Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  “And you countenance this?”

  “Nobody asked my opinion. But I wish them well.”

  Diane gave me a that’s-not-good-enough look but chose not to pursue the argument. We rode an elevator down to the lobby restaurant. As we lined up for table service behind a dozen network news technicians she must have felt the growing excitement.

  After we ordered she turned her head, listening as fragments of conversation—words like “photodissociation” and “cryptoendelithic” and, yes, “ecopoiesis”—spilled over from crowded tables, journalists rehearsing the jargon for their next day’s work or just struggling to understand it. There was also laughter and the reckless clash of cutlery, an air of giddy if uncertain expectation. This was the first time since the moon landing more than sixty years ago that the world’s attention had been so completely focused on a space adventure, and the Spin gave this one what even the moon landing had lacked: real urgency and a global sense of risk.

  “This is all Jason’s work, isn’t it?”

  “Without Jason and E.D. this might still be happening. But it would be happening differently, probably less quickly and efficiently. Jase has always been at the center of it.”

  “And us at the periphery. Orbiting his genius. Tell you a secret. I’m a little afraid of him. Afraid of seeing him after so long. I know he disapproves of me.”

  “Not you. Your lifestyle, maybe.”

  “You mean my faith. It’s okay to talk about it. I know Jase feels a little—I guess betrayed. As if Simon and I have repudiated everything he believes in. But that’s not true. Jason and I were never on the same path.”

  “Basically, you know, he’s just Jase. Same old Jase.”

  “But am I the same old Diane?”

  For which I had no answer.

  She ate with an obvious appetite, and after the main course we ordered dessert and coffee. I said, “It’s lucky you could take the time for this.”

  “Lucky that Simon let me off my leash?”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know. But in a way it’s true. Simon can be a little controlling. He likes to know where I am.”

  “Is that a problem for you?”

  “You mean, is my marriage in trouble? No. It isn’t, and I wouldn’t let it be. That doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally disagree.” She hesitated. “If I talk about this, I’m sharing it with you, right? Not Jason. Just you.”

  I nodded.

  “Simon has changed some since you met him. We all have, everybody from the old NK days. NK was all about being young and making a community of belief, a kind of sacred space where we didn’t have to be afraid of each other, where we could embrace each other not just figuratively but literally. Eden on Earth. But we were mistaken. We thought AIDS didn’t matter, jealousy didn’t matter—they couldn’t matter, because we’d come to the end of the world. But it’s a slow Tribulation, Ty. The Tribulation is a lifetime’s work, and we need to be strong and healthy for it.”

  “You and Simon—”

  “Oh, we’re healthy.” She smiled. “And thank you for asking, Dr. Dupree. But we lost friends to AIDS and drugs. The movement was a roller-coaster ride, love all the way up and grief all the way down. Anyone who was part of it will tell you that.”

  Probably so, but the only NK veteran I knew was Diane herself. “The last few years haven’t been easy for anyone.”

  “Simon had a hard time dealing with it. He really believed we were a blessed generation. He once told me God had come so close to humanity it was like sitting next to a furnace on a winter night, that he could practically warm his hands at the Kingdom of Heaven. We all felt that way, but it really did bring out the best in Simon. And when it started to go bad, when so many of our friends were sick or drifting into addictions of one kind or another, it hurt him pretty deeply. That was when the money started running out, too, and eventually Simon had to look for work—we both did. I did temp work for a few years. Simon couldn’t find a secular job but he does janitorial work at our church in Tempe, Jordan Tabernacle, and they pay him when they can…he’s studying for his pipe fitter’s certificate.”

  “Not exactly the Promised Land.”

  “Yeah, but you know? I don’t think it’s supposed to be. That’s what I tell him. Maybe we can feel the chiliasm coming, but it’s not here yet—we still have to play out the last minutes of the game even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion. And maybe we’re being judged on that. We have to play it like it matters.”

