Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  And if they were here looking for me, did that mean they had found and interrogated Jala, Ina’s ex-husband? Did it mean they had already arrested Diane?

  En blundered into a darkened consulting room. His forehead collided with the extended stirrups of an examination table and he fell back on his rump. When I reached him he was crying soundlessly, frightened, tears rolling down his cheeks. The welt above his left eyebrow was angry-looking but not dangerous.

  I put my hands on his shoulders. “En, she’s not here. Really. She’s really, really not here. And I know for a fact she didn’t mean for you to stay here in the dark when something bad might happen. She wouldn’t do that, would she?”

  “Uh,” En said, conceding the point.

  “So you run home, okay? You run home and stay there. I’ll take care of this problem and we’ll both see Ibu Ina tomorrow. Does that make sense?”

  En attempted to exchange his fear for a judicial look. “I think so,” he said, wincing.

  I helped him to his feet.

  But then there was the sound of gravel crunching under tires in front of the clinic, and we both crouched down again.

  We hurried to the reception room, where I peered through the slatted bamboo blinds with En behind me, his small hands knotted into the fabric of my shirt.

  The car idled in the moonlight. I didn’t recognize the model but judging by the inky shine it looked relatively new. There was a brief flare from the interior darkness that might have been a cigarette lighter. Then a much brighter light, a high-beam spotlight sweeping out from the passenger-side window. It came through the blinds and cast rolling shadows over the hygiene posters on the opposite wall. We ducked our heads. En whimpered.

  “Pak Tyler?” he said.

  I closed my eyes and discovered it was hard to open them again. Behind my eyelids I saw pinwheels and starbursts. The fever again. A small chorus of interior voices repeated, The fever again, the fever again. Mocking me.

  “Pak Tyler!”

  This was very bad timing. (Bad timing, bad timing…) “Go to the door, En. The side door.”

  “Come with me!”

  Good advice. I checked the window again. The spotlight had winked out. I stood and led En down the corridor and past the supply cupboards to the side door, which he had left open. The night was deceptively quiet, deceptively inviting; a span of pressed earth, a rice field; the forest, palm trees black in the moonlight and tossing their crowns softly.

  The bulk of the clinic was between us and the car. “Run straight for the forest,” I said.

  “I know the way—”

  “Stay away from the road. Hide if you have to.”

  “I know. Come with me!”

  “I can’t,” I said, meaning it literally. In my present condition the idea of sprinting after a ten-year-old was absurd.

  “But—” En said, and I gave him a little push and told him not to waste time.

  He ran without looking back, disappearing with almost alarming speed into the shadows, silent, small, admirable. I envied him. In the ensuing quiet I heard a car door open and close.

  The moon was three-quarters full, ruddier and more distant than it used to be, presenting a different face than the one I remembered from my childhood. No more Man in the Moon; and that dark ovoid scar across the lunar surface, that new but now ancient mare, was the result of a massive impact that had melted regolith from pole to equator and slowed the moon’s gradual spiral away from the Earth.

  Behind me, I heard the policemen (I guessed two of them) pounding at the front door, announcing themselves gruffly, rattling the lock.

  I thought about running. I believed I could run—not as deftly as En, but successfully—at least as far as the rice field. And hide there, and hope for the best.

  But then I thought of the luggage I had left in Ina’s back room. Luggage containing not just clothing but notebooks and discs, small slivers of digital memory and incriminating vials of clear liquid.

  I turned back. Inside, I latched the door behind me. I walked barefoot and alert, listening for the sound of the policemen. They might be circling the building or they might make another attempt at the front door. The fever was coming on fast, however, and I heard many things, only some of which were likely to be real sounds.

  Back in Ina’s hidden room the overhead light was still out. I worked by touch and moonlight. I opened one of the two hard-shell suitcases and shoved in a stack of handwritten pages; closed it, latched it, lifted it and staggered. Then I picked up the second case for starboard ballast and discovered I could barely walk.

