Endless Things: A Part of AEgypt

by John Crowley

  While they lingered there Val arrived in the same red Beetle as ever, now pied brown with primer for a last hopeless paint job and thus looking more like a ladybug than ever; on the top of the antenna a plastic flower nodded, filthy and degraded, put there so Val could locate her little car among the big ones in parking lots. Val too unchanged, in a pair of vast painter's pants for a day in the open air.

  "My God, these are yours?” she asked Pierce, looking down at Mary and Vita, who looked up at her transfixed, at the cig bobbing at her lips as she spoke, the ringed hands reaching for them, to finger them like exotic goods. “How old are you guys? What day's your birthday? No, lemme guess. November."

  "We're not sure,” said Roo, retrieving them. “They thought February."

  "Aquarius! Sure. Like their grandpa.” Val turned her great gaze to Axel, who was keeping to the periphery, and who now, catching her look, gave a startled twitch. Val approached him. “They won't think to introduce me, sir, so I'll do it myself. I'm Valerie. A cousin of that lady's, the redhead there.” And she and the redhead laughed, for no reason Axel could discern.

  Val looked around at them all then—Rosie, Sam, Pierce, Spofford, the children, Roo. “Who would have thought,” she said, and the way she said it seemed to mean that she would have, and had, if she hadn't actually brought them here herself by her knowledge. Then they all set out and up the trail, toward where it vanished around a bend, Axel shading his eyes and pausing in alarm.

  "A long way up?” he asked Val.

  "Stick with me and we'll make it."

  "A banner with a strange device,” said Axel. “Excelsior."

  Pierce farther on walked beside Spofford. “You know,” Pierce said, “you said once that we ought to climb up here sometime."

  "I did."

  "Yes. In fact it was the first day I came here."

  "Sure. Yes. No doubt.” He remembered none of this. “And here we are, too."

  "Yes. Here we are."

  They wound upward, by ones and pairs, transiting the mountain's face by the path's rising switchbacks, where those ahead going up leftward were sometimes able to look down and see those below coming up rightward. Pierce found himself walking along beside Sam. He studied her to see if anything remained of her from before, when he, when she. She wouldn't remember, it was fatuous to ask, even to ascertain if she had indeed journeyed here from the past they had briefly shared. He asked instead about her studies.

  "Your mother didn't seem real clear on what exactly you were researching."

  "It's hard to explain. I'm just really starting. I mean this is lifelong."

  They walked on companionably. The mountain was as unfamiliar, perhaps as much changed, as she was.

  "When I first told my mom I was taking biology,” Sam said then, “she told me she had a biology question I might find out the answer to, that she'd always wanted to know. And I said I would if I could. And the question was Why is there sex?"

  "Huh."

  She nodded, it's true.

  "And did you find out?"

  "In a way. I found out what sex does—what it's good for, you could say, but don't tell any of my teachers I said it that way. But I didn't find out why sex is the way this gets done, if there could be a different way or not. I don't think anybody absolutely knows."

  "And what does sex do? What's it good for? You know.” He was grinning uneasily, he could tell, but Sam's self-possession hadn't altered. Soon enough his own daughters.

  "It's a way of increasing the genetic variety that evolution has to work with,” Sam said. “If an organism just divides, or reproduces asexually, new genetic material can't get in to produce variation, so all variation has to come just from replication errors, genetic material making random mistakes."

  "That's what makes for variation? Errors?"

  "Right. It's amazing when you think about it, I was amazed. If your DNA never made mistakes in replicating cells, you'd never die, you could live forever, but your offspring would never be any different from you, you'd never evolve. So the same process of replication that eventually kills us as individuals is the reason why we're here at all."

  "And sex doubles the mistakes, the variations, that get passed on."

  "Yes, sort of. Sex is the way we've come to do it. Have to have babies."

  Remember Man that you are immortal, and the cause of death is love. What Hermes said, Hermes Trismegistus. Corpus Hermetica, his genetic material passing down through the ages, generating errors, making unlikely babies as others coupled with him, Bruno and all of them.

  "But I don't think that's what she meant,” Sam said, looking ahead to where her mother toiled upward with tall Spofford. “I think she meant why are there, you know, boys and girls. Moms and dads, who do different things. If genetic variation has to increase, what's so good about this way? Actually the question more is, why are there men. I mean,” she said, smiling sidewise brilliantly at him, “males."

  "Yes,” Pierce said. “I've wondered too."

  "It's what I wrote my senior honors thesis on.” She lifted her head, listening: a bird sang, stopped. “Well, not really. I wrote a thesis on territorial singing in sparrows. You know it's only males that sing."

  "But females call the tune."

