She looks at Seymour, mouth open.
“Maxwell, I would like to order a pizza.”
Absolutely, Bunny. What size?
“Large. With mushrooms. And sausage.”
One moment, says the capsule and the green dot trundles and she grins her beautiful doomed smile and Seymour feels the world around him crumble a little bit more.
* * *
A week later Janet parks the Audi downtown and they buy ice cream and Janet tells the girl behind the counter that she should use compostable spoons instead of plastic ones and the girl says, “You want sprinkles or not?”
They sit on boulders overlooking the lake and eat their ice cream and Janet takes out her phone. To their left, in the marina parking lot, idles a thirty-two-foot RV with slide-outs on either side and two air-conditioning condenser units on the roof. A man gets out, sets down a little leashed poodle, and walks it around the bend.
“When everything falls apart,” Seymour says, “guys like him will be the first to go.”
Janet pokes the screen of her phone. Seymour fidgets. The roar is close today; he can hear it crackling like a wildfire. From where they sit he can see into the core of downtown to the newly remodeled Eden’s Gate Realty office beside the library.
The RV has Montana plates. Hydraulic jacks. A satellite TV dish.
“He went to walk his dog,” he says, “but left the engine running.”
Beside him Janet takes a photo of herself, then deletes it. Over the lake the eyes of Trustyfriend open, two yellow moons.
In the grass at the edge of the marina lot Seymour spies a round piece of granite as big as a baby’s head. He walks to it. It’s heavier than it looks.
Janet is still looking at her phone. A warrior, Bishop says, truly engaged, does not experience guilt, fear, or remorse. A warrior, truly engaged, becomes something more than human.
Seymour remembers the weight of the grenade in his pocket as he carried it through the vacant lots of Eden’s Gate. Remembers putting his finger through the safety ring. Pull the pin. Pull it pull it pull it.
He lugs the stone over to the motor home. Through the buzz of the roar in his head, he hears Janet call, “Seymour?”
No guilt no fear no remorse. The difference between us and them is action.
“What are you doing?”
He raises the rock above his head.
“Seymour, if you do that, I will never—”
He glances at her. Back at the motor home. Patience, Bishop says, is over.
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 64
DAY 46–DAY 276 INSIDE VAULT ONE
Konstance
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?