Spin

"He's in no more danger than the rest of us."

"I think that's wrong. Even if this thing succeeds, all we stand to get out of it is abstract information. That's good enough for Jason. But it's not good enough for the rest of the world. You don't know Preston Lomax. I do. Lomax would be more than happy to tag Jason with a failure and hang him for it. A lot of people in his administration want Perihelion closed down or turned over to the military. And those are best-case outcomes. Worst case, the Hypotheticals get annoyed and turn off the Spin."

"You're worried Lomax will shut down Perihelion?"

"I built Perihelion. Yes, I care about it. But that's not why I'm here."

"I can tell Jason what you said, but you think he'll change his mind?"

"I—" Now E.D. inspected the tabletop. His eyes went a little vague and watery. "No. Obviously not. But if he wants to talk… I want him to know he can reach me. If he wants to talk. I wouldn't make it an ordeal for him. Honestly. I mean, if he wants that."

It was as if he had opened a door and his essential loneliness had come spilling out.

Jason assumed E.D. had come to Florida as part of some Machiavellian plan. The old E.D. might have. But the new E.D. struck me as an aging, remorseful, newly powerless man who found his strategies at the bottom of a glass and who had drifted into town on a guilty whim.

I said, more gently, "Have you tried talking to Diane?"

"Diane?" He waved his hand dismissively. "Diane changed her number. I can't get through to her. Anyway, she's involved with that fucking end-of-the-world cult."

"It's not a cult, E.D. Just a little church with some odd ideas. Simon's more involved with it than she is."

"She's Spin-paralyzed. Just like the rest of your fucking generation. She took a nosedive into this religious bullshit when she was barely out of puberty. I remember that. She was so depressed by the Spin. Then suddenly she was quoting Thomas Aquinas at the dinner table. I wanted Carol to speak to her about it. But Carol was useless, typically. So you know what I did? I organized a debate. Her and Jason. For six months they'd been arguing about God. So I made it formal, like, you know, a college debate, and the trick was, they each had to take the side they didn't support—Jason had to argue for the existence of God, and Diane had to take the atheist's point of view."

They had never mentioned this to me. But I could imagine with what dismay they had approached E.D.'s educational assignment.

"I wanted her to know how gullible she was. She did her best. I think she wanted to impress me. She repeated back what Jason had been saying to her, basically. But Jason—" His pride was obvious. His eyes shone and some of the color crept back into his face. "Jason was absolutely brilliant. Just stunningly, beautifully brilliant. Jason gave back every argument she had ever offered him and then some. And he didn't just parrot this stuff. He'd read the theology, he'd read biblical scholarship. And he smiled through the whole thing, as if he was saying, Look, I know these arguments backward, I know them as intimately as you do, I can make them in my sleep, and I still think they're contemptible. He was absolutely fucking relentless. And by the end of it she was crying. She held out until the end, but the tears were streaming down her face."

I stared.

He registered my expression and winced. "Go to hell with your moral superiority. I was trying to teach her a lesson. I wanted her to be a realist, not one of these fucking Spin-driven navel gazers. Your whole fucking generation—"

"Do you care whether she's alive?"

"Of course I do."

"No one's heard from her lately. It's not just you, E.D. She's out of touch. I thought I might try to track her down. Do you think that's a good idea?"

But the waitress had come with another drink and E.D. was rapidly losing interest in the subject, in me, in the world around him. "Yeah, I'd like to know if she's all right." He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cocktail napkin. "Yeah, you do that, Tyler."

Which is how I decided to accompany Wun Ngo Wen to the state of Arizona.

* * * * *

Traveling with Wun Ngo Wen was like traveling with a pop star or a head of state—heavy on security and light on spontaneity, but briskly efficient. A neatly timed succession of airport corridors, chartered planes, and highway convoys eventually deposited us at the head of Bright Angel trail, three weeks before the scheduled replicator launches, on a July day hot as fireworks and clear as creek water.

Wun stood where the guardrail followed the canyon's rim. The Park Service had closed the trail and visitor center to tourists, and three of their best and most photogenic rangers were poised to conduct Wun (and a contingent of federal security guys with shoulder holsters under their hiking whites) on an expedition to the canyon floor, where they would camp overnight.

Wun had been promised privacy once the hike began, but right now it was a circus. Media vans filled the parking area; journalists and paparazzi leaned into the cordon ropes like eager supplicants; a helicopter swooped along the canyon rim shooting video. Nevertheless Wun was happy. He grinned. He sucked in huge gulps of piney air. The heat was appalling, especially, I would have thought, for a Martian, but he showed no signs of distress despite the sweat glistening on his wrinkled skin. He wore a light khaki shirt, matching pants, and a pair of children's-size high-top hiking boots he'd been breaking in for the last couple of weeks.

He took a long drink from an aluminum canteen, then offered it to me.

"Water brother," he said.

I laughed. "Keep it. You'll need it."

"Tyler, I wish you could make the descent with me. This is—" He said something in his own language. "Too much stew for one pot. Too much beauty for one human being."

"You can always share it with the G-men."

He gave the security people a baleful glance. "Unfortunately I can't. They look but they do not see."

"Is that a Martian expression, too?"

"Might as well be," he said.

* * * * *

Wun gave the press pool and the newly arrived governor of Arizona a few genial last words while I borrowed one of the several Perihelion vehicles and headed for Phoenix.

Nobody interfered, nobody followed me; the press wasn't interested. I may have been Wun Ngo Wen's personal physician—a few of the press regulars might even have recognized me—but in the absence of Wun himself I wasn't newsworthy. Not even remotely. It was a good feeling. I turned up the air-conditioning until the interior of the car felt like a Canadian autumn. Maybe this was what the media was calling "desperate euphoria"—the we're-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even un-likely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat?

E.D. had accused my generation of Spin paralysis, and maybe that was true. We'd been caught in the headlights for thirty-odd years now. None of us had ever shaken that feeling of essential vulnerability, that deep personal awareness of the sword suspended over our heads. It tainted every pleasure and it made even our best and bravest gestures seem tentative and timid.

But even paralysis erodes. Beyond anxiety lies recklessness. Beyond immobility, action.

Not necessarily good or wise action, however. I passed three sets of highway signs warning against the possibility of roadside piracy. The traffic reporter on local radio listed roads closed for "police purposes" as indifferently as if she'd been talking about maintenance work.

But I made it without incident to the parking lot in back of Jordan Tabernacle.

The current pastor of Jordan Tabernacle was a crew-cut young man named Bob Kobel who had agreed by phone to meet me. He came to the car as I was locking it and escorted me into the rectory for coffee and doughnuts and some hard talk. He looked like a high-school athlete gone slightly paunchy, but still full of that old team spirit.

"I've thought about what you said," he told me. "I understand why you want to get in touch with Diane Lawton. Do you understand why that's an awkward issue for this church?"

"Not exactly, no."

"Thank you for your honesty. Let me explain, then. I became pastor of this congregation after the red heifer crisis, but I was a member for many years before that. I know the people you're curious about—Diane and Simon. I once called them friends."

"Not anymore?"

"I'd like to say we're still friends. But you'd have to ask them about that. See, Dr. Dupree, Jordan Tabernacle has had a contentious history for a relatively small congregation. Mostly it's because we started out as a mongrel church, a bunch of old-fashioned Dispensationalists who came together with some disillusioned New Kingdom hippies. What we had in common was a fierce belief in the imminence of the end times and a sincere desire for Christian fellowship. Not an easy alliance, as you might imagine. We've been through our share of controversies. Schisms. People veering off into little corners of Christianity, doctrinal disputes that, frankly, were almost incomprehensible to much of the congregation. But what happened with Simon and Diane was, they aligned themselves with a crowd of hard-core post-Tribulationists who wanted to claim Jordan Tabernacle for themselves. That made for some difficult politics, what the secular world might even call a power struggle."

"Which they lost?"

"Oh no. They were firmly in control. At least for a while. They radicalized Jordan Tabernacle in a way that made a whole lot of us uncomfortable. Dan Condon was one of them, and he's the one who got us involved with that network of loose cannons trying to bring about the Second Coming with a red cow. Which still strikes me as grotesquely presumptuous. As if the Lord of Hosts would wait on a cattle-breeding program before gathering up the faithful."

Pastor Kobel sipped his coffee.

I said, "I can't speak for their faith."

"You said on the phone Diane's been out of touch with her family."

"Yes."

"That may be her choice. I used to see her father on television. He looks like an intimidating man."

"I'm not here to kidnap her. I just want to make sure she's all right"

Another sip of coffee. Another thoughtful look.

"I'd like to tell you she's fine. And probably she is. But after the scandals, that whole group moved out to the boonies. And some of 'em still have open invitations to speak to federal investigators. So visiting is discouraged."

"But not impossible?"

"Not impossible if you're known to them. I'm not sure you qualify, Dr. Dupree. I could give you directions, but I doubt they'd let you in."

"Even if you vouched for me?"

Pastor Kobel blinked. He appeared to think about it.

Then he smiled. He took a scrap of paper from the desk behind him and wrote an address and a few lines of directions on it. "That's a good idea, Dr. Dupree. You tell 'em Pastor Bob sent you. But be careful all the same."

* * * * *

Pastor Bob Kobel had given me directions to Dan Condon's ranch, which turned out to be a clean two-story farmhouse in a scrubby valley many hours from town. Not much of a ranch, though, at least to my untutored eyes. There was a big barn, in poor repair compared to the house, and a few cattle grazing on weedy patches of grama grass.

As soon as I braked a big man in overalls bounded down the porch steps, about two hundred fifty pounds of him, with a full beard and an unhappy expression. I rolled down my window.

"Private property, chief," he said.

"I'm here to see Simon and Diane."

He stared and said nothing.

"They're not expecting me. But they know who I am."

"Did they invite you? Because we're not big on visitors out here."

"Pastor Bob Kobel said you wouldn't mind me coming by."

"He did, huh."

"He said to tell you I was essentially harmless."

"Pastor Bob, huh. You got any identification?"

I took out my ID card, which he closed in his hand and carried into the house.

I waited. I rolled down the windows and let a dry wind whisper through the car. The sun was low enough to cast sundial shadows from the pillars of the porch, and those shadows lengthened more than a little before the man came back and returned my card and said, "Simon and Diane will see you. And I'm sorry if I sounded a little short. My name's Sorley." I climbed out of the car and shook his hand. He had a fierce grip. "Aaron Sorley. Brother Aaron to most people."

He escorted me through the wheezing screen door into the farmhouse. Inside, the house was summer-hot but lively. A child in a cotton T-shirt ran past us at knee-level, laughing. We passed a kitchen in which two women were collaborating on what looked like a meal for many people—gallon pots on the stove, mounds of cabbage on the chopping board.

"Simon and Diane share the back bedroom, top of the stairs, last door down on your right—you can go on up."

But I didn't need a guide. Simon was waiting at the top of the stairs.

The former chenille-stem heir looked a little haggard.

Which was not surprising given that I hadn't seen him since the night of the Chinese attack on the polar artifacts twenty years ago. He could have been thinking the same about me. His smile was still remarkable, big and generous, a smile Hollywood might have exploited if Simon had loved Mammon more than God. He wouldn't settle for a handshake. He put his arms around me.

"Welcome!" he said. "Tyler! Tyler Dupree! I apologize if Brother Aaron was a little brusque just now. We don't get many visitors, but you'll find our hospitality is on the generous side, at least once you're in the door. We would've invited you before this if we'd known there was a shadow of a chance you could make the trip."

"Happy coincidence," I said. "I'm in Arizona because—"

"Oh, I know. We do hear the news now and then. You came along with the wrinkled man. You're his doctor."

He led me down the hall to a cream-painted door—their door, Simon's and Diane's—and opened it.

The room inside was furnished in a comfortable if slightly time-warped style, a big bed in one corner with a quilted comforter over a billowing mattress, a window curtain of yellow gingham, a cotton throw rug on a plain plank floor. And a chair by the window. And Diane sitting in the chair.

* * * * *

"It's good to see you," she said. "Thank you for making time for us. I hope we haven't taken you away from your work."

"No more than I wanted to be taken away from it. How are you?"

Simon walked across the room and stood beside her. He put his hand on her shoulder and left it there.

"We're both fine," she said. "Maybe not prosperous, but we get by. I guess that's as much as anyone can expect in these times. I'm sorry we haven't been in touch, Tyler. After the troubles at Jordan Tabernacle it's harder to trust the world outside the church. I suppose you heard about all that?"

"A royal mess," Simon put in. "Homeland Security took the computer and the photocopy machine out of the rectory, took them away and never gave them back. Of course we didn't have anything to do with any of that red heifer nonsense. All we did was pass on some brochures to the congregation. For them to decide, you know, if this was the kind of thing they wanted to get involved with. That's what got us interviewed by the federal government, if you can imagine such a thing. Apparently that's a crime in Preston Lomax's America."

"Nobody arrested, I hope."

"Nobody close to us," Simon said.

"But it made everyone nervous," Diane said.

"You start to think about things you took for granted. Phone calls. Letters." I said, "I suppose you have to be careful."

"Oh, yes," Diane said.

"Really careful," Simon said.

Diane wore a plain cotton shift tied at the waist and a checkered red-and-white head scarf that looked like a down-home hijab. No makeup, but she didn't need it. Putting Diane in dowdy clothing was as futile as hiding a searchlight under a straw hat.

I realized how hungry I'd been for the simple sight of her. How unreasonably hungry. I was ashamed of the pleasure I took in her presence. For two decades we had been little more than acquaintances. Two people who had once known each other. I wasn't entitled to this speeding pulse, the sense of weightless acceleration she provoked just by sitting in that wooden chair glancing at me and glancing away, blushing faintly when our eyes met.

It was unrealistic and it was unfair—unfair to someone; maybe me, probably her. I should never have come here.

She said, "And how are you? Still working with Jason, I gather. I hope he's all right."

"He's fine. He sends his love." She smiled.

"I doubt that. It doesn't sound like Jase."

"He's changed."

"Has he?"

"There's been a lot of talk about Jason," Simon said, still gripping her shoulder, his hand calloused and dark against the pale cotton. "About Jason and the wrinkled man, the so-called Martian."

"Not just so-called," I said. "He was born and bred there."

Simon blinked. "If you say so then it must be true. But as I said, there's been talk. People know the Antichrist is walking among us, that's a given, and he may already be a famous man, biding his time, plotting his futile war. So public figures receive a lot of scrutiny around here. I'm not saying Wun Ngo Wen is the Antichrist, but I wouldn't be alone if I did make that assertion. Are you close to him, Tyler?"

"I talk to him from time to time. I don't think he's ambitious enough to be the Antichrist." Though E. D. Lawton might have disagreed with that statement.

"This is the kind of thing that makes us cautious, though," Simon said. "This is why it's been a problem for Diane to stay in touch with her family."

"Because Wun Ngo Wen might be the Antichrist?"

"Because we don't want to attract attention from powerful people, this close to the end of days."

I didn't know what to say to that.

"Tyler's been on the road a long time," Diane said. "He's probably thirsty."

Simon's smile flashed back. "Would you like a drink before dinner? We have plenty of soda pop. Do you like Mountain Dew?"

"That would be fine," I said.

He left the room. Diane waited until we heard his footsteps on the stairs. Then she cocked her head and looked at me more directly. "You traveled a long distance."

"There was no other way to get in touch."

"But you didn't have to go to all this trouble. I'm healthy and happy. You can tell that to Jase. And Carol, for that matter. And E.D., if he cares. I don't need a surveillance visit."

"That's not what this is."

"Just stopped by to say hello?"

"Actually, yes, something like that."

"We haven't joined a cult. I'm not under duress."

"I didn't say you were, Diane."

"But you thought about it, didn't you?"

"I'm glad you're all right."

She turned her head and the light of the setting sun caught her eyes. "I'm sorry. I'm just a little startled. Seeing you like this. And I'm glad you're doing well back east. You are doing well, aren't you?"

I felt reckless. "No," I said. "I'm paralyzed. At least that's what your father thinks. He says our whole generation is Spin-paralyzed. We're all still caught in the moment when the stars went out. We never made peace with it."

"And do you think that's true?"

"Maybe truer than any of us want to admit." I was saying things I hadn't planned on saying. But Simon would be back any minute with his can of Mountain Dew and his adamantine smile and the opportunity would be lost, probably forever. "I look at you," I said, "and I still see the girl on the lawn outside the Big House. So yeah, maybe E.D. was right. Twenty-five stolen years. They went by pretty fast."

Diane accepted this in silence. Warm air turned the gingham curtains and the room grew darker. Then she said, "Close the door."

"Won't that look unusual?"

"Close the door, Tyler, I don't want to be overheard."

So I shut the door, gently, and she stood up and came to me and took my hands in her hands. Her hands were cool. "We're too close to the end of the world to lie to each other. I'm sorry I stopped calling, but there are four families sharing this house and one telephone and it gets to be pretty obvious who's talking to who."

"Simon wouldn't allow it."

"On the contrary. Simon would have accepted it. Simon accepts most of my habits and idiosyncrasies. But I don't want to lie to him. I don't want to carry that burden. But I admit I miss those calls, Tyler. Those calls were lifelines. When I had no money, when the church was splitting up, when I was lonely for no good reason… the sound of your voice was like a transfusion."

"Then why stop?"

"Because it was an act of disloyalty. Then. Now." She shook her head as if she were trying to communicate a difficult but important idea. "I know what you mean about the Spin. I think about it, too. Sometimes I pretend there's a world where the Spin didn't happen and our lives were different. Our lives, yours and mine." She took a tremorous breath, blushing deeply. "And if I couldn't live in that world I thought I could at least visit it every couple of weeks, call you up and be old friends and talk about something besides the end of the world."

"You consider this disloyal?"

"It is disloyal. I gave myself to Simon. Simon is my husband in the eyes of God and the law. If that wasn't a wise choice it was still my choice, and I may not be the kind of Christian I ought to be but I do understand about duty and about perseverance and about standing by someone even if—"

"Even if what, Diane?"

"Even if it hurts. I don't think either one of us needs to look any harder at the lives we might have had."

"I didn't come here to make you unhappy."

"No, but you're having that effect."

"Then I won't stay."

"You'll stay for supper. It's only polite." She put her hands at her side and looked at the floor. "Let me tell you something while we still have a little privacy. For what it's worth. I don't share all of Simon's convictions. I can't honestly say I believe the world will end with the faithful ascending into heaven. God forgive me, but it just doesn't seem plausible to me. But I do believe the world will end. Is ending. It's been ending all our lives. And—"

I said, "Diane—"

"No, let me finish. Let me confess. I do believe the world will end. I believe what Jason told me years and years ago, that one morning the sun will rise swollen and hellish and in a few hours or days, our time on Earth will be finished. I don't want to be alone on that morning—"

"No one does." Except maybe Molly Seagram, I thought. Molly playing On the Beach with her bottle of suicide pills. Molly and all the people like her.

"And I won't be alone. I'll be with Simon. What I'm confessing to you, Tyler—what I want to be forgiven for—is that when I picture that day it isn't necessarily Simon I see myself with."

The door banged open. Simon. Empty-handed. "Turns out dinner's already on the table," he said. "Along with a big pitcher of iced tea for thirsty travelers. Come down and join us. There's plenty to go around."

"Thank you" I said. "That sounds nice."

