Have You Ever Not Seen The Rain? by Martin Lochman

Eliza can’t sleep. Sitting on the bed with her back against the wall with the blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders, she listens to the steady drumming of the raindrops on the metal roof of the habitat. Some would say that the rhythmic, almost musical sound can make almost anyone drift off, but to Eliza it serves as a constant, cruel reminder of days past that often forces her to stay wide awake.

Today, the unending rain isn’t the main reason behind her wakefulness. Kathleen, her older sister and the only relative she has in the world, hasn’t returned home yet. She should have arrived nearly two hours ago–at quarter past eight like every workday. Elize checks the little screen of her communicator for what must be at least twentieth time but there aren’t any new messages.

Something must have happened…

She shakes her head, trying to silence the negative thoughts. Still, she can’t help but recall the fateful evening ten years ago when–similarly to today–her parents didn’t come home at the usual time. She and Kathleen didn’t worry too much in the beginning, at least they didn’t have to go to bed so early, but as hours crept by, their enthusiasm faded away, gradually replaced by the ugly realization that something was wrong. Exhausted, Eliza eventually fell asleep and when she woke up the next morning, there were some people in the habitat that she’d never seen before talking to Kathleen.

They were sad–Eliza saw that immediately–and after they left, saying that they would be back soon, and Kathleen turned to her with outstretched arms to pull her close, she could see that her older sister was really sad too. Where is mom? Where is dad? Eliza demanded, resisting the hug, and Kathleen explained, voice shaking with tears, that their parents wouldn’t be coming home. Ever.

Eliza would later learn that their parents died in a landslide at the southern part of the colony; landslide that claimed lives of more than three hundred other people. Ironically, it wasn’t even one of the biggest catastrophes that occurred throughout the years. All because of the goddamn rain…

A familiar soft thumping sound which is slowly getting louder snaps Eliza back to present. She jumps up from the bed, crosses the small habitat in a few quick strides and yanks the front door open.

“El?!”

Kathleen is standing just outside the door, hand raised to grab the handle. For a split second, she appears startled, then her expression changes into one of confusion.

“Oh, thank God!” Eliza breathes out in relief, only now realizing just how worried she was.

She quickly steps aside to let her sister in and slams the door shut. Kathleen takes off the raincoat and hangs it on the hanger next to the door to dry. Then she sits down, heavily, on the little stool in the corner and leans against the wall.

It’s obvious that she is exhausted.

“Where were you?” Eliza asks and immediately berates herself for not choosing better words. She wants to be mad at her sister for letting her worry and making her relive the painful memories, but she knows Kathleen wouldn’t do that on purpose.

“I am sorry, El,” Kathleen says quietly. “Three more synthesizers broke down today. It was a mess. I got held up…I should have sent you a message, I know.”

Three more down, Eliza thinks grimly. How many does that leave still fully operational–five? Six? That’s hardly enough to feed half of the colony, much less everyone.

“It’s bad,” her sister continues as if she could see Eliza’s thoughts. “Really bad. And we already ran out of reserves. If the word gets out…”

Her voice trails off but Eliza knows exactly what she means–she read enough books and historical records from Earth to know what is inevitable.

But what if it didn’t have to come to that?

“The ship,” she says hopefully, and when Kathleen doesn’t react, she elaborates: “They are building a ship, remember? With it, we can leave here and find a new home. A better home.”

When Eliza was little, their father would tell her stories about space travel and reaching distant worlds every evening, once she was tucked comfortably in bed. “We belong among the stars,” he said often as he recounted humanity’s greatest achievements in interstellar travel. He told her that they themselves, he and mom, were amongst the explorers who set out from Earth in search for extraterrestrial life.

Of course, this was a merciful lie, a fable to tell children unprepared for the harsh truth (as she found out long after their parents were gone). They weren’t explorers or pioneers; they were refugees fleeing their desolated home world in hopes of finding a new one. Their journey was long and tedious–decades of bridging the immense distances between numerous star systems with harsh, uninhabitable worlds took their toll on both the crew and the ship, bringing them to the very edge of their capabilities. Luckily, they finally stumbled upon a planet which was so similar to Earth that many considered it to be a sign from God.

