Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “Okay. I understand that. Just knock if you need anything, all right?”

  He ambled back across the winter-brown lawn. Much had been made, in the press and in the Lawton family, of Jason’s genius, but I reminded myself that E.D. could claim that title, too. He had parlayed an engineering degree and a talent for business into a major corporate enterprise, and he had been selling aerostat-enabled telecom bandwidth when Americom and AT&T were still blinking at the Spin like startled deer. What he lacked was not Jason’s intelligence but Jason’s wit and Jason’s deep curiosity about the physical universe. And maybe a dash of Jason’s humanity.

  Then I was alone again, at home and not at home, and I sat on the sofa and marveled for a while at how little this room had changed. Sooner or later it would fall to me to dispose of the contents of the house, a job I could barely envision, a job more difficult, more preposterous, than the work of cultivating life on another planet. But maybe it was because I was contemplating that act of deconstruction that I noticed a gap on the top shelf of the étagère next to the TV.

  Noticed it because, to my knowledge, the high shelf had received no more than a cursory dusting in all the years I had lived here. The top shelf was the attic of my mother’s life. I could have recited the order of the contents of that shelf by closing my eyes and picturing it: her high school yearbooks (Martell Secondary School in Bingham, Maine, 1975, ’76, ’77, ’78); her Berkeley grad book, 1982; a jade Buddha bookend; her diploma in a stand-up plastic frame; the brown accordion file in which she kept her birth certificate, passport, and tax documents; and, braced by another green Buddha, three tattered New Balance shoeboxes labeled MEMENTOS (SCHOOL), MEMENTOS (MARCUS), and ODDS & ENDS.

  But tonight the second jade Buddha stood askew and the box marked MEMENTOS (SCHOOL) was missing. I assumed she had taken it down herself, though I hadn’t seen it elsewhere in the house. Of the three boxes, the only one she had regularly opened in my presence was ODDS & ENDS. It had been packed with concert playbills and ticket stubs, brittle newspaper clippings (including her own parents’ obituaries), a souvenir lapel pin in the shape of the schooner Bluenose from her honeymoon in Nova Scotia, matchbooks culled from restaurants and hotels she had visited, costume jewelry, a baptismal certificate, even a lock of my own baby hair preserved in a slip of waxed paper closed with a pin.

  I took down the other box, the one marked MEMENTOS (MARCUS). I had never been especially curious about my father, and my mother had seldom spoken about him apart from the basic thumbnail sketch (a handsome man, an engineer, a jazz collector, E.D.’s best friend in college, but a heavy drinker and a victim, one night on the road home from an electronics supplier in Milpitas, of his own fondness for speedy automobiles). Inside the shoebox was a stack of letters in vellum envelopes addressed in a curt, clean handwriting that must have been his. He had sent these letters to Belinda Sutton, my mother’s maiden name, at an address in Berkeley I didn’t recognize.

  I removed one of those envelopes and opened it, pulled out the yellowing paper and unfolded it.

  The paper was unlined but the handwriting cut across the page in small, neat parallels. Dear Bel, it began, and continued, I thought I said everything on the phone last night but can’t stop thinking about you. Writing this seems to bring you closer tho not as close as I’d like. Not as close as we were last August! I play that memory like videotape every night I can’t lie down next to you.

  And more, which I did not read. I folded the letter and tucked it into its yellowed envelope and closed the box and put it back where it belonged.

  In the morning there was a knock at the door. I answered it expecting Carol or some amanuensis from the Big House.

  But it wasn’t Carol. It was Diane. Diane in a midnight-blue floor-sweeper skirt and high-collared blouse. Her hands were clasped under her breasts. She looked up at me, eyes sparkling. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I came as soon as I heard.”

  But too late. The hospital had called ten minutes earlier. Belinda Dupree had died without regaining consciousness.

  At the memorial service E.D. spoke briefly and uncomfortably and said nothing of significance. I spoke, Diane spoke; Carol meant to speak but in the end was too tearful or inebriated to mount the pulpit.

