* * *

“Where,” Mother asks Sybil, “does she get it? I thought we were selected for higher cognitive reasoning? I thought we were supposed to have suppressed imaginative faculties.”

Sybil says, Sometimes genetics surprise us.

Father says, “Thank goodness for that.”

Sybil says, She’ll outgrow it.

* * *

She’s seven and three-quarters. DayLight dims and Mother takes her SleepDrop and Konstance climbs into her berth. She holds her eyes open with her fingertips. Counts from zero to one hundred. Back to zero again.

“Mother?”

No response.

She slips down the ladder, past her sleeping mother, and out the door, blanket trailing behind. In the Commissary two grown-ups walk on Perambulators, Vizers over their eyes, tomorrow’s schedule flickering in the air behind them—DayLight 110 Tai Chi in Library Atrium, DayLight 130 Bioengineering Meeting. She whispers down the corridor in her socks, past Lavatories 2 and 3, past the closed doors of a half-dozen compartments, and stops outside the door with the glowing edges marked Farm 4.

Inside, the air smells of herbs and chlorophyll. Grow lights blaze at thirty different levels on a hundred different racks, and plants fill the room all the way to the ceiling: rice here, kale there, bok choi growing next to arugula, parsley above watercress above potatoes. She waits for her eyes to adjust to the glare, then spots her father on his stepladder fifteen feet away, entwined in drip tubes, his head in the lettuces.

Konstance is old enough to understand that Father’s farm is unlike the other three: those spaces are tidy and systematic, while Farm 4 is a tangle of wires and sensors, grow-racks skewed at every angle, individual trays crowded with different species, creeping thyme beside radishes beside carrots. Long white hairs sprout from Father’s ears; he’s at least two decades older than the other children’s fathers; he’s always growing inedible flowers just to see what they look like and muttering in his funny accent about compost tea. He claims he can taste whether a lettuce has lived a happy life; he says one sniff of a properly grown chickpea can whisk him three zillion kilometers back to the fields he grew up in Scheria.

She picks her way to him and pokes his foot. He raises his eyeshade and smiles. “Hi, kid.”

Bits of soil show against the silver of his beard; there are leaves in his hair. He descends his ladder and wraps her blanket around her shoulders and guides her to where the steel handles of thirty refrigerated drawers protrude from the far wall.

“Now,” he says, “what’s a seed?”

“A seed is a little sleeping plant, a container to protect the little sleeping plant, and a meal for the little sleeping plant when it wakes up.”

“Very good, Konstance. Who would you like to wake up tonight?”

She looks, thinks, takes her time. Eventually she chooses a handle four from the left and pulls. Vapor sighs out of the drawer; inside wait hundreds of ice-cold foil envelopes. She chooses one in the third row.

“Ah,” he says, reading the envelope. “Pinus heldreichii. Bosnian pine. Good choice. Now hold your breath.”

She takes a big inhalation and holds it and he tears open the envelope and onto his palm slides a little quarter-inch seed clasped by a pale brown wing. “A mature Bosnian pine,” he whispers, “can grow thirty meters high and produce tens of thousands of cones a year. They can withstand ice and snow, high winds, pollution. Folded inside that seed is a whole wilderness.”

He brings the seed close to her lips and grins.

“Not yet.”

The seed almost seems to tremble in anticipation.

“Now.”

She exhales; the seed takes flight. Father and daughter watch it sail above the crowded racks. She loses track as it flutters toward the front of the room, then spies it as it settles among the cucumbers.

Konstance pinches it between two fingers, and unclips the seed from its wing. He helps her poke a hole in the gel membrane of an empty tray; she presses the seed in.

“It’s like we’re putting it to sleep,” she says, “but really we’re waking it up.”

Beneath his big white eyebrows Father’s eyes shine. He bundles her beneath an aeroponic table, crawls in beside her, and asks Sybil to dim the lights (plants eat light, Father says, but even plants can overeat). She pulls her blanket to her chin, and presses her head against her father’s chest as shadows fall over the room, and listens to his heart thrum inside his worksuit, and to conduits hum inside the walls, and to water drip from the long white threads of thousands of rootlets, down through the tiers of plants, into channels beneath the floor where it is collected to be resprayed once more, and the Argos hurtles another ten thousand kilometers through the emptiness.

“Will you tell some more of the story, Father?”

“It’s late, Zucchini.”

“Just the part when the witch changes herself into an owl. Please?”

“All right. But only that.”

“Also the part where Aethon turns into a donkey.”

“Fine. But then sleep.”

“Then sleep.”

“And you won’t tell Mother.”

“And I won’t tell Mother. I promise.”

Father and daughter smile, playing their familiar game, and Konstance wriggles inside her blanket, anticipation rolling through her, and the roots drip, and it is as if they drowse together inside the digestive system of a huge and gentle beast.

She says, “Aethon had just arrived in Thessaly, Land of Magic.”

“Right.”

“But he didn’t see any statues come to life or witches flying over rooftops.”

“But the maid at the inn where he was staying,” Father says, “told Aethon that that very night, if he knelt at the door to the room at the top of the house, and peeked through the keyhole, he might see some magic. So Aethon crept to the door and watched the mistress of the house light a lamp, bend over a chest full of hundreds of tiny glass jars, and select one. Then she took off her clothes and rubbed whatever was inside the jar all over her body, head to toe. She took three lumps of incense, dropped them into the lamp, said the magic words—”

“What were they?”

“She said, ‘goobletook’ and ‘dynacrack’ and ‘jimjimsee.’ ”

Konstance laughs. “Last time you said it was ‘fliggleboom’ and ‘cracklepack.’ ”

“Oh, those too. The lamp grew very bright, then—poof!—went out. And though it was hard to see, in the moonlight that spilled through the open window, Aethon watched feathers sprout from the mistress’s back, from her neck, and from the tips of her fingers. Her nose grew hard and turned downward, her feet curled into yellow talons, her arms became big beautiful brown wings, and her eyes—”

“—they grew three times as large and turned the color of liquid honey.”

“That’s right. And then?”

“Then,” says Konstance, “she spread her wings and flew right out the window, over the garden, and into the night.”

FIVE

THE ASS

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio E