A third leaked extract from "One Fish, True Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish," publication date July 2009, leaked by a publishing industry mole to inmemoryofabsentfriends in the last week of January.
Four days of indefinite duration had passed by now; four long dreams in the mind of the being who turned symbols into fish.
Eben was aware that the transformation of thoughts into true objects was a divine privilege: the creatures to whom he gave birth would never have that right.
Those dramatic subsets of the Bluefish Calculator would long, however, to be able to act so definitively. For instance, there is no guarantee that the bluefish and the redfish will ever co-incide, despite the creation of both.
The desire for distant, ungraspable objects, indeed, would be both the highest expression and the first seed of downfall, of the new species. In distant future days, art and science would, in their separate languages, speak of the necessity to theorise (about things that might be true) and wishing for things that they wish were true.
Theorising is all well and good, mused Eben, but wishes are dangerous. They focus minds on things other than their creator, and I am very jealous. The first principle of a theory is an observation, and thereafter evidence, while the seed of a wish is a dream or madness. Such a discontinuity will forever separate the realms of science and religion (or art).
Enveloped in steam and rage, the divine Entity realised that he had just invented sin. Those who observe, and collect, are untethered from this new sensation. Those who build towers from fragments of mad dreams - their fins and scales ooze sin.
What was once awareness that the transformation of thoughts into objects could never take place then took upon the nature of an imperative: even if the laws of the Fish Tank were such that these transformations could take place, the scowling lack of co-operation from Eben expressly precludes it.
Violate that will and you are no longer one of the Truefish, the empiricists. The moral barrier transcends any physical bulwark that Eben could put in place. And this realisation, this schism, the dividing line between Truefish and iconoclasts, was the stone which shattered the simple unity of the universe on the third day.
