“Long way. Both of us.” I raised my cup.
Then we started reminiscing, and the tension drained out of the conversation. We talked about old times. We fell into what I recognized as a pattern. Jason would mention a place—the basement, the mall, the creek in the woods—and I would supply a story: the time we broke into the liquor cabinet; the time we saw a Rice girl named Kelley Weems shoplift a pack of Trojans from the Pharmasave; the summer Diane insisted on reading us breathless passages from Christina Rossetti, as if she had discovered something profound.
The big lawn, Jason offered. The night the stars disappeared, I said.
And then we were quiet for a while.
Finally I said, “So…is she coming or not?”
“She’s making up her mind,” Jase said neutrally. “She’s juggling some commitments. She’s supposed to call tomorrow and let me know.”
“She’s still down south?” This was the last I’d heard, the news relayed from my mother. Diane was at some southern college, studying something I couldn’t quite remember: urban geography, oceanography, some other unlikely -ography.
“Yeah, still,” Jason said, shifting in his chair. “You know, Ty, a lot of things have changed with Diane.”
“I guess that’s not surprising.”
“She’s semi-engaged. To be married.”
I took this pretty gracefully. “Well, good for her,” I said. How could I possibly be jealous? I had no relationship with Diane anymore—had never had one, in that sense of the word “relationship.” And I had almost been engaged myself, back at Stony Brook, to a second-year student named Candice Boone. We had enjoyed saying “I love you” to each other, until we got tired of it. I think Candice got tired first.
And yet: semi-engaged? How did that work?
I was tempted to ask. But Jason was clearly uncomfortable with the whole drift of the conversation. It called up a memory: once, back at the Big House, Jason had brought a date home to meet his family. She was a plain but pleasant girl he’d met at the Rice chess club, too shy to say much. Carol had remained relatively sober that night, but E.D. had clearly disapproved of the girl, had been conspicuously rude to her, and when she was gone he had berated Jase for “dragging a specimen like that into the house.” With great intellect, E.D. said, comes great responsibility. He didn’t want Jason to be shanghaied into a conventional marriage. Didn’t want to see him “hanging diapers on the line” when he could be “making a mark on the world.”
A lot of people in Jason’s position would have stopped bringing home their dates.
Jason had just stopped dating.
The house was empty when I woke up the next morning.
There was a note on the kitchen table: Jase had gone out to pick up provisions for a barbecue. Back noon or later. It was nine-thirty. I had slept luxuriously late, summer-vacation languor creeping over me.
The house seemed to generate it. Last night’s storms had passed and a pleasant morning breeze came through the calico curtains. Sunlight picked out imperfections in the grain of the butcher-block kitchen counters. I ate a slow breakfast by the window and watched clouds like stately schooners sail the horizon.
A little after ten the doorbell rang, and for a second I was panicked by the thought that it might be Diane—had she decided to show up early? But it turned out to be “Mike, the landscape guy,” in a bandanna and sleeveless T-shirt, warning me that he was going to do the lawn—he didn’t want to wake anybody up but the mower was pretty loud. He could come back this afternoon if it was a problem. No problem at all, I said, and a few minutes later he was riding the contours of the property on an ancient green John Deere that smudged the air with burning oil. Still a little sleepy, I wondered how this yard work would look to what Jason was fond of calling the universe at large. To the universe at large, Earth was a planet in near-stasis. Those blades of grass had arisen over centuries, as stately in their motion as the evolution of stars. Mike, a force of nature born a couple of billion years ago, scythed them with a vast and irresistible patience. The severed blades fell as if lightly touched by gravity, many seasons between sun and loam, loam in which Methuselah worms slid while elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps, empires rose and fell.
Jason was right, of course: it was a difficult thing to believe in. Or, no, not to “believe in”—people believe all kinds of implausible things—but to accept as a fundamental truth about the world. I sat on the porch of the house, on the side away from the roaring Deere, and the air was cool and the sun felt fine when I turned my face to it even though I knew it for what it was, radiation filtered from a star in full-out runaway Spin, in a world where centuries were squandered like seconds.
Can’t be true. Is true.
I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancée, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit…not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.
But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with. I had said as much to Candice.
She told me I was “cold.” But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.
The morning rolled on. Mike finished the lawn and drove off, leaving the air full of humid silence. After a time I stirred myself and telephoned my mom in Virginia, where the weather, she said, was less inviting than in Massachusetts: still cloudy after a storm last night that had brought down a few trees and power lines. I told her I’d made it safely to E.D.’s summer rental. She asked me how Jason seemed, though she had probably seen him more recently than I had, during one of his visits to the Big House. “Older,” I said. “But still Jase.”
“Is he worried about this China thing?”
My mom had been a news junkie since the October Event, watching CNN not for pleasure or even information but mainly to reassure herself, the way a Mexican villager might keep an eye on a nearby volcano, hoping not to see smoke. The China thing was only a diplomatic crisis at this stage, she said, though sabers had been gently rattled. Something about a controversial proposed satellite launch. “You should ask Jason about it.”
