Spin (39 page)

“Looks more like he represents the Lollipop Guild,” Carol said.

His dignity was restored in the close-ups. The camera liked his eyes and his elusive smile. And when he spoke to the microphone he spoke softly, which took the effective pitch of his voice down to a more terrestrial level.

Wun knew (or had been coached to understand) how unlikely this event seemed to the average Earthling. (“Truly,” the secretary general had said in his introduction, “we live in an age of miracles.”) So he thanked us all for our hospitality in his best mid-Atlantic accent and talked wistfully about his home and why he had left it to come here. He painted Mars as a foreign but entirely human place, the kind of place you might like to visit, where the people were friendly and the scenery was interesting, although the winters, he admitted, were often harsh.

(“Sounds like Canada,” Carol said.)

Then to the heart of the matter. Everyone wanted to know about the Hypotheticals. Unfortunately, Wun’s people knew little more about them than we did—the Hypotheticals had encapsulated Mars while he was in transit to Earth, and the Martians were as helpless before it as we had been.

He couldn’t guess the Hypotheticals’ motives. That question had been debated for centuries, but even the greatest Martian thinkers had never resolved it. It was interesting,

Wun said, that both Earth and Mars had been sealed off when they were on the brink of global catastrophes: “Our population, like yours, is approaching the limit of sustainability. On Earth your industry and agriculture both run on oil, supplies of which are rapidly being depleted. On Mars we have no oil at all, but we depend on another scarce commodity, elemental nitrogen: it drives our agricultural cycle and imposes absolute limits on the number of human lives the planet can sustain. We’ve coped a little better than has the Earth, but only because we were forced to recognize the problem from the very beginning of our civilization. Both planets were and are facing the possibility of economic and agricultural collapse and a catastrophic human die-off. Both planets were encapsulated before that end point was reached.”

“Perhaps the Hypotheticals understand that truth about us and perhaps it influenced their action. But we don’t know that with any certainty. Nor do we know what they expect from us, if anything, or when or even whether the Spin will come to an end. We
can’t
know, until we gather more direct information about the Hypotheticals.”

“Fortunately,” Wun said, the camera going close on him, “there is a way to gather that information. I’ve come here with a proposal, which I’ve discussed with both President Garland and President-elect Lomax as well as other heads of state,” and he went on to sketch out the basics of the replicator plan. “With luck this will tell us whether the Hypotheticals have overtaken other worlds, how those worlds have reacted, and what the ultimate fate of the Earth might be.”

But when he started talking about the Oort Cloud and “auto-catalytic feedback technology” I saw Carol’s eyes glaze over.

“This can’t be happening,” she said after Wun departed the podium to dazed applause and the network pundits began to chew and regurgitate his speech. She looked genuinely frightened. “Is any of this true, Jason?”

“Most all of it,” Jason said calmly. “I can’t speak for the weather on Mars.”

“Are we really on the brink of disaster?”

“We’ve been on the brink of disaster since the stars went out.”

“I mean about oil and all that. If the Spin hadn’t happened, we’d all be starving?”

“People
are
starving. They’re starving because we can’t support seven billion people in North American-style prosperity without strip-mining the planet. The numbers are hard to argue with. Yes, it’s true. If the Spin doesn’t kill us, sooner or later we’ll be looking at a global human die-back.”

“And that has something to do with the Spin itself?”

“Perhaps, but neither I nor the Martian on television know for sure.”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No.”

“Yes you are. But that’s all right. I know I’m ignorant. It’s been years since I looked at a newspaper. There was always the risk of seeing your father’s face, for one thing. And the only television I watch is afternoon drama. In afternoon drama there aren’t any Martians. I guess I’m Rip van Winkle. I slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to. The parts of it that aren’t terrifying are—” She gestured at the TV. “Are ludicrous.”

“We’re all Rip van Winkle,” Jason said gently. “We’re all waiting to wake up.”

Carol’s mood improved in tandem with Jason’s health and she began to take a livelier interest in his prognosis. I briefed her about his AMS, a disease that had not been formally diagnosed when Carol graduated from medical school, as a way to dodge questions about the treatment itself, an unspoken bargain which she seemed to understand and accept. The important thing was that Jason’s ravaged skin was healing and the blood samples I sent to a lab in D.C. for testing showed drastically reduced neural plaque proteins.

