by Richard Powers (a summary by Pat Evert)
Robin pulled his eye from the eyepiece—my sad, singular, newly turning nine-year-old, in trouble with this world. Stargazing was finished for tonight. Through the circle of trees, so sharp it seemed within easy reach, the Milky Way spilled out—countless speckled placers in a black streambed. If you held still, you could almost see the stars wheel. Nothing definitive. That’s what. He was so me. He was so her. I’d pulled him from school for a week and brought him to the woods. There had been more trouble with his classmates, and we needed a time-out. Lying down on beds spread out on the slats of the sagging deck, we said his mother’s old secular prayer out loud together and fell asleep under our galaxy’s four hundred billion stars.
I never believed the diagnoses the doctors settled on my son. His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin “on the spectrum.” I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. His classmates harassed him for not understanding their vicious gossip. His mother was crushed to death when he was seven. His beloved dog died of confusion a few months later. Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing. My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.
He woke me in the night. How many stars did you say there are? I couldn’t be angry. Even yanked from sleep, I was glad he was still stargazing. “Multiply every grain of sand on Earth by the number of trees. One hundred octillion.” I made him say twenty-nine zeros. How many have planets? That number was changing fast. “Most probably have at least one. Many have several. The Milky Way alone might have nine billion Earth-like planets in their stars’ habitable zones. Add the dozens of other galaxies in the Local Group . . .”
The next morning was his ninth birthday. He knew what he was getting. He’d been bargaining with me for months: a digital microscope that attached to my tablet and let him display magnified images on the screen. I wheeled out the cake I’d bought on the sly at the little 1950s grocery store. Cake, Dad? It’s not vegan. Mom would not have gone for it. “She made exceptions now and then. It’s okay, champ. We can feed it to the birds.” Well. We could try a little, first? How tall was she? “Five-foot-two. You’ll pass her, before long. She was a runner, remember?” Small but mighty. How did I get my name again? “On our first date, your mother and I went birding. Before Madison. Before everything. Your mother was looking through her binoculars like my find was the single most exotic life-form she’d ever seen. Without taking her eyes off it, she said, ‘The robin is my favorite bird.’” That’s when you fell in love with her. We started saying it all the time. Whatever blah or boring thing we were taking for granted. We’d trade a look, read each other’s minds, and one of us would blurt out, ‘The robin is my favorite bird!’” Can I ask you something? No lies. Honesty is important to me, Dad. Was the robin actually her favorite bird? I didn’t know how to be a parent. Most of what I did, I remembered from what she used to do. “Actually? Your mother’s favorite bird was the one in front of her. We just had to say the word, and life got better. We never thought of naming you anything else.” He bared his teeth. Did you have any idea what being a Robin is like? “What do you mean?” I mean, at school? At the park? Everywhere? I have to deal with it, every day. Does the entire third grade being a total jerk-face count? Alyssa used to say, The world is going to take this child apart. Sorry, Dad. It’s a good name. And I’m okay with being . . . you know. Confusing. “Everyone’s confusing. And everyone’s confused.” He showed me a sketch of a robin… and a second bird, unmistakably a raven. Can we print up some stationery from this when we get back? I really, really need some stationery.
I took him to the planet Dvau, about the size and warmth of ours. Across the entire landscape, nothing grew. It looked dead, but it was teeming with microbial life. “It’s three times older than the Earth.” He looked around the blighted landscape. Then what’s wrong? For my boy, large creatures wandering everywhere were a God-given right. It revolved at the right distance around the right kind of star. Like Earth, it had floating plates and volcanoes and a strong magnetic field, which made for stable carbon cycles and steady temperatures. Like Earth, it was showered with water from comets. Holy crow. How many things did Earth need? “More than a planet deserves.” “No large moon. Nothing nearby to stabilize its spin. It could go on forever, until a solar flare burns away its atmosphere.”
The next day we started our week of hiking and camping. We caught a black and yellow millipede. The animal writhed into a ball in my hand. I fanned the air above it toward Robin’s nose. Holy crow! “What does it smell like?” Like Mom! I laughed. “Well, yes. Almond extract, which Mom sometimes smelled like.
I sat down in the torrent and let the chill river crash over me. At his first touch of frigid current, Robin screamed. But the pain lasted only half a minute and his shrieks turned to laughter. “Keep low,” I called. “Crawl. Channel your inner amphibian.” Robbie surrendered to the ecstatic churn. It felt like surfing in reverse: leaning back, balancing by constant adjustment of a hundred muscles. The weird fixed flow of the standing waves roaring over us where we lay in the frothy rapids mesmerized Robin. The stream felt almost tepid now, warmed by the force of the current and our own adrenaline. It’s like a planet where the gravity keeps changing. He sat down in the cascade, still hanging on to me, working it out. It took him no longer than half a minute. Wait. Were you here with Mom? Your honeymoon? His superpower, really. I shook my head in wonderment. “How do you do that, Sherlock?”
