Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  “So why did they turn it off for seven days?”

  “They turned it down, not entirely off. And they did it so something could pass through the membrane.”

  “That thing in the Indian Ocean.”

  “Yes.”

  She asked me to play the recording of Jason’s last hours, and she wept as she listened. She asked about his ashes. Had E.D. taken them away or had Carol kept them? (Neither. Carol had pressed the urn into my hands and told me to dispose of them any way I deemed appropriate. “The awful truth, Tyler, is that you knew him better than I did. Jason was a cipher to me. His father’s son. But you were his friend.”)

  We watched the world rediscover itself. The mass burials finally ended; the bereaved and frightened survivors began to understand that the planet had reacquired a future, however strange that future might turn out to be. For our generation it was a stunning reversal. The mantle of extinction had fallen from our shoulders; what would we do without it? What would we do, now that we were no longer doomed but merely mortal?

  We saw the video footage from the Indian Ocean of the monstrous structure that had embedded itself in the skin of the planet, seawater still boiling to steam where it came into contact with the enormous pillars. The Arch, people began to call it, or the Archway, not only because of its shape but because ships at sea had returned to port with stories of lost navigational beacons, peculiar weather, spinning compasses, and a wild coastline where no continent should have been. Various navies were promptly dispatched. Jason’s testament hinted at the explanation, but only a few people had the advantage of having heard it—myself, Diane, and the dozen or so who had received it in the mail.

  She began to exercise a little every day, jogging a dirt path behind the motel as the weather cooled, coming back with the scent of fallen leaves and woodsmoke in her hair. Her appetite improved, and so did the menu in the coffee shop. Food delivery had been restored; the domestic economy was creaking back into motion.

  We learned that Mars, too, had been un-Spun. Signals had passed between the two planets; President Lomax, in one of his rally-’round-the-flag speeches, even hinted that the manned space program would be resumed, a first step toward establishing ongoing relations with what he called (with suspicious exuberance) “our sister planet.”

  We talked about the past. We talked about the future.

  What we did not do was fall into each other’s arms.

  We knew each other too well, or not well enough. We had a past but no present. And Diane was wracked with anxiety by Simon’s disappearance outside Manassas.

  “He very nearly let you die,” I reminded her.

  “Not intentionally. He’s not vicious. You know that.”

  “Then he’s dangerously naive.”

  Diane closed her eyes meditatively. Then she said, “There’s a phrase Pastor Bob Kobel liked to use back at Jordan Tabernacle. ‘His heart cried out to God.’ If it describes anyone, it describes Simon. But you have to parse the sentence. ‘His heart cried out’—I think that’s all of us, it’s universal. You, Simon, me, Jason. Even Carol. Even E.D. When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy: I think that’s what it was for Jason; I think that’s what I didn’t understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence.” She brushed her hair away from her forehead and I saw that her arm, which had been so perilously thin, was round and strong once more. “I think the cry that rose up from Simon’s heart was the purest human sound in the world. But no, he’s not a good judge of character; yes, he’s naive; which is why he cycled through so many styles of faith, New Kingdom, Jordan Tabernacle, the Condon ranch…anything, as long as it was plainspoken and addressed the need for human significance.”

  “Even if it killed you?”

  “I didn’t say he’s wise. I’m saying he’s not wicked.”

  Later I came to recognize this kind of discourse: she was talking like a Fourth. Detached but engaged. Intimate but objective. I didn’t dislike it, but it made the hair on my neck stand up from time to time.

  Not long after I declared her completely healthy Diane told me she wanted to leave. I asked her where she meant to go.

  She had to find Simon, she said. She had to “settle things,” one way or another. They were, after all, still married. It mattered to her whether he had lived or died.

  I reminded her she didn’t have money to spend or a place of her own to stay. She said she’d get by somehow. So I gave her one of the credit cards Jason had supplied me, along with a warning that I couldn’t guarantee it—I had no idea who was paying the premium, what the credit limit might be, or whether someone might eventually track it to her.

  She asked how she could get in touch with me.

  “Just call,” I said. She had my number, the number I had paid for and preserved these many years, attached to a phone I had carried even though it seldom rang.

  Then I drove her to the local bus depot, where she vanished into a crowd of displaced tourists who had been stranded by the end of the Spin.

  The phone rang six months later, when the newspapers were still running banner headlines about “the new world” and the cable channels had begun to carry video footage of a rocky, wild headland “somewhere across the Archway.”

  By this time hundreds of vessels large and small had made the crossing. Some were big-science expeditions, I.G.Y. and U.N. sanctioned, with American naval escorts and embedded press pools. Some were private charters. Some were fishing trawlers, which came back to port with their holds full of a catch that could pass for cod in a dim light. This was, of course, strictly forbidden, but “arch cod” had infiltrated every major Asian market by the time the ban came down. It proved to be edible and nutritious. Which was, as Jase might have said, a clue: when the fish were subjected to DNA analysis their genome suggested a remote terrestrial ancestry. The new world was not merely hospitable, it seemed to have been stocked with humanity in mind.

