Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

  “There,” the something-like-a-father said to its something-like-a-child, in something almost like speech. “A little higher. Right up there.”

  The little one lay back, floating on its living kinship raft above the intelligent soil. It felt its not-quite arm nudged by a process of assistance no one from Earth would have a name for.

  “There?” the younger one asked. “Right there? Why didn’t they ever answer?”

  The older one replied not in sound or light but in changes in the surrounding air. “We bathed them in signals for thousands of their generations. We tried everything we could think of. We never managed to get their attention.”

  The sequence of chemicals that the young one emitted was not quite a laugh. It was a whole verdict, really, an entire astrobiological theory. “They must have been very busy.”

  THE DAYS LENGTHENED. Sunlight made a comeback. My son did not. He was certain that he’d failed me, that he’d failed all the creatures he was forced to outlive. He sat curled up in Aly’s egg chair or hunched at the dining room table staring at his schoolwork. An hour would pass while he held himself crumpled and still. Once I glimpsed him holding his palms out in front of his face, mystified by all the life that still passed through them.

  It was in my power to help him. The time for fear and principle was past. All I had to do was accept a few future risks, and I could ease his present pain. He needed medication.

  One night, after a bath, he lingered in the bathroom for so long that I had to check on him. He was standing with a towel wrapped around his boy’s slight body, staring at the mirror. It’s gone, Dad. I can’t even remember what I can’t remember.

  This is what I miss most about him. Even when his light went out, he was still looking.

  My spring break was days away. I’d been preparing in secret. I sprang the idea on him. “How about a gigantic treasure hunt?” His shoulders fell. He was done with discovery. “No, Robbie. A real one.”

  He eyed me, suspicious. What do you mean?

  “Put your pajamas on and meet me in my office.”

  He obeyed, too curious to refuse. When he appeared at the side of my desk, I handed him a sheet of paper filled with names, two dozen in all. Spring beauties. Sharp-lobed hepatica. Trailing arbutus. Bishop’s cap. Fire pink. Six kinds of trilliums.

  “Know what these are?” If he didn’t when he started to nod, he’d figured it out by the time the nod was done. “How many can you find and draw?”

  His limbs began to jitter. He snarled in distress. Dad! I held his arm to calm him.

  “I mean for real. From life.”

  Puzzlement kept him from melting down. His hand paddled the air, begging me to be reasonable. How? Where? As if flowers would never happen again, for someone so fallen.

  “How about the Smokies?”

  He shook his head, refusing to believe. Serious? Serious?

  “Totally, Robbie.”

  When?

  “How about next week?”

  He searched my face to see if I was lying. For the first time in weeks, hope trickled out of him. Can we stay in the same cabin again? Can we sleep outdoors? Can we go to that river with the rapids where you and Mom went? Then the full awfulness of life washed over him again. He raised the list of wildflower names up to eye level and groaned. How am I supposed to learn all of these in one week?

  I vowed that when we came back from the woods, I’d make an appointment with his physician and start him on a new treatment.

  THE RIDE DOWN MADE HIM RESTLESS. His smallest thoughts now required endless reassurance. He couldn’t stop asking about the past. Through most of Illinois and all through Indiana and Kentucky, he talked about Aly. He wanted to know where she grew up and what she studied in school. He asked how we met and how long it took us to get married and about all the places we visited before he came along. He wanted to know everything we’d done together on our honeymoon in the Smokies, and what Alyssa had liked best about those mountains.

  When he wasn’t grilling me, he was studying an Appalachian wildflowers book I’d gotten him, indexed by color and organized by the time of blooming. What’s a “spring ephemeral”?

  I corrected his pronunciation and told him.

  Why do they go so fast?

  “Because they’re down in the shade on the forest floor. They have to germinate and bud and bloom and fruit and set their seed before the trees leaf out and it’s game over.”

  What was Mom’s favorite spring wildflower?

  I must have known once. “I can’t remember.”

