The Multiverse
(Moorcock laid out a lot of his ideas about the Multiverse in this comic book, which follows several parallel stories: the Game of Time being played between Jack Karaquazian and Michael Moorcock at the Terminal Café; the adventures of the Rose; the story of Duke Elric in the 11th century AD; and the adventures of Sir Seaton Begg, the Metatemporal Detective. It's a lot to swallow. This prose excerpt, which serves as an introduction, is as tidy a summary of the Multiverse and its workings as you're likely to get.)
From Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, Michael Moorcock, Walter Simonson, Mark Reeve, and John Ridgway. DC Comics, 1999.
Extracts from the notebooks of Captain Oswald Bastable, LTA, airshipman, time-traveler, explorer and adventurer, written during the course of the ill-fated expedition led by Sir Seaton Begg and his Texas Volunteers in search of a world said to lie at the Earth's core. Moo-Ooria. The world of the Off-Moo. Beneath the Earth's Crust and beyond the farthest star. Further conversations with Scholar Oj-ni about the nature of reality.
18/12/39
Thanks to the wisdom of this strange folk, I am at last able to understand the nature of Time and Space. We have been almost wholly wrong in our presumptions, which only seem to explain but perpetually raise more questions. It is what Scholar Oj-ni calls the linear delusion and it is Homo sapiens' particular curse and also their blessing.
We already know that Time is neither linear nor cyclic, although it can appear to be either. But even while we of the League of Temporal Adventurers negotiated what are variously called the timestreams, the moonbeam roads, or the megaflow, we did not understand that Time is in fact a field in which everything happens at the same moment. It is we who give specific form to events and ideas, through our infinitely varied storytelling, our myths, legends and games. I am persuaded that human beings actually create realities by an effort of insensate will out of the flux of Chaos. We are therefore the living creations of our own imaginations, brought to life by, sustained by, and endowed with, some strange moral force which the League sometimes calls The Great Balance.
Some misname what the balance weighs as "Good" and "Evil," when properly these are best termed "Law" and "Chaos." Ideally, it is when the Balance is in perfect equilibrium that the struggle of "The Just" is rewarded. Most sentient and nonsentient activity in the multiverse is based upon this struggle. Most successful, enduring structures, such as the mysterious city of Tanelorn (said to have been built on the site of modern Marrakesh), have achieved that ideal harmony between the two forces.
As our reality is created by insensate will, so is the conscious will of those eternals and neareternals concentrated to achieve, through their strange creative rituals and games, that same harmony. Some will play for Chaos, others for Law, and their roles and rules are constantly shifting, so they must be alert, clever, anticipatory. A few will play for themselves, hoping to achieve advantage by changing loyalties at every turn. They are the enemies of harmony. The multiverse itself is not a sphere, but more closely resembles a vast, unmappable tree, with constantly spreading branches and shoots, constantly dying limbs, a great organic, infinite tangle through which some of us venture by established routes while the bravest of us navigate fresh pathways to new universes.
To translate this into my familiar (if less exact) geometries, the multiverse is like a pool into which a stone is thrown, casting infinite ripples. These ripples, which move out through the time field, are each one different versions of our familiar realities, each one of a slightly larger scale and fractionally dissipating mass. If you imagine a boat skimming over those ripples, altering its mass slightly in accordance, that is how a mukhamir - one of the just - travels between the realities. They are able to negotiate and utilize their own slightly differing personalities as skillfully as they negotiate the multiverse itself.
The multiverse is constantly growing and constantly decaying, densest at its "core" and least dense at its "rim." For this reason the ships of the so-called Chaos Engineers have become completely organic. They are able to change mass, size and shape as they ride "upscale" and "downscale." In contrast, the so-called "Singularity" craft of the First Ether (which contains my own home universe) cut through the scales like knives, leaving scars and fault lines, scaling up and down using mechanical "scaling stations," the oldest and most frequently used being on Mars.
The Martian Scaling Station is also used as an entrance and exit through the walls of the First Ether, composed of a vast sphere of supercarbon buckyballs in which the Lords of Singularity contain their universe and protect it from contamination: All that lies outside the Lords' sphere they call Chaos - or the Second Ether, where minds must be super-flexible (as must organisms) and of a certain character to survive.
The greatest of these explorers are all gamblers of one kind or another. Among these are the jugadors, who play a game with the multiverse itself, creating their own realities and stories which give narrative form to Chaos and enables them to blaze new trails - their "moonbeam roads" - from one reality to the next. To create controllable reality from apparent disorder is the purpose of any round in what is popularly called The Game of Time.
Very rarely there comes an event known as The Conjunction of the Million Spheres (although in reality far more worlds are involved) when it might be possible to determine the fundamental realities of the entire multiverse - to change the rules of nature, to alter the human condition. The Time Gamblers dream of playing this Great Game and long to be privileged enough to become participants. Scholar Oj-ni informs me that the Conjunction nears. The greatest game is beginning, and it will be a battle between those who would control reality and those who would explore and understand it, between simplistic notions of law and acknowledgment of the complex realities of chaos.
I will close for the moment. Sir Seaton Begg has grown very animated. There is some chance that we can negotiate the Grey Fees, after all, and that the expedition can continue. Meanwhile I pass these notes on to Scholar Oj-ji, who promises that he will get them into the hands of my recorder, Lt. Moorcock, who even now waits in Marrakesh for news of our expedition.
