The Rain Planet

The clouds were thickening. In some patches the sky was almost black and it was not quite midmorning. Willow shivered at the scene outside her window as she gathered her equipment together. Everything went into a heavy duty cloth rucksack, its clasps oiled against rust. Finally Willow took her rain cover from its place in a cupboard and ventured outside.

She stood in the covered walkway that linked all the buildings in the settlement. The gutter just beyond her home was blocked again and a waterfall had formed where it overflowed. She sighed; another task to add to her list. She carefully placed her rain cover over herself. The super light material folded out into a cylinder that covered her whole length. She closed it at the top, adjusting it until the dome sat about 10 cm above her head and the sides gave her plenty of space. It was clear with just a little blur. It felt like the rain simply fell around her. She stepped out into the downpour.

The grass and moss beneath her were lush and spongy. Her feet sank deep into the tuffets as she kept to the green path which snaked around the carefully cultivated streams allowing the constant rain to drain away safely.

The path led through thick bushes, each coated with water droplets that magnified the tiny leaves. As she brushed past, her cover caused the drops to scatter only to be instantly replaced. Around her, there was the sound of the rain, her own breath and the calls of distant birds.

She reached the aqua-village after only a fifteen minute walk. That wasn’t its real name, of course, but it was easier for the human settlers than the name in the amphibious language. Croaking is hard on human throats.

Her contact was waiting for her in the shallows of the outer pond. Willow felt her heart begin to pound as she approached. The slim figure ahead of her was beautiful. Her skin was smooth and shimmered with every colour, bright and mesmerising, her eyes huge and dark, her face small and sweet. She sat, swishing her feet in the water, her eyes intent on something in her hands. Willow reached her and knelt down on the bank. Her companion looked up and smiled a wide smile before opening her webbed fingers a little to show willow what she had caught. A softly glowing crab clicked and bubbled between her palms. Its shell was iridescent and its claws were a soft blue. Willow sighed in appreciation and put her head closer. Suddenly the crab shot a stream of water right at her face. She leapt back, her eyes wide in surprise as the jet harmlessly bounced off her cover. The other girl dropped the crab and doubled over in laughter. The crab swam off into the deeper water and vanished from sight.

“Hi Willow”. The girls voice was low and raspy, her mouth still unused to a human language. Willow still felt guilty that they couldn’t communicate in the native languages of the planet, but she lacked the right anatomy. Maybe in the time the budget would stretch to tech that would solve the issue.

“Hi Frog.” That wasn’t her true name, but the amphibious people who had learned the languages of the humans were anxious to make things easier. Frog was, at heart, straight forward.

Willow got to her feet and Frog stretched her arms and pushed off into deeper water. Willow walked up to the floating wood paths that led into the village, aware, once again, that the villagers had no use for the paths before installing them for the humans. She often ended up on her hands and knees to avoid toppling off. Frog swam along next to her, long limbs gracefully kicking through the water with no apparent effort.

They reached Frog’s office after a few minutes. The building was round and smooth, half submerged in the water. The village anchored onto hooks driven deep into the stone beneath the mud and water. This way the buildings could be moved and added as required. It also meant that the buildings all moved like ships and the humans had to quickly adapt to any seasickness they experienced.

Once inside, Frog and Willow started to get to work. Understanding the rain planet meant gathering as much information as possible and Frog was a wealth of knowledge. Her office was filled with tanks and pots containing samples of wildlife, soil, plants and other things Willow could not place. Today they sat together around a floating desk, on which Frog had placed one of the ingenious records that the amphibious people used in place of books.

“Today we’ll talk about the Leviathan,” began Frog, pointing at the illustration.

“We have a Leviathan in our culture too,” said Willow, surprised.

“Leviathan is not a perfect translation,” admitted Frog. “But it will do for now. The story is that when the Leviathan emerges it creates a huge wave that covers all.”

Willow shuddered at the thought. The landmass they had was carefully cultivated out of mud banks and the roots of whatever greenery they could persuade to grow. The rain planet had nearly no solid rock near the surface. Keeping enough dry land for their buildings took daily painstaking maintenance.

“That sounds terrifying. The oceans here are so deep.”

Frog thought about it.

“Yes. Anything could be down there. Isn’t that exciting?”

They continued on, Frog lecturing and Willow taking notes. Mid-afternoon came and they took a break to eat a lunch of raw sliced fish, bitter greens and sweet berries. No grains and no large land animals to farm meant a low fat, high protein diet. Willow missed bread like crazy.

The remains of lunch were tidied away and the two got ready to head out for a small expedition. Willow carefully put on her hood and Frog packed a bag hung with small decorative buoys. After Willow made it back to the mossy bank they headed out towards the shore of the ocean. This involved moving out of the cultivated area to the muddy swamp like surroundings, filled with sinkholes, larger wildlife, and rotting vegetation. Frog took samples as she went, while Willow tried to avoid inhaling the stink. Finally they reached the edge of it and all that lay before them was the endless sea. All the while the rain fell, ever present.

