She offers to drive him home. Thirty-three units are in Eden’s Gate now, lining both sides of Arcady Lane, zigzagging up the hillside behind the double-wide. Mostly people from Boise, Portland, and eastern Oregon use them as vacation homes: they park boat trailers in the cul-de-sacs and drive twenty-thousand-dollar UTVs to town and hang college football flags from their balconies and on weekend nights they stand around backyard firepits laughing and urinating into the huckleberries while their kids shoot Roman candles into the stars.
“Wow,” says Janet, “you have a lot of weeds in your yard.”
“The neighbors complain about it.”
“I like it,” says Janet. “Natural.”
They sit on the front step and sip Shasta Twists and watch bumblebees drift between the thistles. Janet smells like fabric softener and cafeteria tacos and says fifty words for every one of Seymour’s, talking about Key Club, summer camp, how she wants to go to college somewhere far from her parents but not too far, you know—as though her future were a pre-plotted exponential curve arcing ever higher—and a white-haired retiree who lives in the town house next door rolls his fifty-gallon trash bin to the end of his driveway and looks at them and Janet raises a hand in greeting and the man goes inside.
“He hates us. Everyone hopes my mom will sell so they can put in new houses.”
“Seemed nice enough to me,” says Janet, and responds to a warble from her smartphone.
Seymour looks at his shoes. “Did you know that every day internet data storage emits as much carbon as all the airplanes in the world combined?”
“You’re weird,” she says, but smiles when she says it. In the last breath before dark a black bear materializes from the twilight and Janet clutches his arm and takes a video as it sashays between the pools of streetlight. It moves between the half-dozen wheeled trash carts standing at the ends of the Eden’s Gate driveways, sniffing sniffing. Eventually it finds a can it likes, raises one paw, and swats it to the ground. Carefully, with a single claw, the bear drags a plump white bag out of the can’s mouth and scatters its contents across the asphalt.
THE ARGOS
MISSION YEAR 64
DAY 21–DAY 45 INSIDE VAULT ONE
Konstance
She touches her Vizer, steps on the Perambulator. Nothing.
“Sybil. Something’s wrong with the Library.”
Nothing is wrong, Konstance. I have restricted your access. It is time to return to your daily lessons. You need to bathe, eat a proper meal, and be ready in the atrium in thirty minutes. There is rinseless soap in the lavatory kit your father provided.
Konstance sits on the edge of the cot, head in her hands. If she keeps her eyes closed, maybe she can transform Vault One to Compartment 17. Here, in the space just below her, is Mother’s bunk, her blanket neatly folded. Two paces away is Father’s. Here’s the sewing table, the stool, Mother’s button bag. All time, Father once told her, is relative: because of the speed the Argos travels, the ship clock kept by Sybil runs faster than clocks back on Earth. The chronometers that run inside every human cell that tell us it’s time to get drowsy, to make a baby, to grow old—all these clocks, Father said, can be altered by speed, software, or circumstance. Some dormant seeds, he said, like the ones in the drawers in Farm 4, can stop time for centuries, slowing their metabolisms to almost zero, sleeping away the seasons, until the right combination of moisture and temperature appears, and the right wavelength of sunlight penetrates the soil. Then, as though you spoke the magic words: they open.
Goobletook and dynacrack and jimjimsee.
“Fine,” says Konstance. “I’ll wash and eat. I’ll continue my classes. But then you’ll let me go into the Atlas.”
She dumps powder into the printer, chokes down a bowl of rainbow-colored paste, wipes her face, rakes at the snarls in her hair, sits at a table in the Library and does whatever lessons Sybil mandates. What’s the cosmological constant? Explain the etymology of the word trivial. Use addition formulas to simplify the following expression:
?[sin（A + B） + sin（A - B）]
Then she summons the Atlas from its shelf, grief and anger coiled like springs inside her chest, and travels the roads of Earth. Office towers whisk past in late-winter light; a trash collection vehicle veined with filth sits at a stoplight; a mile farther on, she rounds a hill past a shining fenced compound with guards out front beyond which the Atlas cameras do not approach. She breaks into a run, as though chasing the notes of a faraway song just ahead, something she’ll never catch.