The lost Greek prose tale Cloud Cuckoo Land, by the writer Antonius Diogenes, relating a shepherd's journey to a utopian city in the sky, was probably written around the end of the first century C.E. “No thank you, Sybil.” She looks down at the first scrap and reads:
How about some nice risotto? Or roast lamb with mashed potatoes? There are still many combinations you have not tried.
It is late, Konstance, and you have not eaten all day. She leans forward and lifts three scraps from the puzzle in front of her. In the millennium leading up to 1453, the city of Constantinople was besieged twenty-three times, but no army ever breached its land walls. One, for example, contains the twenty-four letters of the ancient Greek alphabet. Some are dense with her handwriting others accommodate a single word. Light comes from a ring of diodes in the ceiling there is no visible exit.Īrranged 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. This is Sybil.Įlsewhere 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. Occasionally a bundle somewhere along the surface of the machine pulses with light: now here, now there. Each filament twines around thousands of others in entanglements of astonishing intricacy. This is Konstance.īehind 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. A mass of curls haloes her head her socks are full of holes. TO MY DEAREST NIECE WITH HOPE THAT THIS BRINGS YOU HEALTH AND LIGHT THE ARGOSĪ fourteen-year-old girl sits cross-legged on the floor of a circular vault. Peisetairos: I've got it! Listenâ≌loud Cuckoo Land!
A pinch of fluff and rare air, a swollen sound. Peisetairos: Well, what do you suggest instead?Ĭhorus Leader: Something big, smacking of the clouds. Peisetairos: How about Sparta? That's a grand old name with a fine pretentious ring.Įuelpides: Great Hercules, call my city Sparta? I wouldn't even insult my mattress by giving it a name like Sparta.
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