Calculating God (4 page)

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, whatever you want.”

“The government of Canada will still require—” began the white CSIS man.

“I can as easily go to the United States,” said Hollus. “Or Europe, or China, or—”

“Let him do what he wants!” shouted a middle-aged male museum patron.

“I do not mean to intimidate,” said Hollus, looking at one of the federal agents and then the other, “but I have zero interest in being a celebrity or in being forced into narrow passages by documentarians or security people.”

“We honestly don’t have any latitude in our orders,” said the white agent. “You simply have to come with us.”

Hollus’s eyestalks arched backward so that his crystal-covered orbs looked up at the mosaic on the Rotunda’s domed ceiling high above, made up of more than a million Venetian-glass tiles; perhaps this was the Forhilnor equivalent of rolling one’s eyes. The words “That all men may know His work”—a quote, I’m told, from the Book of Job—were arranged in a square at the dome’s apex.

After a moment, the stalks came forward again, and one locked onto each of the agents. “Listen,” Hollus said. “I have spent more than a year studying your culture from orbit. I am not fool enough to come down here in a way that would make me vulnerable.” He reached into a fold of the cloth wrapped around his torso—in a flash, the other CSIS man had his gun in his hand, too—and pulled out a polyhedral object about the size of a golf ball. He then scuttled sideways over to me and profferred it. I took it; it was heavier than it looked.

“That device is a holoform projector,” Hollus said. “It has just imprinted itself with Dr. Jericho’s biometrics and will only work when in his company; indeed, I can make it self-destruct, quite spectacularly, if anyone else handles it, so I advise you not to try to take it from him. Further, the projector will only work at locales that I approve of, such as inside this museum.” He paused. “I am here by telepresence,” he said. “The actual me is still inside the landing craft, outside the building next door; the only reason I came down to the surface was to supervise the delivery of the projector that Dr. Jericho is now holding. That projector uses holography and micromanipulated force fields to give the impression that I am here and to allow me to handle objects.” Hollus—or the image of him—froze for a few seconds, as if the real Hollus was preoccupied doing something else. “There,” he said. “My lander is now returning to orbit, with the real me aboard.” Some people rushed outside through the museum’s glass-doored vestibule, presumably to get a glimpse of the departing ship. “There is nothing you can do to coerce me, and there is no way you can physically harm me. I do not mean to be rude, but contact between humanity and my people will be on our terms, not yours.”

The polyhedron in my hand issued a two-toned bleep, and the projection of Hollus wavered for a second, then disappeared.

“You’ll have to surrender that object, of course,” said the white man.

I felt adrenaline coursing through me. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you saw Hollus give it directly to me. I don’t think you have any claim to it.”

“But it’s an alien artifact,” said the black CSIS agent.

“So?” I said.

“Well, I mean, it should be in official hands.”

“I work for the government, too,” I said defiantly.

“I mean it should be in
secure
hands.”

“Why?”

“Well, ah,
because.”

I don’t accept “because” as an argument from my six-year-old son; I wasn’t about to accept it here. “I can’t turn it over to you—you heard what Hollus said about it blowing up. I think Hollus was quite clear about how things are going to be—and you gentlemen do not have a role. And so,” I looked at the white guy, the one with the French accent, “I bid you
adieu.”

3

It had started eight months ago with a cough.

I’d ignored it. Like an idiot, I’d ignored the evidence right in front of me.

I’m a scientist. I should have known better.

But I’d told myself it was just a result of my dusty work environment. We use dental drills to carve rock away from fossils. Of course, we wear masks when doing such work—most of the time (we remember to put on safety goggles, too—most of the time). Still, despite the ventilation system, there’s a lot of fine rock dust in our air; you can see the layers it leaves on piles of books and papers, on unused equipment.

Besides, I first noticed it in the sweltering heat of last August; an inversion layer had been hanging over Toronto, and air-quality advisories were being issued. I thought maybe the cough would stop when we got away from the city, got up to our cottage. And so it seemed to.

But when we came south again, the cough returned. Still, I’d hardly noticed it.

