The pain was growing worse. It would subside, of course.
“Yes,” I said. “I deny God’s existence.”
* * *
6
H
ello, Thomas,” Dr. Noguchi had begun on that fateful day last October, when I’d come in to discuss the results of the tests he’d ordered. He always called me Thomas instead of Tom. We’d known each other long enough that casual names were surely appropriate, but he liked a little bit of formality, a touch of I’m-the-doctor-and-you’re-the-patient distance. “Please sit down.”
I did so.
He didn’t waste time on a preamble. “It’s lung cancer, Thomas.”
My pulse increased. My jaw dropped.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
A million thoughts ran through my head. He must be mistaken; it must be someone else’s file; what am I going to tell Susan? My mouth was suddenly dry. “Are you sure?”
“The cultures from your sputum were absolutely diagnostic,” he said. “There is no doubt that it is cancer.”
“Is it operable?” I said at last.
“We’ll have to determine that. If not, we’ll try to treat it with radiation or chemotherapy.”
My hand went immediately to my head, touching my hair. “Will—will that work?”
Noguchi smiled reassuringly. “It can be very effective.”
Which amounted to a “maybe”—and I didn’t want to hear “maybe.” I wanted certainty. “What—what about a transplant?”
Noguchi’s voice was soft. “Not that many sets of lungs become available each year. Too few donors.”
“I could go to the States,” I said tentatively. You read about that all the time in the Toronto Star, especially since Harris’s cutbacks to the health-care system had begun: Canadians going to the States for medical treatment.
“Makes no difference. There’s a shortage of lungs everywhere. And, anyway, it might not do any good; we’ll have to see if the cancer has spread.”
I wanted to ask, “Am I going to die?” But the question seemed too much, too direct.
“Keep a positive attitude,” continued Noguchi. “You work at the museum, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So you’ve probably got an excellent benefits package. You’re covered for prescription drugs?”
I nodded.
“Good. There’s some medication that will be useful. It’s not cheap, but if you’re covered, you’ll be okay. But, as I say, we have to see if the cancer has spread. I’m going to refer you to an oncologist down at St. Mike’s. She’ll look after you.”
I nodded, feeling my world crumbling around me.
Hollus and I had returned to my office. “What you’re arguing for,” I said, “is a special place in the cosmos for humanity and other lifeforms.”
The spiderlike alien maneuvered his bulk to one side of the room. “We do occupy a special place,” he said.
“Well, I don’t know how the development of science went on Beta Hydri III, Hollus, but here on Earth it’s followed a pattern of repeatedly dethroning us from any special position. My own culture thought our world was at the center of the universe, but that turned out to be wrong. We also thought we had been created full-blown by God in his image, but that turned out to be wrong, too. Every time we believed there was something special about us—or our planet or our sun—science showed that we were misguided.”
“But lifeforms like us are indeed special,” said the Forhilnor. “For instance, we all mass the same order of magnitude. None of the intelligent species, including those that vacated their worlds, had average adult body masses below fifty kilograms or above 500 kilograms. We all are, more or less, two meters along our longest dimension—indeed, civilized life could not exist much below 1.5 meters in size.”
I tried again to lift my eyebrows. “Why on Earth would that be true?”
“It is true everywhere, not just on Earth, because the smallest sustainable fire is about fifty centimeters across, and to manipulate a fire you need to be somewhat bigger than it. Without fire, of course, there is no metallurgy, and therefore no sophisticated technology.” A pause, a bob. “Do you not see? We all evolved to be the right size to use fire—and that size is poised directly in the logarithmic middle of the universe. At its maximum extension, the universe will be some forty orders of magnitude larger than we are, and its smallest constituent is forty orders of magnitude smaller than we are.” Hollus regarded me and bobbed up and down. “We are indeed at the center of creation, if only you know how to look at it.”
