“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.