Read Online King of the Worlds by M. Thomas Gammarino - Free Book Online Page B

striking an equilibrium with their environment — humans, not so much. It probably didn’t hurt that, while many of these civilizations had some form of religion, most seemed to recognize their systems of belief for the psychocosmological metaphors they perforce were.
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    Dylan began his two weeks of paternity leave. Erin stayed at the hospital for a couple of days, and he and the kids went to stay with her and the new baby much of the time. Arthur was great with his new brother. Already he enjoyed holding him and petting his bald head. Poor Tavi, though, had a new distance in her eyes. She seemed to understand, with peculiar clarity, that she’d been usurped, that she was no longer the baby in the family but destined to be lost in that gray middle between her two siblings. At least she was the only girl, special in that sense, but it was clear she resented Mommy for holding this new baby and giving it suck, so instead of going to her, she cleaved, rather touchingly, to Daddy, who for lack of other viable candidates became her new best friend. Barely three years old and her paradise was already lost. Join the club .
    Back at home, Dylan bathed the kids, put them to bed, and then set to work on Junior’s sleeping quarters in what would no longer be his office. He and Erin had been so busy that they’d hardly done any nesting in advance; fortunately the shed was filled with hand-me-downs. Dylan even let Arthur and Tavi decorate the walls with markers. Arthur drew spaceships and dinosaurs. Tavi worked in a rather more abstract mode, rendering varicolored plasmoids and blobules.
    For the first week or so after Erin and Junior’s return, Dylan felt quite happy. He forbade himself to do, or even think about, anything related to work, and focused on enjoying the company of his kin. He and the kids prepared meals for Mommy. They played vintage Terran board games, painted one another’s faces, and watched all the Toy Story films, the third of which choked Dylan up beyond all reason. They played hopscotch and flew a kite in the New Taiwanese wind. And they got to know their new family member. Dylan Junior’s face seemed to change by the minute, and while Dylan still thought he looked pretty much like Gollum, he was beginning to see what Erin meant: Junior did take after him in some respects, more obviously than he did his mother anyway. It was mainly the eyes. They were Dylan’s eyes, really, just popped into a smaller skull. He had not quite realized before how a gene is a gene is a gene. It made for quite an affinity, and one night while the other two kids were sleeping, Dylan cradled the baby in his arms and walked him outside to the deck to peer at the stars. He told him, unabashedly, how he loved him and— screw overpopulation, the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate in all directions anyway —he was glad to have him join them. Then he waxed philosophical and possibly nutty and asked the kid what it had been like in the womb. What was it like when that first spark of mental life kicked in? What was it like before that? How far back could he go? Was there anything important back there that his old man had forgotten? He looked out at the Milky Way, showed his son the pale evening star their species had once been trapped around. All those worlds, and yet—he spared his son now and kept his thoughts to himself—was there nothing truly strange out there? Nothing so exotic and marvelous that it would stymie our human frames of reference, mock our languages, confound our metaphors?
    Because that was the thing about being young, wasn’t it? Everything was still new? Dylan sometimes briefed his students on one of the more interesting tidbits he’d picked up in graduate school: The Russian formalist poet Viktor Shlovsky identified ostranenie —usually translated as “defamiliarization,” though literally “strange-making”—as the