Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

  The audience laughs again, though not comfortably. The question irritates Robin. Something in those two syllables says: You know what’s happening. Everyone knows, despite the code of silence. This endless gift of a place is going away. But his right wrist rotates oddly, down by his thigh, a gesture that none of the hundreds of thousands of viewers but me knows how to interpret.

  Just that I’m not scared anymore. I’m all mixed into a really huge thing. That’s the coolest part.

  Currier gestures toward the audience, who break into applause. He puts a hand on Robin’s head. My son’s mother’s lover. With ten seconds left, the talk ends.

  ON NITHAR, WE WERE ALMOST BLIND. Of our ten major senses, sight was the weakest. But we didn’t need to see much, aside from trickles of glowing bacteria. Our several well-spaced ears could hear in something like color, and we sensed our surroundings with extreme precision through the pressures on our skin. We tasted small changes across great distances. The different tempos of our eight different hearts made us exquisitely sensitive to time. Thermal gradients and magnetic fields told us where we needed to be. We spoke with radio waves.

  Our agriculture, literature, music, sports, and visual arts rivaled those on Earth. But our great intelligence and peaceful culture never hit upon combustion or printing or metalworking or electricity or anything like advanced industry. On Nithar, there was molten magma, combusting magnesium, and other kinds of burning. But there was no fire.

  Cool, my son said. I’m going to explore.

  I told him not to go too far from the surface, especially the vents. But he was young, and the young suffered most from Nithar’s biggest challenge. A planet where the word forever was the same as the word never was hard on its youth.

  He came back from a too-brief adventure upward. He was crushed. There’s nothing up there but heaven, he complained. And heaven is as hard as rock.

  He wanted to know what was above the sky. I didn’t laugh at him, but I was no help. He asked around and got mocked mercilessly by both his generation and mine. That’s when he vowed to drill.

  I didn’t try to talk him out of it. I figured he could toy at the project for a few million macro-beats, and that would be the end of it.

  He used the sharp tip of long, straight, heated nautiloid shell. The work was grindingly dull. It took many millions of heartbeats for his hole to reach the depth of one outstretched tentacle. But rubble dropped from on high, and that made for the first novelty on Nithar in almost never. The Hole became the butt of jokes, the object of suspicions, and the rite of new religious cults. Generations came and went, watching his infinitesimal progress. My son drilled on, with all the time in this world on his hands before bedtime.

  Tens of thousands of lifetimes in, he struck air. And in one great rush of understanding, a revolution so great that nothing on Nithar survived it, my son discovered ice and crust and water and atmosphere and starlight and trapped and eternity and elsewhere.

  ROBIN WAS BESIDE HIMSELF, about our trip to Washington. I was going there to help save the search for life in the universe. My most devoted full-time student was coming along for the ride.

  I’m gonna make something for the trip, okay?

  He wouldn’t tell me what. But as Robin’s legal teacher, I was always looking out for anything better than the grim social studies materials I found online. (How Do I Save Money? What Is Profit? I Need a Job!) A civics field trip to Our Nation’s Capital, with homemade show-and-tell, seemed just the thing.

  He made me wait in the car while he went into the art supply store with his life savings. He came out a few minutes later clasping a bag to his chest. When we got home, he squirreled away his covert treasures in his room and got to work. A sign appeared on his door. His balloon-letter writing had grown more playful, more like Aly’s with each new feedback session:

  WORK ZONE NO VISITORS ALLOWED

  I had no clue what he was up to, other than that it involved a roll of eighteen-inch-wide white butcher paper too bulky to hide. My questions succeeded only in eliciting stern warnings not to pry. So the two of us prepared for our joint field trip. While my son worked on his secret project, I polished the testimony I would present to the congressional Independent Review Panel.

  The panel was tasked with making a simple recommendation: answer the world’s oldest and deepest unanswered question or walk away. Dozens of my colleagues were testifying on behalf of NASA’s proposed Earthlike Planet Seeker mission, over several days. Our job was simple: save the telescope from the ax of the Appropriations subcommittee, and make a world that would be able, in a few more years, to look into nearby space and see life.

