It’s the morning of her tenth birthday. Inside Compartment 17, NoLight brightens to DayLight, and she uses the toilet and brushes her hair and powders her teeth and when she pulls back the curtain, Mother and Father are standing there.
“Close your eyes and put out your hands,” says Mother, and Konstance does. Even before she opens her eyes, she knows what her mother is setting onto her forearms: a new worksuit. The fabric is canary yellow and the cuffs and hems are tacked with little x’s of thread and Mother has embroidered a little Bosnian pine on the collar to match the two-and-a-half-year-old seedling growing inside Farm 4.
Konstance presses it to her nose; it smells of the rarest thing: newness.
“You’ll grow into it,” says Mother, and zips the suit to Konstance’s throat. In the Commissary everyone is there—Jessi Ko and Ramón and Mrs. Chen and Tayvon Lee and Dr. Pori the ninety-nine-year-old mathematics teacher—and everyone sings the Library Day song and Sara Jane sets two big pancakes, made with real flour, one stacked atop the other, in front of her. Little cascades of syrup trickle off the edges.
Everyone watches, the teenaged boys especially, none of whom have eaten a pancake made with real flour since their own tenth birthdays. Konstance rolls up the first cake and eats it in four bites; she takes her time with the second. After she finishes, she raises the tray to her face and licks it, and there is applause.
Then Mother and Father walk her back to Compartment 17 to wait. Somehow she has gotten a blob of syrup on her sleeve, and she worries Mother will be upset, but Mother is too excited to notice, and Father only winks, licks a finger, and helps her blot it out.
“It’ll be a lot to take in at first,” Mother says, “but eventually you’ll love it, you’ll see, it’s time for you to grow up a little, and this may help with some of your—” but before she can finish Mrs. Flowers arrives.
Mrs. Flowers’s eyes are foggy with cataracts and her breath reeks of concentrated carrot paste and every day she seems smaller than the last. Father helps her set the Perambulator she’s carrying on the floor beside Mother’s sewing table.
From the pocket of her worksuit Mrs. Flowers produces a Vizer twinkling with golden lights. “It’s secondhand, of course, belonged to Mrs. Alegawa, rest her soul. It may not look perfect, but it passed all the diagnostics.”
Konstance steps onto the Perambulator and it thrums beneath her feet. Father squeezes her hand, looking sad and happy at the same time, and Mrs. Flowers says, “See you in there,” and totters back out the door, heading for her own compartment six doors down. Konstance feels Mother fit the Vizer over the back of her head, feels it squeeze her occipital bones, extend past her ears, and seal across her eyes. She worried it would hurt, but it only feels as though someone has crept up behind her and pressed two cold hands over her face.
“We’ll be right here,” says Mother, and Father adds, “Next to you the whole time,” and the walls of Compartment 17 disintegrate.
She stands in a vast atrium. Three tiers of bookshelves, each fifteen feet tall, served by hundreds of ladders, run for what appear to be miles down either side. Above the third tier, twin arcades of marble columns support a barrel-vaulted ceiling cut through its center by a rectangular aperture, above which puffy clouds float through a cobalt sky.
Here and there in front of her, figures stand at tables or sit in armchairs. On the tiers above, others peruse shelves or lean on railings or climb or descend the ladders. And through the air, for as far as she can see, books—some as small as her hand, some as big as the mattress on which she sleeps—are flying, lifting off shelves, returning to them, some flitting like songbirds, some lumbering along like big ungainly storks.
For a moment she simply stands and looks, speechless. Never has she stood in a space remotely this large. Dr. Pori the mathematics teacher—only his hair is rich and black, not silver, and looks wet and dry at the same time—slips down a ladder to her right, skipping every other rung like an athletic young man, and lands neatly on both feet. He winks at her; his teeth look milk white.
The yellow of Konstance’s worksuit is even more vibrant than it was in Compartment 17. The spot of syrup is gone.
Mrs. Flowers marches toward her from a long way off, a little white dog trotting at her heels. She’s a cleaner, younger, brighter Mrs. Flowers, with clear hazel eyes and mahogany hair cut in a professorial bob, and she wears a skirt and blazer that are the deep green of living spinach, and on one breast golden stitching reads, Head Librarian.
