Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “It was when St. Augustine died.”

  St. Augustine was a lively black-and-white pedigreed springer spaniel who had been Diane’s particular pet. “St. Dog,” she had called him.

  She winced. “That’s just macabre.”

  But I was serious. E. D. Lawton had bought the dog impulsively, probably because he wanted something to decorate the hearth at the Big House, like a pair of antique andirons. But St. Dog had resisted his fate. St. Dog was decorative enough, but he was also inquisitive and full of mischief. In time E.D. came to despise him; Carol Lawton ignored him; Jason was fondly bemused by him. It was Diane, who had been twelve, who bonded with him. They brought out the best in each other. For six months St. Dog had followed her everywhere except the school bus. The two of them played together on the big lawn summer evenings, and that was when I first noticed Diane in a particular way—the first time I took pleasure in simply watching her. She would run with St. Dog until she was exhausted, and St. Dog was always patient while she got her breath back. She was attentive to the animal in ways none of the other Lawtons even tried to be—she was sensitive to his moods, as St. Augustine was to hers.

  I couldn’t have said why I liked this about her. But in the uneasy, emotionally charged world of the Lawtons it was an oasis of uncomplicated affection. If I’d been a dog, I might have been jealous. Instead it impressed on me that Diane was special, different from her family in important ways. She met the world with an emotional openness the other Lawtons had lost or never learned.

  St. Augustine died suddenly and prematurely—he was still hardly more than a pup—that autumn. Diane was grief-stricken, and I realized I was in love with her….

  No, that does sound macabre. I didn’t fall in love with her because she mourned her dog. I fell in love with her because she was capable of mourning her dog, when everyone else seemed either indifferent or secretly relieved that St. Augustine was finally out of the house.

  She looked away from the bed, toward the sunny window. “I was heart-broken when that animal died.”

  We had buried St. Dog in the wooded tract beyond the lawn. Diane made a little mound of stones as a monument, and she built it up again every spring until she left home ten years later.

  She also prayed over the marker at every change of the seasons, silently, hands folded. Praying to whom, or for what, I don’t know. I don’t know what people do when they pray. I don’t think I’m capable of it.

  But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them.

  The fever came again that night. I remember nothing of it apart from a recurring dread (it came at hourly intervals) that the drug had blanked more memory than I would ever recover, a sense of irretrievable loss akin to those dreams in which one searches futilely for the missing wallet, watch, prized possession, or sense of self. I imagined I felt the Martian drug working in my body, making fresh assaults and negotiating temporary truces with my immune system, establishing cellular beachheads, sequestering hostile chromosomal sequences.

  When I came to myself again Diane was absent. Insulated from the pain by the morphine she had given me, I got out of bed and managed to use the bathroom, then shuffled out onto the balcony.

  Dinner hour. The sun was up but the sky had turned a duskier blue. The air smelled of coconut milk and diesel fumes. The Archway glimmered in the west like frozen quicksilver.

  I found myself wanting to write again, the urge coming on like an echo of the fever. I carried with me the notebook I had half filled with barely decipherable scribbling. I’d have to ask Diane to buy me another one. Maybe a couple more. Which I would then fill with words.

  Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm.

  Rumors of Apocalypse Reach the Berkshires

  I didn’t see Jason for several years after the sledding party, though I kept in touch. We met again the year I graduated from med school, at a summer rental in the Berkshires about twenty minutes from Tanglewood.

  I had been busy. I had done four years of college plus volunteer time at a local clinic and had started prepping for the MCAT a couple of years ahead of writing it. My GPA, the MCAT results, and a sheaf of recommendation letters from undergraduate advisors and other venerable worthies (plus E.D.’s largesse) had bought me admission to the SUNY medical campus at Stony Brook for another four years. That was done, behind me, finished, but I was still looking at at least three more years of residency before I was ready to practice.

  Which put me among the majority of people who continued to conduct their lives as if the end of the world had not been announced.

  It might have been different if doomsday had been calculated down to the day and hour. We all could have chosen our motifs, from panic to saintly resignation, and played out human history with a decent sense of timing and an eye on the clock.

  But what we were facing was merely the strong likelihood of eventual extinction, in a solar system rapidly becoming unfit for life. Probably nothing could protect us indefinitely from the expanding sun we had all seen in NASA images captured from orbital probes…but we were shielded from it for now, for reasons no one understood. The crisis, if there was a crisis, was intangible; the only evidence available to the senses was the absence of the stars—absence as evidence, evidence of absence.

  So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction? The question defined our generation. It was easy enough for Jason, it seemed. He had thrown himself into the problem headlong: the Spin was rapidly becoming his life. And it was, I suppose, relatively easy for me. I had been leaning toward medicine anyway, and it seemed like an even wiser choice in the current atmosphere of simmering crisis. Maybe I imagined myself saving lives, should the end of the world prove to be more than hypothetical and less than instantaneous. Did that matter, if we were all doomed? Why save a life if all human life was due to be snuffed out? But physicians don’t really save lives, of course, we prolong them; and failing that, we provide palliative care and relief from pain. Which might prove to be the most useful skill of all.

