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.

THIRTEEN

OUT OF THE WHALE AND INTO THE STORM

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio N