Dimension of Miracles (2 page)

The trip was brief, lasting no more than Instantaneity plus one microsecond squared; and it was uneventful, since no meaningful experience was possible in so thin a slice of duration. Therefore, after no transition to speak of, Carmody found himself among the broad plazas and outlandish buildings of Galactic Centre.

He stood very still and looked, taking particular note of the three dim dwarf suns that circled each other overhead. He observed the trees, which muttered vague threats to the green-plumaged birds in their branches. And he noticed other things, which, for lack of analogizing referents, failed to register.

‘Wow,’ he said at last.

‘Beg pardon?’ the Messenger asked.

‘I said “wow,”’ Carmody said.

‘Oh. I thought you said “ow.”’

‘No, I said “wow.”’

‘I understand that now,’ the Messenger said, somewhat testily. ‘How do you like our Galactic Centre?’

‘It’s very impressive,’ Carmody said.

‘I suppose so,’ the Messenger said carelessly. ‘It was built specifically to
be
impressive, of course. Personally, I think that it looks very much like any other Galactic Centre. The architecture, you will note, is just about what you would expect – Neo-Cyclopean, a typical government style, lacking any aesthetic imperatives, designed solely to impress the constituents.’

‘Those floating staircases are certainly something,’ Carmody said.

‘Stagey,’ the Messenger commented.

‘And those immense buildings –’

‘Yes, the designer made a rather neat use of compound reverse curves with transitional vanishing points,’ the Messenger said knowledgeably. ‘He also utilized temporal edge distortion to evoke awe. Rather pretty, I suppose, in an obvious sort of way. The design for that cluster of buildings over there, you will be interested to know, was lifted bodily from a General Motors Exhibition from your own planet. It was judged an outstanding example of Primitive Quasi-Modernism; quaintness and cosiness are its main virtues. Those flashing lights in the middle foreground of the Drifting Multiscraper are pure Galactic Baroque. They serve no useful purpose.’

Carmody could not grasp the entire group of structures at one time. Whenever he looked at one, the others seemed to change shape. He blinked hard, but the buildings continued to melt and change out of the corners of his eyes. (‘Peripheral transmutation,’ the Messenger told him. ‘These people will quite literally stop at nothing.’)

‘Where do I get my Prize?’ Carmody asked.

‘Right this way,’ the Messenger said, and led him between two towering fantasies to a small rectangular building nearly concealed behind an inverted fountain.

‘This is where we actually conduct business,’ the Messenger said. ‘Recent researches have shown that a rectilinear form is soothing to the synapses of many organisms. I am rather proud of this building, as a matter of fact. You see, I invented the rectangle.’

‘The hell you did,’ Carmody said. ‘We’ve had it for centuries.’

‘And who do you think brought it to you in the first place?’ the Messenger asked scathingly.

‘Well, it doesn’t seem like much of an invention.’

‘Does it not?’ the Messenger asked. ‘That shows how little you know. You mistake complication for creative self-expression. Are you aware that nature never produces a perfect rectangle? The square is obvious enough, I’ll grant you; and to one who has not studied the problem, perhaps the rectangle appears to be a natural outgrowth of the square. But it is not! The circle is the evolutionary development from the square, as a matter of fact.’

The Messenger’s eyes grew misty. In a quiet, faraway voice, he said, ‘I knew for years that some other development was possible, starting from the square. I looked at it for a very long time. Its maddening sameness baffled and intrigued me. Equal sides, equal angles. For a while I experimented with varying the angles. The primal parallelogram was mine, but I do not consider it any great accomplishment. I studied the square. Regularity is pleasing, but not to excess. How to vary that mind-shattering sameness, yet still preserve a recognizable periodicity! Then it came to me one day! All I had to do, I saw in a sudden flash of insight, was to vary the lengths of two parallel sides in relationship to the other two sides. So simple, and yet so very difficult! Trembling, I tried it. When it worked, I confess, I went into a state of mania. For days and weeks I constructed rectangles, of all sizes and shapes, regular yet varied. I was a veritable cornucopia of rectangles! Those were thrilling days.’

