Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  But by midsummer we were seeing strong spectrographic evidence of biological activity. There was more water vapor in a denser atmosphere, more methane and ethane and ozone, even a tiny but detectable increase in free nitrogen.

  By Christmas these changes, while still subtle, had so dramatically out-paced what could be attributed to solar warming that no doubt remained. Mars had become a living planet.

  The launch platforms were readied once more, new cargos of microbial life cultured and packaged. In the United States that year, fully two percent of the gross domestic product was devoted to Spin-related aerospace work—essentially, the Mars program—and the ratio was similar in other industrialized countries.

  Jason suffered a relapse in February. He woke up unable to focus his eyes. His neurologist adjusted his medication and prescribed an eye patch as a temporary fix. Jase recovered rapidly but was away from work for most of a week.

  Diane was as good as her word. She began to call me at least monthly, usually more often, often late at night when Simon was asleep at the other end of their small apartment. They lived in a few rooms over a secondhand bookstore in Tempe, the best they could do on Diane’s salary and the irregular income Simon took home from Jordan Tabernacle. In warm weather I could hear the drone of a swamp cooler in the background; in winter, a radio playing softly to disguise the sound of her voice.

  I invited her to come back to Florida for the next series of launches, but of course she couldn’t: she was busy with work, they were having church friends to dinner that weekend, Simon wouldn’t understand. “Simon’s going through a minor spiritual crisis. He’s trying to deal with the Messiah issue….”

  “There’s a Messiah issue?”

  “You should read the newspapers,” Diane said, possibly overestimating how often these religious debates made the mainstream press, at least in Florida; maybe it was different out west. “The old NK movement believed in a Christless Parousia. That was what made us distinctive.” That, I thought, and their penchant for public nudity. “The early writers, Ratel and Greengage, saw the Spin as a direct fulfillment of scriptural prophecy—which meant the prophecy itself was redefined, reconfigured by historical events. There didn’t have to be a literal Tribulation or even a physical Second Coming of Christ. All that stuff in Thessalonians and Corinthians and Revelation could be reinterpreted or ignored, because the Spin was a genuine intervention by God in human history—a tangible miracle, which supersedes scripture. That was what freed us to make the Kingdom on Earth. Suddenly we were responsible for our own chiliasm.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.” Actually she had lost me somewhere around the word “Parousia.”

  “It means—well, all that really matters is that Jordan Tabernacle, our little church, has officially renounced all NK doctrine, even though half the congregation is old NK people like me and Simon. So suddenly there are all these arguments about the Tribulation and how the Spin tallies against Biblical prophecy. People taking sides. Bereans versus Progressives, Covenanters versus Preterists. Is there an Antichrist, and if so, where is he? Does the Rapture happen before the Tribulation or during or after? Issues like that. Maybe it sounds picayune, but the spiritual stakes are very high, and the people having these arguments are people we care about, our friends.”

  “Where do you stand?”

  “Me personally?” She was quiet, and there it was again, the sound of the radio murmuring behind her, some Valium-voiced announcer delivering late-night news to insomniacs. Latest on the shooting in Mesa. Parousia or no Parousia. “You could say I’m conflicted. I don’t know what I believe. Sometimes I miss the old days. Making up paradise as we went along. It seems like—”

  She paused. Now there was another voice doubling the staticky murmur of the radio: Diane? Are you still up?

  “Sorry,” she whispered. Simon on patrol. It was time to cut short our telephone tryst, her act of touchless infidelity. “Talk to you soon.”

  She was gone before I could say good-bye.

  The second series of seed launches went off as flawlessly as the first. The media mobbed Canaveral again, but I watched this round on a big digital projection in the auditorium at Perihelion, a sunshine launch that scattered herons into the sky over Merritt Island like bright confetti.

  Followed by another summer of waiting. ESA lofted a series of next-generation orbital telescopes and interferometers, and the stored data they retrieved was even sleeker and cleaner than last year’s. By September every office at Perihelion was plastered with high-res images of our success. I framed one for the infirmary waiting room. It was a color-composite rendering of Mars showing Olympus Mons outlined in frost or ice and scarred with fresh drainage channels, fog flowing like water through Valles Marineris, green capillaries snaking over Solis Lacus. The southern highlands of the Terra Sirenum were still deserts, but the region’s impact craters had eroded to near-invisibility under a wetter, windier climate.

  The oxygen content of the atmosphere rose and fell for a few months as the population of aerobic organisms oscillated, but by December it had topped twenty millibars and stabilized. Out of a potentially chaotic mix of increasing greenhouse gases, an unstable hydrologic cycle, and novel biogeochemical feedback loops, Mars was discovering its own equilibrium.

