Cloud Cuckoo Land (32 page)

IT WAS ALL SO MAGNIFICENT, YET…

MISSION YEAR 65

DAY 325 INSIDE VAULT ONE

W
eeks have passed since Konstance discovered the little ramshackle library hidden inside the Atlas. She has painstakingly copied three-quarters of Zeno Ninis's translations—Folios Alpha through Sigma—from the golden book on the pedestal in the Children's Section onto scraps of sackcloth in the vault. More than one hundred and twenty scraps, covered with her handwriting, now blanket the floor around Sybil's tower, each alive with connections to the nights she spent in Farm 4, listening to the voice of her father.

… I rubbed myself head to toe with the ointment Palaestra chose, took three pinches of frankincense…

… Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real…

… he that knows all that Learning ever writ, knows only this—that he knows nothing yet.

Tonight she sits on the edge of the cot, ink-stained and weary, as the light turns leaden. These are the hardest hours, as DayLight bleeds into NoLight. Each time she's struck anew by the silence beyond the vault, where she fears no living person has stirred for more than ten months, and the silence beyond that, beyond the walls of the
Argos
, that stretches for distances beyond human ability to comprehend them. She curls onto her side and pulls her blanket to her chin.

Going to sleep already, Konstance? But you have not eaten since this morning.

“I'll eat if you open the door.”

As you know, I have not yet been able to determine if the contagion persists outside this vault. Since we have established that you are safe in here, I must keep the door closed.

“It seems dangerous enough in here. I'll eat if you open the door. If you don't, I'll starve myself.”

It hurts me to hear you talk like this.

“You can't be hurt, Sybil. You're just a bunch of fibers inside a tube.”

Your body requires nourishment, Konstance. Picture one of your favorite—

Konstance plugs her ears. Everything we have on board, the grown-ups said, is everything we will ever need. Anything we cannot solve for ourselves, Sybil will solve for us. But this was just a story they told to comfort themselves. Sybil knows everything, and yet she knows nothing. Konstance picks up the drawing she made of the city on the clouds and runs a fingertip over the dried ink. Why did she think re-creating this old book would unlock anything for her? For what reader is she making it? After she dies, won't it sit unread in this vault for eons?

I'm falling apart, she thinks, I'm ungluing. I'm a fool on a treadmill, stumbling through the specter of a planet ten trillion kilometers behind me, searching for answers that don't exist.

From beneath the millstone of her mind, Father stands, plucks a dried leaf out of his beard, and smiles.
But what's so beautiful about a fool
, he says,
is that a fool never knows when to give up
.
It was Grandmom who used to say that.

She scrambles back onto her Perambulator, touches her Vizer, hurries to a Library table.
On February 20, 2020
, she writes on a slip,
who were the five children in the Lakeport Public Library saved by Zeno Ninis?

AUGUST 2019

I
n late August, twin forest fires in Oregon burn a million acres each, and smoke gushes into Lakeport. The sky turns the color of putty, and anyone who steps outdoors returns smelling like a campfire. Restaurant patios close; weddings move inside; youth sports are canceled; the air is deemed too dangerous for children to play outside.

As soon as school lets out for the day, the library floods with kids with nowhere else to be. Zeno sits at his table behind his haystack of legal pads and sticky notes struggling through his translation. On the floor beside him, a redheaded girl in shorts and Wellington boots pops her chewing gum as she pages through gardening books. A few feet beyond that, a thick-chested kid with a lion's mane of blond hair is pressing the bar of the water fountain with his knee and using both hands to scoop water over his head.

Zeno shuts his eyes: a headache simmering. When he opens them, Marian is there.

“One,” she says, “these fires have turned my workplace into a juvenile jamboree. Two, the window air conditioner upstairs sounds like someone force-fed it a metal sandwich. Three, Sharif went to Bergesen Hardware to buy a new one, so I've got to deal with about twenty sugar-frenzied fiends upstairs.” As though on cue, a little boy rides a tattered bean bag down the stairs behind her and lands on his knees and looks up at her and grins.

“Four, as far as I can tell, you've spent the whole week trying to decide whether to call your drunken shepherd ‘illiterate,' ‘humble,' or ‘clueless.' Some fifth graders are here for the next couple of hours, Zeno. Five of them. Would you help me?”

“ ‘Humble' and ‘clueless' are actually quite different—”

“Show them what you're up to. Or do a magic trick, something. Please.”

Before he can concoct an excuse, Marian drags the sopping child from the drinking fountain to his table.

“Alex Hess, meet Mr. Zeno Ninis. Mr. Ninis is going to show you something cool.”

The boy lifts one of the big facsimile printouts from the table and a dozen of Zeno's legal pages tumble to the carpet like injured birds.

