As she approaches I notice something hanging at her throat from a leather thong. It’s a new pendant, one shaped like a hand cupping a face, carved from the same chunk of that strange deposit as mine. It makes me stop and so she closes the distance between us, kissing my cheek when she reaches me.

  “Sung-Soo gave you that?” It’s half question, half statement.

  She nods and smiles, brushing it with her fingertips. “Isn’t it beautiful? He carved it himself. I was wearing the ruby necklace you like, but he gave this to me while I was waiting for you and it’s just too nice to stay in my pocket. Do you like it?”

  I nod, unimpressed with the animal response that flared up inside as she spoke about it. As if I would be the only person he would give such a gift. I don’t deserve to be singled out for his affection anyway.

  “You shouldn’t have waited for me,” I say to her, pointing at the entrance to the city’s courtyard. “You’ll be at the back now.”

  She shrugs. “I don’t mind. I wanted to see if you’re all right.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I didn’t think you’d last at Sung-Soo’s.”

  “Why?”

  “You like your own space too much.”

  “I’d like to . . . Can we . . . I’ve been missing you.” I finally get the words past my lips.

  “Come to my place after the party,” she says before kissing me with her hand cupped around my cheek, like the one on her pendant.

  Even as I nod I worry that I’ve made the wrong decision. Am I just seeking solace in the easiest place I can find it? Why can’t I just be in the moment like she can? I bet she isn’t worrying about what she said as she takes my hand and leads me through the gate.

  We squeeze in at the back and there are hundreds of people between me and the entrance. Everyone looks their best, from children who have been coaxed into tidiness and ribboned hair to people I never see in anything but coveralls now wearing suits and dresses.

  Some are chattering with one another; some are looking around and up at the city with the telltale slow movements of LensCam recording. When they look up at its heights, do they really think Suh is up there? Really? Or is this event now relegated to the status of “tradition” so established that people don’t really think about it at all?

  If Mack and I don’t put an end to this, will it endure? Would the children here be content with a fantasy of the undying Pathfinder, waiting for the right time to return, kept alive by strange and unnatural means in that alien place? Four generations from now will there be twee stories of Suh and the colony founders? In eight generations will they be regarded as allegory and nothing more?

  They all seem so happy. I search the faces I can see from the back for any signs of doubt or cynicism, and there’s none. They’ve all been sucked into the glorious sideshow and if they have any disbelief, they’ve willingly suspended it to make room for a good old-fashioned get-together.

  Mack understands these people far too well. They may be scientists and experts and handpicked from thousands of hopefuls vying for every single place on Atlas, but they’re just people. Just frightened, insecure little things millions of miles from home.

  This is home now.

  I look down at my feet. What would Suh make of this? Would she be appalled? Flattered? I think she would be bemused.

  “Sung-Soo looks a bit freaked-out.” Kay is pointing toward the entrance.

  I follow her finger until I spot him next to Carmen, who is holding his arm and gushing animatedly at him. He’s looking back over the crowd.

  I don’t think he looks freaked-out at all. I think he looks cynical. He looks like a man waiting for a magic show when he knows how the tricks are done.

  “Shit, he looks like Suh,” Kay says.

  He’s wearing his hair loose and it’s shining like patent leather in the sunlight. Carmen just won’t shut up, even though he’s not replying or speaking at all. He’s scanning the crowd, taking in the faces. Is he looking for me? For Mack?

  He doesn’t find whatever he’s looking for and turns back to face the entrance.

  “Marco’s coming!”

  The hushed whisper flies from the child by the gate, one who’s been staring out the whole time, hoping to be the first one to see him. It’s quickly propagated through the crowd, leaving silence in its wake as everyone turns around and looks toward the entrance expectantly.

  Marco arrives soon after, dressed in black linen trousers and top, looking significantly leaner than the last time I saw him. He pauses at the sight of everyone, then fixes his eyes on the entrance to the tunnel at the top of the slope and strides on. The crowd parts ahead of him, pushing Kay and me farther to the side as it does so.

  This is something he has worked so hard for. He’s meditated, avoided all stimulants and any drugs, lived apart for months, all to be the star of Mack’s show.

  I look away again, fearful that if I watch too much more, the urge to break the social spell will be too great to resist. Instead, I reach for Kay’s hand and focus on its softness and the way she squeezes mine back.

  If I start something between us again, the same thing will come between us. Is it time to open up to her? I try to imagine telling her about the house, even showing her, but the thought rapidly dissolves into anxious slurry. She’d never want to be with me if she knew about that.

  I glance at her and she’s watching Marco’s progress through the crowd just like everyone else. I want to talk to her, but it would be selfish to do so now.

  She notices my attention and leans across to whisper “What?” in my ear.

  I press my cheek against hers and whisper back: “I had a little girl. The father and I agreed we’d be better apart. She had a genetic disorder. She died when she was three.”

