Cloud Cuckoo Land (14 page)

“It's like they say,” says Rex. High above them the wind is shredding a vast sheet of cirrus. “Antiquity was invented to be the bread of librarians and schoolmasters.”

He cuts his eyes to Zeno and smiles, so Zeno smiles back, though he does not understand the joke, and a guard at the top of the ridge shouts something down through the trees in Chinese and the two men continue along the trail.

“That was Greek, then? That you scratched into the wooden lid?”

“As a schoolboy, you know, I didn't care for it. Seemed so dusty and dead. The classics master made us choose four pages of Homer, memorize and translate them. I chose Book Seven. Torment, or so I thought at the time. I'd walk the lines into my memory, one word at a time. Out the door:
I could tell yet a longer tale of all the evils which I have endured by the will of the gods.
Down the stairs:
But as for me, suffer me now to eat, despite my grief.
To the loo:
For there is nothing more shameless than a hateful belly
. But during a fortnight alone in the dark”—he taps his temple—“you'd be surprised what you can find etched in the old brain box.”

They walk several more minutes in silence, Rex slowing with each step, and soon they are at the edge of Camp Five.

Woodsmoke, a rumbling generator, the Chinese flag. The reek of
the latrines. All around them the little hunched trees whisper. Zeno can see a darkness seize Rex, then slowly release him.

“I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,” Rex says. “Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.”

2014

F
or months after the Eden's Gate sign appears on the shoulder of Arcady Lane, nothing changes. The osprey leaves her nest atop the tallest tree in the woods and heads for Mexico, and the first snows blow down from the mountains, and the county plow plows it into berms, and Lake Street fills with weekenders driving to the ski hill, and Bunny cleans their rooms at the Aspen Leaf Lodge.

Every day after school, eleven-year-old Seymour walks past the sign

COMING SOON

CUSTOM TOWNHOMES AND COTTAGES

PREMIER HOMESITES AVAILABLE

and drops his backpack on the love seat in the living room and postholes up through the snow to the big dead ponderosa, and every few days Trustyfriend is there, listening to the squeaks of voles, and the scratchings of mice, and the beating inside Seymour's chest.

But on the first warm morning in April, two dump trucks and a flatbed carrying a steamroller stop in front of the double-wide. Airbrakes moan and walkie-talkies squawk and trucks beep, and by Friday after school, Arcady Lane is paved.

Seymour crouches on the brand-new asphalt at the tail end of a spring rain. Everything smells of fresh tar. With two fingers he tweezers up a stranded earthworm, hardly more than a waterlogged pink string. This worm did not expect rain to wash it from its tunnels onto pavement, did it? To find itself on this strange new impenetrable surface?

Two clouds separate and sunlight spills onto the street, and
Seymour glances to his left, and the bodies of what might be fifty thousand earthworms catch the light. Worms, he realizes, cover the whole blacktop. Thousands upon thousands. He deposits the first at the base of a huckleberry bush, rescues a second, then a third. The pines drip; the asphalt steams; the worms thresh.

He rescues twenty-four twenty-five twenty-six. Clouds seal off the sun. A truck turns off Cross Road and approaches, crushing the bodies of how many? Faster. Pick up the pace. Forty-three worms forty-four forty-five. He expects the truck to stop, an adult to climb out, wave the boy over, offer an explanation. The truck keeps going.

Surveyors park white pickups at the end of the road and climb through the trees behind the house. They set up tripods, tie ribbons around trunks. By late April, chain saws are droning in the woods.

As he walks home from school, fear buzzes in Seymour's ears. He imagines looking down at the forest from above: there's the double-wide, the dwindling forest, the clearing at the center. There's Trustyfriend, sitting on his limb, an oval with two eyes surrounded by 27,027 dots in rings.

Bunny is at the kitchen table, lost behind a drift of bills. “Oh, Possum, it's not our property. They can do whatever they want with it.”

“Why?”

“Because those are the rules.”

He presses his forehead to the sliding door. She tears out a check, licks an envelope. “Know what? Those saws could mean good news for us. Remember Geoff-with-a-G from work? He says that lots at the top of Eden's Gate might go for two hundred thousand.”

Darkness is falling. Bunny says the number a second time.

Trucks grumble past the double-wide loaded with logs; bulldozers punch through the end of Arcady Lane and cut a Z-shaped extension
up the hillside. Every day, as soon as the last truck leaves, Seymour walks the new roadway with his earmuffs on.

Sewage pipes loll like fallen pillars in front of mounds of debris; great coils of cables lie here and there. The air smells of shattered wood, sawdust, and gasoline.

