Richard Powers - Bewilderment

“So… say they held a press conference and said alien intelligence was discovered all over the Smokies and—”

Gee, God…! He jabbed his hands in the air. But I’d successfully derailed him. I could see his eyes toy with the idea. His mouth twitched in resentful amusement. That line of people along the side of the road holding out their cell phones were turning back into kin. He saw it now: We humans were dying for company. Our species had grown so desperate for alien contact that traffic could back up for miles at the fleeting glimpse of anything smart and wild.

“No one wants to be alone, Robbie.”

Compassion struggled with righteousness and lost. They used to be everywhere, Dad. Before we got to them. We took over everything! We deserve to be alone .

THAT NIGHT WE WENT TO FALASHA, a planet so dark we were lucky to find it. It wandered in empty space, an orphan without a sun. It had its own star once, but got ejected during its home system’s troubled youth. “When I was in school, no one even mentioned them,” I told him. “Now we think rogue planets might even outnumber stars.”

We watched Falasha drift through interstellar emptiness, in timeless night and temperatures a few degrees above absolute zero.

Why did we come here, Dad? It’s the deadest place in the universe .

“That’s what science thought, too, when I was your age.”

Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.

I pointed out the thick greenhouse atmosphere and the hot, radiating core. I showed him how the tidal friction from a large moon bent and pinched the planet, further warming it. We touched down on Falasha’s surface. Nice! my excited son said.

“Above the melting point of water.”

In the middle of empty space! But no sun. No plants. No photosynthesis. No nothing .

“Life can eat all kinds of things,” I reminded him. “And only one of those is light.”

We went to the bottom of Falasha’s oceans, into their volcanic seams. We aimed our headlamps into the deepest trenches, and he gasped. Creatures everywhere: white crabs and clams, purple tube worms and living draperies. Everything fed on the heat and chemistry oozing from hydrothermal vents.

He couldn’t get enough. He watched as microbes and worms and crustaceans learned new tricks, fed on themselves, and spread their nutrients across seafloors into the surrounding waters. Whole periods went by, eras, even eons. The oceans of Falasha filled with forms, all kinds of outrageous designs, swimming and evading and outmaneuvering.

“We should call it a day,” I said.

But he wanted to keep watching. The vents spewed and cooled. The currents of the waters shifted. Small upheavals and local catastrophes favored the cagey. Sessile barnacles turned into free swimmers, and swimmers developed the power to predict. Pilgrim adventurers colonized new places.

My son was hypnotized. What will happen in a billion more years?

“We’ll have to come back and see.”

We rose from the pitch-black planet. It shrank beneath us, and in no time it was invisible again.

How on Earth did we ever discover this place?

And that’s where the story turned surreal. A lineage of slow, weak, naked, awkward creatures on a far luckier planet had lasted through several near-extinctions and held on long enough to discover that gravity bent light, everywhere in the universe. For no good reason and at insane expense, we’d built an instrument able to see the tiniest bend in starlight made by this small body, from scores of light-years away.

Get out , my son said. You’re making that up .

And we were, we Earthlings. Making it up as we went along, then proving it for all the universe to see.

WE HIT THE ROAD BY DAWN. Robbie was at his best as the sun came up. He got that from his mother, who could solve dozens of not-for-profit crises before breakfast. That morning, he was willing to treat even banishment as an adventure.

The country had been so volatile when we left, and days of spotty reception left me anxious about what was waiting for us back out here. I waited until we got out of Tennessee to tune in the news. Two headlines in, I regretted it. Hurricane Trent’s hundred-mile-an-hour winds returned a good stretch of the South Fork of Long Island to the sea. U.S. and Chinese fleets were playing nuclear cat-and-mouse off Hainan Island. An eighteen-deck cruise ship named Beauty of the Seas exploded off St. John’s, Antigua, killing scores of passengers and wounding hundreds more. Several groups claimed responsibility. In Philadelphia, stoked by social media flame wars, True America militias attacked a HUE demonstration and three people were dead.

I tried to change the station, but Robbie wouldn’t let me. We have to know, Dad. It’s good citizenship .

Maybe it was. Maybe it was even good parenting. Or maybe it was a colossal error in judgment, to let him go on listening.

Following the fires that had taken out three thousand homes across the San Fernando Valley, the President was blaming the trees. His executive order called for two hundred thousand acres of national forest to be cut down. The acres weren’t even all in California.

Holy crap , my son shouted. I didn’t bother with a language check. Can he do that?

The news announcer answered for me. In the name of national security, the President could do pretty much anything.

The President is a dung beetle .

“Don’t say that, bud.”

He is .

“Robin, listen to me. You can’t talk like that.”

Why not?

“Because they can put you in jail, now. Remember when we talked about it, last month?”

He fell back in his seat, having second thoughts about good citizenship.

Well, he is. A you-know-what. He’s wrecking everything .

“I know. But we can’t say so out loud. Besides. You’re being totally unfair.”

He looked at me, baffled. Two beats later, he broke into a spectacular grin. You’re right! Dung beetles are pretty amazing .

“Did you know that they navigate by mental maps of the Milky Way?”

He looked at me, mouth agape. The fact seemed too weird to be invented. He pulled out his pocket notebook and made a note to fact-check me when we got home.

UP THROUGH THE DIMINISHING HILLS of Kentucky, past the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, through counties that had little use for science of any kind, we listened to Flowers for Algernon . I’d read it at age eleven. It was one of the first books in my two-thousand-volume library of science fiction. I bought it in a used bookstore—a mass market paperback bearing a creepy image of a face halfway between mouse and man. Paying for it with my own money felt like cracking the code of adulthood. Holding it open in my hands, I wormholed into a different Earth. Small, light, portable parallel universes turned out to be the only thing in this life I’d ever collect.

Algernon didn’t quite start me down the path of science. That was the “sea monkeys,” a kind of brine shrimp shipped to me in an astonishing state of cryptobiosis. By Robbie’s age, I’d already tabulated my first data sets on their hatching rates. But Algernon lit up my proto-scientific imagination and made me want to experiment on something the size of my own life. I hadn’t read the story in decades, and a twelve-hour drive seemed the perfect excuse to revisit with Robin in tow.

The story gripped him. He kept making me pause for questions. He’s changing, Dad. You hear his words getting bigger? A little later, he asked: Is this for real? I mean: Could it ever be for real, someday?