Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Wun abandoned his meal and began clambering out of his chair. I told him I’d see him later.

  The suit turned to me. “You too,” he said. “They’re asking for both of you.”

  Security hustled us to a boardroom adjoining Jason’s office, where Jase and a handful of Perihelion division heads were facing a delegation that included E. D. Lawton and the likely next president, Preston Lomax. No one looked happy.

  I faced E. D. Lawton, whom I hadn’t seen since my mother’s funeral. His gauntness had begun to look almost pathological, as if something vital had leaked out of him. Starched white cuffs, bony brown wrists. His hair was sparse, limp, and randomly combed. But his eyes were still quick. E.D.’s eyes were always lively when he was angry.

  Preston Lomax, on the other hand, just looked impatient. Lomax had come to Perihelion to be photographed with Wun (photos for release after the official White House announcement) and to confer about the replicator strategy, which he was planning to endorse. E.D. was here on the weight of his reputation. He had talked himself into the vice president’s pre-election tour and apparently hadn’t stopped talking since.

  During the hour-long Perihelion tour E.D. had questioned, doubted, derided, or viewed with alarm virtually every statement Jason’s division heads made, especially when the junket wound past the new incubator labs. But (according to Jenna Wylie, the cryonics team leader, who explained this to me later) Jason had answered each of his father’s outbursts with a patient and probably well-rehearsed rebuttal of his own. Which had driven E.D. to fresh heights of indignation, which in turn made him sound, according to Jenna, “like some crazed Lear raving about perfidious Martians.”

  The battle was still under way when Wun and I entered. E.D. leaned into the conference table, saying, “Bottom line, it’s unprecedented, it’s untested, and it embraces a technology we don’t understand or control.”

  And Jason smiled in the manner of a man far too polite to embarrass a respected but cranky elder. “Obviously, nothing we do is risk-free. But—”

  But here we were. A few of those present hadn’t seen Wun before, and they self-identified, staring like startled sheep when they noticed him. Lomax cleared his throat. “Excuse me, but what I need right now is a word with Jason and our new arrivals—privately, if possible? Just a moment or two.”

  So the crowd dutifully filed out, including E.D., who looked, however, not dismissed but triumphant.

  Doors closed. The upholstered silence of the boardroom settled around us like fresh snow. Lomax, who still hadn’t acknowledged us, addressed Jason. “I know you told me we’d take some flak. Still—”

  “It’s a lot to deal with. I understand.”

  “I don’t like having E.D. outside the tent pissing in. It’s unseemly. But he can’t do us any real harm, assuming…”

  “Assuming there’s no substance to what he says. I assure you, there’s not.”

  “You think he’s senile.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. Do I think his judgment has become questionable? Yes, I do.”

  “You know those accusations are flying both ways.”

  This was as close as I had been or would ever be to a sitting president. Lomax hadn’t been elected yet, but only the formalities stood between him and the office. As V.P. Lomax had always seemed a little dour, a little brooding, rocky Maine to Garland’s ebullient Texas, the ideal presence at a state funeral. During the campaign he had learned to smile more often but the effort was never quite convincing; political cartoonists inevitably accentuated the frown, the lower lip tucked in as if he were biting back a malediction, eyes as chilly as a Cape Cod winter.

  “Both ways. You’re talking about E.D.’s insinuations about my health.”

  Lomax sighed. “Frankly, your father’s opinion on the practicality of the replicator project doesn’t carry much weight. It’s a minority point of view and likely to remain that way. But yes, I have to admit, the charges he made today are a little troubling.” He turned to face me. “That’s why you’re here, Dr. Dupree.”

  Now Jason aimed his attention at me, and his voice was cautious, carefully neutral. “It seems E.D.’s been making some fairly wild claims. He says I’m suffering from, what was it, an aggressive brain disease—?”

  “An untreatable neurological deterioration,” Lomax said, “which is interfering with Jason’s ability to oversee operations here at Perihelion. What do you say to that, Dr. Dupree?”

  “I guess I would say Jason can speak for himself.”

  “I already have,” Jase said. “I told Vice President Lomax all about my MS.”

  From which he did not actually suffer. It was a cue. I cleared my throat. “Multiple sclerosis isn’t entirely curable, but it’s more than just controllable. An MS patient today can expect a life span as long and productive as anyone else’s. Maybe Jase has been reluctant to talk about it, and that’s his privilege, but MS is nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  Jase gave me a hard look I couldn’t interpret. Lomax said, “Thank you,” a little dryly. “I appreciate the information. By the way, do you happen to know a Dr. Malmstein? David Malmstein?”

  Followed by a silence that gaped like the jaws of a steel trap.

  “Yes,” I said, maybe a tick too late.

  “This Dr. Malmstein is a neurologist, is he not?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Have you consulted him in the past?”

  “I consult with lots of specialists. It’s part of what I do as a physician.”

  “Because, according to E.D., you called in this Malmstein regarding Jason’s, uh, grave neurological disorder.”

  Which explained the frigid look Jase was shooting me. Someone had talked to E.D. about this. Someone close. But it hadn’t been me.

