Mares’ tails blew in from the west, clear sign that a big storm was heading our way. As I watched the hundreds of small, wispy ships float silently by on the breeze, I was tempted to keep quiet. After all, I’d warned for years about our town becoming overbuilt, making all of us vulnerable to the flash floods created by big storms. But with memories of the last flood fading, people had ignored me. The mayor even called me a nervous old woman, afraid of my own shadow. It would be just deserts for everyone to be washed away when the big ship’s rains hit.

But wishing for revenge is one thing; actually having people hurt over it, quite another. I grabbed my wooden mallet and rang the alarm bell long and hard, taking pride in a moment when my sworn duty actually mattered.

By the time I climbed down from the weather tower, the mayor was waiting impatiently for me. “What is it this time, Tem?” he asked. “Water or shit?”

I smiled in irritation. Despite my continual corrections—the ships dropped a highly refined organic material, not excrement—too many townsfolk called it just that. While they knew how vital the ships were to our world, that didn’t stop their agitation when salvation splattered across their houses and streets.

“Water,” I said. “But it’ll be a big blow, based on the number of mares’ tails running from the ship. Maybe as big as that storm fifty years ago.” I winced at that memory. My little sister had been killed by those floods, sucked into a vortex which opened right in front of our house.

The mayor glared angrily at the sky. “You sure this isn’t another wrong prediction?”

I restrained the urge to throttle this loathsome, worthless man. “I’ve done my duty and warned the town. It’s now up to you.”

The mayor cussed, not believing me, but also afraid of what the townsfolk would do if he ignored a valid warning. “People aren’t going to like this. The harvest festival started this morning. All the vegetables and fruits are out in the open.”

I glanced at the horizon. Already a dark shape—bigger than anything I’d ever seen—grew from the world’s curve. “They don’t have to like it,” I said. “Tell them we have an hour, at most.”

The mayor nodded and ran toward the festival, yelling at people to save what they could. Other townsfolk ran to their homes, telling their kids to climb into the highest rooms. Everywhere I looked, people were wide-eyed and scared, rushing about as if the world was about to end.

And perhaps it was. After all, a ship of heaven was about to unleash its floods upon our thrown-together land.

 

Imagine a mudball, packed tight by little kid hands. The hands continually pack mud onto the ball, but the ball never grows larger. Just endless mud, packing round and round, until you wonder where it all goes.

That’s our world.

From the weather histories, I know worlds aren’t supposed to be like this. Worlds have solid crusts of metal and rock, and molten cores of fire and heat. Worlds also recycle. They create and destroy, grow and decay. The water you drink was excreted by a woman a thousand years before. Her body is the dust from which your food grows. Her bones are the clay on which you build your home.

Not our world.

Like new mud pushing down the old, everything sinks to the middle of our world. There are no rivers, no oceans, nothing but land continually created from our rain of organics and other materials. Our skies are always hazy. Up high, one sees a dappled, silver sheen from the small mackerel ships passing at high altitude. Down low, the speckled dots and bulges of larger ships float by, bringing the biggest extremes of weather. All the ships contribute something to our world. Oxygen and carbon dioxide. Metal hail and organic particles. Water as rain, vapor, or ice. Every day our skies are filled with a thousand ships, each one giving something before leaving again for the greater universe.

The first thing we do upon waking is to sweep our houses of the dust which fell overnight. Eventually, though, as the land builds up around us, sweeping isn’t enough. So we build our homes higher and higher. Walls ten meters above the walls your grandparents built. A floor which used to be the roof your ancestors slept under.

Up and up, we’re always moving up. But we never go any higher.

 

By the time we’d salvaged what we could of the harvest festival’s food, the ship was almost upon us. The ship was a cumulus, towering four kilometers high and stretching across the visible world. From the number of mares’ tails I’d seen earlier, I’d figured a cumulus would be chasing them, but I’d never seen one this big. It moved slowly through the atmosphere, the massive curve and sweep of its bow funneling the air into cloudy turbulence. Dark rains poured from the ship’s belly, turning the horizon black except for the occasional burst of lightning.

When I reached home my apprentice, Cres, was already at work, carrying books and weather logs to the top floors. I was glad she’d heard the bell. This morning Cres had headed to the ravines south of town to check on the erosion gauges. Passing rains continually wore new gullies and ravines in our world’s loose soil. Unfortunately, loose soils also made being caught in the open during a big storm extremely dangerous—flash floods would literally wash everything away.