“What is this? Alien writing?”

“Looks Russian,” says the redhead in the boots, standing at the table now too.

“It's Greek,” says Marian, as she nudges another boy and two more girls toward Zeno's table. “A very old story. It has wizards inside whales and guard-owls that ask riddles and a city in the clouds where every wish comes true and even”—Marian lowers her voice and glances dramatically over one shoulder—“fishermen who have tree-penises.”

Two of the girls giggle. Alex Hess smirks. Drops of water fall from his hair and strike the page.

Twenty minutes later five kids sit in a ring around Zeno's table, each studying a facsimile of a different folio. A girl with a bob that looks as if it was cut by a weed-whacker raises her hand, then immediately starts talking. “So okay from what you're saying, this Ethan guy has all these insane adventures—”

“Aethon.”

“Should be Ethan,” says Alex Hess. “Easier.”

“—and his story gets written down a zillion years ago on twenty-four wooden tablet-thingys, which are buried with his body when he's dead? Which are then discovered, centuries later, in a graveyard by Dyed-Jeans? And he recopies the whole story onto like hundreds of pieces of paper—”

“Papyrus.”

“—and mails it to his niece who's like dying?”

“Right,” says Zeno, bewildered and excited and enervated all at once. “Though you should remember there wasn't really mail, not as we understand it. If there was a niece at all, Diogenes probably gave his scrolls to a trusted friend, who—”

“Then that copy somehow got copied in Constant-a-wherever, and
that
copy got lost for like another zillion years, only it just got re-found in Italy, but it's still a big mess because a ton of words are missing?”

“You've got it exactly.”

A slight boy named Christopher squirms in his chair. “So switching all this old writing into English is really hard, and you only have pieces of the story, and you don't even know what order they go in?”

Rachel the redhead turns her facsimile this way and that. “And the pieces you do have look like somebody smeared Nutella all over them.”

“Right.”

“So like,” asks Christopher, “why?”

All the children look at him: Alex; Rachel; little Christopher; Olivia, the girl with the weed-whacker bob; and a quiet girl with brown eyes, brown skin, brown clothes, and jet-black hair named Natalie.

Zeno says, “You ever see a superhero movie? Where the hero keeps getting beat up and it always seems like he—”

“Or she,” says Olivia.

“—or she will never make it? That's what these fragments are: superheroes. Try to imagine the epic battles they survived over the last two thousand years: floods, fires, earthquakes, failed governments, thieves, barbarians, zealots, who knows what else? We know that somehow a copy of this text made it to a scribe in Constantinople nine or ten centuries after it was first written, and all we know about him—”

“Or her,” says Olivia.

“—is this tidy handwriting, leaning slightly to the left. But now the few people who can make sense of that old writing have a chance to breathe life back into these superheroes so that maybe they can do battle for a few more decades. Erasure is always stalking us, you know? So to hold in your hands something that has evaded it for so long—”

He wipes his eyes, embarrassed.

Rachel runs her fingers over the faint lines of text in front of her. “It's like Ethan.”

“Aethon,” says Olivia.

“The fool you were telling us about. In the story? Even though he keeps going the wrong way, keeps getting turned into the wrong thing, he never gives up. He survives.”

Zeno looks at her, some new understanding seeping into his consciousness.

“Tell us some more,” says Alex, “about the fishermen with the tree-penises.”

That night, at his dining table, with Nestor the king of Pylos curled at his feet, Zeno lays out his legal pads. Everywhere he looks he sees the inadequacies of his early attempts. He was too concerned about recognizing clever allusions, steering clear of syntactical reefs, getting every word right. But whatever this strange old comedy was, it wasn't proper or elevated or concerned with getting things right. It was a story intended to bring comfort to a dying girl. All those academic commentaries he forced himself to read—
was Diogenes writing lowbrow comedy or elaborate metafiction?
—in the face of five fifth graders, smelling of chewing gum, sweaty socks, and wildfire smoke, those debates flew out the window. Diogenes, whoever he was, was primarily trying to make a machine that captured attention, something to slip the trap.

A great weight slides away. He brews coffee, unwraps a new legal pad, sets Folio β in front of him.
Word gap wordwordword gap
gap word
—they're just marks on the skin of a long-dead goat. But beneath them, something crystallizes.

I am Aethon, a simple shepherd from Arkadia, and the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you'll never believe a word of it—and yet, it's true. For I, the one they called birdbrain and nincompoop—yes, I, dull-witted muttonheaded lamebrained Aethon—once traveled all the way to the edge of the earth and beyond…

MISSION YEAR 65

DAY 325–DAY 340 INSIDE VAULT ONE

T
he 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 10
¹³
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?