Records flutter down from the shelves and stack themselves on the desk in chronological order. An Oregon birth certificate. A bleached piece of paper called a Western Union telegram.
WUX Washington AP 20 551 PM
ALMA BOYDSTUN
431 FOREST ST LAKEPORT
DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR WARD PRIVATE ZENO NINIS US ARMY IS MISSING IN ACTION SINCE 1 APRIL 1951 IN THE KOREAN AREA DURING THE PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTY DETAILS NOT AVAILABLE
Next come transcripts of prisoner-of-war release interviews dated July and August 1953. A passport with one arrival stamp: London. A deed for a house in Idaho. A commendation for four decades of service to the Valley County Highway Department. The bulk of the stack consists of obituaries and articles detailing how, at the age of eighty-six, on the twentieth of February in the year 2020, Zeno Ninis died protecting five children who were trapped in a rural library by a terrorist.
COURAGEOUS KOREA VET SAVES KIDS AND LIBRARY, reads one headline. IDAHO HERO MOURNED, reads another.
She finds nothing connected to the fragments of an ancient comedy titled Cloud Cuckoo Land. No listed publications, no indications that Zeno Ninis translated, adapted, or published anything.
A prisoner of war, a county employee in Idaho, an elderly man who thwarted a planned bombing of a small-town library. Why was a book with this man’s name on it on Father’s nightstand in Nannup? She writes, Was there another Zeno Ninis? and drops the question through the slot. A moment later the reply flutters down: The Library contains no records of any other individuals by that name.
At NoLight she lies on the cot and watches Sybil flicker inside her tower. How many times, as a little girl, was she assured that Sybil contained everything she could ever imagine, everything she would ever need? The memoirs of kings; ten thousand symphonies; ten million television shows; whole baseball seasons; 3-D scans of the Lascaux caves; a complete record of the Great Collaboration that produced the Argos: propulsion, hydration, gravity, oxygenation—all right here, the collected cultural and scientific output of human civilization nested inside the strange filaments of Sybil at the heart of the ship. The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure. And when she first stood in the atrium on her Library Day, gazing down the seemingly infinite rows of shelves, hadn’t she believed it?
But it wasn’t true. Sybil couldn’t stop a contagion from spreading through the crew. She couldn’t save Zeke or Dr. Pori or Mrs. Lee or anybody else, it seems. Sybil still doesn’t know if it’s safe for Konstance outside of Vault One.
There are things that Sybil doesn’t know. Sybil doesn’t know what it meant to be held by your father inside the leafy green twilight of Farm 4, or how it felt to sift through your mother’s button bag and wonder about the provenance of each button. The Library has no records of a royal blue copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land translated by Zeno Ninis, yet Konstance has seen one inside the Atlas, faceup on Father’s nightstand.
Konstance sits up. Into her mind swims a vision of another library, a less presuming place, hidden inside the walls of her own skull, a library of just a few dozen shelves, a library of secrets: the library of things Konstance knows but Sybil does not.
She feeds herself, scrubs the rinseless soap into her hair, does whatever sit-ups and lunges and precalculus Sybil prescribes. Then she goes to work. She rips apart the one Nourish powder sack that she has already emptied and tears the scraps into rectangles: paper. She takes a replacement nylon tube out of the food printer’s repair pack and chews it into a nib: pen.
Her early attempts at ink—synthetic gravy, synthetic grape juice, synthetic coffee bean paste—are pitiful: too runny, too feathery, too slow to dry.
Konstance, what are you doing?
“I’m playing, Sybil. Let me be.”
But after a few dozen experiments, she’s able to write her name without smearing it. In the Library she tells herself, read, reread, take a snapshot of it in your mind. Then she touches her Vizer, steps off the Perambulator, and writes it out.
Courageous Korea Vet Saves Kids and Library
With the makeshift pen, those seven words take her ten minutes to write. But after a few more days of practice, she’s quicker, memorizing whole sentences from texts in the Library, stepping off her Perambulator, and scrawling them onto a scrap. One reads,
Proteomic analysis of the Diogenes codex turned up traces of tree sap, lead, charcoal, and gum tragacanth, a thickening agent commonly used in ink in medieval Constantinople.
Another:
But if it is probable that the manuscript survived the Middle Ages, like so many other ancient Greek texts, in a monastic library of Constantinople, how it traveled out of the city and to Urbino must be left to the imagination.
A current of red light ripples through Sybil. Are you playing a game, Konstance?
“Just making notes, Sybil.”
Why not write your notes in the Library? Far more efficient and you could use whatever colors you would like.
Konstance drags the back of her hand across her face, smearing ink across one cheek. “This suits me fine, thank you.”
Weeks pass. Happy birthday, Konstance, Sybil says one morning. You are fourteen years old today. Would you like me to help you print a cake?
