason's medical history," I said, knowing this would only inflame her suspicions, that I had essentially given away his secret in the act of keeping it.

"It would be just like him to get sick and not tell any of us. He's so, so hermetically sealed.…"

"Maybe you should take the initiative. Call him sometime."

"You think I don't? Did he tell you that, too? I used to call him every week. But he would just turn on that blank charm and refuse to say anything meaningful. How are you, I'm fine, what's new, nothing. He doesn't want to hear from me, Tyler. He's deep in E.D.'s camp. I'm an embarrassment to him." She paused. "Unless that's changed."

"I don't know what's changed. But maybe you should see him, talk to him face to face."

"How would I do that?"

I shrugged. "Take another week off. Fly back with me."

"You said he's busy."

"Once the launches begin it's all sit back and wait. You can come to Canaveral with us. See history being made."

"The launches are futile," she said, but it sounded like something she had been taught to say; she added, "I'd like to, but I can't afford it. Simon and I do all right. But we're not rich. We're not Lawtons."

"I'll spot you the plane fare."

"You're a generous drunk."

"I mean it."

"Thank you, but no," she said. "I couldn't."

"Think about it."

"Ask me when you're sober." She added, as we mounted the steps to the porch, yellow light hooding her eyes, "Whatever I might once have believed—whatever I might have told Jason—"

"You don't have to say this, Diane."

"I know E.D. isn't your father."

What was interesting about her disclaimer was the way she delivered it. Firmly, decisively. As if she knew better now. As if she had discovered a different truth, an alternative key to the Lawton mysteries.

* * * * *

Diane went back to the Big House. I decided I couldn't face more well-wishing. I let myself into my mother's house, which seemed airless and overheated.

Carol, the next day, told me I could take my time about cleaning out my mother's things, which she called "making arrangements." The Little House wasn't going anywhere, she said. Take a month. Take a year. I could "make arrangements" whenever I had the time and as soon as I felt comfortable with it.

Comfort wasn't even on the horizon, but I thanked her for her patience and spent the day packing for the flight back to Orlando. I was nagged by the idea that I ought to take something of my mother's with me, that she would have wanted me to keep a memento for some shoebox of my own. But what? One of her Hummel figurines, which she had loved but which had always struck me as expensive kitsch? The cross-stitched butterfly from the living room wall, the print of Water Lilies in a do-it-yourself frame?

Diane showed up at the door while I was debating. "Does that offer still stand? The trip to Florida? Were you serious about that?"

"Of course I was."

"Because I talked to Simon. He's not completely delighted with the idea, but he thinks he'll be okay on his own for a few more days."

Mighty considerate of him, I thought.

"So," she said, "unless—I mean, I know you'd been drinking—"

"Don't be silly. I'll call the airline."

I booked a seat in Diane's name on the next day's first D.C/Orlando junket.

Then I finished packing. Of my mother's things, I settled at last on the pair of chipped jade Buddha bookends.

I looked around the house, even checked under the beds, but the missing mementos (school) seemed to have vanished permanently.

SNAPSHOTS OF THE ECOPOIESIS

Jason suggested we take rooms in Cocoa Beach and wait a day for him to join us there. He was doing a last round of media Q & A at Perihelion but had cleared his schedule prior to the launches, which he wanted to witness without a CNN crew dunning him with boneheaded questions.

"Great," Diane said when I relayed this information. "I can ask all the boneheaded questions myself."

I had managed to calm her fears about Jason's medical condition: no, he wasn't dying, and any temporary blips on his medical record were his own business. She accepted that, or seemed to, but still wanted to see him, if only to reassure herself, as if my mother's death had shaken her faith in the fixed stars of the Lawton universe.

So I used my Perihelion ID and my connection with Jase to rent us two neighboring suites in a Holiday Inn with a view toward Canaveral. Not long after the Mars project was conceived—once the EPA's objections had been noted and ignored—a dozen shallow-water launch platforms had been constructed and anchored off the coast of Merritt Island. It was these structures we could see most clearly from the hotel. The rest of the view was parking lots, winter beaches, blue water.

We stood on the balcony of her suite. She had showered and changed after the drive from Orlando and we were about to go down and brave the lobby restaurant. Every other balcony we could see bristled with cameras and lenses: the Holiday Inn was a designated media hotel. (Simon may have distrusted the secular press but Diane was suddenly knee-deep in it.) We couldn't see the setting sun but its light caught the distant gantries and rockets and rendered them more ethereal than real, a squadron of giant robots marching off to some battle in the Mid-Atlantic Trench. Diane stood back from the balcony railing as if she found the view frightening. "Why are there so many of them?"

"Shotgun ecopoiesis," I said.

She laughed, a little reproachfully. "Is that one of Jason's words?"

It wasn't, not entirely. "Ecopoiesis" was a word coined by a man named Robert Haynes in 1990, back when terraforming was a purely speculative science. Technically it meant the creation of a self-regulating anaerobic biosphere where none had existed before, but in modern usage it referred to any purely biological modification of Mars. The greening of Mars required two different kinds of planetary engineering: crude terraforming, to raise the surface temperature and atmospheric pressure to a plausible threshold for life, and ecopoiesis: using microbial and plant life to condition the soil and oxygenate the air.

The Spin had already done the heavy lifting for us. Every planet in the solar system—barring Earth—had been warmed significantly by the expanding sun. What remained was the subtler work of ecopoiesis. But there were many possible routes to ecopoiesis, many candidate organisms, from rock-dwelling bacteria to alpine mosses.

"So it's called shotgun," Diane surmised, "because you're sending all of them."

"All of them, and as many of them as we can afford, because no single organism is guaranteed to adapt and survive. But one of them might."

"More than one might."

"Which is fine. We want an ecology, not a monoculture." In fact the launches would be timed and staggered. The first wave would carry only anaerobic and photoautotrophic organisms, simple forms of life that required no oxygen and derived energy from sunlight. If they thrived and died in sufficient numbers they would create a layer of biomass to nurture more complex ecosystems. The next wave, a year from now, would introduce oxygenating organisms; the last unmanned launches would include primitive plants to fix the soil and regulate evaporation and rainfall cycles.

"It all seems so unlikely."

"We live in unlikely times. But no, it's not guaranteed to work."

"And if it doesn't?"

I shrugged. "What have we lost?"

"A lot of money. A lot of manpower."

"I can't think of a better use for it. Yes, this is a wager, and no, it's not a sure thing, but the potential payoff is more than worth the risk. And it's been good for everybody, at least so far. Good for morale at home and a good way of promoting international cooperation."

"But you'll have misled a lot of ordinary people. Convinced them the Spin is something we can manage, something we can find a technological fix for."

"Given them hope, you mean."

"The wrong kind of hope. And if you fail you leave them with no hope at all."

"What would you have us do, Diane? Retreat to our prayer mats?"

"It would hardly be an admission of defeat—prayer, I mean. And if you do succeed, the next step is to send people?"

"Yes. If we green the planet we send people." A much more difficult and ethically complex proposition. We'd be sending candidates in crews of ten. They would have to endure an unpredictably long passage in absurdly small quarters on limited rations. They would have to suffer atmospheric braking at a near-lethal delta-V after months of weightlessness, followed by a perilous descent to the planet's surface. If all this worked, and if their meager allotment of survival gear made its parallel descent and landed anywhere near them, they would then have to teach themselves subsistence skills in an environment only approximately fit for human habitation. Their mission brief was not to return to Earth but to live long enough to reproduce in sufficient numbers and pass on to their offspring a sustainable mode of existence.

"What sane person would agree to that?"

"You'd be surprised." I couldn't speak for the Chinese, the Russians, or any of the other international volunteers, but the North American flight candidates were a shockingly ordinary group of men and women. They had been selected for their youth, physical hardiness, and ability to tolerate and endure discomfort. Only a few had been Air Force test pilots but all possessed what Jason called "the test pilot mentality," a willingness to accept grave physical risk in the name of a spectacular achievement. And, of course, most of them were in all likelihood doomed, just as most of the bacteria mounted on these distant rockets were doomed. The best outcome we could reasonably expect was that some band of nomadic survivors wandering the mossy canyons of Valles Marineris might encounter a similar group of Russians or Danes or Canadians and engender a viable Martian humanity.

"And you countenance this?"

"Nobody asked my opinion. But I wish them well."

Diane gave me a that's-not-good-enough look but chose not to pursue the argument. We rode an elevator down to the lobby restaurant. As we lined up for table service behind a dozen network news technicians she must have felt the growing excitement.

After we ordered she turned her head, listening as fragments of conversation—words like "photodissociation" and "cryptoendelithic" and, yes, "ecopoiesis"—spilled over from crowded tables, journalists rehearsing the jargon for their next day's work or just struggling to understand it. There was also laughter and the reckless clash of cutlery, an air of giddy if uncertain expectation. This was the first time since the moon landing more than sixty years ago that the world's attention had been so completely focused on a space adventure, and the Spin gave this one what even the moon landing had lacked: real urgency and a global sense of risk.

"This is all Jason's work, isn't it?"

"Without Jason and E.D. this might still be happening. But it would be happening differently, probably less quickly and efficiently. Jase has always been at the center of it."

"And us at the periphery. Orbiting his genius. Tell you a secret. I'm a little afraid of him. Afraid of seeing him after so long. I know he disapproves of me."

"Not you. Your lifestyle, maybe."

"You mean my faith. It's okay to talk about it. I know Jase feels a little—I guess betrayed. As if Simon and I have repudiated everything he believes in. But that's not true. Jason and I were never on the same path."

"Basically, you know, he's just Jase. Same old Jase."

"But am I the same old Diane?"

For which I had no answer.

She ate with an obvious appetite, and after the main course we ordered dessert and coffee. I said, "It's lucky you could take the time for this."

"Lucky that Simon let me off my leash?"

"I didn't mean that."

"I know. But in a way it's true. Simon can be a little controlling. He likes to know where I am."

"Is that a problem for you?"

"You mean, is my marriage in trouble? No. It isn't, and I wouldn't let it be. That doesn't mean we don't occasionally disagree." She hesitated. "If I talk about this, I'm sharing it with you, right? Not Jason. Just you."

I nodded.

"Simon has changed some since you met him. We all have, everybody from the old NK days. NK was all about being young and making a community of belief, a kind of sacred space where we didn't have to be afraid of each other, where we could embrace each other not just figuratively but literally. Eden on Earth. But we were mistaken. We thought AIDS didn't matter, jealousy didn't matter—they couldn't matter, because we'd come to the end of the world. But it's a slow Tribulation, Ty. The Tribulation is a lifetime's work, and we need to be strong and healthy for it."

"You and Simon—"

"Oh, we're healthy." She smiled. "And thank you for asking, Dr. Dupree. But we lost friends to AIDS and drugs. The movement was a roller-coaster ride, love all the way up and grief all the way down. Anyone who was part of it will tell you that."

Probably so, but the only NK veteran I knew was Diane herself. "The last few years haven't been easy for anyone."

"Simon had a hard time dealing with it. He really believed we were a blessed generation. He once told me God had come so close to humanity it was like sitting next to a furnace on a winter night, that he could practically warm his hands at the Kingdom of Heaven. We all felt that way, but it really did bring out the best in Simon. And when it started to go bad, when so many of our friends were sick or drifting into addictions of one kind or another, it hurt him pretty deeply. That was when the money started running out, too, and eventually Simon had to look for work—we both did. I did temp work for a few years. Simon couldn't find a secular job but he does janitorial work at our church in Tempe, Jordan Tabernacle, and they pay him when they can… he's studying for his pipe fitter's certificate."

"Not exactly the Promised Land."

"Yeah, but you know? I don't think it's supposed to be. That's what I tell him. Maybe we can feel the chiliasm coming, but it's not here yet—we still have to play out the last minutes of the game even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion. And maybe we're being judged on that. We have to play it like it matters."

We rode the elevator up to our rooms. Diane paused at her door and said, "What I'm remembering is how good it feels to talk to you. We used to be pretty good talkers, remember?"

Confiding our fears through the chaste medium of the telephone. Intimacy at a distance. She had always preferred it that way. I nodded.

"Maybe can do that again," she said. "Maybe I can call you from Arizona sometimes."

She, of course, would call me, because Simon might not like it if I called her. That was understood. As was the nature of the relationship she was proposing. I would be her platonic buddy. Someone harmless to confide in during troubled times, like the leading lady's gay male friend in a cineplex drama. We would chat. We would share. Nobody would get hurt.

