Spin (44 page)

President Lomax was keeping this one close to home. In a move that had infuriated the E.U., the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians, Lomax had declined to share replicator technology beyond the must-know circles at NASA and Perihelion, and he had deleted all relevant passages in the publicly released editions of the Martian archives. “Artificial microbes” (in Lomax-speak) were a “high risk” technology. They could be “weaponized.” (This was true, as even Wun had admitted.) The U.S. was thus obliged to take “custodial control” of the information in order to prevent “nanotech proliferation and a new and deadly arms race.”

The European Union had cried foul and the U.N. was convening an investigatory panel, but in a world with brushfire wars burning on four continents Lomax’s argument carried considerable weight. (Even though, as Wun might have countered, the Martians had successfully lived with the same technology for hundreds of years—and the Martians were no more or less human than their terrestrial ancestors.)

For all these reasons, the late-summer launch date at Canaveral drew minimal crowds and almost desultory media attention. Wun Ngo Wen was dead, after all, and the news services had exhausted themselves covering his murder. Now the four heavy Delta rockets set in their offshore gantries looked like little more than a footnote to the memorial service, or worse, a rerun: the seed launches retooled for an age of diminished expectations.

But even if it was a sideshow, it was still a show. Lomax flew in for the occasion. E. D. Lawton had accepted a courtesy invitation and by this time was willing to pledge good behavior. And so, on the morning of the appointed day, I rode with Jason to the V.I.P. bleachers at the eastern shore of Cape Canaveral.

We faced seaward. The old offshore gantries, still functional but gone a little ruddy with saltwater rust, had been built to hold the heaviest lifters of the seed-launch era. The brand-new Deltas were dwarfed by them. Not that we could see much detail from this distance, only four white pillars out at the misty limits of the summer ocean, plus the fretwork of other unused launch platforms, the rail connectors, the tenders and support vessels anchored at a safe perimeter. It was a clear, hot summer morning. The wind was gusty—not strong enough to scrub the launch but more than enough to snap the flag crisply and tousle the coifed hair of President Lomax as he climbed the podium to address the assembled dignitaries and press.

He delivered a speech, mercifully brief. He cited the legacy of Wun Ngo Wen and his faith that the replicator network about to be planted in the icy fringes of the solar system would soon enlighten us about the nature and purpose of the Spin. He said brave things about humanity leaving its mark on the cosmos. (“He means the galaxy,” Jason whispered, “not the cosmos. And—
leaving our mark
? Like a dog peeing on a hydrant? Someone really ought to edit these speeches”) Then Lomax quoted a poem by a nineteenth-century Russian poet named F. I. Tiutchev, who couldn’t have imagined the Spin but wrote as if he had:

Gone like a vision is the external world

and Man, a homeless orphan, has to face

helpless, naked and alone,

the blackness of immeasurable space.

All life and brightness seem an ancient dream,

while in the substance of the night,

unraveled, alien, he now perceives

a fateful something that is his by right.

Then Lomax departed the stage, and after the prosaic business of backward counting, the first of the rockets rode its column of fire into the unraveling cosmos behind the sky. A fateful something. Ours by right.

While everyone else looked up, Jason closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap.

We adjourned to a reception room along with the rest of the invited guests, pending a round of press interviews. (Jason was scheduled for twenty minutes with a cable news network, I was scheduled for ten. I was “the physician who attempted to save the life of Wun Ngo Wen,” though all I had done was extinguish his burning shoe and pull his body out of the line of fire after he fell. A quick ABC check—airway, breathing, circulation—made it abundantly clear that I couldn’t help him and that it would be wiser simply to keep my head down until help arrived. Which is what I told reporters, until they learned to stop asking.)

President Lomax came through the room shaking hands before he was hustled away once more by his handlers. Then E.D. cornered Jason and me at the buffet table.

“I guess you got what you wanted,” he said, meaning the comment for Jason but looking at me. “It can’t be undone now.”

“In that case,” Jason said, “perhaps it’s not worth arguing about.”

