Something he made. Robin aimed his thumb at me. He knows a lot, but he gets things wrong sometimes.
Floyd grilled him about his studies, and Robin answered. If the state meant to check on his curriculum, they had a satisfactory answer. Charis Siler watched the volley of questions and answers. After a bit, she leaned in and asked, “Did you hurt your head?” And everything clicked at last. She stood and crossed the room to examine the bruise, which protruded from his right brow like a blue carbuncle. “How did that happen?”
Robbie demurred, reluctant to tell a stranger what his animal self had done. He shot me a look. My head barely inclined. Siler and Floyd saw it, I’m sure.
I hit it. His words were tentative, almost a question.
Siler held his hair back with two fingers. I wanted to tell her to get her hands off my son. “How did that happen?”
The fact spilled out of Robin. I hit it against the wall. Honesty was his downfall.
“How, honey?” Siler sounded like the school nurse.
Robbie snuck me another sheepish look. Our visitors intercepted it. My son touched his bruise and looked downward. Do I have to say?
All three turned to me. “It’s okay, Robbie. You can tell them.”
He lifted his head, defiant for five seconds. Then he let it drop again. I was angry.
“About what?” Charis Siler asked.
About the cows. Aren’t you angry?
She stopped in mid-prosecution. I thought for an instant that she felt ashamed. But the tiniest muscles in her face said bafflement. She didn’t know which cows he meant.
The situation was heading south. I caught Robin’s eye and tipped my head toward the front door. “You want to go check on the owl?” He shrugged, defeated by adult stupidity. But he murmured goodbye to the guests and slipped from the house. The door closed behind him, and I turned on my prosecutors. Their masks of professional neutrality enraged me.
“I have never laid a finger on my child in anger. What do you think you’re doing?”
“We received a tip,” Floyd said. “It takes a lot for someone to phone in an alert.”
“He was frightened. Really, really upset over this bovine viral encephalopathy. He’s sensitive to living things.” I didn’t add what I should have—that we all should have been terrified. It still seemed a child’s fear.
Mark Floyd reached into his briefcase and retrieved a folder. He opened it on the coffee table between us. It was filled with two years of papers and notes, everything from Robbie’s initial suspension from third grade to my arrest in Washington for a public incident in which I’d employed my son.
“What is this? You’ve been keeping files on us? Do you keep files on all the troubled kids in the county?”
Charis Siler frowned at me. “Yes. We do. That’s our job.”
“Well, my job is to take care of my son the best way I know how. And I’m doing exactly that.”
I don’t remember what transpired after that. The chemicals flooding my brain prevented my hearing much of what the caseworkers said. But the gist was clear: Robin was an active case in the system, and the system was watching me. The next suggestion of abuse or improper care and the state would intervene.
I managed to stay contrite enough to get them to the door without more drama. Out on the stoop, watching their car pull away, I saw Robbie at the end of the block, astride his stopped bike, waiting for the moment when he could come safely home. I waved him in. He got up in the saddle and pedaled full-out. He did a flying dismount and left his bike lying in the lawn. He trotted to me and clasped me around the waist. I had to peel him off before he’d talk. The first words out of his mouth were, Dad. I’m ruining your life.
-
THE RIVER OF FORMS IS LONG. And among the billions of solutions it has so far unfolded, humans and cows are close cousins. It wasn’t surprising that something on the fringe of life—a strand of RNA that codes for only twelve proteins—was happy, after one small tweak, to give another host a try.
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Denver: none of them matched the density of an industrial-scale feedlot. But human mobility and relentless commerce made up for that. And still, back in February, no one was all that worried. The virus tearing through the beef industry was being upstaged by the President. Week after week, he kept pushing back the rescheduled elections, claiming that digital security in several states was not yet adequate and that various enemies were still poised to interfere.
When the third Tuesday in March came along, it surprised the entire fatigued country when the polls did open at last. But it shocked only half of us when another wave of irregularities were declared insignificant and the President was named the winner.
-
THE SIGNAL CAME FROM XENIA, a small planet in a modest star system near the tip of one spiral arm of the Pinwheel Galaxy. There, at the start of a night that lasted for several Earth years, something like a child held up something not quite a flashlight to something quite unlike the Earth’s night sky.
Near the child stood the closest living thing to what might be called its parent. On Xenia, the entire species of intelligent beings contributed a little germ plasm to birth each new child. But each Xenian was given one child to raise. On Xenia, everyone was everyone else’s parent and everyone else’s child, everyone’s older sister and younger brother all at once. When one person died, so did everyone and no one. On Xenia, fear and desire and hunger and fatigue and sadness and all other transitory feelings were lost in a shared grace, the way that separate stars are lost in the daytime sun.
“There,” the something-like-a-father said to its something-like-a-child, in something almost like speech. “A little higher. Right up there.”
The little one lay back, floating on its living kinship raft above the intelligent soil. It felt its not-quite arm nudged by a process of assistance no one from Earth would have a name for.
“There?” the younger one asked. “Right there? Why didn’t they ever answer?”
The older one replied not in sound or light but in changes in the surrounding air. “We bathed them in signals for thousands of their generations. We tried everything we could think of. We never managed to get their attention.”
The sequence of chemicals that the young one emitted was not quite a laugh. It was a whole verdict, really, an entire astrobiological theory. “They must have been very busy.”
-
THE DAYS LENGTHENED. Sunlight made a comeback. My son did not. He was certain that he’d failed me, that he’d failed all the creatures he was forced to outlive. He sat curled up in Aly’s egg chair or hunched at the dining room table staring at his schoolwork. An hour would pass while he held himself crumpled and still. Once I glimpsed him holding his palms out in front of his face, mystified by all the life that still passed through them.
It was in my power to help him. The time for fear and principle was past. All I had to do was accept a few future risks, and I could ease his present pain. He needed medication.
One night, after a bath, he lingered in the bathroom for so long that I had to check on him. He was standing with a towel wrapped around his boy’s slight body, staring at the mirror. It’s gone, Dad. I can’t even remember what I can’t remember.
This is what I miss most about him. Even when his light went out, he was still looking.
My spring break was days away. I’d been preparing in secret. I sprang the idea on him. “How about a gigantic treasure hunt?” His shoulders fell. He was done with discovery. “No, Robbie. A real one.”