Calculating God

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Earth’s Burgess Shale contains our direct ancestor Pikaia, the first animal with a notochord, from which the spinal column later evolved. Still, almost all the animal fossils from there are clearly invertebrates, and so a special exhibition of such fossils probably should have been organized by the ROM’s senior invertebrate paleontologist, Caleb Jones.

  But Jonesy was set to retire in a few months—no one had yet remarked, to me at least, on the fact that the ROM was going to lose its two most senior paleontologists almost simultaneously—and I was the one who had the personal relationship with the people at the Smithsonian, where Walcott’s Burgess fossils had ended up before Canada had put laws in place protecting its antiquities. I also helped organize an ongoing series of public lectures to accompany the exhibition; most would be given by our own staff (including Jonesy), but we had also arranged for Stephen Jay Gould, whose book Wonderful Life is about the Burgess Shale fossils, to come up from Harvard and give a talk. The exhibition was proving to be a big moneymaker for the ROM; such shows always got us lots of free media coverage and so drew in the crowds.

  I’d been excited about the exhibition when I’d first proposed it, and even more excited when it had been approved and the Smithsonian had come on board, agreeing to pool its fossils with ours for a joint show.

  But now—

  Now, with the cancer—

  Now it was just an irritation, an inconvenience.

  Yet another thing on my plate.

  Yet another demand on my all-too-limited time.

  Telling Ricky was the hardest.

  You know, if I’d been like my dad—if I’d been content with a bachelor’s degree and a regular nine-to-five—things would have been different. I’d probably have fathered my first child in my early twenties—and so, by the time I was the age I am now, that child would be in his thirties, and maybe even have kids of his own.

  But I wasn’t my dad.

  I’d received my bachelor’s in 1968, when I was twenty-two.

  And my master’s in 1970, when I was twenty-four.

  And my Ph.D. when I was twenty-eight.

  And then there was a postdoc at Berkeley.

  And another at the University of Calgary.

  And by that time I was thirty-four.

  And making peanuts.

  And, somehow, not meeting anyone.

  And working late at the museum, night after night.

  And then, before I knew it, I was forty and unmarried and without children.

  Susan Kowalski and I had met at the University of Toronto’s Hart House in 1966; we’d both been in the Drama Club. I wasn’t an actor—but I had a fascination with theatrical lighting; I guess that’s one of the reasons I like museology. Susan had performed in plays, although I suppose, in retrospect, that she’d never been particularly skilled at it. I’d always thought she was fabulous, but the best notices she ever got in the Varsity were that she was “competent” as Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and that she “adequately essayed” Jocasta in Oedipus Rex. Anyway, we’d dated for a time, but then I headed off to the States for grad school—she’d understood that I had to go away to continue my studies, that my dream depended on it.

  I’d thought of her fondly over the years, but never imagined I’d see her again. But I ended up back in Toronto, and, with my mind always on the past and never enough on the future, I finally decided when the big four-o rolled around that I needed some financial advice if I was ever going to be able to retire, and who should the accountant I ended up seeing be but Susan. Her last name had become DeSantis, legacy of a brief, failed marriage a decade and a half ago. We rekindled the old relationship and tied the knot a year later. And although she was forty-one then, and there were risks, we decided to have a baby. We tried for five years. Susan got pregnant once in that time, but she miscarried.

  And so, at last, we decided to adopt. But that took a couple of years, too. Still, finally, we did have a son. Richard Blaine Jericho was now six years old.

  He would not be out of the house by the time his father died.

  He would not even be out of grade school.

  Susan sat him down on the couch, and I knelt down by him.

  “Hey, sport,” I said. I took his little hand.

  “Daddy.” He squirmed a bit and didn’t meet my eyes. Maybe he thought he was in trouble.

  I was quiet for a few moments. I’d given a lot of thought to what I was going to say, but now the words I’d planned seemed completely inadequate.

  “How you feelin’, sport?” I asked.

