Calculating God

33

“Hi, sport,” I said as I came into Ricky’s room.

Ricky was sitting at his desk, which had a world map laminated into its surface. He was drawing something with pencil crayons, his tongue sticking out and up from the corner of his mouth in the quintessential childhood look of concentration. “Dad,” he said, acknowledging me.

I looked around. The room was messy but not a disaster. Some dirty clothes were on the floor; I usually remonstrated him for that, but would not do so today. He had several small plastic dinosaur skeletons that I’d bought for him, and a talking Qui-Gon Jinn action figure he’d received for Christmas. And books, lots of children’s books: our Ricky was going to grow up to be a reader.

“Son,” I said, and I waited patiently for him to give me his full attention. He was completing one of the elements of his drawing — it looked like an airplane. I let him do so; I knew how gnawing unfinished business could be. At last he looked up, seeming surprised that I was still there. He lifted his eyebrows questioningly.

“Son,” I said again, “you know Daddy’s been awfully sick.”

Ricky put down his pencil crayon, realizing we were moving onto serious ground. He nodded.

“And,” I said, “well, I think you know that I’m not going to get better.”

He pursed his lips and nodded bravely. My heart was breaking.

“I’m going to go away,” I said. “I’m going to go away with Hollus.”

“Can he fix you?” Ricky said. “He said he couldn’t, but . . .”

Rick didn’t know that Hollus was female, of course, and I hardly wanted to go off on tangents now. “No. No, there’s nothing he can do for me. But, well, he’s going on a trip, and I want to go with him.” I’d been on numerous trips before — to digs, to conferences. Ricky was used to me traveling.

“When will you be coming back?” he asked. And then, his face all cherubic innocence, “Will you bring me something?”

I closed my eyes for a moment. My stomach was churning.

“I, ah, I won’t be coming back,” I said softly.

Ricky was quiet for a moment, digesting this. “You mean — you mean you’re going off to die?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry to be leaving you.”

“I don’t want you to die.”

“I don’t want to die, either, but . . . but sometimes we don’t have any choice in things.”

“Can I — I want to go with you.”

I smiled sadly. “You can’t, Ricky. You have to stay here and go to school. You have to stay here and help Mommy.”

“But . . .”

I waited for him to finish, to complete his objection. But he didn’t. He simply said, “Don’t go, Daddy.”

But I was going to leave him. Whether this month, on Hollus’s starship, or a couple more months down the road, lying in a hospital bed, tubes in my arm and nose and the back of my hand, EKG monitors softly bleeping in the background, nurses and doctors scuttling to and fro. One way or the other, I was going to leave. I had no choice about leaving, but I did have a say in when and how.

“Nothing,” I said, “is harder for me than going.” There was no point in telling him I wanted him to remember me like this, when really I wanted him to remember me as I was a year ago, seventy pounds heavier, with a reasonably full head of hair. But, still, this was better than what I would soon become.

“Then don’t go, Daddy.”

“I’m sorry, sport. Really, I am.”

Ricky was as good as any kid his age at begging and wheedling to get to stay up late, to get a toy he wanted, to get to eat some more candy. But he realized, it seemed, that none of that would work here, and I loved him all the more for his six-year-old wisdom.

“I love you, Daddy,” he said, tears coming now.

I bent down, lifting him from his chair, raising him up to my chest, hugging him to me. “I love you, too, son.”

Hollus’s starship, the Merelcas, looked nothing like what I’d expected. I’d grown used to movie spaceships with all sorts of detailing on their hulls. But this ship had a perfectly smooth surface. It consisted of a rectangular block at one end and a perpendicular disk at the other, joined by two long tubular struts. The whole thing was a soft green. I couldn’t tell which end was the bow. Indeed, it was impossible to get any sense of its scale; there was nothing that I could recognize — not even any windows. The ship could have been only a few meters long, or kilometers.

“How big is it?” I asked Hollus, who was floating weightlessly next to me.

“About a kilometer,” she said. “The block-shaped part is the propulsion module; the struts are crew habitats — one for Forhilnors, the other for Wreeds. And the disk at the end is the common area.

“Thank you again for taking me along,” I said. My hands were shaking with excitement. Back in the eighties, there had been some brief talk about someday sending a paleontologist to Mars, and I’d daydreamed that it might be me. But of course they’d want an invertebrate specialist; no one seriously believed that vertebrates had ever inhabited the red planet. If Mars did once have an ecosystem, as Hollus contended, it probably lasted only a few hundred million years, ending when too much atmosphere had bled off into space.

Still, there’s a group called the Make-A-Wish Foundation that tries to fulfill final requests of terminally ill children; I don’t know if there’s a comparable group for terminally ill adults, and, to be honest, I’m not sure what I would have wished for had I been given the chance. But this would do. It would certainly do!

The starship continued to grow on the viewscreen. Hollus had said it had been cloaked, somehow, for more than a year, making it invisible to terrestrial observers, but there was no need for that anymore.

Part of me wished there were windows — both here on the shuttle and on the Merelcas. But apparently there were none on either; both had unbroken hulls. Instead, pictures from outside were conveyed to wall-sized viewscreens. I’d loomed in close at one point and couldn’t discern any pixels or scan lines or flicker. The screens served just as well as real glass windows would — indeed, were better in many ways. There was no glare whatsoever from their surface, and, of course, they could zoom in to give a closeup, show the view from another camera, or indeed display any information one wanted. Perhaps sometimes the simulation is better than the real thing.

We flew closer and closer still. Finally, I could see something on the starship’s green hull: some writing, in yellow. There were two lines of it: one in a system of geometric shapes — triangles and squares and circles, some with dots orbiting them — and the other a squiggle that looked vaguely like Arabic. I’d seen markings like the first set on Hollus’s holoform projector, so I assumed that was the Forhilnor language; the other must have been the script of the Wreeds. “What’s that say?” I asked.

“ ‘This end up,’ ” said Hollus.

I looked at her, mouth agape.

“Sorry,” she said. “A little joke. It is the name of the starship.”

“Ah,” I said. “Merelcas, isn’t it? What does that mean?”

“ ‘Vengeful Beast of Mass Destruction,’ ” said Hollus.

I swallowed hard. I guess some part of me had been waiting for one of those “It’s a cookbook!” moments. But then Hollus’s eyestalks rippled with laughed. “Sorry,” she said again. “I could not resist. It means, ‘Stellar Voyager,’ or words to that effect.”

“Kind of bland,” I said, hoping I wasn’t giving offense.

Hollus’s eyestalks moved to their maximum separation. “It was decided by a committee.”

I smiled. Just like the name for our Discovery Gallery back at the ROM. I looked again at the starship. While my attention had been diverted, an opening had appeared in its side; I have no idea whether it had irised open or some panel had slid away. The opening was bathed in yellow-white light, and I could see three other black wedge-shaped landers positioned inside.

Our shuttle continued to grow closer.

“Where are the stars?” I asked.

Hollus looked at me.

“I expected to see stars in space.”

“Oh,” she said. “The glare from Sol and Earth washes them out.” She sang a few words in her own language, and stars appeared on the wallscreen. “The computer has now increased each star’s apparent brightness enough so that it is visible.” She pointed with her left arm. “See that zigzag there? That is Cassiopeia. Just below the central star in the pattern are Mu and Eta Cassiopeae, two of the places I visited before coming here.” The indicated stars suddenly had computer-generated circles around them. “And see that smudge below them?” Another circle obligingly appeared. “That is the Andromeda galaxy.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

Soon, though, the Mercelcas filled the entire field of view. Everything was apparently automatic; except for the occasional sung command, Hollus had done nothing since we entered the shuttle.

There was a clanging sound, conducted through the shuttle’s hull, as we connected with a docking adapter on the far wall of the open bay. Hollus kicked off the bulkhead with her six feet and sailed gently toward the door. I tried to follow, but I realized I’d drifted too far from the wall; I couldn’t reach out to kick or push off anything.

Hollus recognized my predicament, and her eyestalks moved with laughter again. She maneuvered her way back and reached out a hand to me. I took it. It was indeed the flesh-and-blood Hollus; there was no static tingle. She pushed off the bulkhead again with three of her feet, and we both sailed toward the door, which dutifully opened as we approached it.

Waiting for us were three more Forhilnors and two Wreeds. The Forhilnors would be easy to tell apart — each one had a cloth wrapped around its torso of a different color — but the Wreeds looked awfully similar to each other.

I spent three days exploring the ship. The lighting was all indirect; you couldn’t see the fixtures. The walls, and much of the equipment, were cyan. I assumed that to Wreeds and Forhilnors, this color, not too far removed from that of the sky, was considered to be neutral; they used it everywhere humans used beige. I visited the Wreed habitat once, but it had a moldy smell I found unpleasant; I spent most of my time in the common-area module. It contained two concentric centrifuges that spun to simulate gravity; the outer one matched the conditions on Beta Hydri III, and the inner one simulated Delta Pavonis II.

