Gilmour, our resident cultural history expert, tells us about barn raising as we eat our lunch and for the first time in years I feel part of this place. I actually chat with people instead of scurrying away like a rat to my nest, and by the end of the first day the rudimentary structure is up and the excavated soil is almost ready to be put between the membranes.

  So many people ask Sung-Soo to dinner he suggests a communal meal in the Dome around a fire pit and half the colony goes to hear the tales he learned as a child around a fire. I nod off partway through, only to be awoken by Sung-Soo, who is laughing at me affectionately. I’m forgiven, and the assembled applaud me as I make my good-byes and leave. It isn’t until I get outside that I realize Kay has followed me.

  “You look shattered,” she says, slipping her arm around mine and squeezing it.

  “It’s been a busy day.”

  “I’ve never seen you look so happy.”

  I stop and look at her eyes, bright against the sky dusted with stars. “I like building things.”

  Even now, that statement is tainted. I recall my mother saying the same to a friend when they thought I was in another room. “She never decorates them; she just says she likes building things.” She was waving a wineglass at the latest construction project taking up most of the living room. “I don’t even know what they’re supposed to be.”

  “Have you asked her?” Her friend, a man who thought he might fit into the gap my father left, stooped to inspect it.

  “She says all kinds of stupid things; one minute it’s a city and the next it’s a tree. She can’t settle on anything. And they’re so ugly.”

  I saw something in the way he looked at her, something to suggest he might be an ally. “You don’t see this as art?”

  “Art?” She laughed and downed the rest of the wine. “I just wish she’d make something beautiful. Like the other little girls do. Or at least try.”

  Kay kisses my cheek. “And you’re bloody good at it. I won’t keep you—I know you’re off to bed—but I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about Sung-Soo’s”—she pats her stomach—“guest.”

  “I assumed it wasn’t anything bad, or else you would have told me or Mack.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing bad at all. In fact, it’s really useful. It’s unlocked a whole new line of research into digesting some of the proteins in the native plants here. I’m just going to leave it be. It’s not harming him; in fact, it’s kept him alive this long. I’ll keep a close eye on him, see if our germs and viruses give him a hard time, but his immune system is pretty damn robust.”

  “Have you talked to him about it?”

  “Briefly. He’s distracted, understandably.”

  We pause outside his partially constructed house. “I think it’s sweet that he wanted to live near to you,” she says.

  I don’t tell her that he wanted to live even closer, nor that I’ve planned his windows and doors to look out over all the directions except my house.

  “He wanted to be near Mack’s place at first,” I say. “But it would mean extending the formal boundary, and he couldn’t bear to wait for that to be approved by the council.”

  “At least there’s room on this side.”

  There’s room because I put my house as close to the edge as possible. The front door opens out onto the boundary instead of the rest of the colony and I don’t use the back door anymore. Only the grass and the animals see into my house when I go inside.

  Of course, we have more room than we need here, and space aplenty outside the boundary. We just don’t want to sprawl unnecessarily, like so many places did on Earth. We’re all too aware we’re at the foot of a holy place. It would be wrong to dominate the landscape here.

  “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, probably,” I say and kiss her cheek.

  “You are okay, aren’t you, Ren?” She holds my hand, stopping me from leaving. “You’ve looked so stressed lately. Are you eating properly?”

  “I’m fine.” I pull my hand free and wave with it, leaving her to watch a moment before going her own way.

  For a moment I wonder if I should follow her. Initiate something. But I’m tired and need to rest rather than stir up something that’s finally settled. In minutes I’m curled up, nestled in my own little nook. Not even the thought of that metal artifact and the mystery it brings with it can keep me awake.

  • • •

  AS I’m walking to the communal printers early the next morning I realize I haven’t been down to the Masher for a couple of days. The thought of what could have been lost already makes me clench my teeth with worry. I stop and consider turning back, but then I see Sung-Soo waving from inside the skeleton of his home and I know my only chance has passed.

  “I’ve been looking at some more things on Mack’s projector,” he says as I arrive.

  “Good morning.”

  He smiles. “Yes, sorry, good morning. And I wanted to ask you about the pipe that goes here. You said all my waste goes into the walls and gets filtered by the soil. So what’s the pipe for?”

  “The walls process human waste,” I reply. “The pipe will connect your house to the Masher.”

  He listens, enraptured, like the perfect student. I answer his questions, surprised by how much detail he wants. Most people just want to know that their house will be functional, not how.

  When the first lines of inquiry are exhausted, he comes with me to the printer I’ve left working overnight. The membrane is ready and already rolled onto a bolt so we can carry it over.

  When we go back outside, the first tendrils are starting to emerge from the pods on God’s city, nothing more than nubbins at this time of day.

  “People are getting excited about the seed ceremony,” Sung-Soo says. “Are you?”

  Oh shit. What a question. I’m dreading it, but I can’t tell him why, just as much as I can’t pretend to be excited. He’s too tuned in to people. “Sort of,” I say. “It makes me miss Suh more.” I look at him. “Messages only go so far, you know?”

