Spin

"The Spin membrane is an individual?"

"In every important sense, yes. Its ultimate goals are derived from the network, but it evaluates events and makes autonomous choices. It's more complex than we ever dreamed, Ty. We all assumed the membrane was either on or off, like a light switch, like binary code. Not true. It has many states. Many purposes. Many degrees of permeability, for instance. We've known for years that it can transit a spacecraft and repel an asteroid. But it has subtler capabilities even than that. That's why we haven't been overwhelmed with solar radiation in the last few days. The membrane is still giving us a certain level of protection."

"I don't know the casualty numbers, Jase, but there must be thousands of people in this city alone who have lost family since the Spin stopped. I would be very reluctant to tell them they're being 'protected.'"

"But they are. In general if not in particular. The Spin membrane isn't God—it can't see the sparrow fall. It can, however, prevent the sparrow from being cooked with lethal ultraviolet light."

"To what end?"

At that he frowned. "I can't quite grasp," he began, "or maybe I can't quite translate—"

There was a knock at the door. Carol entered with an armful of linen. I switched off the recorder and set it aside. Carol's expression was grim.

"Clean sheets?" I asked.

"Restraints," she said curtly. The linen had been cut into strips. "For when the convulsions start."

She nodded at the window, the lengthening daylight.

"Thank you," Jason said gently. "Tyler, if you need a break, this would be the time. But don't be too long."

* * * * *

I looked in on Diane, who was between episodes, sleeping. I thought about the Martian drug I had administered to her (the "basic Fourth," as Jase had called it), semi-intelligent molecules about to do battle with her body's overwhelming load of CVWS bacteria, microscopic battalions mustering to repair and rebuild her, unless her body was too weakened to withstand the strain of the transformation.

I kissed her forehead and said gentle words she probably couldn't hear. Then I left her bedroom and went downstairs and out onto the lawn of the Big House, stealing a moment for myself.

The rain had finally stopped—abruptly, completely—and the air was fresher than it had been all day. The sky was deep blue at the zenith. A few tattered thunderheads cloaked the monstrous sun where it touched the western horizon. Raindrops stood on every blade of grass, tiny amber pearls.

Jason had admitted that he was dying. Now I began to admit it to myself.

As a physician I had seen more of death than most people ever see. I knew how people died. I knew that the familiar story of how we face death—denial, anger, acceptance—was at best a gross generalization. Those emotions might evolve in seconds or might never evolve at all; death could trump them at any instant. For many people, facing death was never an issue; their deaths arrived unannounced, a ruptured aorta or a bad decision at a busy intersection.

But Jase knew he was dying. And I was bewildered that he seemed to have accepted it with such unearthly calm, until I realized that his death was also an ambition fulfilled. He was on the brink of understanding what he had struggled all his life to understand: the meaning of the Spin and humanity's place in it—his place in it, since he had been instrumental in the launch of the replicators.

It was as if he had reached up and touched the stars.

And they had touched him in return. The stars were murdering him. But he was dying in a state of grace.

* * * * *

"We have to hurry. It's almost dark now, isn't it?" Carol had gone off to light candles throughout the house. "Almost," I said.

"And the rain stopped. Or at least, I can't hear it."

"Temperature's dropping, too. Would you like me to open the window?"

"Please. And the audio recorder, you turned it back on?"

"It's running now." I raised the old frame window a few inches and cool air infiltrated the room.

"We were talking about the Hypotheticals…"

"Yes." Silence. "Jase? Are you still with me?"

"I hear the wind. I hear your voice. I hear…"

"Jason?"

"I'm sorry… don't mind me, Ty. I'm easily distracted right now. I—uh!"

His arms and legs jerked against the restraints Carol had tied across the bed. His head arched into the pillow. He was having what looked like an epileptic seizure, although it was brief: over before I could approach the bed. He gasped and took a deep lungful of air. "Sorry, I'm sorry…"

"Don't apologize."

"Can't control it, I'm sorry."

"I know you can't. It's all right, Jase."

"Don't blame them for what's happening to me."

"Blame who—the Hypotheticals?"

He attempted a smile, though he was clearly in pain. "We'll have to find a new name for them, won't we? They're not as hypothetical as they used to be. But don't blame them. They don't know what's happening to me. I'm under their threshold of abstraction."

"I don't know what that means."

He spoke rapidly and eagerly, as if the talk were a welcome distraction from the physical distress. Or another symptom of it. "You and I, Tyler, we're communities of living cells, yes? And if you damaged a sufficient number of my cells I would die, you would have murdered me. But if we shake hands and I lose a few skin cells in the process neither of us even notices the loss. It's invisible. We live at a certain level of abstraction; we interact as bodies, not cell colonies. The same is true of the Hypotheticals. They inhabit a larger universe than we do."

"That makes it all right to kill people?"

"I'm talking about their perception, not their morality. The death of any single human being—my death—might be meaningful to them, if they could see it in the correct context. But they can't."

"They've done this before, though, created other Spin worlds—isn't that one of the things the replicators discovered before the Hypothetical shut them down?"

"Other Spin worlds. Yes. Many. The network of the Hypothetical has grown to encompass most of the habitable zone of the galaxy, and this is what they do when they encounter a planet that hosts a sentient, tool-using species of a certain degree of maturity—they enclose it in a Spin membrane."

I pictured spiders, wrapping their victims in silk. "Why, Jase?"

The door opened. Carol was back, carrying a tea candle on a china saucer. She put the saucer on the sideboard and lit the candle with a wooden match. The flame danced, imperiled by the breeze from the window.

"To preserve it," Jason said.

"Preserve it against what?"

"Its own senescence and eventual death. Technological cultures are mortal, like everything else. They flourish until they exhaust their resources; then they die."

Unless they don't, I thought. Unless they continue flourishing, expand into their solar systems, transplant themselves to the stars…

But Jason had anticipated my objection. "Even local space travel is slow and inefficient for beings with a human life span. Maybe we would have been an exception to the rule. But the Hypotheticals have been around a very long time. Before they devised the Spin membrane they watched countless inhabited worlds drown in their own effluvia."

He drew a breath and seemed to choke on it. Carol turned to face him. Her mask of competence slipped, and in the moment it took him to recover she was plainly terrified, not a doctor but a woman with a dying child.

Jase, perhaps fortunately, couldn't see. He swallowed hard and began to breathe normally again.

"But why the Spin, Jase? It pushes us into the future, but it doesn't change anything."

"On the contrary," he said. "It changes everything."

* * * * *

The paradox of Jason's last night was that his speech grew awkward and intermittent even as his acquired knowledge seemed to expand exponentially. I believe he learned more in those few hours than he could begin to share, and what he did share was momentous—sweeping in its explanatory power and provocative for what it implied about human destiny.

Pass over the trauma, the agonized groping after appropriate words, and what he said was—

Well, it began with, "Try to see it from their point of view."

Their point of view: the Hypotheticals.

The Hypotheticals—whether considered as one organism or many—had evolved from the first von Neumann devices to inhabit our galaxy. The origin of those primal self-replicating machines was obscure. Their descendants had no direct memory of it, any more than you or I can "remember" human evolution. They may have been the product of an early-emerging biological culture of which no trace remains; they may have migrated from another, older galaxy. In either case, the Hypotheticals of today belonged to an almost unimaginably ancient lineage.

They had seen sentient biological species evolve and die on planets like ours countless times. By passively transporting organic material from star to star they may even have helped seed the process of organic evolution. And they had watched biological cultures generate crude von Neumann networks as a byproduct of their accelerating (but ultimately unsustainable) complexity—not once, but many times. To the Hypotheticals we all looked more or less like replicator nurseries: strange, fecund, fragile.

From their point of view this endless stuttering gestation of simple von Neumann networks, followed by the rapid ecological collapse of source planets, was both a mystery and a tragedy.

A mystery, because transient events on a purely biological time scale were difficult for them to comprehend or even perceive.

A tragedy, because they had begun to conceive of these progenitor cultures as failed biological networks, akin to themselves—growing toward real complexity but snuffed out prematurely by finite planetary ecosystems

For the Hypotheticals, then, the Spin was meant to preserve us—and dozens of similar civilizations that had arisen on other worlds before and since—in our technological prime. But we weren't museum pieces, frozen in place for public display. The Hypotheticals were reengineering our destiny. They had suspended us in slowtime while they put together the pieces of a grand experiment, an experiment formulated over billions of years and now nearing its ultimate goal: to build a vastly expanded biological landscape into which these otherwise doomed cultures could expand and in which they would eventually meet and intermingle.

* * * * *

I didn't immediately grasp the meaning of this: "An expanded biological environment? Bigger than the Earth itself?"

We were courting full darkness now. Jason's words were interrupted by convulsive movements and involuntary sounds, edited out of this account. Periodically I checked his heartbeat, which was rapid and growing weaker.

"The Hypotheticals," he said, "can manipulate time and space. The evidence of that is all around us. But creating a temporal membrane is neither the beginning nor the end of their abilities. They can literally connect our planet through spatial loops to others like it… new planets, some artificially designed and nurtured, to which we can travel instantaneously and easily … travel by way of links, bridges, structures, structures assembled by the Hypotheticals, assembled from—if this is truly possible—the matter of dead stars, neutron stars… structures literally dragged through space, patiently, patiently, over the course of millions of years—"

Carol sat beside him on one side of the bed and I sat on the other. I held his shoulders when his body convulsed and Carol stroked his head during the intervals in which he could not speak. His eyes sparked in the candlelight and he stared intently at nothing at all.

"The Spin membrane is still in place, working, thinking, but the temporal function is finished, complete… that's what the flickers were, the byproduct of a detuning process, and now the membrane has been made permeable so that something can enter the atmosphere through it, something large.…"

Later it became obvious what he meant. At the time I was bewildered and I suspected he might have begun to pass into dementia, a sort of metaphorical overload governed by the word "network."

I was, of course, wrong.

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed.

But the other memory that sprang to mind, as the substance of Jason's nervous system was transformed and eroded by the Hypotheticals in a way they could not have known was lethal to him, was of that afternoon, long ago, when he had ridden my thrift shop bicycle down from the top of Bantam Hill Road. I thought of how adroitly, almost balletically, he had controlled that disintegrating machine, until there was nothing left of it but ballistics and velocity, the inevitable collapse of order into chaos.

His body—and he was a Fourth, remember—was a finely tuned machine. It didn't die easily. Sometime prior to midnight Jason lost the ability to speak, and that was when he began to look both frightened and no longer entirely human. Carol held his hand and told him he was safe, he was at home. I don't know if that consolation reached him in the strange and convolute chambers his mind had entered. I hope it did.

Not long after that his eyes rolled upward and his muscles relaxed. His body struggled on, drawing convulsive breaths almost until morning.

Then I left him with Carol, who stroked his head with infinite gentleness and whispered to him as if he could still hear her, and I failed to notice that the sun when it rose was no longer bloated and red but as bright and perfect as it had been before the end of the Spin.

4X109 A. D. / WE ALL LAND SOMEWHERE

I stayed on deck as the Capetown Mam left its berth and made for the open sea.

No less than a dozen container ships abandoned Teluk Bayur while the oil fires were burning, jostling for position at the harbor mouth. Most of these were small merchant ships of dubious registry, probably bound for Port Magellan despite what their manifests said—vessels whose owners and captains had much to lose from the scrutiny that would follow an investigation.

I stood with Jala and we braced ourselves against the rails, watching a rust-spackled coastal freighter veer out of a bank of oil-fire smoke alarmingly close to the Capetown's stern. Both ships sounded alarms and the Capetown's, deck crew looked aft apprehensively. But the coastal freighter sheered off before it made contact.

Then we were out of the protection of the harbor into high seas and rolling swells, and I went below to join Ina and Diane and the other emigres in the crew lounge. En sat at a trestle table with Ibu Ina and his parents, all four of them looking unwell. In deference to her injury Diane had been given the only padded chair in the room, but the wound had stopped bleeding and she had managed to change into dry clothes.

Jala entered the lounge an hour later. He shouted for attention and delivered a speech, which Ina translated for me: "Setting aside his pompous self-congratulation, Jala says he went to the bridge and spoke to the captain. All deck fires are out and we're safely underway, he says. The captain apologizes for the rough seas. According to forecasts we ought to be out of this weather by late tonight or early tomorrow. For the next few hours, however—"

At which point En, who was sitting next to Ina, turned and vomited into her lap, effectively finishing her sentence for her.

* * * * *

Two nights later I went up on deck with Diane to look at the stars.

The main deck was quieter at night than at any time during the day. We found a safe space between the exposed forty-foot containers and the aft superstructure, where we could talk without being overheard. The sea was calm, the air was pleasantly warm, and stars swarmed over the Capetown's stacks and radars as if they had tangled in the rigging.

"Are you still writing your memoir?" Diane had seen the assortment of memory cards I was carrying in my luggage, alongside the digital and pharmaceutical contraband we had brought from Montreal. Also various paper notebooks, loose pages, scribbled notes.

"Not as often," I said. "It doesn't seem as urgent. The need to write it all down—"

"Or the fear of forgetting."

"Or that."

"And do you feel different?" she asked, smiling.

I was a new Fourth. Diane was not. By now her wound had closed, leaving nothing but a strip of puckered flesh that followed the curvature of her hip. Her body's capacity for self-repair still struck me as uncanny. Even though, presumably, I shared it.

Her question was a little mischievous. Many times I had asked Diane whether she felt different as a Fourth. The real question, of course, was: did she seem different to me?

There had never been a good answer. Obviously she was a different person after her near-death and resurrection at the Big House—who wouldn't be? She had lost a husband and a faith and had awakened to a world that would make even the Buddha scratch his head in perplexity.

"The transition is only a door," she said. "A door into a room. A room you've never been in, though you might have caught a glimpse of it from time to time. Now it's the room where you live; it's yours, it belongs to you. It has certain qualities you can't change—you can't make it bigger or smaller. But how you furnish it is up to you."

"More a proverb than an answer," I said.

"Sorry. Best I can do." She turned her head up toward the stars. "Look, Tyler, you can see the Arch."

We call it an "arch" because we're a myopic species. The Archway is really a ring, a circle a thousand miles in diameter, but only half of it rises above sea level. The rest of it is underwater or buried in the crust of the Earth, perhaps (some have speculated) exploiting the suboceanic magma as a source of energy. But from our ant's-eye point of view it was indeed an arch, the peak of which extended well above the atmosphere.

Even the exposed half of it was completely visible only in photographs taken from space, and even those photographs were usually doctored to emphasize detail. If you could take a cross-section of the ring material itself—in effect, the wire that bends into a hoop—it would be a rectangle a quarter mile on its short side and a mile on the long. Immense, but a tiny fraction of the space it enclosed and not always easy to see at a distance.