‘I suppose they were,’ Carmody said. ‘And later, when your work was accepted –’

‘That was also thrilling,’ the Messenger said. ‘But it took centuries before anyone would take my rectangle seriously. “It’s amusing,” they would say, “but once the novelty wears off, what have you got? You’ve got an imperfect square, that’s what you’ve got!” I argued that I had deduced an entirely new and discrete form, a form as inevitable as that of the square. I suffered abuse. But at last, my vision prevailed. To date, there are slightly more than seventy billion rectangular structures in the galaxy. Each one of them derives from my primal rectangle.’

‘Well,’ Carmody said.

‘Anyhow, here we are,’ the Messenger said. ‘You walk in right there. Give them the data they require and collect your Prize.’

‘Thank you,’ Carmody said.

He entered the room. Immediately, steel bands snapped shut around his arms, legs, waist and neck. A tall, dark individual with a hawk nose and a scar down his left cheek approached Carmody and looked at him with an expression that could only be described as a compound of murderous glee and unctuous sorrow.

CHAPTER 3

‘Hey!’ Carmody cried.

‘And so, once again,’ the dark individual said, ‘the criminal has escaped into his doom. Behold me, Carmody! I am your executioner! You pay now for your crimes against humanity as well as for your sins against yourself. But let me add that this execution is provisional, and implies no value judgement.’

The executioner slipped a knife from his sleeve. Carmody gulped and found his voice.

‘Hold it!’ he cried. ‘I’m not here to be executed!’

‘I know, I know,’ the executioner said soothingly, sighting along his knife blade on Carmody’s jugular vein. ‘What else could you say?’

‘But it’s true!’ Carmody shrieked. ‘I’m supposed to collect a Prize!’

‘A what?’ the executioner asked.

‘A Prize, damn you, a Prize! I was told I’d won a Prize! Ask the Messenger, he brought me here to collect a Prize!’

The executioner studied him, then looked away sheepishly. He pushed a switch on a nearby switchboard. The steel bands around Carmody turned into paper streamers. The executioner’s black garments changed to white. His knife turned into a fountain pen. The scar on his cheek was replaced by a wen.

‘All right,’ he said, with no hint of repentance. ‘I warned them not to combine the Department of Petty Crime with the Office of the Sweepstakes, but no, they wouldn’t listen to me. It would serve them right if I had killed you. Wouldn’t
that
have been a pretty mess, eh?’

‘It would have been messy for me,’ Carmody said shakily.

‘Well, no sense crying over unspilt blood,’ the Prize Clerk said. ‘If we took full account of our eventualities, we’d soon run out of eventualities to take full account of … What did I say? Never mind, the construction is right even if the words are wrong. I’ve got your prize here somewhere.’

He pressed a button on his switchboard. Immediately a large, messy desk materialized in the room two feet above the floor, hung for a moment, then dropped with a resounding thud. The Clerk pulled open the drawers and began to throw out papers, sandwiches, carbon ribbons, file cards and pencil stubs.

‘Well, it has to be here somewhere,’ he said, with a tone of faint desperation. He pushed another button on the switchboard. The desk and the switchboard vanished.

‘Damn it, I’m all nerves,’ the Clerk said. He reached into the air, found something and squeezed it. Apparently, it was the wrong button, for, with an agonizing scream, the Clerk himself vanished. Carmody was left alone in the room.

He stood, humming tunelessly under his breath. Then the Clerk reappeared, looking none the worse for his experience except for a bruise on his forehead and an expression of mortification on his face. He carried a small, brightly wrapped parcel under his arm.

‘Please excuse the interruption,’ he said. ‘Nothing seems to be going right just at present.’

Carmody essayed a feeble joke. ‘Is this any way to run a galaxy?’ he asked.

‘Well, how did you, expect us to run it? We’re only sentient, you know.’

