SPIN

Lomax, in one of his rally-'round-the-flag speeches, even hinted that the manned space program would be resumed, a first step toward establishing ongoing relations with what he called (with suspicious exuberance) 'our sister planet.'

We talked about the past. We talked about the future.

What we did not do was fall into each other's arms.

We knew each other too well, or not well enough. We had a past but no present. And Diane was wracked with anxiety by Simon's disappearance outside Manassas.

'He very nearly let you die,' I reminded her.

'Not intentionally. He's not vicious. You know that.'

'Then he's dangerously naive.'

Diane closed her eyes meditatively. Then she said, 'There's a phrase Pastor Bob Kobel liked to use back at Jordan Tabernacle. 'His heart cried out to God.' If it describes anyone, it describes Simon. But you have to parse the sentence. 'His heart cried out'—I think that's all of us, it's universal. You, Simon, me, Jason. Even Carol. Even E.D. When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it's a shout of joy: I think that's what it was for Jason; I think that's what I didn't understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it's a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence.' She brushed her hair away from her forehead and I saw that her arm, which had been so perilously thin, was round and strong once more. 'I think the cry that rose up from Simon's heart was the purest human sound in the world. But no, he's not a good judge of character; yes, he's naive; which is why he cycled through so many styles of faith, New Kingdom, Jordan Tabernacle, the Condon ranch… anything, as long as it was plainspoken and addressed the need for human significance.'

'Even if it killed you?'

'I didn't say he's wise. I'm saying he's not wicked.' Later I came to recognize this kind of discourse: she was talking like a Fourth. Detached but engaged. Intimate but objective. I didn't dislike it, but it made the hair on my neck stand up from time to time.

* * * * *

Not long after I declared her completely healthy Diane told me she wanted to leave. I asked her where she meant to go.

She had to find Simon, she said. She had to 'settle things,' one way or another. They were, after all, still married. It mattered to her whether he had lived or died.

I reminded her she didn't have money to spend or a place of her own to stay. She said she'd get by somehow. So I gave her one of the credit cards Jason had supplied me, along with a warning that I couldn't guarantee it—I had no idea who was paying the premium, what the credit limit might be, or whether someone might eventually track it to her.

She asked how she could get in touch with me.

'Just call,' I said. She had my number, the number I had paid for and preserved these many years, attached to a phone I had carried even though it seldom rang.

Then I drove her to the local bus depot, where she vanished into a crowd of displaced tourists who had been stranded by the end of the Spin.

* * * * *

The phone rang six months later, when the newspapers were still running banner headlines about 'the new world' and the cable channels had begun to carry video footage of a rocky, wild headland 'somewhere across the Archway.'

By this time hundreds of vessels large and small had made the crossing. Some were big-science expeditions, I.G.Y. and U.N. sanctioned, with American naval escorts and embedded press pools. Some were private charters. Some were fishing trawlers, which came back to port with their holds full of a catch that could pass for cod in a dim light. This was, of course, strictly forbidden, but 'arch cod' had infiltrated every major Asian market by the time the ban came down. It proved to be edible and nutritious. Which was, as Jase might have said, a clue: when the fish were subjected to DNA analysis their genome suggested a remote terrestrial ancestry. The new world was not merely hospitable, it seemed to have been stocked with humanity in mind.

'I found Simon,' Diane said.

'And?'

'He's living in a trailer park outside Wilmington. He picks up a little money doing household repairs—bikes, toasters, that kind of thing. Otherwise he collects welfare and attends a little Pentecostal church.'

'Was he happy to see you?'

'He wouldn't stop apologizing for what happened at the Condon ranch. He said he wanted to make it up to me. He asked if there was anything he could do to make my life easier.'

I gripped the phone a little more tightly. 'What did you tell him?'

'That I wanted a divorce. He agreed. And he said something else. He said I'd changed, that there was something different about me. He couldn't put his finger on it. But I don't think he liked it.'

A whiff of brimstone, perhaps.

'Tyler?' Diane said. 'Have I changed that much?'

'Everything changes,' I said.

* * * * *

Her next important call came a year later. I was in Montreal, thanks in part to Jason's counterfeit ID, waiting for my immigrant status to be officialized and assisting at an outpatient clinic in Outremont.

Since my last conversation with Diane, the basic dynamics Of the Arch had been worked out. The facts were confounding to anyone who conceived of the Archway as a static machine or a simple 'door,' but look at it the way Jason had—as a complex, conscious entity capable of perceiving and manipulating events within its domain—and it made more sense.

Two worlds had been connected through the Arch, but only for manned ocean vessels transiting from the south.

Consider what that means. For a breeze, an ocean current, or a migrant bird the Arch was nothing more than a couple of fixed pillars between the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. They all moved unimpeded around and through the Arch space, as did any ship traveling from north to south.

But cross the equator by ship from the south at ninety degrees east of Greenwich and you'd find yourself looking back at the Arch from an unknown sea under a strange sky, untold light-years from the Earth.

In the city of Madras an ambitious if not quite legal cruise service had produced a series of English-language posters announcing easy travel to friendly planet! Interpol closed the business down—the U.N. was still trying to regulate passage in those days—but the posters had it just about right. How could such things be? Ask the Hypotheticals.

Diane's divorce had been finalized, she told me, but she was out of work and out of prospects. 'I thought if I could join you…' She sounded tentative and not at all like a Fourth, or what I imagined a Fourth ought to sound like. 'If that would be all right. Frankly I need a little help. Finding a place and, you know, getting settled.'

So I arranged a clinic job for her and submitted the immigration paperwork. She joined me in Montreal that autumn.

* * * * *

It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned (or semi-Martian, perhaps), during which Diane and I discovered each other in wholly new ways. We were no longer straitjacketed by the Spin nor were we children blindly seeking solace. We fell in love, finally, as adults.

These were the years when the global population topped out at eight billion. Most of that growth had been funneled into the expanding megacities: Shanghai, Jakarta, Manila, coastal China; Lagos, Kinshasa, Nairobi, Maputo; Caracas, La Paz, Tegucigalpa—all the firelit, smog-shrouded warrens of the world. It would have taken a dozen Archways to dent that population growth, but crowding drove a steady wave of emigrants, refugees, and 'pioneers,' many of them packed into the cargo compartments of illegal vessels and more than a few of them delivered to the shores of Port Magellan already dead or dying.

Port Magellan was the first named settlement in the new world. By now much of that world had been at least crudely mapped, largely by air. Port Magellan was at the eastern tip of a continent some were calling 'Equatoria.' There was a second and even larger land mass ('Borea') that straddled the northern pole and extended into the