A Perfect Vacuum (29 page)

This chief danger of the Game produced a number of
tactical
maneuvers on the part of the Players, for they must have been aware of it. They strove for such transformations as would not be radical universally; in other words, to avoid universal relativism they made a
hierarchical
Physics. A hierarchical physics is “nontotal.” There is no doubt, for example, that
mechanics
would remain undisturbed even if matter on the atomic scale were not to possess quantum properties. This means that the individual “levels” of reality have limited sovereignty, that not all the laws of a given level need be preserved in order that the next level above it have existence. It means that Physics may be changed “a little at a time” and that not every change of a set of laws amounts to changing all of Physics on all its levels of phenomena. Difficulties of this nature for the Players make the simple, elegant image of the Game drawn by Acheropoulos—as a three-stage history—unlikely. Acheropoulos suspected that the different Physics' “falling afoul” of one another, which took place in the course of the Game, must have annihilated a portion of the Players, for not all the initial states would admit of homogeneity. The actual intention of destroying Partners who were situated unfavorably need not have informed the actions of the other Players. The question of who was to endure, and who perish, was decided by pure chance, for the various civilizations were endowed with various environments—on a random basis.

Acheropoulos believed that the last fires of those terrible “battles” in which the different Physics came into collision could still be seen by us in the form of quasars emitting energy on the order of 10
⁶³
ergs, an energy no known physical process can unleash, not in the relatively small space a quasar occupies. He thought that in looking at the quasars we were seeing what happened five to six billion years ago, in the second stage of the Game, for that is the time light takes to travel from the quasars to us. He was mistaken in this hypothesis. The quasars we consider to be phenomena of another order. It must be realized that Acheropoulos lacked the data that would have enabled him to revise such views. A complete reconstruction of the initial strategy of the Players is for us impossible; we can look back only to where the Players proceeded—to put it crudely—more or less as they do today. If the Game possessed critical points necessitating a fundamental change of strategy, our retrospection cannot go back beyond the first such point. And consequently we can learn nothing definite about the Protouniverse that produced the Game.

However, when we look upon the present Universe, we discern in it, embodied in its structure, the basic canons of the strategy employed by the Players. The Universe is constantly expanding; it has a limited velocity, or barrier, set by light; the laws of its Physics are indeed symmetrical, but that symmetry is not a perfect one; the Universe is constructed “hierarchically and coagulatively,” being composed of stars that concentrate in clusters, which in turn make Galaxies, which are grouped in localities of condensation, and finally all these condensations make a Metagalaxy. In addition, the Universe possesses a total asymmetry of time. Such are the basic features of the structure of the Universum, and for each of these we find a profound explanation in the structure of the Cosmogonic Game, a Game that allows us to understand also why one of its principle canons must be the observance of the Silentium Universi. And so: why is the Universe arranged precisely in this way? The Players know that in the course of stellar evolution new planets and new civilizations must come into being; therefore, they see to it that these candidates for future Players, the young civilizations, cannot disturb the equilibrium of the Game. For this reason the Universe expands: since it is only in such a Universe, despite the fact that new Civilizations are continually emerging in it, that the distance separating them remains permanently vast.

Communication, leading to “collaboration,” to the rise of a local coalition of new Players, could still take place even in an expanding Universe, if the latter did not also have a built-in barrier for the speed of actions at a distance. Let us imagine a Universe with a Physics that permits an increase in the speed of action propagation in direct proportion to the energy invested. In such a Universe he who has at his command five times the energy of all the others can inform himself five times as rapidly of the state of the others and, with that advantage, deal them decisive blows. In such a Universe the possibility exists to monopolize control over its Physics and over all the other partners of the Game. Such a Universe might be said to encourage rivalry, energy competition, the acquisition of power. Now, in the real Universe, in order to exceed the speed of light one needs energy that is infinitely great: in other words, it is altogether impossible to break that barrier.

And therefore in the real Universe the stockpiling of energy does not pay. The reason behind the asymmetry in the flow of time is similar. If time were reversible and if the reversing of its course could be realized by dint of sufficient investment of resources and power, again it would be possible to dominate one's partners, in this case through the annulment of their every move. And so, a Universe that does not expand, as well as a Universe without a barrier of speed, and finally a Universe with reversible time, do not allow a full stabilization of the Game. Whereas the whole object was to stabilize it, and stabilize it
normatively
: to this end do the moves of the Players tend, incorporated into the structure of matter. It is clear, surely, that the preventing of all perturbation and all aggression by an
established
Physics is a measure far more certain and far more radical than any other means of prophylaxis (for example, the use of laws
imposed,
of threats, surveillance, coercion, restriction, punishment).

The result is that the Universe constitutes an
absorption screen
against all who attain that level of the Game where they can become full-fledged participants in it. For they meet with rules to which they
must
submit. The Players have rendered impossible for themselves semantic communication; they make themselves understood by methods that preclude the breaking of the rules of the Game. The established unity of physics in itself testifies to their mutual agreement. The Players have rendered impossible any effective semantic communication by creating and preserving between themselves such distances that the
time taken to acquire
strategically operative information about the state of the other Players is always greater than the time of the operativeness of the present tactic of the Game. If, then, one of the Partners were actually to “converse” with his neighbors, he would obtain news invariably out of date, out of date from the moment of its obtainment. Thus, in the Universe there is no opportunity for the formation of antagonistic groupings, for conspiracy, for the establishment of centers of local power, coalitions, collusions, etc. For this reason the Players do not speak to one another;
they themselves have prevented it
; it was one of the canons of the stabilization of the Game, and therefore of the Cosmogony. This is the explanation of part of the mystery of the Silentium Universi. We cannot listen in on the conversations of the Players because they are silent, silent in keeping with their strategy.

Acheropoulos's guess was correct. His thoroughness may be seen, in the pages of
A New Cosmogony,
in his anticipation of objections to this image of the Game. These boil down to pointing out the monstrous disproportion between the billion-year labor that went into the restructuring of the entire Cosmos and the purpose of that restructuring, which is the
pacification
of the Universe—by means of the Physics built into it. What?—says his imaginary critic—You mean to say that billions of years of cultural development
still
are insufficient for societies so inconceivably long-lived to renounce, of their own accord, all forms of aggression, and that, therefore, the Pax Cosmica must be guaranteed by Laws of Nature remodeled for that express purpose? You mean to say that an endeavor that is measured in energies exceeding many millions of Galaxies at once has as its goal nothing but the institution of
barriers
and
restrictions
to military activity? To this Acheropoulos answered: This type of Physics, which pacified the Universe, was at the time of the birth of the Game a necessity, for there was only one strategy that could make the Universe physically homogeneous; in the opposite case its expanses would have been engulfed in a chaos of blind cataclysms. Conditions of existence were, in the Protouniverse, much harsher than today; life could arise in it only as “the exception to the rule,” and, randomly conceived, it came to random ends. The expanding Metagalaxy; its asymmetrical flow of time; its hierarchical structure—all this had to be determined to begin with; it was the minimum order required to lay the ground for the next operations.

Acheropoulos realized that if that stage of transformations constituted the history of existence, the Players should have before them now some new, far-reaching objectives, and he tried to arrive at these. In this, unfortunately, he had no success. And here we touch upon the hidden lapse in his system. For Acheropoulos strove to grasp the Game not through the reconstruction of its formal structure—i.e., logically—but by putting himself in the shoes of the Players—i.e., psychologically. A man, however, cannot come to know the Players' psychology, or any more understand their code of ethics; he lacks the data. We cannot picture to ourselves what the Players think, what they feel, what they desire, just as one cannot build a Physics by picturing to oneself what it means for something “to have existence as an electron.”

The existential immanence of a Player is, for us, as much beyond knowing as an electron's existential immanence. The fact that the electron is a lifeless particle of the processes of matter, and that the Player is an intelligent being, hence—presumably—such as we, has no real significance. I speak of a lapse in Acheropoulos's system, because at one point in
A New Cosmogony
Acheropoulos states quite clearly that the motives of the Players cannot be reproduced on the basis of introspection. He knew this, yet still succumbed to the style of thinking that had shaped him, because philosophers attempt first to understand, and then to generalize; for me, however, it was obvious from the start that to create a model of the Game in this way was inadmissible. The “understanding” approach presupposes a view of the whole of the Game from without, that is, from an observation point that does not exist and never will. Intentional action should not be equated with psychological motivation. The ethics of the Players should not be taken into consideration by an analyst of the Game, just as the personal ethics of military leaders need not be considered by the battle historian who studies the strategic logic of front-line moves during a war. The model of the Game is a decisional structure conditioned by the state of the Game and the state of the environment; it is not the resultant vector of the individual codes, values, wants, whims, or norms held by the separate Players. That they play the same Game does not in the least mean that in any other respect they must be similar! They could be no more similar than a man is to a machine when both play chess. Thus, it is entirely possible that there exist Players who are not alive in the biological sense, having arisen in the course of some nonbiological development, and Players, too, who are the synthetic product of an artificially engendered evolution. But considerations of this sort have no rightful place in the theory of the Players.

Acheropoulos's most troublesome dilemma was the Silentium Universi. His two rules are generally known. The first says that no civilization of a lower order can find the Players, not only because they are silent, but also because their behavior in no way stands out against the cosmic background, and this because
it is that very background.

The second rule of Acheropoulos says that the Players do not approach the younger civilizations with communications of a solicitous or advisory nature, because they cannot specifically address such communications, and without an address they do not wish to broadcast. In order to send information to a particular address, one first must know the state in which the addressee finds himself; but this very thing is prevented by the first principle of the Game, which establishes a barrier to action in time and space. As we know, any information that is acquired—about the state of another civilization—must be a total anachronism at the moment of its reception. In establishing their barriers, the Players thereby made it impossible for themselves to learn the states of other civilizations. On the other hand, the sending of communications without an address, a directionless broadcast, invariably produces more harm than good. Acheropoulos demonstrated this with an experiment. He took two rows of cards; on one he wrote down the latest scientific discoveries of the sixties, on the other, dates of the historical calendar in a hundred-year range (1860–1960). Next, he drew pairs of cards. Pure chance matched up the discoveries with the dates: this was to simulate the directionless sending of information. In truth, such a transmission hardly ever is of positive value to the receiver. In most cases, the arriving communication is either unintelligible (the theory of relativity in 1860), or unusable (the theory of lasers in 1878), or outright harmful (the theory of atomic energy in 1939). Therefore, the Players maintain their silence, because—according to Acheropoulos—they wish the younger civilizations well.

Such a line of reasoning brings in ethics and is therefore no longer sound. The assertion that a civilization must become more perfect ethically the more developed it is instrumentally and scientifically, immediately is introduced into the theory of the Game from the outside. But the theory of the Cosmogonic Game cannot be so constructed. Either the Silentium Universi follows inescapably from the structure of the Game, or the very existence of the Game must be called into question. Ad hoc hypotheses cannot save its credibility.