SPIN

But the gene for AMS had never migrated to the red planet and the drugs Jase was taking were unknown there. And although Wun had insisted my concerns were unwarranted, I noticed he seldom smiled when he did so. So we hedged our bets. I had been backing off Jason's AMS meds for a week before the first injection. Not stopping them, just cutting back.

The strategy had seemed to work. By the time we arrived at the Big House Jason was exhibiting only minor symptomology while carrying a lighter drug load, and we began his treatment optimistically.

Three days later he was spiking fevers I couldn't knock down. A day after that he was semiconscious much of the time. Another day and his skin turned red and began to blister. That evening he began screaming.

He continued to scream despite the morphine I administered.

It was not a full-throated scream but a moan that periodically rose to high volume, a sound you might expect from a sick dog, not a human being. It was purely involuntary. When he was lucid he neither made the sound nor remembered having made it, even though it left his larynx inflamed and painful.

Carol made a brave show of putting up with it. There were parts of the house where Jason's keening was almost inaudible—the back bedrooms, the kitchen—and she spent most of her time there, reading or listening to local radio. But the strain was obvious and before long she started drinking again.

Maybe I shouldn't say "started." She had never stopped. What she had done was cut back to the minimum that allowed her to function, balancing between the very real terrors of sudden withdrawal and the lure of full-blown intoxication. And I hope that doesn't sound glib. Carol was walking a difficult path. She had stayed on it this long because of her love for her son, dormant as that love might have been these many years. The sound of his pain was what derailed her.

By the second week of the process Jase was hooked up to intravenous fluids and I was keeping an eye on his rising BR. He'd had a relatively good day despite his horrifying appearance, scabbed where he wasn't raw, eyes almost buried in the swollen flesh that surrounded them. He had been alert enough to ask whether Wun Ngo Wen had made his first television appearance. (Not yet. It was scheduled for the following week.) But by nightfall he had lapsed back into unconsciousness and the moaning, absent for a couple of days, started again, full-throated and painful to hear.

Painful for Carol, who showed up at the door of the bedroom with tear tracks down her cheeks and an expression of fierce, glassy anger. "Tyler," she said, "you have to stop this!"

"I'm doing what I can. He's not responding to the opiates. It might be better to talk about this in the morning."

"Can't you hear him?"

"Of course I can hear him."

"Does that mean nothing? Does that sound mean nothing to you? My god!" she said. "He would have been better off in Mexico with some quack. He would have been better off with a faith healer. Do you actually have any idea what you've been injecting into him? Fucking quack! My god."

Unfortunately she was echoing questions I had already begun to ask myself. No, I didn't know what I was injecting into him, not in any rigorous scientific sense. I had believed the promises of the man from Mars, but that was hardly a defense I could lay at Carol's feet. The process itself was more difficult, more obviously agonizing, than I had allowed myself to expect. Maybe it was working incorrectly. Maybe it wasn't working at all.

Jase emitted a mournful howl that ended in a sigh. Carol put her hands over her ears. "He's suffering, you fucking quack! Look at him!"

"Carol—"

"Don't Carol me, you butcher! I'm calling an ambulance. I'm calling the police!"

I came across the room and took her by the shoulders. She felt frail but dangerously alive under my hands, a cornered animal. "Carol, listen to me."

"Why, why should I listen to you?"

"Because your son put his life in my hands. Listen. Carol, listen. I'm going to need someone to help me here. I've been ru

"You should have brought a nurse."

I should have, but it hadn't been possible, and that was beside the point. "I don't have a nurse. I need you to do this."

That took a moment to sink in. Then she gasped and stepped back. "Me!"

"You still have a medical license. Last I heard."

"I haven't practiced for—is it decades? Decades…"

"I'm not asking you to perform heart surgery. I just want you to keep an eye on his blood pressure and his temperature. Can you do that?"

Her anger dissipated. She was flattered. She was frightened. She thought about it. Then she gave me a steely look. "Why should I help you? Why should I make myself an accomplice to this, this torture?"

I was still composing an answer when a voice behind me said, "Oh, please."

Jason's voice. One of the trademarks of this Martian drug regimen was the lucidity that came at random and left at will. Apparently it had just arrived. I turned around.

He grimaced and made an attempt, not quite successful, to sit up. But his eyes were clear.

He addressed his mother: "Really," he said, "isn't this a little unseemly? Please do what Tyler wants. He knows what he's doing and so do I."

Carol stared at him. "But I don't. I haven't. I mean I can't—"

Then she turned and walked unsteadily out of the room, one hand braced against the wall.

I sat up with Jase. In the morning Carol came to the bedroom looking chastened but sober and offered to relieve me. Jason was peaceful and didn't really need tending, but I put her in charge and went off to catch up on my sleep.

I slept for twelve hours. When I came back to the bedroom Carol was still there, holding her unconscious son's hand, stroking his forehead with a tenderness I had never seen in her before.

* * * * *

The recovery phase began a week and a half into the course of Jason's treatment. There was no sudden transition, no magic moment. But his lucid periods began to lengthen and his blood pressure stabilized somewhere near the nominal range.

On the night of Wun's speech to the United Nations I located a portable TV in the servants' part of the house and lugged it up to Jason's bedroom. Carol joined us just before the broadcast.

I don't think Carol believed in Wun Ngo Wen.

His presence on Earth had been officially a

Tonight he mounted the dais in the Security Council chamber and stepped up to the podium, which had been adjusted to suit his height. "Why, he's just a tiny thing," Carol said.

Jason said, "Show some respect. He represents a single continuous culture that's lasted longer than any of ours."

"Looks more like he represents the Lollipop Guild," Carol said.

His dignity was restored in the close-ups. The camera liked his eyes and his elusive smile. And when he spoke to the microphone he spoke softly, which took the effective pitch of his voice down to a more terrestrial level.

Wun knew (or had been coached to understand) how unlikely this event seemed to the average Earthling. ("Truly," the secretary general had said in his introduction, "we live in an age of miracles.") So he thanked us all for our hospitality in his best mid-Atlantic accent and talked wistfully about his home and why he had left it to come here. He painted Mars as a foreign but entirely human place, the kind of place you might like to visit, where the people were friendly and the scenery was interesting, although the winters, he admitted, were often harsh.