The Colour of Magic

The Color of Magic
    Prologue
    I N A DISTANT AND SECONDHAND SET OF DIMENSIONS , in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part…
    See…
    Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters. Through sea-sized eyes that are crusted with rheum and asteroid dust He stares fixedly at the Destination.
    In a brain bigger than a city, with geological slowness, He thinks only of the Weight.
    Most of the weight is of course accounted for by Berilia, Tubul, Great T’Phon and Jerakeen, the four giant elephants upon whose broad and star-tanned shoulders the Disc of the World rests, garlanded by the long waterfall at its vast circumference and domed by the baby-blue vault of Heaven.
    Astropsychology has been, as yet, unable to establish what they think about.
    The Great Turtle was a mere hypothesis until the day the small and secretive kingdom of Krull, whose rim-most mountains project out over the Rimfall, built a gantry and pulley arrangement at the tip of the most precipitous crag and lowered several observers over the Edge in a quartz-windowed brass vessel to peer through the mist veils.
    The early astrozoologists, hauled back from their long dangle by enormous teams of slaves, were able to bring back much information about the shape and nature of A’Tuin and the elephants but this did not resolve fundamental questions about the nature and purpose of the universe.
    For example, what was A’Tuin’s actual sex? This vital question, said the astrozoologists with mounting authority, would not be answered until a larger and more powerful gantry was constructed for a deep-space vessel. In the meantime they could only speculate about the revealed cosmos.
    There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at a uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics.
    An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as were all the stars in the sky which were, obviously, also carried by giant turtles. When they arrived they would briefly and passionately mate, for the first and only time, and from that fiery union new turtles would be born to carry a new pattern of worlds. This was known as the Big Bang hypothesis.
    Thus it was that a young cosmochelonian of the Steady Gait faction, testing a new telescope with which he hoped to make measurements of the precise albedo of Great A’Tuin’s right eye, was on this eventful evening the first outsider to see the smoke rise hubward from the burning of the oldest city in the world.
    Later that night he became so engrossed in his studies he completely forgot about it. Nevertheless, he was the first.
    There were others…

The Sending of Eight
    P ROLOGUE
    T HE D ISCWORLD OFFERS SIGHTS far more impressive than those found in universes built by Creators with less imagination but more mechanical aptitude.
    Although the Disc’s sun is but an orbiting moonlet, its prominences hardly bigger than croquet hoops, this slight drawback must be set against the tremendous sight of Great A’Tuin the Turtle, upon Whose ancient and meteor riddled shell the Disc ultimately rests. Sometimes, in His slow journey across the shores of Infinity, He moves His country-sized head to snap at a passing comet.
    But perhaps the most impressive sight of all—if only because most brains, when faced with the sheer galactic enormity of A’Tuin, refuse to believe it—is the endless Rimfall, where the seas of the Disc boil ceaselessly over the Edge into space. Or perhaps it is the Rimbow, the eight-colored, world-girdling rainbow that hovers in the mist-laden air over the Fall. The eighth color is octarine, caused by the scatter effect of strong sunlight on an intense magical field.
    Or perhaps, again, the most magnificent sight is the Hub. There, a spire of green ice ten miles high rises through the clouds and supports at its peak the realm of Dunmanifestin, the abode of the Disc gods. The Disc gods themselves, despite the splendor of the world below them, are seldom satisfied. It is embarrassing to know that one is a god of a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have its far end; especially when one can peer into other dimensions at worlds whose Creators had more