What other statesman, what other politician, anywhere ever, would say such a thing: would ever speak of failure, of his own failure, as inevitable as anyone's. Pierce felt a stab of desire to have been there for real, in that city, in the days of the man's youth and his own; to have learned a harder and a better thing than he had learned during the same years in his own bland land. He couldn't know that Fellowes Kraft, author and traveler, actually had once seen him—touched him even, tickled his fat belly: for the elder Havel, his father, also named Václav, had one day late in the 1930s brought his baby son to the brand-new swimming pool at the Barrandov site south of Prague where the beautiful boys used to gather on summer days. Václav Havel Sr., builder and real-estate magnate, was himself the developer of the new district, responsible for the elegant cafés and brilliant terraces and the film studios where the future was coming to be. One of the young men, a film actor, had introduced Kraft to the smiling fellow and his baby, and the proud papa had talked away while Kraft could only say Nerozumím, nerozumím, I don't understand, I don't understand, one of the few Czech words he knew, one of the few he wouldn't forget.

* * * *

There was more than one way up the mountain. One way started, or had once, not far from Pierce's little cabin by the Blackbury River, but the broader and more popular way, a long traverse plainly marked, began at a roadside cluster of picnic tables and featured a granite plinth surmounted by a symbolic shoemaker's last, the last that Hurd Hope Welkin had not stuck to. A plaque let into the plinth listed his attributes. They all got out from the cars that had brought them there, and paused for a minute; Rosie told them a little of what she had learned of him, his strange career, how the demons had got him and let him go, or been defeated.

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."