Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

"Tyler? Are you all right?"

"Yes," I said. Thinking, for some reason, of Diane. "Maybe the best we can hope for is a little understanding before the curtain comes down."

"Curtain?"

"Before the end."

"It's not much consolation," Wun admitted. "But yes, it may be the best we can hope for."

"Your people have known about the Spin for millennia. And in all that time you haven't been able to learn anything about the Hypotheticals?"

"No. I'm sorry. I don't have that to offer. About the physical nature of the Spin we have only a few speculations." (Which Jason had recently attempted to explain to me: something about temporal quanta, mostly mathematics and far beyond the reach of practical engineering, Martian or terrestial.) "About the Hypotheticals themselves, nothing at all. As for what they want from us—" He shrugged. "Only more speculation. The question we asked ourselves was, what was special about the Earth when it was encapsulated? Why did the Hypotheticals wait to spin Mars, and what made them choose this particular moment in our history?"

"You have answers to that?"

One of his handlers knocked at the door and opened it. A balding guy in a tailored black suit. He spoke to Wun but he looked at me: "Just a reminder. We have the EU rep coming in. Five minutes." He held the door wide, expectantly. I stood up.

"Next time," Wun said.

"Soon, I hope."

"As soon as I can arrange it."

It was late and I was done for the day. I left through the north door. On my way to the parking lot I stopped at the wooden hoarding where the new addition to Perihelion was under construction. Between gaps in the security wall I could see a plain cinder-block building, huge external pressure tanks, pipes as thick as barrels plumbed through concrete embrasures. The ground was littered with yellow PTFE insulation and coiled copper tubing. A foreman in a white hard hat barked orders at men pushing wheelbarrows, men with safety goggles and steel-toed boots.

Men building an incubator for a new kind of life. This was where the replicators would be grown in cradles of liquid helium and prepped for their launch into the cold places of the universe: our heirs, in a sense, bound to live longer and travel farther than human beings ever would. Our final dialogue with the universe. Unless E.D. had his way and canceled the project entirely.

* * * * *

Molly and I took a beach walk that weekend.

It was a cloudless late-October Saturday. We had hiked a quarter mile of cigarette-stub-littered sand before the day got uncomfortably warm and the sun grew insistent, the ocean giving back the light in dazzling pinpoints, as if shoals of diamonds were swimming far offshore. Molly wore shorts and sandals and a white cotton T-shirt that had begun to stick to her body in alluring ways, a visor cap with the bill pulled down to shade her eyes.

"I never did understand this," she said, swiping her wrist across her forehead, turning back to face her own tracks in the sand.

"What's that, Moll?"

"The sun. I mean the sunlight. This light. It's fake, everybody says, but God, the heat: the heat is real."

"The sun's not fake exactly. The sun we see isn't the real sun, but this light would have originated there. It's managed by the Hypotheticals, the wavelengths stepped down and filtered—"

"I know, but I mean the way it rides the sky. Sunrise, sunset. If it's only a projection, how come it looks the same from Canada and South America? If the Spin barrier is only a few hundred miles up?"

I told her what Jason had once told me: the fake sun wasn't an illusion projected on a screen, it was a managed replica of sunlight passing through the screen from a source ninety million miles away, like a ray-trace program rendered on a colossal scale.

"Pretty fucking elaborate stage trick," Molly said.

"If they did it differently we'd all have died years ago. The planetary ecology needs a twenty-four-hour day." We had already lost a number of species that depended on moonlight to feed or mate.

"But it's a lie."

"If you want to call it that."

"A lie, I call it a lie. I'm standing here with the light of a lie on my face. A lie you can get skin cancer from. But I still don't understand it. I guess we won't, until we understand the Hypotheticals. If we ever do. Which I doubt."

You don't understand a lie, Molly said as we paralleled an ancient boardwalk gone white with salt, until you understand the motivation behind it. She said this glancing sidelong at me, eyes shadowed under her cap, sending me messages I couldn't decipher.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in my air-conditioned rental, reading, playing music, but Moll was restless and I hadn't quite come to terms with her raid on my computer, another indecipherable event. I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.

What worried me was that she remained deeply unpredictable, as Spin-bent as the rest of us. I couldn't buy her gifts: there were things she wanted, but unless she had vocally admired something in a shop window I couldn't guess what they were. She kept her deepest needs deeply obscure. Maybe, like most secretive people, she assumed I was keeping important secrets of my own.

We had just finished dinner and started cleaning up when the phone rang. Molly picked it up while I dried my hands. "Uh-huh," she said. "No, he's here. Just wait a second." She muted the phone and said, "It's Jason. Do you want to talk to him? He sounds all freaked out."

"Of course I'll talk to him."

I took the receiver and waited. Molly gave me a long look, then rolled her eyes and left the kitchen. Privacy. "Jase? What's up?"

"I need you here, Tyler." His voice was tense, constricted. "Now."

"Got a problem?"

"Yes, I have a fucking problem. And I need you to come fix it."

"It's that urgent?"

"Would I be calling you if it wasn't?"

"Where are you?"

"Home."

"Okay, listen, it'll take some time if the traffic's bad—"

"Just get here," he said.

So I told Molly I had some urgent work to catch up on. She smiled, or maybe sneered, and said, "What work is that? Somebody missed an appointment? Delivering a baby? What?"

"I'm a doctor, Moll. Professional privilege."

"Being a doctor doesn't mean you're Jason Lawton's lap-dog. You don't have to fetch every time he throws a stick."

"I'm sorry about cutting the evening short. Do you want me to give you a lift somewhere, or—?"

"No," she said. "I'll stay here until you're back." Staring at me defiantly, belligerently, almost wanting me to object.

But I couldn't argue. That would mean I didn't trust her. And I did trust her. Mostly. "I'm not sure how long I'll be."

"Doesn't matter. I'll curl up on the sofa and watch the tube. If that's okay with you?"

"As long as you're not bored."

"I promise I won't be bored."

* * * * *

Jason's barely furnished apartment was twenty miles up the highway, and on the way there I had to detour around a crime scene, a failed roadside attack on a bank truck that had killed a earful of Canadian tourists. Jase buzzed me into his building and when I knocked at his door he called out, "It's open."

The big front room was as spare as it ever had been, a parquet desert in which Jase had set up his Bedouin camp. He was lying on the sofa. The floor lamp next to the sofa put him in a hard, unflattering light. He was pale and his forehead was dotted with sweat. His eyes glittered.

"I thought you might not come," he said. "Thought maybe your hick girlfriend wouldn't let you out of the house."

I told him about the police detour. Then I said, "Do me a favor. Please don't talk about Molly that way."

"Please don't refer to her as an Idaho shitkicker with trailer-park sensibilities? Sure enough. Anything to oblige."