Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The “chapel” was a nondenominational funeral home on a suburban main street, busy now that the travel restrictions had been lifted. Jase had always had a rationalist’s disdain for elaborate funerals, but Carol’s sense of dignity demanded a ceremony even if it was feeble and pro forma. She had managed to round up a small crowd, mostly longtime neighbors who remembered Jason as a child and who had glimpsed his career in TV sound bites and sidebars in the daily paper. It was his fading celebrity status that filled the pews.

  I delivered a brief eulogy. (Diane would have done it better, but Diane was too ill to attend.) Jase, I said, had dedicated his life to the pursuit of knowledge, not arrogantly but humbly: he understood that knowledge wasn’t created but discovered; it couldn’t be owned, only shared, hand to hand, generation to generation. Jason had made himself a part of that sharing and was part of it still. He had woven himself into the network of knowing.

  E.D. entered the chapel while I was still at the pulpit.

  He was halfway down the aisle when he recognized me. He stared at me a long minute before he settled into the nearest empty pew.

  He was more gaunt than I remembered him, and he had shaved the last of his white hair into invisible stubble. But he still carried himself like a powerful man. He wore a suit that had been tailored to razor-tight tolerances. He folded his arms and inspected the room imperially, marking who was present. His gaze lingered on Carol.

  When the service ended Carol stood and gamely accepted the condolences of her neighbors as they filed out. She had wept copiously over the last few days but was resolutely dry-eyed now, almost clinically aloof. E.D. approached her after the last guest had left. She stiffened, like a cat sensing the presence of a larger predator.

  “Carol,” E.D. said. “Tyler.” He gave me a sour stare.

  “Our son is dead,” Carol said. “Jason’s gone.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I hope you’re here to mourn—”

  “Of course I am.”

  “—and not for some other reason. Because he came to the house to get away from you. I assume you know that.”

  “I know more about it than you can imagine. Jason was confused—”

  “He was many things, E.D., but he was not confused. I was with him when he died.”

  “Were you? That’s interesting. Because, unlike you, I was with him when he was alive.”

  Carol drew a sharp breath and turned her head as if she’d been slapped.

  E.D. said, “Come on, Carol. I was the one who raised Jason and you know it. You may not like the kind of life I gave him, but that’s what I did—I gave him a life and a means of living it.”

  “I gave birth to him.”

  “That’s a physiological function, not a moral act. Everything Jason ever owned he got from me. Everything he learned, I taught him.”

  “For better or worse…”

  “And now you want to condemn me just because I have some practical concerns—”

  “What practical concerns?”

  “Obviously, I’m talking about the autopsy.”

  “Yes. You mentioned that on the telephone. But it’s undignified and it’s frankly impossible.”

  “I was hoping you’d take my concerns seriously. Clearly you haven’t. But I don’t need your permission. There are men outside this building waiting to claim the body, and they can produce writs under the Emergency Measures Act.”

  She took a step back from him. “You have that much power?”

  “Neither you nor I have any choice in the matter. This is going to happen whether we like it or not. And it’s really only a formality. No harm will be done. So for god’s sake let’s preserve some dignity and mutual respect. Let me have the body of my son.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Carol—”

  “I can’t give you his body.”

  “You’re not listening to me. You don’t have a choice.”

  “No, I’m sorry, you’re not listening to me. Listen, E.D. I can’t give you his body.”

  He opened his mouth and then closed it. His eyes widened.

  “Carol,” he said. “What have you done?”

  “There is no body. Not anymore.” Her lips curled into a sly, bitter smile. “But I suppose you can take his ashes. If you insist.”

  I drove Carol back to the Big House, where her neighbor Emil Hardy—who had given up his short-lived local news sheet when the power was restored—had been sitting with Diane.

  “We talked about old times on the block,” Hardy said as he was leaving “I used to watch the kids ride their bikes. That was a long time ago. This skin condition she’s got—”

  “It’s not contagious,” Carol said. “Don’t worry.”

  “Unusual, though.”

  “Yes. Unusual it is. Thank you, Emil.”

  “Ashley and I would love to have you over for dinner sometime.”

  “That sounds lovely. Please thank Ashley for me.” She closed the door and turned to me. “I need a drink. But first things first. E.D. knows you’re here. So you have to leave, and you have to take Diane with you. Can you do that? Take her somewhere safe? Somewhere E.D. won’t find her?”

  “Of course I can. But what about you?”

  “I’m not in danger. E.D. might send people around to look for whatever treasure he imagines Jason stole from him. But he won’t find anything—as long as you’re thorough, Tyler—and he can’t take the house away from me. E.D. and I signed our armistice a long time ago. Our skirmishes are trivial. But he can hurt you, and he can hurt Diane even if he doesn’t mean to.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “Then get your things together. You may not have much time.”

  The day before Capetown Maru was due to cross the Archway I went up on deck to watch the sun rise. The Arch was mostly invisible, its descending pillars hidden by horizons east and west, but in the half hour before dawn its apex was a line in the sky almost directly overhead, razor sharp and gently glowing.

  It had faded behind a haze of high cirrus cloud by midmorning, but we all knew it was there.

