Seymour doesn’t drive up the canyon from Boise until their last night: no need to upset anyone by showing his face too soon. At dawn he swallows an extra antianxiety drop and stands on the balcony wearing a suit and tie. Out beyond the hotel docks, the lake sparkles in the sunlight. He waits to see if an osprey might come overhead but none do.
Notes in his left pocket, room key in his right. Recall things you know. Owls have three eyelids. Humans are complicated. For many of the things you love, it’s too late. But not for all.
He meets the two Ilium technicians in a hexagonal lakeside room used primarily for wedding receptions, and supervises as they carry in five brand-new state-of-the-art multidirectional treadmills that they are calling Perambulators. The technicians pair them with five headsets and depart.
Natalie meets him there early. Her kids, she says, are finishing lunch. It’s brave of him, she says, to do this.
“Braver of you,” says Seymour. Every time he inhales he fears his skin might unbuckle and his bones will fall out.
At 1 p.m., the families arrive. Olivia Ott has a chin-length bob and linen capri pants and her eyes look as though she has been crying. Alex Hess is flanked by two gigantic and sullen teens, the hair of all three bright yellow. Christopher Dee appears with a small woman; they sit in the corner, removed from the others, and hold hands. Rachel enters last, wearing jeans and boots; her face has the deep-grained wrinkles of someone who works long days under the sun. A cheerful-looking flame-haired grandson trundles in behind her and sits and swings his feet in his chair.
“He doesn’t look like a murderer,” says one of Alex’s sons.
“Be polite,” says Alex.
“He just looks old. Is he rich?”
Seymour avoids looking at their faces—faces will derail the whole thing. Keep your eyes down. Read from your notes. “That day,” he says, “all those years ago, I took something precious from each of you. I know I can never fully atone for what I did. But because I, too, know what it’s like to lose a place you cared about when you were young—to have it taken from you—I thought it might mean something to you if I tried to give yours back.”
From his bag he takes five hardcover books with royal blue jackets and hands one to each. On the cover birds swing around the towers of a cloud city. Olivia gasps.
“I had these made from the translations of Mr. Ninis. With a lot of help from Natalie, I should add. She wrote all of the translator’s notes.”
Next he distributes the headsets. “The five of you can go first. Then everybody else, if they’d like. Do you remember the book drop box?”
Nods all around. Christopher says, “？‘Owl’ you need are books.”
“Pull the handle on the box. You’ll know what to do from there.”
The adults stand. Seymour helps them fit the headsets over their heads and the five Perambulators hum to life.
Once they’re settled atop their treadmills, he walks to the window and looks out at the lake. There are at least twenty places like that north of here your owl could fly to, she said. Bigger forests, better forests. She was trying to save him.
The Perambulators whir and spin; the grown-up children walk. Natalie says, “Oh my God.”
Alex says, “It’s exactly how I remember.”
Seymour recalls the silence of the trees behind the double-wide as they filled with snow. Trustyfriend on his limb, ten feet up in the big dead tree: he would twitch at the crunch of tires across gravel a quarter mile away. He could hear the heart of a vole beating beneath six feet of snowpack.
Pneumatic motors raise the fronts of the Perambulators. They are climbing the granite steps to the porch. “Look,” says Christopher. “It’s the sign I made.”
In the chair next to Rachel’s vacant one, Rachel’s grandson reaches over, picks up the blue book, sets it in his lap, and turns pages.
With her right hand, Olivia Ott reaches into space and opens the door. One by one the children enter the library.
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 65
Konstance
Oxygen at seven percent, says the voice inside the hood.
Turn left out of the vestibule. Past Compartments 8, 9, 10, all the doors sealed. Does the contagion swirl even now through the air in the corridor, waking from its long sleep? Do bodies almost four-hundred-days-dead molder in the shadows? Or are crew members stirring all around her beneath the hiss of the extinguishers: friends, children, teachers, Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Flowers, Mother, Father?
Little nozzles in the corridor ceiling rain their mist down on her. Homemade book stuffed inside her worksuit, homemade axe in her left hand, she spirals outward from the center of the Argos, the booties over her feet sliding through the chemicals on the floor.