Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Very funny. Give them back if you don’t know how to use them.”

  He held out his hand; she ignored him. She sat upright and aimed the binoculars at the windows of the Big House.

  The party had been going on since late that afternoon. My mother had told me the Lawtons’ parties were “expensive bull sessions for corporate bigshots,” but she had a finely honed sense of hyperbole, so you had to take that down a notch or two. Most of the guests, Jason had said, were aerospace up-and-comers or political staffers. Not old Washington society, but well-heeled newcomers with western roots and defense-industry connections. E. D. Lawton, Jason and Diane’s father, hosted one of these events every three or four months.

  “Business as usual,” Diane said from behind the twin ovals of the binoculars. “First floor, dancing and drinking. More drinking than dancing at this point. It looks like the kitchen’s closing up, though. I think the caterers are getting ready to go home. Curtains pulled in the den. E.D.’s in the library with a couple of suits. Ew! One of them is smoking a cigar.”

  “Your disgust is unconvincing,” Jason said. “Ms. Marlboro.”

  She went on cataloguing the visible windows while Jason scooted over next to me. “Show her the universe,” he whispered, “and she’d rather spy on a dinner party.”

  I didn’t know how to respond to that. Like so much of what Jason said, it sounded witty and more clever than anything I could come up with.

  “My bedroom,” Diane said. “Empty, thank God. Jason’s bedroom, empty except for the copy of Penthouse under the mattress—”

  “They’re good binoculars, but not that good.”

  “Carol and E.D.’s bedroom, empty; the spare bedroom…”

  “Well?”

  But Diane said nothing. She sat very still with the binoculars against her eyes.

  “Diane?” I said.

  She was silent for a few seconds more. Then she shuddered, turned, and tossed—threw—the binoculars back at Jason, who protested but didn’t seem to grasp that Diane had seen something disturbing. I was about to ask her if she was all right—

  When the stars disappeared.

  It wasn’t much.

  People often say that, people who saw it happen. It wasn’t much. It really wasn’t, and I speak as a witness: I had been watching the sky while Diane and Jason bickered. There was nothing but a moment of odd glare that left an afterimage of the stars imprinted on my eyes in cool green phosphorescence. I blinked. Jason said, “What was that? Lightning?” And Diane said nothing at all.

  “Jason,” I said, still blinking.

  “What? Diane, I swear to God, if you cracked a lens on these things—”

  “Shut up,” Diane said.

  And I said, “Stop it. Look. What happened to the stars?”

  They both turned their heads to the sky.

  Of the three of us, only Diane was prepared to believe that the stars had actually “gone out”—that they had been extinguished like candles in a wind. That was impossible, Jason insisted: the light from those stars had traveled fifty or a hundred or a hundred million light-years, depending on the source; surely they had not all stopped shining in some infinitely elaborate sequence designed to appear simultaneous to Earthlings. Anyway, I pointed out, the sun was a star, too, and it was still shining, at least on the other side of the planet—wasn’t it?

  Of course it was. And if not, Jason said, we would all be frozen to death by morning.

  So, logically, the stars were still shining but we couldn’t see them. They were not gone but obscured: eclipsed. Yes, the sky had suddenly become an ebony blankness, but it was a mystery, not a catastrophe.

  But another aspect of Jason’s comment had lodged in my imagination. What if the sun actually had vanished? I pictured snow sifting down in perpetual darkness, and then, I guessed, the air itself freezing out in a different kind of snow, until all human civilization was buried under the stuff we breathe. Better, therefore, oh definitely better, to assume the stars had been “eclipsed.” But by what?

  “Well, obviously, something big. Something fast. You saw it happen, Tyler. Was it all at once or did something kind of move across the sky?”

  I told him it looked like the stars had brightened and then blinked out, all at once.

  “Fuck the stupid stars,” Diane said. (I was shocked: fuck wasn’t a word she customarily used, though Jase and I were pretty free with it now that both our ages had reached double digits. Many things had changed this summer.)

  Jason heard the anxiety in her voice. “I don’t think there’s anything to be afraid of,” he said, although he was clearly uneasy himself.

  Diane just scowled. “I’m cold,” she said.

  So we decided to go back to the Big House and see if the news had made CNN or CNBC. The sky as we crossed the lawn was unnerving, utterly black, weightless but heavy, darker than any sky I had ever seen.

  “We have to tell E.D.,” Jason said.

  “You tell him,” Diane said.

  Jase and Diane called their parents by their given names because Carol Lawton imagined she kept a progressive household. The reality was more complex. Carol was indulgent but not terribly involved in the twins’ lives, while E.D. was systematically grooming an heir. That heir, of course, was Jason. Jason worshipped his father. Diane was afraid of him.

  And I knew better than to show my face in the adult zone at the boozy tag-end of a Lawton social event; so Diane and I hovered in the demilitarized zone behind a door while Jason found his father in an adjoining room. We couldn’t hear the resulting conversation in any detail, but there was no mistaking E.D.’s tone of voice—aggrieved, impatient, and short-tempered. Jason came back to the basement red-faced and nearly crying, and I excused myself and headed for the back door.

