Cloud Cuckoo Land (22 page)

T
he first time he comes north around the city walls and sees the estuary of the Golden Horn—a sheet of silver water a half mile wide, trundling slowly out to sea—it seems the most astonishing thing in the world. Gulls wheel overhead; wading birds as big as gods rise from reed brakes; two of the sultan's barges glide past as if by magic. Grandfather said that the ocean was large enough to contain every dream everyone had ever dreamed, but until now he had no comprehension of what that meant.

Up and down the western banks of the estuary, Ottoman landing stages swarm with activity. As the ox train descends toward the wharfs, Omeir makes out cranes and winches, stevedores unloading barrels and munitions, draft horses waiting with their carts, and is certain he will never see anything so resplendent again.

But as days turn to weeks, his initial wonder melts away. He and the bullocks are assigned to a team of eight hauling wagons of granite balls, quarried on the north shore of the Black Sea, from a landing stage along the Horn to the impromptu foundry outside the walls where stonecutters chisel and polish the balls to match the calibers of the bombards. The trip is four miles, uphill most of the way, and the guns' appetite for new projectiles is unappeasable. The ox trains work dusk to dawn, few of the animals have recovered from their long journey here, and all exhibit signs of distress.

Moonlight takes more of the load for his lame brother every day, and in the evenings, as soon as they are unyoked, Tree manages a few strides before he lies down. Omeir spends most of his nighttime hours bringing fodder and water to him. Chin on the ground, neck
bent, ribs rising falling rising falling: never in life would a healthy bullock lie like that. Men eye him, sensing a meal.

Rain, then fog, then sun hot enough to raise billowing clouds of flies. The sultan's infantry, working among whistling projectiles, fills sections of the moat along the Lycus River with felled trees, collapsed siege engines, tent-cloth, anything and everything they can find, and every few days, the commanders whip the men into a fever, then send another wave across.

They die by the hundreds. Many risk everything to retrieve their dead, and are killed while gathering the corpses, leaving yet more dead to gather. Most mornings, as Omeir yokes his oxen, smoke from funeral pyres lifts into the sky.

The road to the landing stages along the Horn bisects a Christian graveyard which has been transformed into an open-air field hospital. Men lie injured and dying between the old headstones: Macedonians, Albanians, Wallachians, Serbians, some in so much agony that they seem reduced to something less than human, as though pain were a leveling wave, a mortar troweled over everything that person once was. Healers move among the wounded carrying sheaves of smoldering willow and medics lead donkeys carrying earthen jars and from the jars they produce great handfuls of maggots to clean wounds, and the men squirm or scream or faint and Omeir imagines the dead buried just feet below the dying, their flesh rotted green, their skeleton teeth champing, and he is wretched.

Donkey carts hurry past the oxen teams in both directions, the faces of the carters crimped with impatience or fear or anger or all three. Hatred, Omeir sees, is contagious, spreading through the ranks like a disease. Already, three weeks into the siege, some of the men fight no longer for God or the sultan or plunder but out of a fearful rage. Kill them all. Get this over with. Sometimes the anger flares inside Omeir too, and he wants nothing more than for God to plunge a fiery fist through the sky and start crushing buildings one after the next until all the Greeks are dead and he can go home.

On the first of May the sky knots with cloud. The Golden Horn turns slow and black and pocked with the circles of a hundred million raindrops. The wagon team waits as stevedores roll the huge granite balls, veined white with quartz, down the ramp and stack them in the wagon.

Far off, a trebuchet slings rocks that fly in wild arcs over the city walls and disappear. They are a half mile back up the road toward the foundry, deep in the ruts, the oxen drooling and panting, their tongues hanging, when Tree staggers. He manages to get back up, but a few strides later he staggers again. The entire train stops and men rush to brake the wagon as the traffic hurries past.

Omeir ducks in among the animals. When he touches Tree's hind leg, the bullock shudders. Mucus drains in twin streams from his nostrils and he licks the roof of his mouth with his enormous tongue over and over and his eyes vibrate gently back and forth in their sockets. Their surfaces look worn and foggy and carry the distant dreaminess of cataracts. As though the past five months have aged him ten years.

