Calculating God

20

I stormed back to my office. Hollus had been looking at endocranial casts in my absence; spurred on by my earlier comments, he was now exploring the rise of intelligence in mammals after the K/T boundary. I was never sure if I was reading his body language correctly, but he seemed to have no trouble reading mine. “You” “seem” “upset,” he said.

“Dr. Dorati the museum’s director, remember her?” He’d met her several times now, including when the prime minister had shown up. “She’s trying to force me to go on long-term disability leave. She wants me out.”

“Why?”

“I’m the potential vampire slayer, remember? I’m an opponent of hers politically here at the museum. She has taken the ROM in a direction a number of us long-time curators object to. And now she sees an opportunity to replace me with someone who agrees with her views.”

“But disability leave . . . surely that relates to your illness?”

“There’s no other way for her to force me out.”

“What is the nature of your dispute?”

“I believe the museum should be a place of scholarship and it should provide as much information as possible about each of its displays. She believes the museum should be a tourist attraction and should not intimidate laypeople with a lot of facts, figures, and fancy words.”

“And this issue is important?”

I was taken aback by the question. It had seemed important when I’d started fighting Christine over it three years ago. I’d even called it, in an interview in the Toronto Star about all the brouhaha at the ROM, “the fight of my life.” But that was before Dr. Noguchi had shown me the dark spot on my x ray, before I’d started feeling the pain, before the chemotherapy, before . . .

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly.

“I am sorry to hear of your difficulties,” said Hollus.

I chewed my lower lip. I had no right to say any of this. “I told Dr. Dorati that you would leave if she forced me out.”

Hollus was quiet for a long time. Back on Beta Hydri III, he had been an academic of some sort himself; he doubtless understood the prestige his presence brought to the ROM. But perhaps I’d offended him enormously, making him a pawn in a political game. He could surely see ahead several moves, surely knew that this might become ugly. I’d gone too far; I knew that.

And yet —

And yet, who could blame me? Christine was going to win regardless. All too soon, she would win.

Hollus pointed at my desk set. “You have used that device before to communicate with others in this building,” he said.

“My phone? Yes.”

“Can you connect to Dr. Dorati?”

“Umm, yes, but—”

“Do so.”

I hesitated for a moment, then lifted the handset and tapped out Christine’s three-digit extension.

“Dorati,” said Christine’s voice.

I tried to hand Hollus the handset. “I cannot use that,” he said. Of course he couldn’t; he had two separate mouths. I touched the speaker-phone key and nodded for him to go ahead.

“Dr. Dorati, this is Hollus deten stak Jaton.” It was the first time I’d heard the Forhilnor’s full name. “I am grateful for your hospitality in letting me do research here, but I am contacting you to inform you that Thomas Jericho is an integral part of my work, and if he leaves this museum, I will follow him wherever he goes.”

There was a stony silence for several seconds. “I see,” said Christine’s voice.

“Terminate the connection,” Hollus said to me. I clicked the phone off.

My heart fluttered; I had no idea if what Hollus had just done was the right thing. But I was deeply moved by his support. “Thank you,” I said.

The Forhilnor flexed both his upper and lower knees. “Dr. Dorati was all on the left.”

“All on the left?”

“Sorry. I mean what she did was wrong, in my view. Intervening was the least I could do.”

“I thought it was wrong, too,” I said. “But — well, I thought maybe my telling her you would go if I went was wrong, also.”

I was silent for a time, and at last Hollus replied. “So much of what is right and wrong is difficult to determine,” he said. “I probably would have performed similarly, had I been in your place.” He bobbed. “I do sometimes wish I had a Wreed’s insight into these matters.”

“You’d mentioned that before,” I said. “Why do Wreeds have an easier time than we do with questions of morality?”

Hollus shifted slightly from foot to foot. “The Wreeds are freed from the burden of ratiocination — of the kind of logic you and I undertake. Although math may confound them, thinking about philosophical questions, about the meaning of life, about ethics and morality, confounds us. We have an intuitive sense of right and wrong, but every theory of morality we come up with fails. You showed me those Star Trek movies . . .”

I had indeed; he’d been intrigued enough by the episodes we’d looked at to want to watch the first three classic Trek films. “Yes,” I said.

“There was one in which the impossible hybrid died.”

“The Wrath of Khan,”I said.

“Yes. In it, much was made of the notion that ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.’ We Forhilnors have similar sentiments. It is an attempt to apply mathematics — something we are good at — to ethics, something we are not good at. But such attempts always fail us. In the film in which the hybrid was reborn—”

“The Search for Spock,”I said.

His eyeballs clicked together. “In that one, we learn that the first formulation was flawed, and in fact ‘the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.’ It seemed intuitively right that the fellow with the fake hair and the others should have been willing to sacrifice their lives to save one unrelated comrade, even though it defied mathematical logic. And yet this happens all the time: many human societies and all Forhilnor ones are democratic; they are committed to the principle that each individual has identical worth. Indeed, I have seen the great phrase devised by your neighbors to the south: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ And yet the people who wrote those words were slave owners, oblivious to the irony — to use a word you have taught me of that fact.”

“True,” I said.

“Many human and Forhilnor scientists have tried to reduce altruism to genetic imperatives, suggesting that the degree of sacrifice we are willing to make for another is directly proportional to how much genetic material we share. You or I, say these scientists, would not necessarily let ourselves die in order to save one sibling or child, but we should consider it an even trade if our death would save two siblings or children, since between them they have the same quantity of our genes as we ourselves possess. And we would surely sacrifice ourselves to save three siblings or children, since that quantity represents a greater concentration of our genetic material than our own bodies contain.”

