“Ouch, ouch,” I cried, “my lip!” The fishermen had eyes like lamps and hands like fins and penises like trees and they lived on an island inside the whale with a mountain of bones at its center. “Unhook me,” I said. “I’m hardly a meal for men as strong as you. Besides, I’m not even a fish at all!”

The fishermen looked at each other and one said, “Is that you talking or is that the fish?” They carried me to a cave high on the mountain where a disheveled castaway wizard had lived for four hundred years and taught himself how to speak fish. “Great wizard,” I gasped. With every moment that passed it became harder to speak. “Transform me into a bird, please, a brave eagle, possibly, or a bright strong owl, so that I might fly to the city in the clouds where pain never visits and the west wind always blows.”

The wizard laughed. “Even if you grew wings, foolish fish, you could not fly to a place that is not real.”

“Wrong,” I said, “it does exist. Even if you don’t believe in it, I do. Otherwise what’s it all been for?”

“All right,” he said. “Show these fishermen where the big fish live, and I will give you wings.” I flapped my gills in agreement and he mumbled magic words and tossed me into the air, high over the mountain, to the very rim of the leviathan’s gums, where the gory pillars of his tusks sliced the moon…

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEAR 64

DAY 1–DAY 20 INSIDE VAULT ONE

Konstance

She 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.”