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Title Page

Dedication

For the librarians

then, now, and in the years to come

Epigraph

Chorus Leader: To work, men. How do you propose to name our city?

Peisetairos: How about Sparta? That’s a grand old name with a fine pretentious ring.

Euelpides: Great Hercules, call my city Sparta? I wouldn’t even insult my mattress by giving it a name like Sparta.

Peisetairos: Well, what do you suggest instead?

Chorus Leader: Something big, smacking of the clouds. A pinch of fluff and rare air, a swollen sound.

Peisetairos: I’ve got it! Listen—Cloud Cuckoo Land!

—Aristophanes, The Birds, 414 B.C.E.

PROLOGUE

TO MY DEAREST NIECE WITH HOPE THAT THIS BRINGS YOU HEALTH AND LIGHT

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 65

DAY 307 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

A fourteen-year-old girl sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. A mass of curls haloes her head; her socks are full of holes. This is Konstance.

Behind her, inside a translucent cylinder that rises sixteen feet from floor to ceiling, hangs a machine composed of trillions of golden threads, none thicker than a human hair. Each filament twines around thousands of others in entanglements of astonishing intricacy. Occasionally a bundle somewhere along the surface of the machine pulses with light: now here, now there. This is Sybil.

Elsewhere in the room there’s an inflatable cot, a recycling toilet, a food printer, eleven sacks of Nourish powder, and a multidirectional treadmill the size and shape of an automobile tire called a Perambulator. Light comes from a ring of diodes in the ceiling; there is no visible exit.

Arranged in a grid on the floor lie almost one hundred rectangular scraps Konstance has torn from empty Nourish powder sacks and written on with homemade ink. Some are dense with her handwriting; others accommodate a single word. One, for example, contains the twenty-four letters of the ancient Greek alphabet. Another reads:

In the millennium leading up to 1453, the city of Constantinople was besieged twenty-three times, but no army ever breached its land walls.

She leans forward and lifts three scraps from the puzzle in front of her. The machine behind her flickers.

It is late, Konstance, and you have not eaten all day.

“I’m not hungry.”

How about some nice risotto? Or roast lamb with mashed potatoes? There are still many combinations you have not tried.

“No thank you, Sybil.” She looks down at the first scrap and reads: