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: Σχερ?α.
“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.