I think of you, crawling around your enormous sphere whose shape you know—marvel of marvels!
It is quite otherwise with us. We live within our world rather than on the surface of it. We are worms. Or wormoids, since there are several races of worms.
Klaus surprised me by showing definite interest in my telepathic communication with you. “I don’t like to give credence to something that I myself cannot verify,” he said, “but this—let’s call it communication that you have received—opens up some very interesting areas. Our scientists have long been aware of the possibility of other worlds with definite and measurable surfaces. We’ve had no real evidence for it up to now. And I’m not sure this constitutes evidence. But accepting the assumption for the moment, it opens some interesting conjectures.”
“Does it prove that our world has a real surface?” I asked.
“No, dear boy. Quite the contrary. If your informant speaks true, then it proves that our world absolutely does not have a surface, and it proves this as a matter of verifiable knowledge rather than as an idealistic statement.”
“Is that important?” I asked.
“Of course! Ideal concepts are mere logical constructs whose truth depends upon inner consistency, and whose main use is to keep the pragmatists upset and act as a sort of challenge to learn whether the ideal corresponds with what really is.”
“I don’t see why the fact that his world has a surface proves that our world doesn’t.”
“It’s only an indirect proof, a conclusion to be derived from the cosmological evidence presented by your observer. Actually, I’m not absolutely sure what it proves. If anything. I must consult with some of my colleagues, several of whom are working along similar lines.”
Artistry is my pursuit, perhaps the ultimate pursuit of all worms. But philosophy, and most especially metaphysics, is crucial to the direction of our day-to-day lives. I gather that it is the other way around with you. What a lucky creature you are! I had a rather frightening experience today and I’m still in uneasy self-oscillation over it. I almost got trapped in a ninety-nine percent annihilation volume.
Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but only slightly. It’s hard for us worms to know much about degree of danger. With us, either you’re all right or you’re dead, canceled. The fear of cancellation-death haunts us all our lives, but it’s difficult to really assess the threat. As far as I’m concerned, if I can sense three-quarter wormhole coverage around me, I get a little jumpy and start looking for more spacious volumes. Well, today I got into this area, it must have been at least eighty-two percent canceled, and to make it worse, it was surrounded by impenetrable faces.
Still, even eighty-two percent coverage isn’t absolutely critical, as past statistical surveys have shown, and I was able to plot a direction for my wormhole that skirted a ninety-percent space at one point (that was hairy!) and then spiraled into a beautiful sixty percent volume for as far as the eye could see. (We don’t actually see, of course, but we do have a sense similar to your long-distance binocular vision that permits us to survey territory ahead and around us and to form a three-dimensional impression of it, a sort of moving topological map in our heads which models its hollows and solid areas, and, of course, its crystalline faces if any are present.)
Do enclosed self-annihilation spaces occur on the surface where you live, Robert? Here we’re always on the lookout for critical-width bottlenecks, which permit entry through the bottleneck but no exit, since the exit wormhole would violate the critical distance separating it from the entry wormhole. Sometimes we call them bottlenecks, sometimes box canyons, depending on whether the volume is cylindrical or rectangular. There are various other kinds of traps which occur, and which one must be on guard against. The terrain through which we pass is changing constantly. If only it were constant! We are like those pioneers you told me about, traveling over the great plains in their land-schooners. Only we go through the land, not over it. Sometimes we encounter easy going on what are for us the great plains, other times we face mountains—tumbled and tangled crystalline faces which must be worked around, and sometimes there are hollow volumes that must be skirted, and at other times we find the equivalent of swamp—areas that are not hollow, but which are not sufficiently tenacious to permit us to push a wormhole through without the whole thing collapsing around us. Solid matter is what we usually talk about, but actually, that’s a bit rare. Usually our surroundings are in a state of viscosity, and this viscosity exists in a range between tough, discrete, hard-packed particles on the one hand, so stable as to be considered eternal, and air (or, as we would say, space—because to us the chemical constituents of the gas that makes up hollow spaces is of no concern—the space itself is deadly to us—) and water, another peril, since it will support no worm- hole, or rather, a wormhole will leave no trace in it. Since it is essential to know where you’ve just been in order to know where to go next—the importance of the baseline—a worm in water, try as he will to hew a straight line in hope of reaching shore, will all too often describe a circle, enclosing himself in a course too curved to permit sufficient speed to be built up to go on. And so he dies. It seems to be one of the things that our different species share, the ability to drown.
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.