Divine Intervention

by Robert Sheckley

  Please do tell me about your own self-annihilation spaces, Robert, if you have them. In answer to your previous question, no, we don’t have wars or physical conflict of any sort, since we can only kill an enemy at cost of our own life. Some worms do from time to time get angry enough or crazy enough to do just that, but it’s not a big problem as “war” seems to be with you. And thanks for explaining “anxiety” to me. Yes, it rules our lives just as it does yours.

  Telepathic communication seems to carry with it a sense of the sincerity of the communicator, even though some concepts are necessarily unclear until referents (if they exist) can be found for them. So I know—intuitively, shall we say—that you are communicating your truth to me, no matter how mind-shattering and contrary to common sense the matters you are relating seem.

  Robert, you are a very strange creature from my point of view, and you live under circumstances that I find incomprehensible. That is true. But I also know that spiritually we are just alike. And that is the more important truth. I believe that all intelligent beings everywhere are brothers reaching out to one another.

  Well met, brother.

  It’s also nice that we both happen to specialize in the creation of aesthetic patterns. Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk shop.

  We are blind worms, if I understand your definition of vision correctly. We are born that way, but we are aware of our visual light-spectrum blindness because, in dreams, a worm can see the patterns that he blindly digs when he’s awake. Perhaps worms once had sight. We do our sort of seeing through the vibrations we send and receive. And that’s how we also talk to each other, of course. Our way of listening is a form of seeing, too, because during communication we form strong impressions of our respondent’s mood, facial expression, attitude, etc. But we possess no specific organs of light-perception as you do, probably because there’s nothing for us to see—just the face of the wormhole, and you can’t really see that since you’re contiguous to it.

  Even though this is the case, and I am a blind worm and the offspring of unnumbered generations of blind worms, yet still I claim the ability to see things in much the same way you do, breathed in light and imbued with shape and texture and color. We believe that seeing is an innate and inalienable aspect of all sentient creatures, and that visual-light blindness or sightedness has very little to do with it. My friend Klaus would probably call seeing a transcendental function: we are blind but we see anyhow, and we don’t know how it happens or even what we behold.

  A worm’s head terminates in a circular organ equipped with various cutting edges. This organ, in continual contact with the earth it passes through, cuts, grinds, drills, hammers, carves, gnaws, a hole large enough for the worm to pass through. The matter it ingests passes through the worm’s body and comes out as worm turd.

  A worm’s length increases with speed. This is known as “making a long tail.” It is a term of respect, and is preferred to calling someone “a big quick worm” which contains a subtle insult difficult to translate.

  Needless to say, worms fill their wormholes almost completely. Contact is maintained with the surface of the tunnel at all points. Problems of friction are overcome by the ability of worms to exude a substance which I suppose you would call slime but which we refer to as The Divine Lubricant.

  A worm group traveling together can scan the area they are approaching, as they can the area they are in. Therefore some attempt at order can be made. This is necessary since a sufficient volume of space around and ahead of him is to a worm the vital requirement of life, food, shelter, occupation, and art, all rolled into one together with survival itself. In the past, many different political systems have been tried. Most of the time Wormworld is inclined toward anarchy, since a law can be physically enforced only by the death of the one who enforces it. But some social organization is needed, especially as the worm population has grown and the available space lessened. It’s not like the ancient times that we hear about, when the world was virgin and untrammeled, and there weren’t worms and wormholes everywhere.

  From time to time, charismatic worms have sprung up who have gathered around them fanatics willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of law and order. The lives of the followers are used only sparingly, because morale even among fanatics diminishes as one after another of their numbers is killed. Usually the enforcer worms are only sent out in pursuit of crazed or possessed worms. They are the ones whose irrational figures are a threat to everyone, whose unpredictable movements impede the progress of the wormass, and whose ecstatic behavior could sometimes be infectious, as for example in the so-called Years of the Retrograde Spiralers.

  A collective mass of group lore and survival data exists, however, not all of it accurate. It is known as The Code. The Code is the basis for all ethical behavior among worms. But no one knows exactly what The Code says, since no consensus has ever existed that would permit a codification agreed upon by all. But perhaps it’s comforting to be inexact in these matters when you can’t enforce The Code anyhow.

  The total worm-population is forever advancing in a clockwise motion. The few worms who go against this movement are said to be retrograde worms. The environment of the worms can be described as a sphere within the greater sphere of our world. Somewhere above is the unknown and fatal Surface, somewhere below is the legendary and unknown Core. Between these limits the worm-populations move, spread out over a vast front, age-groups frequently traveling together. As for the Core itself, little is known, though much is conjectured. But I’ll have more to say about the Core later.

