But day by day his enthusiasm dims. Many of the folios remain so damaged that sentences dissolve into illegibility before they become comprehensible. Worse, the conservators report that at some point over its long history the codex must have been disbound and rebound in the wrong order, so that the intended sequence of events in Aethon’s tale is no longer obvious. By July he begins to feel as if he’s trying to solve one of Mrs. Boydstun’s jigsaw puzzles, a third of the pieces kicked under the stove, another third missing altogether. He’s too inexperienced, too undereducated, too old; his mind is not up to it.
Sheep Shagger, Fruit Punch, Pansy, Zero. Why is it so hard to transcend the identities assigned to us when we were young?
* * *
In August the library’s air conditioner gives out. Zeno spends an afternoon sweating through his shirt as he agonizes over a particularly problematic folio from which at least sixty percent of the words have been effaced. Something about a hoopoe leading Aethon-the-crow to a river of cream. Something about a prick of doubt—disquietude? restlessness?—beneath his wings.
That’s as far as he gets.
At closing time he gathers his books and legal pads as Sharif pushes in the chairs and Marian shuts off the lights. Outside, the air smells of wildfire smoke.
“There are professionals out there working on this,” Zeno says as Sharif locks the door. “Proper translators. People with fancy degrees who actually know what they’re doing.”
“Could be,” says Marian. “But none of them are you.”
On the lake a surf boat roars past, its speakers thumping bass. A hot, silvery pressure hangs in the atmosphere. The three of them pause beside Sharif’s Isuzu and Zeno feels the ghost of something moving through the heat, invisible, elusive. Over the ski mountain on the far side of the lake, a thundercloud flares blue.
“In the hospital,” Sharif says, as he lights a cigarette, “before she died, my mother used to say, ‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’？”
“Who said that?”
He shrugs. “Some days she said Aristotle, some days John Wayne. Maybe she made it up.”
EIGHTEEN
IT WAS ALL SO MAGNIFICENT, YET…
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Σ
… my feathers grew shiny and full and I flapped about eating whatever I pleased, sweets, meats, fishes—even fowls! There was no pain, no hunger, my ·[wings?]· never throbbed, my talons never ·[stung?]·.
… the nightingales gave ·[evening?]· concerts, the warblers sang love songs in the gardens ·[and]· no one called me dull-witted or muttonheaded or lamebrained, or spoke a cruel word at all…
I had flown so far, I had proven everyone wrong. Yet as I perched on my balcony and peered past the happy flocking birds, over the gates, over the ruffled edges of the clouds, down at the patchwork mud-heap of earth far below, where the cities teemed and the herds, wild and tame, drifted like dust across the plains, I wondered about my friends, and my little bed, and the ewes I’d left behind in the field. I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet…
… still a needle of doubt pricked beneath my wing. A dark restlessness flickered within…
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 65
DAY 325 INSIDE VAULT ONE
Konstance
Weeks have passed since Konstance discovered the little ramshackle library hidden inside the Atlas. She has painstakingly copied three-quarters of Zeno Ninis’s translations—Folios Alpha through Sigma—from the golden book on the pedestal in the Children’s Section onto scraps of sackcloth in the vault. More than one hundred and twenty scraps, covered with her handwriting, now blanket the floor around Sybil’s tower, each alive with connections to the nights she spent in Farm 4, listening to the voice of her father.
… I rubbed myself head to toe with the ointment Palaestra chose, took three pinches of frankincense…
… Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real…
… he that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.
Tonight she sits on the edge of the cot, ink-stained and weary, as the light turns leaden. These are the hardest hours, as DayLight bleeds into NoLight. Each time she’s struck anew by the silence beyond the vault, where she fears no living person has stirred for more than ten months, and the silence beyond that, beyond the walls of the Argos, that stretches for distances beyond human ability to comprehend them. She curls onto her side and pulls her blanket to her chin.