SPIN

'Look out the window, Jase. The sun's shining. What kind of optical illusion lets the sunshine through but hides the stars and the moon?'

'Again, how should I know? But what's the alternative, Tyler? Somebody put the moon and the stars in a sack and ran away with them?'

No, I thought. It was the Earth that was in the sack, for some reason not even Jason could divine.

'Good point, though,' he said, 'about the sun. Not an optical barrier but an optical filter. Interesting…'

'So who put it there?'

'How should I—?' He shook his head irritably. 'You're inferring too much. Who says anybody put it there? It could be a once-in-a-billion-years natural event, like the magnetic poles reversing. It's a big jump to assume there's some controlling intelligence behind it.'

'But it could be true.'

'Lots of things could be true.'

I had taken enough gentle ribbing about my science-fiction reading that I was reluctant to say the word 'aliens.' But of course it was the first thing that occurred to me. Me, and plenty of other people. And even Jason had to admit that the idea of intervening extraterrestrials had become infinitely more plausible over the course of the last twenty-four hours.

'But even so,' I said, 'you have to wonder why they'd do it.'

'There are only two plausible reasons. To hide something from us. Or to hide us from something'

'What does your father think?'

'I haven't asked him. He's been on the phone all day. Probably trying to put in an early sell order on his GTE stock.' This was a joke, and I wasn't sure what he meant by it, but it was also my first hint of what the loss of orbital access might mean for the aerospace industry in general and the Lawton family in particular. 'I didn't sleep last night,' Jase admitted. 'Afraid I might miss something. Sometimes I envy my sister. You know, wake me when somebody figures it out.'

I bristled at this perceived slight of Diane. 'She didn't sleep either,' I said.

'Oh? Really? And how would you know?'

Trapped. 'We talked on the phone a little bit…'

'She called you?'

'Yeah, around dawn.'

'Jesus, Tyler, you're blushing.'

'No I'm not.'

'Yes you are.'

I was saved by a brusque knock at the door: E. D. Lawton, who looked like he hadn't slept much either.

Jason's father was an intimidating presence. He was big, broad shouldered, hard to please, easily angered; on weekends he moved through the house like a storm front, all lightning and thunder. My mother had once said, 'E.D.'s not the kind of person you really want attention from. I never did understand why Carol married him.'

He wasn't exactly the classic self-made businessman—his grandfather, retired founder of a spectacularly successful San Francisco law firm, had bankrolled most of E.D.'s early ventures—but he had built himself a lucrative business in high-altitude instrumentation and lighter-than-air technology, and he had done it the hard way, without any real industry connections, at least when he started out.

He entered Jason's room scowling. His eyes lit on me and flashed away. 'Sorry, Tyler, but you'll have to go home now. I need to discuss a few things with Jason.'

Jase didn't object and I wasn't especially eager to stay. So I shrugged into my cloth jacket and left by the back door. I spent the rest of the afternoon by the creek, skipping stones and watching squirrels forage against the coming winter.

* * * * *

The sun, the moon, and the stars.

In the years that followed, children were raised who had never seen the moon with their own eyes; people only five or six years younger than myself passed into maturity knowing the stars mainly from old movies and a handful of increasingly inapt cliches. Once, in my thirties, I played the twentieth-century Antonio Carlos Jobin song Corcovado— 'Quiet nights of quiet stars'—for a younger woman, who asked me, eyes earnestly wide, 'Were the stars noisy?'

But we had lost something more subtle than a few lights in the sky. We had lost a reliable sense of place. The Earth is round, the moon circles the Earth, the Earth circles the sun: that was as much cosmology as most people owned or wanted, and I doubt one in a hundred thought more about it after high school. But they were baffled when it was stolen from them.

We didn't get an official announcement about the sun until the second week of the October Event.

The sun appeared to move in its predictable and eternal manner. It rose and set according to the standard ephemeris, the days grew shorter in their natural precession; there was nothing to suggest a solar emergency. Much on Earth, including life itself, depends on the nature and amount of solar radiation reaching the planet's surface, and in most respects that hadn't changed. Everything about the sun we could see with the naked eye suggested the same yellow class-G star we'd been blinking at all our lives.

What it lacked, however, were sunspots, prominences, or flares.

The sun is a violent, turbulent object. It seethes, it boils, it rings like a bell with vast energies; it bathes the solar system in a stream of charged particles that would kill us if we weren't protected from it by the Earth's magnetic field. But since the October Event, astronomers announced, the sun had become a geometrically perfect orb of unwaveringly uniform and unblemished brightness. And news came from the north that the aurora borealis, product of the interaction of our magnetic field with all those charged solar particles, had shut down like a bad Broadway play.

Other lapses in the new night sky: no shooting stars. The Earth used to accrete eighty million pounds of spaceborne dust annually, the vast majority of it incinerated by atmospheric friction. But no more: no detectable meteorites entered the atmosphere during the first weeks of the October Event, not even the microscopic ones called Brownlee particles. It was, in astrophysical terms, a deafening silence.

Not even Jason could offer an explanation for that.

* * * * *

So the sun wasn't the sun; but it went on shining, counterfeit or not, and as the days passed, days layered and stacked on days, the bewilderment deepened but the sense of public urgency ebbed. (The water wasn't boiling, it was only warm.)

But what a rich source of talk it all was. Not just the celestial mystery but the immediate consequences of it: the telecom crash; the foreign wars no longer monitored and narrated by satellite; the GPS-guided smart bombs rendered irremediably stupid; the fiber-optic goldrush. Pronouncements were issued with depressing regularity from Washington: We have as yet no evidence of hostile intent on the part of any nation or agency and The best minds of our generation are working to understand, explain, and ultimately reverse the potential negative effects of this shroud that has obscured our view of the universe. Soothing word salad from an administration still hoping to identify an enemy, terrestrial or otherwise, capable of such an act. But the enemy was stubbornly elusive. People began to speak of 'a hypothetical controlling intelligence.' Unable to see past the walls of our prison, we were reduced to mapping its edges and corners.

Jason retreated to his room for most of a month after the Event. During this time I didn't speak to him directly, only caught glimpses of him when the twins were picked up by the Rice Academy minibus. But Diane called me on my cell almost every evening, usually around ten or eleven, when we could both count on a little privacy. And I treasured her calls, for reasons I wasn't quite ready to admit to myself.

'Jason's in a pissy mood,' she told me one night. 'He says if we don't know for sure if the sun is the sun, we don't really know anything at all.'

'Maybe he's right.'

'But it's almost a religious thing for Jase. He's always loved maps—did you know that, Tyler? Even when he was very little, he got the idea of how a map worked. He liked to know where he was. It makes sense of things, he used to say. God, I used to love to listen to him talk about maps. I think that's why he's so freaked now, even more than most people. Nothing's where it's supposed to be. He lost his map.'

Of course, there were already clues in place. Before the week was out the military had begun to collect