Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  More often than he was in Florida. “Lot of talking going on. People are positioning themselves for the post-election.”

  “So something’s in the works.”

  “Something’s always in the works.”

  “I mean about Perihelion. The support staff gets clues. For instance, you want to know what’s weird? We just acquired another hundred acres of property west of the fence. I heard this from Tim Chesley, the transcriptionist in human resources. Supposedly, we’ve got surveyors coming in next week.”

  “For what?”

  “Nobody knows. Maybe we’re expanding. Or maybe they’re turning us into a mall.”

  It was the first I’d heard of it.

  “You’re out of the loop,” Molly said, smiling. “You need contacts. Like me.”

  After dinner we adjourned to Molly’s apartment, where I spent the night.

  I won’t describe here the gestures, looks, and touches by which we negotiated our intimacy. Not because I’m prudish but because I seem to have lost the memory. Lost it to time, lost it to the reconstruction. And yes, I register the irony in that. I can quote the magazine article we discussed and I can tell you what she had for dinner at Champs…but all that’s left of our lovemaking is a faded mental snapshot: a dimly lit room, a damp breeze turning spindles of cloth in an open window, her green eyes close to mine.

  Within a month Jase was back at Perihelion, stalking the hallways as if he had been infused with some strange new energy.

  He brought with him an army of security personnel, black-clad and of uncertain origin but believed to represent the Department of the Treasury. These were followed in turn by small battalions of contractors and surveyors who cluttered the hallways and refused to speak to resident staff. Molly kept me posted on rumors: the compound was going to be leveled; the compound was going to be expanded; we would all be fired; we would all get raises. In short, something was afoot.

  For most of a week I heard nothing from Jason himself. Then, a slow Thursday afternoon, he paged me in my office and asked me to come up to the second floor: “There’s someone I want you to meet.”

  Before I reached the now heavily guarded stairwell I had picked up an escort of armed guards with all-pass badges who conducted me to an upstairs conference room. Not just a casual hello, obviously. This was deep Perihelion business, to which I should not have been privy. Once again, apparently, Jason had decided to share secrets. Never an unmixed blessing. I took a deep breath and pushed through the door.

  The room contained a mahogany table, a half dozen plush chairs, and two men in addition to myself.

  One of the men was Jason.

  The second man could have been mistaken for a child. A horribly burned child in desperate need of a skin graft: that was my first impression. This individual, roughly five feet tall, stood in a corner of the room. He wore blue jeans and a plain white cotton T-shirt. His shoulders were broad, his eyes were wide and bloodshot, and his arms seemed a trifle too long for his abbreviated torso.

  But what was most striking about him was his skin. His skin was glossless, ash black, and completely hairless. It wasn’t wrinkled in the conventional sense—it wasn’t loose, like a bloodhound’s skin—but it was deeply textured, furrowed, like the rind of a cantaloupe.

  The small man walked toward me and put out his hand. A small wrinkled hand at the end of a long wrinkled arm. I took it, hesitantly. Mummy fingers, I thought. But fleshy, plump, like the leaves of a desert plant, like grabbing a handful of aloe vera and feeling it grab back. The creature grinned.

  “This is Wun,” Jason said.

  “One what?”

  Wun laughed. His teeth were large, blunt, and immaculate. “I never tire of that splendid joke!”

  His full name was Wun Ngo Wen, and he was from Mars.

  The man from Mars.

  It was a misleading description. Martians have a long literary history, from Wells to Heinlein. But in reality, of course, Mars was a dead planet. Until we fixed it. Until we birthed our own Martians.

  And here, apparently, was a living specimen, 99.9 percent human if slightly oddly designed. A Martian person, descended through millennia of Spin-hinged time from the colonists we had dispatched only two years ago. He spoke punctilious English. His accent sounded half Oxford, half New Delhi. He paced the room. He took a bottle of spring water from the table, unscrewed the cap, and drank deeply. He wiped his mouth with his forearm. Small droplets beaded on his corrugated flesh.

  I sat down and tried not to stare while Jase explained.

  Here’s what he said, a little simplified and fleshed out with details I learned later.

  The Martian had left his planet shortly before the Spin membrane was imposed upon it.

  Wun Ngo Wen was a historian and a linguist, relatively young by Martian standards—fifty-five terrestrial years—and physically fit. He was a scholar by trade, currently between assignments, donating labor to agricultural cooperatives, and he had just spent a Sparkmonth on the delta of the Kirioloj River, in what we called the Argyre Basin and Martians called the Baryal Plain (Epu Baryal) when his summons to duty came.

  Like thousands of other men and women of his age and class, Wun had submitted his credentials to the committees who were designing and coordinating a proposed journey to Earth, without any real expectation that he would be selected. He was, in fact, relatively timid by nature and had never ventured far beyond his own prefecture, except for scholarly journeys and family reunions. He was deeply dismayed when his name was called, and if he had not recently entered his Fourth Age he might have refused the request. Surely someone else would be better suited to the task? But no, apparently not; his talents and life history were uniquely suited to the work, the authorities insisted; so he settled his affairs (such as they were) and boarded a train to the launch complex at Basalt Dry (on our maps, Tharsis), where he was trained to represent the Five Republics on a diplomatic mission to Earth.

  Martian technology had only recently embraced the notion of manned space travel. In the past it had seemed to the governing councils a profoundly unwise adventure, liable to attract the attention of the Hypotheticals, wasteful of resources, requiring acts of large-scale manufacturing that would dump unbudgeted volatiles into a meticulously managed and highly vulnerable biosphere. The Martians were conservators by nature, hoarders by instinct. Their small-scale and biological technologies were ancient and sophisticated, but their industrial base was shallow and had already been strained by the unmanned exploration of the planet’s tiny, useless moons.

  But they had watched and speculated about the Spin-enshrouded Earth for centuries. They knew the dark planet was mankind’s cradle, and they had learned from telescopic observation and data retained from a late-arriving NEP ark that the membrane surrounding it was penetrable. They understood the temporal nature of the Spin, though not the mechanisms that produced it. A journey from Mars to Earth, they reasoned, while physically possible, would be difficult and impractical. The Earth, after all, was effectively static; an explorer dropped into the terrestrial darkness would remain entrapped there for millennia, even if, by his own reckoning, he left for home the next day.

  But vigilant astronomers had lately detected boxlike structures quietly constructing themselves hundreds of miles above the Martian poles—Hypothetical artifacts, nearly identical to the ones associated with the Earth. After a hundred thousand years of undisturbed solitude, Mars had finally come to the attention of the faceless and omnipotent creatures with whom it shared the solar system. The conclusion—that Mars would soon be placed under a Spin membrane of its own—was inescapable. Powerful factions argued for a consultation with the shrouded Earth. Scarce resources were mustered. A spacecraft was designed and assembled. And Wun Ngo Wen, a linguist and scholar deeply familiar with the extant fragments of terrestrial history and language, was conscripted to make the journey—much to his own dismay.

  Wun Ngo Wen made peace with the likelihood of his own death even as he prepared his
body for the confinement and debilitation of a long space voyage and the rigors of a high-gravity terrestrial environment. Wun had lost most of his immediate family in the Kirioloj flood of three summers ago—one reason he had volunteered for the flight, and one reason he had been accepted. For Wun, the risk of death was a lighter burden than it would have been for most of his peers. Still, it was not something he looked forward to; he hoped to avoid it altogether. He trained vigorously. He taught himself the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of his vehicle. And if the Hypotheticals did embrace Mars—not that he was hoping for such a thing—it would mean he might have a chance of returning, not to a planet rendered strange by millions of passing years but to his own familiar home, preserved with all its memories and losses against the erosion of time.

  Although, of course, no return voyage was anticipated: Wun’s vessel was a one-way device. If he ever did come back to Mars it would be at the pleasure of the terrestrials, who would have to be very generous indeed, Wun thought, to provide him with a ticket home.