  “What is she like? My grandmother?”

  Oh, he speaks of her in the present tense. We rarely talk about Suh in the colony, day to day, and not like this.

  “She’s the most amazing woman I know.”

  “How did you meet her?”

  “At university. We ended up viewing an apartment at the same time and decided to share.” I can’t help but smile at the memory. “It was so hard finding somewhere to live in Paris then; the university had sold off its student accommodation and the only places most of us could afford were in dangerous parts of the city.”

  “Paris?”

  “The capital of France and the European Union.” Neither of which would mean anything to him. “Millions of people lived there. It wasn’t a nice place, really.”

  “Was that where the food was? Is that why you had to live there?”

  It strikes me then, more than it ever has with the children of the colony, that Earth is an alien planet to him. We have no shared reference for what life was like there. How can I convey the sheer number of people, the ancient infrastructure or the emphasis on money and prestige? He’s a product of a life intimately connected with the environment, whereas the society I grew up in did everything it could to divorce us from that connection.

  If he was chipped, it would be easier; there are exabytes of history archives on the cloud, a lot recorded with full immersion. I make a mental note to see what could be interpreted by the projector to remove this barrier between him and our technology.

  “We were in Paris because it was the last independent university in Europe.” I pause. I need to stop referencing things that have no meaning or context for him. “It was the only place we could learn without more powerful people . . . using it as a chance to control us.”

  He looks lost. I shrug. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Suh changed everything. We live here now—that’s the important thing.”

  We reach the house skeleton and he helps me fix the first layer of the membrane. Every single thing I do is accompanied by a question. At the first chance he’s given, he does the work himself.

  The more time I spend with him, the less he reminds me of Suh. When I think back to the Suh I met that day at the apartment though, she’s nothing like the woman I followed here.

  We stood in the lobby with the awkwardness of two people sharing a space without knowing why the other was there. I assumed she was meeting someone else who lived there. In fact, she was waiting for another agent marketing the property. Both parties were unaware of the other and their brief argument when both turned up pushed Suh and me together into a shared social role of innocent but involved bystanders.

  As phone calls were made and bosses consulted, she held out a hand to me. “I’m Lee Suh-Mi,” she said. “But call me Suh.”

  “Renata Ghali,” I replied, but didn’t invite her to call me Ren.

  “Lee is my family name,” she said, dumping her bag on the floor and leaning against the wall. “Unfortunately, my parents didn’t realize that my ‘very pretty’ name sounds like an invitation for litigation in English.”

  I think I laughed. I was fascinated by the fact that she spoke to me in English, rather than French. It was a bit of a faux pas, in France, with so many of the natives infuriated by the sheer number of immigrants squeezed into their capital. Whether economic or intellectual, it didn’t matter. We didn’t belong. Did I give something away in my interaction with the agent? My French was flawless—I’d been speaking it all my life as it was my father’s first language. Perhaps my accent wasn’t Parisian enough.

  “Are you at the university?” she asked and I nodded. “I thought I recognized you. I’ve seen you on campus. I’m studying synthetic biology. You?”

  “Engineering, architecture and mathematics.”

  She looked impressed. “Which is your main subject?”

  “Engineering, but the other two count as a full degree.”

  “Are you some sort of genius, then?”

  I shrugged. I’d learned by then to not advertise the fact that I was gifted. It was only my first year and I was still working out who to be and where I fit in.

  Suh’s agent got off the phone first. “I’m so sorry about this; it really shouldn’t have happened,” he said in French. “We’re just waiting to hear back from the landlord and our booking people to see who made the appointment to view first.”

  “Pas de problème,” she replied, sounding Parisian as hell. “We’ll share, right, Ren? If we like the apartment, that is?”

  I realize now that I was always following her. Nothing but a little cork caught in her eddies and swirls, happy to bob along the river.

  Soon after we moved in, I asked her why she offered to share with someone she’d just met.

  “It made sense,” she said. “And it was fate, us being there at the same time like that. But I wouldn’t have suggested it if you were a philosophy major. They’re so miserable.”

  17

  SUNG-SOO’S HOUSE IS complete by the end of the day. We finish just after sunset and an impromptu housewarming party takes place in his empty house. He must think that’s all we do here, but before he arrived, there weren’t many celebrations in the colony on this scale.

  When it’s over, I help him clean up and then we end up sitting beneath the central dome’s ceiling, looking up at the stars. The design works well.

  “Come on,” he says, jumping to his feet.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, unwilling to get back up. I’m tired.

  “I want to find something that’s outside the colony. Now is the perfect time.”

  “It’ll be easier in daylight.”

  “No, it won’t. Come on.”

  I follow him out of his house and then out of the colony. He’s heading away from God’s city, back toward the mountains in the direction he came from. It’s after midnight and very few lights are on in the houses we pass.

  I’m used to sneaking out after dark, but doing so with someone else lends it an edge of excitement. It feels strange to be heading in the opposite direction of God’s city.

