Cloud Cuckoo Land (17 page)

2014

E
leven-year-old Seymour is walking home from the library on the last Monday of August when he spies something brown on the shoulder of Cross Road just before the turn onto Arcady Lane. Twice before he has found roadkilled raccoons here. Once a smashed coyote.

It's a wing. The severed wing of a great grey owl, with downy coverts and brown-and-white primary flight feathers. A piece of clavicle still clings to the joint, a few sinews trailing out.

A Honda roars past. He scans the road, searches the weeds along the shoulder for the rest of the bird. In the ditch he finds an empty can that says
Übermonster Energy Brew
. Nothing else.

He walks the rest of the way home and stands in the driveway with his backpack on and the wing clamped against his chest. In the lots of Eden's Gate, a model townhome is nearly complete and four more are going up. A truss dangles from a crane while two carpenters move back and forth beneath. Clouds blow in and lightning flashes and for an instant he sees Earth from a million miles away, a mote hurtling through a barren and crushing vacuum, and then he's in the driveway again and there are no clouds, no lightning: it's a bright blue day, the carpenters are fixing the truss into place, their nail guns going pop-pop-pop.

Bunny is at work but has left the television on. On-screen an elderly couple pulls suitcases on wheels toward a cruise ship. They clink champagne glasses, play a slot machine.
Ha ha ha
, they say.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
. Their smiles are excessively white.

The wing smells like an old pillow. The complexity of the brown, tan, and cream striping on the flight feathers is outrageous. For
every 27,027 Americans, one great grey. For every 27,027 Seymours, one Trustyfriend.

The owl must have been hunting from one of the Douglas firs along the edge of Cross Road. Some prey, a mouse probably, crept to the edge of the pavement below, sniffing, twitching, its heartbeat flashing in Trustyfriend's preterhuman hearing like a buoy light.

The mouse started across the river of asphalt; the owl spread his wings and dropped. Meanwhile a car barreled west down the road, headlights cleaving the night, moving faster than any natural thing should move.

Trustyfriend: Who listened. Who had a pure bright beautiful voice. Who always came back.

On the Magnavox the cruise ship explodes.

Well after dark Seymour hears the Grand Am, hears Bunny's keys at the door. She comes into his room smelling of equal parts bleach and maple syrup. He watches her pick up the wing. “Oh, Possum. I'm sorry.”

He says, “Somebody needs to pay.”

She reaches to touch his forehead but he rolls against the wall.

“Somebody needs to go to jail.”

She sets a hand on his back and his whole body stiffens. Through the closed window, through the walls, he can hear cars moving along Cross Road, the whole terrible unceasing human machine roaring on.

“Do you want me to stay home tomorrow? I could call in sick. We could make waffles?”

He hides his face in his pillow. Five months ago the hillside beyond the wire was home to red squirrels black finches pygmy shrews garter snakes downy woodpeckers swallowtail butterflies wolf lichen monkey flowers ten thousand voles five million ants. Now what is it?

“Seymour?”

She said there were twenty places north of here that Trustyfriend
could fly to. Bigger forests. Better forests. Tons of voles, she said. More voles than there were hairs on Seymour's head. But that was just a story. Without raising his head, he reaches for his ear defenders and puts them on.

In the morning Bunny goes to work. Seymour buries the wing beside the egg-shaped boulder in the backyard and decorates the grave with pebbles.

Beneath the bench in Pawpaw's toolshed, beneath three crates of motor oil and a piece of plywood, is a tarp-lined recess Seymour found several years before. Inside are thirty yellowing flyers that say
IDAHO FREEDOM MILITIA
, two boxes of ammunition, one black Beretta pistol, and one rope-handled crate with
DELAY M67 25 GRENADE HAND FRAG
stenciled on the lid.

With his feet braced on either side of the hole, reaching down between his legs, he grasps one of the handles and heaves the crate up and out. He pops open the hasp with the blade of a screwdriver. Nestled inside, in a five-by-five grid, each in its own little cubby, are twenty-five olive-green hand grenades with their handles down and their pins in.

On a library computer a grizzled old-timer with a frighteningly inflamed nose explains the basics of the M67. Six-point-five ounces of high explosive. A four-to-five-second fuse. Lethal radius of five meters. “Once launched,” the man says, “the internal spring pops the spoon and releases a striker, which strikes the primer. The primer will then initiate detonation…”

Marian walks past and smiles; Seymour hides the browser tab until she's out of sight.

The man stands behind a barricade, depresses the handle, pulls the pin, throws. On the far side of the barricade, dirt erupts into the sky.

Seymour hits replay. Watches again.

On Wednesdays Bunny works a double shift at the Pig N' Pancake and doesn't get home until after eleven. She leaves a tub of macaroni in the refrigerator. The note on top says,
It's all going to be okay.
All afternoon Seymour sits at the kitchen table with a forty-year-old fragmentation grenade in his lap.

The last truck leaves Eden's Gate around seven. Seymour puts on his ear defenders, crosses the backyard, slips through the new ranch-rail fence, and walks the empty lots with the grenade in his pocket. Sod, freshly laid in the backyard of the model townhome, glows a dark, malignant green. In the two framed units on either side of it, the front door has been installed, but there are only holes where the doorknob and deadbolt should go.

In front of each home stands a realty sign with its translucent box of flyers.
Live the Lakeport lifestyle that you've always wanted
. Seymour chooses the townhome on the left.

In what will become the kitchen, the shells of cabinets stand empty. From an upstairs window, still covered with stickers and plastic film, he can see out through the branches of a few remaining firs to the clearing where Trustyfriend's tree once stood.

No trucks anywhere. No voices, no music. In the darkening sky a single airplane contrail cuts past a quarter-moon.

He goes back downstairs and props open the front door with the butt end of a two-by-four and stands on the newly poured sidewalk in his shorts and sweatshirt with his ear defenders around his neck and the grenade in his hand.

It's not our property. They can do whatever they want with it.

Bigger forests, better forests. He could have his pick.

He keeps the spoon depressed, holds his breath, and loops his index finger through the safety ring. All he has to do is pull. He sees himself underhand the bomb into the house: the front of the structure splinters, the front door blows off its hinges, windows shatter, the concussion travels through Lakeport, over the mountains, until
it reaches the ears of Trustyfriend in whatever mystic snag the one-winged ghosts of great grey owls stand in, blinking out at eternity.

Pull the pin.

His knees shake, his heart bellows, but his finger won't budge. He remembers the video: the whump, the dirt fountaining into the air. Five six seven eight. Pull the pin.

He can't. He can hardly keep his feet. His finger slides out of the safety ring. The moon is still there in the sky but it might fall at any moment.

MISSION YEAR 64

T
he twelve- and thirteen-year-olds are giving presentations. Ramón describes which biosignature gases have been identified in the atmosphere of Beta Oph2, and Jessi Ko speculates about microclimates in temperate grasslands on Beta Oph2, and Konstance goes last. A book flies toward her from the second tier of the Library and opens flat on the floor and from its pages grows a six-foot-tall stem with a down-facing flower.

The other children groan.

“This,” she says, “is a snowdrop. Snowdrops are tiny flowers that bloom on Earth in cold weather. In the Atlas I have found two places where you can see so many of them that they turn a whole field white.” She waves her arms as though summoning carpets of snowdrops from the corners of the Library.

“On Earth, each individual snowdrop would produce hundreds of tiny seeds, and each seed had a little fatty drop stuck to it called an elaiosome, and ants loved—”

“Konstance,” says Mrs. Chen, “your presentation is supposed to be about biogeographical indicators on Beta Oph2.”

“Not dead flowers ten kajillion miles away,” adds Ramón, and everyone laughs.

