Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

  THE PLANET PELAGOS had many times more surface than Earth. It was covered in water—a single ocean that made the Pacific look like the Great Lakes. One sparse chain of tiny volcanic islands ran through that immensity, bits of punctuation sprinkled through an empty book hundreds of pages long.

  The endless ocean was shallow in places, kilometers deep in others. Life spread through its latitudes from steamy to frozen. Hosts of creatures turned the ocean bottoms into underwater forests. Giant blimps migrated from pole to pole, never stopping, each half of their brains taking turns to sleep. Intelligent kelp hundreds of meters long spelled messages in colors that rippled up the length of their stalks. Annelids practiced agriculture and crustaceans built high-rise cities. Clades of fish evolved communal rituals indistinguishable from religion. But nothing could use fire or smelt ores or build any but the simplest tools. So Pelagos diversified and invented new forms, each stranger than the last.

  Over the eons, the few scattered islands radiated life as if each were its own planet. None of them was large enough to incubate large predators. Each pinprick of land was a sealed terrarium sporting enough species for a small Earth.

  Dozens of dispersed intelligent species spoke millions of languages. Even the pidgins numbered in the hundreds. No town was bigger than a hamlet. Every few miles we came across a speaking thing whose shape and color and form were wholly new. The most universally useful adaptation seemed to be humility.

  The two of us swam along veins of shallow reef down into underwater forests. We scrambled up onto islands whose complex communities were threaded into immense trading networks with islands far away. Caravans took years, even generations, to complete a deal.

  No telescopes, Dad. No rocket ships. No computers. No radios.

  “Only amazement.” It didn’t seem like an outrageous trade.

  How many planets are like this one?

  “There might be none. They might be everywhere.”

  Well, we’ll never hear from any of them.

  I WAS STILL DREAMING UP NEW LAYERS to our creation when I realized I didn’t need any more. I leaned in. Robin’s breath came light and slow. The stream of his consciousness had broadened to a miles-wide delta. I slipped off the bed and reached the doorway without a sound. But the click of the light switch jolted his body upright in the sudden dark. He screamed. I flipped the light back on.

  We forgot Mom’s prayer. And they’re all dying.

  We said it together: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering.

  But the boy who took the next two hours getting safe enough to fall back asleep was no longer sure if that prayer was doing much of anything.

  THEY SHARE A LOT, ASTRONOMY AND CHILDHOOD. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.

  For a dozen years, my job made me feel like a child. I sat behind the computer in my office looking at data sets from telescopes and toying with formulas that could describe them. I roamed the halls in search of minds who might want to come out and play. I lay in bed with a canary-yellow legal pad and a black fine liner, re-creating the journeys to Cygnus A or through the Large Magellanic Cloud or around the Tadpole Galaxy, trips I’d once made in pulp novels. This time around, none of the indigenous inhabitants spoke English or practiced telepathy or floated parasitically through the frozen vacuum or linked together in hive minds to enact their master plans. All they did was metabolize and respire. But in my infant discipline, that was magic enough.

  I made worlds by the thousands. I simulated their surfaces and cores and living atmospheres. I surveyed the ratios of telltale gases that might accumulate, depending on a planet’s evolving inhabitants. I tweaked each simulation to match plausible metabolic scenarios, then incubated the parameters for hours on a supercomputer. Out popped Gaian melodies, unfolding in time. The result was a catalog of ecosystems and the biosignatures that would reveal them. When the space-borne telescope that all my models waited for launched at last, we’d already have spectral fingerprints on file to match to any imaginable perpetrator of the crime of life.

  Some of my colleagues thought I was wasting my time. What’s the use of simulating so many worlds, many of which might not even exist? What’s the use of preparing targets beyond the ability of current instruments to detect? To which I always answered: What’s the use of childhood? I was sure that the Earthlike Planet Seeker that hundreds of colleagues and I lobbied for would come along before the end of the decade and seed my models with real data. And from those seeds, the wildest conclusions would grow.

  Much of existence presents itself in one of three flavors: none, one, or infinite. One-offs were everywhere, at every step of the story. We knew of only one kind of life, arising once on one world, in one liquid medium, using one form of energy storage and one genetic code. But my worlds didn’t need to be like Earth. Their versions of life didn’t require surface water or Goldilocks zones or even carbon for their core element. I tried to free myself from bias and assume nothing, the way a child worked, as if our single instance proved the possibilities were endless.

  I made hot planets with massive wet atmospheres where life lived in the plumes of aerosol geysers. I blanketed rogue planets under thick layers of greenhouse gases and filled them with creatures who survived by joining hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. I sank rock-dwelling endoliths in deep fissures and gave them carbon monoxide to metabolize. I made worlds of liquid methane where biofilms feasted on hydrogen sulfide that rained down in banquets from the toxic skies.

  And all my simulated atmospheres waited for the day when the long-gestated, long-delayed space-borne telescopes would lift off and come online, blowing our little one-off Rare Earth wide open. That day would be for our species like the one when the eye doctor fitted my vain wife with her first pair of long-overdue glasses, ones that made her shout out loud with joy at being able to see her child from all the way across a room.

  THE SHORT, HARD NIGHT made for a late morning. I didn’t get Robin to school until ten: another demerit for us both. When I got him there at last, the hardware on my cargo pants set off the security scanner. We had to go to the office to sign the tardy sheet. By the time Robin rejoined his smirking class, he was humiliated.

  I rushed from his grade school to the university, where I parked illegally to save time and wound up getting a stiff ticket. I had forty minutes to prep my lecture on abiogenesis—the origin of life—for the undergraduate astrobiology survey. I’d taught the same course only two years before, but dozens of new discoveries since then made me want to start over.

  In the auditorium, I felt the pleasure of competence and the warmth that only comes from sharing ideas. It always baffles me when my colleagues complain about teaching. Teaching is like photosynthesis: making food from air and light. It tilts the prospects for life a little. For me, the best class sessions are right up there with lying in the sun, listening to bluegrass, or swimming in a mountain stream.

  Over the run of eighty minutes, I tried to convey to a coven of twenty-one-year-olds with a wide spectrum of intellectual abilities just how absurd it was for everything to spring up out of nothing. The alignment of favorable circumstances for the emergence of self-assembling molecules seemed astronomically unlikely. But the appearance of protocells almost as soon as the molten Hadean Earth cooled suggested that life was the inevitable by-product of ordinary chemistry.

  “So the universe is either pregnant everywhere, or barren. If I could tell you which, beyond all doubt, would it change your study habits?”

  That got a polite, Okay-Xer chuckle out of the happy few who were paying attention. But the rest had signed off. I was starting to lose them. It takes a certain kind of strangeness to hear the cosmic symphony and to realize that it was both playing and listening to itself.

  “Here on Earth, it
was archaea and bacteria and nothing but archaea and bacteria for two billion years. Then came something as mysterious as the origin of life itself. One day two billion years ago, instead of one microbe eating the other, one took the other inside its membrane and they went into business together.”

  I looked down at my notes and came unstuck in time. My wife-to-be, twenty minutes after having me for the first time, was lying with her nose against my floating rib. I love your smell, she said.

  I told her, “You don’t love me. You love my microbiome.”

  When she laughed, I thought: I’ll just stay here in these parts for a bit. Until I die, or so. I told her how a person had ten times more bacterial cells than human cells and how we needed a hundred times more bacterial than human DNA to keep the organism going.

  Her eyes crinkled in love. So we’re the scaffolding, is that it? And they’re the building? Her scaffolding laughed again and climbed on top of mine.

  “Without that bizarre collaboration, there’d be no complex cells, no multicellular creatures, nothing to get you out of bed in the morning. The friendly takeover took forever to happen. But here’s the weird thing: It took two billion years to happen. But it happened more than once.”

  That was as far as my lecture got. A buzz went off in my pocket—a text from one of the few numbers allowed past my afternoon block list. It was from Robin’s school. My son, my own flesh and blood, had smashed a friend in the face and cracked the boy’s cheekbone. The former friend was in the ER getting stitched up, and Robin was being held in the principal’s office pending my arrival.

  I let the class out, ten minutes early. My students would have to figure out the rest of the origin of life on their own.

  THEY WOULDN’T LET ME SEE MY SON until I sat for my own punishment. Dr. Lipman’s office walls were covered with accreditation. Her desk was not large, but she used it to tremendous effect. The previous two times she called me in, she’d tried empathy and posture-mirroring. This time she was considerably more Excel spreadsheet. She was younger than I was and dressed too well. Ed psych jargon enthralled her. In her own over-professionalized way, she cared about my son. She was a reformer, and she saved herself for the troubled ones. To her, I was a pigheaded scientist damaging a special child by not following established protocols.

  She laid out the facts. Robin had been having lunch with Jayden Astley, his only real friend. They were seated across from each other at the long lunchroom table. The feral din of lunch hour gave way to Robin’s shouts. All the witnesses agreed: he wouldn’t quit screaming, Tell me. Tell me, you freaking jerk-face. Just as the lunchroom monitor got to their table to break things up, Robin snapped, scooped up his metal thermos and flung it hard in Jayden’s face. Miraculously it only fractured the boy’s cheek.

  “But what happened? What made him go off?”

  Jill Lipman stared at me as if I’d asked how life began. “Neither boy will say.” It was clear where she placed the blame. “We need to talk about why this happened right after you took him out of school for a week.”

  “I took him out of school to give him a chance to calm down. I doubt my son smashed his only friend’s face because of a week in the Smokies.”

  “He missed a week of class. That’s five days in every academic subject. He needs continuity, focus, and social integration. He’s not getting that, and that’s stressful for him.”

  He’d missed class when Dr. Lipman suspended him, too. But I listened and kept still.

  “Robin needs orientation and accountability. But since his unscheduled vacation, he has been late to school twice.”

  “I’m a single parent. When things beyond my control—”

  “I’m not passing judgment on your parenting.” Which, of course, she was. “Children deserve a safe, secure, and stable learning environment. Instead, we’re all coping with a violent assault against another child.”

