Calculating God

13

Whenever I encountered a new lifeform on Earth, I tried to imagine its ancestors — an occupational hazard, I guess. The same thing happened when Hollus finally introduced me to a Wreed; Wreeds were apparently shy, but I asked to meet one as part of the payment for examining our collections.

We used the conference room on the fifth floor of the Curatorial Centre; again, a series of video cameras were set up to record the event. I placed the holoform projector on the long mahogany table, next to the speaker phone. Hollus sang to it in his language, and suddenly there was a second alien in the room.

Humans, of course, evolved from fishes; our arms were originally pectoral fins (and our fingers originally the supporting bones that gave those fins stiffness), and our legs started out as pelvic fins.

Wreeds almost certainly started out as an aquatic form, as well. The Wreed that stood before me had two legs, but four arms, equally spaced around the top of a torso shaped like an inverted pear. But the four arms perhaps traced ancestry back not just to pectoral fins but also to asymmetrical dorsal and ventral fins. Those ancient pectoral fins had perhaps had four stiffening struts, for the left and right hands now had four fingers apiece (two central fingers and two mutually opposable thumbs). The front hand — presumably derived from the ventral fin — had nine fingers. And the back hand, which I supposed had descended from a dorsal fin, had, when I finally got a look at it, six thick fingers.

The Wreed had no head, and, as far as I could tell, it didn’t have eyes or a nose, either. There was a glossy black strip running around the circumference of the upper torso; I had no idea what it was for. And there were areas with complicated folding of skin on either side of the front and back arms; I guessed that these might be ears.

Wreed skin was covered with the same material that had evolved on Earth in many spiders and insects, all mammals, a few birds, and even a few ancient reptiles: hair. There was about a centimeter of reddish-brown fur covering most of the Wreed’s upper torso and the arms down to the elbows; the lower torso, the forearms, and the legs were naked, showing blue-gray leathery skin.

The only clothing the Wreed wore was a wide belt that encircled the narrow lower part of its torso; it was held up by the being’s knobby hips. The belt reminded me of Batman’s utility belt — it was even the same bright yellow, and it was lined with what I presumed were storage pouches. Instead of the bat emblem on the buckle, though, it sported a bright red pinwheel.

“Thomas Jericho,” said Hollus, “this is T’kna.”

“Hello,” I said. “Welcome to Earth.”

Wreeds, like humans, used a single orifice for speaking and eating; the mouth was located in a depression at the top of the torso. For several seconds T’kna made noises that sounded like rocks banging around inside a clothes dryer. Once the mouth stopped moving, there was a brief silence, then a deep, synthesized voice emerged from the thing’s belt. It said: “Is one animate to speak as for the inanimate?”

I looked at Hollus, baffled by the Wreed’s words. “Animate for the inanimate?” I said.

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 of 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.