Cloud Cuckoo Land (35 page)

He takes off his oxhide cape and lays it down. “What you carry will be safe here. It will be out of the weather and no one will come near.”

She looks at him and the moon-shadow plays across her face and just when he decides she understands none of what he is saying, she passes him the sack. He wraps it in his cape, swings himself into the branches, squeezes inside the hollow tree, and presses the bundle deep inside.

“It will be safe.”

She stares up.

He draws a circle in the air. “We will come back.”

When they reach the road again she volunteers her wrists and he ties her. The river is loud and in the starlight the needles on the pines seem to glow. He knows each step of the road now, knows the timbre and tone of the water. When they reach the track leading up to the ravine he glances back at her: slight, filthy, scratched, shuffling inside her torn dress. All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.

THE SUPER MAGICAL

EXTRA POWERFUL

BOOK OF EVERYTHING

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

6:39 P.M.

B
ehind the bookshelves the children sit with their scripts in their laps: Christopher Dee with his squinty blue eyes and that charming way of talking out of the corner of his mouth; Alex Hess, the thick-chested lion-headed boy who wears gym shorts no matter how cold the weather, who seems impervious to any discomfort save hunger, who has that surprisingly high, silken voice; Natalie, her pink headphones around her neck, who has a real feel for the old Greek; Olivia Ott with her short bob, frighteningly smart, wearing the kaleidoscope dress she worked so hard to make; and redheaded rail-thin Rachel, on her stomach on the carpet, surrounded by props, following the lines of the play with the tip of her pencil as the actors read them.

“On one side is dancing, and the other is death,” whispers Alex, and pretends to turn pages in the air. “Page after page after page.”

The children know. They know someone is downstairs; they know they are in danger. They are being brave, incredibly brave, completing a read-through of the play behind the shelves at a whisper, trying to use the story to slip the trap. But it's long past time for them to go home. It seems an eternity since they heard Sharif call upstairs that he was going to take the backpack to the police. They haven't heard a sound since; Marian hasn't come upstairs with pizza; nobody has called on a bullhorn to tell them it's over.

Pain shudders through Zeno's hip as he rises.

“Just read to the end of the book, little crow,” whispers Olivia-the-goddess, “and you'll learn the secrets of the gods. You can become an eagle, or a bright strong owl, free from desire and death.”

He should have told Rex he loved him. He should have told him at Camp Five; he should have told him in London; he should have told Hillary, and Mrs. Boydstun, and every Valley County woman he went on a miserable date with. He should have risked more. It has taken him his whole life to accept himself, and he is surprised to understand that now that he can, he does not long for one more year, one more month: eighty-six years has been enough. In a life you accumulate so many memories, your brain constantly winnowing through them, weighing consequence, burying pain, but somehow by the time you're this age you still end up dragging a monumental sack of memories behind you, a burden as heavy as a continent, and eventually it becomes time to take them out of the world.

Rachel flaps her hand, whispers, “Stop,” and fans the pages of her script. “Mr. Ninis? The two really messed-up folios, the one with the wild onions, and the dancing? I think we have them in the wrong place. Those don't happen in Cloud Cuckoo Land—they happen back in Arkadia.”

“What,” says Alex, “are you talking about?”

“Quietly,” whispers Zeno. “Please.”

“It's the niece,” whispers Rachel. “We're forgetting about the niece. If what really matters, like Mr. Ninis said, is that the story gets passed on—that it was sent in pieces to a dying girl far away—why would Aethon choose to stay up in the stars and live forever?”

Olivia-the-goddess crouches beside Rachel in her sequined dress. “Aethon doesn't read to the end of the book?”

“That's how he writes his story on the tablets,” says Rachel. “How they get buried in the tomb with him. Because he doesn't stay in Cloud Cuckoo Land. He chooses… What's the word, Mr. Ninis?”

The beating of hearts, the blinking of eyes. Zeno sees himself walk out onto the frozen lake. He sees Rex in the rainy light of the tea room, one hand trembling over his saucer. The children gaze down at their scripts.

“You mean,” says Alex, “Aethon goes home.”

