“So the good guys win,” I said.
Jase smiled. “I’m not sure any of those were running.”
“I thought Lomax was good for us.”
“Maybe. But don’t make the mistake of thinking Lomax cares about Perihelion or the replicator program, except as a convenient way to lowball the space budget and make it look like a great leap forward. The federal money he frees up will be dumped into the military budget. That’s why E.D. couldn’t put together any real anti-Lomax sentiment from his old aerospace cronies. Lomax won’t let Boeing or Lockheed Martin starve. He just wants them to retool.”
“For defense,” I supplied. The lull in global conflict that had followed the initial confusion of the Spin was long past. Maybe a military refit wasn’t such a bad idea.
“If you believe what Lomax says.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m afraid I can’t afford to.”
On that note I retired to bed.
In the morning I administered the first injection. Jason stretched out on a sofa in the Lawtons’ big front room, facing the window. He wore jeans and a cotton shirt and looked casually patrician, frail but at ease. If he was frightened he wasn’t showing it. He rolled up his right sleeve to expose the crook of his elbow.
I took a syringe from my kit, attached a sterile needle, and filled it from one of the vials of clear liquid we had held back from the hiding place. Wun had rehearsed this with me. The protocols of the Fourth Age. On Mars there would have been a quiet ceremony and a soothing environment. Here we made do with November sunlight and the ticking of expensive clocks.
I swabbed his skin prior to the injection. “You don’t have to watch,” I said.
“But I want to,” he said. “Show me how it’s done.”
He always did like to know how things worked.
The injection produced no immediate effects, but by noon the next day Jason was running a degree of fever.
Subjectively, he said, it was no worse than a mild cold, and by midafternoon he was begging me to take my thermometer and my pressure cuff and—well, take them elsewhere, was the gist of it.
So I turned up my collar against the rain (a blank, dumbly persistent rain that had started during the night and persisted through the afternoon) and crossed the lawn once more to my mother’s house, where I rescued MEMENTOS (SCHOOL) from the basement and carried it up to the front room.
Rain-dim light came through the curtains. I switched on a lamp.
My mother had died at the age of fifty-six. For eighteen years I had shared this house with her. That was a little over one third of her life. Of the remaining two thirds I had seen only what she had chosen to show me. She had talked about Bingham, her home town, from time to time. I knew, for instance, that she had lived with her father (a Realtor) and stepmother (a daycare worker) in a house at the top of a steep, tree-lined street; that she had had a childhood friend named Monica Lee; that there had been a covered bridge, a river called the Little Wyecliffe, and a Presbyterian church she had stopped attending when she turned sixteen and to which she had not returned until her parents’ funerals. But she had never mentioned Berkeley or what she had hoped to achieve with her M.B.A. or why she had married my father.
She had, once or twice, taken down these boxes to show me their contents, to impress on me that she had lived through the impossible years before I existed. This was her evidence, Exhibits A, B, and C, three boxes of MEMENTOS and ODDS & ENDS. Somewhere folded into these boxes were fragments of real, verifiable history: the toffee-brown front pages of newspapers announcing terrorist attacks, wars waged, presidents elected or impeached. Here too were the trinkets I had liked to hold in my hand as a child. A tarnished fifty-cent piece issued in the year of her father’s birth (1951); four tan and pink seashells from the beach at Cobscook Bay.
MEMENTOS (SCHOOL) had been my least favorite box. It contained a campaign button for some evidently unsuccessful Democratic candidate for high office, which I had liked for its bright colors, but the rest of the space was taken up with her diploma, a few pages torn from her graduate yearbook, and a bundle of small envelopes none of which I had ever wanted (or been allowed) to touch.
I opened one of the envelopes now and sampled enough of the contents to register that it was: a) a love letter and b) in a handwriting not at all like my father’s neat script from the missives in MEMENTOS: MARCUS.
