Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  “You too, En? You’re going to the new world?”

  He nodded emphatically. “Also my father, my mother, my uncle,” and a dozen other close relations for whom he used Minang kinship words. His eyes glittered. “Perhaps you’ll teach me medicine there.”

  Perhaps I would have to. Crossing the Arch would pretty much rule out a traditional education. This might not be the best thing for En, and I wondered if his parents had given their decision enough thought.

  But that wasn’t my business, and En was clearly excited about the journey. He could hardly control his voice when he talked about it. And I relished the eager, open expression on his face. En belonged to a generation capable of regarding the future with more hope than dread. No one in my generation of grotesques had ever smiled into the future like that. It was a good, deeply human look, and it made me happy, and it made me sad.

  Ina came back the night before we were due to leave, bearing dinner and a plan.

  “My cousin’s son’s brother-in-law,” she said, “drives ambulances for the hospital in Batusangkar. He can borrow an ambulance from the motor pool to take you into Padang. There will be at least two cars ahead of us with wireless phones, so if there’s a roadblock we ought to have some warning.”

  “I don’t need an ambulance,” I said.

  “The ambulance is a disguise. You in the back, hidden, and me in my medical regalia, and a villager—En is pleading for the role—to play sick. Do you understand? If the police look in the back of the ambulance they see me and an ill child, and I say ‘CVWS,’ and the police become reluctant to search more thoroughly. Thus the ridiculously tall American doctor is smuggled past them.”

  “You think this will work?”

  “I think it has a very good chance of working.”

  “But if you’re caught with me—”

  “As bad as things may be, the police can’t arrest me unless I’ve committed a crime. Transporting a Westerner isn’t a crime.”

  “Transporting a criminal might be.”

  “Are you criminal, Pak Tyler?”

  “Depends how you interpret certain acts of Congress.”

  “I choose not to interpret them at all. Please don’t worry about it. Did I tell you the trip has been delayed a day?”

  “Why?”

  “A wedding. Of course, weddings aren’t what they once were. Wedding adat has eroded terribly since the Spin. As has everything else since money and roads and fast-food restaurants came to the highlands. I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive. Young people are in a hurry nowadays. At least we don’t have Las Vegas–style ten-minute weddings….Do those still exist in your country?”

  I admitted they did.

  “Well, we’re headed in that direction as well. Minang hilang, tinggal kerbau. At least there will still be a palaminan and lots of sticky rice and saluang music. Are you well enough to attend? At least for the music?”

  “I would be privileged.”

  “So tomorrow night we sing, and on the following morning we defy the American Congress. The wedding works in our favor, too. Lots of traveling, lots of vehicles on the road; we won’t seem conspicuous, our little rantau group heading for Teluk Bayur.”

  I slept late and woke feeling better than I had for a long time, stronger and subtly more alert. The morning breeze was warm and rich with the smell of cooking and the complaints of roosters and hammering from the center of town where an outdoor stage was under construction. I spent the day at the window, reading and watching the public procession of the bride and groom on their way to the groom’s house. Ina’s village was small enough that the wedding had brought it to a standstill. Even the local warungs had closed for the day, though the franchise businesses on the main road were staffed for tourists. By late afternoon the smell of curried chicken and coconut milk was thick in the air, and En dropped by very briefly with a prepared meal for me.

  Ibu Ina, in an embroidered gown and silk head scarf, came to the door a little after nightfall and said, “It’s done, the wedding proper, I mean. Nothing left but the singing and dancing. Do you still want to come along, Tyler?”

  I dressed in the best clothes I had with me, white cotton pants and a white shirt. I was nervous about being seen in public, but Ina assured me there were no strangers in the wedding party and I would be welcome in the crowd.

  Despite Ina’s reassurances I felt painfully conspicuous as we walked together down the street toward the stage and the music, less because of my height than because I had been indoors too long. Leaving the house was like stepping out of water into air; suddenly I was surrounded by nothing substantial at all. Ina distracted me by talking about the newlyweds. The groom, a pharmacist’s apprentice from Belubus, was a young cousin of hers. (Ina called any relative more distant than brother, sister, aunt or uncle her “cousin” the Minang kinship system used precise words for which there were no simple English equivalents.) The bride was a local girl with a slightly disreputable past. Both would be going rantau after the wedding. The new world beckoned.

  The music began at dusk and would continue, she said, until morning. It was broadcast village-wide through enormous pole-mounted loudspeakers, but the source was the raised stage and the group seated on reed mats there, two male instrumentalists and two female singers. The songs, Ina explained, were about love, marriage, disappointment, fate, sex. Lots of sex, couched in metaphors Chaucer would have appreciated. We sat on a bench at the periphery of the celebration. I drew more than a few long looks from people in the crowd, at least some of whom must have heard the story of the burned clinic and the fugitive American, but Ina was careful not to let me become a distraction. She kept me to herself, though she smiled indulgently at the young people mobbing the stage. “I’m past the age of lament. My field no longer requires ploughing, as the song has it. All this fuss. My goodness.”

  Bride and groom in their embroidered finery sat on mock thrones near the platform. I thought the groom, with his whip-thin mustache, looked shifty; but no, Ina insisted, it was the girl, so innocent in her blue and white brocaded costume, who was the one to watch. We drank coconut milk. We smiled. Coming on toward midnight many of the village’s women drifted away, leaving a crowd of men, young men mobbing the stage, laughing; older men sitting at tables gambling studiously at cards, faces blank as aged leather.

  I had shown Ina the pages I had written about my first meeting with Wun Ngo Wen. “But the account can’t be entirely accurate,” she said during a lull in the music. “You sounded much too calm.”

  “I wasn’t calm at all. Just trying not to embarrass myself.”

  “Introduced, after all, to a man from Mars…” She looked up at the sky, at the post-Spin stars in their frail, scattered constellations, dim in the glare from the wedding party. “What must you have expected?”

  “I suppose, someone less human.”

  “Ah, but he was very human.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Wun Ngo Wen had become something of a revered figure in rural India, Indonesia, southeast Asia. In Padang, Ina said, one sometimes saw his picture in people’s homes, in a gilded frame like a watercolor saint or famous mullah. “There was,” she said, “something extraordinarily attractive in his manner. A familiar way of speaking, even though we only heard him in translation. And when we saw photographs of his planet—all those cultivated fields—it looked so much more rural than urban. More Eastern than Western. The Earth visited by an ambassador from another world, and he was one of us! Or so it seemed. And he chastised the Americans in an enjoyable way.”

  “The last thing Wun meant to do was scold anyone.”

  “No doubt the legend outpaces the reality. Didn’t you have a thousand questions, the day you were introduced to him?”

  “Of course. But I figured he’d been answering the obvious questions ever since he arrived. I thought he might be tired of it.”

  “Was he reluctant to talk about his home?”

  “Not at all. He lo
ved to talk about it. He just didn’t like being interrogated.”

  “My manners aren’t as polished as yours. I’m sure I would have offended him with countless questions. Suppose, Tyler, you had been able to ask him anything at all, that first day: what would it have been?”

  That was easy. I knew exactly what question I had been suppressing the first time I met Wun Ngo Wen. “I would have asked him about the Spin. About the Hypotheticals. Whether his people had learned anything we didn’t already know.”

  “And did you ever discuss that with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did he have much to say?”

  “Much.”

  I glanced at the stage. A new saluang group had come on. One of them was playing a rabab, a stringed instrument. The musician hammered his bow against the belly of the rabab and grinned. Another lewd wedding song.

  “I’m afraid I may have been interrogating you,” Ina said.

  “I’m sorry. I’m still a little tired.”

  “Then you should go home and sleep. Doctor’s orders. With a little luck you’ll see Ibu Diane again tomorrow.”

  She walked with me down the loud street, away from the festivities. The music went on until nearly five the next morning. I slept soundly in spite of it.

