Calculating God

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Until you betrayed me, yes.”

  That’s the way it was going to be, then. There was no reciprocity; no sense that we had each wronged the other. It was all my fault, entirely my doing.

  I felt anger bubbling within me; for a moment, I wanted to lash out, tell him how what he had done had made me feel, tell him how I’d cried—literally cried—in rage and frustration and agony after our friendship had disintegrated.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, calming myself. I’d made this call to bring closure, not to restart an old fight. I felt pain in my chest; stress always magnified it. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “It’s bothered me, Gord. Year after year. I never should have done what I did.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” he said.

  I couldn’t take all the blame, though; there was still pride, or something akin to it, in me. “I was hoping,” I said, “that we might apologize to each other.”

  But Gordon deflected that idea. “Why are you calling? After all these years?”

  I didn’t want to tell him the truth: “Well, Gord-o, it’s like this: I’ll be dead soon, and…”

  No. No, I couldn’t say that. “I just wanted to clean up some old business.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” said Gordon.

  No, I thought. Next year would be too late. But, while we’re alive, it’s not too late.

  “Was that your granddaughter who answered the phone?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “I have a six-year-old boy. His name is Ricky—Richard Blaine Jericho.” I let the name hang in the air. Gordon had been a big Casablanca fan, too; I thought perhaps hearing the name might soften him. But if he were smiling, I couldn’t tell over the phone.

  He said nothing, so I asked, “How are you doing, Gord?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Married for thirty-two years; two sons and three grandkids.” I waited for him to invite reciprocity; a simple “You?” would have done it. But he didn’t.

  “Well, that’s all I wanted to say,” I said. “Just that I’m sorry; that I wish things had never gone the way they did.” It was too much to add, “that I wish we were still friends,” so I didn’t. Instead, I said, “I hope—I hope the rest of your life is terrific, Gord.”

  “Thanks,” he said. And then, after a pause that seemed interminable, “Yours, too.”

  My voice was going to break if I stayed on the phone much longer. “Thank you,” I said. And then, “Goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Tom.”

  And the phone went dead.

  * * *

  24

  O

  ur house on Ellerslie was almost fifty years old. We’d upgraded it with central air conditioning, a second bathroom, and the deck Tad and I had built a few summers back. It was a good home, full of memories.

  But at the moment, I was all alone in it—and that was strange.

  It seemed that I was hardly ever alone anymore. Hollus was with me a lot at work, and when he wasn’t around, the other paleontologists or grad students were milling about. And except for church, Susan almost never left me alone at home anymore. Whether she was trying to make the most of what time we had left, or was simply afraid that I had deteriorated so much that I couldn’t get along without her for even a few hours, I don’t know.

  But it was rare for me to be at home alone, with neither her nor Ricky around.

  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do.

  I could watch TV, but…

  But, God, how much of my life had I wasted watching television? A couple of hours every night—that would be 700 hours a year. Times forty years; my family had gotten its first black-and-white TV in 1960. That’s 28,000 hours, or…

  My God.

  That’s three years.

  In three years, Ricky will be nine. I’d give anything to see that. I’d give anything to have those three years back.

  No, no, I wasn’t going to watch TV.

  I could read a book. I always regretted that I didn’t spend more time reading for pleasure. Oh, I spent an hour and a half every day on the subway perusing scientific monographs and printouts of work-related newsgroups, trying to keep up, but it had been a long time since I’d cracked open a good novel. I’d gotten both John Irving’s a A Widow for One Year and Terence M. Green’s A Witness to Life for Christmas. So, yes, I could start either one this evening. But who knew when I might get to finish it? I was going to have enough uncompleted business left on my plate as it was.

  It used to be when Susan was out that I’d order a pizza, a big, hot, massive pie from Dante’s, which one local newspaper had given an award for the heaviest pizza—a Dante’s with Schneider’s pepperoni, so spicy it would still be on your breath two days hence. Susan didn’t like Dante’s—too filling, too hot—so when she was around, we ordered more pedestrian pies from that Toronto institution, Pizza Pizza.

  But the chemotherapy had robbed me of much of my appetite; I couldn’t face anyone’s pizza tonight.

  I could watch a porno film; we had a few on tape, bought as a lark years ago and rarely viewed. But no. The chemo had killed most of that desire, too, sad to say.

  I sat down on the couch and stared at the mantelpiece above the fireplace, lined with little framed pictures: Susan and me on our wedding day; Susan cradling Ricky in her arms, shortly after we’d adopted him; me in the Alberta badlands, holding a pick; the black-and-white author photo from my one published book, Canadian Dinosaurs; my parents, about forty years ago; Susan’s dad, scowling as usual; all three of us—me, Susan, and Ricky—in the pose we’d used one year on our Christmas cards.

  My family.

  My life.

  I leaned back. The upholstery on the couch was worn; we’d bought it just after we’d gotten married. Still, it should have lasted longer than this…

  I was all alone.

  The chance might not come again.

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t.

  I’d spent my whole life being a rationalist, a secular humanist, a scientist.