  Diane’s eulogy was the most moving, cadenced and heartfelt, a catalogue of the kindnesses my mother had exported across the lawn like gifts from a wealthier, kinder nation. I was grateful for it. Everything else about the ceremony seemed mechanical by comparison: half-familiar faces bobbed out of the crowd to utter homilies and half-truths, and I thanked them and smiled, thanked them and smiled, until it was time for the walk to the graveside.

  There was a function at the Big House that evening, a post-funeral reception at which I was offered condolences by E.D.’s business associates, none of whom I knew but some of whom had known my father, and by the household staff at the Big House, whose grief was more authentic and harder to bear.

  Caterers slid through the crowd with wineglasses on silvered platters and I drank more than I should have, until Diane, who had also been gliding among the guests, tugged me away from yet another round of so-sorry-for-your-loss and said, “You need air.”

  “It’s cold out.”

  “If you keep drinking you’ll get surly. You’re halfway there already. Come on, Ty. Just for a few minutes.”

  Out onto the lawn. The brown midwinter lawn. The same lawn where we had witnessed the opening moments of the Spin almost twenty years ago. We walked the circumference of the Big House—strolled, really, despite the stiff March breeze and the granular snow still inhabiting every sheltered or shaded space.

  We had already said all the obvious things. We had compared notes: my career, the move to Florida, my work at Perihelion; her years with Simon, drifting out of NK toward a blander orthodoxy, welcoming the Rapture with piety and self-denial. (“We don’t eat meat,” she had confided. “We don’t wear artificial fibers.”) Walking next to her, light-headed, I wondered whether I had become gross or repugnant in her eyes, whether she was conscious of the ham-and-cheese aperitifs on my breath or the cotton-poly jacket I was wearing. She hadn’t changed much, though she was thinner than she used to be, maybe thinner than she ought to be, the line of her jaw a little stark against the high, tight collar.

  I was sober enough to thank her for trying to sober me up.

  “I needed to get away, too,” she said. “All those people E.D. invited. None of them knew your mother in any important way. Not one. They’re in there talking about appropriations bills or payload tonnage. Making deals.”

  “Maybe it’s E.D.’s way of paying tribute to her. Salting the wake with political celebrities.”

  “That’s a generous way of interpreting it.”

  “He still makes you angry.” So easily, I thought.

  “E.D.? Of course he does. Though it would be more charitable to forgive him. Which you seem to have done.”

  “I have less to forgive him for,” I said. “He’s not my father.”

  I didn’t mean anything by it. But I was still too aware of what Jason had told me a few weeks ago. I choked on the remark, reconsidered it even before the sentence was out of my mouth, blushed when I finished. Diane gave me a long uncomprehending look; then her eyes widened in an expression that mingled anger and embarrassment so plainly that I could parse it even by the dim glow of the porch light.

  “You’ve been talking to Jason,” she said coldly.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “How does that work exactly? Do the two of you sit around making fun of me?”

  “Of course not. He—anything Jason said, it was because of the medication.”

  Another grotesque faux pas, and she pounced on it: “What medication?”

  “I’m his GP. Sometimes I write him prescriptions. Does it matter?”

  “What medication makes you break a promise, Tyler? He promised he would never tell you—” She drew another inference. “Is Jason sick? Is that why he didn’t co
me to the funeral?”

  “He’s busy. We’re just days away from the first launches.”

  “But you’re treating him for something.”

  “I can’t ethically discuss Jason’s medical history,” I said, knowing this would only inflame her suspicions, that I had essentially given away his secret in the act of keeping it.

  “It would be just like him to get sick and not tell any of us. He’s so, so hermetically sealed….”

  “Maybe you should take the initiative. Call him sometime.”

  “You think I don’t? Did he tell you that, too? I used to call him every week. But he would just turn on that blank charm and refuse to say anything meaningful. How are you, I’m fine, what’s new, nothing. He doesn’t want to hear from me, Tyler. He’s deep in E.D.’s camp. I’m an embarrassment to him.” She paused. “Unless that’s changed.”

