Stories About the Rain

I remember her best as a brightness: a splash of amber against the rain, wet and blurred, her hair pulled up in the imagined style of a dead people. It always rains on Papho, drip-mists and drobbles taking turns like gentle rocking waves, a pulse that becomes a way of life, rising in crescendo to the terror of the summer monsoons. They say that the new natives have a hundred different words for rain, but the truth is simply that they have many ways of expressing what they feel.

The flowering plants on Papho are crevice-huggers. They cling to the sides of things, wind their way up the trunks of trees, climb the faces of cliffs. Their vines are as thick as arms. Two or three individual leaves, unrolled and sewn together, can be made into blankets. The flowers that bloom on them are big enough to curl up inside. Each surface is waxy and waterproof, each contour of the plant designed to guide water where it is needed and dismiss it from where it is not. Like all living things, their workings are complex and mostly unseen. You can describe them in as many words as you like, but they have no explanation.

The people who live on the planet wear clothing made from the leaves to keep the water off, but almost every time I saw her she had decked herself in the petals, and her form was traced underneath their wrapping. She liked the gold ones, the amber, the tangerine, the ochre. Once I saw her wear red, but I think that she was only trying it on. She only wore them when she was alone, or with me. I do not know if it was a habit she kept secret from the other settlers, and I never spoke of it to them.

It always rains on Papho. The continents are honey- combs of straits and seas; wind from off of the water is omnipresent. The tropics are cool enough to condense the vapors, and the habitable land is carpeted with jungle that gives up its own constant moisture. The skies are perennially gray, and the mists mute the scenery and obscure the horizons. It is hard not to see the mood as somber. Where there is color, it stands out intensely.

“You know the face of God when you see it, Ev,” she said to me once. “A holy thing is a thing you see and know that you will never be able to take it for granted. Not ever.” She was standing next to me on the rocks. Stray locks of her hair trailed down her face and channeled the drops, and water ran off of her petals.

There are places on that planet where immense pits have been burrowed into the rocky ground by the pounding and shifting of old flows of water, now redirected. You can stand at the top and look down so far that the rain seems to funnel toward a point shrouded in darkness, past the roughness of the rocks and the clinging vines with their huge flowers and deep down into spaces you cannot fathom or see, but only imagine. There is one such chasm which the settlers call Orakku, not far from the village, a hundred feet across and nearly a mile deep. She had taken me there.

Later, I remember watching her far below as she climbed, a splash of amber clinging to the side of Orakku, complex, unexplained.

* * *

The place where the Reclaimer

had landed was an oddity, a shelf of flat rock a third of a mile long. It barely seated the mass of the ship, the land to three sides falling away into fractured tumbles and dense forestation, and pitching upward in pillar-like formations on the fourth. I remember the ride; there was none of the grating and jostling we braced ourselves for, just the crunching impact of touch- down. And then, after, the smell of steam and charred wood and the burnt odors of plants like none we had known before. The ship’s gunners had to scorch away some of the jungle to make a place to land. Eden

must have had to do the same, seventy years before, but the new natives don’t like to talk about their beginnings.

They burned away the jungle that first day, and they have been forced to do so continually. The plants grow incredibly quickly on Papho when there is new space to be had. So it was within the last tendrils of dissipating steam and the faint traces of that well-remembered smell that I found Will -- Captain William Mantego, commander of the Reclaimer

and tracker of human habitation through the stars -- standing in the shelter of his ship with the ramp down, calling out orders as crates of plant samples were hauled up. He was in full uniform, even the cap, weather be damned, and I wondered briefly if he was the same man I had raced on shiftbike through the canyons years ago on Little Norva.

Stepping up from the lower slopes and feeling the rain suddenly cease as I passed under the rim of the ship was like walking into another world.

He smiled briefly when he saw me, but held his official stance, arms crossed in front of him, legs firmly planted. “Any luck?”

“That depends,” I said, “on what you’d say our mission is.”

“I take it no one is jumping at the chance to come back with us, then,” Will said.

I shrugged. “They like it here, I guess. They like being where they are.”

“They always do.” He turned to shout a command over his shoulder at the haulers, then walked past me toward the edge of the shelf, looking out through the sheet of rain. “You have heard it as many times as I have, and we’ve been on a few of these missions now. Every Reclamation is the same. Every population anchors itself to its planet; it doesn’t matter whether they were stranded or chose to settle. They come, they face terrible hardship, stranger and tougher than anything they’ve ever known, and it changes them. The hell they’ve been through, they take it and store it inside them, make it a part of themselves. They become a part of the planet, as though they had always been there. You can’t get them to leave.”

“At least they haven’t dismissed us outright, like the people on Preta,” I said. “They talk to us. They’ve been generous. I think they enjoy our company.”

“Their cooperation has been helpful.” His voice was hard and edged. That was the Captain’s tone, purged of feeling, but I knew him well enough to hear his frustration.