With the fire blazing, our only responsibility in the whole world was to cook our beans and toast our marshmallows. Robin stared into the flames. In a robotic monotone he droned, The good life. A minute later: I feel like I belong here. Mom used to read poetry at night, to Chester? The embers spat, then settled again into reddish gray ingots. For a moment I worried that he’d ask me to name her favorite poems. Instead, he said, We should get another Chester. We crawled into the two-man tent and lay faceup, side by side. “May all sentient beings . . . be free from needless suffering. Where does that come from, anyway? I mean, before Mom.” I told him. It came from Buddhism. Was Mom a Buddhist? “Your mother was her own religion. When she said something, it was worth saying. When she spoke, everybody listened. Even me. She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal with during the day, if she said those words before bed, she’d be ready for anything the next morning.”
One more question, he said. What exactly do you do, again? “Oh, Robbie. It’s late.” I’m serious. When somebody at school asks me, what am I supposed to say? It had been the cause of his suspension, a month before. The son of some banker had asked Robin what I did. Robin had answered, He looks for life in outer space. That made the son of a brand executive ask, How is Redbreast’s Dad like a piece of toilet paper? He circles Uranus, looking for Klingons. Robin went nuts, apparently threatening to kill both boys. These days, that was grounds for expulsion and immediate psychiatric treatment. We got off easy.
The minute we returned to civilization, I’d be neck-deep in work and Robin would be back in a school he hated, surrounded by kids he couldn’t help spooking. The prospect terrified Alyssa, too, in her own ecstatic way. But somehow the collective wisdom of family, friends, doctors, nurses, and Internet advice sites sufficiently emboldened us to ignore everyone and muddle through on our own best guesses. But he’d survived his mother’s death. I figured he’d survive my best intentions. I liked him otherworldly. I liked having a son so ingenuous that it rattled his smug classmates.
My own parents raised me a Lutheran, but I lost all religion at the age of sixteen. But that night in the Smokies, in our two-person tent, I couldn’t help petitioning the person who knew Robin best in all the world. “Alyssa.” My wife of eleven and a half years. “Aly. Tell me what to do. We’re fine together, in the woods. But I’m afraid to take him home.”
We broke camp late that morning. We hit traffic on the road back. “You know what this is? Bear jam!” I saw them. They were fantastic. His voice was belligerent. They must really hate us. How would you like to star in a freak show? That line of people along the side of the road holding out their cell phones were turning back into kin. He saw it now: We humans were dying for company. Our species had grown so desperate for alien contact that traffic could back up for miles at the fleeting glimpse of anything smart and wild. “No one wants to be alone, Robbie.” They used to be everywhere, Dad. Before we got to them. We took over everything! We deserve to be alone.
That night we went to Falasha, a planet so dark we were lucky to find it. It wandered in empty space, an orphan without a sun. I told him. “Now we think rogue planets might even outnumber stars.” Why did we come here, Dad? It’s the deadest place in the universe. Every belief will be outgrown, in time. We went to the bottom of Falasha’s oceans, into their volcanic seams. We aimed our headlamps into the deepest trenches, and he gasped. Creatures everywhere: white crabs and clams, purple tube worms and living draperies. Everything fed on the heat and chemistry oozing from hydrothermal vents. My son was hypnotized. What will happen in a billion more years? “We’ll have to come back and see.”
I waited until we got out of Tennessee to tune in the news. Following the fires that had taken out three thousand homes across the San Fernando Valley, the President was blaming the trees. His executive order called for two hundred thousand acres of national forest to be cut down. The acres weren’t even all in California. The President is a dung beetle. “Don’t say that, bud.” Two beats later, he broke into a spectacular grin. You’re right! Dung beetles are pretty amazing. “Did you know that they navigate by mental maps of the Milky Way?”
We got to Madison a little later than expected. I took the opportunity to get chewed out by Carl Stryker, my colleague and coauthor on a paper about detecting biosignature gases from lensing-revealed exoplanets that I was holding up. Everything was a race. The truth was, Stryker and I were never going to win the Swedish Sweepstakes. But continued funding was nice. But nothing in existence could ever be luckier than Alyssa and Robin.
By rough count, my mother harbored six different personalities. When I was thirteen, Dad made us kids scrub up and sit behind him in court as he was sentenced for embezzling. By twelfth grade, I was fast-track apprenticing for my own career as a drunk. I was later taught by a bacteriologist named Katja McMillian. There were creatures that retooled themselves into something unrecognizable halfway through their life. There were creatures that saw infrared and sensed magnetic fields. Others that changed sex. Researchers were finding life where science knew it could not live. Life was eking out a living above the boiling point and below freezing… too salty, too acidic, and too radioactive for any creature to survive. Life made a home high up on the edge of space. Life lived deep in solid rock. My people. At last. By the time I was halfway through graduate school, the eight or nine planets known to exist turned into dozens, then hundreds. The life we’d found in Earth’s harshest regions could easily thrive in many of the regions now springing up throughout space.
