Bewilderment Quotes

by Richard Power

Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual condition of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtler than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. —The Gold Bug Variations

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. — Rachel Carson

Therefore, for a similar reason, we must admit that the Earth, the sun, the moon, the ocean and all other things are not unique, but number in numbers beyond number

We said his mother’s old secular prayer out loud together and fell asleep under our galaxy’s four hundred billion stars.

The suggestions were plentiful, including syndromes linked to the billion pounds of toxins sprayed on the country’s food supply each year. His second pediatrician was keen to put Robin “on the spectrum.” I wanted to tell the man that everyone alive on this fluke little planet was on the spectrum. That’s what a spectrum is. I wanted to tell the man that life itself is a spectrum disorder, where each of us vibrated at some unique frequency in the continuous rainbow. Then I wanted to punch him. I suppose there’s a name for that, too.

Watching medicine fail my child, I developed a crackpot theory: Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don’t even know what the experiment is testing.

My wife would have known how to talk to the doctors. Nobody’s perfect, she liked to say. But, man, we all fall short so beautifully.

How many stars did you say there are?
“multiply every grain of sand on Earth by the number of trees. One hundred octillion.” I made him say twenty-nine zeros. Fifteen zeros in, his laughter turned to groans. “if you were an ancient astronomer, using Roman numerals, you couldn’t have written the number down. Not even in. your whole lifetime.”

“But your mother was looking through her binoculars like my find was the single most exotic life-form she’d ever seen. Without taking her eyes off it, she said, ‘The robin is my favorite bird.'”
That’s when you fell in love with her.
“That’s when I knew I wanted to spend as much time around her as I could. I told her so, later, when I knew her better. We started saying it all the time. Whenever we were doing anything together – reading the paper or brushing our teeth or doing the taxes or taking out the trash. Whatever blah or boring thing we were taking for granted. We’d trade a look, read each other’s minds, and one of us would blurt out, ‘The robin is my favorite bird!'”

I told him Dvau was almost perfect – the right place in the right kind of galaxy, with the right metallicity and low risk of annihilation from radiation or other fatal disturbances. It revolved at the right distance around the right kind of star. Like Earth, it was showered w/ water from comets
Holy crow. How many things did Earth need?
“More than a planet deserves.”
Got it meteors!
But Dvau, like Earth, had large planets in a farther orbit shielding it from extreme bombardment.
Then what’s wrong? He seemed about to cry.
“No large moon. Nothing nearby to stabilize its spin.”
We lifted into near orbit and the world wobbled. We watched as the days changed chaotically and April blinked into December, then August, then May.
We watched for millions of years. Microbes bumped up against their limits, like a float thumping a dock. Everytime life tried to break loose, the planet twirled, beating it back down to extremophiles.
Forever?
“Until a solar flare burns away its atmosphere.”

Rising from the leaf duff in a bowl-shaped opening off the path was the most elaborate mushroom I’d ever seen. It mounded up in a cream-colored hemisphere bigger than my two hands. A fluted ribbon of fungus rippled through itself to form a surface as convoluted as an Elizabethan ruff.

Robin gazed at his submerged arms and legs. He fought against the warping, twisting water. It’s like a planet where the gravity keeps changing.

Robin stared into the flames. In a robotic monotone that would have alarmed his pediatrician, he droned, The good life. A minute later: I feel like I belong here.
We did nothing but watch the sparks, and we did that well. One last purple rib of sun lined the ridges to the west. The forested mountainsides, having inhaled all day long, now began to breath back out again. Shadows flickered around the fire. Robin swung his head at every noise. His wide eyes blurred the line between thrill and fear.

I told him. It came from Buddhism, the Four Immeasurable. “There are four good things worth practicing. Being kind toward everything alive. Staying level and steady. Feeling happy for any creature anywhere that is happy. And remembering that any suffering is also yours.”
Was mom a Buddhist?
I laughed, and he slugged my arm through two sleeping bags. “Your mother was her own religion. When she said something, it was worth saying. When she spoke, everybody listened. Even me.”
…
“She once told me that no matter how much bad stuff she had to deal w/ during the day, if she said those words before bed, she’d be ready for anything the next morning.”

