Calculating God

  “I don’t believe in souls, or an afterlife.”

  “Ah, good,” said Hollus. “It surprised me that in this late stage of your race’s development, so many humans still link the concept of a deity with the notion of they themselves having an immortal soul; the one surely does not require the other.”

  I’d never quite thought about it that way. Maybe Hollus’s God was the ultimate Copernican-style dethroning: yes, a creator exists, but its creations don’t have souls. “Still,” I said, “even if I did believe in the afterlife my wife’s religion describes, I’m not sure that I’m a good enough person to make it into heaven. The bar might be set awfully high.”

  “The bar?”

  “A metaphor; it refers to high-jumping, a human sport. The higher the bar you have to jump over is set, the harder it is to do.”

  “Ah. Our comparable metaphor is one of narrowing passages. Still, you must know that the fear of death is irrational; death comes to everyone.”

  It was all clinical for him; he wasn’t the one with only a handful of months left. “I know that,” I said, perhaps too harshly. I took a deep, calming breath. He was my friend; there was no need to be short with him. “I don’t exactly fear death,” I lied. “I just don’t want it to come so soon.” A pause. “It still surprises me that you haven’t conquered death.” I wasn’t fishing; really, I wasn’t.

  “More human thinking,” said Hollus. “Death as an opponent.”

  I should show him The Seventh Seal—either that, or Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. “Regardless,” I said, “I would have expected you to have managed to prolong your lives more.”

  “We have. The average age of death prior to our development of antibiotics was half what it is now; prior to the development of drugs to unclog arteries, it was only three-quarters of what it is now.”

  “Yes, but—” I paused, trying to think of how to make my point. “I saw a doctor interviewed on CTV not too long ago. He said that the first human who is going to live forever has probably already been born. We’ve been assuming that we can conquer—sorry, that we can avoid—death, that there’s nothing theoretically impossible about living forever.”

  “I am not sure that I would want to live in a world in which the only certain thing was taxes,” said Hollus, his eyestalks doing their S-ripple. “Besides, my children are my immortality.”

  I blinked. “You have children?” I said. Why had I never asked him—her—about that?

  “Yes,” Hollus said. “A son and a daughter.” And then, in a startlingly human act, the alien said, “Would you like to see pictures of them?”

  I nodded. The holoform projector buzzed slightly, and suddenly two more Forhilnors were in the collections room with us, life-size but unmoving. “That is my son Kassold,” Hollus said, indicating the one on the left. “And my daughter Pealdon.”

  “They are all grown up?” I asked; Pealdon and Kassold seemed to be about the same size as Hollus.

  “Yes. Pealdon is a—what would you call it? One who works in the theater; she tells performers which interpretations will be allowed.”

  “A director,” I said.

  “A director, yes; part of the reason I wished to view some of your movies was to improve my sense of how human drama compared with Forhilnor plays. And my son Kassold is—a psychiatrist, I suppose. He treats disorders of the Forhilnor mind.”

  “I’m sure you’re very proud of them,” I said.

  Hollus bobbed up and down. “You have no idea,” the alien said.

  Hollus had disappeared during the middle of the afternoon; he—no, she: for Pete’s sake, she was a mother—she’d said she needed to attend to some other research. I used the time to dig through the layers of paperwork on my desk and to reflect a little on what I’d done yesterday. Alan Dershowitz, one of my favorite columnists, once said, “It is while praying that I experience my greatest doubts about God, and it is while looking at the stars that I make the leap of faith.” I wondered if—

  The holoform projector bleeped twice. It startled me; I hadn’t expected to see Hollus again today, but here she was, wavering back into existence in my office—and she looked more excited than I’d ever seen her before: eyestalks weaving rapidly, and her spherical torso bobbing as though it were being dribbled by an invisible hand.

  “The last star we visited before coming here,” Hollus said as soon as her image had stabilized, “was Groombridge 1618, some sixteen light-years from here. The second planet of that star once had a civilization, like the other worlds we had visited. But the inhabitants were gone.”