One day near the end of my PH.D, I sat down in a campus computer lab next to a frantic but friendly woman who, by chance, was struggling with her computer. The fit between us was rough but useful. I gave her stamina and fed her curiosity. She taught me optimism and appetite, albeit plant-based. There it was: roll the dice and find your life catalyzed by another.
Alyssa finished her JD as I wrapped up my doctorate. Aly was a dynamo, cranking out fully researched action plans for one of the country’s leading animal rights NGOs every other week while dashing off countless diplomatic emails and press releases in her spare minutes. In four years, she rose through the ranks from glorified fundraiser to Midwest coordinator. State legislators from Bismarck to Columbus both dreaded and adored her. Wisconsin gave me my first real home. There I was, still getting paid to prepare how to discover whether we were alone or surrounded by crazy neighbors. Aly and I had more projects than we had hours. Then our lives changed, thanks to the one-point-five percent failure rate of our favored birth control. The unlikely roll stunned us both. It seemed a break in our long streak, the worst possible timing for an event we might never have chosen for ourselves. Our careers already stretched us to the limits. Neither of us had the knowledge or wherewithal to raise a child.
The thing that had nagged him since we got home. Can we watch Mom? He needed to study his mother, and he needed me to study her with him. For the magic to work, the ghost had to be nearby. He needed to see his mother lobbying at the state Capitol, an hour’s walk from our two-bedroom bungalow. That’s how it was with the woman who let me marry her. She ionized any room, even a roomful of politicians. All the nerves that plagued her in rehearsal vanished in the final performances. She empathized with all parties, compromising without betraying the truth. Everything she said came across as so damn reasonable. None of the ninety-nine assembly members would have believed she’d suffered from a massive childhood stutter and used to chew her lips until they bled. Aly described the judging stand on the fourth and final day of the hunting competition: an industrial-spec crane scale waiting for the contestants to deliver their hauls. Pickup trucks filled with carcasses pulled up and unloaded their mounds onto the scales. Awards went to those who had bagged the most poundage over four days. Her sober eloquence would conclude later that night in a two-hour crying jag in bed, with me powerless to comfort her. Did that bill pass, Dad? “Not yet, buddy. But something like it will, one of these years. And look at the number of views. People are still hearing her.”
What did mom mean about our ancestors watching us? Are they watching us and seeing whether we’re doing okay? No. I don’t think so. So… what about God, Dad? “God isn’t something you can prove or disprove. But from what I can see, we don’t need any bigger miracle than evolution.” I mean, duh. We’re on a rock, in space, right? There are billions of planets as good as ours, filled with creatures we can’t even imagine. And God is supposed to look like us? I gawked again. “Then why’d you ask?” To make sure you weren’t kidding yourself. So what do you think happened to Mom? “I don’t know, Robbie. She went back into the system. She became other creatures. I think she’s like a salamander or something. Two percent, Dad? He snarled like a cornered badger. Only two percent of all animals are wild? Everything else is factory cows and factory chickens and us?
The planet Pelagos had many times more surface than Earth. It was covered in water—a single ocean. 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. Dozens of dispersed intelligent species spoke millions of languages. Even the pidgins numbered in the hundreds.
Astronomy and childhood share a lot. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. 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.
Over the run of eighty minutes, I tried to convey to a coven of twenty-one-year-olds 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. It takes a certain kind of strangeness to hear the cosmic symphony and to realize that it was both playing and listening to itself. 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. A person has ten times more bacterial cells than human cells and we need a hundred times more bacterial than human DNA to keep the organism going. 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 Robin’s school. My son had smashed a friend in the face and cracked the boy’s cheekbone.
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.
Dad? What happened to her? This time, he meant it. That night, in the car. There were witnesses. Everyone agrees. Something ran in front of her car. An animal. I don’t know, buddy. Nobody does.” So Jayden’s parents are full of crap? Mom wasn’t trying to hurt herself? Then I turned out the light and left him to fall asleep in the comfort of my larger lie. I’ve always been especially good at lying by omission. And I lied wildly to him that night, by failing to tell him about the car’s other passenger, his unborn little sister.
Great idea, Dad. Listen to this. I’m going to paint every endangered species in America. Then I’ll sell them at the farmers’ market next spring. We can raise money and give it to one of Mom’s groups. I knew he’d never be able to paint more than a fraction of them. But I also knew a great idea when I heard one. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service lists more than two thousand North American species as being either threatened or endangered. I should do the most endangered one. The one that needs the most help. After much agonizing, he settled on Lithobates sevosus, the dusky gopher frog. When he was done, Robbie brought his painting to the picture window in the living room and held it up to the light for my inspection. The perspective was skewed, the surface texture clumsy, the outlining naïve, and the colors out of this world. But the thing was a masterpiece, warts and all—the portrait of a creature whose passing few humans would mourn. He hadn’t been so happy since the night we camped out under the stars.
Robin refused to go to school today. Mom says everything’s dying. Do you believe her? Because if she’s right, there’s no point in school. Everything will be dead before I get to tenth grade.
