The twelve- and thirteen-year-olds are giving presentations. Ramón describes which biosignature gases have been identified in the atmosphere of Beta Oph2, and Jessi Ko speculates about microclimates in temperate grasslands on Beta Oph2, and Konstance goes last. A book flies toward her from the second tier of the Library and opens flat on the floor and from its pages grows a six-foot-tall stem with a down-facing flower.
The other children groan.
“This,” she says, “is a snowdrop. Snowdrops are tiny flowers that bloom on Earth in cold weather. In the Atlas I have found two places where you can see so many of them that they turn a whole field white.” She waves her arms as though summoning carpets of snowdrops from the corners of the Library.
“On Earth, each individual snowdrop would produce hundreds of tiny seeds, and each seed had a little fatty drop stuck to it called an elaiosome, and ants loved—”
“Konstance,” says Mrs. Chen, “your presentation is supposed to be about biogeographical indicators on Beta Oph2.”
“Not dead flowers ten kajillion miles away,” adds Ramón, and everyone laughs.
“Ants,” continues Konstance, “would carry the seeds into their middens and lick off the elaiosomes, leaving the seed clean. So the snowdrops gave the ants a treat at a time of year when food was hard to find, and the ants planted more snowdrops, and this was called mutualism, a cycle that—”
Mrs. Chen steps forward and claps her hands and the flower vanishes and the book flaps away.
“That’s enough, Konstance, thank you.”
Second Meal is printed beefsteak with Farm 2 chives. Mother’s expression puckers with worry. “First you’re climbing inside that dusty Atlas all the time, and now ants again? I don’t like it, Konstance, our mandate is to look forward, do you want to end up like—”
Konstance sighs, bracing for it, the great warning story of Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, who, after his Library Day, would not get off his Perambulator day or night, ignoring his studies and violating every protocol in order to trek alone inside the Atlas until the soles of his feet cracked, and then, according to Mother, his sanity cracked too. Sybil restricted his Library access, and the grown-ups took away his Vizer, but Elliot Fischenbacher unbolted a support from a shelf in the galley and over a series of nights tried to chop through an outer wall, right through the skin of the Argos itself, imperiling everyone and everything. Thankfully, Mother always says, before he could get through the outermost layer, Elliot Fischenbacher was subdued and confined to his family compartment, but in his confinement he squirreled away SleepDrops until he had enough for a lethal dose, and when he died his body was sent out the airlock without so much as a song. More than once Mother has pointed out the titanium patch in the corridor between Lavatories 2 and 3 where Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher tried to hack his way out and kill everyone on board.
But Konstance has stopped listening. At the opposite end of the table Ezekiel Lee, a gentle teenager not much older than she is, is groaning and driving his knuckles into his eye sockets. His meal is untouched. His pallor is sickly white.
Dr. Pori the mathematics teacher, seated on Ezekiel’s left, touches him on the shoulder. “Zeke?”
“He’s just tired from his studies,” says Ezekiel’s mother, but to Konstance Ezekiel looks worse than tired.
Father comes into the Commissary with bits of compost stuck in his eyebrows. “You missed the conference with Mrs. Chen,” says Mother. “And you have dirt on your face.”
“Apologies,” says Father. He tugs a leaf from his beard and pops it in his mouth and winks at Konstance.
“How’s our little pine tree today, Father?” asks Konstance.
“On track to punch through the ceiling before you’re twenty.”
They chew their beefsteaks, and Mother embarks on a more inspiring tack, how Konstance ought to feel more pride to be part of this enterprise, that the crew of the Argos represents the future of the species, they exemplify hope and discovery, courage and endurance, they’re widening the window of possibility, shepherding the cumulative wisdom of humanity into a new dawn, and in the meantime why not spend more time with her in the Games Section? How about Rainforest Run, where you tap floating coins with a glowing wand, or Corvi’s Paradox, excellent for the reflexes—but now Ezekiel Lee is grinding his forehead into the table.
“Sybil,” asks Mrs. Lee, rising from her seat, “what’s wrong with Ezekiel?” and the boy rears back, moans, and falls off his stool.
There are gasps. Someone says, “What’s happening?” Mother calls out to Sybil again while Mrs. Lee lifts Ezekiel’s head and sets it in her lap and Father shouts for Dr. Cha, and that’s when Ezekiel retches black vomit all over his mother.
Mother shrieks. Father drags Konstance away from the table. The vomit is on Mrs. Lee’s throat and in her hair, it’s on the legs of Dr. Pori’s worksuit, and everyone in the Commissary is backing away from their meals, astonished, and Father is rushing Konstance into the corridor as Sybil says, Initiating Quarantine Level One, all nonessential personnel to their compartments immediately.
Inside Compartment 17, Mother makes Konstance sanitize her arms to her armpits. Four times she asks Sybil to check their vital signs.
Pulse and respiration rates stable, says Sybil. Blood pressure normal.
Mother climbs on her Perambulator and touches her Vizer and within seconds she’s speed-whispering to people in the Library: “—how do we know it’s not infectious—” and “—hope Sara Jane sterilized everything—” and “—aside from births, what has Dr. Cha seen, really? A few burns, a broken arm, some deaths from old age?”
Father squeezes Konstance’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right. Go to the Library and finish your school day.” He slips out the door and Konstance sits with her back against the wall and Mother paces, chin jutted, forehead creased, and Konstance goes to the door and presses it.
“Sybil, why won’t the door open?”
Only essential personnel are allowed to circulate right now, Konstance.
She sees Ezekiel wince at the lights, fall off his stool. Is it safe for Father to be out there? Is it safe in here?
She steps onto her own Perambulator, beside her mother’s, and touches her Vizer.
In the Library grown-ups gesticulate around tables while cyclones of documents whirl above them. Mrs. Chen herds the teenagers up a ladder to a table on the second tier and sets an orange volume in the center. Ramón and Jessi Ko and Omicron Philips and Ezekiel’s little brother Tayvon watch as a foot-tall woman in a light-blue worksuit with the word ILIUM stitched on the breast emerges from the book. If at some point during your long voyage, she says, it becomes necessary to quarantine in your compartments, be sure to stick to your routines. Exercise daily, seek out fellow crew members in the Library, and…
Ramón says, “You hear about people vomiting but to actually see it?” and Jessi Ko says, “I hear Quarantine One lasts seven days no matter what,” and Omicron says, “I hear Quarantine Two lasts two months,” and Konstance says, “I hope your brother feels better soon, Tayvon,” and Tayvon bunches his eyebrows like he does when he’s concentrating on a mathematics problem.
Below them Mrs. Chen crosses the atrium and joins grown-ups around a table, images of cells and bacteria and viruses rotating in the space between them. Ramón says, “Let’s go play Ninefold Darkness,” and the four of them scamper up a ladder toward the Games Section, and Konstance watches the flying books a moment longer, then takes a slip of paper from the box in the center of the table, writes Atlas, and drops it into the slot.
“Thessaly,” she says, and drops through the Earth’s atmosphere and floats over the olive-and-rust-colored mountainscape of central Greece. Roadways emerge below, the terrain cut into polygons by fences, hedgerows, and walls, a familiar village coming into view now—cinderblock privacy walls, slate rooftops beneath cliff faces—and she’s walking the cracked pavement of a rural road in the Pindus Mountains.
Side streets split left and right, little dirt thoroughfares branching off those, drawing an elaborate tracery higher into the hills. She climbs past a row of houses built right up to the roadside, a disemboweled car in front of one, a face-blurred man in a plastic chair in front of the next. A houseplant wilts in a window; a sign with a skull on it has been mounted on a pole out front.
She turns right, following a route she knows well. Mrs. Flowers was right: the other kids find the Atlas hilariously obsolete. There’s no jumping or tunneling like in the more sophisticated games in the Games Section: all you do is walk. You can’t fly or build or fight or collaborate; you don’t feel mud grab your boots or raindrops prick your face; you can’t hear explosions or waterfalls; you can hardly leave the roads. And inside the Atlas everything besides the roads is as immaterial as air: walls, trees, people. The only solid thing is the ground.
Yet it fascinates Konstance; she cannot get enough of it. To drop feet-first into Taipei or the ruins of Bangladesh, a sand road on a little island off Cuba, to see the images of face-blurred people frozen here and there in their old-fashioned outfits, the pageants of traffic circles and piazzas and tent-cities, pigeons and raindrops and buses and soldiers in helmets frozen mid-gesture; the graffiti murals, the hulks of carbon-capture plants, the rusted army tanks, the water trucks—it’s all there, an entire planet on a server. Gardens are her favorite: mango trees on a median reaching toward the sun in Colombia; wisteria heaped on a café pergola in Serbia; ivy swarming up an orchard wall in Syracuse.
Just ahead an old woman in black stockings and a gray dress has been captured by the cameras halfway up a steep hill, her back hunched in the heat, wearing a white respirator mask and pushing a baby stroller full of what look like glass bottles. Konstance shuts her eyes as she walks through her.
A high fence, a low wall, and the road thins to a track switchbacking up through mixed vegetation. A silver sky plays overhead. Strange bulges and shadows lurk behind trees where the software pixelates, and as the trail climbs it continues to thin, the landscape growing more desolate and windswept, until she reaches a place where the Atlas cameras went no farther, and the trail peters out at a massive Bosnian pine, probably twenty-five meters high, twisting up toward the sky, like the great-great-grandfather of her sapling in Farm 4.
She stops, inhales: a dozen times she has visited this tree, seeking something. Through the gnarled old branches the cameras have caught a great cavalcade of clouds, and the tree clings to the mountainside as though it has grown there since the beginning of time.
She pants, sweating on her Perambulator inside Compartment 17, and leans as far forward as she can to touch its trunk, her fingertips passing through, the interface breaking down into a grainy smudge, a girl alone with a centuries-old pine tree in the sunbaked mountains of Thessaly, land of magic.
Before NoLight Father comes through the door of Compartment 17 wearing an oxygen hood with a clear visor and a cyclopic headlamp. “Just a precaution,” he says, his voice muffled. He sets three covered trays on Mother’s sewing table as the door seals behind him, sanitizes his hands, and removes the hood.
“Broccoli cacciatore. Sybil says we’re moving to printers in each compartment to decentralize meals, so this might be our last fresh produce for a bit.”
Mother gnaws her lips. Her face is as white as the walls. “How’s Ezekiel?”
Father shakes his head.
“It’s contagious?”
“No one knows yet. Dr. Cha is with him.”
“Why hasn’t Sybil solved it?”
I am working on it, says Sybil.
“Work faster,” says Mother.
Konstance and Father eat. Mother sits on her bunk, her food untouched. Again she asks Sybil to check their vital signs.
Pulse and respiration rates normal. Blood pressure shipshape.
Konstance climbs into her berth and Father stacks the trays by the door, then rests his chin on her mattress and pushes her curls out of her eyes.
“On Earth, when I was a boy, most everybody got sick. Rashes, funny little fevers. All the unmodified people got sick every now and then. It’s part of being human. We think of viruses as evil but in reality few are. Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight.”
The diodes in the ceiling dim and Father presses a palm to her forehead and in a great dizzy uprush comes the sensation of standing inside the Atlas atop the Theodosian walls, all that white limestone crumbling under the sun. For as long as we have been a species, Mrs. Flowers said, we humans have tried to defeat death. None of us ever has.
The following morning Konstance stands in the Library at the second-tier railing with Jessi Ko and Omicron and Ramón waiting for Dr. Pori to arrive and commence the morning’s lesson in precalculus. Jessi says, “Tayvon’s late too,” and Omicron says, “I don’t see Mrs. Lee either, and she was the one with Zeke’s chunder all over her,” and the four children fall quiet.
Eventually Jessi Ko says she’s heard that if you feel sick you’re supposed to say, “Sybil, I’m not feeling well,” and if Sybil detects something wrong with you, she sends Dr. Cha and Engineer Goldberg to your compartment wearing full biohazard containment suits, and Sybil will unlock the door so they can isolate you in the Infirmary. Ramón says, “That sounds awful,” and Omicron whispers, “Look,” because down on the main floor Mrs. Chen is leading all six members of the crew who have not yet turned ten across the atrium.
The children look tiny beneath the towering shelves. A few grown-ups send perfunctory IT’S YOUR LIBRARY DAY balloons up into the barrel vault and Ramón says, “They didn’t even get pancakes.”
Jessi Ko says, “What do you think it feels like, to be sick?” and Omicron says, “I hate polynomials, but I do wish Dr. Pori would show up,” and below them the young children hold virtual hands and their bright voices fill the atrium,
We move as one
In everything we do.
It takes everyone together,
Everyone together,
to get to—
and Sybil announces, All non-medical personnel to their compartments, no exceptions, initiating Quarantine Level Two.