  “I found Simon,” Diane said.

  “And?”

  “He’s living in a trailer park outside Wilmington. He picks up a little money doing household repairs—bikes, toasters, that kind of thing. Otherwise he collects welfare and attends a little Pentecostal church.”

  “Was he happy to see you?”

  “He wouldn’t stop apologizing for what happened at the Condon ranch. He said he wanted to make it up to me. He asked if there was anything he could do to make my life easier.”

  I gripped the phone a little more tightly. “What did you tell him?”

  “That I wanted a divorce. He agreed. And he said something else. He said I’d changed, that there was something different about me. He couldn’t put his finger on it. But I don’t think he liked it.”

  A whiff of brimstone, perhaps.

  “Tyler?” Diane said. “Have I changed that much?”

  “Everything changes,” I said.

  Her next important call came a year later. I was in Montreal, thanks in part to Jason’s counterfeit ID, waiting for my immigrant status to be officialized and assisting at an outpatient clinic in Outremont.

  Since my last conversation with Diane, the basic dynamics of the Arch had been worked out. The facts were confounding to anyone who conceived of the Archway as a static machine or a simple “door,” but look at it the way Jason had—as a complex, conscious entity capable of perceiving and manipulating events within its domain—and it made more sense.

  Two worlds had been connected through the Arch, but only for manned ocean vessels transiting from the south.

  Consider what that means. For a breeze, an ocean current, or a migrant bird the Arch was nothing more than a couple of fixed pillars between the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. They all moved unimpeded around and through the Arch space, as did any ship traveling from north t
o south.

  But cross the equator by ship from the south at ninety degrees east of Greenwich and you’d find yourself looking back at the Arch from an unknown sea under a strange sky, untold light-years from the Earth.

  In the city of Madras an ambitious if not quite legal cruise service had produced a series of English-language posters announcing EASY TRAVEL TO FRIENDLY PLANET! Interpol closed the business down—the U.N. was still trying to regulate passage in those days—but the posters had it just about right. How could such things be? Ask the Hypotheticals.

  Diane’s divorce had been finalized, she told me, but she was out of work and out of prospects. “I thought if I could join you…” She sounded tentative and not at all like a Fourth, or what I imagined a Fourth ought to sound like. “If that would be all right. Frankly I need a little help. Finding a place and, you know, getting settled.”

  So I arranged a clinic job for her and submitted the immigration paperwork. She joined me in Montreal that autumn.

  It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned (or semi-Martian, perhaps), during which Diane and I discovered each other in wholly new ways. We were no longer straitjacketed by the Spin nor were we children blindly seeking solace. We fell in love, finally, as adults.

  These were the years when the global population topped out at eight billion. Most of that growth had been funneled into the expanding megacities: Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, coastal China; Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo; Caracas, La Paz, Tegucigalpa—all the firelit, smog-shrouded warrens of the world. It would have taken a dozen Archways to dent that population growth, but crowding drove a steady wave of emigrants, refugees, and “pioneers,” many of them packed into the cargo compartments of illegal vessels and more than a few of them delivered to the shores of Port Magellan already dead or dying.

  Port Magellan was the first named settlement in the new world. By now much of that world had been at least crudely mapped, largely by air. Port Magellan was at the eastern tip of a continent some were calling “Equatoria.” There was a second and even larger land mass (“Borea”) that straddled the northern pole and extended into the temperate zone of the planet. The southern seas were rich with islands and archipelagos.

  The climate was benign, the air was fresh, the gravity was 95.5 percent of Earth’s. Both continents were bread-baskets-in-waiting. The seas and rivers teemed with fish. The legend circulating in the slums of Douala and Kabul was that you could pick dinner from the giant trees of Equatoria and sleep among their sheltering roots.

  You couldn’t. Port Magellan was a U.N. enclave policed by soldiers. The shantytowns that had grown up around it were ungoverned and unsafe. But functional fishing villages dotted the coastline for hundreds of miles; there were tourist hotels under construction around the lagoons of Reach Bay and Aussie Harbor; and the prospect of free fertile land had driven settlers inland along the White and New Irrawaddi river valleys.

  But the most momentous news from the new world that year was the discovery of the second Arch. It was located half a world away from the first, near the southern reaches of the boreal land mass, and beyond it there was yet another new world—this one, according to first reports, a little less inviting; or maybe it was just the rainy season there.

  “There must be other people like me,” Diane said, five years into the post-Spin era. “I’d like to meet them.”

  I had given her my copy of the Martian archives, a first-pass translation on a set of memory cards, and she had pored over them with the same intensity she’d once brought to Victorian poetry and New Kingdom tracts.

  If Jason’s work had been successful, then, yes, there were surely other Fourths on Earth. But announcing their presence would have been a first-class ticket to a federal penitentiary. The Lomax administration had put a national security lid on all things Martian, and Lomax’s domestic security agencies had been granted sweeping police powers in the economic crises that followed the end of the Spin.

