Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

me.
    The house seemed to generate it. Last night’s storms had passed and a pleasant morning breeze came through the calico curtains. Sunlight picked out imperfections in the grain of the butcher-block kitchen counters. I ate a slow breakfast by the window and watched clouds like stately schooners sail the horizon.
    A little after ten the doorbell rang, and for a second I was panicked by the thought that it might be Diane—had she decided to show up early? But it turned out to be “Mike, the landscape guy,” in a bandanna and sleeveless T-shirt, warning me that he was going to do the lawn—he didn’t want to wake anybody up but the mower was pretty loud. He could come back this afternoon if it was a problem. No problem at all, I said, and a few minutes later he was riding the contours of the property on an ancient green John Deere that smudged the air with burning oil. Still a little sleepy, I wondered how this yard work would look to what Jason was fond of calling the universe at large. To the universe at large, Earth was a planet in near-stasis. Those blades of grass had arisen over centuries, as stately in their motion as the evolution of stars. Mike, a force of nature born a couple of billion years ago, scythed them with a vast and irresistible patience. The severed blades fell as if lightly touched by gravity, many seasons between sun and loam, loam in which Methuselah worms slid while elsewhere in the galaxy, perhaps, empires rose and fell.
    Jason was right, of course: it was a difficult thing to believe in. Or, no, not to “believe in”—people believe all kinds of implausible things—but to accept as a fundamental truth about the world. I sat on the porch of the house, on the side away from the roaring Deere, and the air was cool and the sun felt fine when I turned my face to it even though I knew it for what it was, radiation filtered from a star in full-out runaway Spin, in a world where centuries were squandered like seconds.
    Can’t be true.
Is
true.
    I thought about med school again, the anatomy class I had told Jason about. Candice Boone, my one-time almost-fiancee, had shared that class with me. She had been stoic during the dissection but not afterward. A human body, she said, ought to contain love, hate, courage, cowardice, soul, spirit… not this slimy assortment of blue and red imponderables. Yes. And we ought not to be dragged unwilling into a harsh and deadly future.
    But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with. I had said as much to Candice.
    She told me I was “cold.” But it was still the closest thing to wisdom I had ever been able to muster.
     
     
    The morning rolled on. Mike finished the lawn and drove off, leaving the air full of humid silence. After a time I stirred myself and telephoned my mom in Virginia, where the weather, she said, was less inviting than in Massachusetts: still cloudy after a storm last night that had brought down a few trees and power lines. I told her I’d made it safely to E.D.‘s summer rental. She asked me how Jason seemed, though she had probably seen him more recently than I had, during one of his visits to the Big House. “Older,” I said. “But still Jase.”
    “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