  On top of that, college and med school had been one long, relentless, grueling, but welcome, distraction from the rest of the world’s woes.

  So I coped. Jason coped. But many people had a much rougher time. Diane was one of them.

  I was cleaning out my one-bedroom rental at Stony Brook when Jason called.

  It was early in the afternoon. The optical illusion indistinguishable from the sun was shining brightly. My Hyundai was packed and ready for the drive home. I had planned to spend a couple of weeks with my mother, then drive across country in a lazy week or two. This was my last free time before I started interning at Harborview in Seattle, and I intended to use it to see the world, or at least the part of it bracketed between Maine and the state of Washington. But Jason had other ideas. He barely let me get out a hello-how-are-you before he launched into his pitch.

  “Tyler,” he said, “this is too good to pass up. E.D. rented a summerhouse in the Berkshires.”

  “Did he? Good for him.”

  “But he can’t use it. Last week he was touring an aluminum extrusion plant in Michigan and he fell off a loading platform and cracked his hip.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s not serious, he’s recovering, but he’s on crutches for a while and he doesn’t want to ferry himself all the way to Massachusetts just so he can sit around and suck Percodan. And Carol wasn’t that enthusiastic about the idea to begin with.” Not surprisingly. Carol had become a career drunk. I couldn’t imagine what she would have done in the Berkshires with E. D. Lawton, except drink some more. “The thing is,” Jase went on, “he can’t back out of the contract, so the house is empty for three months. So I thought, with you finishing med school and all, maybe we could get together for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe talk Diane into joining us. Take in a
concert. Walk in the woods. Be like old times. I’m headed there now, actually. What do you say, Tyler?”

  I was about to turn him down. But I thought about Diane. I thought about the few letters and phone calls we had exchanged on the predictable occasions and all the unanswered questions that had stacked up between us. I knew the wise thing would be to beg off. But it was too late: my mouth had already said yes.

  So I spent another night on Long Island; then I crammed the last of my worldly possessions into the trunk of the car and followed the Northern State Parkway to the Long Island Expressway.

  Traffic was light and the weather was ridiculously pretty. It was a tall blue afternoon, just pleasantly warm. I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second. I felt as stupidly, corporeally happy as I’d been in a long time.

  Then I turned on the radio.

  I was old enough to remember when a “radio station” was a building with a transmitter and a tower antenna, when radio reception flooded and ebbed from town to town. Plenty of those stations still existed, but the Hyundai’s analog radio had died about a week out of warranty. Which left digital programming (relayed through one or more of E.D.’s high-atmosphere aerostats). Usually I listened to twentieth-century jazz downloads, a taste I’d picked up rummaging through my father’s disc collection. This, I liked to pretend, was his real legacy to me: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, music that had been old even when Marcus Dupree was young, passed down surreptitiously, like a family secret. What I wanted to hear right now was “Harlem Air Shaft,” but the guy who serviced the car before the trip had dumped my presets and programmed a news channel I couldn’t seem to lose. So I was stuck with natural disasters and celebrity misbehavior. There was even talk of the Spin.

  We had begun calling it the Spin by then.

  Even though most of the world didn’t believe in it.

  The polls were pretty clear about that. NASA had released data from their orbital probes the night Jason broke the news to Diane and me, and a flurry of European launches confirmed the American results. But still, eight years after the Spin had been made public, only a minority of Europeans and North Americans considered it “a threat to themselves or their families.” In much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, sturdy majorities considered the whole thing a U.S. plot or accident, probably a failed attempt to create some kind of SDI defense system.

  I had once asked Jason why this was. He said, “Consider what we’re asking them to believe. We’re talking about, globally, a population with an almost pre-Newtonian grasp of astronomy. How much do you really need to know about the moon and the stars when your life consists of scrounging enough biomass to feed yourself and your family? To say anything meaningful about the Spin to those people you have to start a long way back. The Earth, you have to tell them, is a few billion years old, to begin with. Let them wrestle with the concept of ‘a billion years,’ maybe for the first time. It’s a lot to swallow, especially if you’ve been educated in a Moslem theocracy, an animist village, or a public school in the Bible Belt. Then tell them the Earth isn’t changeless, that there was an era longer than our own when the oceans were steam and the air was poison. Tell them how living things arose spontaneously and evolved sporadically for three billion years before they produced the first arguably human being. Then talk about the sun, how the sun isn’t permanent either but started out as a contracting cloud of gas and dust and will one day, some few more billion years from now, expand and swallow the Earth and eventually blow off its own outer layers and shrink to a nugget of superdense matter. Cosmology 101, right? You picked it up from all those paperbacks you used to read, it’s second nature to you, but for most people it’s a whole new worldview and probably offensive to a bunch of their core beliefs. So let that sink in. Let that sink in, then deliver the real bad news. Time itself is fluid and unpredictable. The world that looks so ruggedly normal—in spite of everything we just learned—has recently been locked up in a kind of cosmological cold storage. Why has this been done to us? We don’t exactly know. We think it’s caused by the deliberate action of entities so powerful and inaccessible they might as well be called gods. And if we anger the gods they might withdraw their protection, and pretty soon the mountains will melt and the oceans will boil. But don’t take our word for it. Ignore the sunset and the snow that comes to the mountain every winter same as always. We have proof. We have calculations and logical inferences and photographs taken by machines. Forensic evidence of the highest caliber.” Jason had smiled one of his quizzical, sad smiles. “Strangely, the jury is unconvinced.”