Until the blood came up.

Just a bit.

When I blew my nose, there had been blood in my mucus often enough in winter. Dry air will do that. But this was the sultry Toronto summer. And what I was producing wasn’t mucus; it was phlegm, kicked up from deep in my chest, maneuvered off the roof of my mouth with the tip of my tongue, and transferred to a tissue to get rid of it.

Phlegm, flecked with blood.

I noted it, but nothing similar happened for a couple of weeks. And so I didn’t give it any further thought.

Until it happened again, late in September.

If I’d been paying better attention, I would have noticed my cough getting more persistent. I’m the head of the paleobiology department; I suppose I should have done something, should have complained to the guys in Facilities about the dry air, about the mineral dust floating around.

The second time there was a lot of blood in my phlegm. And there was more the next day.

And the day after.

And so, finally, I had made an appointment to see Dr. Noguchi.

The Hollus simulacrum had left about 4:00 in the afternoon; I normally worked until 5:00, and so I walked—
staggered
might be a better term—back to my office and sat, stunned, for a few minutes. My phone kept ringing, so I turned it off; it seemed that every media outlet in the world wanted to talk to me, the man who had been alone with the alien. I directed Dana, the departmental assistant, to transfer all calls to Dr. Dorati’s office. Christine would be in her element dealing with the press. Then I turned to my computer and began to type up notes. I realized that there should be a record, a chronicle, of everything I saw and everything I learned. I typed furiously for perhaps an hour, then left the ROM via the staff entrance.

A large crowd had gathered outside—but, thankfully, they were all up by the main entrance, half a block away. I looked briefly for any sign of the spaceship landing that had occurred earlier that day; there was nothing. I then hurried down the concrete steps into Museum subway station, with its sickly yellow-beige wall tiles.

During rush hour, most people head north to the suburbs. As usual, I rode the train south, right down University Avenue, around the loop at Union station, and then up the Yonge line all the way to North York Centre; it was hardly the direct route, but it ensured I’d get to sit all the way. Of course, my condition was obvious, so people often offered me seats. But unlike Blanche DuBois, I preferred not to have to depend on the kindness of strangers. As usual, I was carrying a Zip disk with work-related files in my briefcase, and I had some article preprints I wanted to read. But I found myself unable to concentrate.

An alien had come to Toronto. An actual alien.

It was incredible.

I thought about it throughout the forty-five-minute subway ride. And, as I looked at the myriad faces around me—all colors, all races, all ages, the mosaic that is Toronto—I thought about the impact today’s events would have on human history. I wondered if it was Raghubir or I who would end up being mentioned in the encyclopedia articles; the alien had come to see me—or at least someone in my position—but his actual first conversation (I had taken a break to watch the security-camera video) was with Raghubir Singh.

The subway disgorged many passengers at Union, and more at Bloor. By the time it was pulling into North York Centre—penultimate stop on the line—there were seats for all who wanted them, although, as always, some riders, having endured most of the journey standing, now disdained the empty chairs as if those of us who had scored a place to park our behinds were a weaker breed.

I exited the subway. The walls here were tiled in white, much easier on the stomach than Museum station. North York had been a township when I was born, later a borough, then a city in its own right, and, at last, in another fiat of the Harris government, it had been subsumed with all the other satellite burbs into the expanded megacity of Toronto. I walked the four blocks—two west, two north—from North York Centre to our house on Ellerslie. Crocuses were poking up, and already the days were getting noticeably longer.

As usual, Susan, who was an accountant with a firm at Sheppard and Leslie, had gotten home first; she’d picked up Ricky from his after-school daycare and had started cooking dinner.

Susan’s maiden name had been Kowalski; her parents had come to Toronto from Poland shortly after World War II, via a displaced-persons camp. She had brown eyes, high cheekbones, a smallish nose, and an endearing little gap between her two front teeth. Her hair had been dark brown when we’d met, and she kept it that way thanks to Miss Clairol. In the sixties, we’d both loved the Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, and Peter, Paul and Mary; today, we both listened to New Country, including Deana Carter, Martina McBride, and Shania Twain; Shania’s latest was coming from the stereo as I came in the door.

