Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

“Do you say grace?” asked Hollus.

The question startled me. “Not normally.”

“I have seen it on television.”

“Some families do it,” I said. Those that have things to be thankful for.

Hollus used one of his corkscrews to stab some lettuce, and he conveyed it to the orifice on top of his circular body. I’d watched him make the motions of eating before, but had never seen him actually do it. It was a noisy process; his dentition made a snapping sound as it worked. I suppose only his speaking orifices were miked when he used his avatar; I presumed that was why I’d never heard the sound before.

“Is the salad okay?” I asked him.

Hollus continued to transfer it into his eating orifice while he spoke; I guessed that Forhilnors never choked to death while dining. “It is fine, thank you,” he said.

Ricky spoke up. “Why do you talk like that?” he asked. My son imitated Hollus by speaking in turns out of the left and right sides of his mouth. “It” “is” “fine” “thank” “you.”

“Ricky!” said Susan, embarrassed that our son had forgotten his manners.

But Hollus didn’t seem to mind the question. “One thing that humans and my people share is a divided brain,” he said. “You have a left and right hemisphere, and so do we. We hold that consciousness is the result of the interplay of the two hemispheres; I believe humans have some similar theories. In cases where the hemispheres have been severed due to injury, so that they function independently, whole sentences come out of a single speaking orifice, but much less complex thoughts are expressed.”

“Oh,” said Ricky, going back to his salad.

“That’s fascinating,” I said. Coordinating speech between partially autonomous brain halves must be difficult; maybe that was why Hollus was apparently incapable of using contractions. “I wonder if we had two mouths, whether humans would alternate words or syllables between them as well.”

“You seem to rely less on left-right integration than we Forhilnors do,” Hollus said. “I understand that in cases of a severed corpus callosum, humans can still walk.”

“I think that’s right, yes.”

“We cannot,” Hollus said. “Each half of the brain controls three legs, on the corresponding side of the body. All our legs have to work together, or we topple over, and—”

“My daddy is going to die,” said Ricky, looking down at his salad plate.

My heart jumped. Susan looked shocked.

Hollus put down his eating utensils. “Yes, he told me. I am very sorry about that.”

“Can you help him?” asked Ricky, looking now at the alien.

“I am sorry,” said Hollus. “There is nothing I can do.”

“But you’re from space and stuff,” said Ricky.

Hollus’s eyestalks stopped moving. “Yes, I am.”

“So you should know things.”

“I know some things,” he said. “But I do not know how to cure cancer. My own mother died from it.”

Ricky regarded the alien with great interest. He looked like he wanted to offer a word of comfort to the alien, but he clearly had no idea what to say.

Susan stood up and brought the lamb chops and mint jelly in from the kitchen.

We ate in silence.

I realized that an opportunity had presented itself that wasn’t likely to be repeated.

Hollus was here in the flesh.

After dinner, I asked him down to the den. He had some trouble negotiating the half-flight of stairs, but he managed.

I went to a two-drawer filing cabinet and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “It’s normal for people to write a document called a will to indicate how one’s personal effects should be distributed after death,” I said. “Naturally, I’m leaving almost everything to Susan and Ricky, although I’m also making some bequests to charities: the Canadian Cancer Society, the ROM, a couple of others. There are also a few things going to my brother, his children, and one or two other relatives.” I paused. “I — I’ve been thinking of amending my will to leave something to you, Hollus, but well, it seemed pointless. I mean, you won’t likely be around after I’m gone, and, well, usually you’re not really here, anyway. But tonight . . .”

“Tonight,” agreed Hollus, “it is the real me.”

I held out the sheaf of papers. “It’s probably simplest if I just give you this now. It’s the typescript for my book Canadian Dinosaurs. These days, people write books on computers, but that one was banged out on a manual typewriter. It doesn’t have any real value, and the information is now very much out of date, but it’s my little contribution to the popular literature about dinosaurs, and, well, I’d like you to have it — one paleontologist to another.” I shrugged a little. “Something to remember me by.”

The alien took the papers. His eyestalks weaved in and out. “Your family will not want this?”

“They have copies of the finished book.”

He unwrapped a portion of the cloth around his torso, revealing a large plastic carrying pouch. The manuscript pages fit in with room to spare. “Thank you,” he said.

There was silence between us. At last, I said, “No, Hollus — thank you. For everything.” And I reached out and touched the alien’s arm.

I sat in our living room, late that night, after Hollus had returned to his starship. I’d taken two pain pills, and I was letting them settle before I went to bed — the nausea sometimes made it hard to keep the pills down.

Maybe, I thought, the Forhilnor was right. Maybe there was no smoking gun that I would accept. He said it was all there, right in front of my eyes.

There are none so blind as those who will not see;besides the Twenty-ninth Scroll, that’s one of my favorite bits of religious writing.

But I wasn’t blind, dammit. I had a critical eye, a skeptic’s eye, the eye of a scientist.

It stunned me that life on assorted worlds all used the same genetic code. Of course, Fred Hoyle had suggested that Earth — and presumably other planets — were seeded with bacterial life that drifted in from space; if all the worlds Hollus had visited were seeded from the same source, the genetic code would, of course, be the same.

But even if Hoyle’s theory isn’t true — and it’s really not a very satisfying theory, since it simply pushes the origin of life off to some other locale that we can’t easily examine — maybe there were good reasons why only those twenty amino acids were suitable for life.

As Hollus and I had discussed before, DNA has four letters in its alphabet: A, C, G, and T, for adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, the bases that form the rungs of its spiral ladder.

Okay — a four-letter alphabet. But how long are the words in the genetic language? Well, the purpose of that language is to specify sequences of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and, as I said, there are twenty different aminos used by life. Obviously, you can’t uniquely identify each of those twenty with words just one letter long: a four-letter alphabet only provides four different one-letter words. And you couldn’t do it with words two letters long: there are only sixteen possible two-letter words in a language that has just four characters. But if you use three-letter words, ah, then you’ve got an embarrassment of riches, a William F. Buckley-style biochem vocabulary of a whopping sixty-four words. Set aside twenty to name each amino acid, and two more for punctuation marks — one for starting transcription and another for stopping. That means only twenty-two of the sixty-four possible words are needed for DNA to do its work. If a god had designed the genetic code, he must have looked at the surplus vocabulary and wondered what to do with it.