  The ambulance driver was a skinny, taciturn man in Red Crescent whites. His name was Nijon, and he shook my hand with exaggerated deference and kept his large eyes on Ibu Ina when he spoke to me. I asked if he was nervous about the drive to Padang. Ina translated his answer: “He says he’s done more dangerous things for less compelling reasons. He says he’s pleased to meet a friend of Wun Ngo Wen. He adds that we should get underway as soon as possible.”

  So we climbed into the back end of the ambulance. Along one wall was a horizontal steel locker where equipment was usually stored. It doubled as a bench. Nijon had emptied the locker, and we established that it was possible for me to cram myself inside by bending my legs at hip and knee and tucking my head into my shoulder. The locker smelled of antiseptic and latex and was about as comfortable as a monkey coffin, but there I would lie, should we be stopped at a checkpoint, with Ina on the bench in her clinic gown and En laid out on a stretcher doing his best impression of a CVWS infectee. In the hot morning light the plan seemed more than slightly ridiculous.

  Nijon had shimmed the lid of the locker to allow some air to circulate inside, so I probably wouldn’t suffocate, but I didn’t relish the prospect of spending time in what was essentially a hot, dark metal box. Fortunately—once we had established that I fit—I didn’t have to, at least not yet. All the police activity, Ina said, had been on the new highway between Bukik Tinggi and Padang, and because we were traveling in a loose convoy with other villagers we ought to have plenty of warning before we were pulled over. So for the time being I sat next to Ina while she taped a saline drip (sealed, no needle, a prop) to the crook of En’s elbow. En was enthusiastic about the role and began rehearsing his cough, a deep-lung hack that provoked an equally theatrical frown from Ina: “You’ve been stealing your brother’s clove cigarettes?”

  En blushed. It was for the sake of realism, he said.

  “Oh? Well, be careful you don’t act yourself into an early grave.”

  Nijon slammed the rear doors and climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine and we began the bumpy drive to Padang. Ina told En to close his eyes. “Pretend to be asleep. Apply your theatrical skills.” Before long his breathing settled into gentle snorts.

  “He was awake all night with the music,” Ina explained.

  “I’m amazed he can sleep, even so.”

  “One of the advantages of childhood. Or the First Age, as the Martians call it—is that correct?”

  I nodded.

  “They have four, I understand? Four Ages to our three?”

  Yes, as Ina undoubtedly knew. Of all the folkways in Wun Ngo Wen’s Five Republics, this was the one that had most fascinated the terrestrial public.

  Human cultures generally recognize two or three stages of life—childhood and adulthood; or childhood, adolescence, adulthood. Some reserve special status for old age. But the Martian custom was unique and depended on their centuries-long mastery of biochemistry and genetics. The Martians counted human lives in four installments, marked by biochemically mediated events. Birth to puberty was childhood. Puberty to the end of physical growth and the beginning of metabolic equilibrium was adolescence. Equilibrium to decline, death, or radical change was adulthood.

  And beyond adulthood, the elective age: the Fourth.

  Centuries ago, Martian biochemists had devised a means to prolong human life by sixty or seventy years on average. But the discovery wasn’t an unmixed blessing. Mars was a radically constrained ecosystem, ruled by the scarcity of water and nitrogen. The cultivated land that had looked so familiar to Ibu Ina was a triumph of subtle, sophisticated bioengineering. Human reproduction had been regulated for centuries, pegged to sustainability estimates. Another seventy years tacked onto the average life span was a population crisis in the making.

  Nor was the longevity treatment itself simple or pleasant. It was a deep cellular reconstruction. A cocktail of highly engineered viral and bacterial entities was injected into the body. Tailored viruses performed a sort of systemic update, patching or revising DNA sequences, restoring telomeres, resetting the genetic clock, while lab-grown bacterial phages flushed out toxic metals and plaques and repaired obvious physical damage.