  The basic worm migration is unidirectional, clockwise, always progressing into new territory. But of course really new territory is never found, since all worms are in effect pursuing all other worms around the world. We’re all trying to do the same thing, go faster, get bigger, that’s success, but it carries its own danger: the faster/bigger a worm goes, the sooner/oftener he encounters wormhole barriers and traps as his speed takes him into the world faster than new matter can be created for him to wormhole through. It is this limit that keeps worms constantly expanding and contracting, changing speed and direction, doing an occasional helix just to get a little peace.

  I think I may have given you a wrong impression of retrograde motion. When done in moderation it’s not at all a bad thing. No worm, no matter how straightforward, can live a life that just goes straight ahead with no retrograde motion whatsoever. Well, maybe it is possible—we have records of highly moral worms from the classical period (old Cato comes to mind) who go straight ahead and devil take the hindermost, and when they die, they die without evasion and (as far as we know) without regret.

  But most worms don’t want to get ahead quite so directly—straight lines, even when practicable, tend to get boring. And retrogradism is essential in art, since no figure of complexity and elegance can be inscribed while moving only in a straight line.

  The really great artists of our past ignored for the most part the inhibition against retrogradism, treated all directions as equal, considered only the figure important, inscribed their figures and died when they had to.

  Further on the subject of worm-dreams, I should tell you that they always involve the sense of seeing something, and what a worm typically sees in his dreams is designs and figures, some of which can be approximated in art, but most of which are shimmering visions of impossibly intricate wormhole designs which fade all too quickly upon awakening.

  This is not our only dream, however. We also frequently dream the tunnel-dream—a dream of a long, curving cylindrical and segmented tunnel with intricate markings along its sides left by the texture of our individuality as we passed through it This is the vision of the wormhole that we construct throughout our lives and flee from all our lives, and that we can never see except in a dream.

  We also have nightmares of falling into foreordained death-patterns that we must follow to our destruction through an adjacent wormhole wall, or through the surface of the world itself into cancellat
ion.

  This is generally considered a very bad dream. But for the artist-worm, it holds the seeds of transformation.

  Please excuse my prolixity. Frankly, there’s nothing much I can do about it. Telepathy affords little opportunity of putting your thoughts into rational order. The thought/messages just all tumble out in a complicated, inconclusive, tantalizing, disorderly, and loquacious (Wormgod, yes! But you’re as bad yourself, Robert!) flow of thinking/meaning/rethinking/hoping, etc.

  I wish I could continue, but I’m going to have to cut back on speed for a while because I’m tunneling linked U turns through a slow area that just came up and consequently won’t be able to project more signal until I’m out of it and able to get back to decent speed/ strength.

  But I’ll be listening for your message, and I hope to hear from you soon. Tell me more about what it’s like on the surface. Tell me more about the sky.

  I understand, Robert, that you have a problem similar to mine: you can’t present the data I send you to your people as factual, since the scientific determinists among you will demand “verifiability,” whereas our telepathic link seems to be unique and unduplicatable, at least as far as your “laws of evidence” go. I have the same problem: if another worm can’t tune in on the telepathic vibrations you send me, then he has no evidence for all of this except my bare unsupported vibration.

  If it were Klaus telling me this, I’d probably react as he has, asking myself why I should give credence to this fellow’s baseless and unverifiable fantasy. Yes, and I’d pride myself on my intellectual rigor!

  And that of course is just as it should be. As you say, some people will believe anything, if you just tell it to them with enough conviction. No proposition is too absurd to lack followers. I could get some worms to believe that Wormworld itself is no more than a figment of my imagination, and that the lives and very existence of my fellow worms depends entirely on how long I maintain an interest in them. (We’ve had a long history of worms calling themselves the Godworm, or one of His representatives. And maybe one or more of them were the real thing! But who can know?)

  Thanks for your offer of assistance. I’m sure that some of your erudite friends could shed light on our situation in Wormworld from the point of view of your sciences. But why bother? You and I are artists. We know that everything flows, and that this communication is but a ripple in our separate lives.

  And anyhow, the advancement of learning, knowledge, science, metaphysics, philosophy—just between ourselves, is all of that so very important? You yourself have told me that your science, considered on a personal level (and what other level is there to consider it from?) has done nothing despite its absurd achievements. You tell me that in your world, the products of science have served mainly to hamper, to destroy, your moment-by-moment sensory existence. You say that the food’s getting worse every year, that your life-space is cramped by the existence of too many others, and that this is mainly attributable to the technologies derived from the science which makes it all possible.

