Spin

But now there was a Martian living on campus—most of the north wing had been converted into temporary quarters for Wun Ngo Wen and his handlers—and that was a secret difficult to keep.

It couldn't be kept much longer in any case. By the time Wun arrived in Florida much of the D.C. elite and several foreign heads of state had heard all about him. The State Department had granted him ad hoc legal status and planned to introduce him internationally when the time was right. His handlers were already coaching him for the inevitable media feeding frenzy.

His arrival could and perhaps should have been managed differently. He could have been processed through the U.N., his presence immediately made public. Garland's administration was bound to take some heat for hiding him. The Christian Conservative Party was already hinting that "the administration knows more than it's saying about the results of the terraforming project," hoping to draw out the president or open up Lomax, his would-be successor, for criticism. Criticism there would inevitably be; but Wun had expressed his wish not to become a campaign issue. He wanted to go public but he would wait until November, he said, to announce himself.

But the existence of Wun Ngo Wen was only the most conspicuous of the secrets surrounding his arrival. There were others. It made for a strange summer at Perihelion.

Jason called me over to the north wing that August. I met him in his office—his real office, not the tastefully furnished suite where he greeted official visitors and the press; a window-less cube with a desk and sofa. Perched on his chair between stacks of scientific journals, wearing Levi's and a greasy sweatshirt, he looked as if he'd grown out of the clutter like a hydroponic vegetable. He was sweating. Never a good sign with Jase.

"I'm losing my legs again," he said.

I cleared a space on the sofa and sat down and waited for him to elaborate.

"I've been having little episodes for a couple of weeks. The usual thing, pins and needles in the morning. Nothing I can't work around. But it isn't going away. In fact it's getting worse. I think we might need to adjust the medication."

Maybe so. But I really didn't like what the medication had been doing to him. Jase by this time was taking a daily handful of pills: myelin enhancers to slow the loss of nerve tissue, neurological boosters to help the brain rewire damaged areas, and secondary medication to treat the side effects of the primary medication. Could we boost his dosage? Possibly. But the process had a toxicity ceiling that was already alarmingly close. He had lost weight, and he had lost something perhaps more important: a certain emotional equilibrium. Jase talked faster than he used to and smiled less often. Where he had once seemed utterly at home in his body, he now moved like a marionette—when he reached for a cup his hand overshot the target and jogged back for a second intercept.

"In any case," I said, "we'll have to get Dr. Malmstein's opinion."

"There is absolutely no way I can leave here long enough to see him. Things have changed, if you haven't noticed. Can't we do a telephone consult?"

"Maybe. I'll ask."

"And in the meantime, can you do me another favor?"

"What would that be, Jase?"

"Explain my problem to Wun. Dig up a couple of textbooks on the subject for him."

"Medical texts? Why, is he a physician?"

"Not exactly, but he brought a lot of information with him. The Martian biological sciences are considerably in advance of ours." (He said this with a crooked grin I was unable to interpret.) "He thinks he might be able to help."

"Are you serious?"

"Quite serious. Stop looking shocked. Will you talk to him?"

A man from another planet. A man with a hundred thousand years of Martian history behind him. "Well, yeah," I said. "I'd be privileged to talk to him. But—"

"I'll set it up, then."

"But if he has the kind of medical knowledge that can effectively treat AMS, it needs to reach better doctors than me."

"Wun brought whole encyclopedias with him. There are already people going through the Martian archives—parts of them, anyway—looking for useful information, medical and otherwise. This is just a sideshow."

"I'm surprised he can spare the time for a sideshow."

"He's bored more often than you might think. He's also short of friends. I thought he might enjoy spending a little time with someone who doesn't believe he's either a savior or a threat. In the short term, though, I'd still like you to talk to Malmstein."

"Of course."

"And call him from your place, all right? I don't trust the phones here anymore."

He smiled as if he had said something amusing.

* * * * *

Occasionally that summer I took myself for walks on the public beach across the highway from my apartment.

It wasn't much of a beach. A long undeveloped spit of land protected it from erosion and rendered it useless for surfers. On hot afternoons the old motels surveyed the sand with glassy eyes and a few subdued tourists washed their feet in the surf.

I came down and sat on a scalding wooden walkway suspended over scrub grass, watching clouds gather on the eastern horizon and thinking about what Molly had said, that I was pretending to be cool about the Spin (and about the Lawtons), faking an equanimity I couldn't possibly possess.

I wanted to give Molly her due. Maybe that was the way I looked to her.

"Spin" was a dumb but inevitable name for what had been done to the Earth. That is, it was bad physics—nothing was actually spinning any harder or faster than it used to—but it was an apt metaphor. In reality the Earth was more static than it had ever been. But did it feel like it was spinning out of control? In every important sense, yes. You had to cling to something or slide into oblivion.

So maybe I was clinging to the Lawtons—not just Jason and Diane but their whole world, the Big House and the Little House, lost childhood loyalties. Maybe that was the only handle I could grab. And maybe that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. If Moll was right, we all had to grab something or be lost. Diane had grabbed faith, Jason had grabbed science.

And I had grabbed Jason and Diane.

I left the beach when the clouds came up, one of those inevitable late-August afternoon squalls, the eastern sky restless with lightning, rain beginning to whip the sad pastel balconies of the motels. My clothes were wet by the time I got home. It took them hours to dry in the humid air. The storm passed by nightfall but left a fetid, steamy stillness behind it.

Molly came over after dinner and we downloaded a current movie, one of the Victorian drawing-room dramas she was fond of. After the film she went to the kitchen to fix us drinks while I called David Malmstein from the phone in the spare room. Malmstein said he'd like to see Jase "as soon as it's practical" but thought it would be all right to adjust the meds upward a few notches, as long as both Jase and I kept an eye out for any unpleasant reaction.

I hung up the phone and left the room and found Molly in the hall with a drink in each hand and a puzzled expression on her face: "Where'd you go?"

"Just making a call."

"Anything important?"

"No."

"Checking up on a patient?"

"Something like that," I said.

* * * * *

Within the next few days Jase arranged a meeting between me and Wun Ngo Wen in Wun's quarters at Perihelion.

The Martian ambassador lived in a room he had furnished to his own taste, from catalogs. The furniture was lightweight, wicker, low to the ground. A rag rug covered the linoleum floor. A computer sat on a simple raw pine desk. There were bookcases to match the desk. Apparently Martians decorated like newlywed college students.

I supplied Wun with the technical material he wanted: a couple of books on the etiology and treatment of multiple sclerosis, plus a series of JAMA offprints on AMS. AMS, in current thinking, wasn't really MS at all; it was a different disease entirely, a genetic disorder with MS-like symptoms and a similar degradation of the myelin sheaths that protect human nervous tissue. AMS was distinguishable by its severity, rapid progression, and resistance to standard therapies. Wun said he wasn't familiar with the condition but would search his archives for information.

I thanked him but raised the obvious objection: he wasn't a doctor, and Martian physiology was conspicuously unusual—even if he found a suitable therapy, would it work in Jason's case?

"We're not as different as you might think. One of the first things your people did was to sequence my genome. It's indistinguishable from your own."

"I didn't mean to give offense."

"I'm not offended. One hundred thousand years is a long separation, long enough for what biologists call a speciation event. As it happens, however, your people and mine are fully interfertile. The obvious differences between us are superficial adaptations to a cooler, drier environment."

He spoke with an authority that belied his size. His voice was pitched higher than an average adult's but there was nothing juvenile about it; it was lilting, almost feminine, but always statesmanlike.

"Even so," I said, "there are potential legal problems if we're talking about a therapy that hasn't gone through the FDA approval process."

"I'm sure Jason would be willing to wait for official approval. His disease might not be so patient." Here Wun raised his hand to forestall further objections. "Let me read what you brought me. Then we'll discuss it again."

Then, the immediate business discharged, he asked me to stay and talk. I was flattered. Despite his strangeness there was something comforting about Wun's presence, a communicable ease. He sat back in his oversized wicker chair, feet dangling, and listened with apparent fascination to a quick sketch of my life. He asked a couple of questions about Diane ("Jason doesn't speak much about his family") and more about med school (the concept of dissecting cadavers was new to him; he flinched when I described it… most people do).

And when I asked him about his own life he reached into the small gray satchel he carried with him and produced a series of printed images, photographs he had brought with him as digital files. Four pictures of Mars.

"Just four?"

He shrugged. "No number is large enough to substitute for memory. And of course there is much more visual material in the official archives. These are mine. Personal. Would you care to see them?"

"Yes, certainly."

He handed them to me.

Photo 1: A house. It was obviously a human dwelling place despite the odd techno/retro architecture, low and rounded, like a porcelain model of a sod hut. The sky behind it was a brilliant turquoise, or at least that's how the printer had rendered it. The horizon was strangely close but geometrically flat, divided into receding rectangles of cultivated green, a crop I couldn't identify but which was too fleshy to be wheat or corn and too tall to be lettuce or kale. In the foreground were two adult Martians, male and female, with comically stern expressions. Martian Gothic. All it needed was a pitchfork and a Grant Wood signature.

"My mother and father," Wun said simply.

Photo 2: "Myself as a child."

This one was startling. The prodigiously wrinkled Martian skin, Wun explained, develops at puberty. Wun at roughly seven terrestrial years was smooth-faced and smiling. He looked like any Earthly child, though you couldn't place the ethnicity—blond hair, coffee-colored skin, narrow nose and generous lips. He stood in what looked at first glance like an eccentric theme park but was, Wun said, a Martian city. A marketplace. Food stalls and shops, the buildings made of the same porcelainlike material as the farmhouse, in gaudy primary colors. The street behind him was crowded with light machinery and foot traffic. Only a patch of sky was visible between the tallest buildings, and even there some sort of vehicle had been caught in passing, whirligig blades blurred into a pale oval.

"You look happy," I said.

"The city is called Voy Voyud. We came from the countryside to shop on this day. Because it was springtime my parents let me buy murkuds. Small animals. Like frogs, for pets. In the bag I'm holding—see?"

Wun clutched a white cloth bag containing mysterious lumps. Murkuds.

"They only live a few weeks," he said. "But their eggs are delicious."

Photo 3: This one was a panoramic view. In the near ground: another Martian house, a woman in a multicolored kaftan (Wun's wife, he explained) and two smooth-skinned, pretty young girls in sacklike amber dresses (his daughters). The photograph had been taken from high ground. Beyond the house, an entire semirural landscape was visible. Green marshy fields basked under another turquoise sky. The agricultural land was divided by elevated roadways on which a few boxy vehicles traveled, and there were agricultural machines among the crops, graceful black harvesters. And on the horizon where the roads converged was a city, the same city, Wun said, where he had bought murkuds as a child, Voy Voyud, the capital of Kirioloj Province, its low-g towers tall and intricately terraced.

"You can see most of the delta of the Kirioloj in this picture." The river was a blue band feeding a lake the color of the sky. The city of Voy Voyud had been built on higher ground, the eroded rim of an ancient impact crater, Wun said, though it looked like an ordinary line of low hills to me. Black dots on the distant lake might have been boats or barges.

"It's a beautiful place," I said.

"Yes."

"The landscape, but your family, too."

"Yes." His eyes met mine. "They're dead."

"Ah—I'm sorry to hear that."

"They died in a massive flood several years ago. The last photograph, do you see? It's the same view, but taken just after the disaster."

A freakish storm had dumped record rainfall on the slopes of the Solitary Mountains at the end of a long dry season. Most of that rain had been funneled into the parched tributaries of the Kirioloj. The terraformed Mars was in some ways still a young world, still establishing its hydrological cycles, its landscapes evolving rapidly as ancient dust and regolith were rearranged by circulating water. The result of the sudden extreme rain was a slurry of oxide-red mud that had roared down the Kirioloj and into the agricultural delta like a fluid freight train.

Photo 4: The aftermath. Of Wun's house, only the foundation and a single wall remained, standing like shards of pottery in a chaotic plain of mud, rubble, and rocks. The distant city on the hill was untouched but the fertile farmland had been buried. Except for a glint of brown water from the lake this was Mars returned almost to its virgin condition, a lifeless regolith. Several aircraft hovered overhead, presumably searching for survivors.

"I had spent a day in the foothills with friends and came home to this. A great many lives were lost, not just my family. So I keep these four photographs to remind me of where I came from. And why I can't go back."

"It must have been unbearable."

"I've made peace with it. As much as one can. By the time I left Mars the delta had been restored. Not the way it used to be, of course. But fertile, alive, productive."

Which was as much as he seemed to want to say about it.

I looked back at the earlier images, reminded myself what I was seeing. Not some fanciful CGI effect but ordinary photographs. Photographs of another world. Of Mars, a planet long freighted with our own reckless imagination. "It's not Burroughs, certainly not Wells, maybe a little Bradbury…"

Wun furrowed his already densely furrowed brow. "I'm sorry—I don't know those words."

"They're writers. Writers of fiction, who wrote about your planet."

Once I had communicated the idea—that certain authors had imagined a living Mars long before its actual terraforming—Wun was fascinated. "Would it be possible for me to read these books? And discuss them the next time you visit?"

"I'm flattered. Are you sure you can spare the time? There must be heads of state who would very much like to talk to you."

"I'm sure there are. But they can wait."

I told him I looked forward to it.

On my drive home I raided a secondhand bookshop and in the morning I delivered a bundle of paperbacks to Wun, or at least to the taciturn men guarding his quarters. War of the Worlds, A Princess of Mars, The Martian Chronicles, Stranger in a Strange Land, Red Mars.

I heard nothing more from him for a couple of weeks.

* * * * *

Construction continued on the new facilities at Perihelion. By the end of September there was a massive concrete foundation where there used to be scrub pine and ratty palmettos, a great rigging of steel beams and aluminum piping.

Molly had heard there was military-grade lab and refrigeration equipment coming in next week. (Another dinner at Champs, most of the customers staring at a Marlins game on the billboard-sized plasma screen while we shared appetizers in a far, dark corner.) "Why do we need lab gear, Ty? Perihelion's all about space research and the Spin. I don't get it."

"I don't know. Nobody's talking."

"Maybe you could ask Jason, one of those afternoons you spend over at the north wing."

I had told her I was consulting with Jase, not that I had been adopted by the Martian ambassador. "I don't have that kind of security clearance." Nor, of course, did Molly.

"I'm starting to think you don't trust me."

"Just following the rules, Moll."

"Right," she said. "You're such a saint."

* * * * *

Jason stopped by my place unannounced, fortunately on an evening when Molly wasn't present, to talk about his meds. I told him what Malmstein had said, that it would likely be all right to bump up his dosage but that we'd have to watch out for side effects. The disease wasn't standing still and there was a practical limit to the degree to which we could suppress his symptoms. It didn't mean he was doomed, only that sooner or later he would have to conduct his business differently—to accommodate the disease rather than suppress it. (Beyond that was another threshold neither of us discussed: radical disability and dementia.)

"I understand that," Jason said. He sat in a chair by the window, glancing occasionally at his reflection in the glass, one long leg draped over the other. "All I need is another few months."

"A few months for what?"

"A few months to cut the legs out from under E. D. Lawton." I stared at him. I thought it was a joke. He wasn't smiling. "Do I have to explain this?"

"If you want me to make sense of it, yeah, you do."

"E.D. and I have divergent views about the future of Perihelion. As far as E.D.'s concerned, Perihelion exists to support the aerospace industry. That's the bottom line and always has been. He never believed we could do anything about the Spin." Jason shrugged. "He's almost certainly right, in the sense that we can't fix it. But that doesn't mean we can't understand it. We can't fight a war against the Hypotheticals in any meaningful way, but we can do a little guerilla science. That's what Wun's arrival is all about."

"I don't follow."

"Wun isn't just an interplanetary goodwill ambassador. He came here with a plan, a collaborative venture that might give us some clues about the Hypotheticals, where they come from, what they want, what they're doing to both planets. The idea's getting a mixed reception. E.D.'s trying to harpoon it— he doesn't think it's useful and he thinks it puts at risk whatever political capital we've got left after the terraforming."

"So you're undercutting him?"

Jason sighed. "This might sound cruel, but E.D. doesn't understand that his time has come and gone. My father is exactly what the world needed twenty years ago. I admire him for that. He's accomplished amazing, unbelievable things. Without E.D. to light fires under the politicians there would never have been a Perihelion. One of the ironies of the Spin is that the long-term consequences of E. D. Lawton's genius have come back to bite him—if E.D. had never existed, Wun Ngo Wen wouldn't exist. I'm not engaged in some Oedipal struggle here. I know exactly what my father is and what he's done. He's at home in the corridors of power, Garland is his golf buddy. Great. But he's a prisoner, too. A prisoner of his own shortsightedness. His days as a visionary are over. He dislikes Wun's plan because he distrusts the technology—he doesn't like anything he can't reverse-engineer; he doesn't like the fact that the Martians can wield technologies we're only beginning to guess at. And he hates the fact that Wun has me on his side. Me and, I might add, a new generation of D.C. power brokers, including Preston Lomax, who's likely to be the next president. Suddenly E.D.'s surrounded by people he can't manipulate. Younger people, people who've assimilated the Spin in a way E.D.'s generation never did. People like us, Ty."

I was a little flattered and a little alarmed to be included in that pronoun.

I said, "You're taking on a lot, aren't you?"

He looked at me sharply. "I'm doing exactly what E.D. trained me to do. From birth. He never wanted a son; he wanted an heir, an apprentice. He made that decision a long time before the Spin, Tyler. He knew exactly how smart I was and he knew what he wanted me to do with that intelligence. And I went along with it. Even when I was old enough to understand what he was up to, I cooperated. So here I am, an E. D. Lawton production: the handsome, savvy, sexless, media-friendly object you see before you. A marketable image, a certain intellectual acumen, and no loyalties that don't begin and end with Perihelion. But there was always a little rider on that contract, even if E.D. doesn't like to think about it."

"'Heir' implies 'inheritance.' It implies that, at some point, my judgment supersedes his. Well, the time has come. The opportunity before us is simply too important to fuck up."

His hands, I noticed, were clenched into fists, and his legs were shaking, but was that intensity of emotion or a symptom of his disease? For that matter, how much of this monologue was genuine and how much was the product of the neurostimulants I was prescribing for him?

"You look scared," Jason said.

"Exactly what Martian technology are we talking about here?"

He grinned. "It's really very clever. Quasi-biological. Very small scale. Molecular autocatalytic feedback loops, basically, with contingent programming written into their reproductive protocols."

"In English, please, Jase."

"Little tiny artificial replicators."

"Living things?"

"In a certain sense, yes, living things. Artificial living things we can launch into space."

"So what do they do, Jase?"

His grin got bigger. "They eat ice," he said, "and they shit information."

4X109 A.D.

I crossed a few yards of pressed earth to which weathered asphalt clung in scabrous patches, and came to an embankment and slid down it, noisily, with my hard shell suitcases full of modest clothing and handwritten notes and digital files and Martian pharmaceuticals. I landed in a drainage ditch, thigh-deep in water green as papaya leaves and warm as the tropical night. The water reflected the scarred moon and stank of manure.

I hid the luggage in a dry place halfway up the embankment and pulled myself the rest of the way up, lying at an angle that concealed my body but allowed a view of the road, Ibu Ina's concrete-box clinic, and the black car parked in front of it.

The men from the car had broken in through the back door. They switched on more lights as they moved through the building, making yellow squares of windows with drawn blinds, but I had no way of knowing what they were doing there. Searching the place, I guessed. I tried to estimate how long they spent inside, but I seemed to have lost the ability to calculate time or even to read the numbers on my watch. The numerals glowed like restless fireflies but wouldn't stand still long enough to make sense.

