Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

“I will check,” said Hollus. The simulacrum stopped moving; even the torso stopped expanding and contracting. We waited about a minute, and then the giant spider came to life again, Hollus reinhabiting his avatar. “No,” he said.

“No record of a supernova 650 years ago?”

“Not in Vela.”

“Those are Earth years, of course.”

Hollus sounded offended at the suggestion that he might have screwed up. “Of course. The most recent naked-eye supernova observed by either the Forhilnors or the Wreeds was the one in the Large Magellanic Cloud about fifteen years ago. Before that, both races saw one in the constellation you call Serpens, in what would have been very early in your seventeenth century.”

Chen nodded. “Kepler’s supernova.” He looked at me. “It was visible here starting in 1604. It got to be brighter than Jupiter, but you could barely see it during the day.” He pursed his lips, thinking. “That’s fascinating. Kepler’s supernova was nowhere near Earth, or Beta Hydri, or Delta Pavonis, and yet all three worlds saw it and recorded it. Supernova 1987A, of course, wasn’t even in this galaxy, and we all recorded it. But the Vela event of circa 1320 was quite nearby. I’d have thought someone would have seen it.”

“Perhaps a dust cloud intervened?” said Hollus.

“There’s no dust cloud in the way now,” said Chen, “and it would take a cloud either awfully close to the star that blew up or awfully big to obscure the view from Earth and Beta Hydri and Delta Pavonis. Somebody should have seen this thing.”

“Quite a puzzle,” said Hollus.

Chen nodded. “Isn’t it, though?”

“I would be glad to provide you with what information my kind have gathered about supernovas,” said Hollus. “Perhaps it will shed some light on the issue.”

I wondered if Hollus was deliberately making a pun.

“That would be great,” said Chen.

“I will have some material sent down from the mothership,” said Hollus, eyestalks waving.

When I was fourteen, the museum had had a contest for children interested in dinosaurs. The winner would get all sorts of paleontology-related prizes.

If it had been a dinosaur trivia contest, or a test of common knowledge about dinosaurs, or if it had required kids to identify fossils, I would have won, I’m sure.

But it wasn’t. It was a contest to make the best dinosaur marionette.

I knew which dinosaur it had to be: Parasaurolophus, the ROM’s signature mount.

I tried building one out of Plasticine and Styrofoam and wooden dowels.

It was a disaster. The head, with its long crest, kept falling off. I never got it finished. Some fat kid won the contest; I was at the ceremony where he received his prizes, one of which was a sauropod model. He said, “Neat! Brontosaurus!” I was disgusted: even in 1960, no one who knew anything about dinosaurs called Apatosaurus that.

I did learn one valuable lesson, though.

I learned that you can’t choose the ways in which you’ll be tested.

Donald Chen and Hollus might have been fascinated by supernovae, but I was more interested in what Hollus and I had been talking about before. Once Don left, I said, “So, Hollus, you guys seem to know an awful lot about DNA.”

“I suppose that is true,” the alien said.

“What—” My voice had broken a bit; I swallowed and tried again. “What do you know about problems with DNA, about errors in its replication?”

“That is not my field, of course,” said Hollus, “but our ship’s doctor, Lablok, is reasonably expert in that area.”

“And does this Lablok . . . ” I swallowed “. . . does this Lablok know anything about, say, cancer?”

“The treatment of cancer is a specialized discipline on our world,” said Hollus. “Lablok knows something about it, of course, but—”

“Can you cure cancer?”

“We treat it with radiation and chemicals,” said Hollus. “Sometimes these are effective, but often they are not.” He sounded rather sad.

“Ah,” I said. “The same is true here on Earth.” I was quiet for a time; of course, I’d been hoping for a different answer. Oh, well. “Speaking of DNA,” I said, at last, “I — I wonder if I might have a sample of yours. If that’s not too personal, that is. I’d like to have some studies done on it.”

Hollus stretched out an arm. “Help yourself.”

I almost fell for it. “You aren’t really here. You’re just a projection.”

Hollus lowered his arm, and his eyestalks did their S-ripple. “Forgive my sense of humor. But, certainly, if you would like some DNA, you are welcome to it. I will have the shuttle come down with some samples.”

“Thanks.”

“I can tell you what you will find, though. You will find that my existence is just as unlikely as yours. The degree of complexity in an advanced lifeform simply could not have arisen by chance.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to argue with the alien, but, dammitall, he was a scientist. He should know better. I swiveled in my chair, turning to face the computer mounted on what had, when I’d started working here, been the return for a typewriter. I’ve got one of those nifty Microsoft split keyboards; the museum had to provide them to anyone who asked after the staff association started making complaints about liability for carpal-tunnel syndrome.

My computer was a Windows NT system, but I opened a DOS session on it, and typed a command at the prompt. An application began, and it drew a chessboard on the screen.

“That’s a standard human game board,” I said. “We play two games of strategy on it: chess and checkers.”

Hollus touched his eyes together. “I have heard of the former; I understand you used to consider its mastery one of humanity’s greatest intellectual achievements — until a computer was able to beat the most-skilled human. You humans do have a tendency to make the definition of intelligence quite elusive.”

“I guess,” I said. “But, anyway, it’s actually something more like checkers I want to talk about.” I touched a key. “Here’s a random deployment of playing pieces.” About a third of the sixty-four squares sprouted circular occupants. “Now, look: each occupied square has eight neighboring squares, including the diagonal corners, right?”

Hollus clinked his eyes together again.

“Now, consider three simple rules: a given square will remain unchanged — either occupied or vacant — if precisely two of the neighboring squares are occupied. And if an occupied square has three occupied neighbors, it remains occupied. In all other cases, the square becomes empty if it isn’t already, and if it is empty, it remains empty. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Now, let’s expand the board. Instead of an 8-by-8 matrix, let’s use 400 by 300; on this monitor, that lets every square be represented by a two-by-two pixel cell. We’ll show occupied squares by white cells and unoccupied ones by black cells.”

I tapped a key, and the checkerboard apparently receded into the distance while at the same time extending to the four corners of the screen. The grid of the board disappeared at this resolution, but the random pattern of lighted and unlighted cells was obvious.

“Now,” I said, “let’s apply our three rules.” I tapped the space bar, and the pattern of dots shifted. “Again,” I said, tapping the space bar, and again the pattern shifted. “And once more.” Another tap; another reconfiguring of the dots on the screen.

Hollus looked at the monitor and then at me. “So?”

“So this,” I said. I tapped another key, and the process began repeating itself automatically: apply the three rules to every piece on the board, redisplay the new configuration, apply the rules again, redisplay the revised configuration, and so on.