* * * * *

The eight adults sharing the farmhouse were the Sorleys, Dan Condon and his wife, the Mclsaacs, and Simon and Diane. The Sorleys had three children and the Mclsaacs had five, so that made seventeen of us at a big trestle table in the room adjoining the kitchen. The result was a pleasant din that lasted until "Uncle Dan" announced the blessing, at which point all hands promptly folded and all heads promptly bowed.

Dan Condon was the alpha male of the group. He was tall and almost sepulchral, black-bearded, ugly in a Lincolnesque way, and by way of blessing the meal he reminded us that feeding a stranger was a virtuous act even if the stranger happened to arrive without an invitation, amen.

By the way conversation flowed I deduced that Brother Aaron Sorley was second in command and probably the enforcer when it came to disputes. Both Teddy Mclsaac and Simon deferred to Sorley but looked to Condon for ultimate verdicts. Was the soup too salty? "Just about right," Condon said. The weather warm lately? "Hardly unusual in this part of the world," Condon declared.

The women spoke seldom and for the most part kept their eyes fixed on their plates. Condon's wife was a small, portly woman with a pinched expression. Sorley's wife was almost as big as he was and smiled prominently when the food drew compliments. Mclsaac's wife looked barely eighteen to his morose over-forty. None of the women spoke directly to me nor were they introduced to me by their given names. Diane was a diamond among these zircons, conspicuously so, and maybe that explained her careful demeanor.

The families were all refugees from Jordan Tabernacle. They were not the most radical parishioners, Uncle Dan explained, like those wild-eyed Dispensationalists who had fled to Saskatchewan last year, but nor were they tepid in their faith, like Pastor Bob Kobel and his crew of easy compromisers. The families had moved to the ranch (Condon's ranch) in order to separate themselves by a few miles from the temptations of the city and await the final call in monastic peace. So far, he said, the plan had been successful.

The rest of the table talk concerned a truck with a bad power cell, a roof-repair job still in progress, and a looming septic-tank crisis. I was as relieved when the meal ended as the children evidently were—Condon directed a fierce look at one of the Sorley girls when she sighed too audibly.

Once the dishes had been cleared (women's work at the Condon ranch), Simon announced that I had to leave.

Condon said, "Will you be all right on the road, Dr. Dupree? There are robberies almost every night now."

"I'll keep the windows up and the gas pedal down."

"That's probably wise."

Simon said, "If you don't mind, Tyler, I'll ride with you as far as the fence. I like the walk back, warm nights like this. Even by lantern-light."

I agreed.

Then everyone lined up for a cordial good-bye. The children squirmed until I shook their hands and they were dismissed. When her turn came Diane nodded at me but lowered her eyes, and when I offered my hand she took it without looking at me.

* * * * *

Simon rode about a quarter mile uphill from the ranch with me, fidgeting like a man with something to say but keeping his mouth shut. I didn't prompt him. The night air was fragrant and relatively cool. I pulled over where he told me to, at the peak of a ridge by a broken fence and a hedge of ocotillo. "Thank you for the ride," he said.

When he got out he lingered a moment over the open door.

"Something you wanted to say?" I asked.

He cleared his throat. "You know," he said finally, his voice barely louder than the wind, "I love Diane as much as I love God. I admit that sounds blasphemous. It sounded that way to me for a long time. But I believe God put her on Earth to be my wife, that this is her entire purpose. So lately I think it's two sides of the same coin. Loving her is my way of loving God. Do you think that's possible, Tyler Dupree?"

He didn't wait for an answer but closed the door and switched on his flashlight, and I watched in the mirror as he ambled down the hill into darkness and the clatter of crickets.

* * * * *

I didn't run into bandits or road pirates that night.

The absence of stars or moon had made the night a darker and more dangerous place since the early years of the Spin. Criminals had worked out elaborate strategies for rural ambuscades. Traveling at night dramatically increased my chances of being robbed or murdered.

Traffic was therefore sparse during the drive back to Phoenix, mostly interstate truckers in well-defended eighteen-wheelers. Much of the time I was alone on the road, carving a bright wedge out of the night and listening to the grit of the wheels and the rush of the wind. If there's a lonelier sound I don't know what it is. I guess that's why they put radios in cars.

But there were no thieves or murderers on the road.

Not that night.

* * * * *

So I stayed in a motel outside Flagstaff and caught up with Wun Ngo Wen and his security crew in the executive lounge at the airport the following morning.

Wun was in a talkative mood on the flight to Orlando. He'd been studying the geology of the desert southwest and was particularly delighted by a rock he'd bought at a souvenir shack on the way back to Phoenix—forcing the entire cavalcade to pull over and wait while he picked through a bin of fossils. He showed me his prize, a chalky spiral concavity in a chunk of Bright Angel shale an inch on a side. The imprint of a trilobite, he said, dead some ten million years, recovered from these rocky, sandy wastes below us, which had once been the bed of an ancient sea.

He'd never seen a fossil before. There were no fossils on Mars, he said. No fossils anywhere in the solar system except here, here on the ancient Earth.

* * * * *

At Orlando we were ushered into the backseat of another car in another convoy, this one bound for the Perihelion compound.

We rolled out at dusk after a perimeter sweep held us up for an hour or so. Once we reached the highway Wun apologized for yawning: "I'm not accustomed to so much physical exercise."

"I've seen you on the treadmill at Perihelion. You do all right."

"A treadmill is hardly a canyon."

"No, I suppose it isn't."

"I'm sore but not sorry. It was a wonderful expedition. I hope you spent your time as happily."

I told him I'd located Diane and that she was healthy.

"That's good. I'm sorry I couldn't meet her. If she's anything like her brother she must be a remarkable individual."

"She is."

"But the visit wasn't all you'd hoped?"

"Maybe I was hoping for the wrong thing." Maybe I'd been hoping for the wrong thing for a long time.

"Well," Wun said, yawning, eyes half-closed, "the question… as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded."

I wanted to ask him what he meant, but his head had lolled against the upholstery and it seemed kinder to let him sleep.

* * * * *

There were five cars in our convoy plus a personnel carrier with a small detachment of infantrymen in case of trouble.

The APC was a boxy vehicle about the size of the armored cars used to ship cash to and from regional banks and easily mistaken for one.

In fact a Brink's convoy happened to be about ten minutes ahead of us until it turned off the highway toward Palm Bay. Gang spotters—placed on the road past major intersections and linked by phone—confused us with the Brink's shipment and marked us as a target for a band of strikers waiting up ahead.

The strikers were sophisticated criminals who had already emplaced surface mines at a stretch of the road skirting a swampy wilderness preserve. They also carried automatic rifles and a couple of rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and a Brink's convoy would have been no match for them: five minutes after the first concussion the strikers would have been deep in bog country, dividing the spoils. But their spotters had made a critical mistake. Taking on a bank delivery is one thing; taking on five security-modified vehicles and an APC full of highly trained military and security personnel is a different matter entirely.

I was gazing out the tinted window of the car, watching low green water and bald cypress slide past, when the highway lights went out.

A pirate had cut the buried power cables. Suddenly the dark was truly dark, a wall beyond the window, nothing looking back at me but my own startled reflection. I said, "Wun—"

But he was still asleep, his wrinkled face blank as a thumbprint.

Then the lead car hit the mine.

The concussion beat at our hardened vehicle like a steel fist. The convoy was prudently spaced, but we were close enough to see the point car rise on a gout of yellow flame and drop back to the tarmac burning, wheels splayed.

Our driver swerved and, despite what he had probably been taught, slowed down. The road was blocked ahead. And now there was a second concussion at the back of the convoy, another mine, blasting chunks of pavement into the wetlands and boxing us in with ruthless efficiency.

Wun was awake now, baffled and terrified. His eyes were as big as moons and almost as bright.

Small-arms fire rattled in the near distance. I ducked and pulled Wun down next to me, both of us folded double around our seat belts and prying frantically at the clasps. The driver stopped, pulled a weapon from somewhere under the dash, and rolled out the door.

At the same time a dozen men spilled out of the APC behind us and began to fire into the darkness, trying to establish a perimeter. Plainclothes security men from other vehicles began to converge on our car, looking to protect Wun, but gunfire pinned them before they reached us.

The quick response must have rattled the road pirates. They opened up with heavy weapons. One of them fired what I was later told was a rocket-propelled grenade. All I knew was that I was suddenly deaf and the car was rotating around a complicated axis and the air was full of smoke and pebbled glass.

* * * * *

Then, mysteriously, I was halfway out the rear door, face pressed into the gritty pavement, tasting blood, and Wun was next to me, a few feet ahead, lying on his side. One of his shoes—one of the child-size hiking boots he'd bought for the Canyon—was on fire.

I called his name. He stirred, feebly. Bullets battered the ruin of the car behind us, punching craters in steel. My left leg was numb. I pulled myself closer and used a torn hank of upholstery to smother the burning shoe. Wun groaned and lifted his head.

Our guys returned fire, tracers streaking into the wetlands on each side of the road.

Wun arched his back and rose to his knees. He didn't seem to know where he was. He was bleeding from his nose. His forehead was gashed and raw.

"Don't stand up," I croaked.

But he went on trying to gather his feet under him, the burned boot flopping and stinking.

"For god's sake," I said. I reached out but he scuttled away. "For god's sake, don't stand up!"

But he managed it at last, levered himself up and stood trembling, profiled by the burning wreckage. He looked down and seemed to recognize me.

"Tyler," he said. "What happened?"

Then the bullets found him.

* * * * *

There were plenty of people who had hated Wun Ngo Wen. They distrusted his motives, like E. D. Lawton, or despised him for more complex and less defensible reasons: because they believed he was an enemy of God; because his skin happened to be black; because he espoused the theory of evolution; because he embodied physical evidence of the Spin and disturbing truths about the age of the external universe.

Many of those people had whispered about killing him. Dozens of intercepted threats were recorded in the files of Homeland Security.

But he wasn't killed by a conspiracy. What killed him was a combination of greed, mistaken identity, and Spin-engendered recklessness.

It was an embarrassingly terrestrial death.

Wun's body was cremated (after an autopsy and massive sample-extraction) and he was given a full state funeral. His memorial service in Washington's National Cathedral was attended by dignitaries from all over the planet. President Lomax delivered a lengthy eulogy.

There was talk of sending his ashes into orbit, but nothing ever came of it. According to Jason, the urn was stored in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution pending final disposition.

It's probably still there.

HOME BEFORE DARK

So I spent a few days in a Miami-area hospital, recovering from minor injuries, describing events to federal investigators, and coming to grips with the fact of Wun's death. It was during this time I resolved to leave Perihelion and open a private practice of my own.

But I decided not to announce my intention until after the replicator launch. I didn't want to trouble Jason with it at a critical time.

* * * * *

By comparison with the terraforming effort of previous years, the replicator launch was anticlimactic. Its results would be, if anything, greater and more subtle; but its very efficiency—a mere handful of rockets, no clever timing required—failed as drama.

President Lomax was keeping this one close to home. In a move that had infuriated the E.U., the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians, Lomax had declined to share replicator technology beyond the must-know circles at NASA and Perihelion, and he had deleted all relevant passages in the publicly released editions of the Martian archives. "Artificial microbes" (in Lomax-speak) were a "high risk" technology. They could be "weaponized." (This was true, as even Wun had admitted.) The U.S. was thus obliged to take "custodial control" of the information in order to prevent "nanotech proliferation and a new and deadly arms race."

The European Union had cried foul and the U.N. was convening an investigatory panel, but in a world with brushfire wars burning on four continents Lomax's argument carried considerable weight. (Even though, as Wun might have countered, the Martians had successfully lived with the same technology for hundreds of years—and the Martians were no more or less human than their terrestrial ancestors.)

For all these reasons, the late-summer launch date at Canaveral drew minimal crowds and almost desultory media attention. Wun Ngo Wen was dead, after all, and the news services had exhausted themselves covering his murder. Now the four heavy Delta rockets set in their offshore gantries looked like little more than a footnote to the memorial service, or worse, a rerun: the seed launches retooled for an age of diminished expectations.

But even if it was a sideshow, it was still a show. Lomax flew in for the occasion. E. D. Lawton had accepted a courtesy invitation and by this time was willing to pledge good behavior. And so, on the morning of the appointed day, I rode with Jason to the V.I.P. bleachers at the eastern shore of Cape Canaveral.

We faced seaward. The old offshore gantries, still functional but gone a little ruddy with saltwater rust, had been built to hold the heaviest lifters of the seed-launch era. The brand-new Deltas were dwarfed by them. Not that we could see much detail from this distance, only four white pillars out at the misty limits of the summer ocean, plus the fretwork of other unused launch platforms, the rail connectors, the tenders and support vessels anchored at a safe perimeter. It was a clear, hot summer morning. The wind was gusty—not strong enough to scrub the launch but more than enough to snap the flag crisply and tousle the coifed hair of President Lomax as he climbed the podium to address the assembled dignitaries and press.

He delivered a speech, mercifully brief. He cited the legacy of Wun Ngo Wen and his faith that the replicator network about to be planted in the icy fringes of the solar system would soon enlighten us about the nature and purpose of the Spin. He said brave things about humanity leaving its mark on the cosmos. ("He means the galaxy," Jason whispered, "not the cosmos. And—leaving our mark? Like a dog peeing on a hydrant? Someone really ought to edit these speeches") Then Lomax quoted a poem by a nineteenth-century Russian poet named F. I. Tiutchev, who couldn't have imagined the Spin but wrote as if he had:

Gone like a vision is the external world

and Man, a homeless orphan, has to face

helpless, naked and alone,

the blackness of immeasurable space.

All life and brightness seem an ancient dream,

while in the substance of the night,

unraveled, alien, he now perceives

a fateful something that is his by right.

Then Lomax departed the stage, and after the prosaic business of backward counting, the first of the rockets rode its column of fire into the unraveling cosmos behind the sky. A fateful something. Ours by right.

While everyone else looked up, Jason closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap.

* * * * *

We adjourned to a reception room along with the rest of the invited guests, pending a round of press interviews. (Jason was scheduled for twenty minutes with a cable news network, I was scheduled for ten. I was "the physician who attempted to save the life of Wun Ngo Wen," though all I had done was extinguish his burning shoe and pull his body out of the line of fire after he fell. A quick ABC check—airway, breathing, circulation—made it abundantly clear that I couldn't help him and that it would be wiser simply to keep my head down until help arrived. Which is what I told reporters, until they learned to stop asking.)

President Lomax came through the room shaking hands before he was hustled away once more by his handlers. Then E.D. cornered Jason and me at the buffet table.

"I guess you got what you wanted," he said, meaning the comment for Jason but looking at me. "It can't be undone now."

"In that case," Jason said, "perhaps it's not worth arguing about."

Wun and I had made a point of keeping Jase under observation in the months after his treatment. He had submitted to a battery of neurological tests including another series of clandestine MRIs. None of the tests had revealed any deficiency, and the only obvious physiological changes were the ones connected with his recovery from AMS. A clean bill of health, in other words. Cleaner than I once would have imagined possible.

But he did seem subtly different. I had asked Wun whether all Fourths underwent psychological changes. "In a certain sense," he had answered, "yes." Martian Fourths were expected to behave differently after their treatment, but there was a subtlety embedded in the word "expectation"—yes, Wun said, it was "expected" (i.e., considered likely) that a Fourth would change, but change was also "expected of him" (required of him) by his community and peers.

How had Jason changed? He moved differently, for one thing. Jase had disguised his AMS very cleverly, but there was a perceptible new freedom in his walk and his gestures. He was the Tin Man, post-oilcan. He was still occasionally moody, but his moods were less violent. He swore less often—that is, he was less likely to stumble into one of those emotional sinkholes in which the only useful adjective is "fucking." He joked more than he used to.

All these things sound good. And they were, but they were also superficial. Other changes were more troubling. He had withdrawn from the daily management of Perihelion to such a degree that his staff briefed him once a week and otherwise ignored him. He had begun reading Martian astrophysics from the raw translations, skirting security protocols if not absolutely violating them. The only event that had penetrated his newfound calm was the death of Wun, and that had left him haunted and hurt in ways I still didn't quite understand.

"You realize," E.D. said, "what we just saw was the end of Perihelion."

And in a real sense it was. Apart from interpreting whatever feedback we received from the replicators, Perihelion as a civilian space agency was finished. The downsizing had already begun in earnest. Half the support staff had been laid off. The tech people were draining away more slowly, lured by universities or big-money contractors.

"Then so be it," Jason said, displaying what was either the innate equanimity of a Fourth or a long-suppressed hostility to his father. "We've done the work we needed to do."

"You can stand here and deliver that verdict? To me?"

"I believe it's true."

"Does it matter that I spent my life building what you just tore down?"

"Does it matter?" Jason pondered this as if E.D. had asked a real question. "Ultimately, no, I don't suppose it does."

"Jesus, what happened to you? You make a mistake of this magnitude—"

"I don't think it's a mistake."

"—you ought to assume the responsibility for it."

"I think I have."

"Because if it fails, you'll be the one they'll blame."

"I understand that."

"The one they'll burn."

"If it comes to that."

"I can't protect you," E.D. said.

"You never could," Jason said.

* * * * *

I rode back to Perihelion with him. Jase was driving a German fuel-cell car these days—a niche car, since most of us still owned gas-burners designed by people who didn't believe there was a future worth worrying about. Commuters burned past us in the speed lanes, hurrying home before dark.

I told him I meant to leave Perihelion and establish a practice of my own.

Jase was silent for a little while, watching the road, warm air boiling off the pavement as if the edges of the world had softened in the heat. Then he said, "But you don't have to, Tyler. Perihelion ought to struggle along for a few years yet, and I have enough clout to keep you on payroll. I can hire you privately, if need be."

"That's the point, though, Jase. There is no need. I was always a little underutilized at Perihelion."

"Bored, you mean?"

"It might be nice to feel useful for a change."

"You don't feel useful? If not for you I'd be in a wheelchair."

"That wasn't me. That was Wun. All I did was push the plunger."

"Hardly. You saw me through the ordeal. I appreciate that. Besides… I need someone to talk to, someone who isn't trying to buy or sell me."

"When was the last time we had a real conversation?"

"Just because I weathered one medical crisis doesn't mean there won't be another."

"You're a Fourth, Jase. You won't need to see a doctor for another fifty years."

"And the only people who know that about me are you and Carol. Which is another reason I don't want you to leave." He hesitated. "Why not take the treatment yourself? Give yourself another fifty years, minimum."

I supposed I could. But fifty years would carry us deep into the heliosphere of the expanding sun. It would be a futile gesture. "I'd rather be useful now."

"You're absolutely determined to leave?"

E.D. would have said, Stay. E.D. would have said, It's your job to take care of him.

E.D. would have said a lot of things.

"Absolutely."

Jason gripped the wheel and stared down the road as if he had seen something infinitely sad there. "Well," he said. "Then all I can do is wish you luck."

* * * * *

The day I left Perihelion the support staff summoned me into one of the now seldom-used boardrooms for a farewell party, where I was given the kind of gifts appropriate to yet another departure from a dwindling workforce: a miniature cactus in a terracotta pot, a coffee mug with my name on it, a pewter tie pin in the shape of a caduceus.

Jase showed up at my door that evening with a more problematic gift

It was a cardboard box tied with string. It contained, when I opened it, about a pound of densely printed paper documents and six unlabelled optical memory disks.

"Jase?"

