Aurelia

by R. A. Lafferty

  “Just what is this world?” Aurelia asked seriously. “What’s its name?”

  “What is this world, little girl? Well, perhaps we will come to that in the course of our exposition. Now here is the problem:

  “It is once believed that our own Earth had an anti-Earth as an opposite and hidden companion. It was believed that Earth and anti-Earth were exactly on opposite sides of our sun, and therefore they would always be invisible to each other. It was believed that they were identical in all ways, except one, and that one way could hardly be defined without setting up conflict in the entire universe. Well, it was thought that these two worlds were completely similar and at the same time completely opposite. But, when we began to nibble at space and go out of our own orbit, we saw that there was not any anti-Earth. And so that story died.

  “But when we nibbled at space a little deeper, we saw that very many worlds did have anti-worlds exactly opposite them in their orbit around their sun. This seemed to be the normal case. And we found from persons who went into space that they could never see the anti-worlds of their own world, though persons from other worlds could see them. We even find that persons from, ‘Shining World,’ and our best guess is that you come from there, Aurelia, cannot see their own Dark Companion, though people of other worlds can see it. Can you explain it?”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” Aurelia said, “but I will give you back what you have given me. This world we are on (Oh, somebody tell me what the name of this world is—is it Sad-Dog Planet? Is it Gelotopolia? Is it Gaea? Is it Dombon’s World?) This world that we are on, it does have an anti-world. I saw it clearly as I came in. I was afraid that I would come down there. It would not have been of the class approved for me, even though it is identical to this world that is. But anti-world is there. And you do not see it. But persons from other worlds do see it. Tell me why you do not see your own anti-world, and perhaps I can tell you why we do not see our own. Other than the fact, of course, that we do not have one, and you do have one.”

  “But you do have one, Aurelia,” Cousin Clootie said. He was the Dark Adversary and he was always interrupting, “I know you have one. I come from there.”

  Aurelia went well-guarded to speak to some school children that day. It is always good show to go and speak to school children. Most of them were about two years younger than she was, and all of them were four grades behind her. Some of them, though, were quite large and were as old as Aurelia and even older. There was a dislocation of misplaced or held-back students here.

  The students showed a tendency to be unruly when Aurelia was left in charge of them. Then she spoke a phrase sharply, and they shut up and paid attention. The guards who withdrew to the back of the room did not understand the phrase that Aurelia used, and indeed it seemed to be in some strange language. And it was.

  But what phrase had Aurelia spoken to the little and the big buggers to make them behave? Are there certain phrases known only to the children of the various worlds? Yes, there are. And this phrase translated out “I’ll break your necks,” and it carried a modifier to show that Aurelia meant it. The little and big buggers listened to her then, and they had a fruitful conversation. And Aurelia finished with a demonstration, and then a rather startling and challenging explication of that demonstration.

  “A drop of water covering a hole in a leaf is a natural lens-microscope by which things may be seen enlarged,” she said. “I have just made such a microscope, and then several of you have made simple things, and all of you have looked at things magnified through them. So we know that the ‘natural microscope’ does exist.

  “But do you know that there also exist, equally simple, the natural radio, the natural telephone, the natural colour camera, the natural computer, the natural microphone, the natural electric battery? You do not know what they are? Think, children, think. Most of them are as simple as putting a drop of water over the hole in a leaf. Build them now, or arrange them rather. Right here, right now, from things in this room, from things in your school desks. I give you five minutes.”

  Well, they did it in five minutes, but just barely. Some of the solutions were not quite what Aurelia expected. There is more than one way to make several of these things.

  Then Aurelia looked out over a throng that was not there.

  “Well, can you make the things, big people?” she asked. “Try it. Make them right now, from things at hand. I give you ten minutes, since you are slower than children in your wits. Make them. Arrange them.”

  Well, the people in the invisible throng did make all the things within ten minutes, but just barely.

