“You put them to the boards!” cried the threatened resident. “You gave them up to the marching boards. Admit it!”
“I am not privy to such matters. This property, sir, is required. Here are the new renters …”
“No,” says the Rose, “not so. I will not be the cause of this man and his family losing their home!”
“Sentiment! Silly sentiment!” Vailadez Rench roared with laughter that held in it every kind of insult, every heartless mockery. “My dear madam, this family has rented property it cannot afford. You can afford it. That is a simple, natural rule, sir. That is a fact of the world, sir.” (These last addressed to the offending debtor.) “Let us through, sir. Let us through. We uphold our time-honoured Right to View!” With which he pushed past the unfortunate letter-writer and drew the puzzled trio behind him into a dark passageway from which stairs led. From the landing peered bright button-eyes which might have belonged to a weasel, while from the stairs another pair of eyes regarded them with smouldering rage. They entered a large, untidy room, full of threadbare furnishings and old documents, where, in a wheeled chair made of ivory and boarwood, a tiny figure sat hunched. Again only the eyes seemed alive—black, penetrating eyes of no apparent intelligence. “Mother, they invade!” cried the besieged householder. “Oh, sir, you are cruel, to practise such fierce rectitude upon a frail old woman! How can she walk, sir? How can she move?”
“She must be pushed, Master Fallogard! She will roll as we all roll. Forward, always forward. To a finer future, Master Fallogard. We work for that, you know.” Vailadez Rench stooped to peer at the old woman. “Thus do we maintain the integrity of our great Nation.”
“I had read somewhere,” said Master Wheldrake quietly, stepping a little further into the room and inspecting it as if he truly intended to make it his home, “that a society dedicated solely to the preservation of her past, soon has only her past to sell. Why not stop the village, Master Rench, so that the old lady shall not have to move?”
“You enjoy these obscenities, I suppose, sir, in your own realm? They are not appreciated here.” Vailadez Rench looked down his long nose—a stork offering a parakeet only disdain. “The platforms must always move. The Nation must always move. There can be no pause to the gypsy’s way. And any who would block our way are our enemies! Any not invited to set foot on our road but who tread it in defiance of our laws—they are our deadly enemies, for they represent the many who would block our way and attempt to bring to a halt the Gypsy Nation, which has traveled, for more than a thousand times, the circumference of the world, over land and sea, along the road of their own making. The Free Road of the Free Gypsy People!”
“I, too, was taught schoolboy litanies to explain the follies of my own country,” said Wheldrake, turning away. “I have no quarrel with such wounded, needy souls as yourself, who must chant a creed as some kind of primitive charm against the unknown. It seems to me, as I travel the multiverse, that reliance upon such insistencies is what all mortals have in common. Million upon million of different tribes, each with its own fiercely defended truth.”
“Bravo, sir!” cries Fallogard Phatt with a wave of his generous quill (and ink goes flying over mother, books and papers), “but do not elaborate on such sentiments, I warn you! They are mine. They are my whole family’s, yet they are forbidden here, as in so many worlds. Do not speak so frankly, sir, lest you’d follow my uncle and my sister to the boards and the Long Stroll to Oblivion.”
“Heretic! You have no right to such fine Property!” Vailadez Rench’s lugubrious features twist with dismay, his delicate paint glowing from the heat of his own offended blood, as if some exotic fruit of Eden had bloomed and given voice simultaneously. “Evictors must be summoned and that will not be pleasant for Fallogard Phatt and the Family Phatt!”
“What remains of it,” grumbles Phatt, suddenly downhearted, as if he had always anticipated his defeat. “I have a dozen futures. Which to pick?” And he closes his eyes and screws up his face as if he, too, has sipped a dragon’s diluted venom, and he lets out a great keening noise, the cry of a wronged soul, the despairing voice of a creature which sees Justice suddenly as a Chimera and all displays of it a mere Charade. “A dozen futures, but still no fairness for the common folk! Where does this Tanelorn, this paradise, exist?”
And Elric, who is the only one Phatt is ever likely to meet who could supply him with anything but a metaphysical answer, remains silent, for in Tanelorn he took a vow as all do who receive her protection and her peace. Only true seekers after peace shall find Tanelorn, for Tanelorn is a secret carried by every mortal. And Tanelorn exists wherever mortals gather in mutual determination to serve the common good, creating as many paradises as there are human souls …
“I was told,” he said, “that it exists within oneself.”