  And it wasn’t only the ignorant who weren’t convinced. On the radio, an insurance industry CEO began to complain about the economic impact of “all this relentless, uncritical discussion of the so-called Spin.” People were starting to take it seriously, he said. And that was bad for business. It made people reckless. It encouraged immorality, crime, and deficit spending. Worse, it screwed up the actuary tables. “If the world doesn’t come to an end in the next thirty or forty years,” he said, “we may be facing disaster.”

  Clouds began to roll in from the west. An hour later that gorgeous blue sky was flatly overcast and raindrops began spattering the windshield. I put the headlights on.

  The news on the radio progressed from actuary tables. There was much talk of something else from recent headlines: the silver boxes, big as cities, hovering outside the Spin barrier, hundreds of miles above both poles of the Earth. Hovering, not orbiting. An object can hang in a stable orbit over the equator—geosynchronous satellites used to do that—but nothing, by the most elementary laws of motion, can “orbit” in a fixed position above the planet’s pole. And yet here these things were, detected by a radar probe and lately photographed from an unmanned fly-by mission: another layer of the mystery of the Spin, and just as incomprehensible to the untutored masses, in this case including me. I wanted to talk to Jason about it. I think I wanted him to make sense of it for me.

  It was raining full-out, thunder rumbling through the hills, when I finally pulled up at E. D. Lawton’s short-term rental outside Stockbridge.

  The property was a four-bedroom English country–style cottage, the siding painted arsenic green, set into a hundred acres of preserved woodland. It glowed in the dusk like a storm lantern. Jason was already here, his white Ferrari parked under a dripping breezeway.

  He must have heard me pull up: he opened the big front door before I knocked. “Tyler!” he said, grinning.

  I came inside and set my single rain-dampened suitcase on the tiled floor of the foyer. “Been a while,” I said.

  We had kept in touch by e-mail and phone, but apart from a couple of brief holiday appearances at the Big House this was the first time we’d been in the same room in nearly eight years. I suppose the time showed on both of us, a subtle inventory of changes. I had forgotten how formidable he looked. He had always been tall, always at ease in his body; he still was, though he seemed skinnier, not delicate but delicately balanced, like a broomstick standing on end. His hair was a uniform layer of stubble about a quarter-inch long. And although he drove a Ferrari he remained unconscious of personal style: he wore tattered jeans, a baggy knit sweater pocked with balls of unraveling thread, discount sneakers.

  “You ate on the way down?” he asked.

  “Late lunch.”

  “Hungry?”

  I wasn’t, but I admitted I was craving a cup of coffee. Med school had made a caffeine addict of me. “You’re in luck,” Jason said. “I bought a pound of Guatemalan on the way here.” The Guatemalans, indifferent to the end of the world, were still harvesting coffee. “I’ll put on a pot. Show you around while it’s brewing.”

  We trekked through the house. There was a twentieth-century fussiness about it, walls painted apple green or harvest orange, sturdy barn-sale antique furniture and brass bed frames, lace curtains over warped window glass down which the rain streamed relentlessly. Modern amenities in t
he kitchen and living room, big TV, music station, Internet link. Cozy in the rain. Downstairs again, Jason poured coffee. We sat at the kitchen table and tried to catch up.

  Jase was vague about his work, out of modesty or for security reasons. In the eight years since the revelation of the true nature of the Spin he had earned himself a doctorate in astrophysics and then walked away from it to take a junior position in E.D.’s Perihelion Foundation. Perhaps not a bad move, now that E.D. was a ranking member of President Walker’s Select Committee on Global and Environmental Crisis Planning. According to Jase, Perihelion was about to be transformed from an aerospace think tank into an official advisory body, with real authority to shape policy.

  I said, “Is that legal?”

  “Don’t be naive, Tyler. E.D.’s already distanced himself from Lawton Industries. He resigned from the board and his shares are being administered by a blind trust. According to our lawyers he’s conflict-free.”

  “So what do you at Perihelion?”

  He smiled. “I listen attentively to my elders,” he said, “and I make polite suggestions. Tell me about med school.”

  He asked whether I found it distasteful to see so much of human weakness and disease. So I told him about my second-year anatomy class. Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility. But it was also a marker, a passage. Beyond this point there was nothing left of childhood.

  “Jesus, Tyler. You want something stronger than coffee?”

  “I’m not saying it was a big deal. That’s what’s shocking about it. It wasn’t a big deal. You walk away from it and you go to a movie.”

  “Long way from the Big House, though.”