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eBook Category: Fantasy/Alternate History
eBook Description: In the 1970s, an historian named Pierce Moffett moves to the country to write a book, driven by an idea he dare not believe. That the physical laws of the universe once changed and may change again. That before science defined the modern age, other powers, wondrous and magical, once governed the universe, their lore perfected within a lost capital of hieroglyphs, wizard-kings, and fabulous monuments. Not in Egypt--but AEgypt. Yet the notion is not his alone. Something waits at the locked estate of historical romance author Fellowes Kraft, something for which Pierce and those near him have long sought without knowing it--a key, perhaps, to AEgypt.

eBook Publisher: Electricstory.com, Published: Hardcover (Bantam Dell Pub Group), 1987
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2004

This eBook is part of the following series:

• John Crowley's AEgypt Series

10 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [2.0 MB], eReader (PDB) [471 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [482 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [423 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [366 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [441 KB], hiebook (KML) [1.0 MB], Sony Reader (LRF) [579 KB], iSilo (PDB) [399 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [492 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [535 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [646 KB]
Words: 146909
Reading time: 419-587 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
ISBN: 1-930815-18-2

"Reengaging the motifs of alternate lives, worlds and world-views that pulsed through his remarkable Little, Big, Crowley's new novel shapes itself around unorthodox historian Pierce Moffett, who seeks to explain the secret histories of the world, the old notions of science, religion and philosophy that have survived in astrology, myths and superstition; not the real, geographical Egypt, but AEgypt, the cognate country of the imagination from which the gypsies came. In resonating stories nested one inside the other, Crowley describes Blackbury Jambs, Pa., where among ex-students turned shepherds and mystics turned babysitters, Pierce finally finds himself part of a community and rediscovers the source of his quest, the historical novels of local writer Fellowes Kraft, who has his own stories to tellof young Will Shakespeare, Elizabethan Doctor John Dee's desire to speak with angels and Giordano Bruno's thirst to understand his world, for which he would be burned as a heretic. Affecting, cerebral, surprising and delightful, this extraordinary philosophical romance suggests an unlikely but thriving marriage between a writer like Anne Tyler and one such as Jorge Luis Borges."--Publishers Weekly

If ever some power with three wishes to grant were to appear before Pierce Moffett, he or she or it (djinn, fairy godmother, ring curiously inscribed) would find him not entirely unprepared, but not entirely ready either.

Once upon a time there had seemed to him no difficulty: you simply used the third of your three wishes to gain three more, and so on ad infinitum. And once upon a time too he had had no compunctions about making wishes that would result in horrendous distortions of his own and others? universes: that he could change heads with someone else for a day; that the British could have won the War of Independence (he had been profoundly Anglophile as a child); that the ocean could dry up, so that he could see from its shore the fabulous mountains and valleys, higher and deeper than any on land, which he had read lay in its depths.

With an endless chain of wishes, of course, he could theoretically repair the damage he inflicted; but as he grew older he became less sure of his wisdom and power to make all things come out right. And as the lessons of the dozens of cautionary tales he read sank in, tales of wishes horribly misused, wishes trickily turned against their wishers, misspoken or carelessly framed wishes tumbling the greedy, the thoughtless, the stupid into self-made abysses, he began to consider the question at more length. The monkey's paw: bring back my dead son: and the dreadful thing come knocking at the door. All right, make me a martini. And Midas, first and most terrible exemplar of all. It was not, Pierce decided, that those powers which grant wishes intend our destruction, or even our moral instruction: they are only compelled, by whatever circumstances, to do what we ask of them, no more, no less. Midas was not being taught a lesson about false and true values; the dæmon who granted his wish knew nothing of such values, did not know why Midas would wish his own destruction, and didn't care. The wish was granted, Midas embraced his wife?perhaps the dæmon was puzzled for a moment by Midas's despair, but, not being human himself, being power only, gave it little thought, and went away to other wishers, wise or foolish.

Literal-minded, deeply stupid from man's point of view, strong children able thoughtlessly to break the ordinary courses of things like toys, and break human hearts too that were unwise enough not to know how much they loved and needed the ordinary courses of things, such powers had to be dealt with carefully. Pierce Moffett, discovering in himself as he grew older a streak of caution, even fearfulness, coloring a mostly impulsive and greedy nature, saw that he would have to lay plans if he were to escape harmless with what he desired.