  “’Kay.”

  I glanced at Susan. “Well,” I said, “Daddy isn’t feeling so good.”

  Ricky looked at me.

  “In fact,” I said slowly, “Daddy’s pretty sick.” I let the words sink in.

  We’d never lied to Ricky about anything. He knew he was adopted. We’d always told him that Santa Claus was just a story. And when he’d asked where babies came from, we’d told him that, too. Now, though, I wished we had perhaps taken a different route—that we hadn’t always come clean with him.

  Of course, he’d know soon enough. He’d see the changes—see me lose my hair, see me lose weight, hear me get up and vomit in the middle of the night, maybe…

  Maybe even hear me cry when I thought he wasn’t around.

  “How sick?” asked Ricky.

  “Very sick,” I said.

  He looked at me some more. I nodded: I wasn’t kidding.

  “Why?” asked Ricky.

  Susan and I exchanged a glance. That was the same question I’d been asking myself. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Was it something you ate?”

  I shook my head.

  “Were you bad?”

  It was an unexpected question. I thought about it for a few moments. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  We were all quiet for a time. Finally, Ricky spoke softly. “You’re not going to die, are you, Daddy?”

  I’d meant to tell him the truth, unvarnished. I’d meant to level with him. But, when the moment came, I had to give him more hope than Dr. Kohl had given me.

  “Maybe,” I said. Just maybe.

  “But…” Ricky’s voice was small. “But I don’t want you to die.”

  I squeezed his hand. “I don’t want to die, either, but…but it’s like when Mommy and I make you clean your room. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do.”

  “I’ll be good,” he said. “I’ll always be good, if you just don’t die.”

  My heart hurt. Bargaining. One of the stages.

  “I really don’t have any choice in any of this,” I said. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”

  He was blinking a lot; soon the tears would come.

  “I love you, Daddy.”

  “And I love you, too.”

  “What—what will happen to Mommy and me?”

  “Don’t worry, sport. You’ll still live here. You won’t have to worry about money. There’s plenty of insurance.”

  Ricky looked at me, clearly not understanding.

  “Don’t die, Daddy,” he said. “Please don’t die.”

  I drew him close, and Susan put her arms around both of us.

  * * *

  12

  A

  s much as cancer frightened me as a victim, it fascinated me as a biologist.

  Proto-oncogenes—the normal genes that have the potential to trigger cancer—exist in all mammals and birds. Indeed, every proto-oncogene identified to date is present in both mammals and birds. Now, birds evolved from dinosaurs which evolved from thecodonts which evolved from primitive diapsids which evolved from captorhinomorphs, the first true reptiles. Meanwhile, mammals evolved from therapsids which evolved from pelycosaurs which evolved from primitive synapsids which also evolved from captorhinomorphs. Since captorhinomorphs, the common ancestor, date back to the Pennsylvanian, almost 300 million years ago, the shared genes must have existed at least that long (and, indeed, we’ve found cancero
us fossil bones that confirm that the big C existed at least as far back as the Jurassic).

  In a way, it’s not surprising that these genes are shared: proto-oncogenes are related to controlling cell division or organ growth; I suspect we’ll eventually discover that the complete suite of them is common to all vertebrates, and, indeed, possibly to all animals.

  The potential for cancer, it seems, is woven into the very fabric of life.

  Hollus was intrigued by cladistics—the study of how shared features imply common ancestry; it was the principal tool for evolutionary studies on his world. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to show him our hadrosaurs—a clade if ever there was one.

