"What's that, Moll?"
"The sun. I mean the sunlight. This light. It's fake, everybody says, but God, the heat: the heat is real."
"The sun's not fake exactly. The sun we see isn't the real sun, but this light would have originated there. It's managed by the Hypotheticals, the wavelengths stepped down and filtered—"
"I know, but I mean the way it rides the sky. Sunrise, sunset. If it's only a projection, how come it looks the same from Canada and South America? If the Spin barrier is only a few hundred miles up?"
I told her what Jason had once told me: the fake sun wasn't an illusion projected on a screen, it was a managed replica of sunlight passing through the screen from a source ninety million miles away, like a ray-trace program rendered on a colossal scale.
"Pretty fucking elaborate stage trick," Molly said.
"If they did it differently we'd all have died years ago. The planetary ecology needs a twenty-four-hour day." We had already lost a number of species that depended on moonlight to feed or mate.
"But it's a lie."
"If you want to call it that."
"A lie, I call it a lie. I'm standing here with the light of a lie on my face. A lie you can get skin cancer from. But I still don't understand it. I guess we won't, until we understand the Hypotheticals. If we ever do. Which I doubt."
You don't understand a lie, Molly said as we paralleled an ancient boardwalk gone white with salt, until you understand the motivation behind it. She said this glancing sidelong at me, eyes shadowed under her cap, sending me messages I couldn't decipher.
We spent the rest of the afternoon in my air-conditioned rental, reading, playing music, but Moll was restless and I hadn't quite come to terms with her raid on my computer, another indecipherable event. I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute.
What worried me was that she remained deeply unpredictable, as Spin-bent as the rest of us. I couldn't buy her gifts: there were things she wanted, but unless she had vocally admired something in a shop window I couldn't guess what they were. She kept her deepest needs deeply obscure. Maybe, like most secretive people, she assumed I was keeping important secrets of my own.
We had just finished dinner and started cleaning up when the phone rang. Molly picked it up while I dried my hands. "Uh-huh," she said. "No, he's here. Just wait a second." She muted the phone and said, "It's Jason. Do you want to talk to him? He sounds all freaked out."
"Of course I'll talk to him."
I took the receiver and waited. Molly gave me a long look, then rolled her eyes and left the kitchen. Privacy. "Jase? What's up?"
"I need you here, Tyler." His voice was tense, constricted. "Now."
"Got a problem?"
"Yes, I have a fucking problem. And I need you to come fix it."
"It's that urgent?"
"Would I be calling you if it wasn't?"
"Where are you?"
"Home."
"Okay, listen, it'll take some time if the traffic's bad—"
"Just get here," he said.
So I told Molly I had some urgent work to catch up on. She smiled, or maybe sneered, and said, "What work is that? Somebody missed an appointment? Delivering a baby? What?"
"I'm a doctor, Moll. Professional privilege."
"Being a doctor doesn't mean you're Jason Lawton's lap-dog. You don't have to fetch every time he throws a stick."
"I'm sorry about cutting the evening short. Do you want me to give you a lift somewhere, or—?"
"No," she said. "I'll stay here until you're back." Staring at me defiantly, belligerently, almost wanting me to object.
But I couldn't argue. That would mean I didn't trust her. And I did trust her. Mostly. "I'm not sure how long I'll be."
"Doesn't matter. I'll curl up on the sofa and watch the tube. If that's okay with you?"
"As long as you're not bored."
"I promise I won't be bored."
* * * * *
Jason's barely furnished apartment was twenty miles up the highway, and on the way there I had to detour around a crime scene, a failed roadside attack on a bank truck that had killed a earful of Canadian tourists. Jase buzzed me into his building and when I knocked at his door he called out, "It's open."
The big front room was as spare as it ever had been, a parquet desert in which Jase had set up his Bedouin camp. He was lying on the sofa. The floor lamp next to the sofa put him in a hard, unflattering light. He was pale and his forehead was dotted with sweat. His eyes glittered.
"I thought you might not come," he said. "Thought maybe your hick girlfriend wouldn't let you out of the house."
I told him about the police detour. Then I said, "Do me a favor. Please don't talk about Molly that way."
"Please don't refer to her as an Idaho shitkicker with trailer-park sensibilities? Sure enough. Anything to oblige."
"What's the matter with you?"
"Interesting question. Many possible answers. Look."
He stood up.
It was a poor, feeble, ratcheting process. Jase was still tall, still slender, but the physical grace that had once seemed so effortless had deserted him. His arms flailed. His legs, when he managed to bring himself upright, jittered under him like jointed stilts. He blinked convulsively. "This is what's wrong with me," he said. Then, the anger coming on in another convulsive movement, his emotional state as volatile as his limbs: "Look at me! F-fuck, Tyler, look at me!"
"Sit back down, Jase. Let me examine you." I had brought my medical kit. I rolled up his sleeve and wrapped a BP cuff around his skinny arm. I could feel the muscle contracting under it, barely controlled.
His blood pressure was high and his pulse was fast. "You've been taking your anticonvulsants?"
"Of course I've been taking the fucking anticonvulsants."
"On schedule? No double-dosing? Because if you take too many, Jase, you're doing yourself more harm than good."
Jason sighed impatiently. Then he did something surprising. He reached behind my head and grabbed a handful of my hair, painfully, and tugged it down until my face was close to his. Words came out of him, a raging river of them.
"Don't get pedantic on me, Tyler. Don't do that, because I can't afford it right now. Maybe you have issues about my treatment. I'm sorry, but this is no time to take your fucking principles out for a walk. Too much is at stake. E.D. is flying in to Perihelion in the morning. E.D. thinks he has a trump card to play. E.D. would rather shut us down than let me ascend to his fucking throne. I can't let that happen, and look at me: do I look like I'm in any condition to commit an act of patricide?" His grip tightened until it hurt—he was still that strong—then he let go and with his other hand pushed me away. "So FIX ME! That's what you're for, isn't it?"
I pulled up a chair and sat silently until he lapsed back into the sofa, exhausted by his own outburst. He watched me take a syringe out of my kit and load it from a small brown bottle.
"What's that?"
"Temporary relief." In fact it was a harmless B-complex vitamin shot laced with a minor tranquilizer. Jason looked at it suspiciously but let me deliver it into his arm. A tiny bead of blood followed the needle out.
"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."