"You already know what I have to tell you," I said. "There's no cure for this problem."
"No earthly cure."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You know what it means."
He was talking about Wun Ngo Wen's longevity process.
The reconstruction, Wun had said, was also a cure for a long list of genetic disabilities. It would edit the AMS loop out of Jason's DNA, inhibiting the rogue proteins that were eroding his nervous system. "But that would take weeks," I said, "and anyway, I can't condone the idea of making you a guinea pig for an untested procedure."
"It's hardly untested. The Martians have been doing it for centuries, and the Martians are as human as we are. And I'm sorry, Tyler, but I'm not really interested in your professional scruples. They simply don't enter the equation."
"They do, though. As far as I'm concerned."
"Then the question is, how far are you concerned? If you don't want to be a part of it, step aside."
"The risk—"
"It's my risk, not yours." He closed his eyes. "Don't mistake this for arrogance or vanity, but it matters whether I live or die or even whether I can walk straight or pronounce my f-fucking consonants. It matters to the world, I mean. Be-cause I'm in a uniquely important position. Not by accident. Not because I'm smart or virtuous. I was appointed. Basically, Tyler, I'm an artifact, a constructed object, engineered by E. D. Lawton the same way he and your father used to engineer airfoils. I'm doing the job he built me to do—running Perihelion, running the human response to the Spin."
"The president might disagree. Not to mention Congress. Or the U.N., for that matter."
"Please. I'm not delusional. That's the point. Running Perihelion means playing to the interested parties. All of them. E.D. knows that; he's perfectly cynical about it. He turned Perihelion into a dollar windfall for the aerospace industry and he did it by making friends and forging political alliances in high places. By cajoling and pleading and lobbying and funding friendly campaigns. He had a vision and he had contacts and he was in the right place at the right time; he stepped forward with the aerostat program and rescued the telecom industry from the Spin, and that dropped him into the company of powerful people—and he knows how to exploit an opportunity. Without E.D., there wouldn't be human beings on Mars. Without E. D. Lawton, Wun Ngo Wen wouldn't even exist. Give the old fucker credit. He's a great man."
"But?"
"But he's a man of his time. He's pre-Spin. His motives are archaic. The torch has been passed. Or will be, if I have anything to do with it."
"I don't know what that means, Jase."
"E.D. still thinks there's some personal advantage he can wring out of all this. He resents Wun Ngo Wen and he hates the idea of seeding the galaxy with replicators, not because it's too ambitious but because it's bad for business. The Mars project pumped trillions of dollars into aerospace. It made E.D. wealthier and more powerful than he ever dreamed of being. It made him a household name. And E.D. still thinks that matters. He thinks it matters the way it used to matter before the Spin, when you could play politics like a game, gamble for prizes. But Wun's proposal doesn't have that kind of payoff. Launching replicators is a trivial investment compared to terraforming Mars. We can do it with a couple of Delta sevens and a cheap ion drive. A slingshot and a test tube is all it really takes."
"How is that bad for E.D. ?"
"It doesn't do much to protect a collapsing industry. It hollows out his financial base. Worse, it takes him out of the spotlight. Suddenly everyone's going to be looking at Wun Ngo Wen—we're a couple of weeks away from a media shit-storm of unprecedented proportions—and Wun picked me as frontman for this project. The last thing ED. wants is his ungrateful son and a wrinkly Martian dismantling his life's work and launching an armada that costs less to produce than a single commercial airliner."
"What would he prefer to do?"
"He's got a big-scale agenda worked out. Whole-system surveillance, he calls it. Looking for fresh evidence of activity by the Hypotheticals. Planetary surveyors from Mercury to Pluto, sophisticated listening posts in interplanetary space, fly-by missions to scout out the Spin artifacts here and at the Martian poles."
"Is that a bad idea?"
"It might yield a little trivial information. Eke out a little data and funnel cash into the industry. That's what it's designed to do. But what E.D. doesn't understand, what his generation doesn't truly understand—"
"What's that, Jase?"
"Is that the window is closing. The human window. Our time on Earth. The Earth's time in the universe. It's just about over. We have, I think, just one more realistic opportunity to understand what it means—what it meant—to have built a human civilization." His eyelids shuttered once, twice, slowly. Much of the wild tension had drained out of him. "What it means to have been singled out for this peculiar form of extinction. More than that, though. What it means… what it means…" He looked up. "What the fuck did you give me, Tyler?"
"Nothing serious. A mild anxiolytic."
"Quick fix?"
"Isn't that what you want?"
"I suppose so. I want to be presentable by morning, that's what I want."
"The medication isn't a cure. What you want me to do is like trying to repair a loose electrical connection by pushing more voltage through it. Might work, in the short term. But it's undependable and it puts unacceptable stress on other parts of the system. I would love to give you a good clean symptom-free day. I just don't want to kill you."
"If you don't give me a symptom-free day, you might as well kill me."
"All I have to offer you," I said, "is my professional judgment."
"And what can I expect from your professional judgment?"
"I can help. I think. A little. This time. This time, Jase. But there's not much room to maneuver. You have to face up to that."
"None of us has much room to maneuver. We all have to face up to that."
But he sighed and smiled when I opened the med kit again.
* * * * *
Molly was perched on the sofa when I got home, facing the TV square-on, watching a recently popular movie about elves, or maybe they were angels. The screen was full of fuzzy blue light. She switched it off when I came in. I asked her if anything had happened while I was gone.
"Not much. You got a phone call."
"Oh? Who was it?"
"Jason's sister. What's her name. Diane. The one in Arizona."
"Did she say what she wanted?"
"Just to talk. So we talked a little."
"Uh-huh. What did you talk about?"
Molly half turned, showing me her profile against the dim light from the bedroom. "You."
"Anything in particular?"
"Yeah. I told her to stop calling you because you have a new girlfriend. I told her I'd be handling your calls from now on."
I stared.
Molly bared her teeth in what I registered was meant to be a smile. "Come on, Tyler, learn to take a joke. I told her you were out. Is that all right?"
"You told her I was out?"
"Yes, I told her you were out. I didn't say where. Because you didn't actually tell me."
"Did she say whether it was urgent?"
"Didn't sound urgent. Call her back if you want. Go ahead—I don't care."
But this, too, was a test. "It can wait," I said.
"Good." Her cheeks dimpled. "Because I have other plans."
SACRIFICIAL RITES
Jason, obsessed with E. D. Lawton's pending arrival, had neglected to mention that another guest was also expected at Perihelion: Preston Lomax, the current vice president of the United States and front-runner in the upcoming election.
Security was tight at the gates and there was a helicopter on the pad atop the hub of the Perihelion building. I recognized all these Code Red protocols from a series of visits by President Garland over the last month. The guard at the main entrance, the one who called me "Doc" and whose cholesterol levels I monitored once a month, tipped me off that it was Lomax this time.