Spin (22 page)

I quoted the Housman poem she had taught me long ago:
“The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear
.”

“The infant child is starting to figure it out,” she said. “Maybe that’s how you define the Tribulation.”

Maybe so. Some nights, when I couldn’t sleep, I thought about the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they were. There was really only one salient, obvious fact about them: not simply that they were capable of enclosing the Earth in this… strange membrane, but that they had been out there— owning us, regulating our planet and the passage of time— for almost two billion years.

Nothing even remotely human could be so patient.

Jason’s neurologist tipped me off to a
JAMA
study published that winter. Researchers at Cornell had discovered a genetic marker for acute drug-resistant MS. The neurologist—a genial, fat Floridian named David Malmstein—had run Jason’s DNA profile and found the suspect sequence in it. I asked him what that meant.

“It means we can tailor his medication a little more specifically. It also means we can never deliver the kind of permanent remission a typical MS patient expects.”

“Seems like he’s been in remission for most of a year now. Isn’t that long-term?”

“His symptoms are under control, that’s all. The AMS goes on burning, sort of like a fire in a coal seam. The time will come when we can’t compensate for it.”

“The point of no return.”

“You could say.”

“How long can he pass for normal?”

Malmstein paused. “You know,” he said, “that’s exactly what Jason asked me.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I’m not a fortune-teller. That AMS is a disease without a well-established etiology. That the human body has its own calendar.”

“I’m guessing he didn’t like the answer.”

“He was vocal in his disapproval. But it’s true. He could walk around for the next decade asymptomatic. Or he could be in a wheelchair by the end of the week.”

“You told him
that
?”

“A kindler, gentler version. I don’t want him to lose hope. He has a fighting spirit, and that counts for a lot. My honest opinion is that he’ll do all right over the short term—two years, five years, maybe more. Then all bets are off. I wish I had a better prognosis.”

I didn’t tell Jase I’d talked to Malmstein, but I saw the way, in the following weeks, he redoubled his work, counting his successes against time and mortality, not the world’s but his own.

The pace of the launches, not to mention the cost of them, began to escalate. The last wave of seed launches (the only one to carry, in part, actual seeds) happened in March, two years after Jase and Diane and I had watched a dozen similar rockets depart Florida for what had been at the time a barren planet.

The Spin had given us the necessary leverage for a long ecopoiesis. Now that we had launched the seeds of complex plants, however, timing became crucial. If we waited too long Mars could evolve out of our grasp: a species of edible grain after a million years evolving in the wild might not resemble its ancestral form, might have grown unpalatable or even poisonous.

This meant the survey satellites had to be launched only weeks after the seed armada, and the manned NEP vessels, if the results looked promising, immediately after that.

I took another late-night call from Diane the night after the survey sats went up. (Their data packages had been retrieved within hours but were still en route to JPL in Pasadena to be analyzed.) She sounded stressed and admitted when I questioned her that she had been laid off at least until June. She and Simon had run into trouble with their back rent. She couldn’t ask E.D. for money, and Carol was impossible to talk to. She was working up the nerve to speak to Jase, but she didn’t relish the humiliation.

“What kind of money are we talking about, Diane?”

“Tyler, I didn’t mean—”

“I know. You didn’t ask. I’m offering.”

“Well… this month, even five hundred dollars would make a real difference.”

“I guess the pipe cleaner fortune ran dry.”

“Simon’s trust fund ran out. There’s still family money, but his family’s not talking to him.”

“He won’t catch on if I send you a check?”

“He wouldn’t like it. I thought I’d tell him I found an old insurance policy and cashed it in. Something like that. The kind of lie that doesn’t really count as a sin. I hope.”

“You guys are still at the Collier Street address?” Where I mailed a politely neutral Christmas card every year and from which I received one in return, generic snow scenes signed
Simon and Diane Townsend, God Bless
!

“Yes,” she said, then, “Thank you, Tyler. Thank you so much. You know this is incredibly mortifying.”

“Hard times for a lot of folks.”

“You’re doing all right, though?”

“Yeah, I’m doing all right.”

I sent her six checks each postdated for the fifteenth of the month, half a year’s worth, not sure whether this would cement our friendship or poison it. Or whether it mattered.

The survey data revealed a world still drier than the Earth but marked with lakes like polished turquoise inlaid on a copper disk; a planet gently swirled with bands of cloud, storms dropping rainfall on the windward slopes of ancient volcanos and feeding river basins and silty lowland deltas green as suburban lawns.

The big boosters were fueled on their pads, and at launch facilities and cosmodromes around the world nearly eight hundred human beings climbed gantries to lock themselves into cupboard-sized chambers and confront a destiny that was anything but certain. The NEP arks enclosed atop these boosters contained (in addition to astronauts) embryonic sheep, cattle, horses, pigs, and goats, and the steel wombs from which they could, with luck, be decanted; the seeds of ten thousand plants; the larvae of bees and other useful insects; dozens of similar biological cargos which might or might not survive the journey and the rigors of regenesis; condensed archives of essential human knowledge both digital (including the means to read them) and densely printed; and parts and supplies for simple shelters, solar power generators, greenhouses, water purifiers, and elementary field hospitals. In a best-case scenario all these human expeditionary vessels would arrive at roughly the same equatorial lowlands within a span of several years depending on their transit of the Spin membrane. At worst, even a single ship, if it arrived reasonably intact, could support its crew through a period of acclimation.

