Divine Intervention

by Robert Sheckley

  I didn’t want to start a cult on the one hand, or get laughed at on the other, or be put down for crazy on the third hand, or considered possessed by an evil worm-spirit on the fourth hand. (Exactly how many hands do you have, Robert? I figure four, one for each of your locomotive extensions from your central body mass. Have I guessed right? Worms have no hands, but the concept of handedness is part of our ancient lore.)

  I decided to make a trail run in the form of a hypothesis. It just so happened a few units ago that I chanced to be running a pattern contiguous to the pattern of my friend, Klaus. Klaus and I have shared numerous pattern-contiguities, more so in the old days than now. Back then we had great resonance and once even paralleled the same figure (a dodecahedron, if memory serves) for seven linked variations until—frankly—I got bored and decided that I had to go faster and more elegantly, and left Klaus behind and went on to pursue my career in art. Klaus took to paralleling the philosophical wormhole patterns and has made a fair reputation for himself.

  After some small talk about rotational matters, I said to him, “Klaus, I’ve been playing around with a funny notion recently. I’d like your opinion on it.”

  “Let’s hear it,” he said.

  When I say “we talked” I don’t mean to imply, of course, that we met face to face. That would mean instant annihilation, as I pointed out in an earlier communication, and would make our talk rather final! By “talk” I refer to the communications that pass between worms when they are in contiguous corridors with a space between them of no more than Sigma, this being our symbol for the varying range of distances and conditions within which communication is possible. These communications are effected by the hammering motions a worm makes with his head, tapping out the code of language and simultaneously leaving a written record of that talk on the wall of the corridor. Aside from natural cataclysms, like tunnels falling in, every conversation any worm has ever had with any other worm is recorded somewhere in Wormworld on the walls of the tunnels.

  This being the case, it is evident to me that we worms mean something quite different when we say we talked to a fellow worm than what you humans would mean. I thought I should clear up that point. Now to return to my conversation with Klaus.

  “Suppose there exist solid intelligent creatures like us, who live on other worlds Out There—”

  “In other worlds, you mean,” Klaus said.

  “No, that’s just the point. I’ve been thinking: what is there to prevent the existence of solid intelligent creatures like us, living on the outer surface of a world, rather than in it.”

  “Let me consider the immediate implications,” Klaus said. “These hypothetical intelligent creatures living on their world would, I presume have direct experiential contact with the surface of that world, and so would be able to establish fixed coordinates and thus know the shape of their world.”

  “Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, it’s spherical,” I said.

  “The actual shape is unimportant. What is important on this hypothetical world of yours is that its shape, whatever it is, can be known, and therefore all directional and topological facts about that world can also be known.”

  “That seems to follow,” I said. “And I postulate a further condition…”

  “My dear fellow,” Klaus said, “don’t bother to go on. I must tell you that further speculation along this line is fruitless, since it piles fanciful hypothesis upon even more fanciful hypothesis. Aren’t you aware that the organum of worm science and mathematics, of which I think I may claim some slight knowledge, has never been able to establish the absolute existence of a surface to our own world? That’s why we refer to it as the veritable surface.”

  “That doesn’t mean a surface couldn’t exist somewhere else,” I told him.

  “Of course not. Anything is possible, including the existence somewhere of worms who live by consuming their own tails. Possible, but so improbable as to be beneath consideration. If we are to have a reasonable discussion, even on a hypothetical point, it must be based upon the laws of nature as we know them, not as we would like to imagine them.”

  “I think you’re taking much too high and holy a tone,” I told him. “Why, dammit, worm, we always assume that our world has a surface, even though we don’t know where it is, except at the moment of breakthrough/cancellation when it doesn’t do us much good.”

  “The transformation which takes place at the veritable surface, which we refer to as breakthrough/cancellation, or B, is most decidedly not proof of the existence of an actual surface to our world. We do assume in our everyday life that our world has a surface. It’s a necessary psychological construct (though an artificial one, I must insist) for setting direction of wormhole. But philosophers don’t believe in the existence of a veritable surface anymore.”

  “That’s news to me,” I said. “What do they believe, then?”

  “The current trend is to consider that our world has a pseudo-surface, sometimes called an imaginary surface. It is a useful concept, because mathematically the pseudo-surface has to exist, whether a veritable surface exists or not. So it’s useful for certain mathematical functions.”

  “I don’t see the difference between your pseudo-surface and your veritable surface,” I said. “Aren’t you just calling the same thing by a classier name?”

  “Not at all. The term pseudo-surface is used to express indeterminacy.”

  “The hell you say,” I said.

  “You see, dear boy, surface is pseudo-surface, or P/S, and is indeterminate because you cannot investigate it experimentally, since investigation involves cancellation of the investigator when the undetectable pseudo-surface is broken through. If you see what I mean.”

  There was quite a lot of pomposity to Klaus’s vibrations when he communicated that. He calls himself a Transcendental Pragmatist. I think he’s just clever at twisting concepts. Sometimes I think that when Klaus pontificates on one of his subjects of knowledge, there is literally nothing there to understand. It’s just a lot of old wormhole, to use a term of ours for something that has form but no substance.

