Calculating God

by Robert J. Sawyer

  * * *

  21

  S

  o far, Susan had said nothing related to Salbanda’s widely publicized comments about the universe having had a creator—a creator who, apparently, on at least five occasions, had directly intervened in the development of intelligent life.

  But, finally, we did have to have the conversation. It’s one I’d never anticipated. I’d humored my wife, indulging her faith, even agreeing to be married in a traditional church service. But I’d always quietly known that I was the enlightened one, I was in the right, I was the one who really knew how things worked.

  Susan and I were sitting out back on the deck. It was an abnormally warm April evening. She was going to take Ricky to his swimming lesson this evening; sometimes I took him, and sometimes we went together, but tonight I had other plans. Ricky was up in his room, changing.

  “Had Hollus told you he was searching for God?” asked Susan, looking down at her mug of coffee.

  I nodded.

  “And you didn’t say anything to me?”

  “Well, I…” I trailed off. “No. No, I didn’t.”

  “I would have loved to have talked to him about that.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “So the Forhilnors are religious,” she said, summing it all up, at least for her.

  But I had to protest; I had to. “Hollus and his colleagues believe the universe was intelligently designed. But they don’t worship God.”

  “They don’t pray?” asked Susan.

  “No. Well, the Wreeds spend half of each day in meditation, attempting to communicate with God telepathically, but—”

  “That sounds like prayer to me.”

  “They say they don’t want anything from God.”

  Susan was quiet for a moment; we rarely talked about religion, and for a good reason. “Prayer isn’t about asking for things; it’s not like visiting a department-store Santa Claus.”

  I shrugged; I guess I really didn’t know much about the topic.

  “Do the Forhilnors believe in souls? In an afterlife?”

  The question surprised me; I’d never thought about it. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should ask Hollus.”

  I nodded. Maybe I should.

  “You know that I believe in souls,” she said simply.

  “I know.”

  That’s as far as she went with the thought, though. She didn’t ask me to go to church with her again; she’d asked once, a while ago, and that was fine. But she wouldn’t push. If attending St. George’s was helping her get through all this, then that was great. But we each had to cope with it in our own way.

  Ricky came through the sliding glass door, out onto the deck. “Hey, sport,” I said. “Give your dad a kiss.”

  He came over and kissed my cheek. Then he patted my face with his little hand. “I like it better this way,” he said. I think he was trying to cheer me up; he’d never liked the sandpaper roughness of the five o’clock shadow I used to get. I smiled at him.

  Susan got up and kissed me, too.

  And my wife and my son headed off.

  With Ricky and Sue off at the Douglas Snow Aquatic Centre, four blocks away, I was all alone. I went back into the house and set up our video camera—an indulgence, a Christmas gift we’d given to each other a few years back—on a tripod in the den.

  I turned on the camera, moved to the chair behind the desk, and sat down. “Hello, Ricky,” I said. And then I smiled apologetically. “I’m going to ask your mother not to show you this tape for ten years, so I guess you’re sixteen now. I’m sure you don’t go by ‘Ricky,’ anymore. Maybe you’re a ‘Rick,’ or maybe you’ve decided ‘Richard’ suits you better. So—so maybe I’ll just call you ‘son.’”

  I paused. “I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of pictures of me; your mom was always taking snapshots. Maybe you even have some memories of me—I sure hope you do. I remember a few things from when I was six or seven…maybe an hour or two total.” I paused again. If he did remember me, I hoped it was as I looked before the cancer, back when I had hair, when I wasn’t so gaunt. Indeed, I should have made this tape as soon as I was diagnosed—certainly before I’d gone through chemotherapy.

  “So you have me at a disadvantage,” I said. “You know what I look like, but I find myself wondering what you look like—what sort of man you’ve grown into.” I smiled. “You were a little small for your age when you were six—but so much can change in ten years. When I was your age—the age you are now, sixteen—I had grown a scraggly beard. There was only one other guy in my school who had one; it was, I guess, an act of youthful rebellion.” I shifted a bit in my chair.

  “Anyway,” I said, “I’m sure you’ve grown up to be a fine man—I know your mother wouldn’t have let it turn out any other way. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I would have loved to have taught you how to tie a tie, how to shave, how to throw a football, how to drink a glass of wine. I don’t know what interests you’ve pursued. Sports? School theater? Whatever they are, you know I would have been in the audience as often as I could.”

  I paused. “I guess you’re wrestling with what you want to do in life. I know you’ll find happiness and success whatever you choose. If you want, there should be plenty of money for you to go to university for as long as you like—right through to a doctorate, if that’s what you want. Do whatever will make you happy, of course, but I will tell you that I have greatly enjoyed the rewards of an academic life; maybe it won’t be for you, but if you are contemplating it, I do recommend it. I’ve traveled the world over, I’m reasonably well paid, and I get an enormous amount of flexibility in my time. I say that just in case you were wondering if your dad was happy in his job; yes, I was—very much so. And that’s the most important thing. If I have one piece of career advice to give you, it’s this: don’t worry about how much money you’ll make. Pick something that you’ll enjoy doing; you only go around once in life.”