Cpt. O. Bastable
Somewhere in the Grey Fees.
From Michael Moorcock's Multiverse, Michael Moorcock, Walter Simonson, Mark Reeve, and John Ridgway. DC Comics, 1999.
Extracts from the notebooks of Captain Oswald Bastable, LTA, airshipman, time-traveler, explorer and adventurer, written during the course of the ill-fated expedition led by Sir Seaton Begg and his Texas Volunteers in search of a world said to lie at the Earth's core. Moo-Ooria. The world of the Off-Moo. Beneath the Earth's Crust and beyond the farthest star. Further conversations with Scholar Oj-ni about the nature of reality.
18/12/39
Thanks to the wisdom of this strange folk, I am at last able to understand the nature of Time and Space. We have been almost wholly wrong in our presumptions, which only seem to explain but perpetually raise more questions. It is what Scholar Oj-ni calls the linear delusion and it is Homo sapiens' particular curse and also their blessing.
We already know that Time is neither linear nor cyclic, although it can appear to be either. But even while we of the League of Temporal Adventurers negotiated what are variously called the timestreams, the moonbeam roads, or the megaflow, we did not understand that Time is in fact a field in which everything happens at the same moment. It is we who give specific form to events and ideas, through our infinitely varied storytelling, our myths, legends and games. I am persuaded that human beings actually create realities by an effort of insensate will out of the flux of Chaos. We are therefore the living creations of our own imaginations, brought to life by, sustained by, and endowed with, some strange moral force which the League sometimes calls The Great Balance.
Some misname what the balance weighs as "Good" and "Evil," when properly these are best termed "Law" and "Chaos." Ideally, it is when the Balance is in perfect equilibrium that the struggle of "The Just" is rewarded. Most sentient and nonsentient activity in the multiverse is based upon this struggle. Most successful, enduring structures, such as the mysterious city of Tanelorn (said to have been built on the site of modern Marrakesh), have achieved that ideal harmony between the two forces.
As our reality is created by insensate will, so is the conscious will of those eternals and neareternals concentrated to achieve, through their strange creative rituals and games, that same harmony. Some will play for Chaos, others for Law, and their roles and rules are constantly shifting, so they must be alert, clever, anticipatory. A few will play for themselves, hoping to achieve advantage by changing loyalties at every turn. They are the enemies of harmony. The multiverse itself is not a sphere, but more closely resembles a vast, unmappable tree, with constantly spreading branches and shoots, constantly dying limbs, a great organic, infinite tangle through which some of us venture by established routes while the bravest of us navigate fresh pathways to new universes.
To translate this into my familiar (if less exact) geometries, the multiverse is like a pool into which a stone is thrown, casting infinite ripples. These ripples, which move out through the time field, are each one different versions of our familiar realities, each one of a slightly larger scale and fractionally dissipating mass. If you imagine a boat skimming over those ripples, altering its mass slightly in accordance, that is how a mukhamir - one of the just - travels between the realities. They are able to negotiate and utilize their own slightly differing personalities as skillfully as they negotiate the multiverse itself.
The multiverse is constantly growing and constantly decaying, densest at its "core" and least dense at its "rim." For this reason the ships of the so-called Chaos Engineers have become completely organic. They are able to change mass, size and shape as they ride "upscale" and "downscale." In contrast, the so-called "Singularity" craft of the First Ether (which contains my own home universe) cut through the scales like knives, leaving scars and fault lines, scaling up and down using mechanical "scaling stations," the oldest and most frequently used being on Mars.
The Martian Scaling Station is also used as an entrance and exit through the walls of the First Ether, composed of a vast sphere of supercarbon buckyballs in which the Lords of Singularity contain their universe and protect it from contamination: All that lies outside the Lords' sphere they call Chaos - or the Second Ether, where minds must be super-flexible (as must organisms) and of a certain character to survive.
The greatest of these explorers are all gamblers of one kind or another. Among these are the jugadors, who play a game with the multiverse itself, creating their own realities and stories which give narrative form to Chaos and enables them to blaze new trails - their "moonbeam roads" - from one reality to the next. To create controllable reality from apparent disorder is the purpose of any round in what is popularly called The Game of Time.
Very rarely there comes an event known as The Conjunction of the Million Spheres (although in reality far more worlds are involved) when it might be possible to determine the fundamental realities of the entire multiverse - to change the rules of nature, to alter the human condition. The Time Gamblers dream of playing this Great Game and long to be privileged enough to become participants. Scholar Oj-ni informs me that the Conjunction nears. The greatest game is beginning, and it will be a battle between those who would control reality and those who would explore and understand it, between simplistic notions of law and acknowledgment of the complex realities of chaos.
I will close for the moment. Sir Seaton Begg has grown very animated. There is some chance that we can negotiate the Grey Fees, after all, and that the expedition can continue. Meanwhile I pass these notes on to Scholar Oj-ji, who promises that he will get them into the hands of my recorder, Lt. Moorcock, who even now waits in Marrakesh for news of our expedition.
Cpt. O. Bastable
Somewhere in the Grey Fees.