by E R Eddison
'In sum, my Lord the King,' said the Vicar, 'I am a plain man. Know my trade. Know myself. Obey my master. And, for the rest (saving present company):' he glowered, right and left, upon Duke, Admiral, and Chancellor: 'nemo me impune lacessit,'
'In sum,' said the King, 'you like well this world and would let well alone?'
'Humbly, it is my judgement.'
‘Which,' said the King, 'your excellency may very wisely and wholesomely act upon.'
It was as if, for a freezing instant, an axe had shown its mouth. The lean lines of the Chancellor's lip and nostril hardened to a sardonic smile.
‘You and I,' said the King, turning to the Lord Jeronimy, 'are oldest here. What say you?'
'My Lord the King,' answered he, 'I am five years older, I think, than your serene highness. And the older I grow the more, I think, I trust my judgement, the less my knowledge. Things I thought I knew,' he said, leaning an elbow on the table, finger and thumb drawing down over his forehead one strand of his lank pale hair, while he cast about the company a very kindly, very tolerant, very philosophic look, ‘I find I was mistaken. What in a manner were certainties, turn to doubt. In fine,—' he fell silent.
'There you have, charactered in speech, the very inwardness of our noble Admiral,' whispered the Duchess in Zenianthe's ear: 'a man wise and good, yet in discretive niceness so over-abounding that oft when it comes to action he but runneth into a palsy, from unability to choose 'twixt two most balanced but irreconcilable alternatives.'
Eyes were gentle, resting on the lord Admiral. A humorousness sweetened even Beroald's satirical smile as he said, answering the King's look, 'I, too, hold by the material condition. This world will serve. I'd be loth to hazard it by meddling with the works.'
The Duke shrugged his shoulders. 'Unless thus far only, perhaps,' he said, eyeing that Lady Fiorinda across the table: 'seeing that a world should be, to say, a garment, should it not be—to fit the wearer 'twas made for—' and something momentarily ruffled the level line of her underlids as the sun's limb at point of day cuts suddenly the level horizon of the sea, 'everchanging, never-changing?'
'And is this of ours not so?' said the King, his eyes too on that lady. .
'Everchanging,' the Duke said: 'yes. But as for never-changing,' Campaspe heard the alteration in his voice! as the nightbreeze sudden among sallows by the margin of some forsaken lake, ‘I know not. Best, may be, not to know.' Anthea, too, pricked ears at the alteration: scurry of sleet betwixt moraine and ice-cave when all the inside voices of the glacier are stilled by reason of the cold.
'Yes, even and were we Gods,' said the King, and the stillness seemed to wait upon his words: 'best, may be, not to know. Best not to know our own changelessness, our own eternal power and unspeakable majesty altogether uncircumscriptible. For there is, may be, in doubts and uncertainties a salt or savour, without which, all should be turned at last unto weariness and no zest remain. Even in that Olympus.'
'Time,' said the Duchess, breaking the silence. 'And Change. Time, as a river: and each of us chained like Andromeda upon the bank, to behold thence the everchanging treasure or mischief of our days borne past us upon the flood: things never to be seized by us till they be here: never tarrying to be enjoyed: never, for all our striving, to be eluded, neither for our longing, once gone to be had again. And, last mischief, Death.'
'A just image,' said the Admiral. 'And, as with the falling waters of the river, no stay: no turn back.'
'Yes. We may see it is so, Zenianthe said. 'But how and it were other than as we see it? We on the bank, moveless at our window: Time and the world stream by. But how if the window be (though we knew it not) the windows of a caroche or litter, wherein we are borne onward with so smooth, soft, and imperceptible a motion, as floating in air, morning mists are carried beside some lake—?'
'So that we could not tell, but by descending from our chariot, whether, in a manner, the motion were in us or in the scene we look out on? Tis all a matter, howsoever: the masque, howsoever, of our life-days goeth by.'
'Ah, but is it all a matter, my lord Admiral?' said the Duchess. 'For, upon this supposition, there is not but one river only and the floating burden upon its waters: there is the wide world to move in, forth back and about, could we but command the charioteer,—'
'Or but leap from chariot and walk, as a man should, in freedom of the world,' said the Duke.
The King said, 'Or as God and Goddess should, in freedom of all the university of all possible worlds.'
'As to say,' said Barganax, I will that it be now last Tuesday night, midnight; and, at a word, at a thought, make it so.' His eye waited on Fiorinda's, which, as in some overcast night at sea the lode-star, opened upon him momentarily green fires.
'Should need a God, I should think,' said she, and some bell of mockery chimed in her lazy accents, 'to devise wisely, with such infinite choice. New singular judgement, I should think, to fit your times to the high of their perfection.'
The King turned to her. ‘Your ladyship thinks, then, 'tis as well that all is done ready to our hand, without all power whether to tarry or go back, or choose another road: much less, have done with all roads and chariots and be free?'
' 'Tis as well, I should say,' the idle self-preening glance of her hovered about the Vicar: for some of us. Your serene highness will call to mind the old tale of the good-man and his wife and the three wishes.' Her brother, the Lord Beroald, stiffened: shifted in his chair. 'O, ne'er imagine Fd tell it, sweet brother: plain naked words stript from their shirts—foh! yet holdeth as excellent a lesson as a man shall read any. I mean when, at their third wishing, so as to rid 'em out of the nasty pickle whereinto they had brought themselves with the two former, they were fain but to unwish those, and so have all back again as in statu quo prius. And here was but question of three plain wishes: not of the myriads upon myriads you should need, I suppose, for devising a world.'
The King laughed in his beard. 'Which is as much as to say,' he looked over his left shoulder into the face of Barganax, 'that a God, if He will dabble in world-making, had best not be God only but artist?'
‘Because both create?' said Amalie.
Barganax smiled: shook his head. ‘Your artist creates not. Say I paint your grace a picture: make you a poem: that is not create. I but find, choose, set in order.'
'Yet we say God created the world? Is that wrong then?' She looked from father to son. 'How came the world, then?'
There fell a silence: in the midst of it, the Vicar with his teeth cracking of a lobster's claw. Amalie looked on the King, within hand's-reach upon her left. She said, as resolving her own question: 'I suppose it lay in glory in His mind.'
Barganax seemed to pause upon his mother's words. 'And yet, so lying,' he said, 'is not a world yet. To be that, it must lie outside. Nor it cannot, surely, He whole in his mind afore it be first laid also outside. So here's need to create, afore e'er you think of a world.' He paused: looked at Fiorinda. 'And even a God,' he said, 'cannot create beauty: can but discover.'
'Disputing of these things,' the King said, ‘what are we but children, who, playing on the shore, chart in childish fancy the unharvested sea? Even so, sweet is divine philosophy and a pastime at the feast.
‘But to play primero you must have cards first. Grant, then, the eternity of the World (not this world: I mean all the whole university of things and beings and times). Grant God is omnipotent. Then must not that universal World be infinite, by reason of the omnipotence of God? It is the body; and the soul thereof, that omnipotence. And so, to create that universality, that infinite World, is no great matter, nor worth divinity: 'tis but the unwilled natural breath-take or blood-beat, of His omnipotence. But to make a particular several world, like this of ours: to carve prima materia, that gross body of chaos, and shape it to make you your World of Heart's Desire,—why, here's work for God indeed!'
"'and do You attune my song,' said Fiorinda slowly, as if savouring the words upon her tongue: 'and do You attu
ne my song.—I was but remembering,' she said as in answer to the King's swift look.
But Anthea, scanning, as shepherds will some red April sunrise, the shadow-play of that lady's lip and eyelash, said, for Campaspe's private ear. 'Honey-dew: a certain spittle of the stars. We shall see dog-tricks tonight.'
'Have I your higness' drift?' said the Duke: 'that when Truth's unhusked to the kernel, every imaginable thing is real as any other? and every one of them imperishable and eternal?'
.'Ay,' said the King: 'things past, things present, and things to come. And alike things not to come. And things imaginable and unimaginable alike.'
'So that a God, walking where He will, (as you, madam,' to his lady mother, In your garden, making a bunch of flowers), may gather, or note, this or this: make Him so His own particular world at choice.'
The King nodded.
'And soon as made, fling it away, if not to His mind, as you your nosegay. Yet this difference: rose-bud or canker-bud, His flowers are immortal. Worlds He may create and destroy again: but not the stuff of worlds.'
'Nay, there,' said the King, 'you go beyond me. No matter. Proceed.'
