by John Crowley
“No. If there were such a change, then when it was past there’d be almost no way of demonstrating that it had happened. The new laws obtain, and not the old ones. Now gold can’t be made from base matter by fire, and now it never could have been: the laws of the universe, the nature of things, make it impossible.”
He had read to this conclusion once, and then he had pondered it for a long time before he saw what he had here, which was an explanation for the history of magic that answered every need, solved every historical crux, satisfied the skeptic and the ardent seeker both, and had only the one drawback of its complete absurdity.
“It’s like the old paradox: if everything suddenly got twice as big as it is, I mean atoms and all, would you be able to tell? As far as we can show by investigation, the same physical laws have always been in operation; we just haven’t always known them.”
“Well then how could you ever find out that it was even so? That these changes happen?”
“You can’t. You can only know they happen if you pass through one, and recognize it for what it is. How else would you ever stumble on such a mad idea.”
She crossed her arms before her, puzzlement in her darklashed light eyes; there was a pretty flush to her cheeks, where a few brown freckles were sown. Been to the beach, he guessed.
“So you see what that would mean,” he said. “Don’t you.”
“What Pierce would it mean.”
“It means,” he said, leaning toward her, “that if I, and you, and whoever else, have imagined the possibility of such changes; if we have discovered the possibility of their happening, and seen at what times in the past they might have happened; then it must be because we sense that one is under way right now.”
“One?” she said.
“A change. A change in the laws by which the universe is governed.”
She looked at him sidewise, out of one eye, like a bird. “Now? Right now?”
“Now when I’m telling it. Now when I’m writing this book. Now in this decade, this year.”
He watched her understand this, and see what it meant for the project she was representing for him; and it was as though he could see her mind’s eyes cross, and refocus.
“Not only that,” Pierce said. “It seems that the souls or minds who perceive this happening—who guess that a change is under way, that old laws have lost their force, and new laws haven’t yet been imposed—it seems that they can actually affect the shape of the coming world. Construct its laws and its meaning. That’s what Giordano Bruno did. What Galileo and Newton did.”
“They did?”
“They moved the sun,” Pierce said, showing his palms, QED. “They made the earth turn.”
She laughed at last, in delight he thought or hoped.
“Well but why?” she asked. “I mean why should it be just now that this change happens? If it does. Is it the stars, or …”
“Not the stars, apparently. There was a lot of talk in the 1590s about the stars. There were predictions of big stuff that would happen, astrologically, in 1588, and in 1600. But it wasn’t the cusp of a new age, even by their own astrology. Neither is this.”
“Aquarius.”
“Two hundred years away. That’s not it.”
“Well what then.”
“I don’t know. It just happens, apparently. Every once in a while.” A devilish exhilaration was rising in him. “Every little once in a while.”
Julie looked at him, rolling a remnant of bread between her fingers, waiting for this to make sense. But this was the part of Kraft’s scheme that didn’t puzzle Pierce. He didn’t see why the stuff of reality had to be seamless, or why the true springs of things shouldn’t be blind, inaccessible to reason. He thought it likely.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It sounds sort of like a trick.”
“It’s not a trick,” Pierce said. “It’s a story.”
He told her Kraft’s story, the core of it, how twice in the last two thousand years a slip or seam, a rumple in the ground of being, had allowed observers around the world to perceive that the net of space and time is not quite stable, but like the shifting plates and molten core of Mother Earth can move beneath the feet of diurnality; can move, was moving, had moved before and would again.
He told her how only the greatest masters of the workings of the world would ever notice the subtle changes taking place, and even they would doubt themselves, and discount the evidence, blame their own tools or failing skills; if they tried to express what they knew, their contemporaries would not understand it, and the coming age would misread what they said and wrote, would take their writings for allegory or failed prophecy.
Which, when the change was past, was all they were.
He told her how, in Kraft’s scheme, between the old world of things as they used to be, and the new world of things as they would be instead, there has always fallen a sort of passage time, a chaos of unformed possibility in which all sorts of manifestations could be witnessed. Then safe old theurgies and charms have suddenly turned on their practitioners and destroyed them; then huge celestial beings have been formed, born out of the assembling of smaller ones, who become the larger ones’ parts and organs; then great Ægypt has been revealed again, and her children have recognized one another, by signs no one before understood.
Then the wise have forgathered, and prepared.
“Ægypt,” Julie said. “Huh.”
The last such a passage time happened to fall at the cusp of two centuries as well, the sixteenth and the seventeenth of our era, the time when Kraft’s book took place; and hadn’t Jean Bodin the encyclopædist said in those days (Pierce knew this, though he couldn’t remember how he came to know it, sheep’s wool caught in the great mental briar patch) that there was a sudden awful plague of evil spirits around, working all sorts of mischief? Bodin blamed it on the arrogant magicians, willing to call forth dæmons of air, fire, water, who then seized on the unwary and inhabited them. Kraft said: the passage time, breeding spirits as the sun breeds bees in the guts of dead lions. Elementals, dæmonii, incubi and succubi, salamanders. Look into a crystal or a dish of clear water: someone looks back at you.
“Witches,” Julie said.