“Master Tem,” Cres said when she saw me, “I’ve discovered a new phenomenon. Come and see.”

Cres sounded excited by the coming storm, as I guessed I’d have been when I was fourteen. I tossed the food I’d lugged home in our kitchen, then followed her up the weather tower.

The tower, the tallest structure in town, swayed ominously to the wind. I glanced around the town and saw that almost everyone had finished closing up their homes. The only person still out was Les the tailor, who hastily hammered a support beam against one wall of his house. For the last two years I’d been after Les to fix his house, telling him it would never survive a big storm. I shook my head and looked toward the oncoming ship.

“What did you see?” I yelled at Cres over the building wind.

“The cumulus dropped some kind of lighted sphere.”

“Most likely lightning. You aren’t old enough to remember, but big ships generate massive charge differentials between themselves and the ground.”

Cres rolled her eyes. “I’ve read about lightning in the histories,” she shouted back. “This was different. Pay attention and see.”

I resisted the urge to slap her for being cheeky with her master. She acted like I had at that age, totally absorbed in dreams about ships, distant planets, and dimensions beyond belief. Her parents had apprenticed Cres to me because they knew her imagination marked her as someone with the potential for being taken by a passing ship. But I wasn’t sure that what saved me—the burden of weather predicting I’d taken on after my sister’s death—would also work for her.

I looked back at the cumulus, wondering about both the ship and the people inside. Why did cumulus ships always pursue the much smaller mares’ tails? Why did the people inside occasionally pound us with dangerous storms? The histories described the weather patterns on old Earth—the clouds and rains which recycled that world’s water—and how early humans believed gods and demons created their planet’s storms. Despite my years of study, it pained me to admit that I was little better than those ancient humans. The ships might as well be gods or demons for all I knew about them.

My thoughts were interrupted as a single ball of light fell from the ship. It hurled through the dark skies and exploded into the ground two kilometers from us, sending up a mushroom explosion of dirt.

I grabbed the telescope and tried to make out what the light was, but the rain already splattered around us and the wind swayed the tower too much to focus on the impact site.

“We have to get below,” I yelled. “The tower isn’t safe in a storm this big.”

Cres, though, ignored me as she plotted the impact through the rangefinder. She wrote something down on the rain-splattered weather log and shoved the paper under my nose. “That’s the third impact I’ve seen,” she said. “They’re all in a straight line.”

Before I could ask where the line was leading, another ball of light shot from the ship and hit just outside town. The impacts were walking themselves right toward us. Not needing to see more, I rang the warning bell again—for all the good it would do—then grabbed Cres and pulled her down the ladder. We bolted into the house’s safe room, but when I tried to shut the door the wind blew so strong the locking bar wouldn’t catch. I yelled for Cres to get under a desk as I tried to force the door shut.

The last thing I remembered was a loud whining, followed by an explosion of dirt and rain which threw me into blackness.

 

I woke to dried blood caking my face and dried mud stiff on my clothes. I lay on my cot in my bedroom, the sun shining through shattered windows. As I sat up, I saw that my room was a shambles. Even though this was the second story, the flood waters had reached this high. Water and muck coated the floor. As I stood up, I plucked several of my sketches from the mud. One, a detailed look at the high altitude mackerel ships which were hard to see even with the best telescopes, had been a particular favorite of mine. I dropped it back in the mud and walked outside.

In my sixty years of life, I had never seen the town so hard hit. Of the five hundred homes and buildings in town, at least a hundred were damaged. In addition, there were gaps along the streets where houses had once stood. I wasn’t surprised to see that Les the tailor’s house was gone. His house had needed repairs for so long that everyone knew it wouldn’t stand up to a strong blow. I muttered a silent prayer that he’d died quickly, and wasn’t lying entombed in some runoff tunnel dozens of meters beneath our feet.

What shocked me most, though, was the number of strong homes that had also disappeared. During big storms, flood waters usually raced straight through our town before washing into the drainage tunnels which continually opened and closed in the loose soil. This time the ripples left in the mud suggested the waters had swirled about in unusual circular patterns.

I discovered why when I walked two blocks south of my house. A number of buildings there were gone, replaced by a large sink hole fifty meters across. Cres and the mayor stood next to the hole with a group of townsfolk. I walked over to join them.

The mayor was thrilled to see me. “Glad to see you up and about,” he said, hugging me, an embrace I grimaced through. “I was worried our hero wouldn’t get to tell me what the hell happened here.”

I nodded, embarrassed at the mayor’s calling me a hero. Several other townsfolk also thanked me, grateful for the warning I’d been able to give.

