Spin (27 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused. “You have a question, Tyler?”

“No question. It’s just that it’s… a lot to absorb.”

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

“Flows fine. Telling it to who?”

“Everybody. The media. We’re going public.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What ‘stuff,’ Tyler?”

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

“Simon believes in it.”

“I didn’t ask you about Simon.”

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

“Lucky Simon.”

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

“What about you? Aren’t you saved?”

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

“It’s not a decision you ought to be pressured into.”

“I don’t mean to imply he’s pressuring me. ‘Put it in God’s hands,’ he says. Put it in God’s hands and it’ll work out right.”

“But you’re too smart to believe that.”

“Am I? Oh, Tyler, I hope not. I hope that isn’t true.”

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

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

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

“I didn’t say that, Moll.”

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

“It’s not an excuse. It’s a motive. They don’t have a future. They believe they’re doomed.”

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

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

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

“That doesn’t frighten you?”

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

“You can’t pretend you’re not affected by it.”

She surprised me by laughing. “No… that’s
your
style, not mine.”

“Is it?”

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

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

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