Capetown Mam's route had taken us south of the ring, parallel to its radius and almost directly beneath its apex. The sun was still shining on that peak, no longer a bent letter U or J but a gentle frown (a Cheshire frown, Diane called it) high in the northern sky. Stars rotated past it like phosphorescent plankton parted by the prow of a ship.

Diane put her head against my shoulder. "I wish Jason could have seen this."

"I believe he did see it. Just not from this angle."

* * * * *

There were three immediate problems at the Big House following Jason's death.

The most pressing was Diane, whose physical condition remained unchanged for days following the injection of the Martian drug. She was nearly comatose and intermittently feverish, her pulse beating in her throat like the flutter of an insect wing. We were low on medical supplies and I had to coax her to take an occasional sip of water. The only real improvement was in the sound of her breathing, which was incrementally more relaxed and less phlegmatic—her lungs, at least, were mending.

The second problem was distasteful, but it was one we shared with too many other households across the country: a family member had died and needed burying.

A great wave of death (accidental, suicidal, homicidal) had swept over the world in the last few days. No nation on Earth was equipped to deal with it, except in the crudest possible fashion, and the United States was no exception. Local radio had begun to announce collection sites for mass burials; refrigerated trucks had been commandeered from meat packing plants; there was a number to call now that phone service had been restored—but Carol wouldn't hear of it. When I broached the subject she drew herself into a posture of fierce dignity and said, "I won't do that, Tyler. I will not have Jason dumped into a hole like a medieval pauper."

"Carol, we can't—"

"Hush," she said. "I still have a few contacts left from the old days. Let me make some calls."

She had once been a respected specialist and must have had an extensive network of contacts before the Spin; but after thirty years of alcoholic seclusion, whom could she possibly know? Nevertheless she spent a morning on the phone, tracking down changed numbers, reintroducing herself, explaining, coaxing, begging. It all sounded hopeless to me. But not more than six hours later a hearse pulled into the driveway and two obviously exhausted but relentlessly kind and professional men came inside and put Jason's body on a wheeled stretcher and carried him out of the Big House for the last time.

Carol spent the rest of the day upstairs, holding Diane's hand and singing songs she probably couldn't hear. That night she took her first drink since the morning the red sun rose—a "maintenance dose," she called it.

Our third big problem was E. D. Lawton.

* * * * *

E.D. had to be told that his son had died, and Carol steeled herself to perform that duty, too. She confessed she hadn't talked to E.D. except through lawyers for a couple of years now and that he had always frightened her, at least when she was sober—-he was big, confrontational, intimidating; Carol was fragile, elusive, sly. But her grief had subtly altered the equation.

It took hours, but she was finally able to reach him—he was in Washington, within commuting distance—and tell him about Jason. She was carefully vague about the cause of his death. She told him Jason had come home with what looked like pneumonia and that it had turned critical shortly after the power died and the world went berserk—no phone, no ambulance service, ultimately no hope.

I asked her how E.D. had taken the news.

She shrugged. "He didn't say anything at first. Silence is E.D.'s way of expressing pain. His son died, Tyler. That might not have surprised him, given what's happened in the last few days. But it hurt him. I think it hurt him unspeakably."

"Did you tell him Diane's here?"

"I thought it would be wiser not to." She looked at me. "I didn't tell him you're here, either. I know Jason and E.D. were at odds. Jason came home to escape something that was happening at Perihelion, something that frightened him. And I assume it's connected somehow with the Martian drug. No, Tyler, don't explain it to me—I don't care to hear and I probably wouldn't understand. But I thought it would be better if E.D. didn't come bulling out to the house, trying to take charge of things."

"He didn't ask about her?"

"No, not about Diane. One odd thing, though. He asked me to make sure that Jason… well, that Jason's body is preserved. He asked a lot of questions about that. I told him I'd made arrangements, there would be a funeral, I'd let him know. But he didn't want to leave it at that. He wants an autopsy. But I got stubborn." She regarded me coolly. "Why would he want an autopsy, Tyler?"

"I don't know," I said.

But I set about finding out. I went to Jason's room, where his empty bed had been stripped of sheets. I opened the window and sat in the chair next to the dresser and looked at what he'd left behind.

Jason had asked me to record his final insights into the nature of the Hypotheticals and their manipulation of the Earth. He had also asked me to include a copy of that recording in each of a dozen or so fat padded envelopes, stamped and addressed for mailing if and when mail service was restored. Clearly Jase had not expected to produce such a monologue when he arrived at the Big House a few days before the end of the Spin. Some other crisis had been dogging him. His deathbed testament was a late addendum.

I leafed through the envelopes. They were addressed, in Jason's hand, to names I didn't recognize. No, correct that; I did recognize the name on one of the envelopes.

It was mine.

Dear Tyler,

I know I've burdened you unconscionably in the past. I'm afraid I'm about to burden you again, and this time the stakes are considerably higher. Let me explain. And I'm sorry if this seems abrupt, but I'm in a hurry, for reasons that will become clear.

Recent episodes of what the media call "the flicker" have set off alarm bells in the Lomax administration. So have several other events, less well publicized. I'll cite just one example: since the death of Wun Ngo Wen, tissue samples taken from his organs have been under study at the Animal Disease Center on Plum Island, the same facility where he was quarantined when he arrived on Earth. Martian biotechnology is subtle, but modern forensics is stubborn. It recently became clear that Wun's physiology, particularly his nervous system, had been altered in ways even more radical than the "Fourth Age" procedure outlined in his archives. For this and other reasons, Lomax and his people have begun to smell a rat. They invited E.D. out of his reluctant retirement and they're giving new credence to his suspicions about Wun's motives. E.D. welcomed this as an opportunity to reclaim Perihelion (and his own reputation), and he's wasting no time capitalizing on the paranoia in the White House.

How have the authorities chosen to proceed? Crudely. Lomax (or his advisors) conceived a plan to raid the existing facilities at Perihelion and seize whatever we had retained of Wun's possessions and documents, as well as all our records and working notes.

E.D. hasn't yet connected the dots between my recovery from AMS and Wun's pharmaceuticals; or, if he has, he's kept it to himself. Or so I prefer to believe. Because if I fall into the hands of the security services the first thing they'll do is a blood assay, rapidly followed by making me a captive science experiment, probably in Wun's old cell at Plum Island. And I don't believe E.D. actually wants that to happen. As much as he may resent me for "stealing Perihelion" or collaborating with Wun Ngo Wen, he's still my father.

But don't worry. Even though E.D. is very much back in the loop at Lomax's White House, I have resources of my own. I've been cultivating them. These are generally not powerful people, though some are powerful in their own way, but bright and decent individuals who choose to take a longer view of human destiny, and thanks to them I was warned in advance of the raid on Perihelion. I've effected my escape. Now I'm a fugitive.

You, Tyler, are merely a suspected accessory, though it may come to the same thing.

I'm sorry. I know I bear some responsibility for putting you in this position. Someday I'll apologize face-to-face. For now all I can offer is advice.

The digital records I put into your hands when you left Perihelion are, of course, highly classified redactions from the archives of Wun Ngo Wen. For all I know you may have burned them, buried them, or tossed them into the Pacific Ocean. No matter. Years designing spacecraft taught me the virtue of redundancy. I've parceled out Wun's contraband wisdom to dozens of people in this country and across the world. It hasn't been posted on the Internet yet—no one is that feckless—but it's out there. This is no doubt a profoundly unpatriotic and certainly criminal act. If I'm captured I'll be accused of treason. In the meantime I'm making the most of it.