One of the men left by the front door, walked to the car, and started the engine. The second man emerged a few seconds later and ducked into the passenger seat. The midnight-colored car rolled close to me as it turned onto the road, headlights sweeping over the berm. I ducked and lay still until the motor noise faded.

Then I thought about what to do next. The question was difficult to answer, because I was tired—suddenly, massively tired; too weak to stand up. I wanted to go back to the clinic and find a phone and warn Ibu Ina about the men in the car. But maybe En would do that. I hoped so. Because I wasn't going to make it to the clinic. My legs wouldn't do anything but tremble when I willed them to move. This was more than fatigue. It felt like paralysis.

And when I looked at the clinic again there was smoke curling out of the roof vent and the light behind the blinds was flickery yellow. Fire.

The men from the car had set fire to Ibu Ina's clinic, and there was nothing I could do about it but close my eyes and hope I wouldn't die here before someone found me.

* * * * *

The stench of smoke and the sound of weeping woke me.

Still not yet daylight. But I found I could move, at least a little, with considerable effort and pain, and I seemed to be thinking more or less clearly. So I levered myself up the slope, inch after inch.

There were cars and people all over the open space between here and the clinic, headlights and flashlights cutting spastic arcs across the sky. The clinic was a smoldering ruin. Its concrete walls were still standing but the roof had collapsed and the building had been eviscerated by the fire. I managed to stand up. I walked toward the sound of weeping.

The sound came from Ibu Ina. She sat on an island of asphalt hugging her knees. She was surrounded by a group of women who gave me dark, suspicious looks as I approached her. But when Ina saw me she sprang to her feet, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. "Tyler Dupree!" She ran toward me. "I thought you were burned to death! Burned up along with everything else!"

She grabbed me, embraced me, held me up—my legs had turned rubbery again. "The clinic," I managed to say. "All your work. Ina, I'm so sorry…"

"No," she said. "The clinic is a building. The medical paraphernalia can be replaced. You, on the other hand, are unique. En told us all how you sent him away when the arsonists came. You saved his life, Tyler!" She stood back. "Tyler? Are you all right?"

I wasn't all right. I looked past Ina's shoulder at the sky. It was almost dawn. The ancient sun was rising. Mount Merapi was outlined against the indigo blue sky. "Just tired," I said, and closed my eyes. I felt my legs fold under me and I heard Ina calling for help, and then I slept some more—for days, they told me later.

* * * * *

For obvious reasons, I couldn't stay in the village.

Ina wanted to nurse me through the last of the drug crisis, and she felt the village owed me protection. After all, I had saved En's life (or so she insisted), and En was not only her nephew but was related to virtually everyone else in town, one way or another. I was a hero. But I was also a magnet for the attention of evil men, and if not for Ina's pleading I suspect the kepala desa would have put me on the first bus to Padang and to hell with it. So I was taken, along with my luggage, to an uninhabited village house (the owners had gone rantau months ago) long enough for other arrangements to be made.

The Minangkabau of West Sumatra knew how to duck and weave in the face of oppression. They had survived the coming of Islam in the sixteenth century, the Padri War, Dutch colonialism, Suharto's New Order, the Negari Restoration and, post-Spin, the New Reformasi and their thuggish national police. Ina had told me some of these stories, both at the clinic and afterward, when I lay in a tiny room in a wooden house under the huge, slow blades of an electric fan. The strength of the Minang, she said, was their flexibility, their deep understanding that the rest of the world was not like home and never would be. (She quoted a Minang proverb: "In different fields, different grasshoppers; in different ponds, different fish") The tradition of rantau, emigration—of young men going out into the world and coming back wealthier or wiser—had made them a sophisticated people. The simple wooden buffalo-horn houses of the village were adorned with aerostat antennas, and most families in the village, Ina said, regularly received letters or e-mail from family in Australia, Europe, Canada, the United States.

It was not surprising, then, that there were Minangkabau working at every level on the docks at Padang. Ina's ex-husband, Jala, was only one of many in the import/export trade who organized rantau expeditions to the Arch and beyond. It was no coincidence that Diane's inquiries had led her to Jala and thence to Ibu Ina and this highland village. "Jala is opportunistic and he can be mean in a petty way, but he's not unscrupulous," Ina said. "Diane was lucky to find him, or else she's a good judge of character—probably the latter. In any case Jala has no love for the New Reformasi, fortunately for all concerned."

(She had divorced Jala, she said, because he had formed the bad habit of sleeping with disreputable women in the city. He spent too much money on his girlfriends and had twice brought home curable but alarming venereal diseases. He was a bad husband, Ina said, but not an especially bad man. He wouldn't betray Diane to the authorities unless he was captured and physically tortured… and he was far too clever to let himself be captured.)

"The men who burned your clinic—"

"They must have followed Diane to the hotel in Padang and then interrogated the driver who brought you there."

"But why burn the building down?"

"I don't know, but I suspect it was an attempt to frighten you and drive you into the open. And a warning to anyone who might help you."

"If they found the clinic, they'll know your name."

"But they won't come into the village openly, guns blazing. Things have not quite deteriorated to that degree. I expect they'll watch the waterfront and hope we do something stupid."

"Even so, if your name is on a list, if you try to open another clinic—"

"But that was never my plan."

"No?"

"No. You've convinced me that the rantau gadang might be a good thing for a physician to undertake. If you don't mind the competition?"

"I don't understand."

"I mean that there is a simple solution for all our problems, one I've been contemplating a long time. The entire village has considered it, one way or another. Many have already left. We're not a big successful town like Belubus or Batusangkar. The land here isn't especially rich and every year we lose more people to the city or other clans in other towns or to the rantau gadang, and why not? There's room in the new world."

"You want to emigrate?"

"Me, Jala, my sister and her sister and my nephews and cousins—more than thirty of us, all told. Jala has several illegitimate children who would be happy to assume control of his business once he's on the other side. So you see?" She smiled. "You needn't be grateful. We're not your benefactors. Only fellow travelers."

I asked her several times whether Diane was safe. As safe as Jala could make her, Ina said. Jala had installed her in a living space above a customs house where she would be relatively comfortable and safely hidden until the final arrangements were made. "The difficult part will be getting you to the port undetected. The police suspect you're in the highlands and they'll be watching the roads for foreigners, especially sick foreigners, since the driver who brought you to the clinic will have told them you're not well."

"I'm finished being sick," I said.

The last crisis had begun outside the burning clinic and it had passed while I was unconscious. Ibu Ina said it had been a difficult passage, that after the move to this small room in this empty house I had moaned until the neighbors complained, that she had needed her cousin Adek to hold me down during the worst of the convulsions—that was why my arms and shoulders were so badly bruised, hadn't I noticed? But I remembered none of it. All I knew was that I felt stronger as the days passed; my temperature was reliably normal; I could walk without trembling.

"And the other effects of the drug?" Ina asked. "Do you feel different!"

That was an interesting question. I answered honestly: "I don't know. Not yet, anyway."

"Well. For the moment it hardly matters. As I say, the trick will be to get you out of the highlands and back to Padang. Fortunately, I think we can arrange it."

"When do we leave?"

"Three or four days' time," Ina said. "In the meantime, rest."

* * * * *

Ina was busy most of those three days. I saw very little of her. The days were hot and sunny but breezes came through the wooden house in soothing gusts, and I spent the time cautiously exercising, writing, and reading—there were English-language paperbacks on a rattan shelf in the bedroom, including a popular biography of Jason Lawton called A Life for the Stars. (I looked for my name in the index and found it: Dupree, Tyler, with five page references. But I couldn't bring myself to read the book. The swaybacked Somerset Maugham novels were more tempting.)

En dropped in periodically to see that I was all right and to bring me sandwiches and bottled water from his uncle's warung. He adopted a proprietary manner and made a point of asking after my health. He said he was "proud to be making rantau" with me. "You too, En? You're going to the new world?" He nodded emphatically. "Also my father, my mother, my uncle," and a dozen other close relations for whom he used Minang kinship words. His eyes glittered. "Perhaps you'll teach me medicine there."

Perhaps I would have to. Crossing the Arch would pretty much rule out a traditional education. This might not be the best thing for En, and I wondered if his parents had given their decision enough thought.

But that wasn't my business, and En was clearly excited about the journey. He could hardly control his voice when he talked about it. And I relished the eager, open expression on his face. En belonged to a generation capable of regarding the future with more hope than dread. No one in my generation of grotesques had ever smiled into the future like that. It was a good, deeply human look, and it made me happy, and it made me sad.

Ina came back the night before we were due to leave, bearing dinner and a plan.

"My cousin's son's brother-in-law," she said, "drives ambulances for the hospital in Batusangkar. He can borrow an ambulance from the motor pool to take you into Padang. There will be at least two cars ahead of us with wireless phones, so if there's a roadblock we ought to have some warning."

"I don't need an ambulance," I said.

"The ambulance is a disguise. You in the back, hidden, and me in my medical regalia, and a villager—En is pleading for the role—to play sick. Do you understand? If the police look in the back of the ambulance they see me and an ill child, and I say 'CVWS,' and the police become reluctant to search more thoroughly. Thus the ridiculously tall American doctor is smuggled past them."

"You think this will work?"

"I think it has a very good chance of working."

"But if you're caught with me—"

"As bad as things may be, the police can't arrest me unless I've committed a crime. Transporting a Westerner isn't a crime."

"Transporting a criminal might be."

"Are you criminal, Pak Tyler?"

"Depends how you interpret certain acts of Congress."

"I choose not to interpret them at all. Please don't worry about it. Did I tell you the trip has been delayed a day?"

"Why?"

"A wedding. Of course, weddings aren't what they once were. Wedding adat has eroded terribly since the Spin. As has everything else since money and roads and fast-food restaurants came to the highlands. I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive. Young people are in a hurry nowadays. At least we don't have Las Vegas-style ten-minute weddings... Do those still exist in your country?"

I admitted they did.

"Well, we're headed in that direction as well. Minang hiking, tinggal kerbau. At least there will still be a palaminan and lots of sticky rice and saluang music. Are you well enough to attend? At least for the music?"

"I would be privileged."

"So tomorrow night we sing, and on the following morning we defy the American Congress. The wedding works in our favor, too. Lots of traveling, lots of vehicles on the road; we won't seem conspicuous, our little rantau group heading for Teluk Bayur."

I slept late and woke feeling better than I had for a long time, stronger and subtly more alert. The morning breeze was warm and rich with the smell of cooking and the complaints of roosters and hammering from the center of town where an outdoor stage was under construction. I spent the day at the window, reading and watching the public procession of the bride and groom on their way to the groom's house. Ina's village was small enough that the wedding had brought it to a standstill. Even the local warungs had closed for the day, though the franchise businesses on the main road were staffed for tourists. By late afternoon the smell of curried chicken and coconut milk was thick in the air, and En dropped by very briefly with a prepared meal for me.

Ibu Ina, in an embroidered gown and silk head scarf, came to the door a little after nightfall and said, "It's done, the wedding proper, I mean. Nothing left but the singing and dancing. Do you still want to come along, Tyler?"

I dressed in the best clothes I had with me, white cotton pants and a white shirt. I was nervous about being seen in public, but Ina assured me there were no strangers in the wedding party and I would be welcome in the crowd.

Despite Ina's reassurances I felt painfully conspicuous as we walked together down the street toward the stage and the music, less because of my height than because I had been indoors too long. Leaving the house was like stepping out of water into air; suddenly I was surrounded by nothing substantial at all. Ina distracted me by talking about the newly-weds. The groom, a pharmacist's apprentice from Belubus, was a young cousin of hers. (Ina called any relative more distant than brother, sister, aunt or uncle her "cousin"; the Minang kinship system used precise words for which there were no simple English equivalents.) The bride was a local girl with a slightly disreputable past. Both would be going rantau after the wedding. The new world beckoned.

The music began at dusk and would continue, she said, until morning. It was broadcast village-wide through enormous pole-mounted loudspeakers, but the source was the raised stage and the group seated on reed mats there, two male instrumentalists and two female singers. The songs, Ina explained, were about love, marriage, disappointment, fate, sex. Lots of sex, couched in metaphors Chaucer would have appreciated. We sat on a bench at the periphery of the celebration. I drew more than a few long looks from people in the crowd, at least some of whom must have heard the story of the burned clinic and the fugitive American, but Ina was careful not to let me become a distraction. She kept me to herself, though she smiled indulgently at the young people mobbing the stage. "I'm past the age of lament. My field no longer requires ploughing, as the song has it. All this fuss. My goodness."

Bride and groom in their embroidered finery sat on mock thrones near the platform. I thought the groom, with his whip-thin mustache, looked shifty; but no, Ina insisted, it was the girl, so innocent in her blue and white brocaded costume, who was the one to watch. We drank coconut milk. We smiled. Coming on toward midnight many of the village's women drifted away, leaving a crowd of men, young men mobbing the stage, laughing; older men sitting at tables gambling studiously at cards, faces blank as aged leather.

I had shown Ina the pages I had written about my first meeting with Wun Ngo Wen. "But the account can't be entirely accurate," she said during a lull in the music. "You sounded much too calm."

"I wasn't calm at all. Just trying not to embarrass myself."

"Introduced, after all, to a man from Mars…" She looked up at the sky, at the post-Spin stars in their frail, scattered constellations, dim in the glare from the wedding party. "What must you have expected?"

"I suppose, someone less human."

"Ah, but he was very human."

"Yes," I said.

Wun Ngo Wen had become something of a revered figure in rural India, Indonesia, southeast Asia. In Padang, Ina said, one sometimes saw his picture in people's homes, in a gilded frame like a watercolor saint or famous mullah. "There was," she said, "something extraordinarily attractive in his manner. A familiar way of speaking, even though we only heard him in translation. And when we saw photographs of his planet—all those cultivated fields—it looked so much more rural than urban. More Eastern than Western. The Earth visited by an ambassador from another world, and he was one of us! Or so it seemed. And he chastised the Americans in an enjoyable way."

"The last thing Wun meant to do was scold anyone."

"No doubt the legend outpaces the reality. Didn't you have a thousand questions, the day you were introduced to him?"

"Of course. But I figured he'd been answering the obvious questions ever since he arrived. I thought he might be tired of it."

"Was he reluctant to talk about his home?"

"Not at all. He loved to talk about it. He just didn't like being interrogated."

"My manners aren't as polished as yours. I'm sure I would have offended him with countless questions. Suppose, Tyler, you had been able to ask him anything at all, that first day: what would it have been?"

That was easy. I knew exactly what question I had been suppressing the first time I met Wun Ngo Wen. "I would have asked him about the Spin. About the Hypotheticals. Whether his people had learned anything we didn't already know."

"And did you ever discuss that with him?"

"Yes."

"And did he have much to say?"

"Much."

I glanced at the stage. A new saluang group had come on. One of them was playing a rabab, a stringed instrument. The musician hammered his bow against the belly of the rabab and grinned. Another lewd wedding song.

"I'm afraid I may have been interrogating you" Ina said.

"I'm sorry. I'm still a little tired."

"Then you should go home and sleep. Doctor's orders. With a little luck you'll see Ibu Diane again tomorrow."

She walked with me down the loud street, away from the festivities. The music went on until nearly five the next morning. I slept soundly in spite of it.

* * * * *

The ambulance driver was a skinny, taciturn man in Red Crescent whites. His name was Nijon, and he shook my hand with exaggerated deference and kept his large eyes on Ibu Ina when he spoke to me. I asked if he was nervous about the drive to Padang. Ina translated his answer: "He says he's done more dangerous things for less compelling reasons. He says he's pleased to meet a friend of Wun Ngo Wen. He adds that we should get underway as soon as possible."

So we climbed into the back end of the ambulance. Along one wall was a horizontal steel locker where equipment was usually stored. It doubled as a bench. Nijon had emptied the locker, and we established that it was possible for me to cram myself inside by bending my legs at hip and knee and tucking my head into my shoulder. The locker smelled of antiseptic and latex and was about as comfortable as a monkey coffin, but there I would lie, should we be stopped at a checkpoint, with Ina on the bench in her clinic gown and En laid out on a stretcher doing his best impression of a CVWS infectee. In the hot morning light the plan seemed more than slightly ridiculous.

Nijon had shimmed the lid of the locker to allow some air to circulate inside, so I probably wouldn't suffocate, but I didn't relish the prospect of spending time in what was essentially a hot, dark metal box. Fortunately—once we had established that I fit—I didn't have to, at least not yet. All the police activity, Ina said, had been on the new highway between Bukik Tinggi and Padang, and because we were traveling in a loose convoy with other villagers we ought to have plenty of warning before we were pulled over. So for the time being I sat next to Ina while she taped a saline drip (sealed, no needle, a prop) to the crook of En's elbow. En was enthusiastic about the role and began rehearsing his cough, a deep-lung hack that provoked an equally theatrical frown from Ina: "You've been stealing your brother's clove cigarettes?"

En blushed. It was for the sake of realism, he said.

"Oh? Well, be careful you don't act yourself into an early grave."

Nijon slammed the rear doors and climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine and we began the bumpy drive to Padang. Ina told En to close his eyes. "Pretend to be asleep. Apply your theatrical skills." Before long his breathing settled into gentle snorts.

"He was awake all night with the music," Ina explained.

"I'm amazed he can sleep, even so."

"One of the advantages of childhood. Or the First Age, as the Martians call it—is that correct?"

I nodded.

"They have four, I understand? Four Ages to our three?"

Yes, as Ina undoubtedly knew. Of all the folkways in Wun Ngo Wen's Five Republics, this was the one that had most fascinated the terrestrial public.

Human cultures generally recognize two or three stages of life—childhood and adulthood; or childhood, adolescence, adulthood. Some reserve special status for old age. But the Martian custom was unique and depended on their centuries-long mastery of biochemistry and genetics. The Martians counted human lives in four installments, marked by biochemically mediated events. Birth to puberty was childhood. Puberty to the end of physical growth and the beginning of metabolic equilibrium was adolescence. Equilibrium to decline, death, or radical change was adulthood.

And beyond adulthood, the elective age: the Fourth.

Centuries ago, Martian biochemists had devised a means to prolong human life by sixty or seventy years on average. But the discovery wasn't an unmixed blessing. Mars was a radically constrained ecosystem, ruled by the scarcity of water and nitrogen. The cultivated land that had looked so familiar to Ibu Ina was a triumph of subtle, sophisticated bioengineering. Human reproduction had been regulated for centuries, pegged to sustainability estimates. Another seventy years tacked onto the average life span was a population crisis in the making.

Nor was the longevity treatment itself simple or pleasant. It was a deep cellular reconstruction. A cocktail of highly engineered viral and bacterial entities was injected into the body. Tailored viruses performed a sort of systemic update, patching or revising DNA sequences, restoring telomeres, resetting the genetic clock, while lab-grown bacterial phages flushed out toxic metals and plaques and repaired obvious physical damage.

The immune system resisted. The treatment was, at best, equivalent to a six-week course of some debilitating influenza—fevers, joint and muscle pain, weakness. Certain organs went into a kind of reproductive overdrive. Skin cells died and were replaced in fierce succession; nervous tissue regenerated spontaneously and rapidly.

The process was debilitating, painful, and there were potential negative side effects. Most subjects reported at least some long-term memory loss. Rare cases suffered temporary dementia and nonrecoverable amnesia. The brain, restored and rewired, became a subtly different organ. And its owner became a subtly different human being.

