"They may be mining the sun," Jason said, still talking about the Hypotheticals. "We have some suggestive data on solar flares. Obviously, what they've done to the Earth requires vast amounts of usable energy. It's the equivalent of refrigerating a planet-sized mass to a temperature close to absolute zero. So where's the power supply? Most likely, the sun. And we've observed a marked reduction in large solar flares since the Spin. Something, some force or agency, may be tapping high-energy particles before they crest in the heliosphere. Mining the sun, Tyler! That's an act of technological hubris almost as startling as the Spin itself."
I picked up the framed photo of Diane. The photograph predated her marriage to Simon Townsend. It had captured a certain characteristic disquiet, as if she had just narrowed her eyes at a puzzling thought. She was beautiful without trying but not quite at ease, all grace but at the same time just slightly off balance.
I had so many memories of her. But those memories were years old now, vanishing into the past with an almost Spinlike momentum. Jason saw me holding the picture frame and was silent for a few blessed moments. Then he said, "Really, Tyler, this fixation is unworthy of you."
"Hardly a fixation, Jase."
"Why? Because you're over her or because you're afraid of her? But I could ask her the same question. If she ever called. Simon keeps her on a tight leash. I suspect she misses the old NK days, when the movement was full of naked Unitarians and Evangelical hippies. The price of piety is steeper now." He added, "She talks to Carol every now and then."
"Is she at least happy?"
"Diane is among zealots. She may be one herself. Happiness isn't an option."
"Do you think she's in danger?"
He shrugged. "I think she's living the life she chose for herself. She could have made other choices. She could, for instance, have married you, Ty, if not for this ridiculous fantasy of hers—"
"What fantasy?"
"That E.D. is your father. That she's your biological sister."
I backed away from the bookcase too hastily and knocked the photographs to the floor.
"That's ridiculous."
"Patently ridiculous. But I don't think she entirely gave up on the idea until she was in college."
"How could she even think—"
"It was a fantasy, not a theory. Think about it. There was never much affection between Diane and E.D. She felt ignored by him. And in a sense, she was right. E.D. never wanted a daughter, he wanted an heir, a male heir. He had high expectations, and I happened to live up to them. Diane was a distraction as far as E.D. was concerned. He expected Carol to raise her, and Carol—" He shrugged. "Carol wasn't up to the task."
"So she made up this—story?"
"She thought of it as a deduction. It explained the way E.D. kept your mother and you living on the property. It explained Carol's constant unhappiness. And, basically, it made her feel good about herself. Your mother was kinder and more attentive to her than Carol ever was. She liked the idea of being blood kin to the Dupree family."
I looked at Jason. His face was pale, his pupils dilated, his gaze distant and aimed at the window. I reminded myself that he was my patient, that he was exhibiting a predictable psychological response to a powerful drug; that this was the same man who, only a few hours ago, had wept at his own incontinence. I said, "I really have to leave now, Jason."
"Why, this is all so shocking? You thought growing up was supposed to be painless?" Then, abruptly, before I could answer, he turned his head and met my eyes for the first time that evening. "Oh dear. I begin to suspect I've been behaving badly."
I said, "The medication—"
"Behaving monstrously. Tyler, I'm sorry."
"You'll feel better after a night's sleep. But you shouldn't go back to Perihelion for a couple of days."
"I won't. Will you stop by tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"Thank you," he said.
I left without replying.
CELESTIAL GARDENING
That was the winter of the gantries. New launch platforms had been erected not just at Canaveral but across the desert Southwest, in southern France and equatorial Africa, at Jiuquan and Xichang in China and at Baikonur and Svobodnyy in Russia: gantries for the Martian seed launches and larger gantries for the so-called Big Stacks, the enormous booster assemblies that would carry human volunteers to a marginally habitable Mars if the crude terraforming succeeded. The gantries grew that winter like iron and steel forests, exuberant, lush, rooted in concrete and watered with reservoirs of federal money.
The first seed rockets were in a way less spectacular than the launch facilities built to support them. They were assembly-line boosters mass-produced from old Titan and Delta templates, not an ounce or a microchip more complicated than they needed to be, and they populated their pads in startling numbers as winter advanced into spring, spaceships like cottonwood pods, poised to carry dormant life to a distant, sterile soil.
It was also, in a sense, spring in the solar system at large, or at least a prolonged Indian summer. The habitable zone of the solar system was expanding outward as the sun depleted its helium core, beginning to encompass Mars as it would eventually encompass the watery Jovian moon Ganymede, another potential target for late-stage terraforming. On Mars, vast tonnages of frozen C02 and water ice had begun to sublimate into the atmosphere over millions of warming summers. At the beginning of the Spin the Martian atmospheric pressure at ground level had been roughly eight millibars, as rarified as the air three miles above the peak of Mount Everest. Now, even without human intervention, the planet had achieved a climate equivalent to an arctic mountaintop bathed in gaseous carbon dioxide—balmy, by Martian standards.
But we meant to take the process further. We meant to lace the planet's air with oxygen, to green its lowlands, to create ponds where, now, the periodically melting subsurface ice erupted in geysers of vapor or slurries of toxic mud.
We were perilously optimistic during the winter of the gantries.
* * * * *
On March third, shortly before the first scheduled wave of seed launches, Carol Lawton called me at home and told me my mother had suffered a severe stroke and wasn't expected to live.
I made arrangements for a local medic to cover for me at Perihelion, then drove to Orlando and booked the first morning flight to D.C.
Carol met me at Reagan International, apparently sober. She opened her arms and I hugged her, this woman who had never displayed more than a puzzled indifference toward me during the years I had lived on her property. Then she stood back and put her tremorous hands on my shoulders. "I'm so sorry, Tyler."
"Is she still alive?"
"She's hanging on. I have a car waiting. We can talk while we drive."
I followed her out to a vehicle that must have been dispatched by E.D. himself, a black limo with federal stickers. The driver barely spoke as he put my luggage in the trunk, tipped his hat when I thanked him, and climbed into a driver's seat meticulously isolated from the plush passenger compartment. He headed for George Washington University Hospital without being asked.
Carol was skinnier than I remembered her, birdlike against the leather upholstery. She took a cotton handkerchief out of her tiny purse and dabbed her eyes. "All this ridiculous crying," she said. "I lost my contacts yesterday. Just sort of cried them away, if you can imagine that. There are some things a person takes for granted. For me it was having your mother in the house, keeping things in order, or just knowing she was nearby, there across the lawn. I used to wake up at night—I don't sleep soundly, which probably doesn't surprise you—I used to wake up feeling like the world was fragile and I might fall through it, fall right through the floor and keep on falling forever. Then I would think of her over there in the Little House, sound asleep. Sleeping soundly. It was like courtroom evidence. Exhibit A, Belinda Dupree, the possibility of peace of mind. She was the pillar of the household, Tyler, whether you knew it or not."