Divine Intervention

Wormworld

Dear Robert,

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you and I have been able to establish telepathic contact across the vastness of space. I still can hardly believe that I am in communication with an alien creature. Not that it is entirely unexpected. Many of the intelligent worms of my world believe that other worlds exist with intelligent worms living in them. Most of us also admit the possibility (some say probability) that there are intelligent races out there that are not worms at all, not even vermiform, but really quite different. Many of us have been working toward telepathic contact with these hypothetical other-worlders.

From your description of yourself (which I didn’t completely understand) you seem to possess a high degree of bilateral symmetry. So do we. Some of our best theoreticians have long predicted Necessary Degrees of Symmetry as a precondition for intelligent life. I must question a rather astounding statement you made in your recent communication. You told me that you are a nonworm intelligent creature from another solid world who makes neither worm- hole nor nonwormhole, but instead moves around on the outside of your world, in contact with its surface!

At least, I think that’s what you were saying!

Now, the idea that you are a nonworm intelligence communicating to me from another world is easy enough for me to grasp. But that you live on the outer surface of your world, rather than inside, where one would normally expect even a nonworm alien intelligence to live…

Is that really where you live? On the surface?

Please clarify! It’s really important for me to get this straight, for reasons I’ll explain in my next communication. Just now I have to sign off rather hurriedly and do some urgent tunnel-redirecting. Hope to hear from you soon.

Good to hear from you again. If I understand you correctly, you assert that you are a solid, three-dimensional creature, like me, but living on the outside of your world. And you also assert (or rather, I infer from your statements) that you know not only the shape of your world, but also its volume, radius, surface dimensions, and so forth.

Frankly, that’s hard to believe.

Is that what you meant?

Are you really a creature from some distant planet, or another worm somewhere playing tricks on me?

Talking with you has given me difficulties. The other worms know I’m sending out a powerful vibration aimed and tightly focused out into space. A lot of worms do that. But I keep on tracking a single area (your world), and that leads other worms to ask if I’ve gotten obsessive or just what the hell I think I’m doing.

Making up believable tales about why I’ve locked my beam onto a single distant source is easier than telling worms that I’m in contact with a being who lives on the surface of a sphere.

But to hell with the difficulties. As far as I’m concerned this is fascinating stuff. It is extremely interesting to hear tales of wonder from different far-off places, and perhaps it doesn’t really matter if those places really exist, or maybe somehow, somewhere, somewhen, everything that can be imagined has to exist.

I have to sign off now. I promised Jill that I’d do parallel wormholes with her on a hexagonal grid that she thought up all by herself. Artistically speaking, I suppose it isn’t much, but it gives me great pleasure to do figures with her. We’ve made a lot of good parallel wormhole designs together in the last few hundred units, that gal and I.

Do you have mates in your world, Robert? Do you suffer the unending conflict between self-preservation and consummation?

Listen, Robert, philosophy interests me, as it seems to do you. You tell me that you discuss these matters just for the fun of it, not because you’re a professional at it. It’s the same with me. I’m an artist, and I don’t know what I’m talking about half of the time, and I’m glad that it’s the same for you, as you told me. I didn’t really want to contact some giant godlike intellect Out There; I think I just wanted to find a friend, someone to tell the story of my life to, someone the story of whose life I want to hear.

What I’m trying to get at is this Robert, that I want to exchange knowledge with you, but I’m not an expert on anything except the art that I do. I gather it’s the same for you. Then good for us! Professional worm philosophers and scientists usually assume that one of them is going to make contact with their intellectual counterpart when contact is finally established between inhabitants of different worlds. Isn’t it nice that it’s happened to a couple of experimental pattern-makers like us?

Robert, are you a funny looking creature living in accord with weird and special laws of nature? Or am I? Or are we both?

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Hi. It’s me again.

Well, I made an attempt at communicating with one of my fellow-worms about you not long ago. I didn’t figure I’d have much luck at it (and how right I was!) but I had to try. Maybe it was silly of me, but I must tell you that worms are very preoccupied with that sort of thing, perhaps because of the physically isolated lives we lead.

On the other hand, worms, despite their passion for science and metaphysics, and their pressing need for the findings of both, tend to be skeptical about anything they haven’t thought up themselves or actually experienced, except for the lunatic fringe that will believe anything.

I didn’t want to start a cult on the one hand, or get laughed at on the other, or be put down for crazy on the third hand, or considered possessed by an evil worm-spirit on the fourth hand. (Exactly how many hands do you have, Robert? I figure four, one for each of your locomotive extensions from your central body mass. Have I guessed right? Worms have no hands, but the concept of handedness is part of our ancient lore.)

I decided to make a trail run in the form of a hypothesis. It just so happened a few units ago that I chanced to be running a pattern contiguous to the pattern of my friend, Klaus. Klaus and I have shared numerous pattern-contiguities, more so in the old days than now. Back then we had great resonance and once even paralleled the same figure (a dodecahedron, if memory serves) for seven linked variations until—frankly—I got bored and decided that I had to go faster and more elegantly, and left Klaus behind and went on to pursue my career in art. Klaus took to paralleling the philosophical wormhole patterns and has made a fair reputation for himself.

After some small talk about rotational matters, I said to him, “Klaus, I’ve been playing around with a funny notion recently. I’d like your opinion on it.”

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

When I say “we talked” I don’t mean to imply, of course, that we met face to face. That would mean instant annihilation, as I pointed out in an earlier communication, and would make our talk rather final! By “talk” I refer to the communications that pass between worms when they are in contiguous corridors with a space between them of no more than Sigma, this being our symbol for the varying range of distances and conditions within which communication is possible. These communications are effected by the hammering motions a worm makes with his head, tapping out the code of language and simultaneously leaving a written record of that talk on the wall of the corridor. Aside from natural cataclysms, like tunnels falling in, every conversation any worm has ever had with any other worm is recorded somewhere in Wormworld on the walls of the tunnels.

This being the case, it is evident to me that we worms mean something quite different when we say we talked to a fellow worm than what you humans would mean. I thought I should clear up that point. Now to return to my conversation with Klaus.

“Suppose there exist solid intelligent creatures like us, who live on other worlds Out There—”

“In other worlds, you mean,” Klaus said.

“No, that’s just the point. I’ve been thinking: what is there to prevent the existence of solid intelligent creatures like us, living on the outer surface of a world, rather than in it.”

