Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  The policeman demanded something from Ina. His voice was a guttural monotone, bored and threatening, and it made me angry. I thought about Ina and En, cowering or pretending to cower from this armed man and what he represented. Doing it for me. Ibu Ina said something stern but unprovocative in her native language. CVWS, something something something CVWS. She was exercising her medical authority, testing the policeman’s susceptibility, weighing fear for fear.

  The policeman’s answer was curt, a demand to search the ambulance or see her papers. Ina said something more forceful or desperate. The word CVWS again.

  I wanted to protect myself, but more than that, I wanted to protect Ina and En. I would surrender myself before I saw them hurt. Surrender or fight. Fight or flight. Give up, if necessary, all the years the Martian pharmaceuticals had pumped back into my body. Maybe that was the courage of the Fourth, the special courage Wun Ngo Wen had talked about.

  They conquered death. But no: as a species, terrestrial, Martian, in all our years on both our planets, we had only engineered reprieves. Nothing was certain.

  Footsteps, boots on metal. The policeman began climbing into the ambulance. I could tell he had come aboard by the way the vehicle sank on its shocks, rolling like a ship in a gentle swell. I braced myself against the lid of the locker. Ina stood up, screeching refusals.

  I took a breath and got ready to spring.

  But there was fresh noise from the road. Another vehicle roared past. By the dopplered whine of its straining engine, it was traveling at high speed—a conspicuous, shocking, fuck-the-law velocity.

  The policeman emitted a snarl of outrage. The floor bounced again.

  Scuffling noises, silence for a beat, a slammed door, and then the sound of the policeman’s car (I guessed) revved to vengeful life, gravel snapping away from tires in an angry hail.

  Ina lifted the lid of my sarcophagus.

  I sat up in the stink of my own sweat. “What happened?”

  “That was Aji. From the village. A cousin of mine. Running the roadblock to distract the police.” She was pale but relieved. “He drives like a drunk, I’m afraid.”

  “He did that to take the heat off us?”

  “Such a colorful expression. Yes. We’re a convoy, remember. Other cars, wireless telephones, he would have known we had been stopped. He’s risking a fine or a reprimand, nothing more serious.”

  I breathed the air, which was sweet and cool. I looked at En. En gave me a shaky grin.

  “Please introduce me to Aji when we get to Padang,” I said. “I want to thank him for pretending to be a drunk.”

  Ina rolled her eyes. “Unfortunately Aji wasn’t pretending. He is a drunk. An offense in the eyes of the Prophet.”

  Nijon looked in at us, winked, closed the rear doors.

  “Well, that was frightening,” Ina said. She put her hand on my arm.

  I apologized for letting her take the risk.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “We’re friends now. And the risk is not as great as you might imagine. The police can be difficult, but at least they’re local men and bound by certain rules—not like the men from Jakarta, the New Reformasi or whatever they call themselves, the men who burned my clinic. And I expect you would risk yourself on our behalf if necessary. Would you, Pak Tyler?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  Her hand was trembling. She looked me in the eye. “My goodness, I believe that’s true.”

  No, we had never conquered death, only engineered reprieves (the pill, the powder, the angioplasty, the Fourth Age)—enacted our conviction that more life, even a little more life, might yet yield the pleasure or wisdom we wanted or had missed in it. No one goes home from a triple bypass or a longevity treatment expecting to live forever. Even Lazarus left the grave knowing he’d die a second time.

  But he came forth. He came forth gratefully. I was grateful.

  The Cold Places of the Universe

  I drove home after a late Friday session at Perihelion, keyed open the door of the house, and found Molly sitting at the keyboard of my PC terminal.

  The desk was in the southwest corner of the living room against a window, facing away from the door. Molly half-turned and gave me a startled look. At the same time, deftly, she clicked an icon and exited the program she’d been running.

  “Molly?”

  I wasn’t surprised to find her here. Moll spent most weekends with me; she carried a duplicate key. But she’d never shown any interest in my PC.

  “You didn’t call,” she said.

  I’d been in a meeting with the insurance reps who underwrote Perihelion’s employee coverage. I’d been told to expect a two-hour session but it turned out to be a twenty-minute update on billing policy, and when it finished I thought it would be quicker to just drive on home, maybe even beat Molly to the door if she’d stopped to pick up wine. Such was the effect of Molly’s long level gaze that I felt obliged to explain all this before I asked her what she was doing in my files.

  She laughed as I came across the room, one of those embarrassed, apologetic laughs: Look at the funny thing you caught me doing. Her right hand hovered over the touchpad of the PC. She turned back to the monitor. On screen, the cursor dived for the shut-down icon.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “What, you want on here?”

  The cursor homed in on its target. I put my hand over Molly’s hand. “Actually, I’d like to know what you were doing.”

  She was tense. A vein throbbed in the pinkness just forward of her ear. “Making myself at home. Um, a little too much at home? I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Mind what, Moll?”

  “Mind me using your terminal.”

  “Using it for what?”

  “Really nothing. Just checking it out.”

  But it couldn’t be the machine Moll was curious about. It was five years old, nearly an antique. She used more sophisticated gear at work. And I had recognized the program she’d been in such a hurry to close when I came through the door. It was my household tracker, the program I used to pay bills and balance my checkbook and Rolodex my contacts.

  “Kind of looked like a spreadsheet,” I said.

  “I wandered in there. Your desktop confused me. You know. People organize things different ways. I’m sorry, Tyler. I guess I was being presumptuous.” She jerked her hand out from under mine and clicked the shut-down tag. The desktop shrank and I heard the processor’s fan noise whine down to silence. Molly stood up, straightening her blouse. Molly always gave herself a crisp little tuck when she stood up. Putting things in order. “How about I start dinner.” She turned her back on me and walked toward the kitchen.

  I watched her disappear through the swinging doors. After a ten count I followed her in.

  She was pulling pans off the wall rack. She glanced at me and looked away.

  “Molly,” I said. “If there’s anything you want to know, all you have to do is ask.”

  “Oh. Is that all I have to do? Okay.”

  “Molly—”

  She put a pan on the burner of the stove with exaggerated care, as if it were fragile. “Do you need me to apologize again? Okay, Tyler. I’m sorry I played with your terminal without your permission.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything, Moll.”

  “Then why are we talking about it? I mean, why does it look like we’re going to spend the entire rest of the evening talking about it?” Her eyes grew moist. Her tinted lenses turned a deeper shade of emerald. “So I was a little curious about you.”

  “Curious about what, my utility bills?”

  “About you.” She dragged a chair away from the kitchen table. The chair leg caught against the leg of the table and Molly yanked it free. She sat down and crossed her arms. “Yes, maybe even the trivial stuff. Maybe especially the trivial stuff.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I say this and it sounds like I’m some kind of stalker. But yes, your utility bills, your brand of toothpaste, your shoe size, yes. Yes, I want to f
eel like I’m something more than your weekend fuck. I confess.”

  “You don’t have to go into my files for that.”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t have, if—”

  “If?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to argue.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to finish what you start.”

  “Well, like that, for instance. Anytime you feel threatened, you do your detached thing. Get all cool and reserved and analytical, like I’m some nature documentary you’re watching on TV. The glass screen comes down. But the glass screen’s always there, isn’t it? The whole world’s on the other side of it. That’s why you don’t talk about yourself. That’s why I spent a year waiting for you to notice I was more than a piece of office furniture. That big dumb endless cool stare, watching life like it’s the evening news, like it’s some sorry war on the other side of the planet where all the people have unpronounceable names.”

