The Baulomorph 🔮 Vancouver

Light

Berry winced when he imagined his fellow Baulomorphs saying they lived around the corner, just beyond Neptune. Neptune had nothing to do with it. Where Berry came from was beyond the Virgo Supercluster, inside of which Earth and Neptune were tiny and (if not for their sun) invisible specks.

His dinner guests may have been able to understand how far away the Virgo Supercluster was from the Hercules Supercluster, yet he was from a place a million times further from Earth than the Hercules Supercluster. The distances were so great that only a clear understanding of math, pure theoretical math with its long string of numbers cubed and then re-cubed, could lend to the mind a faint semblance of understanding.

Baulians referred to their universe as The Orange Hoop, which was one of the three universes they knew to exist, the other two being the Green Buzz and the Violet Hoop (which included Earth and the Milky Way). The three universes rotated around each other and were collectively called The Great Triangle. But neither the Baulians nor Berry had a clue about anything beyond the Triangle. It was therefore a high principle of Baulian doctrine that beyond the Triangle there was nothing but empty space.

The Baulians did, however, debate whether the Great Triangle curved in upon itself or whether the empty space outside its boundary had an end. The Curvers and the No-Enders had fractious debates that inevitably turned in on themselves, each side re-confirming in the end that their original premise was the right one. The Curvers would take this circularity as proof that everything is circular and turns in on itself, including the Great Triangle. The No-Enders would then leave the lecture hall and say they were never coming back.

The No-Enders made it very clear to the assembled astrophysicists that they were going to glide out of the hall and keep going in a straight line without ever looking over their shoulder. They would go on forever with no end. They would glide forever on their silky stockings away from the lecture hall, finding more and more truth the further they got from the light of existence, until at last they were one with the moist mystical air of Utter Darkness.

Several days later, when a Curver saw a No-Ender at a sandwich bar, the Curver would wink insolently at the No-Ender. The No-ender would tell the insolent winker that he was merely at a pit-stop, en route to the deepest corners of outer space.

It never occurred to any of them that the Great Triangle was itself only one universe cluster in a far larger cosmos, known as the Kraslika by the trillions of species that lived in it.

A thousand years ago, the Baulians discovered the Orange Hoop. The reason they could see it was that it contained an immense dense group of stars called the Star Wall. This Wall of light was 180 megaparsecs wide and contained .7 trillion stars. It was so large and bright that it was the first tiny pinprick of light the Baulians saw beyond their own universe.

Berry was pretty sure that in the next decade or two humans were likely to discover the Star Wall, which was located (from Earth’s perspective) in the general direction of Scorpius and the Norma Cluster. Humans couldn’t detect it because it was directly behind the densest part of their galaxy. From Earth, it lay near the tail of the constellation of Scorpius.

As the Baulians got closer to the Violet Hoop, they started to worship the Star Wall as if it were God. They gave it the grandiose title, The Great Wall, Prime Mover that Maintains the Cosmos in Motion, which made sense to them since it was the densest group of stars they had ever seen. Also, the spatial centre around which the Orange and Violet Hoops appeared to be rotating was clearly in the Violet Hoop — much to the chagrin of the Ancient Baulian philosophers, who insisted that the Pink Well of Baulis Prime was the centre of everything that was and everything that will ever be.

When the Baulians saw another universe next to the Violet Hoop, they revised their theology. They also saw that the Orange Hoop was in a gravitational relation with both the Violet Hoop and a third universe, the Green Buzz. Even more vexing for the Baulian priests was that the three universes rotated around each other, yet all three appeared to rotate around something else. This Something Else lay at the far end of the Violet Hoop, so far out in space that they named it the Mystic Pole. They also noticed that at rare intervals all three universes pulsed in synchrony and emitted a burst of purple energy, the origin of which the Baulians had yet to discover. The Great Wall became a mere stepping stone to the deeper mystery of the Purple Truth.

The Great Wall was downgraded to demi-god status, bright but not nearly as heavenly as they had once imagined. Baulian historians did their best to hide their earlier enthusiasm for what many started sarcastically calling the Big White Thing. They deleted references to the God of Suns from their data banks, and hid poems to its divine radiance in footnotes buried deep in coded appendices. The cantankerous Bualian priests were also forced to correct the theological paradox in which the Great Wall and the Two Divine Directions on Either Side of It constituted the Ultimate Mystical Trinity: Triple and yet One. In time, they gave up on capital letters altogether, and took up a form of chess in which no one could ever win.

The Great Wall became just another mythical shape, like the ones on the floor of the Otranto Cathedral in Southern Italy. Once a magical entity in a faraway land, the Great Wall was now a mere astronomical fact. It had lost all its fabulous myths and its sky monsters. Once the God of Infinite Suns, it was now a strip of stars the Baulians landed on with the intention of travelling Somewhere Else.

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