The door banged open. Simon. Empty-handed. “Turns out dinner’s already on the table,” he said. “Along with a big pitcher of iced tea for thirsty travelers. Come down and join us. There’s plenty to go around.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That sounds nice.”
The eight adults sharing the farmhouse were the Sorleys, Dan Condon and his wife, the McIsaacs, and Simon and Diane. The Sorleys had three children and the McIsaacs had five, so that made seventeen of us at a big trestle table in the room adjoining the kitchen. The result was a pleasant din that lasted until “Uncle Dan” announced the blessing, at which point all hands promptly folded and all heads promptly bowed.
Dan Condon was the alpha male of the group. He was tall and almost sepulchral, black-bearded, ugly in a Lincolnesque way, and by way of blessing the meal he reminded us that feeding a stranger was a virtuous act even if the stranger happened to arrive without an invitation, amen.
By the way conversation flowed I deduced that Brother Aaron Sorley was second in command and probably the enforcer when it came to disputes. Both Teddy McIsaac and Simon deferred to Sorley but looked to Condon for ultimate verdicts. Was the soup too salty? “Just about right,” Condon said. The weather warm lately? “Hardly unusual in this part of the world,” Condon declared.
The women spoke seldom and for the most part kept their eyes fixed on their plates. Condon’s wife was a small, portly woman with a pinched expression. Sorley’s wife was almost as big as he was and smiled prominently when the food drew compliments. McIsaac’s wife looked barely eighteen to his morose over-forty. None of the women spoke directly to me nor were they introduced to me by their given names. Diane was a diamond among these zircons, conspicuously so, and maybe that explained her careful demeanor.
The families were all refugees from Jordan Tabernacle. They were not the most radical parishioners, Uncle Dan explained, like those wild-eyed Dispensationalists who had fled to Saskatchewan last year, but nor were they tepid in their faith, like Pastor Bob Kobel and his crew of easy compromisers. The families had moved to the ranch (Condon’s ranch) in order to separate themselves by a few miles from the temptations of the city and await the final call in monastic peace. So far, he said, the plan had been successful.
The rest of the table talk concerned a truck with a bad power cell, a roof-repair job still in progress, and a looming septic-tank crisis. I was as relieved when the meal ended as the children evidently were—Condon directed a fierce look at one of the Sorley girls when she sighed too audibly.
Once the dishes had been cleared (women’s work at the Condon ranch), Simon announced that I had to leave.
Condon said, “Will you be all right on the road, Dr. Dupree? There are robberies almost every night now.”
“I’ll keep the windows up and the gas pedal down.”
“That’s probably wise.”
Simon said, “If you don’t mind, Tyler, I’ll ride with you as far as the fence. I like the walk back, warm nights like this. Even by lantern-light.”
I agreed.
Then everyone lined up for a cordial good-bye. The children squirmed until I shook their hands and they were dismissed. When her turn came Diane nodded at me but lowered her eyes, and when I offered my hand she took it without looking at me.
Simon rode about a quarter mile uphill from the ranch with me, fidgeting like a man with something to say but keeping his mouth shut. I didn’t prompt him. The night air was fragrant and relatively cool. I pulled over where he told me to, at the peak of a ridge by a broken fence and a hedge of ocotillo. “Thank you for the ride,” he said.
When he got out he lingered a moment over the open door.
“Something you wanted to say?” I asked.
He cleared his throat. “You know,” he said finally, his voice barely louder than the wind, “I love Diane as much as I love God. I admit that sounds blasphemous. It sounded that way to me for a long time. But I believe God put her on Earth to be my wife, that this is her entire purpose. So lately I think it’s two sides of the same coin. Loving her is my way of loving God. Do you think that’s possible, Tyler Dupree?”
He didn’t wait for an answer but closed the door and switched on his flashlight, and I watched in the mirror as he ambled down the hill into darkness and the clatter of crickets.