  Sung-Soo moves with grace and confidence through the tall grasses. He’s sure-footed in a way that I’m not; he’s naturally poised whereas I have to pay attention to where I’m going. I stumble a couple of times on rocks hidden among the tall stalks and it makes me irritable.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I saw one on the way here. I’m sure of it.”

  I haven’t told anyone that I’m striking out into the wilderness with him. Then I wonder why that thought bothers me. He won’t hurt me or lead me to my death. I put it down to the unfamiliarity of being with someone else on an excursion and decide to go down to the Masher in the morning, no matter what time I get to bed. The decision calms me.

  “Yes, over there—look!” I can barely make out his pointing finger in the pale starlight. “Come on.”

  I do my best to look where he pointed but can see nothing except shades of black. I follow and he’s moving faster now. The stalks of the grasses snap on my shoes and I lose my footing. Thankfully he doesn’t notice. Just as I’m about to ask what the hell we’re doing again, I catch sight of something ahead, a shift in the gray and black fabric of the landscape. I speed up in my eagerness to see what it is.

  As I get closer, the shimmer I detected farther back resolves into the shape of leaves clustered tight together. They’re reflecting the starlight, like the leaves are dusted with glitter. It’s too soft to see from a distance but up close it looks quite magical.

  “This is it,” Sung-Soo says with delight. “They’re easier to see at night.”

  I pluck one of the leaves and put it in a pocket to study at another time. Then I remember the botanists and pick leaves for them too. I turn back to the colony in an effort to get a bearing so that I might be able to lead them back to the bush later. It makes me wonder at his ability to have spotted this small plant, mostly obscured by the grasses, while dehydrated and exhausted, and remember it well enough to find it again.

  He’s scrabbling about in the dirt below the bush and I wonder if he’s hidden something there.

  “I want to carve again,” he says. “This is the best stuff for it.”

  “The roots?”

  “No.” He grunts with effort but I can’t see clearly enough to know why. I can hear the dirt landing on the grasses nearby as he excavates. “This.”

  He stands and holds out his prize: a large lump of . . . something. A natural deposit by the look of it, with the same iridescence of the pendant he wears around his neck. There isn’t enough light to make out the colors properly, but I can see they range from light to dark, swirling through the material.

  “It’s hard, but still soft enough to work with the knife,” he says. “You can always find it underneath this kind of bush. I don’t know why. It doesn’t kill the plant. If we leave it alone for a few months, another one will grow.”

  “Perhaps the root system attracts a mineral . . . or perhaps it’s a by-product of some kind of exchange between the roots and the soil,” I suggest. I know ten different people who will want to study it.

  “We can go back now,” he says and I see his teeth glint as he smiles.

  We return to the colony and say good-bye. Even though my body is so tired, I have no desire to sleep. Perhaps the thrill of discovery has made me too wired or perhaps the mysterious deposit has reminded me of my own mystery left to solve.

  Seeing as it seems to be the evening to go excavating, I return to the space beneath the tendril buttress and dig out my coveralls and the hinged metal artifact. I resist a moment of temptation to go on another excursion into the city and instead return home. The clothes no longer smell of the gunk they were covered in, thankfully, and are dry to the touch. I can’t be bothered to tidy away the things in front of the Masher chute, so I stuff the coveralls away beneath the pile of stuff waiting to be thrown out when I’ve got a minute.

  Once I’m as comfortable as I can get, I twist the object over and over, working the hinge and feeling the smoothness of the metal pieces. I know it’s not part of something printed here or on Atlas, nor a relic left from any of the equipment we took with us on that first expedition. But it was made for some purpose and used by someone who went into that place and left it behind. Was it discarded because it broke? Was it a piece of wreckage left behind after someone else succumbed to that hellish place unprotected?

  I call up the virtual replica I created and play around with some additions, but it’s like pissing into the dark. Nothing feels right and I don’t even know what I’m heading toward with each variation of the design.

  Then I decide to go hunting. I access the cloud and start searching in the archives taken from Earth, stashed away like a Noah’s ark of data before we left. I create a search algorithm, take a portion of Atlas’s processing capacity that’s barely used now, and work with the AI to refine the parameters. Then I leave it to scour photos and film for anything that might resemble the artifact. I instruct it to shortlist candidates and create a 3-D model of each one that I can manipulate in my visengineering software, sending me a daily digest of results, knowing that I’ll only get distracted if it pings me throughout the day.

  That done, I tuck the metal artifact under my makeshift pillow (I’ve no idea where my usual one has got to) and invite sleep in.

  18

  “WHERE IS GOD in all this?”

  I rest my head against the plasglass as the memory of my mother’s disapproval comes to its natural end. Why do I have to think about that every fucking time I come down in the Masher room?

  Sometimes I barely notice it, but today my mother’s words seem horribly loud. She’s probably dead now. I’ll never know how or where or when she died and the thought of that makes my throat tight. Was she alone? Was it sudden or slow? Was she even herself at the time or had dementia taken her like so many others?