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.
MATHILDA: thank u 4 reaching out sry for delay just needed
SEEMORE6: ur with bishop? at his camp?
MATHILDA: to verify
MATHILDA: ur not with authorities
SEEMORE6: not I swear
SEEMORE6: want 2 help want 2 join fight
MATHILDA: i have been assigned to u
SEEMORE6: want 2 break machine
At the end of the summer, a hurricane shatters two Caribbean islands, drought squeezes Somalia, the global monthly average temperature breaks another record, an intergovernmental report announces that ocean temperatures have risen four times faster than anyone expected, and the smoke from two separate megafires in Oregon rides eastward currents into Lakeport, where it collects in shapes that look to Seymour, in the satellite images on his tablet, very much like whirlpools.
He has not seen Janet since he smashed the big side window of the RV at the marina and ran. As far as he knows, she didn’t call the police; if the police somehow found her, he doesn’t think she told them about him. All summer he avoids the library, avoids the lakefront, works at the ice rink cleaning locker rooms and stocking sodas with the drawstring of his hoodie pulled tight. Other than that he stays in his bedroom.
MATHILDA: they say eighty dead in the flooding what they don’t count is how many depressed, how many PTSD, how many have no $ to relocate, how many will die from mold, how many
SEEMORE6: wait which floods
MATHILDA: will die of broken hearts
SEEMORE6: the smoke here is v bad today