Richard Powers - Bewilderment

I let my body go limp.

Jam tight!

I tensed again. We did a few rounds before he came around to sit sidesaddle on the arm of the chair. Dad . Chill! It’s all good. I mean, it’s not like I have to make a speech or anything .

The moment he went to bed, I called the local COG organizer—a Trotsky-looking guy Martin and I dealt with. “I have one more stipulation. After you film the talk, if I’m not happy, you don’t post it.”

“That’s up to Dr. Currier.”

“Well, I need veto rights.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“Then I don’t think my son is going onstage tomorrow.”

Funny how you can always win negotiations you’re not crazy about winning.

THREE HUNDRED PEOPLE filled the auditorium, with folks still drifting in as the morning’s presenters finished. Fifteen minutes before showtime, the three of us went backstage. A techie wired up Currier and Robin and walked them through their marks.

“You’ll see a red clock down on the front of the stage. At four minutes and forty-five seconds…” The tech drew his index finger across his throat and gurgled. Marty nodded. Robbie laughed. I wanted to puke on the floorboards.

I didn’t realize the talk was under way until Currier was standing center stage in the audience applause. I held my arm around Robin, as if he might dash onstage if I let go. The tech stood on his other side, brandishing a handheld monitor and whispering into a headset boom.

Currier sounded fresh, given how often he’d pitched his research in public. He still talked about the work as if the results mystified him. He took fifty seconds to describe neurofeedback, another forty to explain the fMRI and AI software, and half a minute to summarize the effects. Minute three went to the clips of Robin. The audience was audibly impressed. So was my son, seeing them again, standing next to me in the wings of a dark, packed theater. Geez. That’s what happened to me?

Minute four brought the reveal. Currier dropped it 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. Robin twitched, under my arm. I looked down at the compact planet next to me, whose shoulder I was clasping too hard. But he was grinning, as if the boy saved from that downward spiral fascinated him.

In his last half minute alone onstage, Currier succumbed to interpretation. “We’ve barely glimpsed the potential of these techniques. Only the future will reveal their full possibilities. 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, as easily as taking piano lessons. We could learn to live here, on Earth, without fear. Now please say hello to a friend of mine. Mr. Robin Byrne.”

The diminutive figure next to me shrugged off my arm and was gone. I held on to the back of my neck as he crossed the stage. He looked so small. I once saw a child his size play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 8 at Merkin Hall in New York. The girl’s hands barely stretched a fifth. I don’t know how she did it, or why her parents let her. I felt the same confusion now. My son had become a tiny prodigy on his own instrument. The audience clapped wildly as Robin trotted to the floodlit center stage. There, he stabbed a hand across his front and bowed deeply from the waist. The clapping and laughter grew.

I’ve watched the film so often my memory is convinced I was out in the darkened hall. Currier must have thought that Robin would smile and wave, then the two of them would say goodbye. But they still had a long and fluid minute left.

The whole auditorium wants him to ask: What’s it like? How does it feel? Is it still her? But Currier veers off into another place. He asks, “What’s the biggest difference between when you started the training and now?”

Robin rubs his mouth and nose. He takes too long to answer. You can see Currier’s confidence waver and hear the audience grow restive. You mean in real life?

The words slip through his teeth with a little lisp. The audience titters. Currier has no idea where Robin is going. But before he can get things back on the rails, my son declares, Nothing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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