  I nearly tripped over a small plastic object which I recognized as Ina’s pager. I stopped, put down the luggage, grabbed the pager and slid it into my shirt pocket. Then I drew a few deep breaths and lifted the cases again; mysteriously, they seemed to have grown even heavier. I tried to tell myself You can do this, but the words were trite and unconvincing and they echoed as if my skull had expanded to the size of a cathedral.

  I heard noises from the back door, the one Ina kept closed with an exterior padlock: clinking metal and the groaning of the latch, maybe a crowbar inserted between the hasps of the lock and twisted. And pretty soon, inevitably, the lock would give way and the men from the car would come inside.

  I staggered to the third door, En’s door, the side door, unlatched it and eased it open in the blind hope that no one was standing outside. No one was. Both intruders (if there were only two of them) were at the back. They whispered as they worked the lock, their voices faintly audible over frog-choruses and the small sound of the wind.

  I wasn’t sure I could make it to the concealment of the rice field without being seen. Worse, I wasn’t sure I could make it without falling down.

  But then there was a loud percussive bang as the padlock parted company with the door. The starting gun, I thought. You can do this, I thought. I gathered up my luggage and staggered barefoot into the starry night.

  Hospitality

  “Have you seen this?”

  Molly Seagram waved her hand at a magazine on the reception desk as I entered the Perihelion infirmary. Her expression said: Bad juju, evil omens. It was the glossy print edition of a major monthly news magazine, and Jason’s picture was on the cover. Tag line: THE VERY PRIVATE PERSONALITY BEHIND THE PUBLIC FACE OF THE PERIHELION PROJECT.

  “Not good news, I take it?”

  She shrugged. “It’s not exactly flattering. Take it. Read it. We can talk about it over dinner.” I had already promised her dinner. “Oh, and Mrs. Tuckman is prepped and waiting in stall three.”

  I had asked Molly not to refer to the consulting rooms as “stalls,” but it wasn’t worth arguing about. I slid the magazine into my mail tray. It was a slow, rainy April morning and Mrs. Tuckman was my only scheduled patient before lunch.

  She was the wife of a staff engineer and had been to see me three times in the last month, complaining of anxiety and fatigue. The source of her problem wasn’t hard to divine. Two years had passed since the enclosure of Mars, and rumors of layoffs abounded at Perihelion. Her husband’s financial situation was uncertain and her own attempts to find work had foundered. She was going through Xanax at an alarming pace and she wanted more, immediately.

  “Maybe we should consider a different medication,” I said.

  “I don’t want an antidepressant, if that’s what you mean.” She was a small woman, her otherwise pleasant face crunched into a fierce frown. Her gaze flickered around the consulting room and alighted for a time on the rain-streaked window overlooking the landscaped south lawn. “Seriously. I was on Paraloft for six months and I couldn’t stop running to the bathroom.”

  “When was this?”

  “Before you came. Dr. Koenig prescribed it. Of course, things were different then. I hardly saw Carl at all, he was so busy. Lots of lonely nights. But at least it looked like good, steady employment in those days, something that would last. I guess I should have counted my blessings. Isn’t that in my, um, chart or what
ever you call it?”

  Her patient history was open on the desk in front of me. Dr. Koenig’s notes were often difficult to decipher, though he had kindly used a red pen to highlight matters of pressing urgency: allergies, chronic conditions. The entries in Mrs. Tuckman’s folder were prim, terse, and ungenerous. Here was the note about Paraloft, discontinued (date indecipherable) at patient’s request, “patient continues to complain of nervousness, fears for future.” Didn’t we all fear for the future?

  “Now we can’t even count on Carl’s job. My heart was beating so hard last night—I mean, very rapidly, unusually rapidly. I thought it might be, you know.”

  “What?”

  “You know. CVWS.”

