Spin (17 page)

“I’ll call for help.”

He straightened in his chair. “You’ll do no such thing. I can sit here until there’s nobody around except the night guard, if necessary.”

“That’s absurd.”

“Or you can
discreetly
help me stand up. We’re what, twenty or thirty yards from the infirmary? If you grab my arm and look congenial we can probably get there without attracting too much attention.”

In the end I agreed, not because I approved of the charade but because it seemed to be the only way to get him into my office. I took his left arm and he braced his right hand on the table edge and levered himself up. We managed to cross the cafeteria floor without weaving, though Jason’s left foot dragged in a way that was hard to disguise—fortunately no one looked too closely. Once we reached the corridor we stayed close to the wall where his shuffling was less conspicuous. When a senior administrator appeared at the end of the hallway Jason whispered, “Stop,” and we stood as if in casual conversation with Jason braced against a display case, his right hand gripping the steel shelf so fiercely that his knuckles turned bloodless and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. The exec passed with a wordless nod.

By the time we made the clinic entrance I was bearing most of his weight. Molly Seagram, fortunately, was out of the office; once I closed the outer door we were alone. I helped Jase onto a table in one of the examination rooms, then went back to the reception desk and posted a note for Molly to make sure we wouldn’t be disturbed.

When I returned to the consultation room Jason was crying. Not weeping, but tears had streaked his face and lingered on his chin. “This is so fucking awful.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.”

He had lost control of his bladder.

I helped him into a medical gown and rinsed his wet clothes in the consulting room sink and put them to dry next to a sunny window in the seldom-used storage room beyond the pharmaceutical cupboards. Business was slow today and I used that excuse to give Molly the afternoon off.

Jason recovered some of his composure, though he looked diminished in the paper gown. “You said this was a curable disease. Tell me what went wrong.”

“It is treatable, Jase. For most patients, most of the time. But there are exceptions.”

“And what, I’m one of them? I won the bad news lottery?”

“You’re having a relapse. That’s typical of the untreated disease, periods of disability followed by intervals of remission. You might just be a late responder. In some cases the drug needs to reach a certain level in the body for an extended length of time before it’s fully effective.”

“It’s been six months since you wrote the prescription. And I’m worse, not better.”

“We can switch you to one of the other sclerostatins, see if that helps. But they’re all chemically very similar.”

“So changing the prescription won’t help.”

“It might. It might not. We’ll try it before we rule it out.”

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“Then we stop talking about eliminating the disease and start to talk about managing it. Even untreated, MS is hardly a death sentence. Lots of people experience full remission between attacks and manage to lead relatively normal lives.” Although, I did not add, such cases were seldom as severe or as aggressive as Jason’s seemed to be. “The usual fallback treatment is a cocktail of anti-inflammatory drugs, selective protein inhibitors, and targeted CNS stimulants. It can be very effective at suppressing symptoms and slowing the course of the disease.”

“Good,” Jason said. “Great. Write me a ticket.”

“It’s not that simple. You could be looking at side effects.”

“Such as?”

“Maybe nothing. Maybe some psychological distress— mild depression or manic episodes. Some generalized physical weakness.”

“But I’ll pass for normal?”

“In all likelihood.” For now and probably for another ten or fifteen years, maybe more. “But it’s a control measure, not a cure—a brake, not a full stop. The disease will come back if you live long enough.”

“You can give me a decade, though, for sure?”

“As sure as anything is in my business.”

“A decade,” he said thoughtfully. “Or a billion years. Depending on how you look at it. Maybe that’s enough. Ought to be enough, don’t you think?”

I didn’t ask, Enough for what? “But in the meantime—”

“I don’t want a ‘meantime,’ Tyler. I can’t afford to be away from my work and I don’t want anyone to know about this.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed of it.” He gestured at the paper gown with his right hand. “Fucking humiliated, but not ashamed. This isn’t a psychological issue. It’s about what I do here at Perihelion. What I’m
allowed
to do. E.D. hates illness, Tyler. He hates weakness of any kind. He hated Carol from the day her drinking became a problem.”

