After I left Oscar I made my way back to the quarters I shared with her. I found her sitting at a table, shoulders hunched, doing what she had been doing daily and obsessively for weeks now: writing. She wrote on sheets of paper with a pencil. Paper hadn’t been hard to come by, since Vox manufactured small amounts of it for various purposes. Vox didn’t use conventional pens or pencils, however, but once I explained the concept to Oscar he had agreed to have a machine shop produce a few samples—rods of graphite in carbon-fiber tubes, more like what we used to call “mechanical” pencils.

The original Allison Pearl had been an obsessive writer, which was one reason her diaries had been so useful to the Voxish scholars who re-created her. I put my hand on Allison’s shoulder to let her know I was home. Leaning over her I caught a glimpse of her cursive script. (Big letters, shakily produced: she had been given Allison Pearl’s urge to write but not the physical skill itself.) Vox was anchored relatively close to the mainland of Antarctica, in a deep basin where the Ross Ice Shelf had once been; Allison had visited one of the high towers today, and she was writing about what she’d seen.

… the mountains are the Queen Maud Range in the ancient atlases, gray bleak teeth under an ugly sky dead as everything else on this ruined planet, green clouds dropping yellow rain on the windward slopes. It’s like a judgment on humanity and tho I know humans have moved on from this place it still looks like a monument to our mistakes, how we lived lives with consequences we could never truly predict or understand …

She cupped her hand over the paper and looked up at me.

“Oscar wants me to go inland,” I said.

Her eyes flared, but she kept silent.

I told her about the proposed expedition. We talked about that a while, the way we talked about everything these days, calculating the effect our words might have on an unseen audience. She didn’t like the idea, but she didn’t argue about it.