He couldn’t have remembered that. He’d been so young, and nothing about that afternoon would have been remarkable enough to impress itself on him.
Like you both had a big secret.
Then my wife was whispering. You remember the secret, don’t you, Theo?
I paddled against our spin and slowed my breathing. “Robbie. What made you think of that?”
He didn’t answer. Alyssa kept teasing. Of course he remembers. His parents were acting weird.
“Did Dr. Currier mention something about that day? Was he asking you things?”
Robin rolled over onto his belly, rocking the boat. He squinted at the far shore, trying to see into the past. Did Mom have a tattoo or something?
He could not have known about that. I didn’t dare ask him how he did. She’d gotten the thing before we met. She needed a psychic boost to power her through a disastrous first year of law school. To push back against the demoralizing crush of L1, she hit upon the idea of sowing the world’s tamest wild oat. Four scalloped petals around a tiny center of stamens and anthers, inked into her skin.
“It was supposed to be a little flower. Her namesake plant.”
Sweet alyssum.
“That’s right.”
But something happened to it?
“She didn’t like the way it turned out. Someone told her it looked like a deformed smiley face. So she asked the tattooist to turn it into a bee.”
And the bee ended up looking funny, too.
He was rattling me. “That’s right. But she stuck with the bee. She didn’t want to end up with a funny-looking horse tattooed all over her.”
His face was turned toward the water. He didn’t smile.
“Robbie? Why are you asking?”
His shoulder blades stuck out through his polo shirt like amputated wings. Dad. What do you think she was thinking, that day? It’s so weird. It’s . . . like walking into a forest a million years old.
I wanted to beg. Send me word—just one small thing that survived what happened to her. I’d lost the gist of her, the feel. And Robbie couldn’t tell me. Or he wouldn’t.
He rested his chin on the side of the boat and gazed into the lake. The bobbing surface of the water was the ocean of another world, one in a story I’d read when not much older than he was. He was looking for the thousands of fish that the dark green water hid from the eyes of air-breathers.
What’s the ocean like, Dad?
What was the ocean like? I couldn’t tell him. The sea was too big, and my bucket was so small. Also, it had a hole. I put my hand on the back of his calf. It seemed like my best available answer.
Did you know that the world’s corals will be dead in six more years?
His voice was soft and his mouth was sad. The world’s most spectacular partnership was coming to an end, and he’d never see it. He looked up at me, with Aly’s ghost planted right into his brain. So what are we supposed to do about that?
THE FIRST TIME TEDIA DIED, a comet tore off a third of the planet and turned it into a moon. Nothing on Tedia survived.
After tens of millions of years, the atmosphere came back, water flowed again, and life sparked a second time. Cells learned that symbiotic trick of how to combine. Large creatures spread once more into every niche of the planet. Then a distant gamma ray burst dissolved Tedia’s ozone shield and ultraviolet radiation killed most everything.
Patches of life survived in the deepest oceans, so this time it was faster coming back. Ingenious forests set out again across the continents. A hundred million years after that, just as a species of cetacean was beginning to make tools and art, a neighborhood star system supernovaed, and Tedia had to start again.
The problem was that the planet lay too near the galactic center, packed in too closely to the calamities of other stars. Extinction would never be far away. But there were periods of grace, between the devastations. Forty resets in, the calm lasted long enough for civilization to take hold. Intelligent bear-people built villages and mastered agriculture. They harnessed steam, channeled electricity, learned and built simple machines. But when their archaeologists revealed how often the world ended, and their astronomers figured out why, society broke down and destroyed itself, millennia before the next supernova would have.
This, too, happened again and again.
But let’s go see, my son said. Let’s just have a look.
By the time we arrived, the planet had died and resurrected itself a thousand and one times. Its sun was almost spent and would soon expand to engulf the entire world. But life went on assembling endless new platforms. It didn’t know any better. It couldn’t do otherwise.