H
e sits with his back against the dictionaries and the Beretta in his lap. A white glare bends through the front windows and sends eerie shadows across the ceiling: the police have installed floodlights.

His phone refuses to ring. He watches the wounded man breathe at the bottom of the stairs. He didn't find the backpack; he hasn't moved. It's the dinner hour, and Bunny will be carrying plates between tables at the Pig N' Pancake, her eleventh hour of work. She will have had to beg a ride there from the Sachse Inn because he didn't pick her up. By now she'll have heard that something is happening at the public library. A dozen police vehicles will have streaked past; they'll be talking about it at all of her tables, and in the kitchen too. Somebody holed up in the library, somebody with a bomb.

Tomorrow, he tells himself, he'll be at Bishop's camp, far to the north, where the warriors live with purpose and meaning, where he and Mathilda will walk through the layers of sun and shadow in the forest. But does he believe that anymore?

Footfalls on the staircase. Seymour raises a cup of his ear defenders. He recognizes Slow-Motion Zeno as he comes down the last steps: a slight old man who always wears a necktie and occupies the same table near the large-print romances, lost behind a molehill of papers, touching them lightly one by one, like a priest seated before a pile of artifacts that hold meaning only for him.

S
harif's shirt is not sitting right on his body, and it looks as though someone has thrown a bucket of ink on him, but Zeno has seen worse. Sharif shakes his head no; Zeno merely bends, touches him on the forehead, and steps over his friend and into the aisle between Nonfiction and Fiction.

The boy is so motionless he might be dead, a handgun resting on his knee. A green backpack sits on the carpet beside him, a mobile phone beside that. What looks like rifle-range ear defenders are cocked on his head, one muff on, one off.

Down through the centuries tumble the words of Diogenes:
I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet—

“So young,” says Zeno.

—
still a needle of doubt pricked beneath my wing. A dark restlessness flickered—

The boy doesn't move.

“What's inside the bag?”

“Bombs.”

“How many?”

“Two.”

“How are they triggered?”

“Tracfones, taped to the top.”

“How do the bombs go off?”

“If I call either of the phones. On the fifth ring.”

“But you're not going to call them. Are you?”

The boy brings his left hand to his earmuffs as though hoping to blot out any further questions. Zeno remembers lying on the straw
mat in Camp Five, knowing Rex was folding his body into one of the empty oil drums. Waiting to hear Zeno climb into the other drum. For Bristol and Fortier to lift them onto the truck.

He shuffles forward and lifts the backpack and pins it gently against his necktie as the boy steers the barrel of the pistol toward him. Zeno's breath is strangely steady.

“Does anyone besides you have the numbers?”

The boy shakes his head. Then his forehead wrinkles, as though realizing something. “Yes. Someone does have them.”

“Who?”

He shrugs.

“What you mean is, someone besides you can detonate the bombs?”

The trace of a nod.

Sharif watches from the base of the stairs, every inch of him alert. Zeno wraps his arms through the backpack straps. “My friend there, the children's librarian? His name is Sharif. He requires medical attention right away. I'm going to use the telephone to call an ambulance now. In all likelihood, there's one right outside.”

The boy grimaces, as though someone has resumed playing loud, screeching music that only he can hear. “I'm waiting for help,” he says, but without conviction.

Zeno walks backward to the welcome desk and lifts the receiver of the telephone. No dial tone. “I'll need to use your phone,” he says. “Just for the ambulance. That's all I'll do, I promise, and I'll give it right back. And then we'll wait for your help to arrive.”

The gun remains pointed at Zeno's chest. The boy's finger remains on the trigger. The cell phone stays on the floor. “We will live lives of clarity and meaning,” the boy says, and rubs his eyes. “We will exist entirely outside of the machine even as we work to destroy it.”

Zeno takes his left hand off the backpack. “I'm going to reach down with one hand and pick up your phone. Okay?”

Sharif is rigid at the base of the stairwell. The children remain silent upstairs. Zeno bends. The gun barrel is inches from his head. His hand has almost reached the phone when, inside the backpack in his arms, one of the Tracfones taped to one of the bombs rings.

MISSION YEAR 65

DAY 341–DAY 370 INSIDE VAULT ONE

“S
ybil, where are we?”

