The slip of paper settles onto the table.
Christopher Dee
Olivia Ott
Alex Hess
Natalie Hernandez
Rachel Wilson
One of the children held hostage in the Lakeport Public Library on February 20, 2020, was Rachel Wilson. Her great-grandmother. That’s why the book of Zeno’s translations was on Father’s night table. His grandmother was in the play.
If Zeno Ninis doesn’t save Rachel Wilson’s life on February 20, 2020, then her father is never born. He never signs up for the Argos. Konstance doesn’t exist.
I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet…
Who was Rachel Wilson and how many years did she live and how did she feel every time she looked at that book, translated by Zeno Ninis? Did she ever sit in the windswept evenings in Nannup with Konstance’s father and read to him from Aethon’s story? Konstance stands, walks laps around the table in the atrium, certain now that she is missing something else. Something hidden right in front of her eyes. Some other thing that Sybil does not know. She summons the Atlas off its shelf. First to Lagos, to the downtown plaza near the gulf, where brilliant white hotels soar above her on three sides, and forty coconut palms grow from black-and-white checkered planters. Welcome, says the sign, to the New Intercontinental.
Around and around Konstance paces through the unchanging Nigerian sunlight. Again the sensation descends on her, gnawing the edges of her consciousness: something is not right. The scars on the trunks of the palms, the old dry leaf sheaths still stuck to the bases of the fronds, the coconuts high above her and the ones tumbled down in the planters: none of the coconuts, she realizes, have the three germination pores Father showed her. Two eyes and a mouth, the face of a little sailor whistling its way around the world—it’s not there.
The trees are computer-generated. They weren’t originally there.
She remembers Mrs. Flowers standing at the base of the Theodosian Walls in Constantinople. Wander around in here long enough, dear, she said, and you’ll discover a secret or two.
Twenty paces away, a vendor’s bicycle with a white barrow mounted in front of the handlebars leans against one of the planters. On the barrow cartoon owls hold ice cream cones. Inside its open receptacle, a dozen canned drinks shine in a bed of ice. The ice glimmers; the cartoon owls seem to almost blink. Like the book drop box in Lakeport, it’s more vibrant than everything else around it.
She reaches for one of the drinks and, rather than pass through it, her fingertips strike something solid, cold, and wet. When she lifts the drink out of the ice, a thousand windows shatter silently in the hotels around her. The tiles of the plaza strip away; the false palm trees evaporate.
All around her figures appear, people sitting or standing or lying not in a shady city plaza but on broken and begrimed concrete: some without shirts, more without shoes, living skeletons, some tucked so deeply within homemade tents of blue tarpaulins that she can see only their calves and mud-caked feet.
Old tires. Trash. Sludge. Several men sit on plastic jugs that once contained a drink called SunShineSix; a woman waves an empty rice sack; a dozen emaciated children crouch over a patch of dust. Nothing moves the way things moved after she touched the book drop box outside the old library in Lakeport; the people are only static images and her hands pass through them as if through shadows.
She bends, tries to see into the blurry patches of the children’s faces. What is happening to them? Why were they hidden?
Next she returns to the jogging trail on the outskirts of Mumbai she found a year ago, the heavy green of the mangroves running alongside her like an ominous wall. Up and down the railing she trots, a half mile up, a half mile down, until she finds it: a little owl painted on the sidewalk. She touches the owl and the mangroves tear away and a wall of red-brown water, full of debris and garbage, gushes into place. It obliterates the people, submerges the path, rides up the sides of the apartment towers. Boats are tethered to second-floor balconies; someone is frozen atop the roof of a submerged car, her arms raised for help, her scream blurred off her face.
Queasy, quaking, Konstance whispers, “Nannup.” She rises; the Earth pivots, inverts, and she drops. A once-quaint little Australian cattle town. The faded banners strung across the roadway read,
DO YOUR PART
DEFEAT DAY ZERO
YOU CAN DO WITH 10 LITRES A DAY
In front of the public hall, shaded by cabbage trees, the begonias stand sprightly in their boxes. The grass looks as green as ever: five shades greener than anything for thirty miles. The fountain sparkles; the bright-blooming trees stand proud. But as with the plaza in Lagos, as with the jogging trail outside Mumbai, something feels altered.
Three times Konstance laps the block, and eventually, on a side door of the public hall, she finds it: a graffiti owl with a gold chain around its neck and a crown cocked on its head.
She touches it. The grass bakes brown, the trees fly apart, the paint on the public hall flakes off, and the water in the fountain evaporates. A tractor trailer with a six-thousand-gallon water tank shimmers into place, a ring of armed men around it, and beyond that a line of dusty vehicles stretches into the distance.
Hundreds of people holding empty jugs and cans press against a chainlink barricade. The Atlas cameras have caught a man with a machete leaping from the top of the barrier, his mouth open; a soldier is in the process of firing his weapon; several people sprawl on the ground.
At the spigot on the water truck, two men tug at the same plastic jug, every tendon in their arms standing out. She sees, among the bodies against the chainlink, mothers and grandmothers carrying babies.