  We rode the elevator up to our rooms. Diane paused at her door and said, “What I’m remembering is how good it feels to talk to you. We used to be pretty good talkers, remember?”

  Confiding our fears through the chaste medium of the telephone. Intimacy at a distance. She had always preferred it that way. I nodded.

  “Maybe can do that again,” she said. “Maybe I can call you from Arizona sometimes.”

  She, of course, would call me, because Simon might not like it if I called her. That was understood. As was the nature of the relationship she was proposing. I would be her platonic buddy. Someone harmless to confide in during troubled times, like the leading lady’s gay male friend in a cineplex drama. We would chat. We would share. Nobody would get hurt.

  It wasn’t what I wanted or needed. But I couldn’t say that to the eager, slightly lost look she was giving me. Instead I said, “Yeah, of course.”

  And she grinned and hugged me and left me in the hall.

  I sat up later than I should have, nursing my wounded dignity, embedded in the noise and laughter from nearby rooms, thinking about all the scientists and engineers at Perihelion and JPL and Kennedy, all these newspaper people and video journalists watching klieg lights play over the distant rockets, all of us doing our jobs here at the tag end of human history, doing what was expected of us, playing it like it mattered.

  Jason arrived at noon the next day, ten hours before the first wave of launches was scheduled to begin. The weather was bright and calm, a good omen. Of all the global launch sites the only obvious no-go was the European Space Agency’s expanded Kourov complex in French New Guinea, shut down by a fierce March storm. (The ESA microorganisms would be delayed a day or two—or half a million years, Spin-time.)

  Jase came directly to my suite, where Diane and I were waiting for him. He wore a cheap plastic windbreaker and a Marlins cap pulled low over his eyes to disguise him from the resident reporters. “Tyler,” he said when I opened the door. “I’m sorry. If I could have been there I would have.”

  The funeral service. “I know.”

  “Belinda Dupree was the best thing about the Big House. I mean that.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said, and stepped out of his way.

  Diane came across the room with a wary expression. Jason closed the door behind him, not smiling. They stood a yard apart, eyeing each other. The silence was weighty. Jason broke it.

  “That collar,” he said, “makes you look like a Victorian banker. And you ought to put on a little weight. Is it so hard to scrounge a meal out there in cow country?”

  Diane said, “More cactus than cows, Jase.”

  And they laughed and fell into each other’s arms.

  We staked out the balcony after dark, brought out comfortable chairs and ordered up a tray of crudités (Diane’s choice) from room service. The night was as dark as every starless Spin-shrouded night, but the launch platforms were illuminated by gigantic spotlights and their reflections danced in the gently rolling swells.

  Jason had been seeing a neurologist for some weeks now. The specialist’s diagnosis had been the same as mine: Jason suffered from severe and nonresponsive multiple sclerosis for which the only useful treatment was a regimen of palliative drugs. In fact the neurologist had wanted to submit Jason’s case to the Centers for Disease Control as part of their ongoing study of what some people were calling AMS—atypical multiple sclerosis. Jase had threatened or bribed him out of the idea. And for now, at least, the new drug c
ocktail was keeping him in remission. He was as functional and mobile as he had ever been. Any suspicions Diane might have harbored were quickly allayed.

  He had brought along a bottle of expensive and authentically French champagne to celebrate the launches. “We could have had VIP seats,” I told Diane. “Bleachers outside the Vehicle Assembly Building. Brushing elbows with President Garland.”

  “The view from here is as good,” Jason said. “Better. Here, we’re not props in a photo opportunity.”

  “I’ve never met a president,” Diane said.

  The sky, of course, was dark, but the TV in the hotel room (we had turned it up to hear the countdown) was talking about the Spin barrier, and Diane looked into the sky as if it might have become miraculously visible, the lid that enclosed the world. Jason saw the tilt of her head. “They shouldn’t call it a barrier,” he said. “None of the journals call it that anymore.”

  “Oh? What do they call it?”

  He cleared his throat. “A ‘strange membrane.’”

