Spin

by Wilson, Robert Charles Charles

  The reporting replicator colonies had shifted into reproductive mode, shedding nonspecific seed cells and launching them on bursts of cometary vapor toward neighboring stars.

  The same message, Jase said, had been beamed at local, less mature colonies, which would respond by bypassing redundant functions and directing their energy into purely reproductive behavior.

  In other words, we had successfully infected the outer system with Wun’s quasi-biological systems.

  Which were now sporulating.

  I said, “This tells us nothing about the Spin.”

  “Of course not. Not yet. But this little trickle of information will be a torrent before long. In time we’ll be able to put together a Spin map of all the nearby stars—maybe eventually the entire galaxy. From that we ought to be able to deduce where the Hypotheticals come from, where they’ve been Spinning, and what ultimately happens to Spin worlds when their stars expand and burn out.”

  “That won’t fix anything, though, will it?”

  He sighed as if I’d disappointed him by asking a stupid question. “Probably not. But isn’t it better to know than to speculate? We might find out we’re doomed, but we might find out we have more time left than we expected. Remember, Tyler, we’re working on other fronts, too. We’ve been delving into the theoretical physics in Wun’s archives. If you model the Spin membrane as a wormhole enclosing an object accelerating at near-light-speed—”

  “But we’re not accelerating. We’re not going anywhere.” Except headlong into the future.

  “No, but if you do the calculation it yields results that match our observation of the Spin. Which might give us a clue as to which forces the Hypotheticals are manipulating.”

  “To what end, though, Jase?”

  “Too soon to say. But I don’t believe in the futility of knowledge.”

  “Even if we’re dying?”

  “Everyone dies.”

  “I mean, as a species.”

  “That remains to be seen. Whatever the Spin is, it has to be more than a sort of elaborate global euthanasia. The Hypotheticals must be acting with a purpose.”

  Maybe so. But this, I realized, was the faith that had deserted me. The faith in Big Salvation.

  All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or.

  Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation.

  The flicker came back the following winter, persisted for forty-four hours, then vanished again. Many of us began to think of it as a kind of celestial weather, unpredictable but generally harmless.

  Pessimists pointed out that the intervals between episodes were growing shorter, the duration of the episodes growing longer.

  In April there was a flicker that lasted three days and interfered with the transmission of aerostat signals. This one provoked another (smaller) wave of successful and attempted suicides—people driven to panic less by what they saw in the sky than by the failure of their telephones and TV sets.

  I had stopped paying attention to the news, but certain events were impossible to ignore: the military setbacks in North Africa and eastern Europe, the cult coup in Zimbabwe, the mass suicides in Korea. Exponents of apocalyptic Islam scored big numbers in the Algerian and Egyptian elections that year. A Filipino cult that worshipped the memory of Wun Ngo Wen—whom they had reconceived as a pastoralist saint, an agrarian Gandhi—had successfully engineered a general strike in Manila.

  And I got a few more calls from Jason. He mailed me a phone with some kind of built-in encryption pad, which he claimed would give us “pretty good protection against keyword hunters,” whatever that meant.

  “Sounds a little paranoid,” I said.

  “Usefully paranoid, I think.”

  Perhaps, if we wanted to discuss matters of national security. We didn’t, though, at least not at first. Instead Jason asked me about my work, my life, the music I’d been listening to. I understood that he was trying to generate the kind of conversation we might have had twenty or thirty years ago—before Perihelion, if not before the Spin. He had been to see his mother, he told me. Carol was still counting out her days by clock and bottle. Nothing had changed. Carol had insisted on that. The house staff kept everything clean, everything in its place. The Big House was like a time capsule, he said, as if it had been hermetically sealed on the first night of the Spin. It was a little spooky that way.

  I asked whether Diane ever called.

  “Diane stopped talking to Carol back before Wun was killed. No, not a word from her.”

  Then I asked him about the replicator project. There hadn’t been anything in the papers lately.

  “Don’t bother looking. JPL is sitting on the results.”

  I heard the unhappiness in his voice. “That bad?”

  “It’s not entirely bad news. At least not until recently. The replicators did everything Wun hoped they would. Amazing things, Tyler. I mean absolutely amazing. I wish I could show you the maps we generated. Big navigable software maps. Almost two hundred thousand stars, in a halo of space hundreds of light-years in diameter. We know more about stellar and planetary evolution now than an astronomer of E.D.’s generation could have imagined.”

  “But nothing about the Spin?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “So what did you learn?”

  “For one thing, we’re not alone. In that volume of space we’ve found three optically blank planets roughly the size of the Earth, in orbits that are habitable by terrestrial standards or would have been in the past. The nearest is circling the star Ursa Majoris 47. The farthest—”

  “I don’t need the details.”

  “If we look at the age of the stars involved and make some plausible assumptions, the Hypotheticals appear to emanate from somewhere in the direction of the galactic core. There are other indicators, too. The replicators found a couple of white dwarf stars—burned-out stars, essentially, but stars that would have looked like the sun a few billion years ago—with rocky planets in orbits that should never have outlasted the solar expansion.”

