Rain pelts her sweat-soaked hair, her cheeks, her forehead. She kneels in the grasses and listens to it strike her suit, feels it land on her eyelids. It seems so incredibly, dangerously, promiscuously wasteful: water, given from the sky, in such quantities.

The headlamp dies, and only a glimmer emits from the gash she has chopped in the side of the Argos. But the darkness of this place is nothing like NoLight. The sky, webbed with cloud, appears to glow, and the wet grass blades catch the light and send it back, tens of thousands of droplets gleaming, and she peels Father’s suit down to her waist, and kneels in the tundra grass, and remembers what Aethon said: A bath, that’s as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs.

She finds her axe, strips off the rest of the bioplastic, gathers as many seed envelopes as she can find, and zips them into her worksuit alongside her homemade book. Then she limps her way through the grass and rocks to the perimeter fence. The Argos looms huge and pale behind her.

The fence is topped with razor wire and too high to climb but with the blade of her hatchet, working against one of the posts, she manages to chop through a dozen links, bend them back, and squirm through.

On the other side lie thousands more shining wet stones. On each grows lichen in crusts, lichen in scales—she could spend a year studying any one of them. Beyond the stones a roar rises, the roar of something perpetually in motion, seething, changing, moving—the sea.

* * *

Dawn takes an hour and she tries not to blink for any of it. First comes a slow spread of purples, then blues, a diversity of hues infinitely more complex and rich than any simulation inside the Library. She stands barefoot in the water, up to her ankles, the low, flat surf moving ceaselessly in a thousand different vectors, and for the first time in her life, the thrum of the Argos, of trickling pipes, of humming conduits, of the creeping tendrils of Sybil—the machine that has whirred all around her, all her life, since before she was conceived—is gone.

“Sybil?”

Nothing.

Far to her right she can just make out the gray outbuilding she uncovered on the Atlas, the boat shelter, a rocky pier. Over her shoulder, the Argos looks smaller: a white bolus beneath the sky.

In front of her, out on the horizon, the blue rim of dawn is turning pink, raising its fingers to push back the night.

EPILOGUE

THE LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

7:02 P.M.

Zeno

The boy lowers his gun. The phone inside the backpack rings a second time. There, past the welcome desk blocking the door, beyond the porch, waits the next world. Does he have the strength?

He crosses the space to the entry and leans into the desk; power flows into his legs as though sent by Athena herself. The desk slides away; he clutches the backpack, pulls open the door, and charges into the glare of the police lights.

The phone rings a third time.

Down the five granite steps, down the walk, into the untracked snow, into a web of sirens, into the sights of a dozen rifles, one voice calling, “Hold fire, hold fire!” another—perhaps his own—yelling something beyond language.

So much snow pours from the sky that the air seems more snow than air. Down through the tunnel of junipers Zeno runs, moving as well as an eighty-six-year-old man with a bad hip can run in Velcro boots and two pairs of wool socks, the backpack pressed against his penguin necktie. He runs the bombs past the yellow owl eyes on the book drop box, past a van that reads Explosives Ordnance Disposal, past men in body armor; he is Aethon turning his back on immortality, happy to be a fool once more, the shepherds are dancing in the rain, playing their pipes and plucking their lyres, the lambs are bleating, the world is wet and muddy and green.

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.

Παράδεισο, 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.”