Some Fine Day (3 page)

My body is moving before my brain even tells it to. High sweeping kick to the chin, followed by a gut punch on the way down. The guy drops like a sack of potatoes.

I feel hands on me, Jake’s, and the guy’s wife or girlfriend screaming. And then the hum of the engines starts up again.

The attendant comes rushing through the door, takes in the scene, and stops in her tracks.

“Everyone back in their seats,” she says.

I comply, ducking my head to avoid the stares of the other passengers. Jake and my father carry the unconscious guy to the rear of the mole and lay him out on the carpet. No one says anything.

The rest of the trip is pretty uneventful.

The earliest years of the colonies, later known as prefectures, were marked by deprivation and psychological trauma to a degree not anticipated by the architects. But the human species adapts; we are curiously, even ruthlessly proficient at it.

Everyone has to put in special contact lenses before we exit the mole. Apparently, it takes a couple of days for our eyes to adjust to the glare. Of course there’s plenty of light underground. Everything runs on geothermal now, which is a practically inexhaustible energy source. But it’s not the sun.

We line up in the aisle. The guy I kicked is awake, bruised but not broken. If I’d wanted to hurt him permanently, I would have. We studiously avoid looking at each other. Once he sobered up, he approached my dad and apologized. They shook hands. No hard feelings. My dad has a little cut on his eyebrow, but my mother remembered to bring his spare reading glasses so he’s not too upset.

“Thanks for choosing Topside Travel,” the attendant says, smiling, and I can tell she’s glad to be rid of us.

She opens the hatch and light spills into the cabin, not the light I’m used to, this stuff is different, brighter and stronger and
hotter
, and it is followed by a warm breeze that smells like nothing I’ve ever smelled before. Equal bits salt and earth and decay; I don’t mean rotten or spoiled, just living matter breaking down into its component parts. We shuffle forward, suddenly uncertain, Jake grinning like a madman ahead of me. There’s a short flight of steps leading down, and then we’re standing on hot, coarse sand, with the sea about thirty yards away.

I’ve seen pictures. They are nothing, absolutely nothing, like the real thing.

A man and woman approach the mole. They’re wearing stacks of flower garlands around their necks, which they proceed to drape all over us.

“I’m Sissy and this is Mac, we’re your check-in coordinators,” the woman says. “The welcome tent is right over there.” She points at a white pavilion about twenty yards away.

I shed my sweater and wander down the shoreline, unsteady on my feet. All my senses are jammed up by a torrent of weird new data, as though I’ve crash-landed on an alien planet, and I’m not the only one. The red-headed kid is standing stock still with his mouth agape, just staring at the sky. I follow his gaze up, up, up. . . and for a dizzying second I feel like I’m on the edge of a cliff, like everything is turned upside down and if I take a step I’ll plummet into the bottomless blue, with nothing to break my fall.

They say that about one in thirty tourists is stricken with agoraphobia so bad they can’t leave the mole. Of course they give you a psych evaluation before booking, but the reality of the surface is just too much for some people, even the well-adjusted ones.

It’s almost too much for me. So I sit down, hard, on the rocks and wait for the world to stop spinning.

Archipelago Six. The brochures I read on the mole said it comprises about three thousand low-lying islands scattered like a string of pearls along the Atlantic seaboard, just above Greenbrier Prefecture. That’s the one adjacent to ours. Raven Rock doesn’t have very good diplomatic relations with its neighbors, which is why they need people like me and Jake.

The storms intensify in fifteen-year cycles and Archipelago Six hasn’t taken a direct hit for a while, so there are palm trees and even a few white birds. Seagulls, I guess. They’re gathered near the welcome tent, watching it with sharp, hungry eyes. There must be food in there.

“You OK, honey?” my dad says, hoisting me to my feet. “Pretty nice, huh?”

Yes. It’s pretty nice.

The water flashes like a field of blue-green crystals. And the air. It moves. The living breath of the planet, I think, feeling romantic and foolish and suddenly sad. We’ve lost so much. More than I ever imagined.

“Don’t stare,” Jake says. “Even with the contacts in, you can go blind.”

I realize I’ve been looking straight at the sun and tear my eyes away. Black afterimages dance against the horizon. It’s smaller than I expected. But harsher too.

My mother spots the third mole erupting through the sand a little way away, beyond a cordon, and says she thinks she knows the science officer, the woman who was supervising the loading. They met at a conference two years ago.

“Carlsson,” she says. “René. Or maybe Rebekah. She had some interesting ideas about nitrogen uptake. I’ll have to say hello once they’ve settled in.”

“Shop talk,” my father grumbles. “We’re supposed to be on vacation.”

“I know you’ll end up triple-checking the security protocols and bossing those poor fellows around, so I guess we’re even,” Mom says.

We look over at the contractors. They got here first, and they’ve already dug trenches at either end of the pebbly beach and set up a discreet perimeter of motion detectors in the underbrush. They’re wearing civilian clothes, slacks and T-shirts, so us tourists don’t feel like we’ve been stuck in an internment camp. But they’re too big and bored and competent to be anything but soldiers.

“Is all that really necessary?” Jake asks. “I mean, what are the toads going to do, swim a thousand miles from Novarctica?”

My father says, “They can swim farther than you think.”