At which Fallogard Phatt laid down his pen and ink, picked up a sack in which he had already, it appeared, packed his necessities, and began with downcast eyes to wheel his old mother from the room, calling out for the other members of his family as he did so.
Vailadez Rench watched them trail off with their bundles and their keepsakes and sniffed with considerable satisfaction as he looked around the house. “A lick of paint will soon brighten this property,” he assured them, “and we will, of course, have all this clutter sent for salvage and put to efficient use. We are well rid, I’m sure you will agree, of the Family Phatt and that disgusting valetudinarian!”
By now Elric’s self-control was growing weak and had it not been for the Rose’s steady eyes upon him, for Wheldrake’s grim and furious silence, he would have spoken his mind. As it was, the Rose approved the house, agreed the lease and accepted the keys from the fastidious fingers of that Sultan of Sophistry, dismissed him swiftly and then led them in hurried pursuit of the exiled debtors, sighting them as they made their way slowly towards the nearest downside stairway.
Elric saw her catch up with Fallogard Phatt, place a comforting hand upon the shoulder of an adolescent girl, whisper a word in the ear of the mother, give a friendly tug to the hair of the boy, and bring them, bewildered, back with her. “They are to live with us—or at least upon our credit. That cannot, surely, be against even the Gypsy Nation’s peculiar sense of security.”
Elric regarded the threadbare group with some dismay, having no wish to burden himself with a family, especially one which seemed to him so feckless. He glanced at the girl, dark and petulant in her blossoming beauty, her expression one of almost permanent contempt for everything she looked upon, while the boy, aged about ten, had the black eyes he had noted on the stairs: the weasel’s alert and eager eyes, and a narrow, pointed face to add to the effect, his long, blond hair slicked hard against his skull, his small-fingered hands twitching and eager, the nose questing, as if he already scented vermin. And when he grinned, in grateful understanding of the Rose’s charity, he revealed sharp little teeth, white against the moist redness of his lips. “You shall see an end to your quest, lady,” he said. “Blood and sap shall blend again—lest Chaos decide to challenge this prognosis. There is a road between the worlds that leads to a better place than the one on which we travel. You must take the Infinite Path, lady, and look at the end of it for the resolution to your troubles.”
Instead of responding with puzzlement or fear to his strange words, the Rose smiled and bent to kiss him. “Clairvoyant, all of you?” she asked.
“It is the chief business of the Family Phatt,” said Fallogard Phatt with some dignity. “It has always been our privilege to read the cards, see through the crystal’s mist and know the future such as it ever can be foretold with any certainty. Which is why, of course, we were not unhappy when we found we must join the Gypsy Nation. But, we discovered, these folk have no true clairvoyance, merely a collection of tricks and illusions with which to impress or control others. Once their people had the richest powers of all. They dissipated, little by little, on their pointless march around the world. They gave them up for security yo
u see. And now we, too, have no use for our powers …” He sighed and scratched rapidly at himself in several places, adjusting buttons and loops and ties as he did so, as if he only just realized his disheveled condition. “What are we to do? Should we become walkers, we shall inevitably be doomed to end our days at the marching boards.”
“We would join forces with you,” Elric heard the Rose say, and he looked at her in surprise. “We have the power to help you against the jurisdiction of the Gypsy Nation. And you have the power to help us find what we seek here. There are three sisters we must discover. Perhaps they have another with them now, an armoured man whose face is never revealed.”
“It is my mother you must ask in that respect,” said Fallogard Phatt absently, as he considered her words. “And my niece. Charion has all her grandmother’s skills, I think, though she must learn more wisdom yet …”
The girl glared at him, but she seemed flattered.
“It is my boy Koropith Phatt, who is the greatest of all Phatts,” said his father, laying a proud and perhaps proprietorial hand upon the infant, whose little black eyes regarded his father with amused affection and a certain knowing sympathy. “There has never been a Phatt as full of the gift as Koropith. He is brimming with psychic advantages!”
“Then he and we must come to our arrangements quickly,” said the Rose. “For the time is here when we must seek a means of charting a specific course between the worlds. If we can free you, can you lead us where we must go?”
