Very little about the evolving social landscape surprised her. One night we sat in front of the TV watching coverage of the Stockholm riots. A mob of cod fishermen and religious radicals threw bricks through windows and burned cars; police helicopters peppered the crowd with tanglefoot gel until much of Gamla Stan looked like something a tubercular Godzilla might have coughed up. I made a fatuous remark about how badly people behave when they’re frightened, and Molly said, “Come on, Tyler, you actually feel sympathy for these assholes?”
“I didn’t say that, Moll.”
“Because of the Spin, they get a free pass to trash their parliament building? Why, because they’re frightened?”
“It’s not an excuse. It’s a motive. They don’t have a future. They believe they’re doomed.”
“Doomed to die. Well, welcome to the human condition. They’re gonna die, you’re gonna die, I’m gonna die—and when was that ever not the case?”
“We’re all mortal, but we used to have the consolation of knowing the human species would go on without us.”
“But species are mortal, too. All that’s changed is that suddenly it’s not way off in the foggy future. It’s possible we’ll all die together in some spectacular way in a few years…but even that’s still just a possibility. The Hypotheticals might keep us around longer than that. For whatever unfathomable reason.”
“That doesn’t frighten you?”
“Of course it does! All of it frightens me. But it’s no reason to go out and kill people.” She waved at the TV. Someone had launched a grenade into the Riksdag. “This is so overwhelmingly stupid. It accomplishes nothing. It’s a hormonal exercise. It’s simian.”
“You can’t pretend you’re not affected by it.”
She surprised me by laughing. “No…that’s your style, not mine.”
“Is it?”
She ducked her head away but came back staring, almost defiant. “The way you always pretend to be cool about the Spin. Same way you’re cool about the Lawtons. They use you, they ignore you, and you smile like it’s the natural order of things.” She watched me for a reaction. I was too stubborn to give her one. “I just think there are better ways to live out the end of the world.”
But she wouldn’t say what those better ways were.
Everyone who worked at Perihelion had signed a nondisclosure agreement when we were hired, all of us had undergone background checks and Homeland Security vetting. We were discreet and we respected the need to keep high-echelon talk in-house. Leaks might spook congressional committees, embarrass powerful friends, scare away funding.
But now there was a Martian living on campus—most of the north wing had been converted into temporary quarters for Wun Ngo Wen and his handlers—and that was a secret difficult to keep.
It couldn’t be kept much longer in any case. By the time Wun arrived in Florida much of the D.C. elite and several foreign heads of state had heard all about him. The State Department had granted him ad hoc legal status and planned to introduce him internationally when the time was right. His handlers were already coaching him for the inevitable media feeding frenzy.
His arrival could and perhaps should have been managed differently. He could have been processed through the U.N., his presence immediately made public. Garland’s administration was bound to take some heat for hiding him. The Christian Conservative Party was already hinting that “the administration knows more than it’s saying about the results of the terraforming project,” hoping to draw out the president or open up Lomax, his would-be successor, for criticism. Criticism there would inevitably be; but Wun had expressed his wish not to become a campaign issue. He wanted to go public but he would wait until November, he said, to announce himself.
But the existence of Wun Ngo Wen was only the most conspicuous of the secrets surrounding his arrival. There were others. It made for a strange summer at Perihelion.
Jason called me over to the north wing that August. I met him in his office—his real office, not the tastefully furnished suite where he greeted official visitors and the press; a windowless cube with a desk and sofa. Perched on his chair between stacks of scientific journals, wearing Levi’s and a greasy sweatshirt, he looked as if he’d grown out of the clutter like a hydroponic vegetable. He was sweating. Never a good sign with Jase.
“I’m losing my legs again,” he said.
I cleared a space on the sofa and sat down and waited for him to elaborate.
“I’ve been having little episodes for a couple of weeks. The usual thing, pins and needles in the morning. Nothing I can’t work around. But it isn’t going away. In fact it’s getting worse. I think we might need to adjust the medication.”
Maybe so. But I really didn’t like what the medication had been doing to him. Jase by this time was taking a daily handful of pills: myelin enhancers to slow the loss of nerve tissue, neurological boosters to help the brain rewire damaged areas, and secondary medication to treat the side effects of the primary medication. Could we boost his dosage? Possibly. But the process had a toxicity ceiling that was already alarmingly close. He had lost weight, and he had lost something perhaps more important: a certain emotional equilibrium. Jase talked faster than he used to and smiled less often. Where he had once seemed utterly at home in his body, he now moved like a marionette—when he reached for a cup his hand overshot the target and jogged back for a second intercept.
“In any case,” I said, “we’ll have to get Dr. Malmstein’s opinion.”
“There is absolutely no way I can leave here long enough to see him. Things have changed, if you haven’t noticed. Can’t we do a telephone consult?”
“Maybe. I’ll ask.”
“And in the meantime, can you do me another favor?”
“What would that be, Jase?”
“Explain my problem to Wun. Dig up a couple of textbooks on the subject for him.”
“Medical texts? Why, is he a physician?”
“Not exactly, but he brought a lot of information with him. The Martian biological sciences are considerably in advance of ours.” (He said this with a crooked grin I was unable to interpret.) “He thinks he might be able to help.”
“Are you serious?”
“Quite serious. Stop looking shocked. Will you talk to him?”
A man from another planet. A man with a hundred thousand years of Martian history behind him. “Well, yeah,” I said. “I’d be privileged to talk to him. But—”
“I’ll set it up, then.”
“But if he has the kind of medical knowledge that can effectively treat AMS, it needs to reach better doctors than me.”
“Wun brought whole encyclopedias with him. There are already people going through the Martian archives—parts of them, anyway—looking for useful information, medical and otherwise. This is just a sideshow.”
“I’m surprised he can spare the time for a sideshow.”
“He’s bored more often than you might think. He’s also short of friends. I thought he might enjoy spending a little time with someone who doesn’t believe he’s either a savior or a threat. In the short term, though, I’d still like you to talk to Malmstein.”
“Of course.”
“And call him from your place, all right? I don’t trust the phones here anymore.”
He smiled as if he had said something amusing.
Occasionally that summer I took myself for walks on the public beach across the highway from my apartment.
It wasn’t much of a beach. A long undeveloped spit of land protected it from erosion and rendered it useless for surfers. On hot afternoons the old motels surveyed the sand with glassy eyes and a few subdued tourists washed their feet in the surf.
I came down and sat on a scalding wooden walkway suspended over scrub grass, watching clouds gather on the eastern horizon and thinking about what Molly had said, that I was pretending to be cool about the Spin (and about the Lawtons), faking an equanimity I couldn’t possibly possess.
I wanted to give
Molly her due. Maybe that was the way I looked to her.
“Spin” was a dumb but inevitable name for what had been done to the Earth. That is, it was bad physics—nothing was actually spinning any harder or faster than it used to—but it was an apt metaphor. In reality the Earth was more static than it had ever been. But did it feel like it was spinning out of control? In every important sense, yes. You had to cling to something or slide into oblivion.
So maybe I was clinging to the Lawtons—not just Jason and Diane but their whole world, the Big House and the Little House, lost childhood loyalties. Maybe that was the only handle I could grab. And maybe that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. If Moll was right, we all had to grab something or be lost. Diane had grabbed faith, Jason had grabbed science.
And I had grabbed Jason and Diane.
I left the beach when the clouds came up, one of those inevitable late-August afternoon squalls, the eastern sky restless with lightning, rain beginning to whip the sad pastel balconies of the motels. My clothes were wet by the time I got home. It took them hours to dry in the humid air. The storm passed by nightfall but left a fetid, steamy stillness behind it.