NeedleMen lie crushed in the mud.
Our legs are broken
, they murmur in their xylophone voices.
Our cities are ruined
. Halfway up the hill, Trustyfriend's clearing has become a tire-churned welter of roots and branches. For now the big dead ponderosa still stands. Seymour trawls his gaze along every limb, every branch, until his neck aches from looking.

Empty empty empty empty.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

“Can you hear me?”

He does not see Trustyfriend for four weeks. Five. Five and a half. Every day more light spills into what was, hours before, forest.

Realty signs sprout up and down the newly paved road, two with
SOLD
placards already attached. Seymour takes a flyer.
Live the Lakeport lifestyle
, it reads,
that you've always wanted.
There's a map of homesites, a drone photograph with the lake in the distance.

At the library Marian tells him that the Eden's Gate people jumped through all the planning and zoning hoops, hosted a public hearing, handed out some seriously delicious cupcakes with their logo in the frosting. She says they even purchased the crumbling old Victorian next to the library and plan to remodel it as a showroom.

“Development,” she says, “has always been part of the story of this town.” From a file cabinet in Local History she produces black-and-white prints from a century ago. Six lumbermen stand shoulder to shoulder on the stump of a felled cedar. Fishermen hold yard-long salmon up by their gills. Several hundred beaver pelts hang from a cabin wall.

Looking at the images starts the roar murmuring at the base of Seymour's spine. In a vision he imagines a hundred thousand NeedleMen rising from the ruins of the forest and marching on the contractors' trucks, a vast army, fearless despite the incredible odds, swinging tiny picks at tires, driving nails through men's boots. Plumbing vans go up in flames.

“A lot of folks in Lakeport,” says Marian, “are excited about Eden's Gate.”

“Why?”

She gives him a sad smile. “Well, you know what they say.”

He chews his shirt collar. He doesn't know what they say.

“Money isn't everything. It's the only thing.”

She looks as though she expects him to laugh, but he doesn't understand what's funny, and a woman wearing sunglasses jerks a thumb toward the back of the library and says, “I think your toilet is overflowing,” and Marian hurries away.

Nonfiction 598.9:

Between 365 million and one billion birds die just from crashing into windows in the United States each year.

Digest of Avian Biology:

Multiple onlookers reported that after the crow died, a large number of fellow crows (well over one hundred individuals by some accounts) descended from the trees and walked circles around the deceased for fifteen minutes.

Nonfiction 598.27:

After its mate struck the utility wire, researchers witnessed the owl return to its roost, turn its face to the trunk, and stand motionless for several days until it died.

One day, halfway through June, Seymour comes home from the library, stares up into Eden's Gate, and sees that Trustyfriend's big dead tree has been cut down. Where this morning the snag stood on the hillside behind the double-wide, now there is only air.

A man unrolls an orange hose from a truck; a backhoe cuts galleries for culverts; someone yells, “Mike! Mike!” The view from the egg-shaped boulder now stretches up a bare drumlin of shredded forest all the way to the top.

He drops his books and runs. Down Arcady Lane, down Spring Street, south along the gravel shoulder of Route 55, traffic roaring past, running not so much in rage but in panic. All this must be undone.

It's the dinner hour and the Pig N' Pancake is packed. Seymour pants in front of the hostess stand and scans faces. The manager eyes him; people waiting for tables watch. Bunny comes through the kitchen door with platters stacked along both arms.

“Seymour? Are you hurt?”

Somehow still balancing five plates of patty melts and chicken-fried steaks on her arms, she crouches, and he lifts one cup of his ear defenders.

Smells: ground beef, maple syrup, French fries. Sounds: the grading of rocks, the driving of sledges, the back-up alarms of dump trucks. He's a mile and a half from Eden's Gate but somehow he can still hear it, as though it's a prison being built around him, as though he's a fly being wrapped and spun in a spiderweb.

Diners watch. The manager watches.

“Possum?”

Words stack up against the backs of his teeth. A busboy trundles past, pushing an empty high chair on wheels, the wheels going
thumpthwock
over the tiles. A woman laughs. Someone yells, “Order up!” The woods the tree the owl—through the soles of his feet he feels a chain saw bite into a trunk, feels Trustyfriend startle awake. No time to think: you drop like shadow into the daylight, as one more safe harbor is wrenched out of the world.

“Seymour, put your hand in my pocket. Do you feel the keys? The car is right outside. Go sit in there, where it's quiet, do your breathing exercise, and I'll be out as soon as I can.”

He sits in the Pontiac as shadows trickle down through the pines. Inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four. Bunny comes out in her apron and gets in the car and rubs her forehead with the heels of her hands. In a to-go box she has three pancakes with strawberries and cream.

