The first stop on the book tour was New York City, where Olive did signing events at two bookstores and then found an hour to walk in Central Park before the bookseller dinner. The Sheep Meadow at twilight: silvery light, wet leaves on the grass. The sky was crowded with low-altitude airships, and in the distance the falling-star lights of commuter aircraft streaked upward toward the colonies. Olive paused for a moment to orient herself, then walked toward the ancient double silhouette of the Dakota. Hundred-story towers rose up behind it.
The Dakota was where Olive’s new publicist was waiting, Aretta, in charge of all events in the Atlantic Republic. Aretta was a little younger than Olive, and deferential in a way that made Olive nervous. When Olive walked into the lobby, Aretta stood quickly, and the hologram with whom she’d been speaking blinked out. “Did you have a nice walk in the park?” she asked, already smiling in anticipation of a positive reply.
“It was lovely, thank you,” Olive said. She didn’t add It made me wish I could live on Earth, because the last time she’d confided in a handler, it was repeated at dinner—“Do you know what Olive told me on the ride over?” a librarian in Montreal had reported breathlessly to a restaurant table full of waiting librarians, “She told me she was a little nervous before her talk!”—so now as a matter of policy Olive didn’t reveal anything even remotely personal to anyone ever.
“Well,” Aretta said, “we should probably be getting to the venue. It’s about six or seven blocks, should we maybe just…?”
“I’d love to walk,” Olive said, “if you don’t mind.” They walked out together into the silver city.
Did Olive actually wish she could live on Earth? She vacillated on the question. She’d lived all her life in the hundred and fifty square kilometers of the second moon colony, the imaginatively named Colony Two. She found it beautiful—Colony Two was a city of white stone, spired towers, tree-lined streets and small parks, alternating neighborhoods of tall buildings and little houses with miniature lawns, a river running under pedestrian archways—but there’s something to be said for unplanned cities. Colony Two was soothing in its symmetry and its order. Sometimes order can be relentless.
In the signing line after the lecture in Manhattan that night, a young man knelt on his side of the table so that he was more or less at eye level with Olive, and said, “I have a book to sign”—his voice trembled a little—“but what I really wanted to tell you is that your work helped me through a bad patch last year. I’m grateful.”
“Oh,” Olive said. “Thank you. I’m honored.” But in these moments honored always felt inadequate, which made it feel like the wrong word, which made Olive feel somehow fraudulent, like an actor playing the role of Olive Llewellyn.
“Everyone feels like a fraud sometimes,” Dad said the following day, on the drive from the Denver airship terminal to the tiny town where he lived with Olive’s mother.
“Oh, I know,” Olive said. “I’m not suggesting it’s an actual problem.” Olive’s understanding of her own life was that she didn’t have any actual problems.
“Right.” Dad smiled. “I’d imagine your life’s a little disorienting these days.”
“Perhaps just a little.” Olive had forty-eight hours to see her parents before the tour resumed. They were passing through an agricultural zone, enormous robots moving slowly over the fields. The sunlight here was sharper than at home. “I’m grateful for all of it,” she said. “Disorienting or not.”
“Sure. Must be hard to be away from Sylvie and Dion, though.”
Now they were in the outskirts of the little town where her parents lived, passing through a district of robot repair foundries.
“I just try not to think about it,” Olive said. The gray of the foundries was subsiding into brightly painted little shops and houses. The clock in the town square glinted in the sunlight.
“The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.” Her father’s gaze was fixed on the road. “Here we are,” he said. They were turning onto her parents’ street, and there, so close, her mother stood in the doorway. Olive leaped down from the hovercraft the moment it stopped, and ran into her mother’s arms. If the distance is unbearable, she didn’t ask, then or in the two days she stayed with her parents, then why do you live so far from me?
Olive’s parents’ house couldn’t be called her childhood home—her childhood home had been sold a few weeks after she left for college, when her parents decided to retire on Earth—but there was peace here. “It was so good to see you,” her mother whispered when she left. She held Olive for just a moment, and stroked her hair. “Come back soon?”
A hovercraft was waiting outside the house, the driver hired by one of Olive’s North American publishers. She had an event at a bookstore in Colorado Springs that night, followed by an early-morning flight to a festival in Deseret.
“I’ll bring Sylvie and Dion next time,” Olive said, and stepped back into the tour.
A book tour paradox: Olive missed her husband and daughter with a desperate passion, but also she liked very much being alone in the empty streets of Salt Lake City at eight-thirty in the morning on a Saturday in the bright autumn air, birds wheeling in white light. There’s something to be said for looking up at a clear blue sky and knowing that it isn’t a dome.
