The Best of Michael Moorcock Page 2

  “I regret, madam, I am only lately bereaved—”

  “I’m no sensation-seeker, sir, but an honest woman with an honest ambition. I do not tempt you with the pleasures of the flesh, but of the soul. Something which might engage you for a while, even ease your mind a little. I can more readily convince you of this if you come to my house. I live there alone, save for servants. You may bring your sword, if you wish. Indeed, if you have fellows, bring them also. Thus I offer you every advantage.”

  The albino rose slowly from his bench and placed the empty goblet carefully on the well-worn wood. His own smile reflected hers. He bowed. “Lead on, madam.” And he followed her through a crowd which parted like corn before the reaper, leaving a momentary silence behind him.

  2 The Material

  She had brought him to the depth of the city’s oldest quarter, where artists of every skill, she told him, were licensed to work unhindered by landlord or, save in the gravest cases, the law. This ancient sanctuary was created by time-honoured tradition and the granting of certain guarantees by the clerics whose great university had once been the centre of the settlement. These guarantees had been strengthened during the reign of the great King Alo’ofd, an accomplished player of the nine-stringed murmerlan, who loved all the arts and struggled with a desire to throw off the burdens of his office and become a musician. King Alo’ofd’s decrees had been law for the past millennium and his successors had never dared challenge them.

  “Thus, this quarter harbours not only artists of great talent,” she told him, “but many who have only the minimum of talent. Enough to allow them to live according to our ancient freedoms. Sadly, sir, there is as much forgery practised here, of every kind, as there is originality.”

  “Yours is not the only such quarter.” He spoke absently, his eyes inspecting the colourful paintings, sculptures and manuscripts displayed on every side. They were of varied quality, but only a few showed genuine inspiration and beauty. Yet the accomplishment was generally higher than Elric had usually observed in the Young Kingdoms. “Even in Melniboné we had these districts. Two of my cousins, for instance, were calligraphers. Another composed for the flute.”

  “I have heard of Melnibonéan arts,” she said. “But we are too distant from your island home to have seen many examples. There are stories, of course.” She smiled. “Some of them are decidedly sinister . . .”

  “Oh, they are doubtless true. We had no trouble if audiences, for instance, died for an artist’s work. Many great composers would experiment, for instance, with the human voice.” His eyes again clouded, remembering not a crime but his lost passion.

  It seemed she misinterpreted him. “I feel for you, sir. I am not one of those who celebrated the fall of the Dreaming City.”

  “You could not know its influence, so far away,” he murmured, picking up a remarkable little pot and studying its design. “But those who were our neighbours were glad to see us humiliated. I do not blame them. Our time was over.” His expression was again one of cultivated insouciance. She turned her own gaze towards a house which leaned like an amiable drunkard on the buttressed walls of two neighbours, giving the impression that if it fell, then all would fall together. The house was of wood and sandy brick, of many floors, each at an angle to the rest, covered by a waved roof.

  “This is the residence,” she told him, “where my forefathers and myself have lived and worked. It is the House of the Th’ee and I am Rai-u Th’ee, last of my line. It is my ambition to leave a single great work of art behind, carved in a material which has been in our possession for centuries, yet until now always considered too valuable to use. It is a rare material, at least to us, and possessed of a number of qualities, some of which our ancestors only hinted at.”

  “My curiosity grows,” said Elric, though now he found himself wishing that he had accepted her offer and brought his sword. “What is this material?”

  “It is a kind of ivory,” she said, leading him into the ramshackle house which, for all its age and decrepitude, had clearly once been rich. Even the wall-hangings, now in rags, revealed traces of their former quality. There were paintings from floor to ceiling which, Elric knew, would have commanded magnificent prices at any market. The furniture was carved by genuine artists and showed the passing of a hundred fashions, from the plain, somewhat austere style of the city’s secular period, to the ornate enrichments of her pagan age. Some were inset with jewels, as were the many mirrors, framed with exquisite and elaborate ornament. Elric was surprised, given what she had told him of the quarter, that the House of Th’ee had never been robbed.

