Calculating God

25

In 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 eyestalks 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.”

“I don’t believe in souls, or an afterlife.”

“Ah, good,” said Hollus. “It surprised me that in this late stage of your race’s development, so many humans still link the concept of a deity with the notion of they themselves having an immortal soul; the one surely does not require the other.”

I’d never quite thought about it that way. Maybe Hollus’s God was the ultimate Copernican-style dethroning: yes, a creator exists, but its creations don’t have souls. “Still,” I said, “even if I did believe in the afterlife my wife’s religion describes, I’m not sure that I’m a good enough person to make it into heaven. The bar might be set awfully high.”

“The bar?”

“A metaphor; it refers to high-jumping, a human sport. The higher the bar you have to jump over is set, the harder it is to do.”

“Ah. Our comparable metaphor is one of narrowing passages. Still, you must know that the fear of death is irrational; death comes to everyone.”

It was all clinical for him; he wasn’t the one with only a handful of months left. “I know that,” I said, perhaps too harshly. I took a deep, calming breath. He was my friend; there was no need to be short with him. “I don’t exactly fear death,” I lied. “I just don’t want it to come so soon.” A pause. “It still surprises me that you haven’t conquered death.” I wasn’t fishing; really, I wasn’t.

“More human thinking,” said Hollus. “Death as an opponent.”

I should show him The Seventh Seal — either that, or Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey. “Regardless,” I said, “I would have expected you to have managed to prolong your lives more.”

“We have. The average age of death prior to our development of antibiotics was half what it is now; prior to the development of drugs to unclog arteries, it was only three-quarters of what it is now.”

“Yes, but—” I paused, trying to think of how to make my point. “I saw a doctor interviewed on CTV not too long ago. He said that the first human who is going to live forever has probably already been born. We’ve been assuming that we can conquer — sorry, that we can avoid — death, that there’s nothing theoretically impossible about living forever.”

“I am not sure that I would want to live in a world in which the only certain thing was taxes,” said Hollus, his eyestalks doing their S-ripple. “Besides, my children are my immortality.”

I blinked. “You have children?” I said. Why had I never asked him — her — about that?

“Yes,” Hollus said. “A son and a daughter.” And then, in a startlingly human act, the alien said, “Would you like to see pictures of them?”

I nodded. The holoform projector buzzed slightly, and suddenly two more Forhilnors were in the collections room with us, life-size but unmoving. “That is my son Kassold,” Hollus said, indicating the one on the left. “And my daughter Pealdon.”

“They are all grown up?” I asked; Pealdon and Kassold seemed to be about the same size as Hollus.

“Yes. Pealdon is a — what would you call it? One who works in the theater; she tells performers which interpretations will be allowed.”

“A director,” I said.

“A director, yes; part of the reason I wished to view some of your movies was to improve my sense of how human drama compared with Forhilnor plays. And my son Kassold is — a psychiatrist, I suppose. He treats disorders of the Forhilnor mind.”

“I’m sure you’re very proud of them,” I said.

Hollus bobbed up and down. “You have no idea,” the alien said.

Hollus had disappeared during the middle of the afternoon; he — no, she: for Pete’s sake, she was a mother — she’d said she needed to attend to some other research. I used the time to dig through the layers of paperwork on my desk and to reflect a little on what I’d done yesterday. Alan Dershowitz, one of my favorite columnists, once said, “It is while praying that I experience my greatest doubts about God, and it is while looking at the stars that I make the leap of faith.” I wondered if —

The holoform projector bleeped twice. It startled me; I hadn’t expected to see Hollus again today, but here she was, wavering back into existence in my office — and she looked more excited than I’d ever seen her before: eyestalks weaving rapidly, and her spherical torso bobbing as though it were being dribbled by an invisible hand.

“The last star we visited before coming here,” Hollus said as soon as her image had stabilized, “was Groombridge 1618, some sixteen light-years from here. The second planet of that star once had a civilization, like the other worlds we had visited. But the inhabitants were gone.”

I smiled. “Welcome back.”

“What? Yes, yes. Thank you. But we have now found them. We have found the missing inhabitants.”

“Just now? How?”

“Whenever we discovered a planet that had apparently been abandoned, we did a scan of its entire sky. The assumption is simple: if the inhabitants had vacated their world, they might have done so via starship. And the starship would likely be taking the shortest path between the planet and wherever it was going, meaning that its fusion exhaust — assuming it is powered by fusion — might be aimed back toward the home planet. We checked in the direction of every F, G, and K-class star within seventy terrestrial light-years of Groombridge, looking for an artificial fusion signature overlapping one of those stars’ own spectra.”

“And you found something?”

“No. No, we never did. Until yesterday. We had saved the whole scan in our computers, of course. I retrieved that scan and wrote a program to do a wider search through it, checking every star of every type, out to five hundred light-years — Forhilnor light-years that is, about seven hundred and twenty terrestrial ones. And the program found it: a fusion exhaust in a direct line between Groombridge and the star Alpha Orionis.”

That would be the brightest star in Orion, which is — “Betelgeuse?” I said. “You mean Betelgeuse? But that’s a red supergiant, isn’t it?” I’d seen the star countless times in the winter skies; it formed the left shoulder of Orion, my favorite constellation — I think the name was even Arabic for “shoulder of the hunter.”

“Betelgeuse, yes,” said Hollus.

“Surely no one would relocate to such a star. It can’t possibly have habitable planets.”

“That is exactly what we thought. Betelgeuse is the largest star visible in the night sky from any of our three worlds; if it were placed where Earth’s sun is now, its outer rim would extend well past the orbit of Mars. It is also much cooler than Sol, Delta Pavonis, or Beta Hydri; that is why it only glows red, of course.”

“How far away is Betelgeuse?” I asked.

“Four hundred and twenty-nine terrestrial light-years from Sol — and roughly the same from Groombridge 1618, of course.”

“That’s a heck of a long way.”

“It is just one half of one percent of our galaxy’s diameter.”

“Still,” I said, “I can’t imagine why they’d send a ship there.”

“Nor can we. Betelgeuse is a prime candidate to go supernova; it is not suitable at all for a colony.”

“Then why go there?”

“We do not know. Of course, it is possible that the ship is headed to some destination on the other side of Betelgeuse, or that it plans to use Betelgeuse either as a refueling stop — it might be easy to harvest hydrogen from the attenuated outer atmosphere of a low-density red supergiant. And, of course, the ship may wish to use Betelgeuse as a gravitational slingshot, giving it a speed boost as it angles off to some other destination.”

“Did you find evidence that the people from Groombridge had sent out other starships?”

“No. But if any of them had changed course even slightly, so that their fusion exhaust did not aim back toward the home planet, we would not be able to detect them.”

“How long ago was the ark launched? And how long until it gets to Betelgeuse?”

“Judging interstellar distances is very difficult, especially without a long baseline for measuring parallax. The ark has been under way for at least 5,000 years — they apparently never developed the near-light-speed fusion engines we have — and it is certainly more than five-sixths of the way to Betelgeuse.” She paused for a moment, her torso bobbing up and down the way it did when she was excited. “But do you see, Tom? Maybe what you proposed happened on the other five worlds we visited; maybe their inhabitants did upload themselves into computers. But the Groombridge natives did not do that. They have built an ark; they are still alive. And that ark lacks the speed of our own ships; it would be possible for us to overtake it. Meaning—” she bobbed some more — “there is another race for us to meet.”