  Robert, I’m sure a good case could be made for the suppression of the advanced sciences and the obliteration of technology. And anyhow, humans and worms have been “discovering” and “proving” the existence of telepathy and intelligent alien races for untold years. So why should you and I bother doing it all over again for an audience that has never since the beginning of time really believed in anything except what they can verify by their own senses? (Quite right, too.)

  No, you have your work and I have mine, so don’t worry about it, let’s just enjoy these privileged moments and to wormhell with the Truth, whatever that may be. Just tell me whatever you remember of the travelers’ tales of your theoreticians, and I’ll tell you mine, and we’ll have a few good laughs. Leave the others out of it, don’t consult anyone, just tell me what you’ve picked up, tell me what the wise men of your world talk about, tell me what you think is really happening in the universe and what is a soul and what is art, even though you know that you don’t really know even the little that is known; and I’ll do the same.

  The interference is getting worse, and your signal is noticeably weaker. Nevertheless, I think I managed to get most of your recent urgent communication. If it is true, it presents a view of our world which neither of us anticipated.

  You tell me that it is commonly accepted among you, and verified as well, that there are many worlds, each grouped around a star, each star part of a collectivity of stars you call a galaxy. A galactic group of stars exists as an isolated area in the nothingness of the universal background. You further note that the galaxies themselves are grouped into universes (how did you people ever find out such things?) which are themselves part of a greater collectivity. Further, you note that each of these universes is in a state of expansion from a deduced original center, like wormholes expanding from the central Core of our world. This universal expansion can be verified, you tell me, beyond reasonable doubt.

  You also went into a lot of stuff about continuous creation theory as contrasted with big bang theory (about both of which you modestly disclaimed any real knowledge) and proposed (not so modestly) your own synthesis.

  You then make the following assumptions: the universe is expanding. The expansion is not, however, infinite: the bits and pieces of the universe don’t keep on traveling away from the center forever. At some point, on the crest or cutting edge of the expanding universe, both matter and energy are destroyed—canceled—converted into nothingness, into background.

  Meanwhile, matter is also being created continuously. Where is this matter being created, you ask. Is it spread out evenly over the whole volume of the universe, which volume, however, is continually expanding? You don’t think so, though you’re willing to listen to arguments.

  Nor do you believe that matter is being created again at the center of the universe, in a never-ending cycle of creation and destruction. You object to that because it doesn’t fit your theory, but also because it strikes you intuitively as too formal, too static, a view which excludes the quantum principle, excludes Indeterminacy, and utilizes the notion of discontinuity only nominally. You also object on aesthetic grounds, since the scheme lacks elegance in your view.

  Okay, I’ll go along with that.

  You feel that something is expanding into nothing, yet you feel that an equipoise, however temporary, must exist between the two. You think that the shock-wave front itself, behind which is the exploding universe and in front of which is nothingness, is itself an interface, a recognizable zone, an area with its own peculiar stability. It is the area where creation and destruction are occurring simultaneously.

  So. The universe is expanding But into what? Into nothing? There is nothing to expand into. The universe simply expands, and exists at all points in dynamic relationship with nothing.

  Every part of the universe is expanding simultaneously, rushing blindly into the nothing that confronts it.

  But just as this nothingness has no beginning or end, so it is with somethingness. It is as all-pervasive as nothingness. You feel that, from one point of view, any location whatsoever could be considered the shock-front interface with nothingness, and that, in fact, it is only an illusion that the universe has depth in the sense of a three dimensional figure. The universe has no depth because every particle of something is confronted on all levels with nothingness.

  Nevertheless, you point out, local configuration and regional peculiarity do exist, differentiation exists, asymmetry exists, uncertainty exists, and creation/destruction may itself be no more than an aspect of something beyond our conception.

  From this viewpoint, the universe is indeed expanding, and some places are moving faster than others and some places are situated closer to the galactic center. Other locations are closer to the leading edge of the universal expansion—the wave-front/point where the universe of something is literally expanding into the non- universe of nothing.

  And then you dropped your bombshell. It is your belief, you said
, based on the evidence I’ve given you, that our planet of Worm-world is poised in dynamic stability on the leading edge of the shockfront, with everything that constitutes something in front of it and everything that constitutes nothing behind it.

  That’s creepy, Robert. It’s given me something to think about.

  Given the stability of the above situation, you further theorize that a planet on the interface between somethingness and nothingness would have certain special properties. First, all directions outward would be into nothing, whereas all directions inward would be moving into something.