Bewilderment

by Richard Powers

  Currier asked me to join him in his office. I sat across his desk, separated from him by a mound of spiral-bound papers. “Theo, I need to ask a favor.”

  The man had given me priceless free therapy. He’d turned Robin around and staved off who knows what disasters. Technically, I probably owed him a favor.

  Currier toyed with an elaborate Japanese wooden puzzle box that only opened to a long ritual of memorized steps. “We think we might have something viable. A significant treatment modality.” I nodded and held still, like Chester when Aly read him poems. “And your son is our most powerful argument. He has always been a high-performing decoder. But now . . .” Currier set down the half-completed puzzle box. “We’d like to start putting the word out.”

  “You’ve been publishing all along, haven’t you?”

  He smiled at me the way my father used to when I swung hard and popped it up. “Sure we have.”

  “And conferences? Colloquia?”

  “Of course. But now we’re fighting to keep our funding.”

  “Tell me about it.” After a dozen glory years, astrobiology was going begging. But it surprised me to hear that even Currier’s practical science was strapped for cash. I’d never imagined that all research would have to show a profit. But then, I’d also never imagined that the Secretary of Education would cut funding from grade schools that taught evolution.

  Currier’s eyes asked for forgiveness in advance. “We need to think about technology transfer while we can. This is a technology very worth transferring.”

  “You want to license it.”

  “The entire process. As a highly adaptable mode of therapy for multiple psychological disorders.”

  My son didn’t suffer from a disorder. “Just tell me the favor.”

  “We’re showing the work at professional gatherings. To journalists and people in private industry. Can we include a clip of him?”

  I stumbled on private industry. I don’t know why. Everything on this planet had been commodified, long before my time. Currier wouldn’t meet my eye. The Japanese puzzle box had his full attention. “We can use the videos of the trainings we’ve been making since the beginning.”

  I couldn’t recall his having mentioned video to me. I must have agreed to it, on some form.

  “He’d be anonymized, of course. But we’d like to mention what makes his progress so singular.”

  Boy learns bliss from his dead mother.

  My brain was too slow for the rash of calculations. I believed in science. I wanted Robin to be part of some larger useful thing. I wanted people to see what was happening to him. He might become a virus of well-being, like Ginny said. But this plan of Martin’s tripped a warning buzzer.

  “That doesn’t sound very safe.”

  “We’d be showing two minutes of pixilated and voice-altered video to researchers and health professionals.”

  I felt petty and superstitious. Worse: self-serving. Like I’d had the meal and now refused to pay my share of the check. “Can you give me a couple of days?”

  “Certainly.” He was more relieved than felt right. Perhaps to ingratiate me, he asked, “Does he glow as much at home as he does in the lab?”

  “He’s been beatific for weeks. I can’t remember the last time he had a fit.”

  “You sound mystified.”

  “Shouldn’t I be?”

  “Imagine what he’s inhabiting.”

  “I’d like to do more than imagine.”

  Currier frowned, not getting me.

  “I’d like to train as well.” I’d become more and more obsessed with the idea after each of Robin’s sessions. I needed access to my dead wife’s mind.

  Currier’s frown turned to an embarrassed grin. “Sorry, Theo. I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to justify the cost of that. Right now we’re struggling to pay for the legitimate experiment.”

  Flustered, I veered away. “I wanted to ask . . . The more Robin trains, the more he resembles Alyssa. The way he taps on his temple and chews on the word actually . . . it’s eerie. He’s learned half the birds Aly knew.”

  The idea amused him. “I assure you. He can’t get that from the training. He can’t get anything from her brain print at all except a feel for that one emotional state of hers that he’s learning to emulate.”

  And yet she was teaching him, one way or the other. I didn’t insist. I felt like a superstitious hunter-gatherer in a magic cargo cult. Instead, I said, “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that emotional state really was her.”

  “Ecstasy? Not Aly?”

  A spark passed between Martin and me. I read it without any feedback training at all. The man’s eyes shied away from mine, and I knew. My whole program of willful ignorance fell apart, revealing the truth beneath a suspicion I’d nursed forever. It wasn’t just my own bottomless insecurity: I never knew my wife of a dozen years. She was a planet all her own.

  THAT NIGHT, ASTRONOMERS AROUND THE WORLD COLLECTED more information about the universe than all the astronomers in the world collected in my first two years of grad school. Cameras five hundred times larger than the ones I’d trained on swept arcs across the sky. Interstellar consciousness was waking up and evolving eyes.

  I sat in front of the large, curved monitor in my study, tapping into oceans of shared planetary data, while my son lay belly-down on the carpet in the other room, browsing his favorite nature sites on his Planetary Exploration Transponder. Around the country, my anxious colleagues were preparing for war. And I was being recruited.

  For eight years, I’d crafted worlds and generated living atmospheres, gradually assembling something my fellow astrobiologists called the Byrne Alien Field Guide. It was basically a taxonomic catalog of all kinds of spectroscopic signatures collated to the stages and types of possible extraterrestrial life that might make them. To test my models, I’d looked upon the Earth from far away. I saw our atmosphere as pale, fuzzy pixels of light reflected off the moon. I’d fed those pixels into my simulations, and the black lines written into their spectra checked the validity of my evolving models and helped me tweak them.

