The Plurality of Worlds. Brian Stableford
been taken to its intimate extreme in bodily fusion. Many inhabited worlds do not have one, as yet. This moon is too small, and is ill-equipped by nature for superficial elaboration and inorganic sophistication, being mostly made of stone without even an iron core like the Earth’s. That is a significant bone of contention here. Some Selenites ambitious to develop their home would be content to make use of matter harvested from the solar system’s halo, imported via ultraetheric canals—but even that sort of development would have a considerable corollary impact on the Earth. Other Selenites contend that it would be a frightful waste of time and effort to transport material from the halo when there is a much richer source of raw materials so close at hand.”
“The Earth,” Thomas said. He did not bother to ask what the difference was between “hyperetheric” and “ultraetheric” methods of transportation. Lumen had made so many other barely-comprehensible improvisations that he had grown used to feeling that he was speaking some strange hybrid in which the Queen’s English was mingled with a Redskin or Hottentot tongue. He was making every possible effort to understand what he was told, but he was keenly aware of the extent to which his intellect and imagination were simply not up to the task. He was glad just to have grasped the broad outlines of the predicament in which he found himself.
“The Earth,” Lumen confirmed. “The Great Fleshcores will not permit its spoliation—and never will, I trust—but that does not prevent the adherents of the scheme hoping that a change of mind might be contrived. At the very least, it might help to license development of a slower and subtler kind, whose effects on the Earth’s surface would be gradual and subtle, as viewed from here, although they might seem considerably greater from the viewpoint of creatures attempting to survive and thrive on the surface. The more massive the moon becomes, the more massive its tidal effects will be—and if the surface is developed, there will be a large population of sapient machines involved, whose rogues and runaways would inevitably see the Earth as a useful refuge. You cannot imagine what a handful of renegade artificial intelligences might do to the pattern and prospects of human progress, but I can. Here comes the bugtrain with supplies from your ethership—we’d best go in and make our meal.”
“I’d rather bathe first,” Thomas said, glad that he still had some authority to decide what he did and thought.
He went down to the quarters that had been provided for his companions below the surface, and made his way to the chamber in which bathing facilities had been provided. Raleigh was there, alone, and seemed very glad to see him. Rather than avoiding him on account of his “possession,” all of his companions—including Field—had quickly become used to treating him as an oracle, capable of answering any and all questions, albeit enigmatically.
“What form will this impending journey take?” Raleigh wanted to know. “How shall we travel distances that would take light itself thousands of years to traverse, without any evident lapse of time?”
Thomas had already consulted his guest about that matter, and had no need to surrender authority over his tongue. “Mercifully,” he told his friend, as he stepped into the heated pool, having handed his clothes to a centipede in order that they might be carefully cleaned and mended by ingenious insectile seamstresses, “the void theorists and atomists alike seem to be completely wrong about the nature of space and matter. The elasticity of the individual goes far beyond the primitive displays of embryonic development and growth, provided one has the art of folding its form. The three dimensions of vision are not the only properties of space; there are many other dimensions, some of which extend beyond the world of vision into a vast series of parallel spaces, while others are squeezed within it into mere lines. We’ll be dispatched along one of those, emerging at a distant terminus without any sensation of time elapsed. Quite painless, I’m assured.”
“Painless it might be,” Raleigh replied, “but I can’t help feeling a certain nausea at the thought that we’re to be crushed so compactly that we have no manifest existence, then projected though a tunnel that has no manifest breadth, to a world so far away that a ray of light would take ten thousand years to catch us up.” He looked suspiciously at the palm of his hand, where there was a blob of some waxen substance their hosts had provided to facilitate the process of washing.
“Light wouldn’t catch us up as soon as that,” Thomas told him, “but otherwise, you seem to have the gist of it.” He applied foam generated by the waxen substance to his own body with a generous will; the sensation it imparted to his skin was by no means unpleasant, and its odor was not offensive.
“And will this world have sufficient affinity to free me from this sensation of weighing no more than a basket of apples?” Raleigh wanted to know.
“In terms of size, it will apparently be very large,” Thomas told him, summarizing the information that Lumen had given him, “but it will not exert a crushing affinity upon our bodies. It was once no bigger than the Earth, but it has been hollowed out, and all the material removed from the core redeployed upon its surface as an ever-expanding network of structures. Its core, meanwhile—having initially taken the form of a labyrinth like the one presently inside the moon—has been gradually filled by a single vast mass of flesh. These citizens of the universe remake their worlds in their own images, you see, with the molluskan model at the center. You may think of the planets of the True Civilization, if you wish, as snails with enormously convoluted shells, whose inner ramifications provide shelter to all manner of crab and insect societies, while their outer ramifications—which would appear to distant observers as their surfaces—are mostly populated by inorganic devices that mimic the properties of life: motile machines designed for countless different kinds of co-operative labor. The members of the True Civilization think, as it were, exoskeletally, habitually placing flesh at the core and protective armor at the periphery.”
Raleigh shook his head in bewilderment. “Can men really be so unusual in such a vast plurality of worlds?” he mused.
“It’s not just humans,” Thomas told him, rinsing himself off. “The entire vertebrate family is an anomaly. On other worlds, endoskeletal organization is a mere fancy, confined to a handful of wormlike and fishlike species, none of them larger than your thumb. For the descendants of fish to become reptiles, let alone birds and mammals, and to emerge from the sea as effective competitors for insects and their exoskeletal kin, was literally unthinkable until the True Civilization’s explorers found Earth.” He looked up as he finished speaking, thinking that he had glimpsed a movement in on of the shadowed coverts of the inordinately uneven ceiling, whose spiraling streamers of radiance were interrupted by numerous coverts.
“Field mistrusts this talk of evolution,” Raleigh told him, although he must have known that the clergyman had already made his opinions abundantly clear to Thomas, and was presumably trying to clarify matters in his own mind. “He is convinced that these creatures are devils sent to tempt and torment us. He is prepared to believe that the moon is Hell, and that the damned are being carefully hidden from our sight, but he does not believe that this exotic item of interdimensional artillery can shoot us to the stars. He thinks we shall be subjected to a clever illusion, with the intention of obliterating our faith.”
“I doubt that he thinks that you or I have any vestige of faith left, Walter,” Thomas said, wryly, as he let himself relax into the pool, savoring its comforts before steeling himself to get out, dress himself, feed himself and take a trip to the center of what Lumen called the galaxy—implying thereby that the Milky Way was merely one sidereal system among many.
“And he suspects de Vere of poisoning his with papist heresies,” Raleigh agreed. “I don’t much care what Ned thinks, but I trust your judgment. Is it possible, do you think, that your monstrous moth really is made in God’s image, while we are mere sports of mischance?”
“Aristocles and his kind do not think of God’s image in terms of a singular form,” Thomas told him. “They are as firmly opposed to idolatry, in their fashion, as any Puritan. God’s image, in the thinking of the True Civilization, is the image of collaboration between different species—what Lumen calls symbiosis by virtue of his incessant improvisation from Greek and Latin roots. He means more by that than the manner in which insectile species, crablike species and snail-like species play complementary