Aegypt

by John Crowley

  The aeronaut beside her fired his burner again; the noise of it struck Rose like a blow, causing something deep within her to vibrate with it. Earth withdrew further. According to the science of Climacterics, whose method Rose had applied to her own life, this blue day was the first of her new Up Passage Year, heading for the plateau of twenty-eight: and despite Mike’s warnings that Climacterics wasn’t prophecy, she was sure sure sure that this was going to be a good year for her. Change for the better. She could feel it, like the shocking certainty of the burner’s firing, at the root of her being.

  ‘See, Sam. Rose isn’t afraid. Rosie wants to look. See?’

  The Woods Center turned a corner of its mountain and was gone. The chartreuse Faraways, seamed by the silver Blackbury, went on west and south, looking to Rose Ryder in the new morning like the interlaced fingers of a pair of patient hands folded on the torso of the enormous earth.

  *

  That was the last day of spring, as the days of spring are counted in the Faraways; and the next week Spofford drove his flock down by the byways and discontinued roads to Arcady. Transhumance was the word he thought about as he walked, a word he had learned from Pierce, a word meaning the movement of pastoral peoples from winter to summer grazing lands; for that, sort of, was what Spofford considered himself to be doing.

  The scheme had, for him, several advantages, and advantages too for Boney Rasmussen, advantages which Spofford had largely emphasized when putting the plan to Boney. His grounds, in danger of reverting to woods under the tight budgets of recent years, would be kept cropped and lawnlike (to say nothing of fertilized, and for free; ‘golden hooves, Mr. Rasmussen,’ Spofford had said, illustrating with two prodding forefingers the sheep’s useful way of treading her own pellets into the soil). There was the picturesque aspect. And a share in the eventual product, as well, neatly wrapped in butcher paper, packed in dry ice at the shambles in Cascadia. All flesh is grass.

  What Spofford would get out of the transaction, he said, was wider and lusher grazing, first of all; and a barn in good repair, his own makeshift byres would have to be torn down and rebuilt to accommodate new lambs; and the (occasional) help of Rosie, who Spofford was sure would like to get the exercise, and the chance to train her two dogs before they got too old and lazy to learn to make a living.

  ‘Well, of course you’ll have to ask her that,’ Boney said.

  ‘Oh I intend to,’ Spofford said. ‘I intend to.’

  In fact on hearing the plan Rosie had not seemed so pleased, nowhere near as pleased as Sam; she implied she had a lot to do, and didn’t like being presented with a partnership she hadn’t asked for. But Spofford had not been surprised at that. He had even taken it into account when conceiving the plan, one restless May night, the first night his window had stood open till morning.

  So he walked the perimeters of Arcady’s back lawns, and found the walls of red sandstone crumbling in places but all sheep-proof, and closed the circle he had been allotted with some inconspicuous electric wire; and on a green morning herded his puzzled and complaining flock into it through a large carved gateway (grapes and faces) no one any longer used. Spofford had got a job upstate, cabinetry on a string of vacation houses going up on the marge of Nickel Lake, and would be passing Boney’s drive every morning and evening; no trouble to look in, and check.

  The sheep were soon calm. The grass was sweet beneath the oaks of Arcady, each calm too in its pool of shade, a crowd of grave eminences standing at respectful intervals. Spofford looked up into them.

  You couldn’t be a real classical shepherd, Pierce had told him, unless you ate acorns, and were in love.

  ‘Well a bread made from acorns,’ Pierce said. ‘I guess not the nut itself.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Spofford said, sure that his leg was being pulled. Acorns.

  The sheep wandered, shy guests at a big lawn party, and he wandered too. The house came into view, brown and many-angled, ensconced in yew and rhododendron; its empty towers roofed in scalloped tiles pink and blue. It was the sort of house his mother always called for some reason a Sleeping Beauty house.

  The house he himself was building, up in the bright mountain orchard, would be different, not a secret; plain and able in a glance to be understood. This summer the foundation, cleaned out, pointed, and sealed. Long afternoon light for him to work in.