  What was her favorite tree? You can’t remember her favorite tree?

  I willed him to stop asking, before I forgot the little I’d ever known.

  “I can tell you her favorite bird.”

  He started shouting at me. It was a long trip.

  I MANAGED TO RENT the same cabin we stayed in so long ago, the one with its wraparound deck open to the woods and stars. We crunched down the steep gravel drive, chasing the shadows of trees. Robin bolted from the car and took the front steps two at a time. I followed, with the bags. Inside, all the light switches still bore their labels—Hallway, Porch, Kitchen, Overhead—and the cabinets were still covered in the same color-coded instructions.

  Robbie tore into the living room and flung himself onto that couch emblazoned with its procession of bears, elk, and canoes. Three minutes later he fell asleep. His breathing was so peaceful I left him there to sleep through the night. He woke only when dawn poured in.

  That morning we hit the trails. I found a climb not far inside the boundary of the park that faced the southern sun while backing onto a damp ledge. Every twenty yards we came across another wet outcrop packed with more species than a manic terrarium. You could have cut out a chunk, loaded it into the cargo bay of an interstellar spacecraft, and used it to terraform a distant Super Earth.

  Robin clutched his list. He was finding new flowers left and right. But he’d lost his ability to name things. Are these rue anemones, Dad?

  He’d found a clump identical to the picture in his field guide. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  Well, the petals don’t quite match up. And the little thingies in the middle are a lot longer.

  I looked at the picture and then at him. He’d lost his confidence. Four months ago, he would have been correcting the book. “Trust yourself, Robbie.”

  He fretted and waved his hands in the air. Dad. Just tell me.

  I confirmed his guess. He drew a clumsy little clump of rue anemone. He went on to find, then worry over, both true and false Solomon’s seal. Then he drew those, too.

  Only drawing gave him a little peace. With a sharp pencil in his hand and a log to sit on, he was still okay. But it took him forever to re-create the ghostly purple streaks lining the inside of a spring beauty. He raged against the shakiness of his trout lilies. And, honestly, his draftsmanship had shriveled a little, from the airy, open boldness of a month before.

  The checklist filled in. He found ten, then a dozen species of ephemerals in full flower, faster than any stranger to this place would have imagined. Each new find filled him with dogged satisfaction. Before we were half a mile up the ridge, he found every kind of plant that I’d put on my challenge. He looked back down along the wall of sun-covered, wet rock so packed with cooperating experiments. Spring will keep coming back, whatever happens. Right, Dad?

  There were strong arguments either way. The Earth had been everything from hell to snowball. Mars had lost its atmosphere and fizzled away to a frigid desert, while Venus descended into hammering winds and a surface hotter than a smelter. Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight. My models said as much, and so did the rocks of this planet. Here we were, in a place fast becoming something new. Predictions were shaky from a sample size of one.

  “Yes,” I told him. “You can count on spring.”

  He nodded to himself and headed up the ridge. We came around a switchback onto a level stretch. The forest cleared fr
om one step to the next. Lush laurel undergrowth surrendered to open stands of oak and pine. My phone pinged. It shocked me to be in coverage, even up here. But it was the job of coverage to cover every uncovered spot on Earth.

  I checked. I couldn’t help it. I flicked past the lock screen—Aly and Robbie on his seventh birthday, their faces painted like tigers. Seventeen messages in six different text chains waited for me. I looked up to see Robbie heading down the trail, his gait almost easy again. I sneaked a look at the texts, fearing the worst. But I failed to imagine what that might be.

  The NextGen Telescope was dead. Thirty years of planning and ingenuity, twelve billion dollars, the work of thousands of brilliant people from twenty-two countries, the hope of all astronomy, and our first good chance to see the contours of other planets. The newly reelected President had killed it with glee:

  THE BIGGEST FRAUD PERPETRATED ON BELIEVERS SINCE THE ATTEMPTED COUP!!!

