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 the 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.