There turned out to be so many angles to consider?his changing desires even aside?that, a grown man now, professor, historian, he still hadn't completed his formulations. In the useless, vacant spaces of time that litter every life, in waiting rooms or holding patterns or?as on this particular August morning?when he sat staring out the tinted windows of long-distance buses, he often found himself mulling over possibilities, negotiating tricky turns of phrase, sharpening his clauses.

There were few things Pierce liked less than long rides on buses. He disliked being in motion at all, and when forced to travel tried to choose the briefest though most grinding means (the plane) or the most leisurely, with the greatest number of respites and amenities (the train). The bus was a poor third, tedious, protracted, and without any amenities at all. (The car, most people's choice, he couldn't take: Pierce had never learned to drive.) And his disdain and loathing for the bus was usually repaid in how it treated him: if he was not forced to wait for hours in squalid terminals for connections, he would be thrust in among colicky infants or seated next to liars with pungent breath who bent his ear and then slept on his shoulder; it was inevitable. This time, though, he had tried to meet the awful necessity halfway: having an appointment today in the city of Conurbana, a job offer at Peter Ramus College there, he had decided to take the slow uncrowded local, to travel in a leisurely way through the Faraway Hills, have a glimpse of places long known to him by name but still more or less imaginary; at least to get out into the country for a day, for sure he needed a break. And it did seem to him, as the bus left the expressways and carried him into summer lands, that he had chosen rightly; he felt suddenly able to shed by sheer motion a state of himself that had become binding and flavorless, and enter into another, or many others, like these scenes now being shown to him one by one, each seeming to be a threshold of happy possibilities.

He rose from his seat, taking from his canvas bag the book he had brought to beguile the time (it was the Soledades of Luis de Góngora in a new translation; he was to review it for a small quarterly), and made his way to the back of the bus, where smoking was permitted. He opened the book, but didn't look at it; he looked out at opulent August, shaded lawns where householders watered their grass, children dabbled in bright plastic pools, dogs panted on cool porches. At the outskirts of town the bus paused at a juncture, considering the possibilities offered by a tall green sign: New York City, but that's where they had come from; Conurbana, which Pierce did not yet want to contemplate; the Faraways. With a thoughtful shifting of gears, they chose the Faraway Hills, and when the bus after a series of smooth ascensions gained a height, Pierce supposed that those hills, green then blue, then so faint as to meld into the pale horizon and disappear, were they.

He rolled a cigarette and lit it.

The first two of his three wishes (and of course there would be three, Pierce had studied the triads that cluster everywhere in Northern mythology?whence it seemed most likely his fortune would come?and had his own ideas as to why it had to be three and not more or fewer) had for some time been in their present form. They seemed airtight, clinker-built, foolproof to him, he had even recommended them to others, like standard legal forms.

He wished, first of all, for the lifelong and long-lived mental and physical health and safety of himself and those whom he loved, nothing asked for in a subsequent wish to abrogate this. Something of a portmanteau wish, but an absolutely necessary piece of caution, considering.

Next he wished for an income, not burdensomely immense but sufficient, safe from the fluctuations of economic life, requiring next to no attention on his part and not distorting his natural career: a winning lottery ticket, along with some careful investment advice, being more the idea than, say, having some book he might write thrust magically onto the bestseller list with all the attendant talk-show and interview business, awful, whatever pleasure he might have in such fame and fortune spoiled by his knowledge that it was fake?that would be selling his soul to the devil, which by definition works out badly; no, he wanted something much more neutral.

Which left one more, the third wish, the odd one, the rogue wish. Pierce shuddered to think what would have become of him if one or another of his adolescent versions of this wish had been granted; at later times in his life he would have wasted it getting himself out of jams and troubles which he had got out of anyway without a wish's help. And even if, now, he could decide what he wanted, which he had never finally done, wisdom would be needed, and courage, and wits; here was danger, and the chance for strange bliss. The third wish was the world-changing one of the triad, and it was hedged around in his mind with strictures, taboos, imperatives moral and categorical: because, for Pierce Moffett anyway, the game was no fun unless all the consequences of any tentative third wish could be taken into account; unless he could imagine, with great and true vividness, what it would really be like to have it come true.