by Jean Roberta
“I do live in Dimashq!” Amat exclaimed, her eyes as wide as jars of honey. “You must visit! We must meet in our own city!”
•
Perrette slips into the copying room, seeking unneeded pieces of vellum: the ones with too many layers of palimpsest to scrape clean, the ones discarded. It will not matter to her that the words she copies will sit among others, among psalms and geographies, only that they are copied, are brought from the gold of the city to her cell. She rests her candle on the table a safe distance from the pages of Lives of the Desert Fathers.
Under the table is a stack of unbound vellum. She moves it onto the table and starts to sort through it.
She cannot stop glancing at Barbe’s painted saints.
Though all are garbed individually, all in different scenes of privation and piety, almost all have dark, curling hair. Almost all have green eyes. Perrette bends to look closer. A strange feeling is running through her. Hope? Fear?
Wanting, tangled up with both. A possibility she dares not think.
Though all the saints have different faces, there—There—And there—
So many noses subtly askew, so many high foreheads.
The saints Barbe has been painting—gazing at, touching with careful, tender fingers—are Perrette.
•
I heard, in my own voice:
“Ye Lesbian Lasses all
that border on the Lake:
And ye that of the Aeolian towne
your names are thought to take,
Ye Lesbian Lasses (that
for cause I looved you sore
Breede my defame) unto my Harpe
I charge you come—”
I stopped there.
Sywe smiled.
I read from English letters, my own, but not Psáppho’s. Sywe told me there wasn’t anything of Psáppho’s in English. Just some man translating some other man, Ovid, who didn’t like Psáppho and wrote the final words “—no more.” I refused to speak them.
Sywe told me, “There used to be much more than what’s on these walls. I’m memorising everything I find here. I’m going to tell it to my daughters.”
Not like this, I thought, leaning forward. Breath against ear. I said to Sywe other words—Psáppho’s words—she’d taught me, “Because I prayed this word: I want.”
I heard:
“Love shook my
thoughts, like wind falling on oak-trees on the mountain.”
I put it away in my memory.
•
“I want to show you something.” Perrette stands at the door to Barbe’s cell, whispering. Shaking. “Will you come with me to the courtyard?”
The door opens and Barbe’s face appears. “Yes,” she whispers.
They walk in silence. Perrette wants words, wants to explain, wants to stop the sudden thought that she imagined the similarities between the saints’ faces and her own, the fear that Barbe will not see the city. Nothing. Silence between them. Barbe does not even yawn.
They reach the courtyard.
“What…” Barbe’s mouth falls open like an unfastened manuscript and she turns to Perrette, pleading, “Why are we seeing this? What vision is this?”
Perrette’s heart is like a bell.
Barbe takes another step forward, cautious. Stops. Turns to Perrette again.
“It is no vision,” Perrette manages to say.
Barbe steps, steps, and Perrette follows, until they stand before the door.
“Touch it,” Perrette says. “Touch those words. I know two women who were so happy when I translated their meaning.”
Barbe’s fingers trace the words like the curl of one of her saints’ hair.
“I have…” Barbe takes a deep breath. “In the corners of my eyes I have seen buildings that do not belong. I never thought to touch one of their doors.”
“Follow me,” Perrette says, pushing open the door.
•
Wallada walked a different way through Dimashq, wearing Hafsa’s—no, her—clothes. At Amat’s door, she stopped. She barely breathed. She knocked.
Amat opened it—Amat, a woman of the city of golden roofs, the city of voice, the city of Dimashq—and led her in, through to the women’s gathering room, explaining that her husband was away for the day and his mother was visiting family and her sister and daughters would be in the souq for hours. They were alone. “Sit. Here is tea. Here is bread and fruit. Here is…you. Here.”
“Here.” Wallada barely tasted the tea. “Your stories.”
“Yes!” Amat’s face shone with happiness like the sun—like the roofs of the other city. “Which ones would you hear?”