"Medical information," he said. "You can think of it as a textbook."

"What kind of medical information?"

He smiled. "From the archives."

"The Martian archives?"

He nodded.

"But that's classified information."

"Yes, technically, it is. But Lomax would classify the phone number for 911 if he thought he could get away with it. There may be information here that would put Pfizer and Eli Lilly out of business. But I don't see that as a legitimate concern. Do you?"

"No, but—"

"Nor do I think Wun would have wanted it kept secret. So I've been quietly doling out little pieces of the archives, here and there, to people I trust. You don't have to actually do anything with it, Tyler. Look at it or ignore it, file it away—fine."

"Great. Thanks, Jase. A gift I could be arrested for possessing."

His smile widened. "I know you'll do the right thing."

"Whatever that is."

"You'll figure it out. I have faith in you, Tyler. Ever since the treatment—"

"What?"

"I seem to see things a little more clearly," he said.

He didn't explain, and in the end I tucked the box into my luggage as a kind of souvenir. I was tempted to write the word mementos on it.

* * * * *

Replicator technology was slow even by comparison with the terraforming of a dead planet. Two years passed before we had anything like a detectable response from the payloads we had scattered among the planetesimals at the edge of the solar system.

The replicators were busy out there, though, barely touched by the gravity of the sun, doing what they were designed to do: reproducing by the inch and the century, following instructions written into their superconductive equivalent of DNA. Given time and an adequate supply of ice and carbonaceous trace elements, they would eventually phone home. But the first few detector satellites placed in orbit beyond the Spin membrane dropped back to Earth without recording a signal.

During those two years I managed to find a partner (Herbert Hakkim, a soft-spoken Bengali-born physician who had finished his internship the year Wun visited the Grand Canyon), and we took over a San Diego practice from a retiring GP. Hakkim was frank and friendly with patients but he had no real social life and seemed to prefer it that way. We seldom got together outside office hours, and I think the most intimate question he ever asked me was why I carried two cell phones.

(One for the customary reasons; the other because the number assigned to it was the last one I'd given Diane. Not that it ever rang. Nor did I attempt to contact her again. But if I had let the number lapse she would have had no way of reaching me, and that still seemed… well, wrong.)

I liked my work, and by and large I liked my patients. I saw more gunshot wounds than I might once have expected, but these were the hard years of the Spin; the domestic trend-lines for murder and suicide had begun to arc toward vertical. Years when it seemed like everyone under thirty was wearing some kind of uniform: armed forces, National Guard, Homeland Security, private security; even Home Scouts and Home Guides for the intimidated products of a dwindling birth rate. Years when Hollywood began to churn out ultraviolent or ultrapious films in which, however, the Spin was never explicitly mentioned; the Spin, like sex and the words describing it, having been banned from "entertainment discourse" by Lomax's Cultural Council and the FCC.

These were also the years when the administration enacted a raft of new laws aimed at sanitizing the Martian archives. Wun's archives, according to the president and his congressional allies, contained intrinsically dangerous knowledge that had to be redacted and secured. Opening them to the public would have been "like posting plans for a suitcase nuke on the Internet." Even the anthropological material was vetted: in the published version, a Fourth was defined as "a respected elder." No mention of medically mediated longevity.

But who needed or wanted longevity? The end of the world was closer every day.

The flickers were evidence of that, if anyone needed proof.

* * * * *

The first positive results from the replicator project had been in for half a year when the flickers began.

I heard most of the replicator news from Jase a couple of days before it broke in the media. In itself, it was nothing spectacular. A NASA/Perihelion survey satellite had recorded a faint signal from a known Oort Cloud body well beyond the orbit of Pluto—a periodic uncoded blip that was the sound of a replicator colony nearing completion. (Nearing maturity, you might say.) Which appears trivial unless you consider what it means: The dormant cells of an utterly novel, man-made biology had alighted on a chunk of dusty ice in deepest space. Those cells had then begun an agonizingly slow form of metabolism, in which they absorbed the scant heat of the distant sun, used it to separate a few nearby molecules of water and carbon, and duplicated themselves with the resulting raw materials.

Over the course of many years the same colony grew to, perhaps, the size of a ball bearing. An astronaut who had made the impossibly long journey and knew precisely where to look would have seen it as a black dimple on the rocky/icy regolith of the host planetesimal. But the colony was fractionally more efficient than its single-celled ancestor. It began to grow more quickly and generate more heat. The temperature differential between the colony and its surroundings was only a fraction of a degree Kelvin (except when brief reproductive bursts pumped latent energy into the local environment), but it was persistent.

More millennia (or terrestrial months) passed. Subroutines in the replicators' genetic substrate, activated by local heat gradients, modified the colony's growth. Cells began to differentiate. Like a human embryo, the colony produced not merely more cells but specialized cells, the equivalent of heart and lungs, arms and legs. Tendrils of it forced themselves into the loose material of the planetesimal, mining it for carbonaceous molecules.

Eventually, microscopic but carefully calculated vapor bursts began to slow the host object's rotation (patiently, over centuries), until the colony's face was turned perpetually to the sun. Now differentiation began in earnest. The colony extruded carbon/carbon and carbon/silicon junctions; it grew monomolecular whiskers to join these junctions together, bootstrapping itself up the ladder of complexity; from these junctions it generated light-sensitive dots—eyes—and the capacity to generate and process microbursts of radio-frequency noise.

And as more centuries passed the colony elaborated and refined these capabilities until it announced itself with a simple periodic chirp, the equivalent of the sound a newborn sparrow might make. Which was what our satellite had detected.

The news media ran the story for a couple of days (with stock footage of Wun Ngo Wen, his funeral, the launch) and then forgot about it. After all, this was only the first stage of what the replicators were designed to do.

Merely mat. Uninspiring. Unless you thought about it for more man thirty seconds.

This was technology with, literally, a life of its own. A genie out of the bottle for good and all.

* * * * *

The flicker happened a few months later.

The flicker was the first sign of a change or disturbance in the Spin membrane—first, that is, unless you count the event that followed the Chinese missile attack on the polar artifacts, back in the earliest years of the Spin. Both events were visible from every point on the globe. But beyond that key resemblance they were not much alike.

After the missile attack the Spin membrane had seemed to stutter and recover, generating strobed images of the evolving sky, multiple moons and gyrating stars.

The flicker was different.

I watched it from the balcony of my suburban apartment. A warm September night. Some of the neighbors had already been outside when the flicker started. Now all of us were. We perched on our ledges like starlings, chattering.

The sky was bright.

Not with stars but with infinitesimally narrow threads of golden fire, crackling like heatless lightning from horizon to horizon. The threads moved and shifted erratically; some flickered or faded altogether; occasionally new ones flared into existence. It was as mesmerizing as it was frightening.

The event was global, not local. On the daylight side of the planet the phenomenon was only slightly visible, lost in sunlight or obscured by cloud; in North and South America and western Europe the dark-sky displays caused sporadic outbreaks of panic. After all, we'd been expecting the end of the world for more years than most of us cared to count. This looked like an overture, at least, to the real thing.

There were hundreds of successful or attempted suicides that night, plus scores of murders or mercy killings, in the city where I lived. Worldwide, the numbers were incalculably larger. Apparently there were plenty of people like Molly Seagram, people who chose to dodge the much-predicted boiling of the seas with a few lethal tablets of this or that. And spares for family and friends. Many of them opted for the final exit as soon as the sky lit up. Prematurely, as it turned out.

The display lasted eight hours. By morning I was at the local hospital lending a hand in the emergency ward. By noon I had seen seven separate cases of carbon monoxide poisoning, folks who had intentionally locked themselves in the garage with an idling car. Most were dead well before I pronounced them and the survivors were hardly better off. Otherwise healthy people, people I might have passed at the grocery store, would be spending the rest of their lives hooked up to ventilators, irreparably brain damaged, victims of a botched exit strategy. Not pleasant. But the gunshot wounds to the head were worse. I couldn't treat them without thinking of Wun Ngo Wen lying on that Florida highway, blood gouting from what remained of his skull.

Eight hours. Then the sky was blank again, the sun beaming out of it like the punchline to a bad joke.

It happened again a year and a half later.

* * * * *

"You look like a man who lost his faith," Hakkim once told me.

"Or never had one," I said.

"I don't mean faith in God. Of that you seem to be genuinely innocent. Faith in something else. I don't know what."

Which seemed cryptic. But I understood it a little more clearly the next time I talked to Jason.

He called me at home. (On my regular cell, not the orphan phone I carried with me like a luckless charm.) I said, "Hello?" and he said, "You must be watching this on television."

"Watching what?"

"Turn on one of the news networks. Are you alone?"

The answer was yes. By choice. No Molly Seagram to complicate the end of days. The TV remote was on the coffee table where I'd left it. Where I always left it.

The news channel showed a graph of many colors accompanied by a droning voice-over. I muted it. "What am I looking at, Jase?"

"A JPL press conference. The data set retrieved from the last orbital receiver."

Replicator data, in other words. "And?"

"We're in business," he said. I could practically hear his smile.

The satellite had detected multiple radio sources narrow-casting from the outer solar system. Which meant that more than one replicator colony had grown to maturity. And the data were complex, Jason said, not simple. As the replicator colonies aged, their growth rate slowed but their functions became more refined and purposeful. They weren't just leaning sunward for free energy anymore. They were analyzing starlight, calculating planetary orbits on neural networks made of silicon and carbon fibers, comparing them to templates etched into their genetic code. No less than a dozen fully adult colonies had sent back precisely the data they were designed to collect, four streams of binary data declaring:

1. This was a planetary system of a star with a solar mass of 1.0;

2. The system possessed eight large planetary bodies (Pluto falling under the detectable mass limit);

3. Two of those planets were optically blank, surrounded by Spin membranes; and

4. The reporting replicator colonies had shifted into reproductive mode, shedding nonspecific seed cells and launching them on bursts of cometary vapor toward neighboring stars.

The same message, Jase said, had been beamed at local, less mature colonies, which would respond by bypassing redundant functions and directing their energy into purely reproductive behavior.

In other words, we had successfully infected the outer system with Wun's quasi-biological systems.

Which were now sporulating.

I said, "This tells us nothing about the Spin."

"Of course not. Not yet. But this little trickle of information will be a torrent before long. In time we'll be able to put together a Spin map of all the nearby stars—maybe eventually the entire galaxy. From that we ought to be able to deduce where the Hypotheticals come from, where they've been Spinning, and what ultimately happens to Spin worlds when their stars expand and burn out."

"That won't fix anything, though, will it?"

He sighed as if I'd disappointed him by asking a stupid question. "Probably not. But isn't it better to know than to speculate? We might find out we're doomed, but we might find out we have more time left than we expected. Remember, Tyler, we're working on other fronts, too. We've been delving into the theoretical physics in Wun's archives. If you model the Spin membrane as a wormhole enclosing an object accelerating at near-light-speed—"

"But we're not accelerating. We're not going anywhere." Except headlong into the future.

"No, but if you do the calculation it yields results that match our observation of the Spin. Which might give us a clue as to which forces the Hypotheticals are manipulating."

"To what end, though, Jase?"

"Too soon to say. But I don't believe in the futility of knowledge."

"Even if we're dying?"

"Everyone dies."

"I mean, as a species."

"That remains to be seen. Whatever the Spin is, it has to be more than a sort of elaborate global euthanasia. The Hypotheticals must be acting with a purpose."

Maybe so. But this, I realized, was the faith that had deserted me. The faith in Big Salvation.

All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.

Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn't the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

* * * * *

The flicker came back the following winter, persisted for forty-four hours, then vanished again. Many of us began to think of it as a kind of celestial weather, unpredictable but generally harmless.

Pessimists pointed out that the intervals between episodes were growing shorter, the duration of the episodes growing longer.

In April there was a flicker that lasted three days and interfered with the transmission of aerostat signals. This one provoked another (smaller) wave of successful and attempted suicides—people driven to panic less by what they saw in the sky than by the failure of their telephones and TV sets.

I had stopped paying attention to the news, but certain events were impossible to ignore: the military setbacks in North Africa and eastern Europe, the cult coup in Zimbabwe, the mass suicides in Korea. Exponents of apocalyptic Islam scored big numbers in the Algerian and Egyptian elections that year. A Filipino cult that worshipped the memory of Wun Ngo Wen—whom they had reconceived as a pastoralist saint, an agrarian Gandhi—had successfully engineered a general strike in Manila.

And I got a few more calls from Jason. He mailed me a phone with some kind of built-in encryption pad, which he claimed would give us "pretty good protection against keyword hunters," whatever that meant.

"Sounds a little paranoid," I said.

"Usefully paranoid, I think."

Perhaps, if we wanted to discuss matters of national security. We didn't, though, at least not at first. Instead Jason asked me about my work, my life, the music I'd been listening to. I understood that he was trying to generate the kind of conversation we might have had twenty or thirty years ago— before Perihelion, if not before the Spin. He had been to see his mother, he told me. Carol was still counting out her days by clock and bottle. Nothing had changed. Carol had insisted on that. The house staff kept everything clean, everything in its place. The Big House was like a time capsule, he said, as if it had been hermetically sealed on the first night of the Spin. It was a little spooky that way.

I asked whether Diane ever called.

"Diane stopped talking to Carol back before Wun was killed. No, not a word from her."

Then I asked him about the replicator project. There hadn't been anything in the papers lately.

"Don't bother looking. JPL is sitting on the results."

I heard the unhappiness in his voice. "That bad?"

"It's not entirely bad news. At least not until recently. The replicators did everything Wun hoped they would. Amazing things, Tyler. I mean absolutely amazing. I wish I could show you the maps we generated. Big navigable software maps. Almost two hundred thousand stars, in a halo of space hundreds of light-years in diameter. We know more about stellar and planetary evolution now than an astronomer of E.D.'s generation could have imagined."

"But nothing about the Spin?"

"I didn't say that."

"So what did you learn?"

"For one thing, we're not alone. In that volume of space we've found three optically blank planets roughly the size of the Earth, in orbits that are habitable by terrestrial standards or would have been in the past. The nearest is circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The farthest—"

"I don't need the details."

"If we look at the age of the stars involved and make some plausible assumptions, the Hypotheticals appear to emanate from somewhere in the direction of the galactic core. There are other indicators, too. The replicators found a couple of white dwarf stars—burned-out stars, essentially, but stars that would have looked like the sun a few billion years ago—with rocky planets in orbits that should never have outlasted the solar expansion."

"Spin survivors?"

"Maybe."

"Are these living planets, Jase?"

"We have no real way of knowing. But they don't have Spin membranes to protect them, and their current stellar environment is absolutely hostile by our standards."

"Meaning what?"

"I don't know. Nobody knows. We thought we'd be able to make more meaningful comparisons as the replicator network expanded. What we created with the replicators is really a neural network on an unimaginably large scale. They talk to themselves the way neurons talk to themselves, except they do it across centuries and light-years. It's absolutely, stunningly beautiful, what they do. A network larger than anything humanity has ever built. Gathering information, culling it, storing it, feeding it back to us—"

"So what went wrong?"

He sounded as if it hurt him to say it. "Maybe age. Everything ages, even highly protected genetic codes. They might be evolving beyond our instructions. Or—"

"Yeah, but what happened, Jase?"

"The data are diminishing. We're getting fragmentary, contradictory information from the replicators that are farthest from Earth. That could mean a lot of things. If they're dying, it might reflect some emerging flaw in the design code. But some of the long-established relay nodes are starting to shut down, too."

"Something's targeting them?"

"That's too hasty an assumption. Here's another idea. When we launched these things into the Oort Cloud we created a simple interstellar ecology—ice, dust, and artificial life. But what if we weren't the first? What if the interstellar ecology isn't simple?"

"You mean there might be other kinds of replicators out there?"

"Could be. If so, they'd be competing for resources. Maybe even using each other for resources. We thought we were sending our devices into a sterile void. But there might be competitor species, there might even be predator species."

"Jason… you think something's eating them?"

"It's possible," he said.

* * * * *

The flicker came back in June and clocked nearly forty-eight hours before it dissipated.

In August, fifty-six hours of flicker plus intermittent telecom problems.

When it started again in late September no one was surprised. I spent most of the first evening with the blinds closed, ignoring the sky, watching a movie I'd downloaded a week before. An old movie, pre-Spin. Watching it not for the plot but for the faces, the faces of people the way they used to look, people who hadn't spent their lives afraid of the future. People who, every once in a while, talked about the moon and the stars without irony or nostalgia.

Then the phone rang.

Not my personal phone, and not the encrypting phone Jase had sent me. I recognized the three-tone ring instantly even though I hadn't heard it for years. It was audible but faint— faint because I'd left the phone in the pocket of a jacket that was hanging in the hallway closet.

It rang twice more before I fumbled it out and said, "Hello?"

Expecting a wrong number. Wanting Diane's voice. Wanting it and dreading it.

But it was a man's voice on the other end. Simon, I recognized belatedly.

He said, "Tyler? Tyler Dupree? Is that you?"

I had taken enough emergency calls to recognize the anxiety in his voice. I said, "It's me, Simon. What's wrong?"

"I shouldn't be talking to you. But I don't know who else to call. I don't know any local doctors. And she's so sick. She's just so sick, Tyler! I don't think she's getting better. I think she needs—"

And then the flicker cut us off and there was nothing but noise on the line.

4X109 A. D.

Behind Diane came En and two dozen of his cousins and an equal number of strangers, all bound for the new world. Jala herded them inside, then slid shut the corrugated steel door of the warehouse. The light dimmed. Diane put her arm around me and I walked her to a relatively clean space under one of the high halide lamps. Ibu Ina unrolled an empty jute bag for her to lie on.

"The noise," Ina said.

Diane closed her eyes as soon as she was horizontal, awake but obviously exhausted. I unbuttoned her blouse and began, gently, to peel it away from the wound.

I said, "My medical case—"

"Yes, of course." Ina summoned En and sent him up the warehouse stairs to bring both bags, mine and hers "The noise—"

Diane winced when I began to pull the matted cloth from the caked blood of the wound, but I didn't want to medicate her until I'd seen the extent of the injury. "What noise?"

"Exactly!" Ina said. "The docks should be noisy this time of the morning. But it's quiet. There is no noise."

I raised my head. She was right. No noise, except the nervous talk of the Minang villagers and a distant drumming that was the sound of rain on the high metal roof.

But this wasn't the time to worry about it. "Go ask Jala," I said. "Find out what's happening."

Then I turned back to Diane.

* * * * *

"It's superficial," Diane said. She took a deep breath. Her eyes were clenched shut against the pain. "At least I think it's superficial."

"It looks like a bullet wound."

"Yes. The Reformasi found Jala's safe house in Padang. Fortunately we were just leaving. Uh!"

She was right. The wound itself was superficial, though it would need suturing. The bullet had passed through fatty tissue just above the hipbone. But the impact had bruised her badly where the skin wasn't torn and I worried that the bruising might be deep, that the concussion might have torn something inside her. But there had been no blood in her urine, she said, and her blood pressure and pulse were at reasonable numbers under the circumstances.

"I want to give you something for the pain, and we need to stitch this up."

"Stitch it if you have to, but I don't want any drugs. We have to get out of here."

"You don't want me suturing you without an anesthetic."

"Something local, then."

"This isn't a hospital. I don't have anything local."

"Then just sew it, Tyler. I can deal with the pain."

