Calculating God

by Robert J. Sawyer

  One species giving rise to the next in an endless pageant of mutations, of adaptations to ever-changing conditions.

  I accept that readily.

  I accept that because Darwin’s theory makes sense.

  So why don’t I also accept Hollus’s theory?

  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. That had been Carl Sagan’s mantra when confronted by UFO nuts.

  Well, guess what, Carl? The aliens are here—in Toronto, in L.A., in Burundi, in Pakistan, in China. The proof is inescapable. They are here.

  And what about Hollus’s God? What about the proof for an intelligent designer? The Forhilnors and Wreeds had more concrete evidence, it seemed, for that than I had for evolution, the intellectual framework upon which I’d built my life, my career.

  But…but…

  Extraordinary claims. Surely they must be held to a higher standard. Surely the proof should be monumental, irrefutable.

  Of course it should be.

  Of course.

  * * *

  10

  S

  usan had come with me last October when I’d gone down to St. Michael’s Hospital to meet the oncologist, Katarina Kohl.

  It was a terrifying experience, for both of us.

  First, Dr. Kohl conducted a bronchoscopic examination. She passed a tube ending in a camera through my mouth into the airway subdivisions of each lung, in hopes of getting at the tumor and collecting a sample. But the tumor was unreachable. And so she performed a needle biopsy, pushing a fine needle through my chest wall directly into the tumor, guided by x rays. Although there had been no doubt, based on the cells I’d coughed up with my phlegm, that I had cancer, this specimen would nonetheless confirm the diagnosis.

  Still, if the tumor was isolated, and we knew where it was, it could be surgically removed. But before opening my chest to do so, another test was required: a mediastinoscopy. Dr. Kohl made a short incision just above my breast bone, cutting down to the trachea. She then passed a camera tube through the incision and pushed it down along the outside of my windpipe to inspect the lymph nodes near each lung. More material was removed for inspection.

  And, at last, she told Susan and me what she’d found.

  We were devastated by the news. I couldn’t catch my breath, and even though I was sitting down when Kohl showed us the test results, I thought I might lose my balance. The cancer had spread to my lymph nodes; surgery would be pointless.

  Kohl gave Susan and me a few moments to compose ourselves. The oncologist had seen it a hundred times, a thousand times, living corpses looking at her, horror on their faces, fear in their eyes, wanting her to say she was just kidding, it was all a mistake, the equipment had malfunctioned, there was still hope.

  But she said none of that.

  There’d been a cancellation for two hours hence; a CAT scan would be possible that very day.

  I didn’t ask why whoever had had the appointment had failed to keep it. Perhaps he or she had died in the interim. The entire cancer ward was filled with ghosts. Susan and I waited, silently. She tried to read some of the outdated magazines; I kept staring into space, my mind racing, eddying.

  I knew about CAT scans—computerized axial tomography. I’d seen lots of them done. From time to time, one or another of Toronto’s hospitals will let us scan an interesting fossil when the equipment isn’t being otherwise used. It’s an effective way to examine specimens that are too fragile to remove from the matrix they’re encased in; it’s also a great way to see the interior structures. We’ve done some wonderful work on Lambeosaurus skulls and Eucentrosaurus eggs. I knew all about the procedure—but I’d never had it done to myself before. My hands were sweating. I kept feeling like I was going to throw up, even though none of the tests should have made me nauseous. I was frightened—more frightened than I’d ever been in my life. The only time I’d been even close to this nervous was while Susan and I were waiting for word about whether we were going to get to adopt Ricky. We had sat by the phone, and every time it rang our hearts jumped. But we’d been waiting for good news, then…

  A CAT scan is painless, and a little radiation could hardly do me any harm now. I lay down on the white pallet, and the technician slid my body into the scanning tunnel, producing images that showed the extent of my lung cancer.

  The substantial extent…

  I’d always been a student, a learner—and so had Susan, for that matter. But the facts and figures came in a dizzying flurry that day, disjointed, complex, too much to absorb, too much to believe. Kohl was detached—she’d given these lectures a thousand times before, a tenured prof, bored, tired.

  But to us, to all those who sat in the same vinyl-covered chairs Susan and I sat in then, those who had struggled to take it all in, to understand, to comprehend—to us it was terrifying. My heart was pounding, a splitting headache; no amount of the warm water the specialist kept offering would slake my thirst; my hands—hands that had carefully chiseled embryonic dinosaur bones from shattered eggs; hands that had removed limestone overburden covering fossilized feathers; hands that had been my livelihood, the tools of my trade—shook like leaves in a breeze.

  Lung cancer, said the oncologist in even tones, as if discussing the features of the latest sport-utility vehicle or VCR, is one of the most deadly forms of cancer because it usually isn’t detected early, and by the time it is, it has often extensively metastasized to lymph nodes in the torso and neck, to the pleural membrane lining the lungs and chest, and to the liver, adrenal glands, and bones.

  I wanted her to keep it abstract, theoretical. Just some general comments, mere context.

  But no. No. She pressed on; she made her point. It was all relevant to me, to my future.

