Spin (4 page)

But we had lost something more subtle than a few lights in the sky. We had lost a reliable sense of place. The Earth is round, the moon circles the Earth, the Earth circles the sun: that was as much cosmology as most people owned or wanted, and I doubt one in a hundred thought more about it after high school. But they were baffled when it was stolen from them.

We didn’t get an official announcement about the sun until the second week of the October Event.

The sun appeared to move in its predictable and eternal manner. It rose and set according to the standard ephemeris, the days grew shorter in their natural precession; there was nothing to suggest a solar emergency. Much on Earth, including life itself, depends on the nature and amount of solar radiation reaching the planet’s surface, and in most respects that hadn’t changed. Everything about the sun we could see with the naked eye suggested the same yellow class-G star we’d been blinking at all our lives.

What it lacked, however, were sunspots, prominences, or flares.

The sun is a violent, turbulent object. It seethes, it boils, it rings like a bell with vast energies; it bathes the solar system in a stream of charged particles that would kill us if we weren’t protected from it by the Earth’s magnetic field. But since the October Event, astronomers announced, the sun had become a geometrically perfect orb of unwaveringly uniform and unblemished brightness. And news came from the north that the aurora borealis, product of the interaction of our magnetic field with all those charged solar particles, had shut down like a bad Broadway play.

Other lapses in the new night sky: no shooting stars. The Earth used to accrete eighty million pounds of spaceborne dust annually, the vast majority of it incinerated by atmospheric friction. But no more: no detectable meteorites entered the atmosphere during the first weeks of the October Event, not even the microscopic ones called Brownlee particles. It was, in astrophysical terms, a deafening silence.

Not even Jason could offer an explanation for that.

So the sun wasn’t the sun; but it went on shining, counterfeit or not, and as the days passed, days layered and stacked on days, the bewilderment deepened but the sense of public urgency ebbed. (The water wasn’t boiling, it was only warm.)

But what a rich source of
talk
it all was. Not just the celestial mystery but the immediate consequences of it: the telecom crash; the foreign wars no longer monitored and narrated by satellite; the GPS-guided smart bombs rendered irremediably stupid; the fiber-optic goldrush. Pronouncements were issued with depressing regularity from Washington:
We have as yet no evidence of hostile intent on the part of any nation or agency
and
The best minds of our generation are working to understand, explain, and ultimately reverse the potential negative effects of this shroud that has obscured our view of the universe
. Soothing word salad from an administration still hoping to identify an enemy, terrestrial or otherwise, capable of such an act. But the enemy was stubbornly elusive. People began to speak of “a hypothetical controlling intelligence.” Unable to see past the walls of our prison, we were reduced to mapping its edges and corners.

Jason retreated to his room for most of a month after the Event. During this time I didn’t speak to him directly, only caught glimpses of him when the twins were picked up by the Rice Academy minibus. But Diane called me on my cell almost every evening, usually around ten or eleven, when we could both count on a little privacy. And I treasured her calls, for reasons I wasn’t quite ready to admit to myself.

“Jason’s in a pissy mood,” she told me one night. “He says if we don’t know for sure if the sun is the sun, we don’t really know anything at all.”

“Maybe he’s right.”

“But it’s almost a religious thing for Jase. He’s always loved maps—did you know that, Tyler? Even when he was very little, he got the idea of how a map worked. He liked to know where he was. It makes sense of things, he used to say. God, I used to love to listen to him talk about maps. I think that’s why he’s so freaked now, even more than most people. Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be. He lost his map.”

Of course, there were already clues in place. Before the week was out the military had begun to collect debris from fallen satellites—satellites that had been in stable orbits until that night in October but had plunged back to Earth before dawn, one and all, some leaving wreckage that was invested with tantalizing evidence. But it took time for that information to reach even the well-connected household of E. D. Lawton.

