Despite appearances, there was an order and a theme to the volumes. The library was, in the main, about war. If there was a book on the plastic arts-and there were several-the owner had studied them because he knew that art had propaganda value in war. If there was a book on music-and there were dozens-that was because music, too, was both a weapon of war and a remarkably subtle yet powerful tool for training for war. If there were books on the Marxism that had made its reappearance under the Volgan tsar during the Great Global War-and there were some few-it was because the reader believed in knowing one's enemy.

There was even a copy of the Koran.

However, most of the library was more obviously military. The collection covered, as nearly and completely as possible on Terra Nova, every human age and culture as it pertained to armed conflict. An English translation of Vegetius rested next to another copy in the original Latin. Apparently not as confident in his Greek as in his Latin, the reader kept most of Xenophon in bilingual texts-Greek and English alternating pages. Plato, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Aristotle, Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Annan, Nussbaum, Harris, Steyn, Fallacci, Yen, Peng and Rostov… war was about philosophy and politics, too, and so the reader studied those as well.

Eyes fixing upon the Nussbaum work, a gift from his parents many years prior, the reader thought, Amazing that that line of thought should have succeeded in contaminating not one but two worlds. What utter nonsense!

A stranger, given time to realize the single-minded purposefulness of the library, might eventually have concluded that the reader considered war his art; perhaps all he cared about.

The stranger would have been wrong. War was not all the reader cared about, nor even what he cared most about. It had been a job and was still a hobby; it was not a life.