Spin (31 page)

“I’m afraid I may have been interrogating
you”
Ina said.

“I’m sorry. I’m still a little tired.”

“Then you should go home and sleep. Doctor’s orders. With a little luck you’ll see Ibu Diane again tomorrow.”

She walked with me down the loud street, away from the festivities. The music went on until nearly five the next morning. I slept soundly in spite of it.

The ambulance driver was a skinny, taciturn man in Red Crescent whites. His name was Nijon, and he shook my hand with exaggerated deference and kept his large eyes on Ibu Ina when he spoke to me. I asked if he was nervous about the drive to Padang. Ina translated his answer: “He says he’s done more dangerous things for less compelling reasons. He says he’s pleased to meet a friend of Wun Ngo Wen. He adds that we should get underway as soon as possible.”

So we climbed into the back end of the ambulance. Along one wall was a horizontal steel locker where equipment was usually stored. It doubled as a bench. Nijon had emptied the locker, and we established that it was possible for me to cram myself inside by bending my legs at hip and knee and tucking my head into my shoulder. The locker smelled of antiseptic and latex and was about as comfortable as a monkey coffin, but there I would lie, should we be stopped at a checkpoint, with Ina on the bench in her clinic gown and En laid out on a stretcher doing his best impression of a CVWS infectee. In the hot morning light the plan seemed more than slightly ridiculous.

Nijon had shimmed the lid of the locker to allow some air to circulate inside, so I probably wouldn’t suffocate, but I didn’t relish the prospect of spending time in what was essentially a hot, dark metal box. Fortunately—once we had established that I fit—I didn’t have to, at least not yet. All the police activity, Ina said, had been on the new highway between Bukik Tinggi and Padang, and because we were traveling in a loose convoy with other villagers we ought to have plenty of warning before we were pulled over. So for the time being I sat next to Ina while she taped a saline drip (sealed, no needle, a prop) to the crook of En’s elbow. En was enthusiastic about the role and began rehearsing his cough, a deep-lung hack that provoked an equally theatrical frown from Ina: “You’ve been stealing your brother’s clove cigarettes?”

En blushed. It was for the sake of realism, he said.

“Oh? Well, be careful you don’t act yourself into an early grave.”

Nijon slammed the rear doors and climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine and we began the bumpy drive to Padang. Ina told En to close his eyes. “Pretend to be asleep. Apply your theatrical skills.” Before long his breathing settled into gentle snorts.

“He was awake all night with the music,” Ina explained.

“I’m amazed he can sleep, even so.”

“One of the advantages of childhood. Or the First Age, as the Martians call it—is that correct?”

I nodded.

“They have four, I understand? Four Ages to our three?”

Yes, as Ina undoubtedly knew. Of all the folkways in Wun Ngo Wen’s Five Republics, this was the one that had most fascinated the terrestrial public.

Human cultures generally recognize two or three stages of life—childhood and adulthood; or childhood, adolescence, adulthood. Some reserve special status for old age. But the Martian custom was unique and depended on their centuries-long mastery of biochemistry and genetics. The Martians counted human lives in four installments, marked by biochemically mediated events. Birth to puberty was childhood. Puberty to the end of physical growth and the beginning of metabolic equilibrium was adolescence. Equilibrium to decline, death, or radical change was adulthood.

And beyond adulthood, the elective age: the Fourth.

Centuries ago, Martian biochemists had devised a means to prolong human life by sixty or seventy years on average. But the discovery wasn’t an unmixed blessing. Mars was a radically constrained ecosystem, ruled by the scarcity of water and nitrogen. The cultivated land that had looked so familiar to Ibu Ina was a triumph of subtle, sophisticated bioengineering. Human reproduction had been regulated for centuries, pegged to sustainability estimates. Another seventy years tacked onto the average life span was a population crisis in the making.

Nor was the longevity treatment itself simple or pleasant. It was a deep cellular reconstruction. A cocktail of highly engineered viral and bacterial entities was injected into the body. Tailored viruses performed a sort of systemic update, patching or revising DNA sequences, restoring telomeres, resetting the genetic clock, while lab-grown bacterial phages flushed out toxic metals and plaques and repaired obvious physical damage.