In the Republic of Texas the next afternoon, she wanted to go for a walk again, because on the map, her hotel—a La Quinta that faced another La Quinta, a parking lot between them—was just across the road from a cluster of restaurants and shops, but what the map didn’t show was that the road was an eight-lane expressway with no crosswalk and constant traffic, mostly modern hovercraft but also the occasional defiantly retro wheeled pickup truck, so she walked along the expressway for a while with the shops and the restaurants shining like a mirage on the other side. There was no way to cross without risking her life, so she didn’t. When she got back to her hotel she felt something scratching her ankles, and when she looked down her socks were spiked with little burrs, astonishingly sharp black-brown stars like miniature weapons that had to be extracted very carefully. She set them on the desk and photographed them from every angle. They were so perfectly hard and shiny that they could’ve passed for biotech, but when she pulled one apart, she saw that it was real. No, real wasn’t the word for it. Everything that can be touched is real. What she saw was it was a thing that grew, a castoff from some mysterious plant they didn’t have in the moon colonies, so she wrapped a few of them in a sock and carefully stowed the sock away in her suitcase to give to her daughter, Sylvie, who was five and collected that kind of thing.
“I was so confused by your book,” a woman in Dallas said. “There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t, ultimately. The book just ended. I was like”—she was some distance away, in the darkened audience, but Olive saw that she was miming flipping through a book and running out of pages—“I was just like, Huh? Is the book missing pages? It just ended.”
“Okay,” Olive said. “So just to clarify, your question is…”
“I was just, like, what,” the woman said. “My question is just…” She spread her hands, like help me out here, I’ve run out of words.
The hotel room that night was all black and white. Olive had dreams about playing chess with her mother.
Did the book end too abruptly? She fixated on the question for three days, from the Republic of Texas to western Canada.
“I’m trying not to be pessimistic,” Olive said, on the phone to her husband, “but I’ve barely slept in three days and I doubt I’ll be terribly impressive in my lecture tonight.” This was in Red Deer. Outside the hotel room window, the lights of residential towers glimmered in the dark.
“Don’t be pessimistic,” Dion said. “Think of that quote I’ve got pinned up in my office.”
“ ‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,’ ” Olive said. “How’s work going, speaking of your office?”
He sighed. “I got assigned to the new project.” Dion was an architect.
“The new university?”
“Yeah, kind of. A center for the study of physics, but also…I signed an ironclad confidentiality agreement, so don’t tell anyone?”
“Of course. I won’t tell a soul. But what’s so secret about the architecture of a university?”
“It’s not quite…I’m not sure it’s exactly a university.” Dion sounded troubled. “There’s some serious weirdness in the blueprints.”
“What kind of weirdness?”
“Well, for starters, there’s a tunnel under the street connecting the building to Security Headquarters,” he said.
“Why would a university need a tunnel to the police?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. And the building backs up on the government building,” Dion said, “which, I mean, at first I thought nothing of it. That’s prime downtown real estate, so you know, why shouldn’t the university build next to the government building, but the two buildings aren’t separate. There are so many passageways between them that it’s functionally the same building.”
“You’re right,” Olive said, “that seems weird.”
“Well, it’s a good project for my portfolio, I guess.”
Olive understood from his tone that he wanted to change the subject. “How’s Sylvie?”
“Doing fine.” Dion immediately pivoted the conversation to some trivial matter involving the grocery order and Sylvie’s school lunches, from which she understood that Sylvie probably wasn’t in fact doing particularly well in her absence, and she was grateful for his kindness in not telling her this.
In the morning she flew to a city in the far north for a day of interviews, and then she had an evening lecture, and then there was a long signing line and a late dinner, followed by three hours of sleep and a three-forty-five a.m. airport pickup.
“What do you do, Olive?” the driver asked.
“I’m a writer,” Olive said. She closed her eyes and rested her head against the window, but the driver spoke again:
“What do you write?”
“Books.”
“Tell me more.”
“Well,” Olive said, “I’m traveling because of a novel called Marienbad. It’s about a pandemic.”
“That’s your most recent?”
“No, I’ve written two others since then. But Marienbad’s being made into a film, so I’m on tour for a new edition.”
“That’s so interesting,” the driver said, and started talking about a book she wanted to write. It seemed to be some kind of sci-fi/fantasy epic, the modern world except with wizards, demons, and talking rats. The rats were good. They helped the wizards. They were rats because in all the books the driver had read that involved helpful talking animals, the animals were just too big. Horses and dragons and whatnot. But how do you discreetly move through the world with a dragon or a horse? It’s untenable. Try taking a horse into a bar sometime. No, what you want, she said, is a pocket-sized animal sidekick, a rat for example.
