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curtains in the bedroom. The first thing I really remember is watching those curtains blow in the wind. It was a sunny day and the window was open and there was a breeze.” The memory was unexpectedly poignant, like the last sight of a receding shoreline. “What about you?”
    The first thing Diane could remember was also a Sacramento moment, though it was a very different one. E.D. had taken both children on a tour of the plant, even then positioning Jason for his role as heir apparent. Diane had been fascinated by the huge perforated spars on the factory floor, the spools of microthin aluminum fabric as big as houses, the constant noise. Everything had been so large that she had half expected to find a fairy-tale giant chained to the walls, her father’s prisoner.
    It wasn’t a good memory. She said she felt left out, almost lost, abandoned inside a huge and terrifying machinery of construction.
    We talked that around for a while. Then Diane said, “Check out the sky.”
    I looked at the window. There was enough light spilling over the western horizon to turn the blackness an inky blue.
    I didn’t want to confess to the relief I felt.
    “I guess you were right,” she said, suddenly buoyant. “The sun’s coming up after all.”
    Of course, it wasn’t really the sun. It was an impostor sun, a clever fabrication. But we didn’t know that yet.
     
     
     

COMING OF AGE
IN BOILING WATER
     
     
    People younger than me have asked me: Why didn’t you panic? Why didn’t
anyone
panic? Why was there no looting, no rioting? Why did your generation acquiesce, why did you all slide into the Spin without even a murmur of protest?
    Sometimes I say,
But terrible things did happen
.
    Sometimes I say,
But we didn’t understand. And what could we have done about it
?
    And sometimes I cite the parable of the frog. Drop a frog into boiling water, he’ll jump out. Drop a frog into a pot of pleasantly warm water, stoke the fire slowly, and the frog will be dead before he knows there’s a problem.
    The obliteration of the stars wasn’t slow or subtle, but neither, for most of us, was it immediately disastrous. If you were an astronomer or a defense strategist, if you worked in telecommunications or aerospace, you probably spent the first few days of the Spin in a state of abject terror. But if you drove a bus or flipped burgers, it was all more or less warm water.
    English-language media called it “the October Event” (it wasn’t “the Spin” until a few years later), and its first and most obvious effect was the wholesale destruction of the multi billion-dollar orbital satellite industry. Losing satellites meant losing most relayed and all direct-broadcast satellite television; it rendered the long-distance telephone system unreliable and GPS locators useless; it gutted the World Wide Web, made obsolete much of the most sophisticated modern military technology, curtailed global surveillance and reconnaissance, and forced local weathermen to draw isobars on maps of the continental United States rather than glide through CGI images rendered from weathersats. Repeated attempts to contact the International Space Station were uniformly unsuccessful. Commercial launches scheduled at Canaveral (and Baikonur and Kourou) were postponed indefinitely.
    It meant, in the long run, very bad news for GE Americom, AT&T, COMSAT, and Hughes Communications, among many others.
    And many terrible things
did
happen as a consequence of that night, though most of them were obscured by media blackouts. News stories traveled like whispers, squeezed through transatlantic fiber-optic cables rather than ricocheted through orbital space: it was almost a week before we learned that a Pakistani Hatf V missile tipped with a nuclear warhead, launched by mistake or miscalculation in the confusing first moments of the Event, had strayed off course and vaporized an agricultural valley in the Hindu Kush. It was the first nuclear device detonated in war since