Tomy and the Planet of Lies (21 page)

…The experts the police sent over were unable to ascertain any more than we could tell them: attempted arson was the verdict. “Have you got any enemies?” asked the oldest of the policeman. Of course, I have. Anyone who writes about subjects that are ‘inconvenient' always has.

…“I don't mean opponents of your ideas, sir,” the arson expert replied. “I mean real enemies who might want to see you dead. To carry out such a base act as this you need to really hate someone quite a lot.”

…The three officers made notes, packed the gasoline-soaked rag in an evidence bag, looked around for fingerprints, and asked us who was living in the house. We produced Tomy, being careful not to say anything about his origins. Finally, they told us—this was supposed to make us feel better—that they would send regular patrols past our house for the next few days, but we should seriously consider getting an alarm system installed.

…It wasn't possible to organize a decent alarm straight away, so I called Marc and my brother Otto and asked them to come over and stay with us for a few days. Our only option was to keep constant watch, around the clock if necessary. Tomy assured us that we needn't fear a second incident: our enemies were warned. Maybe the whole thing had just been an attempt to intimidate us. After all, the other side must have known about the dogs beforehand. Ebet suggested that Tomy and I go up to a hotel in the mountains, but neither of us wanted to leave her on her own.

…Otto was two years younger than me—an engineer by trade and an absolute science fiction fan. He accepted Tomy's strange existence immediately as the sober truth. This led to fantastic and highly interesting conversations, which Marc eagerly joined in. Otto asked Tomy the questions that I—from a kind of respect or reverence—hadn't dared. One of the first of them was whether God existed.

… “Of course,” answered Tomy.

…“You have already told us that the beings of your race are some kind of energy forms. Something like God?”

…“Of course not! We are nothing but microscopic components of the universe—like you. God spans the entire universe and the constant cycle of creation. God existed for a long time before we arose.”

…Tomy explained that what mankind thought of as God had always been there and would always be there. In Tomy's world they called it the “great spirit of creation.” The big bang, so beloved by our physicists, was just the beginning of one single universe, just one portion of time and space, whereby time only existed for matter and the oscillations that arose from it. I had picked up that concept somewhere during my journey through the universe without really grasping what it meant. I didn't understand it now either.

…I asked if it was something only philosophers could understand. Tomy scoffed at this, saying that philosophical thinking looks at Earth as a closed system— something we have never been. Ebet—a product of her catholic upbringing, as was I—insisted on holding onto her Christian view of God. Tomy, blessed as he was with both his own and my entire knowledge, assured her kindly that he had no intention of offending her sensibilities.

…“You aren't,” she assured him. “I know Erich's views about religion and all that interests me is what you have to add.”

…The discussion became ever more complex, so I went off and fetched a tape recorder and although I could set it all down here, word for word, I'm not going to go into so much detail. Rather, I will restrict myself to the main direction of Tomy's explanation. After all, it is of great interest to hear what an extraterrestrial thinks of our Christian God.

…“From what I have understood from Erich's thoughts and those of the theologian who I recently visited, the first Christian, Jewish and Moslem ideas of God were those of the ‘almighty creator,' since creation was—for them—the entire universe. Then, so tell us Christian teachings, this almighty God created plants, animals and then, as the crowning glory of his creation, mankind. It's written down in the Bible: ‘And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.' However, later on he regretted the creation of man ‘and it grieved him at his heart.' He corrected his mistake and sent the Flood.

…You humans considered this to be a result of a divine error, which simply cannot be. The origin of Christianity is the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in Paradise, a guilt that has been handed down through every generation and could only be erased by the sacrifice of God's son himself. This is where you confuse cause and effect. For God, in his eternal wisdom, must have known in advance that the original humans would commit this crime—do you not see the error of your thinking? You have ascribed qualities such as omnipotence and eternal grace to your biblical God, but a God who was almighty and yet looked on idly while all manner of havoc was wreaked throughout the world can hardly be seen as all gracious.