  “I don’t know what’s changed. But maybe you should see him, talk to him face to face.”

  “How would I do that?”

  I shrugged. “Take another week off. Fly back with me.”

  “You said he’s busy.”

  “Once the launches begin it’s all sit back and wait. You can come to Canaveral with us. See history being made.”

  “The launches are futile,” she said, but it sounded like something she had been taught to say; she added, “I’d like to, but I can’t afford it. Simon and I do all right. But we’re not rich. We’re not Lawtons.”

  “I’ll spot you the plane fare.”

  “You’re a generous drunk.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Thank you, but no,” she said. “I couldn’t.”

  “Think about it.”

  “Ask me when you’re sober.” She added, as we mounted the steps to the porch, yellow light hooding her eyes, “Whatever I might once have believed—whatever I might have told Jason—”

  “You don’t have to say this, Diane.”

  “I know E.D. isn’t your father.”

  What was interesting about her disclaimer was the way she delivered it. Firmly, decisively. As if she knew better now. As if she had discovered a different truth, an alternative key to the Lawton mysteries.

  Diane went back to the Big House. I decided I couldn’t face more well-wishing. I let myself into my mother’s house, which seemed airless and overheated.

  Carol, the next day, told me I could take my time about cleaning out my mother’s things, which she called “making arrangements.” The Little House wasn’t going anywhere, she said. Take a month. Take a year. I could “make arrangements” whenever I had the time and as soon as I felt comfortable with it.

  Comfort wasn’t even on the horizon, but I thanked her for her patience and spent the day packing for the flight back to Orlando. I was nagged by the idea that I ought to take something of my mother’s with me, that she would have wanted me to keep a memento for some shoebox of my own. But what? One of her Hummel figurines, which she had loved but which had always struck me as expensive kitsch? The cross-stitched butterfly from the living room wall, the print of Water Lilies in a do-it-yourself frame?

  Diane showed up at the door while I was debating. “Does that offer still stand? The trip to Florida? Were you serious about that?”

  “Of course I was.”

  “Because I talked to Simon. He’s not completely delighted with the idea, but he thinks he’ll be okay on his own for a few more days.”

  Mighty considerate of him, I thought.

  “So,” she said, “unless—I mean, I know you’d been drinking—”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll call the airline.”

  I booked a seat in Diane’s name on the next day’s first D.C./Orlando junket.

  Then I finished packing. Of my mother’s things, I settled at last on the pair of chipped jade Buddha bookends.

  I looked around the house, even checked under the beds, but the missing MEMENTOS (SCHOOL) seemed to have vanished permanently.

  Snapshots of the Ecopoiesis

  Jason suggested we take rooms in Cocoa Beach and wait a day for him to join us there. He was doing a last round of media Q & A at Perihelion but had cleared his schedule prior to the launches, which he wanted to witness without a CNN crew dunning him with boneheaded questions.

  “Great,” Diane said when I relayed this information. “I can ask all the boneheaded questions myself.”

  I had managed to calm her fears about Jason’s medical condition: no, he wasn’t dying, and any temporary blips on his medical record were his own business. She accepted that, or seemed to, but still wanted to see him, if only to reassure herself, as if my mother’s death had shaken her faith in the fixed stars of the Lawton universe.

  So I used my Perihelion ID and my connection with Jase to rent us two neighboring suites in a Holiday Inn with a view toward Canaveral. Not long after the Mars project was conceived—once the EPA’s objections had been noted and ignored—a dozen shallow-water launch platforms had been constructed and anchored off the coast of Merritt Island. It was these structures we could see most clearly from the hotel. The rest of the view was parking lots, winter beaches, blue water.

  We stood on the balcony of her suite. She had showered and changed after the drive from Orlando and we were about to go down and brave the lobby restaurant. Every other balcony we could see bristled with cameras and lenses: the Holiday Inn was a designated media hotel. (Simon may have distrusted the secular press but Diane was suddenly knee-deep in it.) We couldn’t see the setting sun but its light caught the distant gantries and rockets and rendered them more ethereal than real, a squadron of giant robots marching off to some battle in the Mid-Atlantic Trench. Diane stood back from the balcony railing as if she found the view frightening. “Why are there so many of them?”

