A single slip of paper drops from the sky:

Qaanaaq

Inside the Atlas she descends slowly over the north coast of Greenland: three thousand meters, two thousand. Qaanaaq is a treeless harbor village trapped between the sea and hundreds of square miles of moraine sediment. Picturesque little houses—many slumped from being built on thawing permafrost—have been painted green, bright blue, mustard yellow, with white window frames. Along the coastline, among the rocks, lies a marina, some docks, a few boats, and a tumult of construction equipment.

It takes her days to solve it. She eats, sleeps, submits to Sybil’s lessons, searches, searches again, roaming outward in circles from Qaanaaq, skimming the sea. Finally, in a region of Baffin Bay eight miles from the town, on a bare island, all rock and lichen, a place that was probably covered by ice only a decade before, she finds it: a lone red house that looks like a child’s drawing of a barn with a white flagpole out front. At the base of the flagpole stands a little wooden owl no taller than her thigh, looking as if it were sleeping.

Konstance walks up, touches it, and its eyes flip open.

Long concrete piers reach into the sea. A fifteen-foot fence, topped with razor wire, grows out of the ground behind the little red house, and wraps itself around the entire circumference of the island.

No Trespassing, read signs in four languages. Property of Ilium Corporation. Keep Out.

Behind the fence stretches a vast industrial complex: cranes, trailers, trucks, mountains of construction materials piled among rocks. She walks as much of the fence line as the software will permit, then rises and hovers above it. She sees cement trucks, figures in hard hats, a boat shelter, a rock road: in the center of the complex is a huge white circular half-finished structure with no windows.

Handpicked, transported, quarantined, trained for six months, sedated for launch.

They are constructing the thing that will become the Argos. But there are no rockets; there is no launchpad. The ship wasn’t assembled in modules in space: it never went to space at all. It’s on Earth.

She is looking at the past, images taken seven decades before, then redacted from the Atlas by the Ilium Corporation. But she is also looking at herself. Her home. All these years. She touches her Vizer, steps off the Perambulator, a whirlwind turning inside her.

Sybil says, Did you have a nice walk, Konstance?

NINETEEN

AETHON MEANS BLAZING

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio T

… I said, “Why do the others ·[seem?]· content to fly about, singing and eating, day after day, bathed by the warm zephyrs, soaring round the towers, yet inside me this ·[sickness?]·…”

… the hoopoe, vice-undersecretary to the viceroy of Provisions and Accommodations, swallowed his beakful of sardines and flared his feathered crown.

He said, “You sound an awful lot like a human right now.”