She wakes on the floor still wearing the bioplastic suit her father made. The machine flickers inside its tower.
Good afternoon, Konstance.
Scattered around her are the things Father pitched into the vestibule: Perambulator, inflatable cot, recycling toilet, dry-wipes, the sacks of Nourish powder, the food printer still in its wrapper. The oxygen hood lies beside her, its headlamp extinguished.
Drip by drip, horror trickles into her awareness. The two figures in the biohazard suits, the bronze mirror of their face shields reflecting back a warped version of the open doorway to Compartment 17. The tents in the Commissary. Father’s haggard face, his pink-rimmed eyes. The way he flinched every time the beam of the headlamp passed over him.
Mother was not in her bed.
She feels exposed using the little recycling toilet. The bottom half of her worksuit is damp with sweat. “Sybil, how long was I asleep?”
You slept eighteen hours, Konstance.
Eighteen hours? She counts the sacks of Nourish powder: thirteen.
“Vital signs?”
Your temperature is ideal. Pulse and respiration rates perfect.
Konstance walks a lap of the vault, searching for the door.
“Sybil, please let me out.”
I cannot.
“What do you mean you cannot?”
I cannot open the vault.
“Of course you can.”
My primary directive is to tend to the well-being of the crew, and I have confidence that it is safer for you in here.
“Ask Father to come get me.”
Yes, Konstance.
“Tell him I’d like to see him right now.” The cot, the oxygen hood, the food sacks. Dread ticks through her. “Sybil, how many meals can a person print with thirteen sacks of Nourish powder?”
Assuming average caloric output, a Reconstituter could produce 6,526 fully nutritional meals. Are you hungry after your long rest? Would you like me to help you prepare a nutritious meal?
Father poring over technical drawings in the Library. The sewing stool screaming against the pressure of the outer door. One of us is not feeling well. Jessi Ko said the only way to get out of your compartment was to tell Sybil that you weren’t feeling well. If Sybil detected something wrong with you, she’d send Dr. Cha and Engineer Goldberg to escort you to the Infirmary.
Father was not well. When he announced it, Sybil opened the door to Compartment 17 so he could be brought to wherever they were isolating sick crew members, but first he brought Konstance to Sybil’s vault. With enough supplies to last her six and a half thousand meals.
Hands shaking, she touches the Vizer on the back of her head and the Perambulator on the floor whirs to life.
Off to the Library? asks Sybil. Of course, Konstance. You can eat afterw—
No one at the tables, no one on the ladders. No books fly through the air. Not a single person in sight. Above the aperture in the barrel vault, the sky radiates a pleasant blue. Konstance calls, “Hello?” and from beneath a desk trots Mrs. Flowers’s dog, eyes shining, tail high.
No teachers leading classes. No teenagers sliding up and down the ladders to the Games Section.
“Sybil, where is everybody?”
Everyone is elsewhere, Konstance.
The numberless books wait in their places. The spotless rectangles of paper and pencils sit in their boxes. Days ago, at one of these tables, Mother read aloud: The hardiest viruses can persist for months on surfaces: tabletops, door handles, lavatory fixtures.
A cold weight drops through her. She takes a slip of paper, writes, How many years would it take a person to eat 6,526 meals?
The answer floats down: 5.9598
Six years?
“Sybil, please ask Father to meet me in the Library.”
Yes, Konstance.
She sits on the marble floor and the little dog climbs into her lap. His fur feels real. The little pink pads on the bottom of his feet feel warm. High above her, a solitary silver cloud, like a child’s drawing, crosses the sky.
“What did he say?”
He has not yet replied.
“What time is it?”
Six minutes past DayLight thirteen, Konstance.
“Is everyone at Third Meal?”
They are not at Third Meal, no. Would you like to play a game, Konstance? Do a puzzle? There’s always the Atlas, I know you enjoy going in there.
The digital dog blinks its digital eyes. The digital cloud grinds silently through the digital dusk.
By the time she steps off her Perambulator, the walls of Vault One have dimmed. NoLight coming. She presses her forehead to the wall and shouts, “Hello?”
Louder: “Hello?”
Difficult to hear through walls on the Argos but not impossible: from her berth in Compartment 17 she has heard water trickling through pipes, the occasional argument between Mr. and Mrs. Marri in Compartment 16.
She smacks the walls with the heels of her hands, then picks up the inflatable cot, still wrapped and bound, and throws it. It makes a terrible clamor. Waits. Throws it again. Each heartbeat sends a new stroke of terror through her. Again she sees Father poring over schematics in the Library. Hears what Mrs. Chen said, years ago: This vault has autonomous thermal, mechanical, and filtration processes, independent of the rest of… Father must have been making sure of that. He put her in here on purpose to protect her. But why didn’t he join her? Why not put others inside with her?
Because he was sick. Because they may have been carrying an infectious and lethal disease.
The room darkens to black.
“Sybil, how is my body temperature?”
Ideal.
“Not too hot?”
All signs are excellent.
“Will you open the door now, please?”
