Sea of Tranquility

Part 5 has no chapter breaks or asterisks between sections. It picks up where Part 3 left off—with Olive asking Gaspery to go off the record to talk about her experience at the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal. She admits that after seeing the violinist there was darkness and then she saw a forest, as if she were in two places at once. Gaspery asks her if a time traveler told her to “drop everything and go home immediately” (172), would she? He uses his name being the same as the character in her book to persuade her and leaves the interview as her publicist arrives. Olive tells Aretta that she’s ending the tour early and goes to the airship terminal without getting her suitcase from the hotel.

On the way, Olive calls Dion and asks him to pull Sylvie out of school. He doubts her assertion about the pandemic spreading but agrees. While waiting for her flight, Olive uses her device to order pharmaceuticals, bottled water, and toys for Sylvie. She then travels to the moon and sees that Dion scheduled a doctor’s appointment for her, still doubtful about the pandemic. Olive tries to practice social distancing while traveling and misses her suitcase in Colony Two.

At the door of her apartment, she strips and won’t hug her family until she showers, destroys her clothes, and disinfects everything she touches. While she hugs Sylvie, Dion gets an alert on his device about the pandemic, and they go into lockdown. Olive tries to write, but ends up taking notes about the soundscape, which appear in italics and are right-justified, including noises of sirens and birds. They devise a schedule where Dion and Olive take turns teaching or playing with Sylvie, so the other can work. Dion considers the positive changes they can make after lockdown and applies for new jobs.

Olive and Dion attend holographic meetings and discuss how they are more tiring than in-person meetings. Olive wonders what happened to the people she met on her book tour and can’t get ahold of Aretta. On the 100th night of lockdown, Olive sneaks outside and sits in the garden, under a tree, for an hour, and continues this ritual the following nights.

One night, Gaspery walks near the umbrella tree that hides Olive. Zoey meets him, and they discuss how Gaspery left the travel chamber a few minutes prior on an unscheduled trip to supposedly interview a literary scholar who interviewed Olive. He notes that Zoey broke her own rule about not traveling and admits that he warned Olive. Zoey tells him to avoid their present because the consequences will be dire. They talk about how Colony Two’s dome lighting still works and hasn’t become Night City yet. Then, they hear a patrol and leave. Back inside, Olive researches Gaspery and finds the magazine front he used to interview her. Sylvie interrupts, unable to sleep. Olive plays Enchanted Forest, a game with imaginary friends, with her until she gets sleepy.

Olive’s lecture continues in holospace, discussing the popularity of post-apocalyptic fiction. Sections of the lecture are interspersed with right-justified, italicized text that describes locations from the physical book tour, such as Salt Lake City, Buenos Aires, Vancouver, and Dubai. Her lecture posits theories, such as the desire to start over due to economic inequality, the desire for heroism, and dealing with the catastrophes on Earth for the popularity of the genre. The interspersed, italicized text looks at Olive’s mother and Captain Vancouver. Olive’s theory is that humans always believe they are at the end of the world, and that the end of the world is a “continuous and never-ending process” (190).

Olive looks out her window and obsesses over the idea that she was supposed to die in the pandemic. In another lecture, she argues that people long for a world with less technology, spawning interest in apocalypses. An interviewer asks about her new novel, which is sci-fi. Olive admits she does not want to write about the current reality of the pandemic, and says she misses her parents, whom she may not see again because they live on Earth. The journalist, a young woman named Annabel, cries and admits to being lonely because she’s been living alone during lockdown.

During more research, Olive discovers that a Gaspery J. Roberts was sentenced to 50 years in prison for a homicide in Ohio (linking back to Mirella seeing him when she was a child). The fact that this occurred during the late 20th century causes Olive to doubt it is the same Gaspery.

Another interviewer asks how much money she has made from her novel about pandemics during the pandemic. He is shocked that she doesn’t know the exact figure. After the interview, Olive opens a window and enjoys the manufactured air of the moon colony. She thinks about the author Jessica again, researches her, and learns that she died at 37 years old. Sylvie asks to play Enchanted Forest again, and Olive enjoys the calm moment with her.