‘I go beyond your highness? But did not you say 'tis eternal, this stuff worlds are made of?'
'True: but who are you, to hobble the omnipotency of the most Highest? Will you deny the capacity to Almighty God with one breath to uncreate all Being, and, next breath, bring all back again pat as before?'
'To uncreate?' said the Lord Beroald: 'and Himself along with it?'
'And Himself along with it. Why not, if 'tis His whim?'
'Omnipotency is able, then, on your highness's showing, to be, by very virtue of its omnipotency, also impotence? Quod est absurdum.'
'Be it absurd: yet what more is it than to say He is able to create chaos? Chaos is a thing absurd. The condition of its existence is unreasonable. Yet it can exist.'
Beroald smiled his cold smile. 'Your serene highness will bear with me. In this empyreal light I am grown so owly-eyed as see but reason set to unthrone reason, and all confounded to confusion.'
'You must consider of it less narrowly: sub specie aeternitatis. Supposition is, every conceivable bunch of crciumstances, that is to say, every conceivable world, exists: but unworlded, unbunched: to our more mean capacities an unpassable bog or flux of seas, cities, rivers, lakes, wolds and deserts and mountain ranges, all with their plants, forests, mosses, water-weeds, what you will; and all manner of peoples, beasts, birds, fishes, creeping things, climes, dreams, loves, loathings, abominations, ecstasies, dissolutions, hopes, fears, forgetfulnesses, infinite in variety, infinite in number, fantasies beyond nightmare or madness. All this in potentia. All are there, even-just as are all the particulars in a landscape: He, like as the landscape-painter, selects and orders. The one paints a picture, the Other creates a world.'
‘A task to decay the patience of a God!' ' ‘No, Beroald: easy, soon done, if you be Almighty and All-knowing.'
'As the poet hath it,' said the Duke, and his eyes narrowed as a man's that stares up-wind searching yet more remote horizons:
'To an unfettered soules quick nimble hast
Are falling stars, and hearts thoughts, but slow pac'd'
‘What of Time, then?' said the Duchess.
'That is easy,' said Barganax: 'a separate Time for each separate world—call't earth, heaven, what you will—that He creates.'
The Duchess mused. ‘While Himself, will you think? so dealing, moveth not in these lower, cribbed, success-sions which we call Time, but in a more diviner Time which we call Eternity. It must be so,' she said, sitting back, gazing, herself too, as into unseen distances. 'And these worlds must exist, full and actual, as the God chooses them, remaining or going back, as He neglects or destroys them, to that more dim estate which we call possibility— These flowers, as in their causes, sleepe.'
'All which possible worlds,' said the King, 'infinitely many, infinitely diverse, are one as another, being they are every one available alike to His choice.'
'Except that a God,' said the Duchess, ‘will choose the Best.'
'Of an infinite number perfect, each bearing its singular and unique perfection, what is best?'
'And an infinite number imperfect?'
'How otherwise? And infinitely various and innumerable heavens. And infinitely various and innumerable hells.'
‘But a God,' Amalie said, ‘will never choose one of the hells to dwell in.'
'He is God, remember,' said the Duke, 'and can rid it away again when as the fancy takes Him.'
The Vicar gave a brutal laugh. ‘I cannot speak as a God. But I'll stake my soul there's no man born will choose to be in the shoes of one judged to die some ill death, as (saving your presence) be flayed alive; and there's he, stripped to's buff, strapped convenient on a plank, and the hangman with's knife, split, nick, splay, roll back the skin from's belly as you'd roll up a blanket.'
Zenianthe bit her knuckles. ‘No, no.'
The King spoke, and his words came as a darkness. 'As His rule is infinite, His knowing is unconfined.'
To look on at it: enough knowing so, I’d a thought,' said the Parry. 'Or do it. Not be done by.'
'Even that,' said the King, as it were thick darkness turned to speech. The eagless looked forth in Fiorinda's eyes.
'Go,' said the Vicar: 'I hold it plain blasphemy.' Fiorinda, with unreadable gaze beholding him, drew her tongue along her lips with a strange and covert smile.
'Come, we have fallen into unhappy talk,' said the King. 'But I'll not disthrone and dissceptre God of His omniscience: not abridge His choice: no, not were it to become of Himself a little stinking muck of dirt that is swept out of unclean corners. For a moment. To know.'
