"I love my father, but I'm not blind to his faults. No, he would not understand. All the influence I have at Perihelion flows through E.D. And that's a little precarious at the moment. We've had some disagreements. If I became a liability to him he'd have me relegated to some expensive treatment facility in Switzerland or Bali before the week was out, and he'd tell himself he was doing it for my sake. Worse, he would believe it."
"What you choose to make public is your business. But you need to be seeing a neurologist, not a staff GP."
"No," he said.
"I can't in good conscious continue to treat you, Jase, if you won't talk to a specialist. It was dicey enough putting you on Tremex without consulting a brain guy."
"You have the MRI and the blood tests, right? What else do you need?"
"Ideally, a fully equipped hospital lab and degree in neurology."
"Bullshit. You said yourself, MS is no big deal nowadays."
"Unless it fails to respond to treatment."
"I can't—" He wanted to argue. But he was also obviously, brutally tired. Fatigue might be another symptom of his relapse, though; he had been pushing himself hard in the weeks before E.D.'s visit. "I'll make a deal with you. I'll see a specialist if you can arrange it discreetly and keep it off my Perihelion chart. But I need to be functional. I need to be functional tomorrow. Functional as in walking without assistance and not pissing myself. The drug cocktail you talked about, does it work fast?"
"Usually. But without a neurological workup—"
"Tyler, I have to tell you, I appreciate what you've done for me, but I can buy a more cooperative doctor if I need one. Treat me now and I'll see a specialist, I'll do whatever you think is right. But if you imagine I'm going to show up at work in a wheelchair with a catheter up my dick, you're dead wrong."
"Even if I write a script, Jase, you won't be better overnight. It takes a couple of days."
"I might be able to spare a couple of days." He thought about it. "Okay," he said finally. "I want the drugs and I want you to get me out of here inconspicuously. If you can do that, I'm in your hands. No arguments."
"Physicians don't bargain, Jase."
"Take it or leave it, Hippocrates."
* * * * *
I didn't start him on the whole cocktail—our pharmacy didn't stock all the drugs—but I gave him a CNS stimulant that would at least return his bladder control and the ability to walk unassisted for the next few days. The downside was an edgy, icy state of mind, like, or so I'm told, the tail end of a cocaine run. It raised his blood pressure and put dark baggage under his eyes.
We waited until most of the staff had gone home4X109 A.D. and there was only the night shift at the compound. Jase walked stiffly but plausibly past the front desk to the parking lot, waved amicably to a couple of late-departing colleagues, and sank into the passenger seat of my car. I drove him home.
He had visited my little rental house several times, but I hadn't been to his place before. I had expected something that reflected his status at Perihelion. In fact the apartment where he slept—clearly, he did little else there—was a modest condo unit with a sliver of an ocean view. He had furnished it with a sofa, a television, a desk, a couple of bookcases and a broadband media/Internet connection. The walls were bare except for the space above the desk, where he had taped a hand-drawn chart depicting the linear history of the solar system from the birth of the sun to its final collapse into a smoldering white dwarf, with human history diverging from the line at a spot marked the spin. The bookcases were crowded with journals and academic texts and decorated with exactly three framed photographs: E. D. Lawton, Carol Lawton, and a demure image of Diane that must have been taken years ago.
Jase stretched out on the sofa. He looked like a study in paradox, his body in repose, his eyes bright with drug-induced hyperalertness. I went to the small adjoining kitchen and scrambled eggs (neither of us had eaten since breakfast) while Jason talked. And talked some more. And kept on talking. "Of course," he said at one point, "I know I'm being way too verbal, I'm conscious of that, but I can't even think about sleeping—does this wear off?"
"If we put you on the drug cocktail long-term, then yes, the obvious stimulant effect will go away." I carried a plate to the sofa for him.
"It's very speedy. Like one of those cramming-for-the-finals pills people take. But physically, it's calming. I feel like a neon sign on an empty building. All lit up but basically hollow. The eggs, the eggs are very good. Thank you." He put the plate aside. He had eaten maybe a spoonful.
I sat at his desk, glancing at the Spin chart on the opposite wall. Wondering what it was like to live with this stark depiction of human origins and human destiny, the human species rendered as a finite event in the life of an ordinary star. He had drawn it with a felt-tip pen on a scroll of ordinary brown wrapping paper.
Jason followed my look. "Obviously," he said, "they mean for us to do something …"
"Who does?"
"The Hypotheticals. If we must call them that. And I suppose we must. Everyone does. They expect something from us. I don't know what. A gift, a signal, an acceptable sacrifice."
"How do you know that?"
"It's hardly an original observation. Why is the Spin barrier permeable to human artifacts like satellites, but not to meteors or even Brownlee particles? Obviously it's not a barrier; that was never the right word." Under the influence of the stimulant Jase seemed particularly fond of the word obviously. "Obviously," he said, "it's a selective filter. We know it filters the energy reaching the surface of the Earth. So the Hypotheticals want to keep us, or at least the terrestrial ecology, intact and alive, but then why grant us access to space? Even after we attempted to nuke the only two Spin-related artifacts anyone has ever found? What are they waiting for, Ty? What's the prize?"
"Maybe it's not a prize. Maybe it's a ransom. Pay up and we'll leave you alone."
He shook his head. "It's too late for them to leave us alone. We need them now. And we still can't rule out the possibility that they're benevolent, or at least benign. I mean, suppose they hadn't arrived when they did. What were we looking forward to? A lot of people think we were facing our last century as a viable civilization, maybe even as a species. Global warming, overpopulation, the death of the seas, the loss of arable land, the proliferation of disease, the threat of nuclear or biological warfare…"
"We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault."
"Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first: When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you're at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return."
"Is it better, being consumed by the sun?"
"That hasn't happened yet. And we aren't the first star to burn out. The galaxy is littered with white dwarf stars that might once have hosted habitable planets. Do you ever wonder what happened to them?"
"Seldom," I said.
I walked across the bare parquet floor to the bookcase, to the family photos. Here was E.D., smiling into the camera— a man whose smiles were never entirely convincing. His physical resemblance to Jason was marked. (Was obvious, Jase might have said.) Similar machine, different ghost.
"How could life survive a stellar catastrophe? But obviously it depends on what 'life' is. Are we talking about organic life, or any kind of generalized autocatalytic feedback loop? Are the Hypothetical organic? Which is an interesting question in itself…"
"You really ought to try to get some sleep." It was past midnight. He was using words I didn't understand. I picked up the photo of Carol. Here the resemblance was more subtle. The photographer had caught Carol on a good day: her eyes were open, not stuck at half-mast, and although her smile was grudging, a barely perceptible lift of her thin lips, it was not altogether inauthentic.