It took me a while to remember: The question he’d latched onto so long ago, on a starry night in the Smokies. The Fermi paradox. “Then hand them over peacefully, buddy. No questions asked.”
Remember how you said there might be a big roadblock somewhere?
“The Great Filter. That’s what we call it.”
Like, maybe there’s a Great Filter right at the beginning, when molecules turn into living things. Or it might be when you first evolve a cell, or when cells learn to come together. Or maybe the first brain.
“Lots of bottlenecks.”
I was just thinking. We’ve been looking and listening for sixty years.
“The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.”
I know. But maybe the Great Filter isn’t behind us. Maybe it’s ahead of us.
And maybe we were just now hitting it. Wild, violent, and godlike consciousness, lots and lots of consciousness, exponential and exploding consciousness, leveraged up by machines and multiplied by the billions: power too precarious to last long.
Because otherwise . . . How old did you say the universe is?
“Fourteen billion years.”
Because otherwise, they’d be here. All over. Right?
His hands waved in every direction. They froze when something primordial signed the air. Robbie saw them first, still mere specks: a family of sandhill cranes, three of them, flying southward in loose formation toward winter quarters that the young one had not yet seen. They were late leaving. But the whole autumn was weeks late, as late as next spring would be early to arrive.
They drew near along a liquid thread. Their wings, gray shawls trimmed in black, arched and fell. The long dark tips of their primary feathers flexed like spectral fingers. They flew outstretched, an arrow from beak to claws. And in the middle, between the slender necks and legs, came a bulge of body that seemed too bulky to get airborne, even with all the pumping of those great wings.
The sound came again, and Robbie grabbed my arm. First one, then another, then all three birds unspooled a chilling chord. They came so close we could see the splashes of red across the bulbs of their heads.
Dinosaurs, Dad.
The birds passed over us. Robbie held still and watched them wing away to nothing. He seemed frightened and small, unsure how he got here on the edge of woods, water, and sky. At last his fingers loosened their grip on my wrist. How would we ever know aliens? We can’t even know birds.
WE SAW SIMILIS FROM A LONG WAY AWAY. It was a ball of perfect indigo, glinting with the light of the nearby star it captured.
What’s that? my son asked. People must have made that.
“It’s a solar cell.”
A solar cell that covers the whole planet? Crazy!
We made a few rotations around the globe, confirming him. Similis was a world trying to capture every photon of energy that fell on it.
That’s suicide, Dad. If they hog all the energy, how do they grow their food?
“Maybe food is something else, on Similis.”
We went for a look, down to the planet’s surface. It was as dark as Nithar, but much colder, and silent aside from a steady background hum, which we followed. There were lakes and oceans, all frozen under thick ice. We passed underneath scattered, blasted snags that must have been thick forests once. There were fields of nothing, and grassless pastures of slag and rock. The roads were abandoned, the towns and cities empty. But no sign of destruction or violence. Everything had fallen into decay slowly, on its own. The world looked as if all the residents had walked out and been taken into the sky. But the sky was covered in solar panels, pumping out electrons at full tilt.
We followed the hum down into a valley. There we found the only buildings still intact, a vast industrial barracks guarded and repaired by ever-vigilant robots. Great conduits of cabling channeled all the energy captured by the solar shell into the sprawling complex.
Who built this?
“The inhabitants of Similis.”
What is it?
“It’s a computer server farm.”
What happened to everyone, Dad? Where did the people go?
“They’re all inside.”
My son frowned and tried to picture: a building of circuitry, infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside. Rich, unlimited, endless, and inventive civilizations—millennia of hope and fear and adventure and desire—dying and resurrecting, saving and reloading, going on forever, until the power failed.
FOR HIS TENTH BIRTHDAY, the boy who once could not be roused in the morning without wailing like a howler monkey brought me breakfast in bed: fruit compote, toast, and pecan cheese, all artfully arranged on a platter accompanied by a painted bouquet of mums.
Get up, dude. I’m training today. And I have so much homework to do before we go. Thanks to you!
He wanted to walk to Currier’s lab. The lab was four miles from our house, a two-hour walk in each direction. I wasn’t crazy about spending half a day on the adventure, but that was all the birthday present he wanted.
Maples blazed orange against the sky’s deep blue. Robbie took his smallest sketchbook. He held it in the crook of his arm, scribbling into it as we walked. He slowed down for the most banal things. An ant mound. A gray squirrel. An oak leaf on the sidewalk with veins as red as licorice. He and his mother had left me far behind, Earthbound. I needed a moment alone with Aly myself, to visit that ecstasy whose source she never revealed to me. Currier had turned me down for the training once before. But this morning felt like ultimatum time.
Despite my constant prodding, we got to the lab ten minutes late. I came in the door apologizing. Ginny and a pair of lab assistants were huddled in conversation. They broke off, startled to see us. Ginny shook her head, distressed. “I’m so sorry, guys. We need to cancel for today. I should have called.”
I couldn’t tell what was up. But before I could press her, Currier appeared from the back hallway. “Theo. Can we talk?”