“Ants,” continues Konstance, “would carry the seeds into their middens and lick off the elaiosomes, leaving the seed clean. So the snowdrops gave the ants a treat at a time of year when food was hard to find, and the ants planted more snowdrops, and this was called mutualism, a cycle that—”

Mrs. Chen steps forward and claps her hands and the flower vanishes and the book flaps away.

“That's enough, Konstance, thank you.”

Second Meal is printed beefsteak with Farm 2 chives. Mother's expression puckers with worry. “First you're climbing inside that dusty Atlas all the time, and now ants again? I don't like it, Konstance, our mandate is to look forward, do you want to end up like—”

Konstance sighs, bracing for it, the great warning story of Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher, who, after his Library Day, would not get off his Perambulator day or night, ignoring his studies and violating every protocol in order to trek alone inside the Atlas until the soles of his feet cracked, and then, according to Mother, his sanity cracked too. Sybil restricted his Library access, and the grown-ups took away his Vizer, but Elliot Fischenbacher unbolted a support from a shelf in the galley and over a series of nights tried to chop through an outer wall, right through the skin of the
Argos
itself, imperiling everyone and everything. Thankfully, Mother always says, before he could get through the outermost layer, Elliot Fischenbacher was subdued and confined to his family compartment, but in his confinement he squirreled away SleepDrops until he had enough for a lethal dose, and when he died his body was sent out the airlock without so much as a song. More than once Mother has pointed out the titanium patch in the corridor between Lavatories 2 and 3 where Crazy Elliot Fischenbacher tried to hack his way out and kill everyone on board.

But Konstance has stopped listening. At the opposite end of the table Ezekiel Lee, a gentle teenager not much older than she is, is groaning and driving his knuckles into his eye sockets. His meal is untouched. His pallor is sickly white.

Dr. Pori the mathematics teacher, seated on Ezekiel's left, touches him on the shoulder. “Zeke?”

“He's just tired from his studies,” says Ezekiel's mother, but to Konstance Ezekiel looks worse than tired.

Father comes into the Commissary with bits of compost stuck in his eyebrows. “You missed the conference with Mrs. Chen,” says Mother. “And you have dirt on your face.”

“Apologies,” says Father. He tugs a leaf from his beard and pops it in his mouth and winks at Konstance.

“How's our little pine tree today, Father?” asks Konstance.

“On track to punch through the ceiling before you're twenty.”

They chew their beefsteaks, and Mother embarks on a more inspiring tack, how Konstance ought to feel more pride to be part of this enterprise, that the crew of the
Argos
represents the future of the species, they exemplify hope and discovery, courage and endurance, they're widening the window of possibility, shepherding the cumulative wisdom of humanity into a new dawn, and in the meantime why not spend more time with her in the Games Section? How about Rainforest Run, where you tap floating coins with a glowing wand, or Corvi's Paradox, excellent for the reflexes—but now Ezekiel Lee is grinding his forehead into the table.

“Sybil,” asks Mrs. Lee, rising from her seat, “what's wrong with Ezekiel?” and the boy rears back, moans, and falls off his stool.

There are gasps. Someone says, “What's happening?” Mother calls out to Sybil again while Mrs. Lee lifts Ezekiel's head and sets it in her lap and Father shouts for Dr. Cha, and that's when Ezekiel retches black vomit all over his mother.

Mother shrieks. Father drags Konstance away from the table. The vomit is on Mrs. Lee's throat and in her hair, it's on the legs of Dr. Pori's worksuit, and everyone in the Commissary is backing away from their meals, astonished, and Father is rushing Konstance into the corridor as Sybil says,
Initiating Quarantine Level One, all nonessential personnel to their compartments immediately.

Inside Compartment 17, Mother makes Konstance sanitize her arms to her armpits. Four times she asks Sybil to check their vital signs.

Pulse and respiration rates stable
, says Sybil
. Blood pressure normal.