  They say Carl Sagan maintained his atheism right until the end. Even as he lay dying, he didn’t recant, didn’t admit any possibility of there ever being a personal God who cared one way or the other whether he lived or died.

  And yet—

  And yet, I had read his novel Contact. I’d seen the movie, too, for that matter, but the movie watered down the message of the novel. The book was unambiguous: it said that the universe had been designed, created to order by a vast sentience. The novel concluded with the words, “There is an intelligence that antedates the universe.” Sagan may not have believed in the God of the Bible, but he at least allowed the possibility of a creator.

  Or did he? Carl was no more obliged to believe what he wrote in his sole work of fiction than George Lucas was required to believe in the Force.

  Stephen Jay Gould had fought cancer, too; he’d been diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma in July 1982. He’d been lucky; he’d won. Gould, like Richard Dawkins, argued for a purely Darwinian view of nature—even if the two of them couldn’t agree on the precise details of what that view was. But if religion had helped Gould get through his illness, he never said. Still, after his recovery, he’d written a new book, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, which argued for the scientific and the spiritual being two separate realms, two “nonoverlapping magisteria”—a typical bit of Gouldish bafflegab. Clearly, though, larger questions had preoccupied him during his bout with the big C.

  And now it was my turn.

  Sagan had apparently remained stalwart until the end. Gould seemed perhaps to have wavered, but he’d ultimately returned to his old self, the perfect rationalist.

  And me?

  Sagan hadn’t had to contend with visits from an alien whose grand unified theory pointed toward the existence of a creator.

  Gould hadn’t known of the advanced lifeforms from Beta Hydri and Delta Pavonis who believed in God.

  But I did.

  Many years ag
o, I’d read a book called The Search for God at Harvard. I was more intrigued by the title than by the actual contents, which told of the experiences of Ari Goldman, a New York Times journalist who spent a year enrolled in the Harvard Divinity School. If I wanted to search for fossils from the Cambrian explosion, I’d go to Yoho National Park; if I wanted to search for dinosaur eggshell fragments, I’d go to Montana or Mongolia. Most things require you to go to them, but God—God, if he is ubiquitous—should be something you could search for anywhere: at Harvard, at the Royal Ontario Museum, at a Pizza Hut in Kenya.

  Indeed, it seemed to me if Hollus was correct, you should be able to reach out, anywhere, at any time, and sort of grab hold of a handful of space just the right way, and peel back the flap in front of you, revealing the machinery of God behind.

  Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain…

  And I hadn’t. I’d ignored him utterly.

  But now, right now, I was alone.

  Or…

  Christ, I never had thoughts like this. Am I weaker than Sagan? Weaker than Gould?

  I’d met them both over the years; Carl had lectured at U of T, and we invited Stephen up to the ROM every time he had a new book out; he was coming again in a few weeks to speak in conjunction with the Burgess Shale exhibition. I’d been surprised at how tall Carl was, but Stephen was every bit the little round guy they’d drawn him as on The Simpsons.

  Physically, neither looked stronger than I—than I used to be.

  But now, now perhaps I was weaker than either of them.

  God damn it, I didn’t want to die.

  Old paleontologists never die, the joke goes. But they sure are petrified by death.

  I got up off the couch. The living-room rug was pretty much obstacle-free; Ricky was getting better about putting his toys away.

  It shouldn’t matter where you do it.

  I looked out the living-room window. Ellerslie was a great, old street up in what had been called Willowdale when I was a kid; it was lined by mature trees. A passerby would have to make a real effort to see in.

  Still…

  I walked over, closed the brown drapes. The room darkened. I threw the wall switch that controlled one of the torchiere floor lamps. A glance at the glowing blue clock on the VCR: I still had time before Susan and Ricky got home.

  Did I want to do this?

  There was no place for a creator in the curriculum I’d taught at U of T. The ROM was one of the most eclectic museums in the world, but, despite that ceiling mosaic proclaiming the museum’s mission to be “that all men may know His work,” there was no specific gallery devoted to God.

  Of course not, the founders of the ROM would have said. The creator is everywhere.

  Everywhere.

  Even here.

  I blew out air, exhaling my last bit of resistance to the idea.

  And I knelt down, on the carpet, by the fireplace, the pictures of my family staring blindly at what I was doing.

  I knelt down.

  And I began to pray.

  “God,” I said.

  The word echoed softly inside the brick fireplace.

  I repeated it. “God?” A question that time, an invitation for a response.

  There was none, of course. Why should God care that I’m dying of cancer? Millions of people worldwide were battling one form or another of that ancient foe at this very moment, and some of them were much younger than I. Surely children in leukemia wards should command his attention first.

  Still, I tried again, a third uttering of the word I’d only ever used as a curse. “God?”

  There was no sign, and indeed there never would be. Isn’t that what faith is all about?

  “God, if Hollus is right—if the Wreeds and Forhilnors are correct, and you designed the universe piece by piece, fundamental constant by fundamental constant—then couldn’t you have avoided this? What possible good does cancer do anyone?”

  The Lord works in mysterious ways. Mrs. Lansbury had always said that. Everything happens for a purpose.