I didn’t run into bandits or road pirates that night.
The absence of stars or moon had made the night a darker and more dangerous place since the early years of the Spin. Criminals had worked out elaborate strategies for rural ambuscades. Traveling at night dramatically increased my chances of being robbed or murdered.
Traffic was therefore sparse during the drive back to Phoenix, mostly interstate truckers in well-defended eighteen-wheelers. Much of the time I was alone on the road, carving a bright wedge out of the night and listening to the grit of the wheels and the rush of the wind. If there’s a lonelier sound I don’t know what it is. I guess that’s why they put radios in cars.
But there were no thieves or murderers on the road.
Not that night.
So I stayed in a motel outside Flagstaff and caught up with Wun Ngo Wen and his security crew in the executive lounge at the airport the following morning.
Wun was in a talkative mood on the flight to Orlando. He’d been studying the geology of the desert southwest and was particularly delighted by a rock he’d bought at a souvenir shack on the way back to Phoenix—forcing the entire cavalcade to pull over and wait while he picked through a bin of fossils. He showed me his prize, a chalky spiral concavity in a chunk of Bright Angel shale an inch on a side. The imprint of a trilobite, he said, dead some ten million years, recovered from these rocky, sandy wastes below us, which had once been the bed of an ancient sea.
He’d never seen a fossil before. There were no fossils on Mars, he said. No fossils anywhere in the solar system except here, here on the ancient Earth.
At Orlando we were ushered into the backseat of another car in another convoy, this one bound for the Perihelion compound.
We rolled out at dusk after a perimeter sweep held us up for an hour or so. Once we reached the highway Wun apologized for yawning: “I’m not accustomed to so much physical exercise.”
“I’ve seen you on the treadmill at Perihelion. You do all right.”
“A treadmill is hardly a canyon.”
“No, I suppose it isn’t.”
“I’m sore but not sorry. It was a wonderful expedition. I hope you spent your time as happily.”
I told him I’d located Diane and that she was healthy.
“That’s good. I’m sorry I couldn’t meet her. If she’s anything like her brother she must be a remarkable individual.”
“She is.”
“But the visit wasn’t all you’d hoped?”
“Maybe I was hoping for the wrong thing.” Maybe I’d been hoping for the wrong thing for a long time.
“Well,” Wun said, yawning, eyes half-closed, “the question…as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded.”
I wanted to ask him what he meant, but his head had lolled against the upholstery and it seemed kinder to let him sleep.
There were five cars in our convoy plus a personnel carrier with a small detachment of infantrymen in case of trouble.
The APC was a boxy vehicle about the size of the armored cars used to ship cash to and from regional banks and easily mistaken for one.
In fact a Brink’s convoy happened to be about ten minutes ahead of us until it turned off the highway toward Palm Bay. Gang spotters—placed on the road past major intersections and linked by phone—confused us with the Brink’s shipment and marked us as a target for a band of strikers waiting up ahead.
The strikers were sophisticated criminals who had already emplaced surface mines at a stretch of the road skirting a swampy wilderness preserve. They also carried automatic rifles and a couple of rocket-propelled-grenade launchers, and a Brink’s convoy would have been no match for the
m: five minutes after the first concussion the strikers would have been deep in bog country, dividing the spoils. But their spotters had made a critical mistake. Taking on a bank delivery is one thing; taking on five security-modified vehicles and an APC full of highly trained military and security personnel is a different matter entirely.
I was gazing out the tinted window of the car, watching low green water and bald cypress slide past, when the highway lights went out.
A pirate had cut the buried power cables. Suddenly the dark was truly dark, a wall beyond the window, nothing looking back at me but my own startled reflection. I said, “Wun—”
But he was still asleep, his wrinkled face blank as a thumbprint.
Then the lead car hit the mine.
The concussion beat at our hardened vehicle like a steel fist. The convoy was prudently spaced, but we were close enough to see the point car rise on a gout of yellow flame and drop back to the tarmac burning, wheels splayed.