“Has E.D. been worrying you about this stuff?”
“Hardly. I do hear things from Carol every once in a while.”
“I don’t know how much of that you should trust.”
“Come on, Ty. She drinks, but she’s not stupid. Neither am I, particularly.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Most of what I hear about Jason and Diane these days I get through Carol.”
“Did she say whether Diane was coming up to the Berkshires? I can’t get a straight answer out of Jase.”
My mother hesitated. “Diane’s been a little unpredictable the last couple of years. I guess that’s what it’s all about.”
“What does ‘unpredictable’ mean, exactly?”
“Oh, you know. Not much success at school. A little trouble with the law—”
“With the law?”
“No, I mean, she didn’t rob a bank or anything, but she’s been picked up a couple of times when NK rallies got out of hand.”
“What the hell was she doing at NK rallies?”
Another pause. “You should really ask Jason about that.”
I intended to.
She coughed—I pictured her with her hand over the phone, her head turned delicately away—and I said, “How are you feeling?”
“Tired.”
“Anything new with the doctor?” She was being treated for anemia. Bottles of iron tablets.
“No. I’m just getting old, Ty. Everybody gets old sooner or later.” She added, “I’m thinking of retiring. If you call what I do work. Now that the twins are gone it’s just Carol and E.D., and not much E.D. since this Washington business started up.”
“Have you told them you’r
e thinking of leaving?”
“Not yet.”
“It wouldn’t be the Big House without you.”
She laughed, not happily. “I think I’ve had about enough of the Big House for one lifetime, thanks.”
But she never mentioned the move again. It was Carol, I think, who convinced her to stay.
Jase came in the front door midafternoon. “Ty?” His overlarge jeans hung on his hips like the rigging of a becalmed ship, and his T-shirt was spackled with the ghosts of gravy stains. “Give me a hand with the barbecue, can you?”
I went out back with him. The barbecue was a standard propane grill. Jase had never used one. He opened the tank valve, pushed the lighter button and flinched when the flames blossomed up. Then he grinned at me. “We have steaks. We have three-bean salad from the deli in town.”
“And hardly any mosquitos,” I said.
“They sprayed for them this spring. Hungry?”
I was. Somehow, dozing through the afternoon, I had worked up an appetite. “Are we cooking for two or three?”
“I’m still waiting to hear from Diane. Probably won’t know until this evening. Just us for dinner, I think.”
“Assuming the Chinese don’t nuke us first.”
This was bait.
Jason rose to it. “Are you worried about the Chinese, Ty? That’s not even a crisis anymore. It’s been settled.”
“That’s a relief.” I had heard about the crisis and the resolution all in the same day. “My mom mentioned it. Something on the news.”
“The Chinese military want to nuke the polar artifacts. They have nuclear-tipped missiles sitting on pads in Jiuquan, ready to launch. The reasoning is, if they can damage the polar devices they might take down the entire October shield. Of course there’s no reason to believe it would work. How likely is it that a technology capable of manipulating time and gravitation would be vulnerable to our weapons?”
“So we threatened the Chinese and they backed down?”
“A little of that. But we offered a carrot, too. We offered to take them onboard.”
“I don’t understand.”
“To let them join us in our own little project to save the world.”
“You’re scaring me a little here, Jase.”
“Hand me those tongs. I’m sorry. I know this sounds cryptic. I’m not supposed to be talking about these things at all. With anyone.”
“You’re making an exception in my case?”
“I always make an exception in your case.” He smiled. “We’ll discuss it over dinner, okay?”
I left him at the grill, shrouded in smoke and heat.
Two consecutive American administrations had been scolded by the press for “doing nothing” about the Spin. But it was a criticism without teeth. If there was anything practical that could be done, no one seemed to know what it was. And any clearly retaliatory action—like the one the Chinese had proposed—would have been prohibitively dangerous.
Perihelion was pushing a radically different approach.
“The governing metaphor,” Jase said, “isn’t combat. It’s judo. Using a bigger opponent’s weight and momentum against him. That’s what we want to do with the Spin.”
He told me this laconically while he cut up his grilled steak with surgical attention. We ate in the kitchen with the back door open. A huge bumblebee, so fat and yellow it looked like an airborne knot of woolen threads, bumped against the bug screen.
“Try to think about the Spin,” he said, “as an opportunity rather than an assault.”
“An opportunity to do what? Die prematurely?”
“An opportunity to use time for our own ends, in a way we never could before.”
“Isn’t time what they took away from us?”
“On the contrary. Outside our little terrestrial bubble we have millions of years to play with. And we have a tool that works extremely reliably over exactly those spans of time.”
“Tool,” I said, bewildered, while he speared another cube of beef. The meal was straight to the point. A steak on a plate, bottle of beer on the side. No frills, barring the three-bean salad, of which he took a modest helping.
“Yes, a tool, the obvious one: evolution.”
“Evolution.”
“We can’t have this talk, Tyler, if you just repeat everything back to me.”