“Yeah, I guess rats are more portable,” Olive said. She was trying to keep her eyes open, but it was very difficult. The massive transport truck in front of them kept weaving over the center line. Human-driven, or a flaw in the software? Unsettling either way. The driver was talking about the possibilities of the multiverse: rats can’t talk here, she pointed out, but does it logically follow that they can’t talk anywhere? She seemed to be waiting for a reply.
“Well, I don’t know much about rat anatomy,” Olive said, “like if their voice boxes and vocal cords or whatever are up to the task of human speech, but I’ll have to think about it, maybe rats in different universes could have different anatomy…” (She may have been mumbling by that point, or possibly not speaking at all. It was so hard to stay awake.) The back of the transport truck was beautiful, a diamond-patterned textured steel that glinted and shone in the headlights.
“I mean, for all we know,” the driver was saying, “there’s a universe where your book is real, I mean nonfictional!”
“I hope not,” Olive said. She could only keep her eyes half-open, so the lights in her field of vision were streaked into vertical spikes, the dashboard, the taillights, the reflections off the back of the truck.
“So your book,” the driver said, “it’s about a pandemic?”
“Yes. A scientifically implausible flu.” Olive couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore, so she surrendered, she closed her eyes and let herself fall into the kind of half-sleep from which she knew she could be summoned by a voice—
“Have you been following the news about this new thing,” the driver said, “this new virus in Australia?”
“Kind of,” Olive said, with her eyes closed. “It seems like it’s been fairly well contained.”
“You know, in my book,” the driver said, “there’s a kind of apocalypse too.” She talked for some time about a catastrophic rip in the space-time continuum, but Olive was too tired to follow.
“I’ve kept you up this whole time!” the driver said brightly, as the car pulled into the airport. “You didn’t get to sleep at all!”
Twelve hours later, Olive was delivering her Marienbad lecture, which leaned heavily on her research into the history of pandemics. The lecture was so familiar at this point that it required very little in the way of conscious thought, and her mind was wandering. She kept thinking about the conversation with the driver, because she remembered saying It seems like it’s been fairly well contained, but here’s an epidemiological question: if you’re talking about outbreaks of infectious disease, isn’t fairly well contained essentially the same thing as not contained at all? Focus, she told herself, and pulled herself back to the reality of the podium, the hard bright light, the microphone.
“In the spring of 1792,” she said, “Captain George Vancouver sailed northward up the coast of what would later become British Columbia, aboard the HMS Discovery. As he and his crew traveled northward, the men found themselves increasingly unsettled. Here was this temperate climate, this incredibly green landscape, and yet it seemed strangely empty. Vancouver wrote in his shipboard diary: ‘We traveled nearly one hundred fifty miles of those shores, without seeing that number of inhabitants.’ ” A pause to let that sink in, while Olive took a sip of water. A virus is either contained or it isn’t. It’s a binary condition. She hadn’t been sleeping enough. She set down her water glass.
“When they ventured ashore, they found villages that could have housed hundreds, but those villages were abandoned. When they ventured farther, they realized that the forest was a graveyard.” This was the part of the lecture that had been easy before giving birth to her daughter, and was now almost impossible. Olive paused to steady herself. “Canoes with human remains were strung three or four meters up in the trees,” she said. Human remains that were not Sylvie. Not Sylvie. Not Sylvie. “Elsewhere, they found skeletons on the beach. Because smallpox had already arrived.”
In the signing line after that night’s lecture, signing her name over and over again, Olive’s thoughts kept drifting toward disaster. To Xander with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Claudio with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Sohail with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. To Hyeseung with best wishes Olive Llewellyn. Was there going to be another pandemic? A new cluster of cases had appeared in New Zealand that morning.
The hotel room that night was mostly beige, with a painting of some extravagantly petaled pink Earth flower—a peony?—over the bed.
“A year earlier,” Olive told another crowd, same lecture/different city, “in 1791, a trading ship, the Columbia Rediviva, had sailed those same waters. They were trading sea otter skins.” What did a sea otter even look like? Olive had never seen one. She resolved to look this up later. “They had a similar experience. They found a depopulated land, and the very few survivors they encountered had terrible stories and terrible scars. ‘ ’Twas evident that these Natives had been visited by that scourge of mankind the smallpox,’ wrote a crew member, John Boit. Another sailor, John Hoskins, was moved to outrage: ‘Infamous Europeans, a scandal to the Christian name; is it you,’ he wrote, ‘who bring and leave in a country with people you deem savages the most loathsome diseases?’ ”
A sip of water. The audience was silent. (A passing thought that felt like triumph: I am holding the room.) “But of course,” she said, “there’s always a beginning. Before smallpox could be brought from Europe to the Americas, smallpox had to arrive in Europe.”