Once Cres had a moment, she filled me in. The explosion that knocked me unconscious came from one of the balls of light, which crashed into town and created the hole before us. Cres assumed the hole had breached some cavern or tunnel under the town because the flood waters had swirled down the hole as if into a drain. The waters had also carried about forty houses away, along with over a hundred people. But as the mayor kept telling me, it would have been far worse without my warning.

“What do you think’s down there?” Cres asked, trying to get close to the crumbling edge without falling in. Already the hole was collapsing. Within a few days, nothing would be left in the loose soil but a large depression.

“We’ll never know because it’s forbidden,” I said, eying the mayor, who nodded in agreement as I reminded Cres of the only absolute law on our world. “Anytime people try to dig underground or explore sinkholes like this, ships come and kill them. Come, we need to salvage what we can from our house.”

Cres didn’t seem convinced by my words, but she followed me back home without argument as she stared with longing at the ships passing in the sky.

 

The next two months were tough, but the town pulled through. Most of the crops stored at the harvest festival had been destroyed, along with many of the chickens and pigs, and none of us had much food to fill our bellies. But crops grew fast here. They had to—anything which grew too slowly would be buried by the continual rain of organics and other materials. Soon the wheat and rice were ready to harvest, the vegetables were ripe, and the fruit was only weeks from being picked.

As I’d predicted, the sinkhole quickly collapsed under the weight of the loose soil. Several townsfolk petitioned the mayor to allow new houses to be built near there, or at least a memorial park. However, I advised against both options. The ground could still collapse if another storm blew through. Because of my hero status, the mayor actually agreed with me.

In more mundane matters, Cres couldn’t keep her head out of the sky. While this was usually a good trait in a weatherman, she blew off all her studies, only doing just enough work to keep me from yelling at her.

So it was that one fine, hazy day, I found her daydreaming in the weather tower instead of recording the passing ships in the log. When she saw me, she jumped off her stool, knocking the log from the railing. I barely caught the book before it fell six stories to the ground below.

“Master Tem, I’m so sorry,” she began to stammer.

I waved for her to be quiet. “What deep thoughts are you pondering?” I asked.

Cres looked at me like this was a trick question and she’d be smacked for a wrong answer. “The ships,” she said with hesitation.

I nodded. “When I was your age, I spent all my free time watching ships pass in the sky and praying that I was special enough to attract their attention. I didn’t care what ship it was. Massive universe jumper. Slim star hopper. Dimension slider. I wanted to leave this mudball of a world and see the universe.”

From the way Cres nodded, I knew I spoke for her own feelings.

“There’s nothing for us here,” she said. “I mean, humans are exploring the universe, all the universes, and we’re stuck in a pre-industrial cesspool. It’s not right.”

I sighed because Cres was saying the very things I’d said at her age. Above us, a large ship, of a style I’d never seen before, puffed lazily across the sky while a gentle drizzle of rain fell from its body. I knew that Cres wouldn’t be staying here much longer. She had so much potential. All that had saved me was my sister’s death. I’d been so determined that no one else die like my sister that the ships avoided me. Cres, though, wasn’t determined to stay. Eventually one of the countless ships passing by would descend and take her, leaving our world for sights I couldn’t begin to conceive.

Still, I owed it to Cres’s parents to at least try and keep her here.

“Give me a month,” I said. “There are things I want to teach you about our world. If after that you still want to leave, I’ll give you my blessing.”

Cres hugged me and muttered her thanks, no doubt knowing—just as I knew—that nothing I could teach her would keep her here.

 

Over the next few weeks, Cres and I traveled by horse around the countryside, visiting several towns with decent libraries. I showed her numerous histories of our world, including restricted volumes speculating on how our world stayed the same size despite the constant mass being added, and why everything continually sank toward the world’s core. I also showed her ten thousand years’ worth of observations about the ships which continually visited our planet and kept us alive with their offerings.

In one library, I pulled out a worn leather tome detailing three ship crashes over the last few millennia. In each case, our people had rescued humans from the downed ships. While strange differences had been noted—alterations to the head, bizarre tints and glows around their bodies—they had been able to speak with us. One account even briefly described the interior of a ship, which had been merely empty space. That account also swore that the crash’s two survivors had somehow formed out of the ship’s very skin. Unfortunately, all of these accounts were frustratingly vague and sparse. In each case, rescuing ships had quickly arrived and taken away the survivors.

