It couldn't be kept much longer in any case. By the time Wun arrived in Florida much of the D.C. elite and several foreign heads of state had heard all about him. The State Department had granted him ad hoc legal status and planned to introduce him internationally when the time was right. His handlers were already coaching him for the inevitable media feeding frenzy.
His arrival could and perhaps should have been managed differently. He could have been processed through the U.N., his presence immediately made public. Garland's administration was bound to take some heat for hiding him. The Christian Conservative Party was already hinting that "the administration knows more than it's saying about the results of the terraforming project," hoping to draw out the president or open up Lomax, his would-be successor, for criticism. Criticism there would inevitably be; but Wun had expressed his wish not to become a campaign issue. He wanted to go public but he would wait until November, he said, to announce himself.
But the existence of Wun Ngo Wen was only the most conspicuous of the secrets surrounding his arrival. There were others. It made for a strange summer at Perihelion.
Jason called me over to the north wing that August. I met him in his office—his real office, not the tastefully furnished suite where he greeted official visitors and the press; a window-less cube with a desk and sofa. Perched on his chair between stacks of scientific journals, wearing Levi's and a greasy sweatshirt, he looked as if he'd grown out of the clutter like a hydroponic vegetable. He was sweating. Never a good sign with Jase.
"I'm losing my legs again," he said.
I cleared a space on the sofa and sat down and waited for him to elaborate.
"I've been having little episodes for a couple of weeks. The usual thing, pins and needles in the morning. Nothing I can't work around. But it isn't going away. In fact it's getting worse. I think we might need to adjust the medication."
Maybe so. But I really didn't like what the medication had been doing to him. Jase by this time was taking a daily handful of pills: myelin enhancers to slow the loss of nerve tissue, neurological boosters to help the brain rewire damaged areas, and secondary medication to treat the side effects of the primary medication. Could we boost his dosage? Possibly. But the process had a toxicity ceiling that was already alarmingly close. He had lost weight, and he had lost something perhaps more important: a certain emotional equilibrium. Jase talked faster than he used to and smiled less often. Where he had once seemed utterly at home in his body, he now moved like a marionette—when he reached for a cup his hand overshot the target and jogged back for a second intercept.
"In any case," I said, "we'll have to get Dr. Malmstein's opinion."
"There is absolutely no way I can leave here long enough to see him. Things have changed, if you haven't noticed. Can't we do a telephone consult?"
"Maybe. I'll ask."
"And in the meantime, can you do me another favor?"
"What would that be, Jase?"
"Explain my problem to Wun. Dig up a couple of textbooks on the subject for him."
"Medical texts? Why, is he a physician?"
"Not exactly, but he brought a lot of information with him. The Martian biological sciences are considerably in advance of ours." (He said this with a crooked grin I was unable to interpret.) "He thinks he might be able to help."
"Are you serious?"
"Quite serious. Stop looking shocked. Will you talk to him?"
A man from another planet. A man with a hundred thousand years of Martian history behind him. "Well, yeah," I said. "I'd be privileged to talk to him. But—"
"I'll set it up, then."
"But if he has the kind of medical knowledge that can effectively treat AMS, it needs to reach better doctors than me."
"Wun brought whole encyclopedias with him. There are already people going through the Martian archives—parts of them, anyway—looking for useful information, medical and otherwise. This is just a sideshow."
"I'm surprised he can spare the time for a sideshow."
"He's bored more often than you might think. He's also short of friends. I thought he might enjoy spending a little time with someone who doesn't believe he's either a savior or a threat. In the short term, though, I'd still like you to talk to Malmstein."
"Of course."
"And call him from your place, all right? I don't trust the phones here anymore."
He smiled as if he had said something amusing.
* * * * *
Occasionally that summer I took myself for walks on the public beach across the highway from my apartment.
It wasn't much of a beach. A long undeveloped spit of land protected it from erosion and rendered it useless for surfers. On hot afternoons the old motels surveyed the sand with glassy eyes and a few subdued tourists washed their feet in the surf.
I came down and sat on a scalding wooden walkway suspended over scrub grass, watching clouds gather on the eastern horizon and thinking about what Molly had said, that I was pretending to be cool about the Spin (and about the Lawtons), faking an equanimity I couldn't possibly possess.
I wanted to give Molly her due. Maybe that was the way I looked to her.
"Spin" was a dumb but inevitable name for what had been done to the Earth. That is, it was bad physics—nothing was actually spinning any harder or faster than it used to—but it was an apt metaphor. In reality the Earth was more static than it had ever been. But did it feel like it was spinning out of control? In every important sense, yes. You had to cling to something or slide into oblivion.
So maybe I was clinging to the Lawtons—not just Jason and Diane but their whole world, the Big House and the Little House, lost childhood loyalties. Maybe that was the only handle I could grab. And maybe that wasn't necessarily a bad thing. If Moll was right, we all had to grab something or be lost. Diane had grabbed faith, Jason had grabbed science.
And I had grabbed Jason and Diane.
I left the beach when the clouds came up, one of those inevitable late-August afternoon squalls, the eastern sky restless with lightning, rain beginning to whip the sad pastel balconies of the motels. My clothes were wet by the time I got home. It took them hours to dry in the humid air. The storm passed by nightfall but left a fetid, steamy stillness behind it.
Molly came over after dinner and we downloaded a current movie, one of the Victorian drawing-room dramas she was fond of. After the film she went to the kitchen to fix us drinks while I called David Malmstein from the phone in the spare room. Malmstein said he'd like to see Jase "as soon as it's practical" but thought it would be all right to adjust the meds upward a few notches, as long as both Jase and I kept an eye out for any unpleasant reaction.
I hung up the phone and left the room and found Molly in the hall with a drink in each hand and a puzzled expression on her face: "Where'd you go?"
"Just making a call."
"Anything important?"
"No."
"Checking up on a patient?"
"Something like that," I said.
* * * * *
Within the next few days Jase arranged a meeting between me and Wun Ngo Wen in Wun's quarters at Perihelion.
The Martian ambassador lived in a room he had furnished to his own taste, from catalogs. The furniture was lightweight, wicker, low to the ground. A rag rug covered the linoleum floor. A computer sat on a simple raw pine desk. There were bookcases to match the desk. Apparently Martians decorated like newlywed college students.
I supplied Wun with the technical material he wanted: a couple of books on the etiology and treatment of multiple sclerosis, plus a series of JAMA offprints on AMS. AMS, in current thinking, wasn't really MS at all; it was a different disease entirely, a genetic disorder with MS-like symptoms and a similar degradation of the myelin sheaths that protect human nervous tissue. AMS was distinguishable by its severity, rapid progression, and resistance to standard therapies. Wun said he wasn't familiar with the condition but would search his archives for information.