I think more than anything, I enjoyed that: coming home to the stereo playing softly, to the smell of dinner cooking, to Ricky bounding up the stairs from the basement, to Susan coming down from the kitchen to give me a kiss—which is precisely what she did just now. “Hi, hon,” she said. “How was your day?”

She didn’t know. She hadn’t heard. I knew that Persaud, her boss, had a rule against people playing radios at work, and Susan listened to books-on-tape in her car. I checked my watch; ten to six—it hadn’t even been two hours since Hollus’s departure. “Fine,” I said, but I guess I wasn’t quite suppressing my grin.

“What are you smiling at?” she asked.

I let the grin flourish. “You’ll see.”

Ricky arrived just then. I reached down, tousled his hair. It was blond, not unlike mine had been when I’d been his age; a nice coincidence, that. Mine had turned brown by the time I was a teenager, and gray by the time I was fifty, but I’d managed to keep almost all of it until a few months ago.

Susan and I had waited to have a child—too long, it turned out. We’d adopted Ricky when he was just a month old, young enough that we got to give him his name: Richard Blaine Jericho. Those who didn’t know sometimes said Ricky had Susan’s eyes and my nose. He was a typical six-year-old—a bundle of skinned knees, scrawny limbs, and stringy hair. And he was a bright kid, thank God. I’m no athlete, and neither is Susan; we both make our livings with our brains. I’m not sure how I would have related to him if he hadn’t been smart. Ricky was good natured and took well to new people. But for the last week or two there had been a bully beating him up, it seemed, on his way to school. He couldn’t understand why it was happening to him.

I could relate to that.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” said Susan.

I headed to the upstairs bathroom and washed up. There was a mirror above the sink, of course; I made an effort not to look in it. I’d left the bathroom door open, and Ricky came in after me. I helped him wash his hands, inspecting them when he was done, and then my son and I went down to the dining room.

I’ve always had a tendency to put on weight, but for years I’ve managed to control it by eating properly. But I’d recently been given a booklet. It said:

If you can’t each much food, it’s important that what you
do
eat is nutritious. It should also contain as many calories as possible. You can increase your calorie intake by adding butter or margarine to your food; mixing canned cream soups with milk or half-and-half cream; drinking eggnogs and milkshakes; adding cream sauce or melted cheese to vegetables; and snacking on nuts, seeds, peanut butter, and crackers.

I used to love all those things, but for decades I’d avoided them. Now, I was supposed to eat them—but I didn’t find them the least bit appealing.

Susan had grilled some chicken legs coated with Rice Krispies; she’d also prepared green beans and mashed potatoes, made with real cream, and for me, a small saucepan full of melted Cheez Whiz to pour over the potatoes. And she had made chocolate milkshakes, a necessity for me and a nice treat for Ricky. It was unfair, I knew, for her to have to do all the cooking. We used to take turns, but I couldn’t face it anymore, couldn’t face the smell.

I checked my watch again; it was just coming up to six. We had a family rule: although the living-room TV was easily visible from the dining room, it was always off during meals. But tonight I made an exception: I got up from my place at the table, put on the
CityPulse News at Six,
and let my wife and son watch, mouths agape, as the home videos of the alien ship landing and the footage the videographer had shot of me and Hollus played.

“My God,” Susan kept saying, her eyes wide. “My God.”

“That is
so
cool,” said Ricky, looking at the wild, hand-held shots the videographer had taken in the Rotunda.

I smiled at my son. He was right, of course. This was way cool, as cool as it gets.

4

Earth’s various leaders were not pleased, but the aliens seemed to have no interest in visiting the United Nations, the White House, the European parliament, the Kremlin, India’s parliament, the Knesset, or the Vatican—all of which had immediately extended invitations. Still, by early the next day, there were eight other extraterrestrials—or their holographic avatars—on Earth, all of them Forhilnors.

