That was a staggering thought. A new term in the Drake equation: f-sub-L, the fraction of members of your race who are loony.

The Hollus simulacrum moved a little closer to me. “But that is not the principal issue. I told you that my race, the Forhilnors, had made contact with one other technological race, the Wreeds, prior to meeting you; we actually first met them about sixty years ago — by going to Delta Pavonis and discovering them.”

I nodded.

“And I told you that my starship, the Merelcas, visited six other star systems, besides the Wreed home one, before arriving here. But what I did not tell you was that each of those six had, at one time, been home to an intelligent race of its own: the star you call Epsilon Indi, the star you call Tau Ceti, the star you call Mu Cassiopeae A, the star you call Eta Cassiopeae A, the star you call Sigma Draconis, and the star you call Groombridge 1618 all once had native intelligent life.”

“But they don’t anymore?”

“Correct.”

“What did you find?” I asked. “Bombed-out ruins?” My mind filled with visions of bizarre alien architecture, twisted and melted and charred by nuclear blasts.

“Never.”

“Then what?”

Hollus spread his two arms and bobbed his torso. “Abandoned cities, some immensely old — some so old, they had been deeply buried.”

“Abandoned?” I said. “You mean the inhabitants had gone somewhere else?”

The Forhilnor’s eyes touched in affirmation.

“Where?”

“That question still vexes.”

“Do you know anything else about the other races?”

“A great deal. They left many artifacts and records behind, and in some cases interred or fossilized bodies.”

“And?”

“And, at their ends, all were comparably advanced; none had built machines we could not understand. True, the variety of body plans was fascinating, although they all were — what is that phrase humans use? — ‘life as we know it.’ They were all carbon-based DNA lifeforms.”

“Really? Are you and the Wreeds also DNA-based?”

“Yes.”

“Fascinating.”

“Perhaps not,” said Hollus. “We believe that DNA is the only molecule capable of driving life; no other substance has its properties of self-replication, information storage, and compactibility. DNAs ability to compress into a very small space makes it possible for it to exist in the nucleuses of microscopic cells, even though when stretched out, each DNA molecule is more than a meter long.”

I nodded. “In the evolution course I used to teach, we considered whether anything other than DNA could do the job; we never came up with an alternative that was even remotely suitable. Did all the alien DNA use the same four bases: adenine and thymine, guanine and cytosine?”

“Are those these four?” said Hollus. Suddenly, his holoform projector made four chemical formulas float in the air between us in glowing green:

C5H5N5

C5H6N2O2

C5H5N5O

C4H5N3O

I peered at them; it’d been a while since I’d done any biochemistry. “Umm, yes. Yes, those are they.”

“Then, yes,” said Hollus. “Everywhere we have found DNA, it uses those four bases.”

“But we’ve shown in the lab that other bases could be used; we’ve even made artificial DNA that uses six bases, not four.”

“Doubtless extraordinary intervention was required to accomplish that,” said Hollus.

“I don’t know; I guess.” I thought about everything. “Six other worlds,” I said, trying to picture them in my mind.

Alien planets.

Dead planets.

“Six other worlds,” I said again. “All deserted.”

“Correct.”

I sought the right word. “That’s . . . frightening.”

Hollus did not dispute this. “In orbit around Sigma Draconis II,” he said, “we found what seemed to be a fleet of starships.”

“Do you suppose invaders had wiped out the indigenous life?”

“No,” said Hollus. “The starships were clearly built by the same race that had constructed the abandoned cities on the planet below.”

“They built starships?”

“Yes.”

“And they all left the planet?”

“Apparently.”

“But without using the starships, which were left behind?”

“Exactly.”

“That’s . . . mysterious.”

“It certainly is.”

“What about the fossil records on these planets? Do they have mass extinctions that coincide with ours?”

Hollus’s eyestalks moved. “That is difficult to say; if one could easily read fossil records without decades or centuries of searching, I never would have had to reveal myself to you. But as far as we have been able to tell, no, none of the abandoned worlds had mass extinctions at 440, 365, 225, 210, and 65 million years ago.”

“Were any of those civilizations contemporaneous?”

Hollus’s command of English was remarkable, but occasionally it did fail him. “Pardon?”

“Did any of them live at the same time as any of the others?”

“No. The oldest seems to have ended three billion years ago; the most recent, on the third planet of Groombridge 1618, about five thousand years ago. But . . .”

“Yes?”

“But, as I said, all the races seemed to be comparably advanced. Architectural styles varied widely, of course. But, to give you an example, our engineers dismantled one of the orbiting starships we found at Sigma Draconis II; it used different solutions to several problems from the ones we employ, but it was not fundamentally much better — perhaps a few decades beyond what we had developed. That is the way it was for all the races that had abandoned their worlds: they were all only slightly more advanced than the Wreeds or the Forhilnors — or Homo sapiens, for that matter.”

“And you think this happens to all races? They reach a point where they just leave their home planets?”

“Exactly,” said Hollus. “Or else something — perhaps God himself — comes along and takes them away.”

5

Hollus’s presence was being touted by the ROM’s membership department (“Support the museum that attracts visitors from all over the world — and beyond!”), and attendance was up substantially for the first week following the Forhilnor’s arrival. But when it became apparent that his shuttle was unlikely to land again and that an alien wasn’t going to stride along the sidewalk, up the outside stairs, and through the lobby, the crowds tapered to more normal levels.

I never saw the CSIS agents again. Prime Minister Chretien did indeed come by the ROM to meet Hollus; Christine Dorati, of course, turned that into quite the photo-op. And several journalists asked Chretien, for the record, to give his assurance that the alien would be allowed to continue his work unmolested which was what the Maclean’s opinion poll said the Canadian people wanted. He did indeed give that assurance, although I suspected CSIS operatives were always still around, lurking just out of view.

On his fourth day in Toronto, Hollus and I were back in the collections room in the basement of the Curatorial Centre. I’d pulled open a metal drawer and was showing him a shale slab containing a beautifully preserved eurypterid. We moved the specimen to a work table, and Hollus used his right eyestalk to look through one of our large magnifiers on an articulated metal arm, with a fluorescent tube encircling the lens. I wondered briefly about the physics of that: the magnified image was being looked at by a simulated eye, and the information was somehow transferred to the real Hollus, in orbit over Ecuador.

I know, I know — I probably should have let it alone. But, dammitall, it had been keeping me up nights ever since Hollus had mentioned it. “How do you know,” I said to him at last, “that the universe had a creator?”

Hollus’s eyestalks curved to look at me. “The universe was clearly designed; if it has a design, it must therefore have a designer.”