Anana complained that she was hungry and would like to get to the restaurant as soon as possible. He told her that suffering was good for the soul and grinned as he said it. His own belly was contracting with pangs, and his ribs felt more obtrusive than several days ago. But he was not going to be rushed into anything if he could help it.
While they walked, Kickaha questioned her about Red Orc and the “alleged” creation of Earth.
“There was the universe of the Lords in the beginning, and that was the only one we knew about. Then, after ten thousand years of civilization, my ancestors formulated the theory of artificial universes. Once the mathematics of the concept was realized, it was only a matter of time and will until the first pocket universe was made. Then the same ‘space’ would hold two worlds of space-matter, but one would be impervious to the inhabitants of the other, because each universe was ‘at right angles to the other.’ You realize that the term ‘right angles’ does not mean anything. It is just an attempt to explain something that can really only be explained to one who understands the mathematics of the concept. I myself, though I designed a universe of my own and then built it, never understood the mathematics or even how the world-making machines operated.
“The first artificial universe was constructed about two hundred years before I was born. It was made by a group of Lords-they did not call themselves Lords then, by the way-among whom were my father Urizen and his brother Orc. Orc had already lived the equivalent of two thousand Terrestrial years. He had been a physicist and then a biologist and finally a social scientist.
“The initial step was like blowing a balloon in non-space. Can you conceive that? I can’t either, but that’s the way it was explained to me. You blow a balloon in non-space. That is, you create a small space or a small universe, one to which you can ‘gate’ your machines. These ex-and the space next to, or in, the time-space of the original universe. The new world is expanded so that you can gate even larger machines into it. And these expand the universe more, and you gate more machines into the new larger space.
“From the beginning of this making of a new world, you have set up a world which may have quite different physical ‘laws’ than the original universe. It’s a matter of shaping the space-time-matter so that, say, gravity works differently than in the original world.
“However, the first new universe was crude, you might say. It embodied no new principles. It was, in fact, an exact imitation of the original. Well, not exact in the sense that it was not a copy of the world as it was but as it had been in our past.”
“The copy was this-my-world?” Kickaha said. “Earth’s?” She nodded and said, “It-this universe-was the first. And it was made approximately fifteen thousand Earth years ago. This solar system deviated only in small particulars from the solar system of the Lords. This Earth deviated only slightly from the native planet of the Lords.”
“You mean . . . ?”
He was silent while they walked a half block, then he said, “So that explains what you meant when you said this world was fairly recent. I knew that that could not be so, because potassium-argon and xenon-argon dating prove irrefutably that this world is more than four and a half billion years old.”
Perhaps, in the beginning, it did. But they had recovered and gone on to their own making of cosmoses and their solipsist way of life.
And in their search for immortality, they had made the Bellers, those Frankenstein’s monsters, and then, after a long war, had conquered the Bellers and disposed of the menace forever-they had thought. But now there was a Beller loose and . . . No, he was not loose. He was in the hands of Red Orc, who surely would see to it that the Beller died and his bell was buried deep somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of the Pacific.