THIRG, ASKER-OF-FORBIDDEN-QUESTIONS, LIVED IN THE HIGHER reaches of the forests south of the city of Pergassos in the land of the Kroaxians, where the foothills rose toward the mountains bounding the Great Meracasine Wilderness.
He lived in something that was more than a hut but less than a house, in keeping with the not quite hermitic but certainly less than sociable life that he preferred to lead. His home was situated in a small clearing amid pleasant forest groves of copper and aluminum wire-drawing machines, injection molders, transfer presses, and stately pylons bearing their canopy of power lines and data cables, among which scurrying sheet riveters, gracefully moving spot welders, and occasional slow-plodding pipe benders supplied a soothing background of chattering, hissing, whirring, and clunking to insulate him from the world of mortals and their mundane affairs and leave him alone and in peace with his thoughts. A low ice cliff stood at the back of the clearing to prop up the hillside rising away toward the mountains beyond, its line broken on one side by the valley of a liquid methane stream which tumbled cheerfully down over cataracts and ice boulders between clear pools where zinc-separating electrolyzers and potassium-precipitating evaporators came to wallow and wade and dip their slender intake nozzles and funnel-shaped scoops at the height of the bright period.
Thirg had grown the actual dwelling himself, having learned the craft from an old friend who was a builder in Pergassos. After laboring to clear the area of dead steel latticeworks and structural frames, the carcass of a transformer that had clung obstinately to its concrete base, and assorted scrap-metal undergrowth, he had prepared an area of the hydrocarbon soil below the cliff with nitrogenous loams collected from the stream bed, and planted the seed culture for the outside wall in a line ten paces out from the cliff base, curving inward at its ends to close off the frontage of a dry cave. Then he had laid out the baselines of the interior walls to provide a living and dining area, a workroom, and a library, and while carefully nurturing with methane solutions gathered from the forest, and pruning and shaping of the windows and doorways while the walls grew upward and merged into a half-dome overhead, he had enlarged the cave at the rear into a second workroom and a storeroom. The doors and window fittings had grown from secondary cultures grafted into the structure when the frames had stabilized at their correct shapes and sizes, and the larger furnishings from premolded miniatures purchased in the city, A conduit of forest piping diverted running methane from the stream, and a power line strung from a nearby distribution mast provided all the comforts of home recharging. To provide the rustic finish that suited his taste, Thirg had lined the walls with polished alloy sheets obtained from the rolling mill a mile farther downstream, and laid the floors with ceramic bricks and lengths of girder from a partly decomposed foundry that he had come across while walking near the stacking meadows just below the cabinet assembly line on the slopes overlooking the north side of the river.
One morning Thirg was sitting outside his house on a stump of steel forging, pondering the mysteries of life while he watched a phosphor-bronze bearing collector buzzing and chattering to itself as it poked and rummaged among a pile of undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. It was a species of a general family of collector animals that a naturalist friend had spent a lifetime cataloguing and classifying—discreetly since such inquisitiveness could lead to trouble with the authorities if it was brought to the attention of the priests. Like all its related species, it selected just one type of metal composition by sniffing the emissions from a tiny spot that it vaporized with a needle laser, and then only from samples of a particular size and shape, and delivered its trophies to the nearest conveyor to be carried off to other parts of the forest. Thirg’s friend had spent many hours following components through miles of forming, processing, and finishing stations to the assembly places where animals came to life, and observing the furnaces that devoured reject components and excreted pure materials from which new components were manufactured; he had drawn elaborate charts depicting the merging and branching patterns by which components and sub-assemblies flowed through the forest; and he had dismantled hundreds of dead animals and other machines in an attempt to trace where their organs and constituent parts had come from, via what routes, and where the raw materials had originated. But even with the findings of generations of earlier naturalists to build on, the work was barely begun. The intricate, interlocking, mutually interdependent pathways by which Nature recycled its materials as it constantly renewed the living world were so bewildering that Thirg sometimes suspected that, despite all the effort, hardly a fraction of the whole had been glimpsed yet, let alone comprehended. It was fascinating to think that one of the scraps of metal being sorted by the collector that he was watching now might be found twelve-brights later inside the rotor mounting of a centrifuge located miles away, or perhaps in the wheel bearings of a dead plastics-browser on the other side of Kroaxia.
Although Thirg had never elected to start a family of his own, his natural curiosity had led him at times to the places where subassemblies of robeings—the unique, self-aware species to which he belonged—came together for final assembly. He had watched in awed fascination as the embryos grew to their final forms and shapes while anxious parents scurried back and forth to make sure all the parts were available and all the requirements of the assembly machines satisfied, and he had shared their elation when the new robeing was at last activated and departed trustingly with the proud couple to its new home to begin the process of learning language, behavior, customs, and all the other things that characterized an adult member of society.
The assembly process was essentially identical to the ways in which animals and other life forms grew. Thirg’s naturalist friend had assured him that all forms, including robeings, were supplied from the same sources of components, and it seemed remarkable that one species should exhibit thinking abilities sufficient to distinguish it so sharply from all the others. On the face of it, the difference seemed to support the orthodox teaching that robeings were unique in possessing souls which would eventually either return to the Lifemaker after undergoing worldly quality-assurance testing, or else be consigned to the Great Reduction Furnace below, from which the liquid ice volcanoes originated. But the physicians who had carefully dismantled and studied bodies of dead robeings had been able to find nothing more than was found in any other machine: the same kinds of perplexing arrangements of tubes, fibers, brackets, and bearings, and baffling arrays of intricate patterns etched into countless slivers of crystal that descended to levels of detail way beyond the power of the most powerful protein lenses to resolve. So where was the soul? If it existed, why was there no sign of anything different to say that it existed? True, nobody could explain how robeings were able to think, but on the other hand nobody could explain how animals came to act the way they did or to know what they seemed to know either. So did the existence of robeings require anything fundamentally “different” to be explained? Thirg wasn’t at all sure that it did. To him the “fact” of the soul sounded suspiciously as if it had been invented to suit the answer; the answer hadn’t been deduced from the facts in the way that was required by the system of rules he had constructed for answering questions reliably. And in all of the tests that he had subjected them to, the rules had never failed him.
A sudden grinding sound from the edge of the clearing interrupted his thoughts. Moments later the grinding changed to sharp clacking as Rex began gnashing his cutters and running backward and forward excitedly in front of the trail leading from the forest. Thirg stood up just as a tall figure clad in a woven-wire tunic and a dark cloak of carbon fiber came into view. He was wearing a hat of ice-dozer wheelskin and carrying a stout staff of duralumin tubing. “Down, Rex,” Thirg said. “It’s only Groork coming to pay us a rare visit. You should know him by now.” And then, louder, “Well, hello, brother, Hearer-of-Voices. Have your voices led you up into these parts, or do you bring us tidings from the world?”
Groork came into the clearing and approached between the metallic-salt deposition baths on one side of Thirg’s garden and a decorative row of sub-miniature laser drilling and milling heads busily carving delicate aesthetic patterns in an arrangement of used gas cylinders and old pump housings. His radiator vanes were glowing visibly after his exertions, and he was puffing coolant vapors. “There are many strange voices in the sky of late, the like of which I have never heard before,” he replied. He didn’t smile in response to Thirg’s greeting; but then he was a mystic, and so never smiled at anything. “Surely it is an omen of great things that will soon come to pass. I am called to go out into the Wilderness of Meracasine, and there I will find the Revelation that many have sought. For it is written that—“
“Yes, yes, I know all about that,” Thirg said, holding up an arm of silver alloy, jointed by intricately overlapping, sliding scales. “Come in and rest. You look thirsty. A drink of invigorating mountain methane is what you need. I don’t know how you stand that polluted muck that they run into the city at all.”
Thirg led the way inside, and Groork sat down gratefully on the couch by the wall in the dining area. While Thirg was pouring a cup of coolant, Groork selected one of the array of power sockets sprouting from the transformer unit, each of which designated a particular strength and flavor, drew it out on the end of its extension cord, and connected it to a plug inside a flap below his chin. “Ah, that does feel a lot better,” he agreed after a few seconds.
Thirg passed Groork the cup, then glanced at his hands and down at his feet in their wheelskin sandals. He gestured toward the electroplating attachment. “If you’re wearing hungry anywhere, help yourself.”
“You’ve eaten already?”
“Yes, I’ve had a plate. I can recommend a new composition of chromium and vanadium that you ought to try. Delicious—home-regulated, fresh from the garden. Or a top-up of lube, perhaps?”
Groork shook his head, and the fervent glint returned to his imaging matrixes. “My purpose is not to trifle over pleasantries, Thirg. I have a higher calling to answer, and I do indeed bear thee news—grave news, 0 brother who forsakes his soul for Black Arts. Thy heresy hath betrayed thee! A writ has been issued by the King’s Chancellor for you to be brought before the High Council of Priests by the time of the next west-bright, to recant the public utterances in which you have denied the Holy Scribings. Soldiers of the Royal Guard have already departed the city and will arrive hither this bright. Flee now and save thy wretched body while it lives, for its spirit is surely lost already to the Dark Master thou wilt never renounce!”
“Oh...And what am I supposed to have said now?” Thirg asked. Despite the tone of Groork’s words, the thermal patterns playing on the surfaces of his face painted expressions of a concern that was genuine.
“Does thy memory ail?” Groork said. “Is that not the first symptom of the madness that afflicts all blasphemers and drives them into the deserts to perish seeking covenant with the accursed in the lands of the Unbelievers?”
“I’d have said they did it more to get away from the priests and avoid being dipped in acid baths,” Thirg replied, and asked again, “What am I supposed to have said?”
“Didst thou not, in the hearing of many who were in the marketplace, deny the Sacred Doctrine of the Divine and Unknowable Essence of the Maker of All Life?”’ Groork whispered, as if fearful of uttering the words too loudly.
“Hardly. What I said was that some of the sacred logic strikes me as precarious. For is not the existence of Life cited as proof that the Lifemaker must have made it...at least when one troubles to penetrate the confusing tangles of words?” Thirg shrugged and took a short draught from another cord to be sociable. “But we would never permit such a form of argument in our more mundane world of everyday affairs. For example, if I decided to invent an Unknowable Windowmaker, I could hardly claim that because windows exist the Windowmaker must have made them, could I? It is known that windows grow from cultures that are engineered by builders. Like the first, the argument is circular: It begins by assuming that which it sets out to prove.”
Groork, who had raised his hands in an attempt to block his ears, lowered them again with an anguished moan. “Blasphemy!” he exclaimed. “What false creed of faith is this?”
“It’s not a creed of faith at all, but a process by which truths can be shown to follow necessarily from simple observations,” Thirg told him. “My task has been the reduction of this process to a series of rules which can be written down in a form of language and used by anyone. Truly the results astonish me. Shall I demonstrate some examples?”
Groork looked aghast. “Do you presume to impose rules upon the Lifemaker Himself? You would dare constrain how He might choose to manifest His design? You would confine His works to the understanding of mere mortals? What arrogance has taken possession of thee? What manner of—“
“Oh, shut up,” Thirg said wearily. “I impose no rules of my own invention on anyone. I merely observe the world as it is, and attempt to understand the rules that are written into it already. It seems to me that if the Lifemaker saw fit to endow us with intelligence at all, He would have meant us to use it. Well, what use would be better fitting than discovering reliable methods of acquiring knowledge?”
“Know ye of the things that the wise shall not seek after, and the mysteries that the holy shall not question,” Groork recited shrilly. “There are some things that we were not meant to know, Thirg.”
“Oh, and how do you know?”
“It is written in the Scribings.”
“Who wrote them, and how did they know?”
“Those who were inspired to know. Truth cannot be found by following false paths. All of the true knowledge that was meant to be divulged is divulged in the Scribings.”
“And who says that?” Thirg challenged. “The Scribings. Again we see an argument that leads itself into a circle.”
Groork looked away despairingly and his eyes came to rest on an orb covered with unfamiliar markings and notations, standing at one end of Thirg’s worktable. “Thou art bewitched by circles,” he said. “The same madness that has damned Lofbayel is afflicting thee. I have heard of the insanity that deranges his mind with belief the world is round.”
“I have studied his evidence closely, and it is persuasive,” Thirg replied. “Since his trial before the Council, he has entrusted his charts and his records to me for safekeeping.” He gestured toward a large map hanging on the wall above the worktable—a map unlike any that Groork had seen before. “Behold, the world upon which you walk. Much remains to be filled in, as you can see, but Lofbayel has convinced me that in its main features it is reasonably accurate. See how tiny the whole of Kroaxia is upon it.”
“It has straight edges,” Groork objected after staring in mute protest for a while. “It is taught that the world is as a platter, bounded by the unscalable Peripheral Barrier of mountains that support the sky. You talk of rules of reason, but no fool in his wildest ravings would conceive of reason such as this.”
“The edges of the sheet upon which the map is drawn can no more influence what the map represents than the edge of a portrait can cause its subject to be beheaded,” Thirg pointed out.
“And so the world is beheaded on all four sides,” Groork replied. “The Barrier does not appear anywhere. Thus this map cannot represent the entire world. Your words are belied.”