Yes, but could I? I looked at my hands. Clean—there was running water in the warehouse washroom, and Ina had helped me wrestle into latex gloves before I attended Diane. Clean and skilled. But not steady.

I had never been squeamish about my work. Even as a med student, even doing dissections, I'd always been able to switch off the loop of sympathy that makes us feel another's pain as if it were our own. To pretend that the torn artery demanding my attention was unconnected with a living human being. To pretend and for the necessary few minutes to really believe it.

But now my hand was shaking, and the idea of passing a needle through these bloody lips of flesh seemed brutal, cruel beyond countenance.

Diane put her hand on my wrist to steady it. "It's a Fourth thing," she said.

"What?"

"You feel like the bullet went through you instead of me. Right?"

I nodded, astonished.

"It's a Fourth thing. I think it's supposed to make us better people. But you're still a doctor. You just have to work through it."

"If I can't," I said, "I'll turn it over to Ina."

But I could. Somehow. I did.

* * * * *

Ina came back from her conference with Jala. "Today there was to be a labor action," she said. "The police and the Reformasi are at the gates and they mean to take control of the port. Conflict is anticipated." She looked at Diane. "How are you, my dear?"

"In good hands," Diane whispered. Her voice was ragged.

Ina inspected my work. "Competent," she pronounced.

"Thank you," I said.

"Under the circumstances. But listen to me, listen. We need very urgently to leave. Right now the only thing between us and prison is a labor riot. We have to board the Capetown Maru immediately."

"The police are looking for us?"

"I think not you, not specifically. Jakarta has entered into some sort of agreement with the Americans to suppress the emigration trade in general. The docks are being swept here and elsewhere, very publicly, in order to impress the people at the U.S. consulate. Of course it won't last. Too much money changes hands for the trade to be truly eliminated. But for cosmetic effect there's nothing like uniformed police dragging people out of the holds of cargo ships."

"They came to Jala's safe house," Diane said.

"Yes, they're aware of you and Dr. Dupree, ideally they would like to take you into custody, but that isn't why the police are forming ranks at the gates. Ships are still leaving the harbor but that won't last long. The union movement is powerful at Teluk Bayur. They mean to fight."

Jala shouted from the doorway, words I didn't understand.

"Now we really must leave," Ina said.

"Help me make a litter for Diane."

Diane tried to sit up. "I can walk."

"No," Ina said. "In this I believe Tyler is correct. Try not to move."

We doubled up more lengths of stitched jute and made a sort of hammock for her. I took one end and Ina called over one of the huskier Minang men to grab the other.

"Hurry now!" Jala shouted, waving us out into the rain.

* * * * *

Monsoon season. Was this a monsoon? The morning looked like dusk. Clouds like sodden bolts of wool came across the gray water of Teluk Bayur, clipping the towers and radars of the big double-hulled tankers. The air was hot and rank. Rain soaked us even as we loaded Diane into a waiting car. Jala had arranged a little convoy for his group of emigres: three cars and a couple of little open-top cargo-haulers with hard rubber wheels.

The Capetown Maru was docked at the end of a high concrete pier a quarter mile away. Along the wharves in the opposite direction, past rows of warehouses and industrial godowns and fat red-and-white Avigas holding tanks, a dense crowd of dockworkers had gathered by the gates. Under the drumming of the rain I could hear someone shouting through a bullhorn. Then a sound that might or might not have been shots fired.

"Get in," Jala said, urging me into the backseat of the car where Diane bent over her wounds as if she were praying. "Hurry, hurry." He climbed into the driver's seat.

I took a final look back at the rain-obscured mob. Something the size of a football lofted high over the crowd, trailing spirals of white smoke behind it. A tear gas canister.

The car jolted forward.

* * * * *

"This is more than police," Jala said as we wheeled out along the finger of the quay. "Police would not be so foolish. This is New Reformasi. Street thugs hired out of the slums of Jakarta and dressed in government uniforms."

Uniforms and guns. And more tear gas now, roiling clouds of it that blurred into the rainy mist. The crowd began to unravel at its edges.

There was a distant whoomp, and a ball of flame rose a few yards into the sky.

Jala saw it in his mirror. "Dear God! How idiotic! Someone must have fired on a barrel of oil. The docks—"

Sirens bellowed over the water as we followed the quay. Now the crowd was genuinely panicked. For the first time I was able to see a line of police pushing through the gated entrance to the port. Those in the vanguard carried heavy weapons and wore black-snouted masks.

A fire truck rolled out of a shed and screamed toward the gate.

We rolled up a series of ramps and stopped where the pier was level with the main deck of the Capetown Maru. Capetown Maru was an old flag-of-convenience freighter painted white and rust orange. A short steel gangway had been emplaced between the main deck and the pier, and the first few Minang were already scurrying across it.

Jala leaped out of the car. By the time I had Diane on the quay—on foot, leaning hard into me, the jute litter abandoned—Jala was already conducting a heated argument in English with the man at the head of the gangway: if not the ship's captain or pilot then someone with similar authority, a squat man with Sikh headgear and a grimly clenched jaw.

"It was agreed months ago," Jala was saying.

"—but this weather—"

"—in any weather—"

"—but without approval from the Port Authority—"

"—yes but there is no Port Authority—look!"

Jala meant the gesture to be rhetorical. But he was waving his hand at the fuel and gas bunkers near the main gate when one of the tanks exploded.

I didn't see it. The concussion pushed me into the concrete and I felt the heat of it on the back of my neck. The sound was huge but arrived like an afterthought. I rolled onto my back as soon as I could move, ears ringing. The Avigas, I thought. Or whatever else they stored here. Benzene. Kerosene. Fuel oil, even crude palm oil. The fire must have spread, or the unschooled police had fired their weapons in an unwise direction. I turned my head to look for Diane and found her beside me, looking back, more puzzled than frightened. I thought: I can't hear the rain. But mere was another, distinctly audible, more frightening sound: the ping of falling debris. Shards of metal, some burning. Ping, as they struck the concrete quay or the steel deck of the Capetown Maru.

"Heads down," Jala was shouting, his voice watery, submerged: "Heads down, everybody heads down!"

I tried to cover Diane's body with mine. Burning metal fell around us like hail or splashed into the dark water beyond the ship for a few interminable seconds. Then it simply stopped. Nothing fell except the rain, soft as the whisper of brushed cymbals.

We lifted ourselves up. Jala was already pushing bodies across the gangway, casting fearful glances back at the flames. "That might not be the last! Get on board, all of you, go on, go on!" He steered the villagers past the Capetown's crew, who were extinguishing deck fires and casting off lines.

Smoke blew toward us, obscuring the violence ashore. I helped Diane aboard. She winced at every step, and her wound had started leaking into her bandages. We were last up the gangway. A couple of sailors began to draw the aluminum structure in behind us, hands on the winches but eyes darting toward the pillar of fire back ashore.

Capetown Maru's engines thrummed under the deck. Jala saw me and came to take Diane's other arm. Diane registered his presence and said, "Are we safe?"

"Not until we clear the harbor."

Across the green-gray water horns and whistles sounded. Every mobile ship was making for open ocean. Jala looked back at the quay and stiffened. "Your luggage," he said.

It had been loaded onto one of the small cargo-haulers. Two battered hard shell cases full of paper and pharmaceuticals and digital memory. Still sitting there, abandoned.

"Run that gangway back," Jala said to the deck hands.

They blinked at him, uncertain of his authority. The first mate had left for the bridge. Jala puffed up his chest and said something fierce in a language I didn't recognize. The sailors shrugged and reeled the extendable walk back to the quay.

The ship's engines sounded a deeper note.

I ran across the gangway, corrugated aluminum ringing underfoot. Grabbed the cases. Took a last look back. Down at the landward end of the quay a detachment of a dozen or so uniformed New Reformasi began to run toward the Capetown Maru. "Cast off," Jala was shouting as if he owned the ship, "cast off, quickly now, quickly!"

The scaffolding began to retreat. I threw the luggage onboard and scrambled after it.

Made the deck before the ship began to move.

Then another Avigas tank erupted, and we were all thrown down by the concussion.

BY DREAMS SURROUNDED

The nightly battles between road pirates and the CHP made for difficult traveling at the best of times. The flicker made it worse. During a flicker episode any kind of unnecessary travel was officially discouraged, but that didn't stop people from trying to reach family and friends or in some cases simply getting in their cars to drive until they ran out of gas or time. I quick-packed a couple of suitcases with anything I didn't want to leave behind, including the archival records Jase had given me.

Tonight the Alvarado Freeway was clotted with traffic and I-8 wasn't moving much faster. I had plenty of time to reflect on the absurdity of what I was attempting to do.

Running to the rescue of another man's wife, a woman I had once cared about more than was really good for me. When I closed my eyes and tried to picture Diane Lawton there was no coherent image anymore, only a blurred montage of moments and gestures. Diane brushing back her hair with one hand and leaning into the coat of St. Augustine, her dog. Diane smuggling an Internet link to her brother in the tool shed where a lawn mower lay deconstructed on the floor. Diane reading Victorian poetry in a patch of willow shade, smiling at something in the text I hadn't understood: Summer ripens at all hours, or, The infant child is not aware…

Diane, whose subtlest looks and gestures had always implied that she loved me, at least tentatively, but who had always been restrained by forces I didn't understand: her father, Jason, the Spin. It was the Spin, I thought, that had bound us and separated us, locked us in adjoining but doorless rooms.

I was past El Centro when the radio reported "significant" police activity west of Yuma and traffic backed up for at least three miles at the state line. I decided not to risk the long delay and turned onto a local connector—it looked promising on the map—through empty desert north, meaning to pick up I-10 where it crossed the state border near Blythe.

The road was less crowded but still busy. The flicker made the world seem inverted, brighter above than below. Every so often an especially thick vein of light writhed from the northern to the southern horizon as if a fracture had opened in the Spin membrane, fragments of the hurried universe burning through.

I thought about the phone in my pocket, Diane's phone, the number Simon had called. I couldn't call back: I didn't have a return number for Diane and the ranch—if they were still on the ranch—was unlisted. I just wanted it to ring again. Wanted it and dreaded it.

The traffic was bad again where the road approached the state highway near Palo Verde. It was after midnight now and I was making maybe thirty miles per hour at best. I thought about sleeping. I needed sleep. Decided it might be better to sleep, to give up for the night and give the traffic time to clear. But I didn't want to sleep in the car. The only stationary cars I'd seen had been abandoned and looted, trunks agape like startled mouths.

South of a little town called Ripley I spotted a sun-faded and sand-blasted lodging sign, briefly visible in the headlights, and a two-lane, barely paved road exiting the highway. I took the turn. Five minutes later I was at a gated compound that was or once had been a motel, a strip of rooms two stories tall horseshoed around a swimming pool that looked empty under the flickering sky. I stepped out of the car and pushed the buzzer.

The gate was remote controlled, the kind you could roll back from a control panel safely distant, and it was equipped with a palm-sized video camera on a high pole. The camera swiveled to examine me as a speaker mounted at car-window height crackled to life. From somewhere, from the motel's bunker or lobby, I was able to hear a few bars of music. Not programmed music, just something playing in the background. Then a voice. Brusque, metallic, and unfriendly. "We're not taking guests tonight."

After a few moments I reached out and pushed the buzzer again.

The voice returned. "What part of that didn't you understand?"

I said, "I can pay cash if it makes a difference. I won't quibble about the price."

"No sale. Sorry, partner."

"Okay, hang on… look, I can sleep in the car, but would it be all right if I pulled in just to get a little protection? Maybe park around back where I can't be seen from the road?"

Longer pause. I listened to a trumpet chase a snare drum. The song was naggingly familiar.

"Sorry. Not tonight. Please move along."

More silence. More minutes passed. A cricket sawed away in the little palm and pea-gravel oasis in front of the motel. I pushed the buzzer again.

The proprietor came back quickly. "I gotta tell you, we're armed and slightly pissed off in here. It would be better if you just hit the road."

"'Harlem Air Shaft,'" I said.

"Excuse me?"

"The song you're playing. Ellington, right? 'Harlem Air Shaft.' Sounds like his fifties band."

Another long pause, though the speaker was still live. I was almost certain I was right, though I hadn't heard the Duke Ellington tune for years.

Then the music stopped, the thin thread of it cut off in mid-beat. "Anybody else in that car with you?"

I rolled the window down and switched on the overhead light. The camera panned, then swiveled back to me.

"All right," he said. "Okay. Tell me who plays trumpet on that cut and I'll spring the gate."

Trumpet? When I thought of Duke Ellington's midfifties band I thought of Paul Gonsalvez, but Gonsalvez played sax. There had been a handful of trumpeters. Cat Anderson? Willie Cook? It had been too long.

"Ray Nance," I said.

"Nope. Clark Terry. But I guess you can come in anyway."

* * * * *

The owner came out to meet me when I pulled up in front of the lobby. He was a tall man, maybe forty, in jeans and a loose plaid shirt. He looked me over carefully.

"No offense," he said, "but the first time this happened—" He gestured at the sky, the flicker that turned his skin yellow and the stucco walls a sickly ocher. "Well, when they closed the border at Blythe I had people fighting for rooms. I mean literally fighting. Couple guys pulled weapons on me, right there where you're standing. Any money I made that night I paid for twice over in maintenance. People drinking in the rooms, puking, tearing the shit out of tilings. It was even worse up on ten. Night clerk at the Days Inn out toward Ehrenberg was stabbed to death. That's when I installed the security fence, right after that. Now, soon as the flicker starts, I just turn off the vacancy light and lock up until it's over."

"And play Duke," I said.

He smiled. We went inside so I could register. "Duke," he said, "or Pops, or Diz. Miles if I'm in the mood for it." The true fan's first-name intimacy with the dead. "Nothing after about 1965." The lobby was a bleakly lit and generically carpeted room done up in ancient western motifs, but through a door to the proprietor's inner sanctum—it looked like he lived here—more music trickled out. He inspected the credit card I offered him.

"Dr. Dupree," he said, putting out his hand. "I'm Allen Fulton. Are you headed into Arizona?"

I told him I'd been bounced off the Interstate down by the border.

"I'm not sure you'll do any better on ten. Nights like this it seems like everybody in Los Angeles wants to move east. Like the flicker's some kind of earthquake or tidal wave."

"I'll be back on the road before long."

He handed me a key. "Get a little sleep. Always good advice."

"The card's okay? If you want cash—"

"Card's good as cash as long the world doesn't end. And if it does I don't suppose I'll have time to regret it."

He laughed. I tried to smile.

Ten minutes later I was lying fully clothed on a hard bed in a room that smelled of potpourri-scented antiseptic and too-damp air-conditioning, wondering whether I should have stayed on the road. I put the phone at the bedside and closed my eyes and slept without hesitation.

* * * * *

And woke less than an hour later, alert without knowing why.

I sat up and scanned the room, charting gray shapes and darkness against memory. My attention eventually settled on the pallid rectangle of the window, the yellow curtain that had been pulsing with light when I checked in.

The flicker had stopped.

Which should have made it easier to sleep, this gentler darkness, but I knew in the way one knows such things that sleep had become impossible. I had corralled it for a brief time but now it had jumped the fence, and there was no use pretending otherwise.

I made coffee in the little courtesy percolator and drank a cup. Half an hour later I checked my watch again. Fifteen minutes shy of two o'clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity. Might as well shower and get back on the road.

I dressed and walked down the silent concrete walkway to the motel lobby, expecting to drop the key in a mail slot; but

Fulton, the owner, was still awake, television light pulsing from his back room. He put his head out when he heard me rattle the door.

He looked peculiar. A little drunk, maybe a little stoned. He blinked at me until he recognized me. "Dr. Dupree," he said.

"Sorry to bother you again. I need to get back on the road. Thank you for your hospitality, though."

"No need to explain," he said. "I wish you the best of luck. Hope you get somewhere before dawn."

"I hope so, too."

"Me, I'm just watching it on television."

"Oh?"

Suddenly I wasn't sure what he was talking about.

"With the sound turned down. I don't want to wake Jody. Did I mention Jody? My daughter. She's ten. Her mom lives in La Jolla with a furniture repairman. Jody spends the summers with me. Out here in the desert, what a fate, huh?"

"Yeah, well—"

"But I don't want to wake her." He looked suddenly somber. "Is that wrong? Just to let her sleep through it? Or as long as she can? Or maybe I should wake her up. Come to think of it, she's never seen 'em. Ten years old. Never seen 'em. I guess this is her last chance."

"Sorry, I'm not sure I understand—"

"They're different, though. They're not the way I remember. Not that I was ever any kind of expert… but in the old days, if you spent enough nights out here, you'd kind of get familiar with 'em."

"Familiar with what?"

He blinked. "The stars," he said.

* * * * *

We went out by the empty swimming pool to look at the sky.

The pool hadn't been filled for a long time. Dust and sand had duned at the bottom of it, and someone had tagged the walls with ballooning purple graffiti. Wind rattled a steel sign (no lifeguard on duty) against the links of the fence. The wind was warm and from the east.

The stars.

"See?" he said. "Different. I don't see any of the old constellations. Everything looks kind of… scattered."

A few billion years will do that. Everything ages, even the sky; everything tends toward maximum entropy, disorder, randomness. The galaxy in which we live had been racked by invisible violence on a great scale over the last three billion years, had swirled its contents together with a smaller satellite galaxy (M41 in the old catalogs) until the stars were spread across the sky in a meaningless sprawl. It was like looking at the rude hand of time.

Fulton said, "You okay there, Dr. Dupree? Maybe you ought to sit down."

Too numb to stand, yes. I sat on the rubberized concrete with my feet dangling into the shallow-end declivity of the pool, still staring up. I had never seen anything as beautiful or as terrifying.

"Only a few hours before sunrise," Fulton said mournfully.

Here. Farmer east, somewhere over the Atlantic, the sun must already have breached the horizon. I wanted to ask him about that, but I was interrupted by a small voice from the shadows near the lobby door. "Dad? I could hear you talking." That would be Jody, the daughter. She took a tentative step closer. She was wearing white pajamas and a pair of unlaced sneakers to protect her feet. She had a broad, plain-but-pretty face and sleepy eyes.

"Come on over, darlin'," Fulton said. "Get on up on my shoulders and have a look at the sky."

She clambered aboard, still puzzled. Fulton stood, hands on her ankles, lifting her that much closer to the glittering dark.

"Look," he said, smiling despite the tears that had begun to track down his face. "Look there, Jody. Look how far you can see tonight! Tonight you can see all the way to the end of practically everything."

* * * * *

I stopped back at the room to check the TV for news—Fulton said most of the cable news stations were still broadcasting. The flicker had ended an hour ago. It had simply vanished, along with the Spin membrane. The Spin had ended as quietly as it had begun, no fanfare, no noise except for a crackle of uninterpretable static from the sunny side of the planet.

The sun.

Three billion years and change older than it had been when the Spin sealed it away. I tried to remember what Jase had told me about the current condition of the sun. Deadly, no question; we were out of the habitable zone; that was common knowledge. The image of boiling oceans had been mooted in the press; but had we reached that point yet? Dead by noon, or did we have until the end of the week?

Did it matter?

I turned on the motel room's small video panel and found a live broadcast from New York City. Major panic had not yet set in. Too many people were still asleep or had foregone the morning commute when they woke up and saw the stars and drew the obvious conclusions. The crew at this particular cable newsroom, as if in a fever dream of journalistic heroism, had set up a rooftop camera pointed east from the top of Todt Hill on Staten Island. The light was dim, the eastern sky brightening but still void. A pair of barely-holding-it-together anchors read to each other from freshly faxed bulletins.

