Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

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."

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.