Dimension of Miracles (10 page)

‘Yes?’

‘Well, if you ever get home – which is dubious in spite of my help – I would appreciate your delivering a message.’

‘Sure,’ Carmody said. ‘Who’s the message to?’

‘Why, obviously, to the bearded old man for whom I built the planet. I suppose he’s still in charge?’

‘I don’t know,’ Carmody said. ‘There’s been a great deal of discussion on that point. Some people say he’s there just as he always has been. But others say he’s dead (though I think that’s meant metaphorically), and still others maintain that he never existed in the first place.’

‘He’s still there,’ Maudsley said with conviction. ‘You couldn’t kill a fellow like that with a crowbar. As for his apparent absence, that’s very like him. He’s moody, you know, and filled with high morals which he expects people to live by. He can be peevish, he can just drop out of sight for a while if he doesn’t like how things are going. And he can be subtle; he knows that people don’t like too much of anything, no matter if it’s roast beef, lovely women, or God. So it would be just like him to remove himself from the bill of fare, so to speak, until an appetite has been built up for him again.’

‘You seem to know a lot about him,’ Carmody said.

‘Well, I’ve had a lot of time to think about him.’

‘And I think that I should point out,’ Carmody pointed out, ‘that the way you see him is not in accord with any theological view that I’ve ever heard. The idea that God can be moody, peevish –’

‘But he must be those things,’ Maudsley said. ‘And much more besides! He must be a creature of extreme emotionality! After all, that’s how
you
are and, I presume, how your fellow humans are.’

Carmody nodded.

‘Well, there you are! He stated plainly that he was going to create in his own image. And obviously, he did so. The moment you came here, I recognized the family resemblance. There is a little God in you, Carmody, though you shouldn’t let that go to your head.’

‘I’ve never had any contact with him,’ Carmody said. ‘I don’t know how to give him a message.’

‘It’s so plain!’ Maudsley said, with an air of exasperation. ‘When you get home, you must simply speak up in a firm, clear voice.’

‘What makes you think he’ll hear me?’ Carmody asked.

‘He can’t help but hear you!’ Maudsley said. ‘It
is
his planet, you know, and he has shown his deep interest in his tenants. If he had wanted you to communicate in any other way, he would have shown it.’

‘All right, I’ll do it,’ Carmody said. ‘What do you want me to tell him?’

‘Well, it isn’t anything much, really,’ Maudsley said, suddenly ill at ease. ‘But he was quite a worthy old gentleman, really, and I’ve felt a bit bad about the planet I built him. Not that there’s anything
wrong
with the planet, when you come right down to it. It’s quite serviceable and all that. But this old guy was a gentleman. I mean, he had class, which is something you never see too much of. So I’d kind of like to do a renovation on that planet of his, entirely free you understand, gratis, it wouldn’t cost him a cent. If he’d go for it, I could turn that planet into a showplace, a real paradise. I’m really a hell of a good engineer, let me tell you; it’s quite unfair to judge me by the borax I have to turn out to earn a buck.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Carmody said. ‘But very frankly, I don’t think he’ll take you up on the offer.’

‘I don’t think he will, either,’ Maudsley said morosely. ‘He’s a stubborn old man and he doesn’t want favours from anyone. Still, I do want to make the offer, and I mean it in all sincerity.’ Maudsley hesitated, then said, ‘You might also ask him if he’d care to drop around for a chat sometime.’

‘Why don’t you go to see him?’

‘I tried that a couple of times, but he wouldn’t see me. He’s got quite a vindictive streak, that old man of yours! Still, maybe he’ll relent.’

‘Maybe,’ Carmody said doubtfully. ‘Anyhow, I’ll tell him. But if you want to talk to a God, Mr Maudsley, why don’t you talk to Melichrone?’

Maudsley threw back his head and laughed. ‘Meli-chrone! That imbecile? He’s a pompous, self-centred ass, and he has no character worth considering. I’d rather talk metaphysics with a dog! Technically speaking, Godhead is a matter of power and control, you know; there’s nothing magical about it, and it’s not a cure-all for what ails you. No two Gods are alike. Did you know that?’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Bear it in mind. You can never tell when a piece of information like that will prove useful.’

‘Thank you,’ Carmody said. ‘You know, before this, I didn’t believe in any God at all.’

Maudsley looked thoughtful and said, ‘To my way of thinking, the existence of a God or Gods is obvious and inevitable; and belief in God is as easy and natural as belief in an apple, and of no more or less significance. When you come right down to it, there’s only one thing that stands in the way of this belief.’

‘What’s that?’ Carmody asked.

‘It is the Principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a house-building business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called “religion,” and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavour. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. But I’ll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse.’

‘What’s that?’Carmody asked.

‘It’s the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is
free.
And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, “Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.” The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him.’

‘I think I see what you mean,’ Carmody said.

‘I’ve made it too complicated,’ Maudsley said. ‘There’s a much simpler reason for avoiding religion.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Just consider its style – bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans – fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can’t believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?’

CHAPTER 14

Carmody was left to his own devices while Maudsley began construction of a machine to take him back to Earth. He became very bored. Maudsley could only work in utter solitude, and the Prize had apparently gone back into hibernation. Orin and Brookside, the junior engineers, were dull fellows, preoccupied with their work and uninterested in anything else. So Carmody had no one to talk to.

He filled in his time as well as he could. He toured an atom-building factory and listened dutifully while a red-faced foreman explained how it was done.

‘This used to be all handwork,’ the foreman told him. ‘Now machines do it, but the process is really the same. First, we select a proton and attach a neutron to it, using Mr Maudsley’s patented energy-binding. Then, we spin the electrons into position with a standard microcosmic centrifuge. After that, we put in anything else that’s called for – mu mesons, positrons, that sort of gingerbread. And that’s all there is to it.’

‘Do you get much call for gold or uranium atoms?’ Carmody asked.

‘Not much. Too expensive. Mostly, we turn out hydrogen atoms.’

‘What about antimatter atoms?’

‘I’ve never seen much sense in it, myself,’ the foreman said. ‘But Mr Maudsley carries it as a sideline. Antimatter is made in a separate factory, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Carmody said.

‘That stuff explodes when it comes into contact with normal atoms.’

‘Yes, I know. It must be tricky stuff to package.’

‘No, not really,’ the foreman assured him. ‘We put it up in neutral cartons.’

They continued to walk among the huge machines, and Carmody tried to think of something else to say. Finally he asked, ‘Do you make your own protons and electrons?’

‘Nope, Mr Maudsley never wanted to fool around with that really small stuff. We get our subatomic particles from subcontractors.’

Carmody laughed and the foreman looked at him suspiciously. They continued to walk until Carmody’s feet began to hurt him.

He felt tired and dull, and this annoyed him. He ought to be fascinated, he told himself. Here he was, in a place that actually manufactured atoms, and had separate facilities for creating antimatter! Over there was a gigantic machine that extracted cosmic rays from raw space, and purified them, and bottled them in heavy green containers. Beyond that was a thermal probe, used for doctoring up old stars; and just to the left of it …

It was no use. Walking through Maudsley’s factory elicited in Carmody the same sensations of boredom he had experienced during a guided tour through a Gary, Indiana, steel foundry. And that wave of sullen fatigue, that sense of mute rebellion – he had felt just the same after walking for reverent hours through the hushed corridors of the Louvre, the Prado, the British Museum. One’s sense of wonder, he realized, is only capable of a small amount of appreciation. Men remain inexorably true to themselves and their interests. They stay in character, even if that character is suddenly transported to Timbuktu or Alpha Centauri. And, being ruthlessly honest about it, Carmody realized that he would rather ski the Nosedive at Stowe or sail a Tahiti ketch beneath Hell Gate Bridge than see most of the marvels of the Universe. He was ashamed of this, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

‘I guess I’m just not particularly Faustian,’ he said to himself. ‘Here are the secrets of the Universe spread around me like old newspapers, and I’m dreaming about a nice February morning in Vermont before the snow has got carved up.’

He felt bad for a while, but then he began to feel rebellious: ‘After all, not even Faust had to walk through this stuff like it was an exhibition of Old Masters. He had to work his ass off, if I remember correctly. If the devil had made it too easy for him, Faust would have probably given up knowledge and taken up mountain-climbing or something.’

He thought for a while. Then he said, ‘Anyhow. What’s such a big deal about the secrets of the Universe? They’ve been overrated, just like everything else. When you come right down to it, nothing’s as good as you think it’s going to be.’

All of that, even if it were not true, at least served to make Carmody feel better. But he was still bored. And Maudsley still did not come out of his seclusion.

* * *

Time passed with apparent slowness. It was impossible to judge its true rate; but Carmody had the impression that it dragged on and on, and could have been subdivided into days and weeks, perhaps even a month. He also had the feeling – or the premonition – that Maudsley was not finding it easy to do what he had promised so lightly. Perhaps it was simpler to build a new planet than to find an old one. Becoming aware of the complexity of the task and its many unexpected dimensions, Carmody grew disheartened.

One day (to speak conventionally) he watched Orin and Brookside construct a forest. It had been ordered by the primates of Coeth II, to replace their old forest, which had been struck by a meteor. This new one had been paid for entirely out of schoolchildren’s donations; a sufficient sum had been raised to purchase a first-class job.

When the engineers and workmen had left, Carmody wandered alone through the trees. He marvelled at how good a job Maudsley and his team could do when they put their minds to it, for this forest was a marvel of creative and considerate planning.

There were natural glades for walking, with a leafy arbour above and a springy, dappled loam below – enticing to the foot and restful to the eye. The trees were not Earth species, but they were similar. So Carmody chose to ignore the differences and name them after the trees he had known.

That forest was all prime first-growth timberland, with just enough underbrush to keep it interesting. It was landscaped here and there with bright, rushing streams, none deeper than three feet. There was a shallow, intensely blue little lake, flanked by ponderosa pine or its equivalent. And there was a miniature swamp, dense with mangrove and cypress, studded with blackgums, magnolias and willows, and liberally sprinkled coconut palms. Farther back from the water’s edge, on drier land, was a grove in which could be found wild plum and cherry trees, and chestnuts, pecans, oranges, persimmons, dates and figs. It was a perfect place for a picnic.