"They conquered death."

"Not quite."

"You would think," Ina said, "with all their wisdom, they could have made it a less unpleasant experience."

Certainly they could have relieved the superficial discomfort of the transition to Fourth. But they had chosen not to. Martian culture had incorporated the Fourth Age into its folkways, pain and all: pain was one of the limiting conditions, a tutelary discomfort. Not everyone chose to become a Fourth. Not only was the transition difficult, stiff social penalties had been written into their longevity laws. Any Martian citizen was entitled to undergo the treatment, free of charge and without prejudice. But Fourths were forbidden to reproduce; reproduction was a privilege reserved for adults. (For the last two hundred years the longevity cocktail had included drugs that produced irreversible sterilization in both sexes.) Fourths weren't allowed to vote in council elections—no one wanted a planet run by venerable ancients for their own benefit. But each of the Five Republics had a sort of judicial review body, the equivalent of a Supreme Court, elected solely by Fourths. Fourths were both more and less than adults, as adults are both more and less than children. More powerful, less playful; freer and less free.

But I could not decipher, to Ina or to myself, all the codes and totems into which the Martians had folded their medical technology. Anthropologists had spent years in the attempt, working from Wun Ngo Wen's archival records. Until such research had been banned.

"And now we have the same technology," Ina said.

"Some of us do. I hope eventually all of us will."

"I wonder if we'll use it as wisely."

"We might. The Martians did, and the Martians are as human as we are."

"I know. It's possible, certainly. But what do you think, Tyler—will we?"

I looked at En. He was still asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, his eyes darting under closed lids like fish underwater. His nostrils flared as he breathed and the motion of the ambulance rocked him from side to side.

"Not on this planet," I said.

* * * * *

Ten miles down the road out of Bukik Tinggi, Nijon knocked hard at the partition between us and the driver's seat. That was our prearranged signal: roadblock ahead. The ambulance slowed. Ina stood up hastily, bracing herself. She strapped a neon-yellow oxygen mask over En's face—En, awake now, seemed to be reconsidering the merits of the adventure—and covered her own mouth with a paper mask. "Be quick," she whispered at me.

So I contorted myself into the equipment locker. The lid banged down on the shims that allowed a little air to flow inside, a quarter-inch between me and asphyxiation.

The ambulance stopped before I was ready and my head gonged hard against the narrow end of the locker.

"And be quiet now," Ina said—to me or to En, I wasn't sure which.

I waited in the dark.

Minutes passed. There was a distant rumble of talk, impossible to decipher even if I had understood the language. Two voices. Nijon and someone unfamiliar. A voice that was thin, querulous, harsh. A policeman's voice.

They conquered death, Ina had said.

No, I thought.

The locker was heating up fast. Sweat slicked my face, drenched my shirt, stung my eyes. I could hear myself breathing. I imagined the whole world could hear me breathing.

Nijon answered the policeman in deferential murmurs. The policeman barked back fresh questions.

"Be still now, just be still," Ina whispered urgently. En had been bouncing his feet against the thin mattress of the gurney, a nervous habit. Too much energy for a CVWS victim. I saw the tips of Ina's fingers splayed across the quarter-inch of light above my head, four knuckled shadows.

Now the rear doors of the ambulance rattled open and I smelled gasoline exhaust and rank noonday vegetation. If I craned my head—gently, gently—I could see a thin swath of exterior light and two shadows that might be Nijon and a policeman or maybe just trees and clouds.

The policeman demanded something from Ina. His voice was a guttural monotone, bored and threatening, and it made me angry. I thought about Ina and En, cowering or pretending to cower from this armed man and what he represented. Doing it for me. Ibu Ina said something stern but unprovocative in her native language. CVWS, something something something CVWS. She was exercising her medical authority, testing the policeman's susceptibility, weighing fear for fear.

The policeman's answer was curt, a demand to search the ambulance or see her papers. Ina said something more forceful or desperate. The word CVWS again.

I wanted to protect myself, but more than that, I wanted to protect Ina and En. I would surrender myself before I saw them hurt. Surrender or fight. Fight or flight. Give up, if necessary, all the years the Martian pharmaceuticals had pumped back into my body. Maybe that was the courage of the Fourth, the special courage Wun Ngo Wen had talked about.

They conquered death. But no: as a species, terrestrial, Martian, in all our years on both our planets, we had only engineered reprieves. Nothing was certain.

Footsteps, boots on metal. The policeman began climbing into the ambulance. I could tell he had come aboard by the way the vehicle sank on its shocks, rolling like a ship in a gentle swell. I braced myself against the lid of the locker. Ina stood up, screeching refusals.

I took a breath and got ready to spring.

But there was fresh noise from the road. Another vehicle roared past. By the dopplered whine of its straining engine, it was traveling at high speed—a conspicuous, shocking, fuck-the-law velocity.

The policeman emitted a snarl of outrage. The floor bounced again.

Scuffling noises, silence for a beat, a slammed door, and then the sound of the policeman's car (I guessed) revved to vengeful life, gravel snapping away from tires in an angry hail.

Ina lifted the lid of my sarcophagus.

I sat up in the stink of my own sweat. "What happened?"

"That was Aji. From the village. A cousin of mine. Running the roadblock to distract the police." She was pale but relieved. "He drives like a drunk, I'm afraid."

"He did that to take the heat off us?"

"Such a colorful expression. Yes. We're a convoy, remember. Other cars, wireless telephones, he would have known we had been stopped. He's risking a fine or a reprimand, nothing more serious."

I breathed the air, which was sweet and cool. I looked at En. En gave me a shaky grin.

"Please introduce me to Aji when we get to Padang," I said. "I want to thank him for pretending to be a drunk."

Ina rolled her eyes. "Unfortunately Aji wasn't pretending. He is a drunk. An offense in the eyes of the Prophet."

Nijon looked in at us, winked, closed the rear doors.

"Well, that was frightening," Ina said. She put her hand on my arm.

I apologized for letting her take the risk.

"Nonsense," she said. "We're friends now. And the risk is not as great as you might imagine. The police can be difficult, but at least they're local men and bound by certain rules—not like the men from Jakarta, the New Reformasi or whatever they call themselves, the men who burned my clinic. And I expect you would risk yourself on our behalf if necessary. Would you, Pak Tyler?"

"Yes, I would."

Her hand was trembling. She looked me in the eye. "My goodness, I believe that's true."

No, we had never conquered death, only engineered reprieves (the pill, the powder, the angioplasty, the Fourth Age)—enacted our conviction that more life, even a little more life, might yet yield the pleasure or wisdom we wanted or had missed in it. No one goes home from a triple bypass or a longevity treatment expecting to live forever. Even Lazarus left the grave knowing he'd die a second time.

But he came forth. He came forth gratefully. I was grateful.

THE COLD PLACES OF THE UNIVERSE

I drove home after a late Friday session at Perihelion, keyed open the door of the house, and found Molly sitting at the keyboard of my PC terminal.

The desk was in the southwest corner of the living room against a window, facing away from the door. Molly half-turned and gave me a startled look. At the same time, deftly, she clicked an icon and exited the program she'd been running.

"Molly?"

I wasn't surprised to find her here. Moll spent most weekends with me; she carried a duplicate key. But she'd never shown any interest in my PC.

"You didn't call," she said.

I'd been in a meeting with the insurance reps who underwrote Perihelion's employee coverage. I'd been told to expect a two-hour session but it turned out to be a twenty-minute update on billing policy, and when it finished I thought it would be quicker to just drive on home, maybe even beat Molly to the door if she'd stopped to pick up wine. Such was the effect of Molly's long level gaze that I felt obliged to explain all this before I asked her what she was doing in my files.

She laughed as I came across the room, one of those embarrassed, apologetic laughs: Look at the funny thing you caught me doing. Her right hand hovered over the touchpad of the PC. She turned back to the monitor. On screen, the cursor dived for the shut-down icon.

"Wait," I said.

"What, you want on here?"

The cursor homed in on its target. I put my hand over Molly's hand. "Actually, I'd like to know what you were doing."

She was tense. A vein throbbed in the pinkness just forward of her ear. "Making myself at home. Um, a little too much at home? I didn't think you'd mind."

"Mind what, Moll?"

"Mind me using your terminal."

"Using it for what?"

"Really nothing. Just checking it out."

But it couldn't be the machine Moll was curious about. It was five years old, nearly an antique. She used more sophisticated gear at work. And I had recognized the program she'd been in such a hurry to close when I came through the door. It was my household tracker, the program I used to pay bills and balance my checkbook and Rolodex my contacts.

"Kind of looked like a spreadsheet," I said.

"I wandered in there. Your desktop confused me. You know. People organize things different ways. I'm sorry, Tyler. I guess I was being presumptuous." She jerked her hand out from under mine and clicked the shut-down tag. The desktop shrank and I heard the processor's fan noise whine down to silence. Molly stood up, straightening her blouse. Molly always gave herself a crisp little tuck when she stood up. Putting things in order. "How about I start dinner." She turned her back on me and walked toward the kitchen.

I watched her disappear through the swinging doors. After a ten count I followed her in.

She was pulling pans off the wall rack. She glanced at me and looked away.

"Molly," I said. "If there's anything you want to know, all you have to do is ask."

"Oh. Is that all I have to do? Okay."

"Molly—"

She put a pan on the burner of the stove with exaggerated care, as if it were fragile. "Do you need me to apologize again? Okay, Tyler. I'm sorry I played with your terminal without your permission."

"I'm not accusing you of anything, Moll."

"Then why are we talking about it? I mean, why does it look like we're going to spend the entire rest of the evening talking about it?" Her eyes grew moist. Her tinted lenses turned a deeper shade of emerald. "So I was a little curious about you."

"Curious about what, my utility bills?"

"About you." She dragged a chair away from the kitchen table. The chair leg caught against the leg of the table and Molly yanked it free. She sat down and crossed her arms. "Yes, maybe even the trivial stuff. Maybe especially the trivial stuff." She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I say this and it sounds like I'm some kind of stalker. But yes, your utility bills, your brand of toothpaste, your shoe size, yes. Yes, I want to feel like I'm something more than your weekend fuck. I confess."

"You don't have to go into my files for that."

"Maybe I wouldn't have, if—"

"If?"

She shook her head. "I don't want to argue."

"Sometimes it's better to finish what you start."

"Well, like that, for instance. Anytime you feel threatened, you do your detached thing. Get all cool and reserved and analytical, like I'm some nature documentary you're watching on TV. The glass screen comes down. But the glass screen's always there, isn't it? The whole world's on the other side of it. That's why you don't talk about yourself. That's why I spent a year waiting for you to notice I was more than a piece of office furniture. That big dumb endless cool stare, watching life like it's the evening news, like it's some sorry war on the other side of the planet where all the people have unpronounceable names."

"Molly—"

"I mean I'm aware that we're all fucked up, Tyler, every one of us born into the Spin. Pretraumatic stress disorder, or what was it you called us? A generation of grotesques. That's why we're all divorced or promiscuous or hyperreligious or depressed or manic or dispassionate. We all have a really good excuse for our bad behavior, including me, and if being this big pillar of carefully premeditated helpfulness is what gets you through the night, okay, I get it. But it's also okay for me to want more than that. It's okay, in fact, it's perfectly human, for me to want to touch you. Not just fuck you. Touch you."

She said all this and then, realizing she was done, unfolded her arms and waited for me to react.

I thought about making a speech back at her. I was passionate about her, I would say. It might not have been obvious, but I'd been aware of her ever since I came to work at Perihelion. Aware of the lines and dynamics of her body, how she stood or walked or stretched or yawned; aware of her pastel wardrobe and the costume-jewelry butterfly she wore on a skinny silver chain; aware of her moods and impulses and the catalog of her smiles and frowns and gestures. When I closed my eyes I saw her face and when I went to sleep that was what I looked at. I loved her surface and her substance: the salt taste of her throat and the cadence of her voice, the arch of her fingers and the words they wrote on my body.

I thought about all that but couldn't bring myself to say it to her.

It wasn't a lie exactly. But it wasn't exactly the truth.

In the end we made up with vaguer pleasantries and brief tears and conciliatory hugs, let the issue drop, and I played sous-chef while she composed a really very good pasta sauce, and the tension began to lift, and by midnight we had cuddled an hour in front of the news (unemployment up, an election debate, some sorry war on the other side of the planet) and we were ready for bed. Molly turned out the light before we made love, and the bedroom was dark and the window was open and the sky was blank and empty. She arched her back when she came and when she sighed her breath was sweet and milky. Parted but still touching, hand to thigh, we spoke in unfinished sentences. I said, "You know, passion" and she said, "In the bedroom, God, yes."

She fell asleep fast. I was still awake an hour later.

I climbed out of bed gently, registering no change in the pulse of her breathing. I slipped into a pair of jeans and left the bedroom. Sleepless nights like this, a little Drambuie usually helped shut down the nagging interior monologue, the petitions presented by doubt to the weary forebrain. But before I went into the kitchen I sat down at the terminal and called up my household tracker.

There was no telling what Moll had been looking at. But nothing had changed, as far as I could tell. All the names and numbers seemed intact. Maybe she had found something here that made her feel closer to me. If that was really what she wanted.

Or maybe it had been a futile search. Maybe she hadn't found anything at all.

* * * * *

In the weeks leading up to the November election I saw more of Jason. His disease was becoming more active despite the escalating medication, possibly due to the stress caused by the ongoing conflict with his father. (E.D. had announced his intention to "take back" Perihelion from what he considered a cabal of upstart bureaucrats and scientists aligned with Wun Ngo Wen—an empty threat, in Jason's opinion, but potentially disruptive and embarrassing.)

Jase kept me close in case it was necessary to dose him with antispasmodics at some critical moment, which I was willing to do, within the limits of the law and professional ethics. Keeping Jase functional in the short term was the most that medical science could do for him, and staying functional long enough to outmaneuver E. D. Lawton was, for the moment, all that mattered to Jase.

So I spent a lot of time in the V.I.P. wing at Perihelion, usually with Jason but often with Wun Ngo Wen. This made me an object of suspicion to the rest of Wun's handlers, an assortment of government subauthorities (junior representatives from the State Department, the White House, Homeland Security, Space Command, et cetera) and academics who had been recruited to translate, study, and classify the so-called Martian archives. My access to Wun, in the eyes of these people, was irregular and unwelcome. I was a hireling. A nobody. But that was why Wun preferred my company: I had no agenda to promote or protect. And because he insisted, I was from time to time ushered by sullen toadies through the several doors that separated the Martian ambassador's air-conditioned quarters from the Florida heat and all the wide world beyond.

On one of these occasions I found Wun Ngo Wen seated on his wicker chair—someone had brought in a matching footstool so his feet wouldn't dangle—gazing thoughtfully at the contents of a test tube-sized glass vial. I asked him what was inside.

"Replicators," he said.

He was dressed in a suit and tie that might have been tailored for a stocky twelve-year-old: he'd been doing show-and-tell for a congressional delegation. Although Wun's existence had not been formally announced there had been a steady traffic of security-approved visitors both foreign and domestic over the last few weeks. The official announcement would be made by the White House shortly after the election, after which time Wun would be very busy indeed.

I looked at the glass tube from a safe vantage point across the room. Replicators. Ice-eaters. Seeds of an inorganic biology.

Wun smiled. "Are you afraid of it? Please don't be. I assure you the contents are completely inactive. I thought Jason had explained this to you."

He had. A little. I said, "They're microscopic devices. Semi-organic. They reproduce in conditions of extreme cold and vacuum."

"Yes, good, essentially correct. And did Jason explain the purpose of them?"

"To go out and populate the galaxy. To send us data."

Wun nodded slowly, as if this answer were also essentially correct but less than satisfactory. "This is the most sophisticated technological artifact the Five Republics have produced, Tyler. We could never have sustained the kind of industrial activity your people practice on such an alarming scale—ocean liners, men on the moon, vast cities—"

"From what I've seen, your cities are fairly impressive."

"Only because we build them in a gender gravitational gradient. On Earth those towers would crumble under their own weight. But my point is that this, the contents of this tube, this is our equivalent of an engineering triumph, something so complex and so difficult to make that we take a certain perhaps justifiable pride in it."

"I'm sure you do."

"Then come and appreciate it. Don't be afraid." He beckoned me closer and I came across the room and sat on a chair opposite him. I guess we would have looked, from a distance, like any two friends discussing anything at all. But my eyes wouldn't leave the vial. He held it out, offered it to me. "Go on," he said.

I took the tube between thumb and forefinger and held it up to let the ceiling light shine through. The contents looked like ordinary water with a slightly oily sheen. That was all.

"To truly appreciate it," Wun said, "you have to understand what you're holding. In that tube, Tyler, are some thirty or forty thousand individual man-made cells in a glycerin suspension. Each cell is an acorn."

"You know about acorns?"

"I've been reading. It's a commonplace metaphor. Acorns and oaks, correct? When you hold an acorn you hold in your hand the possibility of an oak tree, and not just a single oak but all the progeny of that oak for centuries upon centuries. Enough oak wood to build whole cities… are cities made of oak?"

"No, but it doesn't matter."

"What you're holding is an acorn. Completely dormant, as I said, and in fact that particular sample is probably quite dead, considering the time it's spent at terrestrial ambient temperatures. Analyze it, and the most you might find would be some unusual trace chemicals."

"But?"

"But—put it in an icy, airless, cold environment, an environment like the Oort Cloud, and then, Tyler, it comes to life! It begins, very slowly but very patiently, to grow and reproduce."

The Oort Cloud. I knew about the Oort Cloud from conversations with Jason and from the speculative novels I still occasionally read. The Oort Cloud was a nebulous array of cometary bodies occupying a space beginning roughly at the orbit of Pluto and extending halfway to the nearest star. These small bodies were far from tightly packed—they occupied an almost unimaginably large volume of space—but their total mass equaled twenty to thirty times the mass of the Earth, mostly in the form of dirty ice.

Lots to eat, if ice and dust are what you eat.

Wun leaned forward in his chair. His eyes, couched in skin like crumpled leather, were bright. He smiled, which I had learned to interpret as a signal of earnestness: Martians smile when they speak from the heart.

"This was not uncontroversial for my people. What you hold in your hand has the power to substantially transform not only our own solar system but many others. And of course the outcome is uncertain. While the replicators are not organic in the conventional sense, they are alive. They're living autocatalytic feedback loops, subject to modification by environmental pressure. Just like human beings, or bacteria, or, or—"

"Or murkuds," I said.

He grinned. "Or murkuds."

"In other words, they might evolve."

"They will evolve, and unpredictably. But we've placed some limits on that. Or we believe we have. As I said, controversy abounds."

Whenever Wun talked about Martian politics, I envisioned wrinkly men and women in pastel togas debating abstractions from stainless steel podiums. In fact, Wun insisted, Martian parliamentarians behaved more like cash-strapped farmers bickering at a grain auction; and the clothing—well, I didn't even try to picture the clothing; on formal occasions Martians of both sexes tended to dress like the queen of hearts in a Bicycle deck.

But while the debates had been long and heartfelt, the plan itself was relatively simple. The replicators would be delivered scattershot into the far, cold extremities of the solar system. Some infinitesimally small fraction of those replicators would alight on two or three of the cometary nuclei that constitute the Oort Cloud. There they would begin to reproduce.

