Richard Powers - Bewilderment

The film was a showstopper wherever Currier presented it. He showed the video to six hundred people at the annual conference of the American Public Health Association. At the reception after the talk, he let slip to a group of therapists the even more remarkable story behind the remarkable video. And that’s when Robin’s future began to get away from me.

I GAVE HIM A TREASURE HUNT about the Mississippi. Imagine you’re a drop of water as you made your way from a glacial lake in Minnesota down to Louisiana and the Gulf. What states would you float past? What fish and plants might you see? What sights and sounds would you hear along the way? It seemed innocent enough—homework I might have done myself, thirty years ago. But thirty years ago, it was a different river.

As he often did in those days, Robbie went a little over the top. The treasure hunt turned into a week-long excursion. He drew maps and diagrams, sketches of boats and barges and bridges, whole underwater scenes replete with exotic aquatics. Days in, he appeared alongside my desk in the office, holding out the enameled tablet on which he did his research. Requesting upgrade to the transponder .

“What’s wrong with it?”

Come on, Dad. You call it Planetary, but it’s just a little kiddie browser. It doesn’t let me go anywhere .

“Where do you want to go?”

He told me the things he was looking for and how he would find them.

“Fine. Use the ‘Theo’ sign-in today. But go back to your own account when you’re done.”

Goodie. You are the greatest. I’ve always said so. What’s the password?

“Your mother’s favorite bird. But flying backwards.”

His eyes pitied me for choosing such an obvious secret. But he went back to work, ecstatic.

He was subdued at dinner when we both knocked off for the day. I had to draw him out. “How’s life on the Mississippi?”

He spooned in some tomato soup from far away. Not so great, actually .

“Tell me.”

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 .

His face made me regret giving him my password. How did real teachers handle this? How did they manage field trips down that river without faking the data or ignoring the obvious? The world had become something no schoolchild should be allowed to discover.

He rested his chin on his arm, on the table. I didn’t actually check this, okay? But other rivers are probably just as bad .

I came around the table and stood behind his chair. My hands reached down to take his shoulders. He didn’t look up.

Do people know this?

“I think so. Mostly.”

And they don’t fix it because…?

The standard answer—economics—was insane. I’d missed something essential in school. I was still missing something. I stroked the crown of his head. Somewhere beneath my moving fingers were those cells that the training had reshaped. “I don’t know what to say, Robin. I wish I knew.”

He reached up blindly to clasp my hand. It’s okay, Dad. It’s not your fault .

I was pretty sure he was wrong.

We’re just an experiment, right? And you always say, an experiment with a negative result isn’t a failed experiment .

“No,” I agreed. “You can learn a lot from negative results.”

He stood up, full of energy, ready to go finish his project. 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.

For how long? my son asked.

I shrugged. “There was nothing to stop them.”

Were they scouting out places to invade or something?

“Maybe.”

And they kept dividing? There must have been a million of them!

“Yes,” I told him. “Then two million. Then four.”

Holy crow! They’d be all over the place!

“Space is big,” I said.

Did the ships report back to Mios ?

“Yes, even though the messages took longer and longer to arrive. And the ships went on reporting, even after Mios stopped responding.”

What happened to Mios?

“The ships never learned.”

They kept going, even though Mios was gone?

“They were programmed to.”

This gave my son pause. That’s pretty sad . He sat up in bed and pushed at the air with his hand. But it might still be okay for them, 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.”

That’s a lot , my son said. Maybe that’s enough. Even if Mios was gone .

“They split and they copied and they spread through the galaxy as if they still had a reason to. One of the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the original ship touched down on a rocky planet with shallow seas, in a small, weird stellar system rotating around a G-type star.”

Just say it, Dad. Earth?

“The craft 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 ?

I didn’t deny it. He seemed equal parts skeptical and fascinated.

Then what?

“The ship’s crew studied the gigantic waving green and red and yellow flowers for a long time. But they couldn’t figure out what the things were or how they worked. They saw bees fly into the flowers and the flowers track the sun. 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 get on the communicator and tell every other ship from Mios in the galaxy to shut down .

His words gave me gooseflesh. It wasn’t the ending that I imagined. “Why do you say that?” I asked.

Because they would see. The flowers were going somewhere, and the ships weren’t .

I BROUGHT HIM TO CAMPUS WITH ME on days when I taught. He spread out his books on the desk in my office, and while I lectured or sat on committees, Robin taught himself long division and solved word problems and decoded poems and learned why the trees outside the office window turned carroty and gold. He wasn’t studying anymore. He was simply toying with things and enjoying the unfolding.