He demonstrated the fruit of today’s work. There was an ivory-billed woodpecker and a red wolf and a Franklin’s bumblebee and a giant anole and a clump of desert yellowhead. Some were more skillful than others. But they all vibrated, and the colors shouted, Save us. That’s a bird and a mammal and an insect and a reptile and a plant. To go with yesterday’s amphibian. They were incredible. The next day he wouldn’t go to school again. We had a physical fight.
On Geminus, we were trapped on opposite sides of a terrible meridian. The planet’s sun was small, cool, and red. Geminus lay so close in that the star had captured its rotation. One side remained forever in scalding light. The other side stayed night, icy and perpetual. Life germinated in the strip of twilight between permanent noon and midnight. In that band between burning and frozen, winds whipped the air and currents drove the water. Life on Geminus split into two kingdoms, one of ice, one of fire, each adapting to half of the bipolar planet.
Lots of people loved my wife. And Aly loved lots of people, as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Flirting was a part of her job. I watched her work hallways full of legislators and ballrooms full of donors as if they were all her dear friends. She was on the road a lot, directing her NGO across ten midwestern states. I ran into Marty Currier at the Apple Lady’s stand. We had a quick coffee. He wants us to be in an experiment! Martin Currier was one of Wisconsin’s high-profile scientists: senior research professor in neuroscience. Come on, buster. We should try it. He’s doing wild things. The big grant money was going to desensitizing people with PTSD. DecNef and Connectivity Feedback were being touted as treatments to all kinds of psychiatric disorders. And so we volunteered in her friend’s experiment.
Aly and I would each be given a random feeling from the eight core emotional states in Plutchik’s typology: Terror, Amazement, Grief, Loathing, Rage, Vigilance, Ecstasy, or Admiration. In the fMRI they gave me Admiration. My wife was admirable the way I was tall. But admiration barely touched what I felt. I revered my wife. Then they rolled the dice again and gave me a second target: Grief. What’s grief? The world stripped of something you admire.
Across the room, my wife seemed even smaller inside the scanner. They gave her Vigilance. three minutes into her stint with it, Currier leaned in to the monitor. “Hoo. She’s intense.” Aly sang all of life’s basic tunes in full voice, but vigilance was her national anthem. Her whole life was variations on one theme: whatever work your hands can do, do now, for there is no work for you in that place where you are going. Then they gave her Ecstasy. “Wait,” I told Currier. “I get Grief and she gets Ecstasy?” My wife’s cells pumped out optimism. Her soul aligned toward Ecstasy like iron filings mimic a magnetic field. I watched Aly’s brain-print of bliss on a screen in a booth alongside a man I was sure desired her. Currier stared at her unfolding pattern. “She’s perfect!”
“Robin’s in trouble. His grade school is threatening me with the Department of Human Services if I don’t dope him up.” “Has he been diagnosed with something?” “So far the votes are two Asperger’s, one probable OCD, and one possible ADHD.” “If you’re looking for non-pharmacologic therapy, we could put him in one of our trials. We’re testing DecNef’s efficacy as a behavioral intervention. A subject your son’s age would be a valuable data point. He’d even make a little pocket money. It’s a non-invasive process. We train him how to attend to and control his own feelings.
You mean, like a video game? All with my brain? That’s insane, Dad. He beamed and ran to get his portfolio to show me his latest masterpiece, a birdwing pearlymussel. We’re going to need a big table at the market, Dad. I held the painting with both hands, thinking: No therapy could be better than this.
For Thanksgiving, we drove to Aly’s parents on Chicago’s West Side. Grandma said the prayer. Robbie said, Nobody’s listening to that prayer, you know. We’re on a rock, in space, and there are hundreds of billions of other rocks just like ours. His grandpa Cliff kept riding him. “Have a little turkey, man. It’s Thanksgiving!” When Robin finally blew, it was geothermal. He started screaming, I don’t eat animals. I don’t eat animals! Don’t make me eat animals!
“He’s basically practicing mindfulness. Like doing meditation, but with instant, powerful cues steering him toward the desired emotional state.” I thought Robin might revolt. He’d been in the scanner for almost an hour. Instead, he cackled with pleasure and tranced out again. Soon enough, he’d learned how to run the dot through a rainbow of colors. “How did it feel?” Weird. Good. Like I could learn to do anything.
Decoded Neurofeedback was changing him, as surely as Ritalin would have. But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Who do you think that guy is? “What guy?” The one whose brain I’m copying? “It’s not one guy. It’s the average pattern of a few different people.” My son looked happy, and it chilled me.
