“As you know,” says Mrs. Flowers, “we’re traveling too fast to receive any new data, so depending on when this imaging was done, this is Istanbul as it looked six or seven decades ago, before the Argos departed low Earth orbit.”
The weeds! Weeds with leaves like the blades of Mother’s sewing scissors, weeds with leaves shaped like Jessi Ko’s eyes, weeds with tiny purple flowers on tiny green stems—how many times has Father reminisced about the glories of weeds? A stone beside her foot is mottled with black—is that lichen? Father is always talking about lichen! She reaches to touch it but her hand passes right through.
“All you can do is look,” says Mrs. Flowers. “The only solid thing in the Atlas is the ground. As I said, once the children try the newer things, they hardly ever come back.”
She leads Konstance toward the base of the wall. Everything is motionless. “Sooner or later, child,” Mrs. Flowers says, “all living things die. You, me, your mother, your father, everyone and everything. Even the limestone blocks from which these walls were constructed consist predominantly of the skeletons of long-dead creatures, snails and corals. Come.”
In the shadow of the nearest tower stand a few images of people: one looking up, another caught mid-climb along the stairs. Konstance can see a shirt with buttons, blue pants, a man’s sandals, a woman’s jacket, but the software has blurred their faces. “For privacy,” explains Mrs. Flowers. She points to a staircase winding round the tower. “We go up.”
“I thought you said the only solid thing is the ground.”
Mrs. Flowers smiles. “Wander around in here long enough, dear, and you’ll discover a secret or two.”
With each step up, Konstance can see more of the modern city sprawled around both sides of the old wall: antennas, automobiles, tarps, a building with a thousand windows, everything frozen in time; she can hardly breathe trying to take it all in.
“For as long as we have been a species, whether with medicine or technology, by gathering power, by embarking on journeys, or by telling stories, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.”
They reach the top of the tower and Konstance gazes out, dizzy: the rust-red brick, the limestone made from the bodies of dead creatures, the green ivy flowing up the walls in waves—it’s all too much.
“But some of the things we build,” continues Mrs. Flowers, “do last. Around the year 410 of the Common Era, the emperor of this city, Theodosius the Second, began constructing these walls, four miles of them, to connect with the eight miles of sea walls the city already had. The Theodosian walls had an outer wall, two meters thick and nine high, and an inner one, five meters thick and twelve high—who can guess how many bodies were broken in their construction?”
A tiny insect has been captured crossing the railing directly in front of Konstance. Its carapace is blue-black and shiny, its legs incredible in their articulations: a beetle.
“For over a thousand years these walls warded off every attack,” Mrs. Flowers says. “Books were confiscated at the ports and not returned until they had been copied, all by hand of course, and some believe that at various points the libraries inside the city contained more books than all the other libraries in the world combined. And all this time earthquakes and floods and armies came, and the people of the city worked together to fortify the walls even as weeds scrambled up their sides, and rain trickled down into fissures, until they could not remember a time when the walls didn’t exist.”
Konstance reaches to touch the beetle, but the railing frays into pixels and again her fingers pass through.
“You and I will never reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you.”
The walls do not move; the people below do not breathe; the trees do not sway; the automobiles are still; the beetle is frozen in time. A thought, or a reconsidered memory, strikes her: of the ten-year-olds before her, like Mother, who were born on board, who woke up on their Library Days dreaming of the hour they’d set foot on Beta Oph2 and take a breath outside the Argos, the shelters they’d build, the mountains they’d climb, the life-forms they might discover—a second Earth!—and then they come out of their compartments after their Library Day looking different, valleys in their foreheads, shoulders drooped, lamps dimmed in their eyes. They stopped running down corridors, took SleepDrops at NoLight; sometimes she’d catch older children staring at their hands or the walls, or moving past the Commissary slumped and weary like they carried invisible backpacks made of stone.