His head tipped, a little reticent. My son, growing away from me. I think she’s like a salamander or something.
I rolled to face him. “Wait… what? Where’d you get that?” I knew: the thirty species the Smokies had.
Well, remember you said how Einstein proved nothing could be created or destroyed?
“That’s right. But he was talking about matter and energy. How they keep changing from one form to another.”
That’s what I’m saying! The words tore out of him so wildly I had to shush him. Mom was energy, right?
My face got away from me. “Yes. If Mom was anything, she was energy.”
And now she’s changed into another form.
When I could, I asked him. “Why a salamander?”
Easy. Because she’s fast, and she loves the water. And because how, like you always say, she’s totally her own species.
Amphibious. Small but mighty. And she breathed through her skin.
There’s a salamander that lives for fifty years. Did you know that? He sounded desperate. I tried to hug him, but he pushed away. It’s probably just a figure of speech. She’s probably not anything.
The words froze me. Some awful switch had been thrown in him, and I couldn’t tell why.
Two percent, Dad? He snarled like a cornered badger. Only two percent of all animals are wild? Everything else is factory cows and factory chickens and us?
“Please don’t shout at me, Robbie.”
Is that for real? Is it?
I took our abandoned books and put them on the nightstand. “If your mother said it in a speech for the state legislature, it’s for real.”
His face bunched up like he’d been punched. His eyes curdled and his mouth opened in a silent scream. It took a moment for the soundless jag to turn into tears. I held out my arms, but he shook his head. Something in him hated me for letting that number be true. He backed into the corner of his bed, up against the wall. His head swung sideways in disbelief.
Just as suddenly, he deflated. He lay back down, his back to me, one ear to the mattress. He lay there listening to the hum of defeat. He felt around for my body in the space behind him. When he found it, he mumbled into the sheets, New planet, Dad. Please.
-
THE PLANET PELAGOS had many times more surface than Earth. It was covered in water—a single ocean that made the Pacific look like the Great Lakes. One sparse chain of tiny volcanic islands ran through that immensity, bits of punctuation sprinkled through an empty book hundreds of pages long.
The endless ocean was shallow in places, kilometers deep in others. Life spread through its latitudes from steamy to frozen. Hosts of creatures turned the ocean bottoms into underwater forests. Giant blimps migrated from pole to pole, never stopping, each half of their brains taking turns to sleep. Intelligent kelp hundreds of meters long spelled messages in colors that rippled up the length of their stalks. Annelids practiced agriculture and crustaceans built high-rise cities. Clades of fish evolved communal rituals indistinguishable from religion. But nothing could use fire or smelt ores or build any but the simplest tools. So Pelagos diversified and invented new forms, each stranger than the last.
Over the eons, the few scattered islands radiated life as if each were its own planet. None of them was large enough to incubate large predators. Each pinprick of land was a sealed terrarium sporting enough species for a small Earth.
Dozens of dispersed intelligent species spoke millions of languages. Even the pidgins numbered in the hundreds. No town was bigger than a hamlet. Every few miles we came across a speaking thing whose shape and color and form were wholly new. The most universally useful adaptation seemed to be humility.
The two of us swam along veins of shallow reef down into underwater forests. We scrambled up onto islands whose complex communities were threaded into immense trading networks with islands far away. Caravans took years, even generations, to complete a deal.
No telescopes, Dad. No rocket ships. No computers. No radios.
“Only amazement.” It didn’t seem like an outrageous trade.
How many planets are like this one?
“There might be none. They might be everywhere.”
Well, we’ll never hear from any of them.
-
I WAS STILL DREAMING UP NEW LAYERS to our creation when I realized I didn’t need any more. I leaned in. Robin’s breath came light and slow. The stream of his consciousness had broadened to a miles-wide delta. I slipped off the bed and reached the doorway without a sound. But the click of the light switch jolted his body upright in the sudden dark. He screamed. I flipped the light back on.
We forgot Mom’s prayer. And they’re all dying.
We said it together: May all sentient beings be free from needless suffering.
But the boy who took the next two hours getting safe enough to fall back asleep was no longer sure if that prayer was doing much of anything.
-
THEY SHARE A LOT, ASTRONOMY AND CHILDHOOD. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.
For a dozen years, my job made me feel like a child. I sat behind the computer in my office looking at data sets from telescopes and toying with formulas that could describe them. I roamed the halls in search of minds who might want to come out and play. I lay in bed with a canary-yellow legal pad and a black fine liner, re-creating the journeys to Cygnus A or through the Large Magellanic Cloud or around the Tadpole Galaxy, trips I’d once made in pulp novels. This time around, none of the indigenous inhabitants spoke English or practiced telepathy or floated parasitically through the frozen vacuum or linked together in hive minds to enact their master plans. All they did was metabolize and respire. But in my infant discipline, that was magic enough.
I made worlds by the thousands. I simulated their surfaces and cores and living atmospheres. I surveyed the ratios of telltale gases that might accumulate, depending on a planet’s evolving inhabitants. I tweaked each simulation to match plausible metabolic scenarios, then incubated the parameters for hours on a supercomputer. Out popped Gaian melodies, unfolding in time. The result was a catalog of ecosystems and the biosignatures that would reveal them. When the space-borne telescope that all my models waited for launched at last, we’d already have spectral fingerprints on file to match to any imaginable perpetrator of the crime of life.
Some of my colleagues thought I was wasting my time. What’s the use of simulating so many worlds, many of which might not even exist? What’s the use of preparing targets beyond the ability of current instruments to detect? To which I always answered: What’s the use of childhood? I was sure that the Earthlike Planet Seeker that hundreds of colleagues and I lobbied for would come along before the end of the decade and seed my models with real data. And from those seeds, the wildest conclusions would grow.
Much of existence presents itself in one of three flavors: none, one, or infinite. One-offs were everywhere, at every step of the story. We knew of only one kind of life, arising once on one world, in one liquid medium, using one form of energy storage and one genetic code. But my worlds didn’t need to be like Earth. Their versions of life didn’t require surface water or Goldilocks zones or even carbon for their core element. I tried to free myself from bias and assume nothing, the way a child worked, as if our single instance proved the possibilities were endless.