“I have that ability, at least,” said Fallogard Phatt, “and will gladly aid you however I can. But the boy has found pathways through the realms I had not even heard rumoured. And the girl can seek out an individual through all the layers of the multiverse. She is a bloodhound, that child. She is a terrier. She is a spaniel …”
Interrupting this effusion of canine comparisons, Master Wheldrake found a book in one of his inner pockets and drew it forth with a flourish. “Here’s what I remembered having! Here it is!”
They looked at him in polite expectation as he pulled his newly received credits from his waistcoat and pushed them into the hands of the baffled boy. “Here, young Master Koropith, go with your cousin to the market! I’ll give you a list. Tonight I intend to make us all a meal substantial enough to help us through our coming adventure!”
He brandished the scarlet book. “Between Mrs. Beeton and myself I think I can provide us with a supper the like of which you’ll not have tasted in a twelvemonth!”
CHAPTER FIVE
Conversations with Clairvoyants Concerning the Nature of the Multiverse &c. Dramatic Methods of Escape.
The elaborate and exquisite feast over, and soothed by a recitation of some excellent sonnets, even Elric was able to divert his attention, for a little while, away from the persistent memory of his dead father waiting for him in that dead city.
“We have lived by our wits, the Phatts, for generations.” Fallogard Phatt was in his cups. Even his old mother put wine to her wizened lips and occasionally giggled. His son and niece were either in bed or hidden in the stairwell’s shadows. Wheldrake refilled Mother Phatt’s bumper while the Rose sat back in her chair, the only one determined to keep her mind upon the crucial issues of their circumstances. She drank no wine, but seemed content to let the others relax as they wished. Next to her around the table, Elric sipped the dark blue-black stuff and wished that it could have some effect upon him, reflecting sardonically to himself that after a draught of dragon’s venom most drinks had something of an insipid quality …
“There are only a few adepts,” Fallogard Phatt was saying, “who have ever explored even a fraction of the multiverse, but the Phatts, I must say, are as experienced as any. Mother here, for instance, has the routes of at least two thousand different pathways between some five thousand realms. Her instincts are occasionally a little dulled, these days, but our niece is learning well. She has the same talent.”
“So you sought this plane deliberately?” said the Rose suddenly, as if his remarks coincided with her own thoughts.
This produced a wild peal of laughter in Fallogard Phatt, threatening to burst his thoroughly buttoned waistcoat while his hair sprang up around his head and his face grew red. “No, madam, that’s the joke of it. Few here ever came because they had heard of the Gypsy Nation and wished to join it. But the Nation has set up its own peculiar field—a kind of psychic gravity—which draws many here who would otherwise be in limbo. It acts—in a psychic, but also in an oddly material way, too—as a kind of false-limbo, a world of lost souls, indeed.”
“Lost souls?” Elric now grew alert. “Lost souls, Master Phatt?”
“And bodies, too, of course. For the most part.” Fallogard Phatt made a drunken movement with his hand then paused, as if he heard something, then peered with sudden intelligence into the albino’s crimson eyes. “Aye, sir,” he said in a quieter tone, “lost souls, indeed!” And Elric felt for a few seconds the sense of some benign presence within him, sympathetic and perhaps even protective. The sensation was quickly gone and Phatt was holding forth to Wheldrake on some jolly abstraction which seemed to excite them both, but the Rose was, if anything, more thoughtful as she glanced from Phatt to Elric and, frequently, at the busy head of little Mother Phatt, who sat with her two hands clutching her wine-cup, nodding and smiling and scarcely following, or caring to follow, the general drift, yet seemingly content and alert in her own mysterious way.
“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 th
ose 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. His folk, older and unhuman settlers, pursued or banished or otherwise escaping through the realms, had been victims of a mighty catastrophe, perhaps of their own creation.
Memory follows memory, memory defeats memory; some things are banished only into the realms of our rich imaginings—but this does not mean that they do not or cannot or will not exist—they exist! They exist!
The last Melnibonéan thinks of his people’s history and legends, and he tells his human friends some of what he knows and one day a human scribe will write these remembered words which will become in turn the foundation for whole cycles of myths, whole volumes of legend and superstition, so that a grain of a grain of prehuman memory is carried over to us, blood to blood, life to life. And the cycles turn and spin and intersect at unpredictable points in an eternity of possibilities, paradoxes and conjunctions, and one tale feeds another and one anecdote provides others with entire epics. Thus we influence past, present and future and all their possibilities. Thus are we all responsible for one another, through all the myriad dimensions of time and space that make up the multiverse …