The Cost of Rain

Today, the ships had decided to let it rain. Fat drops plinked down on the back of Rem’s neck, beading like sweat as he clutched his satchel to his chest. He walked past the slanted benches that remained of the park near his home, weaving around the twisted metal sculptures that divided the sidewalk in half. He had drafted the plan ten years before the war but now couldn’t remember what he had told the public the figures represented. Love, perhaps, or community. They did the job he had wanted them to do in the end and made it difficult, if not impossible, to nest one’s body on the sidewalk without being stepped on or kicked.

Rem tried not to stare up at the sky as he crossed the street but found it impossible. Above his head, past the height of any skyscraper he had ever built, was a long formation of black ships, each one of them saucer-shaped with spikes that retracted and contracted in random order. The Stelu had moved their ships, leaving a small break between each one so that the rain fell in uneven patter, sometimes splashing on the top of his head, other times leaving him a block or two of walking without any moisture at all. 

It had been weeks since the last rain. People were running out to the street and placing out barrels and pans to catch the water. No one trusted the city council to save enough, not after the last time. He walked past a young child splashing in an old bomb crater, giggling as wet mud squished between her toes. Rem frowned but didn’t stop.      

He stopped at the bar, almost leaning against the door next to the front wall before remembering the small series of spikes on it. Linette, the bartender, was rolling out an old barrel with arms the size of toothpicks. She muscled it to the street, the old vinegary smell of it wafting to his nostrils as she passed. 

“You open?” Rem asked.

“Yeah” She leaned against the barrel, her brown cheeks puffy with heat. “Give me a minute to catch my breath. Who knows when it’s going to rain again.”

Rem nodded and ducked into the bar, walking past a collection of tables and chairs that had undoubtedly been found in decimated buildings. Red diner stools and dental office chairs clashed with the solid mahogany brown of the bar. He slapped his satchel down on top of it, taking the only actual stool, as he waited for Linette to return. His hand rested on the cracked leather as he surveyed the room. They’d be alone, as he preferred.

“You look like shit, Rem. You start drinking before you got here?” she called out to him from the door. He turned to see her reaching for a vase on one of the nearby tables.

“Funny,” he muttered as she disappeared again, then reappeared a moment later. “How much good is a vase of water going to do you?”

“Better than nothing,” Linette said. “It was getting kind of close, don’t you think? Almost like they’re mad at us.” She jabbed a finger upward, then came toward him, moving and fussing her way to the bar.

“What’s on the menu?”

“Little of this, a little of that.” Linette reached for a dusty glass and gave it a quick rub with the edge of her sleeve. Rem wrinkled his nose. “We’ve got a bit of whiskey, but it’ll cost you. Dandelion wine brewed by that commune down the street. Water, too, but only if you’re nice.”

“I’m never nice.”

“Whiskey then?” She didn’t smile.

“Better not.” Too much booze and he’d start feeling sorry for himself. A drink after that, and he’d be angry enough to tear up the place. “Let’s stick with water. I’ll try to be nice.” 

She snorted. Rem expected her to grab the glass and make him wait twenty minutes for a sip, but instead, Linette grabbed an old coffee can from behind the bar. She tipped it up, into the glass, a few rust flakes settling on the bottom.

“There’s your water.” Linette shoved the glass over at him, as he squinted. “Sorry we don’t have any olives.”

“How about one of those paper umbrellas?” That earned him an eye roll and a half-laugh. Rem closed his eyes and took a very small sip, swallowing fast so his mouth wouldn’t taste like dirt. He had a choice that he had to make and there wasn’t much time. The Stelu were happy now – the rain from above was a sign of that – but how long would it last?

“People ever tell you their problems?” Rem asked.

“Sometimes.” She picked up a rag and suddenly became intent on cleaning the bar. He watched her scrub it in a slow, circular motion, wondering how old Linette was. Younger than him, but probably not old enough to drink when the war had started. He wondered if she’d fought in it – it was a question Rem never dared ask. He’d bribed his own way out of a cockpit, even as the military was recruiting kids barely out of school to fly drones and crawl into the seats of jet fighters.

