The Unreasoning Mask

by Philip José Farmer

  "There is not one universe but many. The human body contains trillions of cells. So does the Pluriverse. Each universe is a cell in its body.

  "I was wrong when I stole the glyfa, though it was with its full permission and expressed wish. Not just wrong. I was a criminal. I was betraying my duty as captain of ship and as a Terran. But I believed then and still believe that I was following a higher duty. I was convinced that the glyfa was right and that I was doing what had to be done if I were to . . . save . . . the world. The Pluriverse."

  Many on Earth had believed that it was their mission to save the world. Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Zoroaster, Luther, a hundred Popes, Knox, Buddha, Joseph Smith, Eddy, a few thousand of greats and well-known among the billions who'd lived on Earth, and how many thousands of insane? What made him different from the others?

  His predecessors had acted only on fantasy. He knew from experience, from fact, what be was talking about.

  Or did be? He could not really be sure.

  But what he knew was not gotten from any stone or golden tablets or an angel appearing to announce that he was God's chosen prophet to reveal anew what had been said before many times and would be said again, though in somewhat different forms and situations.

  "I wish I could say that I took the glyfa because it had hypnotized me, and thus I couldn't help myself. It did not hypnotize me, though its evocation of the Miraj in me enormously influenced me. The glyfa told me that it did expand my minuscule inclination to steal it. Turned a flashing impulse into a steady determination. That may be true. If I'd been completely without that desire, the glyfa could not have affected me thus at all."

  Who among you would not have had that desire? he thought. But he did not voice the thought. To do so would make him seem to be pleading. And Ramstan did not plead.

  "Whatever the reasons for my taking the g(yfa, and I believed and still believe that I had one reason to override everything that told me not to take it, I did."

  Nuoli, unable to obey any longer his order not to interrupt, said, "Why didn't you tell us what you'd done as soon as you returned to ship with the glyfa? Why were you so secretive?"

  "Don't ask me questions until I've finished! But . . . I was getting to that. Isn't it obvious that I would've been arrested at once, Benagur would have made sure of that, and the glyfa returned to the Tenolt? Would you have believed me then? No, not until the bolg appeared would you have put any credence in me. As it is . . ."

  He told them of the voice in the Kalafalan tavern warning him of the bolg. He told them of seeing on the monitor screen the figure in his quarters and the figure which had appeared on the Webn planet when he and Benagur were quarreling.

  "As I found out when I visited the Vwoordha, these were images projected by one of the three. They were projected -- beamed? -- from a very long distance. Not just from a distant planet in another galaxy, though that would be staggering enough. No, they were projected from another universe.

  "I don't know how it was done. Shiyai, the Vwoordha, told me that she rode the waves of the thoughts of God. Doubtless, that's a poetic analogy and so, meaningless. Or perhaps not. For all I know, the images were not objective projections but stimulations of my brain resulting in subjective phenomena that I thought were objective.

  "But I suspect that the glyfa was used, though unwillingly, as a target and a focus for whatever powers the Vwoordha use to project these images."

  "You have guessed it," the glyfa said, using Ramstan's mother's voice now.

  It sounded sullen.

  "I think that's so because the glyfa is also a tool. It was not created primarily as a beamer for the images of the Vwoordha, but it can be used for this. I'll get to its primary purpose in a few minutes.

  "The glyfa could probably have enlightened me on many puzzling things, but, for reasons it won't reveal, it refused. Perhaps it was hoping that I'd not meet the Vwoordha. In fact, I'm almost sure of that, though nothing seems sure in this vast blackness I've been living in. However, it knew what the ritual-chant of the Webnite, Wassruss, meant. And what the true powers are of the three sigils that Wassruss gave me."

  He stopped to drink more water. Another curious thought flashed. His discourse was a ritual, comparable to the Christian Mass, and the water was the wine. The wafers of bread? Not his or anyone's flesh but his spirit. He was eating crow, eating his pride and his self-image, tearing them into bits and devouring them while the . . . worshipers? . . . no . . . witnesses to the sacrifice and the eucharist . . . watched him, a crowd of unbelievers who had to be made into believers.

  In some ways, there was not much difference between eating the flesh of the god and eating crow. Except that it was the god, the fallen god, himself, who ate the crow.

  "Throughout these events, I've felt as if I were being manipulated. Sometimes gently, sometimes not so subtly, I was being nudged and pushed here and there. But the glyfa was urging me in one direction and the Vwoordha in another. In a sense, the Vwoordha won because I came to their home. In another, they lost."

  What is the price?

