Robert Charles Wilson - SPIN

She was afraid he was dying. Her concern didn't extend to the rest of the world, however. Jason had told her not to worry about that. Things will be back to normal soon, he said.

And she had believed him. The red sun held no terrors for Carol. The nights were bad, though, she said. The nights took Jason like a bad dream.

* * * * *

I looked in on Diane first

Carol had put her in an upstairs bedroom—her room from the old days, done over as a generic guest bedroom. I found her physically stable and breathing without assistance, but there was nothing reassuring in that. It was part of the etiology of the disease. The tide advanced and the tide ebbed, but each cycle carried away more of her resilience and more of her strength.

I kissed her dry, hot forehead and told her to rest. She gave no sign of having heard me.

Then I went to see Jason. There was a question I needed to ask.

According to Carol, Jase had come back to the Big House because of some conflict at Perihelion. She couldn't remember his explanation, but it had something to do with Jason's father ("E.D. is behaving badly again," she said) and something to do with "that little black wrinkly man, the one who died. The Martian."

The Martian. Who had supplied the longevity drug that had made Jason a Fourth. The drug that should have protected him from whatever was killing him now.

* * * * *

He was awake when I knocked and entered his room, the same room he had occupied thirty years ago, when we were children in the compassed world of children and the stars were in their rightful places. Here was the rectangle of subtly brighter color where a poster of the solar system had once shaded the wall. Here was the carpet, long since steam-cleaned and chemically bleached, where we had once spilled Cokes and scattered crumbs on rainy days like this.

And here was Jason.

"That sounds like Tyler," he said.

He lay in bed, dressed—he insisted on dressing each morning, Carol had said—in clean khaki pants and a blue cotton shirt. His back was propped against the pillows and he seemed perfectly alert. I said, "Not much light in here, Jase."

"Open the blinds if you like."

I did, but it only admitted more of the sullen amber daylight. "You mind if I examine you?"

"Of course I don't mind."

He wasn't looking at me. He was looking, if the angle of his head meant anything, at a blank patch of wall.

"Carol says you've been having trouble with your vision."

"Carol is experiencing what people in your profession call denial. In fact I'm blind. I haven't been able to see anything at all since yesterday morning."

I sat on the bed next to him. When he turned his head toward me the motion was smooth but agonizingly slow. I took a penlight from my shirt pocket and flashed it into his right eye in order to watch the pupil contract.

It didn't.

It did something worse.

It glittered. The pupil of his eye glittered as if it had been injected with tiny diamonds.

Jason must have felt me jerk back.

"That bad?" he asked.

I couldn't speak.

He said, more somberly, "I can't use a mirror. Please, Ty. I need you to tell me what you see."

"This… I don't know what this is, Jason. This isn't something I can diagnose."

"Just describe it, please."

I tried to muster a clinical detachment. "It appears as if crystals of some kind have grown into your eye. The sclera looks normal and the iris doesn't seem to be affected, but the pupil is completely obscured by flakes of something like mica. I've never heard of anything like this. I would have said it was impossible. I can't treat it."

I backed away from the bed, found a chair and sat in it. For a while there was no sound but the ticking of the bedside clock, another of Carol's pristine antiques.

Then Jason draw a breath and forced what he seemed to imagine was a reassuring smile. "Thank you. You're right. It isn't a condition you can treat. But I'm still going to need your help during—well, during the next couple of days. Carol tries, but she's way out of her depth."

"So am I."

More rain beat at the window. "The help I need isn't entirely medical."

"If you have an explanation for this—"

"A partial one, at best."

"Then please share it with me, Jase, because I'm getting a little scared here."

He cocked his head, listening to some sound I hadn't heard or couldn't hear, until I began to wonder whether he had forgotten me. Then he said, "The short version is that my nervous system has been overtaken by something beyond my control. The condition of my eyes is just an external manifestation of it."

"A disease?"

"No, but that's the effect it's having."

"Is this condition contagious?"

"On the contrary. I believe it's unique. A disease only I can develop—on this planet, at least."

"Then it has something to do with the longevity treatment."

"In a way it does. But I—"

"No, Jase, I need an answer to that before you say anything else. Is your condition—whatever it is—a direct result of the drug I administered?"

"Not a direct result, no… you're not at fault in any way, if that's what you mean."

"Right now I couldn't care less who's at fault. Diane is sick. Didn't Carol tell you?"

"Carol said something about flu—"

"Carol lied. It's not flu. It's late-stage CVWS. I drove two thousand miles through what looks like the end of the world because she's dying, Jase, and there's only one cure I can think of, and you just threw that into doubt."

He rolled his head again, perhaps involuntarily, as if he were trying to shake off some invisible distraction.

But before I could prompt him he said, "There are aspects of Martian life Wun never shared with you. E.D. suspected as much, and to a certain extent his suspicions were well founded. Mars has been doing sophisticated biotechnology for centuries. Centuries ago, the Fourth Age was exactly what Wun told you it was—a longevity treatment and a social institution. But it's evolved since then. For Wun's generation the Fourth was more like a platform, a biological operating system capable of running much more sophisticated software applications. There isn't just a four, there's a 4.1, 4.2—if you see what I mean."

"What I gave you—"

"What you gave me was the traditional treatment. A basic four."

"But?"

"But… I've supplemented it since."

"This supplement was also something Wun transported from Mars?"

"Yes. The purpose—"

"Never mind the purpose. Are you absolutely certain you're not suffering from the effects of the original treatment?"

"As certain as I can be."

I stood up.

Jason heard me moving toward the door. "I can explain," he said. "And I still need your help. By all means take care of her, Ty. I hope she lives. But keep in mind… my time is also limited."

* * * * *

The case of Martian pharmaceuticals was where I had left it, unmolested, behind the broken wallboard in the basement of my mother's house, and when I had retrieved it I carried it across the lawn through the gusting amber rain to the Big House.

Carol was in Diane's room administering sips of oxygen by mask.

"We need to use that sparingly," I said, "unless you can conjure up another cylinder."

"Her lips were a little blue."

"Let me see."

Carol moved away from her daughter. I closed the valve and set the mask aside. You have to be careful with oxygen. It's indispensable for a patient in respiratory distress, but it can also cause problems. Too much can rupture the air sacs in the lung. My fear was that as Diane's condition worsened she would need higher doses to keep her blood levels up, the kind of oxygen therapy generally delivered by mechanical ventilation. We didn't have a ventilator.