“What’s a vole?”
“They’re like mice.”
She turns his earmuffs in her hands. “There are at least twenty places like that north of here your owl could fly to. Bigger forests, better forests. He could have his pick.”
“There are?”
“Sure.”
“With lots of voles?”
“Tons of voles. More voles than there are hairs on your head.”
Seymour chews some pancake and Bunny looks at herself in the rearview mirror and sighs.
“You promise, Mom?”
“I promise.”
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 61
Konstance
It’s the morning of her tenth birthday. Inside Compartment 17, NoLight brightens to DayLight, and she uses the toilet and brushes her hair and powders her teeth and when she pulls back the curtain, Mother and Father are standing there.
“Close your eyes and put out your hands,” says Mother, and Konstance does. Even before she opens her eyes, she knows what her mother is setting onto her forearms: a new worksuit. The fabric is canary yellow and the cuffs and hems are tacked with little x’s of thread and Mother has embroidered a little Bosnian pine on the collar to match the two-and-a-half-year-old seedling growing inside Farm 4.
Konstance presses it to her nose; it smells of the rarest thing: newness.
“You’ll grow into it,” says Mother, and zips the suit to Konstance’s throat. In the Commissary everyone is there—Jessi Ko and Ramón and Mrs. Chen and Tayvon Lee and Dr. Pori the ninety-nine-year-old mathematics teacher—and everyone sings the Library Day song and Sara Jane sets two big pancakes, made with real flour, one stacked atop the other, in front of her. Little cascades of syrup trickle off the edges.
Everyone watches, the teenaged boys especially, none of whom have eaten a pancake made with real flour since their own tenth birthdays. Konstance rolls up the first cake and eats it in four bites; she takes her time with the second. After she finishes, she raises the tray to her face and licks it, and there is applause.
Then Mother and Father walk her back to Compartment 17 to wait. Somehow she has gotten a blob of syrup on her sleeve, and she worries Mother will be upset, but Mother is too excited to notice, and Father only winks, licks a finger, and helps her blot it out.
“It’ll be a lot to take in at first,” Mother says, “but eventually you’ll love it, you’ll see, it’s time for you to grow up a little, and this may help with some of your—” but before she can finish Mrs. Flowers arrives.
Mrs. Flowers’s eyes are foggy with cataracts and her breath reeks of concentrated carrot paste and every day she seems smaller than the last. Father helps her set the Perambulator she’s carrying on the floor beside Mother’s sewing table.
From the pocket of her worksuit Mrs. Flowers produces a Vizer twinkling with golden lights. “It’s secondhand, of course, belonged to Mrs. Alegawa, rest her soul. It may not look perfect, but it passed all the diagnostics.”
Konstance steps onto the Perambulator and it thrums beneath her feet. Father squeezes her hand, looking sad and happy at the same time, and Mrs. Flowers says, “See you in there,” and totters back out the door, heading for her own compartment six doors down. Konstance feels Mother fit the Vizer over the back of her head, feels it squeeze her occipital bones, extend past her ears, and seal across her eyes. She worried it would hurt, but it only feels as though someone has crept up behind her and pressed two cold hands over her face.
“We’ll be right here,” says Mother, and Father adds, “Next to you the whole time,” and the walls of Compartment 17 disintegrate.
* * *
She stands in a vast atrium. Three tiers of bookshelves, each fifteen feet tall, served by hundreds of ladders, run for what appear to be miles down either side. Above the third tier, twin arcades of marble columns support a barrel-vaulted ceiling cut through its center by a rectangular aperture, above which puffy clouds float through a cobalt sky.
Here and there in front of her, figures stand at tables or sit in armchairs. On the tiers above, others peruse shelves or lean on railings or climb or descend the ladders. And through the air, for as far as she can see, books—some as small as her hand, some as big as the mattress on which she sleeps—are flying, lifting off shelves, returning to them, some flitting like songbirds, some lumbering along like big ungainly storks.
For a moment she simply stands and looks, speechless. Never has she stood in a space remotely this large. Dr. Pori the mathematics teacher—only his hair is rich and black, not silver, and looks wet and dry at the same time—slips down a ladder to her right, skipping every other rung like an athletic young man, and lands neatly on both feet. He winks at her; his teeth look milk white.