Aegypt Read online

  JOHN CROWLEY

  AEGYPT

  Gateway Introduction

  Towards the end of 2011, in conjunction with the celebration of fifty years of coherent, continuous science fiction and fantasy publishing, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway.

  Over a decade after launching the landmark SF Masterworks series, we realised that the realities of commercial publishing are such that even the Masterworks could only ever scratch the surface of an author's career. Vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy were almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of those books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing changed that paradigm for ever.

  Embracing the future even as we honour the past, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway with a view to utilising the technology that now exists to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan, at its simplest, was – and still is! – to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  The SF Gateway was designed to be the new home of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy – the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled. The programme has been extremely well received and we've been very happy with the results. So happy, in fact, that we've decided to complete the circle and return a selection of our titles to print, in these omnibus editions.

  We hope you enjoy this selection. And we hope that you'll want to explore more of the classic SF and fantasy we have available. These are wonderful books you're holding in your hand, but you'll find much, much more . . . through the SF Gateway.

  www.sfgateway.com

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Introduction by Graham Sleight

  Author’s Note

  The Prologue in Heaven

  The Prologue on Earth

  I Vita

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  II Lucrum

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  III Fratres

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Gateway Website

  Also by John Crowley

  About The Author

  Copyright

  Introduction by Graham Sleight

  L P Hartley's novel The Go-Between famously begins, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ It's easy to feel that about, say, one's childhood – that the remembered world runs according to different rules than the adult one. But of course we know in our rational hearts that that couldn't really be true. It's the same with history, too. Why did so many of the most learned scholars of the Renaissance spend their time dabbling with alchemy or magic? They surely couldn't have believed they could achieve any of the feats they aspired to? We know now that there are very good reasons why you can't transmute base metals into gold or enchant someone so that they love you. Ægypt is a book that examines that dream. What if the world was not as it has since become? What if it worked in a different way, if its very flesh and bones, the physical laws that governed it, were different from the ones we know?

  I have also put to use the speculations of John Michell and Katherine Maltwood, Robert Graves, Lois Rose, and Richard Deacon. I have used the translations and notes to the Hermetica of Walter Scott, and Gilbert P. Cunningham's translation of the Soledades of Luis de Góngora.

  But what follows is, still, a fiction, and the books that are mentioned, sought for, read, and quoted from within it must not be thought of as being any more real than the people and places, the cities, towns, and roads, the figures of history, the stars, stones, and roses which it also purports to contain.

  Ægypt(1987) is the first in a four-book sequence, followed by Love & Sleep (1994), Dæmonomania (2000) and Endless Things (2007). Crowley has indicated that the overall title for the sequence is Ægypt; this first book has also been published as The Solitudes. As the reader will discover, the sequence is organised around the twelve astrological houses – another belief system that couldn't possibly be true. The three main sections of this book map onto the first three houses of the Zodiac, starting from the spring equinox. This volume takes its tone from spring, a time of new beginnings – just as, for instance, Dæmonomaniais an autumnal book of tragedy and hopes dying on the bough.

  By the time he began this sequence, Crowley was already well-known in the science fiction and fantasy fields. He had published several SF novels, culminating with Engine Summer (1979), a dreamy and elegiac post-holocaust novel. He had come to wider attention with the grave and intricate family saga Little, Big (1981), often cited as the greatest American fantasy novel of the twentieth century. In any of Crowley's books there are, as it were, two worlds. The first is a world of ideas and ways of understanding the world – in the case of Ægypt, these spring from the notions of history that I set out above. The second is a world of characters, often ‘ordinary people’, trying to frame their experience of the world through the ideas the book offers. The dynamic, and the poignancy, of Crowley's works arises from this tension. What happens when those ideas become real in ways that are harsh for the characters or prevent them being with the people they love? What happens when the ideas embedded in a story say that the story has to end?

  If all this sounds abstract, it's worth emphasising that Ægypt is an extremely readable, provocative, and beautifully written book. The main character we follow is Pierce Moffet, a not-quite-failed academic escaping from life in New York City to the upstate village of Blackbury Jambs. There he discovers a manuscript left behind by the local novelist Fellowes Kraft, whose books Pierce read as a child. It appears to follow the stories of Renaissance magi such as John Dee, who was Elizabeth I's astrologer, and Giordano Bruno, the monk-turned-heretic who was the first to theorise that the universe might be infinite. Dee's and Bruno's stories are interspersed with Pierce's; for them, like him, the book described the opening up of new possibilities. Kraft's manuscript is incomplete, and Pierce is offered the chance to try to make sense of it. It is written as if: as if Dee and Bruno's Gnostic view of the world might actually be in some sense true. Might it also be for Pierce?