“Okay, well, evolution as a tool…I still don’t see how we can evolve sufficiently in thirty or forty years to make a difference.”
“Not us, for god’s sake, and certainly not in thirty or forty years. I’m talking about simple forms of life. I’m talking about eons. I’m talking about Mars.”
“Mars.” Oops.
“Don’t be obtuse. Think about it.”
Mars was a functionally dead planet, even if it may once have possessed the primitive precursors to life. Outside the Spin bubble, Mars had been “evolving” for millions of years since the October Event, warmed by the expanding sun. It was still, according to the latest orbital photographs, a dead, dry planet. If it had possessed simple life and a supportive climate it could have become, I guessed, a lush green jungle by now. But it didn’t and it wasn’t.
“People used to talk about terraforming,” Jason said. “Remember those speculative novels you used to read?”
“I still read them, Jase.”
“More power to you. How would you go about terraforming Mars?”
“Try to get enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to warm it up. Release its frozen water. Seed it with simple organisms. But even with the most optimistic assumptions, that would take—”
He smiled.
I said, “You’re kidding me.”
“No.” The smile went away. “Not at all. No, this is quite serious.”
“How would you even begin—?”
“We would begin with a series of synchronized launches containing payloads of engineered bacteria. Simple ion engines and a slow glide to Mars. Mostly controlled crashes, survivable for unicells, and a few larger payloads with bunker-buster warheads to deliver the same organisms below the surface of the planet where we suspect the presence of buried water. Hedge our bets with multiple launches and a whole spectrum of candidate organisms. The idea is to get enough organic action going to loosen up the carbon locked into the crust and respirate it into the atmosphere. Give it a few million years—months, our time—then survey the planet again. If it’s a warmer place with a denser atmosphere and maybe a few ponds of semiliquid water we do the cycle again, this time with multicelled plants engineered for the environment. Which puts some oxygen into the air and maybe cranks up the atmospheric pressure another couple of millibars. Repeat as necessary. Add more millions of years and stir. In a reasonable time—the way our clocks measure time—you might be able to cook up a habitable planet.”
It was a breathtaking idea. I felt like one of those sidekick characters in a Victorian mystery novel—“It was an audacious, even ludicrous, plan he had contrived, but try as I might, I could find no flaw in it!”
Except one. One fundamental flaw.
“Jason,” I said. “Even if this is possible. What good does it do us?”
“If Mars is habitable, people can go there and live.”
“All seven or eight billion of us?”
He snorted. “Hardly. No, just a few pioneers. Breeding stock, if you want to be clinical about it.”
“And what are they supposed to do?”
“Live, reproduce, and die. Millions of generations for each of our years.”
“To what end?”
“If nothing else, to give the human species a second chance in the solar system. In the best case—they’ll have all the knowledge we can give them, plus a few million years to improve on it. Inside the Spin bubble we don’t have time enough to figure out who the Hypotheticals are or why they’re doing this to us. Our Martian heirs might have a better chance. Maybe they can do our thinking for us.”
Or our fighting for us?
(This
was, incidentally, the first time I had heard them called “Hypotheticals”—the hypothetical controlling intelligences, the unseen and largely theoretical creatures who had enclosed us in their time vault. The name didn’t catch on with the general public for a few more years. I was sorry when it did. The word was too clinical, it suggested something abstract and coolly objective; the truth was likely to be more complex.)
“There’s a plan,” I said, “to actually do these things?”
“Oh yes.” Jason had finished three quarters of his steak. He pushed his plate away. “It’s not even prohibitively expensive. Engineering extremely hardy unicells is the only problematic part. The surface of Mars is cold, dry, virtually airless, and bathed in sterilizing radiation every time the sun comes up. Even so, we have whole rafts of extremophiles to work with—bacteria living in Antarctic rocks, bacteria living in the outflow from nuclear reactors. And everything else is fully proven technology. We know rockets work. We know organic evolution works. The only really new thing is our perspective. To be able to get extremely long-term results literally days or months after we launch. It’s…people are calling it ‘teleological engineering.’”
“It’s almost like,” I said (testing the new word he had given me), “what the Hypotheticals are doing.”
“Yes,” Jason said, raising his eyebrows in a look I still found flattering after all these years: surprise, respect. “Yes, in a way I guess it is.”
I had once read an interesting detail in a book about the first manned moon landing back in 1969. At that time, the book said, some of the very elderly—men and women born in the nineteenth century, old enough to remember a world before automobiles and television—had been reluctant to believe the news. Words that would have made only fairy-tale sense in their childhood (“two men walked on the moon tonight”) were being offered as statements of fact. And they couldn’t accept it. It confounded their sense of what was reasonable and what was absurd.
Now it was my turn.
We’re going to terraform and colonize Mars, said my friend Jason, and he wasn’t delusional…or at least no more delusional than the dozens of smart and powerful people who apparently shared his conviction. So the proposition was serious; it must already have been, at some bureaucratic level, a work in progress.
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