* * *
One night, after nearly six weeks alone inside Vault One, Konstance dreams herself back into the Commissary. The tables and benches are gone, and rust-red sand swirls across the floor in thigh-deep drifts. She staggers out into the corridor, passing the closed doors of a half-dozen compartments, until she reaches the entrance to Farm 4.
Inside, the walls have given way to a sunbaked horizon of brown hills. Sand blows everywhere. The ceiling is a swirling red haze, and thousands of grow-racks, stretching for miles, stand half-buried in dunes. She finds Father kneeling at the base of one, his back to her, sand falling through his fingers. Just as she is about to touch his shoulder, he turns. His face is veined with salt; dust fills his eyelashes.
At home, he says, in Scheria, an irrigation ditch ran behind the house. Even after it dried—
She jerks awake. Scheria, scary-ah: it was just a word she heard him say when he talked about home. In Scheria on the Backline Road. She understood that it was the name of the farm where he grew up, but he always said life here was better than life there, so it never occurred to her to use the Atlas to find it.
She eats, tends to the cumulus of her hair, sits politely through her lessons, says please, Sybil, right away, Sybil.
Your behavior today, Konstance, has been delightful.
“Thank you, Sybil. May I go to the Library now?”
Of course.
Straight to a box of slips. She writes, Where is Scheria?
Scheria, Σχερ?α: Land of the Phaeacians, a mythical island of plenty in Homer’s Odyssey.
Confusing.
She takes a fresh slip, writes, Show me all Library materials regarding my father. A thin bundle of bound papers flies toward her from a third-tier shelf. A birth certificate, a grammar school transcript, a teacher’s recommendation, a postbox address in southwest Australia. When she turns the fifth page, a foot-tall three-dimensional boy—a bit younger than Konstance is now—emerges and rambles across the table. Howdy! His head sports a helmet of red curls; he wears a homemade denim suit. My name is Ethan, I’m from Nannup, Australia, and I love botany. C’mon, I’ll show you my glasshouse.
A structure appears beside him, wood-framed and sheathed in what looks like hundreds of multicolored plastic bottles that have been stretched, flattened, and sewn together. Inside, on aeroponic racks not unlike the racks in Farm 4, vegetables grow from dozens of trays.
Out here in the woop woop, like Grandmom calls it, we’ve had heaps of troubles, only one green year in the past thirteen. Dieback killed the whole crop three summers ago, then the cattle tick infestation, probably you heard about that, and not one day of rain last year. I’ve grown every plant you see here with less than four hundred milliliters of water per day per rack, that’s less than a person sweats in…
When he smiles you can see his incisors. She knows that walk, that face, those eyebrows.
… you’re seeking volunteers of all ages from all over, so why me? Well, Grandmom says my best quality is that I always keep my chin up. I love new places, new things, and mostly I love exploring the mysteries of plants and seeds. It would be absolutely ace to be a part of a mission like this. A new world! Give me the chance and I won’t let you down.
She grabs a slip of paper, summons the Atlas, and steps inside, a long needle of loneliness running through her. When Father would get excited, that boy still shone through. He had a love affair with photosynthesis. He could talk about moss for an hour. He said that plants carried wisdom humans would never be around long enough to understand.
“Nannup,” she says into the void. “Australia.”
The Earth flies toward her, inverts, the southern hemisphere pivoting as it rushes closer, and she drops from the sky onto a road lined with eucalyptus. Bronze hills bake in the distance; white fencing runs down both sides. A trio of faded banners, strung overhead, reads,
DO YOUR PART
DEFEAT DAY ZERO
YOU CAN DO WITH 10 LITRES A DAY
Corrugated sheds mottled with rust. A few windowless houses. Dead casuarinas baked black by sun. As she approaches what appears to be the center of town, she comes upon a quaint red-sided, white-roofed public hall, shaded by cabbage trees, and the grass turns viridescent, three shades greener than anything else she has passed. Bright begonias spill from flower boxes mounted on railings; everything looks freshly painted. Ten strange and magnificent trees with intensely bright gold-orange flowers shade a lawn in the center of which glimmers a circular pool.
A current of disturbance runs through Konstance again, something not quite right. Where are the people?