“Use your fingers, honey, it's all right.”

The fading light plays tricks; the parking lot stretches; trees become dream trees. A first star shows, then hides itself again. Best friends best friends, we're never apart.

Bunny tears off a piece of pancake and hands it to him.

“Okay if I take off your muffs?”

He nods.

“And touch your hair?”

He tries not to wince as her fingers catch in his snarls. A family leaves the restaurant, climbs into a truck, and drives away.

“Change is tough, kid, I know. Life is tough. But we still have the house. We still have our yard. We still have each other. Right?” He closes his eyes and sees Trustyfriend cruise over a wasteland of endless parking lots, nowhere to hunt, nowhere to land, nowhere to sleep.

“It won't be the worst thing to have neighbors close by. Maybe there will be kids your age.”

An aproned teenager crashes out the back door and lobs a plump black bag into the dumpster. Seymour says, “They need big hunting ranges. They especially like high vantage points so they can hunt voles.”

“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.”

MISSION YEAR 61

I
t'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.

The yellow of Konstance's worksuit is even more vibrant than it was in Compartment 17. The spot of syrup is gone.

Mrs. Flowers marches toward her from a long way off, a little white dog trotting at her heels. She's a cleaner, younger, brighter Mrs. Flowers, with clear hazel eyes and mahogany hair cut in a professorial bob, and she wears a skirt and blazer that are the deep green of living spinach, and on one breast golden stitching reads,
Head Librarian.

Konstance bends over the little dog: its whiskers twitch; its black eyes shine; its fur, when she puts her fingers in it, feels like fur. She almost laughs from the joy of it.

“Welcome,” says Mrs. Flowers, “to the Library.”

She and Konstance start down the length of the atrium. Various crew members glance up from tables and smile as they pass; a few conjure balloons that say
IT'S YOUR LIBRARY DAY
and Konstance watches them sail up through the aperture into the sky.

The spines of the books closest to them are teal and maroon and imperial purple and some look slender and delicate and others resemble great legless tabletops stacked on shelves. “Go on,” says Mrs. Flowers, “you can't damage them,” and Konstance touches the spine of a little one and it rises and opens in front of her. From its onionskin pages, three daisies grow, and in the center of each glow the same three letters,
M C V
.

“Some are quite bewildering,” says Mrs. Flowers. She taps it and
it closes and flits back to its place. Konstance gazes down the line of bookshelves to where the atrium fades into the distance.

“Does it go on—?”

Mrs. Flowers smiles. “Only Sybil could say for sure.”

Three teenaged boys, the Lee brothers and Ramón—only it's a leaner, tidier version of Ramón—sprint and leap onto a ladder, and Mrs. Flowers calls, “Slowly, please,” and Konstance tries to remind herself that she is still inside Compartment 17, wearing her new worksuit and a hand-me-down Vizer, walking on a Perambulator wedged beside Father's bunk and Mother's sewing table—that Mrs. Flowers and the Lee brothers and Ramón are in their own family compartments, walking on their own Perambulators, wearing their own Vizers, that they are all packed inside a disk hurtling through interstellar space, that the Library is just a swarm of data inside the flickering chandelier that is Sybil.

“History's on our right,” Mrs. Flowers is saying, “to the left is Modern Art, then Languages; those boys are headed to the Games Section, very popular, of course.” She stops at an unoccupied table with a chair on either side and gestures for Konstance to sit. Two little boxes rest on top: one of pencils, the other of rectangles of paper. Between them is a small brass slot and engraved onto its rim are the words
Questions Answered Here.

“For a child's Library Day,” says Mrs. Flowers, “when there is so much to absorb, I try to keep things simple. Four questions, a little scavenger hunt. Question number one. How far from Earth is our destination?”

Konstance blinks, unsure, and Mrs. Flowers's expression softens. “You needn't have it memorized, dear. That's what the Library is for.” She points to the boxes.

Konstance picks up a pencil: it seems so real that she wants to sink her teeth into it. And the paper! It's so clean, so crisp: outside the Library, there is not a piece of paper this clean on the entire
Argos
. She writes
How far from Earth to Beta Oph2?
and looks at Mrs. Flowers and Mrs. Flowers nods and Konstance drops the slip through the slot.

The paper vanishes. Mrs. Flowers clears her throat and points, and behind Konstance, high on the third tier, a thick brown book slips off a shelf. It soars across the atrium, dodges a few other airborne books, hovers, then floats down and opens.

Across a double-fold inside spreads a chart titled
Confirmed List of Exoplanets in the Optimistic Habitable Zone, B-C
. In the first column, little worlds of every color rotate: some rocky, some swirling with gases, some ringed, some dragging tails of ice behind their atmospheres. Konstance runs a fingertip down the rows until she finds Beta Oph2.