“See,” Cres said as we rode back to our town. “They’re keeping us in the dark. Anyone who knows anything is removed from our world.”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, nodding at several large hoppers passing above us dropping large, wet drops of fermented material from their bellies. “Unfortunately, once you go that route you can never come back.”

As we rode our horse over the speckled green and brown hills and through the thin, straggly forests, I tried to explain to Cres that we had a duty to each other. No matter how much technology the rest of humanity possessed, we were all human. Unless one worked for each other, there was nothing worth living for. Just as the trees and grass around us only survived by growing to the sky faster than they were buried, so too did we survive because we helped each other.

However, my heart wasn’t in my words. I thought of my little sister, Llin, who’d died when she was six. We’d played endless ship games—imagining the worlds we’d visit; searching the sky for the ship we’d eventually travel on. Our mom should have punished us for saying such things, but she’d merely nodded and pointed out her own favorite ships when they passed by.

But Llin died before she could find her ship. We’d been walking home from the park—where we’d spent the morning throwing folded paper ships into the wind—when a massive cumulus passed over the town, sending floods raging through the streets. As the waters tore at our bodies, I’d grabbed Llin’s hand and struggled to hold her above the current. She screamed and cried, begged me to hold on, but the flood snatched her away.

My mother had held me all that night, telling me I’d done the best I could and that Llin would still find her ship. But I no longer cared about the ships. If the people who flew the damn things could so easily kill my little sister, I’d never join them.

As if knowing my desire, the ships left me alone.

 

The next morning, Cres was gone. At first I assumed she’d gone to market, or to check our instruments. But when she missed dinner, then supper, my gut climbed to my throat. I stopped by her parents’ house and discreetly inquired about her, but they hadn’t seen her. She also hadn’t spoken to them in days, but if she was going to try and attract a ship I strongly doubted she’d tell her parents.

When Cres didn’t return that night, I knew she was gone. I prayed she’d found a good ship and was enjoying her life.

The next morning I was cooking breakfast when I realized the jar of strawberry preserves was empty. I walked into the root cellar to get a new jar, only to be confronted by loud curses. In the cellar’s far corner, I found a large hole in the wooden floor.

“About time you heard me,” Cres said from the hole. “I’ve been yelling since yesterday.”

I quickly lowered a rope and Cres climbed out. She then explained that she’d gone into the root cellar for supplies and fell through the floor. Evidently the storm several months ago had washed away a lot of the ground under the house.

I was extremely irritated, imagining the house I’d built upon my mother’s house, and her mother’s before that, in danger of collapse. Cres, though, was ecstatic. “You don’t understand,” she said. “The water didn’t just wash the ground away. It exposed a number of underground tunnels. And there’s a faint glow coming from somewhere down there.”

I started to remind Cres that it was forbidden to explore underground; that if the ships didn’t kill us, the mayor definitely would. Tunnels on our loose-soil world were also dangerous because of the potential for the loose soil to collapse. But as I stared into Cres’s excited eyes, I realized that if I said no to exploring beneath the house she would probably give up any remaining desire to stay on our world. Once that happened, she would be gone on the first interested ship.

I sighed and grabbed a jar of strawberry preserves. If I was going to risk my neck, it would at least be on a full stomach.

 

The red glow Cres had seen came from a ship. Gleaming like new and wedged in the old foundations of my house thirty meters below the ground.

The ship appeared to be a dimension slider, although that was merely a name from a book and didn’t tell much about what it could actually do. To get to the ship, Cres and I climbed and dug through the ruins of my ancestors’ houses. Ancient rooms half filled with dirt; walls ruptured and split by pressure and water. Even though it was nerve-wracking seeing how much of my house’s foundation had washed away in the recent flood, it was also fascinating to climb through my family’s history. My grandmother had often talked about the bright red kitchen of her childhood and sure enough, the walls of that room two levels down still showed a faint red ocher beneath the dirt and grime. Four levels down, I ran my fingers along a cracked ceramic oven and wondered about the meals my ancestors had cooked here.

But the ship was the centerpiece of the ruins. A perfect sphere ten meters across, with the lowest timbers of my house merging into the ship’s skin as if they’d always been one.

“How old is this ship?” Cres asked.

I calculated how many levels of the house reached down to this point. “Maybe three hundred years. Give or take a generation or two.”

Cres shook her head. “That can’t be right. The history of the town goes back a thousand years. There’s no record of a ship crashing here.”

That was indeed a puzzle.