When I started working at the ROM, the entire front part of its second floor was given over to paleontology. The north wing, directly above the gift shops and deli, had always housed the vertebrate-paleontology displays—“the Dinosaur Gallery”—and the south wing had originally housed the invertebrate-paleo gallery; indeed, the words “Museum of Paleontology” are still carved in stone along the top of the wall there.
But the invert gallery had been closed ages ago, and in 1999 the space was reopened to the public as “The Discovery Gallery,” precisely the kind of edutainment mind-candy Christine Dorati likes: interactive displays for kids, with almost no real learning going on. The subway-poster ads for the new gallery bore the slogan, “Imagine if the Museum were run by an eight-year-old.” As John Lennon once said, it’s easy if you try.
Our pride and joy in vert paleo is our duckbilled Parasaurolophus skeleton, with its glorious, meter-long head crest. Every specimen you’ve ever seen anywhere in the world is a cast of our mount. Indeed, even the Discovery Gallery contains a cast of our Parasaurolophus, lying on the floor, embedded in fake matrix. Kids whack at it all day long with wooden mallets and chisels, mostly resting their bums on the magnificent skull.
Just out front of the vert-paleo gallery there is an indoor balcony, looking down on the Rotunda, which has a subtle star-burst design laid into its marble floor. There’s another balcony on the opposite side, out front of the Discovery Gallery. Between the two, above the glass-doored main entrance, are three vertical stained-glass windows.
While the museum was closed to the public, I took Hollus through the vert-paleo gallery. We’ve got the best collection of hadrosaurs in the world. We’ve also got a dramatic Albertosaurus, a formidable Chasmosaurus, two dynamic mounts of Allosaurus, an excellent Stegosaurus, plus a Pleistocene-mammals display, a wall covered with casts of primate and hominid remains, a La Brea tar-pits exhibit, a standard evolution-of-the-horse sequence, and a wonderful late-Cretaceous underwater diorama, with plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, and ammonites.
I also took Hollus over to the hated Discovery Gallery, where a cast of a T. rex looms over the hapless, floor-mounted Parasaurolophus. Hollus seemed enchanted by all the fossils.
In addition, I showed him a lot of paintings of dinosaurs as they might have looked while alive, and I had Abdus go get a copy of Jurassic Park on video so Hollus could watch that.
We also spent a lot of time with crusty old Jonesy, going through the invertebrate-paleo collections; Jonesy’s got trilobites up the wazoo.
But, I decided, fair is fair. Hollus had said at the outset that he would share information his people had gathered. It was time to start collecting on that. I asked him to tell me about the evolutionary history of lifeforms on his world.
I’d assumed he was going to send down a book, but he did more.
Much more.
Hollus said he needed some room to do it properly, so we waited until the museum closed for the day. The simulacrum wavered briefly in my office, then disappeared. We found it easier for me to just carry the holoform projector from place to place than for the simulacrum to walk with me through the corridors of the museum, since almost everyone—curator, grad student, janitor, patron—found an excuse to stop us and chat with the alien.
I took the staff elevator down to the main floor, to the wide stone staircase that wound around the Nisga’a totem pole to the basement. Directly below the main Rotunda was what we i
maginatively referred to as the Lower Rotunda. This large, open space, painted the color of cream-of-tomato soup, served as the lobby for Theatre ROM, which was located beneath the gift shops of the first floor.
I’d had support staff set up five video cameras on tripods, to record what Hollus was going to show me—I knew that he didn’t want people looking over his eight shoulders when he was doing his work; but he understood that when he was giving information to us as payment, we had to make a record of it. I placed the holoform projector in the middle of the wide floor and tapped on it to summon the Forhilnor genie. Hollus reappeared, and I heard his language for the first time as he gave further instructions to the projector. It was like a little song, with Hollus harmonizing with himself.
Suddenly the lobby was replaced with an incredible alien vista. Just as with the simulacrum of Hollus, I couldn’t tell that this wasn’t real; it was as though I’d been teleported across two dozen light-years to Beta Hydri III.
