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.
He thought about that. Trouble is what creates intelligence?
I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval.
His voice turned sad and wondrous. Then we’ll never find anyone smarter than us.
THE TECHS GOT A KICK OUT OF ROBIN. They liked to tease him, and, amazingly, he liked being teased. He enjoyed it almost as much as he liked conducting his own private feedback symphonies and directing his own private training animations. Ginny told him, “You’re really something, Brain Boy.”
“Definitely a high-performing decoder,” Currier agreed. The two of us sat in his office surrounded by toys, puzzles, optical illusions, and life-affirming posters.
“Is that because he’s so young? Like how kids learn a new language without trying?”