It wasn't what I wanted or needed. But I couldn't say that to the eager, slightly lost look she was giving me. Instead I said, "Yeah, of course."

And she grinned and hugged me and left me in the hall.

I sat up later than I should have, nursing my wounded dignity, embedded in the noise and laughter from nearby rooms, flunking about all the scientists and engineers at Perihelion and JPL and Kennedy, all these newspaper people and video journalists watching klieg lights play over the distant rockets, all of us doing our jobs here at the tag end of human history, doing what was expected of us, playing it like it mattered.

* * * * *

Jason arrived at noon the next day, ten hours before the first wave of launches was scheduled to begin. The weather was bright and calm, a good omen. Of all the global launch sites the only obvious no-go was the European Space Agency's expanded Kourov complex in French New Guinea, shut down by a fierce March storm. (The ESA microorganisms would be delayed a day or two—or half a million years, Spin-time.)

Jase came directly to my suite, where Diane and I were waiting for him. He wore a cheap plastic windbreaker and a Marlins cap pulled low over his eyes to disguise him from the resident reporters. "Tyler," he said when I opened the door. "I'm sorry. If I could have been there I would have."

The funeral service. "I know."

"Belinda Dupree was the best thing about the Big House. I mean that."

"I appreciate it," I said, and stepped out of his way.

Diane came across the room with a wary expression. Jason closed the door behind him, not smiling. They stood a yard apart, eyeing each other. The silence was weighty. Jason broke it.

"That collar," he said, "makes you look like a Victorian banker. And you ought to put on a little weight. Is it so hard to scrounge a meal out there in cow country?" Diane said, "More cactus than cows, Jase." And they laughed and fell into each other's arms.

* * * * *

We staked out the balcony after dark, brought out comfortable chairs and ordered up a tray of crudites (Diane's choice) from room service. The night was as dark as every starless Spin-shrouded night, but the launch platforms were illuminated by gigantic spotlights and their reflections danced in the gently rolling swells.

Jason had been seeing a neurologist for some weeks now. The specialist's diagnosis had been the same as mine: Jason suffered from severe and nonresponsive multiple sclerosis for which the only useful treatment was a regimen of palliative drugs. In fact the neurologist had wanted to submit Jason's case to the Centers for Disease Control as part of their ongoing study of what some people were calling AMS— atypical multiple sclerosis. Jase had threatened or bribed him out of the idea. And for now, at least, the new drug cocktail was keeping him in remission. He was as functional and mobile as he had ever been. Any suspicions Diane might have harbored were quickly allayed.

He had brought along a bottle of expensive and authentically French champagne to celebrate the launches. "We could have had VIP seats," I told Diane. "Bleachers outside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Brushing elbows with President Garland."

"The view from here is as good," Jason said. "Better. Here, we're not props in a photo opportunity."

"I've never met a president," Diane said.

The sky, of course, was dark, but the TV in the hotel room (we had turned it up to hear the countdown) was talking about the Spin barrier, and Diane looked into the sky as if it might have become miraculously visible, the lid that enclosed the world. Jason saw the tilt of her head. "They shouldn't call it a barrier," he said. "None of the journals call it that anymore."

"Oh? What do they call it?"

He cleared his throat. "A 'strange membrane.'"

"Oh no." Diane laughed. "No, that's awful. That's not acceptable. It sounds like a gynecological disorder."

"Yeah, but 'barrier' is incorrect. It's more like a boundary layer. It's not a line you cross. It acquires objects selectively and accelerates them into the external universe. The process is more like osmosis than, say, crashing a fence. Ergo, membrane."

"I'd forgotten what it's like talking to you, Jase. It can be a little surreal."

"Hush," I told them both. "Listen."

Now the TV had cut to the NASA feed, a bland Mission Control voice talking the numbers down. Thirty seconds. There were twelve rockets fueled and nominal on their pads. Twelve simultaneous launches, an act that a less ambitious space agency would once have deemed impractical and radically unsafe. But we lived in more daring or desperate times.

"Why do they all have to go up at once?" Diane asked.

"Because," Jason began; then he said, "No. Wait. Watch."

Twenty seconds. Ten. Jase stood up and leaned into the balcony railing. The hotel balconies were mobbed. The beach was mobbed. A thousand heads and lenses swiveled in the same direction. Estimates later put the crowd in and around the Cape at nearly two million. According to police reports, more than a hundred wallets were lifted that night. There were two fatal stabbings, fifteen attempted assaults, and one premature labor. (The child, a four-pound girl, was delivered on a trestle table at the International House of Pancakes in Cocoa Beach.)

Five seconds. The TV in the hotel room went quiet. For a moment there was no sound but the buzz and whine of photographic gear.

Then the ocean was ablaze with firelight as far as the horizon.

No single one of these rockets would have impressed a local crowd even in darkness, but this wasn't one column of flame, it was five, seven, ten, twelve. The seaborne gantries were briefly silhouetted like skeletal skyscrapers, lost soon after in billows of vaporized ocean water. Twelve pillars of white fire, separated by miles but compressed by perspective, clawed into a sky turned indigo blue by their combined light. The beach crowd began to cheer, and the sound merged with the sound of the solid-fuel boosters hammering for altitude, a throb that compressed the heart like ecstasy or terror. But it wasn't only the brute spectacle we were cheering. Almost certainly every one of these two million people had seen a rocket launch before, at least on television, and although this multiple ascendancy was grand and loud it was remarkable mainly for its intent, its motivating idea. We weren't just planting the flag of terrestrial life on Mars, we were defying the Spin itself.

The rockets rose. (And on the rectangular screen of the TV, when I glanced at it through the balcony door, similar rockets bent into cloudy daylight in Jiuquan, Svobodnyy, Baikonur, Xichang.) The fierce horizontal light became oblique and began to dim as night rushed back from the sea. The sound spent itself in sand and concrete and superheated salt water. I imagined I could smell the reek of fireworks coming ashore with the tide, the pleasantly awful stench of Roman candles.

A thousand cameras clattered like dying crickets and went still.

The cheering lasted, in one form or another, until dawn.

* * * * *

We went inside and drew the drapes against the anticlimactic darkness and opened the champagne. We watched the news from overseas. Apart from the French rain delay, every launch had been successful. A bacterial armada was en route to Mars.

"So why do they all have to go up at once?" Diane asked again.

Jason gave her a long thoughtful look. "Because we want them to arrive at their destination at roughly the same time. Which is not as easy as it sounds. They have to enter the Spin membrane more or less simultaneously, or they'll exit separated by years or centuries. Not so critical with these anaerobic cargos, but we're practicing for when it really matters."

"Years or centuries'? How is that possible?"

"Nature of the Spin, Diane."

"Right, but centuries?"

He turned his chair to face her, frowning. "I'm trying to grasp the extent of your ignorance here…"

"Just a question, Jase."

"Count a second for me."

"What?"

"Look at your watch and count me one second. No, I'll do it. One—" He paused. "Second. Got that?"

"Jason—"

"Bear with me. You understand the Spin ratio?"

"Roughly."

"Roughly isn't good enough. One terrestrial second equals 3.17 years Spin time. Keep that in mind. If one of our rockets enters the Spin membrane a single second behind the rest, it reaches orbit more than three years late."

"Just because I can't quote numbers—"

"They're important numbers, Diane. Suppose our flotilla just emerged from the membrane, just now, now—" He ticked the air with his finger. "One second, here and gone. For the flotilla, that was three and a fraction years. One second ago they were in Earth orbit. Now they've delivered their cargo to the surface of Mars. I mean now, Diane, literally now. It's already happened, it's done. So let a minute pass on your watch. That's approximately a hundred and ninety years by an outside clock."

"That's a lot, of course, but you can't make over a planet in two hundred years, can you?"

"So now it's two hundred Spin years into the experiment. Right now, as we speak, any bacterial colonies that survived the trip will have been reproducing on Mars for two centuries. In an hour, they will have been there eleven thousand four hundred years. This time tomorrow they'll have been multiplying for almost two hundred seventy-four thousand years."

"Okay, Jase. I get the idea."

"This time next week, 1.9 million years."

"Okay."

"A month. 8.3 million years."

"Jason—"

"This time next year, one hundred million years."

"Yes, but—"

"On Earth, one hundred million years is roughly the span of time between the emergence of life from the sea and your last birthday. One hundred million years is time enough for those microorganisms to pump carbon dioxide out of carbonate deposits in the crust, leach nitrogen from nitrates, purge oxides from the regolith and enrich it by dying in large numbers. All that liberated C02 is a greenhouse gas. The atmosphere gets thicker and warmer. A year from now we send another armada of respirating organisms, and they begin to cycle C02 into free oxygen. Another year—or as soon as the spectroscopic signature from the planet looks right—we introduce grasses, plants, other complex organisms. And when all that stabilizes into some kind of crudely homeostatic planetary ecology, we send human beings. You know what that means?"

"Tell me," Diane said sullenly.

"It means that within five years there'll be a flourishing human civilization on Mars. Farms, factories, roads, cities…"

"There's a Greek word for this, Jase."

"Ecopoiesis."

"I was thinking of 'hubris.'"

He smiled. "I worry about a lot of things. But offending the gods isn't one of them."

"Or offending the Hypotheticals?"

That stopped him. He leaned back and sipped champagne, a little flat by now, from his hotel-room glass.

"I'm not afraid of offending them," he said finally. "On the contrary. I'm afraid we may be doing exactly what they want us to do."

But he wouldn't explain, and Diane was eager to change the subject.

* * * * *

I drove Diane to Orlando the next day for her flight back to Phoenix. It had become obvious over the last few days that we would not discuss, mention, or allude in any way to the physical intimacy we had shared that night in the Berkshires before her marriage to Simon. If we acknowledged it at all it was only in the cumbersome detours we took to avoid it. When we hugged (chastely) in the space in front of the airport security gate she said, "I'll call you," and I knew she would—Diane made few promises but was scrupulous about keeping them—but I was equally conscious of the time that had passed since I had last seen her and the time that would inevitably pass before I saw her again: not Spin time, but something just as erosive and just as hungry. There were creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth, not unlike the ones I saw in the mirror every morning.

Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well.

* * * * *

There were more launches during the spring and summer of that year, surveillance packages that spent months in high Earth orbit and returned with visual and spectrographic images of Mars—snapshots of the ecopoiesis.

The first results were equivocal: a modest increase in atmospheric C02 that might have been a side effect of solar warming. Mars remained a cold, inhospitable world by any plausible measure. Jason admitted that even the GEMOs— the genetically engineered Mars organisms that comprised the bulk of the initial seeding—might not have adjusted well to the planet's unfiltered daylight UV levels and oxidant-ridden regolith.

But by midsummer we were seeing strong spectrographic evidence of biological activity. There was more water vapor in a denser atmosphere, more methane and ethane and ozone, even a tiny but detectable increase in free nitrogen.

By Christmas these changes, while still subtle, had so dramatically outpaced what could be attributed to solar warming that no doubt remained. Mars had become a living planet.

The launch platforms were readied once more, new cargos of microbial life cultured and packaged. In the United States that year, fully two percent of the gross domestic product was devoted to Spin-related aerospace work—essentially, the Mars program—and the ratio was similar in other industrialized countries.

* * * * *

Jason suffered a relapse in February. He woke up unable to focus his eyes. His neurologist adjusted his medication and prescribed an eye patch as a temporary fix. Jase recovered rapidly but was away from work for most of a week.

Diane was as good as her word. She began to call me at least monthly, usually more often, often late at night when Simon was asleep at the other end of their small apartment. They lived in a few rooms over a secondhand book-store in Tempe, the best they could do on Diane's salary and the irregular income Simon took home from Jordan Tabernacle. In warm weather I could hear the drone of a swamp cooler in the background; in winter, a radio playing softly to disguise the sound of her voice.

I invited her to come back to Florida for the next series of launches, but of course she couldn't: she was busy with work, they were having church friends to dinner that weekend, Simon wouldn't understand. "Simon's going through a minor spiritual crisis. He's trying to deal with the Messiah issue…"

"There's a Messiah issue?"

