By Christmas these changes, while still subtle, had so dramatically outpaced what could be attributed to solar warming that no doubt remained. Mars had become a living planet.
The launch platforms were readied once more, new cargos of microbial life cultured and packaged. In the United States that year, fully two percent of the gross domestic product was devoted to Spin-related aerospace work—essentially, the Mars program—and the ratio was similar in other industrialized countries.
* * * * *
Jason suffered a relapse in February. He woke up unable to focus his eyes. His neurologist adjusted his medication and prescribed an eye patch as a temporary fix. Jase recovered rapidly but was away from work for most of a week.
Diane was as good as her word. She began to call me at least monthly, usually more often, often late at night when Simon was asleep at the other end of their small apartment. They lived in a few rooms over a secondhand book-store in Tempe, the best they could do on Diane's salary and the irregular income Simon took home from Jordan Tabernacle. In warm weather I could hear the drone of a swamp cooler in the background; in winter, a radio playing softly to disguise the sound of her voice.
I invited her to come back to Florida for the next series of launches, but of course she couldn't: she was busy with work, they were having church friends to dinner that weekend, Simon wouldn't understand. 'Simon's going through a minor spiritual crisis. He's trying to deal with the Messiah issue…'
'There's a Messiah issue?'
'You should read the newspapers,' Diane said, possibly overestimating how often these religious debates made the mainstream press, at least in Florida; maybe it was different out west. 'The old NK movement believed in a Christless Parousia. That was what made us distinctive.' That, I thought, and their penchant for public nudity. 'The early writers, Ratel and Greengage, saw the Spin as a direct fulfillment of scriptural prophecy—which meant the prophecy itself was redefined, reconfigured by historical events. There didn't have to be a literal Tribulation or even a physical Second Coming of Christ. All that stuff in Thessalonians and Corinthians and Revelation could be reinterpreted or ignored, because the Spin was a genuine intervention by God in human history—a tangible miracle, which supersedes scripture. That was what freed us to make the Kingdom on Earth. Suddenly we were responsible for our own chiliasm.'
'I'm not sure I follow.' Actually she had lost me somewhere around the word 'Parousia.'
'It means—well, all that really matters is that Jordan Tabernacle, our little church, has officially renounced all NK doctrine, even though half the congregation is old NK people like me and Simon. So suddenly there are all these arguments about the Tribulation and how the Spin tallies against Biblical prophecy. People taking sides. Bereans versus Progressives, Covenanters versus Preterists. Is there an Antichrist, and if so, where is he? Does the Rapture happen before the Tribulation or during or after? Issues like that. Maybe it sounds picayune, but the spiritual stakes are very high, and the people having these arguments are people we care about, our friends.'
'Where do you stand?'
'Me personally?' She was quiet, and there it was again, the sound of the radio murmuring behind her, some Valium-voiced announcer delivering late-night news to insomniacs. Latest on the shooting in Mesa. Parousia or no Parousia. 'You could say I'm conflicted. I don't know what I believe. Sometimes I miss the old days. Making up paradise as we went along. It seems like—'
She paused. Now there was another voice doubling the staticky murmur of the radio: Diane? Are you still up?
'Sorry,' she whispered. Simon on patrol. It was time to cut short our telephone tryst, her act of touchless infidelity. 'Talk to you soon.'
She was gone before I could say good-bye.
* * * * *
The second series of seed launches went off as flawlessly as the first. The media mobbed Canaveral again, but I watched this round on a big digital projection in the auditorium at Perihelion, a sunshine launch that scattered herons into the sky over Merritt Island like bright confetti.
Followed by another summer of waiting. ESA lofted a series of next-generation orbital telescopes and interferometers, and the stored data they retrieved was even sleeker and cleaner than last year's. By September every office at Perihelion was plastered with high-res images of our success. I framed one for the infirmary waiting room. It was a color-composite rendering of Mars showing Olympus Mons outlined in frost or ice and scarred with fresh drainage channels, fog flowing like water through Valles Marineris, green capillaries snaking over Solis Lacus. The southern highlands of the Terra Sirenum were still deserts, but the region's impact craters had eroded to near- invisibility under a wetter, windier climate.
The oxygen content of the atmosphere rose and fell for a few months as the population of aerobic organisms oscillated, but by December it had topped twenty millibars and stabilized. Out of a potentially chaotic mix of increasing greenhouse gases, an unstable hydrologic cycle, and novel biogeochemical feedback loops, Mars was discovering its own equilibrium.
The string of successes was good for Jason. He remained in remission and was happily, almost therapeutically, busy. If anything dismayed him it was his own emergence as the iconic genius of the Perihelion Foundation, or at least its scientific celebrity, poster child for the transformation of Mars. This was more E.D.'s doing than Jason's: E.D. knew the public wanted Perihelion to have a human face, preferably young, smart but not intimidating, and he had been pushing Jase in front of cameras since the days when Perihelion was an aerospace lobby group. Jase put up with it—he was a good and patient explainer, and reasonably photogenic—but he hated the process and would leave a room rather than see himself on television.
That was the year of the first unmanned NEP flights, which Jase watched with particular attention. These were the vehicles that would transport human beings to Mars, and unlike the comparatively simple seed carriers, the NEP vehicles were new technology. NEP stood for 'nuclear electric propulsion': miniature nuclear reactors feeding ion engines vastly more powerful than the ones that drove the seed vessels, powerful enough to enable massive payloads. But getting these leviathans into orbit required boosters as large as anything NASA had ever launched, acts of what Jason called 'heroic engineering,' heroically expensive. The price tag had begun to raise red flags even in a largely supportive Congress, but the stream of notable successes kept a lid on dissent. Jason worried that even a single conspicuous failure would shift that equation.
Shortly after New Year's Day a NEP test vehicle failed to return its reentry package of test data and was presumed disabled in orbit. There were finger-pointing speeches on Capitol Hill led by a coterie of fiscal ultraconservatives representing states without significant aerospace investment, but E.D.'s friends in Congress overrode the objections and a successful test a week later buried the controversy. Still, Jason said, we had dodged a bullet.
Diane had followed the debate but considered it trivial. 'What Jase needs to worry about,' she said, 'is what this Mars thing is doing to the world. So far it's all good press, right? Everybody's gung-ho, we all want something to reassure us about the—I'm not sure what to call it—the potency of the human race. But the euphoria will wear off sooner or later, and in the meantime people are getting extremely savvy about the nature of the Spin.'
'Is that a bad thing?'
'If the Mars project fails or doesn't live up to expectations, yeah. Not just because people will be disappointed. They've watched the transformation of an entire planet—they have a yardstick to measure the Spin by. The sheer insane power of it, I mean. The Spin's not just some abstract phenomenon— you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong you steal that courage away again, and now it's worse because they've seen the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they've ever been.'
I quoted the Housman poem she had taught me long ago: 'The infant child is not aware / He has been eaten by the bear.'
'The infant child is starting to figure it out,' she said. 'Maybe that's how you define the Tribulation.'
Maybe so. Some nights, when I couldn't sleep, I thought about the Hypotheticals, whoever or whatever they were. There was really only one salient, obvious fact about them: not simply that they were capable of enclosing the Earth in this… strange membrane, but that they had been out there— owning us, regulating our planet and the passage of time— for almost two billion years.
Nothing even remotely human could be so patient.
* * * * *
