That was the year of the first unmanned NEP flights, which Jase watched with particular attention. These were the vehicles that would transport human beings to Mars, and unlike the comparatively simple seed carriers, the NEP vehicles were new technology. NEP stood for "nuclear electric propulsion": miniature nuclear reactors feeding ion engines vastly more powerful than the ones that drove the seed vessels, powerful enough to enable massive payloads. But getting these leviathans into orbit required boosters as large as anything NASA had ever launched, acts of what Jason called "heroic engineering," heroically expensive. The price tag had begun to raise red flags even in a largely supportive Congress, but the stream of notable successes kept a lid on dissent. Jason worried that even a single conspicuous failure would shift that equation.
Shortly after New Year's Day a NEP test vehicle failed to return its reentry package of test data and was presumed disabled in orbit. There were finger-pointing speeches on Capitol Hill led by a coterie of fiscal ultraconservatives representing states without significant aerospace investment, but E.D.'s friends in Congress overrode the objections and a successful test a week later buried the controversy. Still, Jason said, we had dodged a bullet.
Diane had followed the debate but considered it trivial. "What Jase needs to worry about," she said, "is what this Mars thing is doing to the world. So far it's all good press, right? Everybody's gung-ho, we all want something to reassure us about the—I'm not sure what to call it—the potency of the human race. But the euphoria will wear off sooner or later, and in the meantime people are getting extremely savvy about the nature of the Spin."
"Is that a bad thing?"
"If the Mars project fails or doesn't live up to expectations, yeah. Not just because people will be disappointed. They've watched the transformation of an entire planet—they have a yardstick to measure the Spin by. The sheer insane power of it, I mean. The Spin's not just some abstract phenomenon— you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong you steal that courage away again, and now it's worse because they've seen the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they've ever been."
I quoted the Housman poem she had taught me long ago: "The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear."
"The infant child is starting to figure it out," she said. "Maybe that's how you define the Tribulation."
Maybe so. Some nights, when I couldn't sleep, I thought about the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they were. There was really only one salient, obvious fact about them: not simply that they were capable of enclosing the Earth in this… strange membrane, but that they had been out there— owning us, regulating our planet and the passage of time— for almost two billion years.
Nothing even remotely human could be so patient.
* * * * *
Jason's neurologist tipped me off to a JAMA study published that winter. Researchers at Cornell had discovered a genetic marker for acute drug-resistant MS. The neurologist—a genial, fat Floridian named David Malmstein—had run Jason's DNA profile and found the suspect sequence in it. I asked him what that meant.
"It means we can tailor his medication a little more specifically. It also means we can never deliver the kind of permanent remission a typical MS patient expects."
"Seems like he's been in remission for most of a year now. Isn't that long-term?"
"His symptoms are under control, that's all. The AMS goes on burning, sort of like a fire in a coal seam. The time will come when we can't compensate for it."
"The point of no return."
"You could say."
"How long can he pass for normal?"
Malmstein paused. "You know," he said, "that's exactly what Jason asked me."
"What did you tell him?"
"That I'm not a fortune-teller. That AMS is a disease without a well-established etiology. That the human body has its own calendar."
"I'm guessing he didn't like the answer."
"He was vocal in his disapproval. But it's true. He could walk around for the next decade asymptomatic. Or he could be in a wheelchair by the end of the week."
"You told him that?"
"A kindler, gentler version. I don't want him to lose hope. He has a fighting spirit, and that counts for a lot. My honest opinion is that he'll do all right over the short term—two years, five years, maybe more. Then all bets are off. I wish I had a better prognosis."
I didn't tell Jase I'd talked to Malmstein, but I saw the way, in the following weeks, he redoubled his work, counting his successes against time and mortality, not the world's but his own.
* * * * *
The pace of the launches, not to mention the cost of them, began to escalate. The last wave of seed launches (the only one to carry, in part, actual seeds) happened in March, two years after Jase and Diane and I had watched a dozen similar rockets depart Florida for what had been at the time a barren planet.
The Spin had given us the necessary leverage for a long ecopoiesis. Now that we had launched the seeds of complex plants, however, timing became crucial. If we waited too long Mars could evolve out of our grasp: a species of edible grain after a million years evolving in the wild might not resemble its ancestral form, might have grown unpalatable or even poisonous.
This meant the survey satellites had to be launched only weeks after the seed armada, and the manned NEP vessels, if the results looked promising, immediately after that.
I took another late-night call from Diane the night after the survey sats went up. (Their data packages had been retrieved within hours but were still en route to JPL in Pasadena to be analyzed.) She sounded stressed and admitted when I questioned her that she had been laid off at least until June. She and Simon had run into trouble with their back rent. She couldn't ask E.D. for money, and Carol was impossible to talk to. She was working up the nerve to speak to Jase, but she didn't relish the humiliation.
"What kind of money are we talking about, Diane?"
"Tyler, I didn't mean—"
"I know. You didn't ask. I'm offering."
"Well… this month, even five hundred dollars would make a real difference."
"I guess the pipe cleaner fortune ran dry."
"Simon's trust fund ran out. There's still family money, but his family's not talking to him."
"He won't catch on if I send you a check?"
"He wouldn't like it. I thought I'd tell him I found an old insurance policy and cashed it in. Something like that. The kind of lie that doesn't really count as a sin. I hope."
"You guys are still at the Collier Street address?" Where I mailed a politely neutral Christmas card every year and from which I received one in return, generic snow scenes signed Simon and Diane Townsend, God Bless!
"Yes," she said, then, "Thank you, Tyler. Thank you so much. You know this is incredibly mortifying."
"Hard times for a lot of folks."
"You're doing all right, though?"
"Yeah, I'm doing all right."
I sent her six checks each postdated for the fifteenth of the month, half a year's worth, not sure whether this would cement our friendship or poison it. Or whether it mattered.
* * * * *
The survey data revealed a world still drier than the Earth but marked with lakes like polished turquoise inlaid on a copper disk; a planet gently swirled with bands of cloud, storms dropping rainfall on the windward slopes of ancient volcanos and feeding river basins and silty lowland deltas green as suburban lawns.
The big boosters were fueled on their pads, and at launch facilities and cosmodromes around the world nearly eight hundred human beings climbed gantries to lock themselves into cupboard-sized chambers and confront a destiny that was anything but certain. The NEP arks enclosed atop these boosters contained (in addition to astronauts) embryonic sheep, cattle, horses, pigs, and goats, and the steel wombs from which they could, with luck, be decanted; the seeds of ten thousand plants; the larvae of bees and other useful insects; dozens of similar biological cargos which might or might not survive the journey and the rigors of regenesis; condensed archives of essential human knowledge both digital (including the means to read them) and densely printed; and parts and supplies for simple shelters, solar power generators, greenhouses, water purifiers, and elementary field hospitals. In a best-case scenario all these human expeditionary vessels would arrive at roughly the same equatorial lowlands within a span of several years depending on their transit of the Spin membrane. At worst, even a single ship, if it arrived reasonably intact, could support its crew through a period of acclimation.