What If the Library of Alexandria Never Burned?

Theon smelled the smoke before he heard the shouting. From the roof of the scriptorium he watched the Egyptian fleet burn in the harbor below, orange light crawling up the masts of forty ships at once, embers lifting into the dark like a swarm of dying stars. Caesar's men had set the fire to deny the enemy their navy. No one, not even Caesar, had meant for it to spread.

For a long moment Theon believed he was about to lose everything he had spent thirty years cataloguing — the complete astronomical tables of Hipparchus, the only copy of Aristotle's treatise on animal generation with its author's own corrections in the margins, four hundred thousand scrolls that existed nowhere else on earth. Then the wind turned. It simply turned, the way wind does, indifferent to history, and carried the fire back toward the water instead of up through the warehouse district toward the Library.

Theon did not sleep that night. He walked the stacks with an oil lamp, touching the spines of boxes he had catalogued himself, and understood — with a clarity that frightened him — that he had just watched the edge of something enormous. Not a miracle. A near miss. He began, before dawn, to write down everything he could remember of what had almost been lost, in case the wind changed its mind again.