Bewilderment

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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 kinds of “endless.” Ours is the better one.