The Baulomorph 🔮 Vancouver

Dinner Guests from Baulis Prime

Roots

While others found it comforting, Berry found it disturbing to discover he was of alien extraction. Some of his fellow Baulians remembered the discovery (which always occurred at the age of 13) as if they had learned they had a bit of Hungarian ancestry, way back when.

Berry imagined them at dinner parties, telling other guests, “Oh well, some of us are of Jewish extraction, and some of us are Gypsies. Foreign extraction has an exotic sound to it, you can’t deny. Maybe we’re all wanderers, deep down inside. It’s just that our people happen to be from another planet.” 

Of course Baulians weren’t allowed to talk about who they really were. Yet if they were allowed, he was sure they’d say something like that.

They’re such phonies! Berry thought to himself. Some of us! Deep down inside! He imagined them talking as if they had just dropped in from next door. Our people! He imagined them sipping their martinis in unison with their neighbours: “Oh, you’re from another planet. Neptune, you say? How nice! We’re immigrants too.”

The fact that his people were from another planet would have turned the clear martinis of the other guests pink. Explaining that they were from another planet, however, wouldn’t have been the hardest part. His people were also from another universe. Compared to Baulis, Neptune was like an eyelash away. Or a floater.

Soil

When Berry thought of another universe, he didn’t think of some fantasy universe in which one dimension was superimposed on another. In such a scenario, travelling from Baulis to Earth would be like reversing an energy current. One moment you’re drifting sexless and at ease in an orange essence bath with your tentacles pulsing, then — ⚡️TZZZ⚡️— the next moment you’re trying to keep your balance on a planet with crushing gravity.

He couldn’t imagine something as ridiculous as one space-time continuum superimposed on another. He clamped his slippery tongue (which he privately referred to as his skull tentacle) onto the roof of his mouth when he heard people talking like that. He even heard the human mystic Plotinus Maximus explain that our nervous systems were constantly being split off into new dimensions. Maximus added that our alternate selves lived out other versions of our original selves. Maximus professed to understand the physics that made such an absurdity possible, although he obviously had no proof whatsoever.

Maximus argued by way of analogy (a fallacious method to which humans were particularly vulnerable), using theoretical models based on mathematics. The models were brilliant, yet they couldn’t be applied willy-nilly to the real world. This problem reminded Berry of Zeno’s Paradox, in which it was mathematically impossible to go from point A to point B because the space between A and B could be divided up infinitely. The principle behind this mathematical conundrum was the basis of infinite fractals and infraction, and was sacred to the Baulians. Yet this principle couldn’t be applied with complete disregard for the practical laws of physics. No sane being (even on Earth) argued that it was in practice impossible to go from point A to point B. Things went from A to B all the time. It was an axiom of Baulian scientific theory that abstract mathematics cannot be applied to situations if this creates a practical or demonstrable contradiction to known physical realities.

Yet Plotinus Maximus went on talking about mathematical expressions of infinity and connecting them, in a manner Berry couldn’t fathom, to energy fields so subtle that they disappeared from this space-time continuum and popped into another. Berry understood that orange lines of energy could dissolve into ether, and that this ether operated far below the level of the angstrom (ten to minus ten metres) or the quark (10 to minus 18): it operated at the level of 10 to minus 30. But it was an established fact in the textbooks of the Baulian Academy of Subatomic Science that there was no sign, or even hint of life, beyond 10 to minus 30.

There was only one Baulian philosopher, Rablanar the Fractal Mystic, who took the theories of the human Plotinus Maximus seriously. Rablanar argued that Maximus’ notion of the superimposition of universes might not be correct (at least it couldn’t be proved), yet the paradigm of infinite fractals suggested that the result may be the same: beings might be able to project things (or even their selves) into or out of fractals so deep that they may as well be coming from another universe.

Rablanar posited that other species might be able to operate on subatomic levels that the Baulians couldn’t even see — levels that went into the negative 30s or 40s. They might be privy to an infinite range of fractal layers that were invisible to Baulians, simply because the latter couldn’t look deeply enough. Looking at a billionth of an angstrom wasn’t enough; Baulians needed to divide that billionth by a billion.

Rablanar’s theories had been discredited a dozen times over by the Council of Fractal Masters & Fractal Mystics. Recent Council Sessions were devoted to more practical matters, such as the ethical problem of allowing subjugated species freedom of speech while denying them political and economic freedom. Not being an expert, Berry had to side with the Council: Rablanar’s theories were so theoretical that they might as well be fantasy. Sci-fi fantasy, the worst abuse of mathematics possible!, Berry added under his breath.

Humans hadn’t even started to understand all this. Everything Maximus imagined to be dipping in and out of this space-time continuum was in fact bouncing around in the quantum corners and fractals of the same continuum. If humans had a clue what to do with their particle accelerators they would see that the soil out of which life sprang was not some strange mystical realm. Berry could write a dozen books about the corners humans couldn’t look around and the fractals they couldn’t see. Space was all around them, yet some of their brightest minds still didn’t grasp the basic concept. Alternate dimensions! As if the universe wasn’t big enough — or small enough — for them!

Berry wasn’t allowed to tell the ignorant humans anything about all this, unless of course he wanted neural toxins that only Russians could dream about released into his brain.

Still, he wished he could tell his human friends that his people weren’t people at all. They certainly weren’t from some mystery universe that popped into theirs. Nor were they from around the corner, just beyond Neptune, as his fellow Baulians liked to joke among themselves, implying a geographical intimacy that was completely inaccurate.

Like every Baulomorph, Berry shared a fantasy: one day he would walk right up to those humans who came and went on their red carpets and who talked so knowingly about Shakespeare and Michelangelo and Einstein. He’d stop them in their tracks and tell them that he could literally see right through them, because he had a magic lantern that threw the pattern of their nerves onto the screen of his mind. He’d tell them that he was communicating right under their very noses with an alien Master Race whose home planet was sextillions of miles away. 

In telling them all this, he’d use well-known references to human literature, to suggest to them that they didn’t even understand their own writers. The Master Race had already answered the overwhelming questions of life, and had written these answers within the book and volume of every Baulomorph’s brain, unmixed with the baser matter that humans called science, philosophy, and art. Waving at them as he left the room, martini still in hand, he’d tell them that he saw cosmic mermaids combing the white hair of the Milky Way blown back, but that these mermaids would never talk to them.

🔮

Next: 🔮 Light

Back to Top

Table of Contents - Chart of Contents - Characters - Glossary - Maps - Story Lines