Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The last booster was delayed by a faulty sensor but launched ten minutes late. It would arrive on Mars nearly a thousand years after the rest of the fleet, but this had been taken into account in the planning and might prove to be a good thing, an injection of Terrestrial technology and know-how long after the paper books and digital readers of the original colonists had crumbled into dust.

  Moments later the video broadcast cut to French Guyana, the old and much-expanded Centre National d’Études Spatiales at Kourou, where one of the big boosters from the Aerospatiale factory had risen a hundred feet and then lost thrust and tumbled back onto its pad in a mushroom of flame.

  Twelve people were killed, ten aboard the NEP ark and two on the ground, but it was the only conspicuous tragedy of the entire launch sequence, and that probably amounted to good luck, taken all in all.

  But that wasn’t the end of the exercise. By midnight—and this, it seemed to me, was the clearest indicator yet of the grotesque disparity between terrestrial time and Spin-time—human civilization on Mars had either failed entirely or had been in progress for most of a hundred thousand years.

  That’s roughly the amount of time between the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and yesterday afternoon.

  It passed while I was driving home from Perihelion to my rental. It was entirely possible that Martian dynasties rose and fell while I waited for traffic lights to change. I thought about those lives—those fully real human lives, each one of them boxed into a span of less than a minute as my watch counted time—and felt a little dizzy. Spin vertigo. Or something deeper.

  A half dozen survey satellites were launched that night, programmed to look for signs of human life on Mars. Their payload packages parachuted back to Earth and were retrieved before morning.

  I saw the results before they were made public.

  This was a full week after the Prometheus launches. Jason had booked a 10:30 appointment at the infirmary, subject to breaking news from JPL. He didn’t cancel the appointment but showed up an hour late with a manila envelope in his hand, clearly anxious to discuss something not related to his medical regimen. I hurried him into a consultation room.

  “I don’t know what to tell the press,” he said. “I just got off a conference call with the ESA director and a bunch of Chinese bureaucrats. We’re trying to put together a draft of a joint statement for heads of state, but as soon as the Russians agree to a sentence the Chinese want to veto it, and vice versa.”

  “A statement about what, Jase?”

  “The satellite data.”

  “You got the results?” In fact they were overdue. JPL was usually quicker about sharing its photos. But from what Jason had said I guessed someone had been sitting on the data. Which meant it wasn’t what they’d expected. Bad news, perhaps.

  “Look,” Jason said.

  He opened the manila folder and pulled out two composite telescopic photos, one atop the other. Both were images of Mars taken from Earth orbit after the Prometheus launches.

  The first photograph was heart-stopping. It was not as distinct as the framed image I had put up in the waiting room, since in this one the planet was far from its closest approach to Earth; the clarity it did possess was a testament to modern imaging technology. Superficially it didn’t seem much different from the framed photo: I could make out enough green to know that the transplanted ecology was still intact, still active.

  “Look a little closer,” Jason said.

  He ran his finger down the sinuous line of a riverine lowland. There were green places here with sharp, regular borders. More of them, the more I looked.

  “Agriculture,” Jase said.

  I held my breath and thought about what that meant. I thought: Now there are two inhabited planets in the solar system. Not hypothetically, but really. These were places where people lived, where people lived on Mars.

  I wanted to stare. But Jase slid the printout back into its envelope, revealing the one beneath.

  “The second photo,” he said, “was taken twenty-four hours later.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Taken from the same camera on the same satellite. We have parallel images to confirm the result. It looked like a flaw in the imaging system until we juiced the contrast enough to read a little starlight.”

  But there was nothing in the photograph. A few stars, a fat central nothingness in the shape of a disk. “What is it?”

  “A Spin membrane,” Jason said. “Seen from the outside. Mars has its own now.”

  4 X 109 A.D.

  We were traveling inland from Padang—that much I understood—uphill, over roads that were sometimes silken-smooth and sometimes pitted and uneven, until the car pulled up in front of what in the darkness appeared to be a concrete bunker but must have been (by the painted red crescent under a glaring tungsten bulb) some kind of medical clinic. The driver was upset when he saw where he had taken us—this was further evidence that I was sick, not just drunk—but Diane pushed more bills into his hand and sent him away mollified if not happy.

  I was having trouble standing. I leaned into Diane, who took my weight gamely, and we stood in the wet night, on an empty road, moonlight cutting through tattered clouds. There was the clinic in front of us and a gas station across the pavement and nothing else but forest and flat spaces that might have been cultivated fields. There was no visible human presence until the screened door of the clinic wheezed open and a short, rotund woman wearing a long skirt and small white hat hurried out to us.

  “Ibu Diane!” the woman said, excitedly but softly, as if she were afraid of being overheard, even at this lonely hour. “Welcome!”

  “Ibu Ina,” Diane said respectfully.

  “And this must be—?”

  “Pak Tyler Dupree. The one I told you about.”

  “Too sick to speak?”

  “Too sick to say anything sensible.”

  “Then by all means let’s get him inside.”

  Diane supported me on one side and the woman she had called Ibu Ina grabbed my right arm by the shoulder. She wasn’t a young woman but she was remarkably strong. The hair under her white cap was gray and thinning. She smelled like cinnamon. Judging by the way she wrinkled her nose, I smelled like something much worse.

  Then we were inside, past an empty waiting room furnished with rattan and cheap metal chairs, into what looked like a fairly modern consultancy, where Diane dumped me onto a padded table and Ina said, “Well, then, let’s see what we can do for him,” and I felt safe enough to pass out.

  I woke to the sound of a call to prayer from a distant mosque and the smell of fresh coffee.

  I was lying naked on a pallet in a small concrete room with one window, which admitted the only light, a pale premonition of dawn. There was a doorway covered with a sort of bamboo lacework, and from beyond it the noise of someone doing something energetic with cups and bowls.

  The clothes I had been wearing last night had been laundered and were folded next to the pallet. I was between fevers—I had learned to recognize these little oases of well-being—and strong enough to dress myself.

  I was balancing on one leg and aiming the other into my trousers when Ibu Ina peeked in through the curtain. “So you’re well enough to stand!” she said.

  Briefly. I fell back onto the pallet, half dressed. Ina came into the room with a bowl of white rice, a spoon, an enameled tin cup. She knelt beside me and glanced at the wooden tray: did I want any of this?

  I discovered I did. For the first time in many days I was hungry. Probably a good thing. My pants were ridiculously loose, my ribs obscenely prominent. “Thank you,” I said.

  “We were introduced last night,” she said, handing me the bowl. “Do you remember? I apologize for the crude nature of the accommodations. This room serves concealment better than comfort.”

  She might have been fifty or sixty years old. Her face was round and wrinkled, her features concentrated in a moon of brown flesh, an apple-doll lo
ok that was accentuated by her long black dress and white cap. If the Amish had settled in West Sumatra they might have produced something like Ibu Ina.

  Her accent was lilting Indonesian but her diction was primly correct. “You speak very well,” I said, the only compliment I could come up with on short notice.

  “Thank you. I studied at Cambridge.”

  “English?”

  “Medicine.”

  The rice was bland but good. I made a show of finishing it.

  “Perhaps more, later?” Ibu Ina said.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Ibu was a Minangkabau term of respect used in addressing women. (The male equivalent was Pak.) Which implied that Ina was a Minangkabau doctor and that we were in the Sumatran highlands, probably within sight of Mount Merapi. Everything I knew about Ina’s people I had learned from the Sumatran guidebook I had read on the plane from Singapore: there were more than five million Minangkabau living in villages and cities in the highlands; many of Padang’s finest restaurants were operated by Minangkabau; they were famous for their matrilineal culture, their business savvy, and their blend of Islam and traditional adat customs.

  None of which explained what I was doing in the back room of a Minang doctor’s office.

  I said, “Is Diane still asleep? Because I don’t understand—”

  “Ibu Diane has taken the bus back to Padang, I’m afraid. But you’ll be safe here.”

