There seemed to be almost no formal worship ceremonies or ritual buildings, a simple religious system, it seemed, for such an elaborate priestly community.
The clergy, I theorize, represented an older religion most of whose doctrines (largely magical and superstitious) had been replaced by the more spiritual worship of the Lord Our God. The priests continued to provide the rituals for social and familial ceremonies but apparently had no teaching role. The Lord Our God on the other hand was worshipped privately with almost no formal ritual. He was addressed much like a passionately loving and indulgent parent, or even a sexual lover, in terms of endearing intimacy.
There were no statues or images involved in this prayer devotion. But neither was there any hesitancy in creating such images. Later I would see one of B’Mella’s paintings in which the Lord Our God was presented as a sexually aroused young man in his late teens clad in a bulging athletic supporter (like some of the Renaissance paintings of the Risen Jesus analyzed by Leo Steinberg). It did not seem to have shocked anyone. Nor did G’Ranne’s portrait of the Lord Our God as an elegantly dressed young matron in the advanced state of pregnancy. They had no problems, it would seem, with the androgyny of God. And no need for a theology to explain it.
Their world was “different” physically. It had trees and grass, mountains and rivers, forests and lakes, but the flora and fauna and the geology were not quite like ours. “That oak tree is a fooler,” a botanist told us. “It is almost a perfect oak tree.”
“How is it a fooler?”
“How? Oh, it’s not an oak tree at all. The ribs on the leaves are different, the bark is wrong, the branches are at angles that none of our oak trunks could possibly sustain. A nice imitation, though.”
“Or maybe ours are a nice imitation.”
He looked hard at me. “That is always possible, of course.”
Politically, they didn’t seem much different from us. Two tiny principalities in adjoining broad valleys with a high plain uniting them and providing an arena for warfare. I would guess that neither duchy numbered more than fifty thousand citizens, of whom most were farmers or stolid burghers in the two towns. The warriors who so enthusiastically slaughtered each other were a kind of nobility who had larger farms in the countryside—farms which others worked because the nobles were too busy doing each other in.
Their principal occupation, agriculture, baffled the expert we brought in. “Damn impressive yields, but I don’t know what the hell it is: I’m not even sure whether it’s a vegetable or an animal.” Some sophisticated manufacturing was done in buildings, or rather pavilions as I called them, all constructed with rainbow-colored, lightweight fabric, much like the glittering gowns they wore, but I never learned the exact nature of the manufacturing. I was too busy doing other things.
The politics were, one supposes, not unlike those of petty fiefdoms in early modern Italy. There would be only one exception to that generalization: at no time during my visit was there any reference to a world beyond the borders of the two duchies, no hint of an Empire of which they were a part or even of conflicts between great powers which would sometimes flow across their boundaries as did the wars of France and Spain in Renaissance Italy. If there was a “rest of the world” it didn’t seem to bother or interest them.
The two rivers which drained their circumscribed little environment must have emptied into something bigger, and they flowed in opposite directions, suggesting some kind of continental divide. Moreover, there had to be something beyond the massive mountain ranges, several of the snowcapped peaks at least twenty thousand feet high, which framed the two duchies. Yet I never heard a word about such other lands. It seemed that the produce in their valleys was sufficient to their needs (most families were at reproduction-level size, two, sometimes three, children) and they had no reason to be concerned about the rest of their planet. If planet it was.
“A clever imitation,” Nathan summed it up. “Hastily done, but not bad for a spur-of-the-moment job. When you stop to consider it, nothing is quite right, colors, shapes, angles, perspectives. But at first you are dazzled by the dramatic colors and hardly notice. The only problem is, why did whoever created that world permit it to be such an inaccurate reflection? If he could do it at all, he could have done it better.”
“Maybe,” I mused, filling up his glass of Baileys, “that’s a problem of translation. Perhaps our receiving mechanism has to adjust to signals, electronic or spiritual, which it doesn’t normally receive. Or perhaps only some of the signals get through. Or perhaps there is a mechanism, a censor—make the “c” a capital if you wish—that filters out information that we don’t need or shouldn’t have.”
“What kind of censor?” he demanded impatiently as though I was an undergrad retard or something.
“An author.”
I think I won that point. Anyway, since it’s my story and I’m God in it, I awarded the point to myself.
“It’s still a weird little place.” He shook his head in disapproval.
“Maybe that’s what they would think about our cosmos.”
Nathan didn’t like that much. Most of our scholarly colleagues wanted to think it was an elaborate cosmic hoax. But they were dealing only with the replays, not the reality.
The reality that first night was an uneasy peace that could explode into a bloody war again at a flick of a finger.
3
A Cosmos Down the Street
I decided to follow the two negotiators home. It was not a reassuring experience.
Kaila walked wearily through the still-dripping trees to a small black-and-silver tent near the Duke’s, hesitating briefly in front of an even smaller peppermint-candy-striped tent next to his. A girlfriend, I wondered, not dreaming of the complexity lurking in that tiny pavilion.