Wun and I had made a point of keeping Jase under observation in the months after his treatment. He had submitted to a battery of neurological tests including another series of clandestine MRIs. None of the tests had revealed any deficiency, and the only obvious physiological changes were the ones connected with his recovery from AMS. A clean bill of health, in other words. Cleaner than I once would have imagined possible.

But he did seem subtly different. I had asked Wun whether all Fourths underwent psychological changes. “In a certain sense,” he had answered, “yes.” Martian Fourths were expected to behave differently after their treatment, but there was a subtlety embedded in the word “expectation”—yes, Wun said, it was “expected” (i.e., considered likely) that a Fourth would change, but change was also “expected of him” (required of him) by his community and peers.

How had Jason changed? He moved differently, for one thing. Jase had disguised his AMS very cleverly, but there was a perceptible new freedom in his walk and his gestures. He was the Tin Man, post-oilcan. He was still occasionally moody, but his moods were less violent. He swore less often—that is, he was less likely to stumble into one of those emotional sinkholes in which the only useful adjective is “fucking.” He joked more than he used to.

All these things sound good. And they were, but they were also superficial. Other changes were more troubling. He had withdrawn from the daily management of Perihelion to such a degree that his staff briefed him once a week and otherwise ignored him. He had begun reading Martian astrophysics from the raw translations, skirting security protocols if not absolutely violating them. The only event that had penetrated his newfound calm was the death of Wun, and that had left him haunted and hurt in ways I still didn’t quite understand.

“You realize,” E.D. said, “what we just saw was the end of Perihelion.”

And in a real sense it was. Apart from interpreting whatever feedback we received from the replicators, Perihelion as a civilian space agency was finished. The downsizing had already begun in earnest. Half the support staff had been laid off. The tech people were draining away more slowly, lured by universities or big-money contractors.

“Then so be it,” Jason said, displaying what was either the innate equanimity of a Fourth or a long-suppressed hostility to his father. “We’ve done the work we needed to do.”

“You can stand here and deliver that verdict? To me?”

“I believe it’s true.”

“Does it matter that I spent my life building what you just tore down?”

“Does it matter?” Jason pondered this as if E.D. had asked a real question. “Ultimately, no, I don’t suppose it does.”

“Jesus, what happened to you? You make a mistake of this magnitude—”

“I don’t think it’s a mistake.”

“—you ought to assume the responsibility for it.”

“I think I have.”

“Because if it fails, you’ll be the one they’ll blame.”

“I understand that.”

“The one they’ll burn.”

“If it comes to that.”

“I can’t protect you,” E.D. said.

“You never could,” Jason said.

I rode back to Perihelion with him. Jase was driving a German fuel-cell car these days—a niche car, since most of us still owned gas-burners designed by people who didn’t believe there was a future worth worrying about. Commuters burned past us in the speed lanes, hurrying home before dark.

I told him I meant to leave Perihelion and establish a practice of my own.

Jase was silent for a little while, watching the road, warm air boiling off the pavement as if the edges of the world had softened in the heat. Then he said, “But you don’t have to, Tyler. Perihelion ought to struggle along for a few years yet, and I have enough clout to keep you on payroll. I can hire you privately, if need be.”

“That’s the point, though, Jase. There
is
no need. I was always a little underutilized at Perihelion.”

“Bored, you mean?”

“It might be nice to feel useful for a change.”

“You don’t feel useful? If not for you I’d be in a wheelchair.”

“That wasn’t me. That was Wun. All I did was push the plunger.”

“Hardly. You saw me through the ordeal. I appreciate that. Besides… I need someone to talk to, someone who isn’t trying to buy or sell me.”

“When was the last time we had a real conversation?”

“Just because I weathered one medical crisis doesn’t mean there won’t be another.”

“You’re a Fourth, Jase. You won’t need to see a doctor for another fifty years.”

“And the only people who know that about me are you and Carol. Which is another reason I don’t want you to leave.” He hesitated. “Why not take the treatment yourself? Give yourself another fifty years, minimum.”

I supposed I could. But fifty years would carry us deep into the heliosphere of the expanding sun. It would be a futile gesture. “I’d rather be useful now.”