“In all his searchings Lofbayel was unable to find a single authenticated account of anyone ever finding the Barrier,” Thirg said. “High mountains, yes; immense chains whose very passes are higher than the highest peaks in all Kroaxia, yes; mountains whose summits are sometimes lost from sight in vapors no more substantial than the mists that rise from the stream outside at early bright, yes. But mountains upon which there rests a solid roof of sky? Never. Always there is another side beyond the mountains, and always another shore beyond the ocean.”
“Now you would presume to dictate limits to the Lifemaker again,” Groork accused. “This time you tell him how large He is permitted to make His world. The distance to the Barrier is not written. It is unknown and therefore unknowable.”
“Another reason for its being unwritten and unknown might be that it doesn’t exist,” Thirg commented.
“It is written that it exists!”
“How could it be written about if no one’s ever seen it?”
“How could it not exist? The world must be bounded.”
“Because your imagination is bounded and unable to conceive of any alternative?” Thirg asked. “Now who is imposing his limits upon the Lifemaker? But this map covers the whole world, and no Barrier appears on it. Where, then, is the Barrier if it exists?”
“The map cannot cover the whole world,” Groork answered.
“But it leaves no direction open for any more of the world to exist in.” Thirg picked up the sphere and showed it. “There is the world, Groork! For just one minute forget your dusty texts, written long ago by clerks in their dungeons, who never saw an ocean, let alone crossed one, and who never looked beyond any mountain. This form, and only this form, is consistent with all the facts that have been recorded; no form of platter can be contrived of which the same can be said. Which form, therefore, should we accept as representing more closely the reality that exists?”
Groork unplugged himself from the transformer unit and shook his head in protest. “Your facts are in error, for did you not claim they were amassed from travelers who have seen the farthest limits of north, south, east, and west? But it is obvious that no traveler could venture beyond a small region at the top of that...” He pointed at the globe. “Otherwise they would fall off, as indeed would the methanes of the oceans. But the oceans persist. There is a fact, Brother Thirg, which you would appear to have chosen conveniently to ignore.”
“That was a source of vexation to me too for a while,” Thirg admitted. “But a possible answer suggested itself to me one bright when I was strolling in the forest. I stopped to rest for a while by a glade where spectrometers are assembled, and picked a magnet from one of the storage bins to savor its scent. The iron grains that it attracted from the debris around where I was sitting prompted me to wonder if perhaps the world-sphere might draw all things to itself in the same way that a magnet draws iron grains to itself—from any direction. Just as every line toward the magnet is uniformly ‘down’ for the grain, so ‘down’ at every place on the world-sphere would be toward the ground. The methanes of the oceans would thus seek a level nearest to the center and remain in the lowest regions, which is as we know to be true. Hence, you see, the fact is explained.”
Thirg paused, but Groork made no response. Thirg held up the sphere to study it for a moment or two, and then continued in a more distant voice, “The fact that nobody has ever found a Barrier holding up a solid sky leads me to wonder if the sky is really solid at all. Could it be nothing more than vapors? And if so, how far do they extend? Forever? If not, what lies beyond them? Could there be other worlds? The question intrigues me. Ever since it occurred to me after I began familiarizing myself with Lofbayel’s work, I have been studying the cycles of full-brights and half-brights as they follow one another across the world. On the basis that the world is indeed a sphere and the sky nothing more than vapors, the bright and half-bright periods could be accounted for by two brilliant objects moving beyond the sky in a complicated but repeating motion. Where would you look in your Scribings for the knowledge to answer questions like these, Groork?”
Groork stood up suddenly and dismissed the whole matter with a gesture. “I did not come here to listen to you compounding your folly by adding more heresies to those you are guilty of already,” he said. “The High Council will not look leniently upon you one more time. Their patience is exhausted. May the Lifemaker forgive me for my weakness, but I cannot abandon my brother though the madness boils within him. Collect together the possessions you would carry with you, Thirg, and for this bright we can travel together. But on the far side of the mountains I must lead a lone path to the destiny that has been written but which is yet to be revealed. Hurry. There may be little time.”
Thirg stared back sadly. “I doubt if you could ever understand, Groork, even if I had all the rest of time to try and explain it. Your beliefs are taught without a question’s being tolerated, while mine are learned only after posing every question. What does it say for the worth of beliefs if they cannot survive critical scrutiny and dare not permit a word of dissent to be voiced? Would truth or untruth be the first to tremble in the presence of the other? It seems—“
At that moment the sound of Rex’s agitation again came from outside. Groork rushed to the doorway. “Too late!” he moaned, turning a fearful face as Thirg strode across the living area after him. “They’re here. The King’s soldiers have arrived.” Thirg reached the door and looked out past Groork. Mounted figures in single file were approaching on the trail leading to the clearing.