“Sybil, where are we?”
We are en route to Beta Oph2.
“What speed are we traveling?”
7,734,958 kilometers per hour. You would remember our velocity from your Library Day.
“You’re sure, Sybil?”
It is fact.
She gazes a moment into the trillion resplendent tributaries of the machine.
Konstance, are you feeling well? Your heart rate is rather high.
“I feel fine, thank you. I’m going back to the Library for a bit.”
She studies the same schematics that her father studied during Quarantine Two. Engineering, storage, fluid recycling, waste treatment, oxygen plant. The farms, the Commissary, the kitchens. Five lavatories with showers, forty-two living compartments, Sybil at the center. No windows, no stairs, no way in, no way out, the whole structure a self-sustaining tomb. Sixty-six years ago the original eighty-five volunteers were told they were embarking on an interstellar journey that would outlast them by centuries. They traveled to Qaanaaq, trained for six months, boarded a boat, and were sedated and sealed inside the Argos while Sybil prepared the launch.
Except there was no launch. It was just an exercise. A pilot study, a trial run, an intergenerational feasibility experiment that may have ended long ago or may be ongoing still.
Konstance stands in the Library atrium touching the place on her worksuit where Mother stitched a pine seedling four years before. Mrs. Flowers’s little dog stares up at her and wags his tail. He is not real. The desk beneath her fingertips feels like wood, sounds like wood, smells like wood; the slips in the box look like paper, feel like paper, smell like paper.
None of it is real. She stands on a circular Perambulator in a circular room at the center of a circular white structure on a mostly circular island eight miles across Baffin Bay from a remote village called Qaanaaq. How does a contagion suddenly present itself on a ship streaking through interstellar space? Why couldn’t Sybil solve it? Because none of them, Sybil included, knew where they actually were.
She writes a series of questions on slips of paper and tucks them one by one into the slot. Above the atrium, clouds stream through a yellow sky. The little dog licks his upper lip. Down from the stacks fly books.
Inside Vault One she unscrews all four legs off the cot, and uses the frame to pound one end of one of the legs flat.
Why, Sybil asks, are you dismantling your bed?
Don’t answer. Konstance spends hours discreetly sharpening the edge of the cot leg. She inserts the sharpened leg into a slot on a second leg that will serve as a handle, secures it with a screw, makes cord from the lining of her blanket, and lashes the sharpened cot leg fast: a homemade axe. Then she takes several scoops of Nourish powder, runs them through the food printer, and the machine fills the bowl past the rim.
I am glad, says Sybil, that you are preparing a meal, Konstance. And such a large one too.
“I’ll have another after this one, Sybil. Is there a recipe you might recommend?”
How about pineapple fried rice? Doesn’t that sound nice?
Konstance swallows, fills her mouth again. “It does, yes. It sounds wonderful.”
Once she is full, she crawls around the floor gathering her transcriptions of Zeno Ninis’s translations. Aethon Has a Vision. The Bandits’ Hideout. The Garden of the Goddess. She gathers all the scraps into a stack, Folio A to Folio Ω, sets her drawing of a cloud city on top, and, using one of the aluminum screws from the cot legs, bores a row of holes through the left edge. Then she unravels more blanket lining, braids the fibers together to make twine, lines up the holes, and sews the scraps of food sacks together along one edge to bind them.
An hour left before NoLight, she cleans her food bowl and fills it with water. By running her fingers along her scalp, she collects a little nest of hair and wedges it into the bottom of her empty drinking cup.
Then she sits on the floor and waits and watches Sybil gleam inside her tower. She can almost feel Father bundling her in her blanket, sitting with her against the wall of Farm 4, the space around them crammed with racks of lettuce and watercress and parsley, the seeds sleeping in their drawers.
Will you tell some more of the story, Father?
When NoLight comes, she takes the bioplastic suit her father sewed for her twelve months before and pulls it on. Leaving her arms free, she zips it to her chest, the fit more snug now that she has grown, and tucks her handmade book deep inside her worksuit. Then she balances one end of the legless cot, its mattress still inflated, on the food printer and the other on the toilet to form a kind of canopy.
