In the city of Madras an ambitious if not quite legal cruise service had produced a series of English-language posters announcing easy travel to friendly planet! Interpol closed the business down—the U.N. was still trying to regulate passage in those days—but the posters had it just about right. How could such things be? Ask the Hypotheticals.
Diane's divorce had been finalized, she told me, but she was out of work and out of prospects. "I thought if I could join you…" She sounded tentative and not at all like a Fourth, or what I imagined a Fourth ought to sound like. "If that would be all right. Frankly I need a little help. Finding a place and, you know, getting settled."
So I arranged a clinic job for her and submitted the immigration paperwork. She joined me in Montreal that autumn.
* * * * *
It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned (or semi-Martian, perhaps), during which Diane and I discovered each other in wholly new ways. We were no longer straitjacketed by the Spin nor were we children blindly seeking solace. We fell in love, finally, as adults.
These were the years when the global population topped out at eight billion. Most of that growth had been funneled into the expanding megacities: Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, coastal China; Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo; Caracas, La Paz, Tegucigalpa—all the firelit, smog-shrouded warrens of the world. It would have taken a dozen Archways to dent that population growth, but crowding drove a steady wave of emigrants, refugees, and "pioneers," many of them packed into the cargo compartments of illegal vessels and more than a few of them delivered to the shores of Port Magellan already dead or dying.
Port Magellan was the first named settlement in the new world. By now much of that world had been at least crudely mapped, largely by air. Port Magellan was at the eastern tip of a continent some were calling "Equatoria." There was a second and even larger land mass ("Borea") that straddled the northern pole and extended into the temperate zone of the planet. The southern seas were rich with islands and archipelagos.
The climate was benign, the air was fresh, the gravity was 95.5 percent of Earth's. Both continents were bread-baskets-in-waiting. The seas and rivers teemed with fish. The legend circulating in the slums of Douala and Kabul was that you could pick dinner from the giant trees of Equatoria and sleep among their sheltering roots.
You couldn't. Port Magellan was a U.N. enclave policed by soldiers. The shantytowns that had grown up around it were un-governed and unsafe. But functional fishing villages dotted the coastline for hundreds of miles; there were tourist hotels under construction around the lagoons of Reach Bay and Aussie Harbor; and the prospect of free fertile land had driven settlers inland along the White and New Irrawaddi river valleys.
But the most momentous news from the new world that year was the discovery of the second Arch. It was located half a world away from the first, near the southern reaches of the boreal land mass, and beyond it there was yet another new world—this one, according to first reports, a little less inviting; or maybe it was just the rainy season there.
* * * * *
"There must be other people like me," Diane said, five years into the post-Spin era. "I'd like to meet them."
I had given her my copy of the Martian archives, a first-pass translation on a set of memory cards, and she had pored over them with the same intensity she'd once brought to Victorian poetry and New Kingdom tracts.
If Jason's work had been successful, then, yes, there were surely other Fourths on Earth. But announcing their presence would have been a first-class ticket to a federal penitentiary. The Lomax administration had put a national security lid on all things Martian, and Lomax's domestic security agencies had been granted sweeping police powers in the economic crises that followed the end of the Spin.
"Do you ever think about it?" she asked, a little shyly.
Becoming a Fourth myself, she meant. Injecting into my arm a measured dose of clear liquid from one of the vials I kept in a steel safe at the back of our bedroom closet. Of course I'd thought about it. It would have made us more alike.
But did I want that? I was aware of the invisible space, the gap between her Fourthness and my unmodified humanity, but I wasn't afraid of it. Some nights, looking into her solemn eyes, I even treasured it. It was the canyon that defined the bridge, and the bridge we had built was pleasing and strong.
She stroked my hand, her smooth fingers on my textured skin, a subtle reminder that time never stood still, that one day I might need the treatment even if I didn't especially want it.
"Not yet," I said.
"When?"
"When I'm ready."
* * * * *
President Lomax was succeeded by President Hughes and then by President Chaykin, but they were all veterans of the same Spin-era politics. They saw Martian biotech as the new atomic bomb, at least potentially, and for now it was all theirs, a proprietary threat. Lomax's first diplomatic dispatch to the government of the Five Republics had been a request to withhold biotech information from uncoded Martian broadcasts to Earth. He had justified the request with plausible arguments about the effect such technology might have on a politically divided and often violent world—he cited the death of Wun Ngo Wen as an example—and so far the Martians had been playing along.
But even this sanitized contact with Mars had sewn some discord. The egalitarian economics of the Five Republics had made Wun Ngo Wen a sort of posthumous mascot to the new global labor movement. (It was jarring to see Wun's face on placards carried by garment workers in Asian factory zones or chipsocket fillers from Central American maquiladoras— but I doubt it would have displeased him.)
* * * * *
Diane crossed the border to attend E.D.'s funeral eleven years almost to the day after I rescued her from the Condon ranch.
We had heard of his death in the news. The obituary mentioned in passing that E.D.'s ex-wife Carol had predeceased him by six months, another sad shock. Carol had stopped taking our calls almost a decade ago. Too dangerous, she said. It was enough just knowing we were safe. And there was nothing, really, to say.
(Diane visited her mother's grave while she was in D.C. What saddened her the most, she said, was that Carol's life had been so incomplete: a verb without an object, an anonymous letter, misunderstood for the want of a signature. "I don't miss her as much as I miss what she might have been.")
At E.D.'s memorial service Diane was careful not to identify herself. Too many of E.D.'s government cronies were present, including the attorney general and the sitting vice president. But her attention was drawn to an anonymous woman in the pews, who was sneaking reciprocal glances at Diane: "I knew she was a Fourth," Diane said. "I can't say exactly how. The way she held herself, the sort of ageless look she had—but more than that; it was like a signal went back and forth between us." And when the ceremony was over Diane approached the woman and asked how she had known E.D.
"I didn't know him," the woman said, "not really. I did a research stint at Perihelion at one time, back in Jason Lawton's day. My name is Sylvia Tucker."
The name rang a bell when Diane repeated it to me. Sylvia Tucker was one of the anthropologists who had worked with Wun Ngo Wen at the Florida compound. She had been friendlier than most of the hired academics and it was possible Jase had confided in her.
"We exchanged e-mail addresses," Diane said. "Neither of us said the word 'Fourth.' But we both knew. I'm certain of it."
No correspondence ensued, but every once in a while Diane received digital press clippings from Sylvia Tucker's address, concerning, for instance:
An industrial chemist in Denver arrested on a security writ and detained indefinitely.
A geriatric clinic in Mexico City closed by federal order.
A University of California sociology professor killed in a fire, "arson suspected."