Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Jason found a chair in a corner and sat scowling at anyone who looked friendly. Diane introduced me to a big-eyed girl named Holly and then deserted me. Holly struck up a monologue about every movie she had seen in the last twelve months. She paced me around the room for most of an hour, pausing now and then to snatch California rolls from a tray. When she excused herself for a bathroom visit I scooted over to Jason’s sulking place and begged him to go outside with me.

  “I’m not in the mood for sledding.”

  “Neither am I. Just do me a favor, okay?”

  So we put on our boots and jackets and trudged outside. The night was cold and windless. A half dozen Rice scholars stood huddled in a haze of cigarette smoke on the porch, glaring at us. We followed a path in the snow until we were more or less by ourselves at the top of a low hill, looking down on a few halfhearted sledders skidding through the circus glow of the Christmas lights. I told Jason about Holly, who had attached herself to me like a leech in Gap clothing. He shrugged and said, “Everybody’s got problems.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you tonight?”

  But before he could answer, my cell phone rang. It was Diane, back at the house. “Where’d you guys go? Holly’s kind of pissed. Abandoning her like that. Very rude, Tyler.”

  “There must be someone else she can aim her conversation at.”

  “She’s just nervous. She hardly knows anyone here.”

  “I’m sorry, but how is that my business?”

  “I just thought you guys might hit it off.”

  I blinked. “Hit it off?” There was no good way to interpret that. “What are you saying, you set me up with her?”

  She paused for an incriminating second or two. “Come on, Tyler…don’t take it like that.”

  For five years Diane had been coming in and out of focus like an amateur movie, or so it seemed to me. There had been times, especially after Jason left for university, when I had felt like her best friend. She’d call, we’d talk; we shopped or saw movies together. We were friends. Buddies. If there was any sexual tension it appeared to be entirely on my side, and I was careful to keep it hidden, because even this partial intimacy was fragile—I knew that without having to be told. Whatever Diane wanted from me, it didn’t include passion of any kind.

  E.D., of course, would never have tolerated a relationship between me and Diane unless it was chaperoned, essentially infantile, and in no danger of taking an unexpected turn. But the distance between us seemed to suit Diane, too, and for months at a time I would hardly see her. I might wave at her while she waited for the Rice bus (when she was still at Rice); but during those lapses she wouldn’t call, and on the rare occasions when I was brazen enough to phone her she was never in a mood to talk.

  During these times I occasionally dated girls from school, usually timid girls who would (often explicitly) have preferred seeing a more conspicuously popular guy but who had resigned themselves to a second-string social life. None of these connections lasted long. When I was seventeen I lost my virginity to a pretty, startlingly tall girl named Elaine Bowland; I tried to convince myself I was in love with her, but we drifted apart with a combination of regret and relief after eight or nine weeks.

  After each of these episodes Diane would call unexpectedly, and we’d talk, and I wouldn’t mention Elaine Bowland (or Toni Hickock, or Sarah Burstein), and Diane would never quite get around to telling me how she’d spent her spare time during our hiatus, and that was okay because pretty soon we were back in the bubble, suspended between romance and pretense, childhood and maturity.

  I tried not to expect more. But I couldn’t stop wanting her company. And I thought she wanted mine. She kept coming back for it, after all. I had seen the way she relaxed when I was with her, her spontaneous smile when I came into a room, almost a declaration: Oh, good, Tyler’s here. Nothing bad ever happens when Tyler’s here.

  “Tyler?”

  I wondered what she’d said to Holly. Tyler’s really nice, but he’s been dogging my heels for years now…you two would be great together!

  “Tyler?” She sounded distressed. “Tyler, if you don’t want to talk—”

  “Actually I don’t think I do.”

  “Then put Jason on, would you please?”

  I gave him the cell. Jason listened for a moment. Then he said, “We’re up the hill. No. No. Why don’t you come out here? It’s not as cold as all that. No.”

  I didn’t want to see her. I started to walk away. Jason tossed me the phone and said, “Don’t be an asshole, Tyler. I need to talk to you and Diane both.”

  “About what?”

  “About the future.”

  It was an annoyingly cryptic remark. “Maybe you’re not cold, but I am.” Freezing.

  “This is more important than whatever problem you’re having with my sister.” He looked almost comically serious. “And I know what she means to you.”

  “She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “That wouldn’t be true even if you were just friends.”

  “We are just friends.” I had never really talked to him about Diane; this was one of the places our conversations weren’t supposed to go. “Ask her yourself.”

  “You’re pissed because she introduced you to this Holly person.”

  “I don’t want to discuss it.”

  “But that’s just Diane being saintly. It’s her new thing. She’s been reading those books.”

  “What books?”

  “Apocalyptic theology. Usually from the best-seller shelf. You know: C. R. Ratel, Praying in the Dark, the abnegation of the worldly self. You need to watch more daytime television, Tyler. She wasn’t trying to insult you. It’s some kind of gesture.”

  “That makes it okay?” I took a few more steps away from him, toward the house. I started wondering how to get home without a ride.