Goad in hand, in his ruined shoes, Omeir walks the line of heaving oxen and stands below the quartermaster who sits scowling in the wagon atop the load.

“The animals need rest.”

The quartermaster gapes down half-bemused and half-disgusted and reaches for his bullwhip. Omeir feels his heart swing out over a black void. A memory rises: once, years before, Grandfather took him high on the mountain to watch the woodcutters bring down a huge, ancient silver fir, as tall as twenty-five men, a kingdom unto itself. They sang a low, determined song, driving their wedges into its trunk in rhythm as though hammering needles into the ankle of a giant, and Grandfather explained the names of the tools they used, caulks and punks and blocks and spars, but what Omeir remembers now, as the quartermaster rears back with his whip, is that when the tree tipped, its trunk exploding, the men shouting
hallo
, the air suddenly charged with the ripe, sharp aroma of cracking wood, what he felt was not joy but sorrow. All the timbermen seemed to exult in
their collective power, watching branches that for generations knew only starlight and snow and ravens smash down through the undergrowth. But Omeir felt something close to despair, and sensed that, even at his age, his feelings would not be welcome, that he should hide them even from his own grandfather. Why mourn, Grandfather would say, what men can do? There's something wrong with a child who sympathizes more with other beings than he does with men.

The tip of the quartermaster's bullwhip cracks an inch from Omeir's ear.

A white-bearded teamster who has been with them since Edirne calls, “Leave the boy be. So he is kind to beasts. The Prophet Himself, peace be upon Him, once cut off a piece of his robe rather than wake a cat that was sleeping on it.”

The quartermaster blinks down. “If we do not deliver this load,” he says, “we'll all be lashed, myself included. And I'll see to it that you and that face of yours get the worst of it. Move your beasts, or we'll all be meat for the crows.”

The men turn back to their animals, and Omeir climbs the rutted, ruined road, and crouches beside Tree and says his name and the bullock stands. He touches Moonlight on the withers with his goad and the bullocks lean into the yoke and begin to pull again.

THE WIZARD INSIDE THE WHALE

MISSION YEAR 64

DAY 1–DAY 20 INSIDE VAULT ONE

S
he wakes on the floor still wearing the bioplastic suit her father made. The machine flickers inside its tower.

Good afternoon, Konstance.

Scattered around her are the things Father pitched into the vestibule: Perambulator, inflatable cot, recycling toilet, dry-wipes, the sacks of Nourish powder, the food printer still in its wrapper. The oxygen hood lies beside her, its headlamp extinguished.

Drip by drip, horror trickles into her awareness. The two figures in the biohazard suits, the bronze mirror of their face shields reflecting back a warped version of the open doorway to Compartment 17. The tents in the Commissary. Father's haggard face, his pink-rimmed eyes. The way he flinched every time the beam of the headlamp passed over him.

Mother was not in her bed.

She feels exposed using the little recycling toilet. The bottom half of her worksuit is damp with sweat. “Sybil, how long was I asleep?”

You slept eighteen hours, Konstance.

Eighteen hours? She counts the sacks of Nourish powder: thirteen.

“Vital signs?”

Your temperature is ideal. Pulse and respiration rates perfect.

Konstance walks a lap of the vault, searching for the door.

“Sybil, please let me out.”

I cannot.

“What do you mean you cannot?”

I cannot open the vault.

“Of course you can.”

My primary directive is to tend to the well-being of the crew, and I have confidence that it is safer for you in here.

“Ask Father to come get me.”

Yes, Konstance.

“Tell him I'd like to see him right now.” The cot, the oxygen hood, the food sacks. Dread ticks through her. “Sybil, how many meals can a person print with thirteen sacks of Nourish powder?”

Assuming average caloric output, a Reconstituter could produce 6,526 fully nutritional meals. Are you hungry after your long rest? Would you like me to help you prepare a nutritious meal?

Father poring over technical drawings in the Library. The sewing stool screaming against the pressure of the outer door.
One of us is not feeling well
. Jessi Ko said the only way to get out of your compartment was to tell Sybil that you weren't feeling well. If Sybil detected something wrong with you, she'd send Dr. Cha and Engineer Goldberg to escort you to the Infirmary.

Father was not well. When he announced it, Sybil opened the door to Compartment 17 so he could be brought to wherever they were isolating sick crew members, but first he brought Konstance to Sybil's vault. With enough supplies to last her six and a half thousand meals.

Hands shaking, she touches the Vizer on the back of her head and the Perambulator on the floor whirs to life.

Off to the Library?
asks Sybil.
Of course, Konstance. You can eat afterw—

No one at the tables, no one on the ladders. No books fly through the air. Not a single person in sight. Above the aperture in the barrel vault, the sky radiates a pleasant blue. Konstance calls, “Hello?” and from beneath a desk trots Mrs. Flowers's dog, eyes shining, tail high.

No teachers leading classes. No teenagers sliding up and down the ladders to the Games Section.

“Sybil, where is everybody?”

Everyone is elsewhere, Konstance.

The numberless books wait in their places. The spotless rectangles of paper and pencils sit in their boxes. Days ago, at one of these tables, Mother read aloud:
The hardiest viruses can persist for months on surfaces: tabletops, door handles, lavatory fixtures.

A cold weight drops through her. She takes a slip of paper, writes,
How many years would it take a person to eat 6,526 meals?

The answer floats down:
5.9598

Six years?

“Sybil, please ask Father to meet me in the Library.”

Yes, Konstance.

She sits on the marble floor and the little dog climbs into her lap. His fur feels real. The little pink pads on the bottom of his feet feel warm. High above her, a solitary silver cloud, like a child's drawing, crosses the sky.

“What did he say?”

He has not yet replied.

“What time is it?”

Six minutes past DayLight thirteen, Konstance.

“Is everyone at Third Meal?”

They are not at Third Meal, no. Would you like to play a game, Konstance? Do a puzzle? There's always the Atlas, I know you enjoy going in there.

The digital dog blinks its digital eyes. The digital cloud grinds silently through the digital dusk.

By the time she steps off her Perambulator, the walls of Vault One have dimmed. NoLight coming. She presses her forehead to the wall and shouts, “Hello?”

Louder: “Hello?”

Difficult to hear through walls on the
Argos
but not impossible: from her berth in Compartment 17 she has heard water trickling through pipes, the occasional argument between Mr. and Mrs. Marri in Compartment 16.

She smacks the walls with the heels of her hands, then picks up the inflatable cot, still wrapped and bound, and throws it. It makes a terrible clamor. Waits. Throws it again. Each heartbeat sends a new stroke of terror through her. Again she sees Father poring over schematics in the Library. Hears what Mrs. Chen said, years ago:
This vault has autonomous thermal, mechanical, and filtration processes, independent of the rest of…
Father must have been making sure of that. He put her in here on purpose to protect her. But why didn't he join her? Why not put others inside with her?

Because he was sick. Because they may have been carrying an infectious and lethal disease.

The room darkens to black.

“Sybil, how is my body temperature?”

Ideal.

“Not too hot?”

All signs are excellent.

“Will you open the door now, please?”

The vault will remain sealed, Konstance. This is the safest place for you to be. Best to make a healthy meal. Then you can assemble your cot. Would you like a bit of light?

“Ask my father if he'll change his mind. I'll put together the bed, I'll do whatever you say.” She unstraps the cot, locks the aluminum legs into place, opens the valve. The room is very quiet. Sybil shimmers deep within her folds.

Maybe others are safe in the provision vaults, where the flour and new worksuits and spare parts are kept. Maybe those rooms also have their own thermal systems, their own water filtration. But then why aren't they in the Library? Maybe they don't have Perambulators? Maybe they're asleep? She climbs onto the cot and tears the blanket out of its wrapper and pulls it over her eyes. Counts to thirty.

“Did you ask him yet? Did he change his mind?”

Your father has not changed his mind.

In the hours to come she checks her forehead for a fever twenty times. Is that the oncoming blur of a headache? The lilt of nausea?
Temperature good
, says Sybil.
Respiration and heart rate excellent.