  Ægypt contains many hints about what follows in later volumes of the sequence: the secrets of Prague, Pierce's Kentucky childhood, his absent father Axel, and his obsession with a mysterious woman named Rose. There are also subtler questions raised. On the bus to Blackbury Jambs in the first chapter, Pierce speculates about what three wishes he would choose if some genie were to offer them to him. You could argue that these wishes do, in time, come true for Pierce. (It's another question whether or not that's something for him to be glad of.) We also get, in the first chapter, the first of the book's many mishearings, as Pierce gets the name of the Blackbury river wrong. Conversations in the Ægypt sequence are frequently based on mishearings, as if to say this too is how history works: every telling of a story misrepresents it, with no certainty at the root. And what is the monument on Mount Randa that Pierce spots as he arrives in the town? />
  Above all, this book – like its successors – is a book composed of echoes. (As Crowley says, it is ‘a book made out of other books’.) Certain phrases keep recurring in different contexts, such as ‘There is more than one history of the world.’ By later volumes, these echoes become a kind of labyrinth or prison that Pierce must find his way out of. But this is a book whose emblematic sequence is Giordano Bruno's journey across the Alps in the penultimate chapter. Realising that the Sun is a star like any other, that the universe is composed of worlds without end, he becomes a dangerous message-bearer: ‘and nothing now will ever be the same again’.

  Graham Sleight

  Author’s Note

  More even than most books are, this is a book made out of other books. The author wishes to acknowledge his profound debt to those authors whose books he has chiefly plundered, and to offer his apologies for the uses to which he has put their work: to Joseph Campbell, to Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, to Mircea Eliade, to Peter French, to Hans Jonas, to Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, to Giorgio di Santillana, to Stephen Schoenbaum, to Wayne Shumaker, to Keith Thomas, to Lynn Thorndike, to D. P. Walker, and, most of all, to the late Dame Frances Yates, out of whose rich scholarship this fantasia on her themes has been largely quarried.

  I have also put to use the speculations of John Michell and Katherine Maltwood, Robert Graves, Lois Rose, and Richard Deacon. I have used the translations and notes to the Hermetica of Walter Scott, and Gilbert P. Cunningham's translation of the Soledades of Luis de Góngora.

  But what follows is, still, a fiction, and the books that are mentioned, sought for, read, and quoted from within it must not be thought of as being any more real than the people and places, the cities, towns, and roads, the figures of history, the stars, stones, and roses which it also purports to contain.

  THE

  PROLOGUE

  IN HEAVEN

  There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor’s show. None was dressed in white; some wore fillets or wreaths of flowers and green leaves in their loose hair; all their eyes were strangely gay. They kept pressing in by one and two, always room for more, they linked arms or clasped their hands behind them, they looked out smiling at the two mortals who looked in at them. All their names began with A.

  —See! said one of the two men. Listen!

  —I see nothing, said the other, the elder of them, who had often spent fruitless hours alone before this very showstone, fruitless though he prepared himself with long prayer and intense concentration: I see nothing. I hear nothing.

  —Annael. And Annachor. And Anilos. And Agobel, said the younger man. God keep us and protect us from every harm.

  The stone they looked into was a globe of moleskin-colored quartz the size of a fist, and the skryer who looked into it came so close to it that his nose nearly touched it, and his eyes crossed; he lifted his hands up to it, enclosing it as a man might enclose a fluttering candle-flame, to keep it steady.

  They had been at work not a quarter of an hour before the stone when the first creature appeared: their soft prayers and invocations had ceased, and for a time the only sound was the rattle of the mullions in a hard March wind that filled up the night. When the younger of them, Mr. Talbot, who knelt before the stone, began to tremble as though with cold, the other hugged his shoulder to still him; and when the shivering had not ceased, he had risen to stir the fire; and it was just then that the skryer said: Look. Here is one. Here is another.

  Doctor Dee – the older man, whose stone it was – turned back from the fire. He felt a quick shiver, the hair rose on his neck, and a warmth started in his breastbone. He stood still, looking to where the candle flame glittered doubly, on the surface of the glass and in its depths. He felt the breaths in the room of the wind that blew outside, and heard its soft hoot in the chimney. But he saw nothing, no one, in his gray glass.

  —Do you tell me, he said softly, and I will write what you say.

  He put down the poker, and snatched up an old pen and dipped it. At the top of a paper he scribbled the date: March 8th, 1582. And waited, his wide round eyes gazing through round black-bound spectacles, for what he would be told. His own heartbeat was loud in his ears. Never before had a spirit come to a glass of his so quickly. He could not, himself, ever see the beings who were summoned, but he was accustomed to sitting or kneeling in prayer beside his mediums or skryers for an hour, two hours before some ambiguous glimpse was caught. Or none at all.