 

Over the next week we cleared away more dirt and debris around the ship. To make our work easier, I built a simple pulley system to lower ourselves into the hole. We also took care to only work on days when the passing ships indicated good weather, and only after locking the front door against visitors. After all, if the mayor or town constables discovered that we were exploring an underground ship, not even my hero status would save us from a quick drop and a sudden stop.

One strange thing we discovered was that the waters which had surged through my house’s foundation appeared to have drained into the ship, with the runoff tunnels radiating out from the ship like spokes on a wheel. Cres and I debated whether the ship had somehow called the water to itself.

When Cres and I weren’t clearing around the ship, we attended to our regular duties. We also explored my volumes of weather history.

“The histories are wrong,” Cres said one morning when I climbed up the weather tower to check on her. In her lap sat my oldest volume of histories, dating back a millennium to the town’s first weatherman. “This volume says your family has been building up this house for nine hundred years. But there’s no way the ship has been around that long.”

I sighed, knowing Cres was right, but also not having an answer. As we’d cleared away the dirt from the ship, we hadn’t found any evidence of older houses under it. The ship appeared to support my entire house. “Maybe my ancestors’ houses disappeared into the ship like the water did?”

Cres considered this for a moment, then discounted it with a snort. “That would mean there’s a ship supporting every house in town. I find that hard to believe.”

While I was glad that Cres had given up thoughts of leaving our world—even if the reason she wanted to stay was putting us at risk of death—I refused to let her disrespect me. I closed the history book and told her to keep an eye out for bad weather.

 

The next day the weather changed and, much to Cres’s irritation, we had no time for the ship. Mares’ tails began to blow in from the west, always followed by the cumulus ships which endlessly chased them. While none of these ships were anywhere near as large as the cumulus which damaged our town earlier in the year, they were still big enough to issue warnings. Because of the danger to the town, either Cres or myself stayed in the tower at all times. While Cres hated to be torn from her examinations of the ship—she was frustrated that we still hadn’t found a way inside—she understood our duty. In addition, the runoff from the storms now ran through the underground tunnels beneath my house. Being caught down there during a downpour would mean certain death.

A few days into the storm cycle I woke around midnight to wind and rain howling outside my window. I grabbed my robe and ran to the top floor, irritated that I’d slept through the warning bell. I could just make out the glow of a large cumulus above the town as it pelted us with rain. This was the biggest storm to hit town since the blow months ago. I opened the roof hatch and tried to climb the tower, but the wind was too strong. I yelled for Cres to stay where she was, then closed the hatch and waited out the storm.

The cumulus passed in ten minutes. I opened the front door to survey the damage and was almost run over by the mayor.

“What happened to the warning?” he yelled. “I was walking back from the pub and nearly got washed away.”

I glanced up at the weather tower, which I could now see was empty. I frowned. “The storm wasn’t that bad,” I said. “Stop complaining.” Before the mayor could protest, I slammed the door in his face and ran to the basement. Below the hole I could hear rushing water. Worse, the pulley’s ropes descended into the maelstrom. I’d always detached the rope and pulley when we weren’t using it so there’d be no evidence we were going underground. That meant Cres had gone down there before the storm hit.

Unable to do anything until the water drained away, I made a cup of tea and tried to relax. But I couldn’t stop thinking of all the potential Cres had. I cried for Cres and for myself, the memory of my sister being washed away mixing with the certainty that Cres was dead.

By morning, the water was gone. I lowered myself on the rope and pulley and lit my light stick. The going was slower than before since the path we’d cleared through the old foundations had been washed away.

When I finally reached the bottom level, I found Cres lying beside the ship, which glowed a darker red than I remembered. To my shock, Cres was alive and breathed in labored gasps, which seemed impossible considering how much water had flowed through here. Once again, the wash patterns indicated the water had rushed into the ship. Cres shouldn’t have survived.

But any thoughts on Cres’s miraculous survival vanished when I heard footsteps behind me. I turned—fearing that the mayor or constables had caught us—and stared with shock into the face of my six-year-old sister. Llin looked as she had fifty years ago, when that massive cumulus sent floods raging through the town.

As if nothing had changed between us, Llin reached out and held my hand. I tried to jerk away, but she held on tight and wouldn’t let go.

“I’ve missed you, Tem,” she said.

I nodded, tears falling from my eyes. I wanted to tell Llin how sorry I was for not holding on to her, but she merely smiled and pulled me over to Cres.

