Spin (3 page)

“You’ll see.”

“I like your voice, Tyler. Did I ever tell you that? You have a very reassuring voice.”

Even if what I said was pure bullshit.

But the compliment affected me more than I wanted her to know. I thought about it after she hung up. I played it over in my head for the sake of the warm feeling it provoked. And I wondered what that meant. Diane was a year older than me and three times as sophisticated—so why did I feel so suddenly protective of her, and why did I wish she was close enough that I could touch her face and promise everything would be all right? It was a puzzle almost as urgent and nearly as disturbing as whatever had happened to the sky.

She called again at ten to five, when I had almost, despite myself, drifted off to sleep, fully dressed. I groped the phone out of my shirt pocket. “Hello?”

“Just me. It’s still dark, Tyler.”

I glanced at the window. Yes. Dark. Then the bedside clock. “Not quite sunrise, Diane.”

“Were you asleep?”

“No.”

“Yeah, you were. Lucky you. It’s still dark. Cold, too. I looked at the thermometer outside the kitchen window. Thirty-five degrees. Should it be that cold?”

“It was that cold yesterday morning. Anyone else awake at your place?”

“Jason’s locked in his room with his radio. My, uh, parents are, uh, I guess sleeping off the party. Is your mom awake?”

“Not this early. Not on a weekend.” I cast a nervous glance at the window. Surely by this time there ought to be some light in the sky. Even a hint of daylight would have been reassuring.

“You didn’t wake her up?”

“What’s she going to do, Diane? Make the stars come back?”

“I guess not.” She paused. “Tyler,” she said.

“I’m still here.”

“What’s the first thing you remember?”

“What do you mean—today?”

“No. The first thing you can remember in your life. I know it’s a stupid question, but I think I’ll be okay if we can just talk about something else besides the sky for five or ten minutes.”

“The first thing I remember?” I gave it some thought. “That would be back in L.A., before we moved east.” When my father was still alive and still working for E. D. Lawton at their startup firm in Sacramento. “We had this apartment with big white curtains in the bedroom. The first thing I really remember is watching those curtains blow in the wind. It was a sunny day and the window was open and there was a breeze.” The memory was unexpectedly poignant, like the last sight of a receding shoreline. “What about you?”

The first thing Diane could remember was also a Sacramento moment, though it was a very different one. E.D. had taken both children on a tour of the plant, even then positioning Jason for his role as heir apparent. Diane had been fascinated by the huge perforated spars on the factory floor, the spools of microthin aluminum fabric as big as houses, the constant noise. Everything had been so large that she had half expected to find a fairy-tale giant chained to the walls, her father’s prisoner.

It wasn’t a good memory. She said she felt left out, almost lost, abandoned inside a huge and terrifying machinery of construction.

We talked that around for a while. Then Diane said, “Check out the sky.”

I looked at the window. There was enough light spilling over the western horizon to turn the blackness an inky blue.

I didn’t want to confess to the relief I felt.

“I guess you were right,” she said, suddenly buoyant. “The sun’s coming up after all.”

Of course, it wasn’t really the sun. It was an impostor sun, a clever fabrication. But we didn’t know that yet.

People younger than me have asked me: Why didn’t you panic? Why didn’t
anyone
panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?

Sometimes I say,
But terrible things did happen
.

Sometimes I say,
But we didn’t understand. And what could we have done about it
?

And sometimes I cite the parable of the frog. Drop a frog into boiling water, he’ll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, stoke the fire slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there’s a problem.

The obliteration of the stars wasn’t slow or subtle, but neither, for most of us, was it immediately disastrous. If you were an astronomer or a defense strategist, if you worked in telecommunications or aerospace, you probably spent the first few days of the Spin in a state of abject terror. But if you drove a bus or flipped burgers, it was all more or less warm water.

English-language media called it “the October Event” (it wasn’t “the Spin” until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multi billion-dollar orbital satellite industry. Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weathersats. Repeated attempts to contact the International Space Station were uniformly unsuccessful. Commercial launches scheduled at Canaveral (and Baikonur and Kourou) were postponed indefinitely.

It meant, in the long run, very bad news for GE Americom, AT&T, COMSAT, and Hughes Communications, among many others.

And many terrible things
did
happen as a consequence of that night, though most of them were obscured by media blackouts. News stories traveled like whispers, squeezed through transatlantic fiber-optic cables rather than ricocheted through orbital space: it was almost a week before we learned that a Pakistani Hatf V missile tipped with a nuclear warhead, launched by mistake or miscalculation in the confusing first moments of the Event, had strayed off course and vaporized an agricultural valley in the Hindu Kush. It was the first nuclear device detonated in war since 1945, and, tragic as that event was, given the global paranoia ignited by the loss of telecommunications, we were lucky it only happened once. According to some reports we nearly lost Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Pyongyang.

Reassured by sunrise, I slept from dawn to noon. When I got up and dressed I found my mother in the living room, still in her quilted robe, staring into the television screen and frowning. When I asked her if she’d eaten breakfast she said she hadn’t. So I fixed lunch for both of us.

She would have been forty-five years old that fall. If I had been asked to choose a word to describe her it might have been “solid.” She was rarely angry and the only time in my life I had ever seen her cry was the night the police came to the door (this was back in Sacramento) and told her my father had died on the 80 near Vacaville, driving home from a business trip. She was, I think, careful to show me only this aspect of herself. But there were others. There was a portrait on a shelf in the etagere in the living room, taken years before I was born, of a woman so sleek, beautiful, and fearless before the camera that I had been startled when she told me it was a photo of herself.