His December school evaluations were his second-best ever. His teacher, Kayla Bishop, penned a message at the bottom of his report: Robin’s creativity is growing, along with his self-control. He stepped off the bus in the afternoons humming. One Saturday he even went out sledding with a group of neighborhood kids he barely knew. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d left the house to be with anyone other than me. “What’s this?” My tail. Some kids clipped it on to torture me. You know. Like: “Animal lover” or something. I just left it on. I feel bad for them, Dad. I really do. They’re trapped inside themselves, right? Same as everyone. He thought for a minute. Except me. I’ve got my guys. It creeped me out, the way he said it. “What guys, Robbie?” You know. He frowned. My team. The guys inside my head. For Christmas we drove back down to Aly’s parents’ in Chicago. We watched his cousins react to his gifts—paintings of endangered species—with varying degrees of suppressed mockery. Our first incident-free holiday since Aly’s death.
The planet Stasis looked so much like Earth. The flowing water and green mountains where we touched down, the woody trees and flowering plants, the snails and worms and flying beetles, even the bony creatures were cousins to those we knew. Some astronomers now thought: a billion or more planets at least as lucky as ours in the Milky Way alone. In a universe ninety-three billion light-years across, Rare Earths sprang up like weeds. Each predator hunted one prey. Every flower kept a pollinator of its own. No creature migrated. Is there intelligence? my son asked. Is anything aware? I told him no. Nothing on Stasis needed to remember much or predict much further out than now. In such steadiness, there was no great call to adjust or improvise or second-guess or model much of anything. He thought about that. Trouble is what creates intelligence? I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval.
The techs got a kick out of Robin. They liked to tease him, and, amazingly, he liked being teased. “Definitely a high-performing decoder,” Currier agreed. “He’s a distinctive boy, or he wouldn’t be in the training in the first place.”
I could see the weekly changes. He was quicker to laugh now, slower to flare. More playful when frustrated. He sat still and listened to the birds at dusk. I wasn’t sure which qualities were his and which came courtesy of his team. Still the same mouse, Dad. I just have help now. “Tell me how that works, Robbie.” You know how when you talk to someone stupid and it makes you stupid, too? “I do know that feeling. Very well.” But when you play a game against someone smart, you start making better moves?
Robin took his paintings to school rolled up in a mailing tube to sell them. I told him I didn’t think that was a great idea. Why? You think they’re too crappy? “They’re too good. Your classmates can’t afford to pay you what they’re worth.” Kayla made me return all the money and take the pictures back. She gave me a demerit. She said it was against the rules to sell things on the school grounds, and I should have known that from the class handbook. I asked her if she knew that half the large animal species on the planet would be gone by the time we reached her age. She said we were on social science, not biology, and don’t talk back, or I’d get another demerit.
I was watching Inga Alder on the news. She was a fourteen year old activist in Europe. She cocked an eye at the bemused journalist. “I know our chance of failure if we do nothing.” That’s what I’m saying! Exactly! Robin twitched so hard I reached out to calm him. He pulled away. He had no use for calm. I don’t know why it felt so painful and bottomless, to be sitting three feet away at the moment my son first fell in love. Robin fell hard, as only a nine-year-old can fall for an older woman. But his was that rare love—pure gratitude untroubled by need or desire.
At our first outdoor farmers’ market of the year we sold Robin’s paintings. What do you think would be a good price? I spent hours making that one! He accosted gray-haired ladies from twenty yards away. Help keep a beautiful creature alive, ma’am? Best few dollars you’ll ever spend. The guy who took our booth fee bought the black-chested spiny-tailed iguana—not Robin’s most successful effort—for twelve bucks to make the grand total an even thousand. Robin was beside himself. Months of single-minded work had led to triumph. Can we apply for a protest permit? He held out a sheet of eleven-by-seventeen drawing paper, his sketch for a larger placard. In the middle of the rectangular landscape were the words:
HELP ME I’M DYING
In a ring around these words ran a cartoon bestiary of soon-to-vanish plants and animals. My pride in his skill was offset by my dismay at the slogan.
He spent three days on his poster. When he finished, it was a thing of beauty. After months of neural feedback, his empathy was surpassing mine. He and I would learn together how to enter the world that his mother had lived in like a native. The stillness confused Robin. Nobody else is protesting anything? Everyone in the state is perfectly happy with everything just the way it is? He was right. The two of us standing together would look like an adult put-up job. But a nine-year-old standing alone with a sign reading help me i’m dying might be something you’d want to stop and talk over.
Alyssa warned me, at the start, that she had nightmares. I deal with some grim stuff, Theo. A lot of days. It gets into my dreams. You sure you want to sign on for sleeping next to someone with the screaming meemies? That’s the ruling story on this planet. We live suspended between love and ego. They think we’re neurotic, Theo. That we’re a bunch of nutjobs. I was not included in that disparaged we. She meant her kind, the ones who could feel their way across the species line. Why is it so hard for people to see what’s happening? In her dreams, other kinds of life could talk, and she understood them. And they told her what was really happening on this planet, the systems of invisible suffering on unimaginable scales. She’d helped draft a call for nonhuman rights that she planned to promote throughout the Upper Midwest. The bill she backed was decades ahead of its time. It had no chance in hell of passing, and she knew it. She kissed me, nibbling my lip. Then she headed off to the Capitol. I would not see her again on this planet, except to identify the body.