  My colleagues were scrambling in the ruins, pouring out their fury, grief, and disbelief. I typed in something, five words of uncomprehending solidarity. The message queued but wouldn’t send.

  Down the trail, Robbie knelt at the foot of a hemlock, fixed on something. I put my phone away and headed toward him. He stood as I approached. Did Mom ever hike this trail?

  Fierce as death is love. “What were you looking at?”

  He kept his eyes on a spot in the rhododendrons, back down the ravine. Did she?

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  Then could we just go to the river? The one she liked?

  “It’s early yet, bud. I thought we’d head down after lunch. We’re going to camp there tonight.”

  Could we just go now? Please?

  We headed back over the ridge, along the rock seeps and their packed bouquets. He bore down the mountainside. I tried to slow him to look. “Check out the fire pinks. They were barely open when we came up. Can you believe what they’ve done in one hour?”

  He looked and declared his amazement. But he was elsewhere.

  We came out at the bottom of the mountain and got back in the car. I drove to the other trailhead, the one we’d hiked a year and a half ago. The one my wife and I had hiked on our honeymoon a decade before that. I’d seduced her, as we walked, with stories of the thousands of exoplanets popping up all over, where there had been none for all of human history.

  How long before you find the little green men?

  “Very little,” I told her. “Probably not men. Maybe not even green. But we’ll both live to see them.” Neither of us would.

  Robin sensed something, as we got the frame packs from the car and slung them on. He waited until we were on the first switchback, a quarter mile down the trail. He stopped under a stand of freshly flowering serviceberry and looked at me sideways. Something’s bugging you.

  Some primal part of my brain imagined that if I never spoke the fact out loud, it might yet turn out otherwise. “It’s nothing. I’m just a little thoughtful.”

  It’s me, isn’t it?

  “Robbie. Don’t be ridiculous!”

  My screaming got us in trouble with the Child Protectors. They’re going to take me away from you, aren’t they?

  It’s hard to hug someone half your height when you’re both wearing frame backpacks. My attempt only confirmed his suspicions. He pushed away and started down the trail. Then he stopped, turned, and warned me with a drawn finger.

  You shouldn’t try to protect me from the truth.

  “I’m not.” My hand went up and traced a squiggle in the air, a flick three inches high and two across. It meant, Forgive me, I’m making a lot of mistakes. His head dropped a millimeter. That meant, Me, too.

  “Robbie, I’m sorry. It’s bad news. We heard from Washington.”

  They’re killing the Seeker?

  “Worse. They’re killing the NextGen.”

  He cupped his ears and gave a soft cry, like something half in flight. That’s crazy. All those years. All that work and money. Didn’t they hear your talk?

  I swallowed a bitter laugh.

  What about the Seeker?

  “Not a prayer now.”

  Never?

  “Not while I’m alive.”

  He couldn’t stop shaking his head. Wait. That’s not right. He frowned, doing the math in his head. The years it had taken to conceive, design, and build the NextGen. The wasted years of planning that had gone into the Seeker. The years that would have to pass before anyone dared propose a space-based telescope again. And the years left to me. Math wasn’t Robin’s strongest subject. But it didn’t have to be.

  What are they going to do with it?

  A question sure to wreck the sleep of astronomers and ten-year-olds everywhere. A twelve-billion-dollar device meant to travel fifty thousand times farther from Earth than the Hubble, align its eighteen hexagonal mirrors into an array with a precision less than one ten-thousandth of a millimeter, and peer to the universe’s edge would, presumably, be scavenged and carted away in pieces—history’s most expensive shipwreck.

  Dad. Everything’s going backward.

  He was right. And I had no idea why.

  The trail narrowed to a single track and passed through a long tunnel of rhododendrons. I watched him from behind, struggling under the weight of his pack and the force of realization. We crested and began the mile-long dive back down to the water. He stopped short and I almost knocked him over.

  All those civilizations out there. They’re gonna wonder why they never heard from us.

  WE REACHED THE SITE, tucked into a crook in the steep river. Robin shed his bulky pack and metamorphosed back into a boy.

