Elric to Rescue Tanelorn - Michael Moorcock [168]
“You do your deity credit, sir,” said Elric.
Von Bek made a graceful movement of his hand, like an elegant showman.
Forms of every kind blossomed before him, stretching to infinity—nameless colours, flaming and shimmering and glowing, or dull and distant and cold—complex spiderwebs stretching through all dimensions, one connected with another, glinting, quivering and delicate, yet bearing the cargo and traffic of countless millions of realms.
“There are your moonbeams, sir.” Von Bek was grinning like an ape and relishing this vast, varied, yet ultimately ordered multiverse, forever fecund, forever reproducing, forever expanding its materials derived from the raw, unreasoning, unpredictable stuff of Chaos, which mighty alchemy made concrete. This was the ultimate actuality, the fundamental reality on which all other realities were based, which most mortals only glimpsed in visions, in dreams, in an echo from deep within. “The webs between the worlds are the great roads we tread to pass from one realm of the multiverse to another.”
Spheres blossomed and erupted, re-formed and blossomed again. Swirling, half-familiar images reproduced themselves over and over in every possible variety and on every scale. Elric saw worlds in the shape of trees, galaxies like flowers, star systems which had grown together, root and branch, so tangled that they had become one huge, irregular planet; universes which were steely oceans; universes of unstable fire; universes of desolation and cold evil; universes of pulsing colour whose beings passed through flames to take benign and holy shapes; universes of gods and angels and devils; universes of vital tranquility; universes of shame, of outrage, of humiliation and contemplative courtesy; universes of perpetually raging Chaos, of exhausted, sterile Law; all dominated by a sentience which they themselves had spawned. The multiverse had become entirely dependent for its existence on the reasoning powers, the desires and terrors, the courage and moral resolve of its inhabitants. One could no longer exist without the other.
And still a presence could be sensed behind all this: the presence which held in its hand the scales of justice, the Cosmic Balance, forever tilting this way or that, towards Law or towards Chaos, and always stabilized by the struggles of mortal beings and their supernatural counterparts, their unseen, unknown sisters and brothers in all the mysterious realms of the multiverse.
“Have you heard of a Guild of Adepts calling itself ‘the Just’?” asked von Bek, still as stone and drinking in this familiar vision, this infinite constituency, as another might kneel upon his native earth. Since his companions did not reply, he continued, “Well, my friends, I am of that persuasion. I trained in Alexandria and Marrakech. I have learned to walk between the realms. I have learned to play the Zeitjuego, the Game of Time. Grateful as I am for your wizardry, sir, you should know that your skills drew unconsciously upon all this. You are able to perform certain rituals, describe certain openings through which you summon aid from other realms. You define these allies in terms of unsophisticated, even primitive superstition. You, sir, with all your learning and experience, do little else. But if you come with me and play the great Game of Time, I will show you all the wonders of this multiverse. I will teach you how to explore it and manipulate it and remember it—for without training, without the long years in which one learns the craft of the mukhamir, the mortal mind cannot grasp and contain all it witnesses.”
“I have things to do in my own realm,” Elric told him. “I have responsibilities and duties.”
“I respect your decision, sir,” said von Bek with a bow, “though I regret it. You would have made a noble player in the Game. Yet, however unconsciously, I think you have always played and will continue to play.”