  Not on this night: not on this night. Through the house, as though the March wind outside had now got in and was roaming the rooms, there was heard a patter of raps, thumps, and knockings; in the library the pages of books left open turned one by one. In her bedchamber Doctor Dee’s wife awoke, and pulled aside the bed curtains to see the candle she had left burning for her husband gutter and go out.

  Then the noises and the wind ceased, and there was a pause over the house and the town (over London and all England too, a still windless silence as of a held breath, a pause so sudden and complete that the Queen at Richmond awoke, and looked out her window to see the moon’s face looking in at her). The young man held his hands up to the stone, and in a soft and indistinct voice, only a little louder than the skritching of the doctor’s pen, he began to speak.

  —Here is Annael, he said. Annael who says he is answerable to this stone. God his mercy on us.

  —Annael, said Doctor Dee, and wrote. Yes.

  —Annael who is the father of Michael and of Uriel. Annael who is the Explainer of God’s works. He must answer what questions are put to him.

  —Yes. The Explainer.

  —Look now. Look how he opens his clothes and points to his bosom. God help us and keep us from every harm. In his bosom a glass; in the glass a window, a window that is like this window.

  —I make speed to write.

  —In the window, a little armed child, as it were a soldier infant, and she bearing a glass again, no a showstone like this one but not this one. And in that stone . . .

  —In that stone, Doctor Dee said. He looked up from the shuddery scribble with which he had covered half a sheet. In that stone . . .

  —God our father in heaven hallowed be thy name. Christ Jesus only begotten son our Lord have mercy on us. There is a greater thing now coming.

  The skryer no longer saw or heard but was: in the center of the little stone that the little smiling child held out was a space so immense that the legions of Michael could not fill it. Into that space with awful speed his seeing soul was drawn, his throat tightened and his ears sang, he shot helplessly that way as though slipping over a precipice. There was not anything then but nothing.

  And out of that immense emptiness, ringing infinite void at once larger than the universe and at its heart – out of that nothing a something was being extruded, with exquisite agony produced, like a drop. It was not possible for anything to be smaller or farther away than this drop of nothing, this seed of light; when it had traveled outward for æon upon æon it had grown only a little larger. At last, though, the inklings of a universe began to be assembled around it, the wake of its own strenuous passage, and the drop grew heavy; the drop became a shout, the shout a letter, the letter a child.

  Through the meshing firmaments this one came, and through successive dark heavens pulled aside like drapes. The startled stars looked back at his shouted password, and drew apart to let him through; young, potent, his loose hair streaming backward and his eyes of fire, he strode to the border of the eighth sphere, and stood there as on a crowded quay.

  Set out, set out. So far had he come already that the void from which he had started, the void larger than being, was growing small within him, was a seed only, a drop. He had forgotten each password as soon as he spoke it; had come to be clothed in his passage as in clothing, heavy and warm. After æons more, after inconceivable adventures, grown forgetful, unwise, old, by boat and train and plane he would come at las
t to Where? Whom was he to speak to? For whom was the letter, whom was the shout to awaken?

  When he took ship he still knew. He took ship: those crowding the quay parted for him, murmuring: he put his foot upon a deck, he took the lines in his hands. He sailed under the sign of Cancer, painted on his bellied mainsail; at length there came to be two lights burning on his yardarms, were they Castor and Pollux? Spes proxima: far off, far far off, a blue planet turned, an agate, a milky gem.

  THE

  PROLOGUE

  ON EARTH

  A prayer said at bedtime to her guardian angel was enough, always, to wake his cousin Hildy at whatever hour she needed to get up: so she said. She said she would ask to be awakened at six or seven or seven-thirty, and go to sleep with a picture in her mind of the clock’s face with its hands in that position, and when next she opened her eyes, that’s what she would see.

  He could not do this himself, and wasn’t sure he believed Hildy could either, though he had no way to dispute it. Maybe – like Peter walking on water – he could use the Hildy method if he could only have enough faith, but he just didn’t, and if he woke late he would miss Mass, with incalculable results; the priest would perhaps have to turn to the people, with his sad frog face, and ask if anyone there was capable of serving; and some man in work clothes would come up, and pull at the knees of his trousers, and kneel on the lower step there where he should be but was not.

  So he woke by a brass alarm clock that stood on four feet and had a bell atop it that two clappers struck alternately, as though it were beating its brains out. It was so loud that the first moments of its ringing didn’t even seem like sound, but like something else, a calamity, he was awake and sitting up before he understood what it was: the clock, hollering and walking on its feet across the bureau top. His cousin Bird in the other bed only stirred beneath her covers, and was still again as soon as he stilled the clock.