Well, didn't bomb-man Einstein agree, as far as Kraft could tell anyway, didn't he say that the universe was unbounded but not therefore infinite, and that a man setting out in a straight line from earth would never reach its frontiers, but would eventually, though still traveling his straight line, come back to the place from which he started?

As Fellowes Kraft had done too. Not to pretend that the findings of lofty science could be implicated in such a little human cycle. He had come back, at the end of his writing life, to where he stood at the beginning: to Rome, by Giordano Bruno's side. Having once again in his pages tried him, condemned him, put the tall dunce's hat on his head, tied him backward on the ass, the ass whipped from the prison through the streets past mocking and bloodthirsty or incurious crowds to the Campo dei Fiori where the stake has been erected. Ready but unable or unwilling to burn him again.

He put his hands on the sheets he had covered this day, not all of them with sense. Endless things, his mother had used to say, and write in her letters too: a little ejaculation or verbal sigh, the endless things of this world that trapped and pestered her or pleaded for her attention like unfed sheep. Endless things, he too had said, said to himself in those days when he had set out for the brand-new Old World in his twenties; endless things, his own small prayer and mantra as he stood on the boat deck or in the crowded and scented foreign street. To him it meant not the endless ghastly multiplication of things, as it did to her. It meant those things that roll on forever: travel, and the intoxications of thought and gaze and words, and possibility; sex, the sea, childhood and the view from there, the way ahead.

But of course (he thought now) it might also mean things without endings, without reprieve. Eternal return; limbo of the lost. Death. Bruno's journey to Hell, still going on, from that book to this.

Well, maybe there was a way, this time, to free him. Get him off.

The case clock in the far room whirred and then bonged once, as did his heart.

Yes: a way to free him that would change nothing, that would leave it all to happen just as it had done, as it must, only altogether otherwise. Kraft lifted the papers in his hands, and looked down at the words that his thumbs indicated.

Maybe, maybe there was.

2

Yes: that ass, the little ass that bore him.

Pierce Moffett in the middle of the Magnificat clapped his hand to his brow and made a haw of understanding and self-reproach that made the brothers around him turn to see. He was stunned not so much by the sudden insight arising in his mind as by his own obtuseness: that he could have been shuffling and reshuffling and considering those pages for so long and never noticed it.

But for Christ's sake: that little ass.

But then he thought no, he must be wrong, he was remembering the scene not as Kraft had left it in the manuscript but as he, Pierce, might have written it, or might write it now, because it was so right: he had a nearly uncontrollable impulse to get to his feet right now, in the midst of the prayer, clamber over the legs and laps of the brothers who filled the pew, like a playgoer who's had enough, and rush to his little room to find the pages.

Magnificat anima mea, the choristers sang, or should have sung. It was all in English now, the rare Latin plainsong falling on Pierce's soul like balm, in spite of everything; yes, all English, accompanied today by a brother on guitar. Pierce thought the older brothers must suffer from the change, but of course there was no way to ask them.

When Lauds was done and they had recessed from the cool church together, the brothers housing their meditating heads in their white cuculli, Pierce went back along the flagged halls to his room. Spring light still fell sweetly there. The furnishings were solid and plain, like school furniture: oak desk and chair, plain prie-dieu. A narrow bed, a crucifix at its head, Virgin at its foot. When Giordano Bruno was a young brother in the Dominican house in Naples, he had shocked his superiors by pitching out all the devotional clutter his cell had come to contain, all the statues of saints, the blessed palms and rosaries, the memento mori, leaving only a bare cross. So he could fill, perhaps, those bare spaces with pictures of his own.

On Pierce's desk was piled a photocopy of Kraft's last unfinished book, which for some years Pierce had thought himself free of. Brighter and cleaner in this form than it had been on shoddy goldenrod, but paler too, less distinct, speaking more softly. Seeing it at first was like seeing an old acquaintance after a like number of years, grown gray and strange to you but after a few moments the same. Almost the same.

Kraft's reputation as a novelist had, during those years, undergone an unexpected transformation. His books hadn't ever been as successful as other historical romances similar to his own, those fat but somehow lightweight confections that everyone read when they appeared and no one ever opened again. But—though Kraft certainly hadn't seen any reason to hope for it—his own readership had never entirely dried up; and though his books one by one went out of print, old copies were traded eagerly, and even began to fetch good prices; it became a sign of wide cultural sympathies to at least know about Kraft, as you knew about Erich Korngold or John Cowper Powys or Philip Dick: a never-populous archipelago you could imagine visiting one day, island-hopping through a large oeuvre and having fun.

So in time Kraft's copyright holders (the Rasmussen Foundation) opened negotiations with his old publisher, and though they didn't see prospects there, another house did, and the best known of the books began to come out in pretty “trade” paperbacks with striking covers, and newcomers found them and bought them, and so more were brought out: and then all of them, reissued in numbered volumes so that you could remember which ones you'd read and which were yet to go (they were admittedly pretty similar). It could be seen then that they told a single story, the main branch of them anyway, unfolding over time and populated by a large cast that migrated from book to book with the turning years. In chain bookstores Pierce Moffett with nameless feelings looked on the books that had measured out his childhood, A Passage at Arms, Under Saturn, Bitten Apples, The Werewolf of Prague.

The last remaining was this one, which the Rasmussen Foundation (Rosalind Rasmussen herself, actually, the executive director) asked Pierce to take up again: to edit, fix up and trim up and cap off so that it could be brought out too, finish the story, she said.

I don't think I can, Rosie, he'd told her (though here it was, piled beside the computer into which he was entering or keyboarding it, page after endless page); things, he said, had changed so much for him, she should get a real writer to do it, there were plenty. So Rosie said all right, she understood; and then when a couple of days and sleepless nights had passed he wrote to her to say that well after all he would. He owed it to her, he said, for all that she had given him, all that he had left unfinished and unreturned. When he undid the wrappings and opened the box that contained the thing, though, he knew his reluctance hadn't been misplaced, the whole bad time in which it had figured so largely so long ago was in it, and he found he could hardly touch it for some time even in this clean new form, not the rotting corpse itself, just the bleached bones.

He marked now the place in it to which his transcribing (rewriting too, a bit) had reached, and dug down into the later, the latest, parts, and turned them out to read.