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

settlers had told the story that suited them. There were a hundred truths that could have been, and no way of knowing. If there had been per- petrators, they were long gone.

When she spoke what she believed, it was impossible not to believe it with her. That is my truth. And how could any story be believed but hers? It was the most beautiful of all possibilities, the one most filled with longing.

I did not ask further, only sat and thought. She let me be, until at last she grabbed hold of the vine and said, “Come to the top with me.”

She crept up the face, just a short stretch to the top, and she peered back. There was not much rain, just a drip-mist. A thin stream of water caressed her chin, and I wanted to be there with her.

I was not equal to the climb. I grasped the ledge she had been on and reached for the next handhold, but I could not take it. The rocks were slick under my fingers, the vines evasive, the firmest hold inches out of reach. I tried four or five times, my fingertips sliding away again and again, and then I extended myself too far.

My left hand lost her ledge. My right swung and found nothing. One foot slid opposite to the mo- mentum of my falling body, and the other twisted out of its crevice, dropping straight down. My shoulder and upper back back fell hard across the lower ledge, and the impact threw me out and away, with nowhere to go but to the ground.

I rolled as I struck, but the impact was hard and jarring. I lay there for what felt like a long time, on my back with my face to the rain.

In only a few moments she was there. The gentle touch that rippled all along my spine must have been her fingers in my hair. She asked if I was hurt, and I told her I wasn’t.

Her body lay across me. Her lips blessed my neck and her hair was wet across my face and that was all I knew.

* * *

I made my way up the tumbled rock incline to the ship, taking each step gingerly. Reclaimer

looked not unlike a stone herself, gray and solid and looming against the dark cliff wall as though she had become part of the landscape of Papho. For the crew it was different. Everyone I passed looked ready to be done with the planet and off it as soon as possible. As though there were such a thing as home for a starship’s crew -- unless home were the small, cramped passages of the ship, a metal tomb closed around their bodies for months and years, no view even of the whirling stars, the family and friends left behind all dead of relativity. If they wanted that back, then maybe we were not so unlike the settlers we were failing to reclaim. But none of the crew cared much for Papho.

I planted my feet carefully, one stepstone at a time, and I did not slip. I was getting better at moving over the surfaces of Papho. My education was well under way. I wondered what it would be like to leave.

As I drew near the ship it became less a stone, more an angular block of metal a third of a mile long, held upright by long steel grasshopper legs, a ramp leading down from its bowels with light pouring out. White letters on the hull, beginning to fade from the wear of a long road across the universe, named her: Reclaimer IV

.

Will was at the top of the ramp. He had been waiting for me. Though he was dressed as the Captain, his arm was resting up on the bulkhead and he looked almost at ease--or as though he meant to be at ease. His greeting was friendly, but something was on his mind. I always knew when he was unsettled.

“I wonder what you make of them,” he said. “The new natives, as you anthros call them. The crew think their heads are full of water. I think they’re my duty, but I have limited patience for their obstinance.” He gestured to me with a gloved hand. “What do you think?”

I thought about the question for a moment, then shrugged. “I think they’re a lot like us.”

He shook his head. “You can’t think that. You tell me every day that they won’t become like us. That not one of them will ever do things our way.”

“Tell me, Will,” I said. “Would you ever give up the ship and live on Papho? Resign as captain, throw aside the uniform, and live in the rain for the rest of your days?”

He watched me carefully, and I saw the ember of suspicion he was already nursing beginning to kindle. “No. Of course not.”

“Then you understand their position.”

“Very well,” he said. The words were grudging, almost a growl. “I accept your point. But that can’t be all there is to it.”

“Why?” I said. “Because our way is that much better? It’s almost astonishing the way they’ve adapted. Their whole lives have been shaped to this planet, to finding the best ways to live with it. They live in platform houses and see their lives from the treetops down. They hardly have concepts of shelter or escape, only of acceptance and immersion. Their rhythms have less to do with night and day than with the cycles of the rain. They have ways to walk, ways to climb, ways to search for food, ways to speak and listen. Every detail of their lives is made for Papho. What more do you want from them?”

