“But,” said Hollus, “our friends the Wreeds, because they never developed traditional math, never find themselves vexed by such matters.”

“Well, they certainly vex me,” I said. “Over the years, I’ve often lain in bed, trying to sort out moral quandaries.” The old dyslexic agnostic insomniac joke came to mind: lying awake at night, wondering if there is a dog. “I mean, where does morality come from? We know it’s wrong to steal, and—” I paused. “You do know that, right? I mean, Forhilnors have a taboo against theft?”

“Yes, although it is not innate; Forhilnor children will take anything they can reach.”

“It’s the same with human kids. But we grow up to realize that theft is wrong, and yet . . . and yet why do we feel it’s wrong? If it increases reproductive success, shouldn’t evolution have favored it? For that matter, we think infidelity is wrong, but I could obviously increase my reproductive success by impregnating multiple females. If theft is advantageous for everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn’t the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had — being sorry you got caught?”

Hollus’s eyestalks weaved in and out more quickly than usual. “I have no answer,” he said. “We struggle to find solutions to moral questions, but they always defeat us. Preeminent thinkers, both human and Forhilnor, have devoted themselves to asking what is the meaning of life and how do we know when something is morally wrong. But despite centuries of effort, no progress has been made. The questions are as beyond us as ‘What is two plus two?’ is beyond a Wreed.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “I still find it incredible that they can’t simply see that two objects and two additional objects is equivalent to four objects.”

The Forhilnor tipped his body toward me by flexing the lower knees on three of his legs. “And they find it incredible that we cannot see the underlying truths of moral issues.” He paused. “Our minds do chunking: we break problems down into manageable bits. If we wonder how a planet stays in orbit about its sun, we can ask numerous simpler questions — how does a rock stay on the ground; why is the sun at the center of the solar system — and by solving those, we can confidently answer the larger question. But the problems of ethics and morality and the meaning of life are apparently irreducible, like the ciliums in cells: there are no component parts that are tractable in isolation.”

“You mean to say that being a scientist, a logician, like — well, like you or me — is fundamentally incompatible with being at peace over moral and spiritual issues?”

“Some succeed at both — but they usually do it by compartmentalizing. Science is given responsibility for certain matters; religion for others. But for those looking for a single, overarching worldview, there is little peace. A mind is wired for one or the other, but not both.”

Pascal’s wager came to mind: it was safer, he said, to bet on the existence of God, even if he doesn’t exist, than to risk the eternal damnation of being wrong. Pascal, of course, had been a mathematician; he’d had a logical, rational, number-crunching mind, a human mind. Old Blaise had had no choice in the kind of brain he had; it had been bequeathed to him by evolution, just as mine had.

But if I’d had a choice?

If I could trade some bafflement in factual matters for certitude about questions of ethics, would I do so? Which is more important: knowing the precise phylogenetic relationships between all the various branches on the evolutionary bush or knowing the meaning of life?

Hollus departed for the day, wavering and disappearing, leaving me alone with my books and fossils and unfinished work.

I found myself thinking about the things I wanted to do one last time before I died. At this stage, I realized I had a greater desire to repeat previous pleasurable experiences than to have new ones.

Some of the things I wanted to do again were obvious, of course: make love to my wife, hug my son, see my brother Bill.

And there were the less obvious — the things that were unique to me. I wanted to go to the Octagon again, my favorite steak-house in Thornhill, the place where I’d proposed to Susan. Yes, even with the nausea caused by the chemotherapy, I wanted to do that once more.

And I wanted to watch Casablanca again. Here’s looking at you, kid . . .

I wanted to see the Blue Jays win the World Series one more time . . . but I suppose there wasn’t much chance of that.

I wanted to go back to Drumheller and walk amongst the hoodoos, drinking in the Badlands at twilight with coyotes howling in the background and fossil shards scattered all around.

I wanted to visit my old neighborhood, out in Scarborough. I wanted to walk the streets of my youth, gaze at my parents’ old house or stand in the yard of William Lyon Mackenzie King Public School, and let memories of friends from decades past wash over me.

I wanted to dust off my old ham-radio set, and listen — just listen — to voices in the night from all around the world.

But, most of all, I wanted to go up with Ricky and Susan to our cottage on Otter Lake, and sit on the dock after dark, late enough in the summer that the mosquitoes and black flies would be gone, and watch the moon rise, its pitted face reflecting in the calm water, and listen to the haunting call of a loon and the sound of the odd fish jumping up out of the lake, and lean back in my lounge chair, and clasp my hands behind my head, and breathe out a contented sigh, and feel no pain at all.

21

So far, Susan had said nothing related to Salbanda’s widely publicized comments about the universe having had a creator — a creator who, apparently, on at least five occasions, had directly intervened in the development of intelligent life.

But, finally, we did have to have the conversation. It’s one I’d never anticipated. I’d humored my wife, indulging her faith, even agreeing to be married in a traditional church service. But I’d always quietly known that I was the enlightened one, I was in the right, I was the one who really knew how things worked.

Susan and I were sitting out back on the deck. It was an abnormally warm April evening. She was going to take Ricky to his swimming lesson this evening; sometimes I took him, and sometimes we went together, but tonight I had other plans. Ricky was up in his room, changing.

“Had Hollus told you he was searching for God?” asked Susan, looking down at her mug of coffee.

I nodded.

“And you didn’t say anything to me?”

“Well, I . . .” I trailed off. “No. No, I didn’t.”

“I would have loved to have talked to him about that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“So the Forhilnors are religious,” she said, summing it all up, at least for her.

But I had to protest; I had to. “Hollus and his colleagues believe the universe was intelligently designed. But they don’t worship God.”

“They don’t pray?” asked Susan.

“No. Well, the Wreeds spend half of each day in meditation, attempting to communicate with God telepathically, but—”

“That sounds like prayer to me.

“They say they don’t want anything from God.”

Susan was quiet for a moment; we rarely talked about religion, and for a good reason. “Prayer isn’t about asking for things; it’s not like visiting a department-store Santa Claus.”

I shrugged; I guess I really didn’t know much about the topic.

“Do the Forhilnors believe in souls? In an afterlife?”

The question surprised me; I’d never thought about it. “I honestly don’t know.”

“Maybe you should ask Hollus.”