"No me?"

She moved across the sofa and, because it had become that kind of conversation, put a hand on my cheek. Her hand was cool, the temperature of the drink she'd been holding. "You were the exception. I was scared. You were incredibly patient. I appreciated that."

"But we couldn't—"

"Touch."

"Touch. E.D. would never have stood for it."

She took her hand away. "We could have hidden it from him if we'd wanted to. But you're right, E.D. was the problem. He infected everything. It was obscene, the way he made your mother live a kind of second-class existence. It was debasing. Can I confess this? I absolutely hated being his daughter. I especially hated the idea that if anything, you know, happened between us, it might be your way of taking revenge on E. D. Lawton."

She sat back, a little surprised at herself, I think.

"Of course," I said carefully, "it wouldn't have been."

"I was confused."

"Is that what NK is for you? Revenge on E.D.?"

"No," she said, still smiling, "I don't love Simon just because he makes my father angry. Life's not that simple, Ty."

"I didn't mean to suggest—"

"But you see how insidious it is? Certain suspicions come into your head and get stuck there. No, NK isn't about my father. It's about discovering the divinity in what's happened to the Earth and expressing that divinity in daily life."

"Maybe the Spin isn't that simple, either."

"We're either being murdered or transformed, Simon says."

"He told me you're building heaven on Earth."

"Isn't that what Christians are supposed to do? Make the Kingdom of God by expressing it in their lives?"

"Or at least dancing to it."

"Now you sound like Jason. Obviously I can't defend everything about the movement. Last week we were at a conclave in Philadelphia and we met this couple, our age, friendly, intelligent—'alive in the spirit,' Simon called them. We went out to dinner and talked about the Parousia. Then they invited us up to their hotel room, and suddenly they were laying out lines of coke and playing porn videos. All kinds of marginal people are attracted to NK. No question. And for most of them the theology barely exists, except as a fuzzy image of the Garden of Eden. But at its best the movement is everything it claims to be, a genuine living faith."

"Faith in what, Diane? Ekstasis? Promiscuity?"

I regretted the words as soon as I'd said them. She looked hurt. "Ekstasis isn't about promiscuity. Not when it succeeds, anyway. But in the body of God no act is prohibited as long as it isn't vengeful or angry, as long as it expresses divine as well as human love."

The phone rang then. I must have looked guilty. Diane saw my expression and laughed.

Jason's first words when I picked up: "I said we'd have some warning. I'm sorry. I was wrong."

"What?"

"Tyler… haven't you seen the sky?"

* * * * *

So we went upstairs to find a window facing the sunset.

The west bedroom was generously large, equipped with a mahogany chifferobe, a brass-railed bed, and big windows. I drew the curtains wide. Diane gasped.

There was no setting sun. Or, rather, there were several.

The entire western sky was alight. Instead of the single orb of the sun there was an arc of reddish glow that stretched across at least fifteen degrees of the horizon, containing what looked like a flickering multiple exposure of a dozen or more sunsets. The light was erratic; it brightened and faded like a distant fire.

We gaped at it for an endless time. Eventually Diane said, "What's happening, Tyler? What's going on?"

I told her what Jason had told me about the Chinese nuclear warheads.

"He knew this might happen?" she asked, then answered herself: "Of course he did." The strange light gave the room a roseate hue and fell on her cheeks like a fever. "Will it kill us?"

"Jason doesn't think so. It'll scare the hell out of people, though."

"But is it dangerous? Radiation or something?"

I doubted it. But it wasn't out of the question. "Try the TV," I said. There was a plasma panel in each bedroom, framed in walnut paneling opposite the bed. I figured any kind of remotely lethal radiation would also screw up broadcasting and reception.

But the TV worked well enough to show us news channel views of crowds gathering in cities across Europe, where it was already dark—or as dark as it was going to get that night. No lethal radiation but plenty of incipient panic. Diane sat motionless on the edge of the bed, hands folded in her lap, clearly frightened. I sat beside her and said, "If any of this was going to kill us we'd be dead by now."

Outside, the sunset stuttered toward darkness. The diffuse glow resolved into several distinct setting suns, each ghostly pale, then a coil of sunlight like a luminous spring that arced across the whole sky and vanished just as suddenly.

We sat hip to hip as the sky grew darker. Then the stars came out.

* * * * *

I managed to get hold of Jase one more time before the bandwidth was overwhelmed. Simon had just finished paying for the plug set for his car, he said, when the sky erupted. The roads out of Stockbridge were already crowded and the radio reported scattered looting in Boston and stalled traffic on every major route, so Jase had pulled into a parking lot behind a motel and rented a room for the night for himself and Simon. In the morning, he said, he would probably have to head back to Washington, but he'd drop Simon at the house first.

Then he passed his phone to Simon and I passed mine to Diane and left the room while she talked to her fiance. The summerhouse seemed ominously huge and empty. I walked around turning on lights until she called me back.

"Another drink?" I asked her.

"Oh yes," she said.

* * * * *

We went outside a little after midnight.

Diane was putting on a brave face. Simon had given her some kind of New Kingdom pep talk. In NK theology there was no conventional Second Coming, no Rapture or Armageddon; the Spin was all these things put together, all the ancient prophecies obliquely fulfilled. And if God wanted to use the canvas of the sky to paint us the naked geometry of time, Simon said, He would do so, and our awe and fear were entirely appropriate to the occasion. But we shouldn't be overwhelmed by these feelings because the Spin was ultimately an act of salvation, the last and best chapter in human history.

Or something like that.

So we went outside to watch the sky because Diane thought it was a brave and spiritual thing to do. The sky was cloudless and the air smelled of pine. The highway was a long way off, but we heard occasional faint sounds of car horns and sirens.

Our shadows danced around us as various fractions of the sky lit up, now north, now south. We sat on the grass a few yards from the steady glow of the porch light and Diane leaned into my shoulder and I put my arm around her, both of us a little drunk.

Despite years of emotional chill, despite our history at the Big House, despite her engagement to Simon Townsend, despite NK and Ekstasis and despite even the nuke-inspired derangement of the sky, I was exquisitely conscious of the pressure of her body next to mine. And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar.

The sky sparked with strange light. Not the unadulterated light of the Spinning universe, which would have killed us on the spot. Instead it was a series of snapshots of the sky, consecutive midnights compressed into microseconds, afterimages fading like the pop of a flashbulb; then the same sky a century or a millennium later, like sequences in a surreal movie. Some of the frames were blurred long-exposures, starlight and moonlight become ghostly orbs or circles or scimitars. Some were crisp and quickly fading stills. Toward the north the lines and circles in the sky were narrower, their radii relatively small, while the equatorial stars were more restless, waltzing over huge ellipses. Full and half and waning moons blinked from horizon to horizon in pale orange transparencies. The Milky Way was a band of white fluorescence (now brighter, now darker) lit by flaring, dying stars. Stars were created and stars were demolished with every breath of summer air.