Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

I took a breath and got ready to spring.

But there was fresh noise from the road. Another vehicle roared past. By the dopplered whine of its straining engine, it was traveling at high speed—a conspicuous, shocking, fuck-the-law velocity.

The policeman emitted a snarl of outrage. The floor bounced again.

Scuffling noises, silence for a beat, a slammed door, and then the sound of the policeman's car (I guessed) revved to vengeful life, gravel snapping away from tires in an angry hail.

Ina lifted the lid of my sarcophagus.

I sat up in the stink of my own sweat. "What happened?"

"That was Aji. From the village. A cousin of mine. Running the roadblock to distract the police." She was pale but relieved. "He drives like a drunk, I'm afraid."

"He did that to take the heat off us?"

"Such a colorful expression. Yes. We're a convoy, remember. Other cars, wireless telephones, he would have known we had been stopped. He's risking a fine or a reprimand, nothing more serious."

I breathed the air, which was sweet and cool. I looked at En. En gave me a shaky grin.

"Please introduce me to Aji when we get to Padang," I said. "I want to thank him for pretending to be a drunk."

Ina rolled her eyes. "Unfortunately Aji wasn't pretending. He is a drunk. An offense in the eyes of the Prophet."

Nijon looked in at us, winked, closed the rear doors.

"Well, that was frightening," Ina said. She put her hand on my arm.

I apologized for letting her take the risk.

"Nonsense," she said. "We're friends now. And the risk is not as great as you might imagine. The police can be difficult, but at least they're local men and bound by certain rules—not like the men from Jakarta, the New Reformasi or whatever they call themselves, the men who burned my clinic. And I expect you would risk yourself on our behalf if necessary. Would you, Pak Tyler?"

"Yes, I would."

Her hand was trembling. She looked me in the eye. "My goodness, I believe that's true."

No, we had never conquered death, only engineered reprieves (the pill, the powder, the angioplasty, the Fourth Age)—enacted our conviction that more life, even a little more life, might yet yield the pleasure or wisdom we wanted or had missed in it. No one goes home from a triple bypass or a longevity treatment expecting to live forever. Even Lazarus left the grave knowing he'd die a second time.

But he came forth. He came forth gratefully. I was grateful.

THE COLD PLACES OF THE UNIVERSE

I drove home after a late Friday session at Perihelion, keyed open the door of the house, and found Molly sitting at the keyboard of my PC terminal.

The desk was in the southwest corner of the living room against a window, facing away from the door. Molly half-turned and gave me a startled look. At the same time, deftly, she clicked an icon and exited the program she'd been running.

"Molly?"

I wasn't surprised to find her here. Moll spent most weekends with me; she carried a duplicate key. But she'd never shown any interest in my PC.

"You didn't call," she said.

I'd been in a meeting with the insurance reps who underwrote Perihelion's employee coverage. I'd been told to expect a two-hour session but it turned out to be a twenty-minute update on billing policy, and when it finished I thought it would be quicker to just drive on home, maybe even beat Molly to the door if she'd stopped to pick up wine. Such was the effect of Molly's long level gaze that I felt obliged to explain all this before I asked her what she was doing in my files.

She laughed as I came across the room, one of those embarrassed, apologetic laughs: Look at the funny thing you caught me doing. Her right hand hovered over the touchpad of the PC. She turned back to the monitor. On screen, the cursor dived for the shut-down icon.

"Wait," I said.

"What, you want on here?"

The cursor homed in on its target. I put my hand over Molly's hand. "Actually, I'd like to know what you were doing."

She was tense. A vein throbbed in the pinkness just forward of her ear. "Making myself at home. Um, a little too much at home? I didn't think you'd mind."

"Mind what, Moll?"

"Mind me using your terminal."

"Using it for what?"

"Really nothing. Just checking it out."

But it couldn't be the machine Moll was curious about. It was five years old, nearly an antique. She used more sophisticated gear at work. And I had recognized the program she'd been in such a hurry to close when I came through the door. It was my household tracker, the program I used to pay bills and balance my checkbook and Rolodex my contacts.

"Kind of looked like a spreadsheet," I said.

"I wandered in there. Your desktop confused me. You know. People organize things different ways. I'm sorry, Tyler. I guess I was being presumptuous." She jerked her hand out from under mine and clicked the shut-down tag. The desktop shrank and I heard the processor's fan noise whine down to silence. Molly stood up, straightening her blouse. Molly always gave herself a crisp little tuck when she stood up. Putting things in order. "How about I start dinner." She turned her back on me and walked toward the kitchen.

I watched her disappear through the swinging doors. After a ten count I followed her in.

She was pulling pans off the wall rack. She glanced at me and looked away.

"Molly," I said. "If there's anything you want to know, all you have to do is ask."

"Oh. Is that all I have to do? Okay."

"Molly—"

She put a pan on the burner of the stove with exaggerated care, as if it were fragile. "Do you need me to apologize again? Okay, Tyler. I'm sorry I played with your terminal without your permission."

"I'm not accusing you of anything, Moll."

"Then why are we talking about it? I mean, why does it look like we're going to spend the entire rest of the evening talking about it?" Her eyes grew moist. Her tinted lenses turned a deeper shade of emerald. "So I was a little curious about you."

"Curious about what, my utility bills?"

"About you." She dragged a chair away from the kitchen table. The chair leg caught against the leg of the table and Molly yanked it free. She sat down and crossed her arms. "Yes, maybe even the trivial stuff. Maybe especially the trivial stuff." She closed her eyes and shook her head. "I say this and it sounds like I'm some kind of stalker. But yes, your utility bills, your brand of toothpaste, your shoe size, yes. Yes, I want to feel like I'm something more than your weekend fuck. I confess."

"You don't have to go into my files for that."

"Maybe I wouldn't have, if—"

"If?"

She shook her head. "I don't want to argue."

"Sometimes it's better to finish what you start."

"Well, like that, for instance. Anytime you feel threatened, you do your detached thing. Get all cool and reserved and analytical, like I'm some nature documentary you're watching on TV. The glass screen comes down. But the glass screen's always there, isn't it? The whole world's on the other side of it. That's why you don't talk about yourself. That's why I spent a year waiting for you to notice I was more than a piece of office furniture. That big dumb endless cool stare, watching life like it's the evening news, like it's some sorry war on the other side of the planet where all the people have unpronounceable names."

"Molly—"

"I mean I'm aware that we're all fucked up, Tyler, every one of us born into the Spin. Pretraumatic stress disorder, or what was it you called us? A generation of grotesques. That's why we're all divorced or promiscuous or hyperreligious or depressed or manic or dispassionate. We all have a really good excuse for our bad behavior, including me, and if being this big pillar of carefully premeditated helpfulness is what gets you through the night, okay, I get it. But it's also okay for me to want more than that. It's okay, in fact, it's perfectly human, for me to want to touch you. Not just fuck you. Touch you."