Robert Charles Wilson: SPIN

I entered quietly. My mother had long since retreated to her bedroom. The small living room was tidy save for a single empty shotglass on the side table: she was a five-day teetotaler but took a little whiskey on the weekends. She used to say she had only two vices, and a drink on Saturday night was one of them. (Once, when I asked her what the other one was, she gave me a long look and said, "Your father." I didn't press the subject)

I stretched out on the empty sofa with a book and read until Diane called, less than an hour later. The first thing she said was, "Have you turned on the TV?"

"Should I?"

"Don't bother. There's nothing on."

"Well, you know, it is two in the morning."

"No, I mean absolutely nothing. There are infomercials on local cable, but nothing else. What does that mean, Tyler?"

What it meant was that every satellite in orbit had vanished along with the stars. Telecom, weather, military satellites, the GPS system: all of them had been shut down in the blink of an eye. But I didn't know any of that and I certainly couldn't have explained it to Diane. "It could mean anything."

"It's a little frightening."

"Probably nothing to worry about."

"I hope not. I'm glad you're still awake."

She called back an hour later with more news. The Internet was also missing in action, she said. And local TV had begun to report canceled morning flights out of Reagan and the regional airports, warning people to call ahead.

"But there have been jets flying all night." I'd seen their running lights from the bedroom window, false stars, fast-moving. "I guess military. It could be some terrorist thing."

"Jason's in his room with a radio. He's pulling in stations from Boston and New York. He says they're talking about military activity and airport lockdowns, but nothing about terrorism—and nothing about the stars."

"Somebody must have noticed."

"If they did they're not mentioning it. Maybe they have orders not to mention it. They haven't mentioned sunrise, either."

"Why would they? The sun's supposed to come up in, what, an hour? Which means it's already rising out over the ocean. Off the Atlantic coast. Ships at sea must have seen it. We'll see it, before long."

"I hope so." She sounded simultaneously frightened and embarrassed. "I hope you're right."

"You'll see."

"I like your voice, Tyler. Did I ever tell you that? You have a very reassuring voice."

Even if what I said was pure bullshit.

But the compliment affected me more than I wanted her to know. I thought about it after she hung up. I played it over in my head for the sake of the warm feeling it provoked. And I wondered what that meant. Diane was a year older than me and three times as sophisticated—so why did I feel so suddenly protective of her, and why did I wish she was close enough that I could touch her face and promise everything would be all right? It was a puzzle almost as urgent and nearly as disturbing as whatever had happened to the sky.

She called again at ten to five, when I had almost, despite myself, drifted off to sleep, fully dressed. I groped the phone out of my shirt pocket. "Hello?"

"Just me. It's still dark, Tyler."

I glanced at the window. Yes. Dark. Then the bedside clock. "Not quite sunrise, Diane."

"Were you asleep?"

"No."

"Yeah, you were. Lucky you. It's still dark. Cold, too. I looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen window. Thirty-five degrees. Should it be that cold?"

"It was that cold yesterday morning. Anyone else awake at your place?"

"Jason's locked in his room with his radio. My, uh, parents are, uh, I guess sleeping off the party. Is your mom awake?"

"Not this early. Not on a weekend." I cast a nervous glance at the window. Surely by this time there ought to be some light in the sky. Even a hint of daylight would have been reassuring.

"You didn't wake her up?"

"What's she going to do, Diane? Make the stars come back?"

"I guess not." She paused. "Tyler," she said.

"I'm still here."

"What's the first thing you remember?"

"What do you mean—today?"

"No. The first thing you can remember in your life. I know it's a stupid question, but I think I'll be okay if we can just talk about something else besides the sky for five or ten minutes."

"The first thing I remember?" I gave it some thought. "That would be back in L.A., before we moved east." When my father was still alive and still working for E. D. Lawton at their startup firm in Sacramento. "We had this apartment with big white curtains in the bedroom. The first thing I really remember is watching those curtains blow in the wind. It was a sunny day and the window was open and there was a breeze." The memory was unexpectedly poignant, like the last sight of a receding shoreline. "What about you?"

The first thing Diane could remember was also a Sacramento moment, though it was a very different one. E.D. had taken both children on a tour of the plant, even then positioning Jason for his role as heir apparent. Diane had been fascinated by the huge perforated spars on the factory floor, the spools of microthin aluminum fabric as big as houses, the constant noise. Everything had been so large that she had half expected to find a fairy-tale giant chained to the walls, her father's prisoner.

It wasn't a good memory. She said she felt left out, almost lost, abandoned inside a huge and terrifying machinery of construction.

We talked that around for a while. Then Diane said, "Check out the sky."

I looked at the window. There was enough light spilling over the western horizon to turn the blackness an inky blue.

I didn't want to confess to the relief I felt.

"I guess you were right," she said, suddenly buoyant. "The sun's coming up after all."

Of course, it wasn't really the sun. It was an impostor sun, a clever fabrication. But we didn't know that yet.

COMING OF AGE IN BOILING WATER

People younger than me have asked me: Why didn't you panic? Why didn't anyone panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?

Sometimes I say, But terrible things did happen.

Sometimes I say, But we didn't understand. And what could we have done about it?

And sometimes I cite the parable of the frog. Drop a frog into boiling water, he'll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, stoke the fire slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there's a problem.

The obliteration of the stars wasn't slow or subtle, but neither, for most of us, was it immediately disastrous. If you were an astronomer or a defense strategist, if you worked in telecommunications or aerospace, you probably spent the first few days of the Spin in a state of abject terror. But if you drove a bus or flipped burgers, it was all more or less warm water.

English-language media called it "the October Event" (it wasn't "the Spin" until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multi billion-dollar orbital satellite industry. Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weathersats. Repeated attempts to contact the International Space Station were uniformly unsuccessful. Commercial launches scheduled at Canaveral (and Baikonur and Kourou) were postponed indefinitely.

It meant, in the long run, very bad news for GE Americom, AT&T, COMSAT, and Hughes Communications, among many others.