“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.
“Inner,” I said. “Definitely inner.”
Okay. So, maybe the millions of planets that never launch the telescope are just as lucky as the millions of planets that do.
“Maybe,” I said, and turned my head away from him.
That one, there. He pointed. What’s happening on that one?
I told him. “On that one, people can split in half and grow back as two separate people, with all their memories intact. But only once in life.”
His arm swung to the far side of the sky. And that one? How about over there?
“On that one, chromatophores all over a person’s skin always give away exactly what they’re feeling.”
Cool. I’d like to live there.
We flew around the universe for a long time. We traveled so far that the waxing moon, two days from full, rose over the mountains’ rim and blotted out the stars. He pointed to one of the last bright lights remaining. Jupiter.
On that one? All your memories never get weaker, and they never go away.
“Ouch. A broken bone? A fight you have with somebody?”
The way Mom’s skin smelled. Seeing that heron.
I looked where his finger pointed. The light was dimming in the full wash of the moon. “Do you want to go there?”
His shoulders lifted off his sleeping pad. I don’t know.
Something called in the woods. It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t any mammal I’d ever heard. The cry pierced the dark and hung above the roar of the river. It might have been pain or joy, grief or celebration. Robbie jerked and grabbed my arm. He hushed me, although I made no sound. The shout came again, farther away. Another call provoked another response, overlapping in the wildest chords.
Then it stopped, and the night filled up with other music. Robin turned and grabbed me harder, his face lit by moonlight. Every creature alive would feel all things they were built to feel.
Listen to that, my son told me. And then the words that would never weaken and never go away: Can you believe where we are?
IN THE DARK OF OUR SNUG TENT, ten inches from my face, Alyssa whispered, Why does it matter so much?
We’d hiked for eight hours until my feet bled. We’d swum together in the wild cascades. My exhaustion was so complete that I had struggled to light the camping stove and cook our dinner. I can’t remember what we ate. I only remember how she asked for more.
I wanted to collapse facedown on my inflatable pillow and die for a week. She wanted to keep me up all night and talk philosophy. Does it make any difference at all if it happened anywhere else? It happened here. That’s everything, right?
I was brain-dead. I could barely get my subjects to agree with my verbs. “Once is an accident. Twice is inevitable.”
She pressed my chest and said, I like this marriage business. She sounded surprised, as if that discovery settled all matters.
“Find any trace of it anywhere, and we’ll know that the universe wants life.”
She laughed so hard. Oh, the universe wants life, mister. She rolled over on top of me, compact but planetary. And it wants it now.
For a minute, we were everything. Then we weren’t. I must have fallen asleep afterward, because I woke again to an otherworldly sound. In the dark, someone was singing. I thought at first it was her. Three fluid, looping notes: the briefest melody trying out endless new keys. I looked at Aly. Her eyes in the darkness were wide, as if the wistful, three-note tune were Beethoven. She grabbed my arm in mock-panic.
Honey! They’ve landed. They’re here!
She knew the name of the singer. But I failed to ask her, and now I’ll never know. She listened, until the bird went silent. The wake filled at once with the hum of other creatures, a mesh spreading in all directions through the six different kinds of forest surrounding us. She held still in simple ecstasy, the one our son would for a moment learn.
This is the life, she said. If I could keep this with me forever . . .
Such a small difference, between forever and once.
I DRIFTED OFF, WITHOUT KNOWING. The zipper of the tent opening woke me. I couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten dressed and halfway out of the tent before I knew it. “Robbie?”
Shhh! he said. I couldn’t figure out why.
“Are you okay?”
I’m good, Dad. Super-good.
“Where are you going?”
Number one, Dad. Be right back. In the moonlight, his hand twisted like a spinning globe, his old signal to me that all was well. I lay my head down on my inflatable pillow, pulled the lip of my winter-weight bag around my neck, and fell back asleep.
The silence woke
me. Right away I knew two things. First, I’d been asleep for longer than I thought. And second, Robin wasn’t there.
I dressed and left the tent. The grass we’d pitched in was damp with dew. His shoes and socks lay by the opening. The flashlight, too: no need for it. The moon in the clear sky turned the Earth into a blue-gray aquatint. Navigating the roots and rocks was as easy as walking by streetlight.
I called but heard nothing back, over the sound of the rapids. Rounding the site, I shouted louder. “Robin? Robbie! Buddy?” A muffled moan came from the stream, a few feet away.
I reached the bank in seconds. In the silver light, the rapids were a jumble of shards. He’d told me something once: The darker it gets, the better I can see out of the sides of my eyes. My head swiveled from downstream to up. He was curled over a boulder in the middle of the flow, embracing it.
Five feet into the current, I hit slickness. A stone turned under my foot and I tumbled. I struck with my right knee and left elbow, scraping both open. The freezing surge washed me ten yards downstream before I caught hold of another large rock. I crawled back upstream, working from stone to stone on my hands and knees. Every foot seemed to take minutes. Nearing the boulder, I saw everything. He’d been dismantling cairns. Turning the river back into a safe home.
He was soaked up to the top of his rib cage. His whole body was quaking. He tried to reach out, but his arm swung limply in the air. Slurred sounds came from his mouth, nothing like words. His whole body shook under my hand like the flank of a frightened beast. He felt so cold.
Time came apart. I couldn’t decide what I was supposed to do. His pulse felt so weak I was afraid to lift him. If I tried to crawl back with him through the cascades, it would have meant submerging him in freezing water for longer than he might survive. I gathered him up to carry him to the bank. On my second step, I lost my footing and dunked him in the water. Terrible noises came out of him. No one could have crossed those wet rocks upright, with a weight in their arms.
