Spin

  “We’re all Rip van Winkle,” Jason said gently. “We’re all waiting to wake up.”

  Carol’s mood improved in tandem with Jason’s health and she began to take a livelier interest in his prognosis. I briefed her about his AMS, a disease that had not been formally diagnosed when Carol graduated from medical school, as a way to dodge questions about the treatment itself, an unspoken bargain which she seemed to understand and accept. The important thing was that Jason’s ravaged skin was healing and the blood samples I sent to a lab in D.C. for testing showed drastically reduced neural plaque proteins.

  She was still reluctant to talk about the Spin, however, and she looked unhappy when Jase and I discussed it in her presence. I thought again of the Housman poem Diane had taught me so many years ago: The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear.

  Carol had been beset by several bears, some as large as the Spin and some as small as a molecule of ethanol. I think she might have envied the infant child.

  Diane called (on my personal phone, not Carol’s house phone) a few nights after Wun’s U.N. appearance. I had retreated to my room and Carol was keeping the night watch. Rain had come and gone all November, and it was raining now, the bedroom window a fluid mirror of yellow light.

  “You’re at the Big House,” Diane said.

  “You talked to Carol?”

  “I call her once a month. I’m a dutiful daughter. Sometimes she’s sober enough to talk. What’s wrong with Jason?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “He’s getting better. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I hate it when people say that.”

  “I know. But it’s true. There was a problem, but we fixed it.”

  “And that’s all you can tell me.”

  “All for now. How are things with you and Simon?” Last time we talked she had mentioned legal trouble.

  “Not too good,” she said. “We’re moving.”

  “Moving where?”

  “Out of Phoenix, anyway. Away from the city. Jordan Tabernacle’s been temporarily closed down—I thought maybe you’d heard about it.”

  “No,” I said—why would I have heard about the financial troubles of a little southwest Tribulation church?—and we went on to discuss other matters, and Diane promised to update me once she and Simon had a new address. Sure, why not, what the hell.

  But I did hear about Jordan Tabernacle the following night.

  Uncharacteristically, Carol insisted on watching the late news. Jason was tired but alert and willing, so the three of us sat through forty minutes of international saber rattling and celebrity court cases. Some of this was interesting: there was an update on Wun Ngo Wen, who was in Belgium meeting with officials of the E.U., and good news from Uzbekistan, where the forward marine base had finally been relieved. Then there was a feature about CVWS and the Israeli dairy industry.

  We watched dramatic pictures of culled cattle being bulldozed into mass graves and salted with lime. Five years ago the Japanese beef industry had been similarly devastated. Bovine or ungulate CVWS had broken out and been suppressed in a dozen countries from Brazil to Ethiopia. The human equivalent was treatable with modern antibiotics but remained a smoldering problem in third-world economies.

  But Israeli dairy farmers ran strict protocols of sepsis and testing, so the outbreak there had been unexpected. Worse, the index case—the first infection—had been tracked to an unauthorized shipment of fertilized ova from the United States.

  The shipment was back-traced to a Tribulationist charity called Word for the World, headquartered in an industrial park outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Why was WftW smuggling cattle ova into Israel? Not, it turned out, for particularly charitable reasons. Investigators followed WftW’s sponsors through a dozen blind holding companies to a consortium of Tribulationist and Dispensationalist churches and fringe political groups both large and small. One item of Biblical doctrine shared by these groups was drawn from Numbers (chapter nineteen) and inferred from other texts in Matthew and Timothy—namely, that the birth in Israel of a pure red heifer would signal the second coming of Jesus Christ and the beginning of His reign on Earth.

  It was an old idea. Allied Jewish extremists believed the sacrifice of a red calf on the Temple Mount would mark the coming of the Messiah. There had been several “red calf” attacks on the Dome of the Rock in prior years, one of which had damaged the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nearly precipitated a regional war. The Israeli government had been doing its best to quash the movement but had only succeeded in driving it underground.

  According to the news there were several WftW-sponsored dairy farms across the American Midwest and Southwest all quietly devoted to the business of hastening Armageddon. They had been attempting to breed a pure blood-red calf, presumably superior to the numerous disappointing heifers that had been presented as candidates over the last forty years.

  These farms had systematically evaded federal inspections and feed protocols, to the point of concealing an outbreak of bovine CVWS that had crossed the border from Nogales. The infected ova produced breeding stock with plentiful genes for red-tinged coats, but when the calves themselves were born (at a WftW-linked dairy farm in the Negev) most died of respiratory distress at an early age. The corpses were quietly buried, but too late. The infection had spread to mature stock and a number of human farmhands.

  It was an embarrassment for the U.S. administration. The FDA had already announced a policy review and Homeland Security was freezing WftW bank accounts and serving warrants on Tribulationist fund-raisers. On the news there were pictures of federal agents carrying boxed documents out of anonymous buildings and applying padlocks to the doors of obscure churches.

  The news reader cited a few examples by name.

  One of them was Jordan Tabernacle.

  4 X 109 A.D.

  Outside Padang we transferred from Nijon’s ambulance to a private car with a Minang driver, who dropped us off—me, Ibu Ina, En—at a cartage compound on the coast highway. Five huge tin-roofed warehouses sat in a black gravel plain between conical piles of bulk cement under tarps and a corroded rail tanker idle on a siding. The main office was a low wooden building under a sign that read BAYUR FORWARDING in English.

  Bayur Forwarding, Ina said, was one of her ex-husband Jala’s businesses, and it was Jala who met us in the reception room. He was a beefy, apple-cheeked man in a canary yellow business suit—he looked like a Toby jug dressed for the tropics. He and Ina embraced in the manner of the comfortably divorced, then Jala shook my hand and stooped to shake En’s. Jala introduced me to his receptionists as “a palm oil importer from Suffolk,” presumably in case she was quizzed by the New Reformasi. Then he escorted us to his seven-year-old fuel-cell BMW and we drove south toward Teluk Bayur, Jala and Ina up front, me and En in back.

  Teluk Bayur—the big deepwater harbor south of the city of Padang—was where Jala had made all his money. Thirty years ago, he said, Teluk Bayur had been a sleepy Sumatran sand-mud basin with modest port services and a predictable trade in coal, crude palm oil, and fertilizer. Today, thanks to the economic boom of the nagari restoration and the population explosion of the Archway era, Teluk Bayur was a fully improved port basin with world-class quays and mooring, a huge storage complex, and so many modern conveniences that even Jala eventually lost interest in tallying up all the tugs, sheds, cranes and loaders by tonnage. “Jala is proud of Teluk Bayur,” Ina said. “There’s hardly a high official there he hasn’t bribed.”

  “Nobody higher than General Affairs,” Jala corrected her.

  “You’re too modest.”

  “Is there something wrong with making money? Am I too successful? Is it a crime to make something of myself?”

  Ina inclined her head and said, “These are of course rhetorical questions.”

  I asked whether we were going directly to a ship at Teluk Bayur.

  “Not directly,” Jala said. “I’m taking you to a safe place on the docks. It isn’t as simple
as walking onto some vessel and making ourselves comfortable.”

  “There’s no ship?”

  “Certainly there’s a ship. The Capetown Maru, a nice little freighter. She’s loading coffee and spices just now. When the holds are full and the debts are paid and the permits are signed, then the human cargo goes aboard. Discreetly, I hope.”

  “What about Diane? Is Diane at Teluk Bayur?”

  “Soon,” Ina said, giving Jala a meaningful look.

  “Yes, soon,” he said.

  Teluk Bayur might once have been a sleepy commercial harbor, but like any modern port it had become a city in itself, a city made not for people but for cargo. The port proper was enclosed and fenced, but ancillary businesses had grown up around it like whorehouses outside a military base: secondary shippers and expediters, gypsy truck collectives running rebuilt eighteen-wheelers, leaky fuel depots. We breezed past them all. Jala wanted to get us settled before the sun went down.

