Some Fine Day (2 page)

Jake listens politely as my mother talks a little about her work. She helps run the massive cryobanks where they keep thousands of plant and animal species frozen for rejuvenation someday, everything from grizzly bears to brain coral. It’s still only a tiny fraction of the life that once existed on the surface, but better than nothing. Her specialty is food grains, and she spends most of her time experimenting with different varieties to see which ones do best in underground growing conditions.

Then my father shares a long look with Jake and clears his throat.

“I have a very exciting announcement.” His eyes are sparkling, and so are Jake’s. “We’re going up.”

“Up?” I’m confused. “Upstairs?”

My father laughs. “A little farther than that.”

I don’t know what to say.

“The surface, honey. We’re going to the surface.”

Jake’s watching me. Clearly, he knew about this and didn’t tell me. For a second, I’m irritated. But then the news sinks in and excitement bubbles up from my toes like a kettle starting to boil.

“Are you serious?”

“Entirely. I pulled some strings and we got seats on a mole going to Archipelago Six day after tomorrow. Storm window looks good, nothing for a thousand miles.” He chuckles. “Nothing except sun and sea.”

He hands me a brochure. I touch play and see a girl in a bikini frolicking on a beach with stunted palm trees in the background. “Topside Travel offers all-inclusive packages to Archipelagoes Five through Twelve.” Her voice is rich and husky. “Our secure pods whisk you to the surface in perfect comfort, where you can dine under the stars and enjoy spa treatments, yoga classes, snorkeling or simply soaking up the sun. The five-star accommodations include valet service and an exotic menu designed by renowned chef Henri Petit. . .”

A series of pictures unreels: laughing couples strolling hand-in-hand through the surf, a silver-haired man in a tuxedo sipping a glass of wine underneath a gauzy white tent, little kids tossing a beach ball on a rocky shore.

The girl holds up a pink cocktail glass as the words “All bookings subject to last-minute cancellation due to unforeseen weather events” slide by on the bottom of the screen.

Sun. I’ve never seen the sun, not in person.

Jake looks about ready to explode, and I decide to forgive him the deception.

We’re going to the surface.

The next day is a flurry of activity.

We have to get shots for malaria and typhoid, and of course I don’t own a bathing suit or much else suitable for a tropical vacation. It’s always exactly seventy-three degrees in Raven Rock, which is supposed to be the ideal temperature. I go shopping with my mother in the city, and choose a yellow bikini with two tiny plastic fish dangling from the top.

When I show it to Jake, he waggles his eyebrows suggestively and I pretend to put him in a sleeper hold. We start wrestling on the living room floor, where my father finds us and Jake jumps up, abashed.

“Just getting in some sparring,” I say.

My father snorts.

“Keep it clean,” he says.

But everyone is in a good mood, my parents more affectionate with each other than I’ve seen in a long time. Jake’s restless, spending hours in the media room, flipping from one live feed to the next.

I finally go to bed, but I can’t sleep, trying to imagine the smell of the ocean, the feel of real sunlight on my skin. We spend an hour or so a week under ultraviolet so we don’t get rickets and other bone diseases, but I doubt it’s the same, or even similar.

My room hasn’t changed much since I first went off to the Academy. The daisy-print wallpaper is fading and the air has a musty, unused smell that makes me a little sad. I take down a stuffed tiger that I loved nearly to pieces as a child and hold it for a while. Then I get up and repack my suitcase, just for something to do.

I pray the weather stays clear.

Very few people ever get to see the surface. You need more money than God, or serious connections to the military, or both. I wonder what kind of strings my father had to pull. He’s a two-star general, middle-ranking, but attaché to the head of inter-prefecture relations. That means he has to travel a lot, so he wasn’t around much when I was growing up. He’s very devoted to his job, and I know how important it is to him that I do well at the Academy. He probably arranged for this trip as a reward for my imminent graduation. I’ve always been scared of disappointing my father, even though he doesn’t intentionally put pressure on me. It’s just that carrying on the family tradition is a huge deal for him.

I’m too wound up to eat breakfast in the morning, but Jake wolfs down a stack of pancakes and an obscene amount of synth bacon.

“I’ve heard the moles can be a bumpy ride,” I tease.

“Cast iron stomach,” he grins, patting his torso. Jake’s built like a bulldozer, broad and hard and crushingly heavy.

We drive half an hour to the Raven Rock launch station and get on line. There are ten departure gates, each leading to a group of moles behind closed doors. A perky blonde in pumps and a short grey dress checks our papers, then ushers us to a second, shorter line. A holodisplay ticks down the minutes to launch. Thirty-two. Everything is sleek and white and shiny. I smile at a little red-haired boy just ahead of us in line. He doesn’t smile back.

There’s an edge of anxiety in the air. Talking and laughing just a little too loud. Most of us have never been inside a mole before, although we know how they work: back end a simple pod with seats, front end a boring machine that drills through rock and dirt and whatever else gets in its way. They move faster than you’d expect, but it’s still a long way to the surface.

Jake squeezes my hand. “Lucky seven,” he says, looking at our gate number.

Finally, when the display reads fifteen minutes, the doors open and the line starts moving. A final desultory scan of papers, and we enter the hangar. There are three moles. They look like tin cans with teeth.

The first is carrying security, contractors by the looks of them. Jake sneers a little. They’re heavily armed and joshing around with each other, totally at ease. Not their first trip.

The last mole will take the science officers and support staff. That’s the deal between the government and the adventure companies. One detachment per trip to repair the weather stations and gather data. Botanists, meteorologists, a shrink or two. I watch as a woman in a lab coat supervises the loading of equipment crates. She looks frazzled.