Robin put in a day of protest at the Capitol. How did Mom do it? Every day. For years.
We could not find the planet Isola. What were the odds of any extra-terrestrial contact ending well? All human history answered that one. That’s why the universe is silent, Dad. Everyone’s hiding. All the smart ones, anyway.
“He’s scoring much higher on self-control and resilience. He’s so much better at coping with uncertainty than he was when he first came to see us. All right: So he’s still angry. He’s still depressed.” “He keeps asking me how Aly fought a losing battle for years without getting beaten by it.” “She used to get angry. She got depressed. A lot. But she blew right through. Your son could learn how to put himself into an emotional state his mother once generated. It might be motivating. It could answer his question.”
The question got him out of bed. They have Mom’s brain? She’s in the experiment? Holy crow. Dad! Why didn’t you tell me? Peace came over him, as if all would be well now, whatever the outcome.
For an hour and a half, he’d been feeling his way around Aly’s limbic system. In a voice I barely recognized, the alien on the front seat next to me said, Your wife loves you. You know that, right?
Did you know that the world’s corals will be dead in six more years? The world’s most spectacular partnership was coming to an end, and he’d never see it. He looked up at me, with Aly’s ghost planted right into his brain. So what are we supposed to do about that?
Wild weather throughout the Southeast triggered an outbreak of Amblyomma americanum, the Lone Star tick. It might not be a bad thing, Dad. It might even save us. Seriously. The infection makes people allergic to meat. No more meat eaters could be an amazing thing. Our food would go ten times farther! The words made me queasy. I wanted Aly to intervene with the boy. But that was the problem: she was intervening already. He trained a fifth time on the template of his mother’s ecstasy. Each session left him a little more happily baffled. The boy who stood on the steps of the Capitol waving his handmade placard was gone. I’d go to bed at night feeling something toward my once-anxious child that seemed an awful lot like mourning. I was spying on my son’s notebooks. The oddest feeling came over me: the pages had been dictated from the grave.
We went for a walk. The boy at my right elbow was a different species from the boy who’d played with his birthday microscope in our rented cabin in the woods less than a year earlier. Fascination had made him invincible. “Robbie. When did you learn all this stuff?” What do you mean, “when?” All along! “But have you been teaching yourself?” His whole body demurred. Everybody out here wants me to know them. “Robbie? When you do the training? Is it like Mom’s there?” He stopped and grabbed at a section of chain-link fence. Mom’s all over. Dad? It’s like that planet we went to. The one where all the separate creatures share a single memory.
Dad? I think I’m done with school. What about homeschooling? It’s easy, Dad. We just fill in a form and tell Wisconsin that you’re going to do it. We can get some course packets and stuff online, if we want. You wouldn’t have to spend any time on me at all. I can learn by myself, Dad. I want to be an ornithologist. They don’t teach you that in the fourth grade. He’d discovered, on his own, what formal education tried to deny: Life wanted something from us. And time was running out. “And lesson one is figuring out how this homeschooling thing works.”
The day we withdrew him from school, he ran around the house singing. I built him a Planetary Exploration Transponder—basically my aging tablet computer, gussied up. I searched for something that would keep him busy long enough for me to clear my own backlog of work. “Draw me the outlines of eight countries in West Africa. Then fill them each with four drawings of their native plants and animals.” At the pace he was setting, he threatened to have the 875 hours of fourth grade finished by the end of summer.
I brought Robbie in for his last training of the summer. By then the whole lab was in awe of him. “Your son. I just. Love your son. He’s getting amazing. When he’s around, we all feel happier when he’s here. We all start looking forward to him two days before he comes in. Does he glow as much at home as he does in the lab?” “He’s been beatific for weeks. I can’t remember the last time he had a fit.” The more Robin trains, the more he resembles Alyssa. The way he taps on his temple and chews on the word actually . . . it’s eerie. He’s learned half the birds Aly knew.” I never knew my wife of a dozen years. She was a planet all her own.
The Kepler scope succeeded beyond all our dreams. It filled space with new planets everywhere it looked. We knew now that Earths were common. There were more of them than I’d dared hope, and closer by. But Kepler couldn’t give me what I wanted: to know, beyond all doubt, that one other world out there was alive. Not even my wife really cared all that much one way or the other. Robbie did. The NextGen Space Telescope was a sore spot with my people. The flagship instrument was now a dozen years late and four billion dollars over budget. My trained mind reader appeared in the office doorway, brandishing his Planetary Exploration Transponder. Dad. You won’t believe this. Half of Americans think we’ve already been visited by beings from other worlds.
“Robbie? Dr. Currier wants to know if he can show your training videos to other people.” You mean a business? Or does he want to help people? My question, exactly. Because, you know, Dad. He helped me. A lot. And he brought Mom back. I feel like I’m waking up. Like I’m inside everything. Aly used to claim—that if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. “It sounds like you’re okay with Dr. Currier showing people video of you?” His shrug nudged my bicep. It’s not really my video. It probably belongs to everybody. Aly was there, lying with her head against my other arm. I didn’t shrug her off. Smart boy, she said. Remember how much Mom loved this tree? For two years he’d been asking me what Aly was like. Now he was reminding me. She called it the Boardinghouse. She said no one has ever even counted all the kinds of things that live in it.