Their genetic information, Wun said, was encoded into molecules that were thermally unstable anywhere warmer than the moons of Neptune. But in the hypercold environment for which they had been designed, submicroscopic filaments in the replicators would begin a slow, painstaking metabolism. They grew at speeds that would make a bristle-cone pine look rushed, but grow they would, assimilating trace volatiles and organic molecules and shaping ice into cellular walls, ribs, spars, and joiners.

By the time the replicators had consumed a few hundred cubic feet of cometary nucleus, give or take, their interconnections would begin to complexify and their behavior would become more purposeful. They would grow highly sophisticated appendages, eyes of ice and carbon to sweep the starry darkness.

In a decade or so the replicator colony would have made of itself a sophisticated communal entity capable of recording and broadcasting rudimentary data about its environment. It would look at the sky and ask: Is there a planet-sized dark body circling the nearest star?

Posing and answering the question would consume more decades of time, and at least initially the answer was a foregone conclusion: yes, two worlds circling this star were dark bodies, Earth and Mars.

Nevertheless—patiently, doggedly, slowly—the replicators would collate this data and broadcast it back to their point of origin: to us, or at least to our listening satellites.

Then, in its senescence as a complex machine, the replicator colony would break down into individual clusters of simple cells, identify another bright or nearby star, and use accumulated volatiles mined from the host cometary nucleus to propel its seeds out of the solar system. (They would leave behind a tiny fragment of themselves to act as a radio repeater, a passive node in a growing network.)

These second-generation seeds would drift in interstellar space for years, decades, millennia. Most would eventually perish, lost on fruitless trajectories or drawn into gravitational eddies. Some, unable to escape the faint but distant pull of the sun, would fall back into the solar Oort Cloud and repeat the process, stupidly but patiently eating ice and recording redundant information. If two strains encountered each other they would exchange cellular material, average out copying errors induced by time or radiation, and produce offspring nearly but not exactly like themselves.

Some few would reach the icy halo of a nearby star and begin the cycle anew, this time gathering fresh information, which they would eventually send home in bursts of data, brief digital orgasms. Binary star, they might say, no dark planetary bodies; or they might say, White dwarf star, one dark planetary body.

And the cycle would repeat again.

And again.

And again, one star to the next, stepwise, centuries by millennia, agonizingly slowly, but speedily enough as the galaxy measures time—as we clocked the external universe from our entombment. Our days would encompass their years by the hundreds of thousands and a decade of our slow time would see them infest most of the galaxy.

Information passed at light-speed node-to-node would be forwarded, would modify behavior, would direct new replicators toward unexplored territory, would suppress redundant information so that core nodes were not overwhelmed. In effect we would be wiring the galaxy for a kind of rudimentary thought. The replicators would build a neural network as big as the night sky, and it would talk to us.

Were mere risks? Of course there were risks.

Absent the Spin, Wun said, the Martians would never have approved such an arrogant appropriation of the galaxy's resources. This wasn't just an act of exploration; it was an intervention, an imperial reordering of the galactic ecology. If there were other sentient species out there—and the existence of the Hypothetical had pretty much answered that question in the affirmative—the dispersal of the replicators might be misunderstood as aggression. Which might invite retaliation.

The Martians had only reconsidered this risk when they detected Spin structures under construction above their own northern and southern poles.

"The Spin renders objections moot," Wun said, "or nearly so. With luck the replicators will tell us something important about the Hypotheticals, or at least the extent of their work in the galaxy. We might be able to discern the purpose of the Spin. Failing that, the replicators will serve as a sort of warning beacon to other intelligent species facing the same problem. Close analysis would suggest to a thoughtful observer the purpose for which the network was constructed. Other civilizations might choose to tap into it. The knowledge could help them protect themselves. To succeed where we failed."

"You think we'll fail?"

Wun shrugged. "Haven't we failed already? The sun is very old now. You know that, Tyler. Nothing lasts indefinitely. And under the circumstances, for us, even 'indefinitely' isn't a very long time."

Maybe it was the way he said it, smiling his sad little Martian sincerity-smile and leaning forward in his wicker chair, hit the weight of the pronouncement was quietly shocking.

Not that it surprised me. We all knew we were doomed. Doomed, at the very least, to live out our lives under a shell that was the only thing protecting us from a hostile solar system. The sunlight that had made Mars habitable would cook the Earth if the Spin membrane was stripped away. And even Mars (in its own dark envelope) was rapidly slipping out of the so-called habitable zone. The mortal star that was the mother of all life had passed into bloody senescence and would kill us without conscience.

Life had been born on the fringe of an unstable nuclear reaction. That was true and it had always been true; it had been true before the Spin, even when the sky was clear and summer nights twinkled with distant, irrelevant stars. It had been true but it hadn't mattered because human life was short; countless generations would live and die in the span of a solar heartbeat. But now, God help us, we were outliving the sun. Either we would end up as cinders circling its corpse or we would be preserved into eternal night, encapsulated novelties with no real home in the universe.

"Tyler? Are you all right?"

"Yes," I said. Thinking, for some reason, of Diane. "Maybe the best we can hope for is a little understanding before the curtain comes down."

"Curtain?"

"Before the end."

"It's not much consolation," Wun admitted. "But yes, it may be the best we can hope for."

"Your people have known about the Spin for millennia. And in all that time you haven't been able to learn anything about the Hypotheticals?"

"No. I'm sorry. I don't have that to offer. About the physical nature of the Spin we have only a few speculations." (Which Jason had recently attempted to explain to me: something about temporal quanta, mostly mathematics and far beyond the reach of practical engineering, Martian or terrestial.) "About the Hypotheticals themselves, nothing at all. As for what they want from us—" He shrugged. "Only more speculation. The question we asked ourselves was, what was special about the Earth when it was encapsulated? Why did the Hypotheticals wait to spin Mars, and what made them choose this particular moment in our history?"

"You have answers to that?"

One of his handlers knocked at the door and opened it. A balding guy in a tailored black suit. He spoke to Wun but he looked at me: "Just a reminder. We have the EU rep coming in. Five minutes." He held the door wide, expectantly. I stood up.

"Next time," Wun said.

"Soon, I hope."

"As soon as I can arrange it."

It was late and I was done for the day. I left through the north door. On my way to the parking lot I stopped at the wooden hoarding where the new addition to Perihelion was under construction. Between gaps in the security wall I could see a plain cinder-block building, huge external pressure tanks, pipes as thick as barrels plumbed through concrete embrasures. The ground was littered with yellow PTFE insulation and coiled copper tubing. A foreman in a white hard hat barked orders at men pushing wheelbarrows, men with safety goggles and steel-toed boots.

Men building an incubator for a new kind of life. This was where the replicators would be grown in cradles of liquid helium and prepped for their launch into the cold places of the universe: our heirs, in a sense, bound to live longer and travel farther than human beings ever would. Our final dialogue with the universe. Unless E.D. had his way and canceled the project entirely.

* * * * *

Molly and I took a beach walk that weekend.

It was a cloudless late-October Saturday. We had hiked a quarter mile of cigarette-stub-littered sand before the day got uncomfortably warm and the sun grew insistent, the ocean giving back the light in dazzling pinpoints, as if shoals of diamonds were swimming far offshore. Molly wore shorts and sandals and a white cotton T-shirt that had begun to stick to her body in alluring ways, a visor cap with the bill pulled down to shade her eyes.

"I never did understand this," she said, swiping her wrist across her forehead, turning back to face her own tracks in the sand.

"What's that, Moll?"

"The sun. I mean the sunlight. This light. It's fake, everybody says, but God, the heat: the heat is real."

"The sun's not fake exactly. The sun we see isn't the real sun, but this light would have originated there. It's managed by the Hypotheticals, the wavelengths stepped down and filtered—"

"I know, but I mean the way it rides the sky. Sunrise, sunset. If it's only a projection, how come it looks the same from Canada and South America? If the Spin barrier is only a few hundred miles up?"

I told her what Jason had once told me: the fake sun wasn't an illusion projected on a screen, it was a managed replica of sunlight passing through the screen from a source ninety million miles away, like a ray-trace program rendered on a colossal scale.

"Pretty fucking elaborate stage trick," Molly said.

"If they did it differently we'd all have died years ago. The planetary ecology needs a twenty-four-hour day." We had already lost a number of species that depended on moonlight to feed or mate.

"But it's a lie."

"If you want to call it that."

"A lie, I call it a lie. I'm standing here with the light of a lie on my face. A lie you can get skin cancer from. But I still don't understand it. I guess we won't, until we understand the Hypotheticals. If we ever do. Which I doubt."

You don't understand a lie, Molly said as we paralleled an ancient boardwalk gone white with salt, until you understand the motivation behind it. She said this glancing sidelong at me, eyes shadowed under her cap, sending me messages I couldn't decipher.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in my air-conditioned rental, reading, playing music, but Moll was restless and I hadn't quite come to terms with her raid on my computer, another indecipherable event. I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

What worried me was that she remained deeply unpredictable, as Spin-bent as the rest of us. I couldn't buy her gifts: there were things she wanted, but unless she had vocally admired something in a shop window I couldn't guess what they were. She kept her deepest needs deeply obscure. Maybe, like most secretive people, she assumed I was keeping important secrets of my own.

We had just finished dinner and started cleaning up when the phone rang. Molly picked it up while I dried my hands. "Uh-huh," she said. "No, he's here. Just wait a second." She muted the phone and said, "It's Jason. Do you want to talk to him? He sounds all freaked out."

"Of course I'll talk to him."

I took the receiver and waited. Molly gave me a long look, then rolled her eyes and left the kitchen. Privacy. "Jase? What's up?"

"I need you here, Tyler." His voice was tense, constricted. "Now."

"Got a problem?"

"Yes, I have a fucking problem. And I need you to come fix it."

"It's that urgent?"

"Would I be calling you if it wasn't?"

"Where are you?"

"Home."

"Okay, listen, it'll take some time if the traffic's bad—"

"Just get here," he said.

So I told Molly I had some urgent work to catch up on. She smiled, or maybe sneered, and said, "What work is that? Somebody missed an appointment? Delivering a baby? What?"

"I'm a doctor, Moll. Professional privilege."

"Being a doctor doesn't mean you're Jason Lawton's lap-dog. You don't have to fetch every time he throws a stick."

"I'm sorry about cutting the evening short. Do you want me to give you a lift somewhere, or—?"

"No," she said. "I'll stay here until you're back." Staring at me defiantly, belligerently, almost wanting me to object.

But I couldn't argue. That would mean I didn't trust her. And I did trust her. Mostly. "I'm not sure how long I'll be."

"Doesn't matter. I'll curl up on the sofa and watch the tube. If that's okay with you?"

"As long as you're not bored."

"I promise I won't be bored."

* * * * *

Jason's barely furnished apartment was twenty miles up the highway, and on the way there I had to detour around a crime scene, a failed roadside attack on a bank truck that had killed a earful of Canadian tourists. Jase buzzed me into his building and when I knocked at his door he called out, "It's open."

The big front room was as spare as it ever had been, a parquet desert in which Jase had set up his Bedouin camp. He was lying on the sofa. The floor lamp next to the sofa put him in a hard, unflattering light. He was pale and his forehead was dotted with sweat. His eyes glittered.

"I thought you might not come," he said. "Thought maybe your hick girlfriend wouldn't let you out of the house."

I told him about the police detour. Then I said, "Do me a favor. Please don't talk about Molly that way."

"Please don't refer to her as an Idaho shitkicker with trailer-park sensibilities? Sure enough. Anything to oblige."

"What's the matter with you?"

"Interesting question. Many possible answers. Look."

He stood up.

It was a poor, feeble, ratcheting process. Jase was still tall, still slender, but the physical grace that had once seemed so effortless had deserted him. His arms flailed. His legs, when he managed to bring himself upright, jittered under him like jointed stilts. He blinked convulsively. "This is what's wrong with me," he said. Then, the anger coming on in another convulsive movement, his emotional state as volatile as his limbs: "Look at me! F-fuck, Tyler, look at me!"

"Sit back down, Jase. Let me examine you." I had brought my medical kit. I rolled up his sleeve and wrapped a BP cuff around his skinny arm. I could feel the muscle contracting under it, barely controlled.

His blood pressure was high and his pulse was fast. "You've been taking your anticonvulsants?"

"Of course I've been taking the fucking anticonvulsants."

"On schedule? No double-dosing? Because if you take too many, Jase, you're doing yourself more harm than good."

Jason sighed impatiently. Then he did something surprising. He reached behind my head and grabbed a handful of my hair, painfully, and tugged it down until my face was close to his. Words came out of him, a raging river of them.

"Don't get pedantic on me, Tyler. Don't do that, because I can't afford it right now. Maybe you have issues about my treatment. I'm sorry, but this is no time to take your fucking principles out for a walk. Too much is at stake. E.D. is flying in to Perihelion in the morning. E.D. thinks he has a trump card to play. E.D. would rather shut us down than let me ascend to his fucking throne. I can't let that happen, and look at me: do I look like I'm in any condition to commit an act of patricide?" His grip tightened until it hurt—he was still that strong—then he let go and with his other hand pushed me away. "So FIX ME! That's what you're for, isn't it?"

I pulled up a chair and sat silently until he lapsed back into the sofa, exhausted by his own outburst. He watched me take a syringe out of my kit and load it from a small brown bottle.

"What's that?"

"Temporary relief." In fact it was a harmless B-complex vitamin shot laced with a minor tranquilizer. Jason looked at it suspiciously but let me deliver it into his arm. A tiny bead of blood followed the needle out.

"You already know what I have to tell you," I said. "There's no cure for this problem."

"No earthly cure."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You know what it means."

He was talking about Wun Ngo Wen's longevity process.

The reconstruction, Wun had said, was also a cure for a long list of genetic disabilities. It would edit the AMS loop out of Jason's DNA, inhibiting the rogue proteins that were eroding his nervous system. "But that would take weeks," I said, "and anyway, I can't condone the idea of making you a guinea pig for an untested procedure."

"It's hardly untested. The Martians have been doing it for centuries, and the Martians are as human as we are. And I'm sorry, Tyler, but I'm not really interested in your professional scruples. They simply don't enter the equation."

"They do, though. As far as I'm concerned."

"Then the question is, how far are you concerned? If you don't want to be a part of it, step aside."

"The risk—"

"It's my risk, not yours." He closed his eyes. "Don't mistake this for arrogance or vanity, but it matters whether I live or die or even whether I can walk straight or pronounce my f-fucking consonants. It matters to the world, I mean. Be-cause I'm in a uniquely important position. Not by accident. Not because I'm smart or virtuous. I was appointed. Basically, Tyler, I'm an artifact, a constructed object, engineered by E. D. Lawton the same way he and your father used to engineer airfoils. I'm doing the job he built me to do—running Perihelion, running the human response to the Spin."

"The president might disagree. Not to mention Congress. Or the U.N., for that matter."

"Please. I'm not delusional. That's the point. Running Perihelion means playing to the interested parties. All of them. E.D. knows that; he's perfectly cynical about it. He turned Perihelion into a dollar windfall for the aerospace industry and he did it by making friends and forging political alliances in high places. By cajoling and pleading and lobbying and funding friendly campaigns. He had a vision and he had contacts and he was in the right place at the right time; he stepped forward with the aerostat program and rescued the telecom industry from the Spin, and that dropped him into the company of powerful people—and he knows how to exploit an opportunity. Without E.D., there wouldn't be human beings on Mars. Without E. D. Lawton, Wun Ngo Wen wouldn't even exist. Give the old fucker credit. He's a great man."

"But?"

"But he's a man of his time. He's pre-Spin. His motives are archaic. The torch has been passed. Or will be, if I have anything to do with it."

"I don't know what that means, Jase."

"E.D. still thinks there's some personal advantage he can wring out of all this. He resents Wun Ngo Wen and he hates the idea of seeding the galaxy with replicators, not because it's too ambitious but because it's bad for business. The Mars project pumped trillions of dollars into aerospace. It made E.D. wealthier and more powerful than he ever dreamed of being. It made him a household name. And E.D. still thinks that matters. He thinks it matters the way it used to matter before the Spin, when you could play politics like a game, gamble for prizes. But Wun's proposal doesn't have that kind of payoff. Launching replicators is a trivial investment compared to terraforming Mars. We can do it with a couple of Delta sevens and a cheap ion drive. A slingshot and a test tube is all it really takes."

"How is that bad for E.D. ?"

"It doesn't do much to protect a collapsing industry. It hollows out his financial base. Worse, it takes him out of the spotlight. Suddenly everyone's going to be looking at Wun Ngo Wen—we're a couple of weeks away from a media shit-storm of unprecedented proportions—and Wun picked me as frontman for this project. The last thing ED. wants is his ungrateful son and a wrinkly Martian dismantling his life's work and launching an armada that costs less to produce than a single commercial airliner."

"What would he prefer to do?"

"He's got a big-scale agenda worked out. Whole-system surveillance, he calls it. Looking for fresh evidence of activity by the Hypotheticals. Planetary surveyors from Mercury to Pluto, sophisticated listening posts in interplanetary space, fly-by missions to scout out the Spin artifacts here and at the Martian poles."

"Is that a bad idea?"

"It might yield a little trivial information. Eke out a little data and funnel cash into the industry. That's what it's designed to do. But what E.D. doesn't understand, what his generation doesn't truly understand—"

"What's that, Jase?"

"Is that the window is closing. The human window. Our time on Earth. The Earth's time in the universe. It's just about over. We have, I think, just one more realistic opportunity to understand what it means—what it meant—to have built a human civilization." His eyelids shuttered once, twice, slowly. Much of the wild tension had drained out of him. "What it means to have been singled out for this peculiar form of extinction. More than that, though. What it means… what it means…" He looked up. "What the fuck did you give me, Tyler?"

"Nothing serious. A mild anxiolytic."

"Quick fix?"

"Isn't that what you want?"

"I suppose so. I want to be presentable by morning, that's what I want."

"The medication isn't a cure. What you want me to do is like trying to repair a loose electrical connection by pushing more voltage through it. Might work, in the short term. But it's undependable and it puts unacceptable stress on other parts of the system. I would love to give you a good clean symptom-free day. I just don't want to kill you."

"If you don't give me a symptom-free day, you might as well kill me."

"All I have to offer you," I said, "is my professional judgment."

"And what can I expect from your professional judgment?"

"I can help. I think. A little. This time. This time, Jase. But there's not much room to maneuver. You have to face up to that."

"None of us has much room to maneuver. We all have to face up to that."

But he sighed and smiled when I opened the med kit again.

* * * * *

Molly was perched on the sofa when I got home, facing the TV square-on, watching a recently popular movie about elves, or maybe they were angels. The screen was full of fuzzy blue light. She switched it off when I came in. I asked her if anything had happened while I was gone.

"Not much. You got a phone call."

"Oh? Who was it?"

"Jason's sister. What's her name. Diane. The one in Arizona."

"Did she say what she wanted?"

"Just to talk. So we talked a little."

"Uh-huh. What did you talk about?"

Molly half turned, showing me her profile against the dim light from the bedroom. "You."

"Anything in particular?"

"Yeah. I told her to stop calling you because you have a new girlfriend. I told her I'd be handling your calls from now on."

I stared.

Molly bared her teeth in what I registered was meant to be a smile. "Come on, Tyler, learn to take a joke. I told her you were out. Is that all right?"

"You told her I was out?"

"Yes, I told her you were out. I didn't say where. Because you didn't actually tell me."

"Did she say whether it was urgent?"

"Didn't sound urgent. Call her back if you want. Go ahead—I don't care."

But this, too, was a test. "It can wait," I said.

"Good." Her cheeks dimpled. "Because I have other plans."