  Apparently reading his thoughts, she said: “This place has been afforded certain protections down the years.” She led him into a tall studio, lit by a single, unpapered window through which a great deal of light entered, illuminating the scrolls and boxed books lining the walls. Crowded on tables and shelves stood sculptures in every conceivable material. They were in bone and granite and hardwood and limestone. They were in clay and bronze, in iron and sea-green basalt. Bright, glinting whites, deep, swirling blacks. Colours of every possible shade from darkest blue to the lightest pinks and yellows. There was gold, silver and delicate porphyry. There were heads and torsos and reclining figures, beasts of every kind, some believed extinct. There were representations of the Lords and Ladies of Chaos and of Law, every supernatural aristocrat who had ever ruled in heaven, hell or limbo. Elementals. Animal-bodied men, birds in flight, leaping deer, men and women at rest, historical subjects, group subjects and half-finished subjects which hinted at something still to be discovered in the stone. They were the work of genius, decided the albino, and his respect for this bold woman grew.

  “Yes.” Again she anticipated a question, speaking with firm pride. “They are all mine. I love to work. Many of these are taken from life . . .”

  He thought it impolitic to ask which.

  “But you will note,” she added, “that I have never had the pleasure of sculpting the head of a Melnibonéan. This could be my only opportunity.”

  “Ah,” he began regretfully, but with great grace she silenced him, drawing him to a table on which sat a tall, shrouded object. She took away the cloth. “This is the material we have owned down the generations but for which we had never yet found an appropriate subject.”

  He recognised the material. He reached to run his hand over its warm smoothness. He had seen more than one of these in the old caves of the Phoorn, to whom his folk were related. He had seen them in living creatures who even now slept in Melniboné, wearied by their work of destruction, their old master made an exile, with no one to care for them save a few mad old men who knew how to do nothing else.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “it is what you know it is. It cost my forefathers a great fortune for, as you can imagine, your folk were not readily forthcoming with such things. It was smuggled from Melniboné and traded through many nations before it reached us, some two-and-a-half centuries ago.”

  Elric found himself almost singing to the thing as he caressed it. He felt a mixture of nostalgia and deep sadness.

  “It is dragon ivory, of course.” Her hand joined his on the hard, brilliant surface of the great curved tusk. Few Phoorn had owned such fangs. Only the greatest of the patriarchs, legendary creatures of astonishing ferocity and wisdom, who had come from their old world to this, following their kin, the humanlike folk of Melniboné. The Phoorn, too, had not been native to this world, but had fled another. They, too, had always been alien and cruel, impossibly beautiful, impossibly strange. Elric felt kinship even now for this piece of bone. It was perhaps all that remained of the first generation to settle on this plane.

  “It is a holy thing.” His voice was growing cold again. Inexplicable pain forced him to withdraw from her. “It is my own kin. Blood for blood, the Phoorn and the folk of Melniboné are one. It was our power. It was our strength. It was our continuity. This is ancestral bone. Stolen bone. It would be sacrilege . . .”

  “No, Prin
ce Elric, in my hands it would be a unification. A resolution. A completion. You know why I have brought you here.”

  “Yes.” His hand fell to his side. He swayed, as if faint. He felt a need for the herbs he carried with him. “But it is still sacrilege . . .”

  “Not if I am the one to give it life.” Her veil was drawn back now and he saw how impossibly young she was, what beauty she had: a beauty mirrored in all the things she had carved and moulded. Her desire was, he was sure, an honest one. Two very different emotions warred within him. Part of him felt she was right, that she could unite the two kinsfolk in a single image and bring honour to all his ancestors, a kind of resolution to their mutual history. Part of him feared what she might create. In honouring his past, would she be destroying the future? Then some fundamental part of him made him gather himself up and turn to her. She gasped at what she saw burning in those terrible, ruby eyes.