  I tried not to think about who it might have been. “I’d do the same for any patient with a possible MS diagnosis. I run a good clinic here at Perihelion, but we don’t have the kind of diagnostic equipment Malmstein can access at a working hospital.”

  Lomax, I think, recognized this as a nonanswer, but he tossed the ball back to Jase: “Is Dr. Dupree telling the truth?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “You trust him?”

  “He’s my personal physician. Of course I trust him.”

  “Because, no offense, I wish you well but I don’t really give a shit about your medical problems. What concerns me is whether you can give us the support we need and see this project through to the end. Can you do that?”

  “As long as we’re funded, yes sir, I’ll be here.”

  “And how about you, Ambassador Wen? Does this raise any alarms with you? Any concerns or questions about the future of Perihelion?”

  Wun pursed his lips, three quarters of a Martian smile. “No concerns whatsoever. I trust Jason Lawton implicitly. I also trust Dr. Dupree. He’s my personal physician as well.”

  Which caused both Jason and me to stifle our astonishment, but it closed the deal with Lomax. He shrugged. “All right. I apologize for bringing it up. Jason, I hope your health remains good and I hope you weren’t offended by the tone of the questions, but given E.D.’s status I felt I had to ask.”

  “I understand,” Jase said. “As for E.D.—”

  “Don’t worry about your father.”

  “I’d hate to see him humiliated.”

  “He’ll be quietly sidelined. I think that’s a given. If he insists on going public—” Lomax shrugged. “In that case I’m afraid it’s his own mental capacity people will challenge.”

  “Of course,” Jason said, “we all hope that’s not necessary.”

  I spent the next hour in the clinic. Molly hadn’t shown up this morning and Lucinda had been doing all the bookings. I thanked her and told her to take the rest of the day off. I thought about making a couple of phone calls, but I didn’t want them routed through the Perihelion system.

  I waited until I had seen Lomax’s helicopter lift off and his imperial cavalcade depart by the front gat
es; then I cleared my desk and tried to think about what I wanted to do. I found my hands were a little shaky. Not MS. Anger, maybe. Outrage. Pain. I wanted to diagnose it, not experience it. I wanted to banish it to the index pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.

  I was on my way past reception when Jason came through the door.

  He said, “I want to thank you for backing me up. I assume that means you aren’t the one who told E.D. about Malmstein.”

  “I wouldn’t do that, Jase.”

  “I accept that. But someone did. And that presents a problem. Because how many people are aware I’ve been seeing a neurologist?”

  “You, me, Malmstein, whoever works in Malmstein’s office—”

  “Malmstein didn’t know E.D. was looking for dirt and neither did his staff. E.D. must have found out about Malmstein from a closer source. If not you or me—”

  Molly. He didn’t have to say it.

  “We can’t blame her without any kind of evidence.”

  “Speak for yourself. You’re the one who’s sleeping with her. Did you keep records on my meetings with Malmstein?”

  “Not here in the office.”

  “At home?”

  “Yes.”

  “You showed these to her?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But she might have gained access to them when you weren’t aware of it.”

  “I suppose so.” Yes.

  “And she’s not here to answer questions. Did she call in sick?”

  I shrugged. “She didn’t call in at all. Lucinda tried to get hold of her, but her phone isn’t answering.”

  He sighed. “I don’t exactly blame you for this. But you have to admit, Tyler, you’ve made a lot of questionable choices here.”

  “I’ll deal with it,” I said.

  “I know you’re angry. Hurt and angry. I don’t want you to walk out of here and do something that will make things worse. But I do want you to consider where you stand on this project. Where your loyalties lie.”

  “I know where they lie,” I said.

  I tried to reach Molly from my car but she still wasn’t answering. I drove to her apartment. It was a warm day. The low-rise stucco complex where she lived was enshrouded in lawn-sprinkler haze. The fungal smell of wet garden soil infiltrated the car.

  I was circling toward visitor parking when I caught sight of Moll stacking boxes in the back of a battered white U-Haul trailer hitched to the rear bumper of her three-year-old Ford. I pulled over in front of her. She spotted me and said something I couldn’t hear but which looked a lot like “Oh, shit!” But she stood her ground when I got out of my car.

  “You can’t park there,” she said. “You’re blocking the exit.”

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  Molly placed a cardboard box labeled DISHES on the corrugated floor of the U-Haul. “What does it look like?”

  She was wearing tan slacks, a denim shirt, and a handkerchief tied over her hair. I came closer and she took an equivalent three steps back, clearly frightened.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said.

  “So what do you want?”

  “I want to know who hired you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Did you deal with E.D. himself or did he use an intermediary?”

  “Shit,” she said, gauging the distance between herself and the car door. “Just let me go, Tyler. What do you want from me? What’s the point of this?”

  “Did you go to him and make an offer or did he call you first? And when did all this start, Moll? Did you fuck me for information or did you sell me out at some point after the first date?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “How much were you paid? I’d like to know how much I’m worth.”

  “Go to hell. What does it matter, anyway? It’s not—”

  “Don’t tell me it’s not about money. I mean, is some principle involved here?”