"You should read the newspapers," Diane said, possibly overestimating how often these religious debates made the mainstream press, at least in Florida; maybe it was different out west. "The old NK movement believed in a Christless Parousia. That was what made us distinctive." That, I thought, and their penchant for public nudity. "The early writers, Ratel and Greengage, saw the Spin as a direct fulfillment of scriptural prophecy—which meant the prophecy itself was redefined, reconfigured by historical events. There didn't have to be a literal Tribulation or even a physical Second Coming of Christ. All that stuff in Thessalonians and Corinthians and Revelation could be reinterpreted or ignored, because the Spin was a genuine intervention by God in human history—a tangible miracle, which supersedes scripture. That was what freed us to make the Kingdom on Earth. Suddenly we were responsible for our own chiliasm."

"I'm not sure I follow." Actually she had lost me somewhere around the word "Parousia."

"It means—well, all that really matters is that Jordan Tabernacle, our little church, has officially renounced all NK doctrine, even though half the congregation is old NK people like me and Simon. So suddenly there are all these arguments about the Tribulation and how the Spin tallies against Biblical prophecy. People taking sides. Bereans versus Progressives, Covenanters versus Preterists. Is there an Antichrist, and if so, where is he? Does the Rapture happen before the Tribulation or during or after? Issues like that. Maybe it sounds picayune, but the spiritual stakes are very high, and the people having these arguments are people we care about, our friends."

"Where do you stand?"

"Me personally?" She was quiet, and there it was again, the sound of the radio murmuring behind her, some Valium-voiced announcer delivering late-night news to insomniacs. Latest on the shooting in Mesa. Parousia or no Parousia. "You could say I'm conflicted. I don't know what I believe. Sometimes I miss the old days. Making up paradise as we went along. It seems like—"

She paused. Now there was another voice doubling the staticky murmur of the radio: Diane? Are you still up?

"Sorry," she whispered. Simon on patrol. It was time to cut short our telephone tryst, her act of touchless infidelity. "Talk to you soon."

She was gone before I could say good-bye.

* * * * *

The second series of seed launches went off as flawlessly as the first. The media mobbed Canaveral again, but I watched this round on a big digital projection in the auditorium at Perihelion, a sunshine launch that scattered herons into the sky over Merritt Island like bright confetti.

Followed by another summer of waiting. ESA lofted a series of next-generation orbital telescopes and interferometers, and the stored data they retrieved was even sleeker and cleaner than last year's. By September every office at Perihelion was plastered with high-res images of our success. I framed one for the infirmary waiting room. It was a color-composite rendering of Mars showing Olympus Mons outlined in frost or ice and scarred with fresh drainage channels, fog flowing like water through Valles Marineris, green capillaries snaking over Solis Lacus. The southern highlands of the Terra Sirenum were still deserts, but the region's impact craters had eroded to near-invisibility under a wetter, windier climate.

The oxygen content of the atmosphere rose and fell for a few months as the population of aerobic organisms oscillated, but by December it had topped twenty millibars and stabilized. Out of a potentially chaotic mix of increasing greenhouse gases, an unstable hydrologic cycle, and novel biogeochemical feedback loops, Mars was discovering its own equilibrium.

The string of successes was good for Jason. He remained in remission and was happily, almost therapeutically, busy. If anything dismayed him it was his own emergence as the iconic genius of the Perihelion Foundation, or at least its scientific celebrity, poster child for the transformation of Mars. This was more E.D.'s doing than Jason's: E.D. knew the public wanted Perihelion to have a human face, preferably young, smart but not intimidating, and he had been pushing Jase in front of cameras since the days when Perihelion was an aerospace lobby group. Jase put up with it—he was a good and patient explainer, and reasonably photogenic—but he hated the process and would leave a room rather than see himself on television.

That was the year of the first unmanned NEP flights, which Jase watched with particular attention. These were the vehicles that would transport human beings to Mars, and unlike the comparatively simple seed carriers, the NEP vehicles were new technology. NEP stood for "nuclear electric propulsion": miniature nuclear reactors feeding ion engines vastly more powerful than the ones that drove the seed vessels, powerful enough to enable massive payloads. But getting these leviathans into orbit required boosters as large as anything NASA had ever launched, acts of what Jason called "heroic engineering," heroically expensive. The price tag had begun to raise red flags even in a largely supportive Congress, but the stream of notable successes kept a lid on dissent. Jason worried that even a single conspicuous failure would shift that equation.

Shortly after New Year's Day a NEP test vehicle failed to return its reentry package of test data and was presumed disabled in orbit. There were finger-pointing speeches on Capitol Hill led by a coterie of fiscal ultraconservatives representing states without significant aerospace investment, but E.D.'s friends in Congress overrode the objections and a successful test a week later buried the controversy. Still, Jason said, we had dodged a bullet.

Diane had followed the debate but considered it trivial. "What Jase needs to worry about," she said, "is what this Mars thing is doing to the world. So far it's all good press, right? Everybody's gung-ho, we all want something to reassure us about the—I'm not sure what to call it—the potency of the human race. But the euphoria will wear off sooner or later, and in the meantime people are getting extremely savvy about the nature of the Spin."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"If the Mars project fails or doesn't live up to expectations, yeah. Not just because people will be disappointed. They've watched the transformation of an entire planet—they have a yardstick to measure the Spin by. The sheer insane power of it, I mean. The Spin's not just some abstract phenomenon— you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong you steal that courage away again, and now it's worse because they've seen the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they've ever been."

I quoted the Housman poem she had taught me long ago: "The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear."

"The infant child is starting to figure it out," she said. "Maybe that's how you define the Tribulation."

Maybe so. Some nights, when I couldn't sleep, I thought about the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they were. There was really only one salient, obvious fact about them: not simply that they were capable of enclosing the Earth in this… strange membrane, but that they had been out there— owning us, regulating our planet and the passage of time— for almost two billion years.

Nothing even remotely human could be so patient.

* * * * *

Jason's neurologist tipped me off to a JAMA study published that winter. Researchers at Cornell had discovered a genetic marker for acute drug-resistant MS. The neurologist—a genial, fat Floridian named David Malmstein—had run Jason's DNA profile and found the suspect sequence in it. I asked him what that meant.

"It means we can tailor his medication a little more specifically. It also means we can never deliver the kind of permanent remission a typical MS patient expects."

"Seems like he's been in remission for most of a year now. Isn't that long-term?"

"His symptoms are under control, that's all. The AMS goes on burning, sort of like a fire in a coal seam. The time will come when we can't compensate for it."

"The point of no return."

"You could say."

"How long can he pass for normal?"

Malmstein paused. "You know," he said, "that's exactly what Jason asked me."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I'm not a fortune-teller. That AMS is a disease without a well-established etiology. That the human body has its own calendar."

"I'm guessing he didn't like the answer."

"He was vocal in his disapproval. But it's true. He could walk around for the next decade asymptomatic. Or he could be in a wheelchair by the end of the week."

"You told him that?"

"A kindler, gentler version. I don't want him to lose hope. He has a fighting spirit, and that counts for a lot. My honest opinion is that he'll do all right over the short term—two years, five years, maybe more. Then all bets are off. I wish I had a better prognosis."

I didn't tell Jase I'd talked to Malmstein, but I saw the way, in the following weeks, he redoubled his work, counting his successes against time and mortality, not the world's but his own.

* * * * *

The pace of the launches, not to mention the cost of them, began to escalate. The last wave of seed launches (the only one to carry, in part, actual seeds) happened in March, two years after Jase and Diane and I had watched a dozen similar rockets depart Florida for what had been at the time a barren planet.

The Spin had given us the necessary leverage for a long ecopoiesis. Now that we had launched the seeds of complex plants, however, timing became crucial. If we waited too long Mars could evolve out of our grasp: a species of edible grain after a million years evolving in the wild might not resemble its ancestral form, might have grown unpalatable or even poisonous.

This meant the survey satellites had to be launched only weeks after the seed armada, and the manned NEP vessels, if the results looked promising, immediately after that.

I took another late-night call from Diane the night after the survey sats went up. (Their data packages had been retrieved within hours but were still en route to JPL in Pasadena to be analyzed.) She sounded stressed and admitted when I questioned her that she had been laid off at least until June. She and Simon had run into trouble with their back rent. She couldn't ask E.D. for money, and Carol was impossible to talk to. She was working up the nerve to speak to Jase, but she didn't relish the humiliation.

"What kind of money are we talking about, Diane?"

"Tyler, I didn't mean—"

"I know. You didn't ask. I'm offering."

"Well… this month, even five hundred dollars would make a real difference."

"I guess the pipe cleaner fortune ran dry."

"Simon's trust fund ran out. There's still family money, but his family's not talking to him."

"He won't catch on if I send you a check?"

"He wouldn't like it. I thought I'd tell him I found an old insurance policy and cashed it in. Something like that. The kind of lie that doesn't really count as a sin. I hope."

"You guys are still at the Collier Street address?" Where I mailed a politely neutral Christmas card every year and from which I received one in return, generic snow scenes signed Simon and Diane Townsend, God Bless!

"Yes," she said, then, "Thank you, Tyler. Thank you so much. You know this is incredibly mortifying."

"Hard times for a lot of folks."

"You're doing all right, though?"

"Yeah, I'm doing all right."

I sent her six checks each postdated for the fifteenth of the month, half a year's worth, not sure whether this would cement our friendship or poison it. Or whether it mattered.

* * * * *

The survey data revealed a world still drier than the Earth but marked with lakes like polished turquoise inlaid on a copper disk; a planet gently swirled with bands of cloud, storms dropping rainfall on the windward slopes of ancient volcanos and feeding river basins and silty lowland deltas green as suburban lawns.

The big boosters were fueled on their pads, and at launch facilities and cosmodromes around the world nearly eight hundred human beings climbed gantries to lock themselves into cupboard-sized chambers and confront a destiny that was anything but certain. The NEP arks enclosed atop these boosters contained (in addition to astronauts) embryonic sheep, cattle, horses, pigs, and goats, and the steel wombs from which they could, with luck, be decanted; the seeds of ten thousand plants; the larvae of bees and other useful insects; dozens of similar biological cargos which might or might not survive the journey and the rigors of regenesis; condensed archives of essential human knowledge both digital (including the means to read them) and densely printed; and parts and supplies for simple shelters, solar power generators, greenhouses, water purifiers, and elementary field hospitals. In a best-case scenario all these human expeditionary vessels would arrive at roughly the same equatorial lowlands within a span of several years depending on their transit of the Spin membrane. At worst, even a single ship, if it arrived reasonably intact, could support its crew through a period of acclimation.

Once more into the Perihelion auditorium, then, along with everyone who hadn't gone up the coast to see the event in person. I sat up front next to Jason and we craned our heads at the video feed from NASA, a spectacular long shot of the offshore launch platforms, steel islands linked by immense rail bridges, ten huge Prometheus boosters (called "Prometheus" when they were manufactured by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the Russians, the Chinese, and the EU used the same template but named and painted them differently) bathed in spotlights and ranked like whitewashed fenceposts far into the blue Atlantic. Much had been sacrificed for this moment: taxes and treasure, shorelines and coral reefs, careers and lives. (At the foot of each gantry off Canaveral was an engraved plaque bearing the names of the fifteen construction workers who had died during the assembly work.) Jason tapped his foot in a violent rhythm while the countdown drained into its last minute, and I wondered if this was symptomatic, but he caught me looking and leaned into my ear and said, "I'm just nervous. Aren't you?"

There had already been problems. Worldwide, eighty of these big boosters had been assembled and prepared for tonight's synchronized launch. But they were a new design, not entirely debugged. Four had been scrubbed before launch for technical problems. Three were currently holding in their counts—in a launch that was supposed to be synchronized worldwide—for the usual reasons: dicey fuel lines, software glitches. This was inevitable and had been accounted for in tile planning, but it still seemed ominous.

So much had to happen so quickly. What we were transplanting this time was not biology but human history, and human history, Jase had said, burned like a fire compared to the slow rust of evolution. (When we were much younger, after the Spin but before he left the Big House, Jase used to have a parlor trick to demonstrate this idea. "Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist")

Then the NASA voice announced, "Ignition," and Jason sucked air between his teeth and turned his head half away as nine of ten boosters, hollow tubes of explosive liquid taller than the Empire State Building, detonated skyward against all logic of gravity and inertia, burning tons of fuel to achieve the first few inches of altitude and vaporizing seawater in order to mute a sonic event that would otherwise have shaken them to pieces. Then it was as if they had made ladders of steam and smoke and climbed them, their speed apparent now, plumes of fire outpacing the rolling clouds they had created. Up and gone, just like every successful launch: swift and vivid as a dream, then up and gone.

The last booster was delayed by a faulty sensor but launched ten minutes late. It would arrive on Mars nearly a thousand years after the rest of the fleet, but this had been taken into account in the planning and might prove to be a good thing, an injection of Terrestrial technology and know-how long after the paper books and digital readers of the original colonists had crumbled into dust.

* * * * *

Moments later the video broadcast cut to French Guyana, the old and much-expanded Centre National d'Études Spatiales at Kourou, where one of the big boosters from the Aerospatiale factory had risen a hundred feet and then lost thrust and tumbled back onto its pad in a mushroom of flame.

Twelve people were killed, ten aboard the NEP ark and two on the ground, but it was the only conspicuous tragedy of the entire launch sequence, and that probably amounted to good luck, taken all in all.

* * * * *

But that wasn't the end of the exercise. By midnight—and this, it seemed to me, was the clearest indicator yet of the grotesque disparity between terrestrial time and Spin-time— human civilization on Mars had either failed entirely or had been in progress for most of a hundred thousand years.

That's roughly the amount of time between the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and yesterday afternoon.

It passed while I was driving home from Perihelion to my rental. It was entirely possible that Martian dynasties rose and fell while I waited for traffic lights to change. I thought about those lives—those fully real human lives, each one of them boxed into a span of less than a minute as my watch counted time—and felt a little dizzy. Spin vertigo. Or something deeper.

A half dozen survey satellites were launched that night, programmed to look for signs of human life on Mars. Their payload packages parachuted back to Earth and were retrieved before morning.

* * * * *

I saw the results before they were made public.

This was a full week after the Prometheus launches. Jason had booked a 10:30 appointment at the infirmary, subject to breaking news from JPL. He didn't cancel the appointment but showed up an hour late with a manila envelope in his hand, clearly anxious to discuss something not related to his medical regimen. I hurried him into a consultation room.

"I don't know what to tell the press," he said. "I just got off a conference call with the ESA director and a bunch of Chinese bureaucrats. We're trying to put together a draft of a joint statement for heads of state, but as soon as the Russians agree to a sentence the Chinese want to veto it, and vice versa."

"A statement about what, Jase?"

"The satellite data."

"You got the results?" In fact they were overdue. JPL was usually quicker about sharing its photos. But from what Jason had said I guessed someone had been sitting on the data. Which meant it wasn't what they'd expected. Bad news, perhaps.

"Look," Jason said.

He opened the manila folder and pulled out two composite telescopic photos, one atop the other. Both were images of Mars taken from Earth orbit after the Prometheus launches.

The first photograph was heart-stopping. It was not as distinct as the framed image! had put up in the waiting room, since in this one the planet was far from its closest approach to Earth; the clarity it did possess was a testament to modern imaging technology. Superficially it didn't seem much different from the framed photo: I could make out enough green to know that the transplanted ecology was still intact, still active.

"Look a little closer," Jason said.

He ran his finger down the sinuous line of a riverine lowland. There were green places here with sharp, regular borders. More of them, the more I looked.

"Agriculture," Jase said.

I held my breath and thought about what that meant. I thought: Now there are two inhabited planets in the solar system. Not hypothetically, but really. These were places where people lived, where people lived on Mars.

I wanted to stare. But Jase slid the printout back into its envelope, revealing the one beneath.

"The second photo," he said, "was taken twenty-four hours later."

"I don't understand."

"Taken from the same camera on the same satellite. We have parallel images to confirm the result. It looked like a flaw in the imaging system until we juiced the contrast enough to read a little starlight."

But there was nothing in the photograph. A few stars, a fat central nothingness in the shape of a disk. "What is it?"

"A Spin membrane," Jason said. "Seen from the outside. Mars has its own now."

4X109 A.D.

We were traveling inland from Padang—that much I understood—uphill, over roads that were sometimes silken-smooth and sometimes pitted and uneven, until the car pulled up in front of what in the darkness appeared to be a concrete bunker but must have been (by the painted red crescent under a glaring tungsten bulb) some kind of medical clinic. The driver was upset when he saw where he had taken us—this was further evidence that I was sick, not just drunk—but Diane pushed more bills into his hand and sent him away mollified if not happy.

I was having trouble standing. I leaned into Diane, who took my weight gamely, and we stood in the wet night, on an empty road, moonlight cutting through tattered clouds. There was the clinic in front of us and a gas station across the pavement and nothing else but forest and flat spaces that might have been cultivated fields. There was no visible human presence until the screened door of the clinic wheezed open and a short, rotund woman wearing a long skirt and small white hat hurried out to us.

"Ibu Diane!" the woman said, excitedly but softly, as if she were afraid of being overheard, even at this lonely hour. "Welcome!"

"Ibu Ina," Diane said respectfully.

"And this must be—?"

"Pak Tyler Dupree. The one I told you about."

"Too sick to speak?"

"Too sick to say anything sensible."

"Then by all means let's get him inside."

Diane supported me on one side and the woman she had called Ibu Ina grabbed my right arm by the shoulder. She wasn't a young woman but she was remarkably strong. The hair under her white cap was gray and thinning. She smelled like cinnamon. Judging by the way she wrinkled her nose, I smelled like something much worse.

Then we were inside, past an empty waiting room furnished with rattan and cheap metal chairs, into what looked like a fairly modern consultancy, where Diane dumped me onto a padded table and Ina said, "Well, then, let's see what we can do for him," and I felt safe enough to pass out.

* * * * *

I woke to the sound of a call to prayer from a distant mosque and the smell of fresh coffee.

I was lying naked on a pallet in a small concrete room with one window, which admitted the only light, a pale premonition of dawn. There was a doorway covered with a sort of bamboo lacework, and from beyond it the noise of someone doing something energetic with cups and bowls.

The clothes I had been wearing last night had been laundered and were folded next to the pallet. I was between fevers—I had learned to recognize these little oases of well-being—and strong enough to dress myself.

I was balancing on one leg and aiming the other into my trousers when Ibu Ina peeked in through the curtain. "So you're well enough to stand!" she said.

Briefly. I fell back onto the pallet, half dressed. Ina came into the room with a bowl of white rice, a spoon, an enameled tin cup. She knelt beside me and glanced at the wooden tray: did I want any of this?

I discovered I did. For the first time in many days I was hungry. Probably a good thing. My pants were ridiculously loose, my ribs obscenely prominent. "Thank you," I said.

"We were introduced last night," she said, handing me the bowl. "Do you remember? I apologize for the crude nature of the accommodations. This room serves concealment better than comfort."

She might have been fifty or sixty years old. Her face was round and wrinkled, her features concentrated in a moon of brown flesh, an apple-doll look that was accentuated by her long black dress and white cap. If the Amish had settled in West Sumatra they might have produced something like Ibu Ina.

Her accent was lilting Indonesian but her diction was primly correct. "You speak very well," I said, the only compliment I could come up with on short notice.

"Thank you. I studied at Cambridge."

"English?"

"Medicine."

The rice was bland but good. I made a show of finishing it.

"Perhaps more, later?" Ibu Ina said.

"Yes, thank you."

Ibu was a Minangkabau term of respect used in addressing women. (The male equivalent was Pak.) Which implied that Ina was a Minangkabau doctor and that we were in the Sumatran highlands, probably within sight of Mount Merapi. Everything I knew about Ina's people I had learned from the Sumatran guidebook I had read on the plane from Singapore: there were more than five million Minangkabau living in villages and cities in the highlands; many of Padang's finest restaurants were operated by Minangkabau; they were famous for their matrilineal culture, their business savvy, and their blend of Islam and traditional adat customs.

None of which explained what I was doing in the back room of a Minang doctor's office.

I said, "Is Diane still asleep? Because I don't understand—"

"Ibu Diane has taken the bus back to Padang, I'm afraid. But you'll be safe here."

"I was hoping she'd be safe, too."

"She would be safer here than in the city, certainly. But that wouldn't get either of you out of Indonesia."

"How did you come to know Diane?"

Ina grinned. "Sheerly by luck! Or mostly luck. She was negotiating a contract with my ex-husband, Jala, who is in the import-export business, among others, when it became obvious that the New Reformasi were much too interested in her. I work a few days a month at the state hospital in Padang and I was delighted when Jala introduced me to Diane, even if he was simply looking for a place to temporarily hide a prospective client. It was so exciting to meet the sister of Pak Jason Lawton!"

This was startling in almost too many ways. "You know about Jason?"

"I know of him—unlike you, I have never had the privilege of speaking to him. Oh, but I was a great follower of the news about Jason Lawton in the early days of the Spin. And you were his personal physician! And now here you are in the back room of my clinic!"

"I'm not sure Diane should have mentioned any of that." I was certain she shouldn't have. Our only protection was our anonymity, and now it was compromised.

Ibu Ina looked crestfallen. "Of course," she said, "it would have been better not to mention that name. But foreigners with legal problems are terribly commonplace in Padang. There is an expression: a dime a dozen. Foreigners with legal and medical troubles are even more problematic. Diane must have learned that Jala and I were both great admirers of Jason Lawton—it could only have been an act of desperation for her to invoke his name. Even then, I didn't quite believe her until I sought out photographs on the Internet. I suppose one of the drawbacks of celebrity must be this constant taking of pictures. At any rate, there was a photograph of the Lawton family, taken very early in the Spin, but I recognized her: it was true! And so it must be true what she told me about her sick friend. You were a physician to Jason Lawton, and of course the other, the more famous one—"

"Yes."

"The small black wrinkled man."

"Yes."

"Whose medicine is making you sick."

"Whose medicine, I hope, is also making me better."

"As it has already Diane, or so she said. This interests me. Is there really an adulthood beyond adulthood? How do you feel?"

"Could be better, frankly."

"But the process is not finished."

"No. The process is not finished."

"Then you should rest. Is there anything I can get for you?"

"I had notebooks—paper—"

"In a bundle with your other luggage. I'll bring them. Are you a writer as well as a physician?"

"Only temporarily. I need to put some thoughts down on paper."

"Perhaps when you're feeling better you can share some of those thoughts with me."

"Perhaps so. I would be honored."

She rose from her knees. "Especially about the little black wrinkled man. The man from Mars."

* * * * *

I slept erratically through the next couple of days, waking up surprised by the passage of time, the sudden nights and unexpected mornings, marking what I could of the hours by the call to prayer, the sound of traffic, by Ibu Ina's offerings of rice and curried eggs and periodic sponge baths. We talked, but the conversations washed through my memory like sand through a sieve, and I could tell by her expression that I occasionally repeated myself or had forgotten things she'd said. Light and dark, light and dark; then, suddenly, Diane was kneeling next to Ina beside the bed, both of them giving me somber looks.

"He's awake," Ibu Ina said. "Please excuse me. I'll leave the two of you alone."

Then it was just Diane beside me.

She wore a white blouse, a white scarf over her dark hair, billowy blue trousers. She could have passed for any secularized mall-dweller in downtown Padang, though she was too tall and too pale to really fool anyone.

"Tyler," she said. Her eyes were blue and wide. "Are you paying attention to your fluids?"

"Do I look that bad?"

She stroked my forehead. "It isn't easy, is it?"

"I didn't expect it to be painless."

"Another couple of weeks and it'll be over. Until then—"

She didn't have to tell me. The drug was beginning to work deep into muscle tissue, nervous tissue.

"But this is a good place to be," she added. "We have antispasmodics, decent analgesics. Ina understands what's going on." She smiled sadly. "Still… not exactly what we'd planned."

We had planned on anonymity. Any of the Arch Port cities should have been a safe place for a moneyed American to lose himself. We had settled on Padang not just for its convenience—Sumatra was the land mass closest to the Arch—but because its hyperfast economic growth and the recent troubles with the New Reformasi government in Jakarta had made the city a functioning anarchy. I would suffer through the drug regimen in some undistinguished hotel, and when it was finished—when I was effectively remade—we would buy ourselves passage to a place where nothing bad could touch us. That was how it was supposed to go.

What we had not counted on was the vindictiveness of the Chaykin administration and its determination to make examples of us—both for the secrets we had kept and the secrets we had already divulged.

"I guess I made myself a little too conspicuous in the wrong places," Diane said. "I had us booked with two different rantau collectives, but both deals fell apart, suddenly people weren't talking to me, and it was obvious we were drawing way too much attention. The consulate, the New Reformasi, and the local police all have our descriptions. Not entirely accurate descriptions, but close enough."