  “Life?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A new life honouring the old. Will you sit for me?” She too was caught up in his mood, for she too was endangering everything she valued, possibly her own soul, to make what might be her very last great work. “Will you allow me to create your memorial? Will you help me redeem that destruction whose burden is so heavy upon you? A symbol for everything that was Melniboné?”

  He let go of his caution but felt no responsive glee. The fire dulled in his eyes. His mask returned. “I will need you to help me brew certain herbs, madam. They will sustain me while I sit for you.”

  Her step was light as she led him into a room where she had lit a stove and on which water already boiled, but his own face still resembled the stone of her carvings. His gaze was turned inward, his eyes alternately flared and faded like a dying candle. His chest moved with deep, almost dying breaths as he gave himself up to her art.

  3 The Sitting

  How many hours did he sit, still and silent in the chair? At one time she remarked on the fact that he scarcely moved. He said that he had developed the habit over several hundred years and, when she voiced surprise, permitted himself a smile. “You have not heard of Melniboné’s dream couches? They are doubtless destroyed with the rest. It is how we learn so much when young. The couches let us dream for a year, even centuries, while the time passing for those awake was but minutes. I appear to you as a relatively young man, lady. But actually I have lived for centuries. It took me that time to pursue my dream-quests, which in turn taught me my craft and prepared me for . . .” And then he stopped speaking, his pale lids falling over his troubled, unlikely eyes.

  She drew breath, as if to ask a further question, then thought better of it. She brewed him cup after cup of invigorating herbs and she continued to work, her delicate chisels fashioning an extraordinary likeness. She had genius in her hands. Every line of the albino’s head was rapidly reproduced. And Elric, almost dreaming again, stared into the middle-distance. His thoughts were far away and in the past, where he had left the corpse of his beloved Cymoril to burn on the pyre he had made of his own ancient home, the great and beautiful Imrryr, the Dreaming City, the dreamer’s city, which many had considered indestructible, had believed to be more conjuring than reality, created by the Melnibonéan Sorcerer Kings into a delicate reality, whose towers, so tall they disappeared amongst clouds, were actually the result of supernatural will rather than the creation of architects and masons.

  Yet Elric had proven such theories false when Melniboné burned. Now all knew him for a traitor and none trusted him, even those whose ambition he had served. They said he was twice a traitor, once to his own folk, second to those he had led on the raid which had razed Imrryr and upon whom he had turned. But in his own mind he was thrice a traitor, for he had slain his beloved Cymoril, beautiful sister of cousin Yyrkoon, who had tricked Elric into killing her with that terrible black blade whose energy both sustained and drained him.

  It was for Cymoril, more than Imrryr, that Elric mourned. But he showed none of this to the world and never spoke of it. Only in his dreams, those terrible, troubled dreams, did he see her again, which is why he almost always slept alone and presented a carefully cultivated air of insouciance to the world at large.

  Had he agreed to the sculptress’s request because she reminded him of his cousin?

  Hour upon tireless hour she worked with her exquisitely made instruments until at last she had finished. She sighed and it seemed her breath was a gentle witch-wind, filling the head with vitality. She turned the portrait for his inspection.

  It was as if he stared into a mirror. For a moment he thought he saw movement in the bust, as if his own essence had been absorbed by it. Save for the blank eyes, the carving might have been himself. Even the hair had been carved to add to the portrait’s lifelike qualities.

  She looked to him for his approval and received the faintest of smiles. “You have made the likeness of a monster,” he murmured. “I congratulate you. Now history will know the face of the man they call Elric Kinslayer.”

  “Ah,” she said, “you curse yourself too much, my lord. Do you look into the face of one who bears a guilt-weighted conscience?”

  And of course, he did. She had captured exactly that quality of melancholy and self-hatred behind the mask of insouciance which characterised the albino in repose.

  “Whoever looks on this will not say you were careless of your crimes.” Her voice was so soft it was almost a whisper now.

  At this he rose suddenly, putting down his cup. “I need no sentimental forgiveness,” he said coldly. “There is no forgiveness, no understanding, of that crime. History will be right to curse me for a coward, a traitor, a killer of women and of his own blood. You have done well, madam, to brew me those herbs, for I now feel strong enough to put all this and your city behind me!”

