SPIN

She said all this and then, realizing she was done, unfolded her arms and waited for me to react.

I thought about making a speech back at her. I was passionate about her, I would say. It might not have been obvious, but I'd been aware of her ever since I came to work at Perihelion. Aware of the lines and dynamics of her body, how she stood or walked or stretched or yawned; aware of her pastel wardrobe and the costume-jewelry butterfly she wore on a ski

I thought about all that but couldn't bring myself to say it to her.

It wasn't a lie exactly. But it wasn't exactly the truth.

In the end we made up with vaguer pleasantries and brief tears and conciliatory hugs, let the issue drop, and I played sous-chef while she composed a really very good pasta sauce, and the tension began to lift, and by midnight we had cuddled an hour in front of the news (unemployment up, an election debate, some sorry war on the other side of the planet) and we were ready for bed. Molly turned out the light before we made love, and the bedroom was dark and the window was open and the sky was blank and empty. She arched her back when she came and when she sighed her breath was sweet and milky. Parted but still touching, hand to thigh, we spoke in unfinished sentences. I said, "You know, passion" and she said, "In the bedroom, God, yes."

She fell asleep fast. I was still awake an hour later.

I climbed out of bed gently, registering no change in the pulse of her breathing. I slipped into a pair of jeans and left the bedroom. Sleepless nights like this, a little Drambuie usually helped shut down the nagging interior monologue, the petitions presented by doubt to the weary forebrain. But before I went into the kitchen I sat down at the terminal and called up my household tracker.

There was no telling what Moll had been looking at. But nothing had changed, as far as I could tell. All the names and numbers seemed intact. Maybe she had found something here that made her feel closer to me. If that was really what she wanted.

Or maybe it had been a futile search. Maybe she hadn't found anything at all.

* * * * *

In the weeks leading up to the November election I saw more of Jason. His disease was becoming more active despite the escalating medication, possibly due to the stress caused by the ongoing conflict with his father. (E.D. had a

Jase kept me close in case it was necessary to dose him with antispasmodics at some critical moment, which I was willing to do, within the limits of the law and professional ethics. Keeping Jase functional in the short term was the most that medical science could do for him, and staying functional long enough to outmaneuver E. D. Lawton was, for the moment, all that mattered to Jase.

So I spent a lot of time in the V.I.P. wing at Perihelion, usually with Jason but often with Wun Ngo Wen. This made me an object of suspicion to the rest of Wun's handlers, an assortment of government subauthorities (junior representatives from the State Department, the White House, Homeland Security, Space Command, et cetera) and academics who had been recruited to translate, study, and classify the so-called Martian archives. My access to Wun, in the eyes of these people, was irregular and unwelcome. I was a hireling. A nobody. But that was why Wun preferred my company: I had no agenda to promote or protect. And because he insisted, I was from time to time ushered by sullen toadies through the several doors that separated the Martian ambassador's air-conditioned quarters from the Florida heat and all the wide world beyond.

On one of these occasions I found Wun Ngo Wen seated on his wicker chair—someone had brought in a matching footstool so his feet wouldn't dangle—gazing thoughtfully at the contents of a test tube-sized glass vial. I asked him what was inside.

"Replicators," he said.

He was dressed in a suit and tie that might have been tailored for a stocky twelve-year-old: he'd been doing show-and-tell for a congressional delegation. Although Wun's existence had not been formally a

I looked at the glass tube from a safe vantage point across the room. Replicators. Ice-eaters. Seeds of an inorganic biology.

Wun smiled. "Are you afraid of it? Please don't be. I assure you the contents are completely inactive. I thought Jason had explained this to you."

He had. A little. I said, "They're microscopic devices. Semi-organic. They reproduce in conditions of extreme cold and vacuum."

"Yes, good, essentially correct. And did Jason explain the purpose of them?"

"To go out and populate the galaxy. To send us data."

Wun nodded slowly, as if this answer were also essentially correct but less than satisfactory. "This is the most sophisticated technological artifact the Five Republics have produced, Tyler. We could never have sustained the kind of industrial activity your people practice on such an alarming scale—ocean liners, men on the moon, vast cities—"

"From what I've seen, your cities are fairly impressive."

"Only because we build them in a gender gravitational gradient. On Earth those towers would crumble under their own weight. But my point is that this, the contents of this tube, this is our equivalent of an engineering triumph, something so complex and so difficult to make that we take a certain perhaps justifiable pride in it."

"I'm sure you do."

"Then come and appreciate it. Don't be afraid." He beckoned me closer and I came across the room and sat on a chair opposite him. I guess we would have looked, from a distance, like any two friends discussing anything at all. But my eyes wouldn't leave the vial. He held it out, offered it to me. "Go on," he said.

I took the tube between thumb and forefinger and held it up to let the ceiling light shine through. The contents looked like ordinary water with a slightly oily sheen. That was all.

"To truly appreciate it," Wun said, "you have to understand what you're holding. In that tube, Tyler, are some thirty or forty thousand individual man-made cells in a glycerin suspension. Each cell is an acorn."

"You know about acorns?"

"I've been reading. It's a commonplace metaphor. Acorns and oaks, correct? When you hold an acorn you hold in your hand the possibility of an oak tree, and not just a single oak but all the progeny of that oak for centuries upon centuries. Enough oak wood to build whole cities… are cities made of oak?"

"No, but it doesn't matter."

"What you're holding is an acorn. Completely dormant, as I said, and in fact that particular sample is probably quite dead, considering the time it's spent at terrestrial ambient temperatures. Analyze it, and the most you might find would be some unusual trace chemicals."

"But?"

"But—put it in an icy, airless, cold environment, an environment like the Oort Cloud, and then, Tyler, it comes to life! It begins, very slowly but very patiently, to grow and reproduce."

The Oort Cloud. I knew about the Oort Cloud from conversations with Jason and from the speculative novels I still occasionally read. The Oort Cloud was a nebulous array of cometary bodies occupying a space begi