Molly came over after dinner and we downloaded a current movie, one of the Victorian drawing-room dramas she was fond of. After the film she went to the kitchen to fix us drinks while I called David Malmstein from the phone in the spare room. Malmstein said he’d like to see Jase “as soon as it’s practical” but thought it would be all right to adjust the meds upward a few notches, as long as both Jase and I kept an eye out for any unpleasant reaction.
I hung up the phone and left the room and found Molly in the hall with a drink in each hand and a puzzled expression on her face: “Where’d you go?”
“Just making a call.”
“Anything important?”
“No.”
“Checking up on a patient?”
“Something like that,” I said.
Within the next few days Jase arranged a meeting between me and Wun Ngo Wen in Wun’s quarters at Perihelion.
The Martian ambassador lived in a room he had furnished to his own taste, from catalogs. The furniture was lightweight, wicker, low to the ground. A rag rug covered the linoleum floor. A computer sat on a simple raw pine desk. There were bookcases to match the desk. Apparently Martians decorated like newlywed college students.
I supplied Wun with the technical material he wanted: a couple of books on the etiology and treatment of multiple sclerosis, plus a series of JAMA off-prints on AMS. AMS, in current thinking, wasn’t really MS at all; it was a different disease entirely, a genetic disorder with MS-like symptoms and a similar degradation of the myelin sheaths that protect human nervous tissue. AMS was distinguishable by its severity, rapid progression, and resistance to standard therapies. Wun said he wasn’t familiar with the condition but would search his archives for information.
I thanked him but raised the obvious objection: he wasn’t a doctor, and Martian physiology was conspicuously unusual—even if he found a suitable therapy, would it work in Jason’s case?
“We’re not as different as you might think. One of the first things your people did was to sequence my genome. It’s indistinguishable from your own.”
“I didn’t mean to give offense.”
“I’m not offended. One hundred thousand years is a long separation, long enough for what biologists call a speciation event. As it happens, however, your people and mine are fully interfertile. The obvious differences between us are superficial adaptations to a cooler, drier environment.”
He spoke with an authority that belied his size. His voice was pitched higher than an average adult’s but there was nothing juvenile about it; it was lilting, almost feminine, but always statesmanlike.
“Even so,” I said, “there are potential legal problems if we’re talking about a therapy that hasn’t gone through the FDA approval process.”
“I’m sure Jason would be willing to wait for official approval. His disease might not be so patient.” Here Wun raised his hand to forestall further objections. “Let me read what you brought me. Then we’ll discuss it again.”
Then, the immediate business discharged, he asked me to stay and talk. I was flattered. Despite his strangeness there was something comforting about Wun’s presence, a communicable ease. He sat back in his oversized wicker chair, feet dangling, and listened with apparent fascination to a quick sketch of my life. He asked a couple of questions about Diane (“Jason doesn’t speak much about his family”) and more about med school (the concept of dissecting cadavers was new to him; he flinched when I described it…most people do).
And when I asked him about his own life he reached into the small gray satchel he carried with him and produced a series of printed images, photographs he had brought with him as digital files. Four pictures of Mars.
“Just four?”
He shrugged. “No number is large enough to substitute for memory. And of course there is much more visual material in the official archives. These are mine. Personal. Would you care to see them?”
“Yes, certainly.”
He handed them to me.
Photo 1: A house. It was obviously a human dwelling place despite the odd techno/retro architecture, low and rounded, like a porcelain model of a sod hut. The sky behind it was a brilliant turquoise, or at least that’s how the printer had rendered it. The horizon was strangely close but geometrically flat, divided into receding rectangles of cultivated green, a crop I couldn’t identify but which was too fleshy to be wheat or corn and too tall to be lettuce or kale. In the foreground were two adult Martians, male and female, with comically stern expressions. Martian Gothic. All it needed was a pitchfork and a Grant Wood signature.
“My mother and father,” Wun said simply.
Photo 2: “Myself as a child.”
