* * * * *
I managed to get hold of Jase one more time before the bandwidth was overwhelmed. Simon had just finished paying for the plug set for his car, he said, when the sky erupted. The roads out of Stockbridge were already crowded and the radio reported scattered looting in Boston and stalled traffic on every major route, so Jase had pulled into a parking lot behind a motel and rented a room for the night for himself and Simon. In the morning, he said, he would probably have to head back to Washington, but he'd drop Simon at the house first.
Then he passed his phone to Simon and I passed mine to Diane and left the room while she talked to her fiance. The summerhouse seemed ominously huge and empty. I walked around turning on lights until she called me back.
"Another drink?" I asked her.
"Oh yes," she said.
* * * * *
We went outside a little after midnight.
Diane was putting on a brave face. Simon had given her some kind of New Kingdom pep talk. In NK theology there was no conventional Second Coming, no Rapture or Armageddon; the Spin was all these things put together, all the ancient prophecies obliquely fulfilled. And if God wanted to use the canvas of the sky to paint us the naked geometry of time, Simon said, He would do so, and our awe and fear were entirely appropriate to the occasion. But we shouldn't be overwhelmed by these feelings because the Spin was ultimately an act of salvation, the last and best chapter in human history.
Or something like that.
So we went outside to watch the sky because Diane thought it was a brave and spiritual thing to do. The sky was cloudless and the air smelled of pine. The highway was a long way off, but we heard occasional faint sounds of car horns and sirens.
Our shadows danced around us as various fractions of the sky lit up, now north, now south. We sat on the grass a few yards from the steady glow of the porch light and Diane leaned into my shoulder and I put my arm around her, both of us a little drunk.
Despite years of emotional chill, despite our history at the Big House, despite her engagement to Simon Townsend, despite NK and Ekstasis and despite even the nuke-inspired derangement of the sky, I was exquisitely conscious of the pressure of her body next to mine. And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.
The sky sparked with strange light. Not the unadulterated light of the Spinning universe, which would have killed us on the spot. Instead it was a series of snapshots of the sky, consecutive midnights compressed into microseconds, afterimages fading like the pop of a flashbulb; then the same sky a century or a millennium later, like sequences in a surreal movie. Some of the frames were blurred long-exposures, starlight and moonlight become ghostly orbs or circles or scimitars. Some were crisp and quickly fading stills. Toward the north the lines and circles in the sky were narrower, their radii relatively small, while the equatorial stars were more restless, waltzing over huge ellipses. Full and half and waning moons blinked from horizon to horizon in pale orange transparencies. The Milky Way was a band of white fluorescence (now brighter, now darker) lit by flaring, dying stars. Stars were created and stars were demolished with every breath of summer air.
And it all moved.
Moved in vast shimmerings and intricate dances suggesting ever-greater, still-invisible cycles. The sky beat like a heart above us. "So alive," Diane said.
There is a prejudice imposed on us by our brief window of consciousness: things that move are alive; things that don't are dead. The living worm twines under the dead and static rock. Stars and planets move, but only according to the inert laws of gravitation: a stone may fall but is not alive, and orbital motion is only the same falling indefinitely prolonged.
But extend our mayfly existence, as the Hypotheticals had, and the distinction blurs. Stars are born, live, die, and bequeath their elementary ashes to newer stars. The sum of their various motions is not simple but unimaginably complex, a dance of attraction and velocity, beautiful but frightening. Frightening because, like an earthquake, the writhing stars made mutable what ought to be solid. Frightening because our deepest organic secrets, our couplings and our messy acts of reproduction, turn out not to be secrets after alclass="underline" the stars are also bleeding and laboring. No single thing abides, but all things flow. I couldn't remember where I had read that.
"Heraclitus," Diane said.
I wasn't aware that I'd said it aloud.
"All those years," Diane said, "back at the Big House, all those fucking wasted years, I knew—"
I put my finger on her lips. I knew what she had known.
"I want to go back inside," she said. "I want to go back to the bedroom."
* * * * *
We didn't pull the blinds. The spinning, kinetic stars cast their light into the room and in the darkness the patterns played over my skin and Diane's in focusless images, the way city lights shine through a rain-streaked window, silently, sinuously. We said nothing because words would have been an impediment. Words would have been lies. We made love wordlessly, and only when it was over did I find myself thinking, Let this abide. Just this.
We were asleep when the sky once more darkened, when the celestial fireworks finally dimmed and disappeared. The Chinese attack had amounted to little more than a gesture. Thousands had died as a result of the global panic, but there had been no direct casualties on Earth—or, presumably, among the Hypotheticals.
The sun rose on schedule the next morning.
The buzz of the house phone woke me. I was alone in bed. Diane took the call in another room and came in to tell me it was Jase, he said the roads were clear and he was on his way back.
She had showered and dressed and she smelled like soap and starched cotton. "And that's it?" I said. "Simon shows up and you drive away? Last night means nothing?"
She sat down on the bed next to me. "Last night never meant that I wouldn't leave with Simon."
"I thought it meant more."
"It meant more than I can possibly say. But it doesn't erase the past. I've made promises and I have a faith and those things put certain boundaries on my life."
She sounded unconvinced. I said, "A faith. Tell me you don't believe in this shit."
She stood up, frowning.
"Maybe I don't," she said. "But maybe I need to be around someone who does."
* * * * *
I packed and loaded my luggage into the Hyundai before Jase and Simon got back. Diane watched from the porch as I closed the lid of the trunk.
"I'll call you," she said.
"You do that," I told her.
4X109 A.D.
I broke another lamp during one of my fits of fever. This time Diane managed to conceal it from the concierge. She had bribed the housekeeping staff to exchange clean for dirty linen at the door every second morning rather than have a maid make up the room and risk finding me delirious. Cases of dengue, cholera, and human CVWS had cropped up at the local hospital within the last six months. I didn't want to wake up in an epidemiological ward next to a quarantine case.
"What worries me," Diane said, "is what might happen when I'm not here."
"I can take care of myself."
"Not if the fever spikes."
"Then it's a matter of luck and timing. Are you planning to go somewhere?"
"Only the usual. But I mean, in an emergency. Or if I can't get back to the room for some reason."
"What kind of emergency?"
She shrugged. "It's hypothetical," she said, in a tone that suggested it was anything but.
* * * * *
But I didn't press her about it. There was nothing I could do to improve the situation except cooperate.
I was beginning the second week of the treatment, approaching the crisis. The Martian drug had accumulated to some critical level in my blood and tissues. Even when the fevers subsided I felt disoriented, confused. The purely physical side effects were no fun either. Joint pain. Jaundice. Rash, if by "rash" you mean the sensation of having your skin slough off, layer by layer, exposing flesh almost as raw as an open wound. Some nights I slept for four or five hours—five was my record, I think—and woke in a slurry of dander, which Diane would clean from the blood-pocked bed while I shifted arthritically to a bedside chair.