She got out of bed that night and walked into a side table, because she’d been thinking about the layout of the previous night’s hotel room.
The next morning, on a long drive between cities, the driver asked if Olive had kids back home.
“I have a daughter,” Olive said.
“How old?”
“Five.”
“What are you doing here, then?” the driver asked.
“Well, this is how I provide for her,” she said, in her mildest voice, and didn’t add Fuck you, I know you would never ask a man that question, because after all it was just the two of them alone in the car, this man and Olive. Watching the trees slip by outside the window; they were passing through a forest preserve. Imagining Sylvie was here beside her, imagining that if she wanted to she could reach out and hold that warm little hand.
“You grew up there? In the colonies?” he asked abruptly, after some time had passed. They’d been talking about the moon colonies earlier.
“Yes. My grandmother was one of the first settlers.”
She liked to picture her grandmother sometimes, twenty years old, rising out of the Vancouver Airship Terminal in the first light of dawn, her ship streaking out into the dark.
“Always meant to go up there,” the driver said. “Never made it.”
Remember that you’re lucky to get to travel. Remember that some people never leave this planet. Olive closed her eyes, in order to better imagine that Sylvie was sitting beside her.
“You smell nice, by the way,” the driver said.
The next four hotel rooms were white and gray and had identical layouts, because all four hotels were part of the same chain.
“Is this your first time staying with us?” a woman at a reception desk for the third or fourth hotel said to her, and Olive wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them?
Another city:
“Before smallpox could be brought from Europe to the Americas, smallpox had to arrive in Europe.” Olive was regretting her decision to wear a sweater. The lights in Toronto were too hot. “In the middle of the second century, Roman soldiers returning from their siege of the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia brought a new illness back to the capital.
“Victims of the Antonine Plague, as it came to be called, developed fevers, vomiting, and diarrhea. A few days later, a terrible rash would appear on their skin. The population had no immunity.” Olive had delivered the lecture so many times that she felt at this point like a neutral observer. She listened to the words and cadences from some distance away.
“When the Antonine Plague raged through the Roman Empire,” Olive told the audience, “the army was decimated. There were parts of the empire where one in three people died. Here’s something interesting: the Romans wondered if they’d brought this calamity upon themselves, by their actions in the city of Seleucia.”
She was in that night’s hotel room—mostly beige and blue, with pink accents—when Dion called. This was unusual: generally speaking, she called him. Dion sounded tired. He’d been working long hours, he said, and the new university project was creepy, and Sylvie was being difficult. When he’d picked Sylvie up at school today she hadn’t wanted to leave and had made a scene and everyone had felt sorry for him, he could see it in their soft expressions. “Have you been following the news about this new illness in Australia?” he asked. “I’m kind of worried about it.”
“Not really,” Olive said. “To be honest, I’ve been too tired to think.”
“I wish you could come home.”
“I’ll be home soon.”
He was silent.
“I should go,” she said. “Good night.”
“Good night,” he said, and hung up.
“In the city of Seleucia,” Olive told a crowd at the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati, a day or two later, “the Roman army had destroyed the temple of Apollo. In that temple, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus wrote, Roman soldiers had discovered a narrow crevice. When the Romans opened this hole wider, in the hope that it might contain valuables, Marcellinus wrote that there ‘issued a pestilence, loaded with the force of incurable disease, which…polluted the whole world from the borders of Persia to the Rhine and Gaul with contagion and death.’ ”
A beat. A sip of water. Pacing is everything.
“This explanation might seem a little silly to us now, but they were grasping wildly for an explanation for the nightmare that had befallen them, and I think that in its outlandishness, the explanation touches upon the root of our fear: illness still carries a terrible mystery.”
She looked over the crowd and saw, as always at this point in the lecture, that particular look on the faces of some of the audience, a specific grief. In any given crowd, several people will inevitably be incurably sick, and several others will have recently lost someone they love to illness.
“Are you worried about the new virus?” Olive asked the library director in Cincinnati. They were sitting together in the director’s office, which Olive had immediately ranked as possibly her favorite of all the offices she’d ever seen. It was located beneath the stacks, which were hundreds of years old and made of wrought iron.
“I’m trying not to be,” the director said. “I’m hoping it’ll just fizzle out.”
“I suppose they usually do,” Olive said. Was this true? She was unsure as she spoke.
The library director nodded, her eyes wandering. She clearly didn’t want to talk about pandemics. “Let me tell you something magnificent about this place,” she said.