Konstance peers over the edge of her cot. On the floor around her flutter almost eighty scraps of sacking material. One reads, Who Was Zeno Ninis? Another: Σχερία.
“No, thank you. You could let me out. Why not let me out for my birthday?”
I cannot.
“How many days have I been in here, Sybil?”
You have been safe inside Vault One for two hundred and seventy-six days.
From the floor she picks up a scrap on which she has written,
Out here in the woop woop, like Grandmom calls it, we’ve had heaps of troubles.
She blinks and sees Father lead her into Farm 4 and pull open a seed drawer. Vapor spills out and flows along the floor; she reaches into the rows, selects a foil envelope.
Sybil says, There are several recipes for birthday cake we could try.
“Sybil, you know what I would like for my birthday?”
Tell me, Konstance.
“I would like you to leave me alone.”
Inside the Atlas she floats miles above the rotating Earth, questions whispering through the black. Why did her father have a copy of Zeno Ninis’s translation of Aethon’s story on his nightstand in Nannup? What does it mean?
I had this dream, this vision, of what life could be, Father said in the last minute she spent with him. “Why stay here when I could be there?” The same words Aethon said before he left home.
“Take me,” she says, “to Lakeport, Idaho.”
She plummets through clouds to a mountain town bunched at the south end of a glacial lake. She walks past a marina, two hotels, a boat ramp. An electric tourist tram runs to the top of a nearby peak. Traffic clogs the main road: trucks pull boats on trailers; faceless figures pedal bicycles.
The public library is a steel-and-glass cube a mile south of downtown in a weedy field. A platoon of heat pumps gleams to one side. No plaques, no memorial garden, no mention of any Zeno Ninis.
She returns to Vault One and paces in her ragged socks, the scraps at her feet stirring lightly. She collects four, sets them in a row, and crouches over them.
Courageous Korea Vet Saves Kids and Library
Translation by Zeno Ninis
The Library contains no records of such a volume.
February 20, 2020.
What is she missing? She remembers Mrs. Flowers standing beneath the crumbling Theodosian Walls in Istanbul: Depending on when this imaging was done, this is the city as it looked six or seven decades ago, before the Argos left Earth.
Again she touches her Vizer, climbs onto the Perambulator, takes a slip of paper from a Library table. Show me, she writes, what the Lakeport Public Library looked like on February 20, 2020.
Old-fashioned two-dimensional photographs descend onto the table. The library in these images is entirely different from the steel-and-glass cube inside the Atlas: it’s a high-gabled light-blue house partially concealed behind overgrown bushes at the corner of Lake and Park. Shingles are missing; the chimney is crooked; dandelions grow from cracks in the front walk. A box painted to look like an owl stands on the corner.
Atlas, writes Konstance and the big book lumbers off its shelf.
She finds her way to the corner of Lake and Park and stops. On the southeast corner, where the ramshackle library in the photographs once stood, now rises a three-story hotel full of balconies. Four faceless teenagers in tank tops and swim trunks are stopped mid-stride on the corner.
An awning, an ice cream shop, a pizza restaurant, a parking garage. The lake is dotted with boats and kayaks. Traffic is stopped in a line up and down the road. No sign that a public library inside a rickety old blue house was ever here.
She turns in a half circle and stands beside the teenagers, a wave of hopelessness rearing behind her. Her notes on the floor of the vault, her trips along Backline Road, her discovery of Scheria, the book on her Father’s night table—all this investigation was supposed to lead her somewhere. It felt like a puzzle she was supposed to solve. But she’s no closer to understanding her father than she was when he locked her in the vault.
She’s about to leave when she notices, on the southwest corner of the intersection, a squat cylindrical box that has been painted to look like an owl with its wings pressed to its sides. PLEASE RETURN BOOKS HERE, it says on the door. On the owl’s breast:
LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY
“OWL” YOU NEED ARE BOOKS!
Its two big amber eyes seem almost to track her as she approaches.
They tore down the old library, built a new one at the edge of town, but left a box behind where people could return books? For decades?
From a certain angle, one of the kids on the corner seems to be walking right into the box, as though it was not there when the kids were imaged. Strange.
The owl’s feathers are exquisitely detailed. Its eyes look wet and alive.
… and her eyes, they grew three times as large and turned the color of liquid honey…
The book drop box, she realizes, like the coconut palms that stopped her in Nigeria, or the emerald lawn and blooming trees in front of the public hall in Nannup, looks more vibrant than the building behind it—more vivid than the ice cream parlor or the pizza place or the four kids caught by the Atlas cameras. The owl’s feathers almost quiver as Konstance reaches for them. Her fingertips strike something solid and her heart thumps.
The handle of the door feels like metal: cold, firm. Real. She grabs it and pulls. It starts to snow.