SUNG-SOO’S HOUSE IS complete by the end of the day. We finish just after sunset and an impromptu housewarming party takes place in his empty house. He must think that’s all we do here, but before he arrived, there weren’t many celebrations in the colony on this scale.
When it’s over, I help him clean up and then we end up sitting beneath the central dome’s ceiling, looking up at the stars. The design works well.
“Come on,” he says, jumping to his feet.
“Where are you going?” I ask, unwilling to get back up. I’m tired.
“I want to find something that’s outside the colony. Now is the perfect time.”
“It’ll be easier in daylight.”
“No, it won’t. Come on.”
I follow him out of his house and then out of the colony. He’s heading away from God’s city, back toward the mountains in the direction he came from. It’s after midnight and very few lights are on in the houses we pass.
I’m used to sneaking out after dark, but doing so with someone else lends it an edge of excitement. It feels strange to be heading in the opposite direction of God’s city.
Sung-Soo moves with grace and confidence through the tall grasses. He’s sure-footed in a way that I’m not; he’s naturally poised whereas I have to pay attention to where I’m going. I stumble a couple of times on rocks hidden among the tall stalks and it makes me irritable.
“Where are we going?”
“I saw one on the way here. I’m sure of it.”
I haven’t told anyone that I’m striking out into the wilderness with him. Then I wonder why that thought bothers me. He won’t hurt me or lead me to my death. I put it down to the unfamiliarity of being with someone else on an excursion and decide to go down to the Masher in the morning, no matter what time I get to bed. The decision calms me.
“Yes, over there—look!” I can barely make out his pointing finger in the pale starlight. “Come on.”
I do my best to look where he pointed but can see nothing except shades of black. I follow and he’s moving faster now. The stalks of the grasses snap on my shoes and I lose my footing. Thankfully he doesn’t notice. Just as I’m about to ask what the hell we’re doing again, I catch sight of something ahead, a shift in the gray and black fabric of the landscape. I speed up in my eagerness to see what it is.
As I get closer, the shimmer I detected farther back resolves into the shape of leaves clustered tight together. They’re reflecting the starlight, like the leaves are dusted with glitter. It’s too soft to see from a distance but up close it looks quite magical.
“This is it,” Sung-Soo says with delight. “They’re easier to see at night.”
I pluck one of the leaves and put it in a pocket to study at another time. Then I remember the botanists and pick leaves for them too. I turn back to the colony in an effort to get a bearing so that I might be able to lead them back to the bush later. It makes me wonder at his ability to have spotted this small plant, mostly obscured by the grasses, while dehydrated and exhausted, and remember it well enough to find it again.
He’s scrabbling about in the dirt below the bush and I wonder if he’s hidden something there.
“I want to carve again,” he says. “This is the best stuff for it.”
“The roots?”
“No.” He grunts with effort but I can’t see clearly enough to know why. I can hear the dirt landing on the grasses nearby as he excavates. “This.”
He stands and holds out his prize: a large lump of . . . something. A natural deposit by the look of it, with the same iridescence of the pendant he wears around his neck. There isn’t enough light to make out the colors properly, but I can see they range from light to dark, swirling through the material.
“It’s hard, but still soft enough to work with the knife,” he says. “You can always find it underneath this kind of bush. I don’t know why. It doesn’t kill the plant. If we leave it alone for a few months, another one will grow.”
“Perhaps the root system attracts a mineral . . . or perhaps it’s a by-product of some kind of exchange between the roots and the soil,” I suggest. I know ten different people who will want to study it.
“We can go back now,” he says and I see his teeth glint as he smiles.
We return to the colony and say good-bye. Even though my body is so tired, I have no desire to sleep. Perhaps the thrill of discovery has made me too wired or perhaps the mysterious deposit has reminded me of my own mystery left to solve.
Seeing as it seems to be the evening to go excavating, I return to the space beneath the tendril buttress and dig out my coveralls and the hinged metal artifact. I resist a moment of temptation to go on another excursion into the city and instead return home. The clothes no longer smell of the gunk they were covered in, thankfully, and are dry to the touch. I can’t be bothered to tidy away the things in front of the Masher chute, so I stuff the coveralls away beneath the pile of stuff waiting to be thrown out when I’ve got a minute.
Once I’m as comfortable as I can get, I twist the object over and over, working the hinge and feeling the smoothness of the metal pieces. I know it’s not part of something printed here or on Atlas, nor a relic left from any of the equipment we took with us on that first expedition. But it was made for some purpose and used by someone who went into that place and left it behind. Was it discarded because it broke? Was it a piece of wreckage left behind after someone else succumbed to that hellish place unprotected?
I call up the virtual replica I created and play around with some additions, but it’s like pissing into the dark. Nothing feels right and I don’t even know what I’m heading toward with each variation of the design.
Then I decide to go hunting. I access the cloud and start searching in the archives taken from Earth, stashed away like a Noah’s ark of data before we left. I create a search algorithm, take a portion of Atlas’s processing capacity that’s barely used now, and work with the AI to refine the parameters. Then I leave it to scour photos and film for anything that might resemble the artifact. I instruct it to shortlist candidates and create a 3-D model of each one that I can manipulate in my visengineering software, sending me a daily digest of results, knowing that I’ll only get distracted if it pings me throughout the day.
That done, I tuck the metal artifact under my makeshift pillow (I’ve no idea where my usual one has got to) and invite sleep in.