“Sybil, take me to a farm near here called Scheria.”
I have no record of a landholding or cattle station nearby with that name.
“Backline Road then, please.”
The road climbs past farms for miles. No cars, no bicycles, no tractors. She passes shadeless fields planted with what might once have been chickpeas, long since burned up by heat. Utility towers stand with the cables snapped and hanging. Bone-dry hedgerows; charred sections of forest; padlocked gates. The road is dusty and the pastures are camel brown. A sign says, For Sale, then another. Then a third.
In hours of searching Backline Road, the only figure she passes is a lone man wearing a coat and what looks like a filtration mask, his forearm braced over his eyes against dust or glare or both. She crouches in front of him. “Hello?” Talking to renderings, to pixels. “Did you know my father?” The man tilts forward as though he is held upright by a headwind. She reaches to steady him and her hands pass right through his chest.
* * *
After three days of searching the parched hills around Nannup, trekking up and down Backline Road, in a grove of dry eucalyptus she has already passed three or four times, Konstance finds it: a hand-painted sign wired to a gate.
Σχερ?α
Behind the gate runs a double row of desiccated gum trees, their trunks peeled white. Weeds rise in tufts on both sides of a single dirt track that leads to a yellow ranch house with honeysuckle on the railing, honeysuckle on the siding—all dead.
On either side of its windows hang black shutters. A solar panel skewed on the roof. To one side of the house, in the shade of the dead gum trees, stands the glasshouse from Father’s video, half-built, a portion of its wooden frame covered with sheets of cloudy plastic. A pile of grimy plastic bottles lies beside it.
The dusty light, the dried-up field, the broken solar panel, a film of dust settled like beige snow onto everything, everything as quiet and still as a tomb.
We’ve had heaps of troubles.
Only one green year in the past thirteen.
Her father applied to join the crew when he was twelve, advanced through the application process for a year. At age thirteen—the same age Konstance is now—he would have received the call. Surely he understood that he would never live long enough to reach Beta Oph2? That he would spend the rest of his life inside a machine? Yet he left anyway.
She paddles her arms to enlarge the flexing, buckling digital representation in front of her, and the house degenerates into pixels. But as she presses against the limits of the Atlas’s resolution, she notices that on the right end of the house, because of the circumstances of sunlight and angle, she is able to see through two panes of glass into a wedge of room.
She can make out a portion of a sun-bleached curtain with airplanes printed on it. Two homemade planets, one with rings around it, hang from the ceiling. The chipped headboard of a twin bed, a nightstand, a lamp. A boy’s room.
It would be absolutely ace to be a part of a mission like this.
A new world!
Was he in that room when the cameras swept past? Is the ghost of the boy her father once was right there, just out of sight?
On the nightstand by the window a blue book with a worn spine rests faceup. On its cover birds swing around the tightly packed towers of a city. The city looks as if it stands on a bed of clouds.
She contorts her spine, leans as far as possible into the image, squints against the distorting pixels. At the bottom, below the city, the cover says Antonius Diogenes. Across the top: Cloud Cuckoo Land.
THIRTEEN
OUT OF THE WHALE AND INTO THE STORM
* * *
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio N
… I was a bird, I had wings, I flew! An entire man-of-war was skewered on the fangs of the leviathan, and the sailors howled at me as I flapped by, and I was out! For a day and night I flapped over the infinitude of the ocean, and the sky above stayed blue and so did the waves below, and there were no continents and no ships, nowhere for me to set down and rest my wings. On the second day I grew tired, and the face of the sea darkened and the wind began to sing a frightening, phantom song. Silver fire flew in all directions, and thunderheads split the heavens, and my black feathers crackled white.
Hadn’t I suffered enough? From the sea below rose a great spout of water, whirling and screaming, carrying islands and cows, boats, and houses, and when it caught my puny crow wings, it tore me from my flight, spinning me ever higher, until the white glow of the moon burned my beak as I spun past, so close I could see the moon-beasts charging along their ghostly plains and drinking milk from great white moon-lakes, as frightened by me looking down as I was of them looking up, and I dreamed again of the summer evenings in Arkadia when the clover grew deep upon the hills, and the happy bells of my ewes filled the air, and the shepherds sat with their pipes, and I wished I had never embarked upon this…