"That's why you told these people who we are."

"I told them because they already suspected. Not Ibu Ina, but certainly Jala, her ex. Jala's a very canny guy. He runs a relatively respectable shipping company. A lot of the bulk concrete and palm oil that transits the port of Teluk Bayur also passes through one or another of Jala's warehouses. The rantau gadang business nets less money but it's tax-free, and those ships full of emigrants don't come back empty. He does a brisk sideline in black-market cattle and goats."

"Sounds like a man who would be glad to sell us to the New Reformasi."

"But we pay better. And present fewer legal difficulties, as long as we're not caught."

"Does Ina approve of this?"

"Approve of what? The rantau gadang! She has two sons and a daughter in the new world. Of Jala? She thinks he's more or less trustworthy—if you pay him he stays bought. Of us? She thinks we're next door to sainthood."

"Because of Wun Ngo Wen?"

"Basically."

"You were lucky to find her."

"It's not entirely luck."

"Still, we should get away as soon as possible."

"Soon as you're better. Jala has a ship lined up. The Capetown Maru. That's why I've been back and forth between here and Padang. There are more people I have to pay."

We were rapidly being transformed from foreigners with money to foreigners who used to have money. "Still," I said, "I wish—"

"Wish what?" She ran a finger over my forehead, back and forth, langorously.

"Wish I didn't have to sleep alone."

She gave a little laugh and put her hand on my chest. On my emaciated rib cage, on my skin still alligator-textured and ugly. Not exactly an invitation to intimacy. "It's too hot to cuddle up."

"Too hot?"

I'd been shivering.

"Poor Tyler," she said.

I wanted to tell her to be careful. But I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was gone again.

* * * * *

Inevitably there was worse to come, but in fact I felt much better over the next few days: the eye of the storm, Diane had called it. It was as if the Martian drug and my body had negotiated a temporary truce, both sides rallying for the ultimate battle. I tried to take advantage of the time.

I ate everything Ina offered, and I paced the room from time to time, trying to channel some strength into my scrawny legs. Had I felt stronger this concrete box (in which Ina had stored medical supplies before she built a more secure lock-and-alarm system adjoining the clinic) might have seemed like a prison cell. Under the circumstances it was almost cozy. I piled our hard-shell suitcases in one corner and used them as a sort of desk, sitting on a reed that while I wrote. The high window allowed in a wedge of sunlight.

It also allowed in the face of a local schoolboy, whom I had caught on two occasions peering at me. When I mentioned this to Ibu Ina she nodded, disappeared for a few minutes, and came back with the boy in tow: "This is En," she said, practically throwing him through the curtain at me. "En is ten years old. He is very bright. He wants to be a doctor one day. He is also my nephew's son. Unfortunately he's cursed with curiosity at the expense of sensibility. He climbed on top of the trash bin to see what I was hiding in my back room. Unforgivable. Apologize to my guest, En." En hung his head so drastically low that I was afraid his enormous eyeglasses would drop off the end of his nose. He mumbled something. "In English," Ina said. "Sorry!"

"Inelegant but to the point. Perhaps En can do something for you, Pak Tyler, to make up for his bad behavior?"

En was clearly on the hook. I tried to let him off. "Apart from respecting my privacy, nothing."

"He will certainly respect your privacy from this moment onward—won't you, En?" En cringed and nodded. "However, I have a job for him. En comes by the clinic almost every day. If I'm not busy I show him a few things. The chart of human anatomy. The litmus paper that turns color in vinegar. En claims to be grateful for these indulgences." En's nodding became almost spastically vigorous. "So in return, and as a way of compensating for his gross negligence of common budi, En will now become the clinic's lookout. En, do you know what that means?"

En stopped nodding and looked wary.

"It means," Ibu Ina said, "that from now on you will put your vigilance and curiosity to good use. If anyone comes to the village asking about the clinic—anyone from the city, I mean, especially if they look or act like policemen—you will immediately run here and tell me about it."

"Even if I'm in school?"

"I doubt the New Reformasi will trouble you at school. When you're at school, pay attention to your lessons. Any other time, in the street, at a warung, whatever, if you see something or overhear something involving me or the clinic or Pak Tyler (whom you must not mention), come to the clinic at once. Understand?"

"Yes," En said, and he murmured something else I couldn't hear.

"No," Ina said promptly, "there is no payment involved, what a scandalous question! Although, if I'm pleased, favors might follow. Right now I am not at all pleased."

En scooted away, his oversized white T-shirt billowing behind him.

By nightfall a rain had begun, a deep tropical rain that lasted days, during which I wrote, slept, ate, paced, endured.

* * * * *

Ibu Ina sponged my body during the dark of a rainy night, scrubbing away a slough of dead skin.

"Tell me something you remember about them," she said. "Tell me what it was like growing up with Diane and Jason Lawton."

I thought about that. Or rather, I dipped into the increasingly murky pond of memory for something to offer her, something both true and emblematic. I couldn't fish out exactly what I wanted but something did float to the surface: a starlit sky, a tree. The tree was a silver poplar, darkly mysterious. "One time we went camping," I said. "This was before the Spin, but not by much."

It felt good to have the dead skin washed away, at least at first, but the revealed derma was sensitive, raw. The first stroke of the sponge was soothing, the second felt like iodine on a paper cut. Ina understood this.

"The three of you? Weren't you young for that, a camping trip, I mean, as they calculate such things where you come from? Or did you travel with your parents?"

"Not with our parents. E.D. and Carol vacationed once a year, resorts or cruise ships, preferably without children."

"And your mother?"

"Preferred to stay home. It was a couple from down the road who took us into the Adirondacks along with their own two boys, teenagers who didn't want anything to do with us."

"Then why—oh, I suppose the father wanted to ingratiate himself with E. D. Lawton? Beg a favor perhaps?"

"Something like that. I didn't ask. Nor did Jason. Diane might have known—she paid attention to those kind of things."

"It hardly matters. You went to a campground in the mountains? Roll on your side, please."

"The kind of campground with a parking lot. Not exactly pristine nature. But it was a weekend in September and we had the place almost to ourselves. We pitched tents and built a fire. The adults—" Their name came back to me. "The Fitches sang songs and made us come in on the choruses. They must have had fond memories of summer camp. It was pretty depressing, actually. The Fitch teenagers hated the whole thing and hid out in their tent with headphones. The older Fitches eventually gave up and went to bed."

"And left the three of you around the dying campfire. Was it a clear night or a rainy one, like this one?"

"A clear early autumn night." Hardly like this one, with its frog choruses and raindrops bulleting the thin roof. "No moon but plenty of stars. Not warm but not really cold, even though we were some ways up in the hills. Windy. Windy enough that you could hear the trees talking to themselves."

Ina's smile broadened. "The trees talking to themselves! Yes, I know what that sounds like. Now on your left side, please."

"The trip had been tedious but it started to feel good now that it was just the three of us. Jase fetched a flashlight and we walked a few yards away from the fire, to an open space in a poplar grove, away from the cars and tents and people, where the land sloped down to the west. Jason showed us the zodiacal light rising in the sky."

"What is the zodiacal light?"

"Sunlight reflecting on grains of ice in the asteroid belt. You can sometimes see it on a very clear, dark night." Or could, before the Spin. Was there still a zodiacal light or had solar pressure swept away the ice? "It came up from the horizon like breath in winter, far away, delicate. Diane was fascinated. She listened to Jase explain it, and this was back when Jason's explanations still fascinated her—she hadn't outgrown them yet. She loved his intelligence, loved him for his intelligence—"

"As did Jason's father, perhaps? On your stomach now, please."

"But not in that proprietary way. It was pure goggle-eyed enchantment."

"Excuse me, 'goggle-eyed'?"

"Wide-eyed. Then the wind started to pick up, and Jason turned on the flashlight and pointed it into the poplars so Diane could see the way the branches moved." With this came a vivid memory of young Diane in a sweater at least a size too big for her, hands lost in knitted wool, hugging herself, her face turned up into the cone of light and her eyes reflecting it back in solemn moons. "He showed her the way the biggest branches tossed in a kind of slow motion, and the smaller branches more quickly. That was because each branch and twig had what Jase called a resonant frequency. And you could think of those resonant frequencies as musical notes, he said. The tree's motion in the wind was really a kind of music pitched too low for human ears, the trunk of the tree singing a bass note and the branches singing tenor lines and the twigs playing piccolo. Or, he said, you could think of it as pure numbers, each resonance, from the wind itself to the tremor of a leaf, working out a calculation inside a calculation inside a calculation."

"You describe it very beautifully," Ina said.

"Not half as beautifully as Jason did. It was like he was in love with the world, or at least the patterns in it. The music in it. Ouch."

"I'm sorry. And Diane was in love with Jason?"

"In love with being his sister. Proud of him."

"And were you in love with being his friend?"

"I suppose I was."

"And in love with Diane."

"Yes."

"And she with you."

"Maybe. I hoped so."

"Then, if I may ask, what went wrong?"

"What makes you think anything went wrong?"

"You're obviously still in love. The two of you, I mean. But not like a man and woman who have been together for many years. Something must have kept you apart. Excuse me, this is terribly impertinent."

Yes, something had kept us apart. Many things. Most obviously, I supposed, it was the Spin. She had been especially, particularly frightened by it, for reasons I had never completely understood; as if the Spin were a challenge and a rebuke to everything that made her feel safe. What made her feel safe? The orderly progression of life; friends, family, work—a kind of fundamental sensibility of things, which in E.D. and Carol Lawton's Big House must already have seemed fragile, more wished-for than real.

The Big House had betrayed her, and eventually even Jason had betrayed her: the scientific ideas he presented to her like peculiar gifts, which had once seemed reassuring—the cozy major chords of Newton and Euclid—became stranger and more alienating: the Planck length (beneath which things no longer behaved like things); black holes, sealed by their own imponderable density into a realm beyond cause and effect; a universe not only expanding but accelerating toward its own decay. She told me once, while St. Augustine was still alive, that when she put her hand on the dog's coat she wanted to feel his heat and his liveliness—not count the beats of his heart or consider the vast spaces between the nuclei and the electrons that constituted his physical being. She wanted St. Dog to be himself and whole, not the sum of his terrifying parts, not a fleeting evolutionary epiphenomenon in the life of a dying star. There was little enough love and affection in her life and each instance of it had to be accounted and stored up in heaven, hoarded against the winter of the universe.

The Spin, when it came, must have seemed like a monstrous vindication of Jason's worldview—more so because of his obsession with it Clearly, there was intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy; and, just as obviously, it was nothing like our own. It was immensely powerful, terrifyingly patient, and blankly indifferent to the terror it had inflicted on the world. Imagining the Hypotheticals, one might picture hyperintelligent robots or inscrutable energy beings; but never the touch of a hand, a kiss, a warm bed, or a consoling word.

So she had hated the Spin in a deeply personal way, and I think it was that hatred that ultimately led her to Simon Townsend and the NK movement. In NK theology the Spin became a sacred event but also a subordinate one: large but not as large as the God of Abraham; shocking but less shocking than a crucified Savior, an empty tomb.

I said some of this to Ina. She said, "Of course, I'm not a Christian. I'm not even Islamic enough to satisfy the local authorities. Corrupted by the atheistic West, that's me. But even in Islam there were such movements. People babbling about Imam Mehdi and Ad-Dajjal, Yajuj and Majuj drinking up the Sea of Galilee. Because they thought this made a better kind of sense. There. I'm finished." She had scrubbed the soles of my feet. "Have you always known these things about Diane?"

Known in what sense? Felt, suspected, intuited; but known—no, I couldn't say so.

"Then perhaps the Martian drug is living up to your expectations," Ina said as she exited with her stainless steel pan of warm water and her assortment of sponges, leaving me something to think about in the dark of the night.

* * * * *

There were three doors leading into or out of Ibu Ina's medical clinic. She walked me through the building once, after her last scheduled patient had departed with a splinted finger.

"This is what I've built in my lifetime," she said. "Little enough, you might think. But the people of this village needed something between here and the hospital in Padang— quite a distance, especially if you have to travel by bus or the roads are undependable."

One door was the front door, where her patients came and went.

One door was the back door, metal-lined and sturdy. Ina parked her little power-cell car in the pressed-earth lot behind the clinic, and she used this door when she arrived in the morning and locked it when she left at night. It was adjacent to the room where I lived and I had learned to recognize the sound of her keys jingling in it not long after the first call to prayer from the village mosque a quarter mile away.