“Oh, please do,” Olive said. “It’s been a while since anyone’s told me anything magnificent.”
“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.”
“You’re right. That’s magnificent.”
“Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”
The window in that night’s hotel room opened, which after a dozen rooms with nonopening windows felt like something of a miracle. Olive spent a long time reading a novel by the window, in the beautiful fresh air.
The next morning, leaving Cincinnati, Olive saw a sunrise from the airport lounge. Heat shimmering over the tarmac, the horizon cast in pink. Paradox: I want to go home but I could watch Earth’s sunrises forever.
“The truth is,” Olive said, behind a lectern in Paris, “even now, all these centuries later, for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”
At the reception that night, someone tapped her shoulder, and when she turned around it was Aretta, her publicist from the Atlantic Republic.
“Aretta!” she said. “What are you doing in Paris?”
“I’m off work,” Aretta said, “but one of my best friends works for your French publisher and she got us tickets for the reception, so I thought I’d say hi.”
“It’s good to see you here,” Olive said, and meant it, but someone was pulling her away to speak to a group of sponsors and booksellers, so for a while afterward Olive stood in a circle of people who wanted to know when her next book was coming out and whether she was enjoying France and where her family was.
“You must have a very kind husband,” a woman said, “to look after your daughter while you do this.”
“What do you mean?” Olive asked, but of course she knew what the woman meant.
“Well, he’s looking after your daughter, while you do this,” the woman said.
“Forgive me,” Olive said, “I fear there’s a problem with my translator bot. I thought you said he was kind to care for his own child.” As she turned away, she realized that she was grinding her teeth. She looked for Aretta but couldn’t find her.
The next four hotel rooms were beige, blue, beige again, then mostly white, but all four had silk flowers in a vase on the desk.
“What’s it like?” the interviewer asked. It was difficult to stop thinking about the woman in Paris, but Olive was trying. Keep moving. Olive and the interviewer were onstage in Tallinn. The lights were very hot.
“What do you mean?” It was a strange opening question.
“What’s it like writing such a successful book? What’s it like being Olive Llewellyn?”
“Oh. It’s surreal, actually. I wrote three books that no one noticed, no distribution beyond the moon colonies, and then…it’s like slipping into a parallel universe,” Olive said. “When I published Marienbad, I somehow fell into a bizarre upside-down world where people actually read my work. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never get used to it.”
The driver who took Olive to her hotel that night had a beautiful voice and sang an old jazz song as he drove. Olive opened the hovercraft window and closed her eyes in order to live more completely in the music, cool air in her face, and for several minutes she was perfectly happy.
“It’s amazing how time slows when I’m traveling,” Olive said, on the phone to Dion. She was lying on her back on the floor of another hotel room, staring up at the ceiling. The bed would have been more comfortable, but her back hurt and the hard floor was helping. “I feel like I’ve been on the road for six months. I’m not sure how it’s still November.”
“It’s been three weeks.”
“Like I said.”
There was silence on the line.
“Look,” Olive said, “the thing is, it’s possible to be grateful for extraordinary circumstances and simultaneously long to be with the people you love.”
She felt a softening between them before he spoke. “I know, love,” Dion said gently. “We miss you too.”
“I’ve been thinking about your project,” she said. “Why a university would need an underground passageway to police headquarters and—”
But Dion’s device was ringing. “I’m sorry,” he said, “it’s my boss. Talk soon?”
“Talk soon.”
She’d been on an airship crossing the Atlantic when the answer to the puzzle came to her.
Research teams had been working on time travel for decades, both on Earth and in the colonies. In that context, a university for the study of physics, with an underground passageway to the police headquarters and countless literal back doors into government, made perfect sense. What is time travel if not a security problem?
She kept searching for the song the driver in Tallinn had been singing, but she couldn’t find it. The lyrics evaded her. She kept entering search terms into her device (love + rain + death + money + lyrics + song) and getting nowhere.
In Lyon, at a festival dedicated to mystery fiction, Olive’s French publicist brought her to a media room where the interviewer, a woman who worked for a magazine, was programming an array of hologram cameras. “Olive,” the interviewer said, “I love your work.”
“Thank you, that’s really nice to hear.”
“Will you sit in that chair, please?”
Olive sat. An assistant affixed a mic to her shirt.
“So this is a feature I’m doing with all of the authors at the festival,” the interviewer said, “just a brief interview feature. It’s a fun thing for our audience.”
“A fun thing?” Olive was troubled. Her French publicist shot the interviewer a look of alarm.
“Shall we get started?”
“Sure.” Ten holographic cameras floated through the air and surrounded Olive like a ring of stars, building their composite impression.