  “Tyler,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made me turn back. “Tyler. Listen. You asked what was bothering me.” He sighed. “E.D. told me something about the October Event. It’s not public yet. I promised I wouldn’t talk about it. But I’m going to break that promise. I’m going to break it because there are only three people in the world who feel like family to me, and one of them is my father, and the other two are you and Diane. So could you possibly bear with me just for the next few minutes?”

  I caught sight of Diane working her way up the slope, still struggling into her snowy white parka, one arm in, one arm out.

  I looked at Jason’s face, grievously unhappy in the dim holiday light from below us. That frightened me, and despite what I was feeling I agreed to hear what he had to say.

  He whispered something to Diane when she reached the gazebo. She looked at him wide-eyed and stood back from both of us. Then Jason began to talk, softly, methodically, almost soothingly, delivering a nightmare as if it were a bedtime story.

  He had heard all this from E.D., of course.

  E.D. had done well after the October Event. When the satellites failed, Lawton Industries had stepped forward with plans for an immediate, practical replacement technology: high-altitude aerostats, sophisticated balloons designed to hover indefinitely in the stratosphere. Five years later E.D.’s aerostats were carrying telecom payloads and repeaters, doing multipoint voice and data broadcasts, doing almost anything (apart from GPS and astronomy) a conventional satellite could have done. E.D.’s power and influence had grown apace. Lately he had formed an aerospace lobby group, the Perihelion Foundation, and he had consulted for the federal government on a number of less public projects—in this case, NASA’s ARV (Automated Reentry Vehicle) program.

  NASA had been refining its ARV probes for a couple of years now. The initial launches had been designed as investigations of the October shield. Could it be penetrated, and could useful data be retrieved from outside?

  The first attempt was almost literally a shot in the dark, a simple ARV payload atop a refurbished Lockheed Martin Atlas 2AS, flung into the absolute darkness ov
er Vandenberg Air Force Base. It had looked like a failure almost immediately. The satellite, which had been designed to spend a week in orbit, dropped into the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda moments after its launch. As if, Jason said, it had hit the Event boundary and bounced back.

  But it hadn’t bounced. “When they recovered it they downloaded a full week’s worth of data.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “The question isn’t what’s possible but what happened. What happened was, the payload spent seven days in orbit and came back the same night it left. We know that’s what happened because it happened with every launch they tried, and they tried it repeatedly.”

  “What happened? What are you talking about, Jase? Time travel?”

  “No…not exactly.”

  “Not exactly?”

  “Just let him tell it,” Diane said quietly.

  There were all sorts of clues to what was really happening, Jason said. Ground-based observation seemed to suggest that the boosters actually accelerated into the barrier before they vanished, as if they had been drawn into it. But the recovered onboard data showed no such effect. The two sets of observations couldn’t be reconciled. As seen from the ground, the satellites accelerated into the barrier and then dropped almost immediately back to Earth; the satellites themselves reported that they had progressed smoothly into their programmed orbits, remained there for the allotted span of time, and returned under their own power weeks or months later. (Like the Russian cosmonaut, I thought, whose story, never officially confirmed or denied, had become a sort of urban legend.) Assuming both sets of data were legitimate, there was only one explanation:

  Time was passing differently outside the barrier.

  Or, to turn the equation around, time on Earth was passing more slowly than in the universe at large.

  “You understand what that means?” Jason demanded. “Before, it looked like we were in some kind of electromagnetic cage that was regulating the energy that reaches the surface of the Earth. And that’s true. But it’s really only a side effect, a small part of a much bigger picture.”

  “Side effect of what?”

  “Of what they’re calling a temporal gradient. You grasp the significance? For every second that passes on Earth, a whole lot more time passes outside the barrier.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said immediately. “What the hell kind of physics would that involve?”

  “People with a lot more experience than me are struggling with that question. But the idea of a time gradient has a certain explanatory power. If there’s a time differential between us and the universe, ambient radiation reaching the surface of the Earth at any given moment—sunlight, X rays, cosmic radiation—would be speeded up proportionally. And a year’s sunshine condensed into ten seconds would be instantly lethal. So the electromagnetic barrier around the Earth isn’t concealing us, it’s protecting us. It’s screening out all that concentrated—and, I guess, blue-shifted—radiation.”

  “The fake sunlight,” Diane said, getting it.

  “Right. They gave us fake sunlight because the real thing would be deadly. Just enough of it, and appropriately distributed, to mimic the seasons, to make it possible to raise crops and drive the weather. The tides, our trajectory around the sun—mass, momentum, gravitation—all these things are being manipulated, not just to slow us down but to keep us alive while they do it.”

  “Managed,” I said. “It’s not an act of nature, then. It’s engineering.”

  “I think we’d have to admit that,” Jason said, “yes.”

  “This is being done to us.”

  “People are talking about a hypothetical controlling intelligence.”

  “But what’s the purpose, what’s it supposed to achieve?”

  “I don’t know. No one knows.”

  Diane stared at her brother across a gap of cold and motionless winter air. She hugged her parka and shivered. Not because of the temperature but because she had come to the fundamental question: “How much time, Jason? How much time is passing out there?”

  Out there beyond the blankness of the sky.