“Maybe that’s all we can ask of them,” I said. “Their great grandparents may have been born to our way of life, but they weren’t. It could be for the best.”

“Is that your professional opinion?” the Captain said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t have one yet. Give me some more time.”

“We still have a month here,” he said. He didn’t look at me; his eyes scanned across the treetops and back again. “Ev, promise me one thing. Promise me you will convince some of them. No one has ever Re- claimed anyone -- not without excessive force and a court martial. No one has ever been brought home. Humankind is spreading too far, and it isn’t looking back. I want that first sign that we can unite. We’re one species. We aren’t meant to be fractured like this.”

“I will try,” I said, and I do not know if he heard me over the pounding of the rain. I granted him the right to have his dream, because he was my captain and my greatest friend, and I told it to the wind and the water that no matter how much we had grown apart from each other, I would try.

* * *

Papho is a beautiful place. There are planets made of ice and planets covered by desert and planets where the atmosphere is poison gas, planets where all life has failed and planets where nothing has ever lived, and since there is a kind of beauty to be found in suffering and in vast emptiness, each of them has a kind of beauty. But Papho is like Earth. Though it is choked with water and most of the planet is cold, the equatorial zones harbor the right climate for life. Thousands of plant species, hundreds of fungi, and a handful of small animals have found ways to thrive. It is as eerily familiar as it is unlikely. In the early days after our arrival, when we still knew little, we used to wonder if there had ever been an intelligent species like us.

She would often take me into the treetops when the rain was light. Her people wear a sort of hand- wrapping, made from the rock-grabbing roots of the great flowering plants, which they use to climb, and she would slither up the trunks with incredible grace. I followed with my own hands engulfed in a borrowed pair, clumsily. I had no education in such things.

Near the top, she would straddle one of the great branches, far enough out so that I could not help my fear for her, that the branch might bend and shrug her off, or that she would slip on the wet surface and plummet to the rocks. But she moved with a perfect knowledge, taking the dangers for granted.

Up there--she always chose the tallest trees--we could see across the top of the jungle, the canopy like a moving, living floor. We could see the hewn planet, the columnar rock formations, the short sheer cliff faces, the arches of stone. You’ve never seen natural sculpture like on Papho; the forces of erosion are constant and forever shifting. And always there would be Orakku, heard if not seen, a klick to the south or half a klick east or a hundred yards north. She had many havens, but the titanic cavern shaft was always there, somewhere.

“No one person could ever map the jungle,” she said, “Not even in their heart, where knowing goes deeper. No one could ever know the whole of it. It goes on and on, past everything I will ever be able to see.”

“Can you learn so much from trees?” I said. It was only half a joke.

“We all love the trees." She was leaning forward across the branch, arms laid out in front of her to keep her steady. “I don‘t think that I could ever do without the trees. Or without the rain.”

It ran down her arms, the rainwater. It slid from her matted hair and followed the skin of her neck. It rolled across the petals that contained her breasts. It dripped from her toes and became the rain again, falling to the undergrowth.

“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

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. 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 place again, and no matter how hard the descendants of the Eden

try it will not be the same then.

On the final evening, in the aftermath of my last moments with her, Will took me to see the thing that had been moved into my quarters. A gift from the people of Papho, he told me. It was so big that it barely fit into the room, but he said it didn’t seem right to put it anywhere else. Even disregarding its incredible personal importance to me, it would have been mine to study out of necessity. Who else could understand?

So it came to pass that one of the only three existing copies of Oqar Amarhatta

, Stories About the Rain, became my nearly constant companion for the long journey across the stars.

She must have convinced them. They had relin- quished it to us, I imagine, because they might already be gone by the time another person came to Papho. They wanted to be remembered. And they wanted other people to understand why they had made the choices they had. But over all of that it was for me, from her, one last sense of nearness, as though we can almost touch or speak through the rapidly passing years.

Will knows what I am feeling, if only because he could have felt it instead. Things have been better between us since I left her behind, and I feel a terrible, mar- velous mixture of betrayal and longing and love.

She will be twenty years older already than the last time I saw her. I wonder often whether, to her, the time strode in slow measure through long decades, or whether all those years seemed to wink by in the space of a few months, as they have for me. She must have wandered far, miles and miles through the mists and the rain, the way revealed anew each time she moved aside the heavy draping of a leaf cluster, or came over the crest of a ridge. In my mind she has found the cousins of Orakku, tread the floors of canyons where only she and the water have gone, crossed the inland seas. She walks without looking behind her, and somewhere ahead of her is an edge, a place where all is revealed. Perhaps the old ones are there.

She is a brightness, and belief is enough. I can speak it to you, but do not ask me to explain.

Imprint

Text: Aaron Redfern March 2012
Images: Cover Art: Rebecca Bowslaugh
Publication Date: 03-10-2012

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