SPIN

A man from another planet. A man with a hundred thousand years of Martian history behind him. "Well, yeah," I said. "I'd be privileged to talk to him. But—"

"I'll set it up, then."

"But if he has the kind of medical knowledge that can effectively treat AMS, it needs to reach better doctors than me."

"Wun brought whole encyclopedias with him. There are already people going through the Martian archives—parts of them, anyway—looking for useful information, medical and otherwise. This is just a sideshow."

"I'm surprised he can spare the time for a sideshow."

"He's bored more often than you might think. He's also short of friends. I thought he might enjoy spending a little time with someone who doesn't believe he's either a savior or a threat. In the short term, though, I'd still like you to talk to Malmstein."

"Of course."

"And call him from your place, all right? I don't trust the phones here anymore."

He smiled as if he had said something amusing.

* * * * *

Occasionally that summer I took myself for walks on the public beach across the highway from my apartment.

It wasn't much of a beach. A long undeveloped spit of land protected it from erosion and rendered it useless for surfers. On hot afternoons the old motels surveyed the sand with glassy eyes and a few subdued tourists washed their feet in the surf.

I came down and sat on a scalding wooden walkway suspended over scrub grass, watching clouds gather on the eastern horizon and thinking about what Molly had said, that I was pretending to be cool about the Spin (and about the Lawtons), faking an equanimity I couldn't possibly possess.

I wanted to give Molly her due. Maybe that was the way I looked to her.

"Spin" was a dumb but inevitable name for what had been done to the Earth. That is, it was bad physics—nothing was actually spi

So maybe I was clinging to the Lawtons—not just Jason and Diane but their whole world, the Big House and the Little House, lost childhood loyalties. Maybe that was the only handle I could grab. And maybe that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. If Moll was right, we all had to grab something or be lost. Diane had grabbed faith, Jason had grabbed science.

And I had grabbed Jason and Diane.

I left the beach when the clouds came up, one of those inevitable late-August afternoon squalls, the eastern sky restless with lightning, rain begi

Molly came over after di

I hung up the phone and left the room and found Molly in the hall with a drink in each hand and a puzzled expression on her face: "Where'd you go?"

"Just making a call."

"Anything important?"

"No."

"Checking up on a patient?"

"Something like that," I said.

* * * * *

Within the next few days Jase arranged a meeting between me and Wun Ngo Wen in Wun's quarters at Perihelion.

The Martian ambassador lived in a room he had furnished to his own taste, from catalogs. The furniture was lightweight, wicker, low to the ground. A rag rug covered the linoleum floor. A computer sat on a simple raw pine desk. There were bookcases to match the desk. Apparently Martians decorated like newlywed college students.

I supplied Wun with the technical material he wanted: a couple of books on the etiology and treatment of multiple sclerosis, plus a series of JAMA offprints on AMS. AMS, in current thinking, wasn't really MS at all; it was a different disease entirely, a genetic disorder with MS-like symptoms and a similar degradation of the myelin sheaths that protect human nervous tissue. AMS was distinguishable by its severity, rapid progression, and resistance to standard therapies. Wun said he wasn't familiar with the condition but would search his archives for information.

I thanked him but raised the obvious objection: he wasn't a doctor, and Martian physiology was conspicuously unusual—even if he found a suitable therapy, would it work in Jason's case?

"We're not as different as you might think. One of the first things your people did was to sequence my genome. It's indistinguishable from your own."

"I didn't mean to give offense."

"I'm not offended. One hundred thousand years is a long separation, long enough for what biologists call a speciation event. As it happens, however, your people and mine are fully interfertile. The obvious differences between us are superficial adaptations to a cooler, drier environment."

He spoke with an authority that belied his size. His voice was pitched higher than an average adult's but there was nothing juvenile about it; it was lilting, almost feminine, but always statesmanlike.

"Even so," I said, "there are potential legal problems if we're talking about a therapy that hasn't gone through the FDA approval process."

"I'm sure Jason would be willing to wait for official approval. His disease might not be so patient." Here Wun raised his hand to forestall further objections. "Let me read what you brought me. Then we'll discuss it again."

Then, the immediate business discharged, he asked me to stay and talk. I was flattered. Despite his strangeness there was something comforting about Wun's presence, a communicable ease. He sat back in his oversized wicker chair, feet dangling, and listened with apparent fascination to a quick sketch of my life. He asked a couple of questions about Diane ("Jason doesn't speak much about his family") and more about med school (the concept of dissecting cadavers was new to him; he flinched when I described it… most people do).

And when I asked him about his own life he reached into the small gray satchel he carried with him and produced a series of printed images, photographs he had brought with him as digital files. Four pictures of Mars.

"Just four?"

He shrugged. "No number is large enough to substitute for memory. And of course there is much more visual material in the official archives. These are mine. Personal. Would you care to see them?"

"Yes, certainly."

He handed them to me.

Photo 1: A house. It was obviously a human dwelling place despite the odd techno/retro architecture, low and rounded, like a porcelain model of a sod hut. The sky behind it was a brilliant turquoise, or at least that's how the printer had rendered it. The horizon was strangely close but geometrically flat, divided into receding rectangles of cultivated green, a crop I couldn't identify but which was too fleshy to be wheat or corn and too tall to be lettuce or kale. In the foreground were two adult Martians, male and female, with comically stern expressions. Martian Gothic. All it needed was a pitchfork and a Grant Wood signature.

"My mother and father," Wun said simply.

Photo 2: "Myself as a child."

This one was startling. The prodigiously wrinkled Martian skin, Wun explained, develops at puberty. Wun at roughly seven terrestrial years was smooth-faced and smiling. He looked like any Earthly child, though you couldn't place the ethnicity—blond hair, coffee-colored skin, narrow nose and generous lips. He stood in what looked at first glance like an eccentric theme park but was, Wun said, a Martian city. A marketplace. Food stalls and shops, the buildings made of the same porcelainlike material as the farmhouse, in gaudy primary colors. The street behind him was crowded with light machinery and foot traffic. Only a patch of sky was visible between the tallest buildings, and even there some sort of vehicle had been caught in passing, whirligig blades blurred into a pale oval.