Logan looks at Nessa, who nods. “I see no reason to delay,” he says.
The lifter waits on a second, slightly elevated platform, its props pointed upward. As they walk to it, Wilcox brings Logan up to speed. Per Logan’s instructions, no one has approached the house, although the building’s inhabitant, a woman, has been sighted several times, working in the yard. Wilcox’s team has moved equipment to the camp in order to bag the house, if that’s what Logan wants to do.
“Does she know she’s being watched?” Logan asks.
“She’d have to, with all those lifters going in and out, but she doesn’t act like it.” They take their seats in the bird. From the portfolio under his arm, Wilcox removes a photo and hands it to Logan. The image, taken from a great distance, is grainy and flattened; it shows a woman with a nimbus of white hair, hunched before a vegetable patch. She is wearing what appears to be a kind of thickly woven sack, almost shapeless; her face, angled downward, is obscured.
“So who is she?” Wilcox says.
Logan just looks at him.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Wilcox says, holding up a hand in forbearance, “and pardon me, but no fucking way.”
“She’s the sole human inhabitant of a continent that’s been depopulated for nine hundred years. Give me another theory and I’ll listen.”
“Maybe people came back without our knowing it.”
“Possible. But why just her? Why haven’t we found anybody else in thirty-six months?”
“Maybe they don’t want to be found.”
“She has no problem with it. ‘Come to me’ sounds like an engraved invitation.”
The conversation is drowned out by the roar of the lifter’s engines; a lurch and they are airborne again, rising vertically. When a sufficient altitude is achieved, the nose tips upward as the rotors move to a horizontal position. The lifter accelerates, coming in low over the water and then the coast. The ocean vanishes. All below them is trees, a carpet of green. The noise is tremendous, each of them encased in a bubble of their own thoughts; there will be no more talking until they land.
Logan is drifting at the edge of sleep when he feels the lifter slowing. He sits up and looks out the window.
Color.
That is the first thing he sees. Reds, blues, oranges, greens, violets: extending from the forested base of the mountains to the sea, flowers paint the earth in an array of hues so richly prismatic it is as if light itself has shattered. The rotors tilt; the aircraft begins to descend. Logan breaks his gaze from the window to find Nessa staring at him. Her eyes are full of a mute wonder that is, he knows, a mirror to his own.
“My God,” she mouths.
The camp is situated in a narrow depression separated from the wildflower field by a stand of trees. In the main tent, Wilcox presents his team, about a dozen researchers, some of whom Logan is acquainted with from previous trips. In turn, he introduces Nessa to the group, explaining only that she has come as “a special adviser.” The house’s resident, he is told, has been working in the garden since morning.
Logan issues instructions. Everybody is to wait here, he says; under no circumstances should anyone approach the house until he and Nessa report back. In Wilcox’s tent, they strip to their underclothes and don their yellow biosuits. The afternoon is bright and hot; the suits will be sweltering. Wilcox tapes the joints of their gloves and checks their air supplies.
“Good luck,” he says.
They make their way through the trees, into the field. The house stands about two hundred meters distant.
“Logan …” Nessa says.
“I know.”
Everything is perfect. Everything is just the same, without the slightest deviation. The flowers. The mountains. The sea. The way the wind moves and the light falls. Logan keeps his eyes forward, lest he be consumed by the powerful emotions roiling inside him. Slowly, in their bulky suits, he and Nessa make their way across the field. The house, one story, is homey and neat: wide-planked siding weathered to gray, a simple porch, a sod roof, from which a haze of green grass grows.
As promised, the woman is working in the dooryard, which is planted in rose bushes of several colors. Logan and Nessa halt just outside the picket fence. Kneeling in the dirt, the woman doesn’t notice them, or appears not to. She is profoundly old. With gnarled hands—fingers bent and stiffened, skin puckered in folds, knuckles fat as walnuts—she is plucking weeds and placing them in a bucket.
“Hello,” Logan says.
She offers no reply, just continues her work. Her movements are patient and focused. Perhaps she has not heard him. Perhaps she is hard of hearing or deaf.
Logan tries again: “Good afternoon, ma’am.”