SPIN

'In a certain sense, yes, living things. Artificial living things we can launch into space.'

'So what do they do, Jase?'

His grin got bigger. 'They eat ice,' he said, 'and they shit information.'

4X109 A.D.

I crossed a few yards of pressed earth to which weathered asphalt clung in scabrous patches, and came to an embankment and slid down it, noisily, with my hard shell suitcases full of modest clothing and handwritten notes and digital files and Martian pharmaceuticals. I landed in a drainage ditch, thigh-deep in water green as papaya leaves and warm as the tropical night. The water reflected the scarred moon and stank of manure.

I hid the luggage in a dry place halfway up the embankment and pulled myself the rest of the way up, lying at an angle that concealed my body but allowed a view of the road, Ibu Ina's concrete-box clinic, and the black car parked in front of it.

The men from the car had broken in through the back door. They switched on more lights as they moved through the building, making yellow squares of windows with drawn blinds, but I had no way of knowing what they were doing there. Searching the place, I guessed. I tried to estimate how long they spent inside, but I seemed to have lost the ability to calculate time or even to read the numbers on my watch. The numerals glowed like restless fireflies but wouldn't stand still long enough to make sense.

One of the men left by the front door, walked to the car, and started the engine. The second man emerged a few seconds later and ducked into the passenger seat. The midnight-colored car rolled close to me as it turned onto the road, headlights sweeping over the berm. I ducked and lay still until the motor noise faded.

Then I thought about what to do next. The question was difficult to answer, because I was tired—suddenly, massively tired; too weak to stand up. I wanted to go back to the clinic and find a phone and warn Ibu Ina about the men in the car. But maybe En would do that. I hoped so. Because I wasn't going to make it to the clinic. My legs wouldn't do anything but tremble when I willed them to move. This was more than fatigue. It felt like paralysis.

And when I looked at the clinic again there was smoke curling out of the roof vent and the light behind the blinds was flickery yellow. Fire.

The men from the car had set fire to Ibu Ina's clinic, and there was nothing I could do about it but close my eyes and hope I wouldn't die here before someone found me.

* * * * *

The stench of smoke and the sound of weeping woke me.

Still not yet daylight. But I found I could move, at least a little, with considerable effort and pain, and I seemed to be thinking more or less clearly. So I levered myself up the slope, inch after inch.

There were cars and people all over the open space between here and the clinic, headlights and flashlights cutting spastic arcs across the sky. The clinic was a smoldering ruin. Its concrete walls were still standing but the roof had collapsed and the building had been eviscerated by the fire. I managed to stand up. I walked toward the sound of weeping.

The sound came from Ibu Ina. She sat on an island of asphalt hugging her knees. She was surrounded by a group of women who gave me dark, suspicious looks as I approached her. But when Ina saw me she sprang to her feet, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. 'Tyler Dupree!' She ran toward me. 'I thought you were burned to death! Burned up along with everything else!'

She grabbed me, embraced me, held me up—my legs had turned rubbery again. 'The clinic,' I managed to say. 'All your work. Ina, I'm so sorry…'

'No,' she said. 'The clinic is a building. The medical paraphernalia can be replaced. You, on the other hand, are unique. En told us all how you sent him away when the arsonists came. You saved his life, Tyler!' She stood back. 'Tyler? Are you all right?'

I wasn't all right. I looked past Ina's shoulder at the sky. It was almost dawn. The ancient sun was rising. Mount Merapi was outlined against the indigo blue sky. 'Just tired,' I said, and closed my eyes. I felt my legs fold under me and I heard Ina calling for help, and then I slept some more—for days, they told me later.

* * * * *

For obvious reasons, I couldn't stay in the village.

Ina wanted to nurse me through the last of the drug crisis, and she felt the village owed me protection. After all, I had saved En's life (or so she insisted), and En was not only her nephew but was related to virtually everyone else in town, one way or another. I was a hero. But I was also a magnet for the attention of evil men, and if not for Ina's pleading I suspect the kepala desa would have put me on the first bus to Padang and to hell with it. So I was taken, along with my luggage, to an uninhabited village house (the owners had gone rantau months ago) long enough for other arrangements to be made.

The Minangkabau of West Sumatra knew how to duck and weave in the face of oppression. They had survived the coming of Islam in the sixteenth century, the Padri War, Dutch colonialism, Suharto's New Order, the Negari Restoration and, post-Spin, the New Reformasi and their thuggish national police. Ina had told me some of these stories, both at the clinic and afterward, when I lay in a tiny room in a wooden house under the huge, slow blades of an electric fan. The strength of the Minang, she said, was their flexibility, their deep understanding that the rest of the world was not like home and never would be. (She quoted a Minang proverb: 'In different fields, different grasshoppers; in different ponds, different fish') The tradition of rantau, emigration—of young men going out into the world and coming back wealthier or wiser—had made them a sophisticated people. The simple wooden buffalo-horn houses of the village were adorned with aerostat antennas, and most families in the village, Ina said, regularly received letters or e-mail from family in Australia, Europe, Canada, the United States.

It was not surprising, then, that there were Minangkabau working at every level on the docks at Padang. Ina's ex-husband, Jala, was only one of many in the import/export trade who organized rantau expeditions to the Arch and beyond. It was no coincidence that Diane's inquiries had led her to Jala and thence to Ibu Ina and this highland village. 'Jala is opportunistic and he can be mean in a petty way, but he's not unscrupulous,' Ina said. 'Diane was lucky to find him, or else she's a good judge of character—probably the latter. In any case Jala has no love for the New Reformasi, fortunately for all concerned.'

(She had divorced Jala, she said, because he had formed the bad habit of sleeping with disreputable women in the city. He spent too much money on his girlfriends and had twice brought home curable but alarming venereal diseases. He was a bad husband, Ina said, but not an especially bad man. He wouldn't betray Diane to the authorities unless he was captured and physically tortured… and he was far too clever to let himself be captured.)

'The men who burned your clinic—'

'They must have followed Diane to the hotel in Padang and then interrogated the driver who brought you there.'

'But why burn the building down?'

'I don't know, but I suspect it was an attempt to frighten you and drive you into the open. And a warning to anyone who might help you.'

'If they found the clinic, they'll know your name.'

'But they won't come into the village openly, guns blazing. Things have not quite deteriorated to that degree. I expect they'll watch the waterfront and hope we do something stupid.'

'Even so, if your name is on a list, if you try to open another clinic—'

'But that was never my plan.'

'No?'

'No. You've convinced me that the rantau gadang might be a good thing for a physician to undertake. If you don't mind the competition?'

'I don't understand.'

'I mean that there is a simple solution for all our problems, one I've been contemplating a long time. The entire village has considered it, one way or another. Many have already left. We're not a big successful town like Belubus or Batusangkar. The land here isn't especially rich and every year we lose more people to the city or other clans in other towns or to the rantau gadang, and why not? There's room in the new world.'

'You want to emigrate?'

'Me, Jala, my sister and her sister and my nephews and cousins—more than thirty of us, all told. Jala has