Some Fine Day Read Free Page B

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