  Ramstan told his audience that he had asked the Vwoordha what he must pay for their help. They had replied that he must give them the glyfa. He had refused, though to do so he had had to draw up all his courage and hurl it at them like a ball. If he had failed to strike them out, he would have been done for. These three were awe-inspiring, and he was afraid of them. (His audience did not know how much it cost him to admit that. Or perhaps it did know.) Though he could see no machines responsible for their great powers, he knew that they must have them. The walls of their house could be double and be packed inside with a solid-state or liquid-state technology superior to that of any sentients he had encountered. They took the credit for making the glyfa, and they might not be lying. According to what they claimed, they had once had the ability to burn out a star while making it, but they no longer had the tools to do it nor could they, at this time, duplicate the feat. Besides, another glyfa would be just as self-conscious as the first, hence, a self-governing entity, and would probably turn out to be just as selfish and contrary as this one.

  The Vwoordha might not be as rich in power as they once were, but what they still had scared him.

  Nevertheless, he had said no to them. He did not know what they would do then; he felt that they could destroy al-Buraq if they wished to. They certainly seemed wrathful enough to do it.

  After they had cooled down or seemed to, Shiyai had said, "You are very stubborn, Ramstan. We've offered you a partnership, you, an ephemera. You would be our equal, that is, as equal as possible for you. And you would be immortal, as near immortal as is possible. Also, it is your duty to join us and to earn that equality by delivering the glyfa to us. But you are as stupid, selfish, arrogant, and blind as the glyfa. And you have limits, just as it has, though they are different limits."

  Ramstan had thought that they, too, were bounded, otherwise they would have forced him to hand over the glyfa. He did not say so, however.

  Grrindah had vented her nerve-clawing laughter and said, "Very well. Since you bargain with us, though you do not know how wrong you are to do that, we will lower our price. The gifts of Wassruss will do."

  Again, Ramstan rolled up his courage and pitched it at them.

  The Webn had given him the three sigils and had said that he could pass them on only after he had used them. It would not be right to sell them.

  "Right?" black-eyed Wopolsa had said. "What do you know of right?"

  "Perhaps nothing -- from your viewpoint," Ramstan had said. "Nevertheless, I will not part with them."

  "Then you will get nothing from us," green-eyed Shiyai said.

  Blue-eyed Grrindah laughed, and she said, "You have stolen the glyfa and betrayed your people and wrecked your life and career and will die soon. All in vain."

  "I don't think so," Ramstan had said.

  They had struck out twice. Or was it he who had done so?

  "You want the glyfa. Yo
u want the three gifts," he said. "These were to be the price I must pay for your information or whatever you would have given me in return. But I have already paid your price many times over. You and the glyfa caused me to, as you say, steal it and betray my people and wreck my career and perhaps bring on my death soon. You three and that other, the glyfa."

  All three laughed, and Grrindah said, "He thinks that the other is the glyfa!"

  "Still," Shiyai said, "there is much justice in what he says."

  "Dear sisters," Wopolsa said, "what is justice?"

  "A word," Grrindah said. "Another word is truth."

  "Don't laugh," Ramstan said. "I am getting tired of your mockery."

  They did not laugh with their mouths, though the eyes of Grrindah and Shiyai laughed. Wopolsa's eyes looked as if they were and had always been empty of laughter. They contained only black space and dying stars and a hint of something terrifying beyond the space.

  He was, he told his crew, uncertain whether the three creatures in the well were the pets of the Vwoordha or the Vwoordha were projections of the well-dwellers. Or, possibly, the house-dwellers were solid flesh but were still the pets of the well-dwellers.

  It seemed to him, though, that the shimmering being did not belong to any of the universes he had been in. Rather, it did not seem to be native to any of the planets that ship had set down on. It was his theory that an alaraf-drive vessel starting from a planet of a G0-type star, such as Sol, such as all they had been to, could travel only to the planetary system of a G0 star. None of the alaraf ships they knew had ever been to the "bell" of any but a star like Earth's sun. Apparently, the type of star from which a ship originally departed determined the type to which it could go.

  If, say, sentient life could evolve on a planet of a giant red star or a white dwarf or, who knew, even a planet or a "dead" sun revolving around a galaxy, then it would develop an alaraf drive. But its ship would be confined to "cracks," "flaws," predetermined channels, call them what you would, that would take her to a "bell" of a red star or a white dwarf or whatever.

  The being called Wopolsa, the one in the well or the house or both, may have come from such a planet, if her native place was a planet and not just space or a Saturnian ring around a planet or a blazing gas cloud or perhaps some "continuum" between the walls of two universes. She should not be on any planet of a G0-type star. But, sometime in the past eons, she had managed to break through or had been pulled through -- by Shiyai and Grrindah? -- and now existed on the planet Grrymguurda.