Our first winter of dark nights was claustrophobic and strange. Snow came early: we lived within commuting distance of Washington, D.C., but by Christmas it looked more like Vermont. The news remained ominous. A fragile, hastily brokered peace treaty between India and Pakistan teetered toward war and back again; the U.N.-sponsored decontamination project in the Hindu Kush had already cost dozens of lives in addition to the original casualties. In northern Africa, brushfire wars smoldered while the armies of the industrial world withdrew to regroup. Oil prices skyrocketed. At home, we kept the thermostat a couple of degrees under comfortable until the days began to grow longer (when the sun came back and the first quail called).

But in the face of unknown and poorly understood threats the human race managed not to trigger a full-blown global war, to our credit. We made our adjustments and got on with business, and by spring people were talking about “the new normal.” In the long run, it was understood, we might have to pay a higher price for whatever had happened to the planet… but in the long run, as they say, we’re all dead.

I saw the change in my mother. The passage of time calmed her and the warm weather, when it finally came, drew some of the tension from her face. And I saw the change in Jason, who came out of his meditative retreat. I worried, though, about Diane, who refused to talk about the stars at all and had lately begun to ask whether I believed in God— whether I thought God was responsible for what had happened in October.

I wouldn’t know about that, I told her. My family weren’t churchgoers. The subject made me a little nervous, frankly.

That summer the three of us rode our bikes to the Fairway Mall for the last time.

We had made the trip a hundred, a thousand times before. The twins were already getting a little old for it, but in the seven years we had all lived on the property of the Big House it had become a ritual, the summer-Saturday inevitable. We skipped it on rainy or swelteringly hot weekends, but when the weather was fine we were drawn as if by an invisible hand to our meeting point at the end of the long Lawton driveway.

Today the air was gentle and breezy and the sunlight infused everything it touched with a deep organic warmth. It was as if the climate wanted to reassure us: the natural world was doing all right, thank you, almost ten months after the Event… even if we were (as Jase occasionally said) a
cultivated
planet now, a garden tended by unknown forces rather than a patch of cosmic wildwood.

Jason rode an expensive mountain bike, Diane a less flashy girls’ equivalent. My bike was a secondhand junker my mother had bought for me at a thrift shop. No matter. What was important was the piney tang of the air and the empty hours arrayed before of us. I felt it, Diane felt it, and I think Jason felt it, too, though he seemed distracted and even a little embarrassed when we saddled up that morning. I put it down to stress or (this was August) the prospect of another school year. Jase was in an accelerated academic stream at Rice, a high-pressure school. Last year he had breezed through the math and physics courses—he could have taught them—but next semester he was signed up for a Latin credit. “It’s not even a living language,” he said. “Who the hell reads Latin, outside classical scholars? It’s like learning FORTRAN. All the important texts were translated a long time ago. Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god’s sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?”

I didn’t take any of this too seriously. One of the things we liked to do on these rides was practice the art of complaining. (I had no idea who Alan Dershowitz was; some kid at Jason’s school, I guessed.) But today his mood was volatile, erratic. He stood up on his pedals and biked a little way ahead of us.

The road to the mall wound past deeply treed lots and pastel houses with manicured gardens and embedded sprinklers that marked the morning air with rainbows. The sunlight might be fake, filtered, but it still broke into colors when it cut through falling water and it still felt like a blessing when we rolled from under the shading oaks onto the glittering white sidewalk.

Ten or fifteen minutes of easy riding later the top of Bantam Hill Road loomed ahead of us—last obstacle and major landmark on the way to the mall. Bantam Hill Road was steep, but on the other side it was a sweet long glide to the mall’s parking lot. Jase was already a quarter of the way up. Diane gave me a mischievous look.

“Race you,” she said.

