Girl in Landscape Read Free Page A

with her other hand. “It’s the same arm I’ve had all my life, the same skin and muscles. It just goes pumping on into the future. Brave.”
    “I don’t know,” said Pella. But she looked at her own arm.
    “You’re crazy,” said Raymond.
    “Caitlin’s not crazy,” said David.
    “I’m going to go look at the water anyway,” said Raymond, getting up suddenly. “Maybe I can crawl under the fence.”
    “Stay where I can see you,” said Caitlin.
    “I’m going too,” said David.
    “You can see all the way to the rocks,” said Raymond.
    “Right. So don’t climb on the rocks.”
    “Couldn’t with this stupid cone anyway.”
    They pounded off through the sand, and Caitlin and Pella were left alone in their place, surrounded by a litter of digging tools and sandwich wrappings. The breeze dashed the tips of Pella’s hair into her eyes.
    Just a beat of silence passed between them, then Caitlin spoke.
    “There’s another thing about the Planet of the Archbuilders,” she said. “It’s something Ray and Dave might not understand.”
    Don’t tell me
, Pella thought instantly. She avoided her mother’s eyes.
    It was surely something peculiar and terrible when Caitlin had to begin by flattering her.
    “We aren’t going to be just any family moving there,” Caitlin went on. “Clement is going to do Clement stuff wherever he goes. I mean, that’s one part of why we’re moving, so that he can.”
    “What’s he going to do?”
    “Nothing, at first. We’re just going to move there. There’s only a few settlers. We’ll practically be the first. It’s a chance to be there at the start of something, something very important.”
    Hearing her mother talk in circles, avoiding subjects, Pella suddenly wanted to be beside her, to move inside her cone. She wanted to protect and be protected at once.
    “The thing is, for people to really live there, they have to live like the Archbuilders used to. There’s this thing that happens to Archbuilders, young ones, and it would happen to people too. Except the people there now take a drug to keep it from happening.”
    “What thing?” said Pella.
    “It’s called becoming a witness,” said Caitlin. “It happened to young Archbuilders, which there aren’t so many of now. But it still happens.”
    It’s going to happen to
me
, thought Pella. By telling only me she’s going to make it happen to me.
    “Nobody in our family is going to take the drug,” said Caitlin. “Clement’s looked into it, there’s no danger. Just a chance to learn. It’s something Clement and I feel strongly about.”
    Pella hated that policy talk, that Clement talk.
Feel strongly
. It was like Clement speaking out of Caitlin’s mouth. Pella relied on her mother for words that were an antidote to Clement’s.
    “What does it do?”
    “Well, what happens to
Archbuilders
is that the witness learns things about adults. I mean, the adult Archbuilders. It’s a way of growing up. What happens to
people
we don’t know, because nobody’s tried it.”
    Caitlin said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. But why should Pella want to learn things about adults, let alone Archbuilders?
    Why should she necessarily want to grow up?
    After a pause, Pella said, “So how do they know anything happens? To people, I mean.”
    “Because it started to happen, a few times. But people panicked.”
    “What makes it happen?”
    “It’s something the Archbuilders created with their science. They made viruses, special ones. Only so long ago that it’s like part of the planet now. Like a lot of things they did. Like the weather.”
    “So the people take drugs. Because they don’t want to get an alien virus.” This didn’t sound exactly unreasonable to Pella. “That’s what you mean by panicked.”
    Caitlin nodded, suddenly distracted. She squinted up the beach at Raymond and David, and said, “Something’s wrong.”
    Raymond was at the corner, near the rocks, on the other side of