“4.2399 light-years.”

“Good. Question number two. How fast are we traveling?”

Konstance writes the question, drops it into the slot, and as the first volume rises away, a bundle of rolled charts arrives and unrolls across the tabletop. From its center a bright blue integer rises into the air.

“7,734,958 kilometers per hour.”

“Right.” Now three of Mrs. Flowers's fingers go up. “What is the lifespan of a genetically optimal human under mission conditions?” The question goes into the slot; a half-dozen documents of various sizes fly off shelves and flutter over.

114 years
, reads one.

116 years
, reads a second.

119 years
, reads a third.

Mrs. Flowers bends to scratch the ears of the dog at her feet. All the while she watches Konstance. “Now you know the
Argos
's velocity, the distance it needs to travel, and the expected lifespan of a traveler under these conditions. Last question. How long will our journey take?”

Konstance stares at the desk.

“Use the Library, dear.” Again Mrs. Flowers taps the slot with one fingernail. Konstance writes the question on a sheet of paper and drops it in the slot, and as soon as it vanishes a single slip of paper emerges high in the barrel vault, drifting down, seesawing back and forth like a feather, and lands in front of her.

“216,078 Earth days.”

Mrs. Flowers watches her, and Konstance gazes down the length of the vast atrium to where the shelves and ladders converge in the distance, and a glimmer of understanding rises, then sinks away again.

“How many years is that, Konstance?”

She looks up. A flock of digital birds passes above the barrel vault, and below that a hundred books and scrolls and documents crisscross the air at a hundred different altitudes, and she can feel the attention of others in the Library on her. She writes
216,078 Earth days in years?
and puts the paper in and a fresh slip flutters down.

592.

The pattern of woodgrain on the surface of the desk is churning now, or appears to be, and the marble floor tiles are swirling too, and something roils in her gut.

It takes everyone together,

Everyone together…

Five hundred and ninety-two years.

“We'll never—?”

“That's right, child. We know that Beta Oph2 has an atmosphere like Earth's, that it has liquid water like Earth does, that it probably has forests of some type. But we will never see them. None of us will. We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.”

Konstance presses her palms to the desk; she feels as though she might black out.

“The truth is a great deal to absorb, I know. That's why we wait to bring children to the Library. Until you are mature enough.”

Mrs. Flowers lifts a slip of paper from the box and writes something. “Come, I want to show you one more thing.” She tucks the paper into the slot and a tattered book, as wide and as tall as the entrance to Compartment 17, lurches off a second-floor shelf, gives a few inelegant flaps, and lands open in front of them. Its pages are
profoundly black, as though a doorway has been opened on the rim of a bottomless pit.

“The Atlas,” says Mrs. Flowers, “is a bit dated, I'm afraid. I introduce it to all the children on their Library Day, but after that they tend to prefer slicker, more immersive things. Go on.”

Konstance pokes a finger into the page, pulls it back. Then a foot. Mrs. Flowers takes her hand and Konstance shuts her eyes and braces herself and they step through together.

They don't fall: they hang suspended in the black. In all directions, pinpricks of light perforate the dark. Over Konstance's shoulder floats the frame of the Atlas, a lit rectangle through which she can still glimpse shelves back inside the Library.

“Sybil,” says Mrs. Flowers, “take us to Istanbul.”

In the blackness far below a speck enlarges into a dot, then a blue-green sphere, growing larger; one blue hemisphere, aswirl with vapor, rotates through sunlight, while the other passes through an ultramarine darkness, latticed with electric light. “Is that—?” Konstance asks, but now they are dropping feet-first toward the sphere, or else it's hurtling toward them: it pivots, grows enormous, fills her entire field of vision. She holds her breath as a peninsula expands beneath them—jade-green mottled with beiges and reds, the richness of color overloading her eyes; what rushes toward her is more lavish, more complex, and more intricate than anything she has ever imagined or thought to imagine, a billion Farm 4s all in one place, and now she and Mrs. Flowers are falling through air that is somehow both transparent and aglow, descending over a dense circuitry of roads and rooftops, and finally her feet touch the Earth.

They're in an empty lot. The sky is jewel blue and cloudless. Huge white stones lie among weeds like the lost molars of giants. Off to their left, undulating alongside a crowded road for as far as she can see in both directions, runs a massive and derelict stone wall, tufted everywhere with grasses and punctuated every fifty meters or so by a broad, time-battered tower.

Konstance feels as though every neuron inside her head has been set on fire. They said Earth was a ruin.

“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.