“You don’t think he’d understand?”

“I love my father, but I’m not blind to his faults. No, he would not understand. All the influence I have at Perihelion flows through E.D. And that’s a little precarious at the moment. We’ve had some disagreements. If I became a liability to him he’d have me relegated to some expensive treatment facility in Switzerland or Bali before the week was out, and he’d tell himself he was doing it for my sake. Worse, he would believe it.”

“What you choose to make public is your business. But you need to be seeing a neurologist, not a staff GP.”

“No,” he said.

“I can’t in good conscious continue to treat you, Jase, if you won’t talk to a specialist. It was dicey enough putting you on Tremex without consulting a brain guy.”

“You have the MRI and the blood tests, right? What else do you need?”

“Ideally, a fully equipped hospital lab and degree in neurology.”

“Bullshit. You said yourself, MS is no big deal nowadays.”

“Unless it fails to respond to treatment.”

“I can’t—” He wanted to argue. But he was also obviously, brutally tired. Fatigue might be another symptom of his relapse, though; he had been pushing himself hard in the weeks before E.D.‘s visit. “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll see a specialist if you can arrange it discreetly and keep it off my Perihelion chart. But I need to be functional. I need to be functional
tomorrow
. Functional as in walking without assistance and not pissing myself. The drug cocktail you talked about, does it work fast?”

“Usually. But without a neurological workup—”

“Tyler, I have to tell you, I appreciate what you’ve done for me, but I can buy a more cooperative doctor if I need one. Treat me now and I’ll see a specialist, I’ll do whatever you think is right. But if you imagine I’m going to show up at work in a wheelchair with a catheter up my dick, you’re dead wrong.”

“Even if I write a script, Jase, you won’t be better overnight. It takes a couple of days.”

“I might be able to spare a couple of days.” He thought about it. “Okay,” he said finally. “I want the drugs and I want you to get me out of here inconspicuously. If you can do that, I’m in your hands. No arguments.”

“Physicians don’t bargain, Jase.”

“Take it or leave it, Hippocrates.”

I didn’t start him on the whole cocktail—our pharmacy didn’t stock all the drugs—but I gave him a CNS stimulant that would at least return his bladder control and the ability to walk unassisted for the next few days. The downside was an edgy, icy state of mind, like, or so I’m told, the tail end of a cocaine run. It raised his blood pressure and put dark baggage under his eyes.

We waited until most of the staff had gone home4X10
⁹
A.D. and there was only the night shift at the compound. Jase walked stiffly but plausibly past the front desk to the parking lot, waved amicably to a couple of late-departing colleagues, and sank into the passenger seat of my car. I drove him home.

He had visited my little rental house several times, but I hadn’t been to his place before. I had expected something that reflected his status at Perihelion. In fact the apartment where he slept—clearly, he did little else there—was a modest condo unit with a sliver of an ocean view. He had furnished it with a sofa, a television, a desk, a couple of bookcases and a broadband media/Internet connection. The walls were bare except for the space above the desk, where he had taped a hand-drawn chart depicting the linear history of the solar system from the birth of the sun to its final collapse into a smoldering white dwarf, with human history diverging from the line at a spot marked the spin. The bookcases were crowded with journals and academic texts and decorated with exactly three framed photographs: E. D. Lawton, Carol Lawton, and a demure image of Diane that must have been taken years ago.

Jase stretched out on the sofa. He looked like a study in paradox, his body in repose, his eyes bright with drug-induced hyperalertness. I went to the small adjoining kitchen and scrambled eggs (neither of us had eaten since breakfast) while Jason talked. And talked some more. And kept on talking. “Of course,” he said at one point, “I know I’m being way too verbal, I’m conscious of that, but I can’t even think about sleeping—does this wear off?”

“If we put you on the drug cocktail long-term, then yes, the obvious stimulant effect will go away.” I carried a plate to the sofa for him.

