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 1013 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?

NINETEEN

AETHON MEANS BLAZING

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio T

… I said, “Why do the others ·[seem?]· content to fly about, singing and eating, day after day, bathed by the warm zephyrs, soaring round the towers, yet inside me this ·[sickness?]·…”

… the hoopoe, vice-undersecretary to the viceroy of Provisions and Accommodations, swallowed his beakful of sardines and flared his feathered crown.

He said, “You sound an awful lot like a human right now.”

I said, “I’m not human, sir, dear me, don’t be ridiculous. I’m a humble crow. Why just look at me.”

“Well,” he said, “here’s an idea, to rid yourself of this ·[restless mortal affliction?]·, travel to the palace at ·[the center?]·…

“… a garden there, brighter and greener than every other, and inside the goddess keeps a book containing ·[all the knowledge of the gods]·. Inside you just might find what you…”

LAKEPORT, IDAHO

AUGUST 2019–FEBRUARY 2020

Seymour

The instructions say to use a Tor browser to download a secure messaging platform called Pryva-C. He has to load several updates to get it to work. Days pass before he receives a response.