“Wow,” says Janet, “you have a lot of weeds in your yard.”

“The neighbors complain about it.”

“I like it,” says Janet. “Natural.”

They sit on the front step and sip Shasta Twists and watch bumblebees drift between the thistles. Janet smells like fabric softener and cafeteria tacos and says fifty words for every one of Seymour’s, talking about Key Club, summer camp, how she wants to go to college somewhere far from her parents but not too far, you know—as though her future were a pre-plotted exponential curve arcing ever higher—and a white-haired retiree who lives in the town house next door rolls his fifty-gallon trash bin to the end of his driveway and looks at them and Janet raises a hand in greeting and the man goes inside.

“He hates us. Everyone hopes my mom will sell so they can put in new houses.”

“Seemed nice enough to me,” says Janet, and responds to a warble from her smartphone.

Seymour looks at his shoes. “Did you know that every day internet data storage emits as much carbon as all the airplanes in the world combined?”

“You’re weird,” she says, but smiles when she says it. In the last breath before dark a black bear materializes from the twilight and Janet clutches his arm and takes a video as it sashays between the pools of streetlight. It moves between the half-dozen wheeled trash carts standing at the ends of the Eden’s Gate driveways, sniffing sniffing. Eventually it finds a can it likes, raises one paw, and swats it to the ground. Carefully, with a single claw, the bear drags a plump white bag out of the can’s mouth and scatters its contents across the asphalt.

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 64

DAY 21–DAY 45 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

She touches her Vizer, steps on the Perambulator. Nothing.

“Sybil. Something’s wrong with the Library.”

Nothing is wrong, Konstance. I have restricted your access. It is time to return to your daily lessons. You need to bathe, eat a proper meal, and be ready in the atrium in thirty minutes. There is rinseless soap in the lavatory kit your father provided.

Konstance sits on the edge of the cot, head in her hands. If she keeps her eyes closed, maybe she can transform Vault One to Compartment 17. Here, in the space just below her, is Mother’s bunk, her blanket neatly folded. Two paces away is Father’s. Here’s the sewing table, the stool, Mother’s button bag. All time, Father once told her, is relative: because of the speed the Argos travels, the ship clock kept by Sybil runs faster than clocks back on Earth. The chronometers that run inside every human cell that tell us it’s time to get drowsy, to make a baby, to grow old—all these clocks, Father said, can be altered by speed, software, or circumstance. Some dormant seeds, he said, like the ones in the drawers in Farm 4, can stop time for centuries, slowing their metabolisms to almost zero, sleeping away the seasons, until the right combination of moisture and temperature appears, and the right wavelength of sunlight penetrates the soil. Then, as though you spoke the magic words: they open.

Goobletook and dynacrack and jimjimsee.

“Fine,” says Konstance. “I’ll wash and eat. I’ll continue my classes. But then you’ll let me go into the Atlas.”

She dumps powder into the printer, chokes down a bowl of rainbow-colored paste, wipes her face, rakes at the snarls in her hair, sits at a table in the Library and does whatever lessons Sybil mandates. What’s the cosmological constant? Explain the etymology of the word trivial. Use addition formulas to simplify the following expression:

½[sin(A + B) + sin(A - B)]

Then she summons the Atlas from its shelf, grief and anger coiled like springs inside her chest, and travels the roads of Earth. Office towers whisk past in late-winter light; a trash collection vehicle veined with filth sits at a stoplight; a mile farther on, she rounds a hill past a shining fenced compound with guards out front beyond which the Atlas cameras do not approach. She breaks into a run, as though chasing the notes of a faraway song just ahead, something she’ll never catch.

* * *

One night, after nearly six weeks alone inside Vault One, Konstance dreams herself back into the Commissary. The tables and benches are gone, and rust-red sand swirls across the floor in thigh-deep drifts. She staggers out into the corridor, passing the closed doors of a half-dozen compartments, until she reaches the entrance to Farm 4.

Inside, the walls have given way to a sunbaked horizon of brown hills. Sand blows everywhere. The ceiling is a swirling red haze, and thousands of grow-racks, stretching for miles, stand half-buried in dunes. She finds Father kneeling at the base of one, his back to her, sand falling through his fingers. Just as she is about to touch his shoulder, he turns. His face is veined with salt; dust fills his eyelashes.

At home, he says, in Scheria, an irrigation ditch ran behind the house. Even after it dried—

She jerks awake. Scheria, scary-ah: it was just a word she heard him say when he talked about home. In Scheria on the Backline Road. She understood that it was the name of the farm where he grew up, but he always said life here was better than life there, so it never occurred to her to use the Atlas to find it.

She eats, tends to the cumulus of her hair, sits politely through her lessons, says please, Sybil, right away, Sybil.

Your behavior today, Konstance, has been delightful.

“Thank you, Sybil. May I go to the Library now?”

Of course.

Straight to a box of slips. She writes, Where is Scheria?

Scheria, Σχερία: Land of the Phaeacians, a mythical island of plenty in Homer’s Odyssey.

Confusing.

She takes a fresh slip, writes, Show me all Library materials regarding my father. A thin bundle of bound papers flies toward her from a third-tier shelf. A birth certificate, a grammar school transcript, a teacher’s recommendation, a postbox address in southwest Australia. When she turns the fifth page, a foot-tall three-dimensional boy—a bit younger than Konstance is now—emerges and rambles across the table. Howdy! His head sports a helmet of red curls; he wears a homemade denim suit. My name is Ethan, I’m from Nannup, Australia, and I love botany. C’mon, I’ll show you my glasshouse.

A structure appears beside him, wood-framed and sheathed in what looks like hundreds of multicolored plastic bottles that have been stretched, flattened, and sewn together. Inside, on aeroponic racks not unlike the racks in Farm 4, vegetables grow from dozens of trays.

Out here in the woop woop, like Grandmom calls it, we’ve had heaps of troubles, only one green year in the past thirteen. Dieback killed the whole crop three summers ago, then the cattle tick infestation, probably you heard about that, and not one day of rain last year. I’ve grown every plant you see here with less than four hundred milliliters of water per day per rack, that’s less than a person sweats in…

When he smiles you can see his incisors. She knows that walk, that face, those eyebrows.

… you’re seeking volunteers of all ages from all over, so why me? Well, Grandmom says my best quality is that I always keep my chin up. I love new places, new things, and mostly I love exploring the mysteries of plants and seeds. It would be absolutely ace to be a part of a mission like this. A new world! Give me the chance and I won’t let you down.