  "Right,” she said, and laughed. “Yes. I studied chipping sparrows. They're going nuts right now, you can hear them.... So the question is this, I didn't answer it or even try to answer it, but I thought about it—what's the advantage to putting all that energy into a song?"

  "So what question did you answer? If it wasn't that."

  "I studied inheritance and variation. Statistically. Not every female likes the same song. You can show that whatever attracts a female to a male's song, the same song will also attract her sisters. And a song similar to one she likes, but coming from another male, can lure her away for a quickie, you know? And if that male fathers children with her, his daughters will share their mother's predilection for that exact type of song, and his sons will inherit some of his ability to sing like that."

  "And so taste shapes chance."

  "And vice versa. And we get to be what we are.” She stopped, listened again. Pierce didn't know the song of the chipping sparrow, and couldn't pick it out from the chorus. “They sing so hard,” she said. “You just feel sorry for them that they have to. They can sing all night in spring. They sing in the morning even before they eat. These males. They have to."

  "We don't mind,” Pierce said.

  She smiled. He thought of her child self. Everything had changed but that smile, sign of an inward knowledge she couldn't have had as a five-year-old, but the same now that she had grown, and really did know better, or really had reason to think she did.

  "You know,” he said, “there's a famous anthropologist who said that the biggest problem in any human society is finding something for the men to do."

  "They should study emperor penguins,” she said, and he didn't know whether she meant anthropologists should, or men, or societies. “I was going to Antarctica to study them, but I got sent home. Long story. But they're amazing. The male sits on the eggs the female lays. The females go away back to the sea; the males just sit. They sit all winter long, in Antarctica, in a circle for warmth. It's dark dark dark. They don't eat. They don't move. When the chicks are born the fathers have this stored fluid they throw up to feed them with. When the females come back in the spring, stomachs full of fish, the dads are almost dead."

  "Variation,” Pierce said. “A lesson to us all."

  "Yes. And the females lead them to the sea."

  "Amazing."

  "Yes. So even if there have to be males and females, they don't always have to do the same male and female things.” She was starting to go on faster than he could go, bored maybe with his pace, but she looked back to smile at him again, her clear eyes deep and witty. “And that's not all I know."

  * * * *

  Pierce stopped there. White-painted boulders marked the way upward. He didn't remembe
r anything now of that morning years ago, in the time of his madness, when he had climbed here toward the summit and not reached it: or rather what he remembered hadn't taken place here, not any longer. But something surely had taken his hand here, something, someone, an entity aware of all his failures, and spoken to him. It is not of thy charge. It had been the first day of winter. There was a dog who met him on the way. And for the first time he had seen where he stood, and that he might go on by turning around, by turning back: might find, on his own, an exit from the labyrinth of the heart, his heart, and a way out into the paradise of the world: the fragile, sorrowing, inadequate, endless paradise of the world, the only one he or anyone could ever know.

  After a time a child took his hand. Roo and the girls had come up to him where he stood, and pulled him along with them. Roo sang to the girls as they all went up, an old song:

  First there is a mountain

  Then there is no mountain

  Then there is.

  Then they came out of the woods, and a high steep meadow was before them. A number of those great marbled boulders dropped by passing glaciers before the beginning of the world and called eccentrics squatted here and there amid the tender grasses, and shelves of metamorphosed rock poked out of the earth's skin like its broken bones, compound fractures. There was no path any longer, maybe because now it was evident where you must go to reach the top. A wind had come up, the mountaintop's.

  "Old Mother West Wind,” said Pierce.

  "And the Little Breezes,” said Vita, nodding in solemn certainty.

  "What's that?” said Mary, always alert to danger, and she stopped her father and her sister.

  "What?"

  "That."

  There was a sound that hadn't been there before, a varied, subtle sound, like wind in a cave, Pierce thought; or no it sounded not entirely natural, but not like a mechanical sound either, not a distant Cessna or far-off factory humming. And it was sweet.

  Samantha and Roo up ahead reached the ridgeline, and saw something Pierce and the girls couldn't yet see, and they raised their arms and seemed to laugh or exult. The end, or the goal. Roo called to the girls, who left their father and ran up to where she stood. Pierce looked back, down the path, where Rosie and Spofford came along, and his own father last, holding his hand to his heart and studying the ground around him, looking, Pierce knew, for something to pick up: but there was nothing here, nothing to spy, every leaf or blossom like any other, none out of place. Pierce waited for him.

  "Pierce. I wasn't sure what had become of you."

  "Almost there,” Pierce said, and took his arm. Axel straightened himself, noticing now the strange sounds emanating from on ahead: and in a gesture Pierce had never seen a human perform except on stage, he tossed up his hand and held it fanwise gracefully behind his ear.

  "Yes,” Pierce said. “I hear it."