  But my life’s work had entered a holding pattern. Like hundreds of my fellow researchers, I was waiting for data—real-world data from real worlds, out there. Humanity had taken its first step toward discovering whether the cosmos was breathing. But that step stalled in midair.

  The Kepler scope succeeded beyond all our dreams. It filled space with new planets everywhere it looked. Thousands of its candidate worlds were waiting to be confirmed, without enough researchers to confirm them. We knew now that Earths were common. There were more of them than I’d dared hope, and closer by.

  Yet Kepler never saw a single planet straight on. It cast a wide net, watching for the faintest imaginable dimming of suns many parsecs away, and it gathered that light with a precision of a couple of dozen parts per million. Infinitesimal dips in the brightness of stars betrayed invisible planets passing in front of them. It still stupefies me: like seeing a moth crawl across a streetlight from thirty thousand miles away.

  But Kepler couldn’t give me what I wanted: to know, beyond all doubt, that one other world out there was alive. I don’t know why it meant so much to me, when it left so many people cold. Not even my wife really cared all that much one way or the other. Robbie did.

  To know for certain whether a planet breathed, we needed direct infrared images fine enough to yield detailed spectral fingerprints of their atmospheres. We had the power to get them. For longer than Robin had been alive—longer than Aly and I were together—I’d been one of many researchers planning a space-based telescope that could populate my every model and decide forever whether the universe was barren or alive. The craft we were backing was a hundred times more powerful than Hubble. It made our best existing telescopes look like old men with dark glasses and service dogs.

  It was also a wild fling of cash and effort that made no practical difference in the world. It wouldn’t enrich the future or cure a single disea
se or protect anyone from the rising flood of our own craziness. It would simply answer the thing we humans had been asking since we came down from the trees: Was the mind of God inclined toward life, or did we Earthlings have no business being here?

  That night, a powwow gathered across the continent, from Boston to San Francisco Bay. Congress was threatening to cut the funding for our Earthlike Planet Seeker. My colleagues had assembled a hasty quorum—a hive-mind, ad-hoc defense of our life work. We teleconferenced—two dozen video windows and as many audio channels, drifting in and out of sync. As each speaker had their say, my screen filled with the face of the frail craft that spoke the words. The man with food stains all over his shirt who couldn’t look even a webcam in the eye. The man who peppered every sentence with “in fact.” The woman who had practiced nursing for years before becoming one of this world’s great planet-hunters. The man who lost his child to an IED in Afghanistan. The man who, like me, started binge-drinking at fourteen, but, unlike me, could not rein it in these days.

  —Don’t forget. Congress has twice threatened to pull the plug on the NextGen.

  —The NextGen is the damn problem! It has been bleeding the budget dry for decades.

  The NextGen Space Telescope was a sore spot with my people. The flagship instrument was now a dozen years late and four billion dollars over budget. We all wanted it, of course. But it was more about cosmology than planet-hunting. And it stole cash from all other projects.

  —There couldn’t be a worse time to pursue the Seeker. Did you see the President’s tweet?

  We’d all seen it, of course. But the brilliant observer who also happened to be addicted to ethanol felt the need to post it to the text window:

  Why are we pouring ever more money into a BOTTOMLESS PIT that will never return a SINGLE CENT on investment??? So-called “Science” should stop inventing facts and charging them to the American People!!

  —He’s playing to the xenophobes and isolationists. All the Innies.

  —The Innies have Washington’s ear. The country is bored with astronomy.

  —Then we Outies need to go to Washington and make the case again.

  My heart sank as my people made a battle plan. I didn’t have another hour to spare for any other cause than the one that was taking all my time. And it wasn’t clear to me that a trip to Washington would do a thing. The Seeker was just another proxy battle in the endless American civil war. Our side claimed the discovery of Earths would increase humanity’s collective wisdom and empathy. The President’s men said that wisdom and empathy were collectivist plots to crash our standard of living.

  I turned away from the screen and glanced into the living room. Aly was sitting in her beloved egg chair, swinging her legs, as if it were almost time to have a glass of wine and find a sonnet for Chester. She looked over at me and flashed that startling smile—the small white teeth, the wide, pink gum line. She shook her head, not understanding how I could be so distressed over a conversation of so little consequence. I wanted to ask her if she loved me as much as she loved her dog. I wanted to ask her if that opossum had been worth abandoning her husband and child. But the question that came into my head—does that count for asking, with a ghost?—was even worse. Aly. Is he mine?

  On cue, my trained mind reader appeared in the office doorway, brandishing his Planetary Exploration Transponder.

  Dad. You won’t believe this. Half of Americans think we’ve already been visited by beings from other worlds.

  The conference on my screen broke up in laughter. The man who lost his son to Big Oil called out from across the country. How would you like to talk to some folks in Washington?

  THE NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR CALLED to say that Robin was out behind the house. “He’s very still. He’s not moving. I think there’s something wrong with him.”

  I wanted to say: Of course, there’s something wrong with him. He’s looking at things. But I thanked her for the information. She was just doing her part in the perpetual neighborhood watch, making sure no one ever travels too far.

