Robert Sawyer: Calculating God

“You’re an explorer?”

The eyestalks moved closer to each other, then held their position there. “Not exactly,” said Hollus.

“Then what? You’re not — you’re not an invader are you?”

The eyestalks rippled in an S-shaped motion. Laughter? “No.” And the two arms spread wide. “Forgive me, but you possess little my associates or I might desire.” Hollus paused, as if thinking. Then he made a twirling gesture with one of his hands, as though motioning for me to turn around. “Of course, if you want, I could give you an anal probe . . .”

There were gasps from the small crowd that had assembled in the lobby. I tried to raise my nonexistent eyebrows.

Hollus’s eyestalks did their S-ripple again. “Sorry — just kidding. You humans do have some crazy mythology about extraterrestrial visitations. Honestly, I will not hurt you — or your cattle, for that matter.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Um, you said you weren’t exactly an explorer.”

“No.”

“And you’re not an invader.”

“Nope.”

“Then what are you? A tourist?”

“Hardly. I am a scientist.”

“And you want to see me?” I asked.

“You are a paleontologist?”

I nodded, then, realizing the being might not understand a nod, I said, “Yes. A dinosaurian paleontologist, to be precise; theropods are my specialty.”

“Then, yes, I want to see you.”

“Why?”

“Is there someplace private where we can speak?” asked Hollus, his eyestalks swiveling to take in all those who had gathered around us.

“Umm, yes,” I said. “Of course.” I was stunned by it all as I led him back into the museum. An alien — an actual, honest-to-God alien. It was amazing, utterly amazing.

We passed the paired stairwells, each wrapped around a giant totem pole, the Nisga’a on the right rising eighty feet — sorry, twenty-five meters — all the way from the basement to the skylights atop the third floor, and the shorter Haida on the left starting on this floor. We then went through the Currelly Gallery, with its simplistic orientation displays, all sizzle and no steak. This was a weekday in April; the museum wasn’t crowded, and fortunately we didn’t pass any student groups on our way back to the Curatorial Centre. Still, visitors and security officers turned to stare, and some uttered various sounds as Hollus and I passed.

The Royal Ontario Museum opened almost ninety years ago. It is Canada’s largest museum and one of only a handful of major multidisciplinary museums in the world. As the limestone carvings flanking the entrance Hollus had come through a few minutes before proclaim, its job is to preserve “the record of Nature through countless ages” and “the arts of Man through all the years.” The ROM has galleries devoted to paleontology, ornithology, mammalogy, herpetology, textiles, Egyptology, Greco-Roman archaeology, Chinese artifacts, Byzantine art, and more. The building had long been H-shaped, but the two courtyards had been filled in during 1982, with six stories of new galleries in the northern one, and the nine-story Curatorial Centre in the southern. Parts of walls that used to be outside are now indoors, and the ornate Victorian-style stone of the original building abuts the simple yellow stone of the more recent additions; it could have turned out a mess, but it’s actually quite beautiful.

My hands were shaking with excitement as we reached the elevators and headed up to the paleobiology department; the ROM used to have separate invertebrate and vertebrate paleontology departments, but Mike Harris’s cutbacks had forced us to consolidate. Dinosaurs brought more visitors to the ROM than did trilobites, so Jonesy, the senior invertebrate curator, now worked under me.

Fortunately, no one was in the corridor when we came out of the elevator. I hustled Hollus into my office, closed the door, and sat down behind my desk — although I was no longer frightened, I was still none too steady on my feet.

Hollus spotted the Troodon skull on my desktop. He moved closer and gently picked it up with one of his hands, bringing it to his eyestalks. They stopped weaving back and forth, and locked steadily on the object. While he examined the skull, I took another good look at him.

His torso was no bigger around than the circle I could make with my arms. As I noted earlier, the torso was covered by a long strip of blue cloth. But his hide was visible on the six legs and two arms. It looked a bit like bubble wrap, although the individual domes were of varying sizes. But they did seem to be air filled, meaning they were likely a source of insulation. That implied Hollus was endothermic; terrestrial mammals and birds use hairs or feathers to trap air next to their skin for insulation, but they could also release that air for cooling by having their hair stand on end or by ruffling their feathers. I wondered how bubble-wrap skin could be used to effect cooling; maybe the bubbles could deflate.

“A” “fascinating” “skull,” said Hollus, now alternating whole words between his mouths. “How” “old” “is” “it?”

“About seventy million years,” I said.

“Precisely” “the” “sort” “of” “thing” “I” “have” “come” “to” “see.”

“You said you’re a scientist. You are a paleontologist, like me?”

“Only in part,” said the alien. “My original field was cosmology, but in recent years my studies have moved on to larger matters.” He paused for a moment. “As you have probably gathered by this point, my colleagues and I have observed your Earth for some time — enough to absorb your principal languages and to make a study of your various cultures from your television and radio. It has been a frustrating process. I know more about your popular music and food-preparation technology than I ever cared to — although I am intrigued by the Popeil Automatic Pasta Maker. I have also seen enough sporting events to last me a lifetime. But information on scientific matters has been very hard to find; you devote little bandwidth to detailed discussions in these areas. I feel as though I know a disproportionate amount about some specific topics and nothing at all about others.” He paused. “There is information we simply cannot acquire on our own by listening in to your media or through our own secret visits to your planet’s surface. This is particularly true about scarce items, such as fossils.”

I was getting a bit of a headache as his voice bounced from mouth to mouth. “So you want to look at our specimens here at the ROM?”

“Exactly,” said the alien. “It was easy for us to study your contemporary flora and fauna without revealing ourselves to humanity, but, as you know, well-preserved fossils are quite rare. The best way to satisfy our curiosity about the evolution of life on this world seemed to be by asking to see an existing collection of fossils. No need to reinvent the lever, so to speak.”

I was still flabbergasted by this whole thing, but there seemed no reason to be uncooperative. “You’re welcome to look at our specimens, of course; visiting scholars come here all the time. Is there any particular area you’re interested in?”

“Yes,” said the alien. “I am intrigued by mass extinctions as turning points in the evolution of life. What can you tell me about such things?”

I shrugged a little; that was a big topic. “There’ve been five mass extinctions in Earth’s history that we know of. The first was at the end of the Ordovician, maybe 440 million years ago. The second was in the late Devonian, something like 365 million years ago. The third, and by far the largest, was at the end of the Permian, 225 million years ago.”

Hollus moved his eyestalks so that his two eyes briefly touched, the crystalline coatings making a soft clicking sound as they did so. “Say” “more” “about” “that” “one.”