“She’s not ready,” Llin said, leaning over and smoothing Cres’s wet hair. Before I could ask what Llin meant, she stood and walked to the ship. But instead of the ship opening for her, Llin’s body stretched across the ship itself. Blood gushed out and merged with the ship’s red glow. Her skin and muscles and bones flattened and bent and became the ship. The last thing to go was her face, which smiled at me and said “I love you” as her mouth turned into an impossibly long line before finally disappearing.

Panicked, feeling as if my sister had just died a second time, I grabbed Cres’s arms and pulled her as fast as I could back up the tunnel.

It took me hours to drag Cres to the top level. I tied the rope around her shoulders and prepared to use the pulley to raise her through the hole. But before I could lift Cres I heard the roar of water rushing through the drainage tunnels. Images of Llin being yanked from my grasp shot through me as new flood waters grabbed Cres’s unconscious body. I tried to lift Cres, but I couldn’t fight the water and also pull on the rope.

Just as my grip began to slip, I suddenly found myself being pulled into the air. Someone also pulled Cres’s half of the rope up. I emerged from the hole and collapsed onto the wooden floor of the root cellar, coughing up water and bile.

Only when I finally stopped gagging did I look into the angry eyes of the mayor and several burly town constables.

 

The mayor and constables had come to my house when I failed to give a warning about a second storm in a row. I expected them to drag Cres and myself immediately to the town hall, where a drumhead court would sentence us to death for violating our world’s only absolute law. Instead, the mayor ordered the constables to carry Cres to her bed. He then summoned a doctor to examine my apprentice.

Once we were alone, the mayor demanded to know what Cres and I were doing underground.

“The water washed away the foundation and the floor collapsed under Cres,” I explained, grateful that Cres was still unconscious so she couldn’t mess up my lie. “I was trying to save her.”

The mayor wasn’t a fool. He’d seen the pulley system in the root cellar and knew that wasn’t something I’d thrown together for a quick rescue. However, instead of punishing me, he muttered about all the storms hitting the town in recent days and how frightened the townsfolk were. I suddenly realized at this point he couldn’t afford to kill his only weatherman. Instead, he warned me not to miss another storm and left the house with the constables.

I walked to Cres’s room, where the doctor was still attending to her. Seeing nothing I could do to help, I climbed up the weather tower. The skies appeared settled—the only ships in sight were the high altitude mackerel ships which usually indicated decent weather. That was good, because the town was showing the damage from days of endless storms. Silt rose a meter high along some houses and buildings, while other houses listed at awkward angles, testimony to how water-logged the ground was becoming.

I looked down the street toward the park, where Llin and I had played that fateful day so long ago. While I knew that wasn’t the same ground we’d walked on then—the soil having risen five meters in that last fifty years—I tried not to cry as I remembered yet again the feeling of Llin being yanked from my grasp. I also wondered if I’d hallucinated Llin’s appearance down below, or if the ship had really brought her back. Either way, the feeling of her hand in mine refused to leave.

By the time I climbed down from the tower, Cres was awake, screaming about ships and the sky and the far side of the universe. The doctor gave her a shot, which relaxed her. Cres stared at me for a moment with a strange smile on her face, then fell asleep.

The doctor asked what had happened to Cres. I told him the same lie I’d given the mayor, but the doctor didn’t buy it. He told me to let him know when she woke, then he packed his medical bag and left. I climbed back up the weather tower and wasn’t surprised to see that instead of walking back to his clinic, the doctor went straight to the mayor’s office.

I had a bad feeling that the reprieve the mayor had just given Cres and I would only last as long as the town’s spell of bad weather.

 

Fortunately for Cres and I, the weather grew increasingly worse over the next three days as increasing numbers of ships passed over our town. Their shadows darkened the sky for hours at a time, their water flooded our streets, and their organics buried us in a continual orange haze. A few of the ships even passed a dozen meters above my watch tower, so low that I should have seen the people inside. However, through the ships’ translucent screens I only saw emptiness. I wondered if the ships were reacting to Cres and I disturbing the underground ship, a thought I didn’t dare speak out loud.

However, the mayor obviously believed the bad weather resulted from Cres and I going underground. He stopped by several times a day and grilled me about the weather. He didn’t like my evasive answers, but was also unwilling to arrest me.

Whenever there was a break in the ships passing overhead, I climbed down from the tower and checked on Cres. She slept most of the time. When she woke, she sometimes screamed and cried about the ship. Other times she laughed. Nothing I said or did would make her tell me what had happened. After a few minutes awake, she’d simply fall back asleep.

