Spin (21 page)

A thousand cameras clattered like dying crickets and went still.

The cheering lasted, in one form or another, until dawn.

We went inside and drew the drapes against the anticlimactic darkness and opened the champagne. We watched the news from overseas. Apart from the French rain delay, every launch had been successful. A bacterial armada was en route to Mars.

“So why
do
they all have to go up at once?” Diane asked again.

Jason gave her a long thoughtful look. “Because we want them to arrive at their destination at roughly the same time. Which is not as easy as it sounds. They have to enter the Spin membrane more or less simultaneously, or they’ll exit separated by years or centuries. Not so critical with these anaerobic cargos, but we’re practicing for when it really matters.”

“Years or
centuries‘
? How is that possible?”

“Nature of the Spin, Diane.”

“Right, but centuries?”

He turned his chair to face her, frowning. “I’m trying to grasp the extent of your ignorance here…”

“Just a question, Jase.”

“Count a second for me.”

“What?”

“Look at your watch and count me one second. No, I’ll do it. One—” He paused. “Second. Got that?”

“Jason—”

“Bear with me. You understand the Spin ratio?”

“Roughly.”

“Roughly isn’t good enough. One terrestrial second equals 3.17 years Spin time. Keep that in mind. If one of our rockets enters the Spin membrane a single second behind the rest, it reaches orbit more than three years late.”

“Just because I can’t quote numbers—”

“They’re important numbers, Diane. Suppose our flotilla just emerged from the membrane, just now,
now
—” He ticked the air with his finger. “
One second
, here and gone. For the flotilla, that was three and a fraction years. One second ago they were in Earth orbit. Now they’ve delivered their cargo to the surface of Mars. I mean
now
, Diane, literally
now
. It’s already happened, it’s done. So let a minute pass on your watch. That’s approximately a hundred and ninety years by an outside clock.”

“That’s a lot, of course, but you can’t make over a planet in two hundred years, can you?”

“So now it’s two hundred Spin years into the experiment. Right now, as we speak, any bacterial colonies that survived the trip will have been reproducing on Mars for two centuries. In an hour, they will have been there eleven thousand four hundred years. This time tomorrow they’ll have been multiplying for almost two hundred seventy-four thousand years.”

“Okay, Jase. I get the idea.”

“This time next week, 1.9 million years.”

“Okay.”

“A month. 8.3 million years.”

“Jason—”

“This time next year, one hundred million years.”

“Yes, but—”

“On Earth, one hundred million years is roughly the span of time between the emergence of life from the sea and your last birthday. One hundred million years is time enough for those microorganisms to pump carbon dioxide out of carbonate deposits in the crust, leach nitrogen from nitrates, purge oxides from the regolith and enrich it by dying in large numbers. All that liberated C0
₂
is a greenhouse gas. The atmosphere gets thicker and warmer. A year from now we send another armada of respirating organisms, and they begin to cycle C0
₂
into free oxygen. Another year—or as soon as the spectroscopic signature from the planet looks right—we introduce grasses, plants, other complex organisms. And when all that stabilizes into some kind of crudely homeostatic planetary ecology, we send human beings. You know what that means?”

“Tell me,” Diane said sullenly.

“It means that within five years there’ll be a flourishing human civilization on Mars. Farms, factories, roads, cities…”

“There’s a Greek word for this, Jase.”

“Ecopoiesis.”

“I was thinking of ‘hubris.’”

He smiled. “I worry about a lot of things. But offending the gods isn’t one of them.”

“Or offending the Hypotheticals?”

That stopped him. He leaned back and sipped champagne, a little flat by now, from his hotel-room glass.

“I’m not afraid of offending them,” he said finally. “On the contrary. I’m afraid we may be doing exactly what they want us to do.”

But he wouldn’t explain, and Diane was eager to change the subject.

