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.
TWENTY-TWO
WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE
IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU
SO DESPERATELY SEEK
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio X
Folio X is severely degraded. What happens next in Aethon’s tale has been long debated and need not be belabored here. Many argue this section belongs earlier in the tale, and points to a different conclusion, and that it’s not the translator’s job to speculate. Translation by Zeno Ninis.
the ewes lambing and the rain falling and the hills greening and the lambs being weaned and the ewes growing old and curmudgeonly and trusting only me. Why ·[did I leave?]·? Why this compulsion to be ·[elsewhere?]·, to constantly seek something new? Was hope a curse, ·[the last evil left in Pandora’s jar]·?
You fly all the way to the end of the stars, and all you want ·[to do is go home…]·
… creaking knees…
… mud and all…
My flock, some cheap wine, a bath, ·[that’s]· as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs. I opened ·[my beak and croaked, “In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.”]·
The goddess straightened, ·[her head bumped a star, brought down a colossal hand, and afloat in the center of her lake-sized palm, there rested a single white rose.]·
IDAHO STATE CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION
2021–2030
Seymour
It’s medium security, a campus of low beige buildings wrapped in a double layer of chainlink that could pass for a run-down community college. There’s a woodshop, a gym, a chapel, and a library populated with legal textbooks, dictionaries, and fantasy novels. The food is third-rate.
He spends every hour he can inside the computer lab. He has learned Excel, AutoCAD, Java, C++, and Python, taking comfort in the clear logic of code, input and output, instruction and command. Four times a day electronic chimes sound and he goes outside for a “movement” where he can peer through the fencing to a rising plain of cheatgrass and skeleton weed. The Owyhee Mountains shimmer in the distance. The only trees he sees are sixteen underwatered honey locusts huddled in the visitors’ parking lot, none taller than twelve feet.
His coveralls are denim; all the cells are singles. On the wall opposite his little window is a rectangle of painted cinderblock where men are allowed to post family snapshots, postcards, or art. Seymour’s is empty.
For the first several years, before she gets sick, Bunny visits when she can, riding the Greyhound three hours from Lakeport, then taking a cab to the prison, wearing a surgical mask, her eyes blinking at him across the table in the fluorescent lights.
Possum, are you listening?
Can you look at me?
Once a week she deposits five dollars into his prisoner account, and he spends it on 1.69-ounce packages of plain M&M’s from the vending machine.
Sometimes, when he closes his eyes, he’s back in the courtroom, the gazes of the children’s families like propane torches aimed at the back of his head. He could not look at Marian. Who made the PDF we found on your tablet? Why assume Bishop’s camp was real? Why assume the recruiter you messaged with was female, why assume she was your age, why assume she was human? Each question a needle into an overneedled heart.
Kidnapping, use of a weapon of mass destruction, attempted murder—he pled guilty to it all. The children’s librarian, Sharif, survived his wound, which helped. A buzz-cut prosecutor with a high-pitched voice argued for the death penalty; Seymour got forty to life instead.
* * *
One morning when he’s twenty-two, the chimes sound for the 10:31 movement, but the computer room supervisor asks Seymour and two other good behavior guys to stay put. Officers wheel in three free-standing terminals with trackballs mounted in front, and the assistant warden escorts in a severe-looking woman in a blazer and V-neck.