Richard Powers - Bewilderment

My next slide was a bit of theater: a best-guess digital simulation of what that planet would look like through the occulted eyes of the Seeker. The room gasped, as if Congress said Let There be Light and the universe obliged. I pointed out that a picture that good, with all its data, could reveal whether the planet was inhabited. I finished by showing Robbie’s painting while quoting Sagan: We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers .

Then I braced for less-than-courageous questions. The rep from West Texas came out shooting. “Can your atmospheric models tell the difference between a world with interesting life and a world that’s nothing but germs?”

I said that a distant planet filled with bacteria would rival the most interesting thing ever discovered.

“Could you tell if a planet had intelligent life?”

I tried, in twenty seconds, to say how that might be done.

“And what are the odds of that?”

I wanted to hedge, but it wouldn’t have helped. “No one thinks that is especially likely.”

Disappointment everywhere. Another congressman asked, “Can you do your work with the NextGen, if it ever launches?”

I explained why even that magnificent instrument wasn’t enough to peer directly at atmospheres. A superannuated congressman from Montana lumped the two telescopes together. “What if all these pricey toys tell us that the most interesting beings in the entire universe could have put their billions of dollars to better use right here, on the most interesting planet anywhere?”

I knew then why these men wanted to kill this project. The cost overruns were just an excuse. The country’s ruling party would have opposed the Seeker even if it were free. Finding other Earths was a globalist plot deserving the Tower of Babel treatment. If we academic elites found that life arose all over, it wouldn’t say much for humanity’s Special Relationship with God.

I stepped down from the podium feeling like shit. Weaving my way back to my seat through a narrowing iris of light-headedness, I heard my son exclaim, Dad! That was great! I hid my face from him.

Afterward, we lingered in the hall outside the hearing room. I postmortemed the battlefield with my colleagues. Some were still sanguine. Others had abandoned hope. A terse alpha from Berkeley suggested I might have done better with more statistics and less child art. But one of this world’s great planet hunters fussed over Robbie until he reddened. “You’re so beautiful!” she told him. And to me: “You’re lucky. I can’t understand why my boys love Star Wars more than they love the stars.”

WE WALKED DOWN INDEPENDENCE. Robbie took my hand. I thought you did great, Dad. What do you think?

My thoughts weren’t fit for young ears. “Humans, Robbie.”

Humans , he agreed. He smiled to himself, then lifted his gaze to the bronze Statue of Freedom at the top of the Capitol dome. Do you think any aliens have found a better system than democracy?

“Well, better probably looks different on different planets.”

He nodded, forwarding the memory to us in the future. Everything looks different on different planets. That’s why we need to find them .

“I wish I’d said that, back there.”

He held his arms out to embrace the Capitol. Look at this place . The mother ship!

We followed one of the winding footpaths through the green. Robin nudged us toward the steps. My heart sank when I realized what he had in mind. The butcher-paper banner stuck out of his backpack like a space suit antenna.

Here’s a good spot, right?

The difference between fear and excitement must be only a few neurons wide. Just then, one of the NASA engineers from the morning session came down the path. I waved to the man and said, “Let’s do this, Robbie!” We’d be finished in a minute or two, and at least one of us would have a victory to take back home.

While Robbie retrieved the banner, the engineer and I exchanged a guarded postmortem of the day’s hearing. “It’s just theater,” he said. “Of course they’ll fund us. They’re not cavemen.”

I asked if he’d mind taking a picture or two of me and my son. Robin and I unfurled his masterpiece. A slight breeze wanted to take the banner from our hands. Dad! Careful! We tugged, and the banner stretched to full length. It billowed like the jib of a space probe filled with solar wind. In the full afternoon light, I saw details in his creatures that I’d failed to see in the hotel room.

The engineer was all enthusiasm and crooked teeth. “Hey! You made that? That’s just great. If I’d been able to draw like that, I’d never have started with the ham radio.”

I gave him my cell phone, and he took several shots 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. Another pair of astronomers from the day’s meeting saw us from a distance. They came over to admire the banner and instruct the engineer on how to take a photo. The engineer flipped my phone over to show Robbie the lenses. “We came up with digital cameras at NASA. I helped build the billion-dollar camera that we lost in orbit around Mars.”

One of the astronomers held his head. “ We’re the ones who forced you NASA goons to put a camera on that thing in the first place!”

Ordinary civilians and civics tourists stopped, attracted by Robbie’s scroll and the three old men happily shouting at each other. A woman my mother’s age fussed over Robbie. “You made this? You did all this all by yourself?”

Nobody does anything by themselves . Something Aly used to tell him, back when Robin was little. I don’t know how he remembered it.

We spun the banner around. The onlookers cheered the other side. They hemmed in to see the lush details. The aerospace engineer buzzed around, backing people off so he could take a fresh round of pictures. A shout came from a few yards down the pavement. “I knew it!” Somewhere in the billion revolving worlds of social media, a girl in her late teens must have seen posts of a weird little boy chirping his odd little birdsong. Now the teen milled about in this ad-hoc camp meeting, thumbing her phone through a trail of bread crumb bits back to the Ova Nova videocast. “That’s Jay! That’s the boy they wired up to his dead mom!”

Robin didn’t hear. He was busy talking to two middle-aged women about how we could re-inhabit planet Earth. He was joking and telling stories. The girl who recognized him must have started a text chain, because minutes later other teens drifted in from the east end of the Mall. Somebody pulled a ukulele out of his backpack. They sang “Big Yellow Taxi.” They sang “What a Wonderful World.” People were snapping and posting things with their phones. They shared snacks and improvised a picnic. Robin was in heaven. He and I stood holding the banner, occasionally handing it off to four teens who wanted a turn. It was like something his mother might have tried to organize. It may have been the happiest moment of his life.

I was so caught up in the festivities that I didn’t notice two officers of the U.S. Capitol Police pull up on First Street Northwest and get out of their squad car. The teens began to heckle them. We’re just enjoying ourselves. Go arrest the real criminals!

Robin and I lowered the banner to the pavement so I could talk to the officers. Two teens picked it up and began swirling it around like they were kite surfing. That didn’t lower the temperature of the situation. Robin threaded the gap, trying to make peace between his supporters and the officers. His chest came up to their gun belts.