  “Oh no.” Diane laughed. “No, that’s awful. That’s not acceptable. It sounds like a gynecological disorder.”

  “Yeah, but ‘barrier’ is incorrect. It’s more like a boundary layer. It’s not a line you cross. It acquires objects selectively and accelerates them into the external universe. The process is more like osmosis than, say, crashing a fence. Ergo, membrane.”

  “I’d forgotten what it’s like talking to you, Jase. It can be a little surreal.”

  “Hush,” I told them both. “Listen.”

  Now the TV had cut to the NASA feed, a bland Mission Control voice talking the numbers down. Thirty seconds. There were twelve rockets fueled and nominal on their pads. Twelve simultaneous launches, an act that a less ambitious space agency would once have deemed impractical and radically unsafe. But we lived in more daring or desperate times.

  “Why do they all have to go up at once?” Diane asked.

  “Because,” Jason began; then he said, “No. Wait. Watch.”

  Twenty seconds. Ten. Jase stood up and leaned into the balcony railing. The hotel balconies were mobbed. The beach was mobbed. A thousand heads and lenses swiveled in the same direction. Estimates later put the crowd in and around the Cape at nearly two million. According to police reports, more than a hundred wallets were lifted that night. There were two fatal stabbings, fifteen attempted assaults, and one premature labor. (The child, a four-pound girl, was delivered on a trestle table at the International House of Pancakes in Cocoa Beach.)

  Five seconds. The TV in the hotel room went quiet. For a moment there was no sound but the buzz and whine of photographic gear.

  Then the ocean was ablaze with firelight as far as the horizon.

  No single one of these rockets would have impressed a local crowd even in darkness, but this wasn’t one column of flame, it was five, seven, ten, twelve. The seaborne gantries were briefly silhouetted like skeletal skyscrapers, lost soon after in billows of vaporized ocean water. Twelve pillars of white fire, separated by miles but compressed by perspective, clawed into a sky turned indigo blue by their combined light. The beach crowd began to cheer, and the sound merged with the sound of the solid-fuel boosters hammering for altitude, a throb that compressed the heart like ecstasy or terror. But it wasn’t only the brute spectacle we were cheering. Almost certainly every one of these two million people had seen a rocket launch before, at least on television, and although this multiple ascendancy was grand and loud it was remarkable mainly for its intent, its motivating idea. We weren’t just planting the flag of terrestrial life on Mars, we were defying the Spin itself.

  The rockets rose. (And on the rectangular screen of the TV, when I glanced at it through the balcony door, similar rockets bent into cloudy daylight in Jiuquan, Svobodnyy, Baikonur, Xichang.) The fierce horizontal light became oblique and began to dim as night rushed back from the sea. The sound spent itself in sand and concrete and superheated salt water. I imagined I could smell the reek of fireworks coming ashore with the tide, the pleasantly awful stench of Roman candles.

  A thousand cameras clattered like dying crickets and went still.

  The cheering lasted, in one form or another, until dawn.

  We went inside and drew the drapes against the anticlimactic darkness and opened the champagne. We watched the news from overseas. Apart from the French rain delay, every launch had been successful. A bacterial armada was en route to Mars.

  “So why do they all have to go up at once?” Diane asked again.

  Jason gave her a long thoughtful look. “Because we want them to arrive at their destination at roughly the same time. Which is not as easy as it sounds. They have to enter the Spin membrane more or less simultaneously, or they’ll exit separated by years or centuries. Not so critical with these anaerobic cargos, but we’re practicing for when it really matters.”

  “Years or centuries? How is that possible?”

  “Nature of the Spin, Diane.”

  “Right, but centuries?”

  He turned his chair to face her, frowning. “I’m trying to grasp the extent of your ignorance here….”

  “Just a question, Jase.”

  “Count a second for me.”

  “What?”

  “Look at your watch and count me one second. No, I’ll do it. One—” He paused. “Second. Got that?”

