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 cancellation.
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?)