  CVWS—cardiovascular wasting syndrome—had been in the news the last few months. It had killed thousands of people in Egypt and the Sudan and cases had been reported in Greece, Spain, and the southern U.S. It was a slow-burning bacterial infection, potential trouble for tropical third world economies but treatable with modern drugs. Mrs. Tuckman had nothing to fear from CVWS, and I told her so.

  “People say they dropped it on us.”

  “Who dropped what, Mrs. Tuckman?”

  “That disease. The Hypotheticals. They dropped it on us.”

  “Everything I’ve read suggests CVWS crossed over from cattle.” It was still mainly an ungulate disease and it regularly decimated cattle herds in northern Africa.

  “Cattle. Huh. But they wouldn’t necessarily tell you, would they? I mean, they wouldn’t come out and announce it on the news.”

  “CVWS is an acute illness. If you did have it you’d have been hospitalized by now. Your pulse is normal and your cardio is fine.”

  She looked unconvinced. In the end I wrote her a prescription for an alternative anxiolytic—essentially, Xanax with a different molecular side chain—hoping the new brand name, if not the drug itself, would have a useful effect. Mrs. Tuckman left the office mollified, clutching the script in her hand like a sacred scroll.

  I felt useless and vaguely fraudulent.

  But Mrs. Tuckman’s condition was far from unique. The whole world was reeling with anxiety. What had once looked like our best shot at a survivable future, the terraforming and colonization of Mars, had ended in impotence and uncertainty. Which left us no future but the Spin. The global economy had begun to oscillate, consumers and nations accumulating debt loads they expected never to have to repay, while creditors hoarded funds and interest rates spiked. Extreme religiosity and brutal criminality had increased in tandem, at home and abroad. The effects were especially devastating in third world nations, where collapsing currencies and recurrent famine helped revive slumbering Marxist and militant Islamic movements.

  The psychological tangent wasn’t hard to understand. Neither was the violence. Lots of people harbor grievances, but only those who have lost faith in the future are likely to show up at work with an automatic rifle and a hit list. The Hypotheticals, whether they meant to or not, had incubated exactly that kind of terminal despair. The suicidally disgruntled were legion, and their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives…For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape.

  We lived in dangerous times. Mrs. Tuckman knew that, and all the Xanax in the world wasn’t going to convince her otherwise.

  During lunch I secured a table at the back of the staff cafeteria, where I nursed a coffee, watched rain fall on the parking lot, and perused the magazine Molly had given me.

  If there were a science of Spinology, the lead article began, Jason Lawton would be its Newton, its Einstein, its Stephen Hawking.

  Which was what E.D. had always encouraged the press to say and what Jase had always dreaded hearing.

  From radiological surveys to permeability studies, from hard-core science to philosophical debate, there is hardly an area of Spin study his ideas haven’t touched and transformed. His published papers are numerous and oft-cited. His attendance turns sleepy academic conferences into instant media events. And as acting director of the Perihelion Foundation he has powerfully influenced American and global aerospace policy in the Spin era.

  But amidst the real accomplishments—and occasional hype—surrounding Jason Lawton, it’s easy to forget that Perihelion was founded by his father, Edward Dean (E. D.) Lawton, who still holds a preeminent place on the steering committee and in the presidential cabinet. And the public image of the son, some would argue, is also the creation of the more mysterious, equally influential, and far less public elder Lawton.

  The article went on to detail E.D.’s early career: the massive success of aerostat telecommunications in the aftermath of the Spin, his virtual adoption by three successive presidential administrations, the creation of the Perihelion Foundation.

  Originally conceived as a think tank and industry lobby, Perihelion was eventually reinvented as an agency of the federal government, designing Spin-related space missions and coordinating the work of dozens of universities, research institutions, and NASA centers. In effect, the decline of “the old NASA” was Perihelion’s rise. A decade ago the relationship was formalized and a subtly reorganized Perihelion was officially annexed to NASA as an advisory body. In reality, insiders say, it was NASA that was annexed to Perihelion. And while young prodigy Jason Lawton was charming the press, his father continued to pull the strings.

