“Okay, then.”
No doubt Ryoji didn’t have a friend in the world. Kaoru could understand, because he’d been the same. He’d been just a little of a social outcast at school. But in his case, he’d had a good relationship with his parents that had saved him from feeling lonely. Crazy as his father could be, he’d been the best possible conversation partner for Kaoru. With his father and mother around, Kaoru hadn’t been inclined to wonder why he’d been born into this world. He’d never had doubts about his identity.
What Reiko sought in Kaoru was a father figure for her son. Kaoru didn’t have a problem with that. He was confident he could play that role, and do it well.
But, he wondered: Does she also want a husband figure for herself?
Kaoru’s imagination began to run away with him. He wasn’t as confident on that score. But he wanted to at least try to be the man Reiko needed.
They arranged a date and time for his next visit. Then Kaoru left Ryoji’s hospital room.
Kaoru and Ryoji ended up talking with each other a lot, even outside their scheduled lessons. Usually their talks ended up focusing on general science topics. Kaoru was reminded of his own childhood, when his desire to understand the world had led him to delve deeply into natural science.
At one time, Kaoru had desired to formulate a system or theory that would encompass and explain things normally dismissed as non-science—paranormal phenomena. But the more he learned, the more he came to see that no matter what unified theory he came up with, there would still be phenomena that couldn’t be accounted for within it. That realization combined with his father’s illness turned his exploring impulses into an interest in a practical field of study, namely medicine.
Kaoru snapped out of his reverie and looked at Ryoji, a younger fellow-inquirer into the workings of the universe.
Ryoji was sitting cross-legged on his bed as always, rocking gently back and forth. Reiko was in a chair by the window, watching them talk, and she must have been fairly sleepy, for she’d started moving her head back and forth in time with her son’s movements.
“So is that what you’re interested in right now?”
Ryoji had been peppering Kaoru with questions about genetics.
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Ryoji turned his normally hollow gaze forward and began to stretch where he sat on the bed. He was smiling like he always did, although there was nothing funny about what they were discussing. It wasn’t a healthy smile. It was the desperate grin of someone at the end of his own life scorning the world. Kaoru thought he’d gotten used to it, but it could still annoy him if he looked at it long enough. If his father smiled like that, he’d give him a good talking-to—he’d rip into him, father or not.
There was only one way to wipe that smile off Ryoji’s face: goad him into a passionate debate.
Kaoru changed the subject. “So what are your thoughts on the theory of evolution?” It was a natural progression from genetics.
“What do you mean?” Ryoji squirmed and rolled his eyes at Kaoru.
“Okay, how’s this for starters? Does evolution move randomly or toward a predetermined goal?”
“What do you think?” This was one of Ryoji’s less pleasing habits. He always tried to ferret out his interlocutor’s thinking first, instead of coming straight out with his own opinion.
“I think evolution moves in a certain direction, but always with a certain latitude for choice.” Kaoru couldn’t bring himself to give a ringing endorsement of mainstream Darwinian evolutionary theory. Even now that he was taking his first steps toward becoming a specialist in a natural science, he couldn’t completely abandon the idea that there was a purpose behind it all.
“The direction theory. That’s pretty much what I believe, too.” Ryoji leaned toward Kaoru, as if he’d accomplished something.
“Shall we start with the emergence of life?”
“The emergence of life?” Ryoji looked truly astonished.
“Sure. How you look at the emergence of life is an important question.”
“It is?” Ryoji furrowed his brow and looked like he wanted to get out of this question but quick.
Kaoru didn’t appreciate this attitude of Ryoji’s. For a kid like him it should be fun to play around with questions like this. The question of why life on earth was able to gain the ability to evolve was intimately connected with the question of how life first emerged on earth. Kaoru, at least, had gotten a lot of enjoyment out of debating this with his father.
“Well, let’s move on, then. Let’s grant that life emerged, by some mechanism we don’t yet understand. So, next …” Kaoru stopped to let Ryoji step in.
“I think the first life on earth was something like a seed. That seed contained the right information so that it could sprout, grow, and eventually become the tree which is life as we know it, including humankind.”
“Are there no variations?”
“Yes and no. The biggest tree grows from the tiniest seed. The size of the trunk, the color of the leaves, the type of fruit—all that information is already contained within the seed. But of course the tree is also influenced by the natural environment. If it doesn’t get sunlight it’ll wither, if it doesn’t get enough nutrients the trunk’ll be thin. Maybe it’ll be struck by lightning and split in two, maybe its branches will break in a gale. But no amount of unpredictable influence of that kind can change the basic nature of the tree as contained in the seed. Come rain or snow, a ginkgo tree will never bear apples.”
Kaoru licked his lips. He didn’t mean to contradict Ryoji. He basically agreed with him, in fact.
“So you’re saying that if sea creatures learn to walk on land, if giraffes develop long necks, it’s all because they were programmed that way from the start?”
“Well, yeah.”
“In that case, we should assume that there was some kind of will at work before life began.”
Ryoji responded innocently. “Whose will? God’s?”
But Kaoru wasn’t thinking about God per se, just an invisible will at work both before life began and during the process of evolution.
He found himself imagining a school of fish fighting with each other to get to land. There was an overwhelming power in the thought of all those fish, enough of them to dye the sea black, jumping around as they sought dry land.
Of course it was possible that sea life had never intended to go on land, but had simply succeeded in adapting to it after orogenic processes had begun to dry up the water. That was how the mainstream evolutionary thinker would explain it.
But the image that came to Kaoru’s mind was of those hollow-eyed fish, yearning day in and day out for the land, dying at the water’s edge and making mountains of their corpses. Mainstream evolution had it that a certain fraction of them had simply been lucky enough to adapt. Kaoru simply couldn’t believe that. The transition from a marine to a land-based living environment involved changes in internal organs. Their insides had to be remade to allow for the transition from gill breathing to lung breathing. What kind of bodily trial and error had resulted in those changes? One kind of organ had been reborn as another. It was pretty major, when you thought about it.
Right in front of Kaoru was Ryoji’s bald head. Because Ryoji was hunched over, the top of his head came up to the tip of Kaoru’s nose. At this very moment, within that emaciated