Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

"You look happy," I said.

"The city is called Voy Voyud. We came from the countryside to shop on this day. Because it was springtime my parents let me buy murkuds. Small animals. Like frogs, for pets. In the bag I'm holding—see?"

Wun clutched a white cloth bag containing mysterious lumps. Murkuds.

"They only live a few weeks," he said. "But their eggs are delicious."

Photo 3: This one was a panoramic view. In the near ground: another Martian house, a woman in a multicolored kaftan (Wun's wife, he explained) and two smooth-skinned, pretty young girls in sacklike amber dresses (his daughters). The photograph had been taken from high ground. Beyond the house, an entire semirural landscape was visible. Green marshy fields basked under another turquoise sky. The agricultural land was divided by elevated roadways on which a few boxy vehicles traveled, and there were agricultural machines among the crops, graceful black harvesters. And on the horizon where the roads converged was a city, the same city, Wun said, where he had bought murkuds as a child, Voy Voyud, the capital of Kirioloj Province, its low-g towers tall and intricately terraced.

"You can see most of the delta of the Kirioloj in this picture." The river was a blue band feeding a lake the color of the sky. The city of Voy Voyud had been built on higher ground, the eroded rim of an ancient impact crater, Wun said, though it looked like an ordinary line of low hills to me. Black dots on the distant lake might have been boats or barges.

"It's a beautiful place," I said.

"Yes."

"The landscape, but your family, too."

"Yes." His eyes met mine. "They're dead."

"Ah—I'm sorry to hear that."

"They died in a massive flood several years ago. The last photograph, do you see? It's the same view, but taken just after the disaster."

A freakish storm had dumped record rainfall on the slopes of the Solitary Mountains at the end of a long dry season. Most of that rain had been funneled into the parched tributaries of the Kirioloj. The terraformed Mars was in some ways still a young world, still establishing its hydrological cycles, its landscapes evolving rapidly as ancient dust and regolith were rearranged by circulating water. The result of the sudden extreme rain was a slurry of oxide-red mud that had roared down the Kirioloj and into the agricultural delta like a fluid freight train.

Photo 4: The aftermath. Of Wun's house, only the foundation and a single wall remained, standing like shards of pottery in a chaotic plain of mud, rubble, and rocks. The distant city on the hill was untouched but the fertile farmland had been buried. Except for a glint of brown water from the lake this was Mars returned almost to its virgin condition, a lifeless regolith. Several aircraft hovered overhead, presumably searching for survivors.

"I had spent a day in the foothills with friends and came home to this. A great many lives were lost, not just my family. So I keep these four photographs to remind me of where I came from. And why I can't go back."

"It must have been unbearable."

"I've made peace with it. As much as one can. By the time I left Mars the delta had been restored. Not the way it used to be, of course. But fertile, alive, productive."

Which was as much as he seemed to want to say about it.

I looked back at the earlier images, reminded myself what I was seeing. Not some fanciful CGI effect but ordinary photographs. Photographs of another world. Of Mars, a planet long freighted with our own reckless imagination. "It's not Burroughs, certainly not Wells, maybe a little Bradbury…"

Wun furrowed his already densely furrowed brow. "I'm sorry—I don't know those words."

"They're writers. Writers of fiction, who wrote about your planet."

Once I had communicated the idea—that certain authors had imagined a living Mars long before its actual terraforming—Wun was fascinated. "Would it be possible for me to read these books? And discuss them the next time you visit?"

"I'm flattered. Are you sure you can spare the time? There must be heads of state who would very much like to talk to you."

"I'm sure there are. But they can wait."

I told him I looked forward to it.

On my drive home I raided a secondhand bookshop and in the morning I delivered a bundle of paperbacks to Wun, or at least to the taciturn men guarding his quarters. War of the Worlds, A Princess of Mars, The Martian Chronicles, Stranger in a Strange Land, Red Mars.

I heard nothing more from him for a couple of weeks.

* * * * *

Construction continued on the new facilities at Perihelion. By the end of September there was a massive concrete foundation where there used to be scrub pine and ratty palmettos, a great rigging of steel beams and aluminum piping.

Molly had heard there was military-grade lab and refrigeration equipment coming in next week. (Another dinner at Champs, most of the customers staring at a Marlins game on the billboard-sized plasma screen while we shared appetizers in a far, dark corner.) "Why do we need lab gear, Ty? Perihelion's all about space research and the Spin. I don't get it."

"I don't know. Nobody's talking."

"Maybe you could ask Jason, one of those afternoons you spend over at the north wing."

I had told her I was consulting with Jase, not that I had been adopted by the Martian ambassador. "I don't have that kind of security clearance." Nor, of course, did Molly.

"I'm starting to think you don't trust me."

"Just following the rules, Moll."

"Right," she said. "You're such a saint."

* * * * *

Jason stopped by my place unannounced, fortunately on an evening when Molly wasn't present, to talk about his meds. I told him what Malmstein had said, that it would likely be all right to bump up his dosage but that we'd have to watch out for side effects. The disease wasn't standing still and there was a practical limit to the degree to which we could suppress his symptoms. It didn't mean he was doomed, only that sooner or later he would have to conduct his business differently—to accommodate the disease rather than suppress it. (Beyond that was another threshold neither of us discussed: radical disability and dementia.)

"I understand that," Jason said. He sat in a chair by the window, glancing occasionally at his reflection in the glass, one long leg draped over the other. "All I need is another few months."

"A few months for what?"

"A few months to cut the legs out from under E. D. Lawton." I stared at him. I thought it was a joke. He wasn't smiling. "Do I have to explain this?"

"If you want me to make sense of it, yeah, you do."

"E.D. and I have divergent views about the future of Perihelion. As far as E.D.'s concerned, Perihelion exists to support the aerospace industry. That's the bottom line and always has been. He never believed we could do anything about the Spin." Jason shrugged. "He's almost certainly right, in the sense that we can't fix it. But that doesn't mean we can't understand it. We can't fight a war against the Hypotheticals in any meaningful way, but we can do a little guerilla science. That's what Wun's arrival is all about."

"I don't follow."

"Wun isn't just an interplanetary goodwill ambassador. He came here with a plan, a collaborative venture that might give us some clues about the Hypotheticals, where they come from, what they want, what they're doing to both planets. The idea's getting a mixed reception. E.D.'s trying to harpoon it— he doesn't think it's useful and he thinks it puts at risk whatever political capital we've got left after the terraforming."

"So you're undercutting him?"

Jason sighed. "This might sound cruel, but E.D. doesn't understand that his time has come and gone. My father is exactly what the world needed twenty years ago. I admire him for that. He's accomplished amazing, unbelievable things. Without E.D. to light fires under the politicians there would never have been a Perihelion. One of the ironies of the Spin is that the long-term consequences of E. D. Lawton's genius have come back to bite him—if E.D. had never existed, Wun Ngo Wen wouldn't exist. I'm not engaged in some Oedipal struggle here. I know exactly what my father is and what he's done. He's at home in the corridors of power, Garland is his golf buddy. Great. But he's a prisoner, too. A prisoner of his own shortsightedness. His days as a visionary are over. He dislikes Wun's plan because he distrusts the technology—he doesn't like anything he can't reverse-engineer; he doesn't like the fact that the Martians can wield technologies we're only beginning to guess at. And he hates the fact that Wun has me on his side. Me and, I might add, a new generation of D.C. power brokers, including Preston Lomax, who's likely to be the next president. Suddenly E.D.'s surrounded by people he can't manipulate. Younger people, people who've assimilated the Spin in a way E.D.'s generation never did. People like us, Ty."