Willow felt a bit sick looking out across the water. There was no real horizon, for one thing. The grey of the ocean and the grey of the clouded sky blended together and became almost indistinguishable. The thought of the ocean covering the entire planet, save those small piles of mud that formed and sank was hard to really comprehend.

Some of the humans had sailed out to find other villages and try and map more of the planet. The amphibious people were nomadic and happy to go wherever the water was shallow enough to put down their hooks. They kept in contact via tech and didn’t bother much with navigation.

Frog slipped into the deeper water easily and dived down. Willow set up on the most solid looking piece of land and began taking pictures and noting down her thoughts of the day. Scientists had clear ideas of what their goals were and brought back obvious results. But Willow in her role as an archaeologist and historian felt bereft. This land was all fluid, ever changing and keeping no record of its past. There were no tombs or ancient sites to see. The amphibious people kept their own records – she felt like a pointless middleman. Why not just ask and amphibious person to translate them and leave her out completely? She finished her notes and sighed heavily. The rain felt oppressive today. Most of the time she could ignore it – it became nothing but a soothing white noise. Today though, like on all her low days, it became what it was on Earth in her mind – depressing and numbing.

Frog reappeared, her arms filled with sample containers. She was smiling; her search had brought forth a good surprise. Along with her containers she pulled up a piece of dull material bent in a circle with a gap between the two ends. She beckoned Willow closer and carefully wiped at a section. Gleaming gold appeared underneath the muck.

“It’s a torc,” explained Frog. “It’ll have been made soon after a great storm. If we clean it up, we should be able to learn more.”

The evening came and brought darkness. There was no direct sunlight on the rain planet, but the dim grey of the day was nothing to the soft, absolute darkness of the night. Willow found she was unable to sleep as a chorus of toads started up their nightly singing. The events of the day ran through her mind. When she slept she had nightmares about terrifying monsters from the depths. All of them had Frog’s beautiful eyes .

The next day Willow repeated her morning routine and headed back out into the rain. Frog met her with gleaming eyes. She showed her the newly cleaned torc and a pile of notes.

“The torc is from the second era! That’s approximately two thousand years ago! The fact it was dredged up means significant activity beneath the surface. We may well be due a leviathan ourselves!”

Willow shrank back at this.

“That’s terrible!”

Frog blinked at her.

“It does mean we’ll need to make some preparations. The human settlement will be an issue.”

Willow was numb for the rest of the day.

The next few days were a nightmare of hurried construction and silent prayers as more and more evidence backed up Frog’s prediction. The humans prepared as best they could, evacuating the infirm and young off planet and sending the rest to stay with the amphibious people. Frog’s village merely unhooked from the earth, tethered the buildings to each other, packed supplies and waited. Frog seemed excited for it to happen.

It hit at nightfall only a week later. Willow and Frog, secured in Frog’s office, felt the whole building drop down.

“The water is being pulled back into the ocean. Like a huge breath,” whispered Frog. Willow hung onto her straps and thought about the broken gutter she had never gotten around to fixing.

The first wave hit with a crash like thunder. The impact swept the little sphere up and under and up even more. Through the thick paned windows Willow saw the height they had reached, saw the plants far below them vanish and, for a few brief moments, at the peak of the wave, as they were carried above the clouds, saw the sky, the stars and the space station in orbit far above them. Frog was busily taking pictures of the sky, oblivious to the violent shaking of the sphere.

It was a long night. Willow was violently sick, and more terrified than she had ever been before. There was nothing to do but keep her eyes closed and pray for it to be over. Finally, as dawn came, muted and grey as ever, the waves died down.

The villagers opened their hatches and peered out into the new morning. The fresh air gave life to Willow as she was gently guided to the door by Frog. Looking out, Willow saw a totally new landscape. There was the ocean, newly calm, but the old land mass was gone, utterly. There was no telling whether it had all been swept away or whether the village had simply travelled away from it. Instead, they saw new land; upturned sticky mud, golden sands and all manner of debris. Frog was beside herself in excitement. Willow looked around blearily as other amphibious people took readings, pointed stuff out and slowly but surely started moving the village to the new land. Birds began to land on the new earth. Creatures began to crawl from the mud – new ones Willow hadn’t seen before. Frog leapt into the water and darted away, coming back only minutes later, her arms filled with objects.

“Willow! Look! The wave has unearthed more second era finds! We’ve not seen any of this stuff for eons! This is amazing! This might be the best Leviathan in a hundred years!”

“Best?”

Willow was lost for words. Looking around, she saw the happiness on all the faces around her. Some people were examining the new animals, calling out their names as if they were long lost friends. Others were grabbing samples of the soil and making guesses about what was in it. Most of them, however, were comparing their pictures of the stars. Willow felt the rain fall across her face, washing her clean. She leant on the doorframe and watched the community discover what the ocean had brought up from the depths to show them, a culture that lived in sweeping moments, fluid and always moving, and yet putting down such deep roots that ocean itself kept them safe. We know less of our oceans than we do of space, Willow thought, and when she looked into Frog’s deep, dark eyes, she felt that wonder stronger than ever before.