Clearly she didn’t like what she was hearing from TV. A local station was doing nonstop news, repeating shortwave and ham radio stories and fuzzy stay-calm statements issued by the federal government. “Tyler,” she said, waving me to sit down, “this is hard to explain. Something happened last night—”

“I know,” I said. “I heard about it before I went to bed.”

“You knew about this? And you didn’t wake me up?”

“I wasn’t sure—”

But her annoyance waned as quickly as it had come. “No,” she said, “it’s all right, Ty. I guess I didn’t miss anything by sleeping. It’s funny… I feel like I’m
still
asleep.”

“It’s just the stars,” I said, idiotically.

“The stars and the moon,” she corrected me. “Didn’t you hear about the moon? All over the world, nobody can see the stars and nobody can see the moon.”

The moon was a clue, of course.

I sat awhile with my mom, then left her still fixed in front of the TV (“Back before dark this time,” she said, meaning it) and walked to the Big House. I knocked at the back door, the door the cook and the day maid used, though the Lawtons were careful never to call it a “servant’s entrance.” It was also the door by which, on weekdays, my mother entered to conduct the Lawtons’ household business.

Mrs. Lawton, the twins’ mother, let me in, looked at me blankly, waved me upstairs. Diane was still asleep, the door of her room closed. Jason hadn’t slept at all and apparently wasn’t planning to. I found him in his room monitoring a short-wave radio.

Jason’s room was an Aladdin’s cave of luxuries I coveted but had given up expecting ever to own: a computer with an ultrafast ISP connection, a hand-me-down television twice as big as the one that graced the living room at my house. In case he hadn’t heard the news: “The moon is gone,” I told him.

“Interesting, isn’t it?” Jase stood and stretched, running his fingers through his uncombed hair. He hadn’t changed his clothes since last night. This was uncharacteristic absent-mindedness. Jason, although certifiably a genius, had never acted like one in my presence—that is to say, he didn’t act like the geniuses I had seen in movies; he didn’t squint, stammer, or write algebraic equations on walls. Today, though, he did seem massively distracted. “The moon’s
not
gone, of course—how could it be? According to the radio they’re measuring the usual tides on the Atlantic coast. So the moon’s still there. And if the moon’s still there, so are the stars.”

“So why can’t we see them?”

He gave me an annoyed look. “How should I know? All I’m saying is, it’s at least partly an
optical
phenomenon.”

“Look out the window, Jase. The sun’s shining. What kind of optical illusion lets the sunshine through but hides the stars and the moon?”

“Again, how should I know? But what’s the alternative, Tyler? Somebody put the moon and the stars in a sack and ran away with them?”

No, I thought. It was the Earth that was in the sack, for some reason not even Jason could divine.

“Good point, though,” he said, “about the sun. Not an optical barrier but an optical
filter
. Interesting…”

“So who put it there?”

“How should I—?” He shook his head irritably. “You’re inferring too much. Who says
anybody
put it there? It could be a once-in-a-billion-years natural event, like the magnetic poles reversing. It’s a big jump to assume there’s some controlling intelligence behind it.”

“But it could be true.”

“Lots of things could be true.”

I had taken enough gentle ribbing about my science-fiction reading that I was reluctant to say the word “aliens.” But of course it was the first thing that occurred to me. Me, and plenty of other people. And even Jason had to admit that the idea of intervening extraterrestrials had become infinitely more plausible over the course of the last twenty-four hours.

“But even so,” I said, “you have to wonder why they’d do it.”

“There are only two plausible reasons. To
hide
something from us. Or to hide
us
from
something”

“What does your father think?”

“I haven’t asked him. He’s been on the phone all day. Probably trying to put in an early sell order on his GTE stock.” This was a joke, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by it, but it was also my first hint of what the loss of orbital access might mean for the aerospace industry in general and the Lawton family in particular. “I didn’t sleep last night,” Jase admitted. “Afraid I might miss something. Sometimes I envy my sister. You know,
wake me when somebody figures it out
.”

I bristled at this perceived slight of Diane. “She didn’t sleep either,” I said.

“Oh? Really? And how would
you
know?”

Trapped. “We talked on the phone a little bit…”

“She called you?”

“Yeah, around dawn.”

“Jesus, Tyler, you’re blushing.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are.”

I was saved by a brusque knock at the door: E. D. Lawton, who looked like he hadn’t slept much either.

Jason’s father was an intimidating presence. He was big, broad shouldered, hard to please, easily angered; on weekends he moved through the house like a storm front, all lightning and thunder. My mother had once said, “E.D.‘s not the kind of person you really want attention from. I never did understand why Carol married him.”

He wasn’t exactly the classic self-made businessman—his grandfather, retired founder of a spectacularly successful San Francisco law firm, had bankrolled most of E.D.‘s early ventures—but he had built himself a lucrative business in high-altitude instrumentation and lighter-than-air technology, and he had done it the hard way, without any real industry connections, at least when he started out.

He entered Jason’s room scowling. His eyes lit on me and flashed away. “Sorry, Tyler, but you’ll have to go home now. I need to discuss a few things with Jason.”

Jase didn’t object and I wasn’t especially eager to stay. So I shrugged into my cloth jacket and left by the back door. I spent the rest of the afternoon by the creek, skipping stones and watching squirrels forage against the coming winter.

The sun, the moon, and the stars.

In the years that followed, children were raised who had never seen the moon with their own eyes; people only five or six years younger than myself passed into maturity knowing the stars mainly from old movies and a handful of increasingly inapt cliches. Once, in my thirties, I played the twentieth-century Antonio Carlos Jobin song
Corcovado
— “Quiet nights of quiet stars”—for a younger woman, who asked me, eyes earnestly wide, “Were the stars
noisy
?”