  I paused again. “But, really, there’s not much advice I can give you.” A smile. “Heck, when I was your age, the last thing I wanted was advice from my dad.” And then I shrugged a little. “Still, I will say this: please don’t smoke. Believe me, son, nothing is worth risking going through what I’ve been going through. I wasn’t a smoker—I’m sure you mom has told you that—but that is the way most people get lung cancer. Please, I beg you; don’t risk this.”

  I glanced at the clock on the wall; there was plenty of time left—on the tape, at least.

  “You’re probably curious about my relationship with Hollus, the Forhilnor.” I shrugged. “Frankly, I’m curious about it, too. I suppose if you remember anything from your childhood, it’s the night he came to visit our house. You know that was the real Hollus? Not a projection? Well, it was. You, me, and your mother were the first humans to actually meet a Forhilnor in the flesh. Besides this tape, I’m also leaving you a copy of the journal I’ve been keeping about my experiences with Hollus. Maybe someday you, or somebody else, will put together a book about all this. Of course, there will be gaps that have to be filled in—I’m sure there are relevant things going on that I don’t know about—but the notes I’ve made should give you a good start.

  “Anyway, about my relationship with Hollus, all I know is this: I like him and I think he likes me. There’s a saying that an unexamined life is not worth living; getting cancer caused me to examine my life, but I think getting to know Hollus has caused me to examine what it means to be human.” I shrugged a little, acknowledging that what I was about to say was the sort of thing people didn’t normally say aloud. “And I guess what it means is this: to be human is to be fragile. We are easily hurt, and not just physically. We are easily hurt emotionally, too. So, as you move through life, my son, try not to hurt others.” I lifted my shoulders again. “That’s it; that’s the advice I have for you.” It wasn’t nearly enough, I knew; there was no way to make up for a lost decade with a few bromides. Ricky already had become the man
he was going to be…without my help.

  “There’s one final thing I want you to know,” I said. “Never doubt this for a moment, Richard Blaine Jericho. You had a father once, and he loved you. Always remember that.”

  I got up, shut off the video camera, and stood there in the den, my sanctuary.

  * * *

  22

  I

  t had come to me while sleeping, doubtless because of the recording I’d made for Ricky: a version of me that would live on after my body had died. I was so excited, I got up and went downstairs to tap repeatedly on the holoform dodecahedron, in hopes of summoning Hollus. But he didn’t come; I had to wait until he appeared in my office of his own volition the next day.

  “Hollus,” I said, as soon as his image had stabilized, “I think I know what they’ve buried beneath those warning landscapes on all those dead worlds.”

  Hollus locked his eyes on me.

  “It’s not nuclear waste,” I said. “As you said, there are no markings related to nuclear waste, and no need to worry about such things over million-year timeframes. No, they buried something they wanted to preserve forever, not something they wanted to get rid of. That’s why the Cassiopeians went so far as to shut off plate tectonics on their world by blowing up their moon—they wanted to be sure what they had in their subterranean vault never subducted.”

  “Perhaps,” said Hollus. “But what would they want to preserve so carefully while at the same time trying to frighten anyone away from digging it up?”

  “Themselves,” I said.

  “You propose something like a bomb shelter? Seismic soundings suggest there is not enough volume in the vault on Mu Cassiopeiae A Prime to house more than a small number of individuals.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I think they’re all down there. Millions, billions; whatever their entire population was. I think they scanned their brains and uploaded themselves into a computer world—and the actual hardware generating that world, the machines they didn’t want anyone messing with, are stored beneath those horrendous landscapes.”

  “Scanned…” said Hollus’s left mouth, and “scanned…” ruminated his right. “But we only found three worlds with artificial landscapes designed to frighten off the curious,” he said. “The other worlds we visited—Eta Cassiopeiae A III, Sigma Draconis II, and Groombridge 1618 III—had simply been vacated.”

  “On those worlds, the computer hardware may have been shot into space. Or else those races may have decided that the best way to avoid detection was simply to do nothing at all. Even a warning marker attracts the curious; maybe they decided to hide their computing hardware with no indication of where it is.”

  “But why would entire races do that?” asked Hollus. “Why give up physical existence?”

  That was a no-brainer for me. “How old are you?” I asked.

  “In subjective Earth years? Forty-seven.”

  That surprised me. For some reason, I’d expected Hollus to be older than I was. “And how long will you live?”

  “Perhaps another eighty years, assuming an accident does not befall me.”

  “So a typical Forhilnor lifespan is a hundred and thirty years?”

  “For females, yes. Males live about ten years longer.”

  “So, um—my God—so you’re female?”

  “Yes.”

  I was stunned. “I hadn’t been aware of that. Your voice—it’s rather deep.”

  “That is just the way Forhilnor voices are—male or female.”

  “I think I’ll go on calling you ‘he,’ if that’s okay.”