  And so Wun Ngo Wen had savored what would likely be his final look at Mars—the wind-gullied flatlands of Basalt Dry, Odos on Epu-Epia—before he was locked into the flight chamber of the crude iron-and-ceramic multistage rocket that carried him into space.

  He spent much of the subsequent journey in a state of drug-induced metabolic lethargy, but it was still a bitter and debilitating test of endurance. The Martian Spin membrane was emplaced while he was in transit, and for the remainder of the flight Wun was isolated, cut off by temporal discontinuity from both human worlds: the one ahead and the one behind. Dreadful as death might be, he thought, could it be much different from this sedated silence, his brooding custodianship of a tiny machine falling endlessly through an inhuman vacuum?

  His hours of true consciousness ebbed. He took refuge in reverie and forced sleep.

  His vessel, primitive in many ways but equipped with subtle and semi-intelligent guidance and navigation devices, spent most of its fuel reserves braking into a high orbit around the Earth. The planet beneath him was a black nothingness, its moon a huge gyrating disk. Microscopic probes from Wun’s vessel sampled the outer reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere, generating increasingly red-shifted telemetry before they vanished into the Spin, just enough data to calculate an angle of entry. His spacecraft was equipped with an array of flight surfaces, aerodynamic brakes, and deployable parachutes, and with luck it would carry him through the dense and turbulent air to the surface of the enormous planet without baking or crushing him. But much still depended on luck. Far too much, in Wun’s opinion. He immersed himself in a vat of protective gel and initiated the final descent, fully prepared to die.

  He woke to find his only slightly charred vessel at rest in a canola field in southern Manitoba, surrounded by curiously pale and smooth-skinned men, some of them wearing what he recognized as biological isolation gear. Wun Ngo Wen emerged from his spacecraft, heart pounding, muscles leaden and aching in the terrible gravity, lungs insulted by the thick and insulating air, and was quickly taken into custody.

  He spent the next month in a plastic bubble in a room at the Department of Agriculture’s Animal Disease Center on Plum Island, off the coast of New York’s Long Island. During that time he learned to speak a language he had known only from ancient written records, teaching his lips and tongue to accommodate the rich modalities of its vowels, refining his vocabulary as he struggled to explain himself to grim or intimidated strangers. This was a difficult time. Earthlings were pallid, lanky creatures, not at all what he had imagined when he deciphered the ancient documents. Many were pale as ghosts, reminding him of Embermonth stories that had terrified him as a child: he half expected one of them to rise up at his bedside like Huld of Phraya, demanding an arm or a leg for tribute. His dreams were restless and unpleasant.

  He was, fortunately, still in possession of his skills as a linguist, and before long he was introduced to men and women of status and power who proved far more hospitable than his initial captors. Wun Ngo Wen cultivated these useful friendships, struggling to master the social protocols of an ancient and confusing culture and waiting patiently for the correct moment to convey the proposal he had carried at such personal and public expense between the two human worlds.

  “Jason,” I said when he had reached approximately this point in the narrative. “Stop. Please.”

  He paused. “You have a question, Tyler?”

  “No question. It’s just that it’s…a lot to absorb.”

  “But you’re okay with this? You follow me? Because I’m going to be telling this story more than once. I want it to flow. Does it flow?”

  “Flows fine. Telling it to who?”

  “Everybody. The media. We’re going public.”

  “I don’t want to be a secret anymore,” Wun Ngo Wen said. “I didn’t come here to hide. I have things to say.” He uncapped his bottle of spring water. “Would you like some of this, Tyler Dupree? You look like you could use a drink.”

  I took the bottle from his plump, wrinkled fingers and drank deeply from it.

  “So,” I said, “does this make us water-brothers?”

  Wun Ngo Wen looked puzzled. Jason laughed out loud.

  Four Photographs of the Kirioloj Delta

  It’s hard to capture the brute craziness of the times.

