Bewilderment

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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.”