  The article went on to question E.D.’s long relationship with the Garland administration and hinted at a potential scandal: certain instrument packages had been manufactured for several million dollars apiece by a small Pasadena firm run by one of E.D.’s old cronies, even though Ball Aerospace had tendered a lower-cost proposal.

  We were living through an election campaign in which both major parties had spun off radical factions. Garland, a Reform Republican of whom the magazine notoriously disapproved, had already served two terms, and Preston Lomax, Clayton’s V.P. and anointed successor, was running ahead of his opponent in recent polls. The “scandal” really wasn’t one. Ball’s proposal had been lower but the package they designed was less effective; the Pasadena engineers had crammed more instrumentation into an equivalent payload weight.

  I said as much to Molly over dinner at Champs, a mile down the road from Perihelion. There was nothing really new about the article. The insinuations were more political than substantial.

  “Does it matter,” Molly asked, “if they’re right or wrong? The important thing is how they’re playing us. Suddenly it’s okay for a major media outlet to take shots at Perihelion.”

  Elsewhere in the issue an editorial had described the Mars project as “the single most expensive boondoggle in history, costly in human lives as well as cash, a monument to the human ability to squeeze profit from a global catastrophe.” The author was a speechwriter for the Christian Conservative Party. “The CCP owns this rag, Moll. Everybody knows that.”

  “They want to shut us down.”

  “They won’t shut us down. Even if Lomax loses the election. Even if they scale us back to surveillance missions, we’re the only eye on the Spin the nation has.”

  “Which doesn’t mean we won’t all be fired and replaced.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  She looked unconvinced.

  Molly was the nurse/receptionist I had inherited from Dr. Koenig when I first came to Perihelion. For most of five years she had been a polite, professional, and efficient piece of office furniture. We had exchanged little more than customary pleasantries, by which I had come to know that she was single, three years younger than I was, and living in a walk-up apartment away from the ocean. She had never seemed especially talkative and I had assumed she preferred it that way.

  Then, less than a month ago, Moll
y had turned to me as she collected her purse for a Thursday-night drive home and asked me if I’d like to join her for dinner. Why? “Because I got tired of waiting for you to ask. So? Yes? No?”

  Yes.

  Molly turned out to be smart, sly, cynical, and better company than I had expected. We’d been sharing meals at Champs for three weeks now. We liked the menu (unpretentious) and the atmosphere (collegial). I often thought Molly looked her best in that vinyl booth at Champs, gracing it with her presence, lending it a certain dignity. Her blond hair was long and, tonight, limp in the massive humidity. The green in her eyes was a deliberate effect, colored contacts, but it looked good on her.

  “Did you read the sidebar?” she asked.

  “Glanced at it.” The magazine’s sidebar profile of Jason had contrasted his career success with a private life either impenetrably hidden or nonexistent. Acquaintances say his home is as sparsely furnished as his romantic life. There has never been a rumor of a fiancé, girlfriend, or spouse of either gender. One comes away with an impression of a man not merely married to his ideas but almost pathologically devoted to them. And in many ways Jason Lawton, like Perihelion itself, remains under the stifling influence of his father. For all his accomplishments, he has yet to emerge himself as his own man.

  “At least that part sounds right,” Molly said.

  “Does it? Jason can be a little self-centered, but—”

  “He comes through reception like I don’t exist. I mean, that’s trivial, but it’s not exactly warm. How’s his treatment going?”

  “I’m not treating him for anything, Moll.” Molly had seen Jason’s charts, but I hadn’t made any entries about his AMS. “He comes in to talk.”

  “Uh-huh. And sometimes when he comes in to talk he’s practically limping. No, you don’t have to tell me about it. But I’m not blind. For your information. Anyway, he’s in Washington now, right?”