Mother climbs on her Perambulator and touches her Vizer and within seconds she's speed-whispering to people in the Library: “—how do we know it's not infectious—” and “—hope Sara Jane sterilized everything—” and “—aside from births, what has Dr. Cha seen, really? A few burns, a broken arm, some deaths from old age?”

Father squeezes Konstance's shoulder. “It'll be all right. Go to the Library and finish your school day.” He slips out the door and Konstance sits with her back against the wall and Mother paces, chin jutted, forehead creased, and Konstance goes to the door and presses it.

“Sybil, why won't the door open?”

Only essential personnel are allowed to circulate right now, Konstance.

She sees Ezekiel wince at the lights, fall off his stool. Is it safe for Father to be out there? Is it safe in here?

She steps onto her own Perambulator, beside her mother's, and touches her Vizer.

In the Library grown-ups gesticulate around tables while cyclones of documents whirl above them. Mrs. Chen herds the teenagers up a ladder to a table on the second tier and sets an orange volume in the center. Ramón and Jessi Ko and Omicron Philips and Ezekiel's little brother Tayvon watch as a foot-tall woman in a light-blue worksuit with the word
ILIUM
stitched on the breast emerges from the book.
If at some point during your long voyage
, she says,
it becomes necessary to quarantine in your compartments, be sure to stick to your routines. Exercise daily, seek out fellow crew members in the Library, and…

Ramón says, “You hear about people vomiting but to actually
see
it?” and Jessi Ko says, “I hear Quarantine One lasts seven days no matter what,” and Omicron says, “I hear Quarantine Two lasts two months,” and Konstance says, “I hope your brother feels better soon, Tayvon,” and Tayvon bunches his eyebrows like he does when he's concentrating on a mathematics problem.

Below them Mrs. Chen crosses the atrium and joins grown-ups around a table, images of cells and bacteria and viruses rotating in the space between them. Ramón says, “Let's go play Ninefold Darkness,”
and the four of them scamper up a ladder toward the Games Section, and Konstance watches the flying books a moment longer, then takes a slip of paper from the box in the center of the table, writes
Atlas
, and drops it into the slot.

“Thessaly,” she says, and drops through the Earth's atmosphere and floats over the olive-and-rust-colored mountainscape of central Greece. Roadways emerge below, the terrain cut into polygons by fences, hedgerows, and walls, a familiar village coming into view now—cinderblock privacy walls, slate rooftops beneath cliff faces—and she's walking the cracked pavement of a rural road in the Pindus Mountains.

Side streets split left and right, little dirt thoroughfares branching off those, drawing an elaborate tracery higher into the hills. She climbs past a row of houses built right up to the roadside, a disemboweled car in front of one, a face-blurred man in a plastic chair in front of the next. A houseplant wilts in a window; a sign with a skull on it has been mounted on a pole out front.

She turns right, following a route she knows well. Mrs. Flowers was right: the other kids find the Atlas hilariously obsolete. There's no jumping or tunneling like in the more sophisticated games in the Games Section: all you do is walk. You can't fly or build or fight or collaborate; you don't feel mud grab your boots or raindrops prick your face; you can't hear explosions or waterfalls; you can hardly leave the roads. And inside the Atlas everything besides the roads is as immaterial as air: walls, trees, people. The only solid thing is the ground.

Yet it fascinates Konstance; she cannot get enough of it. To drop feet-first into Taipei or the ruins of Bangladesh, a sand road on a little island off Cuba, to see the images of face-blurred people frozen here and there in their old-fashioned outfits, the pageants of traffic circles and piazzas and tent-cities, pigeons and raindrops and buses and soldiers in helmets frozen mid-gesture; the graffiti murals, the hulks of carbon-capture plants, the rusted army tanks, the water trucks—it's all there, an entire planet on a server. Gardens are her favorite: mango trees on a median reaching toward the sun
in Colombia; wisteria heaped on a café pergola in Serbia; ivy swarming up an orchard wall in Syracuse.

