a diary
"My very dear," said the corpulent, indolent voice, "I shall call you Pandora, and you can address me as Mr Monkfish, and then we will both be quite clear that neither of us is who we say we are."
Those were the first words that Mr Monkfish said to me.
How can I describe Mr Monkfish. Or his ever-present companion, Mr Sole. One was large; one was small. One was loud; one was quiet. One was dangerous; the other was more dangerous still.
Huge and round, with not the hint of any muscular capability, the enormous Mr Monkfish had gingerly squeezed himself into an old, red-leather armchair, and sat snapping his fingers and flapping his tiny hand for Sole to offer wine, to place it on the table at my elbow. He made a show of comporting himself, disarranging the creased white-linen suit that strained to contain him.
Dishevelled and unwashed, Mr Sole slunk to do Monkfish's bidding. His soft-blinking, exophthalmic gaze gave him the air of a wounded pet. He looked like he'd slept stood upright, which indeed he had. He kept to the shadows while making ineffectual brushing gestures to his own stained and crumpled grey flannel suit as though this might somehow make him presentable.
It is extraordinary. I struggle to remember anything before the encounter. How did I get there, why was I there even. It possessed the quality of a dream: each moment would seem to flow into another, but afterwards would be impossible to trace the logical connections.
And yet some memories are fixed, quite distinctly, in my mind: the smell of that little room squeezed into the garret of a terrace row, like sawdust and something stale; the tiny flecks of colour in the old-fashioned wallpaper, little crimson flowers in the mottled myrtle knotwork pattern; the way the warmth from the little electric two-bar fire seemed to leach directly out of the rattling, rimed window, too dirty to show the view, that would only have had a view of a flat factory wall even had it not been. The way that I felt when Mr Sole… touched me…
"This is the name of the game," said Mr Monkfish. "I should like, that is I am going, if I can presume to be so very bold, to tell you one little truth, and then perhaps to offer you an humble invitation. Nothing against your honour, nothing that would trouble your virtue, nothing serious, nothing political. How does that sound, hmmm? Good.
"So now, now that we are, in the words of the old proverb, sitting comfortably, my sweet Pandora, perhaps we can begin…"
"Your Bible has a story of Eden, and the price of paradise was ignorance. That is how they would see the difference between themselves and you. Gods and men. So they would see it."
"The Bible says we were driven out from Eden."
"Because the woman, Eve, took the fruit and ate and saw god for what he really was."
"Are you the serpent then, Mr Monkfish?"
"I have always wondered: why is Lucifer the villain in the story? God wants only a servant, a slave, a pliable, ignorant, oafish lout to keep his garden. Along comes the dragon and shows the woman how much more she can be. And she is the one with the courage to grasp the opportunity."
"That's not a denial."
"Ohh, fie dear one. Monkfish is no Mephisto."
"Who are you then? One of these 'gods'?"
"One of the Trinomens? One of the Twelve? No, not I. I wouldn't dare to claim such a thing. You wouldn't dare to suggest it, if you knew them."
"I suppose they are the secret rulers of the world."
"Hardly. Your world is tiny. Each of them is a World of their own: vast, impossible celestial spheres, thinking Machines, sapient, aware, the very highest technologies; and people aboard, millions upon millions of people, passengers or crew or inhabitants, all awakened to their fullest potential and forming a great collective, a mental space, a dreamscape, a private psychic plane, if you will have it, for a Mind to inhabit; and in the control space of each a Man, though speaking as I am in the Latin form Homo rather than Vir, being as more oft than not a woman in their actual person. Tri-nomen, y'see: Man, Machine and Mind. The least of them could swat this world like a biting insect, should we bite; they could crush it like an addled egg, if only they weren't so entirely self-absorbed.
"All that potential. All that self-indulgent waste! Wouldn't dare? I wouldn't deign! I wouldn't dip my delicate pinkies in their Order if they paid me.
"My dear, your World is defended by such a… thin line. Dilettantes, egoists, aesthetes, epicures… The Order, and so they style themselves, are such a bunch of… amateur super-heroes."
"And you are a professional, I take it."
My reply had been instinctive and immediate. It was such an extraordinary sentence that mockery came at once, while I groped to understand what he could possibly mean by "super-heroes".
"Oh no, dearest one, not I. Mine is an entirely other calling – nay, say not a calling, say… a vocation."
"So you're a priest?"
"I'm a traveller," Mr Monkfish sighed, "just a traveller, my dear, looking for a way home, a magical portal, a gateway, a secret passage if you will. A D-gate, they call them. A door. I think you know of what I speak.
"Find that door, pass through and you step from this World into… others: a dominion of the Mab or the Charm, perhaps, or one of the thousand Worlds of the Argai; an Elgab pleasure planet, maybe, or the wild excitement of a Varair battlefield, or one of the austere counting houses of the Azarine.
"Here is the secret of your World, my very cherub, and the offer Monkfish wishes to make to you: such things are true! Rare, I grant you, most passing unusual, but true if you know where to find them and can afford the toll-keeper's fare."
I'm afraid to say I rather scoffed at the man. "Other worlds?" I said. "Do you mean other planets?"
"Planets! Phuagh! A planet is ball of gas and rock revolving in the heavens, a mundane hangover from the superstition of astrology. I'm speaking of Worlds! Worlds: the places inhabited and uninhabited, the landscapes of the true reality, wherein are all things known and unknown. There are monsters out there, oh yes. And wonders."
"You are talking fiction, Mr Monkfish! Science fiction!"
"If we are to believe Everett and DeWitt then the Universe is infinite in possibilities and all fictions must be true in one realm or another."
"That's ridiculous."
"Is it? Is it, though? Think, truly think what the implications of infinity really mean. Infinite universes that exist in parallel with ours, different from our own by nothing more that the chance impact of a photon on a hydrogen atom three galaxies from here; infinitely many more that are so utterly alien that the mathematics to describe them would be utterly incomprehensible to our Euclidean minds. Every possibility in every possible combination.
"The universe where Sherlock Holmes confounds the real Moriarty; the universe where Prospero nurtures the real Miranda; the universe where Jesus truly cured the lame – the chance of them existing seems absurd to you, but the chance of them not existing in infinity, why it is incomputable. That would be something truly unique: a fiction so impossible it cannot exist!
"If the Many Worlds hypothesis is true, then everything is true."