  The prospect of the transit was making everyone nervous—not just passengers but the seasoned crew, too. They went about their customary business, tending to the needs of the ship, mending machinery, chipping and repainting the superstructure, but there was a briskness in the rhythm of their work that hadn’t been there yesterday. Jala came on deck lugging a plastic chair and joined me where I sat, protected from the wind by the forty-foot containers but facing a narrow view of the sea.

  “This is my last trip to the other side,” Jala said. He was dressed for the warmth of the day in a billowing yellow shirt and jeans. He had opened the shirt to expose his chest to the sunlight. He took a can of beer from the topside cooler and cracked it. All these actions announced him as a secularized man, a businessman, equally disdainful of Muslim sharia and Minang adat. “This time,” he said, “there’s no coming back.”

  He had burned his bridges behind him—literally, if he’d had anything to do with orchestrating the riot at Teluk Bayur. (The explosions had made a suspiciously convenient cover for our getaway, even if we had almost been caught in the conflagration.) For years Jala had been running an emigrant-smuggling brokerage trade far more lucrative than his legitimate import/export business. There was more money in people than in palm oil, he said. But the Indian and Vietnamese competition was stiff and the political climate had soured; better to retire to Port Magellan now than spend the rest of his life in a New Reformasi prison.

  “You’ve made the transit before?”

  “Twice.”

  “Was it difficult?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  By noon many of the passengers were up on deck. In addition to the Minangkabau villagers there were assorted Acehnese, Malay, and Thai emigrants aboard, perhaps a hundred of us in all—far too many for the available cabins, but three aluminum cargo containers in t
he hold had been rigged as sleeping quarters, carefully ventilated.

  This wasn’t the grim, often deadly, human-smuggling trade that used to carry refugees to Europe or North America. Most of the people who crossed the Arch every day were overflow from the feeble U.N.-sanctioned resettlement programs, often with money to spend. We were treated with respect by the crew, many of whom had spent months in Port Magellan and who understood its blandishments and pitfalls.

  One of the deck hands had set aside part of the main deck as a sort of soccer field, marked off with nets, where a group of children were playing. Every now and then the ball bounced past the nets, often into Jala’s lap, much to his chagrin. Jala was irritable today.

  I asked him when the ship would make the transit.

  “According to the captain, unless we change speed, twelve hours or so.”

  “Our last day on Earth,” I said.

  “Don’t joke.”

  “I meant it literally.”

  “And keep your voice down. Sailors are superstitious.”

  “What will you do in Port Magellan?”

  Jala raised his eyebrows. “What will I do? Fuck beautiful women. And quite possibly a few ugly ones. What else?”

  The soccer ball bounced past the net again. This time Jala scooped it up and held it against his belly. “Damn it, I warned you! This game is over!”

  A dozen children promptly pressed against the nets, shrieking protest, but it was En who summoned the courage to come around and confront Jala directly. En was sweating, his rib cage pumping like a bellows. His team had been five points ahead. “Give it back, please,” he said.

  “You want this back?” Jala stood up, still clutching the ball, imperious, mysteriously angry. “You want it? Go get it.” He kicked the ball in a long trajectory that took it past the deck rails and out into the blue-green immensity of the Indian Ocean.

  En looked astonished, then angry. He said something low and bitter in Minang.

  Jala reddened. Then he slapped the boy with his open hand, so hard that En’s heavy glasses went skittering across the deck.

  “Apologize,” Jala demanded.

  En dropped to one knee, eyes squeezed shut. He drew a few sobbing breaths. Eventually he stood up. He walked a few steps across the deck plates and collected his eyeglasses. He fumbled them into place and walked back with what I thought was an astonishing dignity. He stood directly in front of Jala.

  “No,” he said faintly. “You apologize.”

  Jala gasped and swore. En cringed. Jala raised his hand again.

  I caught his wrist in midswing.

  Jala looked at me, startled. “What is this! Let go.”

  He tried to pull his hand away. I wouldn’t let him. “Don’t hit him again,” I said.

  “I’ll do what I like!”

  “Fine,” I said. “But don’t hit him again.”

  “You—after what I’ve done for you—!”

  Then he gave me a second look.

  I don’t know what he saw in my face. I don’t know exactly what I was feeling at that moment. Whatever it was, it appeared to confuse him. His clenched fist went slack. He seemed to wilt.

  “Fucking crazy American,” he muttered. “I’m going to the canteen.” To the small crowd of children and deck hands that had gathered around us: “Where I can have peace and respect!” He stalked away.

  En was still staring at me, gap-jawed.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I can’t get your ball back,” I said.

  He touched his cheek where Jala had slapped him. “That’s okay,” he said faintly.

  Later—over dinner in the crew mess, hours away from the crossing—I told Diane about the incident. “I didn’t think about what I was doing. It just seemed…obvious. Almost reflexive. Is that a Fourth thing?”

  “It might be. The impulse to protect a victim, especially a child, and to do it instantly, without thinking. I’ve felt it myself. I suppose it’s something the Martians wrote into their neural rebuild…assuming they can really engineer feelings as subtle as that. I wish we had Wun Ngo Wen here to explain it. Or Jason, for that matter. Did it feel forced?”