  Diane caught up with me in the hallway. She put her hand on my wrist as if to anchor us together. “Tyler,” she said. “It will come up, won’t it? The sun, I mean, in the morning. I know it’s a stupid question. But the sun will rise, right?”

  She sounded absolutely bereft. I started to say something flippant—we’ll all be dead if it doesn’t—but her anxiety prompted doubts of my own. What exactly had we seen, and what did it mean? Jason clearly hadn’t been able to convince his father that anything important had happened in the night sky, so maybe we were scaring ourselves over nothing. But what if the world really was ending, and only we three knew it?

  “We’ll be okay,” I said.

  She regarded me through pickets of lank hair. “You believe that?”

  I tried to smile. “Ninety percent.”

  “But you’re going to stay up till morning, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe. Probably.” I knew I didn’t feel like sleeping.

  She made a thumb-and-pinky gesture: “Can I call you later?”

  “Sure.”

  “I probably won’t sleep. And—I know this sounds dumb—in case I do, will you call me as soon as the sun comes up?”

  I said I would.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.” I was thrilled that she’d asked.

  The house where I lived with my mother was a neat clapboard bungalow on the east end of the Lawton property. A small rose garden fenced with pine rails braced the front steps—the roses themselves had bloomed well into the fall but had withered in the latest gush of cold air. On this moonless, cloudless, starless night, the porch light gleamed like a beacon.

  I entered quietly. My mother had long since retreated to her bedroom. The small living room was tidy save for a single empty shotglass on the side table: she was a five-day teetotaler but took a little whiskey on the weekends. She used to say she had only two vices, and a drink on Saturday night was one of them. (Once, when I asked her what the other one was, she gave me a long look and said, “Your father.” I didn’t press the subject.)

  I stretched out on the empty sofa with a book and read until Diane called, less than an hour later. The first thing she said was, “Have you turned on the TV?”r />
  “Should I?”

  “Don’t bother. There’s nothing on.”

  “Well, you know, it is two in the morning.”

  “No, I mean absolutely nothing. There are infomercials on local cable, but nothing else. What does that mean, Tyler?”

  What it meant was that every satellite in orbit had vanished along with the stars. Telecom, weather, military satellites, the GPS system: all of them had been shut down in the blink of an eye. But I didn’t know any of that and I certainly couldn’t have explained it to Diane. “It could mean anything.”

  “It’s a little frightening.”

  “Probably nothing to worry about.”

  “I hope not. I’m glad you’re still awake.”

  She called back an hour later with more news. The Internet was also missing in action, she said. And local TV had begun to report canceled morning flights out of Reagan and the regional airports, warning people to call ahead.

  “But there have been jets flying all night.” I’d seen their running lights from the bedroom window, false stars, fast-moving. “I guess military. It could be some terrorist thing.”

  “Jason’s in his room with a radio. He’s pulling in stations from Boston and New York. He says they’re talking about military activity and airport lock-downs, but nothing about terrorism—and nothing about the stars.”

  “Somebody must have noticed.”

  “If they did they’re not mentioning it. Maybe they have orders not to mention it. They haven’t mentioned sunrise, either.”

  “Why would they? The sun’s supposed to come up in, what, an hour? Which means it’s already rising out over the ocean. Off the Atlantic coast. Ships at sea must have seen it. We’ll see it, before long.”

  “I hope so.” She sounded simultaneously frightened and embarrassed. “I hope you’re right.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I like your voice, Tyler. Did I ever tell you that? You have a very reassuring voice.”

  Even if what I said was pure bullshit.

  But the compliment affected me more than I wanted her to know. I thought about it after she hung up. I played it over in my head for the sake of the warm feeling it provoked. And I wondered what that meant. Diane was a year older than me and three times as sophisticated—so why did I feel so suddenly protective of her, and why did I wish she was close enough that I could touch her face and promise everything would be all right? It was a puzzle almost as urgent and nearly as disturbing as whatever had happened to the sky.

  She called again at ten to five, when I had almost, despite myself, drifted off to sleep, fully dressed. I groped the phone out of my shirt pocket. “Hello?”

  “Just me. It’s still dark, Tyler.”

  I glanced at the window. Yes. Dark. Then the bedside clock. “Not quite sunrise, Diane.”

  “Were you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, you were. Lucky you. It’s still dark. Cold, too. I looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen window. Thirty-five degrees. Should it be that cold?”

  “It was that cold yesterday morning. Anyone else awake at your place?”

  “Jason’s locked in his room with his radio. My, uh, parents are, uh, I guess sleeping off the party. Is your mom awake?”

  “Not this early. Not on a weekend.” I cast a nervous glance at the window. Surely by this time there ought to be some light in the sky. Even a hint of daylight would have been reassuring.

  “You didn’t wake her up?”

  “What’s she going to do, Diane? Make the stars come back?”