SACRIFICIAL RITES

Jason, obsessed with E. D. Lawton's pending arrival, had neglected to mention that another guest was also expected at Perihelion: Preston Lomax, the current vice president of the United States and front-runner in the upcoming election.

Security was tight at the gates and there was a helicopter on the pad atop the hub of the Perihelion building. I recognized all these Code Red protocols from a series of visits by President Garland over the last month. The guard at the main entrance, the one who called me "Doc" and whose cholesterol levels I monitored once a month, tipped me off that it was Lomax this time.

I was just past the clinic door (Molly absent, a temp named Lucinda manning reception) when I got a paged message redirecting me to Jason's office in the executive wing. Four security perimeters later I was alone with him. I was afraid he'd ask for more medication. But last night's treatment had put him into a convincing if purely temporary remission. He stood up and came across the room with his tremorless hand extended, showing off: "Want to thank you for this, Ty."

"You're welcome, but I have to say it again—no guarantees."

"Noted. As long as I'm good for the day. E.D.'s due at noon."

"Not to mention the vice president."

"Lomax has been here since seven this morning. The man's an early riser. He spent a couple of hours conferencing with our Martian guest and I'm conducting the goodwill tour shortly. Speaking of which, Wun would like to see you if you have a few minutes free."

"Assuming national affairs aren't keeping him busy." Lomax was the man most likely to win the national vote next week—in a walkover, if the polls were to be trusted. Jase had been cultivating Lomax long before Wun's arrival, and Lomax was fascinated with Wun. "Is your father joining the tour?"

"Only because there's no polite way to keep him out."

"Do you foresee a problem?"

"I foresee many problems."

"Physically, though, you're all right?"

"I feel fine. But you're the doctor. All I need is a couple more hours, Tyler. I assume I'm good for that?"

His pulse was a little elevated—not surprisingly—but his AMS symptoms were effectively suppressed. And if the drugs had left him agitated or confused it didn't show. In fact he seemed almost radiantly calm, locked in some cool, lucid room at the back of his head.

So I went to see Wun Ngo Wen. Wun wasn't in his quarters; he had decamped to the small executive cafeteria, which had been cordoned off and encircled by tall men with coils of wire tucked behind their ears. He looked up when I came past the steam table and waved away the security clones who moved in to intercept me.

I sat down across a glass-topped table from him. He picked at a pallid salmon steak with a cafeteria fork and smiled serenely. I slouched in my chair to match his height. He could have used a booster seat.

But the food agreed with him. He had gained a little weight in his time at Perihelion, I thought. His suit, tailored a couple of months ago, was tight across his belly. He had neglected to button the matching vest. His cheeks were fuller, too, though they were as wrinkled as ever, the dark skin softly gullied.

"I hear you had a visitor," I said.

Wun nodded. "But not for the first time. I met with President Garland in Washington on several occasions and I've met with Vice President Lomax twice. The election is expected to bring him to power, people say."

"Not because he's especially well loved."

"I'm not in a position to judge him as a candidate," Wun said. "But he does ask interesting questions."

The endorsement made me feel a little protective. "I'm sure he's amiable when he wants to be. And he's done a decent job in office. But he spent a lot of his career as the most hated man on Capitol Hill. Party whip for three different administrations. Not much gets past him."

Wun grinned. "Do you think I'm naive, Tyler? Are you afraid Vice President Lomax will take advantage of me?"

"Not naive, exactly—"

"I'm a newcomer, admittedly. The finer political nuances are lost on me. But I'm several years older than Preston Lomax, and I've held public office myself."

"You have?"

"For three years," he said with detectable pride, "I was Agricultural Administrator for Ice Winds Canton."

"Ah."

"The governing body for most of the Kirioloj Delta. It wasn't the Presidency of the United States of America. There are no nuclear weapons at the disposal of the Agricultural Administration. But I did expose a corrupt local official who was falsifying crop reports by weight and selling his margin into the surplus market."

"A rake-off scheme?"

"If that's the term for it."

"So the Five Republics aren't free of corruption?"

Wun blinked, an event that rippled out along the convolute geography of his face. "No, how could they be? And why do so many terrestrials make that assumption? Had I come here from some other Earthly country—France, China, Texas—no one would be startled to hear about bribery or duplicity or theft."

"I guess not. But it's not the same."

"Isn't it? But you work here at Perihelion. You must have met some of the founding generation, as strange as that idea still seems to me—the men and women whose remote descendants we Martians are. Were they such ideal persons that you expect their progeny to be free of sin?"

"No, but—"

"And yet the misconception is almost universal. Even those books you gave me, written before the Spin—"

"You read them?"

"Yes, eagerly. I enjoyed them. Thank you. But even in those novels, the Martians…" He struggled after a thought.

"I guess some of them are a little saintly…"

"Remote," he said. "Wise. Seemingly frail. Actually very powerful. The Old Ones. But to us, Tyler, you're the Old Ones. The elder species, the ancient planet. I would have thought the irony was inescapable."

I pondered that. "Even the H. G. Wells novel—"

"His Martians are barely seen. They're abstractly, indifferently evil. Not wise but clever. But devils and angels are brother and sister, if I understand the folklore correctly."

"But the more contemporary stories—"

"Those were deeply interesting, and the protagonists were at least human. But the truest pleasure of those stories is in the landscapes, don't you agree? And even so, they're transformative landscapes. A destiny behind every dune."

"And of course the Bradbury—"

"His Mars isn't Mars. But his Ohio makes me think of it."

"I understand what you're saying. You're just people. Mars isn't heaven. Agreed, but that doesn't mean Lomax won't try to use you for his own political purposes."

"And I mean to tell you that I'm fully aware of the possibility. The certainty would be more correct. Obviously I'll be used for political advantage, but that's the power I have: to bestow or withhold my approval. To cooperate or to be stubborn. The power to say the right word." He smiled again. His teeth were uniformly perfect, radiantly white. "Or not."

"So what do you want out of all this?"

He showed me his palms, a gesture both Martian and terrestrial. "Nothing. I'm a Martian saint. But it would be gratifying to see the replicators launched."

"Purely in the pursuit of knowledge?"

"That I will confess to, even if it is a saintly motive. To learn at least something about the Spin—"

"And challenge the Hypotheticals?"

He blinked again. "I very much hope the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they are, won't perceive what we're doing as a challenge."

"But if they do—"

"Why would they?"

"But if they do, they'll believe the challenge came from Earth, not Mars."

Wun Ngo Wen blinked several more times. Then the smile crept back: indulgent, approving. "You're surprisingly cynical yourself, Dr. Dupree."

"How un-Martian of me."

"Quite."

"And does Preston Lomax believe you're an angel?"

"Only he can answer that question. The last thing he said to me—" Here Wun dropped his Oxford diction for a note-perfect Preston Lomax impression, brusque and chilly as a winter seashore: "It's a privilege to talk to you, Ambassador Wen. You speak your mind directly. Very refreshing for an old DC. hand like myself."

The impression was startling, coming from someone who had been speaking English for only a little over a year. I told him so.

"I'm a scholar," he said. "I've been reading English since I was a child. Speaking it is another matter. But I do have a talent for languages. It's one of the reasons I'm here. Tyler, may I ask another favor of you? Would you be willing to bring me more novels?"

"I'm all out of Martian stories, I'm afraid."

"Not Mars. Any sort of novel. Anything, anything you consider important, anything that matters to you or gave you a little pleasure."

"There must be plenty of English professors who'd be happy to work up a reading list."

"I'm sure there are. But I'm asking you."

"I'm not a scholar. I like to read, but it's pretty random and mostly contemporary."

"All the better. I'm alone more often than you might think. My quarters are comfortable but I can't leave them without elaborate planning. I can't go out for a meal, I can't see a motion picture or join a social club. I could ask my minders for books, but the last thing I want is a work of fiction that's been approved by a committee. But an honest book is almost as good as a friend."

This was as close as Wun had come to complaining about his position at Perihelion, his position on Earth. He was happy enough during his waking hours, he said, too busy for nostalgia and still excited by the strangeness of what for him would always be an alien world. But at night, on the verge of sleep, he sometimes imagined he was walking the shore of a Martian lake, watching shore birds flock and wheel over the waves, and in his mind it was always a hazy afternoon, the light tinted by streamers of the ancient dust that still rose from the deserts of Noachis to color the sky. In this dream or vision he was alone, he said, but he knew there were others waiting for him around the next curve of the rocky shore. They might be friends or strangers, they might even be his lost family; he knew only that he would be welcomed by them, touched, drawn close, embraced. But it was only a dream.

"When I read," he said to me, "I hear the echo of those voices."

I promised to bring him books. But now we had business. There was a flurry of activity in the security cordon by the door of the cafeteria. One of the suits came across the floor and said, "They're asking for you upstairs."

Wun abandoned his meal and began clambering out of his chair. I told him I'd see him later.

The suit turned to me. "You too," he said. "They're asking for both of you."

* * * * *

Security hustled us to a boardroom adjoining Jason's office, where Jase and a handful of Perihelion division heads were facing a delegation that included E. D. Lawton and the likely next president, Preston Lomax. No one looked happy.

I faced E. D. Lawton, whom I hadn't seen since my mother's funeral. His gauntness had begun to look almost pathological, as if something vital had leaked out of him. Starched white cuffs, bony brown wrists. His hair was sparse, limp, and randomly combed. But his eyes were still quick. E.D.'s eyes were always lively when he was angry.

Preston Lomax, on the other hand, just looked impatient. Lomax had come to Perihelion to be photographed with Wun (photos for release after the official White House announcement) and to confer about the replicator strategy, which he was planning to endorse. E.D. was here on the weight of his reputation. He had talked himself into the vice president's pre-election tour and apparently hadn't stopped talking since.

During the hour-long Perihelion tour E.D. had questioned, doubted, derided, or viewed with alarm virtually every statement Jason's division heads made, especially when the junket wound past the new incubator labs. But (according to Jenna Wylie, the cryonics team leader, who explained this to me later) Jason had answered each of his father's outbursts with a patient and probably well-rehearsed rebuttal of his own. Which had driven E.D. to fresh heights of indignation, which in turn made him sound, according to Jenna, "like some crazed Lear raving about perfidious Martians."

The battle was still under way when Wun and I entered. E.D. leaned into the conference table, saying, "Bottom line, it's unprecedented, it's untested, and it embraces a technology we don't understand or control."

And Jason smiled in the manner of a man far too polite to embarrass a respected but cranky elder. "Obviously, nothing we do is risk-free. But—"

But here we were. A few of those present hadn't seen Wun before, and they self-identified, staring like startled sheep when they noticed him. Lomax cleared his throat. "Excuse me, but what I need right now is a word with Jason and our new arrivals—privately, if possible? Just a moment or two."

So the crowd dutifully filed out, including E.D., who looked, however, not dismissed but triumphant.

Doors closed. The upholstered silence of the boardroom settled around us like fresh snow. Lomax, who still hadn't acknowledged us, addressed Jason. "I know you told me we'd take some flak. Still—"

"It's a lot to deal with. I understand."

"I don't like having E.D. outside the tent pissing in. It's unseemly. But he can't do us any real harm, assuming…"

"Assuming there's no substance to what he says. I assure you, there's not."

"You think he's senile."

"I wouldn't go that far. Do I think his judgment has become questionable? Yes, I do."

"You know those accusations are flying both ways."

This was as close as I had been or would ever be to a sitting president. Lomax hadn't been elected yet, but only the formalities stood between him and the office. As V.P. Lomax had always seemed a little dour, a little brooding, rocky Maine to Garland's ebullient Texas, the ideal presence at a state funeral. During the campaign he had learned to smile more often but the effort was never quite convincing; political cartoonists inevitably accentuated the frown, the lower lip tucked in as if he were biting back a malediction, eyes as chilly as a Cape Cod winter.

"Both ways. You're talking about E.D.'s insinuations about my health."

Lomax sighed. "Frankly, your father's opinion on the practicality of the replicator project doesn't carry much weight. It's a minority point of view and likely to remain that way. But yes, I have to admit, the charges he made today are a little troubling." He turned to face me. "That's why you're here, Dr. Dupree."

Now Jason aimed his attention at me, and his voice was cautious, carefully neutral. "It seems E.D.'s been making some fairly wild claims. He says I'm suffering from, what was it, an aggressive brain disease—?"

"An unbeatable neurological deterioration," Lomax said, "which is interfering with Jason's ability to oversee operations here at Perihelion. What do you say to that, Dr. Dupree?"

"I guess I would say Jason can speak for himself."

"I already have," Jase said. "I told Vice President Lomax all about my MS."

From which he did not actually suffer. It was a cue. I cleared my throat. "Multiple sclerosis isn't entirely curable, but it's more than just controllable. An MS patient today can expect a life span as long and productive as anyone else's. Maybe Jase has been reluctant to talk about it, and that's his privilege, but MS is nothing to be embarrassed about."

Jase gave me a hard look I couldn't interpret.

Lomax said, "Thank you," a little dryly. "I appreciate the information. By the way, do you happen to know a Dr. Malmstein? David Malmstein?" Followed by a silence that gaped like the jaws of a steel trap.

"Yes," I said, maybe a tick too late.

"This Dr. Malmstein is a neurologist, is he not?"

"Yes, he is."

"Have you consulted him in the past?"

"I consult with lots of specialists. It's part of what I do as a physician."

"Because, according to E.D., you called in this Malmstein regarding Jason's, uh, grave neurological disorder."

Which explained the frigid look Jase was shooting me. Someone had talked to E.D. about this. Someone close. But it hadn't been me.

I tried not to think about who it might have been. "I'd do the same for any patient with a possible MS diagnosis. I run a good clinic here at Perihelion, but we don't have the kind of diagnostic equipment Malmstein can access at a working hospital."

Lomax, I think, recognized this as a nonanswer, but he tossed the ball back to Jase: "Is Dr. Dupree telling the truth?"

"Of course he is."

"You trust him?"

"He's my personal physician. Of course I trust him."

"Because, no offense, I wish you well but I don't really give a shit about your medical problems. What concerns me is whether you can give us the support we need and see this project through to the end. Can you do that?"

"As long as we're funded, yes sir, I'll be here."

"And how about you, Ambassador Wen? Does this raise any alarms with you? Any concerns or questions about the future of Perihelion?"

Wun pursed his lips, three quarters of a Martian smile. "No concerns whatsoever. I trust Jason Lawton implicitly. I also trust Dr. Dupree. He's my personal physician as well."

Which caused both Jason and me to stifle our astonishment, but it closed the deal with Lomax. He shrugged. "All right. I apologize for bringing it up. Jason, I hope your health remains good and I hope you weren't offended by the tone of the questions, but given E.D.'s status I felt I had to ask."

"I understand," Jase said. "As for E.D.—"

"Don't worry about your father."

"I'd hate to see him humiliated."

"He'll be quietly sidelined. I think that's a given. If he insists on going public—" Lomax shrugged. "In that case I'm afraid it's his own mental capacity people will challenge."

"Of course," Jason said, "we all hope that's not necessary."

* * * * *

I spent the next hour in the clinic. Molly hadn't shown up this morning and Lucinda had been doing all the bookings. I thanked her and told her to take the rest of the day off I thought about making a couple of phone calls, but I didn't want them routed through the Perihelion system.

I waited until I had seen Lomax's helicopter lift off and his imperial cavalcade depart by the front gates; then I cleared my desk and tried to think about what I wanted to do. I found my hands were a little shaky. Not MS. Anger, maybe. Outrage. Pain. I wanted to diagnose it, not experience it. I wanted to banish it to the index pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

I was on my way past reception when Jason came through the door.

He said, "I want to thank you for backing me up. I assume that means you aren't the one who told E.D. about Malmstein."

"I wouldn't do that, Jase."

"I accept that. But someone did. And that presents a problem. Because how many people are aware I've been seeing a neurologist?"

"You, me, Malmstein, whoever works in Malmstein's office—"

"Malmstein didn't know E.D. was looking for dirt and neither did his staff. E.D. must have found out about Malmstein from a closer source. If not you or me—"

Molly. He didn't have to say it.

"We can't blame her without any kind of evidence."

"Speak for yourself. You're the one who's sleeping with her. Did you keep records on my meetings with Malmstein?"

"Not here in the office."

"At home?"

"Yes."

"You showed these to her?"

"Of course not."

"But she might have gained access to them when you weren't aware of it."

"I suppose so." Yes.

"And she's not here to answer questions. Did she call in sick?"

I shrugged. "She didn't call in at all. Lucinda tried to get hold of her, but her phone isn't answering."

He sighed. "I don't exactly blame you for this. But you have to admit, Tyler, you've made a lot of questionable choices here."

"I'll deal with it," I said.

"I know you're angry. Hurt and angry. I don't want you to walk out of here and do something that will make things worse. But I do want you to consider where you stand on this project. Where your loyalties lie."

"I know where they lie," I said.

* * * * *

I tried to reach Molly from my car but she still wasn't answering. I drove to her apartment. It was a warm day. The low-rise stucco complex where she lived was enshrouded in lawn-sprinkler haze. The fungal smell of wet garden soil infiltrated the car.

I was circling toward visitor parking when I caught sight of Moll stacking boxes in the back of a battered white U-Haul trailer hitched to the rear bumper of her three-year-old Ford. I pulled over in front of her. She spotted me and said something I couldn't hear but which looked a lot like "Oh, shit!" But she stood her ground when I got out of my car.

"You can't park there," she said. "You're blocking the exit."

"Are you going somewhere?"

Molly placed a cardboard box labeled dishes on the corrugated floor of the U-Haul. "What does it look like?"

She was wearing tan slacks, a denim shirt, and a handkerchief tied over her hair. I came closer and she took an equivalent three steps back, clearly frightened.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I said.

"So what do you want?"

"I want to know who hired you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Did you deal with E.D. himself or did he use an intermediary?"

"Shit," she said, gauging the distance between herself and the car door. "Just let me go, Tyler. What do you want from me? What's the point of this?"

"Did you go to him and make an offer or did he call you first? And when did all this start, Moll? Did you fuck me for information or did you sell me out at some point after the first date?"

"Go to hell."

"How much were you paid? I'd like to know how much I'm worth."

"Go to hell. What does it matter, anyway? It's not—"

"Don't tell me it's not about money. I mean, is some principle involved here?"

"Money is the principle." She dusted her hands on her slacks, a little less frightened now, a little more defiant

"What is it you want to buy, Moll?"

"What do I want to buy! The only important thing anybody can buy. A better death. A cleaner, better death. One of these mornings the sun's going to come up and it won't stop coming up until the whole fucking sky is on fire. And I'm sorry, but I want to live somewhere nice until that happens. Somewhere by myself. Some place as comfortable as I can make it. And when that last morning arrives I want some expensive pharmaceuticals to take me over the line. I want to go to sleep before the screaming starts. Really, Tyler. That's all I want, that's the only thing in this world I really really want, and thank you, thank you for making it possible." She was frowning angrily, but a tear dislodged and slid down her cheek. "Please move your car."

I said, "A nice house and a bottle of pills? That's your price?"

"There's no one looking out for me but me."

"This sounds pathetic, but I thought we could look out for each other."

"That would mean trusting you. And no offense, but—look at you. Skating through life like you're waiting for an answer or waiting for a savior or just permanently on hold."

"I'm trying to be reasonable here, Moll."

