First section.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s rain. Not the “water falling from the sky” part… that’s actually pleasant and I like the sound of it. No, it’s the damp. The way nothing feels dry any more, the way the air itself seems to be mildewed, the way the ground slows your stride and clings to your feet, weighing down every step. And it’s the way my body conspires to emulate the weather; my skin is damp and clammy, my eyes and nose water, even my knees feel watery. They can say the watery eyes are from allergies, and the watery knees are from age, but I live in this body, and I can’t help noticing I only have to deal with those things in the rain.
Come here in late summer, especially from midcontinent, and the first thing you notice is the color. Grapt Province is green; year round, it’s always green. Vivid green, not the dusty green that’s all that’s left surrounding the tans and browns in Midwold at the end of season. Not the poisonous greens of the Southwold swamps, nor the pale greens of the Northwold lichens, peeping out from the rocks at the edges of the permafrost. Our greens are oak green, cedar green, grass green. The deep bluish greens of the blue spruce, the prickly, astringent greens of the juniper, the tentative greens of spring and the dark, somber greens of late winter, when the holly is the brightest green to be found. Pick a season, the Province is green, and that’s entirely due to the rain.
I know this. I value the greenery, and the deep peace that seems to permeate the Province; the peace that seems almost to be green, itself. But I’ve lived here the last three quarters of a century, and I know that the peace overlies a subtly savage reality, just as our random sunny days hold out a glorious illusion that does not change the bitter ache of the far more frequent days of rain.
It’s been seventy-six years since I came here, young, hopeful and determined to succeed beyond the wildest dreams of my parents, who had mostly given up on my doing anything but survive. Since then I’ve been rich, I’ve been poor, I’ve been adulated and reviled. None of it really means squat, though, beside what I learned about Grapt Province in my eighth year here. And now they tell me I’m dying, far before my time, and I haven’t found anyone to teach the secrets to. There’s only been one other gap since men came to Wold when there was no living being to keep this secret, and now the only way to preserve it is to write it down. No way to safeguard it, except to pray that there is some force to hear a prayer and protect this journal from falling into the wrong hands.
So, if there is a God, You know what I’ve known for the past sixty-eight years, and You know who the best person is to tend this secret and pass it on. I commend this journal to Your care. And if there is no God, I must simply bury it deep where no one who doesn’t already love Grapt Province will ever think to look, and hope.
1 Talle, 649.
Grapt Province.
Dear Sascha,
Everyone back home said there were jewels scattered in the river beds and money falling from the trees here. I never believed it would be that easy, but certainly I thought that a young, strong body and a willingness to work hard would at least make it possible for me to earn a living in the Province. If anything, it’s harder here than it was in Midwold. The weather is more temperate; the farrier says that except in winter, it’s warm enough to sleep outside, if you have a waterproof kit. Which I thought I did, but apparently what’s considered waterproof back home is a joke out here. My first night I slept in the local accommodations. (They call it a ‘doss’, although no one seems to know why.) I was expecting it to be pretty inexpensive, but it used up almost a third of my travelling money. I did get a chance to get completely dry, which at the time was simply nice, but I look back on being dry now as an incredible luxury.
There are trees here, the tarsh, whose wood doesn’t rot in the wet, and when the area was first colonized, apparently everyone believed that all they had to do was replant the trees they cut down and they’d have enough lumber for every one to have a home of their own in a few years. Unfortunately, as it turns out, tarsh don’t grow under cultivation. And in the wild, they grow very slowly. The first few buildings that went up used up most of the local tarsh timber before it was realized that it couldn’t realistically be replaced. Later buildings were constructed of other timbers, none of which seem to do well against the local molds and mildews. There’s a thriving local research group working to develop a treatment for other timbers to protect them, but, so far, the only one that works is extremely toxic to people. It works for bridges, and shoring, anything that isn’t an enclosed space people have to be in, but staying overnight in a building treated with it will make you very sick and staying two nights can kill you. I mean, I’m all for dry shelter… but I don’t want to die for it!
I miss you. There is no one here who shares any of the experiences you and I have shared, no one I’ve found to whom I can talk without sounding (at least to myself) like I am making excuses for my inability to fit in here. There’s no one I can even talk to without explaining myself. So far I’ve met only three people who read for pleasure. I can’t talk to these people! This is not the romantic adventure I expected it to be, not anything like the films we watched about frontier living. Among other things, I don’t think, in all of the research I did before coming here, I ever thought about what the description of the climate meant as far as day-to-day life. All of those films were set in desert or semi-arid climates. It would take an act of God to make this place resemble the settings of those films. Here no one sits around a campfire at the end of a long day playing songs on a guitar and looking at the stars. I’ve been here for three months now and I’ve only seen the stars once. And horses! I mean, we both know there won’t be horses for another twenty to thirty years, and yet, in the back of my mind, I expected to see them tied up to those rail things in front of the general store on the dusty main street of Abilene.
