Cloud Cuckoo Land (19 page)

S
he is walking a street in Lagos, Nigeria, passing through a plaza near the waterfront, gleaming white hotels rising around her on all sides—a fountain caught mid-spray, forty coconut palms growing from black-and-white checkered planters—when she stops. She peers up, a faint prickling at the base of her neck: something not quite right.

In Farm 4 Father has a single coconut in a cold-storage drawer. All seeds, he said, are voyagers, but none more intrepid than the coconut. Dropped onto beaches where high tides can pick them up and carry them to sea, coconuts, he said, regularly crossed oceans, the embryo of a new tree safe inside its big fibrous husk, twelve months of fertilizer provisioned on board. He handed it to her, vapor rising from its shell, and showed her the three germination pores on the bottom: two eyes and a mouth, he said, the face of a little sailor whistling its way around the world.

To her left a sign says,
Welcome to the New Intercontinental
. She steps into the shade of the palms and continues squinting up when the trees ribbon away, her Vizer retracts from her eyes, and Father is there.

She feels the familiar lurch of motion sickness as she steps off her Perambulator. It's NoLight already. Mother sits on the edge of her bunk working sanitizing powder into the folds of her palms.

“I'm sorry,” Konstance says, “if I was in there too long.”

Father takes her hand. His white eyebrows bunch. “No, no, nothing like that.” The only illumination comes from the lavatory light. In the shadows behind him she can see that Mother's usually orderly
stack of worksuits and patches has been upended, and her button bag is spilled everywhere—buttons under her bunk, under the sewing stool, in the curtain track around the commode.

When Konstance looks back up at her father, some part of her understands before he speaks what he will say, and she feels so acutely that they have left their planet and star behind, that they move at impossible speeds through a cold and silent void, that there is no turning around.

“Zeke Lee,” he says, “is dead.”

One day after Ezekiel's death, Dr. Pori dies, and Zeke's mother has reportedly lost consciousness. Twenty-one others—one quarter of the people on board—are experiencing symptoms. Dr. Cha spends her every hour tending to crew members; Engineer Goldberg works through NoLight in the Biology Lab trying to solve it.

How does a plague start inside a sealed disc that has had no contact with any other living thing for almost six and a half decades? Is it spreading via touch or spittle or food? Via the air? The water? Was deep-space radiation penetrating the shielding and damaging the nuclei of their cells, or was it something asleep in someone's genes, all these years, suddenly waking up? And why can't Sybil, who knows all things, solve it?

Though he has hardly used his Perambulator in Konstance's memory, her father now spends nearly every waking hour on it, Vizer locked over his eyes, studying documents at a Library table. Mother maps the minutes before quarantine. Did she pass Mrs. Lee in a corridor, did some microscopic fleck of Ezekiel's vomit land on her suit, could some of it have splashed into their mouths?

A week ago, it all seemed so secure. So settled. Everyone whispering down the corridors in their patched-up worksuits and socks.
You can be one, or you can be one hundred and two…
Fresh lettuce on Tuesdays, Farm 3 beans on Wednesdays, haircuts on Fridays, dentist in Compartment 6, seamstress in Compartment 17, precalc with Dr. Pori three mornings a week, the warm eye of Sybil keeping
watch over them all. Yet, even then, in the deepest vaults of her subconscious, didn't Konstance sense the terrible precariousness of it all? The frozen immensity tugging, tugging, tugging at the outer walls?

She touches her Vizer and climbs the ladder to the second tier of the Library. Jessi Ko looks up from a book in which a thousand pale deer with oversized nostrils lie dead in snow.

“I'm reading about the saiga antelope. They had this bacteria in them that caused massive die-offs.”

Omicron lies on his back, gazing up.

“Where's Ramón?” Konstance asks.

Below them images from long-ago pandemics flicker above grown-ups at tables. Soldiers in beds, doctors in hazmat suits. Unbidden into her head comes an image of Zeke's body being sent out the airlock, then Dr. Pori's a few hundred thousand kilometers later: a trail of corpses left through the void like breadcrumbs from some ghastly fairy tale.

