Calculating God (17 page)

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.

17

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.

It seems to me that such a being would have considered two possibilities. One was to leave the remaining forty-two sequences undefined, just as there are letter sequences in real languages that don’t form valid words. That way, if one of those sequences cropped up in a string of DNA, you’d know that a mistake had occurred in copying—a genetic typo, turning the valid code A-T-A into, say, the gibberish A-T-C. That would be a clear, useful signal that something had gone wrong.

The other alternative would be to live with the fact that copying errors were going to occur, but try to reduce their impact by adding synonyms to the genetic language. Instead of having one word for each amino acid, you could have three words that mean the same thing. That would use up sixty of the possible words; you could then have two words that mean start and two more that mean stop, rounding out the DNA dictionary. If you tried to group the synonyms logically, you could help guard against transcription errors: if A-G-A, A-G-C, and A-G-G all meant the same thing, and you could only clearly read the first two letters, you’d still have a good shot at guessing what the word meant even without knowing the third letter.

In fact, DNA
does
use synonyms. And if there were three synonyms to specify each amino acid, one might look at the code and say, yup, someone had carefully thought this out. But two amino acids—leucine and serine—are specified by six synonyms each, and others by four, three, two, or even just one: poor tryptophan is specified only by the word T-G-G.

Meanwhile, the code A-T-G can mean either the amino acid methionine (and there are no other genetic words for it) or, depending on context, it can be the punctuation mark for “start transcription” (which also has no other synonyms). Why on Earth—or anyplace else—would an intelligent designer make such a hodgepodge? Why require context sensitivity to determine meaning when there were enough words available to avoid having to do that?

And what about the variations in the genetic code? As I’d told Hollus, the code used by mitochondrial DNA differs slightly from that used by the DNA in the nucleus.

Well, in 1982, Lynn Margulis had suggested that mitochondria—cellular organelles responsible for energy production—had started out as separate bacterial forms, living in symbiosis with the ancestors of our cells, and that eventually these separate forms were co-opted into our cells, becoming part of them. Maybe . . . God, it was a long time since I’d done any serious biochemistry . . . but maybe the mitochondrial and nuclear genetic codes had indeed originally been identical, but, when the symbiosis began, evolution favored mutations that allowed for a few changes in the mitochondrial genetic code; with two sets of DNA existing within the same cell, maybe these few changes served as a way to distinguish the two forms, preventing accidental mingling.

I hadn’t mentioned it to Hollus, but there were also some minor differences in the genetic code employed by ciliated protozoans—if I remember correctly, three codons have different meanings for them. But . . . I was blue-skying; I knew that . . . but some said that cilia, those irreducibly complex organelles whose death had brought about my own lung cancer, had started out as discrete organisms, as well. Maybe those ciliated protozoa that had a variant genetic code were descended from some cilia who had been in symbiosis with other cells in the past, developing genetic-code variations for the same safety-net reasons mitochondria had but, unlike the cilia we still retained, had subsequently broken off the symbiosis and returned to stand-alone life.

It was a possibility, anyway.

Still, when I’d been a kid in Scarborough, we’d shared a back fence with a woman named Mrs. Lansbury. She was very religious—a “Holy Roller,” my dad would say—and was always trying to persuade my parents to let her take me to church on Sundays. I never went, of course, but I do remember her favorite expression: the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Perhaps so. But I found it hard to believe he would work in shoddy, haphazard ones.

And yet—

And yet what was it Hollus had said about Wreed language?

It, too, relies on context sensitivity and the unusual use of synonyms. Maybe at some Chomsky-esque level, I just wasn’t wired properly to see the elegance in the genetic code. Maybe T’kna and his kin found it perfectly reasonable, perfectly elegant.

Maybe.

Suddenly the cat was out of the bag.

I hadn’t said a word to anyone about the
Merelcas’s
mission being, at least in part, to look for God. And I was pretty sure the gorillas in Burundi had been mum on the topic. But all at once, everyone knew.

There was a row of newspaper boxes by the entrance to North York Centre subway station. The headline on today’s
Toronto Star
said, “Aliens Have Proof of God’s Existence.” The headline on the
Globe and Mail
proclaimed, “God a Scientific Fact, Say ETs.” The
National Post
declared, “Universe Had a Creator.” And the
Toronto Sun
proclaimed just two giant words, filling most of its front page: “God lives!”

Usually I grabbed the
Sun
for light reading on the way to work, but for in-depth coverage, nothing beats the
Mop and Pail;
I dropped coins into the gray box and took a copy. And I stood there, in the crisp April air, reading everything above the fold.

A Hindu woman in Brussels had asked Salbanda, the Forhilnor spokesperson who met periodically with the media, the simple, direct question of whether he believes in any gods.

And he’d answered—at length.

And of course, cosmologists all over the planet, including Stephen Hawking and Alan Guth, were quickly interviewed to find out if what the Forhilnor had said made sense.

Religious leaders were jockeying for position. The Vatican—with rather a history of backing the wrong horse in scientific debates—was reserving comment, saying only that the pope would address the issue soon. The Wilayat al-Faqih in Iran denounced the alien’s words. Pat Robertson was calling for more donations, to help his organization study the claims. The moderator of the United Church of Canada embraced the revelations, saying that science and faith were indeed reconcilable. A Hindu leader, whose name, I noted, was spelled two different ways in the same article, declared the alien’s statements to be perfectly compatible with Hindu belief. Meanwhile, the ROM’s own Caleb Jones pointed out, on behalf of CSICOP, that there was no need to read anything mystical or supernatural into any of the Forhilnor’s words.

When I arrived at the ROM, the usual round of UFO nuts had been joined by several different religious groups—some in robes, some holding candles, some chanting, some kneeling in prayer. There were also several police officers, making sure that staff members—including but by no means limited to myself—made it safely into the museum; once the main doors opened for the day, they’d extend the same courtesy to patrons.

Laser-printed leaflets were blowing down the sidewalk; one that caught my eye showed Hollus, or another Forhilnor, with his eyestalks exaggerated to look like a devil’s horns.

I entered the museum and made it up to my office. Hollus wavered into existence a short time later. “I have been thinking about the people who blew up the abortion clinic,” he said. “You said they were religious fundamentalists.”