15. Tell Me About Rain #5
"I'd like to start that interview that we discussed," Orion continued.
"I intend to make it easygoing, just conversations between you and me, in my library.
I'll prompt you with either questions or conversation, you talk, and together we can build and add to information that's never existed in its purest form before.
A true firsthand record of Earth, from someone who lived there. How extraordinary."
Charlie thought about what Orion had said, about the importance and the excitement coming from just him. "What kind of questions will you be asking?"
Orion's face lit up. Somehow, the expression reminded her of how Katie used to look when Charlie agreed to watch a movie she'd been saving.
"Tell me about anything and everything," he answered. "Whatever you want to share. We can start anywhere." He paused, and then, quietly, he said. "Tell me about rain."
"Rain," she repeated wistfully.
"Rain," Orion echoed. "What does it look like?
What does it sound like? What does it feel like on your skin?
I've read about precipitation on other worlds, but Earth rain seems to be...
different. Earth people write songs about it and dance in it.
They have an entire emotional vocabulary built around whether or not water falls from the sky. I find that remarkable."
"Is rain a rarity here?" Charlie asked.
Orion took a deep breath before responding.
"Out here in space, it's things such as plain precipitation falling on your face, or the feel of plant-life thriving between your fingers, that I and others miss most. Space is beautiful and vast and a sight to behold, but the simple things we leave behind are hard to forget and easy to miss.
" He sighed. "Pair that with the fact that rain, in the way that Earth has it, is so rare, the words you will use to describe it will be the most accurate data the Coalition has ever collected. "
Charlie heard those words repeat over and over in her head. All that just over rain. How extraordinary indeed.
She leaned back against the console, crossed her arms, and let a smile spread across her face. "I would love to tell you about rain."
And she did. She told him about summer storms in Indiana that rolled in fast and heavy and turned the street outside into a river in less than ten minutes.
She told him about the smell of petrichor, and then had the pleasure to explain that humans had actually given the smell of rain its own word.
She continued to tell Orion about the way rain sounded on the roof of Frank's garage and how she used to sit there during those heavy storms and listen to the torrential downpour of water compete with whatever song was on the radio.
"You know, humans get a bad reputation in Coalition space, which I feel is wildly unfair seeing as your species doesn't even know we exist. But then you tell me things like the invention of the word 'petrichor,' and I marvel at the beauty humans see that others tend to ignore."
"That may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me about the human species since I've been on this ship."
Orion smiled. "Well then, I hope you will spend time with me more often now."
Charlie chuckled. "I just might."
She continued and told him about California rain and how it was different. Softer, but more chaotic, almost as though rain in Southern California didn't know how to be rain itself.
She told him about how the Pacific Ocean would look on a gray day, how the ocean and the clouds merged and you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
And, she told him about Katie, and how, at seven years old, Charlie remembered her just standing in the driveway in a bright yellow raincoat with her arms spread wide and her face turned up, mouth open, trying to drink the water from the sky.
She paused, and Orion waited. There was no rush, no pressure to fill the silence. He stood there, next to Charlie, right next to her console in the Engineering Bay, his amber eyes showing her he understood that some memories need a moment before you can keep going.
"Sorry," Charlie said, standing up from the console and letting her arms drop to her sides.
"Don't be."
"I haven't talked about... much of this, since arriving."
“But, I mean, there's a reason,” Charlie said.
“Back home, if you want to be with someone so wholly, no matter the obstacles, there was always a way to make it happen. You could drive four hours in the dead of night. You could pick up the phone at any time of the day. Distance was a hurdle easily overcome.” Charlie shrugged.
“But out here? It isn't just a problem, it's a fucking wall with nothing on the other side of it.”
Orion tilted his head. “You speak as though the story is already finished.”
“It is,” Charlie said. “I've got a departure date and everything.” She said it lightly with a forced laugh, hiding behind any feeling.
It just didn't work.
