One of the crewmen had given him a sheet of brown paper and a few stubby crayons to keep him busy.
He seemed relieved to see us. He was worried about the transit, he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose—wincing when his thumb brushed the bruise Jala had left on his cheek—and asked me what it would be like.
'I don't know,' I said. 'I've never crossed.'
'Will we know when it happens?'
'According to the crew, the sky gets a little strange. And just when the crossing happens, when we're balanced between the old world and the new world, the compass needle swings around, north for south. And on the bridge they sound the ship's horn. You'll know.'
'Traveling a long way,' En said. 'In a short time.'
That was undeniably true. The Arch—our 'side' of it, anyway—had been physically dragged across interstellar space, presumably at something less than the speed of light, before it was dropped from orbit. But the Hypotheticals had had eons of Spin time to do the dragging. They could conceivably have bridged any distance shy of three billion light-years. And even a fraction of that would be a numbing, barely comprehensible distance.
'Makes you wonder,' Diane said, 'why they went to so much trouble.'
'According to Jason—'
'I know. The Hypotheticals want to preserve us from extinction, so we can make something more complex of ourselves. But it just begs the question. Why do they want that? What do they expect from us?'
En ignored our philosophizing. 'And after we cross—'
'After that,' I told him, 'it's a day's cruise to Port Magellan.'
He smiled at the prospect.
I exchanged a look with Diane. She had introduced herself to En two days ago and they were already friends. She had been reading to him from a book of English children's stories out of the ship's library. (She had even quoted Housman to him: The infant child is not aware … 'I don't like that one,' En had said.)
He showed us his drawing, pictures of animals he must have seen in video footage from the plains of Equatoria, long-necked beasts with pensive eyes and tiger-striped coats.
'They're beautiful,' Diane said.
En nodded solemnly. We left him to his work and headed up on deck.
* * * * *
The night sky was clear and the peak of the Arch was directly overhead now, reflecting a last glimmer of light. It showed no curvature at all. From this angle it was a pure Euclidean line, an elementary number (1) or noun (I).
We stood by the railing as close as we could get to the prow of the ship. Wind tugged at our clothes and hair. The ship's flags snapped briskly and a restless sea gave back fractured images of the ship's running lights.
'Do you have it?' Diane asked.
She meant the tiny vial containing a sample of Jason's ashes. We had planned this ceremony—if you could call it a ceremony—long before we left Montreal. Jason had never put much faith in memorials, but I think he would have approved of this one. 'Right here.' I took the ceramic tube out of my vest pocket and held it in my left hand.
'I miss him,' Diane said. 'I miss him constantly.' She nestled into my shoulder and I put an arm around her. 'I wish I'd known him as a Fourth. But I don't suppose it changed him much—'
'It didn't.'
'In some ways Jase was always a Fourth.'
As we approached the moment of transit the stars seemed to dim, as if some gauzy presence had enclosed the ship. I opened the tube that contained Jason's ashes. Diane put her free hand on mine.
The wind shifted suddenly and the temperature dropped a degree or two.
'Sometimes,' she said, 'when I think about the Hypotheticals, I'm afraid…'
'What?'
'That we're their red calf. Or what Jason hoped the Martians would be. That they expect us to save them from something. Something they're afraid of.'
Maybe so. But then, I thought, we'll do what life always does—defy expectations.
I felt a shiver pass through her body. Above us, the line of the Arch grew fainter. Haze settled over the sea. Except it wasn't haze in the ordinary sense. It wasn't weather at all.
The last glimmer of the Arch disappeared and so did the horizon. On the bridge of the Capetown Maru the compass must have begun its rotation; the captain sounded the ship's horn, a brutally loud noise, the bray of outraged space. I looked up. The stars swirled together dizzyingly.
'Now,' Diane shouted into the noise.
I leaned across the steel rail, her hand on mine, and we upended the vial. Ashes spiraled in the wind, caught in the ship's lights like snow. They vanished before they hit the turbulent black water—scattered, I want to believe, into the void we were invisibly traversing, the stitched and oceanless place between the stars.
Diane leaned into my chest and the sound of the horn beat through our bodies like a pulse until at last it stopped.
Then she lifted her head. 'The sky,' she said.
The stars were new and strange.
* * * * *
In the morning we all came up on deck, all of us: En, his parents, Ibu Ina, the other passengers, even Jala and a number of off-duty crewmen, to scent the air and feel the heat of the new world.
It could have been Earth, by the color of the sky and the heat of the sunlight. The headland of Port Magellan had appeared as a jagged line on the horizon, a rocky promontory and a few lines of pale smoke rising vertically and tailing to the west in a higher wind.
Ibu Ina joined us at the railing, En in tow.
'It looks so familiar,' Ina said. 'But it feels so different.'
Clumps of coiled weeds drifted in our wake, liberated from the mainland of Equatoria by storms or tides, huge eight-fingered leaves limp on the surface of the water. The Arch was behind us now, no longer a door out but a door back in, a different sort of door altogether.
Ina said, 'It's as if one history has ended and another has begun.'
En disagreed. 'No,' he said solemnly, leaning into the wind as if he could will the future forward. 'History doesn't start until we land.'
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I invented a couple of diseases for dramatic purposes in Spin. CVWS is an imaginary cattle-borne disease with no real-world counterpart. AMS is also wholly imaginary, but its symptoms mimic the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, unfortunately a very real disease. Although MS is not yet curable, a number of promising new therapies have been introduced or are on the horizon. Science fiction novels shouldn't be mistaken for medical journals, however. For readers concerned about MS, one of the best Web sources is www.nationalmssociety.org.
The future I extrapolated for Sumatra and the Minangkabau people is also very much my own invention, but the matrilineal Minangkabau culture, and its coexistence with modern Islam, has attracted the attention of anthropologists-see Peggy Reeves Sanday's study, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy.
Readers interested in current scientific thought about the evolution and future of the solar system might want to check out The Life and Death of Planet Earth by Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee or Our Cosmic Origins by Armand Delsemme for information not refracted through the lens of science fiction.
And once again, of all the folks who helped make possible the writing of this book (and I thank them all), the MVP award goes to my wife, Sharry.
