Free Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

legacy to me: Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, music that had been old even when Marcus Dupree was young, passed down surreptitiously, like a family secret. What I wanted to hear right now was “Harlem Air Shaft,” but the guy who serviced the car before the trip had dumped my presets and programmed a news channel I couldn’t seem to lose. So I was stuck with natural disasters and celebrity misbehavior. There was even talk of the Spin.
    We had begun calling it the Spin by then.
    Even though most of the world didn’t believe in it.
    The polls were pretty clear about that. NASA had released data from their orbital probes the night Jason broke the news to Diane and me, and a flurry of European launches confirmed the American results. But still, eight years after the Spin had been made public, only a minority of Europeans and North Americans considered it “a threat to themselves or their families.” In much of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, sturdy majorities considered the whole thing a U.S. plot or accident, probably a failed attempt to create some kind of SDI defense system.
    I had once asked Jason why this was. He said, “Consider what we’re asking them to believe. We’re talking about, globally, a population with an almost pre-Newtonian grasp of astronomy. How much do you really need to know about the moon and the stars when your life consists of scrounging enough biomass to feed yourself and your family? To say anything meaningful about the Spin to those people you have to start a long way back. The Earth, you have to tell them, is a few billion years old, to begin with. Let them wrestle with the concept of ‘a billion years,’ maybe for the first time. It’s a lot to swallow, especially if you’ve been educated in a Moslem theocracy, an animist village, or a public school in the Bible Belt. Then tell them the Earth isn’t changeless, that there was an era longer than our own when the oceans were steam and the air was poison. Tell them how living things arose spontaneously and evolved sporadically for three billion years before they produced the first arguably human being. Then talk about the sun, how the sun isn’t permanent either but started out as a contracting cloud of gas and dust and will one day, some few more billion years from now, expand and swallow the Earth and eventually blow off its own outer layers and shrink to a nugget of superdense matter. Cosmology 101, right? You picked it up from all those paperbacks you used to read, it’s second nature to you, but for most people it’s a whole new worldview and probably offensive to a bunch of their core beliefs. So let that sink in. Let that sink in, then deliver the
real
bad news.
Time itself
is fluid and unpredictable. The world that looks so ruggedly normal—in spite of everything we just learned—has recently been locked up in a kind of cosmological cold storage.
Why
has this been done to us? We don’t exactly know. We think it’s caused by the deliberate action of entities so powerful and inaccessible they might as well be called gods. And if we anger the gods they might withdraw their protection, and pretty soon the mountains will melt and the oceans will boil. But don’t take our word for it. Ignore the sunset and the snow that comes to the mountain every winter same as always. We have proof. We have calculations and logical inferences and photographs taken by machines. Forensic evidence of the highest caliber.” Jason had smiled one of his quizzical, sad smiles. “Strangely, the jury is unconvinced.”
    And it wasn’t only the ignorant who weren’t convinced. On the radio, an insurance industry CEO began to complain about the economic impact of “all this relentless, uncritical discussion of the so-called Spin.” People were starting to take it seriously, he said. And that was bad for business. It made people reckless. It encouraged immorality, crime, and deficit spending. Worse, it screwed up the actuary tables.