Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

Hollus recognized my predicament, and her eyestalks moved with laughter again. She maneuvered her way back and reached out a hand to me. I took it. It was indeed the flesh-and-blood Hollus; there was no static tingle. She pushed off the bulkhead again with three of her feet, and we both sailed toward the door, which dutifully opened as we approached it.

Waiting for us were three more Forhilnors and two Wreeds. The Forhilnors would be easy to tell apart — each one had a cloth wrapped around its torso of a different color — but the Wreeds looked awfully similar to each other.

I spent three days exploring the ship. The lighting was all indirect; you couldn’t see the fixtures. The walls, and much of the equipment, were cyan. I assumed that to Wreeds and Forhilnors, this color, not too far removed from that of the sky, was considered to be neutral; they used it everywhere humans used beige. I visited the Wreed habitat once, but it had a moldy smell I found unpleasant; I spent most of my time in the common-area module. It contained two concentric centrifuges that spun to simulate gravity; the outer one matched the conditions on Beta Hydri III, and the inner one simulated Delta Pavonis II.

All four of us passengers from Earth — me; Qaiser, the schizophrenic woman; Zhu, the ancient Chinese rice farmer; and Huhn, the silverback gorilla — enjoyed watching the fabulous spectacle of the Earth, a glorious sphere of polished sodalite, receding behind us as the Merelcas began its voyage — although Huhn, of course, didn’t really understand what he was seeing.

It was less than a day later before we passed the orbit of the moon. My fellow passengers and I were now farther into space than anyone from our planet had ever gone before — and yet we’d only covered less than one ten-billionth of the total distance we were going to traverse.

I tried repeatedly to have conversations with Zhu; he was initially quite wary of me — he later told me I was the first Westerner he’d ever met — but the fact that I spoke Mandarin eventually won him over. Still, I suppose I revealed my ignorance more than a few times in our chats. It was easy for me to understand why I, a scientist, might want to go off to the vicinity of Betelgeuse; it was harder for me to understand why an old peasant farmer would wish to do the same. And Zhu was indeed old — he himself wasn’t sure what year he’d been born, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been prior to the end of the nineteenth century.

“I am going,” said Zhu, “in search of Enlightenment.” His voice was slow, whispery. “I seek prajna, pure and unqualified knowledge.” He regarded me through rheumy eyes. “Dandart” — that was the Forhilnor who had bonded with him — “says the universe has undergone a series of births and deaths. So, of course does the individual, until Enlightenment is achieved.”

“So it is religion that brings you here?” I asked.

“It is everything,” said Zhu, simply.

I smiled. “Let’s hope the trip is worth it.”

“I am certain it will be,” said Zhu, with a peaceful look on his face.

“You’re sure this is safe?” I said to Hollus, as we floated down to the room where they would put me in cryogenic freeze.

Her eyestalks rippled. “You are flying through space at what you would refer to as breakneck speed, heading toward a creature who has almost inconceivable strength — and you worry about whether the hibernation process is safe?”

I laughed. “Well, when you put it that way—”

“It is safe; do not worry.”

“Don’t forget to wake me when we reach Betelgeuse.”

Hollus could be perfectly deadpan when she felt like it. “I will write myself a little note.”

Susan Jericho, now sixty-four, sat in the den in the house on Ellerslie. It had been almost ten years since Tom had left. Of course, if he’d stayed on Earth, he’d have been dead for almost a decade. But instead he was presumably still alive, frozen, suspended, traveling aboard an alien starship, not to be revived for 430 years.

Susan understood all this. But the scale of it gave her a headache — and today was a day for celebrations, not pain. Today was Richard Blaine Jericho’s sixteenth birthday.

Susan had given him what he’d wanted most — the promise to pay for driving lessons, and, after he’d received his license, the even bigger promise to buy him a car. There had been a lot of insurance; the cost of the car was a minor concern. Great Canadian Life had tried briefly to renege on paying out; Tom Jericho wasn’t really dead, they’d said. But when the media got hold of the story, GCL had taken such a beating that the president of the company had publicly apologized and had personally hand-delivered a half-million-dollar check to Susan and her son.

A birthday was always special, but Susan and Dick — who would have thought that Ricky would grow up wanting to be called that? — would also celebrate again in a month. Dick’s birthday had never quite had the proper resonance for Susan, since she hadn’t been present when he’d been born. But a month from now, in July, would be the sixteenth anniversary of Dick’s adoption, and that was a memory Susan cherished.

When Dick got home from school — he was just finishing grade ten at Northview Heights — Susan had two more presents for him. First was a copy of his father’s journal about the time he’d spent with Hollus. And second was a copy of the tape Tom had made for his son; she’d had it converted from VHS to DVD.

“Wow,” said Dick. He was tall and muscular, and Susan was enormously proud of him. “I never knew Dad made a video.”

“He asked me to wait ten years before giving it to you,” Susan said. She shrugged a little. “I think he wanted you to be old enough to understand it.”

Dick lifted the jewel case, weighing it in his hand, as if he could thus divine its secrets. He was clearly anxious to see it. “Can we watch it now?” he said.

Susan smiled. “Sure.”

They went into the living room, and Dick slipped the disk into the player.

And the two of them sat on the couch and watched Tom’s gaunt, disease-ravaged form come to life again.

Dick had seen a few pictures of Tom from that time — they were in a scrapbook Susan had kept of the press coverage of Hollus’s visit to Earth and Tom’s subsequent departure. But he’d never seen what the cancer had done to his father in quite this detail. Susan watch him recoil a bit as the images began.

But soon all that was on Dick’s face was attention, rapt attention, as he hung on every word.

At the end, they both wiped tears from their eyes, tears for the man they would always love.

Absolute darkness.

And heat, licking at me from all sides.

Was it hell? Was —

But no. No, of course not. I had a splitting headache, but my mind was beginning to focus.

A loud click, and then —

And then the lid of the cryofreeze unit sliding aside. The oblong coffin, made for a Wreed, was set flush into the floor, and Hollus was straddling it, her six feet in stirrups to keep her from floating away, her front legs tipped, and her eyestalks drooping down to look at me.

“Time” “to” “get” “up,” “my” “friend,” she said

I knew what you were supposed to say in a situation like this; I’d seen Khan Noonien Singh do it. “How long?” I asked.

“More than four centuries,” replied Hollus. “It is now the Earth year 2432.”

Just like that,I thought. More than four hundred years gone, passing by without me being aware. Just like that.

They were wise to have installed the cryochambers outside of the centrifuges; I doubt I could have stood up under my own weight yet. Hollus reached down with her right hand, and I reached up with my left to grab it, the simple gold band on my ring finger looking unchanged by the freezing and the passing of time. Hollus helped haul me up out of the black ceramic coffin; she then slipped her feet out of the stirrups and we floated freely.