

 The Central Argument of the Continuing Time
 and the Collapse of the Levels
 



From: d.moran8@genie.geis.com
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 1995 06:11:00 UTC
Subject: Good and Evil

Copyright 1995, by Daniel Keys Moran. All rights reserved.


The nature of evil -- Central Argument of "Tales" & "Collapse" --

What's wrong with our universe, our reality? It's unjust, in a word. Good
behavior does not necessarily bring good results; bad behavior does not
necessarily bring bad results.

So let's think about this. Assume this situation is unpalatable to you, and
you've decided to change it. Okay -- how do you change it? Some mechanism
for justice -- some basis in physical law -- has to be built into the
structure of the universe, such that good is rewarded, and evil punished. In
other words, the universe is aware of your actions. (This is true in the
case of the actual universe we live in, fwiw -- see the classic double slit
experiment in quantum mechanics. The wave function doesn't collapse until
somebody observes it.) But I'm talking about a level of universe-person
interaction that's a bit beyond that --

But free will is pretty much out the window then, isn't it? Is this valuable
to us? We presume so --

All right, how about a world where evil tends to get punished? How does
this work? What mechanism is in place? The following is from a letter I sent
a friend some time ago, with some stuff removed --



The Collapse of the Levels: Poison is the Wind; Winter's End; and Wild.

First, the hidden background -- i.e., it doesn't appear in any of the
stories set in the World of the Levels except, in a small way, in the
concluding novel, "Wild."

The last two "Continuing Time" novels are "Monument," and "The Way off the
Wheel." "Monument," in fact, is subtitled "The Last Tale of the Continuing
Time." We quote from C.S. Lewis:

"I was with him in his last hour, and he gave me this message to your
Majesty:  to remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is
a treasure which no one is too poor to buy."
---the message of Roonwit the Centaur to King Tirian of Narnia, C.S. Lewis,
"The Last Battle"


In "Monument," the Chained One, who is the power source which created the
Great Wheel, is freed....

Fast forward a few millennia, to "The Way off the Wheel." The universe is
growing chaotic. The Continuing Time has ended and, with its power source
removed, the Great Wheel of Existence is collapsing into non-existence.
(This is one of my Late-Heinlein-period novels, when I get together all my
favorite characters from all of my old stories and they have a party.) A
Group of Stalwart Heroes get together and decide to go look for The Way off
the Wheel. They build -- what else -- an Ark, the Ark of Aesop, and
Venture Forth into Chaos. Aboard the Ark are a quarter million humans, some
of whom you'd recognize, and some of whom you wouldn't --

There are others aboard the Ark as well, quite aside from the humans. There
are Corvichi spacetime gypsies, de Nostri, K'Aillae, slissi, tangletoes,
Golden People -- most of the major oxygen-breathing alien species in the
Continuing Time stories, to make this list shorter.

The Great Wheel of Existence collapses -- and after a long voyage through
Chaos, fighting off the Serathin who want to destroy them, the Ark comes to
a Place where the Serathin are unable to follow them, and sets down. There's
nobody in this Place. A huge range of mountains runs north to south, several
thousand miles long; on the west side of the mountains is a temperate zone,
fed by rain and the runoff of rivers coming down out of the mountains. The
mountains themselves are impassably high, rising up literally as high as
anyone can see. Climb high enough and the atmosphere ends ... but the
mountains go on rising. They are the Wall the world ends against.

To the west, the lowlands trail off into desert. Eternal desert -- no matter
how far anyone has ever gone into the desert, there appears to be no end.
People who go past the halfway mark, where their water runs out, die.
There's no moon and no stars; the nighttime sky is dark.

But it's not a grim place; there's plenty of water, old growth forests,
tillable farmland. There's no sign of who Made the Place ... no sign of the
Serathin who chased them here. Someone or something is protecting them from
the forces of Chaos.

The last section of the Tales of the Continuing Time is called "The Failure
of the Map." This refers to a mathematical principle that says that it is
impossible to produce a system of math in which contradictory things cannot
be said. I.e., no representational system can ever be wholly accurate. The
map is not the thing --

Our colonists spread out across the surface of the Place, humans and aliens.
And ... interesting things start happening. People find it very difficult to
tell a lie; the truth is much easier. Good behavior tends to get rewarded;
bad behavior tends to be punished. Not always; it's not a one-to-one
relationship by any means. But often enough to be noticed.

