Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

Susan Kowalski and I had met at the University of Toronto’s Hart House in 1966; we’d both been in the Drama Club. I wasn’t an actor — but I had a fascination with theatrical lighting; I guess that’s one of the reasons I like museology. Susan had performed in plays, although I suppose, in retrospect, that she’d never been particularly skilled at it. I’d always thought she was fabulous, but the best notices she ever got in the Varsity were that she was “competent” as Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, and that she “adequately essayed” Jocasta in Oedipus Rex. Anyway, we’d dated for a time, but then I headed off to the States for grad school — she’d understood that I had to go away to continue my studies, that my dream depended on it.

I’d thought of her fondly over the years, but never imagined I’d see her again. But I ended up back in Toronto, and, with my mind always on the past and never enough on the future, I finally decided when the big four-o rolled around that I needed some financial advice if I was ever going to be able to retire, and who should the accountant I ended up seeing be but Susan. Her last name had become DeSantis, legacy of a brief, failed marriage a decade and a half ago. We rekindled the old relationship and tied the knot a year later. And although she was forty-one then, and there were risks, we decided to have a baby. We tried for five years. Susan got pregnant once in that time, but she miscarried.

And so, at last, we decided to adopt. But that took a couple of years, too. Still, finally, we did have a son. Richard Blaine Jericho was now six years old.

He would not be out of the house by the time his father died.

He would not even be out of grade school.

Susan sat him down on the couch, and I knelt down by him.

“Hey, sport,” I said. I took his little hand.

“Daddy.” He squirmed a bit and didn’t meet my eyes. Maybe he thought he was in trouble.

I was quiet for a few moments. I’d given a lot of thought to what I was going to say, but now the words I’d planned seemed completely inadequate.

“How you feelin’, sport?” I asked.

“ ’Kay.”

I glanced at Susan. “Well,” I said, “Daddy isn’t feeling so good.”

Ricky looked at me.

“In fact,” I said slowly, “Daddy’s pretty sick.” I let the words sink in.

We’d never lied to Ricky about anything. He knew he was adopted. We’d always told him that Santa Claus was just a story. And when he’d asked where babies came from, we’d told him that, too. Now, though, I wished we had perhaps taken a different route — that we hadn’t always come clean with him.

Of course, he’d know soon enough. He’d see the changes — see me lose my hair, see me lose weight, hear me get up and vomit in the middle of the night, maybe . . .

Maybe even hear me cry when I thought he wasn’t around.

“How sick?” asked Ricky.

“Very sick,” I said.

He looked at me some more. I nodded: I wasn’t kidding.

“Why?” asked Ricky.

Susan and I exchanged a glance. That was the same question I’d been asking myself. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Was it something you ate?”

I shook my head.

“Were you bad?”

It was an unexpected question. I thought about it for a few moments. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

We were all quiet for a time. Finally, Ricky spoke softly. “You’re not going to die, are you, Daddy?”

I’d meant to tell him the truth, unvarnished. I’d meant to level with him. But, when the moment came, I had to give him more hope than Dr. Kohl had given me.

“Maybe,” I said. Just maybe.

“But . . .” Ricky’s voice was small. “But I don’t want you to die.”

I squeezed his hand. “I don’t want to die, either, but . . . but it’s like when Mommy and I make you clean your room. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do.”

“I’ll be good,” he said. “I’ll always be good, if you just don’t die.”

My heart hurt. Bargaining. One of the stages.

“I really don’t have any choice in any of this,” I said. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”

He was blinking a lot; soon the tears would come.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“And I love you, too.”

“What — what will happen to Mommy and me?”

“Don’t worry, sport. You’ll still live here. You won’t have to worry about money. There’s plenty of insurance.”

Ricky looked at me, clearly not understanding.

“Don’t die, Daddy,” he said. “Please don’t die.”

I drew him close, and Susan put her arms around both of us.

As much as cancer frightened me as a victim, it fascinated me as a biologist.

Proto-oncogenes — the normal genes that have the potential to trigger cancer — exist in all mammals and birds. Indeed, every proto-oncogene identified to date is present in both mammals and birds. Now, birds evolved from dinosaurs which evolved from thecodonts which evolved from primitive diapsids which evolved from captorhinomorphs, the first true reptiles. Meanwhile, mammals evolved from therapsids which evolved from pelycosaurs which evolved from primitive synapsids which also evolved from captorhinomorphs. Since captorhinomorphs, the common ancestor, date back to the Pennsylvanian, almost 300 million years ago, the shared genes must have existed at least that long (and, indeed, we’ve found cancerous fossil bones that confirm that the big C existed at least as far back as the Jurassic).

In a way, it’s not surprising that these genes are shared: proto-oncogenes are related to controlling cell division or organ growth; I suspect we’ll eventually discover that the complete suite of them is common to all vertebrates, and, indeed, possibly to all animals.

The potential for cancer, it seems, is woven into the very fabric of life.

Hollus was intrigued by cladistics the study of how shared features imply common ancestry; it was the principal tool for evolutionary studies on his world. It seemed appropriate, therefore, to show him our hadrosaurs — a clade if ever there was one.

It was Tuesday — the ROM’s slowest day — and it was almost closing time. Hollus disappeared, and I worked my way through the museum over to the Dinosaur Gallery, carrying the holoform projector in my pocket. The gallery consists of two long halls, joined at their far ends; the entrance and the exit are side by side. I went in the exit and headed down. There was no one else present; several P.A. announcements about the imminent closing had moved the patrons out. At the far end of this hall is our hadrosaur room, painted with russet and golden horizontal stripes, representing sandstone from the Alberta badlands. The room contains three terrific wall mounts. I stood in front of the middle one, a duckbill, which the placard still called Kritosaurus even though we’d known for more than a decade that it was probably really a Gryposaurus; maybe my successor would find the time and money to update the gallery’s signage. The specimen, which had been collected by Parks during the ROM’s first field season in 1918, is lovely, with the ribs still in matrix and the stiffening tendons along the tail beautifully ossified.

Hollus wavered into existence, and I started talking about how the bodies of hadrosaurs were virtually indistinguishable from each other and that only the presence or absence of cranial crests, and the shapes of those crests, made it possible to tell the different genera apart. Just as I was working up a head of steam about this, a boy, maybe twelve years old, came into the room. He entered from the opposite side I had, coming out of the dimly lit Cretaceous-seas diorama. The boy was Caucasian but had epicanthic folds and a slack jaw, and his tongue protruded a bit from his mouth. He didn’t say anything; he just kept staring at the Forhilnor.