“This is a simulation, of course,” said Hollus, “but we believe it to be accurate, although the coloration of the animals is conjecture. This is how my world appeared seventy million of your years ago, just prior to the most recent mass extinction.”
My pulse thundered in my ears. I stomped my feet, feeling the reassuring solidness of the Lower Rotunda’s floor, the only evidence that I was still in Toronto.
The sky was as cerulean as Earth’s sky, and the clouds were cumulonimbus; the physics of a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere laden with water vapor were apparently universal. The landscape consisted of gently rolling hills, and there was a large pond, limned by sand, located about where the base of the Nisga’a totem pole really is. The sun was the same pale yellow as Sol and appeared about the same size as our sun did to us. I’d looked up Beta Hydri in a reference book: it was 1.6 times as wide as Sol, and 2.7 times as bright, so the Forhilnor homeworld must have orbited it at a greater distance than Earth orbits our sun.
The plants were all green—chlorophyll, another compound Hollus argued showed signs of intelligent design, was the best chemical for its job no matter what world you were on. The things that served the purpose of leaves were perfectly round and supported from beneath by a central stalk. And instead of having bark over whatever the wood-equivalent was, the trunks were encased in a translucent material, similar to the crystal that covered Hollus’s eyes.
Hollus was still visible, standing next to me. Few of the animals I saw seemed to be based on the same body plan as he was, although on those that were, the eight limbs were undifferentiated: all were used for locomotion; none for manipulation. But most of the lifeforms seemed to have five limbs, not eight—presumably these were the ectothermic pentapeds Hollus had referred to earlier. Some of the pentapeds had enormously long legs, raising their torsos to great heights. Others had limbs so stubby that the torsos dragged along the ground. I watched, astounded, as one pentaped used its five legs to kick an octoped into unconsciousness, then lowered its torso, which apparently had a mouth on its underside, down onto the body.
Nothing flew in the blue sky, although I did see pentapeds I dubbed “parasols” with membranes stretched between each of their five limbs. They parachuted down from trees, seemingly able to control their descent by moving specific limbs closer together or farther apart; their goal appeared to be to land on the backs of pentapeds or octopeds, killing them with poisonous ventral prongs.
None of the animals I saw had eyestalks like Hollus’s; I wondered if they had evolved later specifically to allow animals to see if a parasol was waiting to sail down on them. Evolution was, after all, an arms race.
“It’s incredible,” I said. “A completely alien ecosystem.”
I rather imagine that Hollus was amused. “That is much as I felt when I first arrived here. Even though I had seen other ecosystems, there is nothing more amazing than encountering a different set of lifeforms and seeing how they interact.” He paused. “As I said, this is my world as it would have been seventy million of your years ago. When the next extinction event happens, the pentapeds will all be wiped out.”
I watched a midsized pentaped attacking a slightly smaller octoped. The blood was every bit as red as terrestrial blood, and the cries of the dying creature, although two toned, coming in alternating anguish from separate mouths, sounded just as terrified.
Not wanting to die was another universal constant, it seemed.
* * *
7
I
remember coming home last October after getting the initial diagnosis from Dr. Noguchi. I’d pulled my hatchback into the driveway. Susan was already home; on those rare days when I took my car to work, whichever of us got home first turned on the porch light so that the other could tell that there was already a vehicle in the garage. I, of course, had taken my car so I could get to Noguchi’s office, over at Finch and Bayview, for my appointment.
I got out of the car. Dead leaves were blowing across our driveway, across our lawn. I went up to the front door, letting myself in. I could hear Faith Hill’s “The Kiss” coming from the stereo. I was later than usual getting home, and Susan was busy in the kitchen—I could hear the sounds of pots and pans banging together. I walked through the hardwood-tiled entryway and up the half-flight of steps to the living room; I normally stopped in the den to look at my mail—if Susan got home first, she put my mail on top of the low bookcase just inside the den door—but today I had too much on my mind.