“The—hair. The ones about hair.” And thrusts. Wallada couldn’t—yet—say that.
“Oh.” Amat looked at Wallada through lashes like a comb. “Those are best of all when shown.”
Alone, they unbound one another’s hair.
•
In the city, Perrette traces the constellations of Barbe’s freckles with her lips. Barbe moans into the long curls of Perrette’s loose hair. Words woven in fifteen scripts into fine wool cushion their bare bodies.
•
Together, Sywe and I breathed Psáppho.
•
Tears
of the Gods
Sarah L. Byrne
Legend had it that the blue rain was the tears of the gods, though just why gods would weep in blue no one could quite explain. Modern science said the odd meteorological phenomenon was simply a matter of copper sulphate, spores from the blue copper-feeding algae in the deep vents forced into the atmosphere by volcanic activity. Gita knew differently. Opening the door of her house at the patter of the heavy drops on the titanium roof—how did it manage to even sound so blue?—she held out a hand and let the liquid pool in her palm.
What the blue rain really meant was change.
Gita’s hand started to itch. Back inside, she held it under the cold tap, washing off the residue of the rain before her skin began to blister from the contact with the irritant. The first time she’d seen the corrosive blue rain had been more than ten years since, when she first arrived. She and Silvia, assigned Survey work as a couple for the first time, and who cared if it was some backwater planet, not exactly a career-boosting move? It had come again the day the shuttle had arrived to take Silv away for the last time. The relentless blue rain beating futile on its impassive grey hull, and Gita’s dreams trampled in the dust. When the blue rain had come for the third time, she’d made the decision to leave the city, with its bright lights and protective dome, and volunteered for this lonely post. Just her in a little house in the desert outside the city boundaries.
Change meant a number of things to a woman past forty, even aside from the obvious one. But one thing you knew about change by this age was that it was inevitable. It came like the blue rain whether you liked it or not or just hadn’t made your mind up yet. So Gita wasn’t surprised when her door buzzer sounded, though she jumped at the sudden noise all the same.
When did I get so used to silence?
Gita slid the door open to reveal a familiar figure, foot already tapping with impatience. Min. Standing there lithe and long-legged in her black leather-look protective gear, the usual energy visibly humming through her every muscle. Min bounded into the porch, bringing the wet-sand smell of desert rain with her, then tugged off her soft helmet-hood so her short ash-blond hair stood up spikily, grinned at Gita and flashed her a wink.
“What’s new, gorgeous?”
Min: Survey project manager, one-woman whirlwind of unstoppable energy, old friend.
Some things, at least, did not change.
“Don’t flirt with me,” Gita said sourly, as Min stripped off the rest of her outer layers and discarded them on the porch floor. “We both know you don’t mean it.”
“Might do,” Min said, though she did at least look slightly shamefaced. In the soft light of the interior, she looked Gita up and down. Gita knew she was taking in ever
y detail: the old flannel pyjamas, the streaks of grey in the unbrushed dark hair that tumbled to her shoulders. Min herself looked fantastic as always, even standing in her socks, all wiry grace and boyish charm.
“How’ve you been?” she asked at last.
“Fine,” Gita said. “At least I am as long as people don’t keep coming here bothering me.”
Min raised an eyebrow.
“Might do you good to be bothered a bit more,” she observed. “You’re getting a bit…odd. Out here all on your own. People are starting to talk.”
“I’ve always been odd,” Gita said. “I just don’t bother hiding it anymore.”
“All the same.” Min brushed this off. “I haven’t forgotten you exist, and the Survey hasn’t either. We’ve got a job for you.”
Change. There it was, then. There was no avoiding it.
•
The sun blazed down hot on the desert trail, and Gita sweated in her weather-resistant trousers and jacket. She’d left off the headgear and filter-mask at least—she wasn’t worried about rain any time soon, with a sky as clear as this—and the rest of the team had followed her lead and done the same. Gita paused to catch her breath for a moment, to push the damp strands of hair off her forehead. The trail was too steep and narrow now for wheeled transport. Where they were going, the only way was by foot.