So -- if you were going to make a better world, where would you start?
I'd start by installing actual feedback into the system. And weirdly
enough, when you start looking at feedback in this sense, you end up with a
universe that's aware of language, aware of intent ... a universe where
sympathetic magic works, where the map is related to the object.

And all sorts of things are maps. Language is a map, a representational
system. So is painting, sculpture, music, dance ... if something can be used
representationally, it can be used for purposes of magic.

An evil magician is somebody who tells lies. Telling a lie is very
difficult, because it's not supported by the actual structure of the
universe. But conversely ... if you tell a lie, and keep telling that lie
over and over again, with great conviction, the lie becomes the truth.

And you've just cast a spell....

Good Magic is art, or creation. Bad Magic is lying, or destruction.

So here are our million-odd immigrants to the new Place ... and some of them
are pleased by the Place as they find it. Some of them aren't. And some of
them are becoming Powerful. Generations pass, and eventually war breaks out.
Cataclysmic war -- picture the take-no-prisoner attitudes of both pro-choice
and pro-life demonstrators, for whom compromise is simply not a possibility
-- compromise on a moral principle is simply treason -- transferred into a
world where magic works. (I don't mean this as a precise example of the
sorts of issues that end up being fought over.)

So the War of the Gods breaks out, and at its end reality is broken into
three fragments, three slivers, three Levels ... and two hundred thousand
years pass. The Ark of Aesop is lost, and will remain lost, "to the ten
thousandth generation."

Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine generations later, we come to the
novel "The Sheriff of Shokes" --



The Sheriff of Shokes is a woman named Ravenna. Her mother was the Sheriff,
and so was her mother. She lives in a relatively stable world -- picture a
world (I do) stretched along the coast of the Pacific Ocean, running from
Baja California in Mexico, up through California, Oregon, Washington, and
into Canada. This is the World; Shokes is located (curiously) about where
the city of Sherman Oaks is located in California, with much the same
climate and so forth.

The town of Shokes is ancient ... it's one of the few surviving Cities.
Most of the Cities were destroyed in a War that took place so long ago it's
passed into myth. The City of Shokes has about 200,000 inhabitants,
supported by advanced agriculture. They don't have a "technology" as such,
nothing that would scream out "tech," but they do have an old and extremely
well worked out economy. Picture a world lacking electronics, but with
chemistry and biology far in advance of ours ... plus a little magic, here
and there.

Ravenna lives in a world of three Levels. Her level is the middle world;
she's never been to either of the other Levels. The three Levels are
people, different cities, and different cultures. "Heaven" is the upper
Level ... it's where the winners of the War ended up. (Rave's people pray to
a silver-eyed goddess -- quite pragmatically, too. Prayer works.)

"Hell" is the lower Level; it's where the losers ended up. The War itself is
mythical ... Rave couldn't tell you whether the War actually happened or
not. Virtually no one could ... maybe a few of the magicians at the College
of the Arts. (Maybe.) But Rave knows that Heaven and Hell are real places,
though she's never been to either of them; she knows people who have.
She's had occasion to meet visitors from those places; she met an angel
once, and within living memory demons came up out of Hell to raid Shokes.

Rave doesn't think of herself as a "human," though she is one. (Silver-eyed,
too.) She's a "walker," as the Corvichi space-time gypsies are simply
"gypsies." Tangletoes (the Continuing Time name) are "ropemakers" ... not
because they actually make rope, but because they look like a clothes tree
with hundreds of ropes hanging off of them. The other "alien" species have
similarly descriptive (or racist, if you like) names.

I have four books worked out to be set against this background.

The first book is "The Sheriff of Shokes," and the main character is Rave,
the third of her line to be Sheriff. This book introduces us to the world of
the Levels -- Rave gets to go out in the World, and give the reader some
familiarity with the world.

"The Sheriff of Shokes" starts with a demon coming up from Hell, kidnapping
a batch of human children, and dragging them back down to Hell. Rave puts
together a posse, and heads after them ... and finds, once she's gotten to
Hell, that the way you come isn't the way you leave. The course of her book
takes her through Hell, through Heaven, and back to Shokes again  -- older,
wiser, and pregnant with the child of a demon named Call.

The child is a girl, and Rave names her Jake. Jake is the protagonist of the
trilogy "The Collapse of the Levels."



None of this addresses the nature of "evil," particularly, but that's
something I can't do in one short post. An exploration of what makes for
"evil" is one of the things I'm using "Collapse" for.