Once more into the Perihelion auditorium, then, along with everyone who hadn’t gone up the coast to see the event in person. I sat up front next to Jason and we craned our heads at the video feed from NASA, a spectacular long shot of the offshore launch platforms, steel islands linked by immense rail bridges, ten huge Prometheus boosters (called “Prometheus” when they were manufactured by Boeing or Lockheed-Martin; the Russians, the Chinese, and the EU used the same template but named and painted them differently) bathed in spotlights and ranked like whitewashed fenceposts far into the blue Atlantic. Much had been sacrificed for this moment: taxes and treasure, shorelines and coral reefs, careers and lives. (At the foot of each gantry off Canaveral was an engraved plaque bearing the names of the fifteen construction workers who had died during the assembly work.) Jason tapped his foot in a violent rhythm while the countdown drained into its last minute, and I wondered if this was symptomatic, but he caught me looking and leaned into my ear and said, “I’m just nervous. Aren’t you?”

There had already been problems. Worldwide, eighty of these big boosters had been assembled and prepared for tonight’s synchronized launch. But they were a new design, not entirely debugged. Four had been scrubbed before launch for technical problems. Three were currently holding in their counts—in a launch that was supposed to be synchronized worldwide—for the usual reasons: dicey fuel lines, software glitches. This was inevitable and had been accounted for in tile planning, but it still seemed ominous.

So much had to happen so quickly. What we were transplanting this time was not biology but human history, and human history, Jase had said, burned like a fire compared to the slow rust of evolution. (When we were much younger, after the Spin but before he left the Big House, Jase used to have a parlor trick to demonstrate this idea. “Stick out your arms,” he’d say, “straight out at your sides,” and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he’d say, “Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that’s the history of the Earth. You know what
human
history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That’s the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we’re newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist”)

Then the NASA voice announced, “Ignition,” and Jason sucked air between his teeth and turned his head half away as nine of ten boosters, hollow tubes of explosive liquid taller than the Empire State Building, detonated skyward against all logic of gravity and inertia, burning tons of fuel to achieve the first few inches of altitude and vaporizing seawater in order to mute a sonic event that would otherwise have shaken them to pieces. Then it was as if they had made ladders of steam and smoke and climbed them, their speed apparent now, plumes of fire outpacing the rolling clouds they had created. Up and gone, just like every successful launch: swift and vivid as a dream, then up and gone.

The last booster was delayed by a faulty sensor but launched ten minutes late. It would arrive on Mars nearly a thousand years after the rest of the fleet, but this had been taken into account in the planning and might prove to be a good thing, an injection of Terrestrial technology and know-how long after the paper books and digital readers of the original colonists had crumbled into dust.

Moments later the video broadcast cut to French Guyana, the old and much-expanded Centre National d‘Études Spatiales at Kourou, where one of the big boosters from the Aerospatiale factory had risen a hundred feet and then lost thrust and tumbled back onto its pad in a mushroom of flame.

Twelve people were killed, ten aboard the NEP ark and two on the ground, but it was the only conspicuous tragedy of the entire launch sequence, and that probably amounted to good luck, taken all in all.

But that wasn’t the end of the exercise. By midnight—and this, it seemed to me, was the clearest indicator yet of the grotesque disparity between terrestrial time and Spin-time— human civilization on Mars had either failed entirely or had been in progress for most of a hundred thousand years.

That’s roughly the amount of time between the emergence of
Homo sapiens
as a distinct species and yesterday afternoon.

It passed while I was driving home from Perihelion to my rental. It was entirely possible that Martian dynasties rose and fell while I waited for traffic lights to change. I thought about those lives—those fully real human lives, each one of them boxed into a span of less than a minute as my watch counted time—and felt a little dizzy. Spin vertigo. Or something deeper.

A half dozen survey satellites were launched that night, programmed to look for signs of human life on Mars. Their payload packages parachuted back to Earth and were retrieved before morning.

I saw the results before they were made public.

This was a full week after the Prometheus launches. Jason had booked a 10:30 appointment at the infirmary, subject to breaking news from JPL. He didn’t cancel the appointment but showed up an hour late with a manila envelope in his hand, clearly anxious to discuss something not related to his medical regimen. I hurried him into a consultation room.

“I don’t know what to tell the press,” he said. “I just got off a conference call with the ESA director and a bunch of Chinese bureaucrats. We’re trying to put together a draft of a joint statement for heads of state, but as soon as the Russians agree to a sentence the Chinese want to veto it, and vice versa.”

“A statement about what, Jase?”

“The satellite data.”

“You got the results?” In fact they were overdue. JPL was usually quicker about sharing its photos. But from what Jason had said I guessed someone had been sitting on the data. Which meant it wasn’t what they’d expected. Bad news, perhaps.

“Look,” Jason said.

He opened the manila folder and pulled out two composite telescopic photos, one atop the other. Both were images of Mars taken from Earth orbit after the Prometheus launches.

The first photograph was heart-stopping. It was not as distinct as the framed image! had put up in the waiting room, since in this one the planet was far from its closest approach to Earth; the clarity it did possess was a testament to modern imaging technology. Superficially it didn’t seem much different from the framed photo: I could make out enough green to know that the transplanted ecology was still intact, still active.

“Look a little closer,” Jason said.

He ran his finger down the sinuous line of a riverine lowland. There were green places here with sharp, regular borders. More of them, the more I looked.

“Agriculture,” Jase said.

I held my breath and thought about what that meant. I thought:
Now there are two inhabited planets in the solar system
. Not hypothetically, but really. These were places where people lived, where people lived
on Mars
.

I wanted to stare. But Jase slid the printout back into its envelope, revealing the one beneath.

“The second photo,” he said, “was taken twenty-four hours later.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Taken from the same camera on the same satellite. We have parallel images to confirm the result. It looked like a flaw in the imaging system until we juiced the contrast enough to read a little starlight.”