“You want to stop for a break?” Ed asked, beside her. Kind young Ed. New-qualified and on the way up, and solicitous of her as if she was his own old grandma.
“Not at all.”
Gita took a sip of water from her drink tube and forced herself onwards. She was awkwardly aware of being the oldest person on this trek, among all the keen young things, all temporary placements. No one came out here any more unless they needed a bit of exoplanet experience to advance their careers, and had to take what they could get. She felt heavy, and not just the way her muscles were softened from inactivity, or the couple of extra middle-aged pounds around her middle.
“You’re the most senior microbiologist out here,” Min had argued, as Gita resisted her efforts to prise her out of the comfortable hole her quiet little life had become. “You’re wasted doing weather observations, that stuff should have been automated years ago, anyway. We need you on this.”
Gita strongly suspected there was no such urgent need. Sure, the volcanic clefts were finally officially safe to access, now sufficient time had passed since any activity other than a bit of odd-coloured rain. And someone might as well have a look around, bring back some samples for analysis. But this had the flavour of one of Min’s for-your-own-good social-engineering moves. Especially when Gita had hesitated, and that little crease had appeared between Min’s eyebrows, concern and sympathy and more than a little admonishment.
“She’s been gone a long time, Gita. Life goes on, you know.”
So it did. So here she was, heading for the mountains, the weird scooped-out shapes of them on the horizon, eroded by the abrasive rainfall, no sky-scraping peaks here. But except for that, it could almost be back on Earth somewhere. Morocco maybe, the Atlas mountains. Silv would have liked it out here.
•
The first pioneers in this part of space, a hundred years back, had called it the planet of the gods. Since then it had acquired a serial number but no better name.
It was an ironic usage now, of course, because what a godforsaken place it was these days, now the Survey and the terraforming projects had moved onto the bigger and better worlds in the system. Even the bright-lights frontier-town city under the dome was fading, businesses leaving and families packing up. But people had seen things. The people who’d been here before the Survey with its safety protocols had come along and put restrictions on wandering into the remote places. They’d seen things, or said they had; things that became a kind of legend. You could still find their accounts cached somewhere on the old internet if you looked: accounts of ethereal things that materialised out of nowhere and drifted in the wind, and some had said the planet must have its own gods. Others said it was heat stroke or dehydration or whatever it was they were smoking back then, and that you-see-what-you-want-to-see. And they were probably right. But still.
Gita liked to think the gods wept for Silv. Someone had to. Gita was worn dry by the years, by solitude. Someone had to remember her; Gita struggled to picture her face sometimes. Like now, lying awake in her narrow single tent, as the chatter and giggles of her young companions finally quietened, giving way to the weight of the desert-silent night.
It had been cancer, and not one of the curable ones. Not one of the slow-moving chronic types, manageable if you didn’t mind taking so many pills a day you rattled when you walked. It had been the kind that tore through you silent as a scream in space and by the time you suspected that niggling ache in your back, that odd nausea—not pregnant, are you? hah, chance’d be a fine thing, spawn of the gods, hey?—might be anything more than one-of-those-things, it was too late, far too late to even talk about treatment.
Silv hadn’t wanted to go off-planet. She’d loved this place, even though the medical facilities were basic. If there’s nothing they can do anyway…
The transfer shuttle she’d finally agreed to had come too late for her, and the cold silent burden it carried away to the mainland—for freezing, for shipping back to her family, her legal next-of-kin—had not really even been Silv anymore. Gita could have made a fuss about the legal thing, about Silv’s wishes, how she’d wanted to be buried—I was her family too, you know I was—but she had no stomach for that fight. She could have gone along, taken compassionate leave: Min had in fact stopped just short of ordering her onto the shuttle. But the real Silv was still here. The memory of her was right here, where the gods themselves wept their corrosive blue tears because she was gone. That funny, gentle, gorgeous woman who’d loved this place and wanted to grow old here. She was gone.