But I don't believe knowledge of this kind (which includes protocols for human modifications that can cure grave diseases, among other things, and I should know) ought to be corralled for national advantage, even if releasing it poses other problems.

Lomax and his tame Congress clearly disagree. So I'm dispersing the last fragments of the archive and making myself scarce. I'm going into hiding. You might want to do the same. In fact you may have to. Everyone at the old Perihelion, anyone who was close to me, is bound to fall under federal scrutiny sooner or later.

Or, contrarily, you may wish to drop in at the nearest FBI office and hand over the contents of this envelope. If that's what you think is best, follow your conscience; I won't blame you, though I don't guarantee the outcome. My experience with the Lomax administration suggests that the truth will not, in fact, set you free.

In any case, I regret putting you in a difficult position. It isn't fair. It's too much to ask of a friend, and I have always been proud to call you my friend.

Maybe E.D. was right about one thing. Our generation has struggled for thirty years to recover what the Spin stole from us that October night. But we can't. There's nothing in this evolving universe to hold on to, and nothing to be gained by trying. If I learned anything from my "Fourthness," that's it. We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

Fall freely, Tyler. Use the enclosed documents if you need them. They were expensive but they're absolutely reliable. (It's good to have friends in high places!)

The "enclosed documents" were, in essence, a suite of spare identities: passports, Homeland Security ID cards, driver's licenses, birth certificates, Social Security numbers, even med-school diplomas, all bearing my description but none bearing my correct name.

* * * * *

Diane's recovery continued. Her pulse strengthened and her lungs cleared, although she was still febrile. The Martian drug was doing its work, rebuilding her from the inside out, editing and amending her DNA in subtle ways.

As her health improved she began to ask cautious questions—about the sun, about Pastor Dan, about the trip from Arizona to the Big House. Because of her intermittent fever, the answers I gave her didn't always stick. She asked me more than once what had happened to Simon. If she was lucid I told her about the red calf and the return of the stars; if she was groggy I just told her Simon was "somewhere else" and that I'd be looking after her a while longer. Neither of these answers—the true or the half-true—seemed to satisfy her.

Some days she was listless, propped up facing the window, watching sunlight clock across the valleyed bedclothes. Other days she was feverishly restless. One afternoon she demanded paper and a pen… but when I gave it to her all she wrote was the single sentence Am I not my brother's keeper, repeated until her fingers cramped.

"I told her about Jason," Carol admitted when I showed her the paper.

"Are you sure that was wise?"

"She had to hear it sooner or later. She'll make peace with it, Tyler. Don't worry. Diane will be all right. Diane was always the strong one."

* * * * *

On the morning of the day of Jason's funeral I prepared the envelopes he had left, adding a copy of his last recording to each one, stamped them, and dropped them into a randomly selected mailbox on the way to the local chapel Carol had reserved for the service. The packages might have to wait a few days for pickup—mail service was still being restored—but I figured they'd be safer there than at the Big House.

The "chapel" was a nondenominational funeral home on a suburban main street, busy now that the travel restrictions had been lifted. Jase had always had a rationalist's disdain for elaborate funerals, but Carol's sense of dignity demanded a ceremony even if it was feeble and pro forma. She had managed to round up a small crowd, mostly longtime neighbors who remembered Jason as a child and who had glimpsed his career in TV sound bites and sidebars in the daily paper. It was his fading celebrity status that filled the pews.

I delivered a brief eulogy. (Diane would have done it better, but Diane was too ill to attend.) Jase, I said, had dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge, not arrogantly but humbly: he understood that knowledge wasn't created but discovered; it couldn't be owned, only shared, hand to hand, generation to generation. Jason had made himself a part of that sharing and was part of it still. He had woven himself into the network of knowing.

E.D. entered the chapel while I was still at the pulpit.

He was halfway down the aisle when he recognized me. He stared at me a long minute before he settled into the nearest empty pew.

He was more gaunt than I remembered him, and he had shaved the last of his white hair into invisible stubble. But he still carried himself like a powerful man. He wore a suit that had been tailored to razor-tight tolerances. He folded his arms and inspected the room imperially, marking who was present. His gaze fingered on Carol.

When the service ended Carol stood and gamely accepted the condolences of her neighbors as they filed out. She had wept copiously over the last few days but was resolutely dry-eyed now, almost clinically aloof. E.D. approached her after the last guest had left. She stiffened, like a cat sensing the presence of a larger predator.

"Carol," E.D. said. "Tyler." He gave me a sour stare.

"Our son is dead," Carol said. "Jason's gone."

"That's why I'm here."

"I hope you're here to mourn—"

"Of course I am."

"—and not for some other reason. Because he came to the house to get away from you. I assume you know that."

"I know more about it than you can imagine. Jason was confused—"

"He was many things, E.D., but he was not confused. I was with him when he died."

"Were you? That's interesting. Because, unlike you, I was with him when he was alive."

Carol drew a sharp breath and turned her head as if she'd been slapped.

E.D. said, "Come on, Carol. I was the one who raised Jason and you know it. You may not like the kind of life I gave him, but that's what I did—I gave him a life and a means of living it."

"I gave birth to him."

"That's a physiological function, not a moral act. Everything Jason ever owned he got from me. Everything he learned, I taught him."

"For better or worse…"

"And now you want to condemn me just because I have some practical concerns—"

"What practical concerns?"

"Obviously, I'm talking about the autopsy."

"Yes. You mentioned that on the telephone. But it's undignified and it's frankly impossible."

"I was hoping you'd take my concerns seriously. Clearly you haven't. But I don't need your permission. There are men outside this building waiting to claim the body, and they can produce writs under the Emergency Measures Act."

She took a step back from him. "You have that much power?"

"Neither you nor I have any choice in the matter. This is going to happen whether we like it or not. And it's really only a formality. No harm will be done. So for god's sake let's preserve some dignity and mutual respect. Let me have the body of my son."

"I can't do that."

"Carol—"

"I can't give you his body."

"You're not listening to me. You don't have a choice"

"No, I'm sorry, you're not listening to me. Listen, E.D. I can't give you his body."

He opened his mourn and then closed it. His eyes widened.

"Carol," he said. "What have you done?"

"There is no body. Not anymore." Her lips curled into a sly, bitter smile. "But I suppose you can take his ashes. If you insist."

* * * * *

I drove Carol back to the Big House, where her neighbor Emil Hardy—who had given up his short-lived local news sheet when the power was restored—had been sitting with Diane.

"We talked about old times on the block," Hardy said as he was leaving. "I used to watch the kids ride their bikes. That was a long time ago. This skin condition she's got—"

"It's not contagious," Carol said. "Don't worry."

"Unusual, though."

"Yes. Unusual it is. Thank you, Emil."

"Ashley and I would love to have you over for dinner sometime."

"That sounds lovely. Please thank Ashley for me." She closed the door and turned to me. "I need a drink. But first things first. E.D. knows you're here. So you have to leave, and you have to take Diane with you. Can you do that? Take her somewhere safe? Somewhere E.D. won't find her?"

"Of course I can. But what about you?"

"I'm not in danger. E.D. might send people around to look for whatever treasure he imagines Jason stole from him. But he won't find anything—as long as you're thorough, Tyler— and he can't take the house away from me. E.D. and I signed our armistice a long time ago. Our skirmishes are trivial. But he can hurt you, and he can hurt Diane even if he doesn't mean to."

"I won't let that happen."