  Or did she live, somehow, in more than one "channel" and maybe in more than one universe at the same time?

  Whatever the truth, Ramstan was scared of her. Looking into the shimmering and the eyes of the thing in the well, and into the eyes of the being in the house, he had felt that he was falling swiftly, weightless except for terror, into unending space. He would be, and this was his most overpowering reaction, alone. Alone as no one had ever been.

  What then had made him defy her in spite of this?

  There was in all humans, that is, all sentients Terran or non-Terran, a spark of contrariness. Some had much more than others, and Ramstan had been endowed with a full, perhaps overflowing, measure. That may have been why the glyfa and the Vwoordha chose him. Yet they must have realized that the very quality for which they picked him might make him rebel against them.

  There was also the attraction, existing side by side with the repulsion, towards the horrible fate implied by the eyes of Wopolsa. In the twentieth century it had been called a drive toward self-destruction, but now it was defined as a response to the challenge of the unknown.

  Ramstan had it; it was part of his bipolar psyche and larger and more intense than most people's.

  "No matter what we tell you, you won't let us have the sigils?" Shiyai had said.

  "I've paid the price. The hell which you and the glyfa have put me in."

  "That is up to us to determine."

  There had been a pause. During this, the three had said nothing, but he was not sure that they were not communicating by other means.

  Finally, Shiyai said, "Very well but not so well. We, who have so much time, don't have time now to dicker. We tried, and we failed, which we had thought we would. But forecasting is not yet a science. It's an art. As artists, we were not good enough."

  "You have to use the paint, the wood, the stone, the metal, the plastic, the light available," Grrindah said, and she laughed.

  "And the darkness," Wopolsa said.

  "Or that which is between or among," Grrindah said.

  "Or that which is none of these but yet is all," Shiyai said.

  "Or that which is all of those but none or only part," Wopolsa said.

  "We need you but would as soon do without you," Shiyai said.

  "Do not think of yourself as unique," Wopolsa said.

  "Yet, in a sense, he is," Grrindah said.

  "In that sense, all are," Shiyai said. "But does that have any significance?"

  "It depends on the situation," Grrindah said. "This is it."

  "Or those," Wopolsa said.

  "There is a limit to patience," Shiyai said.

  "To everything except eternity," Grrindah said.

  "Perhaps even to that," Wopolsa said. "After that, what?"

  "Not knowing what may make it worthwhile waiting for it," Shiyai said.

  "What?" Grrindah said.

  The three burst into taloned laughing again. Shiyai sounded like the kookaburrah of the Australian Department; Grrindah, like a South-American- Department parrot; Wopolsa, like a North-American-Department hoot owl. Their cachinnations were not quite like these, but he, being human, had to make analogies.

  Ramstan waited until it was quiet. He said, "Laugh. But what is your decision?"

  "Listen," Shiyai said. "Ask questions after we have told you what is what, within the limits of what."

  ... 26 ...

  "There is not just one universe," Ramstan said. "There are many. Perhaps trillions, though there is no way of counting them. I say trillions because the human body is composed of trillions of cells. All these universes are the cells of a Pluriversal being. An entity. A living being.

  "Everything within the walls of a universe composes a cell. And the cells form organs, though neither the anatomy nor physiology of this largest of all creatures is well known. In fact, almost nothing is known. Except that it does exist."

  The faces on the screens had dried into plaster masks. They were set in disbelief or wonderment.

  "I said, 'largest of all creatures.' Creatures may be the wrong word, probably is. A creature is a living thing which has been created by someone. But the Vwoordha do not think that the Pluriverse was created by anyone. It may be God. Or some thing which by definition is the nearest approach to God possible.

  "If it is God, it Is not like the God postulated by sentients. It probably does not know that sentients exist, probably does not even know that life exists. But the Vwoordha are not sure of this.

  "It was born when all of the universe, its cells, had grown from the initial big bang of each to the point where the universes, the cells, were contiguous. Where the walls met and so began to form a single organism. Don't ask me what was between each universe or cell while they were expanding, what was between them during the billions of years that each went from the explosion of the primal fiery ball of matter through the stages of star and planet formation, ever expanding, ever rushing towards that point where their boundaries met those of neighboring universes or cells. Or, more likely, continued expanding even after the outer space-matter came to that area in which walls were formed. The walls themselves may be trillions of light-years thick, that is, the area between the walls may be that wide."