  I smiled. “Welcome back.”

  “What? Yes, yes. Thank you. But we have now found them. We have found the missing inhabitants.”

  “Just now? How?”

  “Whenever we discovered a planet that had apparently been abandoned, we did a scan of its entire sky. The assumption is simple: if the inhabitants had vacated their world, they might have done so via starship. And the starship would likely be taking the shortest path between the planet and wherever it was going, meaning that its fusion exhaust—assuming it is powered by fusion—might be aimed back toward the home planet. We checked in the direction of every F, G, and K-class star within seventy terrestrial light-years of Groombridge, looking for an artificial fusion signature overlapping one of those stars’ own spectra.”

  “And you found something?”

  “No. No, we never did. Until yesterday. We had saved the whole scan in our computers, of course. I retrieved that scan and wrote a program to do a wider search through it, checking every star of every type, out to five hundred light-years—Forhilnor light-years that is, about seven hundred and twenty terrestrial ones. And the program found it: a fusion exhaust in a direct line between Groombridge and the star Alpha Orionis.”

  That would be the brightest star in Orion, which is—“Betelgeuse?” I said. “You mean Betelgeuse? But that’s a red supergiant, isn’t it?” I’d seen the star countless times in the winter skies; it formed the left shoulder of Orion, my favorite constellation—I think the name was even Arabic for “shoulder of the hunter.”

  “Betelgeuse, yes,” said Hollus.

  “Surely no one would relocate to such a star. It can’t possibly have habitable planets.”

  “That is exactly what we thought. Betelgeuse is the largest star visible in the night sky from any of our three worlds; if it were placed where Earth’s sun is now, its outer rim would extend well past the orbit of Mars. It is also much cooler than Sol, Delta Pavonis, or Beta Hydri; that is why it only glows red, of course.”

  “How far away is Betelgeuse?” I asked.

  “Four hundred and twenty-nine terrestrial light-years from Sol—and roughly the same from Groombridge 1618, of course.”

  “That’s a heck of a long way.”

  “It is just one half of one percent of our galaxy’s diameter.”

  “Still,” I said, “I can’t imagine why they’d send a ship there.”

  “Nor can we. Betelgeuse is a prime candidate to go supernova; it is not suitable at all for a colony.”

  “Then why go there?”

  “We do not know. Of course, it is possible that the ship is headed to some destination on the other side of Betelgeuse, or that it plans to use Betelgeuse either as a refueling stop—it might be easy to harvest hydrogen from the attenuated outer atmosphere of a low-density red supergiant. And, of course, the ship may wish to use Betelgeuse as a gravitational slingshot, giving it a speed boost as it angles off to some other destination.”

  “Did you find evidence that the people from Groombridge had sent out other starships?”

  “No. But if any of them had changed course even slightly, so that their fusion exhaust did not aim back toward the home planet, we would not be able to detect them.”

  “How long ago was the ark launched? And how long until it gets to Betelgeuse?”

  “Judging interstellar distances is very difficult, especially without a long baseline for measuring para
llax. The ark has been under way for at least 5,000 years—they apparently never developed the near-light-speed fusion engines we have—and it is certainly more than five-sixths of the way to Betelgeuse.” She paused for a moment, her torso bobbing up and down the way it did when she was excited. “But do you see, Tom? Maybe what you proposed happened on the other five worlds we visited; maybe their inhabitants did upload themselves into computers. But the Groombridge natives did not do that. They have built an ark; they are still alive. And that ark lacks the speed of our own ships; it would be possible for us to overtake it. Meaning—” she bobbed some more—“there is another race for us to meet.”

  * * *

  26

  T

  he ROM had closed to the public at 6:00; Hollus and I were now walking alone again through the Burgess Shale exhibition.

  “I have noticed,” the alien said, “that many of the fossils you have on display are casts.”

