The Forhilnor clinked his eyes. “He is expressing surprise that you are welcoming him to the planet. Wreeds do not generalize from their species to their world. Try welcoming him on behalf of humanity instead.”
“Ah,” I said. I turned back to the Wreed. “As a human, I welcome you.”
More tumbling rocks, then the synthesized voice: “Were you not human, would you welcome me still?”
“Umm…”
“The correct answer is yes,” said Hollus.
“Yes,” I said.
The Wreed spoke in its own language again, then the computer translated the words. “Then welcomed I am, and pleased to be here that is here and here that is there.”
Hollus bobbed up and down. “That is a reference to the virtual-reality interface. He is happy to be here, but he acknowledges that he is really still on board the mothership, of course.”
“Of course,” I repeated. I was almost afraid to speak again. “Did you—um—did you have a good trip to Earth?”
“In which sense do you use ‘good’?” said the synthesized voice.
I looked at Hollus again.
“He knows you employ the term good to mean many things, including moral, pleasant, and expensive.”
“Expensive?” I said.
“‘The good china,’” said Hollus. “‘Good jewelry.’”
These darned aliens knew my own language better than I did. I turned my attention to the Wreed again. “I mean, did you have a pleasant trip?”
“No,” he said.
Hollus interpreted again. “Wreeds only live for about thirty Earth years. Because of that, they prefer to travel in cryofreeze, a form of artificially suspended animation.”
“Oh,” I said. “So it wasn’t a bad trip—he just wasn’t aware of it, right?”
“That is right,” said Hollus.
I tried to think of something to say. After all this time with my Forhilnor friend, I’d grown used to having flowing conversations with an alien. “So, ah, how do you like it here? What do you think of Earth?”
“Much water,” said the Wreed. “Large moon, aesthetically pleasing. Air too moist, though; unpleasantly sticky.”
Now we were getting somewhere; I at least understood all that—although if he thought Toronto’s air was sticky now, in spring, he had a real treat for him coming in August. “Are you interested in fossils, like Hollus is?”
Tossing gravel, then: “Everything fascinates.”
I paused for a moment, deciding if I wanted to ask the question. Then I figured, why not? “Do you believe in God?” I asked.
“Do you believe in sand?” asked the Wreed. “Do you believe in electromagnetism?”
“That is a yes,” said Hollus, trying to be helpful. “Wreeds often speak in rhetorical questions, but they have no notion of sarcasm, so do not take offense.”
“More significant is whether God believes in me,” said T’kna.
“How do you mean?” I asked. My head was starting to hurt.
The Wreed also seemed to be struggling with what to say; his mouth parts worked, but no sound emanated from them. At last he made sounds in his language, and the translator said, “God observes; wavefronts collapse. God’s chosen people are those whose existence he/she/it validates by observing.”
That one I was able to puzzle out even without Hollus playing interpreter. Quantum physics held that events don’t take on concrete reality until they are observed by a conscious entity. That’s all well and good, except how did the first concrete reality emerge? Some humans have used the requirements of quantum physics as an argument for the existence of a conscious observer who has been present since the beginning of time. “Ah,” I said.
“Many possible futures,” said T’kna, wriggling all his fingers simultaneously, as if to suggest the profusion. “From all that are possible, he/she/it chooses one to observe.”
I got that, too—but it hit me hard. When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess, it did so by seeing all the possible positions the chess pieces might have not just at the next turn but also at the one after that and the one after that, and so on.
If God existed, did he see all the possible next moves for all his playing pieces? Did he see right now that I might step forward, or cough, or scratch my bum, or say something that could ruin human-Wreed relations for all time? Did he simultaneously see that a little girl in China might walk to the right or the left or tip her head up to look at the moon? Did he also see an old man in Africa who might give a little boy a piece of advice that would change the child’s life forever, or might not do so, leaving the youngster to figure things out for himself?
We could easily demonstrate that the universe does split, at least briefly, as it considers multiple possible paths: single photons interact with the alternate-universe versions of themselves as they pass simultaneously through multiple slits, producing interference patterns. Was that action of photons the sign of God thinking, the ghostly remnants of him having considered all the possible futures? Did God see all the conceivable actions for all conscious lifeforms—six billion humans, eight billion Forhilnors (as Hollus had told me at one point), fifty-seven million Wreeds, plus presumably countless other thinking beings throughout the universe—and did he calculate the game, the real game of Life, through all the panoply of possible moves for each player?
“You are suggesting,” I said, “that God chooses moment by moment which present reality he wants to observe, and, by so doing, has built up a concrete history timeslice by timeslice, frame by frame?”
“Such must be the case,” said the translated voice.
I looked at the strange, many-fingered Wreed and the bulky, spiderlike Forhilnor, standing there with me, a hairless (more so than some these days), bipedal ape. I wondered if God was happy with the way his game was going.
“And now,” said T’kna, through the translator, “reciprocity of interrogatives.”
His turn to ask a question. Fair enough. “Be my guest,” I said.
The convoluted skin on either side of his front arm wriggled up and down; I guessed this “ear shrug” was the Wreed way of saying “Pardon me?” “I mean go ahead. Ask your question.”
“The same, reversed,” said the Wreed.
“He means—,” began Hollus.
“He means, Do I believe in God?” I said, understanding that he was throwing my question back at me. I paused, then: “It’s my belief that even if God exists, he or she is utterly indifferent to what happens to any of us.”
“You are wrong,” said T’kna. “You should structure your life around God’s existence.”
“Umm, and what exactly would that entail?”
“Devoting half your waking life to attempts to communicate with him/her/it.”
Hollus bent his four front-most legs, tipping his torso toward me. “You can understand why you do not often see Wreeds,” he said in soft voices.
“There are some humans who devote that much of their time to prayer,” I said, “but I’m not one of them.”
“Prayer it is not,” said the translator. “We desire nothing material from God; we wish merely to speak with him/her/it. And you should do the same; only one foolish would fail to spend considerable time trying to communicate with a God whose existence has been proved.”
I’d encountered evangelical humans before—possibly more than my share, since my public talks on evolution often earned their wrath. When I was younger, I used to occasionally argue with them, but these days, I normally just smile politely and walk away.
But Hollus responded for me. “Tom has cancer,” he said. I was miffed; I’d expected him to keep that confidential, but, then again, the idea that medical matters are private might be uniquely human.
“Sorrow,” said T’kna. He touched his belt buckle with the red pinwheel on it.
“There are lots of devoutly religious humans who have died horrible deaths from cancer and other diseases. How do you explain that? Hell, how do you explain the existence o
f cancer? What kind of god would create such a disease?”
“He/she/it may not have created it,” said the deep, translated voice. “Cancer may have arisen spontaneously in one or multiple possible timeslices. But the future does not happen one at a time. Nor are there an infinite number of possibilities from which God may choose. The specific deployment of reality that included cancer, presumably undesirable, must have also contained something much desired.”
“So he had to take the good with the bad?” I said.
“Conceivably,” said T’kna.
“Doesn’t sound like much of a god to me,” I said.
“Humans are unique in believing in divine omnipotence and omniscience,” said T’kna. “The true God is not a form idealized; he/she/it is real and therefore, by definition, imperfect; only an abstraction can be free of flaws. And since God is imperfect, there will be suffering.”
An interesting notion, I had to admit. The Wreed made some more rattling sounds, and, after a bit, the translator spoke again. “The Forhilnors were surprised that we had any sophisticated cosmological science. But we had always known of the creation and destruction of virtual particles in what you call a vacuum. Just as the fallacy of a perfect God hampered your theology, so the fallacy of a perfect vacuum hampered your cosmology, for to argue that a vacuum is nothingness and that this nothingness is real is to argue that something exists which is nothing at all. There are no perfect vacuums; there is no perfect God. And your suffering requires no more explanation than that unavoidable imperfection.”