The third door was a side door, down a little corridor that also housed the toilet and a row of supply cupboards. This was where she accepted deliveries and this was the route by which En preferred to come and go.

En was just as Ina had described him: bashful but bright, smart enough to earn the medical degree on which he had set his heart's hopes. His parents weren't rich, Ina said, but if he landed a scholarship, studied premed at the new university in Padang, excelled, found a way to finance a graduate degree— "Then, who knows? The village might have another doctor. That's how I did it."

"You think he'd come back and practice here?"

"He might. We go out, we come back." She shrugged, as if this were the natural order of things. And for the Minang, it was: rantau, the tradition of sending young men abroad, was part of the system of adat, custom and obligation. Adat, like conservative Islam, had been eroded by the last thirty years of modernization, but it pulsed under the surface of Minang life like a heartbeat.

En had been warned not to bother me, but he gradually lost his fear of me. With Ibu Ina's express permission, when I was between bouts of fever, En would hone his English vocabulary by bringing me items of food and naming them for me: silomak, sticky rice; singgang ayam, curried chicken. When I said, "Thank you," En would call out "Welcome!" and grin, displaying a set of bright white but wildly irregular teeth: Ina was trying to convince his parents to have braces installed.

Ina herself shared a small house in the village with relatives, although lately she had been sleeping in a consulting room in the clinic, a space that couldn't have been any more comfortable than my own bleak cell. Some nights, however, family duties called her away; on those nights she would note my temperature and condition, provision me with food and water, and leave me a pager in case of emergencies. And I would be alone until her key rattled in the door the next morning.

But one night I woke out of a frantic, labyrinthine dream to the sound of the side door shuddering as someone turned the knob in an attempt to open it. Not Ina. Wrong door, wrong hour. It was midnight by my watch, only the beginning of the deepest part of the night; there would still be a few villagers haunting the local warungs, cars transiting the main road, trucks trying to reach some distant desa by morning. Maybe a patient hoping she was still here. Or maybe an addict looking for drugs.

The knob-turning stopped.

Quietly, I levered myself up and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. The clinic was dark, my cell was dark, the only light was moonlight through the high window… which was suddenly eclipsed.

I looked up and saw the silhouette of En's head like a hovering planet. "Pak Tyler!" he whispered.

"En! You scared me." In fact the shock had drained the strength out of my legs. I had to lean on the wall to stay upright.

"Let me in!" En said.

So I padded barefoot to the side door and threw the latch.

The breeze that rushed in was warm and moist. En rushed in after it. "Let me talk to Ibu Ina!"

"She's not here. What's up, En?"

He was deeply disconcerted. He pushed his glasses up the bump of his nose. "But I need to talk to her!"

"She's at home tonight. You know where she lives?"

En nodded unhappily. "But she said to come here and tell her."

"What? I mean, when did she say this?"

"If a stranger asks about the clinic I have to come here and tell her."

"But she's not—" Then the significance of what he'd said pierced the fog of incipient fever. "En, is someone in town asking about Ibu Ina?"

I coaxed the story out of him. En lived with his family in a house behind a warung (a food stall) in the heart of the village, only three doors away from the office of the mayor, the kepala desa. En, on wakeful nights, was able to lie in his room and listen to the murmur of conversation from the warung's customers. Thus he had acquired an encyclopedic if poorly understood store of village gossip. After dark it was usually the men who sat talking and drinking coffee, En's father and uncles and neighbors. But tonight there had been two strangers who arrived in a sleek black car and approached the lights of the warung bold as water buffalo and asked without introducing themselves how to find the local clinic. Neither was ill. They wore city clothes and behaved rudely and carried themselves like policemen, and so the directions they received from En's father were vague and incorrect and would send them in exactly the wrong direction.

But they were looking for Ina's clinic and, inevitably, they would find it; in a village this size the misdirection was at best only a delay. So En had dressed himself and scooted out of the house unseen and come here, as instructed, to complete his bargain with Ibu Ina and to warn her of the danger.

"Very good," I told him. "Good work, En. Now you need to go to the house where she lives and tell her these things." And in the meantime I'd gather my possessions and exit the clinic. I figured I could hide myself in the adjoining rice fields until the police had been and gone. I was strong enough to do that. Probably.

But En crossed his arms and backed away from me. "She said to wait here for her."

"Right. But she won't be back till morning."

"She sleeps here most nights." He craned his head, looking past me down the darkened clinic hallway as if she might step out of the consulting room to reassure him.

"Yeah, but not tonight. Honest. En, this could be dangerous. These people might be Ibu Ina's enemies, understand?"

But some fierce innate stubbornness had possessed him. As friendly as we had been, En still distrusted me. He trembled a moment, wide-eyed as a lemur, then darted around me and deeper into the moonlit clinic, calling, "Ina! Ina!"

I chased him, switching on lights as I went.

Trying at the same time to think coherently about this. The rude men looking for the clinic could be New Reformasi from Padang, or local cops, or they might be working for Interpol or the State Department or whatever other agency the Chaykin administration chose to swing like a hammer.

And if they were here looking for me, did that mean they had found and interrogated Jala, Ina's ex-husband? Did it mean they had already arrested Diane?

En blundered into a darkened consulting room. His forehead collided with the extended stirrups of an examination table and he fell back on his rump. When I reached him he was crying soundlessly, frightened, tears rolling down his cheeks. The welt above his left eyebrow was angry-looking but not dangerous.

I put my hands on his shoulders. "En, she's not here. Really. She's really, really not here. And I know for a fact she didn't mean for you to stay here in the dark when something bad might happen. She wouldn't do that, would she?"

"Uh," En said, conceding the point.

"So you run home, okay? You run home and stay there. I'll take care of this problem and we'll both see Ibu Ina tomorrow. Does that make sense?"

En attempted to exchange his fear for a judicial look. "I think so," he said, wincing.

I helped him to his feet.

But then there was the sound of gravel crunching under tires in front of the clinic, and we both crouched down again.

* * * * *

We hurried to the reception room, where I peered through the slatted bamboo blinds with En behind me, his small hands knotted into the fabric of my shirt.

The car idled in the moonlight. I didn't recognize the model but judging by the inky shine it looked relatively new. There was a brief flare from the interior darkness that might have been a cigarette lighter. Then a much brighter light, a high-beam spotlight sweeping out from the passenger-side window. It came through the blinds and cast rolling shadows over the hygiene posters on the opposite wall. We ducked our heads. En whimpered.

"Pak Tyler?" he said.

I closed my eyes and discovered it was hard to open them again. Behind my eyelids I saw pinwheels and starbursts. The fever again. A small chorus of interior voices repeated, The fever again, the fever again. Mocking me.

"Pak Tyler!"

This was very bad timing. (Bad timing, bad timing …) "Go to the door, En. The side door."

"Come with me!"

Good advice. I checked the window again. The spotlight had winked out. I stood and led En down the corridor and past the supply cupboards to the side door, which he had left open. The night was deceptively quiet, deceptively inviting; a span of pressed earth, a rice field; the forest, palm trees black in the moonlight and tossing their crowns softly.

The bulk of the clinic was between us and the car. "Run straight for the forest," I said.

"I know the way—"

"Stay away from the road. Hide if you have to."

"I know. Come with me!"

"I can't," I said, meaning it literally. In my present condition the idea of sprinting after a ten-year-old was absurd.

"But—" En said, and I gave him a little push and told him not to waste time.

He ran without looking back, disappearing with almost alarming speed into the shadows, silent, small, admirable. I envied him. In the ensuing quiet I heard a car door open and close.

The moon was three-quarters full, ruddier and more distant than it used to be, presenting a different face than the one I remembered from my childhood. No more Man in the Moon; and that dark ovoid scar across the lunar surface, that new but now ancient mare, was the result of a massive impact that had melted regolith from pole to equator and slowed the moon's gradual spiral away from the Earth.

Behind me, I heard the policemen (I guessed two of them) pounding at the front door, announcing themselves gruffly, rattling the lock.

I thought about running. I believed I could run—not as deftly as En, but successfully—at least as far as the rice field. And hide there, and hope for the best.

But then I thought of the luggage I had left in Ina's back room. Luggage containing not just clothing but notebooks and discs, small slivers of digital memory and incriminating vials of clear liquid.

I turned back. Inside, I latched the door behind me. I walked barefoot and alert, listening for the sound of the policemen. They might be circling the building or they might make another attempt at the front door. The fever was coming on fast, however, and I heard many things, only some of which were likely to be real sounds.

Back in Ina's hidden room the overhead light was still out. I worked by touch and moonlight. I opened one of the two hard-shell suitcases and shoved in a stack of handwritten pages; closed it, latched it, lifted it and staggered. Then I picked up the second case for starboard ballast and discovered I could barely walk.

I nearly tripped over a small plastic object which I recognized as Ina's pager. I stopped, put down the luggage, grabbed the pager and slid it into my shirt pocket. Then I drew a few deep breaths and lifted the cases again; mysteriously, they seemed to have grown even heavier. I tried to tell myself You can do this, but the words were trite and unconvincing and they echoed as if my skull had expanded to the size of a cathedral.

I heard noises from the back door, the one Ina kept closed with an exterior padlock: clinking metal and the groaning of the latch, maybe a crowbar inserted between the hasps of the lock and twisted. And pretty soon, inevitably, the lock would give way and the men from the car would come inside.

I staggered to the third door, En's door, the side door, unlatched it and eased it open in the blind hope that no one was standing outside. No one was. Both intruders (if there were only two of them) were at the back. They whispered as they worked the lock, their voices faintly audible over frog-choruses and the small sound of the wind.

I wasn't sure I could make it to the concealment of the rice field without being seen. Worse, I wasn't sure I could make it without falling down.

But then there was a loud percussive bang as the padlock parted company with the door. The starting gun, I thought. You can do this, I thought. I gathered up my luggage and staggered barefoot into the starry night.

HOSPITALITY

"Have you seen this?" Molly Seagram waved her hand at a magazine on the reception desk as I entered the Perihelion infirmary. Her expression said: Badjuju, evil omens. It was the glossy print edition of a major monthly news magazine, and Jason's picture was on the cover. Tag line: the very private personality BEHIND THE PUBLIC FACE OF THE PERIHELION PROJECT.

"Not good news, I take it?"

She shrugged. "It's not exactly flattering. Take it. Read it. We can talk about it over dinner." I had already promised her dinner. "Oh, and Mrs. Tuckman is prepped and waiting in stall three."

I had asked Molly not to refer to the consulting rooms as "stalls," but it wasn't worth arguing about. I slid the magazine into my mail tray. It was a slow, rainy April morning and Mrs. Tuckman was my only scheduled patient before lunch.

She was the wife of a staff engineer and had been to see me three times in the last month, complaining of anxiety and fatigue. The source of her problem wasn't hard to divine.

Two years had passed since the enclosure of Mars, and rumors of layoffs abounded at Perihelion. Her husband's financial situation was uncertain and her own attempts to find work had foundered. She was going through Xanax at an alarming pace and she wanted more, immediately.

"Maybe we should consider a different medication," I said.

"I don't want an antidepressant, if that's what you mean." She was a small woman, her otherwise pleasant face crunched into a fierce frown. Her gaze flickered around the consulting room and alighted for a time on the rain-streaked window overlooking the landscaped south lawn. "Seriously. I was on Paraloft for six months and I couldn't stop running to the bathroom."

"When was this?"

"Before you came. Dr. Koenig prescribed it. Of course, things were different then. I hardly saw Carl at all, he was so busy. Lots of lonely nights. But at least it looked like good, steady employment in those days, something that would last. I guess I should have counted my blessings. Isn't that in my, um, chart or whatever you call it?"

Her patient history was open on the desk in front of me. Dr. Koenig's notes were often difficult to decipher, though he had kindly used a red pen to highlight matters of pressing urgency: allergies, chronic conditions. The entries in Mrs. Tuckman's folder were prim, terse, and ungenerous. Here was the note about Paraloft, discontinued (date indecipherable) at patient's request, "patient continues to complain of nervousness, fears for future." Didn't we all fear for the future?

"Now we can't even count on Carl's job. My heart was beating so hard last night—I mean, very rapidly, unusually rapidly. I thought it might be, you know."

"What?"

"You know. CVWS."