Susan came out of the kitchen and gave me a kiss.
But she knew me well—after all these years, how could she not?
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Where’s Ricky?” I asked. I’d have to tell him, too, but it would be easier to first tell Susan.
“At the Nguyens’.” The Nguyens lived two doors down; their son Bobby was the same age as Ricky. “What’s wrong?”
I was holding the banister at the top of the stairs, still shell-shocked from the diagnosis. I motioned for her to join me on the couch. “Sue,” I said once I’d sat down, “I went to see Dr. Noguchi today.”
She was looking into my eyes, trying to read messages in them. “Why?”
“That cough of mine. I’d gone last week, and he’d done some tests. He asked me to come in today to discuss the results.” I moved closer to her on the couch. “I didn’t say anything; it had seemed routine—hardly worth mentioning.”
She lifted her eyebrows, her face all concern. “And?”
I sought her hand with my own, took it. Her hand was trembling. I drew in breath, filling my damaged lungs. “I have cancer,” I said. “Lung cancer.”
Her eyes went wide. “Oh my God,” she said, shaken. “What…what happens now?” she asked.
I shrugged a little. “More tests. The diagnosis was made based on material in my sputum, but they’ll want to do biopsies and other tests to determine…determine how far it’s spread.”
“How?” she said, the syllable quavering.
“How did I get it?” I shrugged. “Noguchi figures it was all the mineral dust I’ve inhaled over the years.”
“God,” said Susan, trembling. “My God.”
Donald Chen had been with the McLaughlin Planetarium for ten years before it was shut down, but unlike his colleagues, he was still employed. He was transferred internally to the ROM’s education-programs department, but the ROM had no permanent facilities devoted to astronomy, so Don had little to do—although the CBC did put his smiling face on the tube every year for the Perseids.
Everybody on staff referred to Chen as “the walking dead.” He already had an awfully pale complexion—occupational hazard for an astronomer—and it seemed only a matter of time before he would be given the boot from the ROM, as well.
Of course, the entire staff of the museum was intrigued by the presence of Hollus, but Donald Chen had a particular interest. Indeed, he was clearly miffed that the alien had come looking for a paleontologist rather than an astronomer. Chen’s original office had been over in the
planetarium; his new office, here in the Curatorial Centre, was little more than an upright coffin—but he made frequent excuses to come visit me and Hollus, and I was getting used to his knocks on my door.
Hollus opened the door for me this time. He was now quite good with doors and managed to manipulate the knob with one of his feet, instead of having to turn around to use a hand. Sitting on a chair just outside the door was Bruiser—that’s the nickname for Al Brewster, a hulking ROM security guard who was assigned full-time now to the paleobiology department, because of Hollus’s visits. And standing next to Bruiser was Donald Chen.
“Ni hao ma?” said Hollus to Chen; I’d been lucky enough to be part of the Canada-China Dinosaur Project two decades ago, and had learned passably good Mandarin, so I didn’t mind.
“Hao,” said Chen. He slipped into my office and closed the door behind him, with a nod to Bruiser. Switching to English, he said, “Hey, Slayer.”
“Slayer?” said Hollus, looking first at Chen, then at me.
I coughed. “It’s, ah, a nickname.”
Chen turned to Hollus. “Tom has been leading the fight against the current museum administration. The Toronto Star dubbed him the vampire slayer.”
“The potential vampire slayer,” I corrected. “Dorati is still getting her way most of the time.” Chen was carrying an ancient book, written in Chinese judging by the characters on the gold cover; although I could speak the language, reading it at any sophisticated level was beyond me. “What’s that?” I said.
“Chinese history,” said Chen. “I’ve been bugging Kung.” Kung held the Louise Hawley Stone chair in the Near Eastern and Asian civilizations department, another post-Harris-cutback amalgam. “That’s why I wanted to see Hollus.”
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