The diminutive figure next to me shrugged off my arm and was gone. I held on to the back of my neck as he crossed the stage. He looked so small. I once saw a child his size play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 8 at Merkin Hall in New York. The girl’s hands barely stretched a fifth. I don’t know how she did it, or why her parents let her. I felt the same confusion now. My son had become a tiny prodigy on his own instrument. The audience clapped wildly as Robin trotted to the floodlit center stage. There, he stabbed a hand across his front and bowed deeply from the waist. The clapping and laughter grew.
I’ve watched the film so often my memory is convinced I was out in the darkened hall. Currier must have thought that Robin would smile and wave, then the two of them would say goodbye. But they still had a long and fluid minute left.
The whole auditorium wants him to ask: What’s it like? How does it feel? Is it still her? But Currier veers off into another place. He asks, “What’s the biggest difference between when you started the training and now?”
Robin rubs his mouth and nose. He takes too long to answer. You can see Currier’s confidence waver and hear the audience grow restive. You mean in real life?
The words slip through his teeth with a little lisp. The audience titters. Currier has no idea where Robin is going. But before he can get things back on the rails, my son declares, Nothing!
The audience laughs again, though not comfortably. The question irritates Robin. Something in those two syllables says: You know what’s happening. Everyone knows, despite the code of silence. This endless gift of a place is going away. But his right wrist rotates oddly, down by his thigh, a gesture that none of the hundreds of thousands of viewers but me knows how to interpret.
Just that I’m not scared anymore. I’m all mixed into a really huge thing. That’s the coolest part.
Currier gestures toward the audience, who break into applause. He puts a hand on Robin’s head. My son’s mother’s lover. With ten seconds left, the talk ends.
ON NITHAR, WE WERE ALMOST BLIND. Of our ten major senses, sight was the weakest. But we didn’t need to see much, aside from trickles of glowing bacteria. Our several well-spaced ears could hear in something like color, and we sensed our surroundings with extreme precision through the pressures on our skin. We tasted small changes across great distances. The different tempos of our eight different hearts made us exquisitely sensitive to time. Thermal gradients and magnetic fields told us where we needed to be. We spoke with radio waves.
Our agriculture, literature, music, sports, and visual arts rivaled those on Earth. But our great intelligence and peaceful culture never hit upon combustion or printing or metalworking or electricity or anything like advanced industry. On Nithar, there was molten magma, combusting magnesium, and other kinds of burning. But there was no fire.
Cool, my son said. I’m going to explore.
I told him not to go too far from the surface, especially the vents. But he was young, and the young suffered most from Nithar’s biggest challenge. A planet where the word forever was the same as the word never was hard on its youth.
He came back from a too-brief adventure upward. He was crushed. There’s nothing up there but heaven, he complained. And heaven is as hard as rock.
He wanted to know what was above the sky. I didn’t laugh at him, but I was no help. He asked around and got mocked mercilessly by both his generation and mine. That’s when he vowed to drill.
I didn’t try to talk him out of it. I figured he could toy at the project for a few million macro-beats, and that would be the end of it.
He used the sharp tip of long, straight, heated nautiloid shell. The work was grindingly dull. It took many millions of heartbeats for his hole to reach the depth of one outstretched tentacle. But rubble dropped from on high, and that made for the first novelty on Nithar in almost never. The Hole became the butt of jokes, the object of suspicions, and the rite of new religious cults. Generations came and went, watching his infinitesimal progress. My son drilled on, with all the time in this world on his hands before bedtime.
Tens of thousands of lifetimes in, he struck air. And in one great rush of understanding, a revolution so great that nothing on Nithar survived it, my son discovered ice and crust and water and atmosphere and starlight and trapped and eternity and elsewhere.
ROBIN WAS BESIDE HIMSELF, about our trip to Washington. I was going there to help save the search for life in the universe. My most devoted full-time student was coming along for the ride.
I’m gonna make something for the trip, okay?