Then came the day two massive ships arrived. The first, a flat ship of a style I’d never before seen, spanned half the horizon. It glowed dark blue and dropped shards of ice and metal across the land, smashing a number of roofs in town. The other large ship was a cumulus, and its storm was as bad as the one which rocked our town a few months back. I banged the warning bell for as long as I dared, then jumped for the safety of my house.

Once the floods subsided, I wasn’t surprised to find the mayor and two constables at my door. The mayor demanded to inspect the hole in my root cellar. I argued, telling him it was forbidden, but the mayor simply shoved me out of the way. He and his constables waited for the water in the tunnels to subside, then lowered themselves down the hole. The glow from their light sticks faded as they climbed deeper and deeper, heading straight for the ship.

I said a prayer for my sister, hoping the mayor wouldn’t hurt her if she appeared to him. I also prayed for myself and Cres. I could face execution without fear, but Cres was so young I didn’t know how she’d react.

Hours passed as I waited for the mayor to climb back out and arrest me, but he and his men took their time. Finally, as day turned to night, I decided to climb back up the tower. To my surprise, there were so many ships in the sky that their individual glows merged into one rainbowed mass which rippled and swirled like water flowing across the land. I’d never seen anything like this. Unsure what it meant for the weather, I banged the warning bell. Better safe than sorry.

Once I climbed down, I checked on Cres, but her bed was empty. I ran outside and didn’t see her, then looked all over the house. Then I heard the pulley in the basement squeaking. By the time I reached the hole, Cres was gone. I grabbed a light stick and lowered myself down, hoping to stop Cres before the mayor saw her.

Underground, though, everything had changed. Where before the first level had been half collapsed and full of sediment, now this old room was as clean and well-lit as I remembered from my childhood. The stove my mother cooked on glowed warmly, and the table where my sister and I had eaten so many meals looked as fresh as yesterday.

Llin sat at the table, happily folding paper ships as if we were both still kids.

This time I hugged her. She smiled and asked me if I wanted to make some paper ships with her, but I said I had to find Cres.

“I know where she is.” Llin grabbed my hand and led me to the stairs leading to the next level.

Each level of the house was a step back in time. We walked through a red walled room from my grandmother’s childhood. On an even deeper level, the cracked ceramic oven I’d previously seen was now clean and hot with bread baking inside.

I asked Llin how this had happened and she told me the ship remembered the old houses. “I wanted you to be happy,” she said, “so I asked the ship to fix everything up.”

Eventually, Llin led me to the lowest foundation, where the ship sat glowing in a dark, red haze. Cres stood before the ship as if in a trance.

“Where are the mayor and the constables?” I asked Llin. She pointed to the ship. At first I thought she meant they were inside, but then I looked closer at the red haze lining the ship and saw blood vessels, and a heart, and skin stretched to the tearing point. I remembered how Llin’s body had been torn and flattened and I screamed at Cres to get away from the ship.

But when I tried to grab her, Llin held me back, her grip far stronger than any six-year-old girl’s should be. I watched in horror as Cres reached for the ship, her hand stretching out and out until she touched half the ship with impossibly long fingers. She then turned and smiled at me as the rest of her body was pulled in and distorted beyond recognition.

I turned and tried to flee, but Llin kept a firm grip on my hand. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “You’ve always wanted to go.”

As Llin spoke those words, a loud roar pounded my ears as water rushed down the tunnels. The current pushed me toward the ship, only Llin’s grip keeping me from being washed away. As I looked at Llin’s face—begging her not to let go—my sister merely smiled. Then, as the water rose over her head, she released my hand and I was washed into the ship.

 

The stretching didn’t hurt. The tearing and rending and twisting of my body into something it was never meant to be was neither pain nor pleasure. I merely became the ship. I was the ship.

I also wasn’t alone. Melded into the ship with me were Cres and my little sister, along with the mayor and his men. However, while Cres and Llin hummed with excitement over what was to come, the mayor and his men screamed at me to help them. Not that I actually heard them; instead, their fear and pain screamed directly to my mind. Unable to do anything, and needing to focus on my own situation, I shut them out of my thoughts.

Once my shock at the change ended, I felt around myself. The flood continued to carry water and nutrients into me, feeding the ship and strengthening all of us. As our energy grew, I felt beyond myself, feeling the ships in the air above the town, which called to us like parents urging scared children to come outside and play. As I reached out, I felt other ships under the ground with us, laying dormant here and there, many tied into the foundations of houses, others simply nestling in the dirt. All of them buzzed with life, but lacked the potential to actually leave.

