INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 by Andy Cox

story, or planet. She grows up too fast even though years are longer here. She grows tall and thin, so straight against the red sky, and that brown hair deepens to something red-gold.
    She longs for others of her kind – we are not them, she tells us every night as we curl her into bed. Not them – those who know this world inside and out because it is their own. We fashion this world in Latin and they do not have Latin, she insists.
    Your long fingers plait her hair into braids, each end tied with a ribbon the color of Earth skies; come morning, these ribbons spool undone on her pillow, on her floor. One morning, there are only ribbons.
    She wrote us a letter. (No, she didn’t, but hush and let me tell this before I go back to melting moons and the way your hand fit against the curve of my head the same way it eventually did hers and—)
    I can’t. I want to tell you about the rain first.
    •••
    You don’t remember, but this is where we began.
    In the hush of space where there was only the muted rumble of the engines through the walls. I said it was like a cat purring. You tried not to laugh, but I saw the way your mouth moved. That slant. I know all the words it conveys and contains, and tell them each to you so that you might remember.
    Laughter, derision, amusement, irritation, contemplation, love, love, love unspoken. That was never a word between us – it simply was, the way Valles Marineris simply is. The way one finds unexplainable comfort in something so overwhelmingly large. Something so overwhelmingly present.
    You told me about rain first – you hated it on Earth. It was something to slog through, something that flooded gutters, leaked through roofs, soaked socks and shoes and wrinkled fingertips. You liked it dry, because dry was simple, uncomplicated by anything so random as water. Water went where it would, dry was always dry and didn’t go anywhere.
    But slowly on the ship, you came to long for rain. I heard the longing in the slant of your mouth as it moved over the curve of my shoulder in the shower. You tongued the beads of water down the length of my arm, directing them exactly where you wanted them, and you saw something new in water then. Possibility became a word also balanced in the slant of your mouth.
    You watched the skies once we settled in. You communicated with the other distant outposts that had been established, asked them every day what they saw in the clouds. They never saw rain. This world was dry, itching for a good downpour. The planet could not stretch to reach the dry ache in its middle.
    The day we found her ribbons was the day it rained. (This is both true and not – just listen.)
    She wasn’t old enough to go on her own (oh, she was, but will you hush?). We did not walk, we ran to the edge of the canyon, all along that jagged edge. (They don’t call it Valles Marineris – they have no idea what Mariner 9 was and though we tell them, they don’t care. To them, it’s Scar and Cradle and where they first emerged.)
    We ran and did not look where we went because it was her we looked for. We saw their tall forms against the sky as we always did, moving in that dance we didn’t understand but enjoyed watching, but there was no smaller figure amid them.
    We ran, our feet knowing the way without us having to look – we could have traced these routes in our sleep (I probably often did, but you did not, still wishing I could pull you down inside my own dreams). Dust rose in the heavy air, coating arms, cheeks; my lips curled apart they were so dry and at first I thought I was crying – a thing I had not done since we descended to the bottom of the canyon and lost— No. That did not happen. The square in the yard says otherwise, but it needs to hush, and this—
    Hush.
    This. It was not tears, for it was not salty, but it tasted almost like metal as it washed down from the clouded sky. It was harder than anything we had known (it wasn’t), washing away every speck of dust