  “Spin survivors?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are these living planets, Jase?”

  “We have no real way of knowing. But they don’t have Spin membranes to protect them, and their current stellar environment is absolutely hostile by our standards.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. We thought we’d be able to make more meaningful comparisons as the replicator network expanded. What we created with the replicators is really a neural network on an unimaginably large scale. They talk to themselves the way neurons talk to themselves, except they do it across centuries and light-years. It’s absolutely, stunningly beautiful, what they do. A network larger than anything humanity has ever built. Gathering information, culling it, storing it, feeding it back to us—”

  “So what went wrong?”

  He sounded as if it hurt him to say it. “Maybe age. Everything ages, even highly protected genetic codes. They might be evolving beyond our instructions. Or—”

  “Yeah, but what happened, Jase?”

  “The data are diminishing. We’re getting fragmentary, contradictory information from the replicators that are farthest from Earth. That could mean a lot of things. If they’re dying, it might reflect some emerging flaw in the design code. But some of the long-established relay nodes are starting to shut down, too.”

  “Something’s targeting them?”

  “That’s too hasty an assumption. Here’s another idea. When we launched these things into the Oort Cloud we created a simple interstellar ecology—ice, dust, and artificial life. But what i
f we weren’t the first? What if the interstellar ecology isn’t simple?”

  “You mean there might be other kinds of replicators out there?”

  “Could be. If so, they’d be competing for resources. Maybe even using each other for resources. We thought we were sending our devices into a sterile void. But there might be competitor species, there might even be predator species.”

  “Jason…you think something’s eating them?”

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  The flicker came back in June and clocked nearly forty-eight hours before it dissipated.

  In August, fifty-six hours of flicker plus intermittent telecom problems.

  When it started again in late September no one was surprised. I spent most of the first evening with the blinds closed, ignoring the sky, watching a movie I’d downloaded a week before. An old movie, pre-Spin. Watching it not for the plot but for the faces, the faces of people the way they used to look, people who hadn’t spent their lives afraid of the future. People who, every once in a while, talked about the moon and the stars without irony or nostalgia.

  Then the phone rang.

  Not my personal phone, and not the encrypting phone Jase had sent me. I recognized the three-tone ring instantly even though I hadn’t heard it for years. It was audible but faint—faint because I’d left the phone in the pocket of a jacket that was hanging in the hallway closet.

  It rang twice more before I fumbled it out and said, “Hello?”

  Expecting a wrong number. Wanting Diane’s voice. Wanting it and dreading it.

  But it was a man’s voice on the other end. Simon, I recognized belatedly.

  He said, “Tyler? Tyler Dupree? Is that you?”

  I had taken enough emergency calls to recognize the anxiety in his voice. I said, “It’s me, Simon. What’s wrong?”

  “I shouldn’t be talking to you. But I don’t know who else to call. I don’t know any local doctors. And she’s so sick. She’s just so sick, Tyler! I don’t think she’s getting better. I think she needs—”

  And then the flicker cut us off and there was nothing but noise on the line.

  4 X 109 A.D.

  Behind Diane came En and two dozen of his cousins and an equal number of strangers, all bound for the new world. Jala herded them inside, then slid shut the corrugated steel door of the warehouse. The light dimmed. Diane put her arm around me and I walked her to a relatively clean space under one of the high halide lamps. Ibu Ina unrolled an empty jute bag for her to lie on.

  “The noise,” Ina said.

  Diane closed her eyes as soon as she was horizontal, awake but obviously exhausted. I unbuttoned her blouse and began, gently, to peel it away from the wound.

  I said, “My medical case—”

  “Yes, of course.” Ina summoned En and sent him up the warehouse stairs to bring both bags, mine and hers. “The noise—”

  Diane winced when I began to pull the matted cloth from the caked blood of the wound, but I didn’t want to medicate her until I’d seen the extent of the injury. “What noise?”

  “Exactly!” Ina said. “The docks should be noisy this time of the morning. But it’s quiet. There is no noise.”

  I raised my head. She was right. No noise, except the nervous talk of the Minang villagers and a distant drumming that was the sound of rain on the high metal roof.

  But this wasn’t the time to worry about it. “Go ask Jala,” I said. “Find out what’s happening.”

  Then I turned back to Diane.

  “It’s superficial,” Diane said. She took a deep breath. Her eyes were clenched shut against the pain. “At least I think it’s superficial.”

  “It looks like a bullet wound.”

  “Yes. The Reformasi found Jala’s safe house in Padang. Fortunately we were just leaving. Uh!”

  She was right. The wound itself was superficial, though it would need suturing. The bullet had passed through fatty tissue just above the hipbone. But the impact had bruised her badly where the skin wasn’t torn and I worried that the bruising might be deep, that the concussion might have torn something inside her. But there had been no blood in her urine, she said, and her blood pressure and pulse were at reasonable numbers under the circumstances.

  “I want to give you something for the pain, and we need to stitch this up.”

  “Stitch it if you have to, but I don’t want any drugs. We have to get out of here.”