“Says here that two hundred thousand of them died in twelve hours,” Jessi says, “and no one ever figured out why.” Far down the atrium, at the limit of her eyesight, Konstance sees her father at a table by himself, sheets of technical drawings sailing around him.

“I heard,” says Omicron, staring up through the barrel vault, “that Quarantine Three lasts a year.”

“I heard,” whispers Jessi, “that Quarantine Four lasts forever.”

Library hours are extended; Mother and Father hardly leave their Perambulators. More unusual still, inside Compartment 17, Father has taken down the bioplastic privacy curtain that enclosed the commode, snipped it into pieces, and is using Mother's sewing machine to make something with it—she hasn't dared to ask what. Sealed in Compartment 17, beneath the miasma of nutritional paste burping out of the food printer, Konstance can almost smell the collective fear as it moves through the ship: insidious, mephitic, seeping through walls.

Later, inside the Atlas, on the outskirts of Mumbai, she travels a jogging trail wound around the bases of huge, cream-colored towers, forty or fifty stories high. She slips past women in saris, women in jogging suits, men in shorts, everyone motionless. To her right, a wall of green mangroves runs alongside the trail for a half mile, something troubling her as she moves through the frozen joggers, some disquieting wrinkle in the texture of the software: in the people or the trees or the atmosphere. She picks up her pace, uneasy, passing through figures as though through ghosts: with every stride she can feel the fear pervading the
Argos
, about to lay its hand on the back of her neck.

By the time she climbs out of the Atlas, it's dark. Little sconces glow at the base of the Library columns and moonlit clouds scud over the barrel vault.

A few documents shuttle to and fro; a few figures hunch over tables. Mrs. Flowers's little white dog comes trotting to her and sits with its tail swishing back and forth, but Mrs. Flowers is nowhere to be seen.

“Sybil, what time is it?”

Four ten NoLight, Konstance.

She switches off her Vizer and steps off the Perambulator. Father is at Mother's sewing machine again, glasses low on his nose, working by the light of Mother's lamp. The hood of his containment suit sits in his lap like the severed head of some enormous insect. She worries that he will chide her for staying up too late again, but he is mumbling to himself, brooding on something, and she realizes that she would like to be chided for staying up too late.

Toilet, teeth, brush your hair. She's halfway up the ladder to her berth when her heart gives a frightened whump. Mother is not in her bed. Or in Father's. Or on the commode. Mother is not in Compartment 17 at all.

“Father?”

He flinches. Mother's blanket is rumpled. Mother always folds her blanket into a perfect rectangle when she gets out of bed.

“Where's Mother?”

“Hmm? She went to see someone.” The sewing machine clatters back to life, the bobbin spinning, and she waits for it to stop.

“But how did she get out the door?”

Father holds up the edges of curtain to match them, places them under the needle, and the machine resumes drumming.

She repeats her question. Instead of answering he uses Mother's scissors to trim some thread, then says, “Tell me where you went this time, Zucchini. You must have walked for miles.”

“Did Sybil really let Mother out?”

He rises and walks to her berth.

“Take these.”

His voice is calm but his eyes scatter. In his palm are three of Mother's SleepDrops.

“Why?”

“They'll help you rest.”

“Isn't three a lot?”

“Take them, Konstance, it's safe. I'll wrap you in your blanket like a pupa inside its chrysalis, remember? Like we used to? And you'll have answers in the morning, I promise.”

The drops dissolve on her tongue. Father tucks her blanket around her legs and sits again at the sewing machine and the needle starts up again.

She glances over the railing at Mother's bunk. Her rumpled blanket.

“Father, I'm afraid.”

“Want to hear some of Aethon's story?” The sewing machine rumbles and dies. “After Aethon escaped the miller, he walked all the way to the rim of the world, do you remember? The land ran down to an icy sea, and snow blew out of the sky, and there was only black sand and frozen seaweed, and not a scent of a rose for a thousand miles.”

The lamp flickers. Konstance presses her back against the wall and strains to keep her eyes open. People are dying. The only way Sybil let Mother out of the compartment was if—

“But Aethon still hoped. There he was, trapped inside a body that wasn't his, far from home, at the very edge of the known world. He
stared up at the moon as he paced the shore, and thought he could see a goddess spiraling down out of the night to assist him.”