  “I have a speculative question to ask you, Aurelia,” said Charles Greenpasture who was a speculative theologian,” or at least I have some notions that you might react to. You are (I can see it) a light-footed, happy-eyed child of grace. I would not put these propositions to one less blessed. Whether because of the extremes of either reverence or irreverence, the qualities of God are seldom discussed temperately on any of the worlds. But you are a blessed person of easy and comfortable reverence. Let us discuss then whether God is identical to the Universe; whether God is both all-good and all-powerful; and whether all-good and all-powerful are necessarily the same things, or at least implicit in each other. The odds really seem prohibitive against two such extreme qualities being possessed by the same individual. And let us try to put it all into terms of mathematics and physics. Was the ‘Big Bang’ the birth of both God and the Universe? What equations were created by these births? And are they still valid equations? What do you propose, Aurelia?”

  “You speculate first,” Aurelia suggested. “We touched on these things in school, but I am not very good at the ongoing speculation in contingent areas.”

  “The ‘Zero Equation’ was the only equation created at the ‘Big Bang’ moment,” Cousin Clootie interrupted. (Aw, how does that guy always get in on these things!) “It all begins at zero, and it all returns to zero. The apparent activity in between these zero times will obliterate itself. Once time begins to run backwards, extinction and ‘never-have-been’ will appear walking hand-in-claw. They will disappear into the hole, and then it will be found that the phrase ‘to pull the hole in after one’ is more than a metaphor.”

  “Oh, go out and play in the mud, you youngling of whatever species,” snapped Charles Greenpasture who did not like Cousin Clootie, though he had never seen him before. “Let us try this, Aurelia—

  “Let us consider the Birth of God as instantaneous with the ‘Big Bang.’ Consider that the physical and mathematical laws may have been different in that quasi-instant before physics and mathematics were created. Consider that opportunities may have been more open at the beginning, or just before the beginning. With processes perhaps many billions of times more accelerated than that at any time later (since their acceleration created the law of acceleration but might not have conformed with it), with an exponential explosion of everything, and with all the time in the world and all the time that would ever be, there might have been an intellectual giantism generated, such a giantism as still maintains and controls the Universe. Consider a calculator with a total mass (all the mass there was or would ever be), with a mass of billions of billions of galaxies, is there any limit to what it could think and do? It might not have been a sophisticated calculator right at the beginning, but in the thousands of billions of years that were contained in that quasi-moment, with everything running full speed (even before speed was invented) it might easily become very sophisticated. After all, it was up to the calculator to define sophistication, there being nothing else around to do it.

  “That intellectual giantism, that might have been called ‘The Mind of God’ if it wanted itself to be called such, might have been the sum as well as the counterpoint of all the energy in the Universe. And then the whole process could have been back-edited, and raised to as many powers as wanted. Before limits were invented, there were not limits. Exponentially expanded chaos could have been as all-good and as all
-powerful as it wished.

  “Why should not God control and indwell every particle of the Universe? At the moment of the ‘Big Bang,’ He was every particle of the Universe. On the other hand, consider that maybe the ‘Big Bang’ was an explosive cancer by which the proto-order went out of control. Consider that maybe ourselves and all of the worlds are cancerous units of destruction.”

  “Mr. Greenpasture, you are treating this as a simple case of bi-lateral compensation,” Aurelia said. “You restrict exponential explosions when you imply that they might be no more than bilateral or point-to-point equal. When you speak of ‘all the mass there was and all that there would ever be’ you are speaking out of much too small a concept. It is not a bi-lateral equation. It is a billion-lateral equation.”

  “But, Aurelia, isn’t that simply to billionize the sums by adding exponents? Why not keep the bi-lateral aspect, the symmetry?”

  “Maybe so,” Aurelia said. “The period when we had that in school, I wasn’t paying much attention.”

  “Do you know that there are problem children in problem classes on this world who carry these things out further than do your children on ‘Shining World?’ ” Mr. Greenpasture asked proudly.