We are en route to Beta Oph2.

“What speed are we traveling?”

7,734,958 kilometers per hour. You would remember our velocity from your Library Day.

“You're sure, Sybil?”

It is fact.

She gazes a moment into the trillion resplendent tributaries of the machine.

Konstance, are you feeling well? Your heart rate is rather high.

“I feel fine, thank you. I'm going back to the Library for a bit.”

She studies the same schematics that her father studied during Quarantine Two. Engineering, storage, fluid recycling, waste treatment, oxygen plant. The farms, the Commissary, the kitchens. Five lavatories with showers, forty-two living compartments, Sybil at the center. No windows, no stairs, no way in, no way out, the whole structure a self-sustaining tomb. Sixty-six years ago the original eighty-five volunteers were told they were embarking on an interstellar journey that would outlast them by centuries. They traveled to Qaanaaq, trained for six months, boarded a boat, and were sedated and sealed inside the
Argos
while Sybil prepared the launch.

Except there was no launch. It was just an exercise. A pilot study,
a trial run, an intergenerational feasibility experiment that may have ended long ago or may be ongoing still.

Konstance stands in the Library atrium touching the place on her worksuit where Mother stitched a pine seedling four years before. Mrs. Flowers's little dog stares up at her and wags his tail. He is not real. The desk beneath her fingertips feels like wood, sounds like wood, smells like wood; the slips in the box look like paper, feel like paper, smell like paper.

None of it is real. She stands on a circular Perambulator in a circular room at the center of a circular white structure on a mostly circular island eight miles across Baffin Bay from a remote village called Qaanaaq. How does a contagion suddenly present itself on a ship streaking through interstellar space? Why couldn't Sybil solve it? Because none of them, Sybil included, knew where they actually were.

She writes a series of questions on slips of paper and tucks them one by one into the slot. Above the atrium, clouds stream through a yellow sky. The little dog licks his upper lip. Down from the stacks fly books.

Inside Vault One she unscrews all four legs off the cot, and uses the frame to pound one end of one of the legs flat.

Why
, Sybil asks,
are you dismantling your bed?

Don't answer. Konstance spends hours discreetly sharpening the edge of the cot leg. She inserts the sharpened leg into a slot on a second leg that will serve as a handle, secures it with a screw, makes cord from the lining of her blanket, and lashes the sharpened cot leg fast: a homemade axe. Then she takes several scoops of Nourish powder, runs them through the food printer, and the machine fills the bowl past the rim.

I am glad
, says Sybil,
that you are preparing a meal, Konstance. And such a large one too.

“I'll have another after this one, Sybil. Is there a recipe you might recommend?”

How about pineapple fried rice? Doesn't that sound nice?

Konstance swallows, fills her mouth again. “It does, yes. It sounds wonderful.”

Once she is full, she crawls around the floor gathering her transcriptions of Zeno Ninis's translations.
Aethon Has a Vision. The Bandits' Hideout. The Garden of the Goddess.
She gathers all the scraps into a stack, Folio A to Folio Ω, sets her drawing of a cloud city on top, and, using one of the aluminum screws from the cot legs, bores a row of holes through the left edge. Then she unravels more blanket lining, braids the fibers together to make twine, lines up the holes, and sews the scraps of food sacks together along one edge to bind them.

An hour left before NoLight, she cleans her food bowl and fills it with water. By running her fingers along her scalp, she collects a little nest of hair and wedges it into the bottom of her empty drinking cup.

Then she sits on the floor and waits and watches Sybil gleam inside her tower. She can almost feel Father bundling her in her blanket, sitting with her against the wall of Farm 4, the space around them crammed with racks of lettuce and watercress and parsley, the seeds sleeping in their drawers.

Will you tell some more of the story, Father?

When NoLight comes, she takes the bioplastic suit her father sewed for her twelve months before and pulls it on. Leaving her arms free, she zips it to her chest, the fit more snug now that she has grown, and tucks her handmade book deep inside her worksuit. Then she balances one end of the legless cot, its mattress still inflated, on the food printer and the other on the toilet to form a kind of canopy.