  Such bull. Such unmitigated crap. I felt my stomach knotting. Cancer didn’t happen for any purpose. It tore people apart; if a god did create life, then he’s a shoddy workman, churning out flawed, self-destructing products.

  “God, I wish—I wish you had decided to do some things differently.”

  That’s as far as I could go. Susan had said prayer wasn’t about asking for things—and I couldn’t bring myself to ask for mercy, ask not to die, ask to get to see my son graduate from university, ask to be there to grow old with my wife.

  Just then, the front door swung open. I’d been lost in thought, obviously, or else I would have likely heard Susan jostling her keys as she worked the lock.

  I felt myself going beet red. “Found it!” I exclaimed, as if to myself, making a show of picking up some invisible lost object. I rose to my feet and smiled sheepishly at my beautiful wife and my handsome, young son.

  But I hadn’t found anything at all.

  * * *

  25

  I

  n 1997, Stephen Pinker came to the ROM to promote his new book, How the Mind Works. I attended the fascinating lecture he gave. Among other things, he pointed out that humans, even across cultural boundaries, use consistent metaphors in speech. Arguments are always battles. He won; I lost; he beat me; she attacked every point; he made me defend my position; I had to retreat.

  Love affairs are patients or diseases. They have a sick relationship; he got over her; she’s got it bad for him; it broke his heart.

  Ideas are food. Food for thought; something to chew on; his suggestion left a bad taste in my mouth; I couldn’t stomach the notion; a delicious irony; the idea kept me going.

  Virtue, meanwhile, is up, presumably related to our erect posture. He’s an upstanding citizen; that act is beneath me; I wouldn’t sink so low; he took the high road; I tried to come up to his standards.

  Still, it wasn’t until I met Hollus that I realized how uniquely human those ways of thinking were. Hollus had done an excellent job of mastering English, and he did often use human metaphors. But from time to time, I glimpsed what I presumed was the true Forhilnor way of thinking behind his speech.

  For Hollus, love was astronomical—two individuals coming to know each other so well that their movements could be predicted with absolute precision. “Rising love” meant that the affection would be there tomorrow, just as surely as the sun would come up. “A new constellation” was new love between old friends—seeing a pattern amongst the stars that had always been there, but had heretofore eluded detection.

  And morality was based on the integration of thought: “that thought alternates well,” referring to a notion that causes significant switching back and forth between his two mouths. An immoral thought was one that came only from one side: “He was all on the left with that.” A half-brained idea wasn’t a stupid one to Hollus; it was an evil one. And although Forhilnors spoke as we do of having “second thoughts,” they used the phrase to mean that the other brain-half had finally kicked in, bringing the individual back to a moral position.

  As Hollus had intimated the night he came to my house for dinner, Forhilnors alternated words or syllables between two mouths because their brains, like ours, consisted of two lobes, and their consciousness came even more than ours did from the interplay between those two lobes. Humans often speak of a crazy person as someone who has lost it—“it” presumably being his or her grip on reality. Forhilnors didn’t use that metaphor, but they did share our one about the struggle “to keep it together,” although in their case “it” referred directly to the ongoing effort to integrate the two halves of the brain; healthy Forhilnors like Hollus always overlapped the syllables of their names—the “lus” beginning from his right mouth before the “Hol” had ended from his left—communicating to those around them that their brain-halves were safely integrated.

  Still, Hollus had told me that high-speed photography showed that their eyes
talks didn’t actually move as mirror images of each other. Rather, one always took the lead and the other followed a fraction of a second later. Which eyestalk led—and which half of the brain was in control—varied from moment to moment; the study of which lobe initiated which actions was at the center of Forhilnor psychology.

  Because Susan had put the question in my mind, I had indeed asked Hollus whether he believed in souls. Most modern Forhilnors, himself included, did not, but what Forhilnor myths there were about life-after-death had grown out of their split-brain psychology. In their past, most Forhilnor religions had held that each individual possessed not one but two souls, one for each half of the body. Their conception of an afterlife consisted of two possible destinations, a heaven (although it was not as blissful as the Judeo-Christian one—“even in heaven, the rains must fall” was a Forhilnor platitude) and a hell (although it was not a place of torture or suffering; theirs had never been a vengeful god). Forhilnors were not creatures of extremes—having so many limbs perhaps led them to view things as more balanced (I never saw Hollus more astonished than when I stood on one leg to check to see if there was something on the bottom of my shoe; he was amazed I didn’t fall over).

  Anyway, the two Forhilnor souls could each go to heaven, each to hell, or one could go far and the other farther (the post-mortal realms were not “up” and “down”—again, a human notion of opposite extremes). If both souls went to the same place, even if it were hell, it was a better afterlife than if they were split up, for in the splitting whatever personality had been manifest in the being’s physical form would be lost. A split-soul person was truly dead; whatever he had been was gone for good.

  So there was a part of Hollus that was baffled by my fear of death. “You humans believe you have but a single, integrated soul,” he said. We were in the collections room, examining mammallike reptiles from South Africa. “So what do you fear? Under your mythology, you will retain your identity even after death. Surely you do not worry about going to your hell, do you? You are not an evil person.”