“I want them to come back to us,” Will said. “I want the entire diaspora to come together. We aren’t even asking them to return to the inner planets, except those who come as envoys. That’s why you’re here, because a Reclamation is a diplomatic mission now, not a rescue. What we’re asking them to do is join us in a confederation. But it isn’t a confederation if no one joins

, is it?” He exhaled sharply, blowing out his contained fury, and then continued, more coolly. “There must be some angle we can take to com- municate with them. You said they have some kind of religion, with a holy book...”

“Oqar Amarhatta

isn’t a religious text,” I said. “It’s a history.”

“What’s the difference?” he said. “An allegorical fiction that continues to impose itself on later generations.”

“When did you become such a cynic?”

“When I decided that objectivity was a necessary and useful tool,” he said. “Idealism never got any results.”

“If you’re talking about reclaiming people,” I said, “there haven’t been

any results.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint.”

“So am I.”

There was silence between us. Outside it had become a downpour, roaring softly. There were a couple of haulers moving around down below, but they knew to stay away. At last he ran a hand through his hair, and said, “I’ve heard things. The people in the village say you’re spending a lot of time with a girl.”

“Yeah.” I wasn’t interested in lying to him.

The corner of his mouth flickered. “I suppose that’s all diplomacy. Careful study of the settlers. Advancement of the mission.”

“You’ll be glad if she comes back with us,” I said.

“And if she doesn’t?”

I had no response to that.

He waited, and when I still said nothing he looked away. “Jesus, Ev.”

“Will--”

“I don’t want to hear it.” He turned his back to me and strode quickly away, passing out of sight into the minor maze of passageways that crossed through the ship’s underbelly. The sound of his boots was carried away by the mutedness of Papho’s atmosphere, and I was left listening to the steady rattle of the rain.

* * *

On a slate-blue evening in the final days before Reclaimer

’s time on Papho came to an end, she took me to see the Eden

. A century of jungle had over- taken the ship, enveloped it and pulled it in a tight embrace to the earth and stone. Layers upon layers of living and dead vines wove over the hull, and the trunks of many trees had twisted themselves around it, bending to its angles and merging with its struc- ture. The synthesis was alarmingly believable, and strangely lovely.

“I always find the sight of it comforting,” she had said as the derelict swelled toward us, unobtrusive as a hill in the way it came into view. “I know where it came from and what purpose it served, but none of that matters here. It is as transformed as the rest of us. One more of the mysteries of Papho, as sacred as any living piece of the planet.”

The ramp was buried, but there was an old emergency hatch in the upper hull, pitched aslant by some slow upheaval of the ground. We had entered the acci- dental temple, each with a battery torch in hand, and we searched its halls for whatever mysteries we might find. All but the deepest sancta had accepted the earth: mold covered the bulkheads and made them grungy and slick and black; soil and pebbles buried the bottom inches of many halls; water lay everywhere, sometimes thigh-deep. The last few rooms, the captain’s office and the life support systems and the bridge, were coated by a thin layer of scum, the furniture rotten and crumbling like sponge, but otherwise clinging to the semblance of their original form. It was hard to know what most objects had been. I felt like a ghost in the entrails of the Eden

’s corpse, and I do not know what I may have learned there.

Afterward, she stripped off her clothes and lowered herself into a shallow pool she found. I went to the edge, but the rain was enough for me just then. I stood there with the battery torch still glowing in my hand, not wanting to move, watching the way her skin gleamed chatoyant in the edge of the light.

That was where I finally asked her. “Will you come back with me? The ship will take you. You don’t have to stay here on Papho for the rest of your life.”

It was the wrong thing to say, but her answer was gracious. “I’m sorry, Ev. I would never be happy somewhere else.”

I let my head lower, and looked at the rippling water. I had known what she would say, and I knew what she would still say as I kept trying. “I think that people can be surprised by what makes them happy. You want different things than the rest of your people.”

“What I want is here, all the same,” she said. “I want to know this planet like no one ever has.