Spin

by Robert Charles Wilson

  Wun furrowed his already densely furrowed brow. “I’m sorry—I don’t know those words.”

  “They’re writers. Writers of fiction, who wrote about your planet.”

  Once I had communicated the idea—that certain authors had imagined a living Mars long before its actual terraforming—Wun was fascinated. “Would it be possible for me to read these books? And discuss them the next time you visit?”

  “I’m flattered. Are you sure you can spare the time? There must be heads of state who would very much like to talk to you.”

  “I’m sure there are. But they can wait.”

  I told him I looked forward to it.

  On my drive home I raided a secondhand bookshop and in the morning I delivered a bundle of paperbacks to Wun, or at least to the taciturn men guarding his quarters. War of the Worlds, A Princess of Mars, The Martian Chronicles, Stranger in a Strange Land, Red Mars.

  I heard nothing more from him for a couple of weeks.

  Construction continued on the new facilities at Perihelion. By the end of September there was a massive concrete foundation where there used to be scrub pine and ratty palmettos, a great rigging of steel beams and aluminum piping.

  Molly had heard there was military-grade lab and refrigeration equipment coming in next week. (Another dinner at Champs, most of the customers staring at a Marlins game on the billboard-sized plasma screen while we shared appetizers in a far, dark corner.) “Why do we need lab gear, Ty? Perihelion’s all about space research and the Spin. I don’t get it.”

  “I don’t know. Nobody’s talking.”

  “Maybe you could ask Jason, one of those afternoons you spend over at the north wing.”

  I had told her I was consulting with Jase, not that I had been adopted by the Martian ambassador. “I don’t have that kind of security clearance.” Nor, of course, did Molly.

  “I’m starting to think you don’t trust me.”

  “Just following the rules, Moll.”

  “Right,” she said. “You’re such a saint.”

  Jason stopped by my place unannounced, fortunately on an evening when Molly wasn’t present, to talk about his meds. I told him what Malmstein had said, that it would likely be all right to bump up his dosage but that we’d have to watch out for side effects. The disease wasn’t standing still and there was a practical limit to the degree to which we could suppress his symptoms. It didn’t mean he was doomed, only that sooner or later he would have to conduct his business differently—to accommodate the disease rather than suppress it. (Beyond that was another threshold neither of us discussed: radical disability and dementia.)

  “I understand that,” Jason said. He sat in a chair by the window, glancing occasionally at his reflection in the glass, one long leg draped over the other. “All I need is another few months.”

  “A few months for what?”

  “A few months to cut the legs out from under E. D. Lawton.” I stared at him. I thought it was a joke. He wasn’t smiling. “Do I have to explain this?”

  “If you want me to make sense of it, yeah, you do.”

  “E.D. and I have divergent views about the future of Perihelion. As far as E.D.’s concerned, Perihelion exists to support the aerospace industry. That’s the bottom line and always has been. He never believed we could do anything about the Spin.” Jason shrugged. “He’s almost certainly right, in the sense that we can’t fix it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t understand it. We can’t fight a war against the Hypotheticals in any meaningful way, but we can do a little guerilla science. That’s what Wun’s arrival is all about.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Wun isn’t just an interplanetary goodwill ambassador. He came here with a plan, a collaborative venture that might give us some clues about the Hypotheticals, where they come from, what they want, what they’re doing to both planets. The idea’s getting a mixed reception. E.D.’s trying to harpoon it—he doesn’t think it’s useful and he thinks it puts at risk whatever political capital we’ve got left after the terraforming.”

  “So you’re undercutting him?”