  Yes, lung cancer often metastasizes extensively.

  And mine had done precisely that.

  I asked the question I’d been dying to ask, the question I’d been afraid to hear the answer to, the question that was paramount, that defined everything—everything—in my universe from that moment on. How long? How long?

  Kohl, at last a human being and not a robot, failed for a moment to meet my eyes. The average survival time after diagnosis, she said, is nine months without treatment. Chemotherapy might buy me a little more time, but the kind of lung cancer I had was called adenocarcinoma—a new word, a handful of syllables I would come to know as well as my own name, syllables, indeed, more defining of who I was and what would become of me than “Thomas David Jericho” had ever been. Even with treatment, only one in eight adenocarcinoma patients are alive five years after diagnosis, and most were gone—that’s the word she used: “gone,” as though we’d slipped out to the corner store for a loaf of bread, as though we’d called it a night, turned in, gotta get up early tomorrow—most were gone much sooner than that.

  It was like an explosion, rocking everything Susan and I had ever known.

  The clock had started on that autumn day.

  The countdown had begun.

  I had only a year or so left to live.

  * * *

  11

  H

  ollus and I went down into the Lower Rotunda each evening, after the museum closed to the public. As payment for what I’d let him see, he continued to present recreations of various periods from Beta Hydri III’s geologic past, and I recorded all of these on video.

  Maybe it was because my own life was coming to an end, but after a while, I yearned to see something else. Hollus had mentioned the six worlds apparently abandoned by their inhabitants. I wanted to see them, see the most recent artifacts on these alien worlds—the last things the inhabitants had built before they disappeared.

  What he showed me was amazing.

  First was Epsilon Indi Prime. On its southern continent, there is a huge square, enclosed by walls. The walls are made of giant, roughly hewn granite blocks each more than 8 meters on a side. The area they enclose, almost 500 meters across, is filled with rubble: gargantuan, jagged hunks of broken concrete. Even if on
e could climb the walls, the vast field of rubble would be imposingly barren. No animal or vehicle could traverse it without great difficulty, and nothing could ever be made to grow there.

  Then there’s Tau Ceti II. In the middle of a barren landscape, the long-gone inhabitants had made a disk of fused black stone more than 2,000 meters across and, judging by its edge, more than 5 meters thick. The black surface absorbs heat from its sun, making it incredibly hot; flesh would blister trying to walk across it, and the soles of shoes would melt.

  The surface of Mu Cassiopeiae A Prime reveals no sign of its former inhabitants; everything has been buried by 2.4 million years of erosion. But Hollus showed me a computer-generated model of what the starship Merelcas’s sensors had revealed beneath the layers of sediment: a vast plain filled with towering, twisted spires, spikes, and other jagged forms, and beneath that, a vault or chamber, forever hidden from view. That planet had once had a very large moon—proportionately, much larger than Luna is in relation to Earth—but it now sported a glorious system of rings instead. Hollus said they’d determined the ring system was also 2.4 million years old—in other words, it had come into existence at the same time the Cassiopeians had vanished.

  I had him show me the rest of the planet. There were archipelagos in the seas—islands spread out like pearls on a string—and the eastern shoreline of the largest continent closely matched the western shoreline of the next largest: telltale signs of a world that had been undergoing plate tectonics.

  “They blew up their own moon,” I said, surprising myself with the insight. “They wanted to put an end to its tidal forces churning their planet’s core; they wanted to shut off plate tectonics.”

  “Why?” asked Hollus, sounding intrigued by my notion.

  “To prevent the vault they’d built from ever being subducted,” I said. Continental drift causes crustal rocks to be recycled, with old ones pushed down into the mantle and new ones forming from magma welling up at sea-floor trenches.

  “But we had assumed the vault was for the storage of nuclear waste,” said Hollus. “Subduction would actually be the best way to get rid of it.”

  I nodded. The monuments he’d shown me here and on Tau Ceti II and Epsilon Indi Prime were indeed reminiscent of designs I’d seen proposed for nuclear-waste sites on Earth: artificial landscapes so foreboding that no one would ever dig there.

  “Did you find any inscriptions or messages related to nuclear waste?” I said. The plans for Earth’s waste sites all involved symbolic communication indicating the sort of dangerous materials being stored, so that any future inhabitants of the area would understand what had been buried. The proposed iconography ranged from human faces showing expressions of illness or disgust, indicating that the area was poisonous, to diagrams using atomic numbers to note specifically what elements were interred.

  “No,” said Hollus. “Nothing like that. Not in the most recent sites, at least—the ones that I have been showing you from just before the races disappeared.”

  “Well, I suppose they could have wanted the sites to go undisturbed for millions of years—for so long that whatever intelligences that later discovered them might not even be of the same species as those who had buried the waste beneath the warning landscapes. It’s one thing to try to communicate the idea of poison or sickness to members of your own species—we humans associate closed eyes, frowning mouths, and protruding tongues with poisoning—but it might be quite another to try to do it across species boundaries, especially when you know nothing about the species that might succeed you.”