Our driver swerved and, despite what he had probably been taught, slowed down. The road was blocked ahead. And now there was a second concussion at the back of the convoy, another mine, blasting chunks of pavement into the wetlands and boxing us in with ruthless efficiency.
Wun was awake now, baffled and terrified. His eyes were as big as moons and almost as bright.
Small-arms fire rattled in the near distance. I ducked and pulled Wun down next to me, both of us folded double around our seat belts and prying frantically at the clasps. The driver stopped, pulled a weapon from somewhere under the dash, and rolled out the door.
At the same time a dozen men spilled out of the APC behind us and began to fire into the darkness, trying to establish a perimeter. Plainclothes security men from other vehicles began to converge on our car, looking to protect Wun, but gunfire pinned them before they reached us.
The quick response must have rattled the road pirates. They opened up with heavy weapons. One of them fired what I was later told was a rocket-propelled grenade. All I knew was that I was suddenly deaf and the car was rotating around a complicated axis and the air was full of smoke and pebbled glass.
Then, mysteriously, I was halfway out the rear door, face pressed into the gritty pavement, tasting blood, and Wun was next to me, a few feet ahead, lying on his side. One of his shoes—one of the child-size hiking boots he’d bought for the Canyon—was on fire.
I called his name. He stirred, feebly. Bullets battered the ruin of the car behind us, punching craters in steel. My left leg was numb. I pulled myself closer and used a torn hank of upholstery to smother the burning shoe. Wun groaned and lifted his head.
Our guys returned fire, tracers streaking into the wetlands on each side of the road.
Wun arched his back and rose to his knees. He didn’t seem to know where he was. He was bleeding from his nose. His forehead was gashed and raw.
“Don’t stand up,” I croaked.
But he went on trying to gather his feet under him, the burned boot flopping and stinking.
“For god’s sake,” I said. I reached out but he scuttled away. “For god’s sake, don’t stand up!”
But he managed it at last, levered himself up and stood trembling, profiled by the burning wreckage. He looked down and seemed to recognize me.
“Tyler,” he said. “What happened?”
Then the bullets found him.
There were plenty of people who had hated Wun Ngo Wen. They distrusted his motives, like E. D. Lawton, or despised him for more complex and less defensible reasons: because they believed he was an enemy of God; because his skin happened to be black; because he espoused the theory of evolution; because he embodied physical evidence of the Spin and disturbing truths about the age of the external universe.
Many of those people had whispered about killing him. Dozens of intercepted threats were recorded in the files of Homeland Security.
But he wasn’t killed by a conspiracy. What killed him was a combination of greed, mistaken identity, and Spin-engendered recklessness.
It was an embarrassingly terrestrial death.
Wun’s body was cremated (after an autopsy and massive sample-extraction) and he was given a full state funeral. His memorial service in Washington’s National Cathedral was attended by dignitaries from all over the planet. President Lomax delivered a lengthy eulogy.
There was talk of sending his ashes into orbit, but nothing ever came of it. According to Jason, the urn was stored in the basement of the Smithsonian Institution pending final disposition.
It’s probably still there.
Home Before Dark
So I spent a few days in a Miami-area hospital, recovering from minor injuries, describing events to federal investigators, and coming to grips with the fact of Wun’s death. It was during this time I resolved to leave Perihelion and open a private practice of my own.
But I decided not to announce my intention until after the replicator launch. I didn’t want to trouble Jason with it at a critical time.
By comparison with the terraforming effort of previous years, the replicator launch was anticlimactic. Its results would be, if anything, greater and more subtle; but its very efficiency—a mere handful of rockets, no clever timing required—failed as drama.
