What’s that supposed to be? Robin said. Like poetry or something?
“You’re something,” Currier said. Then he booked us for a third visit.
Robin and I walked from the neuroscience building to the lot where I was parked. He held my forearm, chattering. He hadn’t grappled me so much in public since he was eight. Decoded Neurofeedback was changing him, as surely as Ritalin would have. But then, everything on Earth was changing him. Every aggressive word from a friend over lunch, every click on his virtual farm, every species he painted, each minute of every online clip, all the stories he read at night and all the ones I told him: there was no “Robin,” no one pilgrim in this procession of selves for him ever to remain the same as. The whole kaleidoscopic pageant of them, parading through time and space, was itself a work in progress.
Robin tugged on my arm. Who do you think that guy is?
“What guy?”
The one whose brain I’m copying?
“It’s not one guy. It’s the average pattern of a few different people.”
He slapped my hand from underneath, like he was patting a ball into the air. His chin lifted and he skipped a few yards, the way he used to when he was younger. Then he waited for me to catch up. My son looked happy, and it chilled me.
“Why do you ask, Robbie?”
I feel like they’re coming over to my house to hang out or something. Like we’re doing stuff together, in my head.
-
THE LAWS THAT GOVERN THE LIGHT FROM A FIREFLY in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That’s as big a truth as we Earthlings have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.
But the place is big, I tried to tell my son. “You can’t imagine how big. Think of the most unlikely place…”
A planet made out of iron?
“For instance.”
Pure diamond?
“They exist.”
A planet where the oceans are hundreds of miles deep? A planet with four suns?
“Yes times two. And we’ll find even stranger places, between here and the universe’s edge.”
Okay. I’m thinking of my perfect planet. My one-in-a-million place.
“At one in a million, there are roughly ten million of them in the Milky Way alone.”
-
OUR DAYS SEEMED TO IMPROVE, and not just because I looked for evidence. His December school evaluations were his second-best ever. His teacher, Kayla Bishop, penned a message at the bottom of his report: Robin’s creativity is growing, along with his self-control. He stepped off the bus in the afternoons humming. One Saturday he even went out sledding with a group of neighborhood kids he barely knew. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d left the house to be with anyone other than me.
He came home the Friday before winter holidays with a length of jute twine taped to his rear belt loop. I slid it through my fingers. “What’s this?”
He shrugged as he put his mug of ginger hazelnut milk into the microwave. My tail.
“Are you doing genetic engineering in science these days?”
His smile was as mild as the May-like December. Some kids clipped it on to torture me. You know. Like: “Animal lover” or something. I just left it on.
He took his hot milk to the table, where his art supplies had been spread out for weeks, and began poring over candidates for his next portrait.
“Oh, Robin. What jerk-faces. Did Kayla know?”
He shrugged again. No biggie. Kids laughed. It was fun. He lifted his head from his work and looked at some small revelation on the wall behind me. His eyes were clear and his face inquisitive, the way he used to look on his best days when his mother was still alive. What do you suppose that’s like? Having a tail?
He smiled to himself. Painting, he made jungle sounds under his breath. In his mind, he was hanging upside down from a tree branch and waving his hands in the air.
I feel bad for them, Dad. I really do. They’re trapped inside themselves, right? Same as everyone. He thought for a minute. Except me. I’ve got my guys.
It creeped me out, the way he said it. “What guys, Robbie?”
You know. He frowned. My team. The guys inside my head.
For Christmas we drove back down to Aly’s parents’ in Chicago. Cliff and Adele were a little stiff, welcoming us. They hadn’t yet forgiven my little atheist’s Thanksgiving assault on their core beliefs. But Robbie pressed his ear into each of their bellies, and they warmed to his embrace. He proceeded to hug every one of his cousins who put up with it. In a handful of minutes, he managed to freak out Aly’s entire family.
Over the course of two days he sat through all the football and religion, took a ping-pong paddle to the temple, and watched his cousins react to his gifts—paintings of endangered species—with varying degrees of suppressed mockery. He did this all without melting down. When at last he showed signs of breaking, we were close enough to departure that I shoehorned him into the car and escaped before anything could mar our first incident-free holiday since Aly’s death.
“How was that?” I asked him on the way back to Madison.
He shrugged. Pretty good. But people are touchy, aren’t they?
-
THE PLANET STASIS looked so much like Earth. The flowing water and green mountains where we touched down, the woody trees and flowering plants, the snails and worms and flying beetles, even the bony creatures were cousins to those we knew.
How can that be? he asked.
I told him what some astronomers now thought: a billion or more planets at least as lucky as ours in the Milky Way alone. In a universe ninety-three billion light-years across, Rare Earths sprang up like weeds.
But a few days on Stasis showed the place to be as strange as any. The planet’s axis had little tilt, which meant one monotone season at every latitude. A dense atmosphere smoothed out fluctuations in temperature. Larger tectonic plates recycled its continents with few catastrophes. Few meteors ever threaded the gauntlet of massive nearby planets. And so the climate on Stasis had stayed stable through most of its existence.
We walked to the equator, across the layers of planetary parfait. Species counts in every band were huge and filled with specialists. Each predator hunted one prey. Every flower kept a pollinator of its own. No creature migrated. Many plants ate animals. Plants and animals lived in every kind of symbiosis. Larger living entities weren’t organisms at all; they were coalitions, associations, and parliaments.
We walked on to one of the poles. The boundaries between biomes ran like property lines. No flux of seasons blurred or softened them. From one step to the next, deciduous trees stopped and conifers began. Everything on Stasis was built to solve its own private spot. Everything knew one, infinitely deep thing: the sum of the world at their latitude. Nothing alive could thrive anywhere else. A move of even a few kilometers north or south tended to be fatal.
Is there intelligence? my son asked. Is anything aware?
I told him no. Nothing on Stasis needed to remember much or predict much further out than now. In such steadiness, there was no great call to adjust or improvise or second-guess or model much of anything.