  “Molly—”

  “I mean I’m aware that we’re all fucked up, Tyler, every one of us born into the Spin. Pretraumatic stress disorder, or what was it you called us? A generation of grotesques. That’s why we’re all divorced or promiscuous or hyperreligious or depressed or manic or dispassionate. We all have a really good excuse for our bad behavior, including me, and if being this big pillar of carefully premeditated helpfulness is what gets you through the night, okay, I get it. But it’s also okay for me to want more than that. It’s okay, in fact, it’s perfectly human, for me to want to touch you. Not just fuck you. Touch you.”

  She said all this and then, realizing she was done, unfolded her arms and waited for me to react.

  I thought about making a speech back at her. I was passionate about her, I would say. It might not have been obvious, but I’d been aware of her ever since I came to work at Perihelion. Aware of the lines and dynamics of her body, how she stood or walked or stretched or yawned; aware of her pastel wardrobe and the costume-jewelry butterfly she wore on a skinny silver chain; aware of her moods and impulses and the catalog of her smiles and frowns and gestures. When I closed my eyes I saw her face and when I went to sleep that was what I looked at. I loved her surface and her substance: the salt taste of her throat and the cadence of her voice, the arch of her fingers and the words they wrote on my body.

  I thought about all that but couldn’t bring myself to say it to her.

  It wasn’t a lie exactly. But it wasn’t exactly the truth.

  In the end we made up with vaguer pleasantries and brief tears and conciliatory hugs, let the issue drop, and I played sous-chef while she composed a really very good pasta sauce, and the tension began to lift, and by midnight we had cuddled an hour in front of the news (unemployment up, an election debate, some sorry war on the other side of the planet) and we were ready for bed. Molly turned out the light before we made love, and the bedroom was dark and the window was open and the sky was blank and empty. She arched her back when she came and when she sighed her breath was sweet and milky. Parted but still touching, hand to thigh, we spoke in unfinished sentences. I said, “You know, passion,” and she said, “In the bedroom, God, yes.”

  She fell asleep fast. I was still awake an hour later.

  I climbed out of bed gently, registering no change in the pulse of her breathing. I slipped into a pair of jeans and left the bedroom. Sleepless nights like this, a little Drambuie usually helped shut down the nagging interior monologue, the petitions presented by doubt to the weary forebrain. But before I went into the kitchen I sat down at the terminal and called up my household tracker.

  There was no telling what Moll had been looking at. But nothing had changed, as far as I could tell. All the names and numbers seemed intact. Maybe she had found something here that made her feel closer to me. If that was really what she wanted.

  Or maybe it had been a futile search. Maybe she hadn’t found anything at all.

  In the weeks leading up to the November election I saw more of Jason. His disease was becoming more active despite the escalating medication, possibly due to the stress caused by the ongoing conflict with his father. (E.D. had announced his intention to “take back” Perihelion from what he considered a cabal of upstart bureaucrats and scientists aligned with Wun Ngo Wen—an empty threat, in Jason’s opinion, but potentially disruptive and embarrassing.)

  Jase kept me close in case it was necessary to dose him with antispasmodics at some critical moment, which I was willing to do, within the limits of the law and professional ethics. Keeping Jase functional in the short term was the most that medical science could do for him, and staying functional long enough to outmaneuver E. D. Lawton was, for the moment, all that mattered to Jase.

  So I spent a lot of time in the V.I.P. wing at Perihelion, usually with Jason but often with Wun Ngo Wen. This made me an object of suspicion to the rest of Wun’s handlers, an assortment of government subauthorities (junior representatives from the State Department, the White House, Homeland Security, Space Command, et cetera) and academics who had been recruited to translate, study, and classify the so-called Martian archives. My access to Wun, in the eyes of these people, was irregular and unwelcome. I was a hireling. A nobody. But that was why Wun preferred my company: I had no agenda to promote or protect. And because he insisted, I was from time to time ushered by sullen toadies through the several doors that separated the Martian ambassador’s air-conditioned quarters from the Florida heat and all the wide world beyond.

  On one of these occasions I found Wun Ngo Wen seated on his wicker chair—someone had brought in a matching footstool so his feet wouldn’t dangle—gazing thoughtfully at the contents of a test tube–sized glass vial. I asked him what was inside.