  She pulls back, still holding my hand tight, to look at me properly. At the edge of my vision I can see Marco walking up the slope to the entrance. She looks shocked, then full of pity, I think. Her eyes shine and she embraces me, taking care to avoid my hurt shoulder.

  “You were right before,” I whisper. “I didn’t share much with you at all. I’m sorry.”

  “Why now?” she whispers back.

  “Because I suck at timing,” I reply and she stifles a laugh. “Because I was scared.”

  “We’ll talk more later,” she says and kisses me again, this time with the intimacy and tenderness of a lover.

  We both focus on Marco as he reaches the door. I feel horribly separated from the crowd, united in their anticipation, but no longer totally alone. Kay is with them and holding her breath too, but there is a connection between us now. I feel like I’ve started to rebuild a bridge between us and even though it’s a flimsy, rickety thing, it exists and that’s enough for now.

  Marco presses his hand against the join of the door and the valve opens, just like the ones inside the tunnels that I’m used to. He leans back slightly, nervous—as everyone is—of the air inside. We tested it in the first year in full environmental protective gear and it’s nothing like the atmosphere farther inside. But still, he’s understandably cautious.

  He takes a moment to prepare himself and then enters the tunnel. Those closer and at a different angle will see him take a few steps inside, pluck the seed from the plant and eat it. They won’t see the puff of pheromones in the dingy interior, nor will they see any sign that he’s been affected when he emerges.

  Like the others before him, he comes out to face the crowd with a huge smile. He begins to speak the same old stuff as the others before about how much we’ve achieved, how much there is still to do. I tune out when he starts to talk about impressions of connecting with Suh, uninterested in the drama thanks to my knowledge of the special effects Mack has used.

  My attention drifts to Sung-Soo. I can see his face in profile, mere meters from Marco, and I’m disturbed by the frown on his face. Perhaps he’s just concentrating, but I expected to see him . . . I don’t know . . . enthralled like everyone else around him.

  The frown leaves his face and he glances at the people around him, surreptitiously, like someone trying to find something interesting to look at during a sermon the rest of the congregation is attending to with diligence. It’s as if he’s checking their reactions. To compare them with his own perhaps?

  I start to record, but it takes longer than I’d like, having to activate with eye movements rather than hand or speech interface. I don’t trust my ability to read people. I’ve never been very good at it. I want to show Mack.

  I’m left with a gnawing nervousness in the pit of my stomach and I want to leave. It rapidly escalates into a need to get away from here—away from all of it—as quickly as possible.

  “I don’t feel too well,” I whisper to Kay. “I need to go and rest.”

  She gives a concerned glance. “Ping me if you need me,” she whispers back, not tearing her attention away from Marco fully. She knows my chip will automatically inform her if there’s something seriously wrong.

  I push my way past the people between me and the gates, grateful that I’m so close to the back. No one cares about what I’m doing; they’re all fixated on Marco and the drug-induced crap he’s spouting like a transcendental experience.

  My heart is pounding like there are dogs hunting me and by the time I’m through the gates and around the edge of the city I feel like I’m about to have a full-blown panic attack. I haven’t had one for years.

  Initially I head toward the colony, falling back on old techniques my father taught me when I suffered from them as a teenager. I focus on my breath and stop trying to work out why I feel so panicky. All that matters is getting a steady inward-and-outward rhythm.

  Soon they’ll all come out and go to the Dome. There will be food and drink and laughter and all the things I can’t face right now. I change direction and head for the southern gate. Maybe I’ll find some peace between the grass and the sky.

  31

  ONCE I’M OUT of the colony and putting distance between myself and God’s city behind me with every step, my heart steadies itself and it’s easier to breathe again. I listen to the distant animal calls, the gentle wash of sound from the breeze through the grasses, and I can’t understand why I felt so panicked. It’s over now. It’s done. The spectacle has given everyone the excuse to come together, to focus on the positive aspects of the past year and the perfect excuse to drink and eat far too much. All the worry about whether Carmen would derail it, all the concern over getting the props in place and whether the leading man would speak the right lines—all that is over now. Mack will be his usual self once more and won’t demand anything of me over and above my usual duties.

  I’m free to solve the puzzle of the city now. If people remark on my absence, Kay will explain. They saw the sling; they’ll be primed for it.

  I walk a little farther until I can’t hear anything from the colony and then make a little patch to sit on by walking in a circle, easing the stalks flat with the toe of my boot. I’m like a slow, ungainly cat making a temporary place to sun myself. When there’s a small circle of flattened grass, I plunge myself into a green well, lidded with nothing but the blue sky. It hasn’t rained for over a week now, and it’s not forecast for another three days.

  Once I’m relatively comfortable, I pull the CrawlerCam data that’s been processed through the visengineering software. An electric thrill shoots through my chest when I see it’s already modeled fifty objects.