"Then get your things together. You may not have much time."

* * * * *

The day before Capetown Maru was due to cross the Archway I went up on deck to watch the sun rise. The Arch was mostly invisible, its descending pillars hidden by horizons east and west, but in the half hour before dawn its apex was a line in the sky almost directly overhead, razor sharp and gently glowing.

It had faded behind a haze of high cirrus cloud by mid-morning, but we all knew it was there.

The prospect of the transit was making everyone nervous—not just passengers but the seasoned crew, too. They went about their customary business, tending to the needs of the ship, mending machinery, chipping and repainting the superstructure, but there was a briskness in the rhythm of their work that hadn't been there yesterday. Jala came on deck lugging a plastic chair and joined me where I sat, protected from the wind by the forty-foot containers but facing a narrow view of the sea.

"This is my last trip to the other side," Jala said. He was dressed for the warmth of the day in a billowing yellow shirt and jeans. He had opened the shirt to expose his chest to the sunlight. He took a can of beer from the topside cooler and cracked it. All these actions announced him as a secularized man, a businessman, equally disdainful of Muslim sharia and Minang adat. "This time," he said, "there's no coming back."

He had burned his bridges behind him—literally, if he'd had anything to do with orchestrating the riot at Teluk Bayur. (The explosions had made a suspiciously convenient cover for our getaway, even if we had almost been caught in the conflagration.) For years Jala had been running an emigrant-smuggling brokerage trade far more lucrative than his legitimate import/export business. There was more money in people than in palm oil, he said. But the Indian and Vietnamese competition was stiff and the political climate had soured; better to retire to Port Magellan now than spend the rest of his life in a New Reformasi prison.

"You've made the transit before?"

"Twice."

"Was it difficult?"

He shrugged. "Don't believe everything you hear."

By noon many of the passengers were up on deck. In addition to the Minangkabau villagers there were assorted Acehnese, Malay, and Thai emigrants aboard, perhaps a hundred of us in all—far too many for the available cabins, but three aluminum cargo containers in the hold had been rigged as sleeping quarters, carefully ventilated.

This wasn't the grim, often deadly, human-smuggling trade that used to carry refugees to Europe or North America. Most of the people who crossed the Arch every day were overflow from the feeble U.N.-sanctioned resettlement programs, often with money to spend. We were treated with respect by the crew, many of whom had spent months in Port Magellan and who understood its blandishments and pitfalls.

One of the deck hands had set aside part of the main deck as a sort of soccer field, marked off with nets, where a group of children were playing. Every now and then the ball bounced past the nets, often into Jala's lap, much to his chagrin. Jala was irritable today.

I asked him when the ship would make the transit.

"According to the captain, unless we change speed, twelve hours or so."

"Our last day on Earth," I said.

"Don't joke."

"I meant it literally."

"And keep your voice down. Sailors are superstitious."

"What will you do in Port Magellan?"

Jala raised his eyebrows. "What will I do? Fuck beautiful women. And quite possibly a few ugly ones. What else?"

The soccer ball bounced past the net again. This time Jala scooped it up and held it against his belly. "Damn it, I warned you! This game is over!"

A dozen children promptly pressed against the nets, shrieking protest, but it was En who summoned the courage to come around and confront Jala directly. En was sweating, his rib cage pumping like a bellows. His team had been five points ahead. "Give it back, please," he said.

"You want this back?" Jala stood up, still clutching the ball, imperious, mysteriously angry. "You want it? Go get it." He kicked the ball in a long trajectory that took it past the deck rails and out into the blue-green immensity of the Indian Ocean.

En looked astonished, then angry. He said something low and bitter in Minang.

Jala reddened. Then he slapped the boy with his open hand, so hard that En's heavy glasses went skittering across the deck.

"Apologize," Jala demanded.

En dropped to one knee, eyes squeezed shut. He drew a few sobbing breaths. Eventually he stood up. He walked a few steps across the deck plates and collected his eyeglasses. He fumbled them into place and walked back with what I thought was an astonishing dignity. He stood directly in front of Jala.

"No," he said faintly. "You apologize."

Jala gasped and swore. En cringed. Jala raised his hand again.

I caught his wrist in midswing.

Jala looked at me, startled. "What is this! Let go."

He tried to pull his hand away. I wouldn't let him. "Don't hit him again," I said.

"I'll do what I like!"

"Fine," I said. "But don't hit him again."

"You—after what I've done for you—!"

Then he gave me a second look.

I don't know what he saw in my face. I don't know exactly what I was feeling at that moment. Whatever it was, it appeared to confuse him. His clenched fist went slack. He seemed to wilt.

"Fucking crazy American," he muttered. "I'm going to the canteen." To the small crowd of children and deck hands that had gathered around us: "Where I can have peace and respect!" He stalked away.

En was still staring at me, gap-jawed.

"I'm sorry about that," I said.

He nodded.

"I can't get your ball back," I said.

He touched his cheek where Jala had slapped him. "That's okay," he said faintly.

Later—over dinner in the crew mess, hours away from the crossing—I told Diane about the incident. "I didn't think about what I was doing. It just seemed… obvious. Almost reflexive. Is that a Fourth thing?"

"It might be. The impulse to protect a victim, especially a child, and to do it instantly, without thinking. I've felt it myself. I suppose it's something the Martians wrote into their neural rebuild… assuming they can really engineer feelings as subtle as that. I wish we had Wun Ngo Wen here to explain it. Or Jason, for that matter. Did it feel forced?"

"No…"

"Or wrong, inappropriate?"

"No… I think it was exactly the right thing to do."

"But you wouldn't have done it before you took the treatment?"

"I might have. Or wanted to. But I probably would have second-guessed myself until it was too late."

"So you're not unhappy about it."

No. Just surprised. This was as much me as it was Martian biotech, Diane was saying, and I supposed that was true… but it would take some getting used to. Like every other transition (childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood) there were new imperatives to deal with, new opportunities and pitfalls, new doubts.

For the first time in many years I was a stranger to myself again.

* * * * *

I had almost finished packing when Carol came downstairs, a little drunk, loose-limbed, carrying a shoebox in her arms.

The box was labeled mementos (school).

"You should take this," she said. "It was your mother's."

"If it means something to you, Carol, keep it."

"Thank you, but I already took what I wanted from it." I opened the lid and glanced at the contents. "The letters."

The anonymous letters addressed to Belinda Sutton, my mother's maiden name.

"Yes. So you've seen them. Did you ever read them?"

"No, not really. Just enough to know they were love letters."

"Oh, God. That sounds so saccharine. I prefer to think of them as tributes. They're quite chaste, really, if you read them closely. Unsigned. Your mother received them when we were both at university. She was dating your father then, and she could hardly show them to him—he was writing her letters of his own. So she shared them with me."

"She never found out who wrote them?"

"No. Never."

"She must have been curious."

"Of course. But she was already engaged to Marcus by that time. She started dating Marcus Dupree when Marcus and E.D. were setting up their first business, designing and manufacturing high altitude balloons back when aerostats were what Marcus called 'blue sky' technology: a little crazy, a little idealistic. Belinda called Marcus and E.D. 'the Zeppelin brothers.' So I guess we were the Zeppelin sisters, Belinda and I. Because that's when I started flirting with E.D. In a way, Tyler, my entire marriage was nothing more than an attempt to keep your mother as a friend."

