Calculating God

11

Hollus and I went down into the Lower Rotunda each evening, after the museum closed to the public. As payment for what I’d let him see, he continued to present recreations of various periods from Beta Hydri III’s geologic past, and I recorded all of these on video.

Maybe it was because my own life was coming to an end, but after a while, I yearned to see something else. Hollus had mentioned the six worlds apparently abandoned by their inhabitants. I wanted to see them, see the most recent artifacts on these alien worlds — the last things the inhabitants had built before they disappeared.

What he showed me was amazing.

First was Epsilon Indi Prime. On its southern continent, there is a huge square, enclosed by walls. The walls are made of giant, roughly hewn granite blocks each more than 8 meters on a side. The area they enclose, almost 500 meters across, is filled with rubble: gargantuan, jagged hunks of broken concrete. Even if one could climb the walls, the vast field of rubble would be imposingly barren. No animal or vehicle could traverse it without great difficulty, and nothing could ever be made to grow there.

Then there’s Tau Ceti II. In the middle of a barren landscape, the long-gone inhabitants had made a disk of fused black stone more than 2,000 meters across and, judging by its edge, more than 5 meters thick. The black surface absorbs heat from its sun, making it incredibly hot; flesh would blister trying to walk across it, and the soles of shoes would melt.

The surface of Mu Cassiopeae A Prime reveals no sign of its former inhabitants; everything has been buried by 2.4 million years of erosion. But Hollus showed me a computer-generated model of what the starship Merelcas’s sensors had revealed beneath the layers of sediment: a vast plain filled with towering, twisted spires, spikes, and other jagged forms, and beneath that, a vault or chamber, forever hidden from view. That planet had once had a very large moon — proportionately, much larger than Luna is in relation to Earth — but it now sported a glorious system of rings instead. Hollus said they’d determined the ring system was also 2.4 million years old — in other words, it had come into existence at the same time the Cassiopeians had vanished.

I had him show me the rest of the planet. There were archipelagos in the seas — islands spread out like pearls on a string — and the eastern shoreline of the largest continent closely matched the western shoreline of the next largest: telltale signs of a world that had been undergoing plate tectonics.

“They blew up their own moon,” I said, surprising myself with the insight. “They wanted to put an end to its tidal forces churning their planet’s core; they wanted to shut off plate tectonics.”

“Why?” asked Hollus, sounding intrigued by my notion.

“To prevent the vault they’d built from ever being subducted,” I said. Continental drift causes crustal rocks to be recycled, with old ones pushed down into the mantle and new ones forming from magma welling up at sea-floor trenches.

“But we had assumed the vault was for the storage of nuclear waste,” said Hollus. “Subduction would actually be the best way to get rid of it.”

I nodded. The monuments he’d shown me here and on Tau Ceti II and Epsilon Indi Prime were indeed reminiscent of designs I’d seen proposed for nuclear-waste sites on Earth: artificial landscapes so foreboding that no one would ever dig there.

“Did you find any inscriptions or messages related to nuclear waste?” I said. The plans for Earth’s waste sites all involved symbolic communication indicating the sort of dangerous materials being stored, so that any future inhabitants of the area would understand what had been buried. The proposed iconography ranged from human faces showing expressions of illness or disgust, indicating that the area was poisonous, to diagrams using atomic numbers to note specifically what elements were interred.

“No,” said Hollus. “Nothing like that. Not in the most recent sites, at least — the ones that I have been showing you from just before the races disappeared.”

“Well, I suppose they could have wanted the sites to go undisturbed for millions of years — for so long that whatever intelligences that later discovered them might not even be of the same species as those who had buried the waste beneath the warning landscapes. It’s one thing to try to communicate the idea of poison or sickness to members of your own species — we humans associate closed eyes, frowning mouths, and protruding tongues with poisoning — but it might be quite another to try to do it across species boundaries, especially when you know nothing about the species that might succeed you.”

“You are not integrating,” said Hollus. “Most radioactive waste has a half-life of less than a hundred thousand years. By the time a new sapient species has emerged, there would be virtually nothing dangerous left.”

I frowned. “Still, they do look a lot like nuclear-waste storage sites. And, well, if the natives of the planets departed to go somewhere else, maybe they felt it was appropriate to bury their garbage before leaving.”

Hollus sounded dubious. “But why then would the Cassiopeians want to stop subduction? As I said, that is the best way to get rid of nuclear waste — even better than firing it off into space. If the spaceship you are using explodes, you can end up with nuclear contamination spread over half your world, but if the waste is carried down into the mantle, it is gone for good. That is, in fact, what my own race ended up doing with its nuclear waste.”

“Well, then, maybe they buried something else beneath those warning landscapes,” I said. “Something so dangerous, they wanted to make sure that it would never be uncovered, so that it could never come after them. Maybe the Cassiopeians were afraid if the vault was subducted, its walls would melt and whatever — whatever beast perhaps — they’d imprisoned within might escape. And then, all these races, even after burying whatever they were afraid of, left their homeworlds, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and whatever it was they’d left behind.”

“I’m thinking of going to church this Sunday,” Susan had said last October, shortly after our first appointment with Dr. Kohl.

We’d been sitting in our living room, me on the couch, she on the matching chair. I’d nodded. “You usually do.”

“I know, but — well, with everything that’s happened. With . . .”

“I’ll be all right,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded again. “You go to church every Sunday. That shouldn’t change. Dr. Kohl said we should try to keep our lives as normal as possible.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d do with the time — but I’d find plenty. At some point, I’d have to call my brother Bill in Vancouver and let him know what was happening. But Vancouver was three hours behind Toronto, and Bill didn’t get home from work until late. If I called in what was the early evening his time, I’d end up speaking to his new wife Marilyn — and she could talk your ear off. I wasn’t up for that. But Bill, and his kids from his previous marriage, were the only family I had; our parents had passed away a couple of years ago.

Susan was thinking; her lips were pursed. Her brown eyes briefly met mine, then looked at the floor. “You — you could come with me, if you want.”

I exhaled noisily. It had always been something of a sore point between us. Susan had gone to church regularly her whole life. She knew when she married me that that was not something I did. I spent my Sunday mornings surfing the web and watching This Week with Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts. I’d made it plain to her when we started dating that I wouldn’t be comfortable going to church. It would be too hypocritical, I said — an insult to those who believed.

Now, though, she clearly felt things had changed. Perhaps she expected me to want to pray, to want to make my peace with my maker.

“Maybe,” I said, but I’m sure we both knew it wasn’t going to happen.

It never rains but it pours.

Dealing with my cancer, of course, took a lot of my time. And Hollus’s visits were now taking up most of the rest of it. But I had other responsibilities, too. I’d arranged for the special exhibition at the ROM of fossils from the Burgess Shale, and although we’d had the grand opening months ago, I still had a lot of administrative work related to it.

Charles Walcott of the Smithsonian discovered the Burgess Shale fossils in 1909 in the Burgess Pass through British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains; he excavated there until 1917. Starting in 1975 and continuing for the next two decades, the ROM’s own Desmond Collins began an ongoing and extremely fruitful series of new Burgess Shale excavations, uncovering additional collecting fields and harvesting thousands of new specimens. In 1981, UNESCO named the Burgess Pass its eighty-sixth World Heritage site, in the same class as the pyramids of Egypt and the Grand Canyon.

The fossils date back to the middle Cambrian Period, 520 million years ago. The shale, which represents a mud slide from the Laurentian shelf that rapidly buried everything living on the sea floor, is so fine grained that it preserved impressions even of soft body parts. A huge diversity of lifeforms is recorded there, including many complex types that some paleontologists, including our own Jonesy, argue don’t fit into any modern group. They appeared, existed briefly, then died out, as if nature were trying out all sorts of different body plans to see which ones worked best.

Why had this “Cambrian explosion” of diversity occurred? Life had already existed on Earth for perhaps 3.5 billion years, but, during all that time, it had taken very simple forms. What had caused so much complexity, and so much variety, to suddenly appear?

Davidson and Cameron at CalTech and Peterson at UCLA have argued that the reason for the simplicity prior to the Cambrian explosion was, well, simple: until that time, fertilized cells were severely limited in the number of times they could divide; ten or so divisions seemed to be the maximum. And ten divisions yields just 1,024 cells, producing quite small, and quite unsophisticated, creatures.

But at the beginning of the Cambrian, that ten-division barrier was smashed by the development of a new type of cell, still seen in some living organisms; these cells could divide many more times and were used to define the morphological space — the fundamental body shape — of all sorts of new organisms. (Although Earth had been four billion years old when that happened, the same breakthrough — smashing the ten-division limit — apparently occurred on Hollus’s homeworld when it was just two billion years old; at that point life there also stopped spinning its wheels and started evolving in earnest.)

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.