“I write programs that try to take everything we know about all the systems of any kind of planet- the rocks and volcanoes and oceans, all the physics and chemistry – and put them together to predict what kind of gases might be present in their atmospheres.”
Why?
“Because atmospheres are parts of living processes. The mixes of gases can tell us if the planet is alive.”
Like here?
“Exactly. My programs have even predicted the Earth’s atmosphere at different times in history.”
You can’t predict the past, Dad.
“You can if you don’t know it yet.”
So how do you tell what kind of gases a planet has from a hundred light-years away when you can’t even see it?

“Electrons in an atom can only be in certain energy states. Like they’re on the steps of a staircase. When they change stairs, they absorb or give off energy at specific frequencies. Those frequencies depend on what kind of atom they’re in.”
Crazy stuff. He grinned at the trees above the tent.
“You think that’s crazy? Listen to this. When you look at the spectrum of light from a star, you can see little black lines, at the frequency of those stairsteps. It’s called spectroscopy, and it tells you what atoms are in the star.”
Little black lines. From electrons, a gazillion miles away. Who figured that out?
“We’re a very clever species, we humans.”
He didn’t reply. I figured he’d drifted asleep again – a good end to a fine day.

Dad. Dad! I figured it out. … what’s the name for rock-eaters, again?
…
“Lithotrophs.”
He smacked his forehead. Lithotrophs! Duh. So, say there’s a rocky planet full of lithotrophs, living in solid rock. You see the problem?
“Not yet.”
Dad, come on! Or maybe they live in liquid methane or whatever. They’re super-slow, almost frozen solid. Their days are like our centuries. What if their messages take too long for us to even know that they’re messages? Like maybe it takes fifty of our years for them to send two syllables.
“It’s a great idea, Robbie.”
And maybe there’s a water world, where these super-smart, super-fast bird-fish are zooming around, trying to get our attention.
“But they’re sending too fast for us to understand.”
Exactly! We should try listening at different speeds.

One quadrillion neural connections lay on the inflatable camping pillow next to me: one synapse for every star in two thousand five hundred milky ways. Lots of ways to overheat.

All life long I’ve believed that when a person dies, all the beauty and insight and hope – but also all pain and terror – everything stored in her one thousand trillion synapses disperses into noise.

Every belief will be outgrown, in time. The first lesson of the universe is to never reason from only a single instance. Unless you only have one instance. In which case: find another.

How on Earth did we ever discover this place?
And that’s where the story turned surreal. A lineage of slow, weak, naked, awkward creatures on a far luckier planet had lasted through several near-extinctions and held on long enough to discover that gravity bent light, everywhere in the universe. For no good reason and at insane expense, we’d built an instrument able to see the tiniest bend in starlight made by this small body, from scores of light-years away.

When I was thirteen, Dad made us kids scrub up and sit behind him in court as he was sentenced for embezzling. The ploy must have worked because he got only eight months. But we lost the house, and my father never again earned more than minimum wage. I wouldn’t have made it through those years without brains in a vat, Dyson spheres, arcologies, spooky action at a distance, Afrofuturism, Retro-pulp, and psi machines. From Alpha-beams to the Omega point, I lived in a parallel place that spawned scenarios of such infinite variety that they made a laughingstock of the little parochial rock in the galactic sticks where I lived. Nothing could hurt me so long as consensual reality was just a tiny atoll in an ocean without shores.

There were creatures that retooled themselves into something unrecognizable halfway through their life. There were creatures that saw infrared and sensed magnetic fields. There were creatures that changed sex based upon straw polls of the neighborhood, and single cells that acted en masse by sensing quorums.

The harsh Shara and fertile Amazon, mirror-like ice sheets and changing temperate forests: all appeared in the fluctuations of a few pixels. It thrilled me to peer through that narrow keyhole on the breathing Earth and see it the way alien astrobiologists would from a trillion miles away.

A decade later, I see the truth, every morning I wake up. If Aly and I had been in charge, the luckiest thing in my life- the thing that kept me going when all the luck in the world went cold – would never have existed, not even in my wildest models.