This one was startling. The prodigiously wrinkled Martian skin, Wun explained, develops at puberty. Wun at roughly seven terrestrial years was smooth-faced and smiling. He looked like any Earthly child, though you couldn’t place the ethnicity—blond hair, coffee-colored skin, narrow nose and generous lips. He stood in what looked at first glance like an eccentric theme park but was, Wun said, a Martian city. A marketplace. Food stalls and shops, the buildings made of the same porcelainlike material as the farmhouse, in gaudy primary colors. The street behind him was crowded with light machinery and foot traffic. Only a patch of sky was visible between the tallest buildings, and even there some sort of vehicle had been caught in passing, whirligig blades blurred into a pale oval.
“You look happy,” I said.
“The city is called Voy Voyud. We came from the countryside to shop on this day. Because it was springtime my parents let me buy murkuds. Small animals. Like frogs, for pets. In the bag I’m holding—see?”
Wun clutched a white cloth bag containing mysterious lumps. Murkuds.
“They only live a few weeks,” he said. “But their eggs are delicious.”
Photo 3: This one was a panoramic view. In the near ground: another Martian house, a woman in a multicolored kaftan (Wun’s wife, he explained) and two smooth-skinned, pretty young girls in sacklike amber dresses (his daughters). The photograph had been taken from high ground. Beyond the house, an entire semirural landscape was visible. Green marshy fields basked under another turquoise sky. The agricultural land was divided by elevated roadways on which a few boxy vehicles traveled, and there were agricultural machines among the crops, graceful black harvesters. And on the horizon where the roads converged was a city, the same city, Wun said, where he had bought murkuds as a child, Voy Voyud, the capital of Kirioloj Province, its low-g towers tall and intricately terraced.
“You can see most of the delta of the Kirioloj in this picture.” The river was a blue band feeding a lake the color of the sky. The city of Voy Voyud had been built on higher ground, the eroded rim of an ancient impact crater, Wun said, though it looked like an ordinary line of low hills to me. Black dots on the distant lake might h
ave been boats or barges.
“It’s a beautiful place,” I said.
“Yes.”
“The landscape, but your family, too.”
“Yes.” His eyes met mine. “They’re dead.”
“Ah—I’m sorry to hear that.”
“They died in a massive flood several years ago. The last photograph, do you see? It’s the same view, but taken just after the disaster.”
A freakish storm had dumped record rainfall on the slopes of the Solitary Mountains at the end of a long dry season. Most of that rain had been funneled into the parched tributaries of the Kirioloj. The terraformed Mars was in some ways still a young world, still establishing its hydrological cycles, its landscapes evolving rapidly as ancient dust and regolith were rearranged by circulating water. The result of the sudden extreme rain was a slurry of oxide-red mud that had roared down the Kirioloj and into the agricultural delta like a fluid freight train.
Photo 4: The aftermath. Of Wun’s house, only the foundation and a single wall remained, standing like shards of pottery in a chaotic plain of mud, rubble, and rocks. The distant city on the hill was untouched but the fertile farmland had been buried. Except for a glint of brown water from the lake this was Mars returned almost to its virgin condition, a lifeless regolith. Several aircraft hovered overhead, presumably searching for survivors.
“I had spent a day in the foothills with friends and came home to this. A great many lives were lost, not just my family. So I keep these four photographs to remind me of where I came from. And why I can’t go back.”
“It must have been unbearable.”
“I’ve made peace with it. As much as one can. By the time I left Mars the delta had been restored. Not the way it used to be, of course. But fertile, alive, productive.”
Which was as much as he seemed to want to say about it.
I looked back at the earlier images, reminded myself what I was seeing. Not some fanciful CGI effect but ordinary photographs. Photographs of another world. Of Mars, a planet long freighted with our own reckless imagination. “It’s not Burroughs, certainly not Wells, maybe a little Bradbury….”
Spin Page 22