…If he was, however, all-gracious and yet unable to hinder the horrific deeds committed throughout history, then this would exclude his almightiness. Both qualities cannot be united—at least as long as your planet is what it is: a hypocritical collection of people who always think they're right. To find explanations for the inexplicable, you humans have proposed yourselves as the solution. In view of the eternal universe, which is constantly being renewed, the question of God does not arise. Creation is simply there. We, and everything around us, are all products of the creation. And here we find the ‘great spirit of creation.' Unlike your theology and the beliefs of simple people, this ‘great spirit of creation' is not responsible for your suffering, your wars, and your natural catastrophes. You must go beyond the idea of an anthropomorphized God. The ‘great spirit of creation' is not a person; it is the origin of the eternity of the universe.”

…I didn't understand the last sentence at all, and the others didn't either.

…“You took over a senior figure in the Christian church,” Elisabeth broke in. “Christians believe in the original sin and redemption through Jesus Christ. Are you saying that they're all lying?”

…Tomy, who seemed extremely human during this phase, shook his head.

…“You have a word in German that means both yes and no—
jein
, the combination of
ja
and
nein
,” he said. “Not either-or. It means that both possibilities are equally valid. The theologian that I took over is a doctor of theology. His intellect tells him that the story of the original sin and the redemption is false, but his faith overpowers his reason. Faith requires no proof. Faith accepts things regardless of reason. Man is false to the point of artlessness and convinces himself that in the kingdom of God the impossible is possible. Believers, inasmuch as they even have the courage for critical analysis, lie to themselves.”

…Unavoidably, Otto also wanted to know whether there were other beings in the universe like human beings, and Tomy's answer corresponded in many points to what I already knew and had discussed in my books (so I won't repeat it here).

…I felt a little flattered that I had been able to filter out a few things over the decades that weren't so far off the mark. The delicate question about time travel also cropped up that afternoon. Otto claimed stiffly that time travel must be impossible because of the dangerous paradoxes it would cause. (You know the story: man travels into the past, meets his own grandfather, and somehow kills him. If this meeting takes place before the man's father is born, then logically the man himself could never be born to travel back in time in the first place. It's the classic paradox.)

…That indefinable Mona Lisa smile fluttered across Tomy's lips yet again. It always appeared when he knew something but wasn't quite sure how to put it into words that we would understand.

…“Time travel is, nevertheless, possible,” he instructed Otto. “Imagine the network of strings on a tennis racket. When the ball hits the strings it causes a dent. Space is warped. Now instead of the tennis ball, take a tiny, but extremely heavy ball that warps the space around it so much that it becomes a ball around your ball. This microscopic but incredibly heavy ball is the time machine. It can leave the space at any point, even in the past. This much has been formulated on the basis of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.

…What is still beyond your grasp is that when the time machine leaves that warped space it emerges in another dimension, because there are an infinite number of dimensions existing simultaneously at any single point. Figuratively speaking: alongside this room where we are having this discussion are trillions of other rooms only fractions of nanometers away from us, filled with people like us, having a discussion like us, but they are all minutely different. You can kill your grandfather in another dimension, because he is not the grandfather from your dimension.”

…“That's too much for me,” sighed Otto in resignation, “I only had one grandfather and I can't murder him ten times.”

…Tomy's smile was disarming. None of us had the feeling we were being lectured by a self-opinionated schoolmaster, or anything like that. We were like extras on a film set, gawping children who swallow down truths without being able to verify any of it. We believed him because his personality radiated credibility. Tomy dealt with our objections with the gentleness of the Dalai Lama. What did we know?

…“About thirty years ago, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, recognized that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity allowed for traveling through time. But Gödel's time machine was only possible in a rotating universe. But the universe rotates not.” Tomy looked out at a sea of silent faces. Although we didn't understand, we nodded in affirmation. Tomy went over and sat next to Otto—on the broad upholstered arm of his chair.