  Bayur Bay itself was a horseshoe of oily saltwater. Wharfs and jetties lapped at it like concrete tongues. Abutting the shore was the ordered chaos of large-scale commerce, the first- and second-line godowns and stacking yards, the cranes like giant mantises feasting on the holds of tethered container ships. We stopped at a manned guardpost along the line of a steel fence and Jala passed something to the security guard through the window of the car—a permit, a bribe, or both. The guard nodded him through and Jala waved amiably and drove inside, following a line of CPO and Avigas tanks at what seemed like reckless speed. He said, “I’ve arranged for you to stay here overnight. I have an office in one of the E-dock warehouses. Nothing in there but bulk concrete, nobody to bother you. In the morning I’ll bring Diane Lawton.”

  “And then we leave?”

  “Patience. You’re not the only ones making rantau—just the most conspicuous. There might be complications.”

  “Such as?”

  “Obviously, the New Reformasi. The police sweep the docklands every now and then, looking for illegals and archrunners. Usually they find a few. Or more than a few, depending on who’s been paid off. At the moment there is a great deal of pressure from Jakarta, so who knows? Also there’s talk of a labor action. The stevedores’ union is extremely militant. We’ll cast off before any conflict begins, with luck. So you sleep a night on the floor in the dark, I’m afraid, and I’ll take Ina and En to stay with the other villagers for now.”

  “No,” Ina said firmly. “I’ll stay with Tyler.”

  Jala paused. Then he looked at her and said something in Minang.

  “Not funny,” she said. “And not true.”

  “What, then? You don’t trust me to keep him safe?”

  “What have I ever gained by trusting you?”

  Jala grinned. His teeth were tobacco brown. “Adventure,” he said.

  “Yes, quite,” Ina said.

  So we ended up in the north end of a warehousing complex off the docks, Ibu Ina and I in a grimly rectangular room that had been a surveyor’s office, Ina said, until the building was temporarily closed pending repairs to its porous roof.

  One wall of the room was a window of wire-reinforced glass. I looked down into a cavernous storage space pale with concrete dust. Steel support beams rose from a muddy, ponded floor like rusted ribs.

  The only light came from security lamps placed at sparse intervals along the walls. Flying insects had penetrated the building’s gaps and they hovered in clouds around the caged bulbs or died mounded beneath them. Ina managed to get a desk lamp working. Empty cardboard boxes had been piled in one corner, and I unfolded the driest of them and stacked them to make a pair of crude mattresses. No blankets. But it was a hot night. Close to monsoon season.

  “You think you can sleep?” Ina asked.

  “It’s not the Hilton, but it’s the best I can do.”

  “Oh, not that. I mean the noise. Can you sleep through the noise?”

  Teluk Bayur didn’t close down at night. The loading and unloading went on twenty-four hours a day. We couldn’t see it but we could hear it, the sound of heavy motors and stressed metal and the periodic thunder of multiton cargo containers in transit. “I’ve slept through worse,” I said.

  “I doubt that,” Ina said, “but it’s kind of you to say.”

  Neither of us slept for hours. Instead we sat close to the glow of the desk lamp and talked sporadically. Ina asked about Jason.

  I had let her read some of the long passages I’d written during my illness. Jason’s transition to Fourth, she said, sounded as if it had been less difficult than mine. No, I said. I had simply neglected to include the bedpan details.

  “But about his memory? There was no loss? He was unconcerned?”

  “He didn’t talk much about it. I’m sure he was concerned.” In fact he had come swimming out of one of his recurrent fevers to demand that I document his life for him: “Write it down for me, Ty,” he had said. “Write it down in case I forget.”

  “But no graphomania of his own.”

  “No. Graphomania happens when the brain starts to rewire its own verbal faculties. It’s only one possible symptom. The sounds he made were probably his own manifestation of it.”