“Werewolves.” Pierce saw in his mind a troop of gray ones, moving over burnt ground, heads looking side to side for the prey they followed.
“Then gone,” Pierce said. Then gone, the time of passage past when they are possible: and all of them, or nearly all, retreat back into earth air water and fire, not only no longer existing but demonstrably never having existed; new laws, new powers just as great but different, come to be; the sky now infinite, and empty.
“And here we are,” he said.
“Here we are,” she said, but sounded no longer quite here; elevated slightly, exalted maybe.
“But if it’s now our turn,” he said, softly. “If it is.”
“Then all that stuff really could be coming back,” Julie said, as though she had not believed it before, when she had said it herself. “Magic could be done again.”
“Well you don’t know,” Pierce said. “All you know is, what’s coming will be different from, work differently from, the way things work now. It might have more magic in it. It might have less. Giordano Bruno was sure that in his time the magic of a former age was coming back again. But when the passage time was over, it hadn’t. The new age brought new powers in that no one could have imagined. So will the next.”
“Like what powers.”
“Keep your eyes open,” Pierce said. “Maybe they won’t be occurring in million-dollar labs, won’t be an extension of what we know now. Maybe they’ll be entirely different, something we can’t yet imagine. Maybe it’ll be you who can have them.”
He smiled teasingly at her, but his heart was in his mouth; he had not imagined that this would be as hard to say as it was turning out to be, like pushing forward a stack of chips when he held nothing but a pair of twos. One way magic really could be said to work, bad ma
gic, was in convincing others that physical laws were bendable, even breakable, and that you knew how to do it, when you didn’t at all.
And yet it was true: his myth (for that’s what he was offering her, a myth, Kraft’s myth) really described what happened in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when systems warred and there were battles and sudden reversals and defections, and for a time the issue was in doubt. And a case could be made, Pierce could make it, that the same transit was now occurring, old physics and mechanics grown feeble, unable to explain observed reality, hunger for new truths, expectation of new truths, intimations of renewal, of a different paradigm (new word the thinker could not now do without, tossed backward by ongoing Time to grow up and multiply, like Deucalion’s stones), new laws, new ones to break too.
Something entirely new is coming.
“Will people believe it?” Julie said, almost a whisper.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I do.”
“How are you going to convince them? You’ll have to.”
“Well,” Pierce said. “What if I could offer evidence. Some actual tangible evidence. What if I could find something, some sort of something somewhere, that has survived, unchanged, from the former state of things, something.”
“Like what.” She leaned forward to hear, and he too to speak, conspirators, their folded hands nearly touching in the middle of the table.
“Well suppose,” Pierce said. “Suppose that were the story of this book. Suppose that the story of this book was the true story of how such a thing was sought for …”
“And found,” Julie said.
“Well.”
“Pierce. Do you really really know there is such a thing?”
He would not say so. But he held her eyes with his and grinned.
There was only one syllable with which she could respond to this; and when she made it, little round sound of wonder or delight, he nearly laughed with tenderness and remembrance: for it returned him instantly to the railroad flat, not forty blocks from here, where a decade before he and Julie had been lovers: in the days of the great Parade, when the doors of dawn had opened, and nothing was ever to be the same again.
FIFTEEN
After his lunch, Pierce went downtown on foot through the afternoon, walking without noticing where he walked, watching the unrolling of an inward movie, a movie being made even as it unrolled.
Did he really intend to suggest in his book that once-upona-time the useless procedures of magic had had effects, the lead had turned to gold, the dead had risen; but that then the world (“the world”) had passed through some sort of cosmic turnstile and come out the other side different, so that now not only are the old magics inefficacious but now they always were? Was he going to say that?
He guessed he was. Certainly he was going to hint at it, utter it, assemble ambiguous evidence for it, hold his readers in suspense with a search through history for the proof of it, the one thing—event, artifact, place, word—that is still, indisputably, what it once was in the past age, as nothing else any longer is. Whatever it might be.
He was going to entertain the notion; oh more, he was going to fête it, he was going to wine and dine it; he was going to have his way with it amid the spilled cups and crushed fruit of an uproarious banquet. And he was going to father on it a notion more powerful than itself, a notion which would only be given birth to in his concluding pages: only if we treat the past in this way, as though it was different in kind from the present, can we form any idea of how different from the present the future will be.
The future, fast approaching now, when this passage time has ended, and all these broils and clashings are over; when the new science (nuova scienza, novum organum, ars magna) that we sense rising now over the horizon has been formulated, if formulated is how it will be made manifest; when the now-inconceivable is made conceivable, and the present, our present, can no longer be constructed intelligibly, or its technics made to work, a lost world.
He thought he could do it. For the first time he could imagine it done, could imagine the pile of manuscript, the finished book, shy and sly in its wrapper, open it and see.
He lifted his eyes from the street. He had arrived, he saw, at the Public Library, before the great stone lions, as he had after an earlier lunch with Julie, when she had first charged him to write a book about the future.