  Jason hesitated, visibly reluctant to answer her.

  “A lot of time,” he admitted.

  “Just tell us,” she said faintly.

  “Well. There are all kinds of measures. But the last launch, what they did was bounce a calibration signal off the surface of the moon. The moon gets farther away from the Earth every year, did you know that? By some minuscule but measurable amount. If you measure that distance you have a kind of rough calendar, more accurate the more time has passed. Add that to other signifiers, like the motion of nearby stars—”

  “How much time, Jason?”

  “It’s been five years and a couple of months since the October Event. Outside the barrier, that translates into a little over five hundred million years.”

  It was a breathtaking number.

  I couldn’t think of anything to say. Not a single word. I was rendered speechless. Thoughtless. At that moment there was no sound at all, nothing but the crisp emptiness of the night.

  Then Diane, who had seen straight to the scary heart of the thing, said, “And how long do we have left?”

  “I don’t know that either. It depends. We’re protected, to some degree, by the barrier, but how effective is that protection? But there are some unavoidable facts. The sun is mortal, like every other star. It burns hydrogen and it expands and gets hotter as it ages. The Earth exists in a sort of habitable zone in the solar system, and that zone is moving steadily outward. Like I said, we’re protected, we’re okay for the time being no matter what. But eventually the Earth will be inside the heliosphere of the sun. Swallowed up by it. Past a certain point there’s simply no going back.”

  “How long, Jase?”

  He gave her a pitying look. “Forty, maybe fifty years,” he said. “Give or take.”

  4 X 109 A.D.

  The pain was difficult to manage, even with the morphine Diane had purchased at ridiculous cost from a pharmacy in Padang. The fever was worse.

  It wasn’t continuous. It came in waves, clusters, bubbles of heat and noise bursting unexpectedly in my head. It made my body capricious, unpredictable. One night I groped for a nonexistent glass of water and smashed a bedside lamp, waking the couple in the next room.

  Come morning, temporarily lucid again, I couldn’t remember the incident. But I saw the congealed blood on my knuckles and I overhead Diane paying off the angry concierge.

  “Did I really do that?” I asked her.

  “Afraid so.”

  She sat in a wicker chair next to the bed. She had ordered up room service, scrambled eggs and orange juice, so I guessed it was morning. The sky beyond the gauzy drapes was blue. The balcony door was open, admitting wafts of pleasantly warm air and the smell of the ocean. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You were out of your mind. I’d tell you to forget about it. Except you obviously have.” She put a soothing hand on my forehead. “And it’s not over yet, I’m afraid.”

  “How long—?”

  “It’s been a week.”

  “Only a week?”

  “Only.”

  I wasn’t even halfway through the ordeal.

  But the lucid intervals were useful for writing.

  Graphomania was one of the several side effects of the drug. Diane, when she was undergoing the same ordeal, once wrote the phrase Am I not my brother’s keeper in hundreds of nearly identical repetitions over fourteen sheets of foolscap. My own graphomania was at least a little more coherent. I stacked up handwritten pages on the bedside table while I waited for the fever to launch a renewed offensive, rereading what I’d written in an attempt to fix it in my mind.

  Diane spent the day out of the hotel. When she came back I asked her where she’d been.

  “Making connections,” she told me. She said she’d contacted a transit broker, a Minang man named Jala whose import-export business served as cover for his more lu
crative emigration brokerage. Everybody on the docks knew Jala, she said. She was bidding for berths against a bunch of crazy-utopian kibbutzim, so it wasn’t a done deal, but she was cautiously optimistic.

  “Be careful,” I said. “There might still be people looking for us.”

  “Not as far as I can tell, but…” She shrugged. She glanced at the notebook in my hand. “Writing again?”

  “It takes my mind off the pain.”

  “You can hold the pen okay?”

  “It’s like terminal arthritis, but I can deal with it.” So far, I thought. “The distraction is worth the discomfort.”

  But it wasn’t just that, of course. Nor was it simply graphomania. The writing was a way to externalize what felt threatened.

  “It’s really very well done,” Diane said.

  I looked at her, horrified. “You read it?”

  “You asked me to. You begged me to, Tyler.”

  “Was I delirious?”

  “Apparently…though you seemed fairly rational at the time.”

  “I wasn’t writing with an audience in mind.” And I was shocked that I had forgotten showing it to her. How much else might already have slipped away?

  “I won’t look at it again, then. But what you wrote—” She cocked her head. “I’m amazed and flattered you felt so strongly about me, way back then.”

  “It could hardly come as a surprise.”

  “More than you might think. But it’s a paradox, Tyler. The girl on the page is indifferent, almost cruel.”

  “I never thought of you that way.”

  “It’s not your opinion that worries me. It’s mine.”

  I had been sitting up in bed, imagining this was an act of strength, evidence of my own stoicism. More likely it was evidence that the painkillers were temporarily in charge. I shivered. Shivering was the first sign of a resurgent fever. “You want to know when I fell in love with you? Maybe I should write about that. It’s important. It was when I was ten—”

  “Tyler, Tyler. Nobody falls in love when they’re ten.”