SPIN

to die.

He woke to find his only slightly charred vessel at rest in a canola field in southern Manitoba, surrounded by curiously pale and smooth-skinned men, some of them wearing what he recognized as biological isolation gear. Wun Ngo Wen emerged from his spacecraft, heart pounding, muscles leaden and aching in the terrible gravity, lungs insulted by the thick and insulating air, and was quickly taken into custody.

He spent the next month in a plastic bubble in a room at the Department of Agriculture's Animal Disease Center on Plum Island, off the coast of New York's Long Island. During that time he learned to speak a language he had known only from ancient written records, teaching his lips and tongue to accommodate the rich modalities of its vowels, refining his vocabulary as he struggled to explain himself to grim or intimidated strangers. This was a difficult time. Earthlings were pallid, lanky creatures, not at all what he had imagined when he deciphered the ancient documents. Many were pale as ghosts, reminding him of Embermonth stories that had terrified him as a child: he half expected one of them to rise up at his bedside like Huld of Phraya, demanding an arm or a leg for tribute. His dreams were restless and unpleasant.

He was, fortunately, still in possession of his skills as a linguist, and before long he was introduced to men and women of status and power who proved far more hospitable than his initial captors. Wun Ngo Wen cultivated these useful friendships, struggling to master the social protocols of an ancient and confusing culture and waiting patiently for the correct moment to convey the proposal he had carried at such personal and public expense between the two human worlds.

* * * * *

'Jason,' I said when he had reached approximately this point in the narrative. 'Stop. Please'

He paused. 'You have a question, Tyler?'

'No question. It's just that it's… a lot to absorb.'

'But you're okay with this? You follow me? Because I'm going to be telling this story more than once. I want it to flow. Does it flow?'

'Flows fine. Telling it to who?'

'Everybody. The media. We're going public.'

'I don't want to be a secret anymore,' Wun Ngo Wen said. 'I didn't come here to hide. I have things to say.' He uncapped his bottle of spring water. 'Would you like some of this, Tyler Dupree? You look like you could use a drink.'

I took the bottle from his plump, wrinkled fingers and drank deeply from it. 'So,' I said, 'does this make us water-brothers?' Wun Ngo Wen looked puzzled. Jason laughed out loud.

FOUR PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE KIRIOLOJ DELTA

It's hard to capture the brute craziness of the times. Some days it seemed almost liberating. Beyond our picayune illusion of the sky the sun went on expanding, stars burned out or were born, a dead planet had been infused with life and had evolved a civilization that rivaled or surpassed our own. Closer to home, governments were toppled and replaced and their replacements were overthrown; religions, philosophies, and ideologies morphed and merged and begat mutant offspring. The old, ordered world was crumbling. New things grew in the ruins. We picked love green and savored it for its tartness: Molly Seagram loved me, I assumed, mainly because I was available. And why not? The summer was waning and the harvest was uncertain.

The long-defunct New Kingdom movement had begun to seem both prescient and grossly old-fashioned, its timid rebellion against the old ecclesiastical consensus a shadow of newer, edgier devotions. Dionysian cults sprang up everywhere in the western world, stripped of the piety and hypocrisy of the old NK—fuck clubs with flags or sacred symbols. They did not disdain human jealousy but embraced or even reveled in it: scorned lovers favored .45 pistols at close range, a red rose on a victim's body. It was the Tribulation reconfigured as Elizabethan drama.

Simon Townsend, had he been born a decade later, might have stumbled into one of these brands of Quentin Tarantino spirituality. But the failure of NK had left him disillusioned and yearning for something simpler. Diane still called me from time to time—once a month or so, when the auspices were right and Simon was out of the house— to update me on her situation or simply to reminisce, stoking memories like embers and warming herself at the heat. Not much heat at home, apparently, though her financial situation had improved a little. Simon was doing full- time maintenance for Jordan Tabernacle, their little independent church; Diane was doing clerical temp jobs, off- and-on work that often left her fidgeting around the apartment or sneaking off to the local library to read books of which Simon disapproved: contemporary novels, current events. Jordan Tabernacle, she said, was a 'disengagement' church; parishioners were encouraged to turn off the TV and avoid books, newspapers, and other cultural ephemera. Or risk meeting the Rapture in an impure condition.

Diane never advocated these ideas—she never preached to me—but she deferred to them, left them carefully unquestioned. Sometimes I got a little impatient with that. 'Diane,' I said one night, 'do you really believe this stuff?'

'What 'stuff,' Tyler?'

'Take your pick. Not keeping books in the house. The Hypotheticals as agents of the Parousia. All that shit.' (I'd had maybe a beer too many.)

'Simon believes in it.'

'I didn't ask you about Simon.'

'Simon's more devout than I am. I envy him that. I know how it must sound. Put those books in the trash, like he's being monstrous, arrogant. But he isn't. It's an act of humility, really—an act of submission. Simon can give himself to God in a way I can't.'

'Lucky Simon.'

'He is lucky. You can't see it, but he's very peaceful. He's found a kind of equanimity at Jordan. He can look the Spin in the face and smile at it, because he knows he's saved.'

'What about you? Aren't you saved?'

She let a long silence ride down the phone line between us. 'I wish that was a simple question. I really do. I keep thinking, maybe it isn't about my faith. Maybe Simon's faith is enough for both of us. Powerful enough that I can ride it a little way. He's been very patient with me, actually. The only thing we argue about is having kids. Simon would like to have children. The church encourages it. And I understand that, but with the money so tight, and—you know—the world being what it is—'

'It's not a decision you ought to be pressured into.'

'I don't mean to imply he's pressuring me. 'Put it in God's hands,' he says. Put it in God's hands and it'll work out right.'

'But you're too smart to believe that.'

'Am I? Oh, Tyler, I hope not. I hope that isn't true.'

* * * * *

Molly, on the other hand, had no use for what she called 'all this God crap.' Every woman for herself, that was Moll's philosophy. Especially, she said, if the world was coming unglued and none of us was going to live past fifty. 'I don't intend to spend that time kneeling.'

She was tough by nature. Molly's folks were dairy farmers. They had spent ten years in legal arguments over a tar-sands oil-extraction project that bordered their property and was slowly poisoning it. In the end they traded their ranch for an out-of-court settlement large enough to buy a comfortable retirement for themselves and a decent education for their daughter. But it was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

Very little about the evolving social landscape surprised her. One night we sat in front of the TV watching coverage of the Stockholm riots. A mob of cod fishermen and religious radicals threw bricks through windows and burned cars; police helicopters peppered the crowd with tanglefoot gel until much of Gamla Stan looked like something a tubercular Godzilla might have coughed up. I made a fatuous remark about how badly people behave when they're frightened, and Molly said, 'Come on, Tyler, you actually feel sympathy for these assholes?'

'I didn't say that, Moll.'

'Because of the Spin, they get a free pass to trash their parliament building? Why, because they're frightened?'

'It's not an excuse. It's a motive. They don't have a future. They believe they're doomed.'

'Doomed to die. Well, welcome to the human condition. They're gonna die, you're gonna die, I'm gonna die