  Still, Klaus is a recognized philosophical thinker, and if he couldn’t at least take my proposition as a postulate from which to extrapolate—well, I probably wouldn’t do any better with anyone else, except the people who will believe anything, whom I’m not interested in reaching.

  “You’re just being obstinate because you don’t want to consider my conception,” I told him. “Surface is a necessary conception. For Godworm’s sake, worm, we spend our lives digging wormholes and you’re trying to tell me they’re imaginary!”

  “Have you ever seen the surface of a wormhole?” Klaus vibrated coolly.

  “Well, not from the outside, of course not. It’s impossible for a worm to encounter wormhole without cancellation. Everybody knows that! But a worm damned well knows that he’s laying down wormhole, and the wormhole he lays down has surface.”

  “That, of course, is the common-sense ‘worm’s in his wormhole; all’s well with the world’ view,” Klaus went on in his infuriating manner. “We can assume what we please, but as long as the evidence is circumstantial rather than experiential, the thing in question cannot be ascertained with certainty. I will admit that some circumstantial evidence is very strong—as the philosopher said when he came up with a bump against the crystalline face that his theory said didn’t even exist.”

  I gave him a very short burst of appreciation-vibration: it was an old joke and I had heard it many times before.

  Klaus went on, “Let’s leave absolute truth to itself for a moment and postulate that the indeterminate pseudo-surface exists somewhere as a veritable surface. You want me to imagine that there are objects of known dimensions in the Universe? Very well, that’s not too difficult. But you also want me to imagine solid, three dimensional creatures like us living on this surface.”

  “That’s the construct.”

  “Well,” Klaus said mildly (but with ill-concealed ir
onic vibrational overtones), “they would have to be very strange creatures indeed, then. Your creatures living on the surface would be in the position of worms exposed to wormhole breakthrough, not just for an instant, which is long enough to cancel any of us, but continually!”

  “Why don’t we just invent a special law that says he can do just that?” I suggested.

  “To what purpose?” Klaus asked. “Conjecture can be entertaining as well as instructive, but why should we create a baseless fantasy that goes against all our experience of how the world really works? This surface creature that you want to hypothesize, my dear boy, could only exist in accord with laws that (since no necessity exists to even consider them) can only be considered capricious, frivolous, and unlikely in the extreme to actually exist anywhere or anywhen.”

  I vibrated a shrug. “Okay, Klaus, forget it.”

  He vibrated donnish self-approval. “My boy, a solid creature living on the surface of a spherical world of known dimensions would be a very strange creature indeed, as would be his world and the laws that govern it!”

  I managed to get away from him at last—left him there vibrating softly to himself as he absent-mindedly fell into a rotating spiral mono-axial tessellation which was said to be the figure most favored by the great Aristotle, the worm who codified most of our knowledge.

  So that shows what you can expect from my more enlightened colleagues. I think I’ll keep these communications just to myself, though maybe I’ll tell Jill. Jill is my mate, by the way. Actually, she’s my intended mate, and I hers, since we haven’t consummated yet—otherwise I’d be cancelled and I couldn’t very well be communicating all this to you, right?

  Ever since your last telepathic communication, Robert, I have been unable to stop thinking about you. I keep on visualizing you (or trying to) crawling merrily around your “enormous oblate spheroid of tediously regular shape,” as you put it, with its established shape and dimensions. And how I have marveled at the tantalizing glimpses I have had of your strange world—a place where intelligent creatures not only move along the surface of a sphere of known dimensions—as if that weren’t enough! —but also, marvel of marvels, making physical contact with each other without mutual cancellation/death!

  Can I be right about this? It seemed to be the only reasonable interpretation of your regret at our incapacity ever to have a “face to face meeting,” as is customary between friends on your world.

  Robert, you couldn’t know that we worms speak of a face-to-face meeting only when we are speaking about the mating/procreating/dying situation. I’m sure you didn’t want that with me! (But correct me if I’ve misjudged your sexual/death imagination.)

  I think you meant friendly, non-stressful, non-sexual communication together in a contiguous space! A space where we could even touch, if we wanted to, without mutual and instantaneous cancellation/death.

  If my supposition is right, then that sort of thing is normal, to say nothing of possible, for you humans.

  And if that’s really the case, I can only say, wow. Frankly, your claims about yourself and your world are going to seem preposterous to the other worms (though I believe you!). Still, I’m going to feel around and try to find some way of communicating these things you are telling me to someone.

  We worms exist in an intermediate zone between the core and the surface. New matter is created and old matter is destroyed, and, in between, in the stable zone, we worms live in a finite volume, which can never fluctuate as long as the interface holds. Our world creates matter and we consume it, and there’s only so much of the matter for us to eat/burrow through, and more is made only at a certain fixed rate, and so our population is self-limiting, reducing as it over-consumes, expanding as it underconsumes.

  Life does have a tendency to maintain itself in strange situations, doesn’t it, Robert?

  It’s getting pretty crowded around here these days. It looks like a big dieoff is coming up. There’s hardly room to swing a figure 8, much less anything complicated.