  Jason sighed. “This might sound cruel, but E.D. doesn’t understand that his time has come and gone. My father is exactly what the world needed twenty years ago. I admire him for that. He’s accomplished amazing, unbelievable things. Without E.D. to light fires under the politicians there would never have been a Perihelion. One of the ironies of the Spin is that the long-term consequences of E. D. Lawton’s genius have come back to bite him—if E.D. had never existed, Wun Ngo Wen wouldn’t exist. I’m not engaged in some Oedipal struggle here. I know exactly what my father is and what he’s done. He’s at home in the corridors of power, Garland is his golf buddy. Great. But he’s a prisoner, too. A prisoner of his own shortsightedness. His days as a visionary are over. He dislikes Wun’s plan because he distrusts the technology—he doesn’t like anything he can’t reverse-engineer; he doesn’t like the fact that the Martians can wield technologies we’re only beginning to guess at. And he hates the fact that Wun has me on his side. Me and, I might add, a new generation of D.C. power brokers, including Preston Lomax, who’s likely to be the next president. Suddenly E.D.’s surrounded by people he can’t manipulate. Younger people, people who’ve assimilated the Spin in a way E.D.’s generation never did. People like us, Ty.”

  I was a little flattered and a little alarmed to be included in that pronoun.

  I said, “You’re taking on a lot, aren’t you?”

  He looked at me sharply. “I’m doing exactly what E.D. trained me to do. From birth. He never wanted a son; he wanted an heir, an apprentice. He made that decision a long time before the Spin, Tyler. He knew exactly how smart I was and he knew what he wanted me to do with that intelligence. And I went along with it. Even when I was old enough to understand what he was up to, I cooperated. So here I am, an E. D. Lawton production: the handsome, savvy, sexless, media-friendly object you see before you. A marketable image, a certain intellectual acumen, and no loyalties that don’t begin and end with Perihelion. But there was always a little rider on that contract, even if E.D. doesn’t like to think about it. ‘Heir’ implies ‘inheritance.’ It implies that, at some point, my judgment supersedes his. Well, the time has come. The opportunity before us is simply too important to fuck up.”

  His hands, I noticed, were clenched into fists, and his legs were shaking, but was that intensity of emotion or a symptom of his disease? For that matter, how much of this monologue was genuine and how much was the product of the neurostimulants I was prescribing for him?

  “You look scared,” Jason said.

  “Exactly what Martian technology are we talking about here?”

  He grinned. “It’s really very clever. Quasi-biological. Very small scale. Molecular autocatalytic feedback loops, basically, with contingent programming written into their reproductive protocols.”

  “In English, please, Jase.”

  “Little tiny artificial replicators.”

  “Living things?”

  “In a certain sense, yes, living things. Artificial living things we can launch into space.”

  “So what do they do, Jase?”

  His grin got bigger. “They eat ice,” he said, “and they shit information.”

  4 X 109 A.D.

  I crossed a few yards of pressed earth to which weathered asphalt clung in scabrous patches, and came to an embankment and slid down it, noisily, with my hard shell suitcases full of modest clothing and handwritten notes and digital files and Martian pharmaceuticals. I landed in a drainage ditch, thigh-deep in water green as papaya leaves and warm as the tropical night. The water reflected the scarred moon and stank of manure.

  I hid the luggage in a dry place halfway up the embankment and pulled myself the rest of the way up, lying at an angle that concealed my body but allowed a view of the road, Ibu Ina’s concrete-box clinic, and the black car parked in front of it.

  The men from the car had broken in through the back door. They s
witched on more lights as they moved through the building, making yellow squares of windows with drawn blinds, but I had no way of knowing what they were doing there. Searching the place, I guessed. I tried to estimate how long they spent inside, but I seemed to have lost the ability to calculate time or even to read the numbers on my watch. The numerals glowed like restless fire-flies but wouldn’t stand still long enough to make sense.

  One of the men left by the front door, walked to the car, and started the engine. The second man emerged a few seconds later and ducked into the passenger seat. The midnight-colored car rolled close to me as it turned onto the road, headlights sweeping over the berm. I ducked and lay still until the motor noise faded.