But the Duchess Amalie shivered. 'Not that—that filthiness the man spoke on. God is good: will not behold evil.'
'Ah, madam,' the King said, Tiere, where this lower Time determines all our instants, and where is no turning back: here indeed is good and evil. But sub specie aeternitatis, all that IS is good. For how shall God, having supreme and uncontrollable authority to come and go in those infinite successions of eternity, be subject unto time, change, or death? His toys they are, not conditions of His being.'
There was a pause. Then said the Duke, thoughtfully dividing with his silver fork the flesh from the bones of a red mullet, 'Needs must then (so reasoneth at least my unexpert youth) that death and annihilation be real: the circle squared: square root of minus one, a real number. Needs must all particular beings, nay, spirits (if there be) unmade, without beginning or ending in time, be brought to not-being; and with these, the One unical, the only-being Being, be obliterate, put out of memory, vox inanis, Nothing.'
The Vicar, upon a swig of wine, here bedravelled both beard and cheek with his too swift up-tipping of the cup. The Lord Jeronimy, as grown suddenly a very old man, stared, slackmouthed, hollow-eyed, into vacancy, fingering tremulously the while the jewel of the kingly order of the hippogriff that hung about his neck. Zenian - the, herself too at gaze, yet bore not, as the Admiral, aught of human terror in her eye: only the loveliness of her youth seemed to settle deeper, as if rooted in the right and unjarring harmonies of some great oak-tree's being, when the rust of its leaves is melted in the incandescence of a still November sunset which feeds on summer and shines towards spring. Anthea whispered Campaspe: their nymphish glances darted from the Duchess's face to the face of her lady of honour: so, and back: so, again.
After a little, the Duchess began to say, resting her eyes the while on that Lady Fiorinda: 'But there is, I think, a dweller in the innermost which yet IS, even when that immeasurable death shall have disrobed it of all being. There is that which made death, and can unmake. And that dweller, I think, is love. Nay, I question if there truly BE, in the end, aught but love and lovers; and God is the Love that unites them.'
There fell a stillness. Out of which stillness, the Duke was ware of the King his Father saying, 'Well? But what world, then, for us, my Amalie?'<
br />
'Answer me first,' said she, ‘why will God this world and not that? out of this infinity of choice?'
The King answered, 'For Her 'tis wrought'
'So Her choice it is?'
'Must we not think so?'
‘But how is She to choose?'
‘How can She choose amiss? seeing that every choice of Hers is, of Her very nature, a kind of beauty.'
'But if He may so lightly and so unthriftily make and unmake, can He not make and unmake Her?'
'We must think so,' said the King. 'But only at cost of making and unmaking of Himself.'
'My lord Chancellor smiles.'
‘But to observe,' said the Chancellor, ‘How his serene highness, spite of that conclusion he hath driven upon so many reasonable principles, is enforced at last to say No to the Most Highest.'
'It is Himself hast said it, not I. There is this No in His very nature, I should say,' said the King. "The most single and alonely One, abiding still one in itself, though it be possible, is not a thing to be dreamed of by a God: it is poverty, parsimony, an imagination not tolerable save to unbloody and insectile creatures as far _ removed below men's natures as men's below Gods'.'
'As the philosopher hath it,' said Barganax: 'lnfinitus Amor potestate infinitd Pulchritudinem infinitam in infinitd perjectione creatur et conservatur: infinite Love, of His infinite power, createth and conserveth infinite Beauty in Her infinite perfection. You see, I have sat at the feet of Doctor Vandermast.'
Fiorinda's uncomparable lips chilled again to the contours of the sphinx's, as she said, with accents where the bee's sting stabbed through the honey to the shuddering sense, 'But whether it be more than windy words, which of us can know?'
'Which of us indeed, dear Lady of Sakes?' said the King.
'And what need we care?'
Anthea, upon a touch, feather-light, tremulous as a willow-wren's fluttered wing, of Campaspe's hand against her arm, looked round at her: with eyes feral and tawny, into eyes black and bead-like as a little water-rat's: exchanging with these a most strange, discharmed, unweariable look. And that was a look most unaccordant with the wont of human eyes: beasts' eyes, rather, wherein played bo-peep and hid themselves sudden profundities, proceeding, a learned man might have guessed, from near copulation with deity.