  One of our more radical thinkers has claimed that there is actually only one worm in the world, dreaming dreams to itself, traveling around making wormholes, traveling so fast that it meets itself at other location time/points, canceling itself out and coming to life again, immortal within the term of continual death and rebirth, flickering in and out of existence, and dreaming everything else, our civilization, our culture, our laws, our very existence. This Primordial Worm succeeds in deceiving himself into believing that there are many, and then, when that belief is his secure possession, he struggles to deceive himself that there is only one.

  Safety in Wormworld lies toward the Core, and the lower regions are densely wormholed accordingly. As you descend, you encounter a maze of wormholes, growing impenetrable at last. But one can move down, in, with luck and skill avoiding entrapment areas, find a way into the Core Heart, the inner region where creation is continuous and the entire region unwormholed. For even if a few other worms have penetrated to the Core Heart, so rapid is material replacement at the Core that their wormholes would be swallowed up quickly behind them. With their wormholes filling in so quickly behind them, they would have no history of the sort we inscribe on the walls of our long-lasting wormholes. Unaffected by memory, they would live in a sort of Eden.

  “But even if we found this opening,” I told Jill, “we still can’t know if it leads to the Core or to death in an entrapment area.”

  “I realize that,” Jill said. “Frankly, I’d rather run with the pack and live out my life like the other worms. But I’ve fallen in love with you for some reason that escapes me at the moment. If you want to live isolated from the rest, I’ll go with you, and maybe we’ll find the Core, but even if we don’t we’ll at least have a chance at a reasonable life together.”

  “If you feel that way,” I said, “then why not come with me to the Upper Regions?”

  “Because it leads to death, and quickly, too, from what I hear. I love you and am willing to put up with your eccentricities. Looking for the Core is eccentric, but it is still behaviorally permissible. But going to the Upper Regions is just plain suicidal. I love you very much, my dear, but—forgive me—not to the point of making a suicide pact with you.”

  There is evidence that ancient wormhole areas are being filled in, perhaps by the spontaneous creation of matter.

  It’s hard to be sure—there is conflicting evidence on the subject—but there is some evidence to show that ancient wormholes in some areas are being filled in by solid matter. Whole networks of prehistoric wormholes indicated on reliable though old and crudely made maps have apparently been filled in, which would indicate a process of continuous creation in our world.

  The skeptics say that all that shows is that the old maps are wrong. Personally, I have a hunch that it is true. But the cynic in me feels that we worms probably use up the world faster than it can renew itself.

  By the way, thanks for your further description of ideal mate- hood in your world. How lucky you are to be able to get into physical contact with your loved one and not get canceled, but rather go on to greater and richer understandings together. I can’t imagine it, actually. It seems too good to be true.

  I’m glad you clarified the concept of “war” for me. I see it now (correctly, I hope) as numerous solid bodies coming into direct and violent contact with each other, but not canceling each other out, as with us, but rather, violently repelling each other by thrusting and pushing movements. Physical contact does sound extremely interesting, though it’s difficult for a worm to get the sense of it. But then, I suppose you can never really know what tunneling is.

  For us, morality consists in not spiraling around and ahead of the tunneling of another worm. It’s a pretty foul trip: You’ve surrounded him with spirals spaced at a critical distance, see, so what he encounters is in effect a tunnel around and ahead of the tunnel he is digging. He is surrounded by an impenetrable lattice work that forces him to follow predetermined directions. Then th
e aggressor worm can close off the head of the wormhole by crisscrossing in front of it.

  The heart of Wormworld morality: to spiral toward a converging worm or not to spiral.

  The theory that Wormworld is not a single solid figure but instead one or more figures connected by one or more solid bridges, like linked dumbbells.

  Some say that our world is not a single continuous solid figure, but rather a collection of solid bodies connected by cylindrical bridges. There is some evidence for this: some of our maps of dead areas show a dumbbell configuration, for example—two shapes, not necessarily spherical, of course, connected by a cylindrical section. The connection area is presumed interdicted, but empirical investigation is rare, since a mistake is catastrophic.

  Still, enough of these dumbbell shapes turn up to make a worm think there’s something to it. This theory is also compatible with the theory of continuous creation, the supposition being that our world is some sort of living matter that extends itself at various points from its (supposed) surface by a thread or filament, and then grows a new solid volume on the end of it.

  You asked me how worms differentiate each other, whether we have individuality and how we show it, how we communicate, etc. I’m not a scientist, but I’ll explain it as well as I can.

  Every worm is born with a distinct and unique texture-pattern to his skin. And his skin is, of course, in continuous contact with the sides of his wormhole. The same basic figures, patterns, etc., occur over and over, but in ever-differing combinations, of greater or lesser aesthetic appeal. One worm can read another worm’s skin- pattern at varying distances, depending on various factors.

  Skin-pattern is the basic texture of individuality. It impresses itself on the sides of the wormhole as one progresses, and can be read by others, until, in time, it fades out.

  This much is innate, inborn. Beyond that, we have the ability to make conscious textural patterns on our wormskin, and hence impress them on the sides of the wormhole in order to communicate with others, or (using more energy) to leave records whose duration depends on the size and the speed of the worm leaving it.