“I have a problem,” he said.

“You ask me, you’ve got a lot of problems.” It didn't sound unkind, just a statement of fact. Linette wadded the rag up in her hands, juggling it lightly between her palms as she looked at him.

He reached into his satchel and withdrew a ball. It was silver in color with no seams and when he touched it, it melted into the tips of his fingers like a caress. As he pulled away, the air rushed into the space it had filled, leaving him cold.

“Go ahead. Pick it up if you want to,” Rem said.

“Nah, I think I’m good.” The rag dropped from Linette’s hand, plopping between her and the ball. As she looked at the sphere, her forehead creased so hard her eyebrows touched. “That Stelu?”

Rem closed his mouth, then nodded. He’d found it. It was his problem. Or had been, until he’d brought it in here and made it hers.

“You put that away. I’m locking the door,” Linette said.

Rem did as she asked. He’d come here because he hadn’t wanted to deal with the problem himself – even if Linette ran out that door and called for the council, it would spare him from having to make a choice that shouldn’t belong to him alone.

Linette pulled a chair over to him, the sound of metal-on-metal ringing in his ears as it scraped the floor. She plopped down, sitting on the chair backwards and resting her arms on the back of it.

“You can’t go pulling something like that out in a public place. I don’t care how much you had to drink before you got here,” she said.

There were penalties for possession of alien technology and its concealment. That was, if a mob didn’t spot the owner before the council did.

“I didn’t drink--”

“Whatever. What is it?” 

“It’s a message.” Rem gestured at the sphere. The surface of it flexed. “Take it.”

She looked at the ball, then back at him before reaching out and touching it with the tip of her finger. The metal indented where she had touched, leaving space between her skin and the ball. As Linette’s hand moved, it recoiled until she pulled away. 

“It’ll open if you spin it.”

She reached for it again, but the ball rolled across the bar, then stopped. 

“Doesn’t like me,” Linette laughed. “Guess I’ll have to take your word for it. About it being a message and all. This isn’t some toy you designed before the war, is it?”

“I didn’t make toys.” Rem slid off the stool to reclaim the sphere. “I was an architect. I made skyscrapers.” Some of the time. When he wasn’t designing raised grate covers or suggesting that cities place boulders and spike-gardens under bridges.

“I remember,” she said.

No one commissioned skyscrapers anymore. It was too dangerous to build anything that touched the sky.

His hands folded over the ball. It hummed softly, then the metal melted, slipping between his fingers until it broke free. It shifted, forming humanoid shapes, one after the other, the echoes of people Rem had once known.

“Peace,” the shapes whispered. The word was accented with the whistle-click of Stelu. “We propose a treaty of peace between our peoples.” A shrill whistle, then six clicks, and it formed itself back into a sphere. Watching it made Rem’s stomach churn, as alien manufacture always had.

“Why does it want peace? We’re not at war,” Linette said.

“I don’t know.” Rem stared at the bar, not the sphere. He picked at a place where the wood had begun to rot, scraping at it with his thumbnail. “It told me when it first opened that I had to decide before the sun went down. It’s some sort of fucking trap. I don’t know what to do about it.” 

“Could always take it to the council.” 

“And have them accuse me of treason?” He stopped fidgeting and took the sphere back, burying it in his satchel. Could it hear the two of them? Rem didn’t know – he'd rarely seen anything built by the aliens that wasn’t meant to destroy.

“They’d accuse us both now that you showed me that thing,” she pointed out. “And who says that’s what they’ll do? Just tell them you found it – you did find it, right?”

“I think it found me,” he said, for there was no other way of describing that low whistle that had sung him toward a pile of old leaves and rotten clothing. He had been compelled, picking through trash, feces, and shattered brick until he held the sphere in his hands.

“Then just—I don’t know, leave it in a box somewhere. How do you know it’s even new? Maybe it’s from before.”

Before.

