Vargas thought for a while, then shrugged and said, “You got it right, Galactic Effectuator. But how do we end it?”
“That’s always the difficult part,” the Effectuator said. “Maybe, with some luck, you can find some other planet that’ll be crazy enough to take over both your planet and Magellanic. That’s the only way you’re going to get off the hook.”
That is how, upon entering Galactic Civilization, Earth gave up war forever. And that is why there are Earthmen on all the civilized planets of the galaxy. They can be found on the street corners of dusty alien cities. They speak all languages. They sidle up to you and say, “Listen, Mister, would you like to take over a planet with no trouble at all?”
Naturally, no one pays them the slightest attention. Even the newer civilizations have learned that war costs too much and charity begins at home.
Wormworld
Dear Robert,
I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you and I have been able to establish telepathic contact across the vastness of space. I still can hardly believe that I am in communication with an alien creature. Not that it is entirely unexpected. Many of the intelligent worms of my world believe that other worlds exist with intelligent worms living in them. Most of us also admit the possibility (some say probability) that there are intelligent races out there that are not worms at all, not even vermiform, but really quite different. Many of us have been working toward telepathic contact with these hypothetical other-worlders.
From your description of yourself (which I didn’t completely understand) you seem to possess a high degree of bilateral symmetry. So do we. Some of our best theoreticians have long predicted Necessary Degrees of Symmetry as a precondition for intelligent life. I must question a rather astounding statement you made in your recent communication. You told me that you are a nonworm intelligent creature from another solid world who makes neither worm- hole nor nonwormhole, but instead moves around on the outside of your world, in contact with its surface!
At least, I think that’s what you were saying!
Now, the idea that you are a nonworm intelligence communicating to me from another world is easy enough for me to grasp. But that you live on the outer surface of your world, rather than inside, where one would normally expect even a nonworm alien intelligence to live…
Is that really where you live? On the surface?
Please clarify! It’s really important for me to get this straight, for reasons I’ll explain in my next communication. Just now I have to sign off rather hurriedly and do some urgent tunnel-redirecting. Hope to hear from you soon.
Good to hear from you again. If I understand you correctly, you assert that you are a solid, three-dimensional creature, like me, but living on the outside of your world. And you also assert (or rather, I infer from your statements) that you know not only the shape of your world, but also its volume, radius, surface dimensions, and so forth.
Frankly, that’s hard to believe.
Is that what you meant?
Are you really a creature from some distant planet, or another worm somewhere playing tricks on me?
Talking with you has given me difficulties. The other worms know I’m sending out a powerful vibration aimed and tightly focused out into space. A lot of worms do that. But I keep on tracking a single area (your world), and that leads other worms to ask if I’ve gotten obsessive or just what the hell I think I’m doing.
Making up believable tales about why I’ve locked my beam onto a single distant source is easier than telling worms that I’m in contact with a being who lives on the surface of a sphere.
But to hell with the difficulties. As far as I’m concerned this is fascinating stuff. It is extremely interesting to hear tales of wonder from different far-off places, and perhaps it doesn’t really matter if those places really exist, or maybe somehow, somewhere, somewhen, everything that can be imagined has to exist.
I have to sign off now. I promised Jill that I’d do parallel wormholes with her on a hexagonal grid that she thought up all by herself. Artistically speaking, I suppose it isn’t much, but it gives me great pleasure to do figures with her. We’ve made a lot of good parallel wormhole designs together in the last few hundred units, that gal and I.
Do you have mates in your world, Robert? Do you suffer the unending conflict between self-preservation and consummation?
Listen, Robert, philosophy interests me, as it seems to do you. You tell me that you discuss these matters just for the fun of it, not because you’re a professional at it. It’s the same with me. I’m an artist, and I don’t know what I’m talking about half of the time, and I’m glad that it’s the same for you, as you told me. I didn’t really want to contact some giant godlike intellect Out There; I think I just wanted to find a friend, someone to tell the story of my life to, someone the story of whose life I want to hear.
What I’m trying to get at is this Robert, that I want to exchange knowledge with you, but I’m not an expert on anything except the art that I do. I gather it’s the same for you. Then good for us! Professional worm philosophers and scientists usually assume that one of them is going to make contact with their intellectual counterpart when contact is finally established between inhabitants of different worlds. Isn’t it nice that it’s happened to a couple of experimental pattern-makers like us?
Robert, are you a funny looking creature living in accord with weird and special laws of nature? Or am I? Or are we both?
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Hi. It’s me again.
Well, I made an attempt at communicating with one of my fellow-worms about you not long ago. I didn’t figure I’d have much luck at it (and how right I was!) but I had to try. Maybe it was silly of me, but I must tell you that worms are very preoccupied with that sort of thing, perhaps because of the physically isolated lives we lead.
On the other hand, worms, despite their passion for science and metaphysics, and their pressing need for the findings of both, tend to be skeptical about anything they haven’t thought up themselves or actually experienced, except for the lunatic fringe that will believe anything.
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.