“Let me consider the immediate implications,” Klaus said. “These hypothetical intelligent creatures living on their world would, I presume have direct experiential contact with the surface of that world, and so would be able to establish fixed coordinates and thus know the shape of their world.”

“Let’s just say, for argument’s sake, it’s spherical,” I said.

“The actual shape is unimportant. What is important on this hypothetical world of yours is that its shape, whatever it is, can be known, and therefore all directional and topological facts about that world can also be known.”

“That seems to follow,” I said. “And I postulate a further condition…”

“My dear fellow,” Klaus said, “don’t bother to go on. I must tell you that further speculation along this line is fruitless, since it piles fanciful hypothesis upon even more fanciful hypothesis. Aren’t you aware that the organum of worm science and mathematics, of which I think I may claim some slight knowledge, has never been able to establish the absolute existence of a surface to our own world? That’s why we refer to it as the veritable surface.”

“That doesn’t mean a surface couldn’t exist somewhere else,” I told him.

“Of course not. Anything is possible, including the existence somewhere of worms who live by consuming their own tails. Possible, but so improbable as to be beneath consideration. If we are to have a reasonable discussion, even on a hypothetical point, it must be based upon the laws of nature as we know them, not as we would like to imagine them.”

“I think you’re taking much too high and holy a tone,” I told him. “Why, dammit, worm, we always assume that our world has a surface, even though we don’t know where it is, except at the moment of breakthrough/cancellation when it doesn’t do us much good.”

“The transformation which takes place at the veritable surface, which we refer to as breakthrough/cancellation, or B, is most decidedly not proof of the existence of an actual surface to our world. We do assume in our everyday life that our world has a surface. It’s a necessary psychological construct (though an artificial one, I must insist) for setting direction of wormhole. But philosophers don’t believe in the existence of a veritable surface anymore.”

“That’s news to me,” I said. “What do they believe, then?”

“The current trend is to consider that our world has a pseudo-surface, sometimes called an imaginary surface. It is a useful concept, because mathematically the pseudo-surface has to exist, whether a veritable surface exists or not. So it’s useful for certain mathematical functions.”

“I don’t see the difference between your pseudo-surface and your veritable surface,” I said. “Aren’t you just calling the same thing by a classier name?”

“Not at all. The term pseudo-surface is used to express indeterminacy.”

“The hell you say,” I said.

“You see, dear boy, surface is pseudo-surface, or P/S, and is indeterminate because you cannot investigate it experimentally, since investigation involves cancellation of the investigator when the undetectable pseudo-surface is broken through. If you see what I mean.”

There was quite a lot of pomposity to Klaus’s vibrations when he communicated that. He calls himself a Transcendental Pragmatist. I think he’s just clever at twisting concepts. Sometimes I think that when Klaus pontificates on one of his subjects of knowledge, there is literally nothing there to understand. It’s just a lot of old wormhole, to use a term of ours for something that has form but no substance.

Still, Klaus is a recognized philosophical thinker, and if he couldn’t at least take my proposition as a postulate from which to extrapolate—well, I probably wouldn’t do any better with anyone else, except the people who will believe anything, whom I’m not interested in reaching.

“You’re just being obstinate because you don’t want to consider my conception,” I told him. “Surface is a necessary conception. For Godworm’s sake, worm, we spend our lives digging wormholes and you’re trying to tell me they’re imaginary!”

“Have you ever seen the surface of a wormhole?” Klaus vibrated coolly.

“Well, not from the outside, of course not. It’s impossible for a worm to encounter wormhole without cancellation. Everybody knows that! But a worm damned well knows that he’s laying down wormhole, and the wormhole he lays down has surface.”

“That, of course, is the common-sense ‘worm’s in his wormhole; all’s well with the world’ view,” Klaus went on in his infuriating manner. “We can assume what we please, but as long as the evidence is circumstantial rather than experiential, the thing in question cannot be ascertained with certainty. I will admit that some circumstantial evidence is very strong—as the philosopher said when he came up with a bump against the crystalline face that his theory said didn’t even exist.”

I gave him a very short burst of appreciation-vibration: it was an old joke and I had heard it many times before.

Klaus went on, “Let’s leave absolute truth to itself for a moment and postulate that the indeterminate pseudo-surface exists somewhere as a veritable surface. You want me to imagine that there are objects of known dimensions in the Universe? Very well, that’s not too difficult. But you also want me to imagine solid, three dimensional creatures like us living on this surface.”

“That’s the construct.”

“Well,” Klaus said mildly (but with ill-concealed ironic vibrational overtones), “they would have to be very strange creatures indeed, then. Your creatures living on the surface would be in the position of worms exposed to wormhole breakthrough, not just for an instant, which is long enough to cancel any of us, but continually!”

“Why don’t we just invent a special law that says he can do just that?” I suggested.

“To what purpose?” Klaus asked. “Conjecture can be entertaining as well as instructive, but why should we create a baseless fantasy that goes against all our experience of how the world really works? This surface creature that you want to hypothesize, my dear boy, could only exist in accord with laws that (since no necessity exists to even consider them) can only be considered capricious, frivolous, and unlikely in the extreme to actually exist anywhere or anywhen.”

I vibrated a shrug. “Okay, Klaus, forget it.”

He vibrated donnish self-approval. “My boy, a solid creature living on the surface of a spherical world of known dimensions would be a very strange creature indeed, as would be his world and the laws that govern it!”

I managed to get away from him at last—left him there vibrating softly to himself as he absent-mindedly fell into a rotating spiral mono-axial tessellation which was said to be the figure most favored by the great Aristotle, the worm who codified most of our knowledge.

So that shows what you can expect from my more enlightened colleagues. I think I’ll keep these communications just to myself, though maybe I’ll tell Jill. Jill is my mate, by the way. Actually, she’s my intended mate, and I hers, since we haven’t consummated yet—otherwise I’d be cancelled and I couldn’t very well be communicating all this to you, right?

Ever since your last telepathic communication, Robert, I have been unable to stop thinking about you. I keep on visualizing you (or trying to) crawling merrily around your “enormous oblate spheroid of tediously regular shape,” as you put it, with its established shape and dimensions. And how I have marveled at the tantalizing glimpses I have had of your strange world—a place where intelligent creatures not only move along the surface of a sphere of known dimensions—as if that weren’t enough! —but also, marvel of marvels, making physical contact with each other without mutual cancellation/death!

Can I be right about this? It seemed to be the only reasonable interpretation of your regret at our incapacity ever to have a “face to face meeting,” as is customary between friends on your world.

Robert, you couldn’t know that we worms speak of a face-to-face meeting only when we are speaking about the mating/procreating/dying situation. I’m sure you didn’t want that with me! (But correct me if I’ve misjudged your sexual/death imagination.)

I think you meant friendly, non-stressful, non-sexual communication together in a contiguous space! A space where we could even touch, if we wanted to, without mutual and instantaneous cancellation/death.

If my supposition is right, then that sort of thing is normal, to say nothing of possible, for you humans.

And if that’s really the case, I can only say, wow. Frankly, your claims about yourself and your world are going to seem preposterous to the other worms (though I believe you!). Still, I’m going to feel around and try to find some way of communicating these things you are telling me to someone.

We worms exist in an intermediate zone between the core and the surface. New matter is created and old matter is destroyed, and, in between, in the stable zone, we worms live in a finite volume, which can never fluctuate as long as the interface holds. Our world creates matter and we consume it, and there’s only so much of the matter for us to eat/burrow through, and more is made only at a certain fixed rate, and so our population is self-limiting, reducing as it over-consumes, expanding as it underconsumes.

Life does have a tendency to maintain itself in strange situations, doesn’t it, Robert?

It’s getting pretty crowded around here these days. It looks like a big dieoff is coming up. There’s hardly room to swing a figure 8, much less anything complicated.

One of our more radical thinkers has claimed that there is actually only one worm in the world, dreaming dreams to itself, traveling around making wormholes, traveling so fast that it meets itself at other location time/points, canceling itself out and coming to life again, immortal within the term of continual death and rebirth, flickering in and out of existence, and dreaming everything else, our civilization, our culture, our laws, our very existence. This Primordial Worm succeeds in deceiving himself into believing that there are many, and then, when that belief is his secure possession, he struggles to deceive himself that there is only one.

Safety in Wormworld lies toward the Core, and the lower regions are densely wormholed accordingly. As you descend, you encounter a maze of wormholes, growing impenetrable at last. But one can move down, in, with luck and skill avoiding entrapment areas, find a way into the Core Heart, the inner region where creation is continuous and the entire region unwormholed. For even if a few other worms have penetrated to the Core Heart, so rapid is material replacement at the Core that their wormholes would be swallowed up quickly behind them. With their wormholes filling in so quickly behind them, they would have no history of the sort we inscribe on the walls of our long-lasting wormholes. Unaffected by memory, they would live in a sort of Eden.

“But even if we found this opening,” I told Jill, “we still can’t know if it leads to the Core or to death in an entrapment area.”

“I realize that,” Jill said. “Frankly, I’d rather run with the pack and live out my life like the other worms. But I’ve fallen in love with you for some reason that escapes me at the moment. If you want to live isolated from the rest, I’ll go with you, and maybe we’ll find the Core, but even if we don’t we’ll at least have a chance at a reasonable life together.”

“If you feel that way,” I said, “then why not come with me to the Upper Regions?”

“Because it leads to death, and quickly, too, from what I hear. I love you and am willing to put up with your eccentricities. Looking for the Core is eccentric, but it is still behaviorally permissible. But going to the Upper Regions is just plain suicidal. I love you very much, my dear, but—forgive me—not to the point of making a suicide pact with you.”

There is evidence that ancient wormhole areas are being filled in, perhaps by the spontaneous creation of matter.

It’s hard to be sure—there is conflicting evidence on the subject—but there is some evidence to show that ancient wormholes in some areas are being filled in by solid matter. Whole networks of prehistoric wormholes indicated on reliable though old and crudely made maps have apparently been filled in, which would indicate a process of continuous creation in our world.

The skeptics say that all that shows is that the old maps are wrong. Personally, I have a hunch that it is true. But the cynic in me feels that we worms probably use up the world faster than it can renew itself.

By the way, thanks for your further description of ideal mate- hood in your world. How lucky you are to be able to get into physical contact with your loved one and not get canceled, but rather go on to greater and richer understandings together. I can’t imagine it, actually. It seems too good to be true.

I’m glad you clarified the concept of “war” for me. I see it now (correctly, I hope) as numerous solid bodies coming into direct and violent contact with each other, but not canceling each other out, as with us, but rather, violently repelling each other by thrusting and pushing movements. Physical contact does sound extremely interesting, though it’s difficult for a worm to get the sense of it. But then, I suppose you can never really know what tunneling is.

For us, morality consists in not spiraling around and ahead of the tunneling of another worm. It’s a pretty foul trip: You’ve surrounded him with spirals spaced at a critical distance, see, so what he encounters is in effect a tunnel around and ahead of the tunnel he is digging. He is surrounded by an impenetrable lattice work that forces him to follow predetermined directions. Then the aggressor worm can close off the head of the wormhole by crisscrossing in front of it.

The heart of Wormworld morality: to spiral toward a converging worm or not to spiral.

The theory that Wormworld is not a single solid figure but instead one or more figures connected by one or more solid bridges, like linked dumbbells.

Some say that our world is not a single continuous solid figure, but rather a collection of solid bodies connected by cylindrical bridges. There is some evidence for this: some of our maps of dead areas show a dumbbell configuration, for example—two shapes, not necessarily spherical, of course, connected by a cylindrical section. The connection area is presumed interdicted, but empirical investigation is rare, since a mistake is catastrophic.

Still, enough of these dumbbell shapes turn up to make a worm think there’s something to it. This theory is also compatible with the theory of continuous creation, the supposition being that our world is some sort of living matter that extends itself at various points from its (supposed) surface by a thread or filament, and then grows a new solid volume on the end of it.

You asked me how worms differentiate each other, whether we have individuality and how we show it, how we communicate, etc. I’m not a scientist, but I’ll explain it as well as I can.

Every worm is born with a distinct and unique texture-pattern to his skin. And his skin is, of course, in continuous contact with the sides of his wormhole. The same basic figures, patterns, etc., occur over and over, but in ever-differing combinations, of greater or lesser aesthetic appeal. One worm can read another worm’s skin- pattern at varying distances, depending on various factors.

Skin-pattern is the basic texture of individuality. It impresses itself on the sides of the wormhole as one progresses, and can be read by others, until, in time, it fades out.

This much is innate, inborn. Beyond that, we have the ability to make conscious textural patterns on our wormskin, and hence impress them on the sides of the wormhole in order to communicate with others, or (using more energy) to leave records whose duration depends on the size and the speed of the worm leaving it.

I believe I have already told you that velocity and direction are among our areas of free will. Size increases with speed, as does time and communication-strength. Linear speed is the factor for growth, or volume extension, as we call it.

The faster we tunnel the bigger we grow and the more time we have. And this has its psychological counterpart in the sense of well-being. But greater speed also brings the greater possibility of entrapment and cancellation. We have various mathematical techniques to help us plot out the Speed/Danger ratio under various circumstances. Frankly, these are of dubious practical worth and very difficult to understand, and your average worm just bores along on his hunches.

Personally, I detest science. But I, like all of us, am forced into the mysterious area of physics, metaphysics, and mathematics in order to solve the daily problems with which we are continually beset. Even our dreams and fantasies involve intuitional probes into areas where physical laws and special properties might be manipulated to our advantage. And sometimes I have nightmares of constriction.

Sometimes, on a good day, I think to myself that there is no established limit to the speed a worm could attain under ideal circumstances, since speed begets further speed, and at a logarithmic rate. The limiting factors are dead wormholes, other worms, and the unknowable Surface.

Fantasies of continually increasing speed and size are common among us. One of our oldest legends is of the Primordial Worm in the Original World. This world was entirely solid, of course. One version of the legend is that the Primordial Worm tried to reach maximum velocity (which is permitted only to Godworm, if He exists), and that the Primordial Worm grew so large and fast and long that he consumed the entire world, and worm and world canceled simultaneously. That was the end of the first Age of Worms. Then the Godworm made the world all over again, but this time with two worms in it.

Another version of the Creation Legend says the Godworm saved the world by creating a second worm of opposite sex, with whom the Primordial Worm had to share the world, mate, and procreate/ die, thus giving birth to the present worm race.

Both versions of this particular legend agree that in the beginning there was nothing, and then came the solid world, then Primordial Worm, and then the Mother Worm. Other legends say that the first worm was the Mother Worm who mated with herself to give birth to our race.

In any event, the Second Age began (it is said) with two worms, and life was paradisaical because they had the entire world at their disposal, and lived long lives and designed brilliant patterns before they mated/canceled and initiated the process resulting in our present multiplicity.

However it came about, it must have been wonderful back in the old days when there were only a few worms and everyone had a chance to live a long life and express himself fully.

I am puzzled by your references to “gravity.” No such force exists in our world, or if it does, we are not aware of it and it plays no important part in our lives. All directions in our world involve equal expenditure of energy. I don’t understand why you make a differentiation between “up “ and “down.” Does it correspond to “in” and “out”? Does it have something to do with symmetry-hunger? For us it is meaningless.

We dream a time before exclusivity; a dream of innocence, of paradise, when worms coiled round and round each other in veritable contact, when there was no cancellation, only childlike sexuality and unlimited fulfillment; when all worms lived in the great worm tangle, procreated, died, were absorbed back into the tangle of life as nutrients, to blend with sunlight to give more life. That was the state of worm before the Fall.

I was very interested in your description of water, and it does correspond in some ways to what we call earth. We don’t have anything like it, unless “water” is the medium through which we move. But this seems unlikely—from what you tell me, a wormhole made in water would instantaneously be filled in again, which is not the case with us. Might some other “liquid” or “semi-liquid” have the requisite properties? I like the idea that the changes in our earth are due to changes in the viscosity of the medium through which we pass. But I think it’s just a nice idea. I’m pretty sure we’re worms, not fish.

Possession can occur (or is said to occur) when one’s short-term wormhole pattern coincides in sufficient degrees of similitude (the critical degree is unknown) with the wormhole pattern made by some worm now deceased. It would take a very large/fast worm to produce a pattern of sufficient power to continue for a distance after his death. Some evil worms have been said to possess this power, and their patterns are said to wait for someone to be ensnared by forming a similar pattern. The mystics say that the magical power of Resonance then takes place. The living worm’s pattern, via a quantum/gestalt repatterning, becomes similar in all degrees to the dead worm’s pattern. The living worm is forced to continue the dead worm’s pattern; this our definition of possession, since a worm is defined by the patterns he creates. If a worm makes a pattern that is not his own—not self-willed, not self-directed—then he is not the same worm, he is the former worm. A worm so possessed is said to “ride the fixed pattern,” usually to his quick destruction, since he is unable to use his intuition to guide him away from dangerous volumes.

I don’t know if any of this is true, but it would account for the inexplicable behavior that takes over a worm from time to time.

There are said to be worm magicians among us who deliberately seek Similitude with the former pattern of some great former spirit-worm, some supreme magus. The belief is that, done consciously and with proper safeguards, the worm-spirit will not destroy the magician but rather confer on him the power to foresee the patterns of others. At cost of his soul, of course. On the other hand, the really zealous believers in God, sometimes called white magicians, try to attain Holy Resonant Similitude with the Great Pattern of the Godworm, for the sake of bliss or Infinite Velocity Communion, as it is technically called. But there are many doctrinal disputes among the Godworm worshippers and I myself take little note of all that, being an artist above all else, while still trying to keep up an intelligent worm’s interest in the world around me.

We artists (for I know you are a kindred spirit, Robert) use the data that is presented to us, but without taking too much stock of it. Our true allegiance lies not with worldly or unworldly views, but rather with some sort of formal elegance, which, for me, defines art as closely as I can do it. But either you understand these things intuitively or you don’t. Do you understand?

What corresponds to vision in you is our ability to sense wormholes, both individual and in patterns, as well as to sense and often identify other worms, and to sense certain irregularities or inconsistencies (technically called Anomalies) in the density and shape-structure of the world we move through. These Anomalies are sometimes of definite shape, size and thickness and sometimes are impenetrable. It is this fact that lends a possible credence to the otherwise discredited theory that we inhabit a crystalline world. This theory holds that the Anomalies we encounter from time to time are actually zones formed by sets of faces within our crystalline world. The zones may be considered points where intersections are all parallel, and hence impenetrable. I’m not too knowledgeable on all this, but I’m mentioning it in the hopes it’ll interest you.

The primary objection to the crystalline world theory is that if it were so we should be able to find an orderly arrangement of zones and faces, and thus be able to deduce the shape of the world. Which of course we cannot do.

This objection is answered to the satisfaction of some by the Semi or Quasi Crystalline Worlders, who hold that our world has certain crystalline properties, but is not itself a pure crystal, and is not bound by the laws of Symmetry which define classic crystal growth and prediction. They say, some of them, that the world is a living world with certain crystalline properties.

I don’t mean to sneer at the crystallographerworms; however, metaphysically, they may be suspect. But aesthetically, they provide the artist worm with fascinating figures to inscribe via wormhole. Worms at the comic book stage usually inscribe simple cubes, staying well outside the critical limits of cancellation where lines meet, of course, and even then frequently abandoning the figure before completion because they have grown bored or thought of something else to do.

And of course plenty of worms are not interested in crystalline inscription art and prefer to spend their lives making tight helical search-patterns of various degrees of tightness depending on their timidity: a right helical search-pattern is safer and allows its maker to consume more “safe” (i.e. unwormholed) earth. But these tight search patterns are confining and life-limiting, because their extreme angularity holds down speed and therefore self-expression to a minimum, and so the makers of them tend to stay small and slow and lead a dull but safe life.

That sort of thing is not for me, however. Jill keeps on preaching the virtues of the helical way to me, but I am an artist worm and the fascinations of artistic wormhole inscription, the highest form of creation, call to me ceaselessly.

In fact, I made quite a name for myself recently for my composition of three linked tetragonal pyramids with single pyramids adorning all of the points except one, where I inscribed a tetrahedron for comic relief. I got quite a lot of criticism for that by the classicists, which pleased me since I am dedicated to asymmetry. Well, that’s putting it too strongly, I believe in symmetry, of course, as every artist must, but I believe that the frozen perfection of symmetry must be marred deliberately by the mystery and truth of asymmetry. I suppose you’d call me a romantic. But there it is, my creed, and I’m not ashamed of it.

You may laugh at my concept of planned asymmetries, since the nature of the world and the incursions of other worms distort our creations anyhow. Some would even question whether my third tetragonal bipyramid deserved that name at all. Its shape was far from perfect. I had to do some quick maneuvering in a seventy percent filled area to finish it off. It’s rather a distorted figure, but that’s no reason to say that it looks like a wormturd, as one critic said, with extreme injustice.

Well, that’s how it goes in the art game. At least I caused a stir, and showed that I can go beyond the simple-minded geometries which is the current artistic fad.

I promised to tell you something about what I do, and there it is. I’ve simplified it considerably, of course. There’s a great deal more involved in figure-inscription than I’ve indicated. But perhaps I’ve said enough to give you an idea.

What do you do, Robert?

This week I’m doing repeated contact twinning of a pseudo-hexagonal shape that came to me in a dream. It’s a pleasantly repetitious activity of a mildly pleasing aesthetic character, and gives me plenty of long lines along which to build up speed so that I’ll have the energy to communicate with you. By following a set contact twinning procedure I satisfy my form-need without having to actively invent a figure. I do this somewhat reluctantly, because I’ve got some big artistic projects in mind. Some of them would astonish you, I think. And Jill thinks I’m getting more than a little loony! But I restrain myself from entering these grand projects, in part for Jill’s sake, in part out of cowardice (for I contemplate some hazardous patterns!). But most of all I desist from them so that I can give my attention/energy to these communications with you, Robert.

Your explanation of what you do with your life was a little unclear, but I gather that you are a maker of popular aesthetic configurations just as I am. When you say you get “paid” for your work, in my terms that means you get increased fame and enhanced sustenance in some form that you can use. If I understand correctly, you are a maker and seller of your own sort of wormhole structures. We’re very much alike in certain ways. But this matter of “selling” is not at all obvious to me. I take it that your wormhole structures which you call stories are portable and can be isolated for specific distribution to your solid fellows. And they reward you in some way that I hope you will clarify for me in later communication.

I find it a strange idea, and I can’t imagine what they could give you aside from fame. What could other creatures possibly have to do with your sustenance? I guess I’ve supposed that you live according to the way we worms feed ourselves. As I’ve explained, we make our wormholes, and thus create artistic patterns that can only be rewarded by fame, since nothing else could penetrate the isolation in which we worms must live. It’s difficult for me to imagine getting sustenance from others rather than being annihilated by them. Please explain.

It was good to hear from you, Robert, although a lot of your message was garbled, or I just didn’t understand parts of it. But I think I empathized with the important stuff. You tell me that you’re having difficulties with the directing of your wormhole just now; you’ve got a lot of semi-threatening and sometimes ambiguous convergences to worry about as well, and that you’ve also got to make “a living” (please define in your next message!). And so it is difficult for you to set up the necessary circumstances and summon the necessary energy and focus to communicate with me.

I quite understand, I sense your eagerness to continue our association, so I know you’re not trying to put me off. Get in touch when you can. Your buddy Ron the Worm understands. I’ve got difficulties of my own, so my communications may get spotty from time to time also.

You tell me you haven’t told any of your fellow humans about our communication, for reasons I understand perfectly. But you seem to have some idea of finding a form of acceptable disclosure for this experience via your artistic medium, your storytelling.

Go to it, pal. Our talks have given me some ideas, too.

The beauty of telepathic communication is the way the process automatically translates your meanings into symbols and terms comprehensible and familiar to the other. Thus, your name, which in actuality must be incomprehensible and unvibrational to me, comes through, via the navel of telepathy (and perhaps, who knows, divine grace) as a familiar name to me—Robert, the name of several of my friends, as a matter of fact.

I think of you, crawling around your enormous sphere whose shape you know—marvel of marvels!

It is quite otherwise with us. We live within our world rather than on the surface of it. We are worms. Or wormoids, since there are several races of worms.

Klaus surprised me by showing definite interest in my telepathic communication with you. “I don’t like to give credence to something that I myself cannot verify,” he said, “but this—let’s call it communication that you have received—opens up some very interesting areas. Our scientists have long been aware of the possibility of other worlds with definite and measurable surfaces. We’ve had no real evidence for it up to now. And I’m not sure this constitutes evidence. But accepting the assumption for the moment, it opens some interesting conjectures.”

“Does it prove that our world has a real surface?” I asked.

“No, dear boy. Quite the contrary. If your informant speaks true, then it proves that our world absolutely does not have a surface, and it proves this as a matter of verifiable knowledge rather than as an idealistic statement.”

“Is that important?” I asked.

“Of course! Ideal concepts are mere logical constructs whose truth depends upon inner consistency, and whose main use is to keep the pragmatists upset and act as a sort of challenge to learn whether the ideal corresponds with what really is.”

“I don’t see why the fact that his world has a surface proves that our world doesn’t.”

“It’s only an indirect proof, a conclusion to be derived from the cosmological evidence presented by your observer. Actually, I’m not absolutely sure what it proves. If anything. I must consult with some of my colleagues, several of whom are working along similar lines.”

Artistry is my pursuit, perhaps the ultimate pursuit of all worms. But philosophy, and most especially metaphysics, is crucial to the direction of our day-to-day lives. I gather that it is the other way around with you. What a lucky creature you are! I had a rather frightening experience today and I’m still in uneasy self-oscillation over it. I almost got trapped in a ninety-nine percent annihilation volume.

Well, perhaps I exaggerate, but only slightly. It’s hard for us worms to know much about degree of danger. With us, either you’re all right or you’re dead, canceled. The fear of cancellation-death haunts us all our lives, but it’s difficult to really assess the threat. As far as I’m concerned, if I can sense three-quarter wormhole coverage around me, I get a little jumpy and start looking for more spacious volumes. Well, today I got into this area, it must have been at least eighty-two percent canceled, and to make it worse, it was surrounded by impenetrable faces.

Still, even eighty-two percent coverage isn’t absolutely critical, as past statistical surveys have shown, and I was able to plot a direction for my wormhole that skirted a ninety-percent space at one point (that was hairy!) and then spiraled into a beautiful sixty percent volume for as far as the eye could see. (We don’t actually see, of course, but we do have a sense similar to your long-distance binocular vision that permits us to survey territory ahead and around us and to form a three-dimensional impression of it, a sort of moving topological map in our heads which models its hollows and solid areas, and, of course, its crystalline faces if any are present.)

Do enclosed self-annihilation spaces occur on the surface where you live, Robert? Here we’re always on the lookout for critical-width bottlenecks, which permit entry through the bottleneck but no exit, since the exit wormhole would violate the critical distance separating it from the entry wormhole. Sometimes we call them bottlenecks, sometimes box canyons, depending on whether the volume is cylindrical or rectangular. There are various other kinds of traps which occur, and which one must be on guard against. The terrain through which we pass is changing constantly. If only it were constant! We are like those pioneers you told me about, traveling over the great plains in their land-schooners. Only we go through the land, not over it. Sometimes we encounter easy going on what are for us the great plains, other times we face mountains—tumbled and tangled crystalline faces which must be worked around, and sometimes there are hollow volumes that must be skirted, and at other times we find the equivalent of swamp—areas that are not hollow, but which are not sufficiently tenacious to permit us to push a wormhole through without the whole thing collapsing around us. Solid matter is what we usually talk about, but actually, that’s a bit rare. Usually our surroundings are in a state of viscosity, and this viscosity exists in a range between tough, discrete, hard-packed particles on the one hand, so stable as to be considered eternal, and air (or, as we would say, space—because to us the chemical constituents of the gas that makes up hollow spaces is of no concern—the space itself is deadly to us—) and water, another peril, since it will support no worm- hole, or rather, a wormhole will leave no trace in it. Since it is essential to know where you’ve just been in order to know where to go next—the importance of the baseline—a worm in water, try as he will to hew a straight line in hope of reaching shore, will all too often describe a circle, enclosing himself in a course too curved to permit sufficient speed to be built up to go on. And so he dies. It seems to be one of the things that our different species share, the ability to drown.

Please do tell me about your own self-annihilation spaces, Robert, if you have them. In answer to your previous question, no, we don’t have wars or physical conflict of any sort, since we can only kill an enemy at cost of our own life. Some worms do from time to time get angry enough or crazy enough to do just that, but it’s not a big problem as “war” seems to be with you. And thanks for explaining “anxiety” to me. Yes, it rules our lives just as it does yours.

Telepathic communication seems to carry with it a sense of the sincerity of the communicator, even though some concepts are necessarily unclear until referents (if they exist) can be found for them. So I know—intuitively, shall we say—that you are communicating your truth to me, no matter how mind-shattering and contrary to common sense the matters you are relating seem.

Robert, you are a very strange creature from my point of view, and you live under circumstances that I find incomprehensible. That is true. But I also know that spiritually we are just alike. And that is the more important truth. I believe that all intelligent beings everywhere are brothers reaching out to one another.

Well met, brother.

It’s also nice that we both happen to specialize in the creation of aesthetic patterns. Maybe we’ll get a chance to talk shop.

We are blind worms, if I understand your definition of vision correctly. We are born that way, but we are aware of our visual light-spectrum blindness because, in dreams, a worm can see the patterns that he blindly digs when he’s awake. Perhaps worms once had sight. We do our sort of seeing through the vibrations we send and receive. And that’s how we also talk to each other, of course. Our way of listening is a form of seeing, too, because during communication we form strong impressions of our respondent’s mood, facial expression, attitude, etc. But we possess no specific organs of light-perception as you do, probably because there’s nothing for us to see—just the face of the wormhole, and you can’t really see that since you’re contiguous to it.

Even though this is the case, and I am a blind worm and the offspring of unnumbered generations of blind worms, yet still I claim the ability to see things in much the same way you do, breathed in light and imbued with shape and texture and color. We believe that seeing is an innate and inalienable aspect of all sentient creatures, and that visual-light blindness or sightedness has very little to do with it. My friend Klaus would probably call seeing a transcendental function: we are blind but we see anyhow, and we don’t know how it happens or even what we behold.

A worm’s head terminates in a circular organ equipped with various cutting edges. This organ, in continual contact with the earth it passes through, cuts, grinds, drills, hammers, carves, gnaws, a hole large enough for the worm to pass through. The matter it ingests passes through the worm’s body and comes out as worm turd.

A worm’s length increases with speed. This is known as “making a long tail.” It is a term of respect, and is preferred to calling someone “a big quick worm” which contains a subtle insult difficult to translate.

Needless to say, worms fill their wormholes almost completely. Contact is maintained with the surface of the tunnel at all points. Problems of friction are overcome by the ability of worms to exude a substance which I suppose you would call slime but which we refer to as The Divine Lubricant.

A worm group traveling together can scan the area they are approaching, as they can the area they are in. Therefore some attempt at order can be made. This is necessary since a sufficient volume of space around and ahead of him is to a worm the vital requirement of life, food, shelter, occupation, and art, all rolled into one together with survival itself. In the past, many different political systems have been tried. Most of the time Wormworld is inclined toward anarchy, since a law can be physically enforced only by the death of the one who enforces it. But some social organization is needed, especially as the worm population has grown and the available space lessened. It’s not like the ancient times that we hear about, when the world was virgin and untrammeled, and there weren’t worms and wormholes everywhere.

From time to time, charismatic worms have sprung up who have gathered around them fanatics willing to sacrifice their lives for the sake of law and order. The lives of the followers are used only sparingly, because morale even among fanatics diminishes as one after another of their numbers is killed. Usually the enforcer worms are only sent out in pursuit of crazed or possessed worms. They are the ones whose irrational figures are a threat to everyone, whose unpredictable movements impede the progress of the wormass, and whose ecstatic behavior could sometimes be infectious, as for example in the so-called Years of the Retrograde Spiralers.

A collective mass of group lore and survival data exists, however, not all of it accurate. It is known as The Code. The Code is the basis for all ethical behavior among worms. But no one knows exactly what The Code says, since no consensus has ever existed that would permit a codification agreed upon by all. But perhaps it’s comforting to be inexact in these matters when you can’t enforce The Code anyhow.

The total worm-population is forever advancing in a clockwise motion. The few worms who go against this movement are said to be retrograde worms. The environment of the worms can be described as a sphere within the greater sphere of our world. Somewhere above is the unknown and fatal Surface, somewhere below is the legendary and unknown Core. Between these limits the worm-populations move, spread out over a vast front, age-groups frequently traveling together. As for the Core itself, little is known, though much is conjectured. But I’ll have more to say about the Core later.

The basic worm migration is unidirectional, clockwise, always progressing into new territory. But of course really new territory is never found, since all worms are in effect pursuing all other worms around the world. We’re all trying to do the same thing, go faster, get bigger, that’s success, but it carries its own danger: the faster/bigger a worm goes, the sooner/oftener he encounters wormhole barriers and traps as his speed takes him into the world faster than new matter can be created for him to wormhole through. It is this limit that keeps worms constantly expanding and contracting, changing speed and direction, doing an occasional helix just to get a little peace.

I think I may have given you a wrong impression of retrograde motion. When done in moderation it’s not at all a bad thing. No worm, no matter how straightforward, can live a life that just goes straight ahead with no retrograde motion whatsoever. Well, maybe it is possible—we have records of highly moral worms from the classical period (old Cato comes to mind) who go straight ahead and devil take the hindermost, and when they die, they die without evasion and (as far as we know) without regret.

But most worms don’t want to get ahead quite so directly—straight lines, even when practicable, tend to get boring. And retrogradism is essential in art, since no figure of complexity and elegance can be inscribed while moving only in a straight line.

The really great artists of our past ignored for the most part the inhibition against retrogradism, treated all directions as equal, considered only the figure important, inscribed their figures and died when they had to.

Further on the subject of worm-dreams, I should tell you that they always involve the sense of seeing something, and what a worm typically sees in his dreams is designs and figures, some of which can be approximated in art, but most of which are shimmering visions of impossibly intricate wormhole designs which fade all too quickly upon awakening.

This is not our only dream, however. We also frequently dream the tunnel-dream—a dream of a long, curving cylindrical and segmented tunnel with intricate markings along its sides left by the texture of our individuality as we passed through it This is the vision of the wormhole that we construct throughout our lives and flee from all our lives, and that we can never see except in a dream.

We also have nightmares of falling into foreordained death-patterns that we must follow to our destruction through an adjacent wormhole wall, or through the surface of the world itself into cancellation.

This is generally considered a very bad dream. But for the artist-worm, it holds the seeds of transformation.

Please excuse my prolixity. Frankly, there’s nothing much I can do about it. Telepathy affords little opportunity of putting your thoughts into rational order. The thought/messages just all tumble out in a complicated, inconclusive, tantalizing, disorderly, and loquacious (Wormgod, yes! But you’re as bad yourself, Robert!) flow of thinking/meaning/rethinking/hoping, etc.

I wish I could continue, but I’m going to have to cut back on speed for a while because I’m tunneling linked U turns through a slow area that just came up and consequently won’t be able to project more signal until I’m out of it and able to get back to decent speed/ strength.

But I’ll be listening for your message, and I hope to hear from you soon. Tell me more about what it’s like on the surface. Tell me more about the sky.

I understand, Robert, that you have a problem similar to mine: you can’t present the data I send you to your people as factual, since the scientific determinists among you will demand “verifiability,” whereas our telepathic link seems to be unique and unduplicatable, at least as far as your “laws of evidence” go. I have the same problem: if another worm can’t tune in on the telepathic vibrations you send me, then he has no evidence for all of this except my bare unsupported vibration.

If it were Klaus telling me this, I’d probably react as he has, asking myself why I should give credence to this fellow’s baseless and unverifiable fantasy. Yes, and I’d pride myself on my intellectual rigor!

And that of course is just as it should be. As you say, some people will believe anything, if you just tell it to them with enough conviction. No proposition is too absurd to lack followers. I could get some worms to believe that Wormworld itself is no more than a figment of my imagination, and that the lives and very existence of my fellow worms depends entirely on how long I maintain an interest in them. (We’ve had a long history of worms calling themselves the Godworm, or one of His representatives. And maybe one or more of them were the real thing! But who can know?)

Thanks for your offer of assistance. I’m sure that some of your erudite friends could shed light on our situation in Wormworld from the point of view of your sciences. But why bother? You and I are artists. We know that everything flows, and that this communication is but a ripple in our separate lives.

And anyhow, the advancement of learning, knowledge, science, metaphysics, philosophy—just between ourselves, is all of that so very important? You yourself have told me that your science, considered on a personal level (and what other level is there to consider it from?) has done nothing despite its absurd achievements. You tell me that in your world, the products of science have served mainly to hamper, to destroy, your moment-by-moment sensory existence. You say that the food’s getting worse every year, that your life-space is cramped by the existence of too many others, and that this is mainly attributable to the technologies derived from the science which makes it all possible.

Robert, I’m sure a good case could be made for the suppression of the advanced sciences and the obliteration of technology. And anyhow, humans and worms have been “discovering” and “proving” the existence of telepathy and intelligent alien races for untold years. So why should you and I bother doing it all over again for an audience that has never since the beginning of time really believed in anything except what they can verify by their own senses? (Quite right, too.)