  “Shotgun ecopoiesis,” I said.

  She laughed, a little reproachfully. “Is that one of Jason’s words?”

  It wasn’t, not entirely. “Ecopoiesis” was a word coined by a man named Robert Haynes in 1990, back when terraforming was a purely speculative science. Technically it meant the creation of a self-regulating anaerobic biosphere where none had existed before, but in modern usage it referred to any purely biological modification of Mars. The greening of Mars required two different kinds of planetary engineering: crude terraforming, to raise the surface temperature and atmospheric pressure to a plausible threshold for life, and ecopoiesis: using microbial and plant life to condition the soil and oxygenate the air.

  The Spin had already done the heavy lifting for us. Every planet in the solar system—barring Earth—had been warmed significantly by the expanding sun. What remained was the subtler work of ecopoiesis. But there were many possible routes to ecopoiesis, many candidate organisms, from rock-dwelling bacteria to alpine mosses.

  “So it’s called shotgun,” Diane surmised, “because you’re sending all of them.”

  “All of them, and as many of them as we can afford, because no single organism is guaranteed to adapt and survive. But one of them might.”

  “More than one might.”

  “Which is fine. We want an ecology, not a monoculture.” In fact the launches would be timed and staggered. The first wave would carry only anaerobic and photoautotrophic organisms, simple forms of life that required no oxygen and derived energy from sunlight. If they thrived and died in sufficient numbers they would create a layer of biomass to nurture more complex ecosystems. The next wave, a year from now, would introduce oxygenating organisms; the last unmanned launches would include primitive plants to fix the soil and regulate evaporation and rainfall cycles.

  “It all seems so unlikely.”

  “We live in unlikely times. But no, it’s not guaranteed to work.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  I shrugged. “What have we lost?”

  “A lot of money. A lot of manpower.”

  “I can’t think of a better use for it. Yes, this is a wager, and no, it’s not a sure thing, but the potential payoff is more than worth the r
isk. And it’s been good for everybody, at least so far. Good for morale at home and a good way of promoting international cooperation.”

  “But you’ll have misled a lot of ordinary people. Convinced them the Spin is something we can manage, something we can find a technological fix for.”

  “Given them hope, you mean.”

  “The wrong kind of hope. And if you fail you leave them with no hope at all.”

  “What would you have us do, Diane? Retreat to our prayer mats?”

  “It would hardly be an admission of defeat—prayer, I mean. And if you do succeed, the next step is to send people?”

  “Yes. If we green the planet we send people.” A much more difficult and ethically complex proposition. We’d be sending candidates in crews of ten. They would have to endure an unpredictably long passage in absurdly small quarters on limited rations. They would have to suffer atmospheric braking at a near-lethal delta-V after months of weightlessness, followed by a perilous descent to the planet’s surface. If all this worked, and if their meager allotment of survival gear made its parallel descent and landed anywhere near them, they would then have to teach themselves subsistence skills in an environment only approximately fit for human habitation. Their mission brief was not to return to Earth but to live long enough to reproduce in sufficient numbers and pass on to their offspring a sustainable mode of existence.

  “What sane person would agree to that?”

  “You’d be surprised.” I couldn’t speak for the Chinese, the Russians, or any of the other international volunteers, but the North American flight candidates were a shockingly ordinary group of men and women. They had been selected for their youth, physical hardiness, and ability to tolerate and endure discomfort. Only a few had been Air Force test pilots but all possessed what Jason called “the test pilot mentality,” a willingness to accept grave physical risk in the name of a spectacular achievement. And, of course, most of them were in all likelihood doomed, just as most of the bacteria mounted on these distant rockets were doomed. The best outcome we could reasonably expect was that some band of nomadic survivors wandering the mossy canyons of Valles Marineris might encounter a similar group of Russians or Danes or Canadians and engender a viable Martian humanity.