  “Money is the principle.” She dusted her hands on her slacks, a little less frightened now, a little more defiant.

  “What is it you want to buy, Moll?”

  “What do I want to buy? The only important thing anybody can buy. A better death. A cleaner, better death. One of these mornings the sun’s going to come up and it won’t stop coming up until the whole fucking sky is on fire. And I’m sorry, but I want to live somewhere nice until that happens. Somewhere by myself. Some place as comfortable as I can make it. And when that last morning arrives I want some expensive pharmaceuticals to take me over the line. I want to go to sleep before the screaming starts. Really, Tyler. That’s all I want, that’s the only thing in this world I really really want, and thank you, thank you for making it possible.” She was frowning angrily, but a tear dislodged and slid down her cheek. “Please move your car.”

  I said, “A nice house and a bottle of pills? That’s your price?”

  “There’s no one looking out for me but me.”

  “This sounds pathetic, but I thought we could look out for each other.”

  “That would mean trusting you. And no offense, but—look at you. Skating through life like you’re waiting for an answer or waiting for a savior or just permanently on hold.”

  “I’m trying to be reasonable here, Moll.”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it. If reasonability was a knife I’d be losing blood. Poor reasonable Tyler. But I figured that out, too. It’s revenge, isn’t it? All that sweet saintliness you wear like your own suit of clothes. It’s your revenge on the world for disappointing you. The world didn’t give you what you want, and you’re not giving anything back but sympathy and aspirin.”

  “Molly—”

  “And don’t you dare say you love me, because I know that’s not true. You don’t know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you’re in love. It’s nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another.”

  I turned and walked back to my own car, a little unsteadily, shocked less by the betrayal than by the finality of it, intimacies wiped out like penny stocks in a market crash. Then I turned back. “How about you, Moll? I know you were paid for information, but is that why you fucked me in the first place?”

  “I fucked you,” she said, “because I was lonely.”

  “Are you lonely now?”

  “I never stopped,” she said.

  I drove away.

  The Ticking of Expensive Clocks

  The federal election was coming up fast. Jason intended to use it for cover.

  “Fix me,” he had said. And, he insisted, there was a way to do that. It was unorthodox. It wasn’t FDA-approved. But it was a therapy with a long and well-documented history. And he made it clear he meant to take advantage of it, whether I cooperated in the effort or not.

  And because Molly had almost stripped him of everything that was important to him—and left me among the wreckage—I agreed to help. (Thinking, ironically, of what E.D. had said to me years ago: I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Was that what I was doing?)

  In the days before the November election Wun Ngo Wen briefed us on the procedure and its attendant risks.

  Conferring with Wun wasn’t easy. The problem wasn’t so much the web of security surrounding him, though that was difficult enough to negotiate, but the crowd of analysts and specialists who had been feeding at his archives like hummingbirds at nectar. These were reputable scholars, vetted by the FBI and Homeland Security, sworn to secrecy at least pro tem, mesmerized by the vast data banks of Martian wisdom Wun had carried with him to Earth. The digital data amounted to more than five hundred volumes of astronomy, biology, math, physics, medicine, history, and technology at a thousand pages per volume, much of it considerably in advance of terrestrial knowledge. Had the entire contents of the Library of Alexandria been recovered by time machine it could hardly have produced a greater scholarly feedin
g frenzy.

  These people were under pressure to complete their work before the official announcement of Wun’s presence. The federal government wanted at least a rough index to the archives (much of which was in approximate English but some of which was written in Martian scientific script) before foreign governments began to demand equal access to it. The State Department planned to produce and distribute sanitized copies from which certain potentially valuable or dangerous technologies had been excised or “presented in summary form,” the originals to remain highly classified.

  Thus whole tribes of scholars battled for and jealously guarded their access to Wun, who could interpret or explain lacunae in the Martian text. On several occasions I was chased out of Wun’s quarters by frantically polite men and women from “the high-energy physics group” or “the molecular biology group” demanding their negotiated quarter hour. Wun occasionally introduced me to these people but none of them was ever happy to see me, and the medical sciences team leader was alarmed almost to the point of tachycardia when Wun announced he’d chosen me as his personal physician.

  Jase reassured the scholars by hinting that I was part of the “socialization process” by which Wun was polishing his terrestrial manners outside the context of politics or science, and I promised the med team leader I wouldn’t provide medical treatment to Wun without her direct involvement. A rumor spread among the research people that I was a civilian opportunist who had charmed his way into Wun’s inner circle and that my payoff would be a fat book contract after Wun went public. The rumor arose spontaneously but we did nothing to discourage it; it served our purposes.

  Access to pharmaceuticals was easier than I’d expected. Wun had arrived on Earth with an entire pharmacopoeia of Martian drugs, none of which had terrestrial counterparts and any of which, he claimed, he might one day need in order to treat himself. The medical supplies had been confiscated from his landing craft but had been returned once his ambassadorial status was established. (Samples having no doubt been collected by the government; but Wun doubted that crude analysis would reveal the purpose of any of these highly engineered materials.) Wun simply supplied a few vials of raw drug to Jason, who carried them out of Perihelion in an obscuring cloud of executive privilege.