  The party in power was not inclined to hunt for other Earths. The heads of the review panel threatened to add our Planet Seeker to a growing graveyard of NASA cancellations. But scientists across three continents were giving up the pretense of detached objectivity and making the case for exploration, every way we knew how. That’s how the son of a con man, a kid who went by the nickname Mad Dog and got his start in life cleaning out septic tanks, found himself on a plane to D.C., testifying for the most powerful pair of spectacles ever made. And my son was coming with, bringing his own campaign.

  HE HUSTLED DOWN THE AISLE IN FRONT OF ME, beaming and greeting all the passengers. He chided me as I put his bag in the overhead bin. Careful, Dad! Don’t crush it! Robbie wanted the window. He watched the baggage loaders and ground crew as if they were building the pyramids. He gripped my hand during takeoff but was fine once we were airborne. During the flight, he charmed the attendants and told the businessman on my right about “a few good nonprofits” he might want to consider supporting.

  We had to change in Chicago. Robin sketched people in the gate area and gave them their portraits as gifts. Three kids across the concourse whispered to each other and pointed, as if they’d never seen a living video meme before.

  He was better with takeoff the second time. As we broke down through the clouds in our final approach, he shouted over the engines, Holy crap! Washington Monument! Just like in the book!

  The rows near us laughed. I pointed over his shoulder. “There’s the White House.”

  He answered in hushed tones. Wow. So beautiful!

  “Three branches of government,” I quizzed.

  He held out his finger, fencing with me. Executive, legislative, and . . . the one with the judges.

  We saw the Capitol from the cab on our way to the hotel. He was awed. What will you tell them?

  I showed him my prepared comments. “They’ll ask questions, too.”

  What kind of questions?

  “Oh, they might ask anything. Why the Seeker cost keeps going up. What we hope to discover. Why we can’t discover life some cheaper way. What difference it would make if it never got built.”

  Robin gazed out the window of the cab, marveling at the monuments. The cab slowed as we entered Georgetown and neared the hotel. Robbie sat in a cloud of preoccupation, trying to solve my political crisis. I straightened his hair, like Aly used to do when the three of us were heading out into public. I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

  We pulled into the hotel’s circular drive and the cabbie said, “Here we are. Comfort Inn.”

  I FED MY CARD INTO THE CAB’S READER and credits poured out from a server farm nestled in the melting tundra of northern Sweden into the cabbie’s virtual hands. Robbie got out, retrieved his bag from the trunk, gazed at the very modest chain hotel, and gave a deep, appreciative whistle. Holy crow. We are living like kings. He wouldn’t let the doorman take his bag. It’s got stuff in it!

  He whistled again in the very plain room on the ninth floor ove
rlooking the Potomac. His civics lesson stretched out in radial boulevards below. He put his hand to the window and gazed at all the possibilities. Let’s go!

  We never made it past the Bone Hall on the second floor of the Museum of Natural History. The parade of skeletons hooked Robin by the brain stem and wouldn’t let him go. He stood with his sketchbook in front of the case of perciform fishes, lavishing attention on the turn and taper of every rib. I couldn’t stop staring at him from across the hall. In his loosened windbreaker and baggy jeans, he looked like an elder of one of those tiny, superannuated, wayfaring races that have been making records for billions of years, curating an account of a planet that had once thrived brilliantly but vanished without a trace.

  We found a restaurant that served herbivores and walked back to the hotel. Up in our room, he grew earnest again. He sat on the edge of his bed with his hands folded in front of his face. Dad? I wanted to wait until tomorrow to show you, but I should probably just show you now?

