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you know that, Tyler? Even when he was very little, he got the idea of how a map worked. He liked to know where he was. It makes sense of things, he used to say. God, I used to love to listen to him talk about maps. I think that’s why he’s so freaked now, even more than most people. Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be. He lost his map.”
    Of course, there were already clues in place. Before the week was out the military had begun to collect debris from fallen satellites—satellites that had been in stable orbits until that night in October but had plunged back to Earth before dawn, one and all, some leaving wreckage that was invested with tantalizing evidence. But it took time for that information to reach even the well-connected household of E. D. Lawton.
     
     
    Our first winter of dark nights was claustrophobic and strange. Snow came early: we lived within commuting distance of Washington, D.C., but by Christmas it looked more like Vermont. The news remained ominous. A fragile, hastily brokered peace treaty between India and Pakistan teetered toward war and back again; the U.N.-sponsored decontamination project in the Hindu Kush had already cost dozens of lives in addition to the original casualties. In northern Africa, brushfire wars smoldered while the armies of the industrial world withdrew to regroup. Oil prices skyrocketed. At home, we kept the thermostat a couple of degrees under comfortable until the days began to grow longer (when the sun came back and the first quail called).
    But in the face of unknown and poorly understood threats the human race managed not to trigger a full-blown global war, to our credit. We made our adjustments and got on with business, and by spring people were talking about “the new normal.” In the long run, it was understood, we might have to pay a higher price for whatever had happened to the planet… but in the long run, as they say, we’re all dead.
    I saw the change in my mother. The passage of time calmed her and the warm weather, when it finally came, drew some of the tension from her face. And I saw the change in Jason, who came out of his meditative retreat. I worried, though, about Diane, who refused to talk about the stars at all and had lately begun to ask whether I believed in God— whether I thought God was responsible for what had happened in October.
    I wouldn’t know about that, I told her. My family weren’t churchgoers. The subject made me a little nervous, frankly.
     
     
    That summer the three of us rode our bikes to the Fairway Mall for the last time.
    We had made the trip a hundred, a thousand times before. The twins were already getting a little old for it, but in the seven years we had all lived on the property of the Big House it had become a ritual, the summer-Saturday inevitable. We skipped it on rainy or swelteringly hot weekends, but when the weather was fine we were drawn as if by an invisible hand to our meeting point at the end of the long Lawton driveway.
    Today the air was gentle and breezy and the sunlight infused everything it touched with a deep organic warmth. It was as if the climate wanted to reassure us: the natural world was doing all right, thank you, almost ten months after the Event… even if we were (as Jase occasionally said) a
cultivated
planet now, a garden tended by unknown forces rather than a patch of cosmic wildwood.
    Jason rode an expensive mountain bike, Diane a less flashy girls’ equivalent. My bike was a secondhand junker my mother had bought for me at a thrift shop. No matter. What was important was the piney tang of the air and the empty hours arrayed before of us. I felt it, Diane felt it, and I think Jason felt it, too, though he seemed distracted and even a little embarrassed when we saddled up that morning. I put it down to stress or (this was August) the prospect of another school year. Jase was in an accelerated academic stream at Rice, a high-pressure school. Last year he had breezed through the math