The immune system resisted. The treatment was, at best, equivalent to a six-week course of some debilitating influenza—fevers, joint and muscle pain, weakness. Certain organs went into a kind of reproductive overdrive. Skin cells died and were replaced in fierce succession; nervous tissue regenerated spontaneously and rapidly.

The process was debilitating, painful, and there were potential negative side effects. Most subjects reported at least some long-term memory loss. Rare cases suffered temporary dementia and nonrecoverable amnesia. The brain, restored and rewired, became a subtly different organ. And its owner became a subtly different human being.

“They conquered death.”

“Not quite.”

“You would think,” Ina said, “with all their wisdom, they could have made it a less unpleasant experience.”

Certainly they could have relieved the superficial discomfort of the transition to Fourth. But they had chosen not to. Martian culture had incorporated the Fourth Age into its folkways, pain and all: pain was one of the limiting conditions, a tutelary discomfort. Not everyone chose to become a Fourth. Not only was the transition difficult, stiff social penalties had been written into their longevity laws. Any Martian citizen was entitled to undergo the treatment, free of charge and without prejudice. But Fourths were forbidden to reproduce; reproduction was a privilege reserved for adults. (For the last two hundred years the longevity cocktail had included drugs that produced irreversible sterilization in both sexes.) Fourths weren’t allowed to vote in council elections—no one wanted a planet run by venerable ancients for their own benefit. But each of the Five Republics had a sort of judicial review body, the equivalent of a Supreme Court, elected
solely
by Fourths. Fourths were both more and less than adults, as adults are both more and less than children. More powerful, less playful; freer and less free.

But I could not decipher, to Ina or to myself, all the codes and totems into which the Martians had folded their medical technology. Anthropologists had spent years in the attempt, working from Wun Ngo Wen’s archival records. Until such research had been banned.

“And now we have the same technology,” Ina said.

“Some of us do. I hope eventually all of us will.”

“I wonder if we’ll use it as wisely.”

“We might. The Martians did, and the Martians are as human as we are.”

“I know. It’s possible, certainly. But what do you think, Tyler—
will
we?”

I looked at En. He was still asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, his eyes darting under closed lids like fish underwater. His nostrils flared as he breathed and the motion of the ambulance rocked him from side to side.

“Not on this planet,” I said.

Ten miles down the road out of Bukik Tinggi, Nijon knocked hard at the partition between us and the driver’s seat. That was our prearranged signal: roadblock ahead. The ambulance slowed. Ina stood up hastily, bracing herself. She strapped a neon-yellow oxygen mask over En’s face—En, awake now, seemed to be reconsidering the merits of the adventure—and covered her own mouth with a paper mask. “Be quick,” she whispered at me.

So I contorted myself into the equipment locker. The lid banged down on the shims that allowed a little air to flow inside, a quarter-inch between me and asphyxiation.

The ambulance stopped before I was ready and my head gonged hard against the narrow end of the locker.

“And be quiet now,” Ina said—to me or to En, I wasn’t sure which.

I waited in the dark.

Minutes passed. There was a distant rumble of talk, impossible to decipher even if I had understood the language. Two voices. Nijon and someone unfamiliar. A voice that was thin, querulous, harsh. A policeman’s voice.

They conquered death
, Ina had said.

No, I thought.

The locker was heating up fast. Sweat slicked my face, drenched my shirt, stung my eyes. I could hear myself breathing. I imagined the whole world could hear me breathing.

Nijon answered the policeman in deferential murmurs. The policeman barked back fresh questions.

“
Be still now, just be still
,” Ina whispered urgently. En had been bouncing his feet against the thin mattress of the gurney, a nervous habit. Too much energy for a CVWS victim. I saw the tips of Ina’s fingers splayed across the quarter-inch of light above my head, four knuckled shadows.

Now the rear doors of the ambulance rattled open and I smelled gasoline exhaust and rank noonday vegetation. If I craned my head—gently, gently—I could see a thin swath of exterior light and two shadows that might be Nijon and a policeman or maybe just trees and clouds.

The policeman demanded something from Ina. His voice was a guttural monotone, bored and threatening, and it made me angry. I thought about Ina and En, cowering or pretending to cower from this armed man and what he represented. Doing it for me. Ibu Ina said something stern but unprovocative in her native language.
CVWS, something something something CVWS
. She was exercising her medical authority, testing the policeman’s susceptibility, weighing fear for fear.

The policeman’s answer was curt, a demand to search the ambulance or see her papers. Ina said something more forceful or desperate. The word
CVWS
again.

I wanted to protect myself, but more than that, I wanted to protect Ina and En. I would surrender myself before I saw them hurt. Surrender or fight. Fight or flight. Give up, if necessary, all the years the Martian pharmaceuticals had pumped back into my body. Maybe that was the courage of the Fourth, the special courage Wun Ngo Wen had talked about.

They conquered death
. But no: as a species, terrestrial, Martian, in all our years on both our planets, we had only engineered reprieves. Nothing was certain.

Footsteps, boots on metal. The policeman began climbing into the ambulance. I could tell he had come aboard by the way the vehicle sank on its shocks, rolling like a ship in a gentle swell. I braced myself against the lid of the locker. Ina stood up, screeching refusals.

I took a breath and got ready to spring.

But there was fresh noise from the road. Another vehicle roared past. By the dopplered whine of its straining engine, it was traveling at high speed—a conspicuous, shocking, fuck-the-law velocity.

The policeman emitted a snarl of outrage. The floor bounced again.

Scuffling noises, silence for a beat, a slammed door, and then the sound of the policeman’s car (I guessed) revved to vengeful life, gravel snapping away from tires in an angry hail.

Ina lifted the lid of my sarcophagus.

I sat up in the stink of my own sweat. “What happened?”

“That was Aji. From the village. A cousin of mine. Running the roadblock to distract the police.” She was pale but relieved. “He drives like a drunk, I’m afraid.”

“He did that to take the heat off us?”

“Such a colorful expression. Yes. We’re a convoy, remember. Other cars, wireless telephones, he would have known we had been stopped. He’s risking a fine or a reprimand, nothing more serious.”

I breathed the air, which was sweet and cool. I looked at En. En gave me a shaky grin.

“Please introduce me to Aji when we get to Padang,” I said. “I want to thank him for pretending to be a drunk.”

Ina rolled her eyes. “Unfortunately Aji wasn’t pretending. He
is
a drunk. An offense in the eyes of the Prophet.”

Nijon looked in at us, winked, closed the rear doors.

“Well, that was frightening,” Ina said. She put her hand on my arm.

I apologized for letting her take the risk.

“Nonsense,” she said. “We’re friends now. And the risk is not as great as you might imagine. The police can be difficult, but at least they’re local men and bound by certain rules—not like the men from Jakarta, the New Reformasi or whatever they call themselves, the men who burned my clinic. And I expect you would risk yourself on our behalf if necessary. Would you, Pak Tyler?”

“Yes, I would.”

Her hand was trembling. She looked me in the eye. “My goodness, I believe that’s true.”

No, we had never conquered death, only engineered reprieves (the pill, the powder, the angioplasty, the Fourth Age)—enacted our conviction that more life, even a
little
more life, might yet yield the pleasure or wisdom we wanted or had missed in it. No one goes home from a triple bypass or a longevity treatment expecting to live forever. Even Lazarus left the grave knowing he’d die a second time.

But he came forth. He came forth gratefully. I was grateful.

I drove home after a late Friday session at Perihelion, keyed open the door of the house, and found Molly sitting at the keyboard of my PC terminal.

The desk was in the southwest corner of the living room against a window, facing away from the door. Molly half-turned and gave me a startled look. At the same time, deftly, she clicked an icon and exited the program she’d been running.

“Molly?”

I wasn’t surprised to find her here. Moll spent most weekends with me; she carried a duplicate key. But she’d never shown any interest in my PC.

“You didn’t call,” she said.

I’d been in a meeting with the insurance reps who underwrote Perihelion’s employee coverage. I’d been told to expect a two-hour session but it turned out to be a twenty-minute update on billing policy, and when it finished I thought it would be quicker to just drive on home, maybe even beat Molly to the door if she’d stopped to pick up wine. Such was the effect of Molly’s long level gaze that I felt obliged to explain all this before I asked her what she was doing in my files.