His head turned away and he shouted, Didn’t you see them?
He stared at his hands in his lap. I knew enough not to push things. The spectacle over, traffic started to move at last. Half a mile down the road, Robbie spoke again.
They must really hate us. How would you like to star in a freak show?
He stared through the side window at the snaking river. Minutes later, he said, Heron. The word was nothing but flat fact.
I waited for two more miles. “They’re very smart, you know. Ursus americanus. Some scientists say they’re almost as smart as hominids.”
Smarter.
“How do you figure?”
We’d popped out of the park and were driving back through the gauntlet of recreational economy. Robin held his hands out toward the evidence. They don’t do this!
We passed the fudge shop and the hamburger stand, the tube rentals, dollar store, and bumper cars. We made a left past the visitor center, back uphill to our cabin. “They’re just lonely, Robbie.”
He looked at me as if I’d renounced my citizenship in the clan of sentient beings. What are you talking about? They weren’t lonely. They were disgusted.
“Don’t shout, okay? I’m not talking about the bears.”
The puzzle slowed him down, at least.
People are lonely because we’re jerk-faces. We stole everything from them, Dad.
Warnings were everywhere, from his rigid fingers and twitching lips to the purple flush rising around his neck. Another few minutes would undo all the gentleness of the last few days. I didn’t have the stamina for two hours of wounded screaming fit. Years of experience had taught me that my best course now was distraction.
“Robbie, listen. Suppose the Allen Telescope Array had a press conference tomorrow where they announced indisputable evidence of intelligent aliens.”
Dad.
“It would be the most exciting day on Earth. One announcement would change everything.”
He stopped twitching, still disgusted. But curiosity beat disgust in Robin, nine times out of ten. So?
“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?