  “You don’t want me suturing you without an anesthetic.”

  “Something local, then.”

  “This isn’t a hospital. I don’t have anything local.”

  “Then just sew it, Tyler. I can deal with the pain.”

  Yes, but could I? I looked at my hands. Clean—there was running water in the warehouse washroom, and Ina had helped me wrestle into latex gloves before I attended Diane. Clean and skilled. But not steady.

  I had never been squeamish about my work. Even as a med student, even doing dissections, I’d always been able to switch off the loop of sympathy that makes us feel another’s pain as if it were our own. To pretend that the torn artery demanding my attention was unconnected with a living human being. To pretend and for the necessary few minutes to really believe it.

  But now my hand was shaking, and the idea of passing a needle through these bloody lips of flesh seemed brutal, cruel beyond countenance.

  Diane put her hand on my wrist to steady it. “It’s a Fourth thing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You feel like the bullet went through you instead of me. Right?”

  I nodded, astonished.

  “It’s a Fourth thing. I think it’s supposed to make us better people. But you’re still a doctor. You just have to work through it.”

  “If I can’t,” I said, “I’ll turn it over to Ina.”

  But I could. Somehow. I did.

  Ina came back from her conference with Jala. “Today there was to be a labor action,” she said. “The police and the Reformasi are at the gates and they mean to take control of the port. Conflict is anticipated.” She looked at Diane. “How are you, my dear?”

  “In good hands,” Diane whispered. Her voice was ragged.

  Ina inspected my work. “Competent,” she pronounced.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Under the circumstances. But listen to me, listen. We need very urgently to leave. Right now the only thing between us and prison is a labor riot. We have to board the Capetown Maru immediately.”

  “The police are looking for us?”

  “I think not you, not specifically. Jakarta has entered into some sort of agreement with the Americans to suppress the emigration trade in general. The docks are being swept here and elsewhere, very publicly, in order to impress the people at the U.S. consulate. Of course it won’t last. Too much money changes hands for the trade to be truly eliminated. But for cosmetic effect there’s nothing like uniformed police dragging people out of the holds of cargo ships.”

  “They came to Jala’s safe house,” Diane said.

  “Yes, they’re aware of you and Dr. Dupree, ideally they would like to take you into custody, but that isn’t why the police are forming ranks at the gates. Ships are still leaving the harbor but that won’t last long. The union movement is powerful at Teluk Bayur. They mean to fight.”

  Jala shouted from the doorway, words I didn’t understand.

  “Now we really must leave,” Ina said.

  “Help me make a litter for Diane.”

  Diane tried to sit up. “I can walk.”

  “No,” Ina said. “In this I believe Tyler is correct. Try not to move.”

  We doubled up more lengths of stitched jute and made a sort of hammock for her. I took one end and Ina called over one of the huskier Minang men to grab the other.

  “Hurry now!” Jala shouted, waving us out into the rain.

  Monsoon season. Was this a monsoon? The morning looked like dusk. Clouds like sodden bolts of wool came across the gray water of Teluk B
ayur, clipping the towers and radars of the big double-hulled tankers. The air was hot and rank. Rain soaked us even as we loaded Diane into a waiting car. Jala had arranged a little convoy for his group of émigrés: three cars and a couple of little open-top cargo-haulers with hard rubber wheels.

  The Capetown Maru was docked at the end of a high concrete pier a quarter mile away. Along the wharves in the opposite direction, past rows of warehouses and industrial godowns and fat red-and-white Avigas holding tanks, a dense crowd of dockworkers had gathered by the gates. Under the drumming of the rain I could hear someone shouting through a bullhorn. Then a sound that might or might not have been shots fired.

  “Get in,” Jala said, urging me into the backseat of the car where Diane bent over her wounds as if she were praying. “Hurry, hurry.” He climbed into the driver’s seat.

  I took a final look back at the rain-obscured mob. Something the size of a football lofted high over the crowd, trailing spirals of white smoke behind it. A tear gas canister.

  The car jolted forward.

  “This is more than police,” Jala said as we wheeled out along the finger of the quay. “Police would not be so foolish. This is New Reformasi. Street thugs hired out of the slums of Jakarta and dressed in government uniforms.”

  Uniforms and guns. And more tear gas now, roiling clouds of it that blurred into the rainy mist. The crowd began to unravel at its edges.

  There was a distant whoomp, and a ball of flame rose a few yards into the sky.

  Jala saw it in his mirror. “Dear God! How idiotic! Someone must have fired on a barrel of oil. The docks—”

  Sirens bellowed over the water as we followed the quay. Now the crowd was genuinely panicked. For the first time I was able to see a line of police pushing through the gated entrance to the port. Those in the vanguard carried heavy weapons and wore black-snouted masks.

  A fire truck rolled out of a shed and screamed toward the gate.

  We rolled up a series of ramps and stopped where the pier was level with the main deck of the Capetown Maru. Capetown Maru was an old flag-of-convenience freighter painted white and rust orange. A short steel gangway had been emplaced between the main deck and the pier, and the first few Minang were already scurrying across it.