Bewilderment

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ON GEMINUS, WE WERE TRAPPED on opposite sides of a terrible meridian. The planet’s sun was small, cool, and red. Geminus lay so close in that the star had captured its rotation. One side remained forever in scalding light. The other side stayed night, icy and perpetual.

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.”

We traveled to Geminus together, my son and I. But we each arrived alone. I found myself in a wind-fed channel on the side of constant day. I searched throughout the habitable strip but couldn’t find him. The local inhabitants were no help. I’d imagined that people of endless day would be cheerful and upbeat. But their sky was filled with one single unchanging light, blocking out all signs of a universe. They lived as if there could be nothing but Here and Now and this. The thought stunted them. Their sciences and arts had stalled in infancy. They never even invented the telescope.

On Geminus, seasons were places. Walking a few miles toward the boundary belt took me from August to January. He had to be somewhere on the side of constant night. What people would he find there, shaped by lethal cold? Cunning and ingenious, diggers of heat mines and farmers of subterranean fungi. Brutal, barbaric, and depressed killers, competing for every priceless calorie.

He had been looking for me as well. Nearing the temperate boundary belt, I saw him a long way off, rushing from the other side. I broke into a run, but he held up his hands to stop me. I realized, there on the edge of darkness: he had seen the raw night sky. He’d looked at stars as no one on Earth ever would again. He’d seen change and time, cycles and variety. Math and stories, as countless, subtle, and various as the black-backed constellations.

He called to me, from over the standing edge of dark. Dad. Dad! You have no idea. But I was trapped in light and couldn’t cross over.