One was visiting a psychiatric hospital in West Virginia; he was apparently fascinated by unusual human behavior, especially severe schizophrenia. (Apparently, the alien had first appeared at a similar institution in Louisville, Kentucky, but had been dissatisfied with the level of cooperation he was receiving, and so had done precisely what Hollus had threatened to do at the ROM—he left and went to a more accommodating place.)

Another alien was in Burundi, living with a group of mountain gorillas, who seemed to have accepted him quite readily.

A third had attached himself to a public defender in San Francisco and was seen sitting in on arraignments.

A fourth was in China, apparently spending time with a rice farmer in a remote village.

A fifth was in Egypt, joining an archeological dig near Abu Simbel.

A sixth was in northern Pakistan, examining flowers and trees.

Another was seen variously walking around the sites of the old death camps in Germany, scuttling through Tiananmen Square, and visiting the ruins in Kosovo.

And, thankfully, one more had made himself available in Brussels to speak with media from all over the world. He seemed to be fluent in English, French, Japanese, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), Hindi, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, and more (and managed to mimic British, Scottish, Brooklyn, Texan, Jamaican, and other accents, depending on whom he was speaking to).

Even so, no end of people wanted to speak with me. Susan and I had an unlisted phone number. We’d gotten it a few years ago after some fanatics started harassing us following a public debate I’d had with Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research. Still, we had to unplug our phone; it had started ringing as soon as the item appeared on the news. But to my surprise and delight I managed to get a good night’s sleep.

The next day, there was a huge crowd outside the museum when I emerged from the subway around 9:15 A.M.; the museum wouldn’t be open to the public for another forty-five minutes, but these people didn’t want to see the exhibits. They were carrying signs that read “Welcome to Earth!” and “Take Us With You!” and “Alien Power!”

One of the throng spotted me, shouted and pointed, and people started moving my way. Fortunately, it was only a short distance from the staircase leading up from the subway to the ROM’s staff entrance, and I made it inside before I could be accosted.

I hurried up to my office and placed the golf-ball-sized holoform projector on the center of my desk. About five minutes later, it bleeped twice, and Hollus—or the holographic projection of him, at any rate—appeared in front of me. He had a different cloth wrapped around his torso today: this one was a salmon color with black hexagons on it, and it was fastened not with a jeweled disk but a silver pin.

“I’m glad to see you again,” I said. I’d been afraid, despite what he’d said yesterday, that he’d never come back.

“If” “it” “is” “per” “mis” “able,” said Hollus, “I” “will” “appear” “daily” “about” “this” “time.”

“That would be absolutely terrific,” I said.

“Establishing that the dates for the five mass extinctions coincided on all three inhabited worlds is only the beginning of my work, of course,” said Hollus.

I thought about that, then nodded. Even if one accepted Hollus’s God hypothesis, all that having simultaneous disasters on multiple worlds proved was that his God had thrown a series of hissy fits.

The Forhilnor continued. “I want to study the minute details of the evolutionary developments related to the mass extinctions. It appears superficially that each extinction was designed to nudge the remaining lifeforms in specific directions, but I wish to confirm that.”

“Well, then, we should start by examining fossils from just before and just after each of the extinction events,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Hollus, his eyestalks weaving eagerly.

“Come with me,” I said.

“You have to take the projector with you, if I am to follow,” said Hollus.

I nodded, still getting used to this idea of telepresence, and picked up the small object.

“It will work fine if you place it in a pocket,” he said.

I did so, and then led him down to the paleobiology department’s giant collections room, in the basement of the Curatorial Centre; we didn’t have to go out into any of the public areas of the museum to get there.

The collections room was full of metal cabinets and open shelving holding prepared fossils as well as countless plaster field jackets, some still unopened half a century after they’d been brought to the museum. I started by pulling out a drawer containing skulls of Ordovician jawless fishes. Hollus looked them over, handling them gently. The force fields projected by the holoform unit seemed to define a solidness that precisely matched the alien’s apparent physical form. We bumped into each other a few times as we negotiated our way down the narrow aisles in the collections room, and my hands touched his several times as I passed him fossils. I felt a static tingling whenever his projected form contacted my skin, the only indication that he wasn’t really there.

