Cloud Cuckoo Land (39 page)

MISSION YEAR 65

O
xygen at seven percent
, says the voice inside the hood.

Turn left out of the vestibule. Past Compartments 8, 9, 10, all the doors sealed. Does the contagion swirl even now through the air in the corridor, waking from its long sleep? Do bodies almost four-hundred-days-dead molder in the shadows? Or are crew members stirring all around her beneath the hiss of the extinguishers: friends, children, teachers, Mrs. Chen, Mrs. Flowers, Mother, Father?

Little nozzles in the corridor ceiling rain their mist down on her. Homemade book stuffed inside her worksuit, homemade axe in her left hand, she spirals outward from the center of the
Argos
, the booties over her feet sliding through the chemicals on the floor.

Scattered along the corridor are rumpled blankets, discarded masks, a pillow, the pieces of a shattered meal tray.

A sock.

A humped shape furred with gray mold.

Eyes up. Keep moving. Here the dark entrance to the classroom, then more closed compartment doors, past what looks like a glove from one of the biohazard suits that Dr. Cha and Engineer Goldberg wore. Ahead someone's Perambulator rests upside down in the center of the hall.

Oxygen at six percent
, says the hood.

On her right is the entrance to Farm 4. Konstance pauses on the threshold and paws chemicals off her face shield: on every level of the haphazard racks, the plants are dead. Her little Bosnian pine still stands, four feet tall: around its base lies a halo of desiccated needles.

Alarms sound. Her headlamp flickers as she hurries to the far
wall: no time to think. She chooses the handle four from the left and pulls open a seed drawer. Cold vapor spills over her feet: inside wait hundreds of ice-cold foil envelopes in rows. She scoops up as many as she can with her mitts, spilling a number, and clasps them and the axe to her chest.

Somewhere nearby is the ghost of Father or the corpse of him or both. Keep going. You have no time.

Not much farther down the corridor, between Lavatories 2 and 3, is the titanium patch where Mother said Elliot Fischenbacher spent multiple nights attacking the wall. The patch has been secured with perhaps three hundred rivets, far more than she remembered. Her heart sinks.

Oxygen at five percent
.

She drops her haul of seed packets and raises the hatchet with both hands. From her memory whisper the warnings she has been hearing since before she can remember. Cosmic radiation, zero gravity, 2.73 Kelvin.

She swings and the blade dents the patch but bounces off. She swings harder. This time the blade sticks through and she has to put all her weight into it to pry it free.

A third. A fourth. She'll never get through in time. Sweat builds up inside the suit and fogs her hood. The alarms increase in volume; the extinguishers rain down around her. Twenty paces to her right is the entrance to the Commissary, full of tents.

All hands
, says Sybil.
The integrity of the ship is in jeopardy
.

Oxygen at four percent
, says the hood.

With each strike, the gash in the patch grows.

In three seconds outside the walls, your hands and feet will double in size. You'll suffocate. You'll freeze solid.

The gap widens, and through the vapor on her face shield Konstance can see into the interior, where Elliot has pushed aside conduits of wires wrapped in aluminum tape and cut through several layers of insulation. On the far side is another layer of metal: what she hopes is the exterior wall.

She pries the axe free, inhales, rears back, swings again.

Child
, Sybil booms, and her voice is terrible.
Stop what you are doing at once.

An atavistic fear flows through Konstance. She reaches back and with all the strength of months of anger, isolation, and grief, she swings and the blade severs wires and bites through the outer sheet. She wiggles the handle back and forth.

When she pulls it free, there is a puncture in the outer wall, a slice of darkness.

Konstance
, Sybil booms.
You are making a grave mistake.

She was wrong. It's the nothingness, the vacuum of deep space—she is a hundred trillion kilometers from Earth; she will asphyxiate and that will be it. The hatchet falls from her grasp; space wrinkles around her; time folds up. Her father tears open an envelope and onto his palm slides a little seed clasped by a pale brown wing.

Hold your breath.

“Not yet.”

The seed trembles.

“Now.”

Beyond the breach in the outermost layer, the darkness stays put. She is not sucked out, her eyes don't freeze solid: it is only night.

