Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

Ibu Ina, in an embroidered gown and silk head scarf, came to the door a little after nightfall and said, "It's done, the wedding proper, I mean. Nothing left but the singing and dancing. Do you still want to come along, Tyler?"

I dressed in the best clothes I had with me, white cotton pants and a white shirt. I was nervous about being seen in public, but Ina assured me there were no strangers in the wedding party and I would be welcome in the crowd.

Despite Ina's reassurances I felt painfully conspicuous as we walked together down the street toward the stage and the music, less because of my height than because I had been indoors too long. Leaving the house was like stepping out of water into air; suddenly I was surrounded by nothing substantial at all. Ina distracted me by talking about the newly-weds. The groom, a pharmacist's apprentice from Belubus, was a young cousin of hers. (Ina called any relative more distant than brother, sister, aunt or uncle her "cousin"; the Minang kinship system used precise words for which there were no simple English equivalents.) The bride was a local girl with a slightly disreputable past. Both would be going rantau after the wedding. The new world beckoned.

The music began at dusk and would continue, she said, until morning. It was broadcast village-wide through enormous pole-mounted loudspeakers, but the source was the raised stage and the group seated on reed mats there, two male instrumentalists and two female singers. The songs, Ina explained, were about love, marriage, disappointment, fate, sex. Lots of sex, couched in metaphors Chaucer would have appreciated. We sat on a bench at the periphery of the celebration. I drew more than a few long looks from people in the crowd, at least some of whom must have heard the story of the burned clinic and the fugitive American, but Ina was careful not to let me become a distraction. She kept me to herself, though she smiled indulgently at the young people mobbing the stage. "I'm past the age of lament. My field no longer requires ploughing, as the song has it. All this fuss. My goodness."

Bride and groom in their embroidered finery sat on mock thrones near the platform. I thought the groom, with his whip-thin mustache, looked shifty; but no, Ina insisted, it was the girl, so innocent in her blue and white brocaded costume, who was the one to watch. We drank coconut milk. We smiled. Coming on toward midnight many of the village's women drifted away, leaving a crowd of men, young men mobbing the stage, laughing; older men sitting at tables gambling studiously at cards, faces blank as aged leather.

I had shown Ina the pages I had written about my first meeting with Wun Ngo Wen. "But the account can't be entirely accurate," she said during a lull in the music. "You sounded much too calm."

"I wasn't calm at all. Just trying not to embarrass myself."

"Introduced, after all, to a man from Mars…" She looked up at the sky, at the post-Spin stars in their frail, scattered constellations, dim in the glare from the wedding party. "What must you have expected?"

"I suppose, someone less human."

"Ah, but he was very human."

"Yes," I said.

Wun Ngo Wen had become something of a revered figure in rural India, Indonesia, southeast Asia. In Padang, Ina said, one sometimes saw his picture in people's homes, in a gilded frame like a watercolor saint or famous mullah. "There was," she said, "something extraordinarily attractive in his manner. A familiar way of speaking, even though we only heard him in translation. And when we saw photographs of his planet—all those cultivated fields—it looked so much more rural than urban. More Eastern than Western. The Earth visited by an ambassador from another world, and he was one of us! Or so it seemed. And he chastised the Americans in an enjoyable way."

"The last thing Wun meant to do was scold anyone."

"No doubt the legend outpaces the reality. Didn't you have a thousand questions, the day you were introduced to him?"

"Of course. But I figured he'd been answering the obvious questions ever since he arrived. I thought he might be tired of it."

"Was he reluctant to talk about his home?"

"Not at all. He loved to talk about it. He just didn't like being interrogated."

"My manners aren't as polished as yours. I'm sure I would have offended him with countless questions. Suppose, Tyler, you had been able to ask him anything at all, that first day: what would it have been?"

That was easy. I knew exactly what question I had been suppressing the first time I met Wun Ngo Wen. "I would have asked him about the Spin. About the Hypotheticals. Whether his people had learned anything we didn't already know."

"And did you ever discuss that with him?"

"Yes."

"And did he have much to say?"

"Much."

I glanced at the stage. A new saluang group had come on. One of them was playing a rabab, a stringed instrument. The musician hammered his bow against the belly of the rabab and grinned. Another lewd wedding song.

"I'm afraid I may have been interrogating you" Ina said.

"I'm sorry. I'm still a little tired."

"Then you should go home and sleep. Doctor's orders. With a little luck you'll see Ibu Diane again tomorrow."

She walked with me down the loud street, away from the festivities. The music went on until nearly five the next morning. I slept soundly in spite of it.

* * * * *

The ambulance driver was a skinny, taciturn man in Red Crescent whites. His name was Nijon, and he shook my hand with exaggerated deference and kept his large eyes on Ibu Ina when he spoke to me. I asked if he was nervous about the drive to Padang. Ina translated his answer: "He says he's done more dangerous things for less compelling reasons. He says he's pleased to meet a friend of Wun Ngo Wen. He adds that we should get underway as soon as possible."

So we climbed into the back end of the ambulance. Along one wall was a horizontal steel locker where equipment was usually stored. It doubled as a bench. Nijon had emptied the locker, and we established that it was possible for me to cram myself inside by bending my legs at hip and knee and tucking my head into my shoulder. The locker smelled of antiseptic and latex and was about as comfortable as a monkey coffin, but there I would lie, should we be stopped at a checkpoint, with Ina on the bench in her clinic gown and En laid out on a stretcher doing his best impression of a CVWS infectee. In the hot morning light the plan seemed more than slightly ridiculous.

Nijon had shimmed the lid of the locker to allow some air to circulate inside, so I probably wouldn't suffocate, but I didn't relish the prospect of spending time in what was essentially a hot, dark metal box. Fortunately—once we had established that I fit—I didn't have to, at least not yet. All the police activity, Ina said, had been on the new highway between Bukik Tinggi and Padang, and because we were traveling in a loose convoy with other villagers we ought to have plenty of warning before we were pulled over. So for the time being I sat next to Ina while she taped a saline drip (sealed, no needle, a prop) to the crook of En's elbow. En was enthusiastic about the role and began rehearsing his cough, a deep-lung hack that provoked an equally theatrical frown from Ina: "You've been stealing your brother's clove cigarettes?"

En blushed. It was for the sake of realism, he said.

"Oh? Well, be careful you don't act yourself into an early grave."

Nijon slammed the rear doors and climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine and we began the bumpy drive to Padang. Ina told En to close his eyes. "Pretend to be asleep. Apply your theatrical skills." Before long his breathing settled into gentle snorts.

"He was awake all night with the music," Ina explained.

"I'm amazed he can sleep, even so."