  He didn’t know anything about love; what people meant by ‘in love’ had always baffled and annoyed him. Taking flight was what they seemed to mean. What he knew about was something else, something that only came into being by degrees, a quid pro quo; you didn’t take a step unless there was enough road there to step on, but however much road appeared you took. That’s all.

  He found a good tree to sit under, in view of the house, and sat, and crossed his high-top sneakers. He would stay on his feet, his own four feet, and see where they led. It would have to do. He took out his old Kohner, and blew the pocket dust from it, listening with his mind’s ear for a tune.

  It was just then, the sun crossing the meridian on his old journey, that Pierce Moffett in Fellowes Kraft’s house in Stonykill turned facedown on the pile at his left-hand side the last page of what Kraft had written, and sat back in the hard chair (how had Kraft spent so many hours in it?) before the desk.

  He lit a cigarette, but then sat motionless with it in his hand, the smoke rising in a continuous and manifold ribbon, like the warmth rising from Pierce’s loins up to his bosom. He knew now that his whole life up to this time, the religion he had been born into, the stories he had learned and made up and told, the education he had got or avoided, the books somehow chosen for him to read, his taste for history and the colored dates he had fed it on, the drugs he had taken, the thoughts he had thought, had all prepared him not to write a book at all, as he had thought, but to read one. This one. This was what he had once upon a time expected and hoped of all books that he opened, that each be the one book he required, his own book.

  For this book was not different after all from his own book, unfinished also (unstarted for that matter); for that matter his own life seemed the same, the unwritten, unwritable book of his own whole lived life, only another edition, with the same title too. A confusing title, Julie had said, and hard to file.

  He regarded the staggered heap, all facedown, over but not done with. What public, he wondered, had Kraft thought he was writing for, who had he supposed would want to read such a thing? No one, perhaps, which is why it lay still on his desk, unfinished, unpublished, lying in wait for its single ideal reader.

  For it wasn’t a good book at all, Pierce supposed, considered as a book, a novel; it was a philosophical romance, remote and extravagant, without much of the tang of life as it really must have gone on in the world – as it really had gone on if you meant this world, this only one in which, metaphors aside, we all have really and solely lived in. The characters were hungry ghosts, without the cheerful lifelike rotundity Pierce remembered from Kraft’s other things, from like Bitten Apples or that one about Wallenstein. The dozens of historical figures, none except for the most minor as far as Pierce could tell made up, the actual incidents great and small in which they in fact participated, all reduced to a winter’s tale by the springs their actions were imagined here to have: the birth-pangs and death-throes of world-ages, the agonies of potent magicians, the work of dæmons, of Christ’s tears, of the ordering stars.

  No no no, he had said to Julie, no, these Rosicrucians preserving their secret histories, passing them down through the ages encoded in secret books that mean the opposite of what they say, working to alter the lives of empires, lurking behind the thrones of kings and popes – come on: secret societies, Freemasons, illuminati haven’t had real power in history. Can’t you see, he’d said, the truth is so much more interesting: secret societies have not had power in history, but the notion that secret societies have had power in history has had power in history.

  And yet. And yet.

  Finish writing it, huh. Unli
ke histories, stories need endings; the pages of notes at the bottom of Kraft’s manuscript only carried the story far forward, massing more years and books and characters, enough (it seemed to Pierce glancing through them) to fill another two, another three volumes without coming to an end.

  But Pierce could imagine an ending; he could. Could imagine how, after the great change had all gone by – a Noah’s flood, a storm of difference sweeping all the old world away, a storm composed of the Thirty Years’ War, of tercios, Wallenstein, fire and sword; of Reason, Descartes, Peter Ramus, Bacon, and of Unreason too, the witches on their gibbets aflame – after it had all been swept into the unrecoverable again, Rosicrucian brothers fleeing, the Stone, the Cup, the Cross, the Rose all blown away like leaves – he could imagine that under a fuliginous and pitchy sky (dawn due to come, but otherwhere and elsewhen than there and then) they would be gathered up, the heroes of that age which would be by that time already growing imaginary, gathered up one by one by an old man, his beard white as milk and a star on his forehead. Gathered up. Come along now, for our time is past. One by one, from workshops and caves in Prague and philosophical gardens in Heidelberg, from cells and palaces of Rome and Paris and London. All over now. And where then shall they go? The wind is rising with the dawn; they step onto the deck of that ship restless at anchor, whose sails are already filling, the sign of Cancer painted on them. They are for elsewhere, a white city in the farthest East, a country once again without a name. Set out.

