In what will become the kitchen, the shells of cabinets stand empty. From an upstairs window, still covered with stickers and plastic film, he can see out through the branches of a few remaining firs to the clearing where Trustyfriend’s tree once stood.
No trucks anywhere. No voices, no music. In the darkening sky a single airplane contrail cuts past a quarter-moon.
He goes back downstairs and props open the front door with the butt end of a two-by-four and stands on the newly poured sidewalk in his shorts and sweatshirt with his ear defenders around his neck and the grenade in his hand.
It’s not our property. They can do whatever they want with it.
Bigger forests, better forests. He could have his pick.
He keeps the spoon depressed, holds his breath, and loops his index finger through the safety ring. All he has to do is pull. He sees himself underhand the bomb into the house: the front of the structure splinters, the front door blows off its hinges, windows shatter, the concussion travels through Lakeport, over the mountains, until it reaches the ears of Trustyfriend in whatever mystic snag the one-winged ghosts of great grey owls stand in, blinking out at eternity.
Pull the pin.
His knees shake, his heart bellows, but his finger won’t budge. He remembers the video: the whump, the dirt fountaining into the air. Five six seven eight. Pull the pin.
He can’t. He can hardly keep his feet. His finger slides out of the safety ring. The moon is still there in the sky but it might fall at any moment.
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 64
Konstance
The twelve-and thirteen-year-olds are giving presentations. Ramón describes which biosignature gases have been identified in the atmosphere of Beta Oph2, and Jessi Ko speculates about microclimates in temperate grasslands on Beta Oph2, and Konstance goes last. A book flies toward her from the second tier of the Library and opens flat on the floor and from its pages grows a six-foot-tall stem with a down-facing flower.
The other children groan.
“This,” she says, “is a snowdrop. Snowdrops are tiny flowers that bloom on Earth in cold weather. In the Atlas I have found two places where you can see so many of them that they turn a whole field white.” She waves her arms as though summoning carpets of snowdrops from the corners of the Library.
“On Earth, each individual snowdrop would produce hundreds of tiny seeds, and each seed had a little fatty drop stuck to it called an elaiosome, and ants loved—”
“Konstance,” says Mrs. Chen, “your presentation is supposed to be about biogeographical indicators on Beta Oph2.”
“Not dead flowers ten kajillion miles away,” adds Ramón, and everyone laughs.
“Ants,” continues Konstance, “would carry the seeds into their middens and lick off the elaiosomes, leaving the seed clean. So the snowdrops gave the ants a treat at a time of year when food was hard to find, and the ants planted more snowdrops, and this was called mutualism, a cycle that—”
Mrs. Chen steps forward and claps her hands and the flower vanishes and the book flaps away.
“That’s enough, Konstance, thank you.”
* * *
Second Meal is printed beefsteak with Farm 2 chives. Mother’s expression puckers with worry. “First you’re climbing inside that dusty Atlas all the time, and now ants again? I don’t like it, Konstance, our mandate is to look forward, do you want to end up like—”
Konstance sighs, bracing for it, the great warning story of Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, who, after his Library Day, would not get off his Perambulator day or night, ignoring his studies and violating every protocol in order to trek alone inside the Atlas until the soles of his feet cracked, and then, according to Mother, his sanity cracked too. Sybil restricted his Library access, and the grown-ups took away his Vizer, but Elliot Fischenbacher unbolted a support from a shelf in the galley and over a series of nights tried to chop through an outer wall, right through the skin of the Argos itself, imperiling everyone and everything. Thankfully, Mother always says, before he could get through the outermost layer, Elliot Fischenbacher was subdued and confined to his family compartment, but in his confinement he squirreled away SleepDrops until he had enough for a lethal dose, and when he died his body was sent out the airlock without so much as a song. More than once Mother has pointed out the titanium patch in the corridor between Lavatories 2 and 3 where Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher tried to hack his way out and kill everyone on board.
But Konstance has stopped listening. At the opposite end of the table Ezekiel Lee, a gentle teenager not much older than she is, is groaning and driving his knuckles into his eye sockets. His meal is untouched. His pallor is sickly white.