'I'm still here.'
'What's the first thing you remember?'
'What do you mean—today?'
'No. The first thing you can remember in your life. I know it's a stupid question, but I think I'll be okay if we can just talk about something else besides the sky for five or ten minutes.'
'The first thing I remember?' I gave it some thought. 'That would be back in L.A., before we moved east.' When my father was still alive and still working for E. D. Lawton at their startup firm in Sacramento. 'We had this apartment with big white curtains in the bedroom. The first thing I really remember is watching those curtains blow in the wind. It was a sunny day and the window was open and there was a breeze.' The memory was unexpectedly poignant, like the last sight of a receding shoreline. 'What about you?'
The first thing Diane could remember was also a Sacramento moment, though it was a very different one. E.D. had taken both children on a tour of the plant, even then positioning Jason for his role as heir apparent. Diane had been fascinated by the huge perforated spars on the factory floor, the spools of microthin aluminum fabric as big as houses, the constant noise. Everything had been so large that she had half expected to find a fairy-tale giant chained to the walls, her father's prisoner.
It wasn't a good memory. She said she felt left out, almost lost, abandoned inside a huge and terrifying machinery of construction.
We talked that around for a while. Then Diane said, 'Check out the sky.'
I looked at the window. There was enough light spilling over the western horizon to turn the blackness an inky blue.
I didn't want to confess to the relief I felt.
'I guess you were right,' she said, suddenly buoyant. 'The sun's coming up after all.'
Of course, it wasn't really the sun. It was an impostor sun, a clever fabrication. But we didn't know that yet.
COMING OF AGE IN BOILING WATER
People younger than me have asked me: Why didn't you panic? Why didn't anyone panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?
Sometimes I say, But terrible things did happen.
Sometimes I say, But we didn't understand. And what could we have done about it?
And sometimes I cite the parable of the frog. Drop a frog into boiling water, he'll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, stoke the fire slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there's a problem.
The obliteration of the stars wasn't slow or subtle, but neither, for most of us, was it immediately disastrous. If you were an astronomer or a defense strategist, if you worked in telecommunications or aerospace, you probably spent the first few days of the Spin in a state of abject terror. But if you drove a bus or flipped burgers, it was all more or less warm water.
English-language media called it 'the October Event' (it wasn't 'the Spin' until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multi billion-dollar orbital satellite industry. Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long- distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weathersats. Repeated attempts to contact the International Space Station were uniformly unsuccessful. Commercial launches scheduled at Canaveral (and Baikonur and Kourou) were postponed indefinitely.
It meant, in the long run, very bad news for GE Americom, AT&T, COMSAT, and Hughes Communications, among many others.
And many terrible things did happen as a consequence of that night, though most of them were obscured by media blackouts. News stories traveled like whispers, squeezed through transatlantic fiber-optic cables rather than ricocheted through orbital space: it was almost a week before we learned that a Pakistani Hatf V missile tipped with a nuclear warhead, launched by mistake or miscalculation in the confusing first moments of the Event, had strayed off course and vaporized an agricultural valley in the Hindu Kush. It was the first nuclear device detonated in war since 1945, and, tragic as that event was, given the global paranoia ignited by the loss of telecommunications, we were lucky it only happened once. According to some reports we nearly lost Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Pyongyang.
* * * * *
Reassured by sunrise, I slept from dawn to noon. When I got up and dressed I found my mother in the living room, still in her quilted robe, staring into the television screen and frowning. When I asked her if she'd eaten breakfast she said she hadn't. So I fixed lunch for both of us.
She would have been forty-five years old that fall. If I had been asked to choose a word to describe her it might have been 'solid.' She was rarely angry and the only time in my life I had ever seen her cry was the night the police came to the door (this was back in Sacramento) and told her my father had died on the 80 near Vacaville, driving home from a business trip. She was, I think, careful to show me only this aspect of herself. But there were others. There was a portrait on a shelf in the etagere in the living room, taken years before I was born, of a woman so sleek, beautiful, and fearless before the camera that I had been startled when she told me it was a photo of herself.
Clearly she didn't like what she was hearing from TV. A local station was doing nonstop news, repeating shortwave and ham radio stories and fuzzy stay-calm statements issued by the federal government. 'Tyler,' she said, waving me to sit down, 'this is hard to explain. Something happened last night—'
'I know,' I said. 'I heard about it before I went to bed.'
'You knew about this? And you didn't wake me up?'
'I wasn't sure—'
But her annoyance waned as quickly as it had come. 'No,' she said, 'it's all right, Ty. I guess I didn't miss anything by sleeping. It's funny… I feel like I'm still asleep.'
'It's just the stars,' I said, idiotically.
'The stars and the moon,' she corrected me. 'Didn't you hear about the moon? All over the world, nobody can see the stars and nobody can see the moon.'
* * * * *
The moon was a clue, of course.
I sat awhile with my mom, then left her still fixed in front of the TV ('Back before dark this time,' she said, meaning it) and walked to the Big House. I knocked at the back door, the door the cook and the day maid used, though the Lawtons were careful never to call it a 'servant's entrance.' It was also the door by which, on weekdays, my mother entered to conduct the Lawtons' household business.
Mrs. Lawton, the twins' mother, let me in, looked at me blankly, waved me upstairs. Diane was still asleep, the door of her room closed. Jason hadn't slept at all and apparently wasn't planning to. I found him in his room monitoring a short-wave radio.
Jason's room was an Aladdin's cave of luxuries I coveted but had given up expecting ever to own: a computer with an ultrafast ISP connection, a hand-me-down television twice as big as the one that graced the living room at my house. In case he hadn't heard the news: 'The moon is gone,' I told him.
'Interesting, isn't it?' Jase stood and stretched, running his fingers through his uncombed hair. He hadn't changed his clothes since last night. This was uncharacteristic absent-mindedness. Jason, although certifiably a genius, had never acted like one in my presence—that is to say, he didn't act like the geniuses I had seen in movies; he didn't squint, stammer, or write algebraic equations on walls. Today, though, he did seem massively distracted. 'The moon's not gone, of course—how could it be? According to the radio they're measuring the usual tides on the Atlantic coast. So the moon's still there. And if the moon's still there, so are the stars.'
'So why can't we see them?'
He gave me an annoyed look. 'How should I know? All I'm saying is, it's at least partly an optical phenomenon.'