Oxygen at three percent
.

Night! She picks up the axe, swings again and again; fragments of metal tumble into the dark. Out beyond the steadily enlarging hole, thousands upon thousands of tiny silver flecks, illuminated in the dying beam of the headlamp, are falling through the black. She pushes one arm through and her sleeve comes back wet.

Rain. It is raining out there.

Oxygen at two percent
.

Konstance keeps swinging until her shoulders burn and the bones in her hands feel as if they have broken. The puncture gets more jagged as it grows; she can fit her head through, a shoulder. Her face shield is hopelessly fogged, and she's tearing the bioplastic of her suit, but it's worth the risk, and with another blow the hole is almost large enough to wriggle her torso through.

The smell of wild onions.

The dew, the lines of the hills.

Sweetness of light, moon overhead.

Oxygen at one percent
.

The raindrops are falling much farther below the gap than she expected, but there is no time. She pitches armfuls of seed envelopes out into the dark, then the axe, and drives her body through the rift after them.

Miss Konstan—
roars Sybil but Konstance's head and shoulders are outside the
Argos
now. She wriggles, catches one thigh on a dagger of metal.

Oxygen depleted
, says the hood.

Her legs still inside the structure of the wall, her waist stuck, Konstance takes one last breath, then rips off the hood, tearing away the sealing tape, and lets it go. It bounces, rolls, and comes to rest maybe fifteen feet below, among what look like wet stones and long blades of tundra grass, its headlamp shining straight up, into the rain.

The only way out is to drop. Still holding her breath, she braces her arms against the outside of the ship, pushes, and falls.

An ankle twists, her elbow strikes a rock, but she is able to sit up and breathe—she is not dead, not suffocated, not frozen solid.

The air! Rich wet salty alive: if viruses lurk inside this air, if they spill from the perforation she has made in the side of the
Argos
above her, if they are replicating inside her nostrils right now, if all the atmosphere of the Earth is poison, so be it. May she live five more minutes, breathing it, smelling it.

Rain pelts her sweat-soaked hair, her cheeks, her forehead. She kneels in the grasses and listens to it strike her suit, feels it land on her eyelids. It seems so incredibly, dangerously, promiscuously wasteful: water, given from the sky, in such quantities.

The headlamp dies, and only a glimmer emits from the gash she
has chopped in the side of the
Argos
. But the darkness of this place is nothing like NoLight. The sky, webbed with cloud, appears to glow, and the wet grass blades catch the light and send it back, tens of thousands of droplets gleaming, and she peels Father's suit down to her waist, and kneels in the tundra grass, and remembers what Aethon said:
A bath, that's as much magic as any foolish shepherd needs
.

She finds her axe, strips off the rest of the bioplastic, gathers as many seed envelopes as she can find, and zips them into her worksuit alongside her homemade book. Then she limps her way through the grass and rocks to the perimeter fence. The
Argos
looms huge and pale behind her.

The fence is topped with razor wire and too high to climb but with the blade of her hatchet, working against one of the posts, she manages to chop through a dozen links, bend them back, and squirm through.

On the other side lie thousands more shining wet stones. On each grows lichen in crusts, lichen in scales—she could spend a year studying any one of them. Beyond the stones a roar rises, the roar of something perpetually in motion, seething, changing, moving—the sea.

Dawn takes an hour and she tries not to blink for any of it. First comes a slow spread of purples, then blues, a diversity of hues infinitely more complex and rich than any simulation inside the Library. She stands barefoot in the water, up to her ankles, the low, flat surf moving ceaselessly in a thousand different vectors, and for the first time in her life, the thrum of the
Argos
, of trickling pipes, of humming conduits, of the creeping tendrils of Sybil—the machine that has whirred all around her, all her life, since before she was conceived—is gone.

“Sybil?”

Nothing.

Far to her right she can just make out the gray outbuilding she uncovered on the Atlas, the boat shelter, a rocky pier. Over her shoulder, the
Argos
looks smaller: a white bolus beneath the sky.

In front of her, out on the horizon, the blue rim of dawn is turning pink, raising its fingers to push back the night.

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

7:02 P.M.

