Undeterred, I went to the inn. After dark, Palaestra, the innkeeper’s maid, called me into the kitchen. She whispered that the wife of the innkeeper kept a bedchamber at the top of the house stocked with all sorts of equipment for the practice of magic, bird claws and fish hearts and even bits of corpse flesh. “At midnight,” she said, “if you crouch at the keyhole outside the door of that room, you might find what you seek…”

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEARS 55–58

Konstance

She’s four. Inside Compartment 17, an arm’s reach away, Mother walks on her Perambulator, the gold band of her Vizer sealed over her eyes.

“Mother.”

Konstance taps Mother’s knee. Tugs the fabric of her worksuit. No response.

A tiny black creature, no longer than Konstance’s pinkie nail, is climbing the wall. Its antennae wave; its leg joints extend, bend, extend again; the jagged tips of its mandibles would frighten her if they weren’t so small. She sets a finger in the creature’s path and it climbs aboard. It crosses her palm, proceeds to the back of her hand; the intricate complexity of its movements dazzles.

“Mother, look.”

The Perambulator whirs and pivots. Her mother, absorbed in another world, pirouettes, then extends her arms as though soaring.

Konstance presses her hand to the wall: the animal climbs off and continues along its original path, ascending past Father’s berth, until it disappears through the joint where wall meets ceiling.

Konstance stares. Behind her Mother flaps her arms.

An ant. On the Argos. Impossible. All the grown-ups agree. Don’t worry, Sybil tells Mother. It takes children years to learn the difference between fantasy and reality. Some longer than others.

She’s five. The ten-and-unders sit in a circle around the classroom Portal. Mrs. Chen says, “Sybil, please display Beta Oph2,” and a black-and-green sphere, ten feet in diameter, materializes in front of them. “These brown patches here, children, are silica deserts at the equator, and we believe that these are bands of deciduous forest in the higher latitudes. We expect that the oceans at the poles, here and here, will freeze over seasonally…”

Several of the children reach to touch the image as it rotates past, but Konstance keeps her hands pinned beneath her thighs. The green patches are beautiful, but the black ones—blank and serrated at the edges—frighten her. Mrs. Chen has explained that these are simply regions of Beta Oph2 that have not yet been mapped, that the planet is still too far away, that as they draw closer Sybil will take more detailed images, but to Konstance they look like chasms a person could fall into and from which a person could never escape.

Mrs. Chen says, “Planetary mass?”

“One-point-two-six Earth masses,” recite the children.

Jessi Ko pokes Konstance’s knee.

“Nitrogen in the atmosphere?”

“Seventy-six percent.”

Jessi Ko pokes Konstance’s thigh.

“Oxygen?”

“Konstance,” whispers Jessi, “what’s round, on fire, and covered with trash?”