  It was Tuesday—the ROM’s slowest day—and it was almost closing time. Hollus disappeared, and I worked my way through the museum over to the Dinosaur Gallery, carrying the holoform projector in my pocket. The gallery consists of two long halls, joined at their far ends; the entrance and the exit are side by side. I went in the exit and headed down. There was no one else present; several P.A. announcements about the imminent closing had moved the patrons out. At the far end of this hall is our hadrosaur room, painted with russet and golden horizontal stripes, representing sandstone from the Alberta badlands. The room contains three terrific wall mounts. I stood in front of the middle one, a duckbill, which the placard still called Kritosaurus even though we’d known for more than a decade that it was probably really a Gryposaurus; maybe my successor would find the time and money to update the gallery’s signage. The specimen, which had been collected by Parks during the ROM’s first field season in 1918, is lovely, with the ribs still in matrix and the stiffening tendons along the tail beautifully ossified.

  Hollus wavered into existence, and I started talking about how the bodies of hadrosaurs were virtually indistinguishable from each other and that only the presence or absence of cranial crests, and the shapes of those crests, made it possible to tell the different genera apart. Just as I was working up a head of steam about this, a boy, maybe twelve years old, came into the room. He entered from the opposite side I had, coming out of the dimly lit Cretaceous-seas diorama. The boy was Caucasian but had epicanthic folds and a slack jaw, and his tongue protruded a bit from his mouth. He didn’t say anything; he just kept staring at the Forhilnor.

  “Hell” “oh,” said Hollus.

  The boy smiled, apparently delighted to hear the alien speak. “Hello,” he said back at us, slowly and deliberately.

  A breathless woman rounded the corner, joining us in the Hadrosaur room. She let out a little yelp at the sight of Hollus and hurried over to the boy, taking his soft, chubby hand. “Eddie!” she said. “I’ve been looking all over for you.” She turned to us. “I’m sorry if he was disturbing you.”

  Hollus said, “He” “was” “not.”

  The P.A. came on. “Ladies and gentlemen, the museum is now closed. Would all patrons please immediately go to the front exit…”

  The woman pulled Eddie, who kept looking back over his shoulder at us, down through the rest of the Dinosaur Gallery.

  Hollus turned to me. “That child was unlike any I have seen.”

  “He has Down syndrome,” I said. “It retards mental and physical development.”

  “What causes it?”

  “The presence of an extra chromosome twenty-one; all chromosomes should come in pairs, but sometimes a third one gets mixed in.”

  Hollus’s eyestalks moved. “We have a similar condition, although it is almost always screened for in the womb. In our case, a chromosome pair forms without telomeres at one end; the two strands join at that end, making a chromosome twice as long as normal. The result is a complete loss of linguistic ability, many spatial-perception difficulties, and an early death.” He paused. “Still, the resilience of life amazes me. It is remarkable that something as significant as an entire extra chromosome, or two chromosomes joining into one, does not prevent the organism from functioning.” Hollus was still looking in the direction the child had disappeared. “That boy,” he said. “Will his life be cut short, too?”

  “Probably. Down syndrome has that effect.”

  “That is sad,” said Hollus.

  I was quiet for a time. There was a little alcove to one side of the room in which an ancient slide show was playing about how dinosaur fossils form and are excavated. I’d heard its soundtrack a million times, of course. Finally, though, it ended, and since no one had pushed the big red button to start it again, Hollus and I were alone in the silent gallery, only the skeletons for company.

  “Hollus,” I said at last.

  The Forhilnor turned his attention back to me. “Yes?”

  “How—how long are you planning to stay here? I mean, how much longer will you need my help?”

  “I am sorry,” said Hollus. “I have been inconsiderate. If I am taking up too much of your time, merely say so and I shall go.”

  “No, no, no. It’s nothing like that. I’m enjoying this immensely, believe me. But…” I blew out air.

  “Yes?” said the alien.

  “I have something to tell you,” I said at last.

  “Yes?”

  I took another deep breath, then let it out slowly. “I’m telling you this because you have a right to know,” I said, pausing again, wondering how to continue. “I know that when you came to the museum, you simply asked to see a paleontologist—any paleontologist. You didn’t seek me out in particular. Indeed, you could have gone to a different museum—Phil Currie at the Tyrrell or Mike Brett-Surman at the Smithsonian would have loved to have had you show up on their doorsteps.”

  I fell silent. Hollus continued to look at me patiently.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have told you this earlier.” I inhaled again, held the air in as long as I could. “Hollus, I’m dying.”

  The alien repeated the word, as though somehow he’d missed it in his study of English. “Dying?”

  “I have incurable cancer. I have only a matter of months to live.”

  Hollus went silent for several seconds. Then his left mouth said, “I,” but nothing more came for a time. At last, he started again. “Is it permissible to express regret at such a circumstance?”

  I nodded.

  “I” “am” “sorry,” said his mouths. He was silent for a few seconds. “My own mother died of cancer; it is a terrible disease.”

  I certainly couldn’t argue with that. “I know you still have a lot of research to do,” I said. “If you’d prefer to work with somebody else, I’ll understand.”

  “No,” said Hollus. “No. We are a team.”

  I felt my chest constricting. “Thank you,” I said.

  Hollus looked at me a moment longer, then gestured at the wall-mounted hadrosaurs, the reason we’d come down here. “Please, Tom,” he said. That was the first time he’d ever called me by my first name. “Let us continue with our work.”

  * * *

  13

  W

  henever I encountered a new lifeform on Earth, I tried to imagine its ancestors—an occupational hazard, I guess. The same thing happened when Hollus finally introduced me to a Wreed; Wreeds were apparently shy, but I asked to meet one as part of the payment for examining our collections.

  We used the conference room on the fifth floor of the Curatorial Centre; again, a series of video cameras were set up to record the event. I placed the holoform projector on the long mahogany table, next to the speaker phone. Hollus sang to it in his language, and suddenly there was a second alien in the room.

  Humans, of course, evolved from fishes; our arms were originally pectoral fins (and our fingers originally the supporting bones that gave those fins stiffness), and our legs started out as pelvic fins.

  Wreeds almost certainly started out as an aquatic form, as well. The Wreed that stood before me had two legs, but four arms, equally spaced around the top of a torso shaped like an inverted pear. But the four arms perhaps traced ancestry back not just to pectoral fins but also to asymmetrical
dorsal and ventral fins. Those ancient pectoral fins had perhaps had four stiffening struts, for the left and right hands now had four fingers apiece (two central fingers and two mutually opposable thumbs). The front hand—presumably derived from the ventral fin—had nine fingers. And the back hand, which I supposed had descended from a dorsal fin, had, when I finally got a look at it, six thick fingers.

  The Wreed had no head, and, as far as I could tell, it didn’t have eyes or a nose, either. There was a glossy black strip running around the circumference of the upper torso; I had no idea what it was for. And there were areas with complicated folding of skin on either side of the front and back arms; I guessed that these might be ears.

  Wreed skin was covered with the same material that had evolved on Earth in many spiders and insects, all mammals, a few birds, and even a few ancient reptiles: hair. There was about a centimeter of reddish-brown fur covering most of the Wreed’s upper torso and the arms down to the elbows; the lower torso, the forearms, and the legs were naked, showing blue-gray leathery skin.

  The only clothing the Wreed wore was a wide belt that encircled the narrow lower part of its torso; it was held up by the being’s knobby hips. The belt reminded me of Batman’s utility belt—it was even the same bright yellow, and it was lined with what I presumed were storage pouches. Instead of the bat emblem on the buckle, though, it sported a bright red pinwheel.

  “Thomas Jericho,” said Hollus, “this is T’kna.”

  “Hello,” I said. “Welcome to Earth.”

  Wreeds, like humans, used a single orifice for speaking and eating; the mouth was located in a depression at the top of the torso. For several seconds T’kna made noises that sounded like rocks banging around inside a clothes dryer. Once the mouth stopped moving, there was a brief silence, then a deep, synthesized voice emerged from the thing’s belt. It said: “Is one animate to speak as for the inanimate?”

  I looked at Hollus, baffled by the Wreed’s words. “Animate for the inanimate?” I said.