  The string of successes was good for Jason. He remained in remission and was happily, almost therapeutically, busy. If anything dismayed him it was his own emergence as the iconic genius of the Perihelion Foundation, or at least its scientific celebrity, poster child for the transformation of Mars. This was more E.D.’s doing than Jason’s: E.D. knew the public wanted Perihelion to have a human face, preferably young, smart but not intimidating, and he had been pushing Jase in front of cameras since the days when Perihelion was an aerospace lobby group. Jase put up with it—he was a good and patient explainer, and reasonably photogenic—but he hated the process and would leave a room rather than see himself on television.

  That was the year of the first unmanned NEP flights, which Jase watched with particular attention. These were the vehicles that would transport human beings to Mars, and unlike the comparatively simple seed carriers, the NEP vehicles were new technology. NEP stood for “nuclear electric propulsion”: miniature nuclear reactors feeding ion engines vastly more powerful than the ones that drove the seed vessels, powerful enough to enable massive payloads. But getting these leviathans into orbit required boosters as large as anything NASA had ever launched, acts of what Jason called “heroic engineering,” heroically expensive. The price tag had begun to raise red flags even in a largely supportive Congress, but the stream of notable successes kept a lid on dissent. Jason worried that even a single conspicuous failure would shift that equation.

  Shortly after New Year’s Day a NEP test vehicle failed to return its reentry package of test data and was presumed disabled in orbit. There were finger-pointing speeches on Capitol Hill led by a coterie of fiscal ultraconservatives representing states without significant aerospace investment, but E.D.’s friends in Congress overrode the objections and a successful test a week later buried the controversy. Still, Jason said, we had dodged a bullet.

  Diane had followed the debate but considered it trivial. “What Jase needs to worry about,” she said, “is what this Mars thing is doing to the world. So far it’s all good press, right? Everybody’s gung-ho, we all want something to reassure us about the—I’m not sure what to call it—the potency of the human race. But the euphoria will wear off sooner or later, and in the meantime people are getting extremely savvy about the nature of the Spin.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “If the Mars project fails or doesn’t live up to expectations, yeah. Not just because people will be disappointed. They’ve watched the transformation of an entire planet—they have a yardstick to measure the Spin by. The sheer insane power of it, I mean. The Spin’s not just some abstract phenomenon—you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong
you steal that courage away again, and now it’s worse because they’ve seen the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they’ve ever been.”

  I quoted the Housman poem she had taught me long ago: The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear.

  “The infant child is starting to figure it out,” she said. “Maybe that’s how you define the Tribulation.”

  Maybe so. Some nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I thought about the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they were. There was really only one salient, obvious fact about them: not simply that they were capable of enclosing the Earth in this…strange membrane, but that they had been out there—owning us, regulating our planet and the passage of time—for almost two billion years.

  Nothing even remotely human could be so patient.

  Jason’s neurologist tipped me off to a JAMA study published that winter. Researchers at Cornell had discovered a genetic marker for acute drug-resistant MS. The neurologist—a genial, fat Floridian named David Malmstein—had run Jason’s DNA profile and found the suspect sequence in it. I asked him what that meant.

  “It means we can tailor his medication a little more specifically. It also means we can never deliver the kind of permanent remission a typical MS patient expects.”

  “Seems like he’s been in remission for most of a year now. Isn’t that long-term?”

  “His symptoms are under control, that’s all. The AMS goes on burning, sort of like a fire in a coal seam. The time will come when we can’t compensate for it.”

  “The point of no return.”

  “You could say.”

  “How long can he pass for normal?”

  Malmstein paused. “You know,” he said, “that’s exactly what Jason asked me.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I’m not a fortune-teller. That AMS is a disease without a well-established etiology. That the human body has its own calendar.”

  “I’m guessing he didn’t like the answer.”

  “He was vocal in his disapproval. But it’s true. He could walk around for the next decade asymptomatic. Or he could be in a wheelchair by the end of the week.”

  “You told him that?”

  “A kindler, gentler version. I don’t want him to lose hope. He has a fighting spirit, and that counts for a lot. My honest opinion is that he’ll do all right over the short term—two years, five years, maybe more. Then all bets are off. I wish I had a better prognosis.”

  I didn’t tell Jase I’d talked to Malmstein, but I saw the way, in the following weeks, he redoubled his work, counting his successes against time and mortality, not the world’s but his own.

  The pace of the launches, not to mention the cost of them, began to escalate. The last wave of seed launches (the only one to carry, in part, actual seeds) happened in March, two years after Jase and Diane and I had watched a dozen similar rockets depart Florida for what had been at the time a barren planet.

  The Spin had given us the necessary leverage for a long ecopoiesis. Now that we had launched the seeds of complex plants, however, timing became crucial. If we waited too long Mars could evolve out of our grasp: a species of edible grain after a million years evolving in the wild might not resemble its ancestral form, might have grown unpalatable or even poisonous.

  This meant the survey satellites had to be launched only weeks after the seed armada, and the manned NEP vessels, if the results looked promising, immediately after that.