  With a sudden awful certainty, Pierce knew that he would sob.

  Good Lord, he thought, when it had come and passed, good God where within him had that come from, wrenched from him all unexpected as though by a hand. He wiped his eyes on the shoulders of his shirt, left side, right side, and looked out the mullioned window, his breast still trembling. Out there, Rosie Rasmussen and her daughter tended Kraft’s neglected garden. Sam was crying too.

  Why must I live in two worlds, Pierce asked, why. Do we all, or is it only some few, living always in two worlds, a world outside of us that is real but strange, a world within that makes sense, and draws tears of assent from us when we enter there.

  He stood. He squared up the pile dead Kraft had left, and inserted it again into its box.

  It wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t. For if this moment was a moment when it could be true, this moment was also fast passing; and when it had passed all this story of Kraft’s not only would no longer be possible, it would not ever have been possible. There was no way, if the world kept rolling, to save these nested stories; they slipped one by one again into the merely fictional – Hermes’s false Egypt, and Bruno’s false Hermes; Kraft’s false Bruno; Pierce’s false history of the world, the doors that had once blown open blowing closed again one by one down the corridor into the colored centuries.

  The rift was closing; this year might be the last year it could even be sensed, this month the last month; and once it had closed there was no messenger from thence who could be believed, I only am escaped to tell thee, for the messenger would be a fiction too, a crazy idea, a notion.

  The moment of change, Pierce’s moment, was not itself to survive the change, that’s all. It retreated with the rest into the ordinary, this only world, this actual, which would now be paying out backwards endlessly, all of a piece, all like itself.

  Yes.

  Except that from now on, not often but now and then, those who have passed through that moment might experience the sharp sense that their lives are in two halves, and that their childhoods, on the far side, lie not only in the past but in another world: a melancholy certainty, for which no evidence can be adduced or even imagined, that the things contained therein, the Nehi orange and the soiled sneakers, the sung Mass, the geography book and the comic book, the cities and towns, the dogs, stars, stones, and roses, are not cognates of the ones the present world contains.

  Pierce left the study, and went out through the dark house and into the noontide. Continuously, unnoticeably, at the rate of one second per second, the world turned from what it had been and into what it was to be. Rosie tilted up her sun hat to see Pierce striding from the house, and Sam ceased crying; Spofford at Arcady lifted the instrument cupped in his palms to play.

  ‘Done,’ Pierce called. ‘All done.’

  ‘Us too,’ said Rosie; and she held out for him to see what they had looted from Kraft’s garden, huge armfuls of blossoms that would otherwise have fallen unseen, rank poppies and roses, ox-eye daisies, lilies and blue lupines.

  Gateway Website

  A full list of Fantasy Masterworks can be found at

  www.gollancz.co.uk

  Also by John Crowley

  Novels

  The Deep (1975)

  Beasts (1976)

  Engine Summer (1979)

  Little, Big (1981)

  Ægypt (1987)

  Love & Sleep (1994)

  Daemonomania (2000)

  Endless Things (2007)

  Short Story Collections

  Novelty (1989)

  Antiquities (1993)

  Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction (2004)

  About the Author

  John Crowley was born in Maine in 1942 and grew up in Vermont, Kentucky and Indiana before moving to New York and taking up work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues alongside his writing. The Deep, his first SF novel, was published in 1975 and was followed by Beasts, Engine Summer and Great Work of Time. With the publication of Little, Big in 1981 he won the World Fantasy Award and was shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula and BSFA Awards. He lives in Massachusetts.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Text copyright © John Crowley 1987

  Introduction copyright © Graham Sleight 2013

  All rights reserved

  The right of John Crowley to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Graham Sleight to be identified as the author of the introduction, has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by

  Gollancz

  The Orion Publishing Group Ltd

  Orion House

  5 Upper St Martin’s Lane

  London WC2H 9EA

  An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 575 08314 1

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  www.gollancz.co.uk