“It’s very speedy. Like one of those cramming-for-the-finals pills people take. But physically, it’s calming. I feel like a neon sign on an empty building. All lit up but basically hollow. The eggs, the eggs are very good. Thank you.” He put the plate aside. He had eaten maybe a spoonful.

I sat at his desk, glancing at the Spin chart on the opposite wall. Wondering what it was like to live with this stark depiction of human origins and human destiny, the human species rendered as a finite event in the life of an ordinary star. He had drawn it with a felt-tip pen on a scroll of ordinary brown wrapping paper.

Jason followed my look. “Obviously,” he said, “they mean for us to do
something
…”

“Who does?”

“The Hypotheticals. If we must call them that. And I suppose we must. Everyone does. They expect something from us. I don’t know what. A gift, a signal, an acceptable sacrifice.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s hardly an original observation. Why is the Spin barrier permeable to human artifacts like satellites, but not to meteors or even Brownlee particles? Obviously it’s
not
a barrier; that was never the right word.” Under the influence of the stimulant Jase seemed particularly fond of the word
obviously
. “Obviously,” he said, “it’s a selective filter. We know it filters the energy reaching the surface of the Earth. So the Hypotheticals want to keep us, or at least the terrestrial ecology, intact and alive, but then why grant us access to space? Even after we attempted to nuke the only two Spin-related artifacts anyone has ever found? What are they
waiting
for, Ty? What’s the prize?”

“Maybe it’s not a prize. Maybe it’s a ransom. Pay up and we’ll leave you alone.”

He shook his head. “It’s too late for them to leave us alone. We need them now. And we still can’t rule out the possibility that they’re benevolent, or at least benign. I mean, suppose they hadn’t arrived when they did. What were we looking forward to? A lot of people think we were facing our last century as a viable civilization, maybe even as a species. Global warming, overpopulation, the death of the seas, the loss of arable land, the proliferation of disease, the threat of nuclear or biological warfare…”

“We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault.”

“Would it, though?
Whose
fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first: When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you’re at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.”

“Is it better, being consumed by the sun?”

“That hasn’t happened yet. And we aren’t the first star to burn out. The galaxy is littered with white dwarf stars that might once have hosted habitable planets. Do you ever wonder what happened to
them
?”

“Seldom,” I said.

I walked across the bare parquet floor to the bookcase, to the family photos. Here was E.D., smiling into the camera— a man whose smiles were never entirely convincing. His physical resemblance to Jason was marked. (Was obvious, Jase might have said.) Similar machine, different ghost.

“How could life survive a stellar catastrophe? But obviously it depends on what ‘life’ is. Are we talking about organic life, or any kind of generalized autocatalytic feedback loop? Are the Hypothetical organic? Which is an interesting question in itself…”

“You really ought to try to get some sleep.” It was past midnight. He was using words I didn’t understand. I picked up the photo of Carol. Here the resemblance was more subtle. The photographer had caught Carol on a good day: her eyes were open, not stuck at half-mast, and although her smile was grudging, a barely perceptible lift of her thin lips, it was not altogether inauthentic.

“They may be mining the sun,” Jason said, still talking about the Hypotheticals. “We have some suggestive data on solar flares. Obviously, what they’ve done to the Earth requires vast amounts of usable energy. It’s the equivalent of refrigerating a planet-sized mass to a temperature close to absolute zero. So where’s the power supply? Most likely, the sun. And we’ve observed a marked reduction in large solar flares since the Spin. Something, some force or agency, may be tapping high-energy particles before they crest in the heliosphere. Mining the sun, Tyler! That’s an act of technological hubris almost as startling as the Spin itself.”

I picked up the framed photo of Diane. The photograph predated her marriage to Simon Townsend. It had captured a certain characteristic disquiet, as if she had just narrowed her eyes at a puzzling thought. She was beautiful without trying but not quite at ease, all grace but at the same time just slightly off balance.