"Is he worried about this China thing?"

My mom had been a news junkie since the October Event, watching CNN not for pleasure or even information but mainly to reassure herself, the way a Mexican villager might keep an eye on a nearby volcano, hoping not to see smoke. The China thing was only a diplomatic crisis at this stage, she said, though sabers had been gently rattled. Something about a controversial proposed satellite launch. "You should ask Jason about it."

"Has E.D. been worrying you about this stuff?"

"Hardly. I do hear things from Carol every once in a while."

"I don't know how much of that you should trust."

"Come on, Ty. She drinks, but she's not stupid. Neither am I, particularly."

"I didn't mean that."

"Most of what I hear about Jason and Diane these days I get through Carol."

"Did she say whether Diane was coming up to the Berkshires? I can't get a straight answer out of Jase."

My mother hesitated. "Diane's been a little unpredictable the last couple of years. I guess that's what it's all about."

"What does 'unpredictable' mean, exactly?"

"Oh, you know. Not much success at school. A little trouble with the law—"

"With the law?"

"No, I mean, she didn't rob a bank or anything, but she's been picked up a couple of times when NK rallies got out of hand."

"What the hell was she doing at NK rallies?"

Another pause. "You should really ask Jason about that."

I intended to.

She coughed—I pictured her with her hand over the phone, her head turned delicately away—and I said, "How are you feeling?"

"Tired."

"Anything new with the doctor?" She was being treated for anemia. Bottles of iron tablets.

"No. I'm just getting old, Ty. Everybody gets old sooner or later." She added, "I'm thinking of retiring. If you call what I do work. Now that the twins are gone it's just Carol and E.D., and not much E.D. since this Washington business started up."

"Have you told them you're thinking of leaving?"

"Not yet."

"It wouldn't be the Big House without you."

She laughed, not happily. "I think I've had about enough of the Big House for one lifetime, thanks."

But she never mentioned the move again. It was Carol, I think, who convinced her to stay.

* * * * *

Jase came in the front door midafternoon. "Ty?" His over-large jeans hung on his hips like the rigging of a becalmed ship, and his T-shirt was spackled with the ghosts of gravy stains. "Give me a hand with the barbecue, can you?"

I went out back with him. The barbecue was a standard propane grill. Jase had never used one. He opened the tank valve, pushed the lighter button and flinched when the flames blossomed up. Then he grinned at me. "We have steaks. We have three-bean salad from the deli in town."

"And hardly any mosquitos," I said.

"They sprayed for them this spring. Hungry?"

I was. Somehow, dozing through the afternoon, I had worked up an appetite. "Are we cooking for two or three?"

"I'm still waiting to hear from Diane. Probably won't know until this evening. Just us for dinner, I think."

"Assuming the Chinese don't nuke us first."

This was bait.

Jason rose to it. "Are you worried about the Chinese, Ty? That's not even a crisis anymore. It's been settled."

"That's a relief." I had heard about the crisis and the resolution all in the same day. "My mom mentioned it. Something on the news."

"The Chinese military want to nuke the polar artifacts. They have nuclear-tipped missiles sitting on pads in Jiuquan, ready to launch. The reasoning is, if they can damage the polar devices they might take down the entire October shield. Of course there's no reason to believe it would work. How likely is it that a technology capable of manipulating time and gravitation would be vulnerable to our weapons?"

"So we threatened the Chinese and they backed down?"

"A little of that. But we offered a carrot, too. We offered to take them onboard."

"I don't understand."

"To let them join us in our own little project to save the world."

"You're scaring me a little here, Jase."

"Hand me those tongs. I'm sorry. I know this sounds cryptic. I'm not supposed to be talking about these things at all. With anyone."

"You're making an exception in my case?"

"I always make an exception in your case." He smiled. "We'll discuss it over dinner, okay?"

I left him at the grill, shrouded in smoke and heat.

* * * * *

Two consecutive American administrations had been scolded by the press for "doing nothing" about the Spin. But it was a criticism without teeth. If there was anything practical that could be done, no one seemed to know what it was. And any clearly retaliatory action—like the one the Chinese had proposed—would have been prohibitively dangerous.

Perihelion was pushing a radically different approach.

"The governing metaphor," Jase said, "isn't combat. It's judo. Using a bigger opponent's weight and momentum against him. That's what we want to do with the Spin."

He told me this laconically while he cut up his grilled steak with surgical attention. We ate in the kitchen with the back door open. A huge bumblebee, so fat and yellow it looked like an airborne knot of woolen threads, bumped against the bug screen.

"Try to think about the Spin," he said, "as an opportunity rather than an assault."

"An opportunity to do what? Die prematurely?"

"An opportunity to use time for our own ends, in a way we never could before."

"Isn't time what they took away from us?"

"On the contrary. Outside our little terrestrial bubble we have millions of years to play with. And we have a tool that works extremely reliably over exactly those spans of time."

"Tool," I said, bewildered, while he speared another cube of beef. The meal was straight to the point. A steak on a plate, bottle of beer on the side. No frills, barring the three-bean salad, of which he took a modest helping.

"Yes, a tool, the obvious one: evolution."

"Evolution."

"We can't have this talk, Tyler, if you just repeat everything back to me."

"Okay, well, evolution as a tool… I still don't see how we can evolve sufficiently in thirty or forty years to make a difference."

"Not us, for god's sake, and certainly not in thirty or forty years. I'm talking about simple forms of life. I'm talking about eons. I'm talking about Mars."

"Mars." Oops.

"Don't be obtuse. Think about it."

Mars was a functionally dead planet, even if it may once have possessed the primitive precursors to life. Outside the Spin bubble, Mars had been "evolving" for millions of years since the October Event, warmed by the expanding sun. It was still, according to the latest orbital photographs, a dead, dry planet. If it had possessed simple life and a supportive climate it could have become, I guessed, a lush green jungle by now. But it didn't and it wasn't.

"People used to talk about terraforming," Jason said. "Remember those speculative novels you used to read?"

"I still read them, Jase."

"More power to you. How would you go about terraforming Mars?"

"Try to get enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to warm it up. Release its frozen water. Seed it with simple organisms. But even with the most optimistic assumptions, that would take—"

He smiled.

I said, "You're kidding me."

"No." The smile went away. "Not at all. No, this is quite serious."

"How would you even begin—?"

"We would begin with a series of synchronized launches containing payloads of engineered bacteria. Simple ion engines and a slow glide to Mars. Mostly controlled crashes, survivable for unicells, and a few larger payloads with bunker-buster warheads to deliver the same organisms below the surface of the planet where we suspect the presence of buried water. Hedge our bets with multiple launches and a whole spectrum of candidate organisms. The idea is to get enough organic action going to loosen up the carbon locked into the crust and respirate it into the atmosphere. Give it a few million years—months, our time—then survey the planet again. If it's a warmer place with a denser atmosphere and maybe a few ponds of semiliquid water we do the cycle again, this time with multicelled plants engineered for the environment. Which puts some oxygen into the air and maybe cranks up the atmospheric pressure another couple of millibars. Repeat as necessary. Add more millions of years and stir. In a reasonable time—the way our clocks measure time—you might be able to cook up a habitable planet."