Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

Teluk Bayur didn't close down at night. The loading and unloading went on twenty-four hours a day. We couldn't see it but we could hear it, the sound of heavy motors and stressed metal and the periodic thunder of multiton cargo containers in transit. "I've slept through worse," I said.

"I doubt that," Ina said, "but it's kind of you to say."

Neither of us slept for hours. Instead we sat close to the glow of the desk lamp and talked sporadically. Ina asked about Jason.

I had let her read some of the long passages I'd written during my illness. Jason's transition to Fourth, she said, sounded as if it had been less difficult than mine. No, I said. I had simply neglected to include the bedpan details.

"But about his memory? There was no loss? He was unconcerned?"

"He didn't talk much about it. I'm sure he was concerned." In fact he had come swimming out of one of his recurrent fevers to demand that I document his life for him: "Write it down for me, Ty," he had said. "Write it down in case I forget."

"But no graphomania of his own."

"No. Graphomania happens when the brain starts to rewire its own verbal faculties. It's only one possible symptom. The sounds he made were probably his own manifestation of it."

"You learned that from Wun Ngo Wen."

"Yes, or from his medical archives, which I had studied later."

Ina was still fascinated with Wun Ngo Wen. "That warning to the United Nations, about overpopulation and resource depletion, did Wun ever discuss that with you? I mean, in the time before—"

"I know. Yes, he did, a little."

"What did he tell you?"

This was during one of our conversations about the ultimate aim of the Hypotheticals. Wun had drawn me a diagram, which I reproduced for Ina on the dusty parquet floor: a horizontal and vertical line defining a graph. The vertical line was population, the horizontal line was time. A jaggedy trend line crossed the graph space more or less horizontally.

"Population by time," Ina said. "I understand that much, but what exactly are we measuring?"

"Any animal population in a relatively stable ecosystem. Could be foxes in Alaska or howler monkeys in Belize. The population fluctuates with external factors, like a cold winter or an increase in predators, but it's stable at least over the short term."

But then, Wun had said, what happens if we look at an intelligent, tool-using species over a longer term? I drew Ina the same graph as before, except this time the trend line curved steadily toward the vertical.

"What's happening here," I said, "is that the population— we can just say 'people'—people are learning to pool their skills. Not just how to knap a flint but how to teach other people to knap flints and how to divide labor economically. Collaboration makes more food. Population grows. More people collaborate more efficiently and generate new skills. Agriculture. Animal husbandry. Reading and writing, which means skills can be shared more efficiently among living people and even inherited from generations long dead."

"So the curve rises ever more steeply," Ina said, "until we are all drowning in ourselves."

"Ah, but it doesn't. There are other forces that work to pull the curve to the right. Increasing prosperity and technological savvy actually work in our favor. Well-fed, secure people tend to want to limit their own reproduction. Technology and a flexible culture give them the means. Ultimately, or so Wun said, the curve will tend back toward flat."

Ibu Ina looked confused. "So there is no problem? No starvation, no overpopulation?"

"Unfortunately, the line for the population of Earth is still a long way from horizontal. And we're running into limiting conditions."

"Limiting conditions?"

One more diagram. This one showed a trend line like an italic letter S, level at the top. Over this I marked two parallel horizontal lines: one well above the trend line, marked "A," and one crossing it at the upcurve, marked "B."

"What are these lines?" Ina asked.

"They're both planetary sustainability. The amount of arable land available for agriculture, fuel and raw materials to sustain technology, clean air and water. The diagram shows the difference between a successful intelligent species and an unsuccessful one. A species that peaks under the limit has the potential for long-term survival. A successful species can go on to do all those things futurists used to dream about—expand into the solar system or even the galaxy, manipulate time and space."

"How grand," Ina said.

"Don't knock it. The alternative is worse. A species that runs into sustainability limits before it stabilizes its population is probably doomed. Massive starvation, failed technology, and a planet so depleted from the first bloom of civilization that it lacks the means to rebuild."

"I see." She shivered. "So which are we? Case A or Case B? Did Wun tell you that?"

"All he could say for sure was that both planets, Earth and Mars, were starting to run into the limits. And that the Hypotheticals intervened before it could happen."

"But why did they intervene? What do they expect from us?"

It was a question for which Wun's people didn't have an answer. Nor did we.

No, that wasn't quite true. Jason Lawton had found a sort of an answer.

But I wasn't ready to talk about that yet.

* * * * *

Ina yawned, and I brushed away the marks on the dusty floor. She switched off the desk light. The scattered maintenance lamps cast an exhausted glow. Outside the warehouse there was a sound like the striking of an enormous, muted bell every five or so seconds.

"Tick tock," Ina said, arranging herself on her mattress of mildewy cardboard. "I remember when clocks ticked, Tyler. Do you? The old-fashioned clocks?"

"There was one in my mother's kitchen."

"There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It's hard to live in all those kinds of time. Easy to forget that you live in all of them."

The metronomic clanging went on.

"You sound like a Fourth," I said.

In the dim light I could just make out her weary smile.

"I think one lifetime is enough for me," she said.

* * * * *

In the morning we woke to the sound of an accordion door rolled back to its stops, a burst of light, Jala calling for us.

I hurried down the stairs. Jala was already halfway across the warehouse floor and Diane was behind him, walking slowly.

I came closer and said her name.

She tried to smile, but her teeth were clenched and her face was unnaturally pale. By then I had seen that she was holding a wadded cloth against her body above her hip, and that both the cloth and her cotton blouse were vivid red with the blood that had leaked through.

DESPERATE EUPHORIA

Eight months after Wun Ngo Wen's address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, the hypercold cultivation tanks at Perihelion began to yield payload quantities of Martian replicators, and at Canaveral and Vandenberg fleets of Delta sevens were prepped to deliver them into orbit. It was about this time that Wun developed an urge to see the Grand Canyon. What sparked his interest was a year-old copy of Arizona Highways one of the biology wonks happened to leave in his quarters.

He showed it to me a couple of days later. "Look at this," he said, almost trembling with eagerness, folding back the pages of a photo feature on the restoration of Bright Angel trail. The Colorado River cutting pre-Cambrian sandstone into green pools. A tourist from Dubai riding a mule. "Have you heard of this, Tyler?"

"Have I heard of the Grand Canyon? Yes. I think most people have."

"It's astonishing. Very beautiful."