  Then I thought about what to do next. The question was difficult to answer, because I was tired—suddenly, massively tired; too weak to stand up. I wanted to go back to the clinic and find a phone and warn Ibu Ina about the men in the car. But maybe En would do that. I hoped so. Because I wasn’t going to make it to the clinic. My legs wouldn’t do anything but tremble when I willed them to move. This was more than fatigue. It felt like paralysis.

  And when I looked at the clinic again there was smoke curling out of the roof vent and the light behind the blinds was flickery yellow. Fire.

  The men from the car had set fire to Ibu Ina’s clinic, and there was nothing I could do about it but close my eyes and hope I wouldn’t die here before someone found me.

  The stench of smoke and the sound of weeping woke me.

  Still not yet daylight. But I found I could move, at least a little, with considerable effort and pain, and I seemed to be thinking more or less clearly. So I levered myself up the slope, inch after inch.

  There were cars and people all over the open space between here and the clinic, headlights and flashlights cutting spastic arcs across the sky. The clinic was a smoldering ruin. Its concrete walls were still standing but the roof had collapsed and the building had been eviscerated by the fire. I managed to stand up. I walked toward the sound of weeping.

  The sound came from Ibu Ina. She sat on an island of asphalt hugging her knees. She was surrounded by a group of women who gave me dark, suspicious looks as I approached her. But when Ina saw me she sprang to her feet, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “Tyler Dupree!” She ran toward me. “I thought you were burned to death! Burned up along with everything else!”

  She grabbed me, embraced me, held me up—my legs had turned rubbery again. “The clinic,” I managed to say. “All your work. Ina, I’m so sorry….”

  “No,” she said. “The clinic is a building. The medical paraphernalia can be replaced. You, on the other hand, are unique. En told us all how you sent him away when the arsonists came. You saved his life, Tyler!” She stood back. “Tyler? Are you all right?”

  I wasn’t all right. I looked past Ina’s shoulder at the sky. It was almost dawn. The ancient sun was rising. Mount Merapi was outlined against the indigo blue sky. “Just tired,” I said, and closed my eyes. I felt my legs fold under me and I heard Ina calling for help, and then I slept some more—for days, they told me later.

  For obvious reasons, I couldn’t stay in the village.

  Ina wanted to nurse me through the last of the drug crisis, and she felt the village owed me protection. After all, I had saved En’s life (or so she insisted), and En was not only her nephew but was related to virtually everyone else in town, one way or another. I was a hero. But I was also a magnet for the attention of evil men, and if not for Ina’s pleading I suspect the kepala desa would have put me on the first bus to Padang and to hell with it. So I was taken, along with my luggage, to an uninhabited village house (the owners had gone rantau months ago) long enough for other arrangements to be made.

  The Minangkabau of West Sumatra knew how to duck and weave in the face of oppression. They had survived the coming of Islam in the sixteenth century, the Padri War, Dutch colonialism, Suharto’s New Order, the Negari Restoration and, post-Spin, the New Reformasi and their thuggish national police. Ina had told me some of these stories, both at the clinic and afterward, when I lay in a tiny room in a wooden house under the huge, slow blades of an electric fan. The strength of the Minang, she said, was their flexibility, their deep understanding that the rest of the world was not like home and never would be. (She quoted a Minang proverb: “In different fields, different grasshoppers; in different ponds, different fish.”) The tradition of rantau, emigration—of young men going out into the world and coming back wealthier or wiser—had made them a sophisticated people. The simple wooden buffalo-horn houses of the village were adorned with aerostat antennas, and most families in the village, Ina said, regularly received letters or e-mail from family in Australia, Europe, Canada, the United States.

  It was not surprising, then, that there were Minangkabau working at every level on the docks at Padang. Ina’s ex-husband, Jala, was only one of many in the import /export trade who organized rantau expeditions to the Arch and beyond. It was no coincidence that Diane’s inquiries had led her to Jala and thence to Ibu Ina and this highland village. “Jala is opportunistic and he can be mean in a petty way, but he’s not unscrupulous,” Ina said. “Diane was lucky to find him, or else she’s a good judge of character—probably the latter. In any case Jala has no love for the New Reformasi, fortunately for all concerned.”

