Stories About the Rain - Aaron Redfern (red queen free ebook .txt) 📗

/> “Why do you take me out here?” I asked her. “So far from the village?”

She hooked a leg around behind her and pivoted on the branch to face me. It was a surprisingly gentle motion, like the movement of water. “Because you will come with me.”

We watched each other for a moment, until I asked at last: “How much of the jungle will you see, in your lifetime?”

“More,” she said. “Much more. And it will be only me. None of the others have come with me even this far. None of them will go beyond Orakku.”

“I wonder,” I said, “if any of them know that they are missing the whole world.”

She nodded slowly. “They know.”

We were still for a moment, suspended, as the space between us gained density and time began to evaporate. Then she flowed along the branch to me, and her hands were on my chest and she pushed me back against the trunk and the water streamed down my back and it fell in my mouth before she closed the last small distance, when her legs enfolded me and she pressed her mouth into mine, and we flowed together while the rain fell all around us.

* * *

We were in the captain’s quarters, Captain William Montego and me. It was a big room, at least for being on a starship, and its walls were square and black and sleek. The air was circulating and it was cool. It felt dry. He had a snifter of cognac on his desk, probably his second or third. He was jaded with it, but he drank it anyway, when he could, because he felt that it loosened him up. I accepted a whiskey, also because I felt that it loosened him up.

It was the first time I had been there since touchdown. It wasn’t a room I had ever cared for much. Will and the Captain were like two separate people. I rarely saw Will anymore, but he was there now, a little; the cognac helped. He was talking about Little Norva, and the years when we had both been younger--the cities and the bog hopping, the two of us always chasing the same girls, the desert sunsets and the shiftbike rides and the way everything had blurred by so fast. I had loved the shiftbikes even more than he had, but he had put on a show every time he rode them, trying to impress anyone and everyone, even when no one was there but me. I was only a few years out of the university then, and I was still doing anthro work on-planet; even a rock the size of Little Norva has its isolated pockets of humanity. As much as I loved the study, I think I loved the deserts themselves more, and the way I could fly through them. Now, who knows? Maybe they don’t even ride shiftbikes anymore. I’m not very old, but the universe is.

“I guess it never struck me as important,” Will was saying, “that it was Little Norva and not somewhere else. We could have been anywhere, doing anything.”

“That’s probably why we got along,” I said.

Will paused, then nodded. “So there wasn’t much of a decision, that first time. What could I say to visiting other planets but ‘yes, emphatically yes.’ And not just travel like before, but work, with a commission. Something real. But why am I telling you? You, of all people, know where I’ve come from.”

“I don’t think that you cared about the commission,” I said. “At the time.”

He ignored that, and with careful measure the Captain brought his heel down on the train of conversation. “How is your work progressing?”

I looked up. “Did you really call me here to hear a report?”

“I brought you here to share a drink,” said the Captain. “We shared it. So now I want to know about the mission. Our entire purpose for being here rests on you. You realize that, don’t you? You are the critical element.”

“That’s flattering, Will.”

“Nobody knows you like I do,” he said. “And I believe you have it in you to convince them. Do you?”

“It isn’t about me,” I said. “I don’t think the new natives are going to change their minds. They have neither wanderlust nor the need for a place in the grander scheme. They want to be here, in their home. It’s not so hard to blame them, is it? There’s some- thing about this place. You could get used to it.”

He frowned, then barked a sharp laugh to cover it. “Don’t go native on me, Ev. You’re supposed to be bringing some of them back with us, not becoming one of them.”

“Is that an order?” I said.

He looked at me sharply and took some cognac, and said no more.

* * *

It’s funny: with so much available to us at every moment, the ability to spread our fingertips across the stars, we are so inclined to fall in love with the things we cannot have. To meet a people wholly in love with the bounded, finite world that they know can be almost impossible to comprehend. It is also terribly alluring...though possibly only to us, and only because we cannot have it.

We were on two ledges, nested on a low wall. The ground was only a few yards below, and I wasn’t afraid much. She was a little higher, one hand resting on a crawling vine underneath the crown of one of the great golden flowers, looking at me with her legs dangling. The whole cliff was soaked and glistening and so were we, but I rarely thought of it anymore.

In the jungles of Papho, with even the bare and transient traces of humanity, a mere klick distant, erased by the shrouding mists, it is easy to feel a kindred closeness with someone. There were only the two of us and the vast expanse of patternless beauty, revealed a little at a time as though under a lens. The world belonged only to us.

“You have to know life here,” she said to me, after I had made some comment about the weather, “to see what living means to us.”

“I’m doing my best,” I told her.

“Do you think that you understand us?”

“No,” I said. I felt that I was beginning to, but I wanted not to presume.

“You spend every day with us,” she said. “You share your stories and you listen to ours. You are trying to know us. I have seen no other person try the way you do.”

That rang true enough for me. The new natives--the Eden

settlers, I should call them--had been kind to us in every way, generous with their gifts, free with their cultural knowledge when we asked them to be, as long as we did not pry too far into their past. But they made no effort to understand the newcomers in their midst, or to take in any new information from us, or to learn our ways of life. The crew of the Reclaimer

regarded the settlers in much the same way.

“I should point out,” I said, “that trying to know you is my job.” I had been trained as both an anthropologist and a diplomat. When it came to dealing with cultures in isolation, they were the same thing. I had been sent to Papho in order to bargain.

“You chose your role,” she said, “and I am glad you came. My people are simple. But you have to understand them before you can wonder why they are still here.” It was them

, now, not us

.

“What about you?” I said. “You’re alone more often than not, away from them out here in the jungle. You take me out here. You humor me. And you wear colors, which none of the others do.”

“I know everything there is to know about my people. There is more to be taught by the jungle. The village is an enclave of what we know, but everything beyond knowledge, all wisdom, must be attained out here where knowledge becomes moot.” Her finger traced the edge of a petal until she came to the limit of her reach. “Have you seen one of the Oqar Amarhatta

?”

“Not up close.” The most valued treasure of the new natives is a book containing the history of their time on Papho: Oqar Amarhatta

, Stories About the Rain. There are only three copies, two hidden from the crew of the Reclaimer

since our arrival, the third briefly shown to me from a safe distance. The one I saw was nearly as tall as I am, bound in supple wood with pages sewn from leaves, the only materials at hand and the only ones capable of resisting the implacable damp. I would have given a great deal to know what was written in those pages.

She hesitated; I think that it was the only time I ever saw her show reluctance. Then she said, “We were not the first natives of this planet. There was another species before us.”

I started, and my thoughts must have been evident on my face. The story of conquest and genocide, as old as humankind -- the strong pushing aside all trace of the weaker others who had come before. So there had been non-human intelligence after all, and now it was gone.

“They were all dead when we arrived,” she said, “though it must not have been long. At that time the crew of the Eden

was still a crew, and they had all the equipment necessary for exploration. Our ancestors found the remains of the old ones at the bottom of the deep shafts, in Orakku and the others all over the planet. The bodies were piled there. We never knew what happened to them. Other settlers may have come before us, just long enough to kill them and leave; we found no evidence of earlier humans, but the rain has a way of washing things away. Our greatest dread was that they had seen the ship’s entry into the atmosphere, and fearing the unknown or seeing what they thought was the realization of some prophecy from their past, had leapt in together.

“They were not like us. There are drawings in the Oqar

of what our ancestors thought they might have looked like. It must have been hard to be certain. The original settlers, our ancestors, tried to reconstruct the way they might have looked and dressed and worn what passed for their hair, and we have tried to live in tribute to their memory.

“Whatever remained of them is gone now. I have been to the bottom of Orakku. I am the only one in the last two generations to make the descent. But the old ones were not there.”

I tried for a long time to piece together what might have happened, whether it was as she said or whether the Eden