In the air above her berth Konstance sees moonlight shimmer on plates of ice, sees Aethon-the-donkey leaving hoof prints in cold sand. She tries to sit up but her neck is suddenly too weak to support the weight of her head. Snow is blowing across her blanket. She raises a hand to it, but her fingers fall away into the dark.

Two hours later Father leans over the rail in the NoLight and helps her out of bed. She's groggy and muddled from the SleepDrops, and he's shoving her legs and arms into what looks like a deflated person—a suit that he has fashioned from the bioplastic curtain. It's too large around her waist, and has no gloves, only sleeves sewn shut at the ends. As he zips her in, Konstance is so sleepy that she can hardly raise her chin.

“Father?”

Now he's fitting the oxygen hood over her head, pulling it down over her hair and sealing it to the collar of the suit with the same seal-tape he uses to seal drip-lines in the farm. He turns it on and she feels the suit inflate around her.

Oxygen at thirty percent
, says a recorded voice inside the hood, directly into her ear, and the white beam of the headlamp switches on and ricochets across the contents of the compartment.

“Can you walk?”

“I'm boiling in here.”

“I know, Zucchini, you're doing so well. Let me see you walk.” Droplets of sweat on his forehead catch the light of the headlamp, and his pallor looks as white as his beard. Despite the fear and fatigue she manages to take a few steps, the strange, inflated sleeves crinkling. Father squats and picks up Konstance's Perambulator, and with his other hand also manages to pick up the aluminum stool from Mother's sewing table, and carries them to the door.

“Sybil,” he says, “one of us is not feeling well.”

Konstance leans against his hip, hot and frightened, and waits for Sybil to dispute, to argue, to say anything but what she does say.

Someone will be here in a moment.

Konstance can feel the gravity of the SleepDrops pulling at her eyelids, her blood, her thoughts. Father's wan face. Mother's unfolded blanket. Jessi Ko saying,
And if Sybil detects something wrong with you…

Oxygen at twenty-nine percent
, says the hood.

As the door opens, two figures in head-to-toe biohazard suits come clomping down the corridor through the NoLight. They have lights strapped to their wrists and their suits are inflated from within so that they look frighteningly large and their faces are lost behind bronze-mirrored face shields. Behind them trail long hoses wrapped in aluminum tape.

Father rushes them with Konstance's Perambulator still clutched to his chest and they stagger backward. “Don't come near. Please. She's not going to the Infirmary.” He hurries her past them down the unlit corridor, following the quivering beam of her headlamp, her feet sliding in their bioplastic booties.

Things are shored up against the walls: food trays, blankets, what might be bandages. As they hurry past the Commissary, she glances in, but the Commissary is no longer the Commissary. Where tables and benches were arranged in three rows now stand about twenty white tents, tubes and wires running out of each, the lights of medical instruments flickering here and there. In the unzipped mouth of one she glimpses the bare sole of a foot sticking out of a blanket, and then they're around the corner.

Oxygen at twenty-six percent
, says her hood.

Were those sick crew members? Was Mother in one of those tents?

They pass Lavatories 2 and 3, pass the sealed door of Farm 4—her pine sapling in there, six years old now and as tall as she is—curling down corridors toward the center of the
Argos
, Father breathing hard now as he urges her along, both of them slipping on the floor, the beam of her headlamp lurching.
Hydro-Access
, reads one door;
Compartment 8
, reads another,
Compartment 7—
she feels as though they're following a spiral toward the center of a vortex, as though she's being swept toward the hole at the heart of a whirlpool.

Finally they stop outside the door that reads
Vault One
. Pale, panting, his face shining with sweat, Father glances back over his shoulder, then presses his palm to the door. Wheels turn and the vestibule opens.

Sybil says,
Entering Decontamination Area.

He ushers Konstance inside and sets her Perambulator beside her and braces the stool in the threshold against the door frame.

“Don't move.”

She sits in the vestibule in the crinkling suit and wraps her arms over her knees and the hood says,
Oxygen at twenty-five percent
, and Sybil says,
Commencing decontamination process.
Konstance cries, “Father,” through the mask of her hood, and the outer door closes in its track until it meets the stool.