  (She had divorced Jala, she said, because he had formed the bad habit of sleeping with disreputable women in the city. He spent too much money on his girlfriends and had twice brought home curable but alarming venereal diseases. He was a bad husband, Ina said, but not an especially bad man. He wouldn’t betray Diane to the authorities unless he was captured and physically tortured…and he was far too clever to let himself be captured.)

  “The men who burned your clinic—”

  “They must have followed Diane to the hotel in Padang and then interrogated the driver who brought you there.”

  “But why burn the building down?”

  “I don’t know, but I suspect it was an attempt to frighten you and drive you into the open. And a warning to anyone who might help you.”

  “If they found the clinic, they’ll know your name.”

  “But they won’t come into the village openly, guns blazing. Things have not quite deteriorated to that degree. I expect they’ll watch the waterfront and hope we do something stupid.”

  “Even so, if your name is on a list, if you try to open another clinic—”

  “But that was never my plan.”

  “No?”

  “No. You’ve convinced me that the rantau gadang might be a good thing for a physician to undertake. If you don’t mind the competition?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean that there is a simple solution for all our problems, one I’ve been contemplating a long time. The entire village has considered it, one way or another. Many have already left. We’re not a big successful town like Belubus or Batusangkar. The land here isn’t especially rich and every year we lose more people to the city or other clans in other towns or to the rantau gadang, and why not? There’s room in the new world.”

  “You want to emigrate?”

  “Me, Jala, my sister and her sister and my nephews and cousins—more than thirty of us, all told. Jala has several illegitimate children who would be happy to assume control of his business once he’s on the other side. So you see?” She smiled. “You needn’t be grateful. We’re not your benefactors. Only fellow travelers.”

  I asked her several times whether Diane was safe. As safe as Jala could make her, Ina said. Jala had installed her in a living space above a customs house where she would be relatively comfortable and safely hidden until the final arrangements were made. “The difficult part will be getting you to the port undetected. The police suspect you’re in the highlands and they’ll be watching the roads for foreigners, especially sick foreigners, since the driver who brought you to the clinic will have told them you’re not well.”

  “I’m finished being
sick,” I said.

  The last crisis had begun outside the burning clinic and it had passed while I was unconscious. Ibu Ina said it had been a difficult passage, that after the move to this small room in this empty house I had moaned until the neighbors complained, that she had needed her cousin Adek to hold me down during the worst of the convulsions—that was why my arms and shoulders were so badly bruised, hadn’t I noticed? But I remembered none of it. All I knew was that I felt stronger as the days passed; my temperature was reliably normal; I could walk without trembling.

  “And the other effects of the drug?” Ina asked. “Do you feel different?”

  That was an interesting question. I answered honestly: “I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Well. For the moment it hardly matters. As I say, the trick will be to get you out of the highlands and back to Padang. Fortunately, I think we can arrange it.”

  “When do we leave?”

  “Three or four days’ time,” Ina said. “In the meantime, rest.”

  Ina was busy most of those three days. I saw very little of her. The days were hot and sunny but breezes came through the wooden house in soothing gusts, and I spent the time cautiously exercising, writing, and reading—there were English-language paperbacks on a rattan shelf in the bedroom, including a popular biography of Jason Lawton called A Life for the Stars. (I looked for my name in the index and found it: Dupree, Tyler, with five page references. But I couldn’t bring myself to read the book. The swaybacked Somerset Maugham novels were more tempting.)

  En dropped in periodically to see that I was all right and to bring me sandwiches and bottled water from his uncle’s warung. He adopted a proprietary manner and made a point of asking after my health. He said he was “proud to be making rantau” with me.