  “No…”

  “Or wrong, inappropriate?”

  “No…I think it was exactly the right thing to do.”

  “But you wouldn’t have done it before you took the treatment?”

  “I might have. Or wanted to. But I probably would have second-guessed myself until it was too late.”

  “So you’re not unhappy about it.”

  No. Just surprised. This was as much me as it was Martian biotech, Diane was saying, and I supposed that was true…but it would take some getting used to. Like every other transition (childhood to adolescence, adolescence to adulthood) there were new imperatives to deal with, new opportunities and pitfalls, new doubts.

  For the first time in many years I was a stranger to myself again.

  I had almost finished packing when Carol came downstairs, a little drunk, loose-limbed, carrying a shoebox in her arms. The box was labeled MEMENTOS (SCHOOL).

  “You should take this,” she said. “It was your mother’s.”

  “If it means something to you, Carol, keep it.”

  “Thank you, but I already took what I wanted from it.”

  I opened the lid and glanced at the contents. “The letters.” The anonymous letters addressed to Belinda Sutton, my mother’s maiden name.

  “Yes. So you’ve seen them. Did you ever read them?”

  “No, not really. Just enough to know they were love letters.”

  “Oh, God. That sounds so saccharine. I prefer to think of them as tributes. They’re quite chaste, really, if you read them closely. Unsigned. Your mother received them when we were both at university. She was dating your father then, and she could hardly show them to him—he was writing her letters of his own. So she shared them with me.”

  “She never found out who wrote them?”

  “No. Never.”

  “She must have been curious.”

  “Of course. But she was already engaged to Marcus by that time. She started dating Marcus Dupree when Marcus and E.D. were setting up their first business, designing and manufacturing high altitude balloons back when aerostats were what Marcus called ‘blue sky’ technology: a little crazy, a little idealistic. Belinda called Marcus and E.D. ‘the Zeppelin brothers.’ So I guess we were the Zeppelin sisters, Belinda and I. Because that’s when I started flirting with E.D. In a way, Tyler, my entire marriage was nothing more than an attempt to keep your mother as a friend.”

  “The letters—”

  “Interesting, isn’t it, that she kept them all these years? Eventually I asked her why. Why not just throw them away? She said, ‘Because they’re sincere.’ It was her way of honoring whoever had written them. The last one arrived a week before her wedding. None after that. And a year later I married E.D. Even as couples we were inseparable, did she ever tell you that? We vacationed together, we went to movies together. Belinda came to the hospital when the twins were born and I was waiting at the door when she brought you home for the first time. But all that ended when Marcus had his accident. Your father was a wonderful man, Tyler, very earthy, very funny—the only person who could make E.D. laugh. Reckless to a fault, though. Belinda was absolutely devastated when he died. And not just emotionally. Marcus had burned through most of their savings and Belinda spent what was left servicing the mortgage on their house in Pasadena. So when E.D. moved east and we made an offer on this place it seemed perfectly natural to invite her to use the guest house.”

  “In exchange for housekeeping,” I said.

  “That was E.D.’s idea. I just wanted Belinda close by. My marriage wasn’t as successful as hers had been. Quite the opposite. By that time Belinda was more or less the only friend I had. Almost a confidante.” Carol smiled. “Almost.”

  “That’s why you want to keep the letters? Because they’re part of your
history with her?”

  She smiled as if at a slow-witted child. “No, Tyler. I told you. They’re mine.” Her smile thinned. “Don’t look so dumbfounded. Your mother was as uncomplicatedly heterosexual as any woman I have ever met. I simply had the misfortune to fall in love with her. To fall in love with her so abjectly that I would do anything—even marry a man who seemed, even in the beginning, a little distasteful—in order to keep her close. And in all that time, Tyler, in all those silent years, I never told her how I felt. Never, except in these letters. I was pleased she kept them, even though they always seemed a little dangerous, like something explosive or radioactive, hidden in plain sight, evidence of my own foolishness. When your mother died—I mean the very day she died—I panicked a little; I tried to hide the box; I thought about destroying the letters but I couldn’t, I couldn’t bring myself to do it; and then, after E.D. divorced me, when there was no one left to deceive, I simply took them for myself. Because, you see, they’re mine. They’ve always been mine.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Carol saw my expression and shook her head sadly. She put her fragile hands on my shoulders. “Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced.”

  So I spent four weeks in a motel room in Vermont nursing Diane through her recovery.

  Her physical recovery, I should say. The emotional trauma she’d suffered at the Condon ranch and after had left her exhausted and withdrawn. Diane had closed her eyes on a world that seemed to be ending and opened them on a world without compass points. It was not in my power to make this right for her.

  So I was cautiously helpful. I explained what needed to be explained. I made no demands and I made it clear that I expected no reward.

  Her interest in the changed world awoke gradually. She asked about the sun, restored to its benevolent aspect, and I told her what Jason had told me: the Spin membrane was still in place even though the temporal enclosure had ended; it was protecting the Earth the way it always had, editing lethal radiation into a simulacrum of sunlight acceptable to the planet’s ecosystem.