  “I am no longer offended by it,” said Hollus. “You may continue to do so.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “you’ll live a total of about a hundred and thirty years. Me, I’m fifty-four right now; if it weren’t for the adenocarcinoma, I’d live another twenty-odd years, if not thirty or forty.”

  Hollus’s eyestalks moved.

  “But that’s it. And, again, even if I didn’t have cancer, a lot of that time would be in declining health.” I paused. “Do Forhilnors age gracefully?”

  “A poet on my world once said, ‘It is all eclipsing moons’—a metaphor that means much the same as your expression ‘it is all downhill’—from the moment you are born. Forhilnor bodies and minds deteriorate over time, too.”

  “Well, if you could assume a virtual existence—if you could live inside a computer—starting in the prime of youth, you could go on forever, without any deterioration.”

  “Immortality has always been a dream of my people,” Hollus admitted.

  “Mine, too. In fact, many preachers use a promise of life everlasting, albeit in some other realm, as their main inducement for good behavior. But although we’ve extended our life spans a great deal through improved health care, we are nowhere near immortal.”

  “Nor are we,” said Hollus. “Nor are the Wreeds. But both they and we harbor hopes of making eternal life possible.”

  “We thought we’d made a breakthrough a few years ago when we discovered how to put the end caps back on DNA.” Chromosomes have little protective bits at their ends, like the plastic-wrapped tips of shoelaces; every time a chromosome divides, the tips—called telomeres—are shortened. After enough divisions, the tips are completely gone, and the chromosome can’t divide anymore.

  “We discovered that, too,” said Hollus, “almost a hundred years ago. But although replacing telomeres can make individual cells divide forever in the laboratory, it does not work in an integrated organism. When an organism reaches a critical mass of cells, division either halts after a set number of repeats, just as if the telomeres had been diminished, or reproduction becomes uncontrolled, and tumors form.” His eyestalks dipped. “As you know, I lost my own mother to cancer of the vostirrarl, an organ that serves much the same function for us as does the marrow in your bones.”

  “Leukemia,” I said softly. “We call cancer of the marrow leukemia.”

  Hollus was quiet for a time.

  Yes, I could surely understand the appeal.

  To be uploaded.

  To be divorced from the physical.

  To live without tumors, without pain.

  If the opportunity were presented to me, would I do it?

  In a minute.

  “It’s certainly a great incentive to give up physical existence,” I said. “Living forever in the good health of youth.” I looked at Hollus, who was standing on just five legs; he seemed to be giving the sixth a rest. “In which case, perhaps your people have nothing to fear. Presumably, soon enough your race will develop the same ability—it seems every race does. And then, if your people want, they will…will transcend into a new form of existence.”

  Hollus said nothing for several seconds. “I am not sure that I would look forward to that,” he said.

  “It must be very tempting, if race after race has chosen that route.”

  “I suppose,” said Hollus. “My people have been making considerable progress in brain-scanning technology—it is somewhat more difficult for us than it will be for your people, since our brains are in the centers of our bodies and since the integration of the two halves will doubtless pose some problems. Still, I imagine we will be able to upload a combined Forhilnor consciousness within a few decades.” He paused. “But this does explain the phenomenon I observed in those science-fiction videos you showed me: why alien races that encounter each other in the flesh are always at about the same technological level. There is, it seems, a narrow window between when interstellar flight is developed and when a race ceases to have corporeal existence. It also explains why the search for extraterrestrial intelligence via radio telescopes usually fails; again, there is only a short time between the development of radio and the abandonment of its use.”

  “But, as far as you’ve been able to determine, none of the races you’re aware of, except our three, have existed simultaneously.” I paused. “Our races—the three of us—may be the first chance the galaxy has ever had for a…a p
lanetary federation.”

  “Interesting thought,” said Hollus. “Do you suppose that is why God intervened on our worlds? To bring us to technological sophistication simultaneously so that we could form some sort of alliance?”

  “Possibly,” I said. “Although I’m not sure what that would accomplish. I mean, it might be good for our races, but what does it do for the creator?”

  Hollus lowered his sixth foot. “That is a very good question,” he said at last.

  Later that night, after we’d put Ricky to bed, and I’d read to him for a bit, Susan and I were sitting on the couch in the living room. I had my arm draped around her shoulders, and she had her head resting on my chest.

  “Have you ever thought about the future?” I asked her. I lifted my arm a little bit. “I don’t mean the near future.” I’m sure she’d been giving that much thought. “I mean the far future—thousands, or even millions, of years from now.”

  I couldn’t see Susan’s face. I hoped she was smiling. “I won’t be around to see that.”

  I was quiet for a moment; I didn’t know if I really wanted to broach this topic. “But what if there was a way,” I said. “A way to live forever.”

  Susan was sharp; that’s one of the reasons I’d married her. “Has Hollus offered you that? Immortality?”

  I shook my head. “No. He doesn’t have any better idea of how to make it work than we do. But his race has found evidence of six other species that seem to have perhaps discovered immortality…of a sort.”

  She shifted slightly against my chest. “Oh?”