No, you have your work and I have mine, so don’t worry about it, let’s just enjoy these privileged moments and to wormhell with the Truth, whatever that may be. Just tell me whatever you remember of the travelers’ tales of your theoreticians, and I’ll tell you mine, and we’ll have a few good laughs. Leave the others out of it, don’t consult anyone, just tell me what you’ve picked up, tell me what the wise men of your world talk about, tell me what you think is really happening in the universe and what is a soul and what is art, even though you know that you don’t really know even the little that is known; and I’ll do the same.

The interference is getting worse, and your signal is noticeably weaker. Nevertheless, I think I managed to get most of your recent urgent communication. If it is true, it presents a view of our world which neither of us anticipated.

You tell me that it is commonly accepted among you, and verified as well, that there are many worlds, each grouped around a star, each star part of a collectivity of stars you call a galaxy. A galactic group of stars exists as an isolated area in the nothingness of the universal background. You further note that the galaxies themselves are grouped into universes (how did you people ever find out such things?) which are themselves part of a greater collectivity. Further, you note that each of these universes is in a state of expansion from a deduced original center, like wormholes expanding from the central Core of our world. This universal expansion can be verified, you tell me, beyond reasonable doubt.

You also went into a lot of stuff about continuous creation theory as contrasted with big bang theory (about both of which you modestly disclaimed any real knowledge) and proposed (not so modestly) your own synthesis.

You then make the following assumptions: the universe is expanding. The expansion is not, however, infinite: the bits and pieces of the universe don’t keep on traveling away from the center forever. At some point, on the crest or cutting edge of the expanding universe, both matter and energy are destroyed—canceled—converted into nothingness, into background.

Meanwhile, matter is also being created continuously. Where is this matter being created, you ask. Is it spread out evenly over the whole volume of the universe, which volume, however, is continually expanding? You don’t think so, though you’re willing to listen to arguments.

Nor do you believe that matter is being created again at the center of the universe, in a never-ending cycle of creation and destruction. You object to that because it doesn’t fit your theory, but also because it strikes you intuitively as too formal, too static, a view which excludes the quantum principle, excludes Indeterminacy, and utilizes the notion of discontinuity only nominally. You also object on aesthetic grounds, since the scheme lacks elegance in your view.

Okay, I’ll go along with that.

You feel that something is expanding into nothing, yet you feel that an equipoise, however temporary, must exist between the two. You think that the shock-wave front itself, behind which is the exploding universe and in front of which is nothingness, is itself an interface, a recognizable zone, an area with its own peculiar stability. It is the area where creation and destruction are occurring simultaneously.

So. The universe is expanding But into what? Into nothing? There is nothing to expand into. The universe simply expands, and exists at all points in dynamic relationship with nothing.

Every part of the universe is expanding simultaneously, rushing blindly into the nothing that confronts it.

But just as this nothingness has no beginning or end, so it is with somethingness. It is as all-pervasive as nothingness. You feel that, from one point of view, any location whatsoever could be considered the shock-front interface with nothingness, and that, in fact, it is only an illusion that the universe has depth in the sense of a three dimensional figure. The universe has no depth because every particle of something is confronted on all levels with nothingness.

Nevertheless, you point out, local configuration and regional peculiarity do exist, differentiation exists, asymmetry exists, uncertainty exists, and creation/destruction may itself be no more than an aspect of something beyond our conception.

From this viewpoint, the universe is indeed expanding, and some places are moving faster than others and some places are situated closer to the galactic center. Other locations are closer to the leading edge of the universal expansion—the wave-front/point where the universe of something is literally expanding into the non- universe of nothing.

And then you dropped your bombshell. It is your belief, you said, based on the evidence I’ve given you, that our planet of Worm-world is poised in dynamic stability on the leading edge of the shockfront, with everything that constitutes something in front of it and everything that constitutes nothing behind it.

That’s creepy, Robert. It’s given me something to think about.

Given the stability of the above situation, you further theorize that a planet on the interface between somethingness and nothingness would have certain special properties. First, all directions outward would be into nothing, whereas all directions inward would be moving into something.

All right. But then you threw in the big one.

You theorize that our planet is imbedded in the interface between the expanding universe and the nothingness it is expanding into, half in and half out, half in one reality, half in another, half continually being destroyed, half continually being created.

Assuming that situation, our planet really can’t be said to have a surface (making Klaus right, damn it!) since the surface is the interface between being and nothingness.

If what you think is true, then we have no surface, but we do have one hell of a cosmological combat zone. I guess I was being too smug too soon about us having no war. Our surface, according to this, is in a state of continuous explosion, leaving no solid-earth surface at the interface. Wormworld is a continually renewing explosion. Where we should have a surface, we have instead a vast number of wavefronts/points which are destroyed by the nothingness of the non-universe ahead of them but are renewed by the somethingness of the universe behind them.

You point out that this situation renders our situation unique, which is to say, paradoxical. Somehow we must imagine our planet engaged at all points with a destructive substance, nothingness. Since no point is free of the onslaught of nothingness, from whence comes renewal, the continual regeneration of Wormworld, and, perhaps, of the entire universe? From within. The within is everywhere, just like the without. The within is the point furthest from the destniction of the surface. Without a within a surface could not be maintained.

You maintain that worms are conditioned to seek outward, since life must express itself outwardly rather than inwardly. This is the direction in which sure death lies.

You think that the way to the unwormholed density of safety and beauty lies inward.

Not too far inward, you point out. Perhaps the very core of Wormworld is crystalline, and that matter expands from it and begins to undergo transformation into organic substance.

Still, an area should exist, you believe, if one could only find a route through all the ancient wormhole mazes, an area that is untouched, virgin territory. In our special situation, the search physically inward would correspond elsewhere to the search outward.

You’ve solved it for me, Robert! But perhaps not quite as you expected. The way out lies inward, you say, and as far as you and your world goes, you may be right. And I wish I could do it, travel inward, into the unwormed interior frontier, Beulah, the promised land.

And I’d like to get as close as I could to that ultimate crystalline perfection, into perfect symmetry, all points, all angles, faces aligned, in the cosmic explosion of the creation of the interior that goes on forever.

But that’s not where I’m going. I’m going outward and upward to where I can inscribe the Great Figure. I know it’s an absurd enterprise, and Jill points out that all I can hope to do is break through the surface and die. She may be right. But I believe a worm should do with his life the greatest deed he can imagine.

I don’t claim to be a hero-worm. I don’t expect to die. I believe that when I break through the surface, nothing is going to end. Nothingness itself will turn out to be just another partial truth, another illusion. As for me, I will be light, all light.

Here ended the communication of Ron the Worm.