She blinks and sees Father lead her into Farm 4 and pull open a seed drawer. Vapor spills out and flows along the floor; she reaches into the rows, selects a foil envelope.

Sybil says, There are several recipes for birthday cake we could try.

“Sybil, you know what I would like for my birthday?”

Tell me, Konstance.

“I would like you to leave me alone.”

Inside the Atlas she floats miles above the rotating Earth, questions whispering through the black. Why did her father have a copy of Zeno Ninis’s translation of Aethon’s story on his nightstand in Nannup? What does it mean?

I had this dream, this vision, of what life could be, Father said in the last minute she spent with him. “Why stay here when I could be there?” The same words Aethon said before he left home.

“Take me,” she says, “to Lakeport, Idaho.”

She plummets through clouds to a mountain town bunched at the south end of a glacial lake. She walks past a marina, two hotels, a boat ramp. An electric tourist tram runs to the top of a nearby peak. Traffic clogs the main road: trucks pull boats on trailers; faceless figures pedal bicycles.

The public library is a steel-and-glass cube a mile south of downtown in a weedy field. A platoon of heat pumps gleams to one side. No plaques, no memorial garden, no mention of any Zeno Ninis.

She returns to Vault One and paces in her ragged socks, the scraps at her feet stirring lightly. She collects four, sets them in a row, and crouches over them.

Courageous Korea Vet Saves Kids and Library

Translation by Zeno Ninis

The Library contains no records of such a volume.

February 20, 2020.

What is she missing? She remembers Mrs. Flowers standing beneath the crumbling Theodosian Walls in Istanbul: Depending on when this imaging was done, this is the city as it looked six or seven decades ago, before the Argos left Earth.

Again she touches her Vizer, climbs onto the Perambulator, takes a slip of paper from a Library table. Show me, she writes, what the Lakeport Public Library looked like on February 20, 2020.

Old-fashioned two-dimensional photographs descend onto the table. The library in these images is entirely different from the steel-and-glass cube inside the Atlas: it’s a high-gabled light-blue house partially concealed behind overgrown bushes at the corner of Lake and Park. Shingles are missing; the chimney is crooked; dandelions grow from cracks in the front walk. A box painted to look like an owl stands on the corner.

Atlas, writes Konstance and the big book lumbers off its shelf.

She finds her way to the corner of Lake and Park and stops. On the southeast corner, where the ramshackle library in the photographs once stood, now rises a three-story hotel full of balconies. Four faceless teenagers in tank tops and swim trunks are stopped mid-stride on the corner.