No one spoke to him as he slogged through the dark and the mud. Maybe I’d overdone the storm, but it was my first time, you see.
At the time, I thought the young man had incurred some kind of ritual impurity because he had spoken to the other side. Later I realized that it was much simpler: no one knew what to say to him, not even the Duke.
When he entered his tent, a number of the young warriors outside swarmed around the woman who had watched the negotiation up close. Armor tossed aside, arms folded across her breasts (magnificent by the way; the only authentically voluptuous woman I’d seen so far in that world), she stared grimly at Kaila’s tent. Her colleagues began to babble, hinting that perhaps he ought to be killed.
“Have you no more respect for our leader than that? The Lord Kaila is not a brave man as we reckon bravery.” She dismissed them with an imperious wave of her hand. “Still, he did what he was told.”
If she didn’t think that it was brave to walk out on that battlefield and begin to talk about peace, she didn’t know what bravery was.
“Perhaps, G’Ranne,” one of the men murmured, in the tone of a man thinking the unthinkable, “the leader is … not well.”
“I will not listen to treason.” She turned on her heel and walked away, the giant star on her cloak (the insignia of the Duke’s army) trailing like a furious comet behind her.
The Duchess’s symbol, by the way, was a string of four half moons, kind of reminding me of a four-of-a-kind poker hand.
An ice maiden, with a vaguely Celtic name and black-haired, pale-complexioned Irish beauty, constructed from honor and a warrior code of loyalty, a female samurai, a transplanted Gaelic warrior goddess. Not a thought of her own all her life, I wagered. She would have made a good novice in the pre–Vatican II Church.
I didn’t like the warrior code in men. I liked it less in women. This young woman, I concluded, was the enemy. She’d fight treason until her code demanded that she turn traitor. Then she would kill quickly and heartlessly.
Dangerous.
Malvau’s return home was equally unpromising. He kept up a brave front of Gregory Peck aristocratic dignity until he reached the darkened courtyard in front of his own purple p
avilion. Then his pace slowed, his step faltered, his shoulders sagged. In the courtyard, worn, spent, exhausted, he sank into a chair—a flexible form-adjusting device which seemed to be made out of some sort of foam rubber.
I would have expected his wife, whose charm had been praised by the loquacious Kaila, to rush to his assistance. She rushed, all right, but to complain that he was late for a dinner party and that she was greatly embarrassed because the guests had gone home.
Not a word about the end of the war. She apparently could not have cared less about that subject.
Malvau paid no attention to her outburst. He was probably used to tuning her out.
She was dangerous too.
And, like the girl warrior, very similar to many inhabitants on this side of Planck’s Wall.
At the secret Lakeside seminars after the game, we agonized over the “humans” if you want to call them that, and I do. Lenrau and B’Mella were, as I have said, attractive human beings, if not quite like anyone you’ve ever seen. Should you pass one of them on the street, you would hardly notice any difference. But later you would reflect that his flaxen hair was not quite curly the way you’d ever seen curly hair before, and the darkness of her skin was not like any hue you’d recognize. Lovely indeed, but just a tiny bit strange.
Our physiologists had a field day examining close-up shots of their bodies and heaven knows there were some scenes that left little to the imagination. They never did agree whether the cellular structure was identical with ours or not. Some of them thought that their whole muscle system, while an analog of ours, was fundamentally different.
“Hominid, all right,” one of them murmured, “but products of an analogous evolutionary process.”
The word “analogy” and its derivatives were used a lot at those seminars.
Not everyone agreed that they were full hominids. “I’m not sure they could reproduce with one of us,” a young scholar observed with a tug at his beard.
“It might be fun to try.” Nathan was the only one of the gang capable of humor during those sessions.
I had no doubts on the subject of their humanity. Their capacities for self-deception and self-destruction, love and hate, cowardice and bravery were indistinguishable from ours. What difference did muscle or cell structures make?
Of course, I was in love with them—with those inhabitants of an adjoining world.
Why am I convinced that it’s an adjoining world, one existing in a different time-space continuum from ours but closely juxtaposed with us?
First of all, I can’t imagine my “port” mechanism becoming a sending and receiving station powerful enough to reach other worlds in our cosmos. That would seem to be not merely improbable, as the whole experience was, but physically impossible without some kind of “subspace” communication link. The Star Ship Enterprise had one, but its electronics were never explained. If it was another world in our cosmos, it would almost certainly be at a minimum a few light-years away and more likely thousands of light-years from our planet. Yet my instructions through the Compaq 286 had virtually instantaneous effect. Hence I conclude that their world must be very close to us; perhaps, as I shall suggest later in this story, frighteningly close.
If it is in a different segment of the time-space spectrum, a different cosmos, more or less, why would my electromagnetic emissions have any effect on it at all? The theories concerning alternative universes about which the theoretical physicists are merrily chirping these days would suggest that very early on, substantially before the crossing of Planck’s Wall at ten to the minus forty-two seconds (one over ten to the forty-second power), the alternative universes, necessarily according to some of the theorists, would develop force systems all their own.
My answer is that either their world has force systems relatively like ours (just as it seems to have produced an evolutionary process like ours) or that the influences crossing the barriers between the two cosmoi (Greek plural, note what even a bad classical education can do for you) are mental or “spiritual.” If you, whoever you may be, juxtapose two cosmoi and permit/tolerate/direct/insist that mind develop in both of them, it is not impossible—it may be likely and even inevitable—that mind links build up occasionally or often. It may be, to fall back on Père Teilhard’s vocabulary, that we begin to share the same noosphere.
Most speculative fiction, dating back to the time our ancestors acquired the capability of reflecting on the lights which hung above them by day and by night, has fantasized about rational, more or less, creatures like us, more or less, who lived on or near the heavenly bodies we can see. Hence Carl Sagan and his crowd (who leave me a little cold, to tell you the truth, mostly because they are not imaginative enough) send out probes and listen eagerly to static coming in from outer space. No one has bothered to snoop around looking for “ports” to alternative space.
But the theoretical physicists range from “possible” to “probable” to “certain” in their judgments on this subject. The last judgment even postulates an infinite number of actually existing alternative cosmoi, mostly to explain why ours seems so “anthropic” (apparently designed for humankind) or so demanding of “observership.” (Wright of Texas points out that Planck’s Laws don’t apply unless there is an observer.) Either you have Someone engineering the whole business or you need a virtually infinite number of cosmoi to ensure that what seems like a plan in ours is pure chance.
Maybe both.
Over in the next neighborhood, if that is where it is, the pot was still simmering. Three young men had cornered the stony-faced young woman warrior in a dimly lit tent. Like her they were handsome, athletic, self-confident—true Academy graduates, if they had an Academy in that world, the kind of people who in our world won the wars in Korea and Viet Nam for the United States.
Unlike her, they had a wild gleam in their eyes. Not only dangerous, but mad.
“We do not need any of your inventions,” she said somberly. “I will have no part of your insane schemes.”
“How long will you tolerate this betrayal to our ancient enemies? Lenrau, Kaila, the witch child—they will permit us all to be killed in our sleep.”
“I do not propose to die in my sleep,” she shot back tartly.
“When will you resist?” another of them demanded.
“When my honor forces me to resist.”
“You do not trust the Duke?”
She hesitated. “I will trust him until there is reason not to trust him.”
“We think there is already reason not to trust him. The witch child…”
“I do not need to be told about her,” she cut him off.
Who was this witch child?
“We will proceed with our plans,” their leader warned. “We have our honor too.”
“If you take actions against the Lord, your honor is that of mad fools.”
They stomped out of the tent into the darkness, muttering under their breath to one another. As they faded away into the woods, the young woman stepped out of her quarters and stared after them, her lovely face blank and unreadable.
I told the 286 to scan the woods. All was quiet, though I thought I saw some clergy conniving in the darkness.
I wouldn’t have wanted to bet on the chances of the truce lasting another twenty-four hours.
What does the existence of such a world mean, inhabited as it is by people who are disturbingly like us? To speculate about that, one must turn from theoretical physics to theology, two subjects which are clearly converging, or would converge if theologians would acknowledge that a degree in their discipline does not make them expert in international politics and economics and stick to their own last. I think you can make an excellent argument that God, being excessive in all She does (think of the poet’s cliché about the flowers blossoming at the bottom of the sea), would be hard put not to spin forth cosmoi with the same prodigious and passionate recklessness with which He has produced stars and constellations and galaxies in our cosmos.
Why t
he hell not? If you’re exuberant, you’re exuberant, and by all signs and accounts Whoever is behind it all is nothing if not exuberant. Reread the parables of Jesus, stripped of their later allegorical interpretations; a father who forgives a spoiled brat of a son before the clever little fraud even has a chance to deliver his phony speech, a farmer who pays loafers a full day’s wage for at most an hour of grumbling effort, a judge who dismisses a capital charge of adultery against a woman who is patently guilty without even bothering to ask her whether she has any regrets—there, my friends, you have exuberance with a vengeance. Indeed the last story was so exuberant as to be profoundly shocking to the early Christians and hence was cut from many texts of the Bible, not the first time Church leaders have tried to tone down Jesus’s description of his experience of the Father.
A God like that limit Herself to just one old cosmos like ours? Don’t be silly!
Does this admittedly odd kind of God permit creatures to move back and forth between or among various cosmoi? Only if He repeals Planck’s Law or at least tears down Planck’s Wall. God wouldn’t do that, would She?
I tell myself “no way.”
Yet there is Ranora.
Sometimes at night I even hear her pipe, not unlike an Irish tin whistle, blowing outside my window forty-seven stories above ground level.
Playing the theme which she had assigned to me.
I don’t know; you figure it/her out.
My imagination?
God Game Page 4
