Richard Powers - Bewilderment

He looked down at the work from above, picturing how it should have been. I didn’t know how to spell sentient.

“You could have asked me.”

But then you’d know .

“Robbie. This is better.”

You think? Be honest, Dad. I only want honesty .

“Robbie. I’m telling you.”

He looked down, squinting. He shook his head. If people only knew, you know? We’re all bajillionaires . He held his hands out in front of him, as if they were full of germ plasm and treasure.

“What do you want to do with it?”

Oh, yeah. 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 .

We rolled up the scroll and got ready for bed. In the dark, the hotel room glittered with dozens of LEDs of obscure purpose. Propped up in our twin beds, we might have been in the command center of a warp-drive exploratory vessel, tethered for a moment at a watering hole somewhere along an endless surveying mission.

My son’s voice tested the dark. So those people? Are they for real?

“Which people, buddy?”

All those people who linked to my clip?

His voice was tinted with scientific doubt. My heart sank and my head revved. “What about them?”

How many of them were just laughing at me?

The room hummed at half a dozen different frequencies. Every reply seemed gutless. I took too long, and he had his answer. “People, Robbie. They’re a questionable species.”

He thought about this. He weighed what it meant to become a public commodity. His face soured.

“Robbie. I am so sorry. I made a big mistake.”

But against the light from the window, I saw him shake his head. No, Dad. It’s all good. Don’t worry. You remember the signal?

He made it in the pool of light, twisting his cupped hand back and forth on the stalk of his broomstick arm. He’d taught me the code once, months ago, on another Earth—his invented hand sign for All Is Good.

You know how people sometimes worry: Is that person mad at me? Well, if anyone’s ever wondering, I’m good with the whole world .

THE BREAKFAST BUFFET THRILLED HIM. He piled up more oat squares, blueberry muffins, and avocado toast than any creature his size should have been able to eat in a day. His lips oozed chocolate hazelnut butter as he talked . Greatest field trip ever. And it hasn’t even started!

We planned to walk on the Mall that morning, before I testified. We talked a bit about what to see. 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 .

“You are correct, sir!”

I mean, eating light? That’s crazy stuff! Better than SF! His face darkened. So why does science fiction think they’re so scary?

Before I could answer, a woman twice my age, short, avian, with eyeglasses like shop goggles, appeared at the end of our booth. “I’m sorry to intrude on your breakfast,” she said, looking at Robin. “But are you… that boy? The one in that beautiful video?”

Before I could ask her what she wanted, he broke into a smile. It’s possible, actually .

The woman stepped back. “I knew it. There’s something about you. You’re really something!”

Everybody’s something , he said. The echo of the viral clip made them both laugh.

She turned to me. “Is he your son? He’s really something.”

“He is.”

She backed away from my curtness, her words a mess of apology and thanks. When she was out of earshot, Robin gaped at me. Geez, Dad. She was being nice. You didn’t have to be mean to her .

I wanted my son back. The one who knew that large bipeds were not to be trusted.

THE REVIEW PANEL MET in the Rayburn House Office Building, across the street from the Capitol. Robin dawdled, agog with patriotism. I tugged at him to get us to the appointed spot on time. The room was cavernous, wood-paneled, and draped with flags. Long, tiered ranks of leather-padded chairs faced a raised platform with a heavy wooden table measured out by nameplates and plastic water bottles. In the back were side tables full of coffee and nibbles.

We were late getting through security and arrived in a room filled with colleagues from around the country. A couple of them remembered Robin from when he gate-crashed the teleconference. More than a few teased Robin or asked if he was presenting. I bet I could convince them , he said.

The meeting started. I sat Robbie next to me. “Settle in, bud. Lunch is a long way off.” He held up his sketchbook, his pastels, and a graphic novel about a boy who learns how to breathe underwater. He was fully provisioned.

The dais filled with politicians who looked like yesterday’s America. They called on a NASA engineer to start things off with the latest plan for the Planet Seeker. It would settle in somewhere near the orbit of Jupiter before deploying its massive, self-assembling mirror. Then a second instrument, the Occulter, flying several thousand miles away, would position itself in the precise spot to blot out the light from individual stars so our Seeker could see their planets. The engineer demonstrated. “Like holding up your hand to block a flashlight, so you can see who’s holding it.”

Even to me, it sounded crazy. The first question came from the representative of a district in West Texas. His drawl sounded sculpted for public consumption. “So you’re saying the Seeker part alone will be every bit as complex as the NextGen telescope, even before adding in the flying lampshade? And we can’t even get the damn NextGen off the ground!” The engineer demurred, but the congressman rode over him. “The NextGen is decades overdue and billions over budget. How are you possibly going to make something twice as complicated work for the amount you’re asking?”

The questions went downhill from there. Two more engineers tried to undo the damage and restore confidence. One of them pretty much imploded. The morning threatened to end before it began. Robbie had worked away for hours, barely fidgeting. Honestly, I forgot he was there. When we surfaced for lunch, he was holding up a painted page for my approval: another planet, as if seen through the Seeker, its disk swirling with the turbulent blue-green-white whose only possible cause was life.

The image was brilliant. I wanted to work it into my slide deck. We had an hour. First I steered us through the line for the catered box lunches. There were ones marked Vegan and ones marked Altairian . “You’re supposed to laugh,” I told my son.

I’m too Sirius .

“I see you’ve read the Astronomer’s Joke Book .”

I got a Big Bang out of it .

We holed up in a corner. While Robbie ate, I laid his lush painting on the floor, snapped it with my phone, mailed a copy through the air to my laptop computer, cropped and edited, then inserted it at the end of the virtual carousel I would project to a room full of people that afternoon. None of the science fiction I grew up on could have predicted such magic.

After lunch came several scientists whose work required something like the Seeker. I spoke third. I reached the stand just as the room was sliding into blood-sugar doldrums. I talked about how no other method could match direct optical imaging for finding life. I showed our best existing photo of an exoplanet—little more than a grayish blur. Even that was impressive, given that my graduate thesis advisor once assured me we’d never live to see one.