“But without a crew—without me—you have no purpose, Sybil. This room is already so full of smoke that it is not possible for me to breathe. In a few minutes the hood I’m wearing will run out of oxygen. Then I will asphyxiate.”

Sybil’s voice deepens. Remove the cot immediately.

The falling droplets cloud the lens of her hood, and each time she tries to wipe it clean, she only smudges it further. Konstance shifts the book zipped inside her worksuit and picks up her hatchet.

Oxygen at nine percent, says the hood.

Green and orange flames are licking around the top of the cot now, and Sybil is mostly obscured behind smoke.

Please, Konstance. Her voice changes, softens, becomes a mimicry of Mother’s. You must not do this.

Konstance backs against the wall. The voice changes again, flows to a new gender. Listen, Zucchini, can you flip over the cot?

Hairs rise on the back of Konstance’s neck.

We must put out the fire immediately. Everything is in danger.

She can hear a hissing, something melting or boiling inside the mattress, and through the billowing smoke she can just glimpse the tower that is Sybil, sixteen feet tall, rippling with crimson light, and from her memory whispers Mrs. Chen: Every map ever drawn, every census ever taken, every book ever published…

For an instant, she hesitates. The images on the Atlas are decades old. What waits out there now, beyond the walls of the Argos? What if Sybil is the only other intelligence left? What is she risking?

Oxygen at eight percent, says the hood. Try to breathe more slowly.

She turns away from Sybil and holds her breath. In front of her, where a moment before there was only wall, the door to Vault One slides open.

TWENTY-TWO

WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE

IS BETTER THAN WHAT YOU

SO DESPERATELY SEEK

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio X

Folio X is severely degraded. What happens next in Aethon’s tale has been long debated and need not be belabored here. Many argue this section belongs earlier in the tale, and points to a different conclusion, and that it’s not the translator’s job to speculate. Translation by Zeno Ninis.

the ewes lambing and the rain falling and the hills greening and the lambs being weaned and the ewes growing old and curmudgeonly and trusting only me. Why ·[did I leave?]·? Why this compulsion to be ·[elsewhere?]·, to constantly seek something new? Was hope a curse, ·[the last evil left in Pandora’s jar]·?

You fly all the way to the end of the stars, and all you want ·[to do is go home…]·

… creaking knees…

… mud and all…

My flock, some cheap wine, a bath, ·[that’s]· as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs. I opened ·[my beak and croaked, “In much wisdom is much sorrow, and in ignorance is much wisdom.”]·