SPIN

to turn down a ride in that Ferrari, if that's what you're offering.'

'I can put it through its paces for you.' Mollified by the prospect of showing off his car, Jason went into the house to fetch his keys. Simon shot back a well-gosh expression before following him. I looked at Diane. She grinned, proud of this triumph of diplomacy.

Elsewhere, the Dong Feng missiles approached and then crossed the Spin barrier en route to their programmed targets. Strange to think of them streaking over a suddenly dark, cold, motionless Earth, operating solely on internal programming, aiming themselves at the featureless artifacts that drifted in suspension hundreds of miles over the poles.

Like a drama without an audience, too sudden to see.

* * * * *

The educated consensus—afterward—was that the detonation of the Chinese warheads had no effect on the differential flow of time. What was affected (profoundly) was the visual filter surrounding the Earth. Not to mention the human perception of the Spin.

As Jase had pointed out years ago, the temporal gradient meant that massive amounts of radically blue- shifted radiation would have bathed the surface of our planet had that radiation not been filtered and managed by the Hypotheticals. More than three years of sunlight for every second that passed: enough to kill every living thing on Earth, enough to sterilize the soil and boil the oceans. The Hypotheticals, who had engineered the temporal enclosure of the Earth, had also shielded us from its lethal side effects. Moreover, the Hypotheticals were regulating not only how much energy reached the static Earth but how much of the planet's own heat and light was radiated back into space. Which was perhaps why the weather these last few years had been so pleasantly… average.

The sky over the Berkshires, at least, was as cloudless as Waterford crystal when the Chinese payloads reached their targets, 7:55 Eastern time.

* * * * *

I was with Diane in the front room when the house phone rang.

Did we notice anything before Jason's call? A change in the light, something as insignificant as the feeling that a cloud might have passed in front of the sun? No. Nothing. All my attention was on Diane. We were drinking coolers and talking about trivia. Books we'd read, movies we'd seen. The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange. What we said was trite and conventional, but the undertalk was deep and occasionally treacherous.

And pretty soon we were flirting with each other, as if Simon Townsend and the last eight years signified nothing. Joking at first, then maybe not joking. I told her I'd missed her. She said, 'There were times I wanted to talk to you. Needed to talk to you. But I didn't have your number, or I figured you were busy.'

'You could have found my number. I wasn't busy.'

'You're right. Actually it was more like… moral cowardice.'

'Am I that frightening?'

'Not you. Our situation. I suppose I felt as if I ought to apologize to you. And I didn't know how to begin to do that.' She smiled wanly. 'I guess I still don't.'

'There's nothing to apologize for, Diane.'

'Thank you for saying so, but I happen to disagree. We're not kids anymore. It's possible to look back with a certain amount of insight. We were as close as two people can be without actually touching. But that was the one thing we couldn't do. Or even talk about. As if we had taken an oath of silence.'

'Since the night the stars disappeared,' I said, dry-mouthed, aghast at myself, terrified, aroused.

Diane waved her hand. 'That night. That night—you know what I remember about that night? Jason's binoculars. I was looking at the Big House while you two stared off into the sky. I really don't remember the stars at all. What I remember is catching sight of Carol in one of the back bedrooms with somebody from the catering service. She was drunk and it looked like she was making a pass.' She laughed bashfully. 'That was my own little apocalypse. Everything I already hated about the Big House, about my family, it was all summed up in one night. I just wanted to pretend it didn't exist. No Carol, no E.D., no Jason—'

'No me?'

She moved across the sofa and, because it had become that kind of conversation, put a hand on my cheek. Her hand was cool, the temperature of the drink she'd been holding. 'You were the exception. I was scared. You were incredibly patient. I appreciated that.'

'But we couldn't—'

'Touch.'

'Touch. E.D. would never have stood for it.'

She took her hand away. 'We could have hidden it from him if we'd wanted to. But you're right, E.D. was the problem. He infected everything. It was obscene, the way he made your mother live a kind of second-class existence. It was debasing. Can I confess this? I absolutely hated being his daughter. I especially hated the idea that if anything, you know, happened between us, it might be your way of taking revenge on E. D. Lawton.'

She sat back, a little surprised at herself, I think.

'Of course,' I said carefully, 'it wouldn't have been.'

'I was confused.'

'Is that what NK is for you? Revenge on E.D.?'

'No,' she said, still smiling, 'I don't love Simon just because he makes my father angry. Life's not that simple, Ty.'

'I didn't mean to suggest—'

'But you see how insidious it is? Certain suspicions come into your head and get stuck there. No, NK isn't about my father. It's about discovering the divinity in what's happened to the Earth and expressing that divinity in daily life.'

'Maybe the Spin isn't that simple, either.'

'We're either being murdered or transformed, Simon says.'

'He told me you're building heaven on Earth.'

'Isn't that what Christians are supposed to do? Make the Kingdom of God by expressing it in their lives?'

'Or at least dancing to it.'

'Now you sound like Jason. Obviously I can't defend everything about the movement. Last week we were at a conclave in Philadelphia and we met this couple, our age, friendly, intelligent—'alive in the spirit,' Simon called them. We went out to dinner and talked about the Parousia. Then they invited us up to their hotel room, and suddenly they were laying out lines of coke and playing porn videos. All kinds of marginal people are attracted to NK. No question. And for most of them the theology barely exists, except as a fuzzy image of the Garden of Eden. But at its best the movement is everything it claims to be, a genuine living faith.'

'Faith in what, Diane? Ekstasis? Promiscuity?'

I regretted the words as soon as I'd said them. She looked hurt. 'Ekstasis isn't about promiscuity. Not when it succeeds, anyway. But in the body of God no act is prohibited as long as it isn't vengeful or angry, as long as it expresses divine as well as human love.'

The phone rang then. I must have looked guilty. Diane saw my expression and laughed.

Jason's first words when I picked up: 'I said we'd have some warning. I'm sorry. I was wrong.'

'What?'

'Tyler… haven't you seen the sky?'

* * * * *

So we went upstairs to find a window facing the sunset.

The west bedroom was generously large, equipped with a mahogany chifferobe, a brass-railed bed, and big windows. I drew the curtains wide. Diane gasped.

There was no setting sun. Or, rather, there were several.

The entire western sky was alight. Instead of the single orb of the sun there was an arc of reddish glow that stretched across at least fifteen degrees of the horizon, containing what looked like a flickering multiple exposure of