  I took another late-night call from Diane the night after the survey sats went up. (Their data packages had been retrieved within hours but were still en route to JPL in Pasadena to be analyzed.) She sounded stressed and admitted when I questioned her that she had been laid off at least until June. She and Simon had run into trouble with their back rent. She couldn’t ask E.D. for money, and Carol was impossible to talk to. She was working up the nerve to speak to Jase, but she didn’t relish the humiliation.

  “What kind of money are we talking about, Diane?”

  “Tyler, I didn’t mean—”

  “I know. You didn’t ask. I’m offering.”

  “Well…this month, even five hundred dollars would make a real difference.”

  “I guess the pipe cleaner fortune ran dry.”

  “Simon’s trust fund ran out. There’s still family money, but his family’s not talking to him.”

  “He won’t catch on if I send you a check?”

  “He wouldn’t like it. I thought I’d tell him I found an old insurance policy and cashed it in. Something like that. The kind of lie that doesn’t really count as a sin. I hope.”

  “You guys are still at the Collier Street address?” Where I mailed a politely neutral Christmas card every year and from which I received one in return, generic snow scenes signed Simon and Diane Townsend, God Bless!

  “Yes,” she said, then, “Thank you, Tyler. Thank you so much. You know this is incredibly mortifying.”

  “Hard times for a lot of folks.”

  “You’re doing all right, though?”

  “Yeah, I’m doing all right.”

  I sent her six checks each postdated for the fifteenth of the month, half a year’s worth, not sure whether this would cement our friendship or poison it. Or whether it mattered.

  The survey data revealed a world still drier than the Earth but marked with lakes like polished turquoise inlaid on a copper disk; a planet gently swirled with bands of cloud, storms dropping rainfall on the windward slopes of ancient volcanos and feeding river basins and silty lowland deltas green as suburban lawns.

  The big boosters were fueled on their pads, and at launch facilities and cosmodromes around the world nearly eight hundred human beings climbed gantries to lock themselves into cupboard-sized chambers and confront a destiny that was anything but certain. The NEP arks enclosed atop these boosters contained (in addition to astronauts) embryonic sheep, cattle, horses, pigs, and goats, and the steel wombs from which they could, with luck, be decanted; the seeds of ten thousand plants; the larvae of bees and other useful insects; dozens of similar biological cargos which might or might not survive the journey and the rigors of regenesis; condensed archives of essential human knowledge both digital (including the means to read them) and densely printed; and parts and supplies for simple shelters, solar power generators, greenhouses, water purifiers, and elementary field hospitals. In a best-case scenario all these human expeditionary vessels would arrive at roughly the same equatorial lowlands within a span of several years depending on their transit of the Spin membrane. At worst, even a single ship, if it arrived reasonably intact, could support its crew through a period of acclimation.

  Once more into the Perihelion auditorium, then, along with everyone who hadn’t gone up the coast to see the event in person. I sat up front next to Jason and we craned our heads at the video feed from NASA, a spectacular long shot of the offshore launch platforms, steel islands linked by immense rail bridges, ten huge Prometheus boosters (called “Prometheus” when they were manufactured by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the Russians, the Chinese, and the EU used the same template but named and painted them differently) bathed in spotlights and ranked like whitewashed fenceposts far into the blue Atlantic. Much had been sacrificed for this moment: taxes and treasure, shorelines and coral reefs, careers and lives. (At the foot of each gantry off Canaveral was an engraved plaque bearing the names of the fifteen construction workers who had died during the assembly work.) Jason tapped his foot in a violent rhythm while the countdown drained into its last minute, and I wondered if this was symptomatic, but he caught me looking and leaned into my ear and said, “I’m just nervous. Aren’t you?”

  There had already been problems. Worldwide, eighty of these big boosters had been assembled and prepared for tonight’s synchronized launch. But they were a new design, not entirely debugged. Four had been scrubbed before launch for technical problems. Three were currently holding in their counts—in a lau
nch that was supposed to be synchronized worldwide—for the usual reasons: dicey fuel lines, software glitches. This was inevitable and had been accounted for in the planning, but it still seemed ominous.

  So much had to happen so quickly. What we were transplanting this time was not biology but human history, and human history, Jase had said, burned like a fire compared to the slow rust of evolution. (When we were much younger, after the Spin but before he left the Big House, Jase used to have a parlor trick to demonstrate this idea. “Stick out your arms,” he’d say, “straight out at your sides,” and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he’d say, “Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that’s the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That’s the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we’re newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist.”)

  Then the NASA voice announced, “Ignition,” and Jason sucked air between his teeth and turned his head half away as nine of ten boosters, hollow tubes of explosive liquid taller than the Empire State Building, detonated skyward against all logic of gravity and inertia, burning tons of fuel to achieve the first few inches of altitude and vaporizing seawater in order to mute a sonic event that would otherwise have shaken them to pieces. Then it was as if they had made ladders of steam and smoke and climbed them, their speed apparent now, plumes of fire outpacing the rolling clouds they had created. Up and gone, just like every successful launch: swift and vivid as a dream, then up and gone.