All four of us passengers from Earth — me; Qaiser, the schizophrenic woman; Zhu, the ancient Chinese rice farmer; and Huhn, the silverback gorilla — enjoyed watching the fabulous spectacle of the Earth, a glorious sphere of polished sodalite, receding behind us as the Merelcas began its voyage — although Huhn, of course, didn’t really understand what he was seeing.

It was less than a day later before we passed the orbit of the moon. My fellow passengers and I were now farther into space than anyone from our planet had ever gone before — and yet we’d only covered less than one ten-billionth of the total distance we were going to traverse.

I tried repeatedly to have conversations with Zhu; he was initially quite wary of me — he later told me I was the first Westerner he’d ever met — but the fact that I spoke Mandarin eventually won him over. Still, I suppose I revealed my ignorance more than a few times in our chats. It was easy for me to understand why I, a scientist, might want to go off to the vicinity of Betelgeuse; it was harder for me to understand why an old peasant farmer would wish to do the same. And Zhu was indeed old — he himself wasn’t sure what year he’d been born, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been prior to the end of the nineteenth century.

“I am going,” said Zhu, “in search of Enlightenment.” His voice was slow, whispery. “I seek prajna, pure and unqualified knowledge.” He regarded me through rheumy eyes. “Dandart” — that was the Forhilnor who had bonded with him — “says the universe has undergone a series of births and deaths. So, of course does the individual, until Enlightenment is achieved.”

“So it is religion that brings you here?” I asked.

“It is everything,” said Zhu, simply.

I smiled. “Let’s hope the trip is worth it.”

“I am certain it will be,” said Zhu, with a peaceful look on his face.

“You’re sure this is safe?” I said to Hollus, as we floated down to the room where they would put me in cryogenic freeze.

Her eyestalks rippled. “You are flying through space at what you would refer to as breakneck speed, heading toward a creature who has almost inconceivable strength — and you worry about whether the hibernation process is safe?”

I laughed. “Well, when you put it that way—”

“It is safe; do not worry.”

“Don’t forget to wake me when we reach Betelgeuse.”

Hollus could be perfectly deadpan when she felt like it. “I will write myself a little note.”

Susan Jericho, now sixty-four, sat in the den in the house on Ellerslie. It had been almost ten years since Tom had left. Of course, if he’d stayed on Earth, he’d have been dead for almost a decade. But instead he was presumably still alive, frozen, suspended, traveling aboard an alien starship, not to be revived for 430 years.

Susan understood all this. But the scale of it gave her a headache — and today was a day for celebrations, not pain. Today was Richard Blaine Jericho’s sixteenth birthday.

Susan had given him what he’d wanted most — the promise to pay for driving lessons, and, after he’d received his license, the even bigger promise to buy him a car. There had been a lot of insurance; the cost of the car was a minor concern. Great Canadian Life had tried briefly to renege on paying out; Tom Jericho wasn’t really dead, they’d said. But when the media got hold of the story, GCL had taken such a beating that the president of the company had publicly apologized and had personally hand-delivered a half-million-dollar check to Susan and her son.

A birthday was always special, but Susan and Dick — who would have thought that Ricky would grow up wanting to be called that? — would also celebrate again in a month. Dick’s birthday had never quite had the proper resonance for Susan, since she hadn’t been present when he’d been born. But a month from now, in July, would be the sixteenth anniversary of Dick’s adoption, and that was a memory Susan cherished.

When Dick got home from school — he was just finishing grade ten at Northview Heights — Susan had two more presents for him. First was a copy of his father’s journal about the time he’d spent with Hollus. And second was a copy of the tape Tom had made for his son; she’d had it converted from VHS to DVD.

“Wow,” said Dick. He was tall and muscular, and Susan was enormously proud of him. “I never knew Dad made a video.”

“He asked me to wait ten years before giving it to you,” Susan said. She shrugged a little. “I think he wanted you to be old enough to understand it.”

Dick lifted the jewel case, weighing it in his hand, as if he could thus divine its secrets. He was clearly anxious to see it. “Can we watch it now?” he said.

Susan smiled. “Sure.”

They went into the living room, and Dick slipped the disk into the player.

And the two of them sat on the couch and watched Tom’s gaunt, disease-ravaged form come to life again.

Dick had seen a few pictures of Tom from that time — they were in a scrapbook Susan had kept of the press coverage of Hollus’s visit to Earth and Tom’s subsequent departure. But he’d never seen what the cancer had done to his father in quite this detail. Susan watch him recoil a bit as the images began.

But soon all that was on Dick’s face was attention, rapt attention, as he hung on every word.

At the end, they both wiped tears from their eyes, tears for the man they would always love.