CVWS—cardiovascular wasting syndrome—had been in the news the last few months. It had killed thousands of people in Egypt and the Sudan and cases had been reported in Greece, Spain, and the southern U.S. It was a slow-burning bacterial infection, potential trouble for tropical third world economies but treatable with modern drugs. Mrs. Tuckman had nothing to fear from CVWS, and I told her so.

"People say they dropped it on us."

"Who dropped what, Mrs. Tuckman?"

"That disease. The Hypotheticals. They dropped it on us."

"Everything I've read suggests CVWS crossed over from cattle." It was still mainly an ungulate disease and it regularly decimated cattle herds in northern Africa.

"Cattle. Huh. But they wouldn't necessarily tell you, would they? I mean, they wouldn't come out and announce it on the news."

"CVWS is an acute illness. If you did have it you'd have been hospitalized by now. Your pulse is normal and your cardio is fine."

She looked unconvinced. In the end I wrote her a prescription for an alternative anxiolytic—essentially, Xanax with a different molecular side chain—hoping the new brand name, if not the drug itself, would have a useful effect. Mrs. Tuckman left the office mollified, clutching the script in her hand like a sacred scroll.

I felt useless and vaguely fraudulent.

But Mrs. Tuckman's condition was far from unique. The whole world was reeling with anxiety. What had once looked like our best shot at a survivable future, the terraforming and colonization of Mars, had ended in impotence and uncertainty. Which left us no future but the Spin. The global economy had begun to oscillate, consumers and nations accumulating debt loads they expected never to have to repay, while creditors hoarded funds and interest rates spiked. Extreme religiosity and brutal criminality had increased in tandem, at home and abroad. The effects were especially devastating in third world nations, where collapsing currencies and recurrent famine helped revive slumbering. Marxist and militant Islamic movements.

The psychological tangent wasn't hard to understand. Neither was the violence. Lots of people harbor grievances, but only those who have lost faith in the future are likely to show up at work with an automatic rifle and a hit list. The Hypotheticals, whether they meant to or not, had incubated exactly that kind of terminal despair. The suicidally disgruntled were legion, and their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives… For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.

We lived in dangerous times. Mrs. Tuckman knew that, and all the Xanax in the world wasn't going to convince her otherwise.

* * * * *

During lunch I secured a table at the back of the staff cafeteria, where I nursed a coffee, watched rain fall on the parking lot, and perused the magazine Molly had given me.

If there were a science of Spinology, the lead article began, Jason Lawton would be its Newton, its Einstein, its Stephen Hawking.

Which was what E.D. had always encouraged the press to say and what Jase had always dreaded hearing.

From radiological surveys to permeability studies, from hard-core science to philosophical debate, there is hardly an area of Spin study his ideas haven't touched and transformed. His published papers are numerous and oft-cited. His attendance turns sleepy academic conferences into instant media events. And as acting director of the Perihelion Foundation he has powerfully influenced American and global aerospace policy in the Spin era.

But amidst the real accomplishments—and occasional hype—surrounding Jason Lawton, it's easy to forget that Perihelion was founded by his father, Edward Dean (E. D.) Lawton, who still holds a preeminent place on the steering committee and in the presidential cabinet. And the public image of the son, some would argue, is also the creation of the more mysterious, equally influential, and far less public elder Lawton.

The article went on to detail E.D.'s early career: the massive success of aerostat telecommunications in the aftermath of the Spin, his virtual adoption by three successive presidential administrations, the creation of the Perihelion Foundation.

Originally conceived as a think tank and industry lobby, Perihelion was eventually reinvented as an agency of the federal government, designing Spin-related space missions and coordinating the work of dozens of universities, research institutions, and NASA centers. In effect, the decline of "the old NASA" was Perihelion's rise. A decade ago the relationship was formalized and a subtly reorganized Perihelion was officially annexed to NASA as an advisory body. In reality, insiders say, it was NASA that was annexed to Perihelion. And while young prodigy Jason Lawton was charming the press, his father continued to pull the strings.

The article went on to question E.D.'s long relationship with the Garland administration and hinted at a potential scandal: certain instrument packages had been manufactured for several million dollars apiece by a small Pasadena firm run by one of E.D.'s old cronies, even though Ball Aerospace had tendered a lower-cost proposal.

We were living through an election campaign in which both major parties had spun off radical factions. Garland, a Reform Republican of whom the magazine notoriously disapproved, had already served two terms, and Preston Lomax, Clayton's V.P. and anointed successor, was running ahead of his opponent in recent polls. The "scandal" really wasn't one. Ball's proposal had been lower but the package they designed was less effective; the Pasadena engineers had crammed more instrumentation into an equivalent payload weight.

I said as much to Molly over dinner at Champs, a mile down the road from Perihelion. There was nothing really new about the article. The insinuations were more political than substantial.

"Does it matter," Molly asked, "if they're right or wrong? The important thing is how they're playing us. Suddenly it's okay for a major media outlet to take shots at Perihelion."

Elsewhere in the issue an editorial had described the Mars project as "the single most expensive boondoggle in history, costly in human lives as well as cash, a monument to the human ability to squeeze profit from a global catastrophe." The author was a speechwriter for the Christian Conservative Party. "The CCP owns this rag, Moll. Everybody knows that."

"They want to shut us down."

"They won't shut us down. Even if Lomax loses the election. Even if they scale us back to surveillance missions, we're the only eye on the Spin the nation has."

"Which doesn't mean we won't all be fired and replaced."

"It's not that bad."

She looked unconvinced.

Molly was the nurse/receptionist I had inherited from Dr. Koenig when I first came to Perihelion. For most of five years she had been a polite, professional, and efficient piece of office furniture. We had exchanged little more than customary pleasantries, by which I had come to know that she was single, three years younger than I was, and living in a walk-up apartment away from the ocean. She had never seemed especially talkative and I had assumed she preferred it that way.

Then, less than a month ago, Molly had turned to me as she collected her purse for a Thursday-night drive home and asked me if I'd like to join her for dinner. Why? "Because I got tired of waiting for you to ask. So? Yes? No?"

Yes.

Molly turned out to be smart, sly, cynical, and better company than I had expected. We'd been sharing meals at Champs for three weeks now. We liked the menu (unpretentious) and the atmosphere (collegial). I often thought Molly looked her best in that vinyl booth at Champs, gracing it with her presence, lending it a certain dignity. Her blond hair was long and, tonight, limp in the massive humidity. The green in her eyes was a deliberate effect, colored contacts, but it looked good on her.

"Did you read the sidebar?" she asked.

"Glanced at it." The magazine's sidebar profile of Jason had contrasted his career success with a private life either impenetrably hidden or nonexistent. Acquaintances say his home is as sparsely furnished as his romantic life. There has never been a rumor of a fiance, girlfriend, or spouse of either gender. One comes away with an impression of a man not merely married to his ideas but almost pathologically devoted to them. And in many ways Jason Lawton, like Perihelion itself, remains under the stifling influence of his father. For all his accomplishments, he has yet to emerge himself as his own man.

"At least that part sounds right," Molly said.

"Does it? Jason can be a little self-centered, but—"

"He comes through reception like I don't exist. I mean, that's trivial, but it's not exactly warm. How's his treatment going?"

"I'm not treating him for anything, Moll." Molly had seen Jason's charts, but I hadn't made any entries about his AMS. "He comes in to talk."

"Uh-huh. And sometimes when he comes in to talk he's practically limping. No, you don't have to tell me about it. But I'm not blind. For your information. Anyway, he's in Washington now, right?"

More often than he was in Florida. "Lot of talking going on. People are positioning themselves for the post-election."

"So something's in the works."

"Something's always in the works."

"I mean about Perihelion. The support staff gets clues. For instance, you want to know what's weird? We just acquired another hundred acres of property west of the fence. I heard this from Tim Chesley, the transcriptionist in human resources. Supposedly, we've got surveyors coming in next week."

"For what?"

"Nobody knows. Maybe we're expanding. Or maybe they're turning us into a mall."

It was the first I'd heard of it.

"You're out of the loop," Molly said, smiling. "You need contacts. Like me."

* * * * *

After dinner we adjourned to Molly's apartment, where I spent the night.

I won't describe here the gestures, looks, and touches by which we negotiated our intimacy. Not because I'm prudish but because I seem to have lost the memory. Lost it to time, lost it to the reconstruction. And yes, I register the irony in that. I can quote the magazine article we discussed and I can tell you what she had for dinner at Champs… but all that's left of our lovemaking is a faded mental snapshot: a dimly lit room, a damp breeze turning spindles of cloth in an open window, her green eyes close to mine.

* * * * *

Within a month Jase was back at Perihelion, stalking the hallways as if he had been infused with some strange new energy.

He brought with him an army of security personnel, black-clad and of uncertain origin but believed to represent the Department of the Treasury. These were followed in turn by small battalions of contractors and surveyors who cluttered the hallways and refused to speak to resident staff. Molly kept me posted on rumors: the compound was going to be leveled; the compound was going to be expanded; we would all be fired; we would all get raises. In short, something was afoot.

For most of a week I heard nothing from Jason himself. Then, a slow Thursday afternoon, he paged me in my office and asked me to come up to the second floor: "There's someone I want you to meet."

Before I reached the now heavily guarded stairwell I had picked up an escort of armed guards with all-pass badges who conducted me to an upstairs conference room. Not just a casual hello, obviously. This was deep Perihelion business, to which I should not have been privy. Once again, apparently, Jason had decided to share secrets. Never an unmixed blessing. I took a deep breath and pushed through the door.

The room contained a mahogany table, a half dozen plush chairs, and two men in addition to myself.

One of the men was Jason.

The second man could have been mistaken for a child. A horribly burned child in desperate need of a skin graft: that was my first impression. This individual, roughly five feet tall, stood in a corner of the room. He wore blue jeans and a plain white cotton T-shirt. His shoulders were broad, his eyes were wide and bloodshot, and his arms seemed a trifle too long for his abbreviated torso.

But what was most striking about him was his skin. His skin was glossless, ash black, and completely hairless. It wasn't wrinkled in the conventional sense—it wasn't loose, like a bloodhound's skin—but it was deeply textured, furrowed, like the rind of a cantaloupe.

The small man walked toward me and put out his hand. A small wrinkled hand at the end of a long wrinkled arm. I took it, hesitantly. Mummy fingers, I thought. But fleshy, plump, like the leaves of a desert plant, like grabbing a handful of aloe vera and feeling it grab back. The creature grinned.

"This is Wun," Jason said.

"One what?"

Wun laughed. His teeth were large, blunt, and immaculate. "I never tire of that splendid joke!"

His full name was Wun Ngo Wen, and he was from Mars.

* * * * *

The man from Mars.

It was a misleading description. Martians have a long literary history, from Wells to Heinlein. But in reality, of course, Mars was a dead planet. Until we fixed it. Until we birthed our own Martians.

And here, apparently, was a living specimen, 99.9 percent human if slightly oddly designed. A Martian person, descended through millennia of Spin-hinged time from the colonists we had dispatched only two years ago. He spoke punctilious English. His accent sounded half Oxford, half New Delhi. He paced the room. He took a bottle of spring water from the table, unscrewed the cap, and drank deeply. He wiped his mouth with his forearm. Small droplets beaded on his corrugated flesh.

I sat down and tried not to stare while Jase explained.

Here's what he said, a little simplified and fleshed out with details I learned later.

* * * * *

The Martian had left his planet shortly before the Spin membrane was imposed upon it.

Wun Ngo Wen was a historian and a linguist, relatively young by Martian standards—fifty-five terrestrial years— and physically fit. He was a scholar by trade, currently between assignments, donating labor to agricultural cooperatives, and he had just spent a Sparkmonth on the delta of the Kirioloj River, in what we called the Argyre Basin and Martians called the Baryal Plain (Epu Baryal) when his summons to duty came.

Like thousands of other men and women of his age and class, Wun had submitted his credentials to the committees who were designing and coordinating a proposed journey to Earth, without any real expectation that he would be selected. He was, in fact, relatively timid by nature and had never ventured far beyond his own prefecture, except for scholarly journeys and family reunions. He was deeply dismayed when his name was called, and if he had not recently entered his Fourth Age he might have refused the request. Surely someone else would be better suited to the task? But no, apparently not; his talents and life history were uniquely suited to the work, the authorities insisted; so he settled his affairs (such as they were) and boarded a train to the launch complex at Basalt Dry (on our maps, Tharsis), where he was trained to represent the Five Republics on a diplomatic mission to Earth.

