Robert Charles Wilson - Spin

Hugo Award Winner for Best Novel 2006

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless diska heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the worlds artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though theyd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than insidemore than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader whos forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humansand immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earths probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sunand report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere. So we rented a room on the third floor of a colonial-style hotel in Padang where we wouldnt be noticed for a while.

Nine hundred euros a night bought us privacy and a balcony view of the Indian Ocean. During pleasant weather, and there had been no shortage of that over the last few days, we could see the nearest part of the Archway: a cloud-colored vertical line that rose from the horizon and vanished, still rising, into blue haze. As impressive as this seemed, only a fraction of the whole structure was visible from the west coast of Sumatra. The Archways far leg descended to the undersea peaks of the Carpenter Ridge more than a thousand kilometers away, spanning the Mentawai Trench like a wedding band dropped edge-up into a shallow pond. On dry land, it would have reached from Bombay on the eastern coast of India to Madras on the west. Or, say, very roughly, New York to Chicago.

Diane had spent most of the afternoon on the balcony, sweating in the shade of a faded striped umbrella. The view fascinated her, and I was pleased and relieved that she was after everything that had happenedstill capable of taking such pleasure in it.

I joined her at sunset. Sunset was the best time. A freighter heading down the coast to the port of Teluk Bayur became a necklace of lights in the offshore blackness, effortlessly gliding. The near leg of the Arch gleamed like a burnished red nail pinning sky to sea. We watched the Earths shadow climb the pillar as the city grew dark.

It was a technology, in the famous quotation, indistinguishable from magic. What else but magic would allow the uninterrupted flow of air and sea from the Bay of Bengal to the Indian Ocean but would transport a surface vessel to far stranger ports? What miracle of engineering permitted a structure with a radius of a thousand kilometers to support its own weight? What was it made of, and how did it do what it did?

Perhaps only Jason Lawton could have answered those questions. But Jason wasnt with us.

Diane slouched in a deck chair, her yellow sundress and comically wide straw hat reduced by the gathering darkness to geometries of shadow. Her skin was clear, smooth, nut brown. Her eyes caught the last light very fetchingly, but her look was still warythat hadnt changed.

She glanced up at me. Youve been fidgeting all day.

Im thinking of writing something, I said. Before it starts. Sort of a memoir.

Afraid of what you might lose? But thats unreasonable, Tyler. Its not like your memorys being erased.

No, not erased; but potentially blurred, softened, defocused. The other side effects of the drug were temporary and endurable, but the possibility of memory loss terrified me.

Anyway, she said, the odds are in your favor. You know that as well as anyone. There is a risk but its only a risk, and a pretty minor one at that.

And if it had happened in her case maybe it had been a blessing.

Even so, I said. Id feel better writing something down.

If you dont want to go ahead with this you dont have to. Youll know when youre ready.

No, I want to do it. Or so I told myself.

Then it has to start tonight.

I know. But over the next few weeks

You probably wont feel like writing.

Unless I cant help myself. Graphomania was one of the less alarming of the potential side effects.

See what you think when the nausea hits. She gave me a consoling smile. I guess we all have something were afraid to let go of.

It was a troubling comment, one I didnt want to think about. Look, I said, maybe we should just get started. The air smelled tropical, tinged with chlorine from the hotel pool three stories down. Padang was a major international port these days, full of foreigners: Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, even stray Americans like Diane and me, folks who couldnt afford luxury transit and werent qualified for U.N. approved resettlement programs. It was a lively but often lawless city, especially since the New Reformasi had come to power in Jakarta.

But the hotel was secure and the stars were out in all their scattered glory. The peak of the Archway was the brightest thing in the sky now, a delicate silver letter U (Unknown, Unknowable) written upside down by a dyslexic God. I held Dianes hand while we watched it fade.

What are you thinking about? she asked.

The last time I saw the old constellations. Virgo, Leo, Sagittarius: the astrologers lexicon, reduced to footnotes in a history book.

They would have been different from here, though, wouldnt they? The southern hemisphere? I supposed they would.

Then, in the full darkness of the night, we went back into the room. I switched on the room lights while Diane pulled the blinds and unpacked the syringe and ampoule kit I had taught her to use. She filled the sterile syringe, frowned and tapped out a bubble. She looked professional, but her hand was trembling. I took off my shirt and stretched out on the bed.

Tyler

Suddenly she was the reluctant one. No second thoughts, I said. I know what Im getting into. And weve talked this through a dozen times.

She nodded and swabbed the inside of my elbow with alcohol. She held the syringe in her right hand, point up. The small quantity of fluid in it looked as innocent as water.

That was a long time ago, she said.

What was?

When we looked at the stars that time.

Im glad you havent forgotten.

Of course I havent forgotten. Now make a fist.

The pain was trivial. At least at first.

I was twelve, and the twins were thirteen, the night the stars disappeared from the sky.

It was October, a couple of weeks before Halloween, and the three of us had been ordered to the basement of the Lawton housethe Big House, we called itfor the duration of an adults-only social event.