So we’re second in line.

“How long will it take, Daddy?” I haven’t called my father “daddy” since I was eight.

“A few hours, sweetheart. Don’t worry, there’s movies, snacks, games. Network feed, of course. Everything is soundproofed.”

He’s dressed casually, in slacks and a blue button-down, but his back is still straight as a board and he oozes authority. The attendants fawn all over him, and my mother rolls her eyes.

“Who’s the goon squad?” Jake asks as we settle into our seats.

“Mandatory,” my father says.

“That’s a lot of firepower they’re packing.”

“Toads have been known to take a big hit and keep coming.”

“Toads? I thought they stayed at the pole.”

“They do. Usually.”

And then one of the attendants is reviewing safety procedures and telling us to turn off all electronic devices and I feel a hum under my seat as the huge motors start warming up.

Captain Dan comes on the intercom, gives us a pep talk and says he hopes we don’t get too bored, eliciting groans from a couple of the passengers.

The mole ahead of us, the one with the contractors, rumbles off into the darkness of the hangar. Twenty minutes later, it’s our turn.

Six hours to Archipelago Six.

If one imagines the Earth as an apple, the engineering feat proposed by the Intergovernmental Consortium merely entailed pricking the skin.

We haven’t always lived like this. Most historians call it the Transition. It happened a while ago, when my parents were just little kids. And it happened fast.

The seas warmed past fifty degrees, and hypercanes or superstorms or whatever you want to call them began to form, and instead of eventually losing strength and going away they got bigger and stuck around. Some of them are the size of continents now.

So a decision was made to go underground. But there wasn’t room for everyone. Not even for most.

That’s why some call it the Culling.

“Beverage?” the attendant asks, and I thank her and take a soda. We’re an hour or so in, and the trip is actually turning out to be kind of boring, just like Captain Dan said.

The red-headed kid is across the aisle on my left, hammering away at a game. His parents are nursing cocktails. The mood has gone from apprehensive to lethargic and half-drunk, by the glassy looks of some of the passengers. The mole is very smooth, soundproofed as promised, no hint of the rock being explosively vaporized a few feet away. Just a slight upward tilt to my seat.

I doze off, thinking about the sheep and the valley and the sun breaking through the rainclouds. It’s become my favorite daydream.

Then I feel Jake’s hand on my arm. “We’ve stopped,” he says.

And I realize that there’s no hum under my seat anymore. It must have just happened, because no one else seems to have noticed.

“Is that normal?”

“I have no idea.”

I expect Captain Dan to get on the intercom, but he doesn’t. Half the passengers are asleep, the others reading quietly or watching the cane network. Tracking the storms is something of a national obsession.

Then a guy toward the back yells, “It’s not moving. Why is it not moving?”

His voice slurs a little, and there’s an edge of panic there.

Uh-oh, I think.

“Now sir,” an attendant says, gliding down the aisle with a fixed smile on her face.

But the cat’s out of the bag now. A low murmuring begins, as people start to grasp what’s happening. The attendant holds up her hands. She’s young and pretty and immaculately groomed.

“There’s nothing to worry about. The mole ahead of us snapped a rotor on some bedrock. It’s being repaired. We expect to be moving shortly.”

“What does that mean? How shortly?” the man calls out. He’s half risen from his seat. The middle-aged woman next to him, wife or girlfriend, puts a restraining hand on his arm and he shakes it off.

The attendant knows better than to tell him to calm down, which usually has the opposite effect on people. “Why don’t I just check with the captain and get an update?” She disappears into the forward cabin.

No one speaks for a minute. I know it’s my imagination, but the temperature in the mole seems to go up a few degrees.

“How much air do they carry on these things?” someone asks.

I sip my soda and share a look with Jake.

“Moles have redundancies built into their redundancies,” he says quietly. “Foolproof.”

I don’t really want to be the one to say it, but we’re all thinking it anyway, so I go ahead.

“Black Dome.”

Jake snorts and looks away, like he’s disappointed in me. But before he does, I see a flash of fear.

Black Dome.

It happened six years ago. I was only ten, but I remember every detail. My parents tried to shield me, unsuccessfully, since it was all anyone talked about for weeks.

Five moles, twenty-five passengers and crew each. Departed from Black Dome launch station on August the nineteenth. Fair skies above, a perfect window for an excursion to Gallia Archipelago.

Ninety-three adults, thirty-two children.

The tremors started about halfway up, the mole equivalent of turbulence on an airplane. Ice rattling in glasses, maybe a bag or two toppling from the overhead bins. No one’s too alarmed at first. But then they get stronger.

Subterranean quake, six point six in magnitude. The epicenter was two hundred miles away, so the moles weren’t just crushed like the glorified tin cans they are. What happened was worse.

They got trapped.

For thirty-seven days.

The military tried to send in diggers, a smaller, more maneuverable version of moles, to reach the stranded passengers, but the rock was too unstable to get close. Their com uplink still worked, although after a couple of weeks, people stopped talking.

Rescuers got in eventually. They’re probably still in therapy.

I sip my soda and stare at Jake until he looks at me.

“That was totally different,” he says.

I don’t bother to answer.

There were seventeen survivors. It doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out how they managed that.

A few more minutes go by, and someone emits a low sob. My father gets out of his seat.

“I’m going up front,” he says.

But before he can turn around, the drunk guy pushes past him and starts heading for the forward cabin. He has thinning brown hair, and the back of his neck is red and splotchy. My father grabs his arm.

“Get your goddamn hands off me,” the guy hisses, swinging one fist around in a wide arc that catches my father in the side of the face. It shatters his glasses, and a thin line of blood runs into the crease of his nose.