  “I suppose so,” Aurelia admitted again. “After all, if problem children are not good at solving problems, then who will be good at solving them? I believe in the Law of Planetary Constancy. This is an expansion of the Law of Intellectual Constancy, a law that is always very hard to take for such as believe themselves intellectually superior. The Law of Planetary Constancy states that all planets are approximately equal in their potential, all of them from ‘Shining World’ to Skokumchuck. It states that the people on the grubby worlds are just as smart as those on the bright worlds, though sometimes they have poor ways of showing it. We on ‘Shining World’ are not (Oh really, believe it!), not so much smarter than other people as all that. But, oh it is painful to admit this!”

  Tycoon Rex Golightly brought the highly professional bodyguard, the best in the world, to talk with Aurelia that day.

  “Aurelia, this is the illustrious Marshal Straightstreet,” the tycoon Rex Golightly said warmly. “I have known him since our college days. He is the man of the most integrity that I have ever known in my life.”

  “Then why don’t you recognize him now?” Aurelia thought but did not say. “Aw, haystacks, what’s the matter with you anyhow?”

  “You are silent, Aurelia,” Rex Golightly said, and Aurelia was silent.

  “Marshal is more than a bodyguard,” Rex said. “He has been bodyguard for entire nations and leagues. He is probably the most trusted and dependable man in the world. You do not say anything, Aurelia?” Aurelia did not say anything.

  Marshal Straightstreet broke a rule for men of outstanding station or repute on this world, Aurelia noticed. It is a rule observed on worlds with a certain primitive mentality streak in them, though they may not be in all respects primitive worlds. It is the rule that an eminent man (the rule does not apply to women) should be somewhat larger and taller than his fellows. Aurelia had already learned to gauge the supposed eminence of a man by his height. Her own host, Rex Golightly, was quite an eminent man. Real eminence seemed always to stand more than two meters tall. But the illustrious Marshal Straightstreet, the best bodyguard in the world, was considerably short of that height.

  “I am charmed to meet you, Shining Visitor Aurelia,” Marshal said. But Aurelia was silent.

  He was lithe, and of a rapid and intense musculature sheathed in what was the proper flesh for the occasion (was he the man of a thousand fleshes then?); he was good-humoured and intelligent in body as well as mind; he had fire-grey eyes and experienced histrionic eyebrows; he had now a cat-purr voice that showed the insufferable conceit of a tiger (was he the man of a thousand voices also?); but he was still shorter than true eminence should be according to the Primitive-mentality trait.

  “Marshal Straightstreet has prevented the assassination of no less than seventeen heads of state,” Rex Golightly said proudly.

  “For better or worse?” Aurelia asked in her mind but not out loud.

  “He was once the amateur middle-weight boxing champion of the world,” Rex said.

  “If they met today, which of them would win?” Aurelia asked silently in her mind.

  “And he is an Ultimate-Mind-And-Body-Combat Grand Master,” Rex continued. “You do not say anything, Aurelia?” Aurelia did not say anything.

  “Really, Aurelia,” Marshal Straightstreet said with an edge to his cat-purr voice, “if I am to guard your life and well-being, you must at least acknowledge my presence.” But Aurelia did not.

  “Do you not practice the amenities on ‘Shining World,’ Aurelia?” Rex Golightly asked in displeased banter.

  “Oh, we’ve met before,” Aurelia said out loud then. “Aye, and we’ve drunk blood together.”

  “I have heard that that is one of the archaic-cryptic greeting forms that some of the older families on ‘Shining World’ still use,” Rex Golightly said in a sort of apology for Aurelia, but he had never heard any such thing.

  “My methods are air-tight,” Marshal began to explain. “I do not permit error in my operation. We Grand Masters have the saying ‘when something has already happened, it is already too late to prevent it from happening.’ I make a point of knowing every event relating to my case at hand many hours before it happens.”

  “Then why didn’t you know about little Uncle Silas being beheaded before it happened?” Aurelia asked in a surly voice.

  “Perhaps I did know about it before it happened,” Marshal said. “But the murder of young Silas is completely unrelated to the contemplated murder of yourself, Aurelia.”

  “How is that, how is that?” Rex Golightly asked.

