Robin sensed something, as we got the frame packs from the car and slung them on. He waited until we were on the first switchback, a quarter mile down the trail. He stopped under a stand of freshly flowering serviceberry and looked at me sideways. Something’s bugging you.
Some primal part of my brain imagined that if I never spoke the fact out loud, it might yet turn out otherwise. “It’s nothing. I’m just a little thoughtful.”
It’s me, isn’t it?
“Robbie. Don’t be ridiculous!”
My screaming got us in trouble with the Child Protectors. They’re going to take me away from you, aren’t they?
It’s hard to hug someone half your height when you’re both wearing frame backpacks. My attempt only confirmed his suspicions. He pushed away and started down the trail. Then he stopped, turned, and warned me with a drawn finger.
You shouldn’t try to protect me from the truth.
“I’m not.” My hand went up and traced a squiggle in the air, a flick three inches high and two across. It meant, Forgive me, I’m making a lot of mistakes. His head dropped a millimeter. That meant, Me, too.
“Robbie, I’m sorry. It’s bad news. We heard from Washington.”
They’re killing the Seeker?
“Worse. They’re killing the NextGen.”
He cupped his ears and gave a soft cry, like something half in flight. That’s crazy. All those years. All that work and money. Didn’t they hear your talk?
I swallowed a bitter laugh.
What about the Seeker?
“Not a prayer now.”
Never?
“Not while I’m alive.”
He couldn’t stop shaking his head. Wait. That’s not right. He frowned, doing the math in his head. The years it had taken to conceive, design, and build the NextGen. The wasted years of planning that had gone into the Seeker. The years that would have to pass before anyone dared propose a space-based telescope again. And the years left to me. Math wasn’t Robin’s strongest subject. But it didn’t have to be.
What are they going to do with it?
A question sure to wreck the sleep of astronomers and ten-year-olds everywhere. A twelve-billion-dollar device meant to travel fifty thousand times farther from Earth than the Hubble, align its eighteen hexagonal mirrors into an array with a precision less than one ten-thousandth of a millimeter, and peer to the universe’s edge would, presumably, be scavenged and carted away in pieces—history’s most expensive shipwreck.
Dad. Everything’s going backward.
He was right. And I had no idea why.
The trail narrowed to a single track and passed through a long tunnel of rhododendrons. I watched him from behind, struggling under the weight of his pack and the force of realization. We crested and began the mile-long dive back down to the water. He stopped short and I almost knocked him over.
All those civilizations out there. They’re gonna wonder why they never heard from us.
WE REACHED THE SITE, tucked into a crook in the steep river. Robin shed his bulky pack and metamorphosed back into a boy.
Can we sit by the water first, before we pitch the tent?
The day was fresh and clear, with hours of light left and no chance of rain. “We can sit by the river for as long as it takes.”
As long as what takes?
“To figure out the human race.”
He tugged me the dozen yards down to the river’s edge. The stream smelled newborn and green. We each found a rock to sit on, right up on the shore. He dipped his hand into the racing current and winced at the cold. Can we put our feet in?
The NextGen was dead. The Seeker, too. My models would never be tested. My judgment was shot. The force and freedom of the white cascades filled the air. “We can try.”
I stripped off my boots and heavy hiking socks and plunged my bruised feet into the water’s swirl. The freezing water probed the edge between relief and pain. Only when I pulled my legs out of the icy flow did I realize they were numb. Robbie was shaking, pumping his feet in the shallows to warm them.
“That’s enough for now, okay?”
He lifted his stiffened limbs out of the current. From mid-calf downward, he was brick-red. Red-footed booby bird! He grabbed his toes in agony and tried to thaw them. His laugh was a sob of pain. He scoured the water for something. I was afraid to ask him what. A different boy, in a different age, on a different world, once told me that his mother had become a salamander. I stared downstream with him, hoping for a sighting to redeem the day.
Robin made it out first. Heron!
I didn’t think he had such stillness left in him. The bird, a foot deep in the water, fixed on nothing. So did Robin, for a long, hypnotic time. They stared each other down, my son’s forward-facing eyes and the bird’s sideways one. DecNef had ebbed from Robin, but not the knowledge of how to lock in to shimmering feedback. Someday we’ll learn again how to train on this living place, and holding still will be like flying.