Not our ship. Cres, Llin and I were ready to go. The ship had been ready for decades, ever since my sister had been washed into it. But she hadn’t been strong enough to leave on her own. Her last memories, of fear and hope as I’d tried to save her, had trapped her here. She hadn’t known where she wanted to go. Or how to leave.

So with Cres assisting me, we began to raise the ship, floating up on a million drops of thought. The ground around us tumbled and collapsed. What had been my home fell in on itself, tearing itself to shreds and rising in a burst of debris and rain as our ship fell into the sky.

As Cres and my sister learned to control our ship, I watched the town disappear below us. I also felt deep into our world, learning the answer to questions I’d asked ever since my youth. Our world had no core. Instead, it existed as ripples of space-time folded onto themselves, creating the barest film of soap onto which the silt we lived off of continually fell. As the water and organics filtered down, they fed the new ships bubbling up from below, ships needing only someone with potential before they too could take flight. That was why we were forbidden to go underground—doing so could damage the young ships.

As we flew up, I felt the endless ships in the sky greet us. Across the world, ships appeared and disappeared, coming and going to different parts of the universe. And that’s when I understood. Our world existed to remind humanity of who we were. Humanity only traveled the universe by first coming here, making sure that a ship’s crew always remembered that they were human—no matter what changes they might soon go through. Likewise, when ships returned from elsewhere, they came back here to re-remember who they were. Otherwise, as humans traveled the vast distances and times of the universe, they would die. Without the dreams and hopes and everyday lives of our world’s people, all humanity would fall apart.

Some of us still fell apart. I felt the mayor and the two constables, still screaming at the thought of all they could be. They didn’t have the potential to survive outside our world. Instead, their bodies, minds, and souls would be torn apart. When our ship one day returned to this world, the dust from their bodies would sprinkle down, helping to feed and create another human who might one day have the potential to understand eternity and survive.

Worse, if they didn’t die they’d be so damaged that they could cause great harm to others. The ships which needlessly hurt our world were piloted by damaged people, storming across the world until the other ships stopped them.

I felt Cres and Llin preparing to leave. Both of them focused on a distant galaxy, where new stars and life boiled out of a massive expanse of gas and heat. I felt those distant stars. Imagined the sights and wonders we would see. But even as I imagined us arriving there—and knew that imagining our trip would easily take us there—I heard one final plea from the men trapped with us. I was their last link to sanity. I remembered Llin as she’d held onto my hand. Remembered how I’d sworn never to let someone drown if I could save them.

With the briefest of thought caresses, I said goodbye to Cres and my sister. Cres said she’d take care of Llin. Help her grow into the limitless possibilities which existed before them. I then split myself from the ship, creating a smaller ball of ship which encompassed myself and the screaming men. As we fell toward town, I imagined my old house in all its history and glory, in all it had ever been and could ever be. With an explosion of light and energy, the ship became what I willed it to be.

 

The mayor and the constables woke in my den, surrounded by my books and furniture and a roaring fire in the ceramic fireplace. The mayor retched upon waking, while the two constables cried and shook. I sat in my new-old favorite chair and sipped a hot cup of tea, trying to overlook the limitations of these men.

Finally, after he’d recovered enough to stand, the mayor ordered the constables to arrest me.

“On what charge?” I asked.

“Violating the ban. You’ve been underground. In a ship.”

I smiled and placed my teacup on the end table. For the briefest of moments, I removed the reality I’d crafted around them. Showed them our world in all its glory. The mayor and the constables fell to the floor, screaming.

“If you will excuse me, I have work to do,” I said. “After all, someone has to see to the weather.”

Without another word, the mayor and constables scrambled to their feet and ran out the door.

 

I now know I have the potential to see the universe. I always thought I’d be afraid to give up my life, but that’s no longer true.

I still watch the skies. However, instead of predicting the weather, I now simply know it. I caress each ship that passes through our world. I understand the beauties and wonders that ship and people have seen in their travels. In return for this knowledge, I gently remind the ship’s people what it means to be human. I speak to them of the most important duty of humanity, which is to care for those around you. I also keep watch over this world’s people, seeking out those with the potential to embrace the greater universe and helping them toward that goal.

One day Cres and Llin will return, singing to me of all they’ve seen. I’ll join them on that day and go off to see eternity. Until then, I enjoy the warm water falling from the skies and the dust of other people’s dreams. And while I never speak a word of this to anyone, I also know that the ships don’t bring the weather to our world.

Instead, we are the weather, and the ships rise off our rain.