  “Well, all of these are real,” I said, gesturing at the shales around us. “But, sure, we either trade with other museums, giving them a cast of one of ours that they want in exchange for something we want, or we simply purchase the cast from them.” I paused and pointed straight up. “That T. rex we’ve got in the Discovery Gallery is a cast. Meanwhile, our Parasaurolophus is our most popular trade; we just finished making a cast of it for a museum in Helsinki.”

  “I am fascinated by these fossils,” said Hollus. “We do not make physical casts, but we do make high-resolution holographic scans of objects of interest.” She paused. “Would it be permissible for me to scan these fossils.”

  “To scan the Burgess Shale specimens?”

  “Yes, please,” said Hollus. “The process is noninvasive; no damage is done.”

  I scratched where my right sideburn used to be. “I guess that would be all right, but—” For once I was the savvy businessman. “But, as I said, we usually trade or sell casts of our fossils. What could you give us in return?”

  Hollus considered for a moment. “I offer you a similarly scanned library of the counterpart of Beta Hydri’s Cambrian explosion.”

  Bargaining is the third of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages. That sort of bargaining is usually futile, but at least it had taught me not to easily give up. “I want a comparable scan library of the Delta Pavonis equivalent of the Cambrian explosion, too.” Hollus’s eyestalks moved in a way I’d learned meant she was about to object, but I pressed on. “After all, you’re doubtless going to share the data with the Wreeds, anyway, so they, too, should pay a price for it. And I’ll need two copies of your scans, since I’ll have to give one to the Smithsonian.”

  Hollus considered this for a moment, then, eyestalks rippling, she said, “Done.”

  “How is the scan performed?” I asked.

  “Several of us will have to come down here physically with the equipment,” said Hollus.

  “Really? Wow.” I smiled. “It will be good to see you again in the flesh, I mean. How long will the process take?”

  She looked around at the cases, as if estimating the magnitude of the task. “About one of your days, I imagine. Scanning at that level of resolution is time-consuming.”

  I frowned. “Well, regardless, we’d have to do it when the museum is closed. It’s too much of a security risk to have you here in the flesh when we’re open to the public. And if it’s going to take that long, we’ll have to start on a Sunday evening and continue on through Monday, when the museum is closed all day.” Mike Harris’s latest round of cutbacks had forced us to be open only six days a week. “I suppose there’s no reason to wait. How does this Sunday night sound?”

  “When is that?” asked Hollus.

  “Two days from now.”

  “Yes,” said the alien. “That should work out just fine.”

  For me, showering had always simply been a way to quickly get clean—and it was even quicker, now that I had no hair to wash. But for Susan, it was one of her real pleasures. She had to do it quickly on weekdays, but on Saturday mornings, she would spend half an hour or so showering, enjoying the warmth, the wetness, letting the water massage her. While she did so, I lay in bed, staring at the swirls of plaster decorating our bedroom ceiling, thinking. Trying to make sense of it all.

  One of my favorite movies is Inherit the Wind—the original version, with Spencer Tracy, Frederic March, and Gene Kelly in the roles modeled after Clarence Darrow, William Jennings Bryan, and H. L. Mencken. There’s also been a couple of made-for-TV remakes; I’ll never understand why they remake good movies. Why doesn’t somebody go back and remake bad ones, correcting the mistakes? I’d love to see a decent version of Dune or V. I. Warshawski—or The Phantom Menace, for that matter. But they did remake Inherit the Wind, first with Jason Robards, Kirk Douglas, and good old Darren McGavin, The Night Stalker’s Carl Kolchak himself—in fact, come to think of it, Mencken and Kolchak are pretty darn similar…except for the vampires.

  But I digress again. Christ, I wish I could concentrate better.

  I wish the pain would go away.

  I wish—God damn it, how I wish—I could be sure that what I’m thinking is coherent, is reasonable, is what I really think, and not just the result of pain, or my pain medication, confusing my thoughts.

  When I first saw Inherit the Wind, I’d laughed smugly at the way Spencer Tracy demolished Fredric March, reducing the fundamentalist to a gibbering idiot on the witness stand. Take that, I thought. Take that.

