SPIN

* * * * *

Moments later the video broadcast cut to French Guyana, the old and much-expanded Centre National d'Études Spatiales at Kourou, where one of the big boosters from the Aerospatiale factory had risen a hundred feet and then lost thrust and tumbled back onto its pad in a mushroom of flame.

Twelve people were killed, ten aboard the NEP ark and two on the ground, but it was the only conspicuous tragedy of the entire launch sequence, and that probably amounted to good luck, taken all in all.

* * * * *

But that wasn't the end of the exercise. By midnight—and this, it seemed to me, was the clearest indicator yet of the grotesque disparity between terrestrial time and Spin-time— human civilization on Mars had either failed entirely or had been in progress for most of a hundred thousand years.

That's roughly the amount of time between the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species and yesterday afternoon.

It passed while I was driving home from Perihelion to my rental. It was entirely possible that Martian dynasties rose and fell while I waited for traffic lights to change. I thought about those lives—those fully real human lives, each one of them boxed into a span of less than a minute as my watch counted time—and felt a little dizzy. Spin vertigo. Or something deeper.

A half dozen survey satellites were launched that night, programmed to look for signs of human life on Mars. Their payload packages parachuted back to Earth and were retrieved before morning.

* * * * *

I saw the results before they were made public.

This was a full week after the Prometheus launches. Jason had booked a 10:30 appointment at the infirmary, subject to breaking news from JPL. He didn't cancel the appointment but showed up an hour late with a manila envelope in his hand, clearly anxious to discuss something not related to his medical regimen. I hurried him into a consultation room.

"I don't know what to tell the press," he said. "I just got off a conference call with the ESA director and a bunch of Chinese bureaucrats. We're trying to put together a draft of a joint statement for heads of state, but as soon as the Russians agree to a sentence the Chinese want to veto it, and vice versa."

"A statement about what, Jase?"

"The satellite data."

"You got the results?" In fact they were overdue. JPL was usually quicker about sharing its photos. But from what Jason had said I guessed someone had been sitting on the data. Which meant it wasn't what they'd expected. Bad news, perhaps.

"Look," Jason said.

He opened the manila folder and pulled out two composite telescopic photos, one atop the other. Both were images of Mars taken from Earth orbit after the Prometheus launches.

The first photograph was heart-stopping. It was not as distinct as the framed image! had put up in the waiting room, since in this one the planet was far from its closest approach to Earth; the clarity it did possess was a testament to modern imaging technology. Superficially it didn't seem much different from the framed photo: I could make out enough green to know that the transplanted ecology was still intact, still active.

"Look a little closer," Jason said.

He ran his finger down the sinuous line of a riverine lowland. There were green places here with sharp, regular borders. More of them, the more I looked.

"Agriculture," Jase said.

I held my breath and thought about what that meant. I thought: Now there are two inhabited planets in the solar system. Not hypothetically, but really. These were places where people lived, where people lived on Mars.

I wanted to stare. But Jase slid the printout back into its envelope, revealing the one beneath.

"The second photo," he said, "was taken twenty-four hours later."

"I don't understand."

"Taken from the same camera on the same satellite. We have parallel images to confirm the result. It looked like a flaw in the imaging system until we juiced the contrast enough to read a little starlight."

But there was nothing in the photograph. A few stars, a fat central nothingness in the shape of a disk. "What is it?"

"A Spin membrane," Jason said. "Seen from the outside. Mars has its own now."

4X109 A.D.

We were traveling inland from Padang—that much I understood—uphill, over roads that were sometimes silken-smooth and sometimes pitted and uneven, until the car pulled up in front of what in the darkness appeared to be a concrete bunker but must have been (by the painted red crescent under a glaring tungsten bulb) some kind of medical clinic. The driver was upset when he saw where he had taken us—this was further evidence that I was sick, not just drunk—but Diane pushed more bills into his hand and sent him away mollified if not happy.

I was having trouble standing. I leaned into Diane, who took my weight gamely, and we stood in the wet night, on an empty road, moonlight cutting through tattered clouds. There was the clinic in front of us and a gas station across the pavement and nothing else but forest and flat spaces that might have been cultivated fields. There was no visible human presence until the screened door of the clinic wheezed open and a short, rotund woman wearing a long skirt and small white hat hurried out to us.

"Ibu Diane!" the woman said, excitedly but softly, as if she were afraid of being overheard, even at this lonely hour. "Welcome!"

"Ibu Ina," Diane said respectfully.

"And this must be—?"

"Pak Tyler Dupree. The one I told you about."

"Too sick to speak?"

"Too sick to say anything sensible."

"Then by all means let's get him inside."

Diane supported me on one side and the woman she had called Ibu Ina grabbed my right arm by the shoulder. She wasn't a young woman but she was remarkably strong. The hair under her white cap was gray and thi

Then we were inside, past an empty waiting room furnished with rattan and cheap metal chairs, into what looked like a fairly modern consultancy, where Diane dumped me onto a padded table and Ina said, "Well, then, let's see what we can do for him," and I felt safe enough to pass out.

* * * * *

I woke to the sound of a call to prayer from a distant mosque and the smell of fresh coffee.

I was lying naked on a pallet in a small concrete room with one window, which admitted the only light, a pale premonition of dawn. There was a doorway covered with a sort of bamboo lacework, and from beyond it the noise of someone doing something energetic with cups and bowls.

The clothes I had been wearing last night had been laundered and were folded next to the pallet. I was between fevers—I had learned to recognize these little oases of well-being—and strong enough to dress myself.

I was balancing on one leg and aiming the other into my trousers when Ibu Ina peeked in through the curtain. "So you're well enough to stand!" she said.

Briefly. I fell back onto the pallet, half dressed. Ina came into the room with a bowl of white rice, a spoon, an enameled tin cup. She knelt beside me and glanced at the wooden tray: did I want any of this?

I discovered I did. For the first time in many days I was hungry. Probably a good thing. My pants were ridiculously loose, my ribs obscenely prominent. "Thank you," I said.

"We were introduced last night," she said, handing me the bowl. "Do you remember? I apologize for the crude nature of the accommodations. This room serves concealment better than comfort."

She might have been fifty or sixty years old. Her face was round and wrinkled, her features concentrated in a moon of brown flesh, an apple-doll look that was accentuated by her long black dress and white cap. If the Amish had settled in West Sumatra they might have produced something like Ibu Ina.