From the shadows crawl a thousand demons and she swings her headlamp toward them and the demons recede and her light swings away and the demons lunge right back into place. The stool shrieks again. The outer door closes another centimeter.

“I was a fool.” His hand, as he runs it across his forehead, looks skeletal; the skin of his throat sags; the silver of his hair dims to gray. For the first time in her life, her father looks his age, or older, as though, breath by breath, his last years are being siphoned away. Into the mask of her hood she says, “You said that what’s so beautiful about a fool is that a fool never knows when to give up.”

He inclines his head at her, blinking fast, as though a thought runs out in front of him, too quick to catch. “It was Grandmom,” he murmurs, “who used to say that.”

Oxygen at twenty percent, says the hood.

A bead of sweat clings to the tip of Father’s nose, quivers, then drops.

“At home,” he says, “in Scheria, an irrigation ditch ran behind the house. Even after it dried up, even on the hottest days, there was always a surprise if you knelt there long enough. An airborne seed, or a weevil, or a brave little starflower all by itself.”

Wave after wave of drowsiness breaks over Konstance. What is Father doing? What is he trying to tell her? He rises and stumbles over the mangled stool and out of the vestibule.

“Father, please.”

But his face passes out of sight. He braces one foot against the edge of the door, wrestles out the mangled stool, and the vestibule closes.

“No, don’t—”

Outer door sealed, Sybil says. Beginning decontamination.

The noise of the fans builds. She feels cold jets against the bioplastic of her suit, shuts her eyes against the three pulses of light, and the inner door opens. Terrified, exhausted, biting back panic, Konstance drags the toilet inside, the sacks of Nourish powder, the cot, the food printer in its wrap.

The inner door seals. The only light is the glow of Sybil flickering inside her tower, now orange now rose now yellow.

Hello, Konstance.

Oxygen at eighteen percent, says the hood.

I adore visitors.

One two three four five.

Fifty-six fifty-seven fifty-eight.

Oxygen at seventeen percent.

Eighty-eight eighty-nine ninety. Mother’s unfolded blanket. Father’s hair damp with sweat. A bare foot sticking out of a tent. She reaches one hundred and disconnects the hood. Pulls it off her head. Lies on the floor as the SleepDrops drag her down.

TEN

THE GULL

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio K