Mrs. Chen said Sybil was a book that contained the entire world: a thousand variations of recipes for macaroni and cheese, the record of four thousand years of temperatures of the Arctic Sea, Confucian literature and Beethoven’s symphonies and the genomes of the trilobites—the heritage of all humanity, the citadel, the ark, the womb, everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need. Mrs. Flowers said it would be enough.