As he examined the strange, solid skulls, I happened to comment that they looked rather alien. Hollus seemed surprised by the remark. “I” “am” “cur” “i” “ous,” he said, “about” “your” “concepts” “of” “alien” “life.”

“I thought you knew all about that,” I replied, smiling. “Anal probes and so on.”

“We have been watching your TV broadcasts for about a year now. But I suspect you have more interesting material than what I have seen.”

“What have you seen?”

“A show about an academic and his family who are extraterrestrials.”

It took me a moment to recognize it. “Ah,” I said. “That’s
3rd Rock from the Sun.
It’s a comedy.”

“That is a matter of opinion,” said Hollus. “I have also seen the program about the two federal agents who hunt aliens.”

“The X-Files,”
I said.

He clicked his eyes together in agreement. “I found it frustrating. They kept talking about aliens, but you almost never saw any. More instructive was a graphic-arts production about juvenile humans.”

“I need another clue,” I said.

“One of them is named Cartman,” said Hollus.

I laughed.
“South Park.
I’m surprised you didn’t pack up and go home after that. But, sure, I can show you some better samples.” I looked around the collections room. Off at the other end, going through our banks of Pliocene microfossils, I could see a grad student. “Abdus!” I called.

The young man looked up, startled. I waved him over.

“Yes, Tom?” he said once he’d reached us, although his eyes were on Hollus, not me.

“Abdus, can you nip out to Blockbuster and get some videos for me?” Grad students were useful for all sorts of things. “Keep the receipt, and Dana will reimburse you.”

The request was strange enough to get Abdus to stop looking at the alien. “Um, sure,” he said. “Sure thing.”

I told him what I wanted, and he scurried off.

Hollus and I continued to look at the Ordovician specimens until noon, then we headed back up to my office. I imagined that intelligence probably required a high metabolism everywhere in the universe. Still, I thought the Forhilnor might be irritated that I had to take a lunch break (and even more irritated that after stopping our work, I ate almost nothing). But he ate when I did—although, of course, he was really dining aboard his mothership, in orbit over Ecuador. It looked strange: his avatar, which apparently duplicated whatever movements his real body was making, went through the motions of transferring food into his eating slit—a horizontal groove in the top of his torso revealed through a gap in the cloth wound around it. But the food itself was invisible, making it look like Hollus was some extraterrestrial Marcel Marceau, miming the process of eating.

I, on the other hand, needed real food. Susan had packed me a can of strawberry-banana Boost and two leftover drumsticks from yesterday’s dinner. I downed the thick beverage and made it halfway through one of the legs. I wished I’d had something different to eat; it felt a little too primal to be using my teeth to tear meat off bones in front of the alien, although, for all I knew, Hollus was stuffing live hamsters into his gullet.

While we ate, Hollus and I watched the videos Abdus had fetched; I’d had the education department deliver a combo VCR-TV unit to my office.

First up was “Arena,” an episode of the original
Star Trek
series; I immediately froze the image on a picture of Mr. Spock. “See him?” I said. “He’s an alien—a Vulcan.”

“He” “looks” “like” “a” “human” “being,” said Hollus; he could eat and talk at the same time.

“Notice the ears.”

Hollus’s eyestalks stopped weaving in and out. “And
that
makes him an alien?”

“Well,” I said, “of course it’s a human actor playing the part—a guy named Leonard Nimoy. But, yeah, the ears are supposed to suggest alienness; this show was done on a low budget.” I paused. “Actually, Spock there is only half-Vulcan; the other half is human.”

“How is that possible?”

“His mother was a human; his father was a Vulcan.”

“That does not make sense biologically,” said Hollus. “It would seem more likely that you could crossbreed a strawberry and a human; at least they evolved on the same planet.”

I smiled. “Believe me, I know that. But wait, there’s another alien in this episode.” I fast-forwarded for a time, then hit the play button again.