  Looking through them one by one makes me feel like an archaeologist. There are tools and things clearly made for some function or other, made mysterious to me by the distance of time and culture. All the items listed as missing from our party’s original manifest are there in remarkably good condition apart from a bent prong on one of the probes. I spot something with a similar piece of hinged metal to the artifact I found and put them together, forming something like a visor with a couple of attachments I can’t explain. I find three lenses, their width matching the two roughened sections of the piece I have at home, the third matching a section of one of the attachments, perhaps for enhanced magnification.

  After a couple of hours working through the individual models, I’m beginning to see a possible theme. I free my arm from the sling, too excited to be held back by working one-handed any longer. I open a new design project and import some of the objects in, piecing them into a whole until I can see a flight suit taking shape. The wing piece I saw before is now part of a larger whole with a mirror of it forming what seems to be a retractable pair that can be housed in something akin to a backpack.

  The pilot would have been about five feet tall with longer fingers than that of the average human and an extra knuckle in each one, by the look of the gloves. There’s nothing left of them, not even a skeleton, which makes me shiver.

  I try to imagine that person from another world gliding down, probably from a ship in close orbit, landing and walking into God’s city still wearing the very craft used to make Planetfall. There are only enough pieces for one suit. He or she came alone. Perhaps the pilot was also a Pathfinder, having had the same encounter with a mysterious plant and the same compulsion to eat it.

  Suh said the pheromones from the plant—and the seed itself—would work only on humans. The city responds to human touch—at least on the outside; I’ve never dared touch anything in there without a glove. The flight suit was designed for a humanoid shape. I lie back on the stalks, unable to keep sitting now that my mind is so filled with the ramifications of this find. Could it be that humanity wasn’t just an evolutionary quirk of Earth alone? Could it be that our existence was somehow engineered and the same process carried out across multiple solar systems in the galaxy? Could it be that God scattered our building blocks, then called us back when we were ready?

  I’m getting ahead of myself—these are just conclusions I’ve leaped to in the moment, hardly backed up by rigorous testing and data. But I can’t help but be snared in the jaws of the idea that we’re one of many seedlings evolved in isolation but part of a larger project. I’m sweating. I’m too small and feeble to hold these ideas and questions inside without feeling strained at the seams. I start to laugh; then I want to weep; then I’m covering my eyes, unable to even look up at the clouds as all I believed about us as a species unravels within me.

  Then I wish I didn’t know about the room and the suit inside it. I wish I never came here. I should have stayed on Earth and let Suh go. How much easier to regret not leaving than being here now—knowing so much and yet so little—so very far from home. I could have saved those lives, been the person my father hoped I would be, been there for him as he became frail and protected him from a world leaving him and his values behind. I could have been there for my mother too, when her string of lovers finally came to an end and she was facing death alone.

  Where Dad had wept and doused me in bitter regrets and drowning loss, Mum listened and nodded when I explained I was leaving on Atlas when it was ready. And for the first time there was no sense of exasperation or dismissive assumptions that what I was talking about was so unfathomable it wasn’t even worthy of discussion. She just nodded as I rattled off the reasons that formed my preemptive defense.

  She’d wept in front of her friend when I made my announcement. He hadn’t wanted to be there, but she had insisted, thinking I was about to tell her I’d been nominated for some sort of award or that I was off to another country after being headhunted by some prestigious gov-corps. She could think that because she didn’t understand I’d never work for something like that.

  So I had to tell her I was leaving on Atlas in front of a stranger and that meant she had to put on the show of being distraught until she’d pushed him out the door. She made a passing attempt to make it look authentic by dabbing at her eyes as she came back to the living room, and I didn’t call her out on it. Perhaps part of me wanted to believe the tears. Perhaps the rest of me thought I should let her do what she felt she needed to in order to maintain her facade. I don’t remember as clearly as I do the sight of the old plane trees in the London square her flat overlooked. It was fenced off from people who couldn’t afford to touch the peeling bark on the trees. Those were reserved for dogs owned by the wealthy to piss against three times a day when walked by the au pair.

  She sat in her usual way in the antique chair, recently upholstered in the latest fashionable fabric, perched in a position that made her figure look perfect. She had been arranging herself to look her best for so long she didn’t realize she did it anymore.

  She didn’t say a word until my unnecessary defense fizzled out. I should have known I wouldn’t get the same response from her as from my father, but telling him had been so traumatic I’d readied myself anyway.

  For a moment, I thought she just didn’t care. Then I realized that she understood why I had to go. I didn’t even have to justify it.

  We looked at each other for what seemed like a long time. I met her gaze and she met mine without even a flicker of performance or social agenda. I fancied I could see someone real, looking out of her eyes like a lone woman looking out from a house on a hill.

  “When do you go?”

  “In about eighteen months, if everything goes according to schedule. I almost didn’t tell you until just before I went, but one of the psychs on the project, Dr. Lincoln, said we should tell people when we’re certain. To give us time to—”

  “I’m glad you told me. I understand. It would kill you to be left behind, always wanting to know what they’ll find. You wouldn’t be living anymore, wishing yourself so far away.”