Ramón breathes on the glass, puts a finger to the vapor, and draws an R.
Jessi Ko says, “When I’m old enough to go to the Library, I’m going straight to the Games Section to fly around Flower-Fruit Mountain.”
“I’m going to play Swords of Silverman,” says Ramón. “Zeke says it goes on for twenty thousand levels.”
Konstance, Sybil asks, what will you do when you get to the Library?
Konstance glances over her shoulder. The door they entered through has sealed so tightly behind them that it is indistinguishable from the wall. She says, “What’s ‘erasure and destruction’？”
* * *
Night terrors come next. After Third Meal is cleaned up, after the other families retire to their compartments, after Father heads back to his plants in Farm 4, Mother and Konstance walk back to Compartment 17 and tidy the various worksuits waiting their turn at Mother’s sewing machine—here the bin for malfunctioning zippers, here the bin of scraps, here the loose threads, nothing wasted, nothing lost. They powder their teeth and brush their hair and Mother takes a SleepDrop and kisses Konstance on the forehead and they climb into their respective berths, Mother on the bottom and Konstance on the top.
The walls dim from purple to gray to black. She tries to breathe, tries to hold her eyes open.
Still they come. Beasts with glittering razor-teeth. Slavering devils with horns. Eyeless white larvae swarming inside her mattress. The worst are the ogres with skeleton limbs that come scuttling down the corridor; they tear open the compartment door, climb the walls, and chew through the ceiling. Konstance clings to her berth as her mother is sucked out into the void; she tries to blink but her eyes are boiling; she tries to scream but her tongue has turned to ice.
* * *
“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?”