She said how ninety-eight percent by weight of animals left on Earth were either Homo sapiens or their industrially harvested food. Only two percent were wild. Didn’t the few wild things left need a little break?

Much of existence presents itself in one of three flavors: none, one, or infinite. One-offs were everywhere, at every step of the story. We knew of only one kind of life, arising once on one world, in one liquid medium, using one form of energy storage and one genetic code. But my worlds didn’t need to be like Earth. Their versions of life didn’t require surface water of Goldilocks zones or even carbon for their core element. I tried to free myself from bias and assume nothing, the way a child worked, as if our single instance proved the possibilities were endless.

I made hot planets with massive wet atmospheres where life lived in the plumes of aerosol geysers. I blanketed rogue planets under thick layers of greenhouse gases and filled them with creatures who survived by joining hydrogen and nitrogen into ammonia. I sank rock-dwelling endoliths in deep fissures and gave them carbon monoxide to metabolize. I made worlds of liquid methane where biofilms feasted on hydrogen sulfide that rained down in banquets from the toxic skies.

And all my simulated atmospheres waited for the day when the long-gestated, long-delayed space-borne telescopes would lift off and come online, blowing our little one-off Rare Earth wide open. That day would be for our species like the one when the eye doctor fitted my vain wife with her first pair of long-overdue glasses, ones that made her shout out loud with joy at being able to see her child from all the way across a room.

Teaching is like photosynthesis: making food from air and light. It tilts the prospects for life a little.

The alignment of favorable circumstances for the emergence of self-assembling molecules seemed astronomically unlikely. But the appearance of protocells almost as soon as the molten Hadean Earth cooled suggested that life was the inevitable by-product of ordinary chemistry.

“Here on Earth, it was archaea and bacteria and nothing but archaea and bacteria for two billion years. Then came something as mysterious as the origin of life itself. One day two billion years ago, instead of one microbe eating the other, one took the other inside its membrane and they went into business together.”

I told her, “You don’t love me. You love my microbiome.”
When she laughed, I thought: I’ll just stay here in these parts for a bit. Until I die, or so. I told her how a person had ten times more bacterial cells than human cells and how we needed a hundred times more bacterial than human DNA to keep the organism going.
Her eyes crinkled in love. So we’re the scaffolding, is that it? And they’re the building?
“Without that bizarre collaboration, there’d be no complex cells, no multicellular creatures, nothing to get you out of bed in the morning. The friendly takeover took forever to happen. But here’s the weird thing: It took two billion years to happen. But it happened more than once.”

The previous two times she called me in, she’d tried empathy and posture-mirroring. This time she was considerably more Excel spreadsheet.

Life germinated in the strip of twilight between permanent noon and midnight. In that band between burning and frozen, winds whipped the air and currents drove the water. Creatures evolved to exploit the loops of energy, moving bits of morning to warm the blackness and bits of night to cool the endless blaze.
Life pushed deeper into both halves of the wind-whipped landscape. Tendrils of habitability seeped down canyons and up watersheds, creeping from the temperate boundary toward the extremes. Life on Geminus split into two kingdoms, one of ice, one of fire, each adapting to half of the bipolar planet. For the boldest pilgrims, there was no turning back. Even the temperate boundary strip became fatal.
Intelligence arose twice. Each kind solved its own impossible climate. But the minds of day failed to find the night intelligible, while night’s minds couldn’t comprehend the day. They shared only one bit of common knowledge: life could never exist “over the edge.”

He quit the billy-goat butting and turned serious. I pretended I was drawing it. No. Wait. Like it was drawing me.

In such steadiness, there was no great call to adjust or improvise or second-guess or model much of anything.
He thought about that. Trouble is what creates intelligence?
I said yes. Crisis and change and upheaval.
His voice turned sad and wondrous. Then we’ll never find anyone smarter than us.

Marty Currier tipped his head to one side. “Plasticity has been documented at every stage of life. Habit impedes us as we age as much as any change in an innate capacity. These days we like to say that ‘mature’ is just another name for ‘lazy’. “

One night, I made a planet for him where the several species of intelligent life traded bits of temperament and memory and behavior and experiences as easily as Earthly bacteria trade snippets of genes. He grabbed my arm, smiling, before I could add the details.