There had been no intelligible link with Europe since the end of the flicker, they said. This might be due to electrostatic interference, the unmediated sunlight washing out aerostat-linked signals. It was too soon to draw dire conclusions. "And as always," one of the newscasters said, "although we don't have official reaction yet, the best advice is to stay put and stay tuned until we sort all this out. I don't think it would be inappropriate to ask people to remain in their homes if at all possible."

"Today of all days," his partner agreed, "people will want to be close to their families."

I sat on the edge of the motel-room mattress and watched until the sun rose.

The high camera caught it first as a layer of crimson cloud skimming the oily Atlantic horizon. Then a boiling crescent edge, filters sliding over the lens to stop down the glare.

The scale of it was hard to parse, but the sun came up (not quite red but ruddy orange, unless that was an artifact of the camera) and came up some more and kept coming up until it hovered over the ocean, Queens, Manhattan, too large to be a plausible heavenly body, more like an enormous balloon filled with amber light.

I waited for more commentary, but the image was silent until it cut to a studio in the Midwest, the network's fallback headquarters, and another reporter, too poorly groomed to be a regular anchor, who uttered more sourceless and futile cautions. I switched it off.

And took my med kit and suitcase to the car.

Fulton and Jody came out of the office to see me off. Suddenly they were old friends, sorry to see me go. Jody looked frightened now. "Jody's been talking to her mom," Fulton said. "I don't think her mom had heard about the stars."

I tried not to picture the early-morning wake-up call, Jody phoning from the desert to announce what her mother would have instantly understood as the approaching end of the world. Jody's mom saying what might be a final good-bye to her daughter while struggling not to scare her to death, shielding her from the onrushing truth.

Now Jody leaned into her father's ribs and Fulton put his arm around her, nothing but tenderness left between them.

"Do you have to go?" Jody asked.

I said I did.

"Because you can stay if you like. My dad said so."

"Mr. Dupree's a doctor," Fulton said gently. "He probably has a house call to make."

"That's right," I said. "I do."

* * * * *

Something near miraculous happened in the eastbound lanes of the highway that morning. Many people behaved badly in what they believed to be their final hours. It was as if the flickers had been merely a rehearsal for this less arguable doom. All of us had heard the predictions: forests ablaze, searing heat, the seas turned to scalding live steam. The only question was whether it would take a day, a week, a month.

And so we broke windows and took what appealed to us, any trinket life had denied us; men attempted to rape women, some discovering that the loss of inhibition worked both ways, the intended victim endowed by the same events with unexpected powers of eye-gouging and testicle-crushing; old scores were settled by gunshot and guns were fired on a whim. The suicides were legion. (I thought of Molly: if she hadn't died in the first flicker she was almost certainly dead now, might even have died pleased at the logical unfolding of her logical plan. Which made me want to cry for her for the first time in my life.)

But there were islands of civility and acts of heroic kindness, too. Interstate 10 at the Arizona border was one of them.

During the flicker there had been a National Guard detachment stationed at the bridge that crossed the Colorado River. The soldiers had disappeared shortly after the flicker ended, recalled, perhaps, or just AWOL, headed for home. Without them the bridge could have become a tangled, impassable bottleneck.

But it wasn't. Traffic flowed at a gentle pace in both directions. A dozen civilians, self-appointed volunteers with heavy-duty flashlights and flares out of their trunk emergency kits, had taken on the work of directing traffic. And even the terminally eager—the folks who wanted or needed to travel a long way before dawn, to reach New Mexico, Texas, maybe even Louisiana if their engines didn't melt first—seemed to understand that this was necessary, that no attempt to jump the line could possibly succeed and that patience was the only recourse. I don't know how long this mood lasted or what confluence of goodwill and circumstance created it Maybe it was human kindness or maybe it was the weather: in spite of the doom roaring toward us out of the east the night was perversely nice. Scattered stars in a clear, cool sky; a quickening breeze that carried off the stench of exhaust and came in the car window gentle as a mother's touch.

* * * * *

I thought about volunteering at one of the local hospitals— Palo Verde in Blythe, which I had once visited for a consultation, or maybe La Paz Regional in Parker. But what purpose would it serve? There was no cure for what was coming.

There was only palliation, morphine, heroin, Molly's route, assuming the pharmaceutical cupboards hadn't already been looted.

And what Fulton had told Jody was essentially true: I had a house call to make.

A quest. Quixotic now, of course. Whatever was wrong with Diane, I wouldn't be fixing that, either. So why finish the journey? It was something to do at the end of the world, busy hands don't tremble, busy minds don't panic; but that didn't explain the urgency, the visceral need to see her that had set me on the road during the flicker and seemed, if anything, stronger now.

Past Blythe, past the uneasy gauntlet of darkened shops and the fistfights brewing around besieged gas stations, the road opened up and the sky was darker, the stars sparkling. I was thinking about that when the phone trilled.

I almost drove off the road, fumbling in my pocket, braking, while a utility vehicle in back of me squealed past.

"Tyler," Simon said.

Before he went on I said, "Give me a call-back number before you hang up or we get cut off. So I can reach you."

"I'm not supposed to do that. I—"

"Are you calling from a private phone or the house phone?"

"Sort of private, a cell, we just use it locally. I've got it now but Aaron carries it sometimes so—"

"I won't call unless I have to."

"Well. I don't suppose it matters." He gave me the number. "But have you seen the sky, Tyler? I assume so, since you're awake. It's the last night of the world, isn't it?"

I thought: Why are you asking me? Simon had been living in the last days for three decades now. He ought to know. "Tell me about Diane," I said.

"I want to apologize for that call. Because of, you know, what's happening."

"How is she?"

"That's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter."

"Is she dead?"

Long pause. He came back sounding hurt. "No. No, she's not dead. That's not the point."

"Is she hovering in midair, waiting for the Rapture?"

"You don't have to insult my faith," Simon said. (And I couldn't resist interpreting the phrase: my faith, he had said, not our faith.)

"Because, if not, maybe she still needs medical attention. Is she still sick, Simon?"

"Yes. But—"

"Sick how? What are her symptoms?"

"Sunrise is only an hour away, Tyler. Surely you understand what that means."

"I'm not at all sure what it means. And I'm on the road, I can be at the ranch before dawn."

"Oh—no, that's not good—no, I—"

"Why not? If it's the end of the world, why shouldn't I be there?"

"You don't understand. What's going on isn't just the world ending. It's a new one being born."

"How sick is she, exactly? Can I talk to her?"

Simon's voice became tremorous. A man on the brink. We were all on the brink. "She can only whisper. She can't get her breath. She's weak. She's lost a lot of weight."

"How long has she been like that?"

"I don't know. I mean, it started gradually…"

"When was it obvious she was ill?"

"Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well— months."

"Has she had any kind of medical attention?" Pause. "Simon?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"It didn't seem necessary."

"It didn't seem necessary?"

"Pastor Dan wouldn't allow it."

I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself? "I hope he's changed his mind."

"No—"

"Because, if not, I'll need your help getting to her."

"Don't do that, Tyler. It won't do anybody any good."

I was already looking for the exit, which I remembered only dimly but had marked on the map. Off the highway toward some bone-dry cienaga, a nameless desert road.

I said, "Has she asked for me?"

Silence.

"Simon? Has she asked for me?"

"Yes."

"Tell her I'll be there soon as I can."

"No, Tyler… Tyler, there are some troublesome things happening at the ranch. You can't just walk in here."

Troublesome things? "I thought a new world was being born."

"Born in blood," Simon said.

THE MORNING AND THE EVENING

I came up toward the low ridge overlooking the Condon ranch and parked out of sight of the house. When I switched off the headlights I was able to see the predawn glow in the eastern sky, the new stars washed out by an ominous brightening.

That's when I started to shake.

I couldn't control it. I opened the door and fell out of the car and picked myself up by force of will. The land was rising out of the dark like a lost continent, brown hills, neglected pastureland returned to desert, the long shallow slope down to the distant farmhouse. Mesquite and ocotillo trembled in the wind. I trembled, too. This was fear: not the pinched intellectual uneasiness we had all lived with since the beginning of the Spin but visceral panic, fear like a disease of the muscles and the bowels. End of term on Death Row. Graduation day. Tumbrels and gallows approaching from the east.

I wondered if Diane was this frightened. I wondered if I could comfort her. If there was any consolation left in me.

The wind gusted again, washing sand and dust down the dry ridge road. Maybe the wind was the first harbinger of the bloated sun, a wind from the hot side of the world.

I crouched where I hoped I couldn't be seen and, still trembling, managed to peck out Simon's number on the keypad of the phone.

He picked up after a few rings. I pressed the receiver into my ear to block the sound of the wind.

"You shouldn't be doing this," he said.

"Am I interrupting the Rapture?"

"I can't talk."

"Where is she, Simon? What part of the house?"

"Where are you?"

"Just up the hill." The sky was brighter now, brighter by the second, a bruised purple on the western horizon. I could see the farmhouse clearly. It hadn't changed much in the few years since I'd visited. The outlying barn looked a little spruced up, as if it had been whitewashed and repaired.

Far more disturbingly, a trench had been dug parallel to the barn and covered in mounded earth.

A recently installed sewer line, maybe. Or septic tank. Or mass grave.

"I'm coming to see her," I said.

"That's just not possible."

"I'm assuming she's in the house. One of the upper-floor bedrooms. Is that correct?"

"Even if you see her—"

"Tell her I'm coming, Simon."

Down below, I saw a figure moving between the house and the barn. Not Simon. Not Aaron Sorley, unless Brother Aaron had lost about a hundred pounds. Probably Pastor Dan Condon. He was carrying a bucket of water in each hand. He looked like he was in a hurry. Something was happening in the barn.

"You're risking your life here," Simon said.

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

Then I said, "Are you in the barn or the house? Condon's in the barn, right? How about Sorley and Mclsaac? How do I get past them?"

I felt a pressure like a warm hand on the back of my neck and turned.

The pressure was sunlight. The rim of the sun had crossed the horizon. My car, the fence, the rocks, the scraggy line of ocotillo all cast long violet shadows.

"Tyler? Tyler, there is no way past. You have to—"

But Simon's voice was drowned in a burst of static. The full light of the sun must have reached the aerostat that was relaying the call, washing out the signal. I hit redial instinctively, but the phone was useless.

I crouched there until the sun was three quarters up, glancing at it and glancing away, as mesmerized as I was frightened. The disc was huge and ruddy orange. Sunspots crawled over it like festering sores. Now and again, gouts of dust rose from the surrounding desert to obscure it.

Then I stood up. Dead already, perhaps. Perhaps fatally irradiated without even knowing it. The heat was bearable, at least so far, but bad things might be happening on the cellular level, X-rays needling through the air like invisible bullets. So I stood up and began to walk down the pressed-earth road toward the farmhouse in plain sight, unarmed. Unarmed and unmolested at least until I had nearly reached the wooden porch, until Brother Sorley, all three hundred pounds of him, came hurtling through the screen door and levered the butt of a rifle against the side of my head.

* * * * *

Brother Sorley didn't kill me, possibly because he didn't want to meet the Rapture with blood on his hands. Instead he tossed me into an empty upstairs bedroom and locked the door.

A couple of hours passed before I could sit up without provoking waves of nausea.

When the vertigo finally eased I went to the window and raised the yellow paper blind. From this angle the sun was behind the house, the land and the barn washed in a fierce orange glare. The air was already brutally hot, but at least nothing was burning. A barn cat, oblivious to the conflagration in the sky, lapped stagnant water from a shady ditch. I guessed the cat might live to see sunset. So might I.

I tried to lift the ancient window frame—not that I could exactly leap down from here—but it was worse than locked; the sashes had been cut, the counterweights immobilized, the frame painted in place years ago.

There was no furniture in the room apart from the bed, no tool but the useless phone in my pocket.

The single door was a slab of solid wood and I doubted I had the strength to break it down. Diane might be only yards away, a single wall separating us. But there was no way to know that and no way to find out.

Even trying to think coherently about any of this provoked a deep, nauseating pain where the butt of the rifle had bloodied my head. I had to lie down again.

* * * * *

By midafternoon the wind had stilled. When I staggered back to the window I could see the edge of the solar disc above the house and the barn, so large it seemed to be perpetually falling, almost near enough to touch.

The temperature in the upstairs bedroom had climbed steadily since morning. I had no way of measuring it, but I would have guessed at least an even hundred Fahrenheit and rising. Hot but not enough to kill, at least not at once, not immediately. I wished I had Jason here to explain that to me, the thermodynamics of global extinction. Maybe he could have drawn a chart, established where the trend lines converged on lethality.

Heat haze quavered up from the baked ground.

Dan Condon crossed to the barn and back a couple more times. He was easy to recognize in the sharp intensity of the orange daylight, something nineteenth-century about him, his squared beard and pocked, ugly face: Lincoln in blue jeans, long-legged, purposeful. He didn't look up even when I hammered on the glass.

Then I tapped the joining walls, thinking Diane might tap back. But there was no answer.

Then I was dizzy again, and I fell back on the bed, the air in the closed room sweltering, sweat drenching the bedclothes.

I slept, or lost consciousness.

* * * * *

Woke up thinking the room was on fire, but it was only the combination of stagnant heat and an impossibly gaudy sunset.

Went to the window again.

The sun had crossed the western horizon and was sinking with visible speed. High, tenuous clouds arched across the darkening sky, scraps of moisture drawn up from an already parched land. I saw that someone had rolled my car down the hill and parked it just left of the barn. And taken the keys, no doubt. Not that there was enough gas in the car to render it useful.

But I had lived through the day. I thought: We lived through the day. Both of us. Diane and I. And no doubt millions more. So this was the slow version of the apocalypse. It would kill us by cooking us a degree at a time; or, failing that, by gutting the terrestrial ecosystem.

The swollen sun finally disappeared. The air seemed instantly ten degrees cooler.

A few scattered stars showed through the gauzy clouds.

I hadn't eaten, and I was painfully thirsty. Maybe it was Gondon's plan to leave me here to die of dehydration… or maybe he had simply forgotten about me. I couldn't even begin to imagine how Pastor Dan was framing these events in his mind, whether he felt vindicated or terrified or some combination of both.

The room grew dark. No overhead light, no lamp. But I could hear a faint chugging that must be a gasoline-power generator, and light spilled from the first-floor windows and the barn.

Whereas I owned nothing in the way of technology except my phone. I took it out of my pocket and switched it on, idly, just to see the phosphorescence of the screen.

Then I had another thought.

* * * * *

"Simon?" Silence. "Simon, is that you? Can you hear me?"

Silence. Then a tinny, digitized voice:

"You nearly scared the life out of me. I thought this thing was broken."

"Only during daylight."

Solar noise had washed out transmissions from the high-altitude aerostats. But now the Earth was shielding us from the sun. Maybe the 'stats had sustained some damage—the signal sounded low-band and staticky—but the bounce was good enough for now.

"I'm sorry about what happened," he said, "but I warned you."

"Where are you? The barn or the house?"

Pause. "The house."

"I've been looking all day and I haven't seen Condon's wife or Sorley's wife and kids. Or Mclsaac or his family. What happened to them?"

"They left."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Am I sure? Of course I'm sure. Diane wasn't the only one to get sick. Only the latest. Teddy Mclsaac's little girl took ill first. Then his son, then Teddy himself. When it looked like his kids were—well, you know, obviously really sick, sick and not getting better, well, that was when he put them in his truck and drove away. Pastor Dan's wife went along."

"When did this happen?"

"Couple of months ago. Aaron's wife and kids took off by themselves not long after. Their faith failed them. Plus they were worried about catching something."

"You saw them leave? You're certain about that?"

"Yes, why wouldn't I be?"

"Trench by the barn looks a lot like something's buried there."

"Oh, that! Well, you're right, something is buried there— the bad cattle."

"Excuse me?"

"A man named Boswell Geller had a big ranch up in the Sierra Bonita. Friend of Jordan Tabernacle before the shake-up. Friend of Pastor Dan. He was breeding red heifers, but the Department of Agriculture started an investigation late last year. Just when he was making progress! Boswell and Pastor Dan wanted to breed together all the red cattle varieties of the world, because that would represent the conversion of the Gentiles. Pastor Dan says that's what Numbers nineteen is all about—a pure red heifer born at the end of time, from breeds on every continent, everywhere the Gospel's been preached. The sacrifice is literal and symbolic, both. In the biblical sacrifice the ashes of the heifer have the power to clean a defiled person. But at the end of the world the sun consumes the heifer and the ashes are scattered to the four compass points, cleansing the whole Earth, cleansing it of death. That's what's happening now. Hebrews nine—'For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?' So of course—"

"You kept those cattle here?"

"Only a few. Fifteen breeders smuggled out before the Department of Agriculture could claim them."

"That's when people started getting sick?"

"Not just people. The cattle, too. We dug that trench by the barn to bury them in, all but three of the original stock."

"Weakness, unsteady gait, weight loss preceding death?"

"Yes, mostly—how did you know?"

"Those are the symptoms of CVWS. The cows were carriers. That's what's wrong with Diane."

There was a long ensuing silence. Then Simon said, "I can't have this conversation with you."

I said, "I'm upstairs in the back bedroom—"

"I know where you are."

"Then come and unlock this door."

"I can't."

"Why? Is somebody watching you?"

"I can't just set you free. I shouldn't even be talking to you. I'm busy, Tyler. I'm making dinner for Diane."

"She's still strong enough to eat?"

"A little… if I help her."

"Let me out. No one has to know."

"I can't."

"She needs a doctor."

"I couldn't let you out if I wanted to. Brother Aaron carries the keys."

I thought about that. I said, "Then when you take dinner to her, leave the phone with her—your phone. You said she wanted to talk to me, right?"

"Half the time she says things she doesn't mean."

"You think that was one of them?"

"I can't talk anymore."

"Just leave her the phone, Simon. Simon?"

Dead air.

* * * * *

I went to the window, watched and waited.

I saw Pastor Dan carry two empty buckets from the barn to the house and travel back with the buckets full and steaming. A few minutes later Aaron Sorley crossed the gap to join him.

Which left only Simon and Diane in the house. Maybe he was giving her dinner. Feeding her.

I itched to use the phone but I had resolved to wait, let things settle a little more, let the heat go out of the night.

I watched the barn. Bright light spilled through the slat walls as if someone had installed a rack of industrial lights. Condon had been back and forth all day. Something was happening in the barn. Simon hadn't said what.

The small luminosity of my watch counted off an hour.

Then I heard, faintly, a sound that might have been a closing door, footsteps on the stairs; and a moment later I saw Simon cross to the barn.

He didn't look up.

Nor did he leave the barn once he'd arrived there. He was inside with Sorley and Condon, and if he was still carrying the phone, and if he'd been idiotic enough to set it for an audible ring, calling him now might put him in jeopardy. Not that I was especially concerned for Simon's welfare.

But if he had left the phone with Diane, now was the hour.

I pecked out the number.

"Yes," she said—it was Diane who answered—and then, inflection rising, a question, "Yes?"

Her voice was breathless and faint. Those two syllables were enough to beg a diagnosis.

I said, "Diane. It's me. It's Tyler."

