Calculating God by Robert J. Sawyer Read Free Book Online Page A

Ordovician jawless fishes. Hollus looked them over, handling them gently. The force fields projected by the holoform unit seemed to define a solidness that precisely matched the alien’s apparent physical form. We bumped into each other a few times as we negotiated our way down the narrow aisles in the collections room, and my hands touched his several times as I passed him fossils. I felt a static tingling whenever his projected form contacted my skin, the only indication that he wasn’t really there.
    As he examined the strange, solid skulls, I happened to comment that they looked rather alien. Hollus seemed surprised by the remark. “I” “am” “cur” “i” “ous,” he said, “about” “your” “concepts” “of” “alien” “life.”
    “I thought you knew all about that,” I replied, smiling. “Anal probes and so on.”
    “We have been watching your TV broadcasts for about a year now. But I suspect you have more interesting material than what I have seen.”
    “What have you seen?”
    “A show about an academic and his family who are extraterrestrials.”
    It took me a moment to recognize it. “Ah,” I said. “That’s 3rd Rock from the Sun. It’s a comedy.”
    “That is a matter of opinion,” said Hollus. “I have also seen the program about the two federal agents who hunt aliens.”
    “The X-Files,” I said.
    He clicked his eyes together in agreement. “I found it frustrating. They kept talking about aliens, but you almost never saw any. More instructive was a graphic-arts production about juvenile humans.”
    “I need another clue,” I said.
    “One of them is named Cartman,” said Hollus.
    I laughed. “South Park. I’m surprised you didn’t pack up and go home after that. But, sure, I can show you some better samples.” I looked around the collections room. Off at the other end, going through our banks of Pliocene microfossils, I could see a grad student. “Abdus!” I called.
    The young man looked up, startled. I waved him over.
    “Yes, Tom?” he said once he’d reached us, although his eyes were on Hollus, not me.
    “Abdus, can you nip out to Blockbuster and get some videos for me?” Grad students were useful for all sorts of things. “Keep the receipt, and Dana will reimburse you.”
    The request was strange enough to get Abdus to stop looking at the alien. “Um, sure,” he said. “Sure thing.”
    I told him what I wanted, and he scurried off.
    Hollus and I continued to look at the Ordovician specimens until noon, then we headed back up to my office. I imagined that intelligence probably required a high metabolism everywhere in the universe. Still, I thought the Forhilnor might be irritated that I had to take a lunch break (and even more irritated that after stopping our work, I ate almost nothing). But he ate when I did—although, of course, he was really dining aboard his mothership, in orbit over Ecuador. It looked strange: his avatar, which apparently duplicated whatever movements his real body was making, went through the motions of transferring food into his eating slit—a horizontal groove in the top of his torso revealed through a gap in the cloth wound around it. But the food itself was invisible, making it look like Hollus was some extraterrestrial Marcel Marceau, miming the process of eating.
    I, on the other hand, needed real food. Susan had packed me a can of strawberry-banana Boost and two leftover drumsticks from yesterday’s dinner. I downed the thick beverage and made it halfway through one of the legs. I wished I’d had something different to eat; it felt a little too primal to be using my teeth to tear meat off bones in front of the alien, although, for all I knew, Hollus was stuffing live hamsters into his gullet.
    While we ate, Hollus and I watched the videos Abdus had fetched; I’d had the education department deliver a combo VCR-TV unit to my office.
    First up was “Arena,” an episode of the original Star Trek series; I