"The letters—"

"Interesting, isn't it, that she kept them all these years? Eventually I asked her why. Why not just throw them away? She said, 'Because they're sincere.' It was her way of honoring whoever had written them. The last one arrived a week before her wedding. None after that. And a year later I married E.D. Even as couples we were inseparable, did she ever tell you that? We vacationed together, we went to movies together. Belinda came to the hospital when the twins were born and I was waiting at the door when she brought you home for the first time. But all that ended when Marcus had his accident. Your father was a wonderful man, Tyler, very earthy, very funny—the only person who could make E.D. laugh. Reckless to a fault, though. Belinda was absolutely devastated when he died. And not just emotionally. Marcus had burned through most of their savings and Belinda spent what was left servicing the mortgage on their house in Pasadena. So when E.D. moved east and we made an offer on this place it seemed perfectly natural to invite her to use the guest house."

"In exchange for housekeeping," I said.

"That was E.D.'s idea. I just wanted Belinda close by. My marriage wasn't as successful as hers had been. Quite the opposite. By that time Belinda was more or less the only friend I had. Almost a confidante." Carol smiled. "Almost."

"That's why you want to keep the letters? Because they're part of your history with her?"

She smiled as if at a slow-witted child. "No, Tyler. I told you. They're mine." Her smile thinned. "Don't look so dumbfounded. Your mother was as uncomplicatedly heterosexual as any woman I have ever met. I simply had the misfortune to fall in love with her. To fall in love with her so abjectly that I would do anything—even marry a man who seemed, even in the beginning, a little distasteful—in order to keep her close. And in all that time, Tyler, in all those silent years, I never told her how I felt. Never, except in these letters. I was pleased she kept them, even though they always seemed a little dangerous, like something explosive or radioactive, hidden in plain sight, evidence of my own foolishness. When your mother died—I mean the very day she died—I panicked a little; I tried to hide the box; I thought about destroying the letters but I couldn't, I couldn't bring myself to do it; and then, after E.D. divorced me, when there was no one left to deceive, I simply took them for myself. Because, you see, they're mine. They've always been mine."

I didn't know what to say. Carol saw my expression and shook her head sadly. She put her fragile hands on my shoulders. "Don't be upset. The world is full of surprises. We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced."

* * * * *

So I spent four weeks in a motel room in Vermont nursing Diane through her recovery.

Her physical recovery, I should say. The emotional trauma she'd suffered at the Condon ranch and after had left her exhausted and withdrawn. Diane had closed her eyes on a world that seemed to be ending and opened them on a world without compass points. It was not in my power to make this right for her.

So I was cautiously helpful. I explained what needed to be explained. I made no demands and I made it clear that I expected no reward.

Her interest in the changed world awoke gradually. She asked about the sun, restored to its benevolent aspect, and I told her what Jason had told me: the Spin membrane was still in place even though the temporal enclosure had ended; it was protecting the Earth the way it always had, editing lethal radiation into a simulacrum of sunlight acceptable to the planet's ecosystem.

"So why did they turn it off for seven days?"

"They turned it down, not entirely off. And they did it so something could pass through the membrane."

"That thing in the Indian Ocean."

"Yes."

She asked me to play the recording of Jason's last hours, and she wept as she listened. She asked about his ashes. Had E.D. taken them away or had Carol kept them? (Neither. Carol had pressed the urn into my hands and told me to dispose of them any way I deemed appropriate. "The awful truth, Tyler, is that you knew him better than I did. Jason was a cipher to me. His father's son. But you were his friend.")

We watched the world rediscover itself. The mass burials finally ended; the bereaved and frightened survivors began to understand that the planet had reacquired a future, however strange that future might turn out to be. For our generation it was a stunning reversal. The mantle of extinction had fallen from our shoulders; what would we do without it? What would we do, now that we were no longer doomed but merely mortal?

We saw the video footage from the Indian Ocean of the monstrous structure that had embedded itself in the skin of the planet, seawater still boiling to steam where it came into contact with the enormous pillars. The Arch, people began to call it, or the Archway, not only because of its shape but. because ships at sea had returned to port with stories of lost navigational beacons, peculiar weather, spinning compasses, and a wild coastline where no continent should have been. Various navies were promptly dispatched. Jason's testament hinted at the explanation, but only a few people had the advantage of having heard it—myself, Diane, and the dozen or so who had received it in the mail.

She began to exercise a little every day, jogging a dirt path behind the motel as the weather cooled, coming back with the scent of fallen leaves and woodsmoke in her hair. Her appetite improved, and so did the menu in the coffee shop. Food delivery had been restored; the domestic economy was creaking back into motion.

We learned that Mars, too, had been un-Spun. Signals had passed between the two planets; President Lomax, in one of his rally-'round-the-flag speeches, even hinted that the manned space program would be resumed, a first step toward establishing ongoing relations with what he called (with suspicious exuberance) "our sister planet."

We talked about the past. We talked about the future.

What we did not do was fall into each other's arms.

We knew each other too well, or not well enough. We had a past but no present. And Diane was wracked with anxiety by Simon's disappearance outside Manassas.

"He very nearly let you die," I reminded her.

"Not intentionally. He's not vicious. You know that."

"Then he's dangerously naive."

Diane closed her eyes meditatively. Then she said, "There's a phrase Pastor Bob Kobel liked to use back at Jordan Tabernacle. 'His heart cried out to God.' If it describes anyone, it describes Simon. But you have to parse the sentence. 'His heart cried out'—I think that's all of us, it's universal. You, Simon, me, Jason. Even Carol. Even E.D. When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it's a shout of joy: I think that's what it was for Jason; I think that's what I didn't understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it's a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence." She brushed her hair away from her forehead and I saw that her arm, which had been so perilously thin, was round and strong once more. "I think the cry that rose up from Simon's heart was the purest human sound in the world. But no, he's not a good judge of character; yes, he's naive; which is why he cycled through so many styles of faith, New Kingdom, Jordan Tabernacle, the Condon ranch… anything, as long as it was plainspoken and addressed the need for human significance."

"Even if it killed you?"

"I didn't say he's wise. I'm saying he's not wicked." Later I came to recognize this kind of discourse: she was talking like a Fourth. Detached but engaged. Intimate but objective. I didn't dislike it, but it made the hair on my neck stand up from time to time.

* * * * *

Not long after I declared her completely healthy Diane told me she wanted to leave. I asked her where she meant to go.

She had to find Simon, she said. She had to "settle things," one way or another. They were, after all, still married. It mattered to her whether he had lived or died.

I reminded her she didn't have money to spend or a place of her own to stay. She said she'd get by somehow. So I gave her one of the credit cards Jason had supplied me, along with a warning that I couldn't guarantee it—I had no idea who was paying the premium, what the credit limit might be, or whether someone might eventually track it to her.

She asked how she could get in touch with me.

"Just call," I said. She had my number, the number I had paid for and preserved these many years, attached to a phone I had carried even though it seldom rang.

Then I drove her to the local bus depot, where she vanished into a crowd of displaced tourists who had been stranded by the end of the Spin.

* * * * *

The phone rang six months later, when the newspapers were still running banner headlines about "the new world" and the cable channels had begun to carry video footage of a rocky, wild headland "somewhere across the Archway."

By this time hundreds of vessels large and small had made the crossing. Some were big-science expeditions, I.G.Y. and U.N. sanctioned, with American naval escorts and embedded press pools. Some were private charters. Some were fishing trawlers, which came back to port with their holds full of a catch that could pass for cod in a dim light. This was, of course, strictly forbidden, but "arch cod" had infiltrated every major Asian market by the time the ban came down. It proved to be edible and nutritious. Which was, as Jase might have said, a clue: when the fish were subjected to DNA analysis their genome suggested a remote terrestrial ancestry. The new world was not merely hospitable, it seemed to have been stocked with humanity in mind.

