Mr G

by Alan Lightman

  “I am not sure the fellow truly feels superior. If he is wise, then he knows that bodily beauty does not reflect inner value. His worship of his own beauty suggests that he does not believe that he has within himself anything else of value.”

  “But his wisdom is something of value. And if he is wise, he would recognize his wisdom.”

  “So we reach a contradiction,” I said. “The man cannot be wise.”

  “Not for a moment did I think that this miserable creature is wise,” said Belhor. “But he is not only unwise. He has contempt for those less handsome than himself. And for that, he deserves to be flayed and disfigured.”

  “You judge him harshly.”

  “He has brought this judgment upon himself,” said Belhor. “I would deliver to him only what is proper. He, and others like him, demean what you have made. They make a mockery of your creation. But in fact, I would not bother. There are trillions like him. He is an atom. We cannot spend our time involved with individual atoms.”

  “Yet lives are lived by individual beings,” I said. “Regardless of how many trillions there are, a life is an individual thing. Each life is precious.”

  “But of little consequence,” said Belhor. “Certainly not for the whole. The case of the young woman whose mother has asked her to steal in order to support her family is more interesting. She is conflicted.”

  “I am concerned about her. She has already suffered a great deal with the death of her father.”

  “Do you think she would be justified in following her mother’s instructions?”

  “Why don’t I look in more closely,” I said.

  “That is an excellent idea. We may learn from her case. Let us enter the new universe and observe.”

  “I will enter. But you should not.”

  “I have already done so,” said Belhor. “Many times already.”

  “When? I did not give my permission.”

  Belhor smiled. He became thinner and thinner until he was a razor-sharp black line. The line stretched and stretched and extended through the vacuous space of the Void until it penetrated the pulsating sphere that was Aalam-104729 and disappeared.

  “We are here now,” said Belhor. He was hypnotic.

  “Now that we are both here,” I said, “you will respect my creation.”

  “Certainly,” said Belhor.

  “Well then, we will look in on the young woman, to learn from her life. I will unfold the folding of time, dissect the time of rotation of galaxies, then again and again, down to finer and finer durations of time, to individual lifetimes, to moments.”

  “Yes. You have captured a sliver of time, a slice of her life.”

  “In a certain cluster of galaxies. This galaxy. This star system, with three planets. This planet, the innermost planet. This dominion. This commune. This habitat. There. Can you see her? It is late afternoon, dusk. She gazes out of a window. Eighteen years old, in local years. Wearing a white mantle with a frayed border, she slumps against a stucco wall. There is another person in the chamber, her younger sister, who squats on the floor and drops little stones into a bottle one by one. A year ago, their father died an accidental death.”

  Every few moments, the young woman looks around the small chamber as if she were a visitor in her own abode, sighs, then turns again to stare out of the window. She gazes onto a small courtyard of spherical rocks and, beyond, narrow passageways barely wide enough for a cart, weeds hanging from the cracks in the stuccoed walls of other houses. Smell of rotting food. Her own habitat has a dirty tiled entry, a central chamber, two small sleeping spaces. On the pandamin, chimes sing in the breeze that comes before the rain. Other than the chimes, it is quiet, so quiet that the young woman can hear the tiny scratchings of an insect crawling across the limestone floor, and another soft murmur that is the sound of wind moving through the samarin groves.

  The young woman has been standing by the window for some time, brooding in the dim silence, watching as the last rays of starlight stream through the west colonnade and cast long turquoise shadows across the floor and up the back wall onto the painted mural of an ocean storm. Now, her skull begins to pound. Whether it is anxiety or guilt, she doesn’t know. She reaches up and gingerly massages her temples, then shrieks as another wave of pain surges through her head. At the cry, her younger sister leaps to her feet. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” says the young woman. “There is meat in the latrum. Already cooked. Eat.”

  “Where did you get it?” asks the sister in astonishment. She crosses the room, then begins devouring pieces of the meat.

