Elric Swords and Roses - Michael Moorcock [48]
“I find it difficult to imagine, sir,” Wheldrake was saying. “It is a trifle frightening, too, moreover, to contemplate such vastness. So many worlds, so many tribes, and each with a different understanding of the nature of reality! Billions of them, sir. Billions and billions—an infinity of possibilities and alternatives! And Law and Chaos fight to control all that?”
“The war is at present unadmitted,” said Phatt. “Instead there are skirmishes here and there, battles for a world or two, or at best a realm. But a great conjunction is coming and it is then that the Lords of the Higher Worlds wish to establish their rule throughout the Spheres. Each Sphere contains a universe and there are thought to be at least a million of them. This is no ordinary cosmic event!”
“They fight to control infinity!” Wheldrake was impressed.
“The multiverse is not infinite in the strictest sense …” began Phatt, to be interrupted by his mother, suddenly shrill with irritability.
“Infinity? Loose talk! Infinity? The multiverse is finite. It has limits and dimensions which only a god may occasionally perceive—but they are limits and dimensions! Otherwise there would be no point in it!”
“In what, Mother?” Even Fallogard was surprised. “In what?”
“In the Family Phatt, of course. It is our firm belief that we shall one day—” And she left her son to recite the bulk of what was evidently the family creed …
“—learn the plan of the entire multiverse and travel at will from Sphere to Sphere, from realm to realm, from world to world, travel through the great clouds of shifting, multicoloured stars, the tumbling planets in all their millions, through galaxies that swarm like gnats in a summer garden, and rivers of light—glory beyond glory—pathways of moonbeams between the roaming stars.
“Why, sir, have you ever sometimes stood alone and seen visions? That moment, you recall, when you pause and are granted a glimpse of near-eternity, the multiverse? You might glance at a cloud or a burning log, you might notice a certain fold in a blanket, or the angle at which a blade of grass stands—it does not matter. You know what you have seen and it brings that larger vision. Yesterday, for instance—?” And he cocked an enquiring eye at the poet before receiving his new friend’s approval to continue.
“—for instance, I look up at about noon. Silver light pours like water down the massed clouds, themselves vast floating asymmetric sea-beasts so large they are host to whole nations of other species, including, surely, Man? As if they entirely surfaced from their element, ready to plunge again into depths as mysterious to those below as oceans are to those above them.” His face glowed a richer red with all this bright recollection, his eyes appeared to focus again upon those clouds, upon those monumental natural barges, like raised wrecks, alarmingly complete after millennia, alien beyond imagining, beyond any impulse of ordinary mortals to follow, which one’s very soul yearned to forget, those obscenely ancient beast-ships grown insubstantial in their sudden element, this brilliancy of sun and sky, and gradually their outlines dim, turn grey and fade one into another until only the sun and the sky remain, witnesses of their unmourned passing. “Have they grown invisible or are they gone for ever, even from our blood’s strange memory, that tiny speck of ancestral matter that informs our race’s united soul? Would that be to say they never existed and never could exist? Many things existed before our ancestors ever lifted one webbed foot upon a steamy shore …”
And Elric smiled at this, for his race’s memory went back before mankind’s, at least in his own realm.