The Rituals of Infinity
Michael MoorcockPrologue
There they lay, outside of space and time, each hanging in its separate limbo, each a planet called Earth. Fifteen globes, fifteen lumps of matter sharing a name. Once they might have looked the same, too, but now they were very different. One was comprised almost solely of desert and ocean with a lew forests of gigantic, distorted trees growing in the northern hemisphere; another seeemed to be in perpetual twilight, a planet of dark obsidian; yet another was a honeycomb of multicoloured crystal and another had a single continent that was a ring of land around a vast lagoon. The wrecks of Time, abandoned and dying, each with a decreasing number of human inhabitants for the most part unware of the doom overhanging their worlds. These worlds existed in a kind of subspacial well created in furtherance of a series of drastic experiments...