The vault will remain sealed, Konstance. This is the safest place for you to be. Best to make a healthy meal. Then you can assemble your cot. Would you like a bit of light?
“Ask my father if he’ll change his mind. I’ll put together the bed, I’ll do whatever you say.” She unstraps the cot, locks the aluminum legs into place, opens the valve. The room is very quiet. Sybil shimmers deep within her folds.
Maybe others are safe in the provision vaults, where the flour and new worksuits and spare parts are kept. Maybe those rooms also have their own thermal systems, their own water filtration. But then why aren’t they in the Library? Maybe they don’t have Perambulators? Maybe they’re asleep? She climbs onto the cot and tears the blanket out of its wrapper and pulls it over her eyes. Counts to thirty.
“Did you ask him yet? Did he change his mind?”
Your father has not changed his mind.
In the hours to come she checks her forehead for a fever twenty times. Is that the oncoming blur of a headache? The lilt of nausea? Temperature good, says Sybil. Respiration and heart rate excellent.
She paces the Library, shouts Jessi Ko’s name down the galleries, plays Swords of Silverman, curls in a ball beneath a table and sobs while the little white dog licks her face. She sees no one.
Inside the vault the glimmering threads of Sybil tower above the cot. Are you ready to resume your studies, Konstance? Our voyage continues, and it is paramount to maintain a daily—
Are people dying thirty feet away in their compartments? Are the corpses of everyone she has ever known waiting to be jettisoned through the airlock?
“Let me out, Sybil.”
I’m afraid the door remains sealed.
“But you can open it. You’re the one controlling it.”
Because I cannot say whether it is safe for you outside the vault, I am not capable of unsealing the door. My primary directive is to tend to the well-being—
“But you didn’t. You didn’t tend to the well-being of the crew, Sybil.”
With every passing hour, I become more confident that you are safe where you are.
“What if,” Konstance whispers, “I don’t want to be safe anymore?”
Rage next. She unscrews one of the cot’s aluminum legs and swings it at the walls, scratching and dimpling the metal. When that proves unsatisfying, she turns to the translucent tube that surrounds Sybil, beating it until the aluminum shears and her hands feel shattered.
Where has everyone gone and who is she to be the one who is still alive and for what reasons in the universe would Father ever leave his home and doom her to this wretched fate? The diodes in the ceiling are very bright. A drop of blood runs off a fingertip onto the floor. The tube protecting Sybil remains unscratched.
Do you feel better? asks Sybil. It is natural to express anger from time to time.
Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you’re never the same: not quite.
Eight days alone, ten eleven thirteen: she loses track. The door doesn’t open. No one bangs on the other side of the walls. No one enters the Library. The only incoming water line into Vault One is a single, slow-dripping tube that she alternately plugs into the food printer or the recycling toilet. It takes several minutes to fill her drinking cup; she is perpetually thirsty. Some hours she presses her hands against the walls and feels trapped like an embryo inside a seed coat, dormant, waiting to wake up. Other hours she dreams of the Argos settling onto a river delta on Beta Oph2, the walls opening, everyone walking out into clear, clean rain, falling in sheets from the alien sky, rain that tastes faintly of flowers. A breeze strikes their faces; flocks of strange birds rise and wheel; Father smears mud on his cheeks and looks at her with glee, while Mother stares up, mouth wide, drinking from the sky—to wake from a dream like that is the worst kind of loneliness.
DayLight NoLight DayLight NoLight: inside the Atlas she walks deserts, expressways, farm roads, Prague, Cairo, Muscat, Tokyo, searching for something she cannot name. A man in Kenya with a gun slung over his back stands holding a razor as the cameras pass. In Bangkok she finds an open shopfront where a girl hunches behind a desk; on the wall behind her hang at least one thousand clocks, clocks with cat faces, clocks with panda bears for numbers, wooden clocks with brass hands, all their pendulums stilled. Always the trees draw her, a rubber fig in India, mossy yews in England, an oak in Alberta, yet not one image in the Atlas—not even the ancient Bosnian pine in the mountains of Thessaly—possesses the meticulous, staggering complexity of a single lettuce leaf in Father’s farm, or of her pine sapling in its little planter, its textures and surprises; the rich, living green of its long needles, tipped with yellow; the purple-blue of its cones; xylem trundling minerals and water up from the roots, phloem carrying sugars away from the needles to be stored, but just slowly enough that the eye cannot see it happen.
Finally she sits exhausted on the cot and shivers and the diodes in the ceiling dim. Mrs. Chen said Sybil was a book that contained the entire world: a thousand variations of recipes for macaroni and cheese, the record of four thousand years of temperatures of the Arctic Sea, Confucian literature and Beethoven’s symphonies and the genomes of the trilobites—the heritage of all humanity, the citadel, the ark, the womb, everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need. Mrs. Flowers said it would be enough.
Every few hours the questions rise to her lips: Sybil, am I the only one left? Do you pilot a flying graveyard with one soul left on board? But she cannot bring herself to ask.
Her father is only waiting. He is waiting for everything to be safe. Then he will open the door.