“So these questions,” the interviewer said, “they have a mystery focus!”
“Because we’re at a mystery festival,” Olive said.
“Exactly. Okay. Number one: what’s your favorite alibi?”
“My favorite…alibi?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t really…I just say I have other plans. When I don’t want to do something.”
“I understand you’re married to a man,” the interviewer said. “When you met your husband, what was your first clue that you loved him?”
“Well,” Olive said, “I guess just a sense of recognition, if that makes sense. I remember the first time I saw him, I looked at him and I knew he’d be important in my life. Is that a clue, though?”
“What’s your idea of the perfect murder?”
“I remember reading a story once where a guy got stabbed with an icicle,” Olive said. “I guess that’s sort of perfect, a crime where the murder weapon melts. Do you mind if I ask, though, do you have any questions that have to do with my work?”
“I just have one more. Okay, last question. Sex with or without handcuffs?”
Olive unclipped the mic from her shirt as she stood. She placed the mic carefully on the chair. “No comment,” she said, and left the room before the interviewer could see the tears in her eyes.
In Shanghai, Olive spent a combined total of three hours talking about herself and about her book, which meant talking about the end of the world while trying not to imagine the world ending with her daughter in it, and then returned to her hotel, where she noticed in the corridor that she was having difficulty walking in a straight line. She never drank, but drunkenness and fatigue look the same sometimes. Olive weaved down the hallway and stumbled into her room. She closed the door behind her and stood just inside for a long time, her forehead resting on the cool wall above the light switch. After a while, she heard her own voice, repeating It’s too much. It’s too much. It’s too much.
“Olive,” the room’s AI system said softly, when some time had passed, “do you desire assistance?” When Olive didn’t answer, it repeated the inquiry in Mandarin and Cantonese.
“Olive, this is totally random, but I was your agent’s babysitter,” a woman told her, in a signing line in Singapore the next day.
“What message would you like your readers to take away from Marienbad?” another interviewer asked.
Olive and the interviewer were onstage together in Tokyo. The interviewer was a hologram, because for unspecified personal reasons he’d been unable to leave Nairobi. Olive suspected the personal reason was illness: the interviewer kept freezing up, but the sound had no lag, which meant the interviewer wasn’t freezing due to a bad connection, he was freezing because he kept pressing the Cough button on his console.
“I was just trying to write an interesting book,” Olive said. “There’s no message.”
“Are you sure?” the interviewer asked.
“Will you sign a used book?” a woman asked, in a signing line.
“Of course, I’d be happy to.”
“Also,” the woman said, “is this your handwriting?”
Someone, not Olive, had already written in this woman’s copy of Marienbad: Harold: I enjoyed last night. xoxoxoxo Olive Llewellyn.
Olive stared at the message and felt just a touch of vertigo. “No,” she said, “I don’t know who wrote that.”
(She was distracted for days afterward by the thought of a shadow Olive moving over the landscape, on a kind of parallel tour, writing uncharacteristic messages in Olive’s books.)
In Cape Town, Olive met an author who’d been out on the road with his husband for a year and a half, touring in the service of a book that had sold several times as many copies as Marienbad.
“We’re trying to see how long we can travel until we have to go home,” the author said. His name was Ibby, short for Ibrahim, and his husband was Jack. The three of them were sitting together in the evening on the rooftop terrace of the hotel, which was filled with authors attending a literary festival.
“Are you trying to avoid going home?” Olive asked. “Or you just like traveling?”
“Both,” Jack said. “I like being on the road.”
“And our apartment’s mediocre,” Ibby said, “but we haven’t decided what to do about it. Move? Redecorate? Could go either way.”
There were dozens of trees up here, in enormous planters, with little lights sparkling in the branches. Music was playing somewhere, a string quartet. Olive was wearing her designated fancy tour dress, which was silver and went to her ankles. This is one of the glamorous moments, Olive thought, filing it carefully away so she could draw on it for sustenance later. The breeze carried a scent of jasmine.
“I heard some good news today,” Jack said.
“Tell me,” Ibby said. “I’ve been in a kind of book festival tunnel all day. Inadvertent news blackout.”
“Construction just began on the first of the Far Colonies,” Jack said.
Olive smiled, and almost spoke, but she was momentarily wordless. Planning for the Far Colonies had begun when her grandparents were children. She would always remember this moment, she thought, this party, these people whom she very much liked and might never see again. She’d be able to tell Sylvie where she was when she heard the news. When had she last experienced true awe? It had been a while. Olive was flooded with happiness. She raised her glass.
“To Alpha Centauri,” she said.
