Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

Hollus was quiet for a long time. Back on Beta Hydri III, he had been an academic of some sort himself; he doubtless understood the prestige his presence brought to the ROM. But perhaps I’d offended him enormously, making him a pawn in a political game. He could surely see ahead several moves, surely knew that this might become ugly. I’d gone too far; I knew that.

And yet —

And yet, who could blame me? Christine was going to win regardless. All too soon, she would win.

Hollus pointed at my desk set. “You have used that device before to communicate with others in this building,” he said.

“My phone? Yes.”

“Can you connect to Dr. Dorati?”

“Umm, yes, but—”

“Do so.”

I hesitated for a moment, then lifted the handset and tapped out Christine’s three-digit extension.

“Dorati,” said Christine’s voice.

I tried to hand Hollus the handset. “I cannot use that,” he said. Of course he couldn’t; he had two separate mouths. I touched the speaker-phone key and nodded for him to go ahead.

“Dr. Dorati, this is Hollus deten stak Jaton.” It was the first time I’d heard the Forhilnor’s full name. “I am grateful for your hospitality in letting me do research here, but I am contacting you to inform you that Thomas Jericho is an integral part of my work, and if he leaves this museum, I will follow him wherever he goes.”

There was a stony silence for several seconds. “I see,” said Christine’s voice.

“Terminate the connection,” Hollus said to me. I clicked the phone off.

My heart fluttered; I had no idea if what Hollus had just done was the right thing. But I was deeply moved by his support. “Thank you,” I said.

The Forhilnor flexed both his upper and lower knees. “Dr. Dorati was all on the left.”

“All on the left?”

“Sorry. I mean what she did was wrong, in my view. Intervening was the least I could do.”

“I thought it was wrong, too,” I said. “But — well, I thought maybe my telling her you would go if I went was wrong, also.”

I was silent for a time, and at last Hollus replied. “So much of what is right and wrong is difficult to determine,” he said. “I probably would have performed similarly, had I been in your place.” He bobbed. “I do sometimes wish I had a Wreed’s insight into these matters.”

“You’d mentioned that before,” I said. “Why do Wreeds have an easier time than we do with questions of morality?”

Hollus shifted slightly from foot to foot. “The Wreeds are freed from the burden of ratiocination — of the kind of logic you and I undertake. Although math may confound them, thinking about philosophical questions, about the meaning of life, about ethics and morality, confounds us. We have an intuitive sense of right and wrong, but every theory of morality we come up with fails. You showed me those Star Trek movies . . .”

I had indeed; he’d been intrigued enough by the episodes we’d looked at to want to watch the first three classic Trek films. “Yes,” I said.

“There was one in which the impossible hybrid died.”

“The Wrath of Khan,”I said.

“Yes. In it, much was made of the notion that ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.’ We Forhilnors have similar sentiments. It is an attempt to apply mathematics — something we are good at — to ethics, something we are not good at. But such attempts always fail us. In the film in which the hybrid was reborn—”

“The Search for Spock,”I said.

His eyeballs clicked together. “In that one, we learn that the first formulation was flawed, and in fact ‘the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.’ It seemed intuitively right that the fellow with the fake hair and the others should have been willing to sacrifice their lives to save one unrelated comrade, even though it defied mathematical logic. And yet this happens all the time: many human societies and all Forhilnor ones are democratic; they are committed to the principle that each individual has identical worth. Indeed, I have seen the great phrase devised by your neighbors to the south: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ And yet the people who wrote those words were slave owners, oblivious to the irony — to use a word you have taught me of that fact.”

“True,” I said.

“Many human and Forhilnor scientists have tried to reduce altruism to genetic imperatives, suggesting that the degree of sacrifice we are willing to make for another is directly proportional to how much genetic material we share. You or I, say these scientists, would not necessarily let ourselves die in order to save one sibling or child, but we should consider it an even trade if our death would save two siblings or children, since between them they have the same quantity of our genes as we ourselves possess. And we would surely sacrifice ourselves to save three siblings or children, since that quantity represents a greater concentration of our genetic material than our own bodies contain.”

“I would die to save Ricky,” I said.

He gestured at the picture on my desk, the frame’s cardboard back once again facing him. “And yet, if I understand what you have said, Ricky is not your natural son.”

“That’s right. His birth parents didn’t want him.”

“Which confounds on two levels: that parents could choose to reject their healthy offspring and that nonparents could choose to adopt another’s child. And of course there are many good people who, in defiance of genetic logic, have chosen not to have children. There simply is no formula that successfully describes the range of Forhilnor or human choices in the areas of altruism and sacrifice; you cannot reduce these issues to mathematics.”

I thought about that; certainly, Hollus intervening on my behalf with Christine was altruistic, but it obviously had nothing whatsoever to do with favoring a genetic relative. “I guess,” I said.

“But,” said Hollus, “our friends the Wreeds, because they never developed traditional math, never find themselves vexed by such matters.”

“Well, they certainly vex me,” I said. “Over the years, I’ve often lain in bed, trying to sort out moral quandaries.” The old dyslexic agnostic insomniac joke came to mind: lying awake at night, wondering if there is a dog. “I mean, where does morality come from? We know it’s wrong to steal, and—” I paused. “You do know that, right? I mean, Forhilnors have a taboo against theft?”

“Yes, although it is not innate; Forhilnor children will take anything they can reach.”

“It’s the same with human kids. But we grow up to realize that theft is wrong, and yet . . . and yet why do we feel it’s wrong? If it increases reproductive success, shouldn’t evolution have favored it? For that matter, we think infidelity is wrong, but I could obviously increase my reproductive success by impregnating multiple females. If theft is advantageous for everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn’t the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had — being sorry you got caught?”

Hollus’s eyestalks weaved in and out more quickly than usual. “I have no answer,” he said. “We struggle to find solutions to moral questions, but they always defeat us. Preeminent thinkers, both human and Forhilnor, have devoted themselves to asking what is the meaning of life and how do we know when something is morally wrong. But despite centuries of effort, no progress has been made. The questions are as beyond us as ‘What is two plus two?’ is beyond a Wreed.”