The planet was mostly water with only a handful of small continents and islands, out of which the biggest one was barely the size of Iceland. Despite their small overall mass, the land was fertile and abundant with vegetation, so the weary travelers decided to settle down. They gutted the ship and repurposed its parts to build a colony–a new beginning for a lost fraction of mankind.

For a while, they prospered and the colony grew. Then one day–Eliza can barely remember it anymore–the skies went dark with ominous black clouds and it started raining.

And it never stopped.

Of course, nobody was too concerned at first but as days turned into weeks and weeks into months under the continuous downpour even the biggest optimists came to terms with the reality, however impossible it was from the standpoint of both common sense and science (in fact, not even hundreds of years worth of database records from various disciplines helped the best minds of the colony figure out the phenomenon).

By then, an extreme damage had been done–crops and a lot of the vegetation died off, a number of buildings had been gradually rendered completely uninhabitable, whilst even more collapsed due to land erosion, and several landslides buried entire living areas. Close to two thousand people lost their lives to the uncompromising elements–and that was just in the beginning.

Over the course of the next years, the surviving colonists adapted, naturally; reconstructed their habitats to better resist the never-ending rain and fell back on using the synthesizers (the last remaining equipment from the ship) to provide food but it was clear that these solutions were by no means long-term.

With the synthesizers failing one by one in the last couple of days it would seem that they are on the brink of yet another catastrophe.

“The ship?” Kathleen repeats and shakes her head, exasperated by her little sister bringing up the senseless argument again.

“There is no ship, El!” she says sharply. “Get it through your head. It’s just a stupid rumor some idiots made up to give us false hope and take our minds off things that actually matter.”

“But I saw it!” Eliza retorts. “Up there, on the mountain. It looked almost ready.”

“You saw what you wanted to see!” Kathleen’s tone of voice is uncompromising. “The colony doesn’t have the technology–machinery, tools, materials…anything! Not to mention experts to build a spacecraft, especially one capable of leaving this star system. And even if we had all that and somehow managed to build it, there are thousands of us. How would we all fit in?”

“They would come back for the rest. They would keep coming back until everyone was gone from this hell hole!”

“It’s a fantasy, El. Nothing more.”

Eliza is silent, fighting to keep tears from welling in her eyes. She’s not crazy or naive; the ship is real and it’s the only salvation they have. Why is it so difficult to make her sister understand?

“I am sorry,” Kathleen says and her expression and tone soften. “But we need to be realistic, especially now.”

Eliza looks away, quiet, thoughts churning in her head like an ocean in a storm. She can feel her sister’s stare; she can hear her sigh, get up from the little stool to move closer and sit down on the bed next to her.

“Come on, El. Don’t be…”

The rest of the words goes unheard as Eliza suddenly recognizes that something is fundamentally different. Brows furrowed in concentration, she tries to pinpoint what exactly it is. She looks back at her sister.

“What is it?” Kathleen asks in alarm.

“Do you also…” Eliza begins but doesn’t finish, her eyes going wide as the realization hits her.

She shoots up and towards the door, opening it in the same violent manner as those few minutes ago. She steps outside onto the little platform.

Kathleen rushes to join her. Eliza watches with amusement as her sister’s puzzled look disappears, giving way to a mixture of disbelief and excitement.

The rain is gone.

After all those years the silence feels strange, almost unnatural like they just stepped into a dream. Eliza stands there, taking lungfuls of air–how much easier it is now to breathe!

She smiles and closes her eyes. Tilts her head upward. Kathleen is saying something but Eliza isn’t listening, lost in the perfect, indescribable moment.

She has no idea how long she stays like this before something surprisingly cold lands on her cheek.

She opens her eyes again and squints, taken aback by the sight of what she’s never seen before in her life, what she only knows from the stories others told her and the books she read, what–up until this point–was as abstract to her as the word that describes it.

Snow.

—

Martin is a Czech emerging author currently living in Malta and working as a University librarian. His flash fiction and short stories appeared in Ikarie, a former Czech SF magazine, Theme of Absence, Aphelion, AntipodeanSF, 365tomorrows, 101 words and in a bunch of Czech anthologies. You can find him at https://martinlochmanauthor.wordpress.com/.