  A fractured cheekbone. A painkiller and an ice pack, and Jayden was fine. I fractured my own cheekbone, on the monkey bars, when I was seven, back when schools had monkey bars.

  Anger makes me clam up. It’s a deep-seated trait, one that has often saved me. Dr. Lipman’s strange little lips moved, and stranger words came out. “You have a child with special needs. When all this happened the last time—”

  “This didn’t happen, the last time.”

  “When we had trouble before, you chose to ignore the recommendations of more than one doctor. You have another choice now. You can help your child by giving him the treatment that he needs, or we can get the state involved.”

  The principal of my son’s school was threatening to investigate me if I didn’t put my third-grader on psychoactive drugs.

  “We’ll need to see some progress by December.”

  When I spoke again, I sounded remarkably composed. “May I please talk to my son?”

  Dr. Lipman led me out of her office through the administrative suite. The staff’s eyes were on me throughout the perp walk: the man who kept his boy in misery rather than obey the doctors.

  Robin was being held in the “Calm Room,” a detention cubicle next to the vice principal’s office. I saw him through the panel of shatterproof glass. He was hunched over on the too-large wooden chair, doing that thing with his hands he did whenever he was beaten down. He’d stick his thumbs between his index and second fingers and squeeze his fists until everything turned red.

  The door opened and Robin looked up. He saw me and his pain doubled. The first words out of his mouth were something no boy at that school had ever said. Dad, it’s all my fault.

  I sat beside him and cuffed his slender shoulder. “What happened, Robbie?”

  My anger was going nuts. I tried to let my good parts breathe, like you said to. But my hands got confused.

  HE WOULDN’T TELL ME what Jayden Astley said to set him off. I called the boy’s parents, half expecting them to sue me over the phone. Instead, they were weirdly sympathetic. Their boy had given them more information than mine had given me, but they weren’t volunteering anything. Everyone involved was protecting me. I couldn’t tell from what.

  I surprised Robin by not forcing the issue, and he surprised me by not wetting the bed that night. The next day was Saturday. I still hadn’t finished the edits for Stryker. Robin and I took a long walk down near Olbrich Gardens. For lunch, I scrambled tofu, using the exact ratio of black salt and nutritional yeast that he loved. We played his favorite board game about racing cars across Europe. I pretended to work while he played with his microscope and looked through his files of collectible cards. We read together in peace for half an hour, before he asked for another planet.

  I had two thousand paperbacks scattered through our house and thirty years of reading to steal from. When was the golden age of science fiction? For me, it started at nine.

  I gave him a planet where the dominant sentient species could merge into a compound creature with all the powers of its separate parts.

  His slew of questions stopped the story. Are you for real? How could that even be?

  “It’s another planet. That’s how.”

  But, I mean, are they still separate when they’re together, or all one single brain?

  “One single brain that can have their separate thoughts.”

  You mean, like telepathy?

  “More than telepathy. A superorganism.”

  Can the big one, like, get inside the heads of the little ones? Does he need them all, to make it work? What if some of the little ones don’t want to join? Or are they really just parts to begin with?

  He worried the edge between friendly merger and hostile takeover. I tried to tilt his fascinated horror toward horrified fascination. “They do it voluntarily, when times are hard and they need something extra to survive. And later, when things get better, they split up again.”

  He leaned forward, suspicious. Wait a minute! Like slime molds?

  I’d shown him, in the labs at the university: those independent single cells that merged into a
community with its own aggregate behavior and rudimentary intelligence.

  You stole that from Earth! He slugged my upper arm several times in slow motion. Then he lay back on the pillow. I risked smoothing his bangs out of his eyes, the way he liked me to do when he was little.

  “Robbie? You’re still upset. I can tell.”

  He jerked up. How do you know?

  I pointed at his fists, holding his thumbs crimson captives again. He stared, amazed that his own parts had betrayed him. He shook his hands and liberated his thumbs. Then his head dropped back onto the pillow.

  Dad? What happened to her? This time, he meant it. That night, in the car.

  I looked down at my own hands, which were busy tagging me. “Robin? Did Jayden say something about Mom?”

  Luckily, no heavy objects were within reach. But the force of his voice alone knocked me backward. Just tell me. Tell me! He slashed back and forth. I’m nine years old. Just . . . TELL ME!

  I grabbed his wrist, and the pain startled him. “You will stop right now.” I spoke with all the calm authority I could fake. “And get control of yourself. Then you will tell me what Jayden said.”

  He yanked his wrist free and nursed it. Why did you do that?

  I waited out my pounding pulse. He rubbed his wrist, hating me. Then he burst into tears. When I could, I held him. He tried to work his red and worthless mouth. I signaled that he had all the time on Earth.

  He bared his palm and caught his breath. I was telling him about Mom’s video. He said his parents said there was more to her crash than people knew. Jayden said they think that Mom was—

  I pressed his lips, as if I could push the thought back in. “It was an accident, Robbie. Nobody thinks anything else.”

  That’s what I told him! But he kept on saying it. Like he knew the truth. That’s why I went nuts.

  “You know? I might have slugged him myself.”