  Now the company went, one by two, over the ridge, and as Pierce and Axel too went up, there appeared to rise from below some sort of structure, unintelligible: a tall thing of weathered wood beams and iron cabling, erect in the flowered meadow. The strange sweet noises increased, and were clearly associated with it. From the ridge's edge which Pierce and his father, last of all, achieved, it could be seen entire: twice a man's height, no, higher; a shape familiar but so outsized it was ungraspable. Everyone else was gathered around it, or else approaching in awe or delight, and, as though in greeting or acknowledgment of them all, a big consonant sound was produced.

  An instrument. Not cabled but strung; a hundred strings, not for hands to play.

  "A harp,” said Pierce, and his throat filled with sweetness. “An aeolian harp."

  "O harp and altar, of the fury fused,” said Axel. “Father Kircher's harp.” They walked on down toward it, and it rose over them as they did so. Axel's granddaughters stood beneath it, their hands extended and their fingers spread, mouths open too, as though every part of them could hear if it listened. Only their brown eyes were abstracted, unseeing.

  "Amazing, huh?” Rosie Rasmussen asked them. “I told you so."

  How did it make such a perfect concord? They talked about it. The steel strings were tuned with turnbuckles to those intervals Pythagoras had discovered, sacred numbers of which the universe is made; chosen somehow so that any of them sounded together would agree, aleatory harmonies of the wind's wanderings, for the wind bloweth where it listeth. You knew what harmonies were possible because of how you strung the instrument, but not what harmonies you'd get.

  "Well, didn't David hang up his harp on the end of his bed, to hear the wind blow through it in the night?"

  "I don't know,” said Pierce.

  "Yes,” said Axel. “Oh yes. David's harp."

  "Imagine a stormy night here,” Roo said, and Pierce remembered one, down the mountain from here, one stormy night; all possible concords, discords too, played all at once and loud as hell. He took her hand. Vita and Mary brought their fingers close and closer, feeling the buzz of the sensitive strings transmitted into them through the changeful air; looked up to their father and mother as though to ask, Is it true?

  There was an inscription cut into the harp's base, beneath Hurd Hope Welkin's name and dates. Val came closer and bent to read:

  Yea, the swallow hath found an house, and the sparrow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young: even thine altars, O Lord of hosts.

  They had come up as far as it was possible to go. They stood smiling at one another and listening to the wind play the great instrument all by itself, in the same movement by which it blew the light fine hair of Pierce's children. One by one, or two at once, they put their hands upon it to feel the vibrations, as much those of the earth below, it seemed, as of the silver air around. The hills of the Faraways lay around them, they themselves upon the heights of the highest; Spofford and Val pointed to Mount Whirligig to the west across the Shadow River valley, and what might have been the blue edge of Mount Merrow, over east beyond the Blackbury's wide bolt of silk carelessly unrolled. They sat, some of them, and Roo and Rosie opened bags in which they had brought food and drink, which they divided. It seemed to one or two of them that there was no reason now ever to go farther, or to go anywhere else at all, just as there is no reason for the small pilgrims or shepherds or lovers in a painting by Claude of a mountain, a temple, a sky, to do anything further than they are doing at that moment, and at the same time they knew that when they had rested there for long enough they would have to arise and start back down again along the path, into the spring and the rain that would soon begin to fall.

  last author's note

  With Endless Things, the work I have always in my own mind called Ægypt is as complete as it will ever be, and consists now of four parts: The Solitudes, first published as Ægypt in 1987; Love & Sleep, 1994; Dæmonomania, 2000; and the present volume. It will be noted that exactly twenty years have passed between the publication of the first part and the publication of the last. This was not my plan. The conception and writing go back ten years farther.

  The present volume has been largely finished for some years; references to emperor penguins, and to speculations about Jesus’ lineage, predate the current ubiquity of these subjects.

  I have tried to honor the many authors and works from which the historical, geographical, or philosophical underpinnings or overlays of Ægypt derive. To the many mentioned in earlier volumes should be added, for the special contents of this one, Prague in Black and Gold by Peter Demetz; Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science by Hilary Gatti, which largely informed the dialogue between Bruno and his prison visitor, though all distortions deliberate or accidental concerning his theories are my own; The Companion Guide to Rome by Georgina Masson, from which the fictitious guidebook entries in this book are not taken; The Maharal of Prague by Yaakov Dovid Shulman; Comenius by Daniel Murphy. There are others I can't now remember. To all these authors, and to those named in earlier volumes, their predecessors and forebears persisting and vanished, the long chain from
digital Now back to Thoth, I dedicate this series.

  John Crowley was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky, and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He moved to New York City after college to make movies, and did find work in documentary films, an occupation he still pursues. He published his first novel (The Deep) in 1975, and his fourteenth volume of fiction (Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land) in 2005.

  Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He finds it more gratifying that almost all his work is still in print.

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