So my mother had had a college sweetheart. This was news that might have discomfited Marcus Dupree (she had married him a week after graduation) but would hardly have shocked anyone else. Certainly it was no reason to conceal the box in the basement, not when it had been sitting in plain sight for years on end.
Had it even been my mother who had hidden it? I didn’t know who might have been in the house between the time of her stroke and the time I arrived a day later. It was Carol who had found her collapsed on the sofa, and probably some of the Big House staff had helped clean up afterward, and there must have been EMS people in here prepping her for transport. But none of them would have had any remotely plausible reason to carry MEMENTOS (SCHOOL) downstairs and slide it into the dark gap between the furnace and the basement wall.
And maybe it didn’t matter. No crime had been committed, after all, only a peculiar displacement. Could have been the local poltergeist. In all likelihood I would never know, and there was no point dwelling on the question. Everything in this room, every object in the house including these boxes, would sooner or later have to be salvaged, sold, or discarded. I had been putting it off, Carol had been putting it off, but the work was overdue.
But until then—
Until then, I put MEMENTOS (SCHOOL) back on the top shelf of the étagère between MEMENTOS (MARCUS) and ODDS & ENDS. And made the empty room complete.
The most troubling medical question I had raised with Wun Ngo Wen about Jason’s treatment was the issue of drug-drug interactions. I couldn’t discontinue Jason’s conventional medications without throwing him into a disastrous relapse. But I was equally uneasy about combining his daily drug regimen with Wun’s biochemical overhaul.
Wun promised me there wouldn’t be a problem. The longevity treatment wasn’t a “drug” in the conventional sense. What I was injecting into Jason’s bloodstream was more like a biologically enabled computer program. Conventional drugs generally interact with proteins and cell surfaces. Wun’s potion interacted with DNA itself.
But it still had to enter a cell to do its work, and it still had to negotiate Jason’s blood chemistry and immune system on its way there—didn’t it? Wun had said emphatically that none of this mattered. The longevity cocktail was flexible enough to operate through any kind of physiological condition short of death itself.
But the gene for AMS had never migrated to the red planet and the drugs Jase was taking were unknown there. And although Wun had insisted my concerns were unwarranted, I noticed he seldom smiled when he did so. So we hedged our bets. I had been backing off Jason’s AMS meds for a week before the first injection. Not stopping them, just cutting back.
The strategy had seemed to work. By the time we arrived at the Big House Jason was exhibiting only minor symptomology while carrying a lighter drug load, and we began his treatment optimistically.
Three days later he was spiking fevers I couldn’t knock down. A day after that he was semiconscious much of the time. Another day and his skin turned red and began to blister. That evening he began screaming.
He continued to scream despite the morphine I administered.
It was not a full-throated scream but a moan that periodically rose to high volume, a sound you might expect from a sick dog, not a human being. It was purely involuntary. When he was lucid he neither made the sound nor remembered having made it, even though it left his larynx inflamed and painful.
Carol made a brave show of putting up with it. There were parts of the house where Jason’s keening was almost inaudible—the back bedrooms, the kitchen—and she spent most of her time there, reading
or listening to local radio. But the strain was obvious and before long she started drinking again.
Maybe I shouldn’t say “started.” She had never stopped. What she had done was cut back to the minimum that allowed her to function, balancing between the very real terrors of sudden withdrawal and the lure of full-blown intoxication. And I hope that doesn’t sound glib. Carol was walking a difficult path. She had stayed on it this long because of her love for her son, dormant as that love might have been these many years. The sound of his pain was what derailed her.
By the second week of the process Jase was hooked up to intravenous fluids and I was keeping an eye on his rising BP. He’d had a relatively good day despite his horrifying appearance, scabbed where he wasn’t raw, eyes almost buried in the swollen flesh that surrounded them. He had been alert enough to ask whether Wun Ngo Wen had made his first television appearance. (Not yet. It was scheduled for the following week.) But by nightfall he had lapsed back into unconsciousness and the moaning, absent for a couple of days, started again, full-throated and painful to hear.