She paces the Library, shouts Jessi Ko's name down the galleries, plays Swords of Silverman, curls in a ball beneath a table and sobs while the little white dog licks her face. She sees no one.

Inside the vault the glimmering threads of Sybil tower above the cot.
Are you ready to resume your studies, Konstance? Our voyage continues, and it is paramount to maintain a daily—

Are people dying thirty feet away in their compartments? Are the corpses of everyone she has ever known waiting to be jettisoned through the airlock?

“Let me out, Sybil.”

I'm afraid the door remains sealed.

“But you can open it. You're the one controlling it.”

Because I cannot say whether it is safe for you outside the vault, I am not capable of unsealing the door. My primary directive is to tend to the well-being—

“But you didn't. You didn't tend to the well-being of the crew, Sybil.”

With every passing hour, I become more confident that you are safe where you are.

“What if,” Konstance whispers, “I don't want to be safe anymore?”

Rage next. She unscrews one of the cot's aluminum legs and swings it at the walls, scratching and dimpling the metal. When that proves unsatisfying, she turns to the translucent tube that surrounds Sybil, beating it until the aluminum shears and her hands feel shattered.

Where has everyone gone and who is she to be the one who is still alive and for what reasons in the universe would Father ever leave his home and doom her to this wretched fate? The diodes in the ceiling are very bright. A drop of blood runs off a fingertip onto the floor. The tube protecting Sybil remains unscratched.

Do you feel better?
asks Sybil.
It is natural to express anger from time to time.

Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone—you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you're never the same: not quite.

Eight days alone, ten eleven thirteen: she loses track. The door doesn't open. No one bangs on the other side of the walls. No one enters the Library. The only incoming water line into Vault One is a single, slow-dripping tube that she alternately plugs into the food printer or the recycling toilet. It takes several minutes to fill her drinking cup; she is perpetually thirsty. Some hours she presses her hands against the walls and feels trapped like an embryo inside a seed coat, dormant, waiting to wake up. Other hours she dreams of the
Argos
settling onto a river delta on Beta Oph2, the walls opening, everyone walking out into clear, clean rain, falling in sheets from the alien sky, rain that tastes faintly of flowers. A breeze strikes their faces; flocks of strange birds rise and wheel; Father smears mud on his cheeks and looks at her with glee, while Mother stares up, mouth wide, drinking from the sky—to wake from a dream like that is the worst kind of loneliness.

DayLight NoLight DayLight NoLight: inside the Atlas she walks deserts, expressways, farm roads, Prague, Cairo, Muscat, Tokyo, searching for something she cannot name. A man in Kenya with a gun slung over his back stands holding a razor as the cameras pass. In Bangkok she finds an open shopfront where a girl hunches behind a desk; on the wall behind her hang at least one thousand clocks, clocks with cat faces, clocks with panda bears for numbers, wooden clocks with brass hands, all their pendulums stilled. Always the trees draw her, a rubber fig in India, mossy yews in England, an oak in Alberta, yet not one image in the Atlas—not even the ancient Bosnian pine in the mountains of Thessaly—possesses the meticulous,
staggering complexity of a single lettuce leaf in Father's farm, or of her pine sapling in its little planter, its textures and surprises; the rich, living green of its long needles, tipped with yellow; the purple-blue of its cones; xylem trundling minerals and water up from the roots, phloem carrying sugars away from the needles to be stored, but just slowly enough that the eye cannot see it happen.

Finally she sits exhausted on the cot and shivers and the diodes in the ceiling dim. Mrs. Chen said Sybil was a book that contained the entire world: a thousand variations of recipes for macaroni and cheese, the record of four thousand years of temperatures of the Arctic Sea, Confucian literature and Beethoven's symphonies and the genomes of the trilobites—the heritage of all humanity, the citadel, the ark, the womb, everything we can imagine and everything we might ever need. Mrs. Flowers said it would be enough.

Every few hours the questions rise to her lips: Sybil, am I the only one left? Do you pilot a flying graveyard with one soul left on board? But she cannot bring herself to ask.

Her father is only waiting. He is waiting for everything to be safe. Then he will open the door.