The gun remains pointed at Zeno’s chest. The boy’s finger remains on the trigger. The cell phone stays on the floor. “We will live lives of clarity and meaning,” the boy says, and rubs his eyes. “We will exist entirely outside of the machine even as we work to destroy it.”
Zeno takes his left hand off the backpack. “I’m going to reach down with one hand and pick up your phone. Okay?”
Sharif is rigid at the base of the stairwell. The children remain silent upstairs. Zeno bends. The gun barrel is inches from his head. His hand has almost reached the phone when, inside the backpack in his arms, one of the Tracfones taped to one of the bombs rings.
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 65
DAY 341–DAY 370 INSIDE VAULT ONE
Konstance
“Sybil, where are we?”
We are en route to Beta Oph2.
“What speed are we traveling?”
7,734,958 kilometers per hour. You would remember our velocity from your Library Day.
“You’re sure, Sybil?”
It is fact.
She gazes a moment into the trillion resplendent tributaries of the machine.
Konstance, are you feeling well? Your heart rate is rather high.
“I feel fine, thank you. I’m going back to the Library for a bit.”
* * *
She studies the same schematics that her father studied during Quarantine Two. Engineering, storage, fluid recycling, waste treatment, oxygen plant. The farms, the Commissary, the kitchens. Five lavatories with showers, forty-two living compartments, Sybil at the center. No windows, no stairs, no way in, no way out, the whole structure a self-sustaining tomb. Sixty-six years ago the original eighty-five volunteers were told they were embarking on an interstellar journey that would outlast them by centuries. They traveled to Qaanaaq, trained for six months, boarded a boat, and were sedated and sealed inside the Argos while Sybil prepared the launch.
Except there was no launch. It was just an exercise. A pilot study, a trial run, an intergenerational feasibility experiment that may have ended long ago or may be ongoing still.
Konstance stands in the Library atrium touching the place on her worksuit where Mother stitched a pine seedling four years before. Mrs. Flowers’s little dog stares up at her and wags his tail. He is not real. The desk beneath her fingertips feels like wood, sounds like wood, smells like wood; the slips in the box look like paper, feel like paper, smell like paper.
None of it is real. She stands on a circular Perambulator in a circular room at the center of a circular white structure on a mostly circular island eight miles across Baffin Bay from a remote village called Qaanaaq. How does a contagion suddenly present itself on a ship streaking through interstellar space? Why couldn’t Sybil solve it? Because none of them, Sybil included, knew where they actually were.
She writes a series of questions on slips of paper and tucks them one by one into the slot. Above the atrium, clouds stream through a yellow sky. The little dog licks his upper lip. Down from the stacks fly books.
* * *
Inside Vault One she unscrews all four legs off the cot, and uses the frame to pound one end of one of the legs flat.
Why, Sybil asks, are you dismantling your bed?
Don’t answer. Konstance spends hours discreetly sharpening the edge of the cot leg. She inserts the sharpened leg into a slot on a second leg that will serve as a handle, secures it with a screw, makes cord from the lining of her blanket, and lashes the sharpened cot leg fast: a homemade axe. Then she takes several scoops of Nourish powder, runs them through the food printer, and the machine fills the bowl past the rim.
I am glad, says Sybil, that you are preparing a meal, Konstance. And such a large one too.
“I’ll have another after this one, Sybil. Is there a recipe you might recommend?”
How about pineapple fried rice? Doesn’t that sound nice?
Konstance swallows, fills her mouth again. “It does, yes. It sounds wonderful.”
Once she is full, she crawls around the floor gathering her transcriptions of Zeno Ninis’s translations. Aethon Has a Vision. The Bandits’ Hideout. The Garden of the Goddess. She gathers all the scraps into a stack, Folio A to Folio Ω, sets her drawing of a cloud city on top, and, using one of the aluminum screws from the cot legs, bores a row of holes through the left edge. Then she unravels more blanket lining, braids the fibers together to make twine, lines up the holes, and sews the scraps of food sacks together along one edge to bind them.
An hour left before NoLight, she cleans her food bowl and fills it with water. By running her fingers along her scalp, she collects a little nest of hair and wedges it into the bottom of her empty drinking cup.