Jason rode an expensive mountain bike, Diane a less flashy girls' equivalent. My bike was a secondhand junker my mother had bought for me at a thrift shop. No matter. What was important was the piney tang of the air and the empty hours arrayed before of us. I felt it, Diane felt it, and I think Jason felt it, too, though he seemed distracted and even a little embarrassed when we saddled up that morning. I put it down to stress or (this was August) the prospect of another school year. Jase was in an accelerated academic stream at Rice, a high-pressure school. Last year he had breezed through the math and physics courses—he could have taught them—but next semester he was signed up for a Latin credit. "It's not even a living language," he said. "Who the hell reads Latin, outside classical scholars? It's like learning FORTRAN. All the important texts were translated a long time ago. Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god's sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?"
I didn't take any of this too seriously. One of the things we liked to do on these rides was practice the art of complaining. (I had no idea who Alan Dershowitz was; some kid at Jason's school, I guessed.) But today his mood was volatile, erratic. He stood up on his pedals and biked a little way ahead of us.
The road to the mall wound past deeply treed lots and pastel houses with manicured gardens and embedded sprinklers that marked the morning air with rainbows. The sunlight might be fake, filtered, but it still broke into colors when it cut through falling water and it still felt like a blessing when we rolled from under the shading oaks onto the glittering white sidewalk.
Ten or fifteen minutes of easy riding later the top of Bantam Hill Road loomed ahead of us—last obstacle and major landmark on the way to the mall. Bantam Hill Road was steep, but on the other side it was a sweet long glide to the mall's parking lot. Jase was already a quarter of the way up. Diane gave me a mischievous look.
"Race you," she said.
That was dismaying. The twins had their birthdays in June. Mine was in October. Every summer they were not one but two years older than me: the twins had turned fourteen but I was still twelve for another frustrating four months. The difference translated into a physical advantage. Diane must have known I couldn't beat her up the hill, but she pedaled off anyway and I sighed and tried to pump my creaking old junker into plausible competition. It was no contest. Diane rose up on her gleaming contrivance of etched aluminum, and by the time she reached the upslope she had gained a ferocious momentum. A trio of little girls chalk-marking the sidewalk scurried out of her way. She shot a glance back at me, half encouraging, half taunting.
The rising road stole back her momentum, but she shifted gears deftly and put her legs to work again. Jason, at the peak, had stopped and balanced himself with one long leg, looking back quizzically. I labored on, but halfway up the hill my ancient bike was swaying more than moving and I was forced to sidle off and walk it the rest of the way up.
Diane grinned at me when I finally arrived.
"You win," I said.
"Sorry, Tyler. It wasn't really fair."
I shrugged, embarrassed.
Here the road ended in a cul-de-sac, where residential lots had been sketched with stakes and string but no houses built. The mall lay down a long, sandy decline to the west. A pressed-earth path cut through scrubby trees and berry bushes. "See you at the bottom," she said, and rolled away again.
* * * * *
We left our bikes locked to a rack and entered the glassy nave of the mall. The mall was a reassuring environment, chiefly because it had changed so little since last October. The newspapers and television might still be in high-alert mode, but the mall lived in blessed denial. The only evidence that anything might have gone askew in the larger world was the absence of satellite dish displays at the consumer-electronics chain stores and a surge of October-related titles on the bookstore display racks. Jason snorted at one paperback with a high-gloss blue-and-gold cover, a book that claimed to link the October Event to Biblical prophecy: "The easiest kind of prophecy," he said, "is the kind that predicts things that have already happened."
Diane gave him an aggravated look. "You don't have to make fun of it just because you don't believe in it."
"Technically, I'm only making fun of the front cover. I haven't read the book."
"Maybe you should."
"Why? What are you defending here?"
"I'm not defending anything. But maybe God had something to do with last October. That doesn't seem so ridiculous."
"Actually," Jason said, "yes, it does seem ridiculous."
She rolled her eyes and stalked ahead of us, sighing to herself. Jase stuffed the book back in its display rack.
I told him I thought people just wanted to understand what had happened, that's why there were books like that.
"Or maybe people just want to pretend to understand. It's called 'denial.' You want to know something, Tyler?"
"Sure," I said.
"Keep it secret?" He lowered his voice so that even Diane, a few yards ahead, couldn't hear him. "This isn't public yet."
One of the remarkable things about Jason was that he often did know genuinely important things a day or two in advance of the evening news. In a sense Rice Academy was only his day school; his real education was conducted under the tutelage of his father, and from the beginning E.D. had wanted him to understand how business, science, and technology intersect with political power. E.D. had been working those angles himself. The loss of telecom satellites had opened up a vast new civilian and military market for the stationary high-altitude balloons ("aerostats") his company manufactured. A niche technology was going mainstream, and E.D. was riding the crest of the wave. And sometimes he shared secrets with his fifteen-year-old son he wouldn't have dared whisper to a competitor.
E.D., of course, didn't know Jase occasionally shared these secrets with me. But I was scrupulous about keeping them. (And anyway, who would I have told? I had no other real friends. We lived in the kind of new-money neighborhood where class distinctions were measured out with razor-sharp precision: the solemn, studious sons of single working mothers didn't make anyone's A list.)
He lowered his voice another notch. "You know the three Russian cosmonauts? The ones who were in orbit last October?"
Lost and presumed dead the night of the Event. I nodded.
"One of them's alive," he said. "Alive and in Moscow. The Russians aren't saying much. But the rumor is, he's completely crazy."
I gave him a wide-eyed look, but he wouldn't say anything more.
* * * * *
It took a dozen years for the truth to be made public, but when it was finally published (as a footnote to a European history of the early Spin years) I thought of the day at the mall. What happened was this:
Three Russian cosmonauts had been in orbit the night of the October Event, returning from a housekeeping mission to the moribund International Space Station. A little after midnight Eastern Standard Time the mission commander, a Colonel Leonid Glavin, noted loss of signal from ground control and made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to reestablish contact.
Alarming as this must have been for the cosmonauts, it got worse fast. When the Soyuz crossed from the nightside of the planet into dawn it appeared that the planet they were circling had been replaced with a lightless black orb.
Colonel Glavin would eventually describe it just that way: as a blackness, an absence visible only when it occluded the sun, a permanent eclipse. The rapid orbital cycle of sunrise and sunset was their only convincing visual evidence that the Earth even existed any longer. Sunlight appeared abruptly from behind the silhouetted disc, cast no reflection in the darkness below, and vanished just as suddenly when the capsule slid into night.