  I used to teach evolution at U of T. I said that before, right? When Darwin first proposed his theory, scientists assumed the fossil record would bear it out: that we would see a gradual progression from form to form, with slow changes accumulating over time, until a new species emerged.

  But the fossil record doesn’t show that. Oh, there are transitional forms: Ichthyostega, which seems intermediate between fish and amphibians; Caudipteryx, a melange of dinosaur and bird; even Australopithecus, the quintessential ape-man.

  But gradual change? An accumulation of tiny mutations over time? No. Sharks have been sharks for almost four hundred million years; turtles have turtled for two hundred million years; snakes have snuck for eighty million years. Indeed, the fossil record is mostly lacking in gradual sequences, in incremental improvements; the only really good vertebrate sequence we’ve got is that of the horse, which is why just about every large museum has a display of equine evolution like the one here at the ROM.

  Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge responded, putting forth the theory of punctuated equilibria—punky-E, as we say in the evolution biz. Species are stable for long periods of time, and then suddenly, when environmental conditions change, they rapidly evolve into new forms. Ninety percent of me wanted to believe Stephen and Niles, but ten percent felt it was a bit of a semantic trick, word play like Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” of religion and science, glossing over a thorny issue, in this case that the fossil record didn’t show what Darwin predicted it would, with bafflegab—as though giving a fancy name to the problem was the same as solving it. (Not that Gould was the first to do that: Herbert Spencer’s phrase for the engine of evolution—“survival of the fittest”—was nothing more than a circular definition, since fitness was never pinned down more precisely than simply being that which increased the odds of survival.)

  Long-term environmental stability? In February, Toronto often has temperatures of twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and the snow can lie hip-deep on the ground. The air is so dry that skin flakes off and lips crack open. Without a bulky sweater and a down-filled parka, a scarf and a tuque, you could easily die from exposure.

  Six months later, in August, temperatures in the nineties are common, and breaking one hundred is not unheard of. The air is so laden with humidity that just standing still is enough to cause sweat to pour out of you; the sun is so bright that even a few minutes without my clip-ons and a hat brings on a splitting headache, and the radio often urges the elderly and those with heart conditions to stay indoors.

/>   The theory of punctuated equilibria says the environment stays stable for extended periods of time. In much of the world, the environment isn’t stable for months at a time.

  But I soldiered on; we all did—all of us who taught evolution. We incorporated punky-E into our lesson plans, and we shook our heads condescendingly when naïve students asked us about missing links.

  It wasn’t the first time we’d been smug. Evolutionists had arrogantly folded their arms across their chests back in 1953 when Harold Urey and Stanley Miller created amino acids by putting an electric discharge through a primordial soup—what they thought, then, Earth’s early atmosphere might have been like. Why, we were halfway to creating life in a jar, we thought; the final triumph of evolutionary theory, the proof that it had all started through simple, natural processes. If we zapped the soup just right, full-fledged self-replicating organisms might appear.

  Except they never did. We still don’t know how to go from amino acids to self-replication. And we look at the cell under electron microscopes, we see things Darwin never dreamed of, mechanisms like the cilia that turn out to be so incredibly complex in their own right that it’s almost impossible to see how they might have evolved in the step-by-single-step fashion that evolution allows, mechanisms that seemed to have been created full-blown with all their complex, moving parts.

  But, well, we ignored the biochemical argument, too—and with equal smugness. I remember old Jonesy handing me an article out of his Skeptical Inquirer once, in which Martin Gardner tried to tear apart Michael Behe, the Lehigh University professor who wrote Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, a strongly presented case for intelligent design. The name Behe, Gardner wasted no time pointing out, rhymes with “tee-hee,” a titter, a giggle, a joke, nothing to take seriously. Just because we couldn’t at the moment see the sequence of steps that might have given rise to cilia—or to the cascade sequence that causes blood to clot, or to the complexity of the human eye, or to the ATP-driven system of cellular metabolism—didn’t mean that such sequences hadn’t occurred.