Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

* * * * *

Within a month Jase was back at Perihelion, stalking the hallways as if he had been infused with some strange new energy.

He brought with him an army of security personnel, black-clad and of uncertain origin but believed to represent the Department of the Treasury. These were followed in turn by small battalions of contractors and surveyors who cluttered the hallways and refused to speak to resident staff. Molly kept me posted on rumors: the compound was going to be leveled; the compound was going to be expanded; we would all be fired; we would all get raises. In short, something was afoot.

For most of a week I heard nothing from Jason himself. Then, a slow Thursday afternoon, he paged me in my office and asked me to come up to the second floor: "There's someone I want you to meet."

Before I reached the now heavily guarded stairwell I had picked up an escort of armed guards with all-pass badges who conducted me to an upstairs conference room. Not just a casual hello, obviously. This was deep Perihelion business, to which I should not have been privy. Once again, apparently, Jason had decided to share secrets. Never an unmixed blessing. I took a deep breath and pushed through the door.

The room contained a mahogany table, a half dozen plush chairs, and two men in addition to myself.

One of the men was Jason.

The second man could have been mistaken for a child. A horribly burned child in desperate need of a skin graft: that was my first impression. This individual, roughly five feet tall, stood in a corner of the room. He wore blue jeans and a plain white cotton T-shirt. His shoulders were broad, his eyes were wide and bloodshot, and his arms seemed a trifle too long for his abbreviated torso.

But what was most striking about him was his skin. His skin was glossless, ash black, and completely hairless. It wasn't wrinkled in the conventional sense—it wasn't loose, like a bloodhound's skin—but it was deeply textured, furrowed, like the rind of a cantaloupe.

The small man walked toward me and put out his hand. A small wrinkled hand at the end of a long wrinkled arm. I took it, hesitantly. Mummy fingers, I thought. But fleshy, plump, like the leaves of a desert plant, like grabbing a handful of aloe vera and feeling it grab back. The creature grinned.

"This is Wun," Jason said.

"One what?"

Wun laughed. His teeth were large, blunt, and immaculate. "I never tire of that splendid joke!"

His full name was Wun Ngo Wen, and he was from Mars.

* * * * *

The man from Mars.

It was a misleading description. Martians have a long literary history, from Wells to Heinlein. But in reality, of course, Mars was a dead planet. Until we fixed it. Until we birthed our own Martians.

And here, apparently, was a living specimen, 99.9 percent human if slightly oddly designed. A Martian person, descended through millennia of Spin-hinged time from the colonists we had dispatched only two years ago. He spoke punctilious English. His accent sounded half Oxford, half New Delhi. He paced the room. He took a bottle of spring water from the table, unscrewed the cap, and drank deeply. He wiped his mouth with his forearm. Small droplets beaded on his corrugated flesh.

I sat down and tried not to stare while Jase explained.

Here's what he said, a little simplified and fleshed out with details I learned later.

* * * * *

The Martian had left his planet shortly before the Spin membrane was imposed upon it.

Wun Ngo Wen was a historian and a linguist, relatively young by Martian standards—fifty-five terrestrial years— and physically fit. He was a scholar by trade, currently between assignments, donating labor to agricultural cooperatives, and he had just spent a Sparkmonth on the delta of the Kirioloj River, in what we called the Argyre Basin and Martians called the Baryal Plain (Epu Baryal) when his summons to duty came.

Like thousands of other men and women of his age and class, Wun had submitted his credentials to the committees who were designing and coordinating a proposed journey to Earth, without any real expectation that he would be selected. He was, in fact, relatively timid by nature and had never ventured far beyond his own prefecture, except for scholarly journeys and family reunions. He was deeply dismayed when his name was called, and if he had not recently entered his Fourth Age he might have refused the request. Surely someone else would be better suited to the task? But no, apparently not; his talents and life history were uniquely suited to the work, the authorities insisted; so he settled his affairs (such as they were) and boarded a train to the launch complex at Basalt Dry (on our maps, Tharsis), where he was trained to represent the Five Republics on a diplomatic mission to Earth.

Martian technology had only recently embraced the notion of manned space travel. In the past it had seemed to the governing councils a profoundly unwise adventure, liable to attract the attention of the Hypotheticals, wasteful of resources, requiring acts of large-scale manufacturing that would dump unbudgeted volatiles into a meticulously managed and highly vulnerable biosphere. The Martians were conservators by nature, hoarders by instinct. Their small-scale and biological technologies were ancient and sophisticated, but their industrial base was shallow and had already been strained by the unmanned exploration of the planet's tiny, useless moons.

But they had watched and speculated about the Spin-enshrouded Earth for centuries. They knew the dark planet was mankind's cradle, and they had learned from telescopic observation and data retained from a late-arriving NEP ark that the membrane surrounding it was penetrable. They understood the temporal nature of the Spin, though not the mechanisms that produced it. A journey from Mars to Earth, they reasoned, while physically possible, would be difficult and impractical. The Earth, after all, was effectively static; an explorer dropped into the terrestrial darkness would remain entrapped there for millennia, even if, by his own reckoning, he left for home the next day.

But vigilant astronomers had lately detected boxlike structures quietly constructing themselves hundreds of miles above the Martian poles—Hypothetical artifacts, nearly identical to the ones associated with the Earth. After a hundred thousand years of undisturbed solitude, Mars had finally come to the attention of the faceless and omnipotent creatures with whom it shared the solar system. The conclusion—that Mars would soon be placed under a Spin membrane of its own—was inescapable. Powerful factions argued for a consultation with the shrouded Earth. Scarce resources were mustered. A spacecraft was designed and assembled. And Wun Ngo Wen, a linguist and scholar deeply familiar with the extant fragments of terrestrial history and language, was conscripted to make the journey—much to his own dismay.

Wun Ngo Wen made peace with the likelihood of his own death even as he prepared his body for the confinement and debilitation of a long space voyage and the rigors of a high-gravity terrestrial environment. Wun had lost most of his immediate family in the Kirioloj flood of three summers ago—one reason he had volunteered for the flight, and one reason he had been accepted. For Wun, the risk of death was a lighter burden than it would have been for most of his peers. Still, it was not something he looked forward to; he hoped to avoid it altogether. He trained vigorously. He taught himself the intricacies and idiosyncrasies of his vehicle. And if the Hypotheticals did embrace Mars—not that he was hoping for such a thing—it would mean he might have a chance of returning, not to a planet rendered strange by millions of passing years but to his own familiar home, preserved with all its memories and losses against the erosion of time.