…“Do you know who Kurt Gödel was?” “Not a clue,” admitted Otto.

…“He was born in Brno in 1906, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied math in Vienna and physics and later wrote a post-doctoral thesis with the somewhat impossible title:
On formally undecidable propositions in the Principia Mathematica and related systems
.”

…“Heavens above!” exclaimed Otto holding his hands up in surrender. “None of us understands any of that!”

…“Have a little patience,” laughed Tomy. “Gödel shook mathematics to its very foundations, although mathematics of all disciplines is so unutterably logical. He formulated an incompleteness theorem for mathematics and revealed that all formal systems cannot be both consistent and complete. Which is true, but I won't burden you with that.”

…“I didn't understand any of it anyway,” I remarked dryly, “I was never kissed by the muse of higher math. Have you got an example down at our level?”

…Tomy switched positions, now squatting on the floor cross- legged. He looked compassionately at the people sat around him.

…“OK. The mayor of New York wants to fly with his daughter, a friend of his who is a lawyer and the lawyer's wife to Paris. There are only three seats left on the plane, so the whole group gets on board and flies to France. How is that possible?”

…Ebet reacted quickest: “Aha, the daughter must sit on her father's lap!”

…Tomy laughed. “No, it's much simpler: the daughter is the lawyer's wife!”

…“Eureka!” cried Otto, clapping his hands with delight. “Thank heavens we got all this on tape. Now all I have to do is find one of those nice quantum physicist fellows to explain it all to me.”

…“Why not?” agreed Tomy. “He will take what you can't understand, wrap it in mathematical formulae and at least his colleagues will be able to understand it. In this universe myriads of realities exist right next to each other, spatially, that is. In truth they are all simultaneous. You can get a vague idea of what I mean by considering a hologram. Put infinite numbers of holograms next to each other, on top of each other, under each other, inside each other. They all exist at the same time, but are all slightly different. Your time machine will always take you to a different reality—or a different hologram, if you will.”

…What could we say? Elisabeth started handing round fruit; Marc blew smoke rings into the air; Otto stared at the pattern of the carpet in front of him. Tomy turned to me, for a last attempt, although he already knew what my memory contained:

…“Maybe it's not possible for you to understand it, Erich. Humans are constantly overwhelmed; you suffer from a state of exhaustion brought on by the multitudes of impressions around you. But if you look inside yourself, you remember the ‘show' and recognize the holographic universe.”

…“And what happens to God?”

…“The great spirit of creation is the omnipresence of creation itself. If a large, colorful parrot flies towards you, lands on your window sill and starts croaking sentences at you that you can understand, even though you've no idea where the bird came from, what can you assume?”

…I didn't need to consider for long.

…“That somewhere someone had taught the parrot these sentences,” I said.

…“And that's exactly how it is with the great spirit of creation!”

 

We let three more people in on the secret of Tomy's existence and organized a round-the-clock watch. We set up spotlights in the garden that looked as if they had been put there to illuminate the shrubs. For 24 hours a day vigilant eyes were guarding the property. The dogs were sent out frequently and at random intervals. The Villa Serdang was enclosed by the wall at the front and by a strong fence around the back. The dogs couldn't run away and Neptune would have chased down any unwelcome visitor quickly. For four days and four nights nothing happened, apart from a phone call from Chantal who called from somewhere to announce that she would like to visit us on Sunday evening. That was in five days' time.

In the meantime, Tomy spent every day lying deathly pale on his bed. Every time he returned from his travels he seemed more and more dejected, I tried to talk to him, to cheer him up, but usually he just smiled and begged my understanding when he didn't want to talk. On the second day after Marc and Otto's arrival, he showed us a perfumed letter he'd received from Edith, our housemaid. She wrote that every time she was near him, she had a feeling of wellbeing—a tingling that seized her thoughts and wouldn't let go. Could he help her?