  I went out into the crepuscular yard to find the offender. He’d gone out in the later afternoon with a box of chalks to sketch the birch, which was still trading in late-summer greens. He took a little canvas stool. I found him sitting in the chill grass and sat down next to him. My jeans were damp in seconds. I forgot that dew forms at night. We only discover it in the morning.

  “Let’s see.” He handed over his pastel hostage. The tree was gray by now, as was his drawing. “I’m going to have to trust you on this one, buddy. I can’t see a thing.”

  His small laugh got lost in the roar of leaves. Weird, Dad, isn’t it? Why does color disappear in the dark?

  I told him the fault was in our eyes, not in the nature of light. He nodded, like he’d reached that conclusion already. His head aimed straight in front of him at the exhaling tree. Off to each side of his face, his hands patted the air for secret compartments.

  This is even weirder. The darker it gets, the better I can see out of the sides of my eyes.

  I tested; he was right. I vaguely remembered the reason—more rods on the edges of the retina. “That might make a good treasure hunt.” He didn’t seem interested in anything but the experience itself.

  “Robbie? Dr. Currier wants to know if he can show your training videos to other people.”

  I’d been evading the question for two days. I hated the idea of other people appraising the changes in Robin. I hated Currier for destroying my memories of Aly. Now he had my son.

  I lay back on the wet grass. I owed Currier nothing but hostility. And still, I felt an obligation so large I couldn’t name it. No good parent would turn his child into a commodity. But ten thousand children with Robin’s new eyes might teach us how to live on Earth.

  He faced the tree, still experimenting, watching me from the corner of his eye. What other people?

  “Journalists. Health workers. People who might set up neurofeedback centers around the country.”

  You mean a business? Or does he want to help people?

  My question, exactly.

  Because, you know, Dad. He helped me. A lot. And he brought Mom back.

  Some large invertebrate in the dirt sank its mandibles into the back of my calf. Robin dug his fingernails into the soil and pulled up ten thousand species of bacteria wrapped in thirty miles of fungal filament in his small hand. He shook out the fistful of dirt and came down on the grass to lie beside me. He propped his head on the pillow of my arm. For a long time, we just looked up at the stars—all the ones we could see and half the ones we couldn’t.

  Dad. I feel like I’m waking up. Like I’m inside everything. Look where we are! That tree. This grass!

  Aly used to claim—to me, to state legislators, to her colleagues and blog followers, to anyone who would listen—that if some small but critical mass of people recovered a sense of kinship, economics would become ecology. We’d want different things. We’d find our meaning out there.

  I pointed up to my favorite late summer constellation. Before I could name it, Robin said, Lyra. Some harp thingie?

  It was hard to nod, with my head against the ground. Robin pointed to the far corner of the sky, and moonrise.

  You said that light gets from there to here almost instantly, right? That means everybody who looks at the moon is seeing the same thing at the same time. We could use it like a giant light telephone, if we ever get separated.

  He was traveling beyond me again. “It sounds like you’re okay with Dr. Currier showing people video of you?”

  His shrug nudged my bicep. It’s not really my video. It probably belongs to everybody.

  Aly was there, lying with her head against my other arm. I didn’t shrug her off. Smart boy, she said.

  Remember how much Mom loved this tree? For two years he’d been asking me what Aly was like. Now he was reminding me. She called it the Boardinghouse. She said no one has ever even counted all the kinds of things that live in it.

&nb
sp; I looked to his mother for confirmation, but she was gone. When the first of the year’s last fireflies lit up the air a few feet from us, Robin gasped. We held still and watched them flash and blink out. They floated in slow streaks across the summer dark, like the lights of interstellar landing craft from all the planets we’d ever visited, gathered in a mass invasion of our backyard.

  I CALLED MARTIN CURRIER. “Use the clip. But his face had better be totally obscured.”

  “I can promise that.”

  “And if this comes back to us in any way, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

  “I understand. Theo. Thank you.”

  I hung up on him. At least I waited until the line was dead before cursing.

  This late in the world’s story, everything was marketing. Universities had to build their brands. Every act of charity was forced to beat the drum. Friendships were measured out now in shares and likes and links. Poets and priests, philosophers and fathers of small children: we were all on an endless, flat-out hustle. Of course science had to advertise. Call it my belated graduation from naïveté.

  Currier was a dignified salesman, at least. He pitched his results to interested parties without distorting the data. He was clear about the technique’s clinical limits while still suggesting the far shores of its possibility. In a world addicted to upgrades, journalists loved his careful hints of a coming golden age.

  By October, spots about the Currier Lab began appearing in the popular media. Robin and I watched him on the Tech Roundup show. I saw the articles in New Science, Weekly Breakthrough, and Psychology Now. In each venue, he came across as a slightly different person, cutting the carpet to fit the corner store.

  Then came the half-page feature in the Times. It portrayed Currier as sanguine but circumspect. A picture of him seated next to the machine that had so often scanned Robin’s feelings in real time bore the caption: “The brain is a tangled network of networks. We’ll never fully map it.” The man in the picture rested his chin on his hand.