Hollus looked at me for the longest time. “These — what did you call them? Fundamentalist extremists? These fundamentalist extremists believe it is wrong to kill even an unborn child?”

“Yes.”

It was hard to discern tone in Hollus’s speech, what with his voice bouncing between two mouths, but he sounded incredulous, at least to me. “And they demonstrate their disapproval over this by murdering adults?”

I nodded slightly. “Apparently.”

Hollus was quiet for a few moments longer, his spherical torso bobbing slowly up and down. “Among my people,” he said, “we have a concept called” — and his twin mouths sang two discordant notes. “It refers to incongruities, to events or words that convey the opposite of the intended meaning.”

“We have a similar concept. We call it irony.”

His eyes turned to the newspaper again. “Apparently not all humans understand it.”

9

I’ve never smoked. So why do I have lung cancer?

It’s actually, so I’ve learned, somewhat common among paleontologists, geologists, and mineralogists of my generation. I was right, in a way, when I attributed my cough to the dusty environment I worked in. We often use tools that pulverize rocks, creating a lot of fine dust, which —

But lung cancer takes a long time to develop, and I’ve been working in paleontology labs for thirty years. These days, I almost always wear a mask; our consciousness has been raised, and almost everyone does so when doing that kind of work. But, still, over the decades, I’d breathed in more than my share of rock dust, not to mention asbestos fibers as well as fiberglass filaments while making casts.

And now I’m paying for it.

Some of Susan’s and my friends said we should sue — perhaps the museum, perhaps the Ontario government (my ultimate employer). Surely my workplace could have been made safer; surely I should have been given better safety instruction; surely —

It was a natural reaction. Someone should pay for such an injustice. Tom Jericho: he’s a nice guy, good husband, good father, gives to charity . . . maybe not as much as he should, but some, each month. And he was always there to lend a hand when someone was moving or painting their house. And now good old Tom had cancer.

Yes, surely someone should pay, they thought.

But the last thing I wanted to do was waste time on litigation. So, no, I wasn’t going to sue.

Still, I had lung cancer; I had to deal with that.

And there was an irony here.

Some of what Hollus was saying about what he took as proof for God’s existence wasn’t new to me. That stuff about the fundamental constants was sometimes referred to as the anthropic cosmological principle; I’d touched on it in my evolution course. He was certainly right that the universe, superficially at least, seemed designed for life. As Sir Fred Hoyle said in 1981, “A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” But, then again, Sir Fred championed a lot of notions the rest of the scientific community balked at.

Still, as Hollus and I continued to talk, he brought up cilia — although he called them “ciliums;” he always had trouble with Latin plurals. Cilia are the hairlike extensions from cells that are capable of rhythmic motion; they are present in many types of human cells, and, he said, in the cells of Forhilnors and Wreeds, too. Humans who believed that not just the universe but life itself had been intelligently designed often cited cilia. The tiny motors that allow the fibers to move are enormously complex, and the intelligent-design proponents say they are irreducibly complex: there is no way they could have evolved through a series of incremental steps. Like a mousetrap, a cilium needs all of its various parts to work; take away any element and it becomes useless junk — just as without the spring, or the holding bar, or the platform, or the hammer, or the catch, a mousetrap does nothing at all. It was indeed a conundrum to explain how cilia had evolved through the accumulation of gradual changes, which is supposed to be how evolution works.

Well, among other places, cilia are found on the single layer of cells that line the bronchi. They beat in unison, moving mucus out of the lungs — mucous containing particles that have been accidentally inhaled, getting them out before cancers can begin.

If the cilia are destroyed, though, by exposure to asbestos, tobacco smoke, or other substances, the lungs can no longer keep themselves clean. The only other mechanism for dislodging phlegm and moving it upward is coughing — persistent, racking coughing. Such coughing isn’t as effective, though; carcinogens stay longer in the lungs, and tumors form. The persistent coughing sometimes damages the surface of the tumor, adding blood to the sputum; as in my case, that is often the first symptom of lung cancer.

If Hollus and the humans who shared his beliefs were right, cilia had been designed by some master engineer.

If so, then maybe that’s the son of a bitch who should be sued.

“My friend over at the university has got a preliminary report on your DNA,” I said to Hollus, a few days after he’d provided the sample I had asked for; I’d missed the landing of the shuttle again, but a Forhilnor who wasn’t Hollus had dropped off the specimen with Raghubir, along with the Forhilnor data on supernovae Hollus had promised to give to Donald Chen.

“And?”

At some point, I would ask him what governed which mouth he would use when he was only going to utter a single syllable. “And she doesn’t believe it’s extraterrestrial in origin.”

Hollus shifted on his six feet; he always found it cramped in my office. “Of course it is. I confess it is not my own DNA; Lablok extracted it from herself. But she is a Forhilnor, too.”

“My friend identified hundreds of genes that seem to be the same as those in life from this planet. The gene that creates hemoglobin, for instance.”

“There are only a limited number of possible chemicals that can be used to carry oxygen in the bloodstream.”

“I guess she was expecting something more — well, alien.”

“I am as alien a being as you are every likely to encounter,” said Hollus. “That is, the difference between your body plan and mine is as great as we have ever seen. There are practical engineering constraints on how weird life can get, after all, even” — and here he raised one of his six-fingered hands and did a Vulcan salute — “if your filmmakers seem incapable of coming close to the variety possible.”

“I suppose,” I said.

Hollus bobbed. “The minimum number of genes required for life is about 300,” he said. “But that quantity is sufficient only for truly primitive creatures; most eukaryotic cells share a core group of about three thousand genes — you find them in everything from single-celled lifeforms to elaborate animals like ourselves, and they are the same, or almost the same, on every world we have looked at. On top of that, there are 4,000 additional genes that are shared by all multicellular lifeforms, which encode proteins for cell-to-cell adhesion, signaling between cells, and so on. There are thousands more shared by all animals with internal skeletons. And thousands more beyond that are shared by all warm-blooded animals. Of course, if your friend keeps searching, she will find tens of thousands of genes in Forhilnor DNA that have no counterparts in Earthly lifeforms, although, naturally, it is easier to match genes than to find unfamiliar ones. But there really are only a few possible solutions to the problems posed by life, and they recur on world after world.”