I drove Diane to Orlando the next day for her flight back to Phoenix. It had become obvious over the last few days that we would not discuss, mention, or allude in any way to the physical intimacy we had shared that night in the Berkshires before her marriage to Simon. If we acknowledged it at all it was only in the cumbersome detours we took to avoid it. When we hugged (chastely) in the space in front of the airport security gate she said, “I’ll call you,” and I knew she would—Diane made few promises but was scrupulous about keeping them—but I was equally conscious of the time that had passed since I had last seen her and the time that would inevitably pass before I saw her again: not Spin time, but something just as erosive and just as hungry. There were creases at the corners of her eyes and mouth, not unlike the ones I saw in the mirror every morning.

Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn’t know one another very well.

There were more launches during the spring and summer of that year, surveillance packages that spent months in high Earth orbit and returned with visual and spectrographic images of Mars—snapshots of the ecopoiesis.

The first results were equivocal: a modest increase in atmospheric C0
₂
that might have been a side effect of solar warming. Mars remained a cold, inhospitable world by any plausible measure. Jason admitted that even the GEMOs— the genetically engineered Mars organisms that comprised the bulk of the initial seeding—might not have adjusted well to the planet’s unfiltered daylight UV levels and oxidant-ridden regolith.

But by midsummer we were seeing strong spectrographic evidence of biological activity. There was more water vapor in a denser atmosphere, more methane and ethane and ozone, even a tiny but detectable increase in free nitrogen.

By Christmas these changes, while still subtle, had so dramatically outpaced what could be attributed to solar warming that no doubt remained. Mars had become a living planet.

The launch platforms were readied once more, new cargos of microbial life cultured and packaged. In the United States that year, fully two percent of the gross domestic product was devoted to Spin-related aerospace work—essentially, the Mars program—and the ratio was similar in other industrialized countries.

Jason suffered a relapse in February. He woke up unable to focus his eyes. His neurologist adjusted his medication and prescribed an eye patch as a temporary fix. Jase recovered rapidly but was away from work for most of a week.

Diane was as good as her word. She began to call me at least monthly, usually more often, often late at night when Simon was asleep at the other end of their small apartment. They lived in a few rooms over a secondhand book-store in Tempe, the best they could do on Diane’s salary and the irregular income Simon took home from Jordan Tabernacle. In warm weather I could hear the drone of a swamp cooler in the background; in winter, a radio playing softly to disguise the sound of her voice.

I invited her to come back to Florida for the next series of launches, but of course she couldn’t: she was busy with work, they were having church friends to dinner that weekend, Simon wouldn’t understand. “Simon’s going through a minor spiritual crisis. He’s trying to deal with the Messiah issue…”

“There’s a Messiah issue?”

“You should read the newspapers,” Diane said, possibly overestimating how often these religious debates made the mainstream press, at least in Florida; maybe it was different out west. “The old NK movement believed in a Christless Parousia. That was what made us distinctive.” That, I thought, and their penchant for public nudity. “The early writers, Ratel and Greengage, saw the Spin as a direct fulfillment of scriptural prophecy—which meant the prophecy itself was redefined, reconfigured by historical events. There didn’t have to be a literal Tribulation or even a physical Second Coming of Christ. All that stuff in Thessalonians and Corinthians and Revelation could be reinterpreted or ignored, because the Spin was a genuine intervention by God in human history—a tangible miracle, which supersedes scripture. That was what freed us to make the Kingdom on Earth. Suddenly we were responsible for our own chiliasm.”

“I’m not sure I follow.” Actually she had lost me somewhere around the word “Parousia.”

“It means—well, all that really matters is that Jordan Tabernacle, our little church, has officially renounced all NK doctrine, even though half the congregation is old NK people like me and Simon. So suddenly there are all these arguments about the Tribulation and how the Spin tallies against Biblical prophecy. People taking sides. Bereans versus Progressives, Covenanters versus Preterists. Is there an Antichrist, and if so, where is he? Does the Rapture happen before the Tribulation or during or after? Issues like that. Maybe it sounds picayune, but the spiritual stakes are very high, and the people having these arguments are people we care about, our friends.”

“Where do you stand?”