  “You learned that from Wun Ngo Wen.”

  Yes, or from his medical archives, which I had studied later.

  Ina was still fascinated with Wun Ngo Wen. “That warning to the United Nations, about overpopulation and resource depletion, did Wun ever discuss that with you? I mean, in the time before—”

  “I know. Yes, he did, a little.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  This was during one of our conversations about the ultimate aim of the Hypotheticals. Wun had drawn me a diagram, which I reproduced for Ina on the dusty parquet floor: a horizontal and vertical line defining a graph. The vertical line was population, the horizontal line was time. A jaggedy trend line crossed the graph space more or less horizontally.

  “Population by time,” Ina said. “I understand that much, but what exactly are we measuring?”

  “Any animal population in a relatively stable ecosystem. Could be foxes in Alaska or howler monkeys in Belize. The population fluctuates with external factors, like a cold winter or an increase in predators, but it’s stable at least over the short term.”

  But then, Wun had said, what happens if we look at an intelligent, tool-using species over a longer term? I drew Ina the same graph as before, except this time the trend line curved steadily toward the vertical.

  “What’s happening here,” I said, “is that the population—we can just say ‘people’—people are learning to pool their skills. Not just how to knap a flint but how to teach other people to knap flints and how to divide labor economically. Collaboration makes more food. Population grows. More people collaborate more efficiently and generate new skills. Agriculture. Animal husbandry. Reading and writing, which means skills can be shared more efficiently among living people and even inherited from generations long dead.”

  “So the curve rises ever more steeply,” Ina said, “until we are all drowning in ourselves.”

  “Ah, but it doesn’t. There are other forces that work to pull the curve to the right. Increasing prosperity and technological savvy actually work in our favor. Well-fed, secure people tend to want to limit their own reproduction. Technology and a flexible culture give them the means. Ultimately, or so Wun said, the curve will tend back toward flat.”

  Ibu Ina looked confused. “So there is no problem? No starvation, no overpopulation?”

  “Unfortunately, the line for the population of Earth is still a long way from horizontal. And we’re running into limiting conditions.”

  “Limiting conditions?”

  One more diagram. This one showed a trend line like an italic letter S, level at the top. Over this I marked two parallel horizontal lines: one well above the trend line, marked “A,” and one crossing it at the upcurve, marked “B.”

  “What are these lines?” Ina asked.

  ?
??They’re both planetary sustainability. The amount of arable land available for agriculture, fuel and raw materials to sustain technology, clean air and water. The diagram shows the difference between a successful intelligent species and an unsuccessful one. A species that peaks under the limit has the potential for long-term survival. A successful species can go on to do all those things futurists used to dream about—expand into the solar system or even the galaxy, manipulate time and space.”

  “How grand,” Ina said.

  “Don’t knock it. The alternative is worse. A species that runs into sustainability limits before it stabilizes its population is probably doomed. Massive starvation, failed technology, and a planet so depleted from the first bloom of civilization that it lacks the means to rebuild.”

  “I see.” She shivered. “So which are we? Case A or Case B? Did Wun tell you that?”

  “All he could say for sure was that both planets, Earth and Mars, were starting to run into the limits. And that the Hypotheticals intervened before it could happen.”

  “But why did they intervene? What do they expect from us?”

  It was a question for which Wun’s people didn’t have an answer. Nor did we.

  No, that wasn’t quite true. Jason Lawton had found a sort of an answer.

  But I wasn’t ready to talk about that yet.

  Ina yawned, and I brushed away the marks on the dusty floor. She switched off the desk light. The scattered maintenance lamps cast an exhausted glow. Outside the warehouse there was a sound like the striking of an enormous, muted bell every five or so seconds.

  “Tick tock,” Ina said, arranging herself on her mattress of mildewy cardboard. “I remember when clocks ticked, Tyler. Do you? The old-fashioned clocks?”