  Crossing to his luggage, he extracted the roll of butcher paper, a little crumpled from the journey. He set it on the floor at the foot of the beds, placed a pillow on one curled end, and unrolled. The banner was longer than the two of us stretched end to end. And it was covered in paints, markers, and inks of all colors. Down the length of it ran the words:

  LET’S HEAL WHAT WE HURT

  He had filled the scroll with bright, bold design. It seemed another thing he’d learned directly from Aly, who worked on a canvas too large for me to see. Creatures ringed the letters, as though drawn by a hand more mature than his. Stands of staghorn coral were bleaching white. Birds and mammals fled a burning forest. Ten-inch-long honeybees lay on their backs along the bottom of the banner, legs up and little X’s in their eyes.

  That’s supposed to be pollinator decline. You think people will get that?

  I couldn’t say. I couldn’t even talk. But then, he wasn’t really waiting for my answer.

  You can’t depress people, though. That just scares them. You gotta show them the good life.

  He lifted one end of the banner and told me to grab the other. We flipped the whole scroll over. If the first side was hell, this was the peaceable kingdom. This time the words filled the banner’s middle, one row above the other:

  MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE FROM SUFFERING

  Creatures crowded in on either side: feathered and fur-covered, spiny, star-shaped, lobed and finned, bulky or sleek and streamlined, bilateral, branching, radial, rhizomatic creatures, known and unknown, creatures in the wildest array of colors and forms, all deployed between the deep green forest and the ocean blue. The sessions with Aly’s brain print had made his painting more luminous, freed up his hand and eye.

  He looked down at the work from above, picturing how it should have been. I didn’t know how to spell sentient.

  “You could have asked me.”

  But then you’d know.

  “Robbie. This is better.”

  You think? Be honest, Dad. I only want honesty.

  “Robbie. I’m telling you.”

  He looked down, squinting. He shook his head. If people only knew, you know? We’re all bajillionaires. He held his hands out in front of him, as if they were full of germ plasm and treasure.

  “What do you want to do with it?”

  Oh, yeah. I thought, after you’re done talking to the panel, that you and me could hold this up outside somewhere, with cool buildings in the background, and we could get somebody to take pictures. Then we could upload them using my name for the tags, and when people search for that freaking clip of me, they’d see this instead.

  We rolled up the scroll and got ready for bed. In the dark, the hotel room glittered with dozens of LEDs of obscure purpose. Propped up in our twin beds, we might have been in the command center of a warp-drive exploratory vessel, tethered for a moment at a watering hole somewhere along an endless surveying mission.

  My son’s voice tested the dark. So those people? Are they for real?

  “Which people, buddy?”

  All those people who linked to my clip?

  His voice was tinted with scientific doubt. My heart sank and my head revved. “What about them?”

  How many of them were just laughing at me?

  The room hummed at half a dozen different frequencies. Every reply seemed gutless. I took too long, and he had his answer. “People, Robbie. They’re a questionable species.”

  He thought about this. He weighed what it meant to become a public commodity. His face soured.

  “Robbie. I am so sorry. I made a big mistake.”

  But against the light from the window, I saw him shake his head. No, Dad. It’s all good. Don’t worry. You remember the signal?

  He made it in the pool of light, twisting his cupped hand back and forth on the stalk of his broomstick arm. He’d taught me the code once, months ago, on another Earth—his invented hand sign for All Is Good.

  You know how people sometimes worry: Is that person mad at me? Well, if anyone’s ever wondering, I’m good with the whole world.

  THE BREAKFAST BUFFET THRILLED HIM. He piled up more oat squares, blueberry muffins, and avocado toast than any creature his size should have been able to eat in a day. His lips oozed chocolate hazelnut butter as he talked. Greatest field trip ever. And it hasn’t even started!

  We planned to walk on the Mall that morning, before I testified. We talked a bit about what to see. He wanted to return to the Museum of Natural History. To see the plants. Dad? Almost nobody knows this, but plants do pretty much all the work. Everybody else is just a parasite.

  “You are correct, sir!”

  I mean, eating light? That’s crazy stuff! Better than SF! His face darkened. So why does science fiction think they’re so scary?

