"You're worried Lomax will shut down Perihelion?"
"I built Perihelion. Yes, I care about it. But that's not why I'm here."
"I can tell Jason what you said, but you think he'll change his mind?"
"I—" Now E.D. inspected the tabletop. His eyes went a little vague and watery. "No. Obviously not. But if he wants to talk… I want him to know he can reach me. If he wants to talk. I wouldn't make it an ordeal for him. Honestly. I mean, if he wants that."
It was as if he had opened a door and his essential loneliness had come spilling out.
Jason assumed E.D. had come to Florida as part of some Machiavellian plan. The old E.D. might have. But the new E.D. struck me as an aging, remorseful, newly powerless man who found his strategies at the bottom of a glass and who had drifted into town on a guilty whim.
I said, more gently, "Have you tried talking to Diane?"
"Diane?" He waved his hand dismissively. "Diane changed her number. I can't get through to her. Anyway, she's involved with that fucking end-of-the-world cult."
"It's not a cult, E.D. Just a little church with some odd ideas. Simon's more involved with it than she is."
"She's Spin-paralyzed. Just like the rest of your fucking generation. She took a nosedive into this religious bullshit when she was barely out of puberty. I remember that. She was so depressed by the Spin. Then suddenly she was quoting Thomas Aquinas at the dinner table. I wanted Carol to speak to her about it. But Carol was useless, typically. So you know what I did? I organized a debate. Her and Jason. For six months they'd been arguing about God. So I made it formal, like, you know, a college debate, and the trick was, they each had to take the side they didn't support—Jason had to argue for the existence of God, and Diane had to take the atheist's point of view."
They had never mentioned this to me. But I could imagine with what dismay they had approached E.D.'s educational assignment.
"I wanted her to know how gullible she was. She did her best. I think she wanted to impress me. She repeated back what Jason had been saying to her, basically. But Jason—" His pride was obvious. His eyes shone and some of the color crept back into his face. "Jason was absolutely brilliant. Just stunningly, beautifully brilliant. Jason gave back every argument she had ever offered him and then some. And he didn't just parrot this stuff. He'd read the theology, he'd read biblical scholarship. And he smiled through the whole thing, as if he was saying, Look, I know these arguments backward, I know them as intimately as you do, I can make them in my sleep, and I still think they're contemptible. He was absolutely fucking relentless. And by the end of it she was crying. She held out until the end, but the tears were streaming down her face."
I stared.
He registered my expression and winced. "Go to hell with your moral superiority. I was trying to teach her a lesson. I wanted her to be a realist, not one of these fucking Spin-driven navel gazers. Your whole fucking generation—"
"Do you care whether she's alive?"
"Of course I do."
"No one's heard from her lately. It's not just you, E.D. She's out of touch. I thought I might try to track her down. Do you think that's a good idea?"
But the waitress had come with another drink and E.D. was rapidly losing interest in the subject, in me, in the world around him. "Yeah, I'd like to know if she's all right." He took off his glasses and cleaned them with a cocktail napkin. "Yeah, you do that, Tyler."
Which is how I decided to accompany Wun Ngo Wen to the state of Arizona.
* * * * *
Traveling with Wun Ngo Wen was like traveling with a pop star or a head of state—heavy on security and light on spontaneity, but briskly efficient. A neatly timed succession of airport corridors, chartered planes, and highway convoys eventually deposited us at the head of Bright Angel trail, three weeks before the scheduled replicator launches, on a July day hot as fireworks and clear as creek water.
Wun stood where the guardrail followed the canyon's rim. The Park Service had closed the trail and visitor center to tourists, and three of their best and most photogenic rangers were poised to conduct Wun (and a contingent of federal security guys with shoulder holsters under their hiking whites) on an expedition to the canyon floor, where they would camp overnight.
Wun had been promised privacy once the hike began, but right now it was a circus. Media vans filled the parking area; journalists and paparazzi leaned into the cordon ropes like eager supplicants; a helicopter swooped along the canyon rim shooting video. Nevertheless Wun was happy. He grinned. He sucked in huge gulps of piney air. The heat was appalling, especially, I would have thought, for a Martian, but he showed no signs of distress despite the sweat glistening on his wrinkled skin. He wore a light khaki shirt, matching pants, and a pair of children's-size high-top hiking boots he'd been breaking in for the last couple of weeks.
He took a long drink from an aluminum canteen, then offered it to me.
"Water brother," he said.
I laughed. "Keep it. You'll need it."
"Tyler, I wish you could make the descent with me. This is—" He said something in his own language. "Too much stew for one pot. Too much beauty for one human being."
"You can always share it with the G-men."
He gave the security people a baleful glance. "Unfortunately I can't. They look but they do not see."
"Is that a Martian expression, too?"
"Might as well be," he said.
* * * * *
Wun gave the press pool and the newly arrived governor of Arizona a few genial last words while I borrowed one of the several Perihelion vehicles and headed for Phoenix.
Nobody interfered, nobody followed me; the press wasn't interested. I may have been Wun Ngo Wen's personal physician—a few of the press regulars might even have recognized me—but in the absence of Wun himself I wasn't newsworthy. Not even remotely. It was a good feeling. I turned up the air-conditioning until the interior of the car felt like a Canadian autumn. Maybe this was what the media was calling "desperate euphoria"—the we're-all-doomed-but-anything-can-happen feeling that had begun to peak around the time Wun went public. The end of the world, plus Martians: given that, what was impossible? What was even un-likely? And where did that leave the standard arguments in favor of propriety, patience, virtue, and not rocking the boat?
E.D. had accused my generation of Spin paralysis, and maybe that was true. We'd been caught in the headlights for thirty-odd years now. None of us had ever shaken that feeling of essential vulnerability, that deep personal awareness of the sword suspended over our heads. It tainted every pleasure and it made even our best and bravest gestures seem tentative and timid.
But even paralysis erodes. Beyond anxiety lies recklessness. Beyond immobility, action.
Not necessarily good or wise action, however. I passed three sets of highway signs warning against the possibility of roadside piracy. The traffic reporter on local radio listed roads closed for "police purposes" as indifferently as if she'd been talking about maintenance work.
But I made it without incident to the parking lot in back of Jordan Tabernacle.
The current pastor of Jordan Tabernacle was a crew-cut young man named Bob Kobel who had agreed by phone to meet me. He came to the car as I was locking it and escorted me into the rectory for coffee and doughnuts and some hard talk. He looked like a high-school athlete gone slightly paunchy, but still full of that old team spirit.
"I've thought about what you said," he told me. "I understand why you want to get in touch with Diane Lawton. Do you understand why that's an awkward issue for this church?"
"Not exactly, no."
"Thank you for your honesty. Let me explain, then. I became pastor of this congregation after the red heifer crisis, but I was a member for many years before that. I know the people you're curious about—Diane and Simon. I once called them friends."