This. This is why Father left.
By the time she climbs off the Perambulator, it’s DayLight in the vault. She limps through her scraps of sackcloth and disconnects the water line from the food printer and puts it in her mouth. Her hands shake. Her socks have finally disintegrated, all holes becoming one, and two of her toes are bleeding.
You just walked seven miles, Konstance, says Sybil. If you don’t sleep and eat a proper meal, I will restrict your Library access.
“I will, I’ll eat, I’ll rest. I promise.” She remembers Father working among his plants one day, adjusting a mister, then letting the water spray the back of his hand. “Hunger,” he said, and she had the sense that he was speaking not to her but to the plants, “after a little while you can forget about hunger. But thirst? The worse it gets, the more you think about it.”
She sits on the floor and examines a bleeding toe and remembers Mother’s stories about Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, the boy who wandered the Atlas until his feet cracked and then his sanity too. Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, who tried to hack through the skin of the Argos, imperiling everyone and everything. Who saved enough SleepDrops to take his own life.
She eats, cleans her face, brushes a mat out of her hair, does her grammar and physics, whatever Sybil asks. The Library atrium looks bright and serene. The marble floor gleams as though it has been polished overnight.
When she has finished her studies she sits at a table and Mrs. Flowers’s little dog curls at her feet. With trembling fingers Konstance writes: How was the Argos constructed?
From the flocks of books, registers, and charts that come wheeling around the table, she weeds out all the documents that were sponsored by the Ilium Corporation: glossy schematics on nuclear pulse propulsion technology; materials analyses; artificial gravity; compartment designs; spreadsheets exploring carrying capacity; plans for water treatment systems; diagrams of food printers; images of the ship’s modules being prepared for assembly in low Earth orbit; hundreds of booklets detailing how the crew would be handpicked, transported, quarantined, trained for six months, and sedated for launch.
Hour by hour, the multitude of documents dwindles. Konstance can find no independent reports evaluating the feasibility of constructing an interstellar ark in space and propelling it at sufficient speed to reach Beta Oph2 in 592 years. Each time a writer begins to question whether the technologies are ready, if the thermal systems will be adequate, how a human crew might be shielded from prolonged deep-space radiation, how gravity would be simulated, whether the costs can be managed or the laws of physics can support a mission like this, the documents go blank. Academic papers cut off mid-sentence. Chapter numbers jump from two to six or four to nine, nothing in between.
For the first time since her Library Day, Konstance summons the catalogue of known exoplanets off its shelf. Page after page, row after row of the known worlds beyond Earth, their little images rotating on the pages: pink, maroon, brown, blue. She runs her finger down the line to Beta Oph2 where it slowly rotates in place. Green. Black. Green. Black.
4.0113 x 1013 kilometers. 4.24 light-years.
Konstance gazes out into the echoing atrium, feeling as though millions of thread-thin cracks radiate invisibly through it. She takes a slip of paper. Writes: Where was the crew of the Argos gathered before launch?
A single slip of paper drops from the sky:
Qaanaaq
Inside the Atlas she descends slowly over the north coast of Greenland: three thousand meters, two thousand. Qaanaaq is a treeless harbor village trapped between the sea and hundreds of square miles of moraine sediment. Picturesque little houses—many slumped from being built on thawing permafrost—have been painted green, bright blue, mustard yellow, with white window frames. Along the coastline, among the rocks, lies a marina, some docks, a few boats, and a tumult of construction equipment.
It takes her days to solve it. She eats, sleeps, submits to Sybil’s lessons, searches, searches again, roaming outward in circles from Qaanaaq, skimming the sea. Finally, in a region of Baffin Bay eight miles from the town, on a bare island, all rock and lichen, a place that was probably covered by ice only a decade before, she finds it: a lone red house that looks like a child’s drawing of a barn with a white flagpole out front. At the base of the flagpole stands a little wooden owl no taller than her thigh, looking as if it were sleeping.
Konstance walks up, touches it, and its eyes flip open.
Long concrete piers reach into the sea. A fifteen-foot fence, topped with razor wire, grows out of the ground behind the little red house, and wraps itself around the entire circumference of the island.
No Trespassing, read signs in four languages. Property of Ilium Corporation. Keep Out.
Behind the fence stretches a vast industrial complex: cranes, trailers, trucks, mountains of construction materials piled among rocks. She walks as much of the fence line as the software will permit, then rises and hovers above it. She sees cement trucks, figures in hard hats, a boat shelter, a rock road: in the center of the complex is a huge white circular half-finished structure with no windows.
Handpicked, transported, quarantined, trained for six months, sedated for launch.
They are constructing the thing that will become the Argos. But there are no rockets; there is no launchpad. The ship wasn’t assembled in modules in space: it never went to space at all. It’s on Earth.
She is looking at the past, images taken seven decades before, then redacted from the Atlas by the Ilium Corporation. But she is also looking at herself. Her home. All these years. She touches her Vizer, steps off the Perambulator, a whirlwind turning inside her.
Sybil says, Did you have a nice walk, Konstance?