That was dismaying. The twins had their birthdays in June. Mine was in October. Every summer they were not one but
two
years older than me: the twins had turned fourteen but I was still twelve for another frustrating four months. The difference translated into a physical advantage. Diane must have known I couldn’t beat her up the hill, but she pedaled off anyway and I sighed and tried to pump my creaking old junker into plausible competition. It was no contest. Diane rose up on her gleaming contrivance of etched aluminum, and by the time she reached the upslope she had gained a ferocious momentum. A trio of little girls chalk-marking the sidewalk scurried out of her way. She shot a glance back at me, half encouraging, half taunting.

The rising road stole back her momentum, but she shifted gears deftly and put her legs to work again. Jason, at the peak, had stopped and balanced himself with one long leg, looking back quizzically. I labored on, but halfway up the hill my ancient bike was swaying more than moving and I was forced to sidle off and walk it the rest of the way up.

Diane grinned at me when I finally arrived.

“You win,” I said.

“Sorry, Tyler. It wasn’t really fair.”

I shrugged, embarrassed.

Here the road ended in a cul-de-sac, where residential lots had been sketched with stakes and string but no houses built. The mall lay down a long, sandy decline to the west. A pressed-earth path cut through scrubby trees and berry bushes. “See you at the bottom,” she said, and rolled away again.

We left our bikes locked to a rack and entered the glassy nave of the mall. The mall was a reassuring environment, chiefly because it had changed so little since last October. The newspapers and television might still be in high-alert mode, but the mall lived in blessed denial. The only evidence that anything might have gone askew in the larger world was the absence of satellite dish displays at the consumer-electronics chain stores and a surge of October-related titles on the bookstore display racks. Jason snorted at one paperback with a high-gloss blue-and-gold cover, a book that claimed to link the October Event to Biblical prophecy: “The easiest kind of prophecy,” he said, “is the kind that predicts things that have already happened.”

Diane gave him an aggravated look. “You don’t have to make fun of it just because you don’t believe in it.”

“Technically, I’m only making fun of the front cover. I haven’t read the book.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Why? What are you defending here?”

“I’m not defending anything. But maybe God had something to do with last October. That doesn’t seem so ridiculous.”

“Actually,” Jason said, “yes, it
does
seem ridiculous.”

She rolled her eyes and stalked ahead of us, sighing to herself. Jase stuffed the book back in its display rack.

I told him I thought people just wanted to understand what had happened, that’s why there were books like that.

“Or maybe people just want to pretend to understand. It’s called ‘denial.’ You want to know something, Tyler?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Keep it secret?” He lowered his voice so that even Diane, a few yards ahead, couldn’t hear him. “This isn’t public yet.”

One of the remarkable things about Jason was that he often did know genuinely important things a day or two in advance of the evening news. In a sense Rice Academy was only his day school; his real education was conducted under the tutelage of his father, and from the beginning E.D. had wanted him to understand how business, science, and technology intersect with political power. E.D. had been working those angles himself. The loss of telecom satellites had opened up a vast new civilian and military market for the stationary high-altitude balloons (“aerostats”) his company manufactured. A niche technology was going mainstream, and E.D. was riding the crest of the wave. And sometimes he shared secrets with his fifteen-year-old son he wouldn’t have dared whisper to a competitor.

E.D., of course, didn’t know Jase occasionally shared these secrets with me. But I was scrupulous about keeping them. (And anyway, who would I have told? I had no other real friends. We lived in the kind of new-money neighborhood where class distinctions were measured out with razor-sharp precision: the solemn, studious sons of single working mothers didn’t make anyone’s A list.)

He lowered his voice another notch. “You know the three Russian cosmonauts? The ones who were in orbit last October?”

Lost and presumed dead the night of the Event. I nodded.

“One of them’s alive,” he said. “Alive and in Moscow. The Russians aren’t saying much. But the rumor is, he’s completely crazy.”

I gave him a wide-eyed look, but he wouldn’t say anything more.

It took a dozen years for the truth to be made public, but when it was finally published (as a footnote to a European history of the early Spin years) I thought of the day at the mall. What happened was this: