A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (31 page)

'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 ever-changing 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 f
irst. 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 attune
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 to-night.'

'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 filth
iness 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 a
eter
nitatis,
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.