  “Replicators,” he said.

  He was dressed in a suit and tie that might have been tailored for a stocky twelve-year-old: he’d been doing show-and-tell for a congressional delegation. Although Wun’s existence had not been formally announced there had been a steady traffic of security-approved visitors both foreign and domestic over the last few weeks. The official announcement would be made by the White House shortly after the election, after which time Wun would be very busy indeed.

  I looked at the glass tube from a safe vantage point across the room. Replicators. Ice-eaters. Seeds of an inorganic biology.

  Wun smiled. “Are you afraid of it? Please don’t be. I assure you the contents are completely inactive. I thought Jason had explained this to you.”

  He had. A little. I said, “They’re microscopic devices. Semi-organic. They reproduce in conditions of extreme cold and vacuum.”

  “Yes, good, essentially correct. And did Jason explain the purpose of them?”

  “To go out and populate the galaxy. To send us data.”

  Wun nodded slowly, as if this answer were also essentially correct but less than satisfactory. “This is the most sophisticated technological artifact the Five Republics have produced, Tyler. We could never have sustained the kind of industrial activity your people practice on such an alarming scale—ocean liners, men on the moon, vast cities—”

  “From what I’ve seen, your cities are fairly impressive.”

  “Only because we build them in a gentler gravitational gradient. On Earth those towers would crumble under their own weight. But my point is that this, the contents of this tube, this is our equivalent of an engineering triumph, something so complex and so difficult to make that we take a certain perhaps justifiable pride in it.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “Then come and appreciate it. Don’t be afraid.” He beckoned me closer and I came across the room and sat on a chair opposite him. I guess we would have looked, from a distance, like any two friends discussing anything at all. But my eyes wouldn’t leave the vial. He held it out, offered it to me. “Go on,” he said.

  I took the tube between thumb and forefinger and held it up to let the ceiling light shine through. The contents looked like ordinary water with a slightly oily sheen. That was all.

  “To truly
appreciate it,” Wun said, “you have to understand what you’re holding. In that tube, Tyler, are some thirty or forty thousand individual man-made cells in a glycerin suspension. Each cell is an acorn.”

  “You know about acorns?”

  “I’ve been reading. It’s a commonplace metaphor. Acorns and oaks, correct? When you hold an acorn you hold in your hand the possibility of an oak tree, and not just a single oak but all the progeny of that oak for centuries upon centuries. Enough oak wood to build whole cities…are cities made of oak?”

  “No, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “What you’re holding is an acorn. Completely dormant, as I said, and in fact that particular sample is probably quite dead, considering the time it’s spent at terrestrial ambient temperatures. Analyze it, and the most you might find would be some unusual trace chemicals.”

  “But?”

  “But—put it in an icy, airless, cold environment, an environment like the Oort Cloud, and then, Tyler, it comes to life! It begins, very slowly but very patiently, to grow and reproduce.”

  The Oort Cloud. I knew about the Oort Cloud from conversations with Jason and from the speculative novels I still occasionally read. The Oort Cloud was a nebulous array of cometary bodies occupying a space beginning roughly at the orbit of Pluto and extending halfway to the nearest star. These small bodies were far from tightly packed—they occupied an almost unimaginably large volume of space—but their total mass equaled twenty to thirty times the mass of the Earth, mostly in the form of dirty ice.

  Lots to eat, if ice and dust are what you eat.

  Wun leaned forward in his chair. His eyes, couched in skin like crumpled leather, were bright. He smiled, which I had learned to interpret as a signal of earnestness: Martians smile when they speak from the heart.

  “This was not uncontroversial for my people. What you hold in your hand has the power to substantially transform not only our own solar system but many others. And of course the outcome is uncertain. While the replicators are not organic in the conventional sense, they are alive. They’re living autocatalytic feedback loops, subject to modification by environmental pressure. Just like human beings, or bacteria, or, or—”