"Oh, I don't doubt it. If reasonability was a knife I'd be losing blood. Poor reasonable Tyler. But I figured that out, too. It's revenge, isn't it? All that sweet saintliness you wear like your own suit of clothes. It's your revenge on the world for disappointing you. The world didn't give you what you want, and you're not giving anything back but sympathy and aspirin."

"Molly—"

"And don't you dare say you love me, because I know that's not true. You don't know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you're in love. It's nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another."

I turned and walked back to my own car, a little unsteadily, shocked less by the betrayal than by the finality of it, intimacies wiped out like penny stocks in a market crash. Then I turned back. "How about you, Moll? I know you were paid for information, but is that why you fucked me in the first place?"

"I fucked you," she said, "because I was lonely."

"Are you lonely now?"

"I never stopped," she said.

I drove away.

THE TICKING OF EXPENSIVE CLOCKS

The federal election was coming up fast. Jason intended to use it for cover.

"Fix me," he had said. And, he insisted, there was a way to do that. It was unorthodox. It wasn't FDA-approved. But it was a therapy with a long and well-documented history. And he made it clear he meant to take advantage of it, whether I cooperated in the effort or not.

And because Molly had almost stripped him of everything that was important to him—and left me among the wreckage—I agreed to help. (Thinking, ironically, of what E.D. had said to me years ago: I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Was that what I was doing?)

In the days before the November election Wun Ngo Wen briefed us on the procedure and its attendant risks.

Conferring with Wun wasn't easy. The problem wasn't so much the web of security surrounding him, though that was difficult enough to negotiate, but the crowd of analysts and specialists who had been feeding at his archives like hummingbirds at nectar. These were reputable scholars, vetted by the FBI and Homeland Security, sworn to secrecy at least pro tem, mesmerized by the vast data banks of Martian wisdom Wun had carried with him to Earth. The digital data amounted to more than five hundred volumes of astronomy, biology, math, physics, medicine, history, and technology at a thousand pages per volume, much of it considerably in advance of terrestrial knowledge. Had the entire contents of the Library of Alexandria been recovered by time machine it could hardly have produced a greater scholarly feeding frenzy.

These people were under pressure to complete their work before the official announcement of Wun's presence. The federal government wanted at least a rough index to the archives (much of which was in approximate English but some of which was written in Martian scientific script) before foreign governments began to demand equal access to it. The State Department planned to produce and distribute sanitized copies from which certain potentially valuable or dangerous technologies had been excised or "presented in summary form," the originals to remain highly classified.

Thus whole tribes of scholars battled for and jealously guarded their access to Wun, who could interpret or explain lacunae in the Martian text. On several occasions I was chased out of Wun's quarters by frantically polite men and women from "the high-energy physics group" or "the molecular biology group" demanding their negotiated quarter hour. Wun occasionally introduced me to these people but none of them was ever happy to see me, and the medical sciences team leader was alarmed almost to the point of tachycardia when Wun announced he'd chosen me as his personal physician.

Jase reassured the scholars by hinting that I was part of the "socialization process" by which Wun was polishing his terrestrial manners outside the context of politics or science, and I promised the med team leader I wouldn't provide medical treatment to Wun without her direct involvement. A rumor spread among the research people that I was a civilian opportunist who had charmed his way into Wun's inner circle and that my payoff would be a fat book contract after Wun went public. The rumor arose spontaneously but we did nothing to discourage it; it served our purposes.

Access to pharmaceuticals was easier than I'd expected. Wun had arrived on Earth with an entire pharmacopoeia of Martian drugs, none of which had terrestrial counterparts and any of which, he claimed, he might one day need in order to treat himself. The medical supplies had been confiscated from his landing craft but had been returned once his ambassadorial status was established. (Samples having no doubt been collected by the government; but Wun doubted that crude analysis would reveal the purpose of any of these highly engineered materials.) Wun simply supplied a few vials of raw drug to Jason, who carried them out of Perihelion in an obscuring cloud of executive privilege.

Wun briefed me on dosage, timing, contraindications, and potential problems. I was dismayed by the long list of attendant dangers. Even on Mars, Wun said, the mortality rate from the transition to Fourth was a nontrivial 0.1 percent, and Jason's case was complicated by his AMS.

But without treatment Jason's prognosis was even worse. And he would go ahead with this whether I approved of it or not—in a sense, the prescribing physician was Wun Ngo Wen, not me. My role was simply to oversee the procedure and treat any unexpected side effects. Which soothed my conscience, although the argument would have been hard to defend in court—Wun might have "prescribed" the drugs, but it wasn't his hand that would put them into Jason's body.

It would be mine.

Wun Ngo Wen wouldn't even be with us. Jase had booked a three-week leave of absence for the end of November, early December, by which time Wun would have become a global celebrity, a name (however unusual) everyone recognized. Wun would be busy addressing the United Nations and accepting the hospitality of our planet's somewhat bloodstained collection of monarchs, mullahs, presidents, and prime ministers, while Jason sweated and vomited his way toward better health.

We needed a place to go. A place where he could be inconspicuously sick, a place where I could attend him without attracting unwanted attention, but civilized enough that I could call an ambulance if things went wrong. Somewhere comfortable. Somewhere quiet.

"I know the perfect place," Jason said.

"Where's that?"

"The Big House," he said.

I laughed, until I realized he was serious.

* * * * *

Diane didn't call back until a week after Lomax's visit to Perihelion, a week after Molly left town to claim whatever reward E. D. Lawton or his hired detectives had promised her.

Sunday afternoon. I was alone in my rental. A sunny day, but the blinds were pulled. All week, balancing time between patients at the Perihelion clinic and secretive tutorials with Wun and Jase, I'd been staring down the barrel of this empty weekend. It was good to be busy, I reasoned, because when you were busy you were awash in the countless but comprehensible daily problems that crowd out pain and stifle remorse. That was healthy. That was a coping process. Or at least a delaying tactic. Useful but, alas, temporary. Because sooner or later the noise fades, the crowds disperse, and you go home to the burned-out lightbulb, the empty room, the unmade bed.

It was pretty bad. I wasn't even sure how to feel—or rather, which of the several conflicting and incompatible modes of pain I ought to acknowledge first. "You're better off without her," Jase had said a couple of times, and that was at least as true as it was banal: better off without her, but better still if I could make sense of her, if I could decide whether Molly had used me or had punished me for using her, whether my chilly and perhaps slightly counterfeit love equaled her cold and profitable repudiation of it.

Then the phone rang, which was embarrassing because I was busy stripping the sheets from my bed, balling them up for a trip to the laundry room, lots of detergent and scalding hot water to bleach out Molly's aura. You don't want to be interrupted at a task like that. Makes you feel the tiniest bit self-conscious. But I'd always been a slave to a ringing phone. I picked up.

"Tyler?" Diane said. "Is that you, Ty? Are you alone?"

I admitted that I was alone.

"Good, I'm glad I finally got hold of you. I wanted to tell you, we're changing our phone number. Unlisting it. But in case you need to get in touch with me—"

She recited the private number, which I scribbled on a handy napkin. "Why are you unlisting your phone?" She and Simon had only a single static land line between them, but I guessed that was a devotional penance, like wearing wool or eating whole grains.

"For one thing we've been getting these odd calls from E.D. A couple of times he called late at night and started haranguing Simon. He sounded a little drunk, frankly. E.D. hates Simon, E.D. hated Simon from the get-go, but after we moved to Phoenix we never heard from him. Until now. The silence was hurtful. But this is worse."

Diane's telephone number might have been something else Molly filched from my household tracker and passed on to E.D. I couldn't explain that to Diane without violating my security oath, for the same reason I couldn't mention Wun Ngo Wen or ice-eating replicators. But I did tell her that Jason had been engaged in a struggle with his father over control of Perihelion, and Jason had come out on top, and maybe that's what was bothering E.D.

"Could be," Diane said. "Coming so soon after the divorce."

"What divorce? Are you talking about E.D. and Carol?"

"Jason didn't tell you? E.D.'s been living in a rental in Georgetown since May. The negotiations are still going on, but it looks like Carol gets the Big House and maintenance payments and E.D. gets everything else. The divorce was his idea, not hers. Which is maybe understandable. Carol's been just this side of an alcoholic coma for decades. She wasn't much of a mother and she can't have been much of a wife for E.D."

"You're saying you approve?"

"Hardly. I haven't changed my mind about him. He was an awful, indifferent parent—at least to me. I didn't like him and he didn't care whether I liked him. But I wasn't in awe of him, either, not the way Jason was. Jason saw him as this monumental king of industry, this towering Washington mover and shaker—"

"Isn't he?"

"He's successful and he's got some leverage, but this stuff is all relative, Ty. There are ten thousand E. D. Lawtons in this country. E.D. would never have gotten anywhere if his father and his uncle hadn't bankrolled his first business— which I'm sure they expected to function as a tax write-off, nothing more. E.D. was good at what he did, and when the Spin opened up an opportunity he took advantage of it, and that brought him to the attention of genuinely powerful people. But he was still basically nouveau riche as far as the big boys were concerned. He never had that Yale-Harvard-Skull-and-Bones thing going for him. No cotillion balls for me. We were the poor kids on the block. I mean, it was a nice block, but there's old money and there's new money, and we were definitely new money."

"I guess it looked different," I said, "from across the lawn. How's Carol holding up?"

"Carol's medicine comes out of the same bottle it ever did. What about you? How are things with you and Molly?"

"Molly's gone," I said.

"Gone as in 'gone to the store,' or—"

"Plain gone. We broke up. I don't have a cute euphemism for it."

"I'm sorry, Tyler."

"Thank you, but it's for the best. Everybody says so."

"Simon and I are doing all right," she said, though I hadn't asked. "The church thing is hard on him."

"More church politics?"

"Jordan Tabernacle's in some kind of legal trouble. I don't know all the details. We're not directly involved, but Simon's taking it pretty hard. You sure you're okay, though? You sound a little hoarse."

"I'll survive," I said.

* * * * *

The morning before the election I packed a couple of suitcases (fresh clothes, a brace of paperback books, my medical kit), drove to Jason's place, and picked him up for the drive to Virginia. Jase was still fond of quality cars, but we needed to travel inconspicuously. My Honda, therefore, not his Porsche. The interstates weren't safe for Porsches these days. The Garland presidency had been good times for anybody with an income over half a million dollars, hard times for everybody else. That was pretty obvious from the look of the road, a rolling tableau of warehouse retailers bookended by boarded-over malls, parking lots where squatters lived in tireless automobiles, highway towns subsisting on the income from a Stuckey's and a radar trap. Warning signs posted by the state police announced 'NO STOPPING AFTER DARK' or 'VERIFIED 911 CALL REQUIRED FOR PROMPT EMERGENCY RESPONSE'. Highway piracy had cut the volume of small-vehicle traffic by half. We spent much of the drive bracketed between eighteen-wheel rigs, some of them in conspicuously poor repair, and camo-green troop trucks servicing various military bases.

But we didn't talk about any of that. And we didn't talk about the election, which was in any case a foregone conclusion, Lomax outpolling any of the two major and three minor rival candidates. We didn't talk about ice-eating replicators or Wun Ngo Wen and we surely didn't talk about E. D. Lawton. Instead we talked about old times and good books, and much of the time we didn't talk at all. I had loaded the dashboard memory with the kind of angular, contrarian jazz I knew Jason liked: Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins—people who had long ago fathomed the distance between the street and the stars.

We pulled up in front of the Big House at dusk.

The house was brightly lit, big windows butter yellow under a sky the color of iridescent ink. Election weather was chilly this year. Carol Lawton came down from the porch to meet the car, her small body shrouded in paisley scarves and a knitted sweater. She was nearly sober, judging by her steady if slightly overcalculated gait.

Jason unfolded himself slowly, cautiously from the passenger seat.

Jase was in remission, or as close as he came to remission these days. With a little effort he could pass for normal. What surprised me was that he stopped making the effort as soon as we arrived at the Big House. He careened through the entrance hall to the dining room. No servants were present— Carol had arranged for us to have the house to ourselves for a couple of weeks—but the cook had left a platter of cold meats and vegetables in case we arrived hungry. Jason slumped into a chair.

Carol and I joined him. Carol had aged visibly since my mother's death. Her hair was so fine now that the contours of her skull showed through it, pink and simian, and when I took her arm it felt like kindling under silk. Her cheeks were sunken. Her eyes had the brittle, nervous alacrity of a drinker at least temporarily on the wagon. When I said it was good to see her she smiled ruefully: "Thank you, Tyler. I know how awful I look. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Not quite ready for my close-up, thank you very effing much." I didn't know what she was talking about. "But I endure. How is Jason?"

"Same as always," I said.

"You're sweet for prevaricating. But I know—well, I won't say I know all about it. But I know he's ill. He told me that much. And I know he's expecting you to treat him for it. Some unorthodox but effective treatment." She took her arm away and looked into my eyes. "It is effective, isn't it, this medication you propose to give him?"

I was too startled to say anything but, "Yes."

"Because he made me promise not to ask questions. I suppose that's all right. Jason trusts you. Therefore I trust you. Even though when I look at you I can't help seeing the child who lives in the house across the lawn. But I see a child when I look at Jason, too. Vanished children—I can't think where I lost them."

* * * * *

That night I slept in a guest room at the Big House, a room I had only glimpsed from the hallway during the years I lived on the property.

I slept some of the night, anyway. Some of it I spent lying awake, trying to gauge the legal risk I had assumed by coming here. I didn't know exactly which laws or protocols Jase might have violated by smuggling prepared Martian pharmaceuticals off the Perihelion campus, but I had already made myself an accessory to the act.

Come the next morning Jason wondered where we ought to store the several vials of clear liquid Wun had passed on to him—enough to treat four or five people. ("In case we drop a suitcase," he had explained at the beginning of the trip. "Redundancy.")

"Are you expecting a search?"

I pictured federal functionaries in biohazard suits swarming up the steps of the Big House.

"Of course not. But it's never a bad idea to hedge a risk." He gave me a closer look, though his eyes jerked to the left every few seconds, another symptom of his disease. "Feeling a little apprehensive?"

I said we could conceal the spares in the house across the lawn, unless they needed refrigeration.

"According to Wun they're chemically stable under any condition short of thermonuclear warfare. But a warrant for the Big House would cover the entire property."

"I don't know about warrants. I do know where the hiding places are."

"Show me," Jason said.

So we trooped across the lawn, Jason following a little unsteadily behind me. It was early afternoon, election day, but in the grassy space between the two houses it might have been any autumn, any year. Somewhere off in the wooded patch straddling the creek a bird announced itself, a single note that began boldly but faded like a reconsidered thought. Then we reached my mother's house and I turned the key and opened the door into a deeper stillness.

The house had been periodically cleaned and dusted but essentially closed since my mother's death. I hadn't been back to organize her effects, no other family existed, and Carol had preferred to maintain the building rather than change it. But it wasn't timeless. Far from it. Time had nested here. Time had made itself at home. The front room smelled of enclosure, of the essences that seep out of undisturbed upholstery, yellow paper, settled fabric. In winter, Carol told me later, the house was kept just warm enough to prevent the pipes from freezing; in summer the curtains were drawn against the heat. It was cool today, inside and out.

Jason came across the threshold trembling. His gait had been ragged all morning, which was why he had let me carry the pharmaceuticals (apart from what I had already set aside for his treatment), a half pound or so of glass and biochemicals in a foam-padded leather overnight bag.

"This is the first time I've been here," he said shyly, "since before she died. Is it stupid to say I miss her?"

"No, not stupid."

"She was the first person I ever noticed being kind to me. All the kindness in the Big House came in the door with Belinda Dupree."

I led him through the kitchen to the half-size door that opened into the basement. The small house on the Lawton property had been designed to resemble a New England cottage, or someone's notion of one, down to the rude concrete-slab cellar with a ceiling low enough that Jason had to stoop to follow me. The space was just big enough to contain a furnace, water heater, washing machine and dryer. The air was even colder here and it had a moist, mineral scent.

I crouched into the nook behind the sheet-metal body of the furnace, one of those dusty cul-de-sacs even professional cleaners habitually ignore. I explained to Jase that there was a cracked slab of drywall here, and with a little dexterity you could pry it out to reveal the small uninsulated gap between the pine studs and the foundation wall.

"Interesting," Jason said from where he stood a yard behind me and around the angle of the quiescent furnace. "What did you keep in there, Tyler? Back issues of Gent?"

When I was ten I had kept certain toys here, not because I was afraid anyone would steal them but because it was fun knowing they were hidden and that only I could find them. Later on I stashed less innocent things: several brief attempts at a diary, letters to Diane never delivered or even finished, and, yes, though I wouldn't admit it to Jason, printouts of some relatively tame Internet porn. All these guilty secrets had been disposed of long ago.

"Should have brought a flashlight," Jase said. The single overhead bulb cast negligible light into this cobwebbed coiner.

"There used to be one on the table by the fuse box." There still was. I backed out of the gap long enough to take it from Jason's hand. It emitted the watery, pale glow of a dying battery pack, but it worked well enough that I could find the loose chunk of drywall without groping. I lifted it away and slid the overnight bag into the space behind it, then fitted the drywall in place and brushed chalky dust over the visible seams.

But before I could back out I dropped the flashlight and it rolled even farther into the spidery shadows behind the furnace. I grimaced and reached for it, following the flickery glow. Touched the barrel of it. Touched something else. Something hollow but substantial. A box.

I pulled it closer.

"You almost finished in there, Ty?"

"One second," I said.

I trained the light on the box. It was a shoe box. A shoe box with a dusty New Balance logo printed on it and a different legend written over that in fat black ink: mementos (school).

It was the box missing from my mother's etagere upstairs, the one I hadn't been able to find after her funeral.

"Having trouble?" Jason asked.

"No," I said.

I could investigate later. I pushed the box back where I'd found it and crawled out of the dusty space. Stood up and brushed my hands. "I guess we're done here."

"Remember this for me," Jason said. "In case I forget."

* * * * *

That night we watched the election returns on the Lawtons' impressively large but outdated video rig. Carol had misplaced her corrective lenses and sat close to the screen, blinking at it. She had spent most of her adult life ignoring politics—"That was always E.D.'s department"—and we had to explain who some of the major players were. But she seemed to enjoy the sense of occasion. Jason made gentle jokes and Carol obliged him by laughing, and when she laughed I could see a little of Diane in her face.

She tired easily, though, and she had gone to her room by the time the networks began calling states. No surprises there. In the end Lomax collected all the Northeast and most of the Midwest and West. He did less well in the South, but even there the dissenting vote was split almost evenly between old-line Democrats and the Christian Conservatives.

We started clearing away our coffee cups about the time the last opposing candidate delivered a grimly polite concession.

"So the good guys win," I said.

Jase smiled. "I'm not sure any of those were running."

"I thought Lomax was good for us."

"Maybe. But don't make the mistake of thinking Lomax cares about Perihelion or the replicator program, except as a convenient way to lowball the space budget and make it look like a great leap forward. The federal money he frees up will be dumped into the military budget. That's why E.D. couldn't put together any real anti-Lomax sentiment from his old aerospace cronies. Lomax won't let Boeing or Lockheed Martin starve. He just wants them to retool."

"For defense," I supplied. The lull in global conflict that had followed the initial confusion of the Spin was long past. Maybe a military refit wasn't such a bad idea.

"If you believe what Lomax says."

"Don't you?"

"I'm afraid I can't afford to."

On that note I retired to bed.

In the morning I administered the first injection. Jason stretched out on a sofa in the Lawtons' big front room, facing the window. He wore jeans and a cotton shirt and looked casually patrician, frail but at ease. If he was frightened he wasn't showing it. He rolled up his right sleeve to expose the crook of his elbow.