  “I was hoping she’d be safe, too.”

  “She would be safer here than in the city, certainly. But that wouldn’t get either of you out of Indonesia.”

  “How did you come to know Diane?”

  Ina grinned. “Sheerly by luck! Or mostly luck. She was negotiating a contract with my ex-husband, Jala, who is in the import-export business, among others, when it became obvious that the New Reformasi were much too interested in her. I work a few days a month at the state hospital in Padang and I was delighted when Jala introduced me to Diane, even if he was simply looking for a place to temporarily hide a prospective client. It was so exciting to meet the sister of Pak Jason Lawton!”

  This was startling in almost too many ways. “You know about Jason?”

  “I know of him—unlike you, I have never had the privilege of speaking to him. Oh, but I was a great follower of the news about Jason Lawton in the early days of the Spin. And you were his personal physician! And now here you are in the back room of my clinic!”

  “I’m not sure Diane should have mentioned any of that.” I was certain she shouldn’t have. Our only protection was our anonymity, and now it was compromised.

  Ibu Ina looked crestfallen. “Of course,” she said, “it would have been better not to mention that name. But foreigners with legal problems are terribly commonplace in Padang. There is an expression: a dime a dozen. Foreigners with legal and medical troubles are even more problematic. Diane must have learned that Jala and I were both great admirers of Jason Lawton—it could only have been an act of desperation for her to invoke his name. Even then, I didn’t quite believe her until I sought out photographs on the Internet. I suppose one of the drawbacks of celebrity must be this constant taking of pictures. At any rate, there was a photograph of the Lawton family, taken very early in the Spin, but I recognized her: it was true! And so it must be true what she told me about her sick friend. You were a physician to Jason Lawton, and of course the other, the more famous one—”

  “Yes.”

  “The small black wrinkled man.”

  “Yes.”

  “Whose medicine is making you sick.”

  “Whose medicine, I hope, is also making me better.”

  “As it has already Diane, or so she said. This interests me. Is there really an adulthood beyond adulthood? How do you feel?”

  “Could be better, frankly.”

  “But the process is not finished.”

  “No. The process is not finished.”

  “Then you should rest. Is there anything I can get for you?”

  “I had notebooks—paper—”

  “In a bundle with your other luggage. I’ll bring them. Are you a writer as well as a physician?”

  “Only temporarily. I need to put some thoughts down on paper.”

  “Perhaps when you’re feeling better you can share some of those thoughts with me.”

  “Perhaps so. I would be honored.”

  She rose from her knees. “Especially about the little black wrinkled man. The man from Mars.”

  I slept erratically through the next couple of days, waking up surprised by the passage of time, the sudden nights and unexpected mornings, marking what I could of the hours by the call to prayer, the sound of traffic, by Ibu Ina’s offerings of rice and curried eggs and periodic sponge baths. We talked, but the conversations washed through my memory like sand through a sieve, and I could tell by her expression that I occasionally repeated myself or had forgotten things she’d said. Light and dark, light and dark; then, suddenly, Diane was kneeling next to Ina beside the bed, both of them giving me somber looks.

  “He’s awake,” Ibu Ina said. “Please excuse me. I’ll leave the two of you alone.”

  Then it was just Diane beside me.

  She wore a white blouse, a white scarf over her dark hair, billowy blue trousers. She could have passed for any secularized mall-dweller in downtown Padang, though she was too tall and too pale to really fool anyone.

  “Tyler,” she said. Her eyes were blue and wide. “Are you paying attention to your fluids?”

  “Do I look that bad?”

  She stroked my forehead. “It isn’t easy, is it?”

  “I didn’t expect it to be painless.”

  “Another couple of weeks and it’ll be over. Until then—”

  She didn’t have to tell me. The drug was beginning to work deep into muscle tissue, nervous tissue.

  “But this is a good place to be,” she added. “We have antispasmodics, decent analgesics. Ina understands what’s going on.” She smiled sadly. “Still…not exactly what we’d planned.”