  “You are not integrating,” said Hollus. “Most radioactive waste has a half-life of less than a hundred thousand years. By the time a new sapient species has emerged, there would be virtually nothing dangerous left.”

  I frowned. “Still, they do look a lot like nuclear-waste storage sites. And, well, if the natives of the planets departed to go somewhere else, maybe they felt it was appropriate to bury their garbage before leaving.”

  Hollus sounded dubious. “But why then would the Cassiopeians want to stop subduction? As I said, that is the best way to get rid of nuclear waste—even better than firing it off into space. If the spaceship you are using explodes, you can end up with nuclear contamination spread over half your world, but if the waste is carried down into the mantle, it is gone for good. That is, in fact, what my own race ended up doing with its nuclear waste.”

  “Well, then, maybe they buried something else beneath those warning landscapes,” I said. “Something so dangerous, they wanted to make sure that it would never be uncovered, so that it could never come after them. Maybe the Cassiopeians were afraid if the vault was subducted, its walls would melt and whatever—whatever beast perhaps—they’d imprisoned within might escape. And then, all these races, even after burying whatever they were afraid of, left their homeworlds, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and whatever it was they’d left behind.”

  “I’m thinking of going to church this Sunday,” Susan had said last October, shortly after our first appointment with Dr. Kohl.

  We’d been sitting in our living room, me on the couch, she on the matching chair. I’d nodded. “You usually do.”

  “I know, but—well, with everything that’s happened. With…”

  “I’ll be all right,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded again. “You go to church every Sunday. That shouldn’t change. Dr. Kohl said we should try to keep our lives as normal as possible.”

  I wasn’t sure what I’d do with the time—but I’d find plenty. At some point, I’d have to call my brother Bill in Vancouver and let him know what was happening. But Vancouver was three hours behind Toronto, and Bill didn’t get home from work until late. If I called in what was the early evening his time, I’d end up speaking to his new wife Marilyn—and she could talk your ear off. I wasn’t up for that. But Bill, and his kids from his previous marriage, were the only family I had; our parents had passed away a couple of years ago.

  Susan was thinking; her lips were pursed. Her brown eyes briefly met mine, then looked at the floor. “You—you could come with me, if you want.”

  I exhaled noisily. It had always been something of a sore point between us. Susan had gone to church regularly her whole life. She knew when she married me that that was not something I did. I spent my Sunday mornings surfing the web and watching This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. I’d made it plain to her when we started dating that I wouldn’t be comfortable going to church. It would be too hypocritical, I said—an insult to those who believed.

  Now, though, she clearly felt things had changed. Perhaps she expected me to want to pray, to want to make my peace with my maker.

  “Maybe,” I said, but I’m sure we both knew it wasn’t going to happen.

  It never rains but it pours.

  Dealing with my cancer, of course, took a lot of my time. And Hollus’s visits were now taking up most of the rest of it. But I had other responsibilities, too. I’d arranged for the special exhibition at the ROM of fossils from the Burgess Shale, and although we’d had the grand opening months ago, I still had a lot of administrative work related to it.

  Charles Walcott of the Smithsonian discovered the Burgess Shale fossils in 1909 in the Burgess Pass through British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains; he excavated there until 1917. Starting in 1975 and continuing for the next two decades, the ROM’s own Desmond Collins began an ongoing and extremely fruitful series of new Burgess Shale excavations, uncovering additional collecting fields and harvesting thousands of new specimens. In 1981, UNESCO named the Burgess Pass its eighty-sixth World Heritage site, in the same class as the pyramids of Egypt and the Grand Canyon.

  The fossils date back to the middle Cambrian Period, 520 million years ago. The shale, which represents a mud slide from the Laurentian shelf that rapidly buried everything living on the sea floor, is so fine grained that it preserved impressions even of soft body parts. A huge diversi
ty of lifeforms is recorded there, including many complex types that some paleontologists, including our own Jonesy, argue don’t fit into any modern group. They appeared, existed briefly, then died out, as if nature were trying out all sorts of different body plans to see which ones worked best.

  Why had this “Cambrian explosion” of diversity occurred? Life had already existed on Earth for perhaps 3.5 billion years, but, during all that time, it had taken very simple forms. What had caused so much complexity, and so much variety, to suddenly appear?

  Davidson and Cameron at CalTech and Peterson at UCLA have argued that the reason for the simplicity prior to the Cambrian explosion was, well, simple: until that time, fertilized cells were severely limited in the number of times they could divide; ten or so divisions seemed to be the maximum. And ten divisions yields just 1,024 cells, producing quite small, and quite unsophisticated, creatures.

  But at the beginning of the Cambrian, that ten-division barrier was smashed by the development of a new type of cell, still seen in some living organisms; these cells could divide many more times and were used to define the morphological space—the fundamental body shape—of all sorts of new organisms. (Although Earth had been four billion years old when that happened, the same breakthrough—smashing the ten-division limit—apparently occurred on Hollus’s homeworld when it was just two billion years old; at that point life there also stopped spinning its wheels and started evolving in earnest.)