I took a syringe from my kit, attached a sterile needle, and filled it from one of the vials of clear liquid we had held back from the hiding place. Wun had rehearsed this with me. The protocols of the Fourth Age. On Mars there would have been a quiet ceremony and a soothing environment. Here we made do with November sunlight and the ticking of expensive clocks.

I swabbed his skin prior to the injection. "You don't have to watch," I said.

"But I want to," he said. "Show me how it's done."

He always did like to know how things worked.

* * * * *

The injection produced no immediate effects, but by noon the next day Jason was running a degree of fever.

Subjectively, he said, it was no worse than a mild cold, and by midafternoon he was begging me to take my thermometer and my pressure cuff and—well, take them elsewhere, was the gist of it.

So I turned up my collar against the rain (a blank, dumbly persistent rain that had started during the night and persisted through the afternoon) and crossed the lawn once more to my mother's house, where I rescued mementos (school) from the basement and carried it up to the front room.

Rain-dim light came through the curtains. I switched on a lamp.

My mother had died at the age of fifty-six. For eighteen years I had shared this house with her. That was a little over one third of her life. Of the remaining two thirds I had seen only what she had chosen to show me. She had talked about Bingham, her home town, from time to time. I knew, for instance, that she had lived with her father (a Realtor) and stepmother (a daycare worker) in a house at the top of a steep, tree-lined street; that she had had a childhood friend named Monica Lee; that there had been a covered bridge, a river called the Little Wyecliffe, and a Presbyterian church she had stopped attending when she turned sixteen and to which she had not returned until her parents' funerals. But she had never mentioned Berkeley or what she had hoped to achieve with her M.B.A. or why she had married my father.

She had, once or twice, taken down these boxes to show me their contents, to impress on me that she had lived through the impossible years before I existed. This was her evidence, Exhibits A, B, and C, three boxes of mementos and odds & ends. Somewhere folded into these boxes were fragments of real, verifiable history: the toffee-brown front pages of newspapers announcing terrorist attacks, wars waged, presidents elected or impeached. Here too were the trinkets I had liked to hold in my hand as a child. A tarnished fifty-cent piece issued in the year of her father's birth (1951); four tan and pink seashells from the beach at Cobscook Bay.

Mementos (school) had been my least favorite box. It contained a campaign button for some evidently unsuccessful Democratic candidate for high office, which I had liked for its bright colors, but the rest of the space was taken up with her diploma, a few pages torn from her graduate yearbook, and a bundle of small envelopes none of which I had ever wanted (or been allowed) to touch.

I opened one of the envelopes now and sampled enough of the contents to register that it was: a) a love letter and b) in a handwriting not at all like my father's neat script from the missives in mementos: marcus.

So my mother had had a college sweetheart. This was news that might have discomfited Marcus Dupree (she had married him a week after graduation) but would hardly have shocked anyone else. Certainly it was no reason to conceal the box in the basement, not when it had been sitting in plain sight for years on end.

Had it even been my mother who had hidden it? I didn't know who might have been in the house between the time of her stroke and the time I arrived a day later. It was Carol who had found her collapsed on the sofa, and probably some of the Big House staff had helped clean up afterward, and there must have been EMS people in here prepping her for transport. But none of them would have had any remotely plausible reason to carry mementos (school) downstairs and slide it into the dark gap between the furnace and the basement wall.

And maybe it didn't matter. No crime had been committed, after all, only a peculiar displacement. Could have been the local poltergeist. In all likelihood I would never know, and there was no point dwelling on the question. Everything in this room, every object in the house including these boxes, would sooner or later have to be salvaged, sold, or discarded. I had been putting it off, Carol had been putting it off, but the work was overdue.

But until then—

Until then, I put mementos (school) back on the top shelf of the étagère between mementos (marcus) and odds & ends. And made the empty room complete.

* * * * *

The most troubling medical question I had raised with Wun Ngo Wen about Jason's treatment was the issue of drug-drug interactions. I couldn't discontinue Jason's conventional medications without throwing him into a disastrous relapse. But I was equally uneasy about combining his daily drug regimen with Wun's biochemical overhaul.

Wun promised me there wouldn't be a problem. The longevity treatment wasn't a "drug" in the conventional sense. What I was injecting into Jason's bloodstream was more like a biologically enabled computer program. Conventional drugs generally interact with proteins and cell surfaces. Wun's potion interacted with DNA itself.

But it still had to enter a cell to do its work, and it still had to negotiate Jason's blood chemistry and immune system on its way there—didn't it? Wun had said emphatically that none of this mattered. The longevity cocktail was flexible enough to operate through any kind of physiological condition short of death itself.

But the gene for AMS had never migrated to the red planet and the drugs Jase was taking were unknown there. And although Wun had insisted my concerns were unwarranted, I noticed he seldom smiled when he did so. So we hedged our bets. I had been backing off Jason's AMS meds for a week before the first injection. Not stopping them, just cutting back.

The strategy had seemed to work. By the time we arrived at the Big House Jason was exhibiting only minor symptomology while carrying a lighter drug load, and we began his treatment optimistically.

Three days later he was spiking fevers I couldn't knock down. A day after that he was semiconscious much of the time. Another day and his skin turned red and began to blister. That evening he began screaming.

He continued to scream despite the morphine I administered.

It was not a full-throated scream but a moan that periodically rose to high volume, a sound you might expect from a sick dog, not a human being. It was purely involuntary. When he was lucid he neither made the sound nor remembered having made it, even though it left his larynx inflamed and painful.

Carol made a brave show of putting up with it. There were parts of the house where Jason's keening was almost inaudible—the back bedrooms, the kitchen—and she spent most of her time there, reading or listening to local radio. But the strain was obvious and before long she started drinking again.

Maybe I shouldn't say "started." She had never stopped. What she had done was cut back to the minimum that allowed her to function, balancing between the very real terrors of sudden withdrawal and the lure of full-blown intoxication. And I hope that doesn't sound glib. Carol was walking a difficult path. She had stayed on it this long because of her love for her son, dormant as that love might have been these many years. The sound of his pain was what derailed her.

By the second week of the process Jase was hooked up to intravenous fluids and I was keeping an eye on his rising BR. He'd had a relatively good day despite his horrifying appearance, scabbed where he wasn't raw, eyes almost buried in the swollen flesh that surrounded them. He had been alert enough to ask whether Wun Ngo Wen had made his first television appearance. (Not yet. It was scheduled for the following week.) But by nightfall he had lapsed back into unconsciousness and the moaning, absent for a couple of days, started again, full-throated and painful to hear.

Painful for Carol, who showed up at the door of the bedroom with tear tracks down her cheeks and an expression of fierce, glassy anger. "Tyler," she said, "you have to stop this!"

"I'm doing what I can. He's not responding to the opiates. It might be better to talk about this in the morning."

"Can't you hear him?"

"Of course I can hear him."

"Does that mean nothing? Does that sound mean nothing to you? My god!" she said. "He would have been better off in Mexico with some quack. He would have been better off with a faith healer. Do you actually have any idea what you've been injecting into him? Fucking quack! My god."

Unfortunately she was echoing questions I had already begun to ask myself. No, I didn't know what I was injecting into him, not in any rigorous scientific sense. I had believed the promises of the man from Mars, but that was hardly a defense I could lay at Carol's feet. The process itself was more difficult, more obviously agonizing, than I had allowed myself to expect. Maybe it was working incorrectly. Maybe it wasn't working at all.

Jase emitted a mournful howl that ended in a sigh. Carol put her hands over her ears. "He's suffering, you fucking quack! Look at him!"

"Carol—"

"Don't Carol me, you butcher! I'm calling an ambulance. I'm calling the police!"

I came across the room and took her by the shoulders. She felt frail but dangerously alive under my hands, a cornered animal. "Carol, listen to me."

"Why, why should I listen to you?"

"Because your son put his life in my hands. Listen. Carol, listen. I'm going to need someone to help me here. I've been running on no sleep for days. Before too long I'm going to need someone to sit with him, someone with real medical savvy who can make informed judgments."

"You should have brought a nurse."

I should have, but it hadn't been possible, and that was beside the point. "I don't have a nurse. I need you to do this."

That took a moment to sink in. Then she gasped and stepped back. "Me!"

"You still have a medical license. Last I heard."

"I haven't practiced for—is it decades? Decades…"

"I'm not asking you to perform heart surgery. I just want you to keep an eye on his blood pressure and his temperature. Can you do that?"

Her anger dissipated. She was flattered. She was frightened. She thought about it. Then she gave me a steely look. "Why should I help you? Why should I make myself an accomplice to this, this torture?"

I was still composing an answer when a voice behind me said, "Oh, please."

Jason's voice. One of the trademarks of this Martian drug regimen was the lucidity that came at random and left at will. Apparently it had just arrived. I turned around.

He grimaced and made an attempt, not quite successful, to sit up. But his eyes were clear.

He addressed his mother: "Really," he said, "isn't this a little unseemly? Please do what Tyler wants. He knows what he's doing and so do I."

Carol stared at him. "But I don't. I haven't. I mean I can't—"

Then she turned and walked unsteadily out of the room, one hand braced against the wall.

I sat up with Jase. In the morning Carol came to the bedroom looking chastened but sober and offered to relieve me. Jason was peaceful and didn't really need tending, but I put her in charge and went off to catch up on my sleep.

I slept for twelve hours. When I came back to the bedroom Carol was still there, holding her unconscious son's hand, stroking his forehead with a tenderness I had never seen in her before.

* * * * *

The recovery phase began a week and a half into the course of Jason's treatment. There was no sudden transition, no magic moment. But his lucid periods began to lengthen and his blood pressure stabilized somewhere near the nominal range.

On the night of Wun's speech to the United Nations I located a portable TV in the servants' part of the house and lugged it up to Jason's bedroom. Carol joined us just before the broadcast.

I don't think Carol believed in Wun Ngo Wen.

His presence on Earth had been officially announced last Wednesday. His picture had been on front pages for days now, plus live footage of him striding across the White House lawn under the avuncular arm of the sitting president. The White House had made it clear that Wun was here to help but that he had no instant solution to the problem of the Spin and not much new knowledge about the Hypotheticals. Public reaction had been cautious.

Tonight he mounted the dais in the Security Council chamber and stepped up to the podium, which had been adjusted to suit his height. "Why, he's just a tiny thing," Carol said.

Jason said, "Show some respect. He represents a single continuous culture that's lasted longer than any of ours."

"Looks more like he represents the Lollipop Guild," Carol said.

His dignity was restored in the close-ups. The camera liked his eyes and his elusive smile. And when he spoke to the microphone he spoke softly, which took the effective pitch of his voice down to a more terrestrial level.

Wun knew (or had been coached to understand) how unlikely this event seemed to the average Earthling. ("Truly," the secretary general had said in his introduction, "we live in an age of miracles.") So he thanked us all for our hospitality in his best mid-Atlantic accent and talked wistfully about his home and why he had left it to come here. He painted Mars as a foreign but entirely human place, the kind of place you might like to visit, where the people were friendly and the scenery was interesting, although the winters, he admitted, were often harsh.

("Sounds like Canada," Carol said.)

Then to the heart of the matter. Everyone wanted to know about the Hypotheticals. Unfortunately, Wun's people knew little more about them than we did—the Hypotheticals had encapsulated Mars while he was in transit to Earth, and the Martians were as helpless before it as we had been.

He couldn't guess the Hypotheticals' motives. That question had been debated for centuries, but even the greatest Martian thinkers had never resolved it. It was interesting,

Wun said, that both Earth and Mars had been sealed off when they were on the brink of global catastrophes: "Our population, like yours, is approaching the limit of sustainability. On Earth your industry and agriculture both run on oil, supplies of which are rapidly being depleted. On Mars we have no oil at all, but we depend on another scarce commodity, elemental nitrogen: it drives our agricultural cycle and imposes absolute limits on the number of human lives the planet can sustain. We've coped a little better than has the Earth, but only because we were forced to recognize the problem from the very beginning of our civilization. Both planets were and are facing the possibility of economic and agricultural collapse and a catastrophic human die-off. Both planets were encapsulated before that end point was reached."

"Perhaps the Hypotheticals understand that truth about us and perhaps it influenced their action. But we don't know that with any certainty. Nor do we know what they expect from us, if anything, or when or even whether the Spin will come to an end. We can't know, until we gather more direct information about the Hypotheticals."

"Fortunately," Wun said, the camera going close on him, "there is a way to gather that information. I've come here with a proposal, which I've discussed with both President Garland and President-elect Lomax as well as other heads of state," and he went on to sketch out the basics of the replicator plan. "With luck this will tell us whether the Hypotheticals have overtaken other worlds, how those worlds have reacted, and what the ultimate fate of the Earth might be."

But when he started talking about the Oort Cloud and "auto-catalytic feedback technology" I saw Carol's eyes glaze over.

"This can't be happening," she said after Wun departed the podium to dazed applause and the network pundits began to chew and regurgitate his speech. She looked genuinely frightened. "Is any of this true, Jason?"

"Most all of it," Jason said calmly. "I can't speak for the weather on Mars."

"Are we really on the brink of disaster?"

"We've been on the brink of disaster since the stars went out."

"I mean about oil and all that. If the Spin hadn't happened, we'd all be starving?"

"People are starving. They're starving because we can't support seven billion people in North American-style prosperity without strip-mining the planet. The numbers are hard to argue with. Yes, it's true. If the Spin doesn't kill us, sooner or later we'll be looking at a global human die-back."

"And that has something to do with the Spin itself?"

"Perhaps, but neither I nor the Martian on television know for sure."

"You're making fun of me."

"No."

"Yes you are. But that's all right. I know I'm ignorant. It's been years since I looked at a newspaper. There was always the risk of seeing your father's face, for one thing. And the only television I watch is afternoon drama. In afternoon drama there aren't any Martians. I guess I'm Rip van Winkle. I slept too long. And I don't much like the world I woke up to. The parts of it that aren't terrifying are—" She gestured at the TV. "Are ludicrous."

"We're all Rip van Winkle," Jason said gently. "We're all waiting to wake up."

* * * * *

Carol's mood improved in tandem with Jason's health and she began to take a livelier interest in his prognosis. I briefed her about his AMS, a disease that had not been formally diagnosed when Carol graduated from medical school, as a way to dodge questions about the treatment itself, an unspoken bargain which she seemed to understand and accept. The important thing was that Jason's ravaged skin was healing and the blood samples I sent to a lab in D.C. for testing showed drastically reduced neural plaque proteins.

She was still reluctant to talk about the Spin, however, and she looked unhappy when Jase and I discussed it in her presence. I thought again of the Housman poem Diane had taught me so many years ago: The infant child is not aware/He has been eaten by the bear.

Carol had been beset by several bears, some as large as the Spin and some as small as a molecule of ethanol. I think she might have envied the infant child.

* * * * *

Diane called (on my personal phone, not Carol's house phone) a few nights after Wun's U.N. appearance. I had retreated to my room and Carol was keeping the night watch. Rain had come and gone all November, and it was raining now, the bedroom window a fluid mirror of yellow light.

"You're at the Big House," Diane said.

"You talked to Carol?"

"I call her once a month. I'm a dutiful daughter. Sometimes she's sober enough to talk. What's wrong with Jason?"

"It's a long story," I said. "He's getting better. It's nothing to worry about."

"I hate it when people say that."

"I know. But it's true. There was a problem, but we fixed it"

"And that's all you can tell me."

"All for now. How are things with you and Simon?" Last time we talked she had mentioned legal trouble.

"Not too good," she said. "We're moving."

"Moving where?"

"Out of Phoenix, anyway. Away from the city. Jordan Tabernacle's been temporarily closed down—I thought maybe you'd heard about it."

"No," I said—why would I have heard about the financial troubles of a little southwest Tribulation church?—and we went on to discuss other matters, and Diane promised to update me once she and Simon had a new address. Sure, why not, what the hell.

But I did hear about Jordan Tabernacle the following night.

Uncharacteristically, Carol insisted on watching the late news. Jason was tired but alert and willing, so the three of us sat through forty minutes of international saber rattling and celebrity court cases. Some of this was interesting: there was an update on Wun Ngo Wen, who was in Belgium meeting with officials of the E.U., and good news from Uzbekistan, where the forward marine base had finally been relieved. Then there was a feature about CVWS and the Israeli dairy industry.

We watched dramatic pictures of culled cattle being bulldozed into mass graves and salted with lime. Five years ago the Japanese beef industry had been similarly devastated. Bovine or ungulate CVWS had broken out and been suppressed in a dozen countries from Brazil to Ethiopia. The human equivalent was treatable with modern antibiotics but remained a smoldering problem in third-world economies.

But Israeli dairy farmers ran strict protocols of sepsis and testing, so the outbreak there had been unexpected. Worse, the index case—the first infection—had been tracked to an unauthorized shipment of fertilized ova from the United States.

The shipment was back-traced to a Tribulationist charity called Word for the World, headquartered in an industrial park outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Why was WftW smuggling cattle ova into Israel? Not, it turned out, for particularly charitable reasons. Investigators followed WftW's sponsors through a dozen blind holding companies to a consortium of Tribulationist and Dispensationalist churches and fringe political groups both large and small. One item of Biblical doctrine shared by these groups was drawn from Numbers (chapter nineteen) and inferred from other texts in Matthew and Timothy—namely, that the birth in Israel of a pure red heifer would signal the second coming of Jesus Christ and the beginning of His reign on Earth.

It was an old idea. Allied Jewish extremists believed the sacrifice of a red calf on the Temple Mount would mark the coming of the Messiah. There had been several "red calf" attacks on the Dome of the Rock in prior years, one of which had damaged the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearly precipitated a regional war. The Israeli government had been doing its best to quash the movement but had only succeeded in driving it underground.

According to the news there were several WftW-sponsored dairy farms across the American Midwest and Southwest all quietly devoted to the business of hastening Armageddon. They had been attempting to breed a pure blood-red calf, presumably superior to the numerous disappointing heifers that had been presented as candidates over the last forty years.

These farms had systematically evaded federal inspections and feed protocols, to the point of concealing an outbreak of bovine CVWS that had crossed the border from Nogales. The infected ova produced breeding stock with plentiful genes for red-tinged coats, but when the calves themselves were born (at a WftW-linked dairy farm in the Negev) most died of respiratory distress at an early age. The corpses were quietly buried, but too late. The infection had spread to mature stock and a number of human farmhands.

It was an embarrassment for the U.S. administration. The FDA had already announced a policy review and Homeland Security was freezing WftW bank accounts and serving warrants on Tribulationist fund-raisers. On the news there were pictures of federal agents carrying boxed documents out of anonymous buildings and applying padlocks to the doors of obscure churches.

The news reader cited a few examples by name.

One of them was Jordan Tabernacle.

4X109 A. D.

Outside Padang we transferred from Nijon's ambulance to a private car with a Minang driver, who dropped us off—me, Ibu Ina, En—at a cartage compound on the coast highway. Five huge tin-roofed warehouses sat in a black gravel plain between conical piles of bulk cement under tarps and a corroded rail tanker idle on a siding. The main office was a low wooden building under a sign that read 'Bayur Forwarding' in English.

Bayur Forwarding, Ina said, was one of her ex-husband Jala's businesses, and it was Jala who met us in the reception room. He was a beefy, apple-cheeked man in a canary yellow business suit—he looked like a Toby jug dressed for the tropics. He and Ina embraced in the manner of the comfortably divorced, then Jala shook my hand and stooped to shake En's. Jala introduced me to his receptionists as "a palm oil importer from Suffolk," presumably in case she was quizzed by the New Reformasi. Then he escorted us to his seven-year-old fuel-cell BMW and we drove south toward Teluk Bayur, Jala and Ina up front, me and En in back.

