Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  North of Anywhere

  Half an hour before the transit of the Arch, an hour after dark, we came across En in the crew dining room. One of the crewmen had given him a sheet of brown paper and a few stubby crayons to keep him busy.

  He seemed relieved to see us. He was worried about the transit, he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose—wincing when his thumb brushed the bruise Jala had left on his cheek—and asked me what it would be like.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never crossed.”

  “Will we know when it happens?”

  “According to the crew, the sky gets a little strange. And just when the crossing happens, when we’re balanced between the old world and the new world, the compass needle swings around, north for south. And on the bridge they sound the ship’s horn. You’ll know.”

  “Traveling a long way,” En said. “In a short time.”

  That was undeniably true. The Arch—our “side” of it, anyway—had been physically dragged across interstellar space, presumably at something less than the speed of light, before it was dropped from orbit. But the Hypotheticals had had eons of Spin time to do the dragging. They could conceivably have bridged any distance shy of three billion light-years. And even a fraction of that would be a numbing, barely comprehensible distance.

  “Makes you wonder,” Diane said, “why they went to so much trouble.”

  “According to Jason—”

  “I know. The Hypotheticals want to preserve us from extinction, so we can make something more complex of ourselves. But it just begs the question. Why do they want that? What do they expect from us?”

  En ignored our philosophizing. “And after we cross—”

  “After that,” I told him, “it’s a day’s cruise to Port Magellan.”

  He smiled at the prospect.

  I exchanged a look with Diane. She had introduced herself to En two days ago and they were already friends. She had been reading to him from a book of English children’s stories out of the ship’s library. (She had even quoted Housman to him: The infant child is not aware…“I don’t like that one,” En had said.)

  He showed us his drawing, pictures of animals he must have seen in video footage from the plains of Equatoria, long-necked beasts with pensive eyes and tiger-striped coats.

  “They’re beautiful,” Diane said.

  En nodded solemnly. We left him to his work and headed up on deck.

  The night sky was clear and the peak of the Arch was directly overhead now, reflecting a last glimmer of light. It showed no curvature at all. From this angle it was a pure Euclidean line, an elementary number (1) or noun (I).

  We stood by the railing as close as we could get to the prow of the ship. Wind tugged at our clothes and hair. The ship’s flags snapped briskly and a restless sea gave back fractured images of the ship’s running lights.

  “Do you have it?” Diane asked.

  She meant the tiny vial containing a sample of Jason’s ashes. We had planned this ceremony—if you could call it a ceremony—long before we left Montreal. Jason had never put much faith in memorials, but I think he would have approved of this one. “Right here.” I took the ceramic tube out of my vest pocket and held it in my left hand.

  “I miss him,” Diane said. “I miss him constantly.” She nestled into my shoulder and I put an arm around her. “I wish I’d known him as a Fourth. But I don’t suppose it changed him much—”

  “It didn’t.”

  “In some ways Jase was always a Fourth.”

  As we approached the moment of transit the stars seemed to dim, as if some gauzy presence had enclosed the ship. I opened the tube that contained Jason’s ashes. Diane put her free hand on mine.

  The wind shifted suddenly and the temperature dropped a degree or two.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “when I think about the Hypotheticals, I’m afraid…”

  “What?”

  “That we’re their red calf. Or what Jason hoped the Martians would be. That they expect us to save them from something. Something they’re afraid of.”

  Maybe so. But then, I thought, we’ll do what life always does—defy expectations.

  I felt a shiver pass through her body. Above us, the line of the Arch grew fainter. Haze settled over the sea. Except it wasn’t haze in the ordinary sense. It wasn’t weather at all.

  The last glimmer of the Arch disappeared and so did the horizon. On the bridge of the Capetown Maru the compass must have begun its rotation; the captain sounded the ship’s horn, a brutally loud noise, the bray of outraged space. I looked up. The stars swirled together dizzyingly.

  “Now,” Diane shouted into the noise.

  I leaned across the steel rail, her hand on mine, and we upended the vial. Ashes spiraled in the wind, caught in the ship’s lights like snow. They vanished before they hit the turbulent black water—scattered, I want to believe, into the void we were invisibly traversing, the stitched and oceanless place between the stars.

  Diane leaned into my chest and the sound of the horn beat through our bodies like a pulse until at last it stopped.

  Then she lifted her head. “The sky,” she said.

  The stars were new and strange.

  In the morning we all came up on deck, all of us: En, his parents, Ibu Ina, the other passengers, even Jala and a number of off-duty crewmen, to scent the air and feel the heat of the new world.

  It could have been Earth, by the color of the sky and the heat of the sunlight. The headland of Port Magellan had appeared as a jagged line on the horizon, a rocky promontory and a few lines of pale smoke rising vertically and tailing to the west in a higher wind.

  Ibu Ina joined us at the railing, En in tow.

  “It looks so familiar,” Ina said. “But it feels so different.”

  Clumps of coiled weeds drifted in our wake, liberated from the mainland of Equatoria by storms or tides, huge eight-fingered leaves limp on the surface of the water. The Arch was behind us now, no longer a door out but a door back in, a different sort of door altogether.

  Ina said, “It’s as if one history has ended and another has begun.”

  En disagreed. “No,” he said solemnly, leaning into the wind as if he could will the future forward. “History doesn’t start until we land.”

  By Robert Charles Wilson from Tom Doherty Associates

  A Hidden Place

  Darwinia

  Bios

  The Perseids and Other Stories

  The Chronoliths

  Blind Lake

  Spin

  Acknowledgments

  I invented a couple of diseases for dramatic purposes in Spin. CVWS is an imaginary cattle-borne disease with no real-world counterpart. AMS is also wholly imaginary, but its symptoms mimic the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, unfortunately a very real disease. Although MS is not yet curable, a number of promising new therapies have been introduced or are on the horizon. Science fiction novels shouldn’t be mistaken for medical journals, however. For readers concerned about MS, one of the best Web sources is www.nationalmssociety.org.

  The future I extrapolated for Sumatra and the Minangkabau people is also very much my own invention, but the matrilineal Minangkabau culture, and its coexistence with modern Islam, has attracted the attention of anthropologists—see Peggy Reeves Sanday’s study, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.

  Readers interested in current scientific thought about the evolution and future of the solar system might want to check out The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee or Our Cosmic Origins by Armand Delsemme for information not refracted through the lens of science fiction.

  And once again, of all the folks who helped make possible the writing of this book (and I thank them all), the MVP award goes to my wife, Sharry.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  SPIN

  Copyright © 2005 by Robert Charles Wi
lson

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  “Infant Innocence” by A. E. Housman is quoted by permission of The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of A. E. Housman.

  Edited by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilson, Robert Charles, 1953–

  Spin / Robert Charles Wilson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN: 978-1-4299-1543-4

  1. Human-alien encounters—Fiction. 2. End of the world—Fiction. 3. Cults—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9199.3.W4987S65 2005

  813'.54—dc22

  2004058862

  Read on for a preview of

  VORTEX

  by Robert Charles Wilson

  Available in July 2011 from Tom Doherty Associates

  A Tor Hardcover ISBN 978-0-7653-2342-7

  Copyright © 2011 by Robert Charles Wilson

  Chapter Two

  Turk Findley’s Story

  1.

  My name is Turk Findley, and this is the story of the life I lived long after everything I knew and loved was dead and gone. It begins in the desert of a planet we used to call Equatoria, and it ends—well, that’s hard to say.

  These are my memories. This is what happened.

  2.

  Ten thousand years is how long I was away from the world. That was a terrible thing to know, and for a span of time it was nearly all I knew.

  I woke up dizzy and lost and naked in the open air. The sun was hammering out of a blue sky. I was thirsty. My body ached and my tongue felt thick in my mouth. I tried to sit up and nearly toppled over. My vision was blurred. I didn’t know where I was or how I had got here. Nor could I really remember where I had come from. All I had of knowledge was the sickening conviction that an enormous span of time (ten thousand years, but who had counted them?) had passed.

  I kept still until the worst of the vertigo passed. Then I raised my head and tried to make sense of what I saw.

  I was outdoors in what appeared to be a desert. There was no one on the ground for miles, as far as I could tell, but I wasn’t alone: a number of aircraft were passing overhead at low speed. The aircraft were peculiarly shaped and it wasn’t obvious what was keeping them aloft, since they seemed to have no wings or rotors.

  I ignored them. The first thing I needed to do was to get out of the sunlight—my skin was red and there was no telling how long I’d been exposed. The desert was hardpacked sand all the way to the horizon, but it was littered with fragments of what looked like gigantic broken toys. Close by there was a smoothly-curved half-eggshell at least twelve feet tall, dusty green; in the distance there were other similar shapes in bright but fading colors, as if a giant’s tea-party had come to grief. And on the horizon a range of mountains like a blackened jawbone. The air smelled of mineral dust and hot metal.

  I crawled a few yards into the shadow of the fractured eggshell. The shade was blissfully cool. What I needed next was water. And maybe something to cover myself up. But the effort of moving had made me dizzy again. One of the strange aircraft seemed to be hovering overhead; I tried to wave my arms to attract its attention but my strength had deserted me. Instead I closed my eyes and passed out.

  3.

  The next time I woke I was being lifted into what might have been a stretcher.

  The bearers were dressed in yellow uniforms and wore dust masks over their mouths and noses. A woman in the same yellow clothing walked beside me. When our eyes met she said, “Please try to stay calm. I know you’re frightened. We have to hurry, but trust me, we’ll get you to a safe place.”

  Was this place then unsafe?

  Several of the aircraft had landed, and I was carried into one of them. The woman in yellow said a few words to her companions in a language I didn’t recognize. My captors or saviors set me on my feet and I discovered I could stand without falling. A door came down, cutting off the view of the desert and the sky. Softer light suffused the interior of the aircraft.

  Men and women in yellow jumpers bustled around me, but I kept my eye on the woman who had spoken in English. “Steady,” she said, taking my arm. She wasn’t much taller than five feet and change, and when she pulled off her mask she looked reassuringly human. Her skin was brown, her features were vaguely Asian, her dark hair was cut short. “How do you feel?”

  That was a complicated question. I managed to shrug.

  We were in a large room and she escorted me to one corner of it. A surface like a bed slid out of the wall, along with a rack of what might have been medical equipment. The woman in yellow told me to lie down. The other soldiers or airmen—I didn’t know how to think of them—ignored us and went about their business, working control surfaces along the walls or hurrying off to other chambers of the aircraft. I felt a rising-elevator sensation and I guessed we had lifted off, though there was no noise apart from the sound of voices speaking a language I didn’t recognize. No bounce, no chop, no turbulence.

  The woman in yellow pressed a blunt metallic tube against my forearm and then against my ribcage, and I felt my anxiety gradually ease into numbness. I guessed I had been drugged but I didn’t really mind. My thirst had vanished. “Can you tell me your name?” the woman asked.

  I croaked out the fact that I was Turk Findley. I told her I was an American but that I had been living in Equatoria lately. I asked her who she was where she was from. She smiled and said, “My name is Treya, and the place I’m from is called Vox.”

  “Is that where we’re going now?”

  “Yes. We’ll be there soon. Try to sleep, if you can.”

  So I closed my eyes and tried to take inventory of myself.

  Turk Findley, born in the last years of the Spin. Variously a day laborer, sailor, small-plane pilot. Worked my way across the Arch to Equatoria on a coastal freighter bound for breaking in a New World shipyard. Lived in Port Magellan some years. Met a woman named Lise Adams who was searching for her father, and that search took us among the kind of people who liked to fuck with Martian drugs—took us deep into the oil lands of the Equatorian desert at a time when ash began to fall from the sky and strange things grew out of the ground. I had loved Lise Adams well enough to know I wasn’t good for her. We had been separated in the desert… and I believed it was then that the Hypotheticals had taken me. Had picked me up and carried me the way a wave carries a grain of sand. And dropped me on this beach, this shoal, this sandbar, ten thousand years downcurrent. That was my history, as much as I could reconstruct of it.

  When I came to myself again I was in a smaller and more private cabin of the aircraft. Treya, my guard or my doctor (I didn’t know how to think of her was sitting at my bedside humming a tune in a minor key. She or someone else had dressed me in a simple tunic and trousers.

  Night had fallen. A narrow window to the left of me showed scattered stars that turned like points on a wheel whenever the aircraft made a banking turn. The small Equatorian moon was on the horizon (which meant I was still in Equatoria, however much it might have changed). Down below, whitecapped waves glistened with phosphorescence. We were flying over the sea, far from land.

  “What’s that song you’re humming?” I asked.

  Treya gave little start, surprised to find me awake. She appeared to be twenty or twenty-five years old. Her eyes were attentive but cautious, as if she were subtly afraid of me. But she smiled at the question. “Just a tune…”

  A familiar tune. It was one of those slow lamentations that had been so popular in the aftermath of the Spin. “Reminds me of a song I used to know. It was called…”

>   “Après Nous.”

  Yes. Overheard in a bar once when I was young and alone in the world. Not a bad tune, but I couldn’t imagine how it had survived ten thousand years. “How do you know it?”

  “Well, that’s not easy to explain. In a way, I grew up with that song.”

  “How old are you exactly?”

  Another smile. “Not as old as you, Turk Findley. I have some memories, though. That’s why they assigned me to you. I’m not just your nurse. I’m your translator, your guide.”

  “Then maybe you can explain—”

  “I can explain a lot, but not right now. Your body needs to rest. I can give you something to make you sleep.”

  “I’ve been asleep.”

  “Is that how it felt when you were with the Hypotheticals—like sleep?”

  The question startled me. I knew I had been “with the Hypotheticals” in some sense, but I had no real memory of it. She appeared to know more about it than I did. I told her so.

  Treya frowned and began another question, but before she could finish it the aircraft banked sharply. She gave the window a nervous glance. A burst of white light obscured the stars and lit up the rolling waves below. I sat up to get a better view and I thought I saw something on the horizon as the flash faded, something like a distant continent or (because it was almost geometrically flat) an enormous ship. Then it was gone in the darkness.

  “Stay down,” Treya said tersely. The aircraft went into a banking curve. She ducked into a chair attached to the nearest wall.

  Evasive maneuvers. “I thought we were going somewhere safe.”

  “We are, but we’re not there yet.”

  More light bloomed in the window. “Is there a war on?”

  “Yes. Stay down!” The floor bucked. “The room will protect you if our vehicle is damaged.”

  It happened almost before the words were out of her mouth.

  There were five aircraft (I learned later) in our formation. We were the last flight out of the Equatorian desert. The attack came sooner and more powerfully than expected. Four escort craft went down protecting us, and after that we were defenseless.