•
“I’ll go in,” Gita said, as they stood high above the desert, looking down into the crevice that opened up in the rock at their feet.
“You sure?” Ed frowned in concern.
“I’ve done quite a bit of climbing, you know.” She was irritated by the dubious looks they gave her; that was enough to make her determined, despite her tiredness from the ascent. That, and if this was going to done, it should be done properly, taking the samples with minimum disturbance to the environment.
Gita clipped her descender device onto her harness, checked the rope and the spring-loaded anchor wedged in the rock. All in order. Here we go.
How many years had it been? Odd how your body remembered things. Her gloved hands slipped a little on the rope, her feet groping more clumsily for the wall than she would have liked. But the harness took her weight, she began to descend smoothly into the dark crevasse, the pale glow of her headtorch dimly lighting the way.
“All right down there?” someone shouted down from the blinding-bright sliver of light above.
“All good,” Gita called back.
And then the rope slithered loose and she was falling.
She’d fallen before. There was never any life-before-your-eyes endless-seeming plunge. Just a brief panicked flail of your arms and legs then the ground slamming you hard in the back. Gita lay still for a moment, trying to catch her breath, letting her hammering heart slow. She moved her arms and legs tentatively: nothing broken, the protective gear had taken the worst of the impact. She wasn’t sure how far she’d fallen. The rope had been good for ten metres; they hadn’t expected the cave to go deeper than that. She didn’t think the blue algae could survive too far from the warmth and oxygen of the surface.
Warmth, yes. It was warm down here, and there was a hot coppery tang in the air that Gita could taste even through her filter mask. She turned her head. Liquid bubbled blue in the pool inches from her face, from where she lay on a narrow rock ledge. She’d been lucky not to fall in that pool—deep and larger than she’d first realised, an underwater lagoon stretching into the shadows. Might
have been an easier landing though. Gita winced with the sharp pain in her back as she started to ease herself up. And then the surface erupted. The god burst forth from the depths and rose up before her.
Sleek, blue-translucent, it breached the surface like the ethereal ghost of a dolphin, stretching, forming. Liquid fountained from the pore that took shape in its centre. Air was forced out in reed-like whistles and clicks. Turning towards her; reaching. Then splitting apart into a thousand glistening particles, as a panicked shout echoed down from above.
“Dr G? Can you hear me? You all right?”
“I’m all right,” Gita called back. But she didn’t move. She just watched.
Those shining droplets, raining back down into the pool of their birth: safe, contained, to reform again, reborn.
She understood then: the blue raindrops were not the tears of the gods, but their death. Unless, for them, the two things were the same.
•
They hauled her out strapped to a backboard, despite her protestations. She unstrapped herself and pulled off her face mask, blinking in the too-bright daylight, fending off the attentions of the slightly panicked young woman with the medical kit. Gita winced a little as she saw the crumbled rock where the anchor had pulled out of its crack. The rock must have been more fragile than it looked, eroded with the corrosive rainfall and vapour. Should have thought of that. Once upon a time she would have checked and double-checked everything.
You were supposed to get less reckless with age, weren’t you, not more? That depended on your priorities, maybe. On what you had to lose. How much of a hurry you were in to meet your gods.
Ed and his young team had hitched the rescue rope around a sturdy outcrop, the most likely thing to hold. Good thinking there, and brave of them to risk themselves for her. They weren’t bad people. They couldn’t help being irritating, any more than she could help becoming more of a cranky old woman with every passing year. They’d grabbed some samples from the pool while they were down there. They’d done it hastily, in a hurry to get out, afraid of the rope corroding and trapping them. They’d done it before Gita’d had the chance to tell them not to, though they’d at least remembered to use the proper vials: temperature and acidity controlled.