She stands in the Library alone. From the nearest desk she takes a slip of paper, writes Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, and drops it into the slot. Documents volley toward her from multiple sections and arrange themselves in a dozen stacks. Many are academic papers in German, Chinese, French, Japanese. Nearly all seem to have been written during the second decade of the twenty-first century. She opens the first book at hand in English: Selected Ancient Greek Novels.
The 2019 discovery of the late Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land inside a badly corrupted codex in the Vatican Library briefly set the world of Greco-Roman scholarship aflame. Alas, what archivists were able to salvage of the text left plenty to be desired: twenty-four mangled folios, each damaged to some degree. Chronology confuses and lacunae abound.
From the next volume, foot-high projections of two men emerge and walk to opposing podiums. This was a text, says the first, a bow-tied man with a silver beard, intended for a single reader, a young girl on her deathbed, and therefore it’s a narrative about death-anxiety…
Wrong, says the other speaker, also with a silver beard, also wearing a bow tie. Diogenes clearly wanted to play with notions of pseudo-documentarianism, placing fiction on one side and nonfiction on the other, claiming the story was a true transcription discovered in a tomb, while constructing a contract with the reader that the tale was of course invented.
She shuts the book and the men disappear. The next title appears to spend three hundred pages exploring the provenance and tonality of the ink used inside the codex. Another speculates about tree sap found on some of the pages. Another is a numbing account of various attempts to arrange the salvaged folios in their original order.
Konstance rests her forehead in her hands. The English translations of the folios that she can find among the stacks mostly bewilder: either they’re boring and spangled with footnotes, or they’re too fragmented to make much sense of. In them she can see the contours of Father’s stories—Aethon kneels at the door of a witch’s bedroom, Aethon becomes a donkey, the donkey is kidnapped by bandits who rob the inn—but where are the silly magic words and the beasts drinking moon-milk and the boiling river of wine on the sun? Where’s the squawk Father would make when Aethon mistakes a gull for a goddess, and the growl he’d use for the wizard inside the whale?
The hope she’d felt minutes before flags. All these books, all this knowledge, but what’s any of it for? None of it will help her understand why her father would leave his home. None of it will help her understand why she has been consigned to this fate.
She takes a slip from a box, and writes, Show me the blue copy with the drawing of a city in the clouds on the cover.
A scrap of paper comes fluttering down. The Library contains no records of such a volume.
Konstance gazes down the unending rows of shelves. “But I thought you contained everything.”
Another NoLight, another printed First Meal, more lessons from Sybil. Then she climbs back into the Atlas, drops into the sunbaked hills outside Nannup, and walks Backline Road to her father’s house. Σχερία, says the hand-painted sign.
She crouches, twists, presses as close to the house as she can, the view through the bedroom window degrading into a quivering field of color. The book on the nightstand is royal blue. The cloud city in the center of the cover looks faded by sun. She goes to her tiptoes and squints. Beneath Diogenes’s name run four words in smaller type that she missed the first time.
Translation by Zeno Ninis.
Into the sky, out of the Atlas, back to the atrium. She takes a slip from the nearest desk. Writes: Who was Zeno Ninis?