"I found Simon," Diane said.

"And?"

"He's living in a trailer park outside Wilmington. He picks up a little money doing household repairs—bikes, toasters, that kind of thing. Otherwise he collects welfare and attends a little Pentecostal church."

"Was he happy to see you?"

"He wouldn't stop apologizing for what happened at the Condon ranch. He said he wanted to make it up to me. He asked if there was anything he could do to make my life easier."

I gripped the phone a little more tightly. "What did you tell him?"

"That I wanted a divorce. He agreed. And he said something else. He said I'd changed, that there was something different about me. He couldn't put his finger on it. But I don't think he liked it."

A whiff of brimstone, perhaps.

"Tyler?" Diane said. "Have I changed that much?"

"Everything changes," I said.

* * * * *

Her next important call came a year later. I was in Montreal, thanks in part to Jason's counterfeit ID, waiting for my immigrant status to be officialized and assisting at an outpatient clinic in Outremont.

Since my last conversation with Diane, the basic dynamics Of the Arch had been worked out. The facts were confounding to anyone who conceived of the Archway as a static machine or a simple "door," but look at it the way Jason had—as a complex, conscious entity capable of perceiving and manipulating events within its domain—and it made more sense.

Two worlds had been connected through the Arch, but only for manned ocean vessels transiting from the south.

Consider what that means. For a breeze, an ocean current, or a migrant bird the Arch was nothing more than a couple of fixed pillars between the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. They all moved unimpeded around and through the Arch space, as did any ship traveling from north to south.

But cross the equator by ship from the south at ninety degrees east of Greenwich and you'd find yourself looking back at the Arch from an unknown sea under a strange sky, untold light-years from the Earth.

In the city of Madras an ambitious if not quite legal cruise service had produced a series of English-language posters announcing easy travel to friendly planet! Interpol closed the business down—the U.N. was still trying to regulate passage in those days—but the posters had it just about right. How could such things be? Ask the Hypotheticals.

Diane's divorce had been finalized, she told me, but she was out of work and out of prospects. "I thought if I could join you…" She sounded tentative and not at all like a Fourth, or what I imagined a Fourth ought to sound like. "If that would be all right. Frankly I need a little help. Finding a place and, you know, getting settled."

So I arranged a clinic job for her and submitted the immigration paperwork. She joined me in Montreal that autumn.

* * * * *

It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned (or semi-Martian, perhaps), during which Diane and I discovered each other in wholly new ways. We were no longer straitjacketed by the Spin nor were we children blindly seeking solace. We fell in love, finally, as adults.

These were the years when the global population topped out at eight billion. Most of that growth had been funneled into the expanding megacities: Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, coastal China; Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo; Caracas, La Paz, Tegucigalpa—all the firelit, smog-shrouded warrens of the world. It would have taken a dozen Archways to dent that population growth, but crowding drove a steady wave of emigrants, refugees, and "pioneers," many of them packed into the cargo compartments of illegal vessels and more than a few of them delivered to the shores of Port Magellan already dead or dying.

Port Magellan was the first named settlement in the new world. By now much of that world had been at least crudely mapped, largely by air. Port Magellan was at the eastern tip of a continent some were calling "Equatoria." There was a second and even larger land mass ("Borea") that straddled the northern pole and extended into the temperate zone of the planet. The southern seas were rich with islands and archipelagos.

The climate was benign, the air was fresh, the gravity was 95.5 percent of Earth's. Both continents were bread-baskets-in-waiting. The seas and rivers teemed with fish. The legend circulating in the slums of Douala and Kabul was that you could pick dinner from the giant trees of Equatoria and sleep among their sheltering roots.

You couldn't. Port Magellan was a U.N. enclave policed by soldiers. The shantytowns that had grown up around it were un-governed and unsafe. But functional fishing villages dotted the coastline for hundreds of miles; there were tourist hotels under construction around the lagoons of Reach Bay and Aussie Harbor; and the prospect of free fertile land had driven settlers inland along the White and New Irrawaddi river valleys.

But the most momentous news from the new world that year was the discovery of the second Arch. It was located half a world away from the first, near the southern reaches of the boreal land mass, and beyond it there was yet another new world—this one, according to first reports, a little less inviting; or maybe it was just the rainy season there.

* * * * *

"There must be other people like me," Diane said, five years into the post-Spin era. "I'd like to meet them."

I had given her my copy of the Martian archives, a first-pass translation on a set of memory cards, and she had pored over them with the same intensity she'd once brought to Victorian poetry and New Kingdom tracts.

If Jason's work had been successful, then, yes, there were surely other Fourths on Earth. But announcing their presence would have been a first-class ticket to a federal penitentiary. The Lomax administration had put a national security lid on all things Martian, and Lomax's domestic security agencies had been granted sweeping police powers in the economic crises that followed the end of the Spin.

"Do you ever think about it?" she asked, a little shyly.

Becoming a Fourth myself, she meant. Injecting into my arm a measured dose of clear liquid from one of the vials I kept in a steel safe at the back of our bedroom closet. Of course I'd thought about it. It would have made us more alike.

But did I want that? I was aware of the invisible space, the gap between her Fourthness and my unmodified humanity, but I wasn't afraid of it. Some nights, looking into her solemn eyes, I even treasured it. It was the canyon that defined the bridge, and the bridge we had built was pleasing and strong.

She stroked my hand, her smooth fingers on my textured skin, a subtle reminder that time never stood still, that one day I might need the treatment even if I didn't especially want it.

"Not yet," I said.

"When?"

"When I'm ready."

* * * * *

President Lomax was succeeded by President Hughes and then by President Chaykin, but they were all veterans of the same Spin-era politics. They saw Martian biotech as the new atomic bomb, at least potentially, and for now it was all theirs, a proprietary threat. Lomax's first diplomatic dispatch to the government of the Five Republics had been a request to withhold biotech information from uncoded Martian broadcasts to Earth. He had justified the request with plausible arguments about the effect such technology might have on a politically divided and often violent world—he cited the death of Wun Ngo Wen as an example—and so far the Martians had been playing along.

But even this sanitized contact with Mars had sewn some discord. The egalitarian economics of the Five Republics had made Wun Ngo Wen a sort of posthumous mascot to the new global labor movement. (It was jarring to see Wun's face on placards carried by garment workers in Asian factory zones or chipsocket fillers from Central American maquiladoras— but I doubt it would have displeased him.)

* * * * *

Diane crossed the border to attend E.D.'s funeral eleven years almost to the day after I rescued her from the Condon ranch.

We had heard of his death in the news. The obituary mentioned in passing that E.D.'s ex-wife Carol had predeceased him by six months, another sad shock. Carol had stopped taking our calls almost a decade ago. Too dangerous, she said. It was enough just knowing we were safe. And there was nothing, really, to say.

(Diane visited her mother's grave while she was in D.C. What saddened her the most, she said, was that Carol's life had been so incomplete: a verb without an object, an anonymous letter, misunderstood for the want of a signature. "I don't miss her as much as I miss what she might have been.")

At E.D.'s memorial service Diane was careful not to identify herself. Too many of E.D.'s government cronies were present, including the attorney general and the sitting vice president. But her attention was drawn to an anonymous woman in the pews, who was sneaking reciprocal glances at Diane: "I knew she was a Fourth," Diane said. "I can't say exactly how. The way she held herself, the sort of ageless look she had—but more than that; it was like a signal went back and forth between us." And when the ceremony was over Diane approached the woman and asked how she had known E.D.

