Omeir sits on a milking stool against the wall as night drapes itself across the Apennines, feeling as though he has accomplished some final task, and prays that another life exists beyond this one where Anna waits for him beneath the wing of God. He dreams he is walking to a well, and peers into it with Tree and Moonlight at his side, all three of them looking down into the cool, emerald-colored water, and Moonlight startles when a little bird flies up out of the well and rises into the sky, and when he wakes a servant in a brown coat is setting a platter of flatbreads, stuffed with sheep’s cheese, beside him. Beside that a second servant sets a roll of rabbit meat seasoned with sage and roasted fennel seeds, and a flagon of wine, enough food and drink for four men, and one servant fixes a lit torch in a bracket on the wall, and the other sets a great clay bowl of oats beneath it, and they back away.

The three of them, dog, donkey, and man, eat their fill. And when they are done the dog curls up in the corner, and Clover sighs an immense sigh, and Omeir sits with his back against the stall, his legs stretched out in the good clean straw, and they sleep, and out in the dark it begins to rain.

TWENTY-FOUR

NOSTOS

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Ω

The quality of Folio Ω deteriorates substantially farther down the page. The final five lines are severely lacunose and only isolated words could be recovered. Translation by Zeno Ninis.

… they brought down the jars and the singers gathered…

… ·[young men?]· danced, the shepherds ·[piped?]·…

… ·[platters]· were passed, bearing hard bread…

… rind of pork. I rejoiced to see the ·[meager?]· feast…

… four lambs, each bawling for its mother…

… ·[rain?]· and mud…

… the women came…

… old spindly ·[crone]· took ·[my hand?]·…

… the lamps…

… still dancing, ·[spinning?]·…

… ·[breathless?]·…

… everyone dancing…

… dancing…

BOISE, IDAHO

2057–2064

Seymour

His work-release apartment has a kitchenette that overlooks a sun-hammered hillside of rabbitbrush. It’s August and the sky is beige with smoke and everything wavers with heat blurs.

Six mornings a week he rides a self-driving bus to an office park where he crosses an acre of broiling asphalt to a sprawling stucco Ilium-owned low-rise. In the lobby a polyurethane raised-relief Earth, twelve feet in diameter, turns on a pedestal, dust gathered in the clefts of the mountains. A faded placard on the wall says, Capturing the Earth. He works twelve hours a day with teams of engineers testing next-generation iterations of the Atlas treadmill and headset. He’s a ropy and pallid man who prefers to eat prepackaged sandwiches at his desk rather than visit the cafeteria, and who finds peace only in work, in accumulating mile after mile on the treadmill like some Dark Age pilgrim walking off a great penance.