She drove out through Stonykill and took the turn now marked with a new sign that pointed discreetly but plainly to the Rasmussen Humanities Conference Center up the tree-lined way.

It was the smartest thing Rosie had done as executive director of the Rasmussen Foundation, and she was still proud of it, and it still made her heart clutch in panic sometimes when she thought back on it, of the nerve it had taken, the chance of screwing up. Allan Butterman, in the course of some dealings he had with the state university, had first noted the possibility and alerted Rosie to it, but it was she who'd done the work, gone back and forth to the university to meet deans and alums and the president, a fearsome woman whom Rosie could actually call not so bad in the end to Allan when the deal was done and the press release sent out. So “Arcady,” which was the name a nineteenth-century Rasmussen had given to his new shingle-style fairy castle in the Faraway Hills, was now the university's Rasmussen Humanities Conference Center, and the university was responsible for it, for its plumbing and its boiler and its pretty multicolored slate roofs, for the professors and scholars who came and went there in season, like migrating owls or hawks. Rosie was greeter and facilitator and majordomo, and ran the foundation's business from an office under the eaves in what had been the attic before the splendid renovation. Fellowes Kraft's little villa too had been included in the deal, also now renovated and rearranged and repainted, new windows punched in the old walls and new floors laid. From there and from this great house the proprietary ghosts had vanished gratefully, like old ulcers healed or old errands run at last; their only reality had been their persistence. And every workday evening Rosie pulled a plastic hood over her computer and went home to her own handmade house at the verge of an old orchard up on the slopes of Mount Randa, to the man she still called by his last name (Spofford) and not his first, which would have been odd if she had changed her own name to his on that June day when they swapped rings and those vows at once so profound and so unenforceable, but she hadn't, she was Rosalind Rasmussen, as she had been when she first learned she had a name.

The first conference at the Rasmussen Humanities Center that Rosie oversaw when the renovations were done was entitled “Wisdom and Knowledge: Gendered Hypostases in Western Religious Discourse.” How scholars were to spend days in discussion of a topic even whose name she could not understand was a mystery to her, but she was new to the game, and she'd learn.

There were three scholars bound for that conference who met at the Conurbana airport, coming from three different cities. They were a large round one, a tall lean one, and a very old one; two were acquainted, the third they knew only by reputation. They each were to be greeted there by someone from the conference center, but each had neglected to notify the organizers of their arrival time, and now, finding themselves together and alone, they decided they would take the initiative and rent a car and drive themselves the fifty miles (it couldn't be more) to the center. It was Rosie Rasmussen's constant grief, the way these academics would get up to things like this. The car was a Caprice, and the large round one took the back, the other two the front. Bloom, Wink, Quispel.

"Since the Renaissance we have believed that man is making up these stories, that we ourselves are the authors of the tales we live within. That's the ultimate arrogance of power, the arrogance of the gods: for all the gods believe themselves self-created.” That was the tall thin one at the wheel speaking. Old Route Six wound through winter fields, and night fell.

"Man is projecting his own illusions on the patient screen of eternity. This solution is so simple that it can't be true,” said the very aged one. He rubbed the frosted window with the back of his gloved hand.

"All thought is necessarily sexual,” said the large one in the back. “Except in the case of those few great souls who can liberate themselves, and bear the terms of freedom."

"And this is done by...?” asked the driver.

"This is done,” said the man in back, “by remembering."

Night had fallen when they reached the turnoff to Blackbury Jambs, and there they misread the brief instructions they had, brief because it was thought they wouldn't need them. They wandered into the village, and asked at the Donut Hole—just closing its doors—where the conference center was, and received directions; went up the Shadow River road, all wrong, past the closed cabins and camps, through Shadowland and past the Here U Are Grocery, the three of them silent now and wondering: but at length they came to a tall lightless sign. The Woods Center, they made out in their headlights, and turned up that way.

The Woods Center for Psychotherapy had long been closed by then. No buyer had been found for the great pile, full of defects obvious and subtle. Once that pseudo-Christian cult the Powerhouse had gone so far as to make deposits and sign binders but in the end had failed to meet the stiff conditions that the owner (the Rasmussen Foundation) had set for a purchase, God not choosing that way for them. There could have been no mistaking the fact that the place was shut up, and yet the scholars were drawn to park their little car and get out—the two in front, anyway, the third in back looking on with anxious care. They went up the path of wrinkled ice, arms outstretched for balance, to the great central portal. From there, doors led into each wing. The tall scholar went to one door and pushed on it; it was locked; the other scholar went to the other door, and it, incredibly, was not locked, not even latched, and it swung open at his touch. A strange desire or fear entered him. He called down into the darkness, the other beside him now and also looking in. There wasn't any answer.

How long they waited there they would not remember clearly (when at length they got to the Rasmussen Humanities Center at Arcady, and had company around them and drinks in their hands before the fire in Boney's old study). Laughing at themselves, perturbed and exalted, they told their tale once again. A charisma, said the oldest of them. None of the three said that it was a light burning in a window of the large lounge on the main floor that had drawn them on, a light that had been burning a long time, and was now seemingly going out; but it was not a light you could name to others, even if you had seen or known it yourself.

Pierce Moffett missed that first conference, though its subject was one he would have been glad to hear about. A paper was read there in the freshly painted music room entitled “Sophia prunikos and Snoopie Sophie: Gnostic Persistence in Popular Culture.” But he and Roo were not in the Faraways then, or in the country: they had returned together to the little Utopia on the green mountaintops, to adopt a girl child.

9

All Pierce and Roo's great efforts to produce a child of their own had failed. She thought that it was the old abortions, those refused children, that were the cause, though doctors couldn't locate any harm she'd suffered; she imagined that no baby soul was willing to take a chance on her again. And since there was no organic reason to be found, it did seem some deep reluctance on the part of their children to materialize: they seemed to hover just beyond the physical, just not paying attention maybe, or maybe trying their best to turn that way and set out but failing, just as their parents were failing, despite the recipes they followed, ancient and modern. It was profoundly frustrating and saddening, to Roo, thus to Pierce.

So it was a good thing—and Pierce spending his working retreat among the barren celibates of an abbey could see how good a thing, when he thought of his daughters waiting at home—that Roo was the kind who could set out on the way to finding a child for herself by other means, and begin to compile the files of agencies, and type up at night the notes she had made in the day, and call phone numbers and go to the agencies and state with great firmness what she wanted, what she was prepared to do, and what she needed therefore to know. It was a process as arduous and vivifying and scary and uncomfortable, and just as long, as any pregnancy, and the outcome just as doubtful.