Selu had been assigned Case 9 on her first day at the archive and had not been reassigned in nine years. This was unusual. Most cases moved through the catalog: documented, analyzed, closed or transferred. Case 9 had been active since 1987, when Eivor Strand had donated a book that was, at the time of donation, two thousand, three hundred and forty pages long.
It was now six thousand, two hundred pages. Selu had documented three thousand, eight hundred and sixty of those over nine years, cataloging themes, tracking recurring images, noting generation rates. In the year she inherited the case, the book had produced approximately three hundred and forty new pages. This year it had produced eighty.
She had three hypotheses. The first: the book was slowing toward a stop, approaching completion the way a sentence approaches its period. The second: the slowdown was temporary, a pause before resumption. The third: she was measuring wrong, and the slowdown was an artifact of her methodology.
She had tested the third hypothesis extensively. She believed it was the first.
The evidence for completion: the book had, in the last three years, been returning to images from its earliest sections. Not repeating them. Responding to them, the way a piece of music restates its opening theme in a different key near the end. The figure from the 1990-era pages had reappeared in last year's pages, older, in a scene that seemed to know the earlier scene. A phrase from page forty-seven had appeared again on page five thousand, eight hundred and three, inverted.
She had four thousand pages ahead of her that she had not yet read. She read ten pages a day. She did the arithmetic once and did not do it again.
Eivor Strand had died in 2003. There was no one left who knew where the book had come from, or what it had been before it became what it was.
Selu turned to the morning's new pages. Three pages today. The figure had appeared again, in summer this time, in a scene she did not recognize from anything she had read before.
She read it slowly, watching for the image she was not yet sure she was looking for.