  We had planned on anonymity. Any of the Arch Port cities should have been a safe place for a moneyed American to lose himself. We had settled on Padang not just for its convenience—Sumatra was the land mass closest to the Arch—but because its hyperfast economic growth and the recent troubles with the New Reformasi government in Jakarta had made the city a functioning anarchy. I would suffer through the drug regimen in some undistinguished hotel, and when it was finished—when I was effectively remade—we would buy ourselves passage to a place where nothing bad could touch us. That was how it was supposed to go.

  What we had not counted on was the vindictiveness of the Chaykin administration and its determination to make examples of us—both for the secrets we had kept and the secrets we had already divulged.

  “I guess I made myself a little too conspicuous in the wrong places,” Diane said. “I had us booked with two different rantau collectives, but both deals fell apart, suddenly people weren’t talking to me, and it was obvious we were drawing way too much attention. The consulate, the New Reformasi, and the local police all have our descriptions. Not entirely accurate descriptions, but close enough.”

  “That’s why you told these people who we are.”

  “I told them because they already suspected. Not Ibu Ina, but certainly Jala, her ex. Jala’s a very canny guy. He runs a relatively respectable shipping company. A lot of the bulk concrete and palm oil that transits the port of Teluk Bayur also passes through one or another of Jala’s warehouses. The rantau gadang business nets less money but it’s tax-free, and those ships full of emigrants don’t come back empty. He does a brisk sideline in black-market cattle and goats.”

  “Sounds like a man who would be glad to sell us to the New Reformasi.”

  “But we pay better. And present fewer legal difficulties, as long as we’re not caught.”

  “Does Ina approve of this?”

  “Approve of what? The rantau gadang? She has two
sons and a daughter in the new world. Of Jala? She thinks he’s more or less trustworthy—if you pay him he stays bought. Of us? She thinks we’re next door to sainthood.”

  “Because of Wun Ngo Wen?”

  “Basically.”

  “You were lucky to find her.”

  “It’s not entirely luck.”

  “Still, we should get away as soon as possible.”

  “Soon as you’re better. Jala has a ship lined up. The Capetown Maru. That’s why I’ve been back and forth between here and Padang. There are more people I have to pay.”

  We were rapidly being transformed from foreigners with money to foreigners who used to have money. “Still,” I said, “I wish—”

  “Wish what?” She ran a finger over my forehead, back and forth, langorously.

  “Wish I didn’t have to sleep alone.”

  She gave a little laugh and put her hand on my chest. On my emaciated rib cage, on my skin still alligator-textured and ugly. Not exactly an invitation to intimacy. “It’s too hot to cuddle up.”

  “Too hot?”

  I’d been shivering.

  “Poor Tyler,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her to be careful. But I closed my eyes, and when I opened them she was gone again.

  Inevitably there was worse to come, but in fact I felt much better over the next few days: the eye of the storm, Diane had called it. It was as if the Martian drug and my body had negotiated a temporary truce, both sides rallying for the ultimate battle. I tried to take advantage of the time.

  I ate everything Ina offered, and I paced the room from time to time, trying to channel some strength into my scrawny legs. Had I felt stronger this concrete box (in which Ina had stored medical supplies before she built a more secure lock-and-alarm system adjoining the clinic) might have seemed like a prison cell. Under the circumstances it was almost cozy. I piled our hard-shell suitcases in one corner and used them as a sort of desk, sitting on a reed mat while I wrote. The high window allowed in a wedge of sunlight.

  It also allowed in the face of a local schoolboy, whom I had caught on two occasions peering at me. When I mentioned this to Ibu Ina she nodded, disappeared for a few minutes, and came back with the boy in tow: “This is En,” she said, practically throwing him through the curtain at me. “En is ten years old. He is very bright. He wants to be a doctor one day. He is also my nephew’s son. Unfortunately he’s cursed with curiosity at the expense of sensibility. He climbed on top of the trash bin to see what I was hiding in my back room. Unforgivable. Apologize to my guest, En.”