SPIN

We rolled out at dusk after a perimeter sweep held us up for an hour or so. Once we reached the highway Wun apologized for yawning: "I'm not accustomed to so much physical exercise."

"I've seen you on the treadmill at Perihelion. You do all right."

"A treadmill is hardly a canyon."

"No, I suppose it isn't."

"I'm sore but not sorry. It was a wonderful expedition. I hope you spent your time as happily."

I told him I'd located Diane and that she was healthy.

"That's good. I'm sorry I couldn't meet her. If she's anything like her brother she must be a remarkable individual."

"She is."

"But the visit wasn't all you'd hoped?"

"Maybe I was hoping for the wrong thing." Maybe I'd been hoping for the wrong thing for a long time.

"Well," Wun said, yawning, eyes half-closed, "the question… as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded."

I wanted to ask him what he meant, but his head had lolled against the upholstery and it seemed kinder to let him sleep.

* * * * *

There were five cars in our convoy plus a perso

The APC was a boxy vehicle about the size of the armored cars used to ship cash to and from regional banks and easily mistaken for one.

In fact a Brink's convoy happened to be about ten minutes ahead of us until it turned off the highway toward Palm Bay. Gang spotters—placed on the road past major intersections and linked by phone—confused us with the Brink's shipment and marked us as a target for a band of strikers waiting up ahead.

The strikers were sophisticated criminals who had already emplaced surface mines at a stretch of the road skirting a swampy wilderness preserve. They also carried automatic rifles and a couple of rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and a Brink's convoy would have been no match for them: five minutes after the first concussion the strikers would have been deep in bog country, dividing the spoils. But their spotters had made a critical mistake. Taking on a bank delivery is one thing; taking on five security-modified vehicles and an APC full of highly trained military and security perso

I was gazing out the tinted window of the car, watching low green water and bald cypress slide past, when the highway lights went out.

A pirate had cut the buried power cables. Suddenly the dark was truly dark, a wall beyond the window, nothing looking back at me but my own startled reflection. I said, "Wun—"

But he was still asleep, his wrinkled face blank as a thumbprint.

Then the lead car hit the mine.

The concussion beat at our hardened vehicle like a steel fist. The convoy was prudently spaced, but we were close enough to see the point car rise on a gout of yellow flame and drop back to the tarmac burning, wheels splayed.

Our driver swerved and, despite what he had probably been taught, slowed down. The road was blocked ahead. And now there was a second concussion at the back of the convoy, another mine, blasting chunks of pavement into the wetlands and boxing us in with ruthless efficiency.

Wun was awake now, baffled and terrified. His eyes were as big as moons and almost as bright.

Small-arms fire rattled in the near distance. I ducked and pulled Wun down next to me, both of us folded double around our seat belts and prying frantically at the clasps. The driver stopped, pulled a weapon from somewhere under the dash, and rolled out the door.

At the same time a dozen men spilled out of the APC behind us and began to fire into the darkness, trying to establish a perimeter. Plainclothes security men from other vehicles began to converge on our car, looking to protect Wun, but gunfire pi

The quick response must have rattled the road pirates. They opened up with heavy weapons. One of them fired what I was later told was a rocket-propelled grenade. All I knew was that I was suddenly deaf and the car was rotating around a complicated axis and the air was full of smoke and pebbled glass.

* * * * *

Then, mysteriously, I was halfway out the rear door, face pressed into the gritty pavement, tasting blood, and Wun was next to me, a few feet ahead, lying on his side. One of his shoes—one of the child-size hiking boots he'd bought for the Canyon—was on fire.

I called his name. He stirred, feebly. Bullets battered the ruin of the car behind us, punching craters in steel. My left leg was numb. I pulled myself closer and used a torn hank of upholstery to smother the burning shoe. Wun groaned and lifted his head.

Our guys returned fire, tracers streaking into the wetlands on each side of the road.

Wun arched his back and rose to his knees. He didn't seem to know where he was. He was bleeding from his nose. His forehead was gashed and raw.

"Don't stand up," I croaked.

But he went on trying to gather his feet under him, the burned boot flopping and stinking.

"For god's sake," I said. I reached out but he scuttled away. "For god's sake, don't stand up!"

But he managed it at last, levered himself up and stood trembling, profiled by the burning wreckage. He looked down and seemed to recognize me.

"Tyler," he said. "What happened?"

Then the bullets found him.

* * * * *

There were plenty of people who had hated Wun Ngo Wen. They distrusted his motives, like E. D. Lawton, or despised him for more complex and less defensible reasons: because they believed he was an enemy of God; because his skin happened to be black; because he espoused the theory of evolution; because he embodied physical evidence of the Spin and disturbing truths about the age of the external universe.

Many of those people had whispered about killing him. Dozens of intercepted threats were recorded in the files of Homeland Security.

But he wasn't killed by a conspiracy. What killed him was a combination of greed, mistaken identity, and Spin-engendered recklessness.

It was an embarrassingly terrestrial death.

Wun's body was cremated (after an autopsy and massive sample-extraction) and he was given a full state funeral. His memorial service in Washington's National Cathedral was attended by dignitaries from all over the planet. President Lomax delivered a lengthy eulogy.

There was talk of sending his ashes into orbit, but nothing ever came of it. According to Jason, the urn was stored in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution pending final disposition.

It's probably still there.

HOME BEFORE DARK

So I spent a few days in a Miami-area hospital, recovering from minor injuries, describing events to federal investigators, and coming to grips with the fact of Wun's death. It was during this time I resolved to leave Perihelion and open a private practice of my own.

But I decided not to a

* * * * *

By comparison with the terraforming effort of previous years, the replicator launch was anticlimactic. Its results would be, if anything, greater and more subtle; but its very efficiency—a mere handful of rockets, no clever timing required—failed as drama.

President Lomax was keeping this one close to home. In a move that had infuriated the E.U., the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians, Lomax had declined to share replicator technology beyond the must-know circles at NASA and Perihelion, and he had deleted all relevant passages in the publicly released editions of the Martian archives. "Artificial microbes" (in Lomax-speak) were a "high risk" technology. They could be "weaponized." (This was true, as even Wun had admitted.) The U.S. was thus obliged to take "custodial control" of the information in order to prevent "nanotech proliferation and a new and deadly arms race."