‘I know,’ Carmody said. ‘But I had expected that here, at Galactic Centre –’

‘You provincials are all alike,’ the Clerk said wearily. ‘Filled with impossible dreams of order and perfection, which are mere idealized projections of your own incompletion. You should know by now that life is a sloppy affair, that power tends to break things up rather than put things together, and that the greater the intelligence, the higher the degree of complication which it detects. You may have heard Holgee’s Theorem; that Order is merely a primitive and arbitrary relational grouping of objects in the chaos of the Universe, and that, if a being’s intelligence and power approached maximum, his coefficient of control (considered as the product of intelligence and power, and expressed by the symbol
ing
) would approach minimum – due to the disastrous geometric progression of objects to be comprehended and controlled outstripping the arithmetic progression of Grasp.’

‘I never thought of it that way,’ Carmody said politely enough. But he was beginning to grow annoyed at the glib civil servants of Galactic Centre. They had an answer for everything; but the fact was, they simply didn’t do their jobs very well, and they blamed their failures on cosmic conditions.

‘Well, yes, that’s also true,’ the Clerk said. ‘Your point (I took the liberty of reading your mind) is well made. Like all other organisms, we use intelligence to explain away disparity. But the fact is, things are forever just a little beyond our grasp. It is also true that we do not extend our grasp to the utmost; sometimes we do our work mechanically, carelessly, even erroneously. Important data sheets are misplaced, machines malfunction, whole planetary systems are forgotten. But this merely points out that we are subject to emotionality, like all other creatures with any measure of self-determination. What would you have?
Somebody
has to control the galaxy; otherwise everything would fly apart. Galaxies are reflections of their inhabitants; until everyone and everything can rule himself and itself, some outer control is necessary. Who would do the job if we didn’t?’

‘Couldn’t we build machines to do the work?’ Carmody asked.

‘Machines!’ the Clerk said scornfully. ‘We have many of them, some exquisitely complex. But even the best of them are much like idiot savants. They do adequately on tedious straightforward tasks like building stars or destroying planets. But give them something tough, like solacing a widow, and they simply go to pieces. Would you believe it, the largest computer in our section can landscape an entire planet; but it cannot fry an egg or carry a tune, and it knows less about ethics than a newborn wolf cub. Would you want something like
that
to run your life?’

‘Of course not,’ Carmody said. ‘But couldn’t someone build a machine with creativity and judgement?’

‘Someone has,’ the Clerk said. ‘It has been designed to learn from experience, which means that it must make errors in order to arrive at truths. It comes in many shapes and sizes, most of them quite portable. Its flaws are readily apparent, but seem to exist as necessary counterweights to its virtues. No one has yet improved on the basic design, though many have tried. This ingenious device is called “intelligent life.”’

The Clerk smiled the self-satisfied smile of the aphorism-maker. Carmody felt like hitting him square on his smug pug nose. But he restrained himself.

‘If you are quite through lecturing,’ Carmody said, ‘I would like my Prize.’

‘Just as you wish,’ the Clerk said. ‘If you are quite sure that you want it.’

‘Is there any reason why I shouldn’t want it?’

‘No particular reason,’ the Clerk said. ‘Just a general one; the introduction of any novel object into one’s life pattern is apt to be disrupting.’

‘I’ll take my chances on that,’ Carmody said. ‘Let’s have the Prize.’

‘Very well,’ the Clerk said. He took a large clipboard out of a small rear pocket and produced a pencil. ‘We must fill this in first. Your name is Car-Mo-Dee, you’re of Planet 73C, System BB454C252, Left Quadrant, Local Galactic System referent LK by CD, and you were picked at random from approximately two billion contestants. Correct?’

‘If you say so,’ Carmody said.

‘Let me see now,’ the Clerk said, scanning the page rapidly, ‘I can skip the stuff about you accepting the Prize on your own risk and recognizance, can’t I?’

‘Sure, skip it,’ Carmody said.

‘And then there’s the section on Edibility Rating, and the part on Reciprocal Fallibility Understandings between you and the Sweepstakes Office of the Galactic Centre, and the part about Irresponsible Ethics, and, of course, the Termination Determinant Residue. But all of that is quite standard, and I suppose you adhere to it.’