  “Do you ever think about it?” she asked, a little shyly.

  Becoming a Fourth myself, she meant. Injecting into my arm a measured dose of clear liquid from one of the vials I kept in a steel safe at the back of our bedroom closet. Of course I’d thought about it. It would have made us more alike.

  But did I want that? I was aware of the invisible space, the gap between her Fourthness and my unmodified humanity, but I wasn’t afraid of it. Some nights, looking into her solemn eyes, I even treasured it. It was the canyon that defined the bridge, and the bridge we had built was pleasing and strong.

  She stroked my hand, her smooth fingers on my textured skin, a subtle reminder that time never stood still, that one day I might need the treatment even if I didn’t especially want it.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “When?”

  “When I’m ready.”

  President Lomax was succeeded by President Hughes and then by President Chaykin, but they were all veterans of the same Spin-era politics. They saw Martian biotech as the new atomic bomb, at least potentially, and for now it was all theirs, a proprietary threat. Lomax’s first diplomatic dispatch to the government of the Five Republics had been a request to withhold biotech information from uncoded Martian broadcasts to Earth. He had justified the request with plausible arguments about the effect such technology might have on a politically divided and often violent world—he cited the death of Wun Ngo Wen as an example—and so far the Martians had been playing along.

  But even this sanitized contact with Mars had sewn some discord. The egalitarian economics of the Five Republics had made Wun Ngo Wen a sort of posthumous mascot to the new global labor movement. (It was jarring to see Wun’s face on placards carried by garment workers in Asian factory zones or chipsocket fillers from Central American maquiladoras—but I doubt it would have displeased him.)

  Diane crossed the border to attend E.D.’s funeral eleven years almost to the day after I rescued her from the Condon ranch.

  We had heard of his death in the news. The obituary mentioned in passing that E.D.’s ex-wife Carol had predeceased him by six months, another sad shock. Carol had stopped taking our calls almost a decade ago. Too dangerous, she said. It was enough just knowing we were safe. And there was nothing, really, to say.

  (Diane visited her mother’s grave while she was in D.C. What saddened her the most, she said, was that Carol’s life had been so incomplete: a verb without an object, an anonymous letter, misunderstood for the want of a signature. “I don’t miss her as much as I miss what she might have been.”)

  At E.D.’s memorial service Diane was careful not to identify herself. Too many of E.D.’s government cronies were present, including the attorney general and the sitting vice president. But her attention was drawn to an anonymous woman in the pews, who was sneaking reciprocal glances at Diane: “I knew she was a Fourth,” Diane said. “I can’t say exactly how. The way she held herself, the sort of ageless look she had—but more than that; it was like a signal went back and forth between us.” And when the ceremony was over Diane approached the woman and asked how she had known E.D.

  “I didn’t know him,” the woman said, “not really. I did a research stint at Perihelion at one time, back in Jason Lawton’s day. My name is Sylvia Tucker.”

  The name rang a bell when Diane repeated it to me. Sylvia Tucker was one of the anthropologists who had worked with Wun Ngo Wen at the Florida compound. She had been friendlier than most of the hired academics and it was possible Jase had confided in her.

  “We exchanged e-mail addresses,” Diane said. “Neither of us said the word ‘Fourth.’ But we both knew. I’m certain of it.”

  No correspondence ensued, but every once in a while Diane received digital press clippings from Sylvia Tucker’s address, concerning, for instance:

  An industrial chemist in Denver arrested on a security writ and detained indefinitely.

  A geriatric clinic in Mexico City closed by federal order.

  A University of California sociology professor killed i
n a fire, “arson suspected.”

  And so on.

  I had been careful not to keep a list of the names and addresses to which Jason had addressed his final packages, nor had I memorized them. But some of the names in the articles seemed plausibly familiar.

  “She’s telling us they’re being hunted,” Diane said. “The government is hunting Fourths.”

  We spent a month debating what we would do if we attracted the same kind of attention. Given the global security apparatus Lomax and his heirs had set up, where would we run?

  But there was really only one plausible answer. Only one place where the apparatus failed to operate and where the surveillance was wholly blind. So we made our plans—these passports, that bank account, this route through Europe to South Asia—and set them aside until we needed them.

  Then Diane received a final communication from Sylvia Tucker, a single word:

  Go, it said.

  And we went.

  On the last flight of the trip, coming into Sumatra by air, Diane said, “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  I had made the decision days ago, during a layover in Amsterdam, when we were still worried that we might have been followed, that our passports might have been flagged, that our supply of Martian pharmaceuticals might yet be confiscated.

  “Yes,” I said. “Now. Before we cross over.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I’ll ever be.”

  No, not sure. But willing. Willing, finally, to lose what might be lost, willing to embrace what might be gained.

  So we rented a room on the third floor of a colonial-style hotel in Padang where we wouldn’t be noticed for a while. We all fall, I told myself, and we all land somewhere.