Konstance bends over the little dog: its whiskers twitch; its black eyes shine; its fur, when she puts her fingers in it, feels like fur. She almost laughs from the joy of it.
“Welcome,” says Mrs. Flowers, “to the Library.”
She and Konstance start down the length of the atrium. Various crew members glance up from tables and smile as they pass; a few conjure balloons that say IT’S YOUR LIBRARY DAY and Konstance watches them sail up through the aperture into the sky.
The spines of the books closest to them are teal and maroon and imperial purple and some look slender and delicate and others resemble great legless tabletops stacked on shelves. “Go on,” says Mrs. Flowers, “you can’t damage them,” and Konstance touches the spine of a little one and it rises and opens in front of her. From its onionskin pages, three daisies grow, and in the center of each glow the same three letters, M C V.
“Some are quite bewildering,” says Mrs. Flowers. She taps it and it closes and flits back to its place. Konstance gazes down the line of bookshelves to where the atrium fades into the distance.
“Does it go on—?”
Mrs. Flowers smiles. “Only Sybil could say for sure.”
Three teenaged boys, the Lee brothers and Ramón—only it’s a leaner, tidier version of Ramón—sprint and leap onto a ladder, and Mrs. Flowers calls, “Slowly, please,” and Konstance tries to remind herself that she is still inside Compartment 17, wearing her new worksuit and a hand-me-down Vizer, walking on a Perambulator wedged beside Father’s bunk and Mother’s sewing table—that Mrs. Flowers and the Lee brothers and Ramón are in their own family compartments, walking on their own Perambulators, wearing their own Vizers, that they are all packed inside a disk hurtling through interstellar space, that the Library is just a swarm of data inside the flickering chandelier that is Sybil.
“History’s on our right,” Mrs. Flowers is saying, “to the left is Modern Art, then Languages; those boys are headed to the Games Section, very popular, of course.” She stops at an unoccupied table with a chair on either side and gestures for Konstance to sit. Two little boxes rest on top: one of pencils, the other of rectangles of paper. Between them is a small brass slot and engraved onto its rim are the words Questions Answered Here.
“For a child’s Library Day,” says Mrs. Flowers, “when there is so much to absorb, I try to keep things simple. Four questions, a little scavenger hunt. Question number one. How far from Earth is our destination?”
Konstance blinks, unsure, and Mrs. Flowers’s expression softens. “You needn’t have it memorized, dear. That’s what the Library is for.” She points to the boxes.
Konstance picks up a pencil: it seems so real that she wants to sink her teeth into it. And the paper! It’s so clean, so crisp: outside the Library, there is not a piece of paper this clean on the entire Argos. She writes How far from Earth to Beta Oph2? and looks at Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Flowers nods and Konstance drops the slip through the slot.
The paper vanishes. Mrs. Flowers clears her throat and points, and behind Konstance, high on the third tier, a thick brown book slips off a shelf. It soars across the atrium, dodges a few other airborne books, hovers, then floats down and opens.
Across a double-fold inside spreads a chart titled Confirmed List of Exoplanets in the Optimistic Habitable Zone, B-C. In the first column, little worlds of every color rotate: some rocky, some swirling with gases, some ringed, some dragging tails of ice behind their atmospheres. Konstance runs a fingertip down the rows until she finds Beta Oph2.
“4.2399 light-years.”
“Good. Question number two. How fast are we traveling?”
Konstance writes the question, drops it into the slot, and as the first volume rises away, a bundle of rolled charts arrives and unrolls across the tabletop. From its center a bright blue integer rises into the air.
“7,734,958 kilometers per hour.”
“Right.” Now three of Mrs. Flowers’s fingers go up. “What is the lifespan of a genetically optimal human under mission conditions?” The question goes into the slot; a half-dozen documents of various sizes fly off shelves and flutter over.
114 years, reads one.
116 years, reads a second.
119 years, reads a third.
Mrs. Flowers bends to scratch the ears of the dog at her feet. All the while she watches Konstance. “Now you know the Argos’s velocity, the distance it needs to travel, and the expected lifespan of a traveler under these conditions. Last question. How long will our journey take?”
Konstance stares at the desk.
