Robert Sawyer: Calculating God

I checked my watch again; it was just coming up to six. We had a family rule: although the living-room TV was easily visible from the dining room, it was always off during meals. But tonight I made an exception: I got up from my place at the table, put on the CityPulse News at Six, and let my wife and son watch, mouths agape, as the home videos of the alien ship landing and the footage the videographer had shot of me and Hollus played.

“My God,” Susan kept saying, her eyes wide. “My God.”

“That is so cool,” said Ricky, looking at the wild, hand-held shots the videographer had taken in the Rotunda.

I smiled at my son. He was right, of course. This was way cool, as cool as it gets.

Earth’s various leaders were not pleased, but the aliens seemed to have no interest in visiting the United Nations, the White House, the European parliament, the Kremlin, India’s parliament, the Knesset, or the Vatican — all of which had immediately extended invitations. Still, by early the next day, there were eight other extraterrestrials — or their holographic avatars — on Earth, all of them Forhilnors.

One was visiting a psychiatric hospital in West Virginia; he was apparently fascinated by unusual human behavior, especially severe schizophrenia. (Apparently, the alien had first appeared at a similar institution in Louisville, Kentucky, but had been dissatisfied with the level of cooperation he was receiving, and so had done precisely what Hollus had threatened to do at the ROM — he left and went to a more accommodating place.)

Another alien was in Burundi, living with a group of mountain gorillas, who seemed to have accepted him quite readily.

A third had attached himself to a public defender in San Francisco and was seen sitting in on arraignments.

A fourth was in China, apparently spending time with a rice farmer in a remote village.

A fifth was in Egypt, joining an archeological dig near Abu Simbel.

A sixth was in northern Pakistan, examining flowers and trees.

Another was seen variously walking around the sites of the old death camps in Germany, scuttling through Tiananmen Square, and visiting the ruins in Kosovo.

And, thankfully, one more had made himself available in Brussels to speak with media from all over the world. He seemed to be fluent in English, French, Japanese, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese), Hindi, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Hebrew, and more (and managed to mimic British, Scottish, Brooklyn, Texan, Jamaican, and other accents, depending on whom he was speaking to).

Even so, no end of people wanted to speak with me. Susan and I had an unlisted phone number. We’d gotten it a few years ago after some fanatics started harassing us following a public debate I’d had with Duane Gish of the Institute for Creation Research. Still, we had to unplug our phone; it had started ringing as soon as the item appeared on the news. But to my surprise and delight I managed to get a good night’s sleep.

The next day, there was a huge crowd outside the museum when I emerged from the subway around 9:15 A.M.; the museum wouldn’t be open to the public for another forty-five minutes, but these people didn’t want to see the exhibits. They were carrying signs that read “Welcome to Earth!” and “Take Us With You!” and “Alien Power!”

One of the throng spotted me, shouted and pointed, and people started moving my way. Fortunately, it was only a short distance from the staircase leading up from the subway to the ROM’s staff entrance, and I made it inside before I could be accosted.

I hurried up to my office and placed the golf-ball-sized holoform projector on the center of my desk. About five minutes later, it bleeped twice, and Hollus — or the holographic projection of him, at any rate — appeared in front of me. He had a different cloth wrapped around his torso today: this one was a salmon color with black hexagons on it, and it was fastened not with a jeweled disk but a silver pin.

“I’m glad to see you again,” I said. I’d been afraid, despite what he’d said yesterday, that he’d never come back.

“If” “it” “is” “per” “mis” “able,” said Hollus, “I” “will” “appear” “daily” “about” “this” “time.”

“That would be absolutely terrific,” I said.

“Establishing that the dates for the five mass extinctions coincided on all three inhabited worlds is only the beginning of my work, of course,” said Hollus.

I thought about that, then nodded. Even if one accepted Hollus’s God hypothesis, all that having simultaneous disasters on multiple worlds proved was that his God had thrown a series of hissy fits.

The Forhilnor continued. “I want to study the minute details of the evolutionary developments related to the mass extinctions. It appears superficially that each extinction was designed to nudge the remaining lifeforms in specific directions, but I wish to confirm that.”

“Well, then, we should start by examining fossils from just before and just after each of the extinction events,” I said.

“Precisely,” said Hollus, his eyestalks weaving eagerly.

“Come with me,” I said.

“You have to take the projector with you, if I am to follow,” said Hollus.

I nodded, still getting used to this idea of telepresence, and picked up the small object.

“It will work fine if you place it in a pocket,” he said.

I did so, and then led him down to the paleobiology department’s giant collections room, in the basement of the Curatorial Centre; we didn’t have to go out into any of the public areas of the museum to get there.

The collections room was full of metal cabinets and open shelving holding prepared fossils as well as countless plaster field jackets, some still unopened half a century after they’d been brought to the museum. I started by pulling out a drawer containing skulls of Ordovician jawless fishes. Hollus looked them over, handling them gently. The force fields projected by the holoform unit seemed to define a solidness that precisely matched the alien’s apparent physical form. We bumped into each other a few times as we negotiated our way down the narrow aisles in the collections room, and my hands touched his several times as I passed him fossils. I felt a static tingling whenever his projected form contacted my skin, the only indication that he wasn’t really there.

As he examined the strange, solid skulls, I happened to comment that they looked rather alien. Hollus seemed surprised by the remark. “I” “am” “cur” “i” “ous,” he said, “about” “your” “concepts” “of” “alien” “life.”

“I thought you knew all about that,” I replied, smiling. “Anal probes and so on.”

“We have been watching your TV broadcasts for about a year now. But I suspect you have more interesting material than what I have seen.”

“What have you seen?”

“A show about an academic and his family who are extraterrestrials.”

It took me a moment to recognize it. “Ah,” I said. “That’s 3rd Rock from the Sun. It’s a comedy.”

“That is a matter of opinion,” said Hollus. “I have also seen the program about the two federal agents who hunt aliens.”

“The X-Files,”I said.

He clicked his eyes together in agreement. “I found it frustrating. They kept talking about aliens, but you almost never saw any. More instructive was a graphic-arts production about juvenile humans.”

“I need another clue,” I said.

“One of them is named Cartman,” said Hollus.

I laughed. “South Park. I’m surprised you didn’t pack up and go home after that. But, sure, I can show you some better samples.” I looked around the collections room. Off at the other end, going through our banks of Pliocene microfossils, I could see a grad student. “Abdus!” I called.