We headed to his office. Ginny snagged Robin by the shoulder. “Want to check out the sea slugs?” Robin lit up, and she led him away.
I’d never seen Martin Currier move so slowly. He waved for me to sit. He remained standing, hovering near the window. “We’ve been put on hold. The Office for Human Research Protections sent an interdiction letter last night.”
My first thought was for my son’s safety. “Is there a problem with the technique?”
Currier swung to face me. “Aside from how promising it is?” He waved an apology and composed himself. “We’ve been told to halt all further experiments funded in whole or part by Health and Human Services, pending a review for possible violations of human subject protection.”
“Wait. HHS? That doesn’t happen.”
His mouth soured again at my quaint objection. He crossed to his desk and sat. He pecked at his keyboard. A moment later, he read from the screen. “ ‘There is concern that your procedures may be violating the integrity, autonomy, and sanctity of your research subjects.’ ”
“Sanctity?”
He shrugged. It made no sense. DecNef was a simple, self-modulating therapy showing good results. Labs across the country were conducting far dodgier trials. More drastic experiments were being run inside the bodies of hundreds of thousands of kids every day. But someone in Washington was keen to enforce the new human protection guidelines.
“The government doesn’t arbitrarily shut down reasonable science. Did you do something to alienate someone in power?”
Currier inhaled, and it dawned on me. He hadn’t done anything. My meme of a son had. The elections were coming, and the parties were neck-and-neck. In a single gesture, designed to make the news, agents of the chaos-seeking administration had played to the Human Sanctity Crusade, slapped down the environmental movement, pissed on science, saved taxpayer money, thrown red meat to the base, and shut down a novel threat to commodity culture.
Marty held my gaze—a neural feedback all its own. He was having as much trouble
with the idea as I was. The law of parsimony demanded a simpler explanation. But neither of us had one. He pushed his rolling chair away from the computer and massaged his face with both hands. “Needless to say, this kills any chance of licensing the technique. If I were a paranoid person . . .” He was paranoid enough to leave the thought unfinished.
“What will you do?”
“Comply with the investigators and make my case to the appeals board. What else can I do? Maybe it’ll turn out to be a short-lived nuisance.”
“And in the meantime . . . ?”
He looked at me askance. “You want to know what will happen to him, without any more treatments.”
It shamed me, but he was right. The trap evolution shaped for us: the entire species might have been on the line, and I’d still worry first about my son.
“The honest answer is: We don’t know. We have fifty-six subjects pursuing some form of feedback. They’re all going to be yanked violently out of their training. We’re in uncharted waters. There’s no data for what happens next.” He looked around his office, the inspirational posters and 3-D brain teasers. “With luck, he has achieved permanent orbit. Maybe he’ll keep making gains on his own. But DecNef could be like any other kind of exercise. When you stop working out, the health gains degrade and you regress back toward your body’s set point. Life is a machine for homeostasis.”
“What do I do if there are changes?”
He seemed to want to ask a favor, scientist to scientist. “I’d ask you to keep bringing him in for evaluation if I could. But I can’t, until this investigation is over.”
“Clear,” I said. Although nothing was.
ROBIN WAS PHILOSOPHICAL, WALKING HOME. It’s still the experiment, right? Whatever happens, we’ll learn something interesting.
I wasn’t sure if he was consoling me or educating me in the scientific method. I couldn’t concentrate. I was thinking of all the legitimate scientific research that might be shut down between now and Election Day, on no better grounds than political caprice. We were, as Marty said, in uncharted waters.
“It’s temporary. They’re just on hold for a while.”
Do they think the training is dangerous or something?
The maples were too orange. My mail notification sounded. I could smell winter on the air, two thousand miles and three days away. Robbie tugged at my sleeve.
This isn’t because of Washington, is it?
“Oh, no, Robbie. Of course not.”
He twitched at the tone in my voice. My mail bell dinged again. Robbie stopped in place on the sidewalk and said the strangest thing. Dad? If you went to sea or to war . . . if something happened to you? If you had to die? I would just hold still and think of how your hands move when you walk, and then you’d still be here.
After dinner, he asked me to quiz him with flash cards of state flowers. Before bed, he entertained me with tales from a planet where a day lasted only an hour, but an hour lasted longer than a year. And years had different lengths. Time sped up and slowed down, depending on your latitude. Some old people were younger than young people. Things that happened long ago were sometimes closer than yesterday. Everything was so confusing that people gave up on keeping time and made do with Now. It was a good world. I’m glad he made that one.
He shocked me by kissing me good night, on the mouth, the way he always insisted on when he was six. Trust me, Dad. I’m a hundred percent good. We can keep the training going by ourselves. You and me.
THAT FIRST TUESDAY IN NOVEMBER, online conspiracy theories, compromised ballots, and bands of armed poll protesters undermined the integrity of the vote in six different battleground states. The country slid into three days of chaos. On Saturday, the President declared the entire election invalid. He ordered a repeat, claiming it would require at least three more months to secure and implement. Half the electorate revolted against the plan. The other half was gung-ho for a retry. Where suspicion was total and facts were settled with the like button, there was no other way forward but to do over.