Just ahead an old woman in black stockings and a gray dress has been captured by the cameras halfway up a steep hill, her back hunched in the heat, wearing a white respirator mask and pushing a baby stroller full of what look like glass bottles. Konstance shuts her eyes as she walks through her.

A high fence, a low wall, and the road thins to a track switchbacking up through mixed vegetation. A silver sky plays overhead. Strange bulges and shadows lurk behind trees where the software pixelates, and as the trail climbs it continues to thin, the landscape growing more desolate and windswept, until she reaches a place where the Atlas cameras went no farther, and the trail peters out at a massive Bosnian pine, probably twenty-five meters high, twisting up toward the sky, like the great-great-grandfather of her sapling in Farm 4.

She stops, inhales: a dozen times she has visited this tree, seeking something. Through the gnarled old branches the cameras have caught a great cavalcade of clouds, and the tree clings to the mountainside as though it has grown there since the beginning of time.

She pants, sweating on her Perambulator inside Compartment 17, and leans as far forward as she can to touch its trunk, her fingertips passing through, the interface breaking down into a grainy smudge, a girl alone with a centuries-old pine tree in the sunbaked mountains of Thessaly, land of magic.

Before NoLight Father comes through the door of Compartment 17 wearing an oxygen hood with a clear visor and a cyclopic headlamp. “Just a precaution,” he says, his voice muffled. He sets three covered trays on Mother's sewing table as the door seals behind him, sanitizes his hands, and removes the hood.

“Broccoli cacciatore. Sybil says we're moving to printers in each compartment to decentralize meals, so this might be our last fresh produce for a bit.”

Mother gnaws her lips. Her face is as white as the walls. “How's Ezekiel?”

Father shakes his head.

“It's contagious?”

“No one knows yet. Dr. Cha is with him.”

“Why hasn't Sybil solved it?”

I am working on it
, says Sybil.

“Work faster,” says Mother.

Konstance and Father eat. Mother sits on her bunk, her food untouched. Again she asks Sybil to check their vital signs.

Pulse and respiration rates normal. Blood pressure shipshape.

Konstance climbs into her berth and Father stacks the trays by the door, then rests his chin on her mattress and pushes her curls out of her eyes.

“On Earth, when I was a boy, most everybody got sick. Rashes, funny little fevers. All the unmodified people got sick every now and then. It's part of being human. We think of viruses as evil but in reality few are. Life usually seeks to cooperate, not fight.”

The diodes in the ceiling dim and Father presses a palm to her forehead and in a great dizzy uprush comes the sensation of standing inside the Atlas atop the Theodosian walls, all that white limestone crumbling under the sun.
For as long as we have been a species,
Mrs. Flowers said,
we humans have tried to defeat death
.
None of us ever has.

The following morning Konstance stands in the Library at the second-tier railing with Jessi Ko and Omicron and Ramón waiting for Dr. Pori to arrive and commence the morning's lesson in precalculus. Jessi says, “Tayvon's late too,” and Omicron says, “I don't see Mrs. Lee either, and she was the one with Zeke's chunder all over her,” and the four children fall quiet.

Eventually Jessi Ko says she's heard that if you feel sick you're supposed to say, “Sybil, I'm not feeling well,” and if Sybil detects something wrong with you, she sends Dr. Cha and Engineer Goldberg to
your compartment wearing full biohazard containment suits, and Sybil will unlock the door so they can isolate you in the Infirmary. Ramón says, “That sounds awful,” and Omicron whispers, “Look,” because down on the main floor Mrs. Chen is leading all six members of the crew who have not yet turned ten across the atrium.

The children look tiny beneath the towering shelves. A few grown-ups send perfunctory
IT'S YOUR LIBRARY DAY
balloons up into the barrel vault and Ramón says, “They didn't even get pancakes.”