Orion nodded his head in understanding. Then, his eyes sparkled as he turned to look at Charlie again. "Perhaps that's exactly why it matters," he said. "Not just for the archive. But for you, as well."
Charlie looked over at him. Somehow, after weeks aboard the Emberkind, reminding herself this wasn't a dream or a nightmare, he'd said the one thing she didn't know she needed to hear.
Yet now, the idea of going home and leaving all this behind, gave her pause. It wasn't as though she could decide to stay in space. That was a pipe dream.
Wasn't it?
And even then, the pipe dream had a catch.
The more of this she let herself consider, from the ship to the work to that damn woman two consoles over who kept turning up wherever Charlie was, the worse the leaving would be.
There was no version of it that ended with her coming back.
Non-contact protocols had seen to that. It ended with a shuttle ride to the surface of her home planet and then complete silence.
Thinking about the possibilities more, however small already, didn't result in her keeping the Emberkind.
It just raised the price of the goodbye she already knew was coming.
"Perhaps that's true. What else would you like to know?" she asked.
"What else is there?" He asked, his eyes still sparkling.
Charlie laughed, loud and real, practically surprised right out of her. "Orion. There is so much else."
"Then I have time," he said. "And tea. One must always have tea for important conversations."
"You know what, actually..." Charlie pushed off the console. "Hold on. There's something I want to show you."
She grabbed her datapad, the one now connected to the music system they'd just built, and scrolled through until she found it. Then she pressed play.
The opening bars of "We Didn't Start the Fire" filled the Engineering Bay.
Orion's eyebrows rose as Billy Joel started rattling off names and events at breakneck speed, the Voxlink translating in real time.
"What is this?" Orion asked, leaning forward.
"This," Charlie said, grinning, "is the history of my world in four minutes and twenty seconds. Every name, every event, it's all real. Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray, those are all real people and real things that happened. It goes all the way up to 1989, the year before I left."
"Hey, Charlie!" Tavi shouted across the bay, grabbing both Charlie and Orion's attention. "What's a 'Disneyland'?"
Charlie laughed. "The Happiest Place on Earth, Tav!"
"I wanna know more!" Tavi replied.
"Perhaps I should share all my notes from our sessions with our young Head Engineer over there, hmm?" Orion asked, his eyes twinkling. "Now, please, play it again."
So Charlie played it again. And again. And by the third listen, Orion was pausing her to ask questions.
"Who is Marilyn Monroe?" and "What was the Space Race?
" and "Why does he keep saying they didn't start the fire?
" Charlie was answering them as she could, and then the answers became stories she could tell Orion about her experiences specifically with the events in history from the song.
It was those stories that prompted Orion to ask Charlie a very important question.
"Charlie," Orion said, somewhere around the fourth play-through. "Our friend Tavi here is proof but, have you considered that the rest of the crew might want to hear these stories?"
Charlie stood still.
"Earth is such an anomaly in our existence. And you don't just have the data on it, you have storytelling - real, factual, and filled with life recollections of this data lived by real species. I can imagine that much of this very ship would want to hear all of what you can tell and so much more."
Charlie'd been so focused on Engineering, on keeping her head down and proving herself useful, and even now on this music system development, that she'd never really considered what the rest of the crew could see in her besides the human.
But now that Orion voiced his opinion, she could see that the crew had already been interested in Earth and all that came with it since the day she arrived.
How Borran asked her about Indiana every time she came in for a meal.
Or Tavi, who wanted to know the story behind every single song she had in her nineteen cassettes.
Even Selowen, who she figured was one of the wisest beings on the ship, had spent an entire tea date listening to Charlie talk about being from Indiana and California, and listened to Charlie's view of the crew and the world of the Emberkind with a look of pure fascination.
"So, you're saying, you want me to present on Earth to members of the crew? Like, in a group thing?" Charlie asked.
"Like an evening thing," Orion answered. "It can be just you, members of the crew that want to be there, and your stories about Earth. We can even include the music. Your picks, the ones you want to share with people who want to learn."
Charlie was quiet.