What happened to Mios?
“The ships never learned.”
They kept going, even though Mios was gone?
“They were programmed to.”
This gave my son pause. That’s pretty sad. He sat up in bed and pushed at the air with his hand. But it might still be okay for them, Dad. Think of what they saw.
“They saw hydrogen planets and oxygen planets, neon and nitrogen planets, water worlds, silicate, iron, and globes of liquid helium wrapped around trillion-carat diamonds. There were always more planets. Always different ones. For a billion years.”
That’s a lot, my son said. Maybe that’s enough. Even if Mios was gone.
“They split and they copied and they spread through the galaxy as if they still had a reason to. One of the great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the original ship touched down on a rocky planet with shallow seas, in a small, weird stellar system rotating around a G-type star.”
Just say it, Dad. Earth?
“The craft landed on a level plain in the middle of wild, waving, towering structures more complex than anything the crew had seen. These elaborate, fluttering structures reflected light at various frequencies. Many of them sported astonishing forms at their very top that resonated in lower frequencies—”
Wait. Plants? Flowers. You mean the ships are tiny?
I didn’t deny it. He seemed equal parts skeptical and fascinated.
Then what?
“The ship’s crew studied the gigantic waving green and red and yellow flowers for a long time. But they couldn’t figure out what the things were or how they worked. They saw bees fly into the flowers and the flowers track the sun. They saw the flowers wilt and turn into seed. They saw the seeds drop and sprout.”
My son held his hand up to stop the story. It would kill them, Dad, when they figured it out. They would get on the communicator and tell every other ship from Mios in the galaxy to shut down.
His words gave me gooseflesh. It wasn’t the ending that I imagined. “Why do you say that?” I asked.
Because they would see. The flowers were going somewhere, and the ships weren’t.
r
I BROUGHT HIM TO CAMPUS WITH ME on days when I taught. He spread out his books on the desk in my office, and while I lectured or sat on committees, Robin taught himself long division and solved word problems and decoded poems and learned why the trees outside the office window turned carroty and gold. He wasn’t studying anymore. He was simply toying with things and enjoying the unfolding.
The grad students loved to tutor him. Checking in after a long October morning seminar, I caught Viv Britten, who was working on the small-scale crisis inherent in the Lambda-CDM model of the universe, sitting across the desk from my son, holding her head.
“Boss. Have you ever considered what is going on inside a leaf? I mean, really thought about it? It’s a total mind-fuck.”
Robin sat smirking at the havoc he’d unleashed. Hey! Curse word!
“What?” Viv said. “I said freak. It’s a total mind-freak, what you’re telling me.”
It was all that, and more. The green Earth was on a roll, assembling the atmosphere, making more shapes for itself than it could ever need. And Robin was taking notes.
We were down on the shores of the lake over lunch, fish-spotting. Robbie had discovered that polarized sunglasses let him see into a whole new alien world beneath the mirroring surface. We were looking, hypnotized, at a school of three-inch intelligences when someone called, four feet from my shoulder.
“Theodore Byrne?”
A woman my age stood clutching a brushed-silver computer to her chest. She wore a fair amount of turquoise hardware, and the folds of her gray tunic fell over skinny jeans. Her controlled contralto voice seemed baffled by her own boldness.
“I’m sorry. Have we met?”
Her smile hung between embarrassed and amused. She turned to my son, who, in a favorite animist ritual, was patting the almond butter sandwich he was about to eat. “You must be Robin!”
A flush of premonition warmed my neck. Before I could ask her business, Robin said, You remind me of my mom.
The woman looked sideways at Robin and laughed. Alyssa’s and my ancestors had come from Africa, too, only from somewhat further back. She turned to me again. “I’m sorry to intrude like this. Would you have a moment?”
I wanted to ask: A moment for what, exactly? But my son, trained up on ecstasy, said, We got a million moments. Right now we’re on fish time.
She handed me a business card spattered with fonts and colors. “I’m Dee Ramey, a producer for Ova Nova.”