President Lomax was keeping this one close to home. In a move that had infuriated the E.U., the Chinese, the Russians, and the Indians, Lomax had declined to share replicator technology beyond the must-know circles at NASA and Perihelion, and he had deleted all relevant passages in the publicly released editions of the Martian archives. “Artificial microbes” (in Lomax-speak) were a “high risk” technology. They could be “weaponized.” (This was true, as even Wun had admitted.) The U.S. was thus obliged to take “custodial control” of the information in order to prevent “nanotech proliferation and a new and deadly arms race.”
The European Union had cried foul and the U.N. was convening an investigatory panel, but in a world with brushfire wars burning on four continents Lomax’s argument carried considerable weight. (Even though, as Wun might have countered, the Martians had successfully lived with the same technology for hundreds of years—and the Martians were no more or less human than their terrestrial ancestors.)
For all these reasons, the late-summer launch date at Canaveral drew minimal crowds and almost desultory media attention. Wun Ngo Wen was dead, after all, and the news services had exhausted themselves covering his murder. Now the four heavy Delta rockets set in their offshore gantries looked like little more than a footnote to the memorial service, or worse, a rerun: the seed launches retooled for an age of diminished expectations.
But even if it was a sideshow, it was still a show. Lomax flew in for the occasion. E. D. Lawton had accepted a courtesy invitation and by this time was willing to pledge good behavior. And so, on the morning of the appointed day, I rode with Jason to the V.I.P. bleachers at the eastern shore of Cape Canaveral.
We faced seaward. The old offshore gantries, still functional but gone a little ruddy with saltwater rust, had been built to hold the heaviest lifters of the seed-launch era. The brand-new Deltas were dwarfed by them. Not that we could see much detail from this distance, only four white pillars out at the misty limits of the summer ocean, plus the fretwork of other unused launch platforms, the rail connectors, the tenders and support vessels anchored at a safe perimeter. It was a clear, hot summer morning. The wind was gusty—not strong enough to scrub the launch but more than enough to snap the flag crisply and tousle the coifed hair of President Lomax as he climbed the podium to address the assembled dignitaries and press.
He delivered a speech, mercifully brief. He cited the legacy of Wun Ngo Wen and his faith that the replicator network about to be planted in the icy fringes of the solar system would soon enlighten us about the nature and purpose of the Spin. He said brave things about humanity leaving its mark on the cosmos. (“He means the galaxy,” Jason whispered, “not the cosmos. And—leaving our mark? Like a dog peeing on a hydrant? Someone really ought to edit
these speeches.”) Then Lomax quoted a poem by a nineteenth-century Russian poet named F. I. Tiutchev, who couldn’t have imagined the Spin but wrote as if he had:
Gone like a vision is the external world
and Man, a homeless orphan, has to face
helpless, naked and alone,
the blackness of immeasurable space.
All life and brightness seem an ancient dream,
while in the substance of the night,
unraveled, alien, he now perceives
a fateful something that is his by right.
Then Lomax departed the stage, and after the prosaic business of backward counting, the first of the rockets rode its column of fire into the unraveling cosmos behind the sky. A fateful something. Ours by right.
While everyone else looked up, Jason closed his eyes and folded his hands in his lap.
We adjourned to a reception room along with the rest of the invited guests, pending a round of press interviews. (Jason was scheduled for twenty minutes with a cable news network, I was scheduled for ten. I was “the physician who attempted to save the life of Wun Ngo Wen,” though all I had done was extinguish his burning shoe and pull his body out of the line of fire after he fell. A quick ABC check—airway, breathing, circulation—made it abundantly clear that I couldn’t help him and that it would be wiser simply to keep my head down until help arrived. Which is what I told reporters, until they learned to stop asking.)
President Lomax came through the room shaking hands before he was hustled away once more by his handlers. Then E.D. cornered Jason and me at the buffet table.
“I guess you got what you wanted,” he said, meaning the comment for Jason but looking at me. “It can’t be undone now.”
“In that case,” Jason said, “perhaps it’s not worth arguing about.”