“You’re absolutely determined to leave?”

E.D. would have said,
Stay
. E.D. would have said,
It’s your job to take care of him
.

E.D. would have said a lot of things.

“Absolutely.”

Jason gripped the wheel and stared down the road as if he had seen something infinitely sad there. “Well,” he said. “Then all I can do is wish you luck.”

The day I left Perihelion the support staff summoned me into one of the now seldom-used boardrooms for a farewell party, where I was given the kind of gifts appropriate to yet another departure from a dwindling workforce: a miniature cactus in a terracotta pot, a coffee mug with my name on it, a pewter tie pin in the shape of a caduceus.

Jase showed up at my door that evening with a more problematic gift

It was a cardboard box tied with string. It contained, when I opened it, about a pound of densely printed paper documents and six unlabelled optical memory disks.

“Jase?”

“Medical information,” he said. “You can think of it as a textbook.”

“What kind of medical information?”

He smiled. “From the archives.”

“The Martian archives?”

He nodded.

“But that’s classified information.”

“Yes, technically, it is. But Lomax would classify the phone number for 911 if he thought he could get away with it. There may be information here that would put Pfizer and Eli Lilly out of business. But I don’t see that as a legitimate concern. Do you?”

“No, but—”

“Nor do I think Wun would have wanted it kept secret. So I’ve been quietly doling out little pieces of the archives, here and there, to people I trust. You don’t have to actually do anything with it, Tyler. Look at it or ignore it, file it away—fine.”

“Great. Thanks, Jase. A gift I could be arrested for possessing.”

His smile widened. “I know you’ll do the right thing.”

“Whatever that is.”

“You’ll figure it out. I have faith in you, Tyler. Ever since the treatment—”

“What?”

“I seem to see things a little more clearly,” he said.

He didn’t explain, and in the end I tucked the box into my luggage as a kind of souvenir. I was tempted to write the word mementos on it.

Replicator technology was slow even by comparison with the terraforming of a dead planet. Two years passed before we had anything like a detectable response from the payloads we had scattered among the planetesimals at the edge of the solar system.

The replicators were busy out there, though, barely touched by the gravity of the sun, doing what they were designed to do: reproducing by the inch and the century, following instructions written into their superconductive equivalent of DNA. Given time and an adequate supply of ice and carbonaceous trace elements, they would eventually phone home. But the first few detector satellites placed in orbit beyond the Spin membrane dropped back to Earth without recording a signal.

During those two years I managed to find a partner (Herbert Hakkim, a soft-spoken Bengali-born physician who had finished his internship the year Wun visited the Grand Canyon), and we took over a San Diego practice from a retiring GP. Hakkim was frank and friendly with patients but he had no real social life and seemed to prefer it that way. We seldom got together outside office hours, and I think the most intimate question he ever asked me was why I carried two cell phones.

(One for the customary reasons; the other because the number assigned to it was the last one I’d given Diane. Not that it ever rang. Nor did I attempt to contact her again. But if I had let the number lapse she would have had no way of reaching me, and that still seemed… well, wrong.)

I liked my work, and by and large I liked my patients. I saw more gunshot wounds than I might once have expected, but these were the hard years of the Spin; the domestic trend-lines for murder and suicide had begun to arc toward vertical. Years when it seemed like everyone under thirty was wearing some kind of uniform: armed forces, National Guard, Homeland Security, private security; even Home Scouts and Home Guides for the intimidated products of a dwindling birth rate. Years when Hollywood began to churn out ultraviolent or ultrapious films in which, however, the Spin was never explicitly mentioned; the Spin, like sex and the words describing it, having been banned from “entertainment discourse” by Lomax’s Cultural Council and the FCC.

These were also the years when the administration enacted a raft of new laws aimed at sanitizing the Martian archives. Wun’s archives, according to the president and his congressional allies, contained intrinsically dangerous knowledge that had to be redacted and secured. Opening them to the public would have been “like posting plans for a suitcase nuke on the Internet.” Even the anthropological material was vetted: in the published version, a Fourth was defined as “a respected elder.” No mention of medically mediated longevity.