She was still reluctant to talk about the Spin, however, and she looked unhappy when Jase and I discussed it in her presence. I thought again of the Housman poem Diane had taught me so many years ago:
The infant child is not aware/He has been eaten by the bear
.

Carol had been beset by several bears, some as large as the Spin and some as small as a molecule of ethanol. I think she might have envied the infant child.

Diane called (on my personal phone, not Carol’s house phone) a few nights after Wun’s U.N. appearance. I had retreated to my room and Carol was keeping the night watch. Rain had come and gone all November, and it was raining now, the bedroom window a fluid mirror of yellow light.

“You’re at the Big House,” Diane said.

“You talked to Carol?”

“I call her once a month. I’m a dutiful daughter. Sometimes she’s sober enough to talk. What’s wrong with Jason?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “He’s getting better. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“I hate it when people say that.”

“I know. But it’s true. There was a problem, but we fixed it”

“And that’s all you can tell me.”

“All for now. How are things with you and Simon?” Last time we talked she had mentioned legal trouble.

“Not too good,” she said. “We’re moving.”

“Moving where?”

“Out of Phoenix, anyway. Away from the city. Jordan Tabernacle’s been temporarily closed down—I thought maybe you’d heard about it.”

“No,” I said—why would I have heard about the financial troubles of a little southwest Tribulation church?—and we went on to discuss other matters, and Diane promised to update me once she and Simon had a new address. Sure, why not, what the hell.

But I did hear about Jordan Tabernacle the following night.

Uncharacteristically, Carol insisted on watching the late news. Jason was tired but alert and willing, so the three of us sat through forty minutes of international saber rattling and celebrity court cases. Some of this was interesting: there was an update on Wun Ngo Wen, who was in Belgium meeting with officials of the E.U., and good news from Uzbekistan, where the forward marine base had finally been relieved. Then there was a feature about CVWS and the Israeli dairy industry.

We watched dramatic pictures of culled cattle being bulldozed into mass graves and salted with lime. Five years ago the Japanese beef industry had been similarly devastated. Bovine or ungulate CVWS had broken out and been suppressed in a dozen countries from Brazil to Ethiopia. The human equivalent was treatable with modern antibiotics but remained a smoldering problem in third-world economies.

But Israeli dairy farmers ran strict protocols of sepsis and testing, so the outbreak there had been unexpected. Worse, the index case—the first infection—had been tracked to an unauthorized shipment of fertilized ova from the United States.

The shipment was back-traced to a Tribulationist charity called Word for the World, headquartered in an industrial park outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Why was WftW smuggling cattle ova into Israel? Not, it turned out, for particularly charitable reasons. Investigators followed WftW’s sponsors through a dozen blind holding companies to a consortium of Tribulationist and Dispensationalist churches and fringe political groups both large and small. One item of Biblical doctrine shared by these groups was drawn from Numbers (chapter nineteen) and inferred from other texts in Matthew and Timothy—namely, that the birth in Israel of a pure red heifer would signal the second coming of Jesus Christ and the beginning of His reign on Earth.

It was an old idea. Allied Jewish extremists believed the sacrifice of a red calf on the Temple Mount would mark the coming of the Messiah. There had been several “red calf” attacks on the Dome of the Rock in prior years, one of which had damaged the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearly precipitated a regional war. The Israeli government had been doing its best to quash the movement but had only succeeded in driving it underground.

According to the news there were several WftW-sponsored dairy farms across the American Midwest and Southwest all quietly devoted to the business of hastening Armageddon. They had been attempting to breed a pure blood-red calf, presumably superior to the numerous disappointing heifers that had been presented as candidates over the last forty years.

These farms had systematically evaded federal inspections and feed protocols, to the point of concealing an outbreak of bovine CVWS that had crossed the border from Nogales. The infected ova produced breeding stock with plentiful genes for red-tinged coats, but when the calves themselves were born (at a WftW-linked dairy farm in the Negev) most died of respiratory distress at an early age. The corpses were quietly buried, but too late. The infection had spread to mature stock and a number of human farmhands.

It was an embarrassment for the U.S. administration. The FDA had already announced a policy review and Homeland Security was freezing WftW bank accounts and serving warrants on Tribulationist fund-raisers. On the news there were pictures of federal agents carrying boxed documents out of anonymous buildings and applying padlocks to the doors of obscure churches.

The news reader cited a few examples by name.

One of them was Jordan Tabernacle.

Outside Padang we transferred from Nijon’s ambulance to a private car with a Minang driver, who dropped us off—me, Ibu Ina, En—at a cartage compound on the coast highway. Five huge tin-roofed warehouses sat in a black gravel plain between conical piles of bulk cement under tarps and a corroded rail tanker idle on a siding. The main office was a low wooden building under a sign that read ‘Bayur Forwarding’ in English.

Bayur Forwarding, Ina said, was one of her ex-husband Jala’s businesses, and it was Jala who met us in the reception room. He was a beefy, apple-cheeked man in a canary yellow business suit—he looked like a Toby jug dressed for the tropics. He and Ina embraced in the manner of the comfortably divorced, then Jala shook my hand and stooped to shake En’s. Jala introduced me to his receptionists as “a palm oil importer from Suffolk,” presumably in case she was quizzed by the New Reformasi. Then he escorted us to his seven-year-old fuel-cell BMW and we drove south toward Teluk Bayur, Jala and Ina up front, me and En in back.

Teluk Bayur—the big deepwater harbor south of the city of Padang—was where Jala had made all his money. Thirty years ago, he said, Teluk Bayur had been a sleepy Sumatran sand-mud basin with modest port services and a predictable trade in coal, crude palm oil, and fertilizer. Today, thanks to the economic boom of the
nagari
restoration and the population explosion of the Archway era, Teluk Bayur was a fully improved port basin with world-class quays and mooring, a huge storage complex, and so many modern conveniences that even Jala eventually lost interest in tallying up all the tugs, sheds, cranes and loaders by tonnage. “Jala is proud of Teluk Bayur,” Ina said. “There’s hardly a high official there he hasn’t bribed.”

“Nobody higher than General Affairs,” Jala corrected her.

“You’re too modest.”

“Is there something wrong with making money? Am I too successful? Is it a crime to make something of myself?”

Ina inclined her head and said, “These are of course rhetorical questions.”

I asked whether we were going directly to a ship at Teluk Bayur.

“Not directly,” Jala said. “I’m taking you to a safe place on the docks. It isn’t as simple as walking onto some vessel and making ourselves comfortable.”

“There’s no ship?”

“Certainly there’s a ship. The
Capetown Maru
, a nice little freighter. She’s loading coffee and spices just now. When the holds are full and the debts are paid and the permits are signed, then the human cargo goes aboard. Discreetly, I hope.”

“What about Diane? Is Diane at Teluk Bayur?”

“Soon,” Ina said, giving Jala a meaningful look.

“Yes, soon,” he said.

Teluk Bayur might once have been a sleepy commercial harbor, but like any modern port it had become a city in itself, a city made not for people but for cargo. The port proper was enclosed and fenced, but ancillary businesses had grown up around it like whorehouses outside a military base: secondary shippers and expediters, gypsy truck collectives running rebuilt eighteen-wheelers, leaky fuel depots. We breezed past them all. Jala wanted to get us settled before the sun went down.

Bayur Bay itself was a horseshoe of oily saltwater. Wharfs and jetties lapped at it like concrete tongues. Abutting the shore was the ordered chaos of large-scale commerce, the first- and second-line godowns and stacking yards, the cranes like giant mantises feasting on the holds of tethered container ships. We stopped at a manned guardpost along the line of a steel fence and Jala passed something to the security guard through the window of the car—a permit, a bribe, or both. The guard nodded him through and Jala waved amiably and drove inside, following a line of CPO and Avigas tanks at what seemed like reckless speed. He said, “I’ve arranged for you to stay here overnight. I have an office in one of the E-dock warehouses. Nothing in there but bulk concrete, nobody to bother you. In the morning I’ll bring Diane Lawton.”