Then came the video: half a minute of a pixilated Robin talking with experimenters on the day of his first session, forty-five seconds of him training on a screen while inside the tube, and another minute, one year later, of him talking to his beloved Ginny. I gasped. My son’s posture and carriage, the melody of his voice. He wasn’t the same person. He was barely the same species.
“How’s life on the Mississippi?” It’s pretty bad, Dad. Are you sure you want to know? “I can handle it.” I don’t know where to start. Like, more than half our migrating birds use the river, but they can’t because they’re losing their habitat. Did you know that? The chemicals that farmers spray on their stuff goes in the river, and that’s turning the amphibians into mutants. And all the drugs that people pee and poop down the toilet. The fish are completely doped up. You can’t even swim in it anymore! And where it comes out? The mouth? Thousands of square miles of dead zone. Don’t worry, Dad. We might not figure it out. But Earth will.
I told him about the planet Mios, how it had flourished for a billion years before we came along. The people of Mios built a ship for long-distance, long-duration discovery, filled with intelligent machines. That ship traveled hundreds of parsecs until it found a planet full of raw materials where it landed, set up shop, repaired, and copied itself and all its crew. Then two identical ships set off in different directions for hundreds more parsecs, until they found new planets, where they repeated that whole process again. And they kept dividing? There must have been a million of them! “Yes,” I told him. “Then two million. Then four. The ships went on reporting, even after Mios stopped responding.” They kept going, even though Mios was gone? “They were programmed to.” Dad. Think of what they saw. “They saw hydrogen planets and oxygen planets, neon and nitrogen planets, water worlds, silicate, iron, and globes of liquid helium wrapped around trillion-carat diamonds. There were always more planets. Always different ones. For a billion years.” The original ship touched down on a rocky planet with shallow seas, in a small, weird stellar system rotating around a G-type star.” It landed on a level plain in the middle of wild, waving, towering structures more complex than anything the crew had seen. These elaborate, fluttering structures reflected light at various frequencies. Many of them sported astonishing forms at their very top that resonated in lower frequencies—” Wait. Plants? Flowers. You mean the ships are tiny? “They saw the flowers wilt and turn into seed. They saw the seeds drop and sprout.” My son held his hand up to stop the story. It would kill them, Dad, when they figured it out. They would see. The flowers were going somewhere, and the ships weren’t.
I’d lost count of how many parenting errors I’d already made. Robin thought it would be fun, to become an episode alongside all of Earth’s other strange inhabitants. He put his case to me over ice cream, hours after I sent Dee Ramey packing. Honestly, Dad, think about it. I was super-miserable for so long. And now I’m not. People might like to know about that. And it’ll be educational. You’re all about education, Dad. Besides, it’s a cool show. Like Dr. Currier says. Maybe it could be useful.
“Does it feel like talking to your mother?” His brows pinch; he doesn’t quite like the question. Nobody’s saying anything out loud, if that’s what you mean. “But you can feel her? You can tell it’s her?” He shrugs. Vintage Robin. It’s us. He’s looking at something way too big to tell her. He reaches one hand above his head to catch the lowest branches of the willow and let it slip back through his fingers. She’s here right now.
Everyone’s broken, he tells her. That’s why we’re breaking the whole planet. And pretending we aren’t, like you just did. The shame in her face shows up only in freeze-frame. Everybody knows what’s happening. But we all look away.
Currier called a week after Ova Nova posted the video. “Your boy’s viral.” Ova Nova had dropped the video as part of a bundle called “The World Is Ending Again. What Now?” “Theo. The thing is, we’re also hearing from journalists.” Which meant they’d be on my front stoop in another few heartbeats. Currier said, “Let’s stay calm and see how this plays out.” Robin was thoughtful but cautious. They want me to talk about the training and Mom’s brain and stuff?
Three hundred people filled the auditorium, with folks still drifting in. Currier mentioned as if it were just another data point: “the same mother whose death sent the boy into a downward spiral has returned to nurse his spirit into health. Meanwhile, imagine a world where one person’s anger is soothed by another’s calm, where your private fears are assuaged by a stranger’s courage, and where pain can be trained away. We could learn to live here, on Earth, without fear. Now please say hello to a friend of mine. Mr. Robin Byrne.” He asks, “What’s the biggest difference between when you started the training and now?” You mean in real life? My son declares, Nothing! Just that I’m not scared anymore. I’m all mixed into a really huge thing. That’s the coolest part.
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. My son was coming with, bringing his own campaign.
From his luggage, he extracted the roll of butcher paper, a little crumpled from the journey. The banner was longer than the two of us stretched end to end.
LET’S HEAL WHAT WE HURT
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. 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.
