He'd never seen her thus, as though incandescent, radiant. Who is it that's always called radiant? He made a guess, and she began to laugh, as though spilling over with goodwill or delight, and so did he.

"I thought you were going to wait,” he said. “For a long while. Maybe travel. Maybe see the world. Walk in the woods."

"I walked in the woods. I can't explain. It's a big surprise to me."

"I knew he was going to ask. Hadn't he already, before?"

"Yeah. Well. That wasn't what surprised me.” And they laughed uproariously together.

"When?” he asked.

"We thought June,” she said, and they laughed again together, at the great and glorious absurdity. “And you're telling me he never said a word to you?"

"No word."

"So, what did you talk about?"

"Cars."

"For heaven's sake."

"June, huh,” he said.

"You'll come?"

"Rosie,” he said, as though the answer was so obvious he refused the question. And for a moment she only stood and glowed. Then she took his arm.

"You're back,” she said. “Come talk. Tell me everything."

She led him toward the house, the door, and he remembered many things: not a list of items (Boney, summer, grief, winter, Rosie's daughter, night, drink, Rosie's bed) but a taste, a garment warm and binding; a thing both his and not his but all of a piece. Inside renovations were going on: not the same place at all, pleasingly.

"So what happened? What came of it all?"

"It came,” he said, “to nothing."

"Oh.” She sat down behind Boney's big desk—he'd always think of it as Boney's, and no doubt so would she—and put her hands together as in prayer. “I guess that's all right."

"Yes?"

"I guess I'm sort of glad."

"Glad?"

"Well, you know. What would I have done. If you'd come home with the Holy Grail."

At that moment Pierce, seeing or feeling something indistinct behind him, turned to see Rosie's daughter, Sam, standing in the doorway. He would have greeted her, but her attention seemed not pointed his way.

"And what about the stuff you were looking for?” Rosie asked. “What you needed for yourself."

"I found it,” Pierce said. “But I left it there."

Sam wore a knit dress striped in rainbow colors, red to orange to yellow to green to blue to purple; and when the dress ended, the colors began again on her tights.

"So no book?"

"No. There never really was one."

"Oh.” She scrutinized him, as though to see if she should extend some hope, or pity, or consolation. Then she said: “Did you have enough money?"

"I've got lots left,” Pierce said. “You have to tell me what you want me to do with it."

"Keep it,” Rosie said. “It was a grant. Nonreturnable."

"But..."

"It would cause endless accounting problems if you gave it back. Believe me."

Sam had clasped her hands together behind her back, and put one foot out to rest it on the heel, which made the S-curve of her torso more pronounced. Pierce recognized it as a common human pose, more common in girl children than in others. Still she had not chosen to turn his way. He thought she'd grown a lot.

"She's grown a lot,” he said to Rosie.

"Who has?"

"Sam. How's she feel about all this?"

They both looked to the door, but Sam was gone.

"You know what she said to me, when I told her?” Rosie said. “She said it was good because Spofford'd be here in case she needed him. I asked if she thought she might need him, and she said well there was the time he had brought me to the Woods, that night when Beau was there."

"Yes.” Winter dark. Sam taken away from the Powerhouse and brought here again where she belonged. Could all that have really happened, really truly, the month he had last been here in this land?

"And she said,” Rosie said, and seemed to laugh and cry a little at once, “she said she was glad, because he got me there just in the nickel-dime. That's what she said. In the nickel-dime."

* * * *

She stood in her rainbow dress again at the top of the stair when Pierce went out the door, and he waved to her, and stood for a moment to see what she would say, but she only stood and smiled. He went out into the day.

So, he thought, and said: “So."

So he would not ever do what Frank Walker Barr had charged him to do: to take up, in a book, the questions people ask, that history might answer. His own question had been Why is everything the way it is, and not some different way instead? Which he had meant to answer by showing that everything is a different way instead. And then, in that laboratory, those pages, gather the evidence for his proposition, or in that sealed courtroom make the case for it in contrast to the case against it, bring it forth even shaped by the case against it; build the case over slow time, so slow it would seem to build itself, gathering like storm clouds or battle, forming always in the direction of a conclusion. It's so. Or It's not so.

Why had he imagined he could do that. He didn't have the thought to make the language that would draw a new thing, like wire, out of the future: or he didn't have the language to embody the thought, same thing. The only marvel was how long he had believed otherwise, without even understanding that he did.

Because he was not, actually, all that smart. He really knew next to nothing about European history or Hellenistic religion, he read no modern or ancient languages with any real comprehension, had no way to judge if what he projected was what had happened, or like what had happened, or something else entirely different. How could he have spent so much time on a thing so inchoate, cutting off its blooming endless heads until he just couldn't anymore, and so going away with nothing?

You could say, of course—anyway Fellowes Kraft might, in jest or not—that the book had become impossible only because the world was ceasing to be different: that the possibility of difference was once again leaking or running away, and that his apprehension of the possibility of a magical renaissance had itself been a sign that it wouldn't last much longer. For magic—great magic, world-making magic—vanishes from the world at exactly the same rate as it is perceived to be there: a rising and a falling line on a graph, and right where they meet the world trembles uncertainly for a moment, and then goes on alone.

Which is why Prospero has to drown his book and break his staff: when the world has gone on, you must live in it without magic. Or there will, at last and in the end, be no world for you to live in.

You could say that. But he wasn't going to say that. His lips were sealed. He would, from now on forever, be a true Rosicrucian, and keep his mouth shut. Silentium post clamores.

Whistling—when had he last whistled?—he went back to the pretend car he had been given. When he was seated he spent a moment counting, mentally, his money; then he backed out of Arcady and drove to the Jambs and out to Route 6 toward Cascadia, where the trucks and the travelers pass and repass, to look for a place to stop and stay.

* * * *

From the room he was given at the Morpheus Arms Motel, which was just as he had expected it to be, he called the number of the car dealer that Spofford had given him.

"Corvino,” said the phone. It was a woman's voice, and was one of those voices on the phone that sound somehow sadly far-off when they first speak, making you almost shy to go on.

"Hi. Is Barney there?"