Konstance, says Sybil, what are you doing to your bed?
She crawls beneath the elevated cot. From the back of the printer she unplugs the low-voltage power connection, strips away the thermoplastic sheath, and attaches the wires inside the cable to the two remaining cot legs. Positive to one, negative to the other. These she sticks into the water in her food bowl.
She holds her drinking cup, her hair wadded inside, upside down over the positive electrode and waits as oxygen rises from the water and collects in the inverted cup.
Konstance, what are you up to under there?
She counts to ten, takes the wires off the cot legs, and rubs their ends together. The ensuing spark, rising into the pure oxygen, ignites the hair.
I insist that you reply. What are you doing beneath your bed?
As she turns over the cup, smoke rises, and with it the odor of burning hair. Konstance sets a crumpled square of dry-wipe on it, then another. According to the schematics, extinguishers are embedded into the ceiling of every room on the Argos. If this is not true in Vault One—if the schematics were wrong, and there are extinguishers in the walls, or in the floor, this will never work. But if they are only in the ceiling, it might.
Konstance, I sense heat. Please answer me, what are you doing under there?
Little nozzles extend from the ceiling and begin to spray a chemical mist onto the cot above her head; she can feel it pattering onto the legs of her suit as she feeds the flames beneath the cot.
The fire fades as she nearly smothers it with more dry-wipes, then surges back to life. Threads of black curl around the edges of the upside-down cot, and into the mist raining down from the ceiling. She blows on the flames, layers on more wipes, then feeds it scoops of Nourish powder. If this does not work, she will not have enough material to burn a second time.
Soon the underside of her mattress catches fire and she has to crawl out from beneath the cot. She pitches in the last of the dry-wipes. Green flames rise from the mattress’s edge and an acrid, burnt-chemical smell fills the vault. Konstance slides across the room beneath the spray of the extinguishers, puts her hands into the suit’s sleeves, pulls on the oxygen hood, and seals it to the suit’s collar.
She feels it catch, feels the suit inflate.
Oxygen at ten percent, says the hood.
Konstance, this is outrageously irresponsible behavior. You are jeopardizing everything.
The underside of the cot glows brighter as the mattress burns. The beam of the headlamp flickers through the smoke.
“Sybil, your prime directive is to protect the crew, isn’t it? Above all else?”
Sybil raises the lights in the ceiling to full brightness and Konstance squints into the glare. Her hands are lost in sleeves; her feet slide on the floor.
“It’s mutualism, right?” Konstance says. “The crew needs you and you need a crew.”
Please remove the cot frame so the fire beneath it can be extinguished.
“But without a crew—without me—you have no purpose, Sybil. This room is already so full of smoke that it is not possible for me to breathe. In a few minutes the hood I’m wearing will run out of oxygen. Then I will asphyxiate.”
Sybil’s voice deepens. Remove the cot immediately.
The falling droplets cloud the lens of her hood, and each time she tries to wipe it clean, she only smudges it further. Konstance shifts the book zipped inside her worksuit and picks up her hatchet.
Oxygen at nine percent, says the hood.
Green and orange flames are licking around the top of the cot now, and Sybil is mostly obscured behind smoke.
Please, Konstance. Her voice changes, softens, becomes a mimicry of Mother’s. You must not do this.
Konstance backs against the wall. The voice changes again, flows to a new gender. Listen, Zucchini, can you flip over the cot?
Hairs rise on the back of Konstance’s neck.
We must put out the fire immediately. Everything is in danger.
She can hear a hissing, something melting or boiling inside the mattress, and through the billowing smoke she can just glimpse the tower that is Sybil, sixteen feet tall, rippling with crimson light, and from her memory whispers Mrs. Chen: Every map ever drawn, every census ever taken, every book ever published…
For an instant, she hesitates. The images on the Atlas are decades old. What waits out there now, beyond the walls of the Argos? What if Sybil is the only other intelligence left? What is she risking?
Oxygen at eight percent, says the hood. Try to breathe more slowly.
She turns away from Sybil and holds her breath. In front of her, where a moment before there was only wall, the door to Vault One slides open.