  The immune system resisted. The treatment was, at best, equivalent to a six-week course of some debilitating influenza—fevers, joint and muscle pain, weakness. Certain organs went into a kind of reproductive overdrive. Skin cells died and were replaced in fierce succession; nervous tissue regenerated spontaneously and rapidly.

  The process was debilitating, painful, and there were potential negative side effects. Most subjects reported at least some long-term memory loss. Rare cases suffered temporary dementia and nonrecoverable amnesia. The brain, restored and rewired, became a subtly different organ. And its owner became a subtly different human being.

  “They conquered death.”

  “Not quite.”

  “You would think,” Ina said, “with all their wisdom, they could have made it a less unpleasant experience.”

  Certainly they could have relieved the superficial discomfort of the transition to Fourth. But they had chosen not to. Martian culture had incorporated the Fourth Age into its folkways, pain and all: pain was one of the limiting conditions, a tutelary discomfort. Not everyone chose to become a Fourth. Not only was the transition difficult, stiff social penalties had been written into their longevity laws. Any Martian citizen was entitled to undergo the treatment, free of charge and without prejudice. But Fourths were forbidden to reproduce; reproduction was a privilege reserved for adults. (For the last two hundred years the longevity cocktail had included drugs that produced irreversible sterilization in both sexes.) Fourths weren’t allowed to vote in council elections—no one wanted a planet run by venerable ancients for their own benefit. But each of the Five Republics had a sort of judicial review body, the equivalent of a Supreme Court, elected solely by Fourths. Fourths were both more and less than adults, as adults are both more and less than children. More powerful, less playful; freer and less free.

  But I could not decipher, to Ina or to myself, all the codes and totems into which the Martians had folded their medical technology. Anthropologists had spent years in the attempt, working from Wun Ngo Wen’s archival records. Until such research had been banned.

  “And now we have the same technology,” Ina said.

  “Some of us do. I hope eventually all of us will.”

  “I wonder if we’ll use it as wisely.”

  “We might. The Martians did, and the Martians are as human as we are.”

  “I know. It’s possible, certainly. But what do you think, Tyler—will we?”

  I looked at En. He was still asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, his eyes darti
ng under closed lids like fish underwater. His nostrils flared as he breathed and the motion of the ambulance rocked him from side to side.

  “Not on this planet,” I said.

  Ten miles down the road out of Bukik Tinggi, Nijon knocked hard at the partition between us and the driver’s seat. That was our prearranged signal: roadblock ahead. The ambulance slowed. Ina stood up hastily, bracing herself. She strapped a neon-yellow oxygen mask over En’s face—En, awake now, seemed to be reconsidering the merits of the adventure—and covered her own mouth with a paper mask. “Be quick,” she whispered at me.

  So I contorted myself into the equipment locker. The lid banged down on the shims that allowed a little air to flow inside, a quarter-inch between me and asphyxiation.

  The ambulance stopped before I was ready and my head gonged hard against the narrow end of the locker.

  “And be quiet now,” Ina said—to me or to En, I wasn’t sure which.

  I waited in the dark.

  Minutes passed. There was a distant rumble of talk, impossible to decipher even if I had understood the language. Two voices. Nijon and someone unfamiliar. A voice that was thin, querulous, harsh. A policeman’s voice.

  They conquered death, Ina had said.

  No, I thought.

  The locker was heating up fast. Sweat slicked my face, drenched my shirt, stung my eyes. I could hear myself breathing. I imagined the whole world could hear me breathing.

  Nijon answered the policeman in deferential murmurs. The policeman barked back fresh questions.

  “Be still now, just be still,” Ina whispered urgently. En had been bouncing his feet against the thin mattress of the gurney, a nervous habit. Too much energy for a CVWS victim. I saw the tips of Ina’s fingers splayed across the quarter-inch of light above my head, four knuckled shadows.

  Now the rear doors of the ambulance rattled open and I smelled gasoline exhaust and rank noonday vegetation. If I craned my head—gently, gently—I could see a thin swath of exterior light and two shadows that might be Nijon and a policeman or maybe just trees and clouds.