  “Jason—”

  “Bear with me. You understand the Spin ratio?”

  “Roughly.”

  “Roughly isn’t good enough. One terrestrial second equals 3.17 years Spin time. Keep that in mind. If one of our rockets enters the Spin membrane a single second behind the rest, it reaches orbit more than three years late.”

  “Just because I can’t quote numbers—”

  “They’re important numbers, Diane. Suppose our flotilla just emerged from the membrane, just now, now—” He ticked the air with his finger. “One second, here and gone. For the flotilla, that was three and a fraction years. One second ago they were in Earth orbit. Now they’ve delivered their cargo to the surface of Mars. I mean now, Diane, literally now. It’s already happened, it’s done. So let a minute pass on your watch. That’s approximately a hundred and ninety years by an outside clock.”

  “That’s a lot, of course, but you can’t make over a planet in two hundred years, can you?”

  “So now it’s two hundred Spin years into the experiment. Right now, as we speak, any bacterial colonies that survived the trip will have been reproducing on Mars for two centuries. In an hour, they will have been there eleven thousand four hundred years. This time tomorrow they’ll have been multiplying for almost two hundred seventy-four thousand years.”

  “Okay, Jase. I get the idea.”

  “This time next week, 1.9 million years.”

  “Okay.”

  “A month, 8.3 million years.”

  “Jason—”

  “This time next year, one hundred million years.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “On Earth, one hundred million years is roughly the span of time between the emergence of life from the sea and your last birthday. One hundred million years is time enough for those microorganisms to pump carbon dioxide out of carbonate deposits in the crust, leach nitrogen from nitrates, purge oxides from the regolith and enrich it by dying in large numbers. All that liberated CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The atmosphere gets thicker and warmer. A year from now we send another armada of respirating organisms, and they begin to cycle CO2 into free oxygen. Another year—or as soon as the spectroscopic signature from the planet looks right—we introduce grasses, plants, other complex organisms. And when all that stabilizes into some kind of crudely homeostatic planetary ecology, we send human beings. You know what that means?”

  “Tell me,” Diane said sullenly.

  “It means that within five years there’ll be a flourishing human civilization on Mars. Farms, factories, roads, cities…”

  “There’s a Greek word for this, Jase.”

  �
��Ecopoiesis.”

  “I was thinking of ‘hubris.’”

  He smiled. “I worry about a lot of things. But offending the gods isn’t one of them.”

  “Or offending the Hypotheticals?”

  That stopped him. He leaned back and sipped champagne, a little flat by now, from his hotel-room glass.

  “I’m not afraid of offending them,” he said finally. “On the contrary. I’m afraid we may be doing exactly what they want us to do.”

  But he wouldn’t explain, and Diane was eager to change the subject.

  I drove Diane to Orlando the next day for her flight back to Phoenix.

  It had become obvious over the last few days that we would not discuss, mention, or allude in any way to the physical intimacy we had shared that night in the Berkshires before her marriage to Simon. If we acknowledged it at all it was only in the cumbersome detours we took to avoid it. When we hugged (chastely) in the space in front of the airport security gate she said, “I’ll call you,” and I knew she would—Diane made few promises but was scrupulous about keeping them—but I was equally conscious of the time that had passed since I had last seen her and the time that would inevitably pass before I saw her again: not Spin time, but something just as erosive and just as hungry. There were creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth, not unlike the ones I saw in the mirror every morning.

  Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn’t know one another very well.

  There were more launches during the spring and summer of that year, surveillance packages that spent months in high Earth orbit and returned with visual and spectrographic images of Mars—snapshots of the ecopoiesis.

  The first results were equivocal: a modest increase in atmospheric CO2 that might have been a side effect of solar warming. Mars remained a cold, inhospitable world by any plausible measure. Jason admitted that even the GEMOs—the genetically engineered Mars organisms that comprised the bulk of the initial seeding—might not have adjusted well to the planet’s unfiltered daylight UV levels and oxidant-ridden regolith.