MAY ALL BEINGS BE FREE FROM SUFFERING
If people only knew, you know? We’re all bajillionaires. 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. If anyone’s ever wondering, I’m good with the whole world.
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. I mean, eating light? That’s crazy stuff
I thought you did great, Dad. What do you think? My thoughts weren’t fit for young ears. “Humans, Robbie.” The difference between fear and excitement must be only a few neurons wide. We took out Robin’s banner and held it up while a passerby took several photos from different angles and distances in the changing light. A boy, his father, the dying birds and beasts, the insect apocalypse along the banner’s bottom, the background mosaic of sandstone, limestone, and marble dedicated to freedom and built by slaves: the engineer wanted to get it exactly right. I wound up getting arrested.
Dad. I can’t believe you did that. You stood up for the ol’ Life Force! He loved it. You’ve got a record now. Criminal! He tugged me to a halt on the sidewalk alongside Constitution Avenue. Your wife loves you. I know it for a fact.
Dinosaurs, Dad. The birds passed over us. Robbie held still and watched them wing away to nothing. At last his fingers loosened their grip on my wrist. How would we ever know aliens? We can’t even know birds.
Currier had 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. This isn’t because of Washington, is it? Trust me, Dad. I’m a hundred percent good. We can keep the training going by ourselves. You and me.
Dad. I’m going backwards. I can feel it. He rolled out a paper path through the middle of the room. “All right. Nine feet, for four and a half billion years. That’s half a billion years per foot. Let’s make a timeline.” I penciled in the major waypoints: the end of the Hadean, one foot into our scroll. Immediately after that, the start of life. Five feet in, I marked the moment when competition gave way to networking and complex cells swarmed the Earth. The main event, I penciled it in—the Cambrian explosion, just over a foot from the end of the scroll.
The sound came from Robin’s bedroom. I opened the door and saw him curled up in the corner holding his Planetary Exploration Transponder and banging his head against the wall. The story was all over the net: brain contagion, tearing through Texas’s four and a half million head of cattle, spreading from feedlot to feedlot with industrial-scale efficiency. “Aren’t you forgetting something? May all sentient beings—” He held up a flaccid hand. I want to change the words. May all life. Get free. From us.
Visitors showed up the next Monday. Floyd grilled Robin about his studies, Charis leaned in and asked, “Did you hurt your head?” And everything clicked at last. She stood and crossed the room to examine the bruise, which protruded from his right brow like a blue carbuncle. “How did that happen?” I hit it against the wall. I was angry about the cows. Their briefcase was filled with two years of papers and notes, everything from Robbie’s initial suspension from third grade to my arrest in Washington for a public incident in which I’d employed my son. The first words out of his mouth were, Dad. I’m ruining your life.
My son did not make a comeback. He was certain that he’d failed me, that he’d failed all the creatures he was forced to outlive. “How about a gigantic treasure hunt?” His shoulders fell. He was done with discovery. “No, Robbie. A real one. How about the Smokies?” Can we stay in the same cabin again? Can we go to that river with the rapids where you and Mom went? 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. He couldn’t stop asking about Aly. He wanted to know where she grew up and what she studied in school. He wanted to know everything we’d done together on our honeymoon in the Smokies, and what Alyssa had liked best about those mountains.
Spring will keep coming back, whatever happens. Right, Dad? 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. Here we were, in a place fast becoming something new. 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. Something’s bugging you. “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? “Robbie, I’m sorry. It’s bad news. We heard from Washington.” They’re killing the Seeker? “Worse. They’re killing the NextGen.” 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.
He turned to me and said, Mom’s here. Stars everywhere. More than we can count? So why isn’t the night sky full of light? Aly, who had been away for so long, leaned her mouth up to my other ear. He’s quite something. You know that, don’t you? Our solar system was a mere fourteen billion years old, and all the stars were rushing away from us at an increasing rate. This place was too young and was expanding too fast for stars to erase the night. Listen to that, my son told me. And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?
He’d been dismantling cairns. Turning the river back into a safe home. He was soaked up to the top of his rib cage. His whole body was quaking. I curled around him on the rock and tried to seal a layer of air around his torso. The shivering went on, but I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. A long time passed before I could accept that he no longer needed me.
The university gave me compassionate leave. After the funeral, I couldn’t bring myself to pay a bill or cut the grass or wash a dish or watch the news. Then one day, a message from Currier. If you’d like to be with Robbie, you can be. He’s risking a lot for me, breaking the law. We’ll all be breaking it, soon enough. But Martin is more than merely criminal. He’s spending a budget that he doesn’t have, powering these machines with energy that will soon be hard to come by at any price. He runs the scanner himself, having laid off all his staff. Like so many others, his lab is folding. The feedback guides me, and all the while, my brain learns how to resemble what it loves.
And then one day, my son is there, inside my head as sure as life. My wife, too, still inside him. What they felt, then, I now feel. We rise together into orbit high above the place we’ve been visiting. The thought occurs to him, and I have it. Can you believe where we just were? Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.
Hidden in Plain Sight 