The world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

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.
We discovered creatures high up in Tedia’s jagged young mountains. They were tubular and branchy and they held so still for so long that we mistook them for plants. But they greeted us, putting the word Welcome directly into our heads.
They probed my son. I could feel their thoughts go into him. You want to know if you should warn us.
My frightened son nodded.
You want us to be ready. But you don’t want to cause us pain.
My son nodded again. He was crying.
Don’t worry, the doomed tubular creatures told us. There are two kind of ‘endless.’ Ours is the bette one.

Earth has two kinds of people, those who could do the math and follow the science, and those who were happier with their own truths. But in our hearts’ daily practice, whatever schools we went to, we all lived as if tomorrow would be a clone of now.

I have a GREAT Idea, Robbie said. Dr. Currier’s lab could take a dog. A really good dog. But it could be a cat or a bear or even a bird. You know that birds are a lot smarter than anybody thinks? I mean, some birds can see magnetism. How cool is that?

“Take a dog and do what, Robbie?” His thoughts these days often grew richer than he could say.
Take him and scan him. Scan his brain while he was really excited. Then people could train on his patterns, and we’d learn what it felt like to be a dog.

Robbie was right: we needed universal mandatory courses of neural feedback training, like passing the Constitution test or getting a driver’s license. The template animal could be a dog or a cat or a bear or even one of my son’s beloved birds. Anything that could make us feel what it was like to not be us.

I felt like a superstitious hunter-gatherer in a magic cargo cult. Instead, I said, “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure that emotional state really was her.”
“Ecstasy? Not Aly?”
A spark passed between Martin and me. I read it without any feedback training at all. The man’s eyes shied away from mine, and I knew. My whole program of willful ignorance fell apart, revealing the truth beneath a suspicion I’d nursed forever. It wasn’t just my own bottomless insecurity: I never knew my wife of a dozen years. She was a planet all her own.

I had an awful thought: Maybe the last few months of neural feedback were hurting Robbie. In the face of the world’s basic brokenness, more empathy meant deeper suffering. The question wasn’t why Robin was sliding down again. The question was why rest of us were staying so insanely sanguine.

Of course Robin was auto-suggesting. I was auto-suggesting. The changes might be entirely imagined. But brain science knew that even imagination could change our cells for real.

I don’t know where to start. Like, more than half our migrating birds use the river, but they can’t because they’re losing their habitat. Did you know that? The chemicals that farmers spray on their stuff goes in the river, and that’s turning the amphibians into mutants. And all the drugs that people pee and poop down the toilet. The fish are completely doped up. You can’t even swim in it anymore! And where it comes out? The mouth? Thousands of square miles of dead zone.

I told him about the planet Mios, how it had flourished for a billion years before we came along. The people of Mios built a ship for long-distance, long-duration discovery, filled with intelligent machines. That ship traveled hundreds of parsecs until it found a planet full of raw materials where it landed, set up shop, repaired, and copied itself and all its crew. Then two identical ships set off in different directions for hundreds more parsecs, until they found new planets, where they repeated that whole process again.
For how long? My son asked.
I shrugged. “There was nothing to stop them.”
Were they scouting out places to invade or something?
“Maybe.”
And they kept dividing? There must have been a million of them!
“Yes,” I told him. “Then two million. Then four.”
Holy crow! They’d be all over the place!
“Space is big,” I said.
Did the ship report back to Mios?
“Yes, even though the messages took longer and longer to arrive. And the ships went on reporting, even after Mios stopped responding.”
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 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 flowers track the sun. They saw the flowers wilt and turn into seed. They saw the seeds dropand 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.

He was simply toying with things and enjoying the unfolding.

Life assembles itself on accumulating mistakes.

Everybody’s inside everyone.

On a bench under the trees, Dee Ramey holds one of his note books in her lap, turning pages. He’s explaining the drawings. That’s an annelid. Incredible, you gotta admit. That is a brittle star. These things? They’re water bears. Also known as tardigrades. They can survive in outer space. Serious. They could float to Mars.

