Spin by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

hugged her parka and shivered. Not because of the temperature but because she had come to the fundamental question: “How
much
time, Jason? How
much
time is passing out there?”
    Out there beyond the blankness of the sky.
    Jason hesitated, visibly reluctant to answer her.
    “A lot of time,” he admitted.
    “Just tell us,” she said faintly.
    “Well. There are all kinds of measures. But the last launch, what they did was bounce a calibration signal off the surface of the moon. The moon gets farther away from the Earth every year, did you know that? By some minuscule but measurable amount. If you measure that distance you have a kind of rough calendar, more accurate the more time has passed. Add that to other signifiers, like the motion of nearby stars—”
    “
How much time
, Jason?”
    “It’s been five years and a couple of months since the October Event. Outside the barrier, that translates into a little over five hundred million years.”
    It was a breathtaking number.
    I couldn’t think of anything to say. Not a single word. I was rendered speechless. Thoughtless. At that moment there was no sound at all, nothing but the crisp emptiness of the night.
    Then Diane, who had seen straight to the scary heart of the thing, said, “And how long do we have left?”
    “I don’t know that either. It depends. We’re protected, to some degree, by the barrier, but how effective is that protection? But there are some unavoidable facts. The sun is mortal, like every other star. It burns hydrogen and it expands and gets hotter as it ages. The Earth exists in a sort of habitable zone in the solar system, and that zone is moving steadily outward. Like I said, we’re protected, we’re okay for the time being no matter what. But eventually the Earth will be inside the heliosphere of the sun. Swallowed up by it. Past a certain point there’s simply no going back.”
    “How
long
, Jase?”
    He gave her a pitying look. “Forty, maybe fifty years,” he said. “Give or take.”
     
     
     

4X10 9 A.D.
     
     
    The pain was difficult to manage, even with the morphine Diane had purchased at ridiculous cost from a pharmacy in Padang. The fever was worse.
    It wasn’t continuous. It came in waves, clusters, bubbles of heat and noise bursting unexpectedly in my head. It made my body capricious, unpredictable. One night I groped for a nonexistent glass of water and smashed a bedside lamp, waking the couple in the next room.
    Come morning, temporarily lucid again, I couldn’t remember the incident. But I saw the congealed blood on my knuckles and I overhead Diane paying off the angry concierge.
    “Did I really do that?” I asked her.
    “Afraid so.”
    She sat in a wicker chair next to the bed. She had ordered up room service, scrambled eggs and orange juice, so I guessed it was morning. The sky beyond the gauzy drapes was blue. The balcony door was open, admitting wafts of pleasantly warm air and the smell of the ocean. “I’m sorry,” I said.
    “You were out of your mind. I’d tell you to forget about it. Except you obviously
have
.” She put a soothing hand on my forehead. “And it’s not over yet, I’m afraid.”
    “How long—?”
    “It’s been a week.”
    “Only a week?”
    “Only.”
    I wasn’t even halfway through the ordeal.
     
     
    But the lucid intervals were useful for writing.
    Graphomania was one of the several side effects of the drug. Diane, when she was undergoing the same ordeal, once wrote the phrase
Am I not my brother’s keeper
in hundreds of nearly identical repetitions over fourteen sheets of foolscap. My own graphomania was at least a little more coherent. I stacked up handwritten pages on the bedside table while I waited for the fever to launch a renewed offensive, rereading what I’d written in an attempt to fix it in my mind.
    Diane spent the day out of the hotel. When she came back I asked her where she’d been.
    “Making connections,” she told me. She said she’d contacted a