“Use the Library, dear.” Again Mrs. Flowers taps the slot with one fingernail. Konstance writes the question on a sheet of paper and drops it in the slot, and as soon as it vanishes a single slip of paper emerges high in the barrel vault, drifting down, seesawing back and forth like a feather, and lands in front of her.
“216,078 Earth days.”
Mrs. Flowers watches her, and Konstance gazes down the length of the vast atrium to where the shelves and ladders converge in the distance, and a glimmer of understanding rises, then sinks away again.
“How many years is that, Konstance?”
She looks up. A flock of digital birds passes above the barrel vault, and below that a hundred books and scrolls and documents crisscross the air at a hundred different altitudes, and she can feel the attention of others in the Library on her. She writes 216,078 Earth days in years? and puts the paper in and a fresh slip flutters down.
592.
The pattern of woodgrain on the surface of the desk is churning now, or appears to be, and the marble floor tiles are swirling too, and something roils in her gut.
It takes everyone together,
Everyone together…
Five hundred and ninety-two years.
“We’ll never—?”
“That’s right, child. We know that Beta Oph2 has an atmosphere like Earth’s, that it has liquid water like Earth does, that it probably has forests of some type. But we will never see them. None of us will. We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.”
Konstance presses her palms to the desk; she feels as though she might black out.
“The truth is a great deal to absorb, I know. That’s why we wait to bring children to the Library. Until you are mature enough.”
Mrs. Flowers lifts a slip of paper from the box and writes something. “Come, I want to show you one more thing.” She tucks the paper into the slot and a tattered book, as wide and as tall as the entrance to Compartment 17, lurches off a second-floor shelf, gives a few inelegant flaps, and lands open in front of them. Its pages are profoundly black, as though a doorway has been opened on the rim of a bottomless pit.
“The Atlas,” says Mrs. Flowers, “is a bit dated, I’m afraid. I introduce it to all the children on their Library Day, but after that they tend to prefer slicker, more immersive things. Go on.”
Konstance pokes a finger into the page, pulls it back. Then a foot. Mrs. Flowers takes her hand and Konstance shuts her eyes and braces herself and they step through together.
They don’t fall: they hang suspended in the black. In all directions, pinpricks of light perforate the dark. Over Konstance’s shoulder floats the frame of the Atlas, a lit rectangle through which she can still glimpse shelves back inside the Library.
“Sybil,” says Mrs. Flowers, “take us to Istanbul.”
In the blackness far below a speck enlarges into a dot, then a blue-green sphere, growing larger; one blue hemisphere, aswirl with vapor, rotates through sunlight, while the other passes through an ultramarine darkness, latticed with electric light. “Is that—?” Konstance asks, but now they are dropping feet-first toward the sphere, or else it’s hurtling toward them: it pivots, grows enormous, fills her entire field of vision. She holds her breath as a peninsula expands beneath them—jade-green mottled with beiges and reds, the richness of color overloading her eyes; what rushes toward her is more lavish, more complex, and more intricate than anything she has ever imagined or thought to imagine, a billion Farm 4s all in one place, and now she and Mrs. Flowers are falling through air that is somehow both transparent and aglow, descending over a dense circuitry of roads and rooftops, and finally her feet touch the Earth.
They’re in an empty lot. The sky is jewel blue and cloudless. Huge white stones lie among weeds like the lost molars of giants. Off to their left, undulating alongside a crowded road for as far as she can see in both directions, runs a massive and derelict stone wall, tufted everywhere with grasses and punctuated every fifty meters or so by a broad, time-battered tower.
Konstance feels as though every neuron inside her head has been set on fire. They said Earth was a ruin.
“As you know,” says Mrs. Flowers, “we’re traveling too fast to receive any new data, so depending on when this imaging was done, this is Istanbul as it looked six or seven decades ago, before the Argos departed low Earth orbit.”
The weeds! Weeds with leaves like the blades of Mother’s sewing scissors, weeds with leaves shaped like Jessi Ko’s eyes, weeds with tiny purple flowers on tiny green stems—how many times has Father reminisced about the glories of weeds? A stone beside her foot is mottled with black—is that lichen? Father is always talking about lichen! She reaches to touch it but her hand passes right through.