Martian technology had only recently embraced the notion of manned space travel. In the past it had seemed to the governing councils a profoundly unwise adventure, liable to attract the attention of the Hypotheticals, wasteful of resources, requiring acts of large-scale manufacturing that would dump unbudgeted volatiles into a meticulously managed and highly vulnerable biosphere. The Martians were conservators by nature, hoarders by instinct. Their small-scale and biological technologies were ancient and sophisticated, but their industrial base was shallow and had already been strained by the unmanned exploration of the planet's tiny, useless moons.

But they had watched and speculated about the Spin-enshrouded Earth for centuries. They knew the dark planet was mankind's cradle, and they had learned from telescopic observation and data retained from a late-arriving NEP ark that the membrane surrounding it was penetrable. They understood the temporal nature of the Spin, though not the mechanisms that produced it. A journey from Mars to Earth, they reasoned, while physically possible, would be difficult and impractical. The Earth, after all, was effectively static; an explorer dropped into the terrestrial darkness would remain entrapped there for millennia, even if, by his own reckoning, he left for home the next day.

But vigilant astronomers had lately detected boxlike structures quietly constructing themselves hundreds of miles above the Martian poles—Hypothetical artifacts, nearly identical to the ones associated with the Earth. After a hundred thousand years of undisturbed solitude, Mars had finally come to the attention of the faceless and omnipotent creatures with whom it shared the solar system. The conclusion—that Mars would soon be placed under a Spin membrane of its own—was inescapable. Powerful factions argued for a consultation with the shrouded Earth. Scarce resources were mustered. A spacecraft was designed and assembled. And Wun Ngo Wen, a linguist and scholar deeply familiar with the extant fragments of terrestrial history and language, was conscripted to make the journey—much to his own dismay.

Wun Ngo Wen made peace with the likelihood of his own death even as he prepared his body for the confinement and debilitation of a long space voyage and the rigors of a high-gravity terrestrial environment. Wun had lost most of his immediate family in the Kirioloj flood of three summers ago—one reason he had volunteered for the flight, and one reason he had been accepted. For Wun, the risk of death was a lighter burden than it would have been for most of his peers. Still, it was not something he looked forward to; he hoped to avoid it altogether. He trained vigorously. He taught himself the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of his vehicle. And if the Hypotheticals did embrace Mars—not that he was hoping for such a thing—it would mean he might have a chance of returning, not to a planet rendered strange by millions of passing years but to his own familiar home, preserved with all its memories and losses against the erosion of time.

Although, of course, no return voyage was anticipated: Wun's vessel was a one-way device. If he ever did come back to Mars it would be at the pleasure of the terrestrials, who would have to be very generous indeed, Wun thought, to provide him with a ticket home.

And so Wun Ngo Wen had savored what would likely be his final look at Mars—the wind-gullied flatlands of Basalt Dry, Odos on Epu-Epia—before he was locked into the flight chamber of the crude iron-and-ceramic multistage rocket that carried him into space.

He spent much of the subsequent journey in a state of drug-induced metabolic lethargy, but it was still a bitter and debilitating test of endurance. The Martian Spin membrane was emplaced while he was in transit, and for the remainder of the flight Wun was isolated, cut off by temporal discontinuity from both human worlds: the one ahead and the one behind. Dreadful as death might be, he thought, could it be much different from this sedated silence, his brooding custodianship of a tiny machine falling endlessly through an inhuman vacuum?

His hours of true consciousness ebbed. He took refuge in reverie and forced sleep.

His vessel, primitive in many ways but equipped with subtle and semi-intelligent guidance and navigation devices, spent most of its fuel reserves braking into a high orbit around the Earth. The planet beneath him was a black nothingness, its moon a huge gyrating disk. Microscopic probes from Wun's vessel sampled the outer reaches of the Earth's atmosphere, generating increasingly red-shifted telemetry before they vanished into the Spin, just enough data to calculate an angle of entry. His spacecraft was equipped with an array of flight surfaces, aerodynamic brakes, and deployable parachutes, and with luck it would carry him through the dense and turbulent air to the surface of the enormous planet without baking or crushing him. But much still depended on luck. Far too much, in Wun's opinion. He immersed himself in a vat of protective gel and initiated the final descent, fully prepared to die.

He woke to find his only slightly charred vessel at rest in a canola field in southern Manitoba, surrounded by curiously pale and smooth-skinned men, some of them wearing what he recognized as biological isolation gear. Wun Ngo Wen emerged from his spacecraft, heart pounding, muscles leaden and aching in the terrible gravity, lungs insulted by the thick and insulating air, and was quickly taken into custody.

He spent the next month in a plastic bubble in a room at the Department of Agriculture's Animal Disease Center on Plum Island, off the coast of New York's Long Island. During that time he learned to speak a language he had known only from ancient written records, teaching his lips and tongue to accommodate the rich modalities of its vowels, refining his vocabulary as he struggled to explain himself to grim or intimidated strangers. This was a difficult time. Earthlings were pallid, lanky creatures, not at all what he had imagined when he deciphered the ancient documents. Many were pale as ghosts, reminding him of Embermonth stories that had terrified him as a child: he half expected one of them to rise up at his bedside like Huld of Phraya, demanding an arm or a leg for tribute. His dreams were restless and unpleasant.

He was, fortunately, still in possession of his skills as a linguist, and before long he was introduced to men and women of status and power who proved far more hospitable than his initial captors. Wun Ngo Wen cultivated these useful friendships, struggling to master the social protocols of an ancient and confusing culture and waiting patiently for the correct moment to convey the proposal he had carried at such personal and public expense between the two human worlds.

* * * * *

"Jason," I said when he had reached approximately this point in the narrative. "Stop. Please"

He paused. "You have a question, Tyler?"

"No question. It's just that it's… a lot to absorb."

"But you're okay with this? You follow me? Because I'm going to be telling this story more than once. I want it to flow. Does it flow?"

"Flows fine. Telling it to who?"

"Everybody. The media. We're going public."

"I don't want to be a secret anymore," Wun Ngo Wen said. "I didn't come here to hide. I have things to say." He uncapped his bottle of spring water. "Would you like some of this, Tyler Dupree? You look like you could use a drink."

I took the bottle from his plump, wrinkled fingers and drank deeply from it. "So," I said, "does this make us water-brothers?" Wun Ngo Wen looked puzzled. Jason laughed out loud.

FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE KIRIOLOJ DELTA

It's hard to capture the brute craziness of the times. Some days it seemed almost liberating. Beyond our picayune illusion of the sky the sun went on expanding, stars burned out or were born, a dead planet had been infused with life and had evolved a civilization that rivaled or surpassed our own. Closer to home, governments were toppled and replaced and their replacements were overthrown; religions, philosophies, and ideologies morphed and merged and begat mutant offspring. The old, ordered world was crumbling. New things grew in the ruins. We picked love green and savored it for its tartness: Molly Seagram loved me, I assumed, mainly because I was available. And why not? The summer was waning and the harvest was uncertain.

The long-defunct New Kingdom movement had begun to seem both prescient and grossly old-fashioned, its timid rebellion against the old ecclesiastical consensus a shadow of newer, edgier devotions. Dionysian cults sprang up everywhere in the western world, stripped of the piety and hypocrisy of the old NK—fuck clubs with flags or sacred symbols. They did not disdain human jealousy but embraced or even reveled in it: scorned lovers favored .45 pistols at close range, a red rose on a victim's body. It was the Tribulation reconfigured as Elizabethan drama.

Simon Townsend, had he been born a decade later, might have stumbled into one of these brands of Quentin Tarantino spirituality. But the failure of NK had left him disillusioned and yearning for something simpler. Diane still called me from time to time—once a month or so, when the auspices were right and Simon was out of the house—to update me on her situation or simply to reminisce, stoking memories like embers and warming herself at the heat. Not much heat at home, apparently, though her financial situation had improved a little. Simon was doing full-time maintenance for Jordan Tabernacle, their little independent church; Diane was doing clerical temp jobs, off-and-on work that often left her fidgeting around the apartment or sneaking off to the local library to read books of which Simon disapproved: contemporary novels, current events. Jordan Tabernacle, she said, was a "disengagement" church; parishioners were encouraged to turn off the TV and avoid books, newspapers, and other cultural ephemera. Or risk meeting the Rapture in an impure condition.

Diane never advocated these ideas—she never preached to me—but she deferred to them, left them carefully unquestioned. Sometimes I got a little impatient with that. "Diane," I said one night, "do you really believe this stuff?"

"What 'stuff,' Tyler?"

"Take your pick. Not keeping books in the house. The Hypotheticals as agents of the Parousia. All that shit." (I'd had maybe a beer too many.)

"Simon believes in it."

"I didn't ask you about Simon."

"Simon's more devout than I am. I envy him that. I know how it must sound. Put those books in the trash, like he's being monstrous, arrogant. But he isn't. It's an act of humility, really—an act of submission. Simon can give himself to God in a way I can't."

"Lucky Simon."

"He is lucky. You can't see it, but he's very peaceful. He's found a kind of equanimity at Jordan. He can look the Spin in the face and smile at it, because he knows he's saved."

"What about you? Aren't you saved?"

She let a long silence ride down the phone line between us. "I wish that was a simple question. I really do. I keep thinking, maybe it isn't about my faith. Maybe Simon's faith is enough for both of us. Powerful enough that I can ride it a little way. He's been very patient with me, actually. The only thing we argue about is having kids. Simon would like to have children. The church encourages it. And I understand that, but with the money so tight, and—you know—the world being what it is—"

"It's not a decision you ought to be pressured into."

"I don't mean to imply he's pressuring me. 'Put it in God's hands,' he says. Put it in God's hands and it'll work out right."

"But you're too smart to believe that."

"Am I? Oh, Tyler, I hope not. I hope that isn't true."

* * * * *

Molly, on the other hand, had no use for what she called "all this God crap." Every woman for herself, that was Moll's philosophy. Especially, she said, if the world was coming unglued and none of us was going to live past fifty. "I don't intend to spend that time kneeling."

She was tough by nature. Molly's folks were dairy farmers. They had spent ten years in legal arguments over a tar-sands oil-extraction project that bordered their property and was slowly poisoning it. In the end they traded their ranch for an out-of-court settlement large enough to buy a comfortable retirement for themselves and a decent education for their daughter. But it was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

Very little about the evolving social landscape surprised her. One night we sat in front of the TV watching coverage of the Stockholm riots. A mob of cod fishermen and religious radicals threw bricks through windows and burned cars; police helicopters peppered the crowd with tanglefoot gel until much of Gamla Stan looked like something a tubercular Godzilla might have coughed up. I made a fatuous remark about how badly people behave when they're frightened, and Molly said, "Come on, Tyler, you actually feel sympathy for these assholes?"

"I didn't say that, Moll."

"Because of the Spin, they get a free pass to trash their parliament building? Why, because they're frightened?"

"It's not an excuse. It's a motive. They don't have a future. They believe they're doomed."

"Doomed to die. Well, welcome to the human condition. They're gonna die, you're gonna die, I'm gonna die—and when was that ever not the case?"

"We're all mortal, but we used to have the consolation of knowing the human species would go on without us."

"But species are mortal, too. All that's changed is that suddenly it's not way off in the foggy future. It's possible we'll all die together in some spectacular way in a few years… but even that's still just a possibility. The Hypotheticals might keep us around longer than that. For whatever unfathomable reason."

"That doesn't frighten you?"

"Of course it does! All of it frightens me. But it's no reason to go out and kill people." She waved at the TV. Someone had launched a grenade into the Riksdag. "This is so overwhelmingly stupid. It accomplishes nothing. It's a hormonal exercise. It's simian."

"You can't pretend you're not affected by it."

She surprised me by laughing. "No… that's your style, not mine."

"Is it?"

She ducked her head away but came back staring, almost defiant. "The way you always pretend to be cool about the Spin. Same way you're cool about the Lawtons. They use you, they ignore you, and you smile like it's the natural order of things." She watched me for a reaction. I was too stubborn to give her one. "I just think there are better ways to live out the end of the world."

But she wouldn't say what those better ways were.

* * * * *

Everyone who worked at Perihelion had signed a nondisclosure agreement when we were hired, all of us had undergone background checks and Homeland Security vetting. We were discreet and we respected the need to keep high-echelon talk in-house. Leaks might spook congressional committees, embarrass powerful friends, scare away funding.