“But imperfection only explains why suffering begins,” I said. “Once your God became aware that someone was suffering, if he did have the power to stop it, then surely, as a moral being, he would have to do so.”
“If God is indeed aware of your illness and has done nothing,” said T’kna’s computer-generated voice, “then other concerns mandate that he/she/it let it run its course.”
That was too much for me. “Damn you,” I snapped. “I vomit blood. I have a six-year-old boy who is scared out of his mind—a boy who is going to have to grow up without a father. I have a wife who is going to be a widow before next summer. What other concerns could possibly outweigh those?”
The Wreed seemed agitated, flexing its legs as if ready to run, presumably an instinctive reaction to a threat. But, of course, he wasn’t really here; he was safely aboard the mothership. After a moment, he calmed down. “Do you a direct answer desire?” asked T’kna.
I blew out air, trying to calm down; I’d forgotten about the cameras and now felt rather embarrassed. I guess I wasn’t cut out to be Earth’s ambassador. I glanced at Hollus. His eyestalks had stopped weaving; I’d seen them do that before when he was startled—my outburst had upset him, too.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I inhaled deeply, then let it out slowly. “Yes,” I said, nodding slightly. “I want an honest answer.”
The Wreed rotated 180 degrees, so that its back was facing me—that’s when I first got a glimpse of its rear hand. I later learned that if a Wreed faced you with its opposite side, it was about to say something particularly candid. His yellow belt had an identical buckle on its back, and he touched it. “This symbolizes my religion,” he said. “A galaxy of blood—a galaxy of life.” He paused. “If God did not directly create cancer, then to berate him/her/it for its existence is unjust. And if he/she/it did create it, then he/she/it did so because it is necessary. Your death may serve no purpose for yourself or your family. But if it does serve some purpose in the creator’s plan, you should be grateful that, regardless of what pain you might feel, you are part of something that does have meaning.”
“I don’t feel grateful,” I said. “I feel cursed.”
The Wreed did something astonishing. It turned back around and reached out with its nine-fingered hand. My skin tingled as the force fields making up the avatar’s arm touched my own hand. The nine fingers squeezed gently. “Since your cancer is unavoidable,” said the synthesized voice, “perhaps you would find more peace if you believed what I believe rather than what you believe.”
I had no answer for that.
“And now,” said T’kna, “I must disengage; time it is again to attempt to communicate with God.”
The Wreed wavered and vanished.
I merely wavered.
* * *
14
A
reconstruction…
Half a city away, down by the shore of Lake Ontario, Cooter Falsey was sitting in a dingy motel room’s overstuffed easy chair, hugging his knees and whimpering softly. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said, over and over, almost as if it were a mantra, a prayer. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
Falsey was twenty-six, thin, blond, with a crew cut and teeth that should have received braces but never had.
J. D. Ewell sat down on the bed, facing Falsey. He was ten years older than Cooter, with a pinched face and longer dark hair. “Listen to me,” he said gently. Then, more forcefully: “Listen to me!”
Falsey looked up, his eyes red.
“There,” said Ewell. “That’s better.”
“He’s dead,” said Falsey. “That man on the radio said it: the doctor is dead.”
Ewell shrugged. “An eye for an eye, you know?”
“I never wanted to kill anybody,” said Falsey.
“I know,” said Ewell. “But that doctor, he was doing the devil’s work. You know that, Cooter. God will forgive you.”
Falsey seemed to consider this. “You think?”
“Of course,” said Ewell. “You and me, we’ll pray for His forgiveness. And He’ll grant it, you know He will.”
“What’ll happen to us if they catch us here?”
“Nobody’s going to catch us, Cooter. Don’t you worry about that.”
