Cloud Cuckoo Land (24 page)

MISSION YEAR 64

DAY 21–DAY 45 INSIDE VAULT ONE

S
he 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:

½[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.

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,
Σχερία
: 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?

“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.

Σχερία

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
.

OUT OF THE WHALE AND INTO THE STORM

MAY 1453

I
t is the fifth week of the siege, or maybe the sixth, each day bleeding into the last. Anna sits with Maria's head in her lap and her back against the wall and a fresh candle stuck to the floor among the melted stubs. Out in the lane something whumps and a horse whinnies and a man curses and the commotion is a long time fading.

“Anna?”

“I'm here.”

Maria's world has gone entirely dark now. Her tongue does not cooperate when she tries to speak, and every few hours muscles in her back and neck seize. The eight embroideresses who still sleep inside the house of Kalaphates alternate between devotions and staring into space in nerve-shattered trances. Anna helps Chryse in the frost-stunted garden or scavenges what markets are still open for flour or fruit or beans. The rest of the time she sits with Maria.

She has grown quicker at deciphering the tidy, left-leaning script inside the old codex, and by now can lift lines off the page without trouble. Whenever she comes to a word she does not know, or lacunas where mold has obliterated the text, she invents replacements.

Aethon has managed to become a bird at last: not the resplendent owl he hoped, but a bedraggled crow. He flaps across a limitless sea, searching for the end of the earth, only to be swept up by a waterspout. So long as Anna keeps reading, Maria seems to be at peace, her face calm, as though she sits not in a damp cell in a besieged city listening to a silly tale, but in a garden in the hereafter listening to the hymns of the angels, and Anna remembers something Licinius said: that a story is a way of stretching time.

In the days, he said, when bards traveled from town to town carrying the old songs in their memories, performing them for anyone who would listen, they would delay the outcomes of their tales for as long as they could, improvising one last verse, one last obstacle for the heroes to overcome, because, Licinius said, if the singers could hold their listeners' attention for one more hour, they might be granted one more cup of wine, one more piece of bread, one more night out of the rain. Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer.

“He suffers so much,” murmurs Maria. “But he keeps on.”

Maybe Kalaphates was right: maybe dark magic does live inside the old books. Maybe as long as she still has more lines to read to her sister, as long as Aethon persists on his harebrained journey, flapping his way toward his dream in the clouds, then the city gates will hold; maybe death will stay outside their door for one more day.

On a bright, redolent May morning, when it feels as though the unseasonable cold has finally loosened its grip, the Hodegetria, the city's most venerated icon—a painting with the Virgin and Christ child on one side and the crucifixion on the other, purportedly made by the apostle Luke on a three-hundred-pound piece of slate and conveyed to the city from the Holy Lands by an empress a thousand years before Anna was born—is carried out of the church built to hold it.

If anything can save the city it is this: an object of immense power, the icon of icons, credited with safeguarding the city from numerous sieges in the past. Chryse picks up Maria and slings her over her back, and the embroideresses walk to the square to be a part of the procession, and when the icon comes out the church doors into the sunlight it blazes so brightly that it stamps Anna's vision with swimming designs of gold.

The six priests carrying the painting set it onto the shoulders of a hulking monk in crimson velvet with a thick embroidered band
across his chest. Wobbling under his load, the icon-bearer processes barefoot through the city from church to church, going wherever the Hodegetria leads him. Two deacons follow his every step, propping a golden canopy over the icon, dignitaries with staves behind them, novices and nuns and citizens and slaves and soldiers in the back, many carrying candles and performing an eerie and beautiful chant. Children run alongside holding garlands of roses or little pieces of cotton that they hope to touch to the Virgin's likeness.

Anna and Chryse, with Maria draped over Chryse's back, march in the wake of the procession as the Hodegetria winds toward the Third Hill. All morning the city glows. Wildflowers carpet the ruins; a breeze scatters little white flower petals across the cobblestones; chestnut trees wave the ivory candles of their blooms. But as the parade climbs toward the huge crumbling fountain of the nymphaeum, the day darkens. The air turns chill, black clouds appear as if from nowhere, doves stop warbling, dogs start barking, and Anna glances up.

Not a single bird crosses the sky. Thunder rolls over the houses. A gust snuffs half the candles in the parade, and the chanting falters. In the stillness that follows, Anna can hear a drummer, out in the camps of the Saracens, pounding his drum.

“Sister?” asks Maria, her cheek pressed to Chryse's spine. “What is happening?”

“A storm.”

Forks of lightning lash the domes of the Hagia Sophia. Trees thrash, shutters bang, sheets of hail assault the rooftops, and the procession scatters. At its head, the wind rips the gold canopy sheltering the icon from its standards and carries it off between houses.

Chryse scrambles for cover, but Anna waits a moment longer, watching the monk at the front of the train try to keep carrying the Hodegetria up the hill. Wind drives him back, whipping debris past his feet. Still he pushes higher. He nearly crests the hill. Then he staggers, and slips, and the thirteen-hundred-year-old painting falls crucifixion-side-down onto the rain-soaked street.

Agata rocks at the table with her head in her hands; Widow Theodora mumbles into the cold hearth; Chryse curses over the wreckage of her vegetable garden. The hallowed Hodegetria has failed; the Mother of God has forsaken them; the beast of the apocalypse rises from the sea. The Antichrist scratches at the gate. Time is a circle, Licinius used to say, and every circle eventually must close.

As darkness falls, Anna crawls onto the horsehair pallet and sits with Maria's head in her lap, the old manuscript open in front of them. The storm propels Aethon-the-crow past the moon and tumbles him into the blackness between the stars. There is not much left to go.