“That’s a Gorn,” I said, pointing to the tailless green reptile with compound eyes wearing a gold tunic. “He’s the captain of another starship. Pretty neat, huh? I always loved that one—reminded me of a dinosaur.”

“Indeed,” said Hollus. “Which means, again, that it is far too terrestrial in appearance.”

“Well, it’s an actor inside a rubber suit,” I said.

Hollus’s eyes regarded me as if I were again being Master of the Bleeding Obvious.

We watched the Gorn stagger around for a bit, then I ejected the tape and put in “Journey to Babel.” I didn’t fast-forward, though; I just let the teaser unfold. “See them?” I said. “Those are Spock’s parents. Sarek is a full-blooded Vulcan, and Amanda, the woman there, is a full-blooded human.”

 “Astonishing,” said Hollus. “And humans believe such crossbreeding is possible?”

I shrugged a little. “Well, it’s science fiction,” I said. “It’s entertainment.” I fast-forwarded to the diplomatic reception. A stocky snout-nosed alien accosted Sarek: “No,
you,”
he snarled. “How do
you
vote, Sarek of Vulcan?”

“That’s a Tellarite,” I said. Then, remembering: “His name is Gay.”

“He looks like one of your pigs,” said Hollus. “Yet again, too terrestrial.”

I fast-forwarded some more. “That’s an Andorian,” I said. The screen showed a blue-skinned, white-haired male humanoid, with two thick, segmented antennae emerging from the top of his head.

“What is his name?” asked Hollus.

It was Shras, but for some reason I was embarrassed that I knew that. “I don’t remember,” I said, then I put in another tape: the special-edition version of
Star Wars,
letterboxed. I fast-forwarded to the cantina sequence. Hollus liked Greedo—Jabba’s insectlike henchman who confronted Han Solo—and he liked Hammerhead and a few of the others, but he still felt that humanity had missed the boat on coming up with realistic portrayals of extraterrestrial life. I certainly didn’t disagree.

“Still,” said Hollus, “your filmmakers did get one thing right.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The diplomatic reception; the scene in the bar. All the aliens shown seem to have about the same level of technology.”

I furrowed my brow. “I always thought that was one of the
least
believable things. I mean, the universe is something like twelve billion years old—”

“Actually, it is 13.93422 billion,” said Hollus, “measured in Earth years, of course.”

“Well, fine. The universe is 13.9 billion years old, and Earth is only 4.5 billion years old. There must be planets much, much older than ours, and much, much younger. I’d expect some intelligent races to be millions if not billions of years more advanced than we are, and some to be at least somewhat more primitive.”

“A race even a few decades less advanced than you are would not have radio or spaceflight and therefore would be undetectable,” said Hollus.

“True. But I’d still expect lots of races to be much more advanced than we are—like, well, like yourself, for instance.”

Hollus’s eyes looked at each other—an expression of surprise? “We Forhilnors are not greatly advanced beyond your race—perhaps a century at most; certainly no more than that. I expect that within a few decades your physicists will make the breakthrough that will allow you to use fusion to economically accelerate ships to within a tiny fraction of the speed of light.”

“Really? Wow. But—but how old is Beta Hydri?” It would be quite a coincidence if it were the same age as Earth’s sun.

“About 2.6 billion Earth years.”

“A little over half as old as Sol.”

“Sol?” said Hollus’s left mouth.

“That’s what we call our sun, when we want to distinguish it from other stars,” I said. “But if Beta Hydri is that young, I’m surprised that you have any vertebrates on your world, let alone any intelligent life.”

Hollus considered this. “When did life first emerge on Earth?”

“We certainly had life by 3.8 billion years ago—there are fossils that old—and it may have been here as far back as four billion years ago.”

The alien sounded incredulous. “And the first animals with spinal columns appeared just half a billion years ago, no? So it took perhaps as much as 3.5 billion years to go from the origin of life to the first vertebrates?” He bobbed his torso. “Life originated on my world when it was 350 million years old, and vertebrates appeared just 1.8 billion years later.”