In Buenos Aires, Olive met a woman who wanted to show her a tattoo. “I hope this isn’t weird,” she said, and rolled up her sleeve to reveal a quote from the book: We knew it was coming, in a beautiful curly script on her left shoulder.
Olive’s breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t just a line from Marienbad, it was a tattoo in Marienbad. In the second half of the novel, her character Gaspery-Jacques had the line tattooed on his left arm. You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She’d seen five of those tattoos, but that didn’t make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin.
“That’s incredible,” Olive said softly. “It’s incredible to see that tattoo in the real world.”
“It’s my favorite line from your book,” she said. “It’s just true of so much, isn’t it?”
But doesn’t everything seem obvious in retrospect? Blue dusk over the prairies, gliding toward the Dakota Republic in a low-altitude airship. Olive stared out the window and tried to find some peace in the landscape. She had a new invitation for a festival on Titan. She hadn’t been since she was a kid and retained only vague memories of crowds at the Dolphinarium and some oddly tasteless popcorn, the warm yellowish haze of the daytime sky—she’d been in a so-called Realist colony, one of the outposts whose settlers had decided on clear domes in order to experience the true colors of the Titanian atmosphere—and strange fashions, this thing all the teenagers were doing that involved painting their faces like pixels, big squares of color that were supposed to defeat the facial-recognition software but that had the side effect of making them look like deranged clowns. Should she go to Titan? I want to go home. Where was Sylvie at this moment? This is easier than having a day job, though, just remember that.
“I remember reading somewhere,” an interviewer said, “that the title of your first book actually came from your last day job?”
“Yes,” Olive said, “I came across it at work one day.”
“Your first novel was, of course, Swimming Stars with Goldflitter. Will you tell me about that title?”
“Sure, yes. I was working in AI training. So, you know, correcting awkward renderings from the translator bots. I remember sitting there by the hour in this cramped little office—”
“This was in Colony Two?”
“Yes, Colony Two. My job was to sit there all day, rewording unfortunate sentences. But there was one that stopped me cold, because it may have been awkward and error-ridden, but I loved it.” Olive had told this story so often that it was like reciting lines from a play. “It was a description of votive candles with little poems on the candleholders. The description had somehow been rendered as seven motives for verse, and then one of the candle descriptions was swimming stars with goldflitter. The beauty of those phrases, I don’t know, it just stopped me cold.”
Stopped me cold. Two days later she was on a panel with another writer at a festival in the city-state of Los Angeles, and the implication of that phrase had just occurred to her. What stops you, and turns you cold? Death, obviously. Olive couldn’t believe she’d never thought of this. Los Angeles was under a dome, but still the light through the windows was blinding. This meant she couldn’t see the audience, which was frankly ideal. All those faces staring at her. No, at them: the other writer’s name was Jessica Marley and Olive was glad Jessica was here with her, even though she didn’t actually like her very much. Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.
“Well, some of us don’t have doctorates in literature, Jim,” Jessica said to the interviewer, in response to some imperceptible provocation. The look on his face mirrored Olive’s thought at that moment: Well, that escalated quickly. But a man in the audience was standing up with a question about Marienbad. Almost all of the questions were about Marienbad, which was awkward because Jessica was there too, Jessica with her book about coming of age in the moon colonies. Olive was pretending that she hadn’t read Moon/Rise, because she’d hated it. Olive had lived the real thing, and it wasn’t nearly as poetic as Jessica’s book suggested. Growing up in a moon colony was fine. It was neither great nor dystopian. It was a little house in a pleasant neighborhood of tree-lined streets, a good but not extraordinary public school, life lived at a consistent 15° to 22° Celsius under carefully calibrated dome lighting, scheduled rainfalls. She didn’t grow up longing for Earth or experience her life as a continual displacement, thank you.
“I wanted to ask Olive about the death of the prophet in Marienbad,” the man in the audience said. Jessica sighed and slumped a little in her chair. “It could have been a much bigger moment, but you decided to make it a relatively small, not-climactic event.”
“Really? I thought of it as climactic,” Olive said, as mildly as possible.
He smiled, humoring her. “But you chose to make it really small, almost inconsequential, when it could have been cinematic, something really big. Why is that?”
Jessica sat up straight, excited by the possibility of combat.
“Well,” Olive said. “I suppose everyone has a different idea of what constitutes a big moment.”
“You’re a master of deflection,” Jessica murmured, without looking at her. “You’re like some kind of deflection ninja.”
“Thank you,” Olive said, although she knew it wasn’t a compliment.
“Let’s move on to the next question,” the interviewer said.