  She watched him leave, walking a little unsteadily like a man carrying a heavy burden, through the busy night, back to the inn where he had left his sword and armour. She knew that by morning he would be gone, riding out of Séred-Öma, never to return. Her hands caressed the likeness she had made, the blind, staring eyes, the mouth which was set in a grimace of self-mocking carelessness.

  And she knew he would always wonder, even as he put a thousand leagues between them, if he had not left at least a little of his yearning, desperate soul behind him.

  The Visible Men (2006)

  Now we move on to Moorcock’s other most famous and influential character, Jerry Cornelius, the ambiguous, androgynous “English Assassin.”

  Jerry started life in New Worlds—the seminal speculative fiction magazine which Moorcock edited for many years and with which he remains closely associated—in 1965, with “Preliminary Data,” an extract from what was to become the first of several Cornelius novels, The Final Programme, published in 1968. A later novel, The Condition of Muzak (1977), won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize.

  “The Visible Men” is a much more recent outing for Jerry and his bizarre circle of family, friends and foes. It is by far the shortest story in this collection, and possibly one of the strangest. It first appeared in Nature magazine (No. 7,091) in May 2006.

  Or, Down the Multiversal Rabbit Hole

  “That a cat’s cradle?” Miss Brunner peered down at a naked Jerry Cornelius tangling his hands in a mess of guitar strings. A red Rickenbacker twelve lay beside him.

  “It’s twine theory,” he said. Frank was absorbed in his own calculations covering the large slate propped on his mum’s kitchen table. “He got a bit confused. Too many Es. Too much reverb.” He followed her gaze. “G? Somewhere in the seventh dimension.”

  “He’s a simple soul at heart. Easily led . . .” Major Nye stroked his pale moustache. He’d come in with Miss Brunner hoping to take Mrs. Cornelius out. “Is she here at all?”

  “Pictures with Colonel Pyat.” Frank spoke spitefully. “IT at the Electric. I’ll tell her you called.” His horrible feet in a bowl of soapy water, he frowned over his equations. What had been in that third syringe?

  “Pip,�
� said Jerry. “Pip. Pip.” The strings coiled into a neat pile and vanished. He beamed.

  Frank wondered why Jerry could charm and he couldn’t?

  Jerry strolled into the basement room sniffing. At the window, Jerry stopped to test the bars. In the kitchen Jerry cursed as he felt about in the toaster. From the front door upstairs Jerry called through the letter box. They were all naked, save for black car-coats. Jerry stood up pulling on his underpants. “Sorry I’m not decent.”

  Miss Brunner turned away with a strangled word. “What . . ?”

  “Interdimensional travel.” Jerry knotted his wide tie, copping Frank’s calculations. “Though not very sophisticated.” He reached to rub out a figure.

  Pettishly, Frank slapped him. “Just the air cooling. Entropy factor. Anyway, your sizes are all slightly different.”

  “All?” Jerry frowned at the versions of himself. “If I had a black hole they’d follow me into it. As it is . . .”

  Frank scowled. “You and your bloody multiverse. Energy’s bound to thin out if you’re that profligate.”

  “Crap.” Jerry holstered his vibragun. “Effectively energy’s limitless. It’s Mandelbrot, Frank. Each set’s invisibly smaller. Or invisibly bigger. Depending where you start. You don’t go through the multiverse—you go up and down scales of almost infinite but tiny variability. Only the mass varies enormously, making them invisible. That’s why we’re all essentially the same.” With scarcely any echo, identical voices came from each identical mouth: “Only after travelling through billions of sets do you start spotting major differences. The quasi-infinite, Frank. Think how many billions of multiversal planes of the Universe there are! Vast as it is, with my box you can step from one end to the other in about ten minutes. Go all the way round. Your mass compresses or expands accordingly. Once I realised space is a dimension of time, the rest was easy!”