“All you can do is look,” says Mrs. Flowers. “The only solid thing in the Atlas is the ground. As I said, once the children try the newer things, they hardly ever come back.”
She leads Konstance toward the base of the wall. Everything is motionless. “Sooner or later, child,” Mrs. Flowers says, “all living things die. You, me, your mother, your father, everyone and everything. Even the limestone blocks from which these walls were constructed consist predominantly of the skeletons of long-dead creatures, snails and corals. Come.”
In the shadow of the nearest tower stand a few images of people: one looking up, another caught mid-climb along the stairs. Konstance can see a shirt with buttons, blue pants, a man’s sandals, a woman’s jacket, but the software has blurred their faces. “For privacy,” explains Mrs. Flowers. She points to a staircase winding round the tower. “We go up.”
“I thought you said the only solid thing is the ground.”
Mrs. Flowers smiles. “Wander around in here long enough, dear, and you’ll discover a secret or two.”
With each step up, Konstance can see more of the modern city sprawled around both sides of the old wall: antennas, automobiles, tarps, a building with a thousand windows, everything frozen in time; she can hardly breathe trying to take it all in.
“For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.”
They reach the top of the tower and Konstance gazes out, dizzy: the rust-red brick, the limestone made from the bodies of dead creatures, the green ivy flowing up the walls in waves—it’s all too much.
“But some of the things we build,” continues Mrs. Flowers, “do last. Around the year 410 of the Common Era, the emperor of this city, Theodosius the Second, began constructing these walls, four miles of them, to connect with the eight miles of sea walls the city already had. The Theodosian walls had an outer wall, two meters thick and nine high, and an inner one, five meters thick and twelve high—who can guess how many bodies were broken in their construction?”
A tiny insect has been captured crossing the railing directly in front of Konstance. Its carapace is blue-black and shiny, its legs incredible in their articulations: a beetle.
“For over a thousand years these walls warded off every attack,” Mrs. Flowers says. “Books were confiscated at the ports and not returned until they had been copied, all by hand of course, and some believe that at various points the libraries inside the city contained more books than all the other libraries in the world combined. And all this time earthquakes and floods and armies came, and the people of the city worked together to fortify the walls even as weeds scrambled up their sides, and rain trickled down into fissures, until they could not remember a time when the walls didn’t exist.”
Konstance reaches to touch the beetle, but the railing frays into pixels and again her fingers pass through.
“You and I will never reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you.”
The walls do not move; the people below do not breathe; the trees do not sway; the automobiles are still; the beetle is frozen in time. A thought, or a reconsidered memory, strikes her: of the ten-year-olds before her, like Mother, who were born on board, who woke up on their Library Days dreaming of the hour they’d set foot on Beta Oph2 and take a breath outside the Argos, the shelters they’d build, the mountains they’d climb, the life-forms they might discover—a second Earth!—and then they come out of their compartments after their Library Day looking different, valleys in their foreheads, shoulders drooped, lamps dimmed in their eyes. They stopped running down corridors, took SleepDrops at NoLight; sometimes she’d catch older children staring at their hands or the walls, or moving past the Commissary slumped and weary like they carried invisible backpacks made of stone.
You, me, your mother, your father, everyone and everything.
She says, “But I don’t want to die.”
Mrs. Flowers smiles. “I know, dear. You won’t, not for a long time. You have an extraordinary journey to help complete. Come, it’s time to go; time moves strangely in here and Third Meal is beginning.” She takes Konstance’s hand and they rise together up from the tower, the city falling away, a strait becoming visible, then seas, continents, the Earth dwindling until it’s just a pinprick again, and they step back through the Atlas into the Library.
In the atrium the little dog wags its tail and paws at Konstance’s leg and Mrs. Flowers looks at her kindly as the huge frayed Atlas closes, rises, and floats back to its shelf. The sky above the vault is lavender now. Fewer books fly through the air. Most of the crew members are gone.
Her palms are damp and her feet hurt. When she thinks of the younger children darting down the corridors right now, on their way to Third Meal, a long ache runs through her like a blade. Mrs. Flowers gestures at the measureless shelves. “Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you’ll have this. It will be enough, don’t you think?”