I wondered how I might explain the crisis to an anthropologist from Promixa Centauri. In this place, with such a species, trapped in such technologies, even a simple head count grew impossible. Only pure bewilderment kept us from civil war.
I FOUND HIM IN THE BACKYARD on a too-warm, late autumn day, drawing into a notebook as if his colored pencil were a scalpel. He jerked when my shadow fell across the grass in front of him, and he rushed the notebook shut. His stealth surprised me. He switched to his math problems worksheets—two-digit multiplication—and slipped the incriminating notebook under his folded legs as if it might disappear back into the grass and soil.
The last thing I wanted was to ransack his private thoughts again. But given the situation, it felt wise to have a look. I waited three days, until Robbie took an afternoon bike ride down to the railroad tracks to look for migrating monarchs on the last milkweeds. Then I combed through his bookcase and his bedroom’s prime hiding spots until I found the book. In between his field notes was a two-page splash of lines and colors. The painting looked like a child’s Kandinsky. It had that rush of modernist excitement shared by a generation of artists about to go up in flames. Underneath, he’d written, in a small, shaky hand: Remember what she feels like! You can remember!!!
ON MONDAY MORNING I had to go into his bedroom to rouse him for breakfast. I’d made his favorite tofu scramble, but when I tried to tickle him awake, he shouted at me. His own volume startled him. Dad! I’m sorry. I’m really tired. I didn’t sleep so good.
“Was it too warm in here?”
He closed his eyes, watching some remnant animation on the inside of his lids. There weren’t any more birds. That’s what happened. In my dream.
He rallied and got up. We had breakfast and enjoyed a reasonable day, although his homework, as always now, took longer than before. We played bocce in the park and he won. Coming home, we saw an eagle take a mourning dove, and though Robbie flinched at the sight of the tearing beak, he still drew it from memory when we got back to the house.
I’d fallen so behind in my teaching that I was in danger of having my tenure revoked. But after dinner I took him by the shoulders and said, “How do you want to spend the evening? Name your galaxy.”
He knew his answer. With one admonitory finger, he commanded me to sit on the couch. He poured me a glass of pomegranate juice—the closest thing to wine available—and went to the bookshelf to retrieve a beaten-up anthology. He put it in my hands.
Read me Chester’s favorite poem. I laughed. He kicked my shins. Serious.
“I’m not sure which one was his favorite. Should I read you your mom’s?”
He didn’t even bother to shrug—just a flick of his small hands. I read him Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Maybe it wasn’t Aly’s favorite. Maybe it was just the one I remember her reading to me. It’s a long poem. It was long for me back then, in my thirties. For Robin, it must have felt geological. But he sat still for it. He still had some concentration left. I was tempted to skip to the end, but I didn’t want him to discover, twenty years later, that I’d cheated him.
I was fine until stanza nine. That one had some long pauses in it, as I read.
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
Robin sat still for the whole long trip. He didn’t even twitch until I finished. Even then, he stayed curled against my flank. In that clear soprano voice, he said, I didn’t get it, Dad. Chester probably got more of it than I did.
I had promised him months ago that we’d talk about getting another dog. Nothing had kept me from following through but selfish cowardice.
I nudged him with my flank. “We still need to get you a birthday present, Robbie. Should we look for a new Chester?”
I thought the words would galvanize him. He didn’t even lift his head. Maybe, Dad. It might help.
THE FIRST MELTDOWN CAME as we were driving back from the shoe store at the mall. We were six blocks from home, on the edge of our quiet neighborhood, when I hit a squirrel. The thing about squirrels is that they think the car is a predator. Natural selection has shaped them to evade pursuers by cutting back and running right into you, as you carry straight on down the street.
The thing threw itself under my wheels with a fur-muffled thump. Robin swung around to stare at the sentient being in the road behind us. I saw it, too, in the rearview mirror, a lump on the asphalt. My son screamed. In the closed car, the sound turned wild, long and bloodcurdling, and it converged on the word Dad.
He undid his seat belt and opened the passenger door. I screamed, too, and grabbed his left arm to keep him from stepping out of the moving car. I rolled to a stop on the side of the residential street. He was still howling, tearing against my grip and trying to jump out. I held him until he stopped struggling. But the end of the struggle was not the end of his howls. He calmed down enough to light into me again.
You killed it! You freaking killed it!
I told him it was an accident, that everything had happened too fast for me to make any choice at all. I apologized. Nothing made any difference.
You didn’t even slow down! You didn’t even . . . Mom died instead of killing an opossum, and you didn’t even take your foot off the gas!
I tried to stroke his hair, but he shoved me away. He turned to look out the back window. “Robbie,” I said. But he wouldn’t look away from the lump in the street. I asked him to say something, to tell me what he was feeling. But he held his face into his hands. There was nothing to do but start the car and head home.
Bewilderment Page 20