“When can we go home?” Falsey said. “I don’t like being in a foreign country. It was bad enough coming up to Buffalo, but at least that was the States. If we get caught, who knows what the Canucks will do to us. They might never let us go home.”
Ewell thought about mentioning that at least Canada had no death penalty, but decided not to. Instead, he said, “We can’t go back across the border yet. You heard the news report: they’ve already figured it was the same guys who did that clinic in Buffalo. Best we stay up here for a piece.”
“I want to go home,” said Falsey.
“Trust me,” said Ewell. “It’s better we stay awhile.” He paused, wondering if it was time to broach the topic yet. “Besides, there’s one more job we’ve got to do up here.”
“I don’t want to kill anybody again. I won’t—I can’t do that, J. D. I can’t.”
“I know,” said Ewell. He reached out, stroked Falsey’s arm. “I know. But you won’t have to, I promise.”
“You don’t know that,” said Falsey. “You can’t be sure.”
“Yes, I can,” said Ewell. “You don’t have to worry about killing anybody this time—because this time what we’re going after is already dead.”
“Well, that was a baffling conversation,” I said, turning to Hollus after the Wreed had disappeared from the conference room.
Hollus’s eyestalks did an S-ripple. “You can see why I like talking to you so much, Tom. At least I can understand you.”
“T’kna’s voice was translated, it seemed, by a computer.”
“Yes,” said Hollus. “Wreeds do not speak in a linear fashion. Rather, the words are woven together in a complex way that is utterly nonintuitive to us. The computer has to wait until they have finished speaking, then try to decipher their meaning.”
I thought about this. “Is it something like those word puzzles? You know, the ones in which we write ‘he himself,’ but decode it as the word ‘he’ is adjacent to the word ‘himself,’ and read that as ‘he is beside himself,’ and then take that metaphorically to mean ‘he was in a state of extreme excitement or agitation.’”
“I have not encountered such puzzles, but, yes, I suppose they ar
e vaguely similar,” said Hollus, “but with much more complex thoughts, and much more intricate relationships between the words. Context sensitivity is extremely important to the Wreeds; words mean entirely different things depending on where they are positioned. They also have a language full of synonyms that seem to mean exactly the same things, but only one of which is appropriate at any given time. It took us years to learn to communicate verbally with Wreeds; only a few of my people—and I am not one of them—can do it without a computer’s aid. But even beyond the mere syntactic structures, Wreeds are different from humans and Forhilnors. They fundamentally do not think the same way we do.”
“What’s different about it?” I asked.
“Did you notice their digits?” asked Hollus.
“You mean their fingers? Yes. I counted twenty-three.”
“You counted them, yes,” said the Forhilnor. “That is what I had to do the first time I met a Wreed, too. But a Wreed would not have had to count. It would have simply known there were twenty-three.”
“Well, they are its fingers…” I said.
“No, no, no. It would not have had to count because it can perceive that level of cardinality at a glance.” He bounced his torso. “It is amusing,” he said, “but I have perhaps studied more human psychology than you have—not that it is my field, but…” He paused again. “That is another non-Wreed concept: the idea of having a specialized field of endeavor.”
“You’re making about as much sense as T’kna did,” I said, shaking my head.
“You are correct; sorry. Let me attempt this passage again. I have studied human psychology—as much as one can from monitoring your radio and TV broadcasts. You said you counted twenty-three fingers on T’kna, and doubtless you did. You mentally said to yourself, one, two, three, et cetera, et cetera, all the way up to twenty-three. And, if you are like me, you probably had to redo the counting, just to be sure you had not got it wrong the first time.”
I nodded; I had indeed done that.
“Well, if I showed you one object—one rock, say—you would not have to count it. You would just perceive its cardinality: you would know there was one object. The same thing happens with two objects. You just look at the pair of rocks and in a single glance, without any processing, you perceive that there are two of them present. You can do the same with three, four, or five items, if you are an average human. It is only when confronted with six or more items that you actually start counting them.”
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