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

I want to breathe with the rhythm of its life. I want to under- stand it the way the old ones did. You can’t know how important that is to all of us, even the ones who never wish to see anything anew. The people who lived here before us will be forgotten unless we remember them with every moment of our lives. Papho will be for- gotten unless we keep it close within us.”

“That’s why we are trying to learn everything about you,” I said, “and why we want an envoy, and com- munication, and trade, and the exchange of people, immigrants and emigrants. You’ll never last here. There are so few of you. The population is too small to sustain itself.”

“Love does not cut apart and rebuild,” she said. “We will do the best we can. But when we’re gone, the jungles and the columns of stone will still be here. Maybe another people will remember us, in turn.” She stirred the pool as she rose. “I will miss you, Ev. But...” She trailed off. “Will you come back? Or will you send others? I would like to meet them, whoever comes.”

I shook my head sadly. “Space travel changes the way time passes. For us, the trip to Papho was a matter of months, but almost thirty years passed outside of the ship. It will be six decades before the next mission came to Papho, if there will be one.”

Her eyes closed and she let out a small, hard breath. It might have been bitterness; it was, at least, the closest I ever saw her come to it. “I understand. I am afraid nothing is changed.”

I told myself that I was not without hope. There were other options available to me. But I didn’t want to think about them either.

She drew nearer to me. “No more light,” she said, and I flicked it off. It was already night, and we would not be returning to the village in the darkness. We would spend the night inside the Eden’s hatch, or on the ground in the rain with a blanket of leaves.

I felt her breath on my face. There was very little space between us. Slowly, her arms slid around behind my neck.

“You will be remembered,” she said, “with every moment of my life.”

* * *

Captain’s quarters again. The lights were too bright. The air was too sterile. There was no water anywhere except in the glass on his desk, and I ached so hard looking at it that I wanted to dive in and sink to the bottom and drown.

Will was pacing the room, looking like he wanted out as badly as I did. The uniform was tight to his shoul- ders, and I could see how tense his whole body was. I had not yet told him the decision I had made, but he sensed it. We knew each other inside and out. That was what made it so hard.

“I have to stay,” I told him. “On the planet. On Papho.”

“You have

to stay?” he said, his voice pitched as though we had already been arguing for an hour. “You expect me to accept that? You expect me to let you abandon me and the crew and the diplomatic mission and every other thing you please, because you found a nice girl and a vacation spot like no other?”

“I would like for you to let me stay,” I said. “But it isn’t your place to stop me from doing so. I answer to civilian authorities, not to you. They can come get me if they like.”

“I stand in for all authority on my ship,” he said. “And what

civilian authorities? You think the Board at NorTaj is even still around after thirty years? You’ve already changed hands twice after two missions. They have never seen you, they don’t know your name from God’s, and they don’t care whether you stay or go. I

do.” He laid a hand on the wall and leaned into it, giving up some, but not all, of his composure. He was turned almost entirely away from me. “Don’t you dare try to take the moral high ground. You have none. You really think you can walk away from this ship, and from me? After everything we’ve been through?”

I winced. It was true; we had seen a lot together. All those years on Little Norva, evaporated like shiftbike exhaust. We had both been shipped off our separate ways, out into the stars, but in one of those rare coincidences had come back at the same time and had met again. You don’t make many friends in interstellar travel; everyone you meet ages and dies before you can see them again, or your trails cross a hundred times, this planet, that planet, two engine signatures in the same stellar lane, but you’re years apart every time and you never know it. There are so many faces in the galaxy, few of them familiar. But there we both were, and we had raced the deserts one last time, and he got me pulled onto his ship for some work, even though I wasn’t really needed. We had been all over, and watched everything change but us. When he had gotten his own ship under the Re- clamation program, he had needed an anthro, and there had been no question that it would be me.

“Yes, Will,” I said. “After everything. Don’t you ever get tired of it? God knows I have.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t see how anyone could ever get enough. Especially not you; have you changed that much?” He rounded on me. “You can’t leave. This is my

ship. And you’re...” He stopped and stared at me, his eyes filled with pain, breathing deeply. Finally, he let his shoulders slump. “Just go. I will try to give you my blessing. Some day.”

Five minutes later, I was in the rain.

* * *

We were at the edge of Orakku again, watching as the sky fell and was swallowed up. The view into that enormous mouth was dizzying, sublime. It was the first place she had taken me alone, and the place she loved most. The great echoing gutter-hum of the rain falling down it was all around us.

“This is why we live,” she said. “To see the holy. We’re the only creatures in the universe who can even try to understand. And we must try. That’s our place in things. It was their

place too, before they died.”

I remembered that whatever else it might be, Orakku had been a mass grave. The bodies of the old natives had been found at the bottom. It was an eerie thing to think about, the fact that we had missed the only other intelligent species in the known galaxy by such a short time. Unless it had been some of us who had killed them. It was hard not to feel their presence, easy to believe that they could be watching our every move from the mists, behind the balancing stones and the water-heavy fans of the leaves, wondering, observing, or judging. “I wonder what it would have been like,” I said, “if we had met them.”

“A part of me likes to believe that some of them are still out there,” she said, “living in the farthest parts of the jungle. My ancestors could not have looked everywhere. A part of me wants to believe that the old ones can be found. I will spend my whole life looking, and maybe someday I will know. Or at least I will be closer to knowing.”

“We can look together,” I said. She had been talking for a long time about the jungles and the mysteries, about what was beautiful and what was meaningful to look upon, but she had never come to the con- versation that felt, to me, to be the most urgent. I asked instead. “Do you think I’ve done the right thing?”

“It seemed to be the decision that would make you happy,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “I still have a day to change my mind.”

“I don’t think your mind is changed very easily,” she said.

“Tell that to Will.” My legs, impatient, itched to move. I wanted to walk around the mouth of Orakku to clear my mind, right at the knife’s edge of the drop. But I had no wish to fall in, even if the plunge would have been absolutely incredible. “It’s hard when there are other people. We probably all deserve better than we get.”

“I can’t tell you what the right thing is.” She leaned closer to me. Her fingers were very light on my shoulder. “He is your husband.”

I laid my head in my hands.

Orakku is deep, and the jungles of Papho spread very far. Between the many narrow land masses are lakes like inverted mountains, the beach crescents of hundreds of bays and the great expanses of inland seas, and beyond them are the oceans as far as the planet can contain, with the surface of the world sleeping forever beneath them. Farther still there is a thin belt of weedy tundra and permafrost, and then sheets of ice that cover half of the world, thousands of miles across frozen empty water. It is a beautiful planet, weird and hard, and it is all hers because she is the one who is willing to make it her own.

Pressed into her arms, I knew that she really would seek the far reaches, and she would have to find something there, whether it was what she expected or not. She would keep going for as long as she lived, untold miles opening up to her, even if she was the only one. I knew that she would do very well, whether I was there with her or not. And my heart ached as deep down as the bottom of Orakku with the beauty and the wholeness of her.

“Yes,” I said softly. “He is.”

* * *

We lifted off in the morning, with soft light coming in diffuse through the thin clouds and the jungle warm and alive. It was raining, of course; there was no escape from the rain. The thruster kicked in hard, and must have smashed the cliff to pieces as it threw us upward. The new natives of Papho had been warned of this. She had told me that they would gather up on a high ridge two klicks south to watch us ascend.

We flew out, like a plummeting stone in reverse. The planet grew more distant beneath us, and very soon we rose over the cloud cover and lost sight of the land. It will be a long time, if there ever is a time, before we see that