Toads. Newly emerged life form, amphibian but with primate characteristics. As in bipedal, as in crudely intelligent. Also, if you hadn’t guessed, not friendly. No one knows where they came from. One day, they just appeared. In biology, it’s called punctuated equilibrium, a fancy way of describing the rapid evolution of a species when it’s put under severe environmental stress. Some cold-blooded species are apparently very good at this. Better than we are.

“They’ve never been known to attack a large party,” Jake persists.

Strictly speaking, this is true. But every now and then, a surface expedition doesn’t come back. The camps are found abandoned, ransacked, the people just gone. No hard evidence that the toads did it. No evidence that they didn’t, either.

But Jake is right about one thing. They’ve never been spotted this far south.

“It’s a legal liability issue. The travel agencies have to offer security or we’d shut them down,” my father says, and I take Jake by the arm and drag him over to the welcome tent. Enough toad talk. I want to put on my little yellow bikini and see what that water actually feels like.

Inside, there’s a table piled high with fruit and cheese and cold cuts and pastries. I bite into a slice of ham and almost choke. It’s real. Not synth ham, which, like all “meat” products, is actually a kind of fungus that supposedly has the texture of flesh. This is real ham. From an actual pig. It’s like the difference between ice cream and cottage cheese.

I think I’ve eaten meat from an animal about four times in my life. It’s that hard to get.

I decide I’m really going to enjoy this vacation.

Jake and I get fruity concoctions from the bar and take our plates to the shore while my parents sort out the check-in process. The meteorologists are setting up their equipment at the far end of the beach. They assemble a satellite dish, solar panels, and Doppler LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, a laser system that measures temperature and wind speed along the beam.

“I think you’re getting a tan already,” Jake teases.

“Not likely with the two hundred SPF I slathered all over myself. But I appreciate the lie.”

He smiles. Jake has the best smile, honest and open. Like a puppy.

“There goes the guy whose ass you kicked.”

I look over my shoulder. He’s walking with his lady friend toward the sleeping tents, which look plush. They’re laughing together, and he leans over and pecks her cheek.

“I did not kick his ass.”

“Oh right, sorry. You kicked his face in.”

“Jake.”

“OK, OK. I would’ve done it if you hadn’t gotten there first, sweetie.”

I swat him on the leg. “Let’s go swimming.”

I change in my assigned tent. It’s not plush. It’s palatial. I can hear the ocean through the gauzy walls, which are thin enough to let in plenty of light but not completely immodest. Thick oriental rugs cover the ground, and my bed is four-poster, mahogany, another unimaginable luxury.

The advance crew arrived days ago, and they seem to have anticipated anything I could possibly want. There’s a mini-fridge stocked with food and drinks, fresh flowers everywhere, and an exquisitely carved oval standing mirror in which I am now checking out my bikini. I’ve gotten more muscular in the shoulders and thighs these last months, though Jake probably still has a hundred pounds on me. At the Academy, they call me the Speck because I’m shorter than everyone else. Not in an affectionate way either. But looking at my reflection, with no one towering over me for comparison, I feel good. I just wish I had longer hair.

We’ve trained in pools since we were five, but I’m still nervous when I walk down to the shore. The waves aren’t all that big. It’s the size of the ocean that intimidates me. Not to mention what’s out there, somewhere beyond the horizon. It’s sunny and calm, but I can’t forget the hypercanes churning their way across the surface, obliterating everything in their paths as efficiently and remorselessly as the moles blast through bedrock. I can’t forget that I am up here with them, instead of safe down below.

Jake’s already in the water. He’s swum out past the breakers and waves when he spots me, an anonymous head identifiable only by his massive shoulders. I stick a toe in. It’s very warm. I suddenly wonder what else lives in there.

“C’mon, Nordqvist,” Jake yells. “Don’t be a cherry.”

I’ve gone through so much worse than this in training, I remind myself. Rappelling down the sheer sides of lightless subterranean caverns with god knows what at the bottom. Fighting guys twice my size with no weapons except my hands and feet and superior intellect. Survival stuff I don’t even want to think about now because I’m on vacation. This should be a piece of cake.

My knees are knocking as I take a deep breath and march into the beautiful blue-green water like I’ve been summoned to the commandant’s study. A big wave rolls in, and I time it wrong and get shoved off my feet. The world goes topsy-turvy. I lose all sense of up and down and start to panic. But then my training kicks in. I stop struggling and make myself go limp, and my own buoyancy pulls me to the surface.

I float on my back, just letting the surges push me around. I think my contacts get washed out, because everything is suddenly brighter, almost blinding. So I close my eyes and savor the salt on my tongue and just float for a while. I haven’t been this relaxed in months. Maybe years.

Then something grabs my foot and I think it’s a barracuda, but of course it’s only Jake.

He chases me down and we try to throw each other in the surf and after a while, I stop worrying about giant squids and just want to see him get a royal snoutful of ocean. My skin stings. I have sand in my bathing suit. And it’s the best time I’ve had in a really long while.

Food, air and water; these essential commodities were as valuable, and scarce, as if we had relocated to another planet entirely.

Dinner is an elaborate affair. After showering and modeling nearly every item in my suitcase in front of the mirror, I settle on a simple white linen dress with delicate flowers embroidered on the neckline and sleeves. My mother loans me her diamond studs, and I go minimal with the makeup, just a little lip gloss and mascara. Strappy white sandals, for which I painted my toenails a bright coral. I think I look pretty nice.