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.
FIFTEEN
THE GUARDIANS AT THE GATES
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio O
… through the gateposts I could glimpse twinkling jewels in the pavements, and what appeared to be a steaming river of broth. Round the towers above, birds flew in rainbow-colored flocks, bright green, purple, crimson. Was I dreaming? Had I really arrived? After so many miles, after so much ·[believing?]· still my heart doubted what my eyes saw.
“Halt, little crow,” said an owl. He rose above me, five times my size, and carried a golden spear in each talon. “For you to pass through the gates, we must make sure you are actually a bird, a noble creature of the air, older than Kronos, than Time itself.”
“Not one of those foul, treacherous humans, made of dust and dirt, wearing a disguise,” said a second owl, even larger than the first.
Behind them, just inside the gates, beneath the hanging plums, almost within reach, a tortoise plodded slowly past with a pillar of honeycakes piled on his back. I leaned forward but the owls bristled their feathers. After crossing half the Milky Way, would the Fates really have me torn to pieces by magnificent beasts such as these?