Painful for Carol, who showed up at the door of the bedroom with tear tracks down her cheeks and an expression of fierce, glassy anger. “Tyler,” she said, “you have to stop this!”
“I’m doing what I can. He’s not responding to the opiates. It might be better to talk about this in the morning.”
“Can’t you hear him?”
“Of course I can hear him.”
“Does that mean nothing? Does that sound mean nothing to you? My god!” she said. “He would have been better off in Mexico with some quack. He would have been better off with a faith healer. Do you actually have any idea what you’ve been injecting into him? Fucking quack! My god.”
Unfortunately she was echoing questions I had already begun to ask myself. No, I didn’t know what I was injecting into him, not in any rigorous scientific sense. I had believed the promises of the man from Mars, but that was hardly a defense I could lay at Carol’s feet. The process itself was more difficult, more obviously agonizing, than I had allowed myself to expect. Maybe it was working incorrectly. Maybe it wasn’t working at all.
Jase emitted a mournful howl that ended in a sigh. Carol put her hands over her ears. “He’s suffering, you fucking quack! Look at him!”
“Carol—”
“Don’t Carol me, you butcher! I’m calling an ambulance. I’m calling the police!”
I came across the room and took her by the shoulders. She felt frail but dangerously alive under my hands, a cornered animal. “Carol, listen to me.”
“Why, why should I listen to you?”
“Because your son put his life in my hands. Listen. Carol, listen. I’m going to need someone to help me here. I’ve been running on no sleep for days. Before too long I’m going to need someone to sit with him, someone with real medical savvy who can make informed judgments.”
“You should have brought a nurse.”
I should have, but it hadn’t been possible, and that was beside the point. “I don’t have a nurse. I need you to do this.”
That took a moment to sink in. Then she gasped and stepped back. “Me!”
“You still have a medical license. Last I heard.”
“I haven’t practiced for—is it decades? Decades…”
“I’m not asking you to perform heart surgery. I just want you to keep an eye on his blood pressure and his temperature. Can you do that?”
Her anger dissipated. She was flattered. She was frightened. She thought about it. Then she gave me a steely look. “Why should I help you? Why should I make myself an accomplice to this, this torture?”
I was still composing an answer when a voice behind me said, “Oh, please.”
Jason’s voice. One of the trademarks of this Martian drug regimen was the lucidity that came at random and left at will. Apparently it had just arrived. I turned around.
He grimaced and made an attempt, not quite successful, to sit up. But his eyes were clear.
He addressed his mother: “Really,” he said, “isn’t this a little unseemly? Please do what Tyler wants. He knows what he’s doing and so do I.”
Carol stared at him. “But I don’t. I haven’t. I mean I can’t—”
Then she turned and walked unsteadily out of the room, one hand braced against the wall.
I sat up with Jase. In the morning Carol came to the bedroom looking chastened but sober and offered to relieve me. Jason was peaceful and didn’t really need tending, but I put her in charge and went off to catch up on my sleep.
I slept for twelve hours. When I came back to the bedroom Carol was still there, holding her unconscious son’s hand, stroking his forehead with a tenderness I had never seen in her before.
The recovery phase began a week and a half into the course of Jason’s treatment. There was no sudden transition, no magic moment. But his lucid periods began to lengthen and his blood pressure stabilized somewhere near the nominal range.
On the night of Wun’s speech to the United Nations I located a portable TV in the servants’ part of the house and lugged it up to Jason’s bedroom. Carol joined us just before the broadcast.
I don’t think Carol believed in Wun Ngo Wen.
His presence on Earth had been officially announced last Wednesday. His picture had been on front pages for days now, plus live footage of him striding across the White House lawn under the avuncular arm of the sitting president. The White House had made it clear that Wun was here to help but that he had no instant solution to the problem of the Spin and not much new knowledge about the Hypotheticals. Public reaction had been cautious.
Tonight he mounted the dais in the Security Council chamber and stepped up to the podium, which had been adjusted to suit his height. “Why, he’s just a tiny thing,” Carol said.
Jason said, “Show some respect. He represents a single continuous culture that’s lasted longer than any of ours.”
“Looks more like he represents the Lollipop Guild,” Carol said.
His dignity was restored in the close-ups. The camera liked his eyes and his elusive smile. And when he spoke to the microphone he spoke softly, which took the effective pitch of his voice down to a more terrestrial level.
Wun knew (or had been coached to understand) how unlikely this event seemed to the average Earthling. (“Truly,” the secretary general had said in his introduction, “we live in an age of miracles.”) So he thanked us all for our hospitality in his best mid-Atlantic accent and talked wistfully about his home and why he had left it to come here. He painted Mars as a foreign but entirely human place, the kind of place you might like to visit, where the people were friendly and the scenery was interesting, although the winters, he admitted, were often harsh.
(“Sounds like Canada,” Carol said.)
Then to the heart of the matter. Everyone wanted to know about the Hypotheticals. Unfortunately Wun’s people knew little more about them than we did—the Hypotheticals had encapsulated Mars while he was in transit to Earth, and the Martians were as helpless before it as we had been.
He couldn’t guess the Hypotheticals’ motives. That question had been debated for centuries, but even the greatest Martian thinkers had never resolved it. It was interesting, Wun said, that both Earth and Mars had been sealed off when they were on the brink of global catastrophes: “Our population, like yours, is approaching the limit of sustainability. On Earth your industry and agriculture both run on oil, supplies of which are rapidly being depleted. On Mars we have no oil at all, but we depend on another scarce commodity, elemental nitrogen: it drives our agricultural cycle and imposes absolute limits on the number of human lives the planet can sustain. We’ve coped a little better than has the Earth, but only because we were forced to recognize the problem from the very beginning of our civilization. Both planets were and are facing the possibility of economic and agricultural collapse and a catastrophic human die-off. Both planets were encapsulated before that end point was reached.
“Pe
rhaps the Hypotheticals understand that truth about us and perhaps it influenced their action. But we don’t know that with any certainty. Nor do we know what they expect from us, if anything, or when or even whether the Spin will come to an end. We can’t know, until we gather more direct information about the Hypotheticals.
“Fortunately,” Wun said, the camera going close on him, “there is a way to gather that information. I’ve come here with a proposal, which I’ve discussed with both President Garland and President-elect Lomax as well as other heads of state,” and he went on to sketch out the basics of the replicator plan. “With luck this will tell us whether the Hypotheticals have overtaken other worlds, how those worlds have reacted, and what the ultimate fate of the Earth might be.”
But when he started talking about the Oort Cloud and “autocatalytic feedback technology” I saw Carol’s eyes glaze over.
“This can’t be happening,” she said after Wun departed the podium to dazed applause and the network pundits began to chew and regurgitate his speech. She looked genuinely frightened. “Is any of this true, Jason?”
“Most all of it,” Jason said calmly. “I can’t speak for the weather on Mars.”
“Are we really on the brink of disaster?”
“We’ve been on the brink of disaster since the stars went out.”
“I mean about oil and all that. If the Spin hadn’t happened, we’d all be starving?”
“People are starving. They’re starving because we can’t support seven billion people in North American–style prosperity without strip-mining the planet. The numbers are hard to argue with. Yes, it’s true. If the Spin doesn’t kill us, sooner or later we’ll be looking at a global human die-back.”
“And that has something to do with the Spin itself?”
“Perhaps, but neither I nor the Martian on television know for sure.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No.”
“Yes you are. But that’s all right. I know I’m ignorant. It’s been years since I looked at a newspaper. There was always the risk of seeing your father’s face, for one thing. And the only television I watch is afternoon drama. In afternoon drama there aren’t any Martians. I guess I’m Rip van Winkle. I slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to. The parts of it that aren’t terrifying are—” She gestured at the TV. “Are ludicrous.”