A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and
awesome silence full of the spirit of desolation. On every hand pressed
the illimitable vastness of the void; yet the seeker knew that the
Being was still there. After a moment he thought of words whose mental
substance he flung into the abyss: "I accept. I will not retreat."
The waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the Being had heard.
And now there poured from that limitless Mind a flood of knowledge and
explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him
for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He
was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional
world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known
directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the
smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their
petty, human interests and connections--their hatreds, rages, loves and
vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for
faiths contrary to reason and nature.
While most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words,
there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps
with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a
region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of
man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first
a vortex of power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation
that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivable vantage-point he
looked upon prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any
conception of being, size and boundaries which his mind had hitherto
been able to hold, despite a lifetime of cryptical study. He began to
understand dimly why there could exist at the same time the little boy
Randolph Carter in the Arkham farmhouse in 1883, the misty form on the
vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing
the Presence in the limitless abyss, and all the other Carters his
fancy or perception envisaged.
Then the waves increased in strength and sought to improve his
understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his
present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every
figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of
some corresponding figure of one more dimension--as a square is cut
from a cube, or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three
dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions,
which men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn
are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and
reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of
the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal
thing--the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached
by the First Gate, where Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the
Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality, and brand thoughts of
its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very
opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and
illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and
reality.
Time, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end.
That it has motion and is the cause of change is an illusion. Indeed,
it is itself really an illusion, for except to the narrow sight of
beings in limited dimensions there are no such things as past, present
and future. Men think of time only because of what they call change,
yet that too is illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists
simultaneously.
These revelations came with a god-like solemnity which left Carter
unable to doubt. Even though they lay almost beyond his comprehension,
he felt that they must be true in the light of that final cosmic
reality which belies all local perspectives and narrow partial views;
and he was familiar enough with profound speculations to be free from
the bondage of local and partial conceptions. Had his whole quest not
been based upon a faith in the unreality of the local and partial?
After an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the
denizens of few-dimensioned zones call change is merely a function
of their consciousness, which views the external world from various
cosmic angles. As the Shapes produced by the cutting of a cone seem to
vary with the angles of cutting--being circle, ellipse, parabola or
hyperbola according to that angle, yet without any change in the cone
itself--so do the local aspects of an unchanged and endless reality
seem to change with the cosmic angle of regarding. To this variety
of angles of consciousness the feeble beings of the inner worlds are
slaves, since with rare exceptions they can not learn to control them.
Only a few students of forbidden things have gained inklings of this
control, and have thereby conquered time and change. But the entities
outside the Gates command all angles, and view the myriad parts of the
cosmos in terms of fragmentary change-involving perspective, or of the
changeless totality beyond perspective, in accordance with their will.
As the waves paused again, Carter began to comprehend, vaguely
and terrifiedly, the ultimate background of that riddle of lost
individuality which had at first so horrified him. His intuition pieced
together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closer
to a grasp of the secret. He understood that much of the frightful
revelation would have come upon him--splitting up his ego amongst
myriads of earthly counterparts--inside the First Gate, had not the
magic of 'Umr at-Tawil kept it from him in order that he might use the
silver key with precision for the Ultimate Gate's opening. Anxious for
clearer knowledge, he sent out waves of thought, asking more of the
exact relationship between his various facets--the fragment now beyond
the Ultimate Gate, the fragment still on the quasi-hexagonal pedestal
beyond the First Gate, the boy of 1883, the man of 1928, the various
ancestral beings who had formed his heritage and the bulwark of his
ego, and the nameless denizens of the other eons and other worlds which
that first hideous flash of ultimate perception had identified with
him. Slowly the waves of the Being surged out in reply, trying to make
plain what was almost beyond the reach of an earthly mind.
All descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued
the waves, and all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are
merely manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in the space
outside dimensions. Each local being--son, father, grandfather, and so
on--and each stage of individual being--infant, child, boy, man--is
merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal
being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane
which cuts it. Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his
ancestors, both human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial;
all these were only phases of one ultimate, eternal "Carter" outside
space and time--phantom projections differentiated only by the angle at
which the plane of consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype
in each case.
A slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the
child of yesterday; could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard,
Edmund Carter who fled from Salem to the hills behind Arkham in 1692,
or that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use strange means
in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia; could turn a human
Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal
Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down
from Kythamil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus;
could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully
shaped dweller on Kythamil itself, or a still remoter creature of
trans-galactic Stronti, or a four-dimensioned gaseous consciousness in
an older space-time continuum, or a vegetable brain of the future on a
dark, radio-active comet of inconceivable orbit--and so on, in endless
cosmic cycle.
The archetypes, throbbed the waves, are the people of the Ultimate
Abyss--formless, ineffable, and guessed at only by rare dreamers on
the low-dimensioned worlds. Chief among such was this informing Being
itself ... _which indeed was Carter's own archetype_. The glutless zeal
of Carter and all his forebears for forbidden cosmic secrets was a
natural result of derivation from the Supreme Archetype. On every world
all great wizards, all great thinkers, all great artists, are facets of
It.
* * * * *
Almost stunned with awe, and with a kind of terrifying delight,
Randolph Carter's consciousness did homage to that transcendent Entity
from which it was derived. As the waves paused again he pondered in the
mighty silence, thinking of strange tributes, stranger questions, and
still stranger requests. Curious concepts flowed conflictingly through
a brain dazed with unaccustomed vistas and unforeseen disclosures.
It occurred to him that, if these disclosures were literally true,
he might bodily visit all those infinitely distant ages and parts of
the universe which he had hitherto known only in dreams, could he but
command the magic to change the angle of his consciousness-plane. And
did not the silver key supply that magic? Had it not first changed
him from a man in 1928 to a boy in 1883, and then to something quite
outside time? Oddly, despite his present apparent absence of body, he
knew that the key was still with him.
While the silence still lasted, Randolph Carter radiated forth
the thoughts and questions which assailed him. He knew that in
this ultimate abyss he was equidistant from every facet of his
archetype--human or non-human, terrestrial or extra-terrestrial,
galactic or trans-galactic; and his curiosity regarding the other
phases of his being--especially those phases which were farthest from
an earthly 1928 in time and space, or which had most persistently
haunted his dreams throughout life--was at fever heat. He felt that his
archetypal Entity could at will send him bodily to any of these phases
of bygone and distant life by changing his consciousness-plane, and
despite the marvels he had undergone he burned for the further marvel
of walking in the flesh through those grotesque and incredible scenes
which visions of the night had fragmentarily brought him.
Without definite intention he was asking the Presence for access
to a dim, fantastic world whose five multicolored suns, alien
constellations, dizzily black crags, clawed, tapir-snouted denizens,
bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating
cylinders had intruded again and again upon his slumbers. That world,
he felt vaguely, was in all the conceivable cosmos the one most freely
in touch with others; and he longed to explore the vistas whose
beginnings he had glimpsed, and to embark through space to those still
remoter worlds with which the clawed, snouted denizens trafficked.
There was no time for fear. As at all crises of his strange life, sheer
cosmic curiosity triumphed over everything else.
When the waves resumed their awesome pulsing, Carter knew that his
terrible request was granted. The Being was telling him of the nighted
gulfs through which he would have to pass, of the unknown quintuple
star in an unsuspected galaxy around which the alien world revolved,
and of the burrowing inner horrors against which the clawed, snouted
race of that world perpetually fought. It told him, too, of how the
angle of his personal consciousness-plane, and the angle of his
consciousness-plane regarding the space-time elements of the sought-for
world, would have to be tilted simultaneously in order to restore to
that world the Carter-facet which had dwelt there.
The Presence warned him to be sure of his symbols if he wished ever to
return from the remote and alien world he had chosen, and he radiated
back an impatient affirmation; confident that the silver key, which he
felt was with him and which he knew had tilted both world and personal
planes in throwing him back to 1883, contained those symbols which
were meant. And now the Being, grasping his impatience, signified its
readiness to accomplish the monstrous precipitation. The waves abruptly
ceased, and there supervened a momentary stillness tense with nameless
and dreadful expectancy.
Then, without warning, came a whirring and drumming that swelled to a
terrific thundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of
an intense concentration of energy which smote and hammered and seared
unbearably in the now-familiar rhythm of outer space, and which he
could not classify as either the blasting heat of a blazing star, or
the all-petrifying cold of the ultimate abyss. Bands and rays of color
utterly foreign to any spectrum of our universe played and wove and
interlaced before him, and he was conscious of a frightful velocity of
motion. He caught one fleeting glimpse of a figure sitting _alone_ upon
a cloudy throne more hexagonal than otherwise....