Trying to control my own raging pulse, as if a door had opened in my chest.

"Tyler," she said. "Ty… Simon said you might call."

I had to strain to make out the words. There was no force behind them; they were all throat and tongue, no chest. Which was consistent with the etiology of CVWS. The disease affects the lungs first, then the heart, in a coordinated attack of near-military efficiency. Scarred and foamy lung tissue passes less oxygen to the blood; the heart, oxygen-starved, pumps blood less efficiently; the CVWS bacteria exploit both weaknesses, digging deeper into the body with every laborious breath.

"I'm not far away," I said. "I'm real close, Diane."

"Close. Can I see you?"

I wanted to tear a hole in the wall. "Soon. I promise. We need to get you out of here. Get you some help. Fix you up."

I listened to the sound of more agonized inhalations and wondered if I'd lost her attention. Then she said, "I thought I saw the sun…"

"It's not the end of the world. Not yet, anyway."

"It's not?"

"No."

"Simon," she said.

"What about him?"

"He'll be so disappointed."

"You have CVWS, Diane. That's almost certainly what McIsaac's family had. They were smart to get help. It's a curable disease." I did not add, Up to a certain point or As long as it hasn't progressed to the terminal stage. "But we have to get you out of here."

"I missed you."

"I missed you, too. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

"Yes."

"Are you ready to leave?"

"If the time comes…"

"The time is pretty close. Rest until then. But we might have to hurry. You understand, Diane?"

"Simon," she said faintly. "Disappointed," she said.

"You rest, and I—"

But I didn't have time to finish.

A key rattled in the door. I flipped the phone closed and pushed it into my pocket. The door opened, and Aaron Sorley stood in the frame, rifle in hand, huffing as if he'd run up the stairs. He was silhouetted in the dim light from the hallway.

I backed away until my shoulders hit the wall.

"Tag on your license says you're a doctor," he said. "Is that right?"

I nodded.

"Then come with me," he said.

* * * * *

Sorley marched me downstairs and out the rear door toward the barn.

The moon, stained amber by the light of the gibbous sun, scarred and smaller than I remembered it, had risen over the eastern horizon. The night air was almost intoxicatingly cool. I took deep breaths. The relief lasted until Sorley threw open the barn door and a raw, animal stench gushed out—a slaughterhouse smell of excrement and blood.

"Go on in," Sorley said, and he gave me a push with his free hand.

The light came from a fat halide bulb suspended by its power cord over an open cattle stall. A gasoline generator rattled from an enclosure out back somewhere, a sound like someone revving a distant motorcycle.

Dan Condon stood at the open end of the pen, dipping his hands in a bucket of steaming water. He looked up when we entered. He frowned, his face a stark geography under the glaring single-point light, but he looked less intimidating than I remembered. In fact he looked diminished, gaunt, maybe even sick, maybe in the opening stages of his own case of CVWS. "Close that door back up," he said.

Aaron pushed it shut. Simon stood a few paces away from Condon, shooting me quick nervous glances.

"Come here," Condon said. "We need your help with this. Possibly your medical expertise."

In the pen, on a bed of filthy straw, a skinny heifer was trying to birth a calf.

The heifer was lying down, her bony rump projecting from the stall. Her tail had been tied to her neck with a length of twine to keep it out of the way. Her amniotic sac was bulging from her vulva, and the straw around her was dotted with bloody mucus.

I said, "I'm not a vet."

"I know that," Condon said. There was a suppressed hysteria in his eyes, the look of a man who's thrown a party but finds it spiraling out of control, the guests gone feral, neighbors complaining, liquor bottles flying from the windows like mortar rounds. "But we need another hand."

All I knew about brood stock and birthing I had learned from Molly Seagram's stories about life on her parents' farm. None of the stories had been particularly pleasant. At least Condon had set himself up with what I recalled as the necessary basics: hot water, disinfectant, obstetrical chains, a big bottle of mineral oil already stained with bloody handprints.

"She's part Angeln," Condon said, "part Danish Red, part Belarus Red, and that's only her most recent bloodline. But crossbreeding's a risk for 'dystocia'. That's what Brother Geller used to say. The word 'dystocia' means a difficult labor. Crossbreeds often have trouble calving. She's been in labor almost four hours. We need to extract the fetus."

Condon said this in a distant monotone, like a man lecturing a class of idiots. It didn't seem to matter who I was or how I'd got here, only that I was available, a free hand.

I said, "I need water."

"There's a bucket for washing up."

"I don't mean for washing. I haven't had anything to drink since last night."

Condon paused as if to process this information. Then he nodded and said, "Simon. See to it."

Simon appeared to be the trio's errand boy. He ducked his head and said, "I'll fetch you a drink, Tyler, sure enough," still avoiding my eyes as Sorley opened the barn door to let him out.

Condon turned back to the cattle pen where the exhausted heifer lay panting. Busy flies decorated the heifer's flanks. A couple of them lighted on Condon's shoulders, unnoticed. Condon doused his hands with mineral oil and squatted to expand the heifer's birth canal, his face contorting with a combination of eagerness and disgust. But he had barely begun when the calf crowned in another gush of blood and fluid, its head barely emerging despite the heifer's fierce contractions. The calf was too big. Molly had told me about oversized calves—not as bad as a breech birth or a hiplock, but unpleasant to deal with.

It didn't help that the heifer was obviously ill, drooling greenish mucus and struggling for breath even when the contractions eased. I wondered whether I should say anything about that to Condon. His divine calf was obviously infected, too.

But Pastor Dan didn't know or didn't care. Condon was all that was left of the Dispensationalist wing of Jordan Tabernacle, a church unto himself, reduced to two parishioners, Sorley and Simon, and I could only imagine how muscular his faith must have been to sustain him all the way to the end of the world. He said in the same tone of suppressed hysteria, "The calf, the calf is red—Aaron, look at the calf."

Aaron Sorley, who was posted on the door with his rifle, came over to peer into the pen. The calf was indeed red. Doused in blood. Also limp.

Sorley said, "Is it breathing?"

"Will be," Condon said. He was abstracted, seemed to be savoring it, this moment on which he genuinely believed the world was about to pivot into eternity. "Get the chains around the pasterns, quickly now."

Sorley gave me a look that was also a warning—don't say a fucking word—and we did as we were instructed, worked until we were bloody up to our elbows. The act of birthing an oversized calf is both brutal and ludicrous, a grotesque marriage of biology and crude force. It takes at least two reasonably strong men to assist at an outsized calving. The obstetric chains were for pulling. The pulls had to be timed to the cow's contractions; otherwise the animal could be eviscerated.

But this heifer was weak unto death, and her calf—its head lolled lifelessly—was now obviously a stillbirth.

I looked at Sorley, Sorley looked at me. Neither of us spoke. Condon said, "The first thing is to get her out. Then we'll revive her."

There was a movement of cooler air from the barn door. That was Simon, back with a bottle of spring water, staring at us and then at the half-delivered stillbirth, his face gone startlingly pale.

"Got your drink," he managed.

The heifer finished another weak, unproductive contraction. I dropped the chain. Condon said, "You take that drink, son. Then we'll carry on."

"I have to clean up. At least wash my hands."

"Clean hot water in buckets by the hay bales. But be quick about it." His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith.

I rinsed and disinfected my hands. Sorley .watched closely. His own hands were on the obstetrical chain, but his rifle was propped against a rail of the stall within easy reach.

When Simon handed me the bottle I leaned into his shoulder and said, "I can't help Diane unless I get her out of here. Do you understand? And I can't do that without your help. We need a reliable vehicle with a full tank of gas, and we need Diane inside it, preferably before Condon figures out the calf is dead."

Simon gasped, "It's truly dead?"—too loud, but neither Sorley nor Condon appeared to hear.

"The calf isn't breathing," I said. "The heifer's barely alive."

"But is the calf red? Red all over? No white or black patches? Purely red?"

"Even if it's a fucking fire engine, Simon, it won't do Diane any good."

He looked at me as if I'd announced his puppy had been run over. I wondered when he had traded his brimming self-confidence for this blank bewilderment, whether it had happened suddenly or whether the joy had drained out of him a grain at a time, sand through an hourglass.

"Talk to her," I said, "if you need to. Ask her whether she's willing to go."

If she was still alert enough to answer him. If she remembered that I'd spoken to her.

He said, "I love her more than life itself."

Condon called out, "We need you here!"

I drained half the bottle while Simon gazed at me, tears welling in his eyes. The water was clean and pure and delicious.

Then I was back with Sorley on the obstetric chains, pulling in concert with the pregnant heifer's dying spasms.

* * * * *

We finally extracted the calf around midnight, and it lay on the straw in a tangle of itself, forelegs tucked under its limp body, its bloodshot eyes lifeless.

Condon stood over the small body a little while. Then he said to me, "Is there anything you can do for it?"

"I can't raise it from the dead, if that's what you mean."

Sorley gave me a warning look, as if to say: Don't torture him; this is hard enough.

I edged to the door of the barn. Simon had disappeared an hour earlier, while we were still struggling with a flood of hemorrhagic blood that had drenched the already sodden straw, our clothing, our arms and hands. Through the open wedge of the door I could see movement around the car—my car—and a blink of checkered cloth that might have been Simon's shirt.

He was doing something out there. I hoped I knew what.

Sorley looked from the dead calf to Pastor Dan Condon and back again, stroking his beard, oblivious of the blood he was braiding into it. "Maybe if we burned it," he said.

Condon gave him a withering, hopeless stare.

"But maybe," Sorley said.

Then Simon threw open the barn doors and let in a gust of cool air. We turned to look. The moon over his shoulder was gibbous and alien.

"She's in the car," he said. "Ready to go." Speaking to me but staring hard at Sorley and Condon, almost daring them to respond.

Pastor Dan just shrugged, as if these worldly matters were no longer pertinent.

I looked at Brother Aaron. Brother Aaron leaned toward the rifle.

"I can't stop you," I said. "But I'm walking out the door."

He halted in midreach and frowned. He looked as if he were trying to puzzle out the sequence of events that had brought him to this moment, each one leading inexorably to the next, logical as stepping stones, and yet, and yet…

His hand dropped to his side. He turned to Pastor Dan.

"I think if we burned it anyway, that would be all right."

I walked to the barn door and joined Simon, not looking back. Sorley could have changed his mind, grabbed his rifle and taken aim. I was no longer entirely capable of caring.

"Maybe burn it before morning," I heard him say. "Before the sun comes up again."

* * * * *

"You drive," Simon said when we reached the car. "There's gas in the tank and extra gas in jericans in the trunk. And a little food and more bottled water. You drive and I'll sit in back and keep her steady."

I started the car and drove slowly uphill, past the split-rail fence and the moonlit ocotillo toward the highway.

SPIN

A few miles up the road and a safe distance from the Condon farm I pulled over and told Simon to get out.

"What," he said, "here?"

"I need to examine Diane. I need you to get the flashlight out of the trunk and hold it for me. Okay?"

He nodded, wide-eyed.

Diane hadn't said a word since we'd left the ranch. She had simply lain across the backseat with her head in Simon's lap, drawing breath. Her breathing had been the loudest sound in the car.

While Simon stood by, flashlight in hand, I stripped off my blood-soaked clothing and washed myself as thoroughly as I could—a bottle of mineral water with a little gasoline to strip away the filth, a second bottle to rinse. Then I put on clean Levi's and a sweatshirt from my luggage and a pair of latex gloves from the medical kit. I drank a third bottle of water straight down. Then I had Simon angle the light on Diane while I looked at her.

She was more or less conscious but too groggy to put together a fully coherent sentence. She was thinner than I had ever seen her, almost anorexically thin, and dangerously feverish. Her BP and pulse were elevated, and when I listened to her chest her lungs sounded like a child sucking a milk shake through a narrow straw.

I managed to get her to swallow a little water and an aspirin on top of it. Then I ripped the seal on a sterile hypodermic.

"What's that?" Simon asked.

"General-purpose antibiotic." I swabbed her arm and with some difficulty located a vein. "You'll need one, too." And me. The heifer's blood had undoubtedly been loaded with live CVWS bacteria.

"Will that cure her?"

"No, Simon, I'm afraid it won't. A month ago it might have. Not anymore. She needs medical attention."

"You're a doctor."

"I may be a doctor, but I'm not a hospital."

"Then maybe we can take her into Phoenix."

I thought about that. Everything I'd learned during the flickers suggested that an urban hospital would be swamped at best, a smoldering ruin at worst. But maybe not.

I took out my phone and scrolled through its memory for a half-forgotten number.

Simon said, "Who're you calling?"

"Someone I used to know."

His name was Colin Hinz, and we had roomed together back at Stony Brook. We kept in touch a little. Last I'd heard from him he was working management at St. Joseph's in Phoenix. It was worth a try—now, before the sun came up and scrubbed telecommunications for another day.

I entered his personal number. The phone rang a long while but eventually he picked up and said, "This better be good."

I identified myself and told him I was maybe an hour out of town with a casualty in need of immediate attention— someone close to me.

Colin sighed. "I don't know what to tell you, Tyler. St. Joe's is working, and I hear the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale is open, but we both have minimal staff. There are conflicting reports from other hospitals. But you won't get quick attention anywhere, sure as hell not here. We've got people stacked up outside the doors—gunshot wounds, attempted suicides, auto accidents, heart attacks, you name it. And cops on the doors to keep them from mobbing Emerg. What's your patient's condition?"

I told him Diane was late-stage CVWS and would probably need airway support soon.

"Where the fuck did she pick up CVWS? No, never mind—doesn't matter. Honestly, I'd help you if I could, but our nurses have been doing parking-lot triage all night and I can't promise they'd give your patient any priority, even with a word from me. In fact it's pretty much a sure thing she wouldn't even be assessed by a physician for another twenty-four hours. If any of us live that long."

"I'm a physician, remember? All I need is a little gear to support her. Ringer's, an airway kit, oxygen—"

"I don't want to sound callous, but we're wading through blood here… you might ask yourself whether it's really worthwhile supporting a terminal CVWS case, given what's happening. If you've got what you need to keep her comfortable—"

"I don't want to keep her comfortable. I want to save her life."

"Okay… but what you described is a terminal situation, unless I misunderstood." In the background I could hear other voices demanding his attention, a generalized rattle of human misery.

"I need to take her somewhere," I said, "and I need to get her there alive. I need the supplies more than I need a bed."

"We've got nothing to spare. Tell me if there's anything else I can do for you. Otherwise, I'm sorry, I have work to do."

I thought frantically. Then I said, "Okay, but the supplies— anywhere I can pick up Ringer's, Colin, that's all I ask."

"Well—"

"Well, what?"

"Well… I shouldn't be telling you this, but St. Joe's has a deal with the city under the civil emergency plan. There's a medical distributor called Novaprod north of town." He gave me an address and simple directions. "The authorities put a National Guard unit up there to protect it. That's our primary source for drugs and hardware."

"They'll let me in?"

"If I call up and tell them you're coming, and if you have some ID to show."

"Do that for me, Colin. Please."

"I will if I can get a line out. The phones are unreliable."

"If there's a favor I can do in return…"

"Maybe there is. You used to work in aerospace, right? Perihelion?"

"Not recently, but yes."

"Can you tell me how much longer all this is going to last?" He half whispered the question, and suddenly I could hear the fatigue in his voice, the unadmitted fear. "I mean, one way or the other?"

I apologized and told him I simply didn't know—and I doubted anyone at Perihelion knew more than I did.

He sighed. "Okay," he said. "It's just galling, the idea that we could go through all this and burn out in a couple of days and never know what it was all about."

"I wish I could give you an answer."

Someone on the other end of the line began calling his name. "I wish a lot of things," he said. "Gotta go, Tyler."

I thanked him again and clicked off.

Dawn was still a few hours away.

Simon had been standing a few yards from the car, staring up at the starry sky and pretending not to listen. I waved him back and said, "We have to get going."

He nodded meekly. "Did you find help for Diane?"

"Sort of."

He accepted the answer without asking for details. But before he bent to get in the car he tugged at my sleeve and said, "There ... what do you suppose that is, Tyler?"

He was pointing at the western horizon, where a gently curving silver line arced through five degrees of the night sky. It looked as if someone had scratched an enormous, shallow letter C out of the blackness.

"Maybe a condensation trail," I said. "A military jet."

"At night? Not at night."

"Then I don't know what it is, Simon. Come on, get in— we don't have time to waste."

* * * * *

We made better time than I expected. We reached the medical supply warehouse, a numbered unit in a dreary industrial park, with time to spare before sunrise. I presented my ID to the nervous National Guardsman posted at the entrance; he handed me over to another Guardsman and a civilian employee who walked me through the aisles of shelving. I found what I needed and a third Guardsman helped me carry it to the car, though he backed off quickly when he saw Diane gasping in the backseat. "Luck to you," he said, his voice shaking a little.

I took the time to set up an IV drip, the bag jury-rigged to the jacket hanger in the car, and showed Simon how to monitor the flow and make sure she didn't snag the line in her sleep. (She didn't wake even when I put the needle in her arm.)

Simon waited until we were back on the road before he asked, "Is she dying?"

I gripped the wheel a little tighter. "Not if I can help it."

"Where are we taking her?"

"We're taking her home."

"What, all the way across country? To Carol and E.D.'s house?"

"Right."

"Why there?"

"Because I can help her there."

"That's a long drive. I mean, the way things are."

"Yes. It might be a long drive."

I glanced into the backseat. He stroked her head, gently. Her hair was limp and matted with perspiration. His hands were pale where he had washed off the blood.

"I don't deserve to be with her," he said. "I know this is my fault. I could have left the ranch when Teddy did. I could have gotten help."

Yes, I thought. You could have.

"But I believed in what we were doing. Probably you don't understand that. But it wasn't just the red calf, Tyler. I was certain we'd be raised up imperishable. That in the end we'd be rewarded."

"Rewarded for what?"

"Faith. Perseverance. Because from the very first time I set eyes on Diane I had a powerful feeling we'd be part of something spectacular, even if I didn't wholly comprehend it. That one day we'd stand together before the throne of God—no less than that. 'This generation shall not pass away till all be fulfilled.' Our generation, even if we took a wrong turn at first. I admit, things happened at those New Kingdom rallies that seem shameful to me now. Drunkenness, lechery, lies. We turned our backs on that, which was good; but it seemed like the world got a little smaller when we weren't among people who were trying to build the chiliasm, however imperfectly. As if we'd lost a family. And I thought, well, if you look for the cleanest and simplest path, that should take you in the right direction. 'In your patience possess ye your souls.'"

"Jordan Tabernacle," I said.

"It's easy to set prophecy against the Spin. Signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars, it says in Luke. Well, here we are. The powers of heaven shaken. But it isn't—it isn't—"

He seemed to lose the thought.

"How's her breathing back there?" But I didn't really need to ask. I could hear every breath she took, labored but regular. I just wanted to distract him.

"She's not in distress," Simon said. Then he said, "Please, Tyler. Stop and let me out."

We were traveling east. There was surprisingly little traffic on the interstate. Colin Hinz had warned me about congestion around Sky Harbor airport, but we'd bypassed that. Out here we'd encountered only a few passenger cars, though there were a good many vehicles abandoned on the shoulder. "That's not a good idea," I said.

I looked in the mirror and saw Simon knuckling tears out of his eyes. At that moment he looked as vulnerable and bewildered as a ten-year-old at a funeral.