His father Axel loved these beasts. Loved libraries and books with a chivalric passion. Often when Axel had taken him to Manhattan for some treat they had passed by here, and studied them, and read their inscriptions; Axel had told him the sculptor’s name. Why are they here? Pierce asked. To keep people out, Axel answered; a joke of Little Enosh’s. To keep people out. They repeated the joke every time they passed by here.
He went up the wide steps, where as always lovers and vagrants and eaters of al-fresco lunch were disposed, and through the doors. Cool and large and solemn. There were books he could look for, he had always a mental list of questions to be answered; he was at loose ends; he could turn, too, and cross town, and take the next bus home.
Home. He saw green hills in his heart.
Mounting the stairs—though still not having made a decision—he came without real surprise on his father. Axel stood beneath the big painting on the first-floor landing of blind Milton dictating to his (bored or transfixed) daughters. He was studying it, or might be thought to be studying it, but Pierce—not having been noticed as yet, stopped on the stairs below the landing—knew better. Axel’s eyes scanned the huge dark picture, but he too watched an inward movie; his lips moved, speaking his endless monologue; his hands searched in the pockets of his blazer, and pulled out papers, which he studied with the same dreamy interest as he did Milton, and then replaced. Axel could go through whole museums in this state of semi-trance, ravished by beauty, noting great moments in Art or History, and yet borne on his own currents mostly. Pierce had been with him often thus.
Should he turn now and flee, before he was seen?
He didn’t dare turn away. Axel’s heart would break if he caught sight of Pierce’s back, and guessed Pierce was trying to avoid him.
Nothing for it. He climbed up, and nearly had to bump into Axel before Axel focused on him.
“Good god. Well! Pierce!”
“Hello, Axel.”
“I was just. Milton. I come here, you know. You remember this moment. The blind daughters. Justify God’s ways to Man.” “Yes.”
“Well how are you? You didn’t call.”
“I just decided this morning. I had some business to do.”
“Well. Well.” Axel Moffett looked up at his tall son, a head at least higher than himself, awed and delighted. “Your business is done?”
“Oh mostly.”
“We’ll have an evening then.”
“Actually I was sort of thinking of going on.”
“Oh no. No. Foolish. Two long bus rides in a single day. When you haven’t been back in months. No, no. Come on, Pierce. We’ll have a day, like we used to.” He nearly danced with eagerness before Pierce. “Aw come on.”
They had, actually, used to walk the city a lot, when Pierce lived here; at Axel’s insistence, usually, using up Pierce’s days off unless Pierce fought him off. But Pierce was also fascinated by Axel; he had turned out, when Pierce had returned to the city as an adult and had found Axel still here, to be an entirely different person from the one he remembered: not, he thought, because Axel had changed, he was a fixed entity, but because so much of him had been hidden from Pierce as a boy.
“Oh all right,” he said at last, annoyed at himself for being unable to refuse; he had never been good at refusing. If he could not evade or avoid, he usually assented.
“Good, good,” Axel said, mightily pleased, taking his son’s arm. “Oh Pierce. Well met. Well met by moonlight.”
“It’s ill met,” Pierce said. “The line is Ill met by moonlight.”
“We’ll go downtown,” Axel said. “Stretch our legs. Have you e
ver looked into the Little Church Around the Corner? It’s an interesting story.”
“Yes,” Pierce said. “You’ve told me.”
Walking with Axel was a peculiar exercise, and somewhat conspicuous. Axel had a habit of spying small items on the street, papers or unrecognizable jetsam, and stooping to pick them up. Sometimes he carried what he found to a trash basket, a good citizen; more often he simply examined it and dropped it again, only to pick up another a few yards on. He had used to tell his exasperated son that he was on the lookout for money or other treasure; but had at length confessed it wasn’t that at all, he just couldn’t help it. He didn’t cease talking while he picked and looked and discarded, and Pierce, striding ahead, had often to stop and return a pace or two. Pierce thought sometimes they must look like two silent-film comedians, the tall saturnine one, the short plump one, backing and filling in a sort of dance, or stopping in the midst of traffic to crane their necks at an unremarkable building, where Axel thought he had spied a caryatid, or a gargoyle, or a Palladian window.
“Look look, Pierce. Rustication. You see?” Axel ran his hand over the blocks of a building, carved to look roughly-quarried. “Imitating natural blocks of stone, you see? Why we might be in Rome.”
“Uh huh. Rustication meant antique virtue when Roman architects used it. Then the Renaissance.”
“Well yes. You see? Rome never fell. You see?”
Pierce hands in his pockets refrained from joining Axel in feeling the wall like a blind man. “Come on, Axel.”
Had Axel got worse lately? Pierce remembered that when he was very young Axel had held a job, a real one, he had been a bookkeeper, Pierce thought. It was hard to imagine him employed now at anything except the all-but-unpaid jobs he did for Catholic charities or the temporary clerical work he sometimes got. The rents on the little building in Brooklyn he owned and lived in kept him alive. What would happen to him otherwise? Pierce thought sometimes with guilty horror of caring for him in some awful future; or refusing to.
“Your book’s all about this,” Axel said, who had heard Pierce’s descriptions and absorbed what he chose to. “Rome. Greece. Egypt. With that little ligature.”