The next day I met Tom at the airport.

I held back, unsure how to handle the situation. He seemed angry, at me, at Siberia, at gas hydrates; I supposed that to him this return was a defeat.

He let me hold him. It was like hugging a statue. But then, after a few seconds, he melted. “Oh, Dad—” Suddenly we were embracing properly, all barriers down, no more bullshit, just father and son reunited.

He was grimy, covered in stubble, and exhausted by his long flight. He actually stank a bit. But he was Tom, the reality of him, in my arms. Standing there with Tom in that half-empty airport concourse, I felt as happy as it’s possible for a parent to feel, I think. I guess the genes were calling.

But the moment passed, too quickly, and Tom pulled back. I knew we had words to exchange, words that were going to be like bullets flying. But not now, not yet. I took him to the hotel, checked him in, and let him go to his room alone.

While Tom rested up, I went for a restless walk around the old car lot. It was immense, a cathedral among parking facilities. There were ten, twelve floors, and there was parking space even on the roof. It was an open concrete frame, and from the outside you could look right through it to see daylight coming through from the other side. It was like a huge concrete skull.

I walked inside, past barriers that no longer raised, tollbooths with broken glass and rusting ticket machines. Only a few bays on the ground floor were occupied, by electric utility vehicles nuzzled up against power sockets. The rest were vacant, bay after bay still marked out in fading white paint, all neatly numbered, now plaintively empty. A halfhearted attempt had been made to extend the hotel itself into this vast area, but the conversion had apparently been abandoned.

Once elevators and escalators took you to the higher floors, but they no longer worked, and the stairs smelled of damp and rot. I chose to walk up the ramps which had once borne the cars. It was a long steep walk through that gargantuan architecture, exhausting for a mere human.

On the roof it was breezy, and I approached the edge cautiously. I looked out over the airport. The runways were neat straight-line strips, surrounded by the vaster acreage of the roads. Standing there on that parking-lot roof, I was the only human in sight in square kilometers of concrete and tarmac, stained by rubber and oil, now turning gray-green as it crumbled.

The cars and planes had gone, and I remained; and on the breeze I could smell, not the dense stinks of carbon monoxide, gasoline, and rubber I remembered from my childhood, but the poignant scent of spring grass. One day, I knew, the car lot would vanish, too. The small blind things of nature were already eating into the concrete fabric. Eventually the decay would reach the cables that held together this stressed-concrete structure, and when they gave way the whole place would explode, scattering concrete dust like dandelion thistle.

I turned back and wound my way back down the huge exit ramps, and returned to the hotel.

Tom slept, showered, whatever, for twelve hours. Then he called me through my implant. I went to his room.

He sat in the room’s single armchair. He was bundled up in a tired-looking hotel dressing gown, watching news that bubbled quietly from one wall. His hair had been shaved at some point during his brief hospitalization. He looked cadaverous, ill; he probably looked worse than he was. He had an aspirator in his hand, the only sign I’d seen of continuing medical treatment.

I sat on the bed, and he gave me a whisky from his minibar. It was midnight, but both our body clocks were screwed. With nobody else around, you make your own time.

There we were, the two of us, sitting side by side in an alien country, neutral territory.

“We need to talk,” I said tentatively.

“Yeah, we do.” The words came out as a growl. He leaned over and tapped the wall.

To my surprise, an image of the Kuiper Anomaly came up. It was a tetrahedron, an electric-blue framework that rotated slowly. Every so often starlight caught one of its faces, and it would flare up, iridescent, as if soap films were stretched across the frame.

“What’s this?”

He said, “I’ve been hacking into your logs, Dad. Seeing what you’ve been up to, the last few days.”

“You always did do your homework,” I said.

“Still this shit with you, isn’t it? Starships and alien beings.”

I folded my arms — I know, a defensive posture, but he had gone straight on the attack. “How can you call it shit? Look at this thing, obviously artificial, the only artificial object we know of in the universe not made by human hands. We’re facing the biggest mystery in human history — and the answers may deliver the greatest change in human consciousness since—”

“Since we came out of the caves? Since we walked on the Moon? Since Columbus or Galileo, or the invention of the sentient toilet bowl?”

“But—”

“Dad, will you just stop talking? You’ve been talking all my fucking life. I remember when Mom left you that time. I was six—”

“Seven, actually.”

“She told me why she was taking me away from you for a while.”

“She did?”

“She always talked to me, Dad, in a way you never did. Even though I was only a little kid. She said you had two modes. You were either depressed, or else you were escaping from the fucking planet altogether. We would come back to you, she promised me, and we did, but she needed a break.”

I said grimly, “It might have been better if she’d had that out with me, not you.”

“She’s dead, Dad,” he reminded me. He snapped his fingers, and the image of the Anomaly scrunched up and whirled away. “So you think it would have been better if I’d followed you, and devoted my life to this kind of blue-sky shit rather than the Library of Life?”

I still had my arms folded. “If you had, you wouldn’t have got yourself nearly killed by some burp of toxic gas in a godforsaken place nobody ever heard of. At least I’d know where you were, instead of having to hear that you’d nearly died through some friend of a friend…” I hadn’t meant to say any of that. All this stuff, the resentment, the sense of abandonment, the hurt, was just tumbling out, having been penned up inside me since I’d heard the bad news.

Tom said, “So it’s not the danger to me that bothers you. It’s the effect on you. You’ve always been the same, Dad.”

“Just don’t get yourself killed,” I blurted. “It’s not worth it.”

He looked at me, almost curiously. “Biospheric capture isn’t worth it? Why not? Because we’re through the Bottleneck? Is that what you think, that the worst is over?”

I spread my hands. Here we were, with a kind of dreadful inevitability, arguing about the state of the world, rather than our relationship. “We’re dealing with it, Tom. Aren’t we? We gave up the damn automobile. We gave up oil! Some people will tell you that was the most profound economic transformation since the end of the Bronze Age. And then there’s the Stewardship.”

He actually laughed. “The Stewardship? You think that the Warming, the Die-back, are somehow fixed by that vast instrumentality? Dad, are you really that complacent?”

“Tom—”

“We are fundamentally different people. Dad, you were always a dreamer. A utopian. You dreamed of space and aliens — the future. But I think the future in your head is a lot like the afterlife, like Heaven. Both impossible fantasies of places that we can never reach, and yet where all our problems will just go away. And, like the afterlife, those who believe in the future try to control what we do in the here-and-now. There has always been a kind of future fascism, Dad. But the future is irrelevant.”

“It is?”

“Yes! Not if we can’t get through the present. I’m different from you, Dad. I’m no dreamer. I go out there, into the world, and I deal with it like it is. And that was always beyond you, wasn’t it? You never liked the present. It’s just too complicated, too messy, too interconnected. There’s nothing you can get your engineer’s teeth into. And not only that, it’s depressing.”