T
he boy lowers his gun. The phone inside the backpack rings a second time. There, past the welcome desk blocking the door, beyond the porch, waits the next world. Does he have the strength?

He crosses the space to the entry and leans into the desk; power flows into his legs as though sent by Athena herself. The desk slides away; he clutches the backpack, pulls open the door, and charges into the glare of the police lights.

The phone rings a third time.

Down the five granite steps, down the walk, into the untracked snow, into a web of sirens, into the sights of a dozen rifles, one voice calling, “Hold fire, hold fire!” another—perhaps his own—yelling something beyond language.

So much snow pours from the sky that the air seems more snow than air. Down through the tunnel of junipers Zeno runs, moving as well as an eighty-six-year-old man with a bad hip can run in Velcro boots and two pairs of wool socks, the backpack pressed against his penguin necktie. He runs the bombs past the yellow owl eyes on the book drop box, past a van that reads
Explosives Ordnance Disposal
, past men in body armor; he is Aethon turning his back on immortality, happy to be a fool once more, the shepherds are dancing in the rain, playing their pipes and plucking their lyres, the lambs are bleating, the world is wet and muddy and green.

From the backpack comes the fourth ring. One ring left to live. For a quarter second, he glimpses Marian crouched behind a police car, sweet Marian in her cherry-red coat with her almond eyes and
paint-flecked jeans; she watches him with a hand over her mouth, Marian the Librarian, whose face, every summer, becomes a sandstorm of freckles.

Down Park Street, away from the police vehicles, library at his back.
Imagine
, says Rex,
how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home
. A quarter mile away is Mrs. Boydstun's old house, no curtains on the windows, translations all over the dining table, five Playwood Plastic soldiers in a tin box upstairs beside the little brass bed, and Nestor the king of Pylos drowsing on the kitchen mat. Someone will need to let him out.

Ahead is the lake, frozen and white.

“Why,” says one librarian, “you don't look warm at all.”

“Where,” says the other, “is your mother?”

He runs through the snow, and for the fifth time the phone rin

2146

T
here are forty-nine of them in the village. She lives in a little one-story pastel-blue house built from wood and scrap metal with a greenhouse attached. She has a son: three years old, busy, hot, eager to test everything, learn everything, put everything in his mouth. Inside her grows a second child, not much more than a flicker, a little intelligence unfurling.

It's August, the sun has not set since mid-April, and tonight most everyone else is out gathering bunchberries. In the distance, at the bottom of the town, past the docks, the ocean glimmers. On the very clearest days, at the farthest edge of the horizon, she can see a low lump that is the rocky island eight miles away where the
Argos
rusts beneath the weather.

She works in her container garden behind the house while the boy sits among the stones. In his lap is a misshapen book made from the scraps of empty Nourish powder sacks. He pages through it back to front, past
Aethon Means Blazing
, past
The Wizard Inside the Whale,
his mouth moving silently as he goes.

The summer twilight is warm and the leaves of the lettuces in her containers flutter and the sky turns lavender—as close to dark as it will get—as she moves back and forth with a watering can. Broccoli. Kale. Zucchini. A Bosnian pine as tall as her thigh.

Παράδεισο, parádeisos,
paradise: it means garden.

When she is done she sits in a weather-faded nylon chair and the boy brings the book over and pulls her pant leg. His eyelids grow heavy and he fights to hold them up. He says, “You tell the story?”

She looks at him, his round cheeks, his eyelashes, his damp hair. Does the boy sense, already, the precarity of all this?

She hauls him into her lap. “Go to the first page and do it properly.” She waits for him to turn the book right side up. He sucks his lower lip, then pulls back the cover. She runs her finger under the lines.

“I,” she says, “am Aethon, a simple shepherd from Arkadia, and—”

“No, no,” says the boy. He bats the page with his hand. “The voice, with the voice.”

She blinks; the planet rotates another degree; beyond her little garden, below the town, a wind hazes the tops of the swells. The boy raises an index finger and pokes the page. Konstance clears her throat.

“And the tale I have to tell is so ludicrous, so incredible, that you'll never believe a word of it, and yet”—she taps the end of his nose—“it's true.”