It wasn’t just the one pipe but several, visible as dark shadows against the gray sky. Some were straight, some curved at a right angle at the top. A sudden cone of light hit one of the pipes, revealing a yellow surface with riveted joints. Its angled opening was torn, as if something had burst out of it with great force. The light moved on. Someone was walking around among the pipes. More figures joined the first, bringing more light. Vanja flattened herself against the ground. Cones of light swept across green protective suits. The shortest pipe ended at head height; some of the others were twice as tall. All of them looked easily wide enough to crawl into. The people in overalls didn’t make any attempts, though. They took measurements, made notes, and talked among themselves. One of them opened up a canister and started to paint letters on the pipes. Two others began picking their way up the slope. Vanja crawled backward until she reached flat ground, then ran north at a crouch. If those people were going anywhere, it was probably back to Amatka. She looked back to see the beam of a flashlight sweeping across the rise. She lay down on her stomach again and waited. She hadn’t run like that for a long time; it was hard to breathe without making noise. She pressed her mouth into the grass. The scent of wet vegetation and cold filled her nostrils. More silhouettes carrying flashlights arrived at the top of the rise. They were walking very slowly. One of the beams swung her way and then back again. The sky was growing lighter; they would be able spot her any moment now. She rose into a crouch and ran farther north.
If she hadn’t banged her shin on its edge, she would have run right past the low pipe in the semidarkness. She toppled over and for a moment could do nothing but hold her leg and whimper. When the pain had subsided somewhat, she sat up and peered down. The opening was perhaps three feet across. On the inside, right below the edge, she could glimpse the rungs of a ladder. She leaned closer to the opening to listen. At first, there was only the pounding of her pulse in her ears, the wind rushing across the edge of the opening, the echo of her breathing. Then, something like distant music, a snatch of notes forever repeating. She listened for a long moment but couldn’t decide if it really was music or her own head trying to create order from chaos.
It occurred to her that more rungs in the pipe had become visible. She looked up at the gray expanse of the sky, which was ever so slowly growing brighter. In the old world, the sky had been full of light. Lars had said so: that the sky was blue in the daytime and black at night, and that glowing lights traversed the sky, and one could follow their paths with one’s eyes. That it was sometimes overcast, but that was only vapor; the sky was still there behind it. That there was something beyond the clouds, something that moved. This was always followed by Vanja’s inevitable question: Is there something behind the gray of our sky?
We don’t know, Lars had said. Maybe, maybe not.
The inhabitants of Colony Five had thought there was. They missed the skies of the old world. They longed for light. They talked about it so much that something finally appeared: a sun, a white-hot sphere that broke through the sky and burned the colony to a cinder. Such is the world in which we live, Teacher Jonas said. The words need guarding. A citizen who doesn’t guard their words could destroy their commune.
Vanja arrived at the office just before eight. Today’s first batch of forms was already on the reception desk, together with a handwritten note:
Anders is off sick today. Kindly tend to his tasks when you have completed your own. —Sec.
She took the note and walked upstairs to the long corridor of small offices on the first floor. The first office belonged to the head secretary, a graying woman in her fifties dressed in a rumpled green shirt. She was hunched over a ledger but looked up with a benevolent smile when Vanja opened the door. “Anders is off sick,” Vanja said.
“Yes.” The secretary nodded and continued to write in the ledger, with a dry, scratching noise.
“I don’t know what Anders’s tasks are.”
The secretary firmly underlined something. “Oh. You haven’t watched him work?”
Vanja considered this. “I suppose I haven’t,” she replied. “I’ve been very busy.”
Moving with deliberate slowness, the secretary put her pen down and looked up at Vanja. There were dark circles under her eyes. She gave Vanja another smile. “Sort incoming reports, write a summary, file or dispose of reports as needed. There’s a marking schedule on the notice board. And a manual under the reception desk.”
“I see,” Vanja replied. “I’ll go do that, then.”
The secretary nodded slowly. “Very good.” She turned back to her ledger.
Vanja returned to the reception and looked for the manual. The space behind the desk was filled with carefully sorted rubber stamps, blank forms, notepads, sharpened pencils in a small cup, stackable letter trays.
She found the manual in a drawer under the desk: a small stapled bundle of good paper describing daily routines, marking order, emergency procedures, and instructions for machinery that Vanja didn’t recognize and hadn’t actually seen anywhere in the office. While she browsed through the manual, another courier arrived with more documents.
She started by separating forms from reports. The reports came in thin folders printed with titles like Patient Statistics: Clinic Department 3, or Report: Results of the New Hygiene Protocol, or Follow-Up: Special Diet Plan for Mushroom Farmers with Dermatological Issues. The receptionist’s task was to record the total number of reports into a log along with titles, a summary of the contents, and date of registration; sign it; and then date the signature. After that, everything had to be filed according to a system that the manual needed three pages to describe. Vanja realized that Anders had actually been going easy on her.
One of the reports gave her pause. The title was short: Incident Report. Vanja opened the folder. The account of the collapse in the mushroom farm took up only a single page. They called it a solidity incident. Information was scant: the floor had collapsed and exposed a hitherto unknown cavity. Said cavity was now sealed. Three workers had perished. That was all, except for a short sentence at the bottom of the page: further information restricted, committee-level clearance.
In other words, no reports of what she had seen on the tundra, or what Ivar had seen under the mushroom farm, would cross her desk.
Vanja quickly put the report aside when the courier returned with a fresh stack of papers, this time from a children’s house. She would have to speed up if she were to have any hope of finishing today.
It was only when she had sorted, stamped, and entered everything into the books and worked through almost the whole midday break that Vanja realized she couldn’t find the keys to the archive. She went back upstairs to the secretary, who pulled out a drawer and removed a small key from a key ring.
“I’m making a note of your loan of this archive key,” the secretary said. “The time is thirteen twenty-two. You will return the key thirty minutes from now, at the latest.” She put the key in Vanja’s hand.
“What if I need more time?”
The secretary smiled and shook her head. “I’m sure you won’t.”
According to the wall clock above the door, Vanja had seven minutes left of her allotted archive time. She had filed everything except the incident report, which according to the manual belonged in the Incidents section of the drawer labeled MUSHROOM FARM. The section was empty. She slipped the folder in behind the divider and skimmed the other sections. They bore labels like PLANNING, ACTIVITY, STAFF, CONSTRUCTION. Behind the CONSTRUCTION divider lay a fat folder from which a corner of a yellowed sheet of good paper stuck out. Six minutes left. Vanja pulled the folder out and carefully leafed through the documents. This was an old file, the paper yellow and brittle. The contents were sorted in chronological order—blueprints, diagrams, and calculations, none of which Vanja could decipher but which probably referred to the construction of the chambers. A report from the committee meeting that approved the construction plan made things a little clearer. It was dated the sixday of the third month, year fifteen, written by Oltas’ Raisa One. It began with a long enumeration of the agenda: opening the meeting; nominating and approving the president, secretary, members responsible for checking the report; establishing the meeting’s validity; and approving the agenda. Finally, at Item 8, a clue.