The word brought back the warm winds of the night that the Stelu ships had descended. The sharp, short pains in his side as he ran through the burning streets, dodging falling chunks of concrete. Holding his sleeve against his mouth and trying not to breath in ash, clouds of dust stinging his eyes so hard that he wept as he kept looking for a safe doorway to hide in. Stumbling over spikes set into the ground so that no shelter could be found. Watching as the city he had helped design crumbled, the skyscrapers imploding one by one. Rem did not, even now, think of the people who had been in those buildings. He couldn’t.

Linette was still talking.

“...imagine if that is an old message. Well, maybe the best thing to do is just destroy it. If you’re worried about the council, and well, you probably should be.” The corners of her mouth pinched. She reached out for his glass and downed the water in one shot, tipping her head back like it was whiskey. Her hand trembled as she sat the glass down.

She was being kinder than he deserved. Always had been.

“I think you’re right. About taking it to the council,” he lied. 

“Great.” Her shoulders slumped as she nodded in response.

“Just don’t say anything about it, okay? If something does happen...” Rem didn’t meet her eyes. He had asked her to shoulder a burden for which she had never consented, simply because he had watched other men and women do the same, night after night at the bar. But it didn’t make it right. “I’m sorry, Linette.”

He wasn’t good at apologies. She wasn’t good at accepting them. Linette coughed, then shrugged. Rem looked down and reached into his satchel until he found the tin he was looking for. He set the sardines on the bar, knowing it wasn’t enough.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’m going to go check the water barrels now.”

“Do you want me to help you bring them in?” he asked, walking with her to the entrance.

“Nah.” Linette opened the door wide, and Rem stepped out onto the sidewalk backwards. The rain had not stopped, but the air had warmed. In the distance, dogs barked, and children splashed in puddles. If he didn’t turn around, he could ignore that all these things were happening in a city that only existed in pieces. 

He gave her one faint smile, then walked away. 

An old message. What if the Stelu had come in peace but humanity had not gotten the message? Rem cradled the bottom of the satchel in one hand as he walked. How quickly the war had begun, at a time when it seemed the whole world was already imploding of its own accord. How odd that it had ended so quickly, with a massive show of firepower and the Stelu retreating up to the clouds with their ships, forming a cluster that could fire again, at any time. There had not been enough firepower left to challenge them at the war’s end and so, the nations of Earth surrendered.

He walked past a street corner where a woman was sitting on a blanket, bartering small comforts like spoons and towels for canned goods. In the old days, Rem might have feared for his safety or, in a rare moment of compassion, for hers; today, her presence comforted him as it meant that he was not alone. He continued his route until he reached the park again, sitting down on the edge of a slanted bench, taking out the sphere, and dropping the satchel on the ground.

The ships hovered overhead. It seemed that the rain eased a little as the sphere hummed to him again, metal clinging to his skin. Rem tried to lean back and look at them, but the angle of the bench wouldn’t allow it.

What would peace look like? Had someone before him received the message and ignored it? The sphere warmed, then cooled at the thought. Rem thought of his life before the war – what normalcy had looked like. Days spent planning divisions within the city – building neighborhoods behind gates and apartments that rose high enough that the people who lived at the top never had to think about those who slept at the bottom. There had been more to life than his job, but not much more – he loved people from a distance, through text messages and drinks in bars.

He wanted to keep hating the aliens. They had taken his world away.

But in the end, he had also not chosen to rebuild the places he had lost.

As the ships floated above him, and his thoughts drifted in turn, he understood. The Stelu did not intend to go to war again, whatever he decided. All that they wanted was to keep humanity from continuing their navigation amongst the stars.

Rem cradled the ball for a moment, then threw it up into the air. It did not fall; it hovered. His chest relaxed, feeling as if a great weight had been lifted from him, and yet, at the same time, he felt empty. He imagined ships that looked like clouds and open spaces and cities that felt like homes. Dreams welled up in him as he stared into the sphere, love speaking to pain.

The ball whispered, “Peace.”

And he answered, “The people of Earth accept.”

Author’s Biography

Gwen Whiting (she/her) is an author and museum curator living and working on the United States' West Coast. She has previously published in Metaphorosis, Tree and Stone, and Daily Science Fiction. Learn more about her work at gwen-whiting.com