“Like this,” Maya said, and held her legs together and extended her arms, to make a three-bladed bike prop or a crucifix. She had thrown herself into a spin as she made the movement, and revolved slowly, stage center—red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, white blouse, red shorts, no shoes.
Diane asked, “And you saw that she was never going home, she was going to hospital instead, she was going to cut her wrist there, she was going to die?”
Nicholas nodded.
“Did you tell her?”
“Yes,” Nicholas said. “No.”
“Make up your mind. Didn’t you tell her? Now, don’t get mad.”
“Is it telling, when the one you tell doesn’t understand?”
Diane thought about that for a few steps while Nicholas dashed water on the hot bruises Ignacio had left upon his face. “If it was plain and clear and she ought to have understood—that’s the trouble I have with my family.”
“What is?”
“They won’t say things—do you know what I mean? I just say, ‘Look, just tell me, just tell me what I’m supposed to do, tell me what it is you want,’ but it’s different all the time. My mother says, ‘Diane, you ought to meet some boys; you can’t go out with him; your father and I have never met him; we don’t even know his family at all; Douglas, there’s something I think you ought to know about Diane; she gets confused sometimes; we’ve had her to doctors; she’s been in a hospital; try—’ ”
“Not to get her excited,” Nicholas finished for her.
“Were you listening? I mean, are you from the Trojan Planets? Do you know my mother?”
“I only live in these places,” Nicholas said. “That’s for a long time. But you talk like other people.”
“I feel better now that I’m with you; you’re really nice. I wish you were older.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to get much older.”
“It’s going to rain—feel it?”
Nicholas shook his head.
“Look.” Diane jumped, bunny-rabbit clumsy, three meters into the air. “See how high I can jump? That means people are sad and it’s going to rain. I told you.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did, Nicholas.”
He waved the argument away, struck by a sudden thought. “You ever been to Callisto?”
The girl shook her head, and Nicholas said, “I have; that’s where they did the operation. It’s so big the gravity’s mostly from natural mass, and it’s all domed in, with a whole lot of air in it.”
“So?”
“And when I was there it rained. There was a big trouble at one of the generating piles, and they shut it down and it got colder and colder until everybody in the hospital wore their blankets, just like Amerinds in books, and they locked the switches off on the heaters in the bathrooms, and the nurses and the comscreen told you all the time it wasn’t dangerous, they were just rationing power to keep from blacking out the important stuff that was still running. And then it rained, just like on Earth. They said it got so cold the water condensed in the air, and it was like the whole hospital was right under a shower bath. Everybody on the top floor had to come down because it rained right on their beds, and for two nights I had a man in my room with me that had his arm cut off in a machine. But we couldn’t jump any higher, and it got kind of dark.”
“It doesn’t always get dark here,” Diane said. “Sometimes the rain sparkles. I think Dr. Island must do it to cheer everyone up.”
“No,” the waves explained, “or at least not in the way you mean, Diane.” Nicholas was hungry and started to ask them for something to eat, then turned his hunger in against itself, spit on the sand, and was still.
“It rains here when most of you are sad,” the waves were saying, “because rain is a sad thing, to the human psyche. It is that, that sadness, perhaps because it recalls to unhappy people their own tears, that palliates melancholy.”
Diane said, “Well, I know sometimes I feel better when it rains.”
“That should help you to understand yourself. Most people are soothed when their environment is in harmony with their emotions, and anxious when it is not. An angry person becomes less angry in a red room, and unhappy people are only exasperated by sunshine and birdsong. Do you remember:
And, missing thee, I walk unseen
On the dry smooth-shaven green,
To behold the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven’s wide pathless way?
The girl shook her head.
Nicholas said, “No. Did somebody write that?” and then, “You said you couldn’t do anything.”
The waves replied, “I can’t—except talk to you.”
“You make it rain.”