"I only ever had two signposts in my life," he said. "God and Diane. And I betrayed them both. I waited too long. You're kind to deny it, but she's dying."

"Not necessarily."

"I don't want to be with her and know I could have prevented this. I would as soon die in the desert. I mean it, Tyler. I want to get out."

The sky was growing light again, an ugly violet glow more like the arc in a malfunctioning fluorescent lamp than anything wholesome or natural.

"I don't care," I said.

Simon gave me a startled look. "What?"

"I don't care how you feel. The reason you should stay with Diane is that we have a difficult drive ahead of us and I can't take care of her and steer at the same time. And I'm going to have to sleep sooner or later. If you take the wheel once in a while we won't have to stop except for food and fuel." If we could find any. "If you drop out it'll double the travel time."

"Does it matter?"

"She may not be dying, Simon, but she's exactly as sick as you think she is, and she will die if she doesn't get help. And the only help I know about is a couple of thousand miles from here."

"Heaven and earth are passing away. We're all going to die."

"I can't speak for heaven and earth. I refuse to let her die as long as I have a choice."

"I envy you that," Simon said quietly.

"What? What could you possibly envy?"

"Your faith," he said.

* * * * *

A certain kind of optimism was still possible, but only at night. It wilted by daylight.

I drove into the Hiroshima of the rising sun. I had stopped worrying that the light itself would kill me, though it probably wasn't doing me any good. That any of us had survived the first day was a mystery—a miracle, Simon might have said. It encouraged a certain rough practicality: I pulled a pair of sunglasses out of the glove compartment and tried to keep my eyes on the road instead of on the hemisphere of orange fire levitating out of the horizon.

The day grew hotter. So did the interior of the car, despite the overworked air-conditioning. (I was running it hard in an effort to keep Diane's body temperature under control.) Somewhere between Albuquerque and Tucumcari a great wave of fatigue washed over me. My eyelids drifted closed and I nearly ran the car into a mile marker. At which point I pulled over and turned off the engine. I told Simon to fill the tank from the jericans and get ready to take the wheel. He nodded reluctantly.

We were making better time than I'd anticipated. Traffic had been light to nearly nonexistent, maybe because people were afraid of being on the road by themselves. While Simon put gas in the car I said, "What did you bring for food?"

"Only what I could grab from the kitchen. I had to hurry. See for yourself."

I found a cardboard box among the dented jericans and packaged medical supplies and loose bottles of mineral water in the trunk. It contained three boxes of Cheerios, two cans of corned beef, and a bottle of Diet Pepsi. "Jesus, Simon."

He winced at what I had to remind myself he considered a blasphemy. "That was all I could find."

And no bowls or spoons. But I was as hungry as I was sleep deprived. I told Simon we ought to let the engine cool off, and while it did we sat in the shade of the car, windows rolled down, a gritty breeze coming off the desert, the sun suspended in the sky like high noon on the surface of Mercury. We used the torn-off bottoms of empty plastic bottles as makeshift cups and ate Cheerios moistened with tepid water. It looked and tasted like mucilage.

I briefed Simon on the next leg of the trip, reminded him to turn on the air-conditioning once we were underway, told him to wake me if there seemed to be trouble on the road ahead.

Then I tended to Diane. The IV drip and the antibiotics seemed to have bolstered her strength, but only marginally. She opened her eyes and said, "Tyler," after I helped her drink a little water. She accepted a few spoonfuls of Cheerios but turned her head away after that. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes listless and inattentive.

"Bear with me," I said. "Just a little longer, Diane." I adjusted her drip. I helped her sit up, legs splayed out of the car, while she passed a little brownish urine. Then I sponged her off and switched her soiled panties for a pair of clean cotton briefs from my own suitcase.

When she was comfortable again I stuffed a blanket into the narrow gap between the front and back seats to make a space where I could stretch out without displacing her. Simon had napped only briefly during the first leg of the trip and must have been as exhausted as I was… but he hadn't been beaten with a rifle butt. The place where Brother Aaron had clubbed me was swollen and rang like a bell when I put my fingers anywhere near it.

Simon watched all this from a couple of yards away, his expression sullen or possibly jealous. When I called him he hesitated and looked longingly across the salt-pan desert, deep into the heart of nothing at all.

Then he loped back to the car, downcast, and slid behind the wheel.

I compressed myself into my niche behind the front seat. Diane seemed to be unconscious, but before I slept I felt her press her hand against mine.

* * * * *

When I woke it was night again, and Simon had pulled over to trade places.

I climbed out of the car and stretched. My head still throbbed, my spine felt as if it had cramped into a permanent geriatric gnarl, but I was more alert than Simon, who crawled into the back and was instantly asleep.

I didn't know where we were except that we were on 1-40 heading east and the land was less arid here, irrigated fields stretching out on either side of the road under crimson moonlight. I made sure Diane was comfortable and breathing without distress and I left the front and rear doors open for a couple of minutes to air out the stink, a sickroom smell overlaid with hints of blood and gasoline. Then I took the driver's seat.

The stars above the road were distressingly few and impossible to recognize. I wondered about Mars. Was it still under a Spin membrane or had it been cut loose like the Earth? But I didn't know where in the sky to look and I doubted I'd know it if I saw it. I did see—couldn't help seeing—the enigmatic silvery line Simon had pointed out back in Arizona, the one I had mistaken for a contrail. It was even more prominent tonight. It had moved from the western horizon almost to the zenith, and the gentle curve had become an oval, a flattened letter O.

The sky I was looking at was three billion years older than the one I had last seen from the lawn of the Big House. I supposed it could harbor all kinds of mysteries.

Once we were in motion I tried the dashboard radio, which had been silent the night before. Nothing digital was coming in, but I did eventually locate a local station on the FM band—the kind of small-town station usually devoted to country music and Christianity, but tonight it was all talk. I learned a lot before the signal finally faded into noise.

I learned, for one thing, that we had been wise to avoid big cities. Major cities were disaster areas—not because of looting and violence (there had been surprisingly little) but because of catastrophic infrastructure collapse. The rising of the red sun had looked so much like the long-predicted death of the Earth that most people had simply stayed home to die with their families, leaving urban centers with minimally functioning police and fire departments and radically understaffed hospitals. The minority of people who attempted death by gunshot, or who dosed themselves with extravagant amounts of alcohol, cocaine, OxyContin, or amphetamines, were the inadvertent cause of the most immediate problems: they left gas stoves running, passed out while driving, or dropped cigarettes as they died. When the carpet began to smolder or the drapes burst into flames nobody called 911, and in many cases there would have been no one there to pick up. House fires quickly became neighborhood fires.

Four big plumes of smoke were rising from Oklahoma City, the newscaster said, and according to phone reports much of the south side of Chicago had already been reduced to embers. Every major city in the country—every one that had been heard from—was reporting at least one or two large-scale uncontrolled fires.

But the situation was improving, not deteriorating. Today it had begun to seem possible that the human race might survive at least a few days longer, and as a result more first-responders and essential-service personnel were back at their posts. (The downside was that people had begun to worry how long their provisions might last: grocery-store looting was a growing problem.) Anyone who was not an essential-service provider was being urged to stay off the roads—the message had gone out before dawn over the emergency broadcast system and through every radio and TV outlet still functioning, and it was being repeated tonight. Which helped to explain why traffic had been reasonably scarce on the interstate. I had seen a few military and police patrols but none of them had interfered with us, presumably because of the plates on my car— California and most other states had begun issuing EMS license plate stickers to physicians after the first flicker episode.

Policing was sporadic. The regular military remained more or less intact despite some desertions, but Reserve and National Guard units were at fractional strength and couldn't fill in for local authorities. Electrical power was sporadic, too; most generating stations were understaffed and barely functional, and blackouts had begun to cascade through the grid. There were rumors that nuclear plants at San Onofre in California and Pickering in Canada had come close to terminal meltdowns, though that was unconfirmed.

The announcer went on to read a list of designated local food depots, hospitals still open for business (with estimated waiting times for triage), and home first-aid tips. He also read a Weather Bureau advisory cautioning against prolonged exposure to the sun. The sunlight seemed not to be immediately deadly, but excessive UV levels could cause "long-term problems," they said, which was about as sad as it was funny.

* * * * *

I caught a few more scattered broadcasts before dawn, but the rising sun obscured them all with noise.

The day dawned overcast. I did not, therefore, have to drive directly into the glare of the sun; but even this muted sunrise was dauntingly strange. The entire eastern half of the sky became a churning soup of red light, as hypnotic in its way as the embers of a dying campfire. Occasionally the clouds parted and fingers of amber sunlight probed the land. But by noon the overcast had deepened and within the hour rain began to fall—a hot, lifeless rain that coated the highway and mirrored the sickly colors of the sky.

I had emptied the last jerican of gasoline into the tank that morning, and somewhere between Cairo and Lexington the needle on the gas gauge began to sag alarmingly. I woke Simon and explained the problem and told him I'd pull into the next gas station… and each one after that, until we found one that would sell us some fuel.

The next station turned out to be a little four-pump mom-and-pop gas-and-snack-food franchise a quarter mile off the highway. The store was dark and the pumps were probably dead, but I rolled up anyhow and got out of the car and took the nozzle off its hook.

A man with a Bengals cap on his head and a shotgun cradled in his arms came around the side of the building and said, "That's no good."

I put the nozzle back, slowly. "Your power out?"

"That's correct."

"No backup?"

He shrugged and came closer. Simon started to get out of the car but I waved him back in. The man in the Bengals cap—he was about thirty years old and thirty pounds overweight—looked at the Ringer's drip rigged up in the backseat. Then he squinted at the license plate. It was a California plate, which probably didn't win me any goodwill points, but the EMS sticker was plainly visible. "You're a doctor?"

"Tyler Dupree," I said. "M.D."

"Pardon me if I don't shake your hand. That your wife in there?"

I said yes, because it was simpler than explaining. Simon shot me a look but didn't contradict me.

"You have identification to prove you're a medical doctor? Because, no offense, there's been some auto theft happening these past couple of days."

I took out my wallet and tossed it at his feet. He picked it up and looked at the card folder. Then he fished a pair of eyeglasses out of his shirt pocket and looked at it again. Finally he handed it back and offered me his hand. "Sorry about that, Dr. Dupree. I'm Chuck Bernelli. If it's just gas you need, I'll turn on the pumps. If you need more than that, it'll only take me a minute to open the store."

"I need the gas. Provisions would be nice, but I'm not carrying a lot of cash."

"The heck with cash. We're closed to criminals and drunks, and there's no lack of those on the road right now, but we're open all hours to the military and the highway patrol. And medical men. At least as long as there's gas to pump. I hope your wife's not too badly off."

"Not if I can get where I'm headed."

"Lexington V.A.? Samaritan?"

"A little farther than that. She needs special care."

He glanced back at the car. Simon had rolled down the windows to let some fresh air in. Rain spackled down on the dusty vehicle, the puddled oily asphalt. Bernelli caught a glimpse of Diane as she turned and began to cough in her sleep. He frowned.

"I'll get the pumps going, then," he said. "You'll want to be on your way."

Before we left he put together some groceries for us, a few cans of soup, a box of saltine crackers, a can opener in a plastic display pack. But he didn't want to get close to the car.

* * * * *

A racking, intermittent cough is a common symptom of CVWS. The bacteria is almost canny in the way it preserves its victims, preferring not to drown them in a catastrophic pneumonia, though that's the means by which it eventually kills—that, or wholesale cardiac failure. I had taken an oxygen canister, bleeder valve, and mask from the wholesaler outside Flagstaff, and when Diane's cough began to interfere with her breathing—she was on the verge of panic, drowning in her own sputum, eyes rolling—I cleared her airway as best I could and held the mask over her mouth and nose while Simon drove.

Eventually she calmed down, her color improved, and she was able to sleep again. I sat with her while she rested, her feverish head nestled into my shoulder. The rain had become a relentless downpour, slowing us down. Big plumes of water rooster-tailed behind the car every time we hit a low place in the road. Toward evening the light faded to hot coals on the western horizon.

There was no sound but the beating of rain on the roof of the car and I was content to listen to it until Simon cleared his throat and said, "Are you an atheist, Tyler?"

"Pardon me?"

"I don't mean to be rude, but I was wondering: do you consider yourself an atheist?"

I wasn't sure how to answer that. Simon had been helpful—had been invaluable—in getting us this far. But he was also someone who had hitched his intellectual wagon to a team of lunatic-fringe Dispensationalists whose only argument with the end of the world was that it had defied their detailed expectations. I didn't want to offend him because I still needed him—Diane still needed him.

So I said, "Does it matter what I consider myself?"

"Just curious."

"Well—I don't know. I guess that's my answer. I don't claim to know whether God exists or why He wound up the universe and made it spin the way it does. Sorry, Simon. That's the best I can do on the theological front."

He was silent for another few miles. Then he said, "Maybe that's what Diane meant."

"Meant about what?"

"When we talked about it. Which we haven't done lately, come to think of it. We disagreed about Pastor Dan and Jordan Tabernacle even before the schism. I thought she was too cynical. She said I was too easily impressed. Maybe so. Pastor Dan had the gift of looking into Scripture and finding knowledge on every page—knowledge solid as a house, beams and pillars of knowledge. It really is a gift. I can't do it myself. As hard as I try, to this day I can't open the Bible and make immediate sense of it."

"Maybe you're not supposed to."

"But I wanted to. I wanted to be what Pastor Dan was: smart and, you know, always on solid ground. Diane said it was a devil's bargain, that Dan Condon had traded humility for certainty. Maybe that's what I lacked. Maybe that's what she saw in you, why she clung to you all these years—your humility."

"Simon, I—"

"It's not anything you have to apologize for or make me feel better about. I know she called you when she thought I was asleep or when I was out of the house. I know I was lucky to have her as long as I did." He looked back at me. "Will you do me a favor? I'd like you to tell her I'm sorry I didn't take better care of her when she got sick."

"You can tell her yourself."

He nodded thoughtfully and drove deeper into the rain. I told him to see if he could find any useful information on the radio, now that it was dark again. I meant to stay awake and listen; but my head was throbbing and my vision wanted to double, and after a while it seemed easier just to close my eyes and sleep.

* * * * *

I slept hard and long, and miles passed under the wheels of the car.

When I woke it was another rainy morning. We were parked at a rest stop (west of Manassas, I learned later) and a woman with a torn black umbrella was tapping on the window.

I blinked and opened the door and she backed off a pace, casting cautious looks at Diane. "Man said to tell you don't wait."

"Excuse me?"

"Said to tell you good-bye and don't wait for him."

Simon wasn't in the front seat. Nor was he visible among the trash barrels, sodden picnic tables, and flimsy latrines in the immediate neighborhood. A few other cars were parked here, most of them idling while the owners visited the potties. I registered trees, parkland, a hilly view of some rain-soaked little industrial town under a fiery sky. "Skinny blond guy? Dirty T-shirt?"

"That's him. That's the one. He said he didn't want you to sleep too long. Then he took off."

"On foot?"

"Yes. Down toward the river, not along the road." She peered at Diane again. Diane was breathing shallowly and noisily. "Are you two okay?"

"No. But we don't have far to go. Thank you for asking. Did he say anything else?"

"Yes. He said to say God bless you, and he'll find his own way from here."

I tended to Diane's needs. I took a last look around the rainy parking lot. Then I got back on the road.

* * * * *

I had to stop several times to adjust Diane's drip or feed her a few breaths of oxygen. She wasn't opening her eyes anymore—she wasn't just asleep, she was unconscious. I didn't want to think about what that meant.

The roads were slow and the rain was relentless and there was evidence everywhere of the chaos of the last couple of days. I passed dozens of wrecked or burned-out cars pushed to the side of the road, some still smoldering. Certain routes had been closed to civilian traffic, reserved for military or emergency vehicles. I had to double back from roadblocks a couple of times. The day's heat made the humid air almost unbearable, and although a fierce wind came up in the afternoon it didn't bring relief.

But Simon had at least abandoned us close to our destination, and I made it to the Big House while there was still some light in the sky.

The wind had grown worse, almost gale force, and the Lawtons' long driveway was littered with branches torn from the surrounding pines. The house itself was dark, or looked that way in the amber dusk.

I left Diane in the car at the foot of the steps and pounded on the door. And waited. And pounded again. Eventually the door opened a crack and Carol Lawton peered out.

I could barely make out her features through that crevice: one pale blue eye, a wedge of wrinkled cheek. But she recognized me.

"Tyler Dupree!" she said. "Are you alone?"

The door opened wider.

"No," I said. "Diane's with me. And I might need some help getting her inside."

Carol came out onto the big front porch and squinted down at the car. When she saw Diane her small body stiffened; she drew up her shoulders and gasped.

"Dear God," she whispered. "Have both my children come home to die?"

THE ABYSS IN FLAMES

Wind rattled the Big House all that night, a hot salt wind stirred out of the Atlantic by three days of unnatural sunlight. I was aware of it even as I slept: it was what I rose to in moments of near-wakefulness and it was the soundtrack for a dozen uneasy dreams. It was still knocking at the window after sunrise, when I dressed myself and went looking for Carol Lawton.

The house had been without electrical power for days. The upstairs hallway was dimly illuminated by the rainy glow from a window at the end of the corridor. The oaken stairway descended to the foyer, where two streaming bay windows admitted daylight the color of pale roses. I found Carol in the parlor, adjusting an antique mantel clock.

I said, "How is she?"

Carol glanced at me. "Unchanged," she said, returning her attention to the clock as she wound it with a brass key. "I was with her a moment ago. I'm not neglecting her, Tyler."

"I didn't think you were. How about Jason?"

"I helped him dress. He's better during daylight. I don't know why. The nights are hard on him. Last night was… hard."

"I'll look in on them both." I didn't bother asking whether she had heard any news, whether FEMA or the White House had issued any fresh directives. There would have been no point; Carol's universe stopped at the borders of the property. "You should get some sleep."

"I'm sixty-eight years old. I don't sleep as much as I used to. But you're right, I'm tired—I do need to lie down. As soon as I finish this. This clock loses time if you don't tend to it. Your mother used to adjust it every day, did you know that? And after your mother died Marie wound it whenever she cleaned. But Marie stopped coming about six months ago. For six months the clock was stuck at a quarter after four. As in the old joke, right twice a day."

"We should talk about Jason." Last night I had been too exhausted to do more than learn the basics: Jason had arrived unannounced a week before the end of the Spin and had fallen ill the night the stars reappeared. His symptoms were an intermittent, partial paralysis and occluded vision, plus fever. Carol had tried calling for medical help but circumstances had made that impossible, so she was caring for him herself, though she hadn't been able to diagnose the problem or provide more than simple palliative care.

She was afraid he was dying. Her concern didn't extend to the rest of the world, however. Jason had told her not to worry about that. Things will be back to normal soon, he said.

And she had believed him. The red sun held no terrors for Carol. The nights were bad, though, she said. The nights took Jason like a bad dream.

* * * * *

I looked in on Diane first

Carol had put her in an upstairs bedroom—her room from the old days, done over as a generic guest bedroom. I found her physically stable and breathing without assistance, but there was nothing reassuring in that. It was part of the etiology of the disease. The tide advanced and the tide ebbed, but each cycle carried away more of her resilience and more of her strength.

I kissed her dry, hot forehead and told her to rest. She gave no sign of having heard me.

Then I went to see Jason. There was a question I needed to ask.