Konstance
, says Sybil,
what are you doing to your bed?

She crawls beneath the elevated cot. From the back of the printer she unplugs the low-voltage power connection, strips away the thermoplastic sheath, and attaches the wires inside the cable to the two remaining cot legs. Positive to one, negative to the other. These she sticks into the water in her food bowl.

She holds her drinking cup, her hair wadded inside, upside down over the positive electrode and waits as oxygen rises from the water and collects in the inverted cup.

Konstance, what are you up to under there?

She counts to ten, takes the wires off the cot legs, and rubs their ends together. The ensuing spark, rising into the pure oxygen, ignites the hair.

I insist that you reply. What are you doing beneath your bed?

As she turns over the cup, smoke rises, and with it the odor of burning hair. Konstance sets a crumpled square of dry-wipe on it, then another. According to the schematics, extinguishers are embedded into the ceiling of every room on the
Argos
. If this is not true in Vault One—if the schematics were wrong, and there are extinguishers in the walls, or in the floor, this will never work. But if they are only in the ceiling, it might.

Konstance, I sense heat. Please answer me, what are you doing under there?

Little nozzles extend from the ceiling and begin to spray a chemical mist onto the cot above her head; she can feel it pattering onto the legs of her suit as she feeds the flames beneath the cot.

The fire fades as she nearly smothers it with more dry-wipes, then surges back to life. Threads of black curl around the edges of the upside-down cot, and into the mist raining down from the ceiling. She blows on the flames, layers on more wipes, then feeds it scoops of Nourish powder. If this does not work, she will not have enough material to burn a second time.

Soon the underside of her mattress catches fire and she has to crawl out from beneath the cot. She pitches in the last of the dry-wipes. Green flames rise from the mattress's edge and an acrid, burnt-chemical smell fills the vault. Konstance slides across the room beneath the spray of the extinguishers, puts her hands into the suit's sleeves, pulls on the oxygen hood, and seals it to the suit's collar.

She feels it catch, feels the suit inflate.

Oxygen at ten percent
, says the hood.

Konstance, this is outrageously irresponsible behavior. You are jeopardizing everything.

The underside of the cot glows brighter as the mattress burns. The beam of the headlamp flickers through the smoke.

“Sybil, your prime directive is to protect the crew, isn't it? Above all else?”

Sybil raises the lights in the ceiling to full brightness and Konstance squints into the glare. Her hands are lost in sleeves; her feet slide on the floor.

“It's mutualism, right?” Konstance says. “The crew needs you and you need a crew.”

Please remove the cot frame so the fire beneath it can be extinguished.

“But without a crew—without me—you have no purpose, Sybil. This room is already so full of smoke that it is not possible for me to breathe. In a few minutes the hood I'm wearing will run out of oxygen. Then I will asphyxiate.”

Sybil's voice deepens.
Remove the cot immediately.

The falling droplets cloud the lens of her hood, and each time she tries to wipe it clean, she only smudges it further. Konstance shifts the book zipped inside her worksuit and picks up her hatchet.

Oxygen at nine percent
, says the hood.

Green and orange flames are licking around the top of the cot now, and Sybil is mostly obscured behind smoke.

Please, Konstance
. Her voice changes, softens, becomes a mimicry of Mother's.
You must not do this.

Konstance backs against the wall. The voice changes again, flows to a new gender.
Listen, Zucchini, can you flip over the cot?

Hairs rise on the back of Konstance's neck.

We must put out the fire immediately. Everything is in danger.

She can hear a hissing, something melting or boiling inside the mattress, and through the billowing smoke she can just glimpse the tower that is Sybil, sixteen feet tall, rippling with crimson light, and from her memory whispers Mrs. Chen:
Every map ever drawn, every census ever taken, every book ever published…

For an instant, she hesitates. The images on the Atlas are
decades old. What waits out there now, beyond the walls of the
Argos
? What if Sybil is the only other intelligence left? What is she risking?

Oxygen at eight percent
, says the hood.
Try to breathe more slowly
.

She turns away from Sybil and holds her breath. In front of her, where a moment before there was only wall, the door to Vault One slides open.