“I would die to save Ricky,” I said.

He gestured at the picture on my desk, the frame’s cardboard back once again facing him. “And yet, if I understand what you have said, Ricky is not your natural son.”

“That’s right. His birth parents didn’t want him.”

“Which confounds on two levels: that parents could choose to reject their healthy offspring and that nonparents could choose to adopt another’s child. And of course there are many good people who, in defiance of genetic logic, have chosen not to have children. There simply is no formula that successfully describes the range of Forhilnor or human choices in the areas of altruism and sacrifice; you cannot reduce these issues to mathematics.”

I thought about that; certainly, Hollus intervening on my behalf with Christine was altruistic, but it obviously had nothing whatsoever to do with favoring a genetic relative. “I guess,” I said.

“But,” said Hollus, “our friends the Wreeds, because they never developed traditional math, never find themselves vexed by such matters.”

“Well, they certainly vex me,” I said. “Over the years, I’ve often lain in bed, trying to sort out moral quandaries.” The old dyslexic agnostic insomniac joke came to mind: lying awake at night, wondering if there is a dog. “I mean, where does morality come from? We know it’s wrong to steal, and—” I paused. “You do know that, right? I mean, Forhilnors have a taboo against theft?”

“Yes, although it is not innate; Forhilnor children will take anything they can reach.”

“It’s the same with human kids. But we grow up to realize that theft is wrong, and yet . . . and yet why do we feel it’s wrong? If it increases reproductive success, shouldn’t evolution have favored it? For that matter, we think infidelity is wrong, but I could obviously increase my reproductive success by impregnating multiple females. If theft is advantageous for everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn’t the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had — being sorry you got caught?”

Hollus’s eyestalks weaved in and out more quickly than usual. “I have no answer,” he said. “We struggle to find solutions to moral questions, but they always defeat us. Preeminent thinkers, both human and Forhilnor, have devoted themselves to asking what is the meaning of life and how do we know when something is morally wrong. But despite centuries of effort, no progress has been made. The questions are as beyond us as ‘What is two plus two?’ is beyond a Wreed.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “I still find it incredible that they can’t simply see that two objects and two additional objects is equivalent to four objects.”

The Forhilnor tipped his body toward me by flexing the lower knees on three of his legs. “And they find it incredible that we cannot see the underlying truths of moral issues.” He paused. “Our minds do chunking: we break problems down into manageable bits. If we wonder how a planet stays in orbit about its sun, we can ask numerous simpler questions — how does a rock stay on the ground; why is the sun at the center of the solar system — and by solving those, we can confidently answer the larger question. But the problems of ethics and morality and the meaning of life are apparently irreducible, like the ciliums in cells: there are no component parts that are tractable in isolation.”

“You mean to say that being a scientist, a logician, like — well, like you or me — is fundamentally incompatible with being at peace over moral and spiritual issues?”

“Some succeed at both — but they usually do it by compartmentalizing. Science is given responsibility for certain matters; religion for others. But for those looking for a single, overarching worldview, there is little peace. A mind is wired for one or the other, but not both.”

Pascal’s wager came to mind: it was safer, he said, to bet on the existence of God, even if he doesn’t exist, than to risk the eternal damnation of being wrong. Pascal, of course, had been a mathematician; he’d had a logical, rational, number-crunching mind, a human mind. Old Blaise had had no choice in the kind of brain he had; it had been bequeathed to him by evolution, just as mine had.

But if I’d had a choice?

If I could trade some bafflement in factual matters for certitude about questions of ethics, would I do so? Which is more important: knowing the precise phylogenetic relationships between all the various branches on the evolutionary bush or knowing the meaning of life?

Hollus departed for the day, wavering and disappearing, leaving me alone with my books and fossils and unfinished work.

I found myself thinking about the things I wanted to do one last time before I died. At this stage, I realized I had a greater desire to repeat previous pleasurable experiences than to have new ones.

Some of the things I wanted to do again were obvious, of course: make love to my wife, hug my son, see my brother Bill.

And there were the less obvious — the things that were unique to me. I wanted to go to the Octagon again, my favorite steak-house in Thornhill, the place where I’d proposed to Susan. Yes, even with the nausea caused by the chemotherapy, I wanted to do that once more.

And I wanted to watch Casablanca again. Here’s looking at you, kid . . .

I wanted to see the Blue Jays win the World Series one more time . . . but I suppose there wasn’t much chance of that.

I wanted to go back to Drumheller and walk amongst the hoodoos, drinking in the Badlands at twilight with coyotes howling in the background and fossil shards scattered all around.

I wanted to visit my old neighborhood, out in Scarborough. I wanted to walk the streets of my youth, gaze at my parents’ old house or stand in the yard of William Lyon Mackenzie King Public School, and let memories of friends from decades past wash over me.

I wanted to dust off my old ham-radio set, and listen — just listen — to voices in the night from all around the world.

But, most of all, I wanted to go up with Ricky and Susan to our cottage on Otter Lake, and sit on the dock after dark, late enough in the summer that the mosquitoes and black flies would be gone, and watch the moon rise, its pitted face reflecting in the calm water, and listen to the haunting call of a loon and the sound of the odd fish jumping up out of the lake, and lean back in my lounge chair, and clasp my hands behind my head, and breathe out a contented sigh, and feel no pain at all.