“You know the phrase I keep thinking about?” a poet asked, on a different panel, at a festival in Copenhagen. “ ‘The chickens are coming home to roost.’ Because it’s never good chickens. It’s never ‘You’ve been a good person and now your chickens are coming home to roost.’ It’s never good chickens. It’s always bad chickens.”
Scattered laughter and applause. A man in the audience was having a coughing fit. He left quickly, bent over in an apologetic way. Olive wrote no good chickens in the margin of her festival program.
Was the death of the prophet in Marienbad too anticlimactic? It seemed possible. Olive was sitting alone at a hotel bar near the Copenhagen festival, drinking tea and eating a wilted salad with too much cheese on it. On the one hand the prophet’s death was dramatic, after all he’d been shot in the head, but maybe there should’ve been some kind of battle scene, maybe the death really was too casual, in the way he went from perfect health to death over the course of a paragraph and the story kept moving without him—
“May I get you anything else?” the bartender asked.
“Just the check, please,” Olive said.
—but on the other hand, isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us? But obviously Marienbad was fiction, i.e., reality wasn’t relevant to the question at hand, and maybe the death of the prophet really was a flaw. Now Olive was holding the pen over the check, but there was a difficulty: she’d forgotten her room number. She had to go to the front desk to retrieve it.
“It happens more often than you’d think,” the clerk at the front desk said.
At the airship terminal the next morning, she sat next to a business traveler who wanted to tell her about his job, which had something to do with detecting counterfeit steel. Olive listened for a long time, because the monologue distracted her from how much she missed Sylvie. “And what do you do?” the other traveler asked finally.
“I write books,” Olive said.
“For children?” he asked.
When Olive circled back to the Atlantic Republic, seeing her AR publicist again was like seeing an old friend. Aretta and Olive sat together at a dinner for booksellers in Jersey City.
“How’s it been since I saw you last?” Aretta asked.
“Fine,” Olive said, “it’s all going fine. I have no complaints.” And then, because she was tired and she knew Aretta a little by now, she broke her own rule about never revealing anything personal, and said, “It’s just a lot of people.”
Aretta smiled. “Publicists aren’t supposed to be shy,” she said, “but I get a little overwhelmed at these dinners sometimes.”
“Me too,” Olive said. “My face gets tired.”
That night’s hotel room was white and blue. The thing with being away from her husband and daughter was that every hotel room was emptier than the one before.
The last interview of the tour was the following afternoon in Philadelphia, where Olive met a man in a dark suit who was her age or a little younger, in a beautiful meeting room at a hotel. The room was on a high floor with a wall of glass, and the city rolled away beneath them.
“Here we are,” said Aretta brightly. “Olive, this is Gaspery Roberts, Contingencies Magazine. I have to make a couple of quick calls, so I’ll leave you two.” She receded. Olive and the interviewer sat in matching green velvet chairs.
“Thank you for meeting with me,” the man said.
“My pleasure. Do you mind if I ask about your name? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Gaspery.”
“I’ll tell you something even stranger,” he said. “My first name is actually Gaspery-Jacques.”
“Seriously? I thought I’d made up the name for that character in Marienbad.”
He smiled. “My mother was astonished when she came across the name in your book. She thought she’d made it up too.”
“Perhaps I came across your name somewhere and didn’t consciously remember it.”
“Anything’s possible. It’s hard to know what we know sometimes, isn’t it?” He had a gentle way of speaking that Olive liked, and a faint accent that she couldn’t quite place. “Have you been in interviews all day?”
“Half the day. You’re my fifth.”
“Ouch. I’ll keep this brief, then. I’d like to ask you about a specific scene in Marienbad, if I may.”
“Okay. Sure.”
“The scene in the spaceport,” he said. “Where your character Willis hears the violin and he’s…transported.”
“It’s an odd passage,” Olive said. “I get a lot of questions about it.”
“I’d like to ask you something.” Gaspery hesitated. “This might seem a bit—I don’t mean to pry. But is there an element of—I’m wondering if that bit of the book was inspired by a personal experience.”
“I’ve never been interested in auto-fiction,” Olive said, but it was difficult to meet his eyes now. She’d always found something steadying in looking at her own clasped hands, but she didn’t know if it was the hands or the shirt, the impeccable white cuffs. Clothes are armor.
“Listen,” Gaspery said, “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable or put you on the spot. But I’m curious if you experienced something strange in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.”
In the quiet, Olive could hear the soft hum of the building, the sounds of ventilation and plumbing. Perhaps she wouldn’t have admitted it if he hadn’t caught her toward the end of the tour, if she hadn’t been so tired.
“I don’t mind talking about this,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll seem too eccentric if it makes it into the final version of the interview. Could we go off the record for a moment?”
“Yes,” he said.