  Before I could answer, a woman twice my age, short, avian, with eyeglasses like shop goggles, appeared at the end of our booth. “I’m sorry to intrude on your breakfast,” she said, looking at Robin. “But are you . . . that boy? The one in that beautiful video?”

  Before I could ask her what she wanted, he broke into a smile. It’s possible, actually.

  The woman stepped back. “I knew it. There’s something about you. You’re really something!”

  Everybody’s something, he said. The echo of the viral clip made them both laugh.

  She turned to me. “Is he your son? He’s really something.”

  “He is.”

  She backed away from my curtness, her words a mess of apology and thanks. When she was out of earshot, Robin gaped at me. Geez, Dad. She was being nice. You didn’t have to be mean to her.

  I wanted my son back. The one who knew that large bipeds were not to be trusted.

  THE REVIEW PANEL MET in the Rayburn House Office Building, across the street from the Capitol. Robin dawdled, agog with patriotism. I tugged at him to get us to the appointed spot on time. The room was cavernous, wood-paneled, and draped with flags. Long, tiered ranks of leather-padded chairs faced a raised platform with a heavy wooden table measured out by nameplates and plastic water bottles. In the back were side tables full of coffee and nibbles.

  We were late getting through security and arrived in a room filled with colleagues from around the country. A couple of them remembered Robin from when he gate-crashed the teleconference. More than a few teased Robin or asked if he was presenting. I bet I could convince them, he said.

  The meeting started. I sat Robbie next to me. “Settle in, bud. Lunch is a long way off.” He held up his sketchbook, his pastels, and a graphic novel about a boy who learns how to breathe underwater. He was fully provisioned.

  The dais filled with politicians who looked like yesterday’s America. They called on a NASA engineer to start things off with the latest plan for the Planet Seeker. It would settle in somewhere near the orbit of Jupiter before deploying its massive, self-assembling mirror. Then a second instrument, the Occulter, flying several thousand miles away, would position itself in the precise spot to blot out the light from
individual stars so our Seeker could see their planets. The engineer demonstrated. “Like holding up your hand to block a flashlight, so you can see who’s holding it.”

  Even to me, it sounded crazy. The first question came from the representative of a district in West Texas. His drawl sounded sculpted for public consumption. “So you’re saying the Seeker part alone will be every bit as complex as the NextGen telescope, even before adding in the flying lampshade? And we can’t even get the damn NextGen off the ground!” The engineer demurred, but the congressman rode over him. “The NextGen is decades overdue and billions over budget. How are you possibly going to make something twice as complicated work for the amount you’re asking?”

  The questions went downhill from there. Two more engineers tried to undo the damage and restore confidence. One of them pretty much imploded. The morning threatened to end before it began. Robbie had worked away for hours, barely fidgeting. Honestly, I forgot he was there. When we surfaced for lunch, he was holding up a painted page for my approval: another planet, as if seen through the Seeker, its disk swirling with the turbulent blue-green-white whose only possible cause was life.

  The image was brilliant. I wanted to work it into my slide deck. We had an hour. First I steered us through the line for the catered box lunches. There were ones marked Vegan and ones marked Altairian. “You’re supposed to laugh,” I told my son.

  I’m too Sirius.

  “I see you’ve read the Astronomer’s Joke Book.”

  I got a Big Bang out of it.

  We holed up in a corner. While Robbie ate, I laid his lush painting on the floor, snapped it with my phone, mailed a copy through the air to my laptop computer, cropped and edited, then inserted it at the end of the virtual carousel I would project to a room full of people that afternoon. None of the science fiction I grew up on could have predicted such magic.

  After lunch came several scientists whose work required something like the Seeker. I spoke third. I reached the stand just as the room was sliding into blood-sugar doldrums. I talked about how no other method could match direct optical imaging for finding life. I showed our best existing photo of an exoplanet—little more than a grayish blur. Even that was impressive, given that my graduate thesis advisor once assured me we’d never live to see one.