  Can we sit by the water first, before we pitch the tent?

  The day was fresh and clear, with hours of light left and no chance of rain. “We can sit by the river for as long as it takes.”

  As long as what takes?

  “To figure out the human race.”

  He tugged me the dozen yards down to the river’s edge. The stream smelled newborn and green. We each found a rock to sit on, right up on the shore. He dipped his hand into the racing current and winced at the cold. Can we put our feet in?

  The NextGen was dead. The Seeker, too. My models would never be tested. My judgment was shot. The force and freedom of the white cascades filled the air. “We can try.”

  I stripped off my boots and heavy hiking socks and plunged my bruised feet into the water’s swirl. The freezing water probed the edge between relief and pain. Only when I pulled my legs out of the icy flow did I realize they were numb. Robbie was shaking, pumping his feet in the shallows to warm them.

  “That’s enough for now, okay?”

  He lifted his stiffened limbs out of the current. From mid-calf downward, he was brick-red. Red-footed booby bird! He grabbed his toes in agony and tried to thaw them. His laugh was a sob of pain. He scoured the water for something. I was afraid to ask him what. A different boy, in a different age, on a different world, once told me that his mother had become a salamander. I stared downstream with him, hoping for a sighting to redeem the day.

  Robin made it out first. Heron!

  I didn’t think he had such stillness left in him. The bird, a foot deep in the water, fixed on nothing. So did Robin, for a long, hypnotic time. They stared each other down, my son’s forward-facing eyes and the bird’s sideways one. DecNef had ebbed from Robin, but not the knowledge of how to lock in to shimmering feedback. Someday we’ll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.

  Tall bird stalking. Every five minutes, half a step. The bird was a piece of standing driftwood. Even the fish forgot. When the heron at last jabbed out, Robin shrieked. The strike crossed two meters with barely a lean-in from the bird. It came back upright, a meal the size of astonishment dangling from its mouth. The fish seemed too big to slip down the bird’s throat. But that baggy gullet opened, and in another moment, not even a bulge betrayed what had happened.

  Robin whooped, and t
he sound startled the heron into flight. It bent, kicked, flapped its massive wings. It looked even more pterodactyl as it lifted, and the croaking it made as it took off was older than emotion. The clumsy launch turned graceful. Robin hung on the bird as it threaded the undergrowth and was gone. He went on staring at the spot where the great thing had disappeared. He turned to me and said, Mom’s here.

  We put our shoes back on, turned upstream, and worked our way for a hundred yards along the stony banks to the spot where my whole family had once swum, if not all at the same time. As we came up to the pools beneath the rapids, I swore out loud. Robin blanched at the word. What, Dad? What?

  He didn’t see until I pointed. The whole stretch of stream was covered in cairns. Stacked-up rocks rose everywhere, from both banks and from the boulder tops in the middle of the stream. They looked like Neolithic standing stones or tapering Towers of Hanoi.

  Robin quizzed me with a look, still not understanding.

  What’s wrong with them, Dad?

  “Those were your mother’s worst nightmare. They destroy the homes of everything in the river. Imagine creatures from another world materializing in our airspace and tearing up our neighborhoods, again and again.”

  His eyes darted, searching out the chub and shiners and trout and salamanders and algae and crayfish and waterborne larvae and the endangered madtoms and hellbenders, all sacrificed to this turf-marking art. We have to take them down.

  I felt so weary. I wanted to set life down and leave it by the side of the water. Instead, we went to work. We demolished the towers within our reach. I knocked mine down. Robin dismantled his one at a time, peering through the clear water for the best place to replace each stone. When we finished with the stacks on the near bank, he looked across to the stacks in the middle of the stream. Let’s get the rest of them.

  Two thousand five hundred miles of rock-strewn rivers ran through these mountains. Human industry would reach them all. We could dismantle cairns every day, all summer and fall long, and the towers would rise again next spring.