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Pierce thought was called roan in horses; she had that strong and slightly desiccated look of women who were cute early on and are going to make it through to handsome age, but just barely.
    "That's where it began,” Pierce said.
    "It,” said Barr.
    "Yes, I found out,” Pierce said.
    "Simple enough,” Barr said.
    "You said,” Pierce said, and swallowed—this was hard to recount, because it was Pierce's book, which he had been compelled by Barr's question to set out on, and which he already suspected would never be completed. “You said that there is more than one history of the world. More than one. One for each of us, you said."
    "Yes."
    "I thought what would happen if you took that as true. Literally true, not metaphorically or."
    "Not just more than one history of the world,” Barr said. “More than one world?"
    "It seemed to me a case could really sort of be made.” He knew he was saying too much, and couldn't stop, as though here before these beings, regarding him kindly enough but with a shaming wisdom in their tolerant smiles—so lucky, too, unlike him, lucky in each other—he had perforce to unburden himself of this, this. “So then I'd consider how such other worlds are made, or were made,” he said. “How does one world turn into another, become the next. How are they, you know, cast."
    " Cosmopoeia ,” said Barr. “World-making."
    "Um yes."
    "That poeia being the root of our word poetry, of course. Poets being makers. Makers of poems, and of the worlds in them.” He sipped the martini he held. “So I'd guess you're embarked on a piece of poetry too. And that your taking this metaphor literally is itself a species of metaphor."
    Pierce said nothing in response to this, tried to smile inscrutably, knowing he could not himself have thought of that formula, and wondering if it was so.
    Taffy was now stripping the skin from tiny blood oranges and dropping the sections in a cut-glass bowl. “I'd need an example,” she said. “An instance."
    "That's what I mean,” Pierce said. “I mean that's where the question led me. To Egypt, which is where Gypsies come from, and where magic was invented, and the gods first worshipped."
    "Oh?"
    "Only of course they don't,” Pierce said. “They were believed to come from there. But the place they were believed to come from wasn't the Egypt we know. It was another Egypt."
    "Ah yes,” said Frank Walker Barr.
    "Another Egypt,” said his wife. “Well, now."
    Pierce began to explain about the ancient writings ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, priest and king of Egypt, and the error that Renaissance thinkers had made, to suppose that these late-antique Greek metaphysical vaporings were authentic Egyptian beliefs; and Barr put in that at that time hieroglyphics of course couldn't be read, and were interpreted as mystic signs when mystic signs were all the rage; and Taffy went on working, raising her eyes now and then to one or the other of them; and Pierce had the impression that she actually knew all this already, and that Barr knew she knew it, and they were both at work eliciting it from him, Pierce, like cops at an interrogation, or parents listening to a child's story, not news to them.
    "Ægypt,” he said. “A land that never existed. Where Hermes was king, where magic worked; and the memory of it descends to us to this day, and we can remember it even though the land ceased to exist, and now never existed. We made a new one to replace it. Egypt."
    "'When I was a king in Egypt,'” Taffy declaimed, “'and you were a Christian slave.’”
    "Babylon,” said her husband.
    "I'm not babbling,” she said. “It's a poem."
    She had enough oranges now in her bowl, it seemed, and to them she added a bag of tiny marshmallows. She noticed Pierce watching her preparations.
    "Ambrosia,” she said. She poured honey over it from a jar. Sue Bee. “That's what it's called. I don't know why. Frank loves it."
    Frank smiled, in fact he beamed, and the beam fell upon