The Unreasoning Mask

by Philip José Farmer

  His lips felt as dry as the faces on the screens. He drank more water.

  "I'm using analogies, of course, not giving you a literal description or definition.

  "In any event, the Pluriverse or God, this entity composed of all the universes, this organism, grows. Not in size. The Vwoordha think that Its growth is mental. That It develops or evolves from a baby, a cosmic infant, into an adult. What the adult form would be . . . the Vwoordha don't know. They hope that It will become self-conscious and eventually find out about sentient life, which, in some ways, is a reflection, a mental reflection, perhaps emotional reflection, of Itself. And then It will communicate with sentients."

  He licked his lips.

  "Who knows what might happen then?"

  He stopped speaking for a moment, and, unexpectedly even to himself, crashed his fist on a table. He saw some of the crew flinch. Al-Buraq quivered like a dog which does not understand why its master is angry but is afraid that the anger might be, for some reason, directed at it.

  "The Vwoordha . . . and the glyfa . . . don't know what'll happen then because the Pluriverse has never reached adulthood. Twice, twice, It has died . . . been killed . . . before It could grow from infancy into . . . what? . . . a child? . . . a juvenile?"

  He scanned the faces on the screens. They had not changed expression, but some were exchanging glances. Did these subtly indicate that the captain had indeed jettisoned his sanity?

  "While the . . . Pluriverse is developing or evolving, while It's growing from infancy towards childhood, life originates on the planets of the stars in each cell. And that life evolves into sentiency. And many sentients eventually discover the alaraf drive. Having done so, they use the drive, of course.

  "But their ships travel through the walls of the universes. According to the Vwoordha, they are able to do so because of 'weak' areas in the cells. Vulnerable spots. When the wall of a universe is penetrated, it starts to collapse.

  "The process thereafter is analogous to cancer. The alaraf-drive vessels are carcinogens. They cause the beginning of an irreversible collapse. The matter in each cancerous universe ceases to expand outwards, and it starts to rush back towards the center of origin. Towards the eventual primal ball of matter.

  "Now, you and I know that the astrophysicists have been disputing about whether the universe is a continually expanding or an oscillating world. At various times, the evidence seemed to indicate that oscillation was inevitable. At other times, for instance, the late twentieth century, the evidence pointed to an ever-expanding universe. Then the astrophysicists changed their minds in the early twenty-first century. But for a hundred years now no one has advocated the oscillation process.

  "Perhaps the universe would be always expanding -- if there wasn't an interfering agent."

  He stopped and lifted a finger as if he were trying to signal the world to stop.

  "But sentient life interferes. It invents and uses the alaraf drive. The infant Pluriverse . . . God, perhaps . . . sickens and dies. Its cells collapse, and the matter in each rushes towards the point of origin, drawing space after it. Then the primal balls explode again, and eventually the great organism is formed anew, and It grows towards maturity. But . . . oh, God! . . . this has happened twice, God is cheated of life by Life.

  "However, this living thing has living processes analogous to ours. To combat this cancer, it develops an antibody. This antibody sets about destroying the sources of the cancers. I don't know if the process is unconscious or conscious. The Vwoordha think that it's as unconscious on Its part as the origin of antibodies in our flesh is."

  He stopped again. His lips trembled.

  "This antibody is the bolg!"

  Would they believe that? They must.

  "The Vwoordha tell me that there is not one bolg for every cell-universe. There is but one for the entire body. But it can travel through the walls without injury or carcinogenic incident, just as Shiyai the Vwoordha can travel from universe to universe, though she uses a different method and doesn't really travel bodily. The method of the bolg is analogous to osmosis.

  "True," the glyfa said in the voice of Ramstan's mother.

  "Those universe-cells in which sentients have not yet developed and the walls of which have not been pierced by the drive of sentients from other universes do not collapse. They are left free-floating, as it were. But if too many universe-cells become cancerous, then the Pluriversal organism is destroyed as an organism. It dies. This is what has happened in the two eons past. Twice has God been born and twice killed.

  "The free-floating cell-universes apparently continue expanding, but the new cells born of the primal fireballs catch up with them. What function these larger cells have in the new Pluriversal infant, I don't know.

  "The free-floating cell-universes would continue expanding, though it would not be for long. The bolg, after destroying life or as much of it as it can, then goes to the free-floating cells. And it destroys the life there. Thus preventing that life from developing an alaraf drive. Or at least setting the civilizations so far back that it's a very long time before they develop new civilizations and so discover alaraf drive. When that happens, the bolg destroys the life, but it's too late. The free-floating universes have already begun to collapse."

  "My God!" Nuoli yelled. "What hope is there, then?"

  At least, she believed. But then she had been subjected to the glyfa's blaze of revelation, and she was more receptive than the others. If she had not been, she would not have been invited into the temple.

  Ramstan said, "I'll get to that. You're all probably asking yourselves what difference it makes, aside from the fate immediately threatening you. It may take thousands of years before the bolg can get to Earth. As for the universes collapsing, it will take billions of years before all matter falls back to the point of origin. If this were a natural process, unavoidable, it would be only a remote and philosophical concern to those presently living and to those living a million years from now. Depressing, yes, but not alarming except to our inconceivably distant descendants.

  "But, once the universes start collapsing, they are subject to an acceleration factor. The fall back is not the sixteen-billion-year stately procession of outwards. It takes place within a relatively short time. Six thousand Earth-years.

  "Yes, I know that sounds incredible. But, as you know, the speed of light is not the fastest thing in the world, nor is its speed the limit beyond which nothing can go. That was determined sixty years ago.

  "Long before that, however, the bolg will have tracked along our spatial and interspatial path back to Earth and eliminated all or almost all there. The Vwoordha say that that may be done within a month or fifty years from now. Those are the limits of time for the bolg.

  "What happens if we could somehow destroy the bolg with our puny weapons? Would the Pluriversc then produce another bolg?

  "Nobody knows. No bolg has so far been destroyed by sentients.

  "But if it can be done, then it must be done. After that, we wait and see. And if we could kill one bolg, we can kill the next.

  "Even so, Earth's universe and many others are doomed. And we can't go to one which hasn't started to collapse yet. Our very act of entering it would cause its death if we used alaraf drive. But what if we could analyze and reproduce the means which the bolg uses for transition from one cell to the other? Then we could travel interuniversally without damage to any of them.

  "How can we take the first step? That is, killing the bolg so that it may be dissected, as it were. Direct attack won't do. Al-Buraq would be pierced thousands of times over, and we, too. Our missiles wouldn't get through its trillions of missiles. It's a colossal antibody, the specific function of which is to wipe out all life. Nobody knows how it makes and throws those meteoritelike missiles. Probably some sort of energy-matter conversion is used. If so, it's far more efficient than anything Terran science has developed.

  "But there's a good probability that, after it's discharged its missiles,
it takes a long time for it to make a new stock. It should be vulnerable during the recharging period. Unless it reserves a small supply for attacks against it."

  Tenno must have been so eager to talk that he forgot or deliberately ignored his captain's order not to interrupt him.

  "Then you're planning to attack it at that time? How will you know it's emptied its ammunition? Oh, I see! I think. It's devastated three planets in a row! It must be empty now!"

  "We'll talk about that after I'm through with my résumé of what's happened," Ramstan said. "Uh, just a moment."

  He had forgotten that Indra and Toyce were still trapped. They would have heard and seen what the others did because al-Buraq would automatically have placed a viewscreen in front of them. But they must be very uncomfortable. He ordered ship to release them. Then he said, "Benagur, if I free you, will you promise not to interrupt?"

  At Ramstan's command, ship lowered the flesh sealing the commodore's mouth. Benagur shouted, "No! This is mutiny! And blasphemy! Insan- "

  The flesh had closed over his lips.

  "I just wanted to spare you further constraint and humiliation," Ramstan said.

  "The Vwoordha became aware of the nature and development of God . . . of the Pluriversal entity, if you prefer . . . three Pluriverses ago. They made the glyfa with the assistance of several peoples. Its primary function was to be a rotatable amplifying antenna."

  He paused. "A rotatable amplifying antenna. A device to communicate with the Pluriverse. Or, if It was in an infant state, to study It and learn more of Its nature. And, it was hoped, eventually perhaps to . . . ah . . . nurse It . . . educate It . . . help It grow into an adult. In a sense, because all sentients are basically human, humans would become the father and mother, the parents of God. The most ambitious project ever launched.

  "As I said, the tool had to be a sentient, and in time the glyfa became independent, rebelled, as sentients often do, and went off on its own. Before that, however, the Vwoordha . . . and the g1yfa . . . learned something of the Pluriverse. It seemed indeed to be in an infant stage. Its voice could be . . . heard? . . . but it seemed to be the babblings of a baby. Of a baby in the prespeech stage, using every sound Its . . . lips . . . could utter, tuning up, as it were, for the stage where It would have to use only certain sounds and drop the others. That's how the Vwoordha interpreted what they detected.

  "Its babblings were part of the cosmic background noise that astronomers have picked up. But they would not be able to distinguish the Pluriversal babbling, from other noise without something like the glyfa."

  This was perhaps the part of his explanation the most difficult to believe. The masks on the screen had melted a little now; the incredulity was hot beneath them.

  "You're asking yourselves how the Vwoordha could know this. You're thinking that what they termed babbling was really just a different type of noise and that the Vwoordha, without sufficient evidence, arbitrarily decided on a certain explanation for it. An explanation fitting their preconceptions. Infant babbllngs are meaningless noise, though they are a necessary prelude to the meaningful structure called language.

  "But," and again he lifted a finger, though this time he felt that the gesture looked as if he was testing the wind of their judgment, "ten million years passed . . ."

  He stopped once more. Should he digress on just how the Vwoordha had managed to live so long, tell them of the enormously long periods of suspended animation which enabled them to endure such eons? No, that would have to come later.

  "Ten millions years passed. And then the Vwoordha heard a modulation of Its sounds more complex than those detected before. Rather, they heard what seemed to be the beginning of structure in the use of the sounds. And they noted that now It uttered only certain sounds ; others had been dropped.

  "A baby does this when it begins to learn the speech of its parents. But . . . what parents could It have? To whom was It talking, from whom was It learning speech?

  "One theory was that It was, In a sense, schizophrenic. It had two personalities or chambers or parts, call them what you will. This theory was quickly abandoned, though. Two infants can't teach each other to talk if neither has had a teacher.

  "How, then, could the Pluriversal being . . . or God . . . be sentient if It had no language with which to think? Or does It think in feelings and images only? If It does, then It could never talk to sentients, though many sentients have claimed that It has talked to them. It could never be more than a highly intelligent and perhaps even self-conscious animal, just as a human being brought up from infancy in total linguistic isolation, isolation even from dumb and deaf signs, would be an animal, its potentiality for speech undeveloped.

  "Perhaps It was teaching Itself to talk to Itself. How could It do that? A human infant couldn't. In fact, on reaching a certain age, its linguistic potentiality would be so stultified that it couldn't learn to talk even if it had a teacher after that age.

  "But that theory may be too anthropomorphic. The Pluriverse may have potentialities which humans don't have. Perhaps It could form names for objects It sees or feels or hears in some way we can't understand. Perhaps It could even find, through experimentation, a syntax for the words, the verbal referents it would invent.

  "The Vwoordha don't think so. They think that It has somehow developed to a sound-selection stage but won't progress beyond that if sentients don't help It. They think that just possibly evolution may have as its goal, if evolution could have a goal, a role for sentients that no one, as far as anybody knows, even thought of. Until, that is, the Vwoordha came along.

  "It may be built into the structure of evolution or it may just be chance or the workings of probability. But the Vwoordha believe that one of the roles of sentients, the most important, is to be a teacher of God . . . the Pluriverse. It is up to sentients, the minute life on planets, the life much much smaller in relation to God than a microbe or virus is to a human, to teach God speech. And so help It to attain adulthood.

  "After which, of course, sentients would profit by their relationship, their parenthood, to God."

  The glyfa, using the voice of Ramstan's father, said, "In a sense, the Vwoordha are my parents, and they reared me. But I will have nothing to do with them. Indeed, I am their enemy. Why should God differ from me? It may hate Its teachers, despise them, or become indifferent to them."

  "You are not It," Ramstan subvocalized.

  "True. I am, however, the only being through whom you. anybody . . . can speak to that entity and through whom you may receive intelligible communication."

  "If it's not intelligible, it's not communication."

  "Always the pedant," the glyfa said. Somewhere, far off, faint, reverberating in some neural path, was a ghostly jeering cachinnation.

  Ramstan hated the glyfa at the same time that he was attracted to it, and now its use of the voices of his parents and uncle was making him hate them. It brought up something in him that he did not want to confront. Of course, he had no time for that now anyway. The Vwoordha . . . they reminded him of his great-grand-mothers . . . no time for that, either.

  He steered his attention back to the crew.

  "But, according to the Vwoordha, the glyfa desires more than just being the father to God. It lusts after power; it aches for domination. It would become Its master and, so, even greater than God."

  "Liars!" the glyfa said in the voice of Ramstan's father.

  "Yes, liars. Contemptible worms!" the voice of Ramstan's mother said. "It's they who want to be to God as parents to a boy. Tyrants!"

  "My sister and her husband are right," the voice of Ramstan's uncle said. "Hűd! You must not listen to those liars, those wretches, those insane creatures! Do what is right!"

  Ramstan did not reply to the glyfa, though he felt that he was somehow being wicked by not doing so.

  "The glyfa maintains that it's the Vwoordha who want to do what they claim he wants to do. I have no way now, perhaps never, of determining which is telling the tru
th." He paused. "Or if both are lying."