  “The decapitation of young Silas or Simon was just an adolescent strangeness here. Many of the adolescents in this house behave like strange particles. I believe that Silas was killed without hate or passion. He was funny-looking. He was put together awkwardly. I believe that one of the out-of-context adolescents simply said, ‘How would he look with his head moved over here? and so he moved it some distance from the body to find out. That is only theory, of course. But his killing was without purpose. Possibly it was a rock thrown to distract us from the real threats to Aurelia, but I do not believe that it was even that.”

  “I will sleep much better knowing that Marshal is in the house,” Rex said.

  “I suspect that I might sleep a modicum better knowing where he is,” Aurelia said, and she left them abruptly.

  How was it that Rex Golightly was fooled? He said that he had been to college with Marshal Straightstreet and had known him well. Where was the real Marshal Straightstreet now? Couldn’t Rex even remember or fail to recognize a personal odour? Aurelia had to conclude that the inhabitants of this world, whatever it was, just couldn’t smell very well, or were undisciplined in their smelling. Were not personal odours used here for identification?

  The false bodyguard, who might possibly be the best in the world at something, who might be better than the real Marshal Straightstreet at some sorts of conspiracies, was Julio Cordovan, the man of a thousand faces. Aurelia had indeed met him and drunk blood with him, when he was wearing a different one of his faces.

  The ‘Kill Aurelia Now’ League was demonstrating outside of the luxury cabin. This organization had been in existence less than an hour and already had more than ten million members worldwide. Infiltrators in the League said that its people believed that Aurelia was giving herself airs of superiority and that she must be killed for that. And they believed that she held unacceptable views. But mostly, it was just that they wanted someone to kill, and who would it be so satisfying to kill as this ‘Shining Person’ Aurelia?

  Aurelia now discovered that she had an appointments secretary, and the secretary told her that she had an appointment with Walter Kunste H.H.H. (High Honcho of the Humanities.) So she talked with Walter.

  “Do you reali
ze that you have given rise to a whole new theory of discordancies, Miss Aurelia?” Walter asked. “A group of ‘with-it’ people recorded the sound of your horns as you landed. The result is amazing. They haven’t the depth or intricacy of some of the discordancies of this world, but they bring a new simplicity to discords. How could such obvious falsities of tone have been overlooked by our searchers for discords? They are wonderful, and they are pregnant with further wonders. Nothing like them has ever been heard on this world before.”

  “By and by, what is this world?” Aurelia asked. “I really want to know. Is it Bandicoot? Is it Gaea? Is it Skokumchuck? Is it Groll’s Planet? Is it Aphthonica? I believe that by the process of elimination I have it down to these five, but which one of the five is it that we are on?”

  “This is the only one of them that appreciates discordancies,” Walter Kunste said. “The others are all for harmony and beauty. And so I believed that ‘Shining World’ was also, until the recording of the shouting of your horns opened my ears. Are there other such masters of primitive discordancies on ‘Shining World?’ ”

  “Unfortunately yes,” Aurelia said, “but not so many of them. None of us wants to produce discords, you see. For myself, it is just that I have a bad sense of tone and tune, and each of us must produce his own sound and music on ‘Shining World.’ I’m rotten at it, but I wish I weren’t.”

  “Wonderful, and still more wonderful,” Walter said. “Do you know that the discordancy of your horns is the only thing, so far, that is saving you from the wrath of the mob outside? Partisans of yours are telling the ‘Kill Aurelia Now’ League people that anyone with horns like yours cannot be all good. Myself, I do want to produce discords, but I have never attained such discordancy as that. All of us are in love—hate with discord. You are familiar with the work of Retchin’ Gretchen? What a brave regurgitation she does produce in almost everyone! Visual discords, tactile discords, auditory discords, gustatory discords, olfactory discords, we love-hate them all. We have a group that meets Wednesday evenings at ‘Rotton Ralph’s the Rottenest Restaurant in the World.’ There are pulmotors and stomach-pumps always available for all, since we are still a little bit queasy or qualmish about crossing over to actual death. One of our mottos is ‘The Rot of Death Without Death Itself.’