  Some days it seemed almost liberating. Beyond our picayune illusion of the sky the sun went on expanding, stars burned out or were born, a dead planet had been infused with life and had evolved a civilization that rivaled or surpassed our own. Closer to home, governments were toppled and replaced and their replacements were overthrown; religions, philosophies, and ideologies morphed and merged and begat mutant offspring. The old, ordered world was crumbling. New things grew in the ruins. We picked love green and savored it for its tartness: Molly Seagram loved me, I assumed, mainly because I was available. And why not? The summer was waning and the harvest was uncertain.

  The long-defunct New Kingdom movement had begun to seem both prescient and grossly old-fashioned, its timid rebellion against the old ecclesiastical consensus a shadow of newer, edgier devotions. Dionysian cults sprang up everywhere in the western world, stripped of the piety and hypocrisy of the old NK—fuck clubs with flags or sacred symbols. They did not disdain human jealousy but embraced or even reveled in it: scorned lovers favored .45 pistols at close range, a red rose on a victim’s body. It was the Tribulation reconfigured as Elizabethan drama.

  Simon Townsend, had he been born a decade later, might have stumbled into one of these brands of Quentin Tarantino spirituality. But the failure of NK had left him disillusioned and yearning for something simpler. Diane still called me from time to time—once a month or so, when the auspices were right and Simon was out of the house—to update me on her situation or simply to reminisce, stoking memories like embers and warming herself at the heat. Not much heat at home, apparently, though her financial situation had improved a little. Simon was doing full-time maintenance for Jordan Tabernacle, their little independent church; Diane was doing clerical temp jobs, off-and-on work that often left her fidgeting around the apartment or sneaking off to the local library to read books of which Simon disapproved: contemporary novels, current events. Jordan Tabernacle, she said, was a “disengagement” church; parishioners were encouraged to turn off the TV and avoid books, newspapers, and other cultural ephemera. Or risk meeting the Rapture in an impure condition.

  Diane never advocated these ideas—she never preached to me—but she deferred to them, left them carefully unquestioned. Sometimes I got a little impatient with that. “Diane,” I said one night, “do you really believe this stuff?”

  “What ‘stuff,’ Tyler?”

  “Take your pick. Not keeping books in the house. The Hypotheticals as agents of the Parousia. All that shit.” (I’d had maybe a beer too many.)

  “Simon believes in it.”

  “I didn’t ask you about Simon.”

  “Simon’s more devout
than I am. I envy him that. I know how it must sound. Put those books in the trash, like he’s being monstrous, arrogant. But he isn’t. It’s an act of humility, really—an act of submission. Simon can give himself to God in a way I can’t.”

  “Lucky Simon.”

  “He is lucky. You can’t see it, but he’s very peaceful. He’s found a kind of equanimity at Jordan. He can look the Spin in the face and smile at it, because he knows he’s saved.”

  “What about you? Aren’t you saved?”

  She let a long silence ride down the phone line between us. “I wish that was a simple question. I really do. I keep thinking, maybe it isn’t about my faith. Maybe Simon’s faith is enough for both of us. Powerful enough that I can ride it a little way. He’s been very patient with me, actually. The only thing we argue about is having kids. Simon would like to have children. The church encourages it. And I understand that, but with the money so tight, and—you know—the world being what it is—”

  “It’s not a decision you ought to be pressured into.”

  “I don’t mean to imply he’s pressuring me. ‘Put it in God’s hands,’ he says. Put it in God’s hands and it’ll work out right.”

  “But you’re too smart to believe that.”

  “Am I? Oh, Tyler, I hope not. I hope that isn’t true.”

  Molly, on the other hand, had no use for what she called “all this God crap.” Every woman for herself, that was Moll’s philosophy. Especially, she said, if the world was coming unglued and none of us was going to live past fifty. “I don’t intend to spend that time kneeling.”

  She was tough by nature. Molly’s folks were dairy farmers. They had spent ten years in legal arguments over a tar-sands oil-extraction project that bordered their property and was slowly poisoning it. In the end they traded their ranch for an out-of-court settlement large enough to buy a comfortable retirement for themselves and a decent education for their daughter. But it was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass.