Sandra had considered and reconsidered the event over many years, looking for an ultimate cause. She would have liked to pin her hatred on some particular thing or person. But in this case, blame was slippery. It glided over potential targets but refused to stick. And ultimately, behind all the trivial and quotidian facts, behind the million unfathomable contingencies, there was the Spin. The Spin had changed and mutilated many lives, not just her brother’s, not just her own.

In a perverse way, the Spin had been good for Sandra’s mother. Sandra’s mother was an electronics engineer whose career had stalled out, until the Spin rendered satellite communications obsolete and created a booming market for aerostatic signal-relay devices. She had been hired by a company owned by the aerostat tycoon E. D. Lawton, where she designed an airborne antenna stabilization system that became an industry standard. Her work was much in demand and she was often away from home.

The opposite was true of Sandra’s father. The initial chaos and confusion that followed the disappearance of the stars from the sky had triggered a global recession in which her father’s software business had wilted like a Christmas poinsettia after New Year’s Day. That—or the Spin itself, the blunt and simple fact of it—had thrown him into a state of depression that occasionally lifted but never entirely went away. “He just kind of forgot how to smile,” Sandra’s brother once explained; and Sandra, ten, had accepted this non-explanation somberly.

Easy for us, Sandra thought, the generation that followed: we’re so accustomed to these truths, that the Earth was encircled by nameless alien beings capable of manipulating even the passage of time; that to these godlike beings the human race was both trivial and somehow significant. You lived with it because you had always lived with it. Sandra herself had been born at the tag end of the Spin, about the time the stars (scattered and strange though they had become) reappeared in the sky. She may have owed her own existence to a last burst of optimism or desperation on the part of her parents, the affirmative act of creating new life in a world that had seemed to be crumbling into anarchy.