“Me personally?” She was quiet, and there it was again, the sound of the radio murmuring behind her, some Valium-voiced announcer delivering late-night news to insomniacs.
Latest on the shooting in Mesa
. Parousia or no Parousia. “You could say I’m conflicted. I don’t know what I believe. Sometimes I miss the old days. Making up paradise as we went along. It seems like—”

She paused. Now there was another voice doubling the staticky murmur of the radio:
Diane? Are you still up
?

“Sorry,” she whispered. Simon on patrol. It was time to cut short our telephone tryst, her act of touchless infidelity. “Talk to you soon.”

She was gone before I could say good-bye.

The second series of seed launches went off as flawlessly as the first. The media mobbed Canaveral again, but I watched this round on a big digital projection in the auditorium at Perihelion, a sunshine launch that scattered herons into the sky over Merritt Island like bright confetti.

Followed by another summer of waiting. ESA lofted a series of next-generation orbital telescopes and interferometers, and the stored data they retrieved was even sleeker and cleaner than last year’s. By September every office at Perihelion was plastered with high-res images of our success. I framed one for the infirmary waiting room. It was a color-composite rendering of Mars showing Olympus Mons outlined in frost or ice and scarred with fresh drainage channels, fog flowing like water through Valles Marineris, green capillaries snaking over Solis Lacus. The southern highlands of the Terra Sirenum were still deserts, but the region’s impact craters had eroded to near-invisibility under a wetter, windier climate.

The oxygen content of the atmosphere rose and fell for a few months as the population of aerobic organisms oscillated, but by December it had topped twenty millibars and stabilized. Out of a potentially chaotic mix of increasing greenhouse gases, an unstable hydrologic cycle, and novel biogeochemical feedback loops, Mars was discovering its own equilibrium.

The string of successes was good for Jason. He remained in remission and was happily, almost therapeutically, busy. If anything dismayed him it was his own emergence as the iconic genius of the Perihelion Foundation, or at least its scientific celebrity, poster child for the transformation of Mars. This was more E.D.‘s doing than Jason’s: E.D. knew the public wanted Perihelion to have a human face, preferably young, smart but not intimidating, and he had been pushing Jase in front of cameras since the days when Perihelion was an aerospace lobby group. Jase put up with it—he was a good and patient explainer, and reasonably photogenic—but he hated the process and would leave a room rather than see himself on television.

That was the year of the first unmanned NEP flights, which Jase watched with particular attention. These were the vehicles that would transport human beings to Mars, and unlike the comparatively simple seed carriers, the NEP vehicles were new technology. NEP stood for “nuclear electric propulsion”: miniature nuclear reactors feeding ion engines vastly more powerful than the ones that drove the seed vessels, powerful enough to enable massive payloads. But getting these leviathans into orbit required boosters as large as anything NASA had ever launched, acts of what Jason called “heroic engineering,” heroically expensive. The price tag had begun to raise red flags even in a largely supportive Congress, but the stream of notable successes kept a lid on dissent. Jason worried that even a single conspicuous failure would shift that equation.

Shortly after New Year’s Day a NEP test vehicle failed to return its reentry package of test data and was presumed disabled in orbit. There were finger-pointing speeches on Capitol Hill led by a coterie of fiscal ultraconservatives representing states without significant aerospace investment, but E.D.‘s friends in Congress overrode the objections and a successful test a week later buried the controversy. Still, Jason said, we had dodged a bullet.

Diane had followed the debate but considered it trivial. “What Jase
needs
to worry about,” she said, “is what this Mars thing is doing to the world. So far it’s all good press, right? Everybody’s gung-ho, we all want something to reassure us about the—I’m not sure what to call it—the
potency
of the human race. But the euphoria will wear off sooner or later, and in the meantime people are getting extremely savvy about the nature of the Spin.”

“Is that a bad thing?”

“If the Mars project fails or doesn’t live up to expectations, yeah. Not just because people will be disappointed. They’ve watched the transformation of an entire planet—they have a yardstick to measure the Spin by. The sheer insane power of it, I mean. The Spin’s not just some abstract phenomenon— you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong you steal that courage away again, and now it’s worse because they’ve
seen
the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they’ve ever been.”