SPIN

"I'm not sure I follow." Actually she had lost me somewhere around the word "Parousia."

"It means—well, all that really matters is that Jordan Tabernacle, our little church, has officially renounced all NK doctrine, even though half the congregation is old NK people like me and Simon. So suddenly there are all these arguments about the Tribulation and how the Spin tallies against Biblical prophecy. People taking sides. Bereans versus Progressives, Covenanters versus Preterists. Is there an Antichrist, and if so, where is he? Does the Rapture happen before the Tribulation or during or after? Issues like that. Maybe it sounds picayune, but the spiritual stakes are very high, and the people having these arguments are people we care about, our friends."

"Where do you stand?"

"Me personally?" She was quiet, and there it was again, the sound of the radio murmuring behind her, some Valium-voiced a

She paused. Now there was another voice doubling the staticky murmur of the radio: Diane? Are you still up?

"Sorry," she whispered. Simon on patrol. It was time to cut short our telephone tryst, her act of touchless infidelity. "Talk to you soon."

She was gone before I could say good-bye.

* * * * *

The second series of seed launches went off as flawlessly as the first. The media mobbed Canaveral again, but I watched this round on a big digital projection in the auditorium at Perihelion, a sunshine launch that scattered herons into the sky over Merritt Island like bright confetti.

Followed by another summer of waiting. ESA lofted a series of next-generation orbital telescopes and interferometers, and the stored data they retrieved was even sleeker and cleaner than last year's. By September every office at Perihelion was plastered with high-res images of our success. I framed one for the infirmary waiting room. It was a color-composite rendering of Mars showing Olympus Mons outlined in frost or ice and scarred with fresh drainage cha

The oxygen content of the atmosphere rose and fell for a few months as the population of aerobic organisms oscillated, but by December it had topped twenty millibars and stabilized. Out of a potentially chaotic mix of increasing greenhouse gases, an unstable hydrologic cycle, and novel biogeochemical feedback loops, Mars was discovering its own equilibrium.

The string of successes was good for Jason. He remained in remission and was happily, almost therapeutically, busy. If anything dismayed him it was his own emergence as the iconic genius of the Perihelion Foundation, or at least its scientific celebrity, poster child for the transformation of Mars. This was more E.D.'s doing than Jason's: E.D. knew the public wanted Perihelion to have a human face, preferably young, smart but not intimidating, and he had been pushing Jase in front of cameras since the days when Perihelion was an aerospace lobby group. Jase put up with it—he was a good and patient explainer, and reasonably photogenic—but he hated the process and would leave a room rather than see himself on television.

That was the year of the first unma

Shortly after New Year's Day a NEP test vehicle failed to return its reentry package of test data and was presumed disabled in orbit. There were finger-pointing speeches on Capitol Hill led by a coterie of fiscal ultraconservatives representing states without significant aerospace investment, but E.D.'s friends in Congress overrode the objections and a successful test a week later buried the controversy. Still, Jason said, we had dodged a bullet.

Diane had followed the debate but considered it trivial. "What Jase needs to worry about," she said, "is what this Mars thing is doing to the world. So far it's all good press, right? Everybody's gung-ho, we all want something to reassure us about the—I'm not sure what to call it—the potency of the human race. But the euphoria will wear off sooner or later, and in the meantime people are getting extremely savvy about the nature of the Spin."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"If the Mars project fails or doesn't live up to expectations, yeah. Not just because people will be disappointed. They've watched the transformation of an entire planet—they have a yardstick to measure the Spin by. The sheer insane power of it, I mean. The Spin's not just some abstract phenomenon— you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong you steal that courage away again, and now it's worse because they've seen the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they've ever been."

I quoted the Housman poem she had taught me long ago: "The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear."

"The infant child is starting to figure it out," she said. "Maybe that's how you define the Tribulation."

Maybe so. Some nights, when I couldn't sleep, I thought about the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they were. There was really only one salient, obvious fact about them: not simply that they were capable of enclosing the Earth in this… strange membrane, but that they had been out there— owning us, regulating our planet and the passage of time— for almost two billion years.

Nothing even remotely human could be so patient.

* * * * *

Jason's neurologist tipped me off to a JAMA study published that winter. Researchers at Cornell had discovered a genetic marker for acute drug-resistant MS. The neurologist—a genial, fat Floridian named David Malmstein—had run Jason's DNA profile and found the suspect sequence in it. I asked him what that meant.

"It means we can tailor his medication a little more specifically. It also means we can never deliver the kind of permanent remission a typical MS patient expects."

"Seems like he's been in remission for most of a year now. Isn't that long-term?"

"His symptoms are under control, that's all. The AMS goes on burning, sort of like a fire in a coal seam. The time will come when we can't compensate for it."

"The point of no return."

"You could say."

"How long can he pass for normal?"

Malmstein paused. "You know," he said, "that's exactly what Jason asked me."

"What did you tell him?"

"That I'm not a fortune-teller. That AMS is a disease without a well-established etiology. That the human body has its own calendar."

"I'm guessing he didn't like the answer."

"He was vocal in his disapproval. But it's true. He could walk around for the next decade asymptomatic. Or he could be in a wheelchair by the end of the week."