It was a breathtaking idea. I felt like one of those sidekick characters in a Victorian mystery novel—"It was an audacious, even ludicrous, plan he had contrived, but try as I might, I could find no flaw in it!"

Except one. One fundamental flaw.

"Jason," I said. "Even if this is possible. What good does it do us?"

"If Mars is habitable, people can go there and live."

"All seven or eight billion of us?"

He snorted. "Hardly. No, just a few pioneers. Breeding stock, if you want to be clinical about it."

"And what are they supposed to do?"

"Live, reproduce, and die. Millions of generations for each of our years."

"To what end?"

"If nothing else, to give the human species a second chance in the solar system. In the best case—they'll have all the knowledge we can give them, plus a few million years to improve on it. Inside the Spin bubble we don't have time enough to figure out who the Hypotheticals are or why they're doing this to us. Our Martian heirs might have a better chance. Maybe they can do our thinking for us."

Or our fighting for us?

(This was, incidentally, the first time I had heard them called "Hypotheticals"—the hypothetical controlling intelligences, the unseen and largely theoretical creatures who had enclosed us in their time vault. The name didn't catch on with the general public for a few more years. I was sorry when it did. The word was too clinical, it suggested something abstract and coolly objective; the truth was likely to be more complex.)

"There's a plan," I said, "to actually do these things?"

"Oh yes." Jason had finished three quarters of his steak. He pushed his plate away. "It's not even prohibitively expensive. Engineering extremely hardy unicells is the only problematic part. The surface of Mars is cold, dry, virtually airless, and bathed in sterilizing radiation every time the sun comes up. Even so, we have whole rafts of extremophiles to work with—bacteria living in Antarctic rocks, bacteria living in the outflow from nuclear reactors. And everything else is fully proven technology. We know rockets work. We know organic evolution works. The only really new thing is our perspective. To be able to get extremely long-term results literally days or months after we launch. It's… people are calling it 'teleological engineering.'"

"It's almost like," I said (testing the new word he had given me), "what the Hypotheticals are doing."

"Yes," Jason said, raising his eyebrows in a look I still found flattering after all these years: surprise, respect. "Yes, in a way I guess it is."

* * * * *

I had once read an interesting detail in a book about the first manned moon landing back in 1969. At that time, the book said, some of the very elderly—men and women born in the nineteenth century, old enough to remember a world before automobiles and television—had been reluctant to believe the news. Words that would have made only fairy-tale sense in their childhood ("two men walked on the moon tonight") were being offered as statements of fact. And they couldn't accept it. It confounded their sense of what was reasonable and what was absurd.

Now it was my turn.

We're going to terraform and colonize Mars, said my friend Jason, and he wasn't delusional… or at least no more delusional than the dozens of smart and powerful people who apparently shared his conviction. So the proposition was serious; it must already have been, at some bureaucratic level, a work in progress.

I took a walk around the grounds after dinner while there was still a little daylight.

Mike the yard guy had done a decent job. The lawn glowed like a mathematician's idea of a garden, the cultivation of a primary color. Beyond it, shadows had begun to rise in the wooded acreage. Diane would have appreciated the woods in this light, I thought. I thought again of those summer sessions by the creek, years ago now, when she would read to us from old books. Once, when we talked about the Spin, Diane had quoted a little rhyme by the English poet A. E. Housman:

The Grizzly Bear is huge and wild;

He has devoured the infant child.

The infant child is not aware

He has been eaten by the bear.

* * * * *

Jason was on the phone when I came back through the kitchen door. He looked at me, then turned away and lowered his voice.

"No," he said. "If it has to be that way, but—no, I understand. All right. I said all right, didn't I? All right means all right."

He pocketed the phone. I said, "Was that Diane?"

He nodded.

"She's coming?"

"She's coming. But there are a couple of things I want to mention before she gets here. You know what we talked about over dinner? We can't share that with her. Or, actually, anyone. It's not public information."

"You mean it's classified."

"Technically, I suppose so, yes."

"But you told me about it."

"Yes. That was a federal crime." He smiled. "Mine, not yours. And I trust you to be discreet about it. Be patient—it'll be all over CNN in a couple of months. Besides, I have plans for you, Ty. One of these days, Perihelion is going to vet candidates for some extremely rugged homesteading. We'll need all kinds of physicians on site. Wouldn't it be great if you could do that, if we could work together?"

I was startled. "I just graduated, Jase. I haven't interned."

"All things in time."

I said, "You don't trust Diane?"

His smile collapsed. "No, frankly. Not anymore. Not these days."

"When will she get here?"

"Before noon tomorrow."

"And what is it you don't want to tell me?"

"She's bringing her boyfriend."

"Is that a problem?"

"You'll see."

NO SINGLE THING ABIDES

I woke up knowing I wasn't ready to see her again. Woke up in E. D. Lawton's plush summerhouse in the Berkshires with the sun shining through filigreed lace blinds thinking, Enough bullshit. I was tired of it. All the self-serving bullshit of the last eight years, up to and including my affair with Candice Boone, who had seen through my own wishful lies sooner than I had. "You're a little bit fixated on these Lawton people," Candice had once said. Tell me about it.

I couldn't honestly say I was still in love with Diane. The connection between us had never been as unambiguous as that. We had both grown in and out of it, like vines weaving through a latticework fence. But at its best it had been a real connection, an emotion almost frightening in its gravity and maturity. Which was why I had been so eager to disguise it. It would have frightened her, too.

I still found myself conducting imaginary conversations with her, usually late at night, offering asides to the starless sky. I was selfish enough to miss her but sane enough to know we had never really been together. I was fully prepared to forget about her.

I just wasn't prepared to see her again.

* * * * *

Downstairs, Jason sat in the kitchen while I fixed myself breakfast. He had propped open the door. Sweet breezes swept the house. I was thinking seriously of throwing my bag into the back of the Hyundai and just driving away. "Tell me about this NK thing," I said.

"Do you read the papers at all?" Jason asked. "Do they keep med students in isolation up at Stony Brook?"

Of course I knew a little bit about NK, mostly what I'd heard on the news or picked up from lunchroom conversation. I knew NK stood for "New Kingdom." I knew it was a Spin-inspired Christian movement—at least nominally Christian, though it had been denounced by mainstream and conservative churches alike. I knew it attracted mainly the young and disaffected. A couple of guys in my freshman class had dropped out of school and into the NK lifestyle, trading shaky academic careers for a less demanding enlightenment.

"It's really just a millenarian movement," Jase said. "Too late for the millennium but right on time for the end of the world."