Richard Powers - Bewilderment

As long as what takes?

“To figure out the human race.”

He tugged me the dozen yards down to the river’s edge. The stream smelled newborn and green. We each found a rock to sit on, right up on the shore. He dipped his hand into the racing current and winced at the cold. Can we put our feet in?

The NextGen was dead. The Seeker, too. My models would never be tested. My judgment was shot. The force and freedom of the white cascades filled the air. “We can try.”

I stripped off my boots and heavy hiking socks and plunged my bruised feet into the water’s swirl. The freezing water probed the edge between relief and pain. Only when I pulled my legs out of the icy flow did I realize they were numb. Robbie was shaking, pumping his feet in the shallows to warm them.

“That’s enough for now, okay?”

He lifted his stiffened limbs out of the current. From mid-calf downward, he was brick-red. Red-footed booby bird! He grabbed his toes in agony and tried to thaw them. His laugh was a sob of pain. He scoured the water for something. I was afraid to ask him what. A different boy, in a different age, on a different world, once told me that his mother had become a salamander. I stared downstream with him, hoping for a sighting to redeem the day.

Robin made it out first. Heron!

I didn’t think he had such stillness left in him. The bird, a foot deep in the water, fixed on nothing. So did Robin, for a long, hypnotic time. They stared each other down, my son’s forward-facing eyes and the bird’s sideways one. DecNef had ebbed from Robin, but not the knowledge of how to lock in to shimmering feedback. Someday we’ll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.

Tall bird stalking. Every five minutes, half a step. The bird was a piece of standing driftwood. Even the fish forgot. When the heron at last jabbed out, Robin shrieked. The strike crossed two meters with barely a lean-in from the bird. It came back upright, a meal the size of astonishment dangling from its mouth. The fish seemed too big to slip down the bird’s throat. But that baggy gullet opened, and in another moment, not even a bulge betrayed what had happened.

Robin whooped, and the sound startled the heron into flight. It bent, kicked, flapped its massive wings. It looked even more pterodactyl as it lifted, and the croaking it made as it took off was older than emotion. The clumsy launch turned graceful. Robin hung on the bird as it threaded the undergrowth and was gone. He went on staring at the spot where the great thing had disappeared. He turned to me and said, Mom’s here .

We put our shoes back on, turned upstream, and worked our way for a hundred yards along the stony banks to the spot where my whole family had once swum, if not all at the same time. As we came up to the pools beneath the rapids, I swore out loud. Robin blanched at the word. What, Dad? What?

He didn’t see until I pointed. The whole stretch of stream was covered in cairns. Stacked-up rocks rose everywhere, from both banks and from the boulder tops in the middle of the stream. They looked like Neolithic standing stones or tapering Towers of Hanoi.

Robin quizzed me with a look, still not understanding.

What’s wrong with them, Dad?

“Those were your mother’s worst nightmare. They destroy the homes of everything in the river. Imagine creatures from another world materializing in our airspace and tearing up our neighborhoods, again and again.”

His eyes darted, searching out the chub and shiners and trout and salamanders and algae and crayfish and waterborne larvae and the endangered madtoms and hellbenders, all sacrificed to this turf-marking art. We have to take them down .

I felt so weary. I wanted to set life down and leave it by the side of the water. Instead, we went to work. We demolished the towers within our reach. I knocked mine down. Robin dismantled his one at a time, peering through the clear water for the best place to replace each stone. When we finished with the stacks on the near bank, he looked across to the stacks in the middle of the stream. Let’s get the rest of them .

Two thousand five hundred miles of rock-strewn rivers ran through these mountains. Human industry would reach them all. We could dismantle cairns every day, all summer and fall long, and the towers would rise again next spring.

“They’re too far. The current’s too strong. You felt how cold it is.”

A look comes into the eyes of every ten-year-old, the first hint of the long war to come. Robin wavered on the threshold of daring me to stop him. Then he sat down on a rock covered with lichen a thousand years old.

Mom would do it .

His mother, the salamander.

“We can’t today, Robbie. That water is pure snowmelt. Let’s come back in July. The cairns will still be all over the place. I guarantee.”

He gazed at the green-lined channel that plunged through the forest and down the mountain. The song of a veery seemed to appease him. His breathing deepened and slowed. A hatch of gnats swarmed above the rapids and a flurry of early bluish-white sulphurs puddled around a pool near his feet. In this place, it would have been hard for anyone, even my son, to remember his anger for long. He turned to me, too quickly my friend again. What are we making for dinner? Can I work the cookstove?

IN CAMP, NO ONE could touch us. We pitched the tent close to the riverbank and spread our sleeping rolls on the ground. We set up kitchen in a blackened fire ring, and Robbie cooked lentils with tomato, cauliflower, and onions. The meal left him ready to forgive me everything.

We hung our packs in the same old sycamores, by the water. The sky through our gap in the tulip poplars and hickories was so clear that we tempted fate again and took off the tent fly. Soon it was dark. We lay side by side, on our backs, under the transparent mesh, looking up into the blue-black wash, where stars remade the rules in all quarters of the night.

He nudged me with his shoulder. So there are billions of stars in the Milky Way?

This boy made the world good for me. “Hundreds of billions.”

And how many galaxies in the universe?

My shoulder nudged his back. “Funny you should ask. A British team just published a paper saying there might be two trillion. Ten times more than we thought!”

He nodded in the dark, confirmed. His hand waved a question across the sky. Stars everywhere. More than we can count? So why isn’t the night sky full of light?

His slow, sad words stiffened the hairs up and down my body. My son had rediscovered Olbers’ paradox. 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?

I laid it out for him, as clearly as I could. If the universe were steady and eternal, if it had been around forever, the light from countless suns in every direction would turn night as bright as day. But ours 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.

Lying so close, I felt his thoughts racing outward into the darkness. His eyes skipped around the sky from star to star. He was drawing pictures, making his own constellations. When he spoke, he sounded small but wise. You shouldn’t be sad. I mean, because of the telescope .

He spooked me. “Why not?”

Which do you think is bigger? Outer space…? He touched his fingers to my skull. Or inner ?

Words from Stapledon’s Star Maker , the bible of my youth, lit up in a backwater of my brain. I hadn’t thought about the book in decades. The whole cosmos was infinitely less than the whole of being … the whole infinity of being underlay every moment of the cosmos .