"I didn't know him," the woman said, "not really. I did a research stint at Perihelion at one time, back in Jason Lawton's day. My name is Sylvia Tucker."

The name rang a bell when Diane repeated it to me. Sylvia Tucker was one of the anthropologists who had worked with Wun Ngo Wen at the Florida compound. She had been friendlier than most of the hired academics and it was possible Jase had confided in her.

"We exchanged e-mail addresses," Diane said. "Neither of us said the word 'Fourth.' But we both knew. I'm certain of it."

No correspondence ensued, but every once in a while Diane received digital press clippings from Sylvia Tucker's address, concerning, for instance:

An industrial chemist in Denver arrested on a security writ and detained indefinitely.

A geriatric clinic in Mexico City closed by federal order.

A University of California sociology professor killed in a fire, "arson suspected."

And so on.

I had been careful not to keep a list of the names and addresses to which Jason had addressed his final packages, nor had I memorized them. But some of the names in the articles seemed plausibly familiar.

"She's telling us they're being hunted," Diane said. "The government is hunting Fourths."

We spent a month debating what we would do if we attracted the same kind of attention. Given the global security apparatus Lomax and his heirs had set up, where would we run?

But there was really only one plausible answer. Only one place where the apparatus failed to operate and where the surveillance was wholly blind. So we made our plans—these passports, that bank account, this route through Europe to South Asia—and set them aside until we needed them.

Then Diane received a final communication from Sylvia Tucker, a single word:

Go, it said.

And we went.

* * * * *

On the last flight of the trip, coming into Sumatra by air, Diane said, "Are you sure you want to do this?"

I had made the decision days ago, during a layover in Amsterdam, when we were still worried that we might have been followed, that our passports might have been flagged, that our supply of Martian pharmaceuticals might yet be confiscated.

"Yes," I said. "Now. Before we cross over."

"Are you sure?"

"As sure as I'll ever be."

No, not sure. But willing. Willing, finally, to lose what might be lost, willing to embrace what might be gained.

So we rented a room on the third floor of a colonial-style hotel in Padang where we wouldn't be noticed for a while. We all fall, I told myself, and we all land somewhere.

NORTH OF ANYWHERE

Half an hour before the transit of the Arch, an hour after dark, we came across En in the crew dining room. One of the crewmen had given him a sheet of brown paper and a few stubby crayons to keep him busy.

He seemed relieved to see us. He was worried about the transit, he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose—wincing when his thumb brushed the bruise Jala had left on his cheek—and asked me what it would be like.

"I don't know," I said. "I've never crossed."

"Will we know when it happens?"

"According to the crew, the sky gets a little strange. And just when the crossing happens, when we're balanced between the old world and the new world, the compass needle swings around, north for south. And on the bridge they sound the ship's horn. You'll know."

"Traveling a long way," En said. "In a short time."

That was undeniably true. The Arch—our "side" of it, anyway—had been physically dragged across interstellar space, presumably at something less than the speed of light, before it was dropped from orbit. But the Hypotheticals had had eons of Spin time to do the dragging. They could conceivably have bridged any distance shy of three billion light-years. And even a fraction of that would be a numbing, barely comprehensible distance.

"Makes you wonder," Diane said, "why they went to so much trouble."

"According to Jason—"

"I know. The Hypotheticals want to preserve us from extinction, so we can make something more complex of ourselves. But it just begs the question. Why do they want that? What do they expect from us?"

En ignored our philosophizing. "And after we cross—"

"After that," I told him, "it's a day's cruise to Port Magellan."

He smiled at the prospect.

I exchanged a look with Diane. She had introduced herself to En two days ago and they were already friends. She had been reading to him from a book of English children's stories out of the ship's library. (She had even quoted Housman to him: The infant child is not aware … "I don't like that one," En had said.)

He showed us his drawing, pictures of animals he must have seen in video footage from the plains of Equatoria, long-necked beasts with pensive eyes and tiger-striped coats.

"They're beautiful," Diane said.

En nodded solemnly. We left him to his work and headed up on deck.

* * * * *

The night sky was clear and the peak of the Arch was directly overhead now, reflecting a last glimmer of light. It showed no curvature at all. From this angle it was a pure Euclidean line, an elementary number (1) or noun (I).

We stood by the railing as close as we could get to the prow of the ship. Wind tugged at our clothes and hair. The ship's flags snapped briskly and a restless sea gave back fractured images of the ship's running lights.

"Do you have it?" Diane asked.

She meant the tiny vial containing a sample of Jason's ashes. We had planned this ceremony—if you could call it a ceremony—long before we left Montreal. Jason had never put much faith in memorials, but I think he would have approved of this one. "Right here." I took the ceramic tube out of my vest pocket and held it in my left hand.

"I miss him," Diane said. "I miss him constantly." She nestled into my shoulder and I put an arm around her. "I wish I'd known him as a Fourth. But I don't suppose it changed him much—"

"It didn't."

"In some ways Jase was always a Fourth."

As we approached the moment of transit the stars seemed to dim, as if some gauzy presence had enclosed the ship. I opened the tube that contained Jason's ashes. Diane put her free hand on mine.

The wind shifted suddenly and the temperature dropped a degree or two.

"Sometimes," she said, "when I think about the Hypotheticals, I'm afraid…"

"What?"

"That we're their red calf. Or what Jason hoped the Martians would be. That they expect us to save them from something. Something they're afraid of."

Maybe so. But then, I thought, we'll do what life always does—defy expectations.

I felt a shiver pass through her body. Above us, the line of the Arch grew fainter. Haze settled over the sea. Except it wasn't haze in the ordinary sense. It wasn't weather at all.

The last glimmer of the Arch disappeared and so did the horizon. On the bridge of the Capetown Maru the compass must have begun its rotation; the captain sounded the ship's horn, a brutally loud noise, the bray of outraged space. I looked up. The stars swirled together dizzyingly.

"Now," Diane shouted into the noise.

I leaned across the steel rail, her hand on mine, and we upended the vial. Ashes spiraled in the wind, caught in the ship's lights like snow. They vanished before they hit the turbulent black water—scattered, I want to believe, into the void we were invisibly traversing, the stitched and oceanless place between the stars.

Diane leaned into my chest and the sound of the horn beat through our bodies like a pulse until at last it stopped.

Then she lifted her head. "The sky," she said.

The stars were new and strange.

* * * * *

In the morning we all came up on deck, all of us: En, his parents, Ibu Ina, the other passengers, even Jala and a number of off-duty crewmen, to scent the air and feel the heat of the new world.

It could have been Earth, by the color of the sky and the heat of the sunlight. The headland of Port Magellan had appeared as a jagged line on the horizon, a rocky promontory and a few lines of pale smoke rising vertically and tailing to the west in a higher wind.

Ibu Ina joined us at the railing, En in tow.

"It looks so familiar," Ina said. "But it feels so different."

Clumps of coiled weeds drifted in our wake, liberated from the mainland of Equatoria by storms or tides, huge eight-fingered leaves limp on the surface of the water. The Arch was behind us now, no longer a door out but a door back in, a different sort of door altogether.

Ina said, "It's as if one history has ended and another has begun."

En disagreed. "No," he said solemnly, leaning into the wind as if he could will the future forward. "History doesn't start until we land."