From the backpack comes the fourth ring. One ring left to live. For a quarter second, he glimpses Marian crouched behind a police car, sweet Marian in her cherry-red coat with her almond eyes and paint-flecked jeans; she watches him with a hand over her mouth, Marian the Librarian, whose face, every summer, becomes a sandstorm of freckles.
Down Park Street, away from the police vehicles, library at his back. Imagine, says Rex, how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. A quarter mile away is Mrs. Boydstun’s old house, no curtains on the windows, translations all over the dining table, five Playwood Plastic soldiers in a tin box upstairs beside the little brass bed, and Nestor the king of Pylos drowsing on the kitchen mat. Someone will need to let him out.
Ahead is the lake, frozen and white.
“Why,” says one librarian, “you don’t look warm at all.”
“Where,” says the other, “is your mother?”
He runs through the snow, and for the fifth time the phone rin
QAANAAQ
2146
Konstance
There are forty-nine of them in the village. She lives in a little one-story pastel-blue house built from wood and scrap metal with a greenhouse attached. She has a son: three years old, busy, hot, eager to test everything, learn everything, put everything in his mouth. Inside her grows a second child, not much more than a flicker, a little intelligence unfurling.
It’s August, the sun has not set since mid-April, and tonight most everyone else is out gathering bunchberries. In the distance, at the bottom of the town, past the docks, the ocean glimmers. On the very clearest days, at the farthest edge of the horizon, she can see a low lump that is the rocky island eight miles away where the Argos rusts beneath the weather.
She works in her container garden behind the house while the boy sits among the stones. In his lap is a misshapen book made from the scraps of empty Nourish powder sacks. He pages through it back to front, past Aethon Means Blazing, past The Wizard Inside the Whale, his mouth moving silently as he goes.
The summer twilight is warm and the leaves of the lettuces in her containers flutter and the sky turns lavender—as close to dark as it will get—as she moves back and forth with a watering can. Broccoli. Kale. Zucchini. A Bosnian pine as tall as her thigh.
Παρ?δεισο, parádeisos, paradise: it means garden.
When she is done she sits in a weather-faded nylon chair and the boy brings the book over and pulls her pant leg. His eyelids grow heavy and he fights to hold them up. He says, “You tell the story?”
She looks at him, his round cheeks, his eyelashes, his damp hair. Does the boy sense, already, the precarity of all this?
She hauls him into her lap. “Go to the first page and do it properly.” She waits for him to turn the book right side up. He sucks his lower lip, then pulls back the cover. She runs her finger under the lines.
“I,” she says, “am Aethon, a simple shepherd from Arkadia, and—”
“No, no,” says the boy. He bats the page with his hand. “The voice, with the voice.”
She blinks; the planet rotates another degree; beyond her little garden, below the town, a wind hazes the tops of the swells. The boy raises an index finger and pokes the page. Konstance clears her throat.
“And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you’ll never believe a word of it, and yet”—she taps the end of his nose—“it’s true.”
Author’s Note
This book, intended as a paean to books, is built upon the foundations of many other books. The list runs too long to include them all, but here are a few of the brightest lights. Apuleius’s The Golden Ass and “Lucius the Ass” （an epitome possibly by Lucian of Samosata） retell the doofus-turns-into-a-donkey story with far more zest and skill than I do. The metaphor of Constantinople serving as a Noah’s ark for ancient texts comes from The Archimedes Codex by Reviel Netz and William Noel. I discovered Zeno’s solution to Aethon’s riddle in Voyages to the Moon by Marjorie Hope Nicolson. Many of the details of Zeno’s experiences in Korea were found in Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War by Lewis H. Carlson, and I was introduced to early Renaissance book culture by Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve.
This novel owes its greatest debt to an eighteen-hundred-plus-year-old novel that no longer exists: The Wonders Beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes. Only a few papyrus fragments of that text remain, but a ninth-century plot summary written by the Byzantine patriarch Photios suggests that The Wonders was a big globetrotting tale, full of interlocking subnarratives and divided into twenty-four books. It apparently borrowed from sources both scholarly and fanciful, mashed up existing genres, played around with fictionality, and may have included the first literary voyage to outer space.