Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

And it all moved.

Moved in vast shimmerings and intricate dances suggesting ever-greater, still-invisible cycles. The sky beat like a heart above us. "So alive," Diane said.

There is a prejudice imposed on us by our brief window of consciousness: things that move are alive; things that don't are dead. The living worm twines under the dead and static rock. Stars and planets move, but only according to the inert laws of gravitation: a stone may fall but is not alive, and orbital motion is only the same falling indefinitely prolonged.

But extend our mayfly existence, as the Hypotheticals had, and the distinction blurs. Stars are born, live, die, and bequeath their elementary ashes to newer stars. The sum of their various motions is not simple but unimaginably complex, a dance of attraction and velocity, beautiful but frightening. Frightening because, like an earthquake, the writhing stars made mutable what ought to be solid. Frightening because our deepest organic secrets, our couplings and our messy acts of reproduction, turn out not to be secrets after all: the stars are also bleeding and laboring. No single thing abides, but all things flow. I couldn't remember where I had read that.

"Heraclitus," Diane said.

I wasn't aware that I'd said it aloud.

"All those years," Diane said, "back at the Big House, all those fucking wasted years, I knew—"

I put my finger on her lips. I knew what she had known.

"I want to go back inside," she said. "I want to go back to the bedroom."

* * * * *

We didn't pull the blinds. The spinning, kinetic stars cast their light into the room and in the darkness the patterns played over my skin and Diane's in focusless images, the way city lights shine through a rain-streaked window, silently, sinuously. We said nothing because words would have been an impediment. Words would have been lies. We made love wordlessly, and only when it was over did I find myself thinking, Let this abide. Just this.

We were asleep when the sky once more darkened, when the celestial fireworks finally dimmed and disappeared. The Chinese attack had amounted to little more than a gesture. Thousands had died as a result of the global panic, but there had been no direct casualties on Earth—or, presumably, among the Hypotheticals.

The sun rose on schedule the next morning.

The buzz of the house phone woke me. I was alone in bed. Diane took the call in another room and came in to tell me it was Jase, he said the roads were clear and he was on his way back.

She had showered and dressed and she smelled like soap and starched cotton. "And that's it?" I said. "Simon shows up and you drive away? Last night means nothing?"

She sat down on the bed next to me. "Last night never meant that I wouldn't leave with Simon."

"I thought it meant more."

"It meant more than I can possibly say. But it doesn't erase the past. I've made promises and I have a faith and those things put certain boundaries on my life."

She sounded unconvinced. I said, "A faith. Tell me you don't believe in this shit."

She stood up, frowning.

"Maybe I don't," she said. "But maybe I need to be around someone who does."

* * * * *

I packed and loaded my luggage into the Hyundai before Jase and Simon got back. Diane watched from the porch as I closed the lid of the trunk.

"I'll call you," she said.

"You do that," I told her.

4X109 A.D.

I broke another lamp during one of my fits of fever. This time Diane managed to conceal it from the concierge. She had bribed the housekeeping staff to exchange clean for dirty linen at the door every second morning rather than have a maid make up the room and risk finding me delirious. Cases of dengue, cholera, and human CVWS had cropped up at the local hospital within the last six months. I didn't want to wake up in an epidemiological ward next to a quarantine case.

"What worries me," Diane said, "is what might happen when I'm not here."

"I can take care of myself."

"Not if the fever spikes."

"Then it's a matter of luck and timing. Are you planning to go somewhere?"

"Only the usual. But I mean, in an emergency. Or if I can't get back to the room for some reason."

"What kind of emergency?"

She shrugged. "It's hypothetical," she said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but.

* * * * *

But I didn't press her about it. There was nothing I could do to improve the situation except cooperate.

I was beginning the second week of the treatment, approaching the crisis. The Martian drug had accumulated to some critical level in my blood and tissues. Even when the fevers subsided I felt disoriented, confused. The purely physical side effects were no fun either. Joint pain. Jaundice. Rash, if by "rash" you mean the sensation of having your skin slough off, layer by layer, exposing flesh almost as raw as an open wound. Some nights I slept for four or five hours—five was my record, I think—and woke in a slurry of dander, which Diane would clean from the blood-pocked bed while I shifted arthritically to a bedside chair.

I came to distrust even my most lucid moments. Just as often what I felt was a purely hallucinatory clarity, the world overbright and hyperdefined, words and memory cogged like gears in a runaway engine.

Bad for me. Maybe worse for Diane, who had to do bedpan duty during the times I was incontinent. In a way she was returning a favor. I had been with her when she endured this phase of the struggle herself. But that had been many years ago.

* * * * *

Most nights she slept beside me, though I don't know how she stood it. She kept a careful distance between us—at times just the pressure of the cotton sheet was painful enough to make me weep—but the almost subliminal sense of her presence was soothing.

On the really bad nights, when in my thrashing I might have thrown out an arm and hurt her, she curled up on the flower-print settee by the balcony doors.

She didn't say much about her trips into Padang. I knew approximately what she was doing there: making connections with pursers and cargo masters, pricing out options for a transit of the Arch. Dangerous work. If anything made me feel worse than the effects of the drug it was watching Diane walk out the door into a potentially violent Asian demimonde with no more protection than a pocket-sized can of Mace and her own considerable courage.

But even that intolerable risk was better than getting caught.

They—and by "they" I mean agents of the Chaykin administration or their allies in Jakarta—were interested in us for a number of reasons. Because of the drug, of course, and more important the several digital copies of the Martian archives we were carrying. And they would have loved to interrogate us about Jason's last hours: the monologue I had witnessed and recorded, everything he had told me about the nature of the Hypotheticals and the Spin, knowledge only Jason had possessed.

* * * * *

I slept and woke, and she was gone.

I spent an hour watching the balcony curtains move, watching sunlight angle up the visible leg of the Arch, daydreaming about the Seychelles.

Ever been to the Seychelles? Me neither. What was running in my head was an old PBS documentary I had once seen. The Seychelles are tropical islands, home to tortoises and coco de mer and a dozen varieties of rare birds. Geologically, they're all that remains of an ancient continent that once linked Asia and South America, long before the evolution of modern humans.

Dreams, Diane once said, are metaphors gone feral. The reason I dreamed about the Seychelles (I imagined her telling me) was because I felt submerged, ancient, almost extinct.

Like a drowning continent, awash in the prospect of my own transformation.

* * * * *

I slept again. Woke, and she still wasn't there.