Everything had grown smaller. Pierce caught himself thinking he was glad to have come back before it all became too small to enter, but when they actually came close to them, doors and roads and gates let them pass the same as ever. Relativity. See down that road? See that big yellow house? Daddy used to live there; not there, but down that way, no, let's not go down, let's go on.

At Arcady, the Rasmussen Humanities Center, Roo parked in the new parking lot that covered a swathe of meadow where once Spofford had kept his sheep. Spofford and his truck had turned in just ahead of them, coming from the other way.

"No more sheep?” Pierce said to him, taking his hand and then falling into an embrace. “Your Totem Animal."

"Too much damn trouble. It was all I could think about, even when I put ‘em on the table. The damn trouble they were.” He was grinning, turning to Pierce's girls to be introduced. And Rosie was suddenly there, in the doorway of Arcady, unchanged, it seemed, not gone gray as he and Spofford were rapidly doing, bright shawl around her shoulders, and beside her a young woman Pierce didn't know, a woman who seemed to be both here and not here, graciously present, secretly absent. Self-possessed, he might say.

"God, Pierce!"

"Hi, Rosie, hi. Rosie, you remember Kelley Corvino, my wife. My father, Axel Moffett. And our girls, Mary and Vita, no Vita and Mary."

Roo raised a cool hand to Rosie, and put forward the girls, who in earlier years would have hung back and hid behind her, but not now. Roo didn't know that Pierce and Rosie had once slept together, but then Pierce didn't know that Spofford and Roo had. Indeed they could hardly, any of them, exactly remember these things, only the bare names of them. Gone.

"And you all know my daughter, Samantha,” Rosie said, and the young woman, dark brown curls and plumbless blue eyes, put out her hand to Pierce.

* * * *

Rosie took Pierce and his package—the photocopied typescript, which she'd said he should chuck but which he found he couldn't, and the set of little plastic squares within which the book hid, at once changed and unchanged—down the hall to the office. It was all certainly changed, clean and bright; even the floors had been bleached and varnished so that they glowed like buttered toast.

"You haven't seen all this before,” she said.

"No."

"Like it?"

"Um,” he said, not knowing how to answer. In the office, the same fruitwood bookcases anyway, filled with software manuals and file cases of white plastic. There were posters and notices of lecture series, conferences, calls for papers.

"You'll like this one,” she said. “You have to come. We're so proud."

The topic was “Civility and Civilization: Eastern Europe After.” Of course in that month of that year you didn't need to ask after what, though the term might puzzle the future. Photographs of those who were coming to speak. Pierce pointed to one in awe.

"You could meet him,” Rosie said. “I mean you were there, before."

"I was never there,” Pierce said.

"Sure you were. You wrote me from there."

For a moment he wasn't sure himself. The face on the poster was dark, minatory, storm-cloudy, as the man surely was not. The same picture was on the cover of a book that lay on Rosie's desk. Pierce opened it and read.

Genuine conscience and genuine responsibility are always, in the end, explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed “from above,” that everything is visible, that nothing is forgotten, and so earthly time has no power to wipe away the sharp disappointments of earthly failure: our spirit knows it is not the only entity aware of these failures.

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.