Teluk Bayur—the big deepwater harbor south of the city of Padang—was where Jala had made all his money. Thirty years ago, he said, Teluk Bayur had been a sleepy Sumatran sand-mud basin with modest port services and a predictable trade in coal, crude palm oil, and fertilizer. Today, thanks to the economic boom of the nagari restoration and the population explosion of the Archway era, Teluk Bayur was a fully improved port basin with world-class quays and mooring, a huge storage complex, and so many modern conveniences that even Jala eventually lost interest in tallying up all the tugs, sheds, cranes and loaders by tonnage. "Jala is proud of Teluk Bayur," Ina said. "There's hardly a high official there he hasn't bribed."

"Nobody higher than General Affairs," Jala corrected her.

"You're too modest."

"Is there something wrong with making money? Am I too successful? Is it a crime to make something of myself?"

Ina inclined her head and said, "These are of course rhetorical questions."

I asked whether we were going directly to a ship at Teluk Bayur.

"Not directly," Jala said. "I'm taking you to a safe place on the docks. It isn't as simple as walking onto some vessel and making ourselves comfortable."

"There's no ship?"

"Certainly there's a ship. The Capetown Maru, a nice little freighter. She's loading coffee and spices just now. When the holds are full and the debts are paid and the permits are signed, then the human cargo goes aboard. Discreetly, I hope."

"What about Diane? Is Diane at Teluk Bayur?"

"Soon," Ina said, giving Jala a meaningful look.

"Yes, soon," he said.

* * * * *

Teluk Bayur might once have been a sleepy commercial harbor, but like any modern port it had become a city in itself, a city made not for people but for cargo. The port proper was enclosed and fenced, but ancillary businesses had grown up around it like whorehouses outside a military base: secondary shippers and expediters, gypsy truck collectives running rebuilt eighteen-wheelers, leaky fuel depots. We breezed past them all. Jala wanted to get us settled before the sun went down.

Bayur Bay itself was a horseshoe of oily saltwater. Wharfs and jetties lapped at it like concrete tongues. Abutting the shore was the ordered chaos of large-scale commerce, the first- and second-line godowns and stacking yards, the cranes like giant mantises feasting on the holds of tethered container ships. We stopped at a manned guardpost along the line of a steel fence and Jala passed something to the security guard through the window of the car—a permit, a bribe, or both. The guard nodded him through and Jala waved amiably and drove inside, following a line of CPO and Avigas tanks at what seemed like reckless speed. He said, "I've arranged for you to stay here overnight. I have an office in one of the E-dock warehouses. Nothing in there but bulk concrete, nobody to bother you. In the morning I'll bring Diane Lawton."

"And then we leave?"

"Patience. You're not the only ones making rantau—just the most conspicuous. There might be complications."

"Such as?"

"Obviously, the New Reformasi. The police sweep the docklands every now and then, looking for illegals and archrunners. Usually they find a few. Or more than a few, depending on who's been paid off. At the moment there is a great deal of pressure from Jakarta, so who knows? Also there's talk of a labor action. The stevedores' union is extremely militant. We'll cast off before any conflict begins, with luck. So you sleep a night on the floor in the dark, I'm afraid, and I'll take Ina and En to stay with the other villagers for now."

"No," Ina said firmly. "I'll stay with Tyler."

Jala paused. Then he looked at her and said something in Minang.

"Not funny," she said. "And not true."

"What, then? You don't trust me to keep him safe?"

"What have I ever gained by trusting you?"

Jala grinned. His teeth were tobacco brown. "Adventure," he said.

"Yes, quite," Ina said.

* * * * *

So we ended up in the north end of a warehousing complex off the docks, Ibu Ina and I in a grimly rectangular room that had been a surveyor's office, Ina said, until the building was temporarily closed pending repairs to its porous roof.

One wall of the room was a window of wire-reinforced glass. I looked down into a cavernous storage space pale with concrete dust. Steel support beams rose from a muddy, ponded floor like rusted ribs.

The only light came from security lamps placed at sparse intervals along the walls. Flying insects had penetrated the building's gaps and they hovered in clouds around the caged bulbs or died mounded beneath them. Ina managed to get a desk lamp working. Empty cardboard boxes had been piled in one corner, and I unfolded the driest of them and stacked them to make a pair of crude mattresses. No blankets. But it was a hot night. Close to monsoon season.

"You think you can sleep?" Ina asked.

"It's not the Hilton, but it's the best I can do."

"Oh, not that. I mean the noise. Can you sleep through the noise?"

Teluk Bayur didn't close down at night. The loading and unloading went on twenty-four hours a day. We couldn't see it but we could hear it, the sound of heavy motors and stressed metal and the periodic thunder of multiton cargo containers in transit. "I've slept through worse," I said.

"I doubt that," Ina said, "but it's kind of you to say."

Neither of us slept for hours. Instead we sat close to the glow of the desk lamp and talked sporadically. Ina asked about Jason.

I had let her read some of the long passages I'd written during my illness. Jason's transition to Fourth, she said, sounded as if it had been less difficult than mine. No, I said. I had simply neglected to include the bedpan details.

"But about his memory? There was no loss? He was unconcerned?"

"He didn't talk much about it. I'm sure he was concerned." In fact he had come swimming out of one of his recurrent fevers to demand that I document his life for him: "Write it down for me, Ty," he had said. "Write it down in case I forget."

"But no graphomania of his own."

"No. Graphomania happens when the brain starts to rewire its own verbal faculties. It's only one possible symptom. The sounds he made were probably his own manifestation of it."

"You learned that from Wun Ngo Wen."

"Yes, or from his medical archives, which I had studied later."

Ina was still fascinated with Wun Ngo Wen. "That warning to the United Nations, about overpopulation and resource depletion, did Wun ever discuss that with you? I mean, in the time before—"

"I know. Yes, he did, a little."

"What did he tell you?"

This was during one of our conversations about the ultimate aim of the Hypotheticals. Wun had drawn me a diagram, which I reproduced for Ina on the dusty parquet floor: a horizontal and vertical line defining a graph. The vertical line was population, the horizontal line was time. A jaggedy trend line crossed the graph space more or less horizontally.

"Population by time," Ina said. "I understand that much, but what exactly are we measuring?"

"Any animal population in a relatively stable ecosystem. Could be foxes in Alaska or howler monkeys in Belize. The population fluctuates with external factors, like a cold winter or an increase in predators, but it's stable at least over the short term."

But then, Wun had said, what happens if we look at an intelligent, tool-using species over a longer term? I drew Ina the same graph as before, except this time the trend line curved steadily toward the vertical.

"What's happening here," I said, "is that the population— we can just say 'people'—people are learning to pool their skills. Not just how to knap a flint but how to teach other people to knap flints and how to divide labor economically. Collaboration makes more food. Population grows. More people collaborate more efficiently and generate new skills. Agriculture. Animal husbandry. Reading and writing, which means skills can be shared more efficiently among living people and even inherited from generations long dead."

"So the curve rises ever more steeply," Ina said, "until we are all drowning in ourselves."

"Ah, but it doesn't. There are other forces that work to pull the curve to the right. Increasing prosperity and technological savvy actually work in our favor. Well-fed, secure people tend to want to limit their own reproduction. Technology and a flexible culture give them the means. Ultimately, or so Wun said, the curve will tend back toward flat."

Ibu Ina looked confused. "So there is no problem? No starvation, no overpopulation?"

"Unfortunately, the line for the population of Earth is still a long way from horizontal. And we're running into limiting conditions."

"Limiting conditions?"

One more diagram. This one showed a trend line like an italic letter S, level at the top. Over this I marked two parallel horizontal lines: one well above the trend line, marked "A," and one crossing it at the upcurve, marked "B."

"What are these lines?" Ina asked.

"They're both planetary sustainability. The amount of arable land available for agriculture, fuel and raw materials to sustain technology, clean air and water. The diagram shows the difference between a successful intelligent species and an unsuccessful one. A species that peaks under the limit has the potential for long-term survival. A successful species can go on to do all those things futurists used to dream about—expand into the solar system or even the galaxy, manipulate time and space."

"How grand," Ina said.

"Don't knock it. The alternative is worse. A species that runs into sustainability limits before it stabilizes its population is probably doomed. Massive starvation, failed technology, and a planet so depleted from the first bloom of civilization that it lacks the means to rebuild."

"I see." She shivered. "So which are we? Case A or Case B? Did Wun tell you that?"

"All he could say for sure was that both planets, Earth and Mars, were starting to run into the limits. And that the Hypotheticals intervened before it could happen."

"But why did they intervene? What do they expect from us?"

It was a question for which Wun's people didn't have an answer. Nor did we.

No, that wasn't quite true. Jason Lawton had found a sort of an answer.

But I wasn't ready to talk about that yet.

* * * * *

Ina yawned, and I brushed away the marks on the dusty floor. She switched off the desk light. The scattered maintenance lamps cast an exhausted glow. Outside the warehouse there was a sound like the striking of an enormous, muted bell every five or so seconds.

"Tick tock," Ina said, arranging herself on her mattress of mildewy cardboard. "I remember when clocks ticked, Tyler. Do you? The old-fashioned clocks?"

"There was one in my mother's kitchen."

"There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It's hard to live in all those kinds of time. Easy to forget that you live in all of them."

The metronomic clanging went on.

"You sound like a Fourth," I said.

In the dim light I could just make out her weary smile.

"I think one lifetime is enough for me," she said.

* * * * *

In the morning we woke to the sound of an accordion door rolled back to its stops, a burst of light, Jala calling for us.

I hurried down the stairs. Jala was already halfway across the warehouse floor and Diane was behind him, walking slowly.

I came closer and said her name.

She tried to smile, but her teeth were clenched and her face was unnaturally pale. By then I had seen that she was holding a wadded cloth against her body above her hip, and that both the cloth and her cotton blouse were vivid red with the blood that had leaked through.

DESPERATE EUPHORIA

Eight months after Wun Ngo Wen's address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the hypercold cultivation tanks at Perihelion began to yield payload quantities of Martian replicators, and at Canaveral and Vandenberg fleets of Delta sevens were prepped to deliver them into orbit. It was about this time that Wun developed an urge to see the Grand Canyon. What sparked his interest was a year-old copy of Arizona Highways one of the biology wonks happened to leave in his quarters.

He showed it to me a couple of days later. "Look at this," he said, almost trembling with eagerness, folding back the pages of a photo feature on the restoration of Bright Angel trail. The Colorado River cutting pre-Cambrian sandstone into green pools. A tourist from Dubai riding a mule. "Have you heard of this, Tyler?"

"Have I heard of the Grand Canyon? Yes. I think most people have."

"It's astonishing. Very beautiful."

"Spectacular. So they say. But isn't Mars famous for its canyons?"

He smiled. "You're talking about the Fallen Lands. Your people called it Valles Marineris when they discovered it from orbit sixty years ago—or a hundred thousand years ago. Parts of it do look a lot like these photographs from Arizona. But I've never been there. And I don't suppose I ever will be there. I think I'd like to see the Grand Canyon instead."

"Then see it. It's a free country."

Wun blinked at the expression—maybe the first time he'd heard it—and nodded. "Very well, I will. I'll talk to Jason about arranging transportation. Would you like to come?"

"What, to Arizona?"

"Yes! Tyler! To Arizona, to the Grand Canyon!" He might have been a Fourth, but at that moment he sounded like a ten-year-old. "Will you go there with me?"

"I'll have to think about that"

I was still thinking about it when I got a call from E. D. Lawton.

* * * * *

Since the election of Preston Lomax, E. D. Lawton had become politically invisible. His industry contacts were still in place—he could throw a party and expect powerful people to show up—but he would never again wield the kind of cabinet-level influence he had enjoyed under Garland's presidency. In fact there were rumors that he was in a state of psychological decline, holed up in his Georgetown residence making unwelcome phone calls to former political allies. Maybe so, but neither Jase nor Diane had heard from him recently; and when I picked up my home phone I was stunned when I heard his voice.

"I'd like to talk to you," he said.

Which was interesting, coming from the man who had conceived and financed Molly Seagram's acts of sexual espionage. My first and probably best instinct was to hang up. But as a gesture it seemed inadequate.

He added, "It's about Jason."

"So talk to Jason."

"I can't, Tyler. He won't listen to me."

"Does that surprise you?"

He sighed. "Okay, I understand, you're on his side, that's a given. But I'm not trying to hurt him. I want to help him. In fact it's urgent. Regarding his welfare."

"I don't know what that means."

"And I can't tell you over the goddamn phone. I'm in Florida now, I'm twenty minutes down the highway. Come to the hotel and I'll buy you a drink and then you can tell me to fuck off face-to-face. Please, Tyler. Eight o'clock, the lobby bar, the Hilton on ninety-five. Maybe you'll save somebody's life."

He hung up before I could answer.

I called Jason and told him what had happened.

"Wow," he said, then, "If the rumors are true, E.D.'s even less pleasant to spend time with than he used to be. Be careful."

"I wasn't planning to keep the appointment."

"You certainly don't have to. But… maybe you should."

"I've had enough of E.D.'s gamesmanship, thanks."

"It's just that it might be better if we know what's on his mind."

"You're saying you want me to see him?"

"Only if you're comfortable with it."

"Comfortable?"

"It's up to you, of course."

So I got in my car and drove dutifully up the highway, past Independence Day bunting (the fourth was tomorrow) and street-corner flag merchants (unlicensed, ready to bolt in their weathered pickups), rehearsing in my mind all the go-to-hell speeches I had ever imagined myself delivering to E. D. Lawton. By the time I reached the Hilton the sun was lost behind the rooftops and the lobby clock said 8:35.

E.D. was at a booth in the bar, drinking determinedly. He looked surprised to see me. Then he stood up, grabbed my arm, and steered me to the vinyl bench across the table from him.

"Drink?"

"I won't be here that long."

"Have a drink, Tyler. It'll improve your attitude."

"Has it improved yours? Just tell me what you want, E.D."

"I know a man's angry when he makes my name sound like an insult. What are you so pissed about? That thing with your girlfriend and the doctor, what's his name, Malmstein? Look, I want you to know I didn't arrange that. I didn't even sign off on it. I had a zealous staff working for me. Things were done in my name. Just so you know."

"That's a poor excuse for shitty behavior."

"I guess it is. Guilty as charged. I apologize. Can we move on to other things?"

I might have walked out then. I suppose the reason I stayed was the aura of desperate anxiety seeping out of him. E.D. was still capable of that brand of thoughtless condescension that had so endeared him to his family. But he was no longer confident. In the silence between vocal outbursts his hands were restless. He stroked his chin, folded and unfolded a cocktail napkin, smoothed his hair. This particular silence expanded until he was halfway through a second drink. Which was probably more than his second. The waitress had cycled past with a breezy familiarity.

"You have some influence with Jason," he said finally.

"If you want to talk to Jason, why not do it directly?"

"Because I can't. For obvious reasons."

"Then what do you want me to tell him?"

E.D. stared at me. Then he looked at his drink. "I want you to tell him to pull the plug on the replicator project. I mean literally. Turn off the refrigeration. Kill it."

Now it was my turn to be incredulous.

"You must know how unlikely that is."

"I'm not stupid, Tyler."

"Then why—"

"He's my son."

"You figured that out?"

"Because we had political arguments he's suddenly not my son? You think I'm so shallow I can't make that distinction? That because I don't agree with him I don't love him?"

"All I know about you is what I've seen."

"You've seen nothing." He started to say something else, then reconsidered. "Jason is a pawn for Wun Ngo Wen," he said. "I want him to wake up and understand what's happening."

"You raised him to be a pawn. Your pawn. You just don't like seeing someone else with that kind of influence over him."

"Bullshit. Bullshit. I mean, no, all right, we're confessing here, maybe it's true, I don't know, maybe we all need some family therapy, but that's not the point. The point is that every powerful person in this country happens to be in love with Wun Ngo Wen and his fucking replicator project. For the obvious reason that it's cheap and it looks plausible to the voting public. And who cares if it doesn't work because nothing else works and if nothing works then the end is nigh and everybody's problems will look different when the red sun rises. Right? Isn't that right? They dress it up, they call it a wager or gamble, but it's really just sleight-of-hand for the purpose of distracting the rubes."

"Interesting analysis," I said, "but—"

"Would I be here talking to you if I thought this was an interesting analysis! Ask the appropriate questions, if you want to argue with me."

"Such as?"

"Such as, who exactly is Wun Ngo Wen? Who does he represent, and what does he really want? Because despite what they say on television he's not Mahatma Gandhi in a Munchkin package. He's here because he wants something from us. He's wanted it from day one."

"The replicator launch."

"Obviously."

"Is that a crime?"

"A better question would be, why don't the Martians do this launch themselves?"

"Because they can't presume to speak on behalf of the entire solar system. Because a work like this can't be undertaken unilaterally."

He rolled his eyes. "Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying 'I love you'—it serves to facilitate the fucking. Unless, of course, the Martians really are angelic spirits descended from heaven to deliver us from evil. Which I presume you don't believe."

Wun had denied it so often that I could hardly object.

"I mean look at their technology. These guys have been doing high-end biotech for something like a thousand years. If they wanted to populate the galaxy with nanobots they could have done it a long time ago. So why didn't they? Ruling out explanations that depend on their better nature, why? Obviously, because they're afraid of a reprisal."

"Reprisal from the Hypotheticals? They don't know anything about the Hypotheticals we don't know."

"So they claim. Doesn't mean they're not afraid of them. As for us—we're the assholes who launched a nuclear strike on the polar artifacts not that long ago. Yeah, we'll take the responsibility, why not? Jesus, look at it, Tyler. It's a classic setup. It could hardly be more slick."

"Or maybe you're paranoid."

"Am I? Who defines paranoia this far into the Spin? We're all paranoid. We all know there are malevolent, powerful forces controlling our lives, which is pretty much the definition of paranoia."

"I'm just a GP," I said. "But intelligent people tell me—"

"You're talking about Jason, of course. Jason tells you it'll all be okay."

"Not just Jason. The whole Lomax administration. Most of Congress "

"But they depend on the wonks for advice. And the wonks are as hypnotized by all this as Jason is. You want to know what motivates your friend Jason? Fear. He's afraid of dying ignorant. The situation we're in, if he dies ignorant, it means the human race dies ignorant. And that scares the living shit out of him, the idea that a whole arguably intelligent species can be erased from the universe without ever understanding why or what for. Maybe instead of diagnosing my paranoia you ought to think about Jason's delusions of grandeur. He's made it his mission to figure out the Spin before he dies. Wun shows up and hands him a tool he can use to that end and of course he buys it: it's like handing a matchbook to a pyromaniac."

"Do you really want me to tell him this?"

"I don't—" E.D. looked suddenly morose, or maybe it was just his blood alcohol peaking. "I thought, because he listens to you—"

"You know better than that."

He closed his eyes. "Maybe I do. I don't know. But I have to try. Do you see that? For the sake of my conscience." I was startled that he had confessed to having one. "Let me be frank with you. I feel like I'm watching a train wreck in slow motion. The wheels are off the track and the driver hasn't noticed. So what do I do? Is it too late to pull the alarm? Too late to yell 'duck'? Probably so. But he's my son, Tyler. The man driving the train is my son."