Of course, Hollus’s solar system apparently resembled ours, as did the Wreed system. But, nonetheless, systems like Sol’s were extraordinary; the exception, not the rule. And cells aren’t simple; they are enormously complex. And the fossil record, fascinating but frustrating thing that it is, shows evolution proceeding by leaps rather than by the accumulation of gradual changes.

I’ve spent my whole adult life being an uncompromising neo-Darwinian evolutionist. I certainly don’t want to issue a deathbed retraction.

And yet —

And yet perhaps, as Hollus believes, there is more to the puzzle of life.

I know evolution happens; I know it for a fact. I’ve seen the fossils, seen the DNA studies that say that we and chimps have 98.6 percent of our genetic material in common, and therefore must have had a recent common ancestor.

Proceeding by leaps . . .

By . . . perhaps, maybe . . . by quantum leaps.

Newton’s seventeenth-century laws of physics are mostly correct; you can use them to reliably predict all sorts of things. We didn’t discard them; rather, in the twentieth century, we subsumed them into a new, more comprehensive physics, a physics of relativity and quantum mechanics.

Evolution is a nineteenth-century notion, outlined in Darwin’s 1859 book, a book called, in full, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. But the more we learn, the more natural selection seems inadequate on its own as a mechanism for the creation of new species; even our best attempts at artificial, intelligently guided selection apparently aren’t up to the task — all dogs are still Canis familiaris.

And now it’s the start of the twenty-first century. Surely it’s not unreasonable to think that Darwin’s ideas, like Newton’s before them, will be subsumed into a greater whole, a more comprehensive understanding?

Damn it!

God damn it.

I hate it when the pain comes like that — like a knife, slicing into me.

I reached over onto my cluttered night table. Where are my pills? Where are they?

27

Rhonda Weir, short, stocky, silver-haired, was a detective for the Toronto Police. Her phone rang at 1:11 P.M.on Sunday afternoon. She picked up the handset and said, “Detective Weir.”

“Hello,” said a raspy man’s voice at the other end of the phone, sounding somewhat exasperated. “I hope I’ve got the right person this time; I’ve been transferred several times.”

“What can I do for you?” asked Rhonda.

“My name is Constantin Kalipedes,” said the voice. “I’m the weekend manager at the Lakeshore Inn in Etobicoke. One of my housekeepers just found a gun in one of the rooms.”

“What kind of gun?”

“A pistol. And she also found an empty gun case, the kind you’d use to carry one of those — what do you call it? — one of those assault weapons.”

“Has the guest checked out?”

“Guests, plural. And no. They’ve got a reservation through Wednesday morning.”

“What are their names?”

“One is J. D. Ewell; the other, C. Falsey. They have Arkansas license plates.”

“You took down the plate number?”

“No, but they wrote it themselves on the registration card.” He read the string of characters to Rhonda.

“Did the maid finish cleaning the room?”

“No. I had her stop as soon as she found the gun.”

“Good man,” said Rhonda. “What’s your address?”

He told her.

“I’ll be there in” — she looked at her watch, then calculated; traffic should be light on a Sunday afternoon — “twenty minutes. If this Ewell or Falsey return, stall them if you can, but don’t put yourself at risk, understood?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on my way.

The Lakeshore Inn was, not surprisingly, on Lakeshore Boulevard. Rhonda Weir and her partner, Hank Li, parked their unmarked car in front of the entrance. Hank checked the license plates on the cars to the left, and Rhonda looked at those on the ones to the right. Six were American — two from Michigan, two from New York, and one each from Minnesota and Illinois — but none were from Arkansas. A little rain was falling; there would doubtless be more later. The air was pungent with ozone.

Constantin Kalipedes turned out to be an old, paunchy Greek, with a stubble of gray beard. He led Rhonda and Hank along a row of units, past door after door, until they came to an open one. There they found the East Indian woman who was his housekeeper, and he brought her with them to room 118. Kalipedes got out his pass key, but Rhonda had him hand it over; she opened the door herself, turning the knob with the key so as not to disturb any fingerprints that might be on it. It was a fairly shabby room, with two framed prints hanging crookedly, and powder-blue wallpaper peeling at the seams. There were two double beds, one of which had beside it the sort of oxygen bottle that a person who suffered from sleep apnea needed. Both beds were disheveled; the maid obviously hadn’t gotten to them by the time she’d made her discovery.

“Where’s the gun?” asked Rhonda.

The young woman stepped into the room and pointed. The gun was lying on the floor, beside a suitcase. “I had to move the suitcase,” she said with a lilting accent, to get at the outlet, so I could plug in the vacuum cleaner. It must not have been closed all the way, and the gun tumbled out. Behind it was that wooden case.” She pointed.

“A Glock 9mm,” said Hank, glancing at the handgun. Rhonda looked at the case. It had a specially cut black foam-rubber inlay, just the right size to hold an Intertec Tec-9 carbine, a nasty beast — essentially a submachine gun — about the length of a man’s forearm. Possession of the handgun was illegal in Canada, but more disturbing was that Falsey and Ewell had left it behind, opting for the Tec-9 instead, a weapon banned now even in the U.S. because of its thirty-two-round clip. Rhonda put her hands on her hips and slowly surveyed the room. There were two ashtrays; it was a smoking room. It had data jacks for hooking up a modem, but there was no sign of a portable computer. She stepped into the bathroom. Two straight razors and a can of foam. Two toothbrushes, one of them badly chewed.

Back in the main room, she noticed a black-covered Bible sitting on one of the night tables.

“Probable cause?” said Rhonda to her partner.

“I’d say,” said Hank.

Kalipedes was looking at them. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” said Rhonda, “there’s enough superficial evidence to indicate that a crime has been or is about to be committed to allow us to thoroughly search this room without first obtaining a warrant. You’re welcome to remain and watch in fact, we encourage you to do so.” The department had been sued more than once by people who had claimed that valuables had disappeared during a search.

Kalipedes nodded, but he turned to the chambermaid. “Back to work,” he said. She scurried out the door.

Rhonda pulled out a handkerchief and used it held between two fingers to open the drawer in one of the night tables. It had another Bible in it, this one bound in red — typical Gideon issue. She crossed over to the other night table. She pulled a pen out of her pocket and used it to flip open the cover of the black bible. It wasn’t a Gideon one, and on the inside front cover it said “C. Falsey” in red ink. She glanced at the submachine-gun case. “Our Bible boy needs to reread the part about swords into plowshares, I think.”

Hank grunted in response as he used his own pen to fan out the papers on the dresser. “Look at this,” he said, after a moment.

Rhonda came over. Hank had revealed an unfolded city map of Toronto. Taking care to handle only the edges, Hank turned it over and pointed to the segment that would have been the cover had the map been folded up. It had a Barnes and Noble price sticker on it — an American bookstore chain, with no outlets in Canada. Falsey and Ewell had presumably brought the map with them from Arkansas. Hank gingerly flipped it over again. It was a full-color map with all sorts of symbols and markings. It took a moment before Rhonda noticed the simple circle drawn in ballpoint pen at Kipling and Homer, less than two kilometers from the spot they were currently at.