But while Currier told me not to worry, mass cascades of error-correcting bits surged in waves of electromagnetic radiation around the planet’s surface. They blasted in vertical geysers 35,786 kilometers upward into space and rained back down at 300 million meters per second. They coursed in bundles of parallel light through fiber conduits only to fan out in bursts of radio across the open air at the whim of tens of millions of grazing fingers coaxing electrons from hundreds of millions of spots on capacitive touch screens a few inches high. Robin’s streams were the slightest blip in the race’s desperate search for mass diversion. As a fraction of the feed produced and consumed that day, a few hundred billion bits of information were like a single pip on the surface of a strawberry at the end of an eight-course dinner. But these bits were my son, and, reassembled, they held the record of his face on a late afternoon by the side of a lake telling a perfect stranger, Everybody’s inside everyone.

Currier frowned but nodded. Something in me appalled him, and for good reason. I felt as if I were my own son, about to turn ten, seeing through adulthood for the first time.

“We’ve barely glimpsed the potential of these techniques. Only the future will reveal their full possibilities. Meanwhile, imagine a world where one person’s anger is soothed by another’s calm, where your private fears are assuaged by a stranger’s courage, and where pain can be trained away, as easily as taking piano lessons. We could learn to live here, on Earth, without fear. Now please say hello to a friend of mine. Mr. Robin Byrne.”

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 projector 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.

I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global super power on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

How many of them were just laughing at me?
The room hummed at half a dozen different frequencies. Every reply seemed gutless. I took too long, and he had his answer. “People, Robbie. They’re a questionable species.”
He thought about this. He weighted what it meant to become a public commodity. His face soured.
“Robbie. I am so sorry. I made a big mistake.”
But against the light from the window, I saw him shake his head. No, Dad. It’s all good. Don’t worry. You remember the signal?
He made it in the pool of light, twisting his cupped hand back and forth on the stalk of his broomstick arm. He’d taught me the code once, months ago, on another Earth – his invented hand sign for All Is Good.
You know how people sometimes worry: Is that person mad at me? Well, if anyone’s ever wondering, I’m good with the whole world.

Spring will keep coming back, whatever happens. Right, dad?
There were strong arguments either way. The Earth had been everything from hell to snowball. Mars had lost its atmosphere and fizzled away to a frigid desert, while Venus descended into hammering winds and a surface hotter than a smelter. Life could crash and spin out, pretty much overnight. My models said as much, and so did the rocks of this planet. Here we were, in a place fast becoming something new. Predictions were shaky from a sample size of one.

I laid it out for him, as clearly as I could. If the universe were steady and eternal, if it had been around forever, the light from countless suns in every direction would turn night as bright as day. But ours was a mere fourteen billion years old, and all the stars were rushing away from us at an increasing rate. This place was too young and was expanding too fast for stars to erase the night.

There was a planet that couldn’t figure out where everyone was. It died of loneliness. That happened billions of times in our galaxy alone.

I’m not sure why he’s helping me. It’s more than pity. Like lots of scientists, he’s a sucker for redemption. And for some reason, he’s deeply invested in my progress. It would take much more advanced brain science than his to explain that one. It’s a question for astrobiology, in fact. Goldilocks planets can turn rain and lava and a little energy into agency and will. Natural selection can prune selfishness into its opposite.

– Light travels at three hundred thousand kilometers a second. It takes ninety-three billion years to cross from one end of space to the other, past black holes and pulsars and quasars, neutron and preon and quark stars, metallics and blue stragglers, binaries and triple-star systems, globular and hypercompact clusters, coronal, tidal, and halo galaxies, reflection and plerion nebulae, stellar, interstellar, and intergalactic disks, dark matter and energy, cosmic dust and filaments and voids, all spun from the laws folded up into vibrations far smaller than the smallest units we have names for. The universe is a living thing, and my son wants to take me for a quick look around while there’s still time.

We rise together into orbit high above the place we’ve been visiting. The thought occurs to him, and I have it. Can you believe where we just were?
Oh, this planet was a good one. And we, too, were good, as good as the burn of the sun and the rain’s sting and the smell of living soil, the all-over song of endless solutions signing the air of a changing world that by every calculation ought never to have been.