I lifted him onto the tiny island he’d been hugging and held him in place while I climbed up next to him. I stripped off his pants and shirt, taking forever to get the wet clothes off his skin. His T-shirt clung in a heap on the narrow boulder; his tiny jeans slipped off and washed downstream. His shivering got worse. I tried to dry him, but only succeeded in speeding the chill of evaporation.
I fought to stay calm and concentrate. I needed to wrap him in something warm, but my own clothes were wet from my fall. His breath came out in shallow, labored sighs. I tucked his knees to his chest, removed my soaked shirt, and huddled my torso around him. But my skin was as cold and wet as his.
I lifted my head. The world was silvered and still. Even the river tumbled too slowly to be real. We were miles from the trailhead. Mountains blocked all cell coverage. The nearest person was across the ridge. And still I yelled. My screaming distressed Robin, and his moaning got worse. Even if someone by some miracle heard me, they’d never find us in time.
I rubbed and patted him, calling his name. The patting turned to slaps. He stopped moaning, stopped responding in any way. Purpose leaked from his body. Even with all my friction, his skin slipped from red toward blue. I leaned in again to wrap him in my wet arms, but it was no good. I needed some other way to get him warm. A few minutes more, in the cold spring air without any clothes, and he’d be gone.
I looked up. The tent with my dry thermal sleeping bag was just above the bank, no more than twenty feet away. I curled around him on the rock and tried to seal a layer of air around his torso. The shivering went on, but I couldn’t hear a heartbeat.
A voice said, Try. I left him curled on the rock and stumbled through the rapids to shore. I scrambled up the rocky, tree-lined bank. The tent zipper tore as I fought with it. I grabbed the sleeping bag and ran back to the river. On the bank, I wrapped the bag around my neck and somehow thrashed my way back to the boulder without falling. I wrestled the bag around him and sealed it. Then I covered him with my body. I sheltered him as best I could, searching for the sound of his breath above the rushing water.
A long time passed before I could accept that he no longer needed me.
THERE WAS A PLANET that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.
THE UNIVERSITY GAVE ME COMPASSIONATE LEAVE. After the funeral, after long days with Robbie’s relatives and everyone who counted us as friends, I felt no need to speak to anyone ever again. It was enough to stay inside, to read his notebooks and look through his drawings, and to write down everything I could remember about our time together.
People brought food. The less I ate, the more they brought. I couldn’t bring myself to pay a bill or cut the grass or wash a dish or watch the news. Two million people in Shanghai lost their homes. Phoenix ran out of water. Bovine viral encephalopathy jumped from cattle to people. Weeks passed before anyone realized. I slept in the day and stayed up at night, reading poems to a room full of sentient beings who were everywhere but here.
I didn’t answer my phone. Now and then I skimmed voice mails and glanced at texts. Nothing needed answering. I wouldn’t have had answers, anyway.
Then one day, a message from Currier. If you’d like to be with Robbie, you can be.
“OKAY,” SAYS THE MAN I NO LONGER HATE. “Relax and hold still. Watch the dot in the middle of the screen. Now let the dot move to the right.”
I don’t know how. He says it’s the easiest thing in the world. Wait until it starts to move itself. Then stay in that state of mind.
He’s risking a lot for me, breaking the law. We’ll all be breaking it, soon enough. But Martin is more than merely criminal. He’s spending a budget that he doesn’t have, powering these machines with energy that will soon be hard to come by at any price. He runs the scanner himself, having laid off all his staff. Like so many others, his lab is folding.
I lie in the tube and tune myself to a print of Robbie. One that they recorded last August, when he was at his best. Just being in this space helps me breathe. I learn to move the dot, to grow it and shrink it and change its color. Two hours fly by. Currier says, “Would you like to come again tomorrow?”
I’m not sure why he’s helping me. It’s more than pity. Like lots of scientists, he’s a sucker for redemption. And for some reason, he’s deeply invested in my progress. It would take much more advanced brain science than his to explain that one. It’s a question for astrobiology, in fact. Goldilocks planets can turn rain and lava and a little energy into agency and will. Natural selection can prune selfishness into its opposite.
I come the next day, and the day after that. I learn to raise and lower the pitch of the clarinet, to slow it down and speed it up and turn it into a violin, simply by letting my feelings match his. The feedback guides me, and all the while, my brain learns how to resemble what it loves.
AND THEN ONE DAY, MY SON IS THERE, inside my head as sure as life. My wife, too, still inside him. What they felt, then, I now feel. Which is bigger, outer space or inner?
He doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t have to. I know what he wants from me. He only wants to see what’s out there. Light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers a second. It takes ninety-three billion years to cross from one end of space to the other, past black holes and pulsars and quasars, neutron and preon and quark stars, metallics and blue stragglers, binaries and triple-star systems, globular and hypercompact clusters, coronal, tidal, and halo galaxies, reflection and plerion nebulae, stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic disks, dark matter and energy, cosmic dust and filaments and voids, all spun from the laws folded up into vibrations far smaller than the smallest units we have names for. The universe is a living thing, and my son wants to take me for a quick look around while there’s still time.
We rise together into orbit high above the place we’ve been visiting. The thought occurs to him, and I have it. Can you believe where we just were?
Oh, this planet was a good one.
And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.
ALSO BY RICHARD POWERS
The Overstory (2018)
Orfeo (2014)
Generosity: An Enhancement (2009)
The Echo Maker (2006)
The Time of Our Singing (2003)
Plowing the Dark (2000)
Gain (1998)
Galatea 2.2 (1995)
Operation Wandering Soul (1993)
The Gold Bug Variations (1991)
Prisoner’s Dilemma (1988)
Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985)
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Bewilderment is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the
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