According to Carol, Jase had come back to the Big House because of some conflict at Perihelion. She couldn't remember his explanation, but it had something to do with Jason's father ("E.D. is behaving badly again," she said) and something to do with "that little black wrinkly man, the one who died. The Martian."

The Martian. Who had supplied the longevity drug that had made Jason a Fourth. The drug that should have protected him from whatever was killing him now.

* * * * *

He was awake when I knocked and entered his room, the same room he had occupied thirty years ago, when we were children in the compassed world of children and the stars were in their rightful places. Here was the rectangle of subtly brighter color where a poster of the solar system had once shaded the wall. Here was the carpet, long since steam-cleaned and chemically bleached, where we had once spilled Cokes and scattered crumbs on rainy days like this.

And here was Jason.

"That sounds like Tyler," he said.

He lay in bed, dressed—he insisted on dressing each morning, Carol had said—in clean khaki pants and a blue cotton shirt. His back was propped against the pillows and he seemed perfectly alert. I said, "Not much light in here, Jase."

"Open the blinds if you like."

I did, but it only admitted more of the sullen amber daylight. "You mind if I examine you?"

"Of course I don't mind."

He wasn't looking at me. He was looking, if the angle of his head meant anything, at a blank patch of wall.

"Carol says you've been having trouble with your vision."

"Carol is experiencing what people in your profession call denial. In fact I'm blind. I haven't been able to see anything at all since yesterday morning."

I sat on the bed next to him. When he turned his head toward me the motion was smooth but agonizingly slow. I took a penlight from my shirt pocket and flashed it into his right eye in order to watch the pupil contract.

It didn't.

It did something worse.

It glittered. The pupil of his eye glittered as if it had been injected with tiny diamonds.

Jason must have felt me jerk back.

"That bad?" he asked.

I couldn't speak.

He said, more somberly, "I can't use a mirror. Please, Ty. I need you to tell me what you see."

"This… I don't know what this is, Jason. This isn't something I can diagnose."

"Just describe it, please."

I tried to muster a clinical detachment. "It appears as if crystals of some kind have grown into your eye. The sclera looks normal and the iris doesn't seem to be affected, but the pupil is completely obscured by flakes of something like mica. I've never heard of anything like this. I would have said it was impossible. I can't treat it."

I backed away from the bed, found a chair and sat in it. For a while there was no sound but the ticking of the bedside clock, another of Carol's pristine antiques.

Then Jason draw a breath and forced what he seemed to imagine was a reassuring smile. "Thank you. You're right. It isn't a condition you can treat. But I'm still going to need your help during—well, during the next couple of days. Carol tries, but she's way out of her depth."

"So am I."

More rain beat at the window. "The help I need isn't entirely medical."

"If you have an explanation for this—"

"A partial one, at best."

"Then please share it with me, Jase, because I'm getting a little scared here."

He cocked his head, listening to some sound I hadn't heard or couldn't hear, until I began to wonder whether he had forgotten me. Then he said, "The short version is that my nervous system has been overtaken by something beyond my control. The condition of my eyes is just an external manifestation of it."

"A disease?"

"No, but that's the effect it's having."

"Is this condition contagious?"

"On the contrary. I believe it's unique. A disease only I can develop—on this planet, at least."

"Then it has something to do with the longevity treatment."

"In a way it does. But I—"

"No, Jase, I need an answer to that before you say anything else. Is your condition—whatever it is—a direct result of the drug I administered?"

"Not a direct result, no… you're not at fault in any way, if that's what you mean."

"Right now I couldn't care less who's at fault. Diane is sick. Didn't Carol tell you?"

"Carol said something about flu—"

"Carol lied. It's not flu. It's late-stage CVWS. I drove two thousand miles through what looks like the end of the world because she's dying, Jase, and there's only one cure I can think of, and you just threw that into doubt."

He rolled his head again, perhaps involuntarily, as if he were trying to shake off some invisible distraction.

But before I could prompt him he said, "There are aspects of Martian life Wun never shared with you. E.D. suspected as much, and to a certain extent his suspicions were well founded. Mars has been doing sophisticated biotechnology for centuries. Centuries ago, the Fourth Age was exactly what Wun told you it was—a longevity treatment and a social institution. But it's evolved since then. For Wun's generation the Fourth was more like a platform, a biological operating system capable of running much more sophisticated software applications. There isn't just a four, there's a 4.1, 4.2—if you see what I mean."

"What I gave you—"

"What you gave me was the traditional treatment. A basic four."

"But?"

"But… I've supplemented it since."

"This supplement was also something Wun transported from Mars?"

"Yes. The purpose—"

"Never mind the purpose. Are you absolutely certain you're not suffering from the effects of the original treatment?"

"As certain as I can be."

I stood up.

Jason heard me moving toward the door. "I can explain," he said. "And I still need your help. By all means take care of her, Ty. I hope she lives. But keep in mind… my time is also limited."

* * * * *

The case of Martian pharmaceuticals was where I had left it, unmolested, behind the broken wallboard in the basement of my mother's house, and when I had retrieved it I carried it across the lawn through the gusting amber rain to the Big House.

Carol was in Diane's room administering sips of oxygen by mask.

"We need to use that sparingly," I said, "unless you can conjure up another cylinder."

"Her lips were a little blue."

"Let me see."

Carol moved away from her daughter. I closed the valve and set the mask aside. You have to be careful with oxygen. It's indispensable for a patient in respiratory distress, but it can also cause problems. Too much can rupture the air sacs in the lung. My fear was that as Diane's condition worsened she would need higher doses to keep her blood levels up, the kind of oxygen therapy generally delivered by mechanical ventilation. We didn't have a ventilator.

Nor did we have any clinical means of monitoring her blood gases, but her lips looked relatively normal when I took the mask away. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, however, and though she opened her eyes once she remained lethargic and unresponsive.

Carol watched suspiciously as I opened the dusty case and extracted one of the Martian vials and a hypodermic syringe. "What's that?"

"Probably the only thing that can save her life."

"Is it? Are you sure of that, Tyler?"

I nodded.

"No," she said, "I mean, are you really sure? Because that's what you gave Jason, isn't it? When he had AMS."

There was no point in denying it. "Yes," I said.

"I may not have practiced medicine for thirty years, but I'm not ignorant. I did a little research on AMS after the last time you were here. I looked up the journal abstracts. And the interesting thing is, there isn't a cure for it. There is no magic drug. And if there were it would hardly be cross-specific for CVWS. So what I'm assuming, Tyler, is that you're about to administer a pharmaceutical agent probably connected with that wrinkled man who died in Florida."

"I won't argue, Carol. You've obviously drawn your own conclusions."

"I don't want you to argue; I want you to reassure me. I want you to tell me this drug won't do to Diane what it seems to have done to Jason."

"It won't," I said, but I think Carol knew I was editing out the caveat, the unspoken to the best of my knowledge.

She studied my face. "You still care for her."

"Yes."

"It never fails to astonish me," Carol said. "The tenacity of love."

I put the needle into Diane's vein.

* * * * *

By midday the house was not merely hot but so humid I expected moss to be hanging from the ceilings. I sat with Diane to make sure there were no immediate ill effects from the injection. At one point there was a protracted knocking at the front door of the house. Thieves, I thought, looters, but by the time I got to the foyer Carol had answered and was thanking a portly man, who nodded and turned to leave. "That was Emil Hardy," Carol said as she pulled the door closed. "Do you remember the Hardys? They own the little colonial house on Bantam Hill Road. Emil printed up a newspaper."

"A newspaper?"

She held up two stapled sheets of letter-sized paper. "Emil has an electrical generator in his garage. He listens to the radio at night and takes notes, then he prints a summary and delivers it to local houses. This is his second issue. He's a nice man and well meaning. But I don't see any point in reading such things."

"May I look at it?"

"If you like."

I took it upstairs with me.

Emil was a creditable amateur reporter. The stories mainly concerned crises in D.C. and Virginia—a list of official no-go zones and fire-related evacuations, attempts to restore local services. I skimmed through these. It was a couple of items lower down that caught my attention.

The first was a report that solar radiation recently measured at ground level was heightened but not nearly as intense as predicted. "Government scientists," it said, "are perplexed but cautiously optimistic about chances for long-term human survival." No source was credited, so this could have been some commentator's fabrication or an attempt to forestall further panic, but it jibed with my experience to date: the new sunlight was strange but not immediately deadly.

No word on how it might be affecting crop yields, weather, or the ecology in general. Neither the pestilential heat nor this torrential rain felt especially normal.

Below that was an item headlined lights in sky sighted WORLDWIDE.

These were the same C- or O-shaped lines Simon had pointed out back in Arizona. They had been seen as far north as Anchorage and as far south as Mexico City. Reports from Europe and Asia were fragmentary and primarily concerned with the immediate crisis, but a few similar stories had slipped through. ("Note," Emil Hardy's copy said, "cable news networks only intermittently available but showing recent video from India of similar phenomenon on larger scale." Whatever that meant.)

* * * * *

Diane woke for a few moments while I was with her.

"Tyler," she said.

I took her hand. It was dry and unnaturally warm.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"You have nothing to be sorry about."

"I'm sorry you have to see me like this."

"You're getting better. It might take a while, but you'll be all right."

Her voice was soft as the sound of a falling leaf. She looked around the room, recognizing it. Her eyes widened. "Here I am!"

"Here you are."

"Say my name again."

"Diane," I said. "Diane. Diane."

* * * * *

Diane was gravely ill, but it was Jason who was dying. He told me as much when I went to see him.

He hadn't eaten today, Carol had informed me. Jase had taken ice water through a straw but otherwise refused liquids. He could barely move his body. When I asked him to raise his arm he did so, but with such exquisite effort and torpid speed that I pressed it down again. Only his voice was still strong, and he anticipated losing even that: "If tonight is anything like last night I'll be incoherent until dawn. Tomorrow, who knows? I want to talk while I still can."

"Is there some reason your condition deteriorates at night?"

"A simple one, I think. We'll get to that. First I want you to do something for me. My suitcase was on the dresser: is it still there?"

"Still there."

"Open it. I packed an audio recorder. Find it for me."

I found a brushed-silver rectangle the size of a deck of playing cards, next to a stack of manila envelopes addressed to names I didn't recognize. "This it?" I said, then cursed myself: of course he couldn't see.

"If the label says Sony, that's it. There ought to be a package of blank memory underneath."

"Yup, got it."

"So we'll have a talk. Until it gets dark, and maybe a little after. And I want you to keep the recorder running. No matter what happens. Change the memory when you have to, or the battery if the power gets low. Do that for me, all right?"

"As long as Diane doesn't need urgent attention. When do you want to start?"

His turned his head. The diamond-specked pupils of his eyes glittered in the strange light.

"Now would not be too soon," he said.

ARS MORIENDI

The Martians, Jason said, were not the simple, peaceful, pastoral people Wun had led (or allowed) us to believe they were.

It was true that they weren't especially warlike—the Five Republics had settled their political differences almost a millennium ago—and they were "pastoral" in the sense that they devoted most of their resources to agriculture. But nor were they "simple" in any sense of the word. They were, as Jase had pointed out, past masters of the art of synthetic biology. Their civilization had been founded on it. We had built them a habitable planet with biotech tools, and there had never been a Martian generation that didn't understand the function and potential uses of DNA.

If their large-scale technology was sometimes crude— Wun's spacecraft, for instance, had been almost primitive, a Newtonian cannonball—it was because of their radically constrained natural resources. Mars was a world without oil or coal, supporting a fragile water- and nitrogen-starved ecosystem. A profligate, lush industrial base like the Earth's could never have existed on Wun's planet. On Mars, most human effort was devoted to producing sufficient food for a strictly controlled population. Biotechnology served this purpose admirably. Smoke-stack industries did not.

"Wun told you this?" I asked, as rain fell continuously and the afternoon ebbed.

"He confided in me, yes, though most of what he said was already implicit in the archives."

Rust-colored light from the window reflected from Jason's blind, altered eyes.

"But he could have been lying."

"I don't know that he ever lied, Tyler. He was just a little stingy with the truth."

The microscopic replicators Wun had carried to Earth were cutting-edge synthetic biology. They were fully capable of doing everything Wun promised they would do. In fact they were more sophisticated than Wun had been willing to admit.

Among the replicators' unacknowledged functions was a hidden second subchannel for communicating among themselves and with their point of origin. Wun hadn't said whether this was conventional narrowband radio or something technologically more exotic—the latter, Jase suspected. In any case, it required a receiver more advanced than anything we could build on Earth. It required, Wun had said, a biological receiver. A modified human nervous system.

* * * * *

"You volunteered for this?"

"I would have. If anyone had asked. But the only reason Wun confided in me was that he feared for his life from the day he arrived on Earth. He harbored no illusions about human venality or power politics. He needed someone he could trust to take custody of his pharmacopoeia, if anything happened to him. Someone who understood the purpose of it. He never proposed that I become a receiver. The modification only works on a Fourth—remember what I said? The longevity treatment is a platform. It runs other applications. This is one of them."

"You did this to yourself on purpose?"

"I injected myself with the substance after he died. It wasn't traumatic and it had no immediate effect. Remember, Tyler, there was no way for communication from the replicators to penetrate a fully functioning Spin membrane. What I gave myself was a latent ability."

"Why do it, then?"

"Because I didn't want to die in a condition of ignorance. We all assumed, if the Spin ended, we'd be dead within days or hours. The sole advantage to Wun's modification was that in those last days or hours, as long as I lasted, I would be in intimate contact with a database almost as large as the galaxy itself. I would know as nearly as anyone on Earth could know who the Hypothetical were and why they had done this to us."

I thought, And do you know that now? But maybe he did. Maybe that was what he wanted to communicate before he lost the ability to speak, why he wanted me to make a recording of it. "Did Wun know you might do this?"

"No, and I doubt he would have approved… although he was running the same application himself."

"Was he? It didn't show."

"It wouldn't. Remember: what's happening to me—to my body, to my brain—that's not the application." He turned his sightless eyes toward me. "That's a malfunction."

* * * * *

The replicators had been launched from Earth and had flourished in the outer solar system, far from the sun. (Had the Hypotheticals noticed this, and had they blamed the Earth for what was in fact a Martian intervention? Was that, as E.D. had implied, what the sly Martians had intended all along? Jason didn't say—I presumed he didn't know.)

In time the replicators spread to the nearest stars and beyond… eventually far beyond. The replicator colonies were invisible at astronomical distances, but if you had mapped them onto a grid of our local stellar neighborhood you would have seen a continually expanding cloud of them, a glacially slow explosion of artificial life.

The replicators were not immortal. As individual entities they lived, reproduced, and eventually died. What remained in place was the network they built: a coral reef of gated, interconnected nodes in which novel data accumulated and drained toward the network's point of origin.

"The last time we talked," I reminded Jase, "you said there was a problem. You said the replicator population was dying back."

"They encountered something no one had planned for."

"What was that, Jase?"

He was silent a few moments, as if gathering his thoughts.

"We assumed," he said, "that when we launched the replicators we were introducing something new to the universe, a wholly new kind of artificial life. That assumption was naive. We—human beings, terrestrial or Martian—weren't the first sentient species to evolve in our galaxy. Far from it. In fact there's nothing particularly unusual about us. Virtually everything we've done in our brief history has been done before, somewhere, by someone else."

"You're telling me the replicators ran into other replicators?"

"An ecology of replicators. The stars are a jungle, Tyler. Fuller of life man we ever imagined."

I tried to picture the process as Jason described it:

Far beyond the Spin-sequestered Earth, far beyond the solar system—so deep in space that the sun itself is only one more star in a crowded sky—a replicator seed alights on a dusty fragment of ice and begins to reproduce. It initiates the same cycle of growth, specialization, observation, communication, and reproduction that has taken place countless times during its ancestors' slow migrations. Maybe it reaches maturity; maybe it even begins to pump out microbursts of data; but this time, the cycle is interrupted.

Something has sensed the replicator's presence. Something hungry.

The predator (Jase explained) is another kind of semiorganic autocatalytic feedback system—another colony of self-reproducing cellular mechanisms, as much machine as biology—and the predator is plugged into its own network, this one older and vastly larger than anything the terrestrial replicators have had time to construct during their exodus from Earth. The predator is more highly evolved than its prey: its subroutines for nutrient-seeking and resource-utilization have been honed over billions of years. The terrestrial replicator colony, blind and incapable of fleeing, is promptly eaten.

But "eaten" carries a special meaning here. The predator wants more than the sophisticated carbonaceous molecules of which the replicator's mature form is composed, useful as these might be. Far more interesting to the predator is the replicator's meaning, the functions and strategies written into its reproductive templates. It adopts from these what it considers potentially valuable; then it reorganizes and exploits the replicator colony for its own purposes. The colony does not die but is absorbed, ontologically devoured, subsumed along with its brethren into a larger, more complex, and vastly older interstellar hierarchy.

It is not the first nor the last such device to be so absorbed.

"Replicator networks," Jason said, "are one of the things sentient civilizations tend to produce. Given the inherent difficulty of sublight-speed travel as a way of exploring the galaxy, most technological cultures eventually settle for an expanding grid of von Neumann machines—which is what the replicators are—that costs nothing to maintain and generates a trickle of scientific information that expands exponentially over historical time."

"Okay," I said, "I understand that. The Martian replicators aren't unique. They ran into what you call an ecology—"

"A von Neumann ecology." (After the twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann, who first suggested the possibility of self-reproducing machines.)

"A von Neumann ecology, and they were absorbed by it. But that doesn't tell us anything about the Hypotheticals or the Spin."

Jason pursed his lips impatiently. "Tyler, no. You don't understand. The Hypotheticals are the von Neumann ecology. They're one and the same."

* * * * *

At this point I had to step back and reconsider exactly who was in the room with me.

It looked like Jase. But everything he'd said was casting that into doubt.

"Are you communicating with this… entity? Now, I mean? As we speak?"

"I don't know if you'd call it communication. Communication works two ways. This doesn't, not in the sense you're implying. And real communication wouldn't be quite so overwhelming. This is. Especially at night. The input is moderated during daylight hours, presumably because solar radiation washes out the signal."

"At night the signal is stronger"

"Maybe the word 'signal' is misleading, too. A signal is what the original replicators were designed to transmit. What I receive is coming in on the same carrier wave, and it does convey information, but it's active, not passive. It's trying to do to me what it's done to every other node in the network. In effect, Ty, it's trying to acquire and reprogram my nervous system."

So there was a third entity in the room. Me, Jase—and the Hypotheticals, who were eating him alive.

"Can they do that? Reprogram your nervous system?"

"Not successfully, no. To them I look like one more node in the replicator network. The biotechnology I injected into myself is sensitive to their manipulation, but not in the ways they anticipate. Because they don't perceive me as a biological entity, all they can do is kill me."

"Is there any way to screen this signal or interfere with it?"

"None that I know of. If the Martians had such a technique they neglected to include the information in their archives."

The window in Jason's room faced west. The roseate glow now penetrating the room was the waning sun, obscured by clouds.

"But they're with you now. Talking to you."

"They. It. We need a better pronoun. The entire von Neumann ecology is a single entity. It thinks its own slow thoughts and makes its own plans. But many of its trillions of parts are also autonomous individuals, often competing with each other, quicker to act than the network as a whole and vastly more intelligent than any single human being. The Spin membrane, for instance—"