  “Doesn’t matter,” says the young woman. “Save some for our mother.”

  “How did you get it?” asks the sister.

  Without answering, the young woman walks across the chamber and ignites a copper lamp. It creates a distended ellipsoid of light and releases the fragrance of mlyex bark. Then she returns to the window. Outside, in the fading light, she sees a bedraggled man walk out of one of the cone-roofed dwellings, dump fish bones into the alley, and go back inside. A tadr bird circles the cistern three times before landing. Bad omens everywhere, she thinks to herself.

  “What are you looking at?” asks the sister.

  “Nothing,” says the young woman. “I am not looking at anything.”

  “Then why are you staring out the window?”

  “I don’t know,” says the young woman. “I did something bad today.”

  “Our mother will punish you. But I won’t tell her. What did you do? Was it really really bad? Does she know what you did?”

  “She asked me to do it.” The young woman continues to stare out the window and pushes her hand against a sharp edge of the window latch until it begins to bleed.

  “What did you do that was bad? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” The sister wipes her mouth. “Thank you for getting meat. Our mother will be happy. She said that she didn’t know if we would ever be able to eat meat again.” The girl looks down at the dusty limestone floor, shudders, and begins crying.

  “Please don’t cry,” says the young woman. She puts her arms around her younger sister and kisses her forehead.

  “What will happen to us?” says the sister.

  “You should not worry about it,” says the young woman. “I will get more good food.”

  “But what if you can’t?” says the sister.

  “You should not worry.”

  Immortality Reconsidered

  Uncle Deva and Aunt Penelope could not hear the voices. But I told them.

  Poor girl, said Uncle Deva. She is so young. There is a great anxiety in her. And a sadness. In so many of these creatures. Uncle let out a long sigh. Now we know sadness. It has come into the universe, I don’t understand from where, but I can feel it. Before now, I didn’t know what sadness was. Now it has washed over houses and communes. It has infected lives like a wound that will not heal. I am so sorry, so sorry. And now I too am sad, for the first time in the infinity of time. That poor young woman, still a girl really. First her father died, and now this. What kind of mother would ask her child to steal?

  The family needed food, I said. The mother hated to ask her daughter to steal, just as the daughter hated doing it. We had only a glimpse.

  You cannot pay so much attention to individual creatures in the new universe, said Aunt P. That is my advice. We must remember where we are and who we are.

  Sometimes, Penelope, you sound so … I wish that … But I suppose you are right. Those beings are not of our essence. That is what I have been saying all along.

  No, that is not quite what you have been saying all along, said Aunt P, and to punctuate her point she snipped off a piece of nothingness and stuck it in her hair. Before you were talking about inanimate matter. And then souls. Now you are lumping animate and inanimate matter together. Are they the same or not the same, which is it?

  They are the same in some ways and not the same in others, said Uncle D. I am trying to agree with yo
u.

  Here we go, said Aunt P. What do you say, Nephew? You made all of it. It’s your production.

  I will not continue to be brought into these arguments, I said. Were you happier in that endless sleep we all had before time? When we were all doing a great deal of nothing? When there was nothing to do? It was easy, I admit, but is that what you wanted? I, for one, realize I was … bored.

  Aunt looked away, as she did when she had been cornered.

  I knew from experience that I had to allow her to save face. Animate and inanimate matter are made of the same material, I said. But there are obvious differences.

  Of course there are obvious differences, said Uncle D. For one thing, the animate matter talks.

  And apparently suffers anxiety and pain, said Aunt P. My dear husband, didn’t you assure all of us that there would be no pain in the new universe? What about that rosy prediction of yours?

  Uncle Deva was hurt by this remark and became quiet. He didn’t deserve such treatment. You should not say such things, I said to my aunt. Please. You cannot criticize Uncle for being optimistic. The responsibility for suffering in Aalam-104729 is mine. I made the universe.

  Aunt Penelope groaned and swept back her hair. Don’t blame yourself, Nephew. None of us knew what would happen. The thing took off. You did a good job. It just took off by itself.

  We looked over at Aalam-104729. The universe had grown so full and swollen that the pinch in its middle had all but disappeared. Since intelligent life had arisen, the sphere vibrated with more urgency, more intensity. Yet none of the dramatic happenings inside were visible from the outside. Outside, it still appeared as a pudgy sphere, silky and pink. As we were watching, it slowly glided by, tentative, always a bit separate from the other universes that zipped and slammed through the Void.

  I don’t blame your uncle either, said Aunt P. Sometimes things just happen, they just happen. She made an attempt at a little smile. I am out of sorts, out of sorts. I’m sorry, Deva. Forgive me, Deva. Then Aunt P did something I had rarely seen. She began weeping. None of us wanted the suffering, she said. It just happened. Or that terrible Belhor made it happen.

  Uncle Deva embraced Aunt Penelope, and she allowed him to hold her. There, there, he said. The new universe is not all suffering and sadness. There is much happiness in the thing. Isn’t there, Nephew. There is joy, and there is music, and there is spirit.

  Yes, I said. All of those things. It is a beautiful universe.

  We have been changed, said Aunt P. I can feel it. Everything is different now. The Void is different. What will become of us?

  What do you mean by that? Uncle Deva exclaimed. We will go on, as we always have. We are immortal.

  But I don’t feel immortal, said Aunt P. Those poor creatures that you have made, Nephew, they will live and die. Why do we live on? Is it right that we should exist forever while they do not?

  Penelope! What are you saying? said Uncle.

  It just doesn’t seem right, said Aunt P. Is it right that they will have pain, and we will never have pain? Those wretched creatures, and here we are strolling about in the infinite Void, infinite ourselves.

  Uncle Deva was bewildered. Like me, he had rarely seen my aunt in tears. Penelope, didn’t you say just a moment ago that we cannot pay attention to those creatures?

  I don’t know what I said a moment ago, said Aunt P. I am all turned around. The new universe has changed everything. Everything.

  Yes, I said. As much as we want, we cannot help but feel for the creatures. Their lives. I … I never predicted.

  You are definitely out of sorts, Uncle D said to Aunt Penelope. You are not acting yourself.

  I don’t know, said Aunt P. I just don’t know. The suffering, the unhappiness. I don’t know. Not right. What’s happened? I just don’t know. Suffering. Unhappiness.

  We must think of the joy, I said. As Uncle has said.

  But … that poor young woman, said Aunt Penelope. So many … so much … pain. And we …

  Stop it! shouted Uncle D. You can’t act like this. And stop that bawling.

  Aunt P sniffled and shuddered and stood up. At full height, she was a rather imposing figure. Don’t tell me how to act, she said. And don’t condescend to me. Now, go fetch me my chair.

  Certainly, my dear, said Uncle, smiling. Now you are acting like yourself. There’s my old girl.

  Like Diamonds

  “Now that we’ve started,” said Belhor, “we should see what becomes of the young woman. She is struggling to right herself like a turtle on its back. I trust you will not intervene?”

  “It is not easy to watch her anguish,” I said.

  “You must allow her to make her own choices,” said Belhor. “At the least, you must allow matters to take their course. You have already set everything in motion.”

  “I did not intend for this woman and her family to suffer,” I said. “Your previous pronouncement, that suffering is warranted, is clearly not always true. This young woman did nothing to bring misery upon herself.”

  “But she made the decision to steal,” said Belhor. “She could have decided otherwise.”

  “You know as well as I that there would be misery in either choice.”

  “Ah, but the choices are different, and the miseries different as well. She could have refused to steal. There are other ways she could have gotten food for her family. She could have begged for food, like her mother. Young and pretty as she is, she might have made a very successful beggar. Instead, she chose to steal. She made a decision. Not only did she steal, she stole from her neighbors, who knew her and trusted her. She violated their trust.”

  “She had no way of knowing whether she could get food by begging. That is your estimation, Belhor, not hers.”

  “And why does she weep?” asks Belhor. “Her weeping is not a matter of estimation. It is a fact. I believe she weeps out of selfishness. She regrets her decision and knows it will haunt her. She weeps from her guilt and anticipated suffering. She weeps for herself.”

  “I agree only in part,” I said. “To me, her weeping shows that she is connected to the life around her, to her younger sister, to her mother, to her neighbors. She feels for them as well as herself. She is part of the world, shaking like a leaf pelted by rain.”

  Belhor and I had entered the universe again and now observed the young woman. She was walking along a narrow rock-strewn path between the houses in her commune, her head hidden within a shawl as if she did not want anyone to see her. It was early morning, and the cracked stuccoed walls glowed in the morning sun. The smell of her sweat mingled with the odors of cooking meat and smoke. Could I comfort her? She was so close. I watched her step after step. Could I help her? No, she was only one among many. I could not become involved. I could not. But there she was, so tender, in agony. Could I help her? Now? How could I watch without helping?

  “I think you feel sorry for this girl who stole food from her neighbors,” said Belhor. “What about the neighbors? Why not feel sorry for them?”

  “I feel sorry for them as well. I could have intervened. I could have prevented all of this from happening.”

  “And would you also have intervened in the trillions upon trillions of other cases?” said Belhor. “After deciding which ones merited your intervention? And suppose you did intervene, with good intentions of course, but sometimes made bad situations worse? What then?”

  “Stop taunting me, Belhor. I have said I will not intervene.”

  “And I am grateful for that declaration. Your nonintervention, in fact, is what makes these cases interesting. These cases have a certain … untidiness. But more than that, I maintain that your intelligent creatures must be able to make decisions on their own, without intervention, in order to know who they are. If they choose to do good, then they know something about themselves, and if they choose to do bad, then they know something else about themselves. Otherwise, they are like stones, they are inanimate matter. The creatures would be even more interesting if
they were of any consequence. All little lives, such little lives. Still, from the aggregate we may learn something. And I find it amusing to see how they live—their cities, their habitats and rooms, their squalid little alleyways filled with garbage. Did you notice the dirty pools of water in the alley in front of the young woman’s house?”

  “Yes,” I said. A thin film of pollen had floated down and covered their surfaces. The puddles of water split the sunlight and glimmered in colors. Like diamonds sprinkled about.

  Hand Stunting

  It has now been approximately 1.576 x 1033 ticks of the hydrogen clocks since I created the universe. Although I am the Creator, I have learned much from what I have created. One thing I have learned: the mind is its own place. Regardless of natural conditions and circumstances, even of biological imperatives, the mind can contrive its reality. The mind can make hot out of cold and cold out of hot, beauty from ugliness and ugliness from beauty. The mind makes its own rules.

  Consider the case of the planet Uncle has named Akeba. It orbits the smaller of two stars in a double star system. Over the course of eons of evolution, the triumphant civilization on this planet has constructed a striking imbalance between its two genders. The females are considered to be inferior to the males. Not only inferior, but completely dependent. To ensure that the women will be helpless, the hands of all female children are rendered dysfunctional by severing certain nerves. After years of effective paralysis, hands shrivel up into little stumps of gnarled flesh. Females in this society cannot grasp objects, cannot engage in handcrafts or operate machines, cannot even feed themselves. Each female is thus completely reliant on males—that is, creatures with functional hands—to take care of her. For her entire life, she must be fed by males, she must live in the habitats built by males, she must be clothed and cared for by males. She must attach herself to a male and follow him all day. Female babies in this world continue to be born with normal hands, as millions of years of evolution have determined the survival benefit of such appendages, but the cultural traditions of this society oppose and contradict the natural. At an early age, the nerves are cut with a ritual knife. The secretions of the lstrex plant prevent pain.