  “I guess not.” She paused. “Tyler,” she said.

  “I’m still here.”

  “What’s the first thing you remember?”

  “What do you mean—today?”

  “No. The first thing you can remember in your life. I know it’s a stupid question, but I think I’ll be okay if we can just talk about something else besides the sky for five or ten minutes.”

  “The first thing I remember?” I gave it some thought. “That would be back in L.A., before we moved east.” When my father was still alive and still working for E. D. Lawton at their startup firm in Sacramento. “We had this apartment with big white curtains in the bedroom. The first thing I really remember is watching those curtains blow in the wind. It was a sunny day and the window was open and there was a breeze.” The memory was unexpectedly poignant, like the last sight of a receding shoreline. “What about you?”

  The first thing Diane could remember was also a Sacramento moment, though it was a very different one. E.D. had taken both children on a tour of the plant, even then positioning Jason for his role as heir apparent. Diane had been fascinated by the huge perforated spars on the factory floor, the spools of microthin aluminum fabric as big as houses, the constant noise. Everything had been so large that she had half expected to find a fairy-tale giant chained to the walls, her father’s prisoner.

  It wasn’t a good memory. She said she felt left out, almost lost, abandoned inside a huge and terrifying machinery of construction.

  We talked that around for a while. Then Diane said, “Check out the sky.”

  I looked at the window. There was enough light spilling over the western horizon to turn the blackness an inky blue.

  I didn’t want to confess to the relief I felt.

  “I guess you were right,” she said, suddenly buoyant. “The sun’s coming up after all.”

  Of course, it wasn’t really the sun. It was an impostor sun, a clever fabrication. But we didn’t know that yet.

  Coming of Age in Boiling Water

  People younger than me have asked me: Why didn’t you panic? Why didn’t anyone panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?

  Sometimes I say, But terrible things did happen.

  Sometimes I say, But we didn’t understand. And what could we have done about it?

  And sometimes I cite the parable of the frog. Drop a frog into boiling water, he’ll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, stoke the fire slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there’s a problem.

  The obliteration of the stars wasn’t slow or subtle, but neither, for most of us, was it immediately disastrous. If you were an astronomer or a defense strategist, if you worked in telecommunications or aerospace, you probably spent the first few days of the Spin in a state of abject terror. But if you drove a bus or flipped burgers, it was all more or less warm water.

  English-language media called it “the October Event” (it wasn’t “the Spin” until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multibillion-dollar orbital satellite industry. Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weather-sats. Repeated attempts to contact the International Space Station were uniformly unsuccessful. Commercial launches scheduled at Canaveral (and Baikonur and Kourou) were postponed indefinitely.

  It meant, in the long run, very bad news for GE Americom, AT&T, COMSAT, and Hughes Communications, among many others.

  And many terrible things did happen as a consequence of that night, though most of them were obscured by media blackouts. News stories traveled like whispers, squeezed through transatlantic fiber-optic cables rather than ricocheted through orbital space: it was almost a week before we learned that a Pakistani Hatf V missile tipped with a nuclear warhead, launched by mistake or miscalculation in the confusing first moments of the Event, had strayed off course and vaporized an agricultural valley in the Hindu Kush. It was the first nuclear device detonated in war
since 1945, and, tragic as that event was, given the global paranoia ignited by the loss of telecommunications, we were lucky it only happened once. According to some reports we nearly lost Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Pyongyang.

  Reassured by sunrise, I slept from dawn to noon. When I got up and dressed I found my mother in the living room, still in her quilted robe, staring into the television screen and frowning. When I asked her if she’d eaten breakfast she said she hadn’t. So I fixed lunch for both of us.

  She would have been forty-five years old that fall. If I had been asked to choose a word to describe her it might have been “solid.” She was rarely angry and the only time in my life I had ever seen her cry was the night the police came to the door (this was back in Sacramento) and told her my father had died on the 80 near Vacaville, driving home from a business trip. She was, I think, careful to show me only this aspect of herself. But there were others. There was a portrait on a shelf in the étagère in the living room, taken years before I was born, of a woman so sleek, beautiful, and fearless before the camera that I had been startled when she told me it was a photo of herself.

  Clearly she didn’t like what she was hearing from TV. A local station was doing nonstop news, repeating shortwave and ham radio stories and fuzzy stay-calm statements issued by the federal government. “Tyler,” she said, waving me to sit down, “this is hard to explain. Something happened last night—”

  “I know,” I said. “I heard about it before I went to bed.”

  “You knew about this? And you didn’t wake me up?”

  “I wasn’t sure—”

  But her annoyance waned as quickly as it had come. “No,” she said, “it’s all right, Ty. I guess I didn’t miss anything by sleeping. It’s funny…I feel like I’m still asleep.”

  “It’s just the stars,” I said, idiotically.

  “The stars and the moon,” she corrected me. “Didn’t you hear about the moon? All over the world, nobody can see the stars and nobody can see the moon.”