Speaking of Abilene, I can’t imagine why anyone would name a town here after the Abilene in those old films. This place is about as different from that one as it’s possible to be and still call both of them towns. Here there is no dust, no sage brush, no meetings at high noon. The main street is a kind of gravel mosaic laid over a deep layer of a wiry moss. There are no hitching posts, and so far, the only beast of burden is the urcamel. Desert references again. Have you seen pictures of them? They’re just called “urs” here. They’re actually native, and look sort of distantly like a drunken dromedary. The farrier said that they were named urcamels by one of the original settlers, and the name stuck. It annoys the taxonomists enormously, because in taxonomy, an “urcamel” would be a primitive ancestor of the entire line of modern camels, the first ancestor or original camel. Properly speaking, the urs aren’t camels at all; they are more closely akin to seals. Seems the guy who named them thought that their feet worked like camel feet, spreading to bear weight on the soggy ground. And as beasts of burden go, well, they can carry about four times what a man can, and can forage off native plants so you don’t have to worry about feeding them. They aren’t domesticated animals, though, more like primitive sentients. You can’t force an urs to work for you. If one decides it likes you, it’ll work for you; otherwise, it may drag your stuff out into the wilds and then abandon you, or even walk you into a sinkhole and blandly watch you sink, then take your pack back to town without you. No kidding, Sasch; that actually happened to a guy the first week I was here. The urs can walk on ground that you or I would sink in like water; this guy was out with an urs and the urs got ahead of him and walked him right into a sinkhole. Thing is, after they unloaded the urs, it led a search party back to the sinkhole, just in time for his decomposing body to rise to the surface. I was in the search party, and that’s a sight I never want to see again.
Did I already tell you I miss you? I miss you. I know your parents don’t want you to come here, and certainly I haven’t painted Grapt in any flattering colors, but it’s not something you can really describe to someone who hasn’t seen it. The air here seems thick, but thick with oxygen. As though it’s harder to draw in to your lungs, but every breath is worth four breaths there. The streams are clear and musical, the trees seem to murmur pleasantries as you walk among them, and the sunrises and sunsets (when we always seem to get a few minutes of clear sky at the horizons) are beyond description. Even the rain isn’t a great burden; yes, it rains (almost) constantly, but it isn’t a downpour; it’s a slow, steady rain, which sounds as though it’s music falling from the sky, not water. I finally have a job, not a great job, but in a couple of paydays I will be able to get a waterproof kit and still have enough money to take a couple of days and dry out everything I have. Meanwhile, my dear, I know you have the money your grandmother left you; why not come out? You know what I started with ; it’s a small fraction of your trust. If you came out with only as much as I started with, you could get a real waterproof kit when you get here, and try this life out for a while.
Even if you decide to go back, you’d have had the adventure, you’d have seen the Province. And who knows? Stay a year and we might even strike it rich. There aren’t gems lining the river beds, but there are fortunes to be made here. With your training, I know the research group would LOVE to have you, and if you start a month after you get my letter, by the time you get here I will have a house. “Come live with me and be my love…” Come see the Province. Despite it not being what I expected or what I dreamed of, it has won my heart. I just know that, given a chance, it will win your heart too. And I miss you more than I could ever tell you. I want to see you and talk to you and hold you again. Please come.
All my love
- Me
16 Rist, 650
Harber, Grapt Province.
My dear Sascha,
It’s been over a year since I wrote to you asking you to come. I hope this finds you well. I’ve missed you terribly. As I promised, I now have a house, big enough for both of us. It’s on the hill overlooking Abilene. I also have a pad, that is a group, of urs. They are John Wayne, Lucy, Linus, and Barkeater. Now that I’ve made their acquaintance, I find that in my opinion they are as intelligent as, say, a three year old child. They have very definite likes and dislikes. They’ll come and curl up around me if the temperature drops while we’re on the trail. They seem to know I don’t handle cold as well as they do. On the other hand, they will all move upwind if I eat dried fish, and if I eat it too many days in a row, all of the dried fish will disappear from my pack. So far it’s all been returned to the kitchen at my house when that happens, but I suspect that if I don’t limit my intake, one of these days it will disappear and make no reappearance. The urs seem to think we are dim, but educable.
As far as the standards of the Province go, I have become fairly well off. The urs like me and that makes it possible for me to act as a guide, or as a carter, making a fair bit of money. Not only that, but the urs feed me, bringing me local edible plants. I need only buy fish and food supplements, for the nutrients the local plant life is missing.
I’m nattering, trying to find a graceful way to work up to what I meant to say when I started this letter. I’m sorry, I just don’t see any way to ease into this… I got the note you sent via John Parker. Short and to the point. The letters I’ve written to you and not sent since the last one I sent you, I’ll burn. I didn’t send them because if you’d been coming here, as I hoped, you’d have crossed paths and never gotten them. Your new husband isn’t going to want to stumble across old love letters from me, no matter how interesting the filler is. There’s much I wrote about the Province that I may include in later letters, if you still want to hear from me. If you don’t reply to this letter, I’ll assume you don’t want to stay friends, despite your note. If that’s your wish, so be it. Best of luck to you and your family from me and mine…
Yours sincerely,
- Me
- Linus
- Lucy
- John Wayne, and
- Barkeater.
Dear “You”, Linus, Lucy, John Wayne, and Barkeater:
I know you despise the name your parents gave you, but you’re on the far frontier of the planet, you could choose another name. Anything, just so you have a name and not a pronoun to append to your letters!
Thanks for the good wishes; David sends his best, and by the time you get this I’ll be sending you best wishes from the rest of my family, too. We’re expecting twins in only two months.
I feel as though I’m lugging around a transport. David has been very busy; as you probably remember, his parents are high up in the government and David will probably get his father’s cabinet appointment when his father steps down in three years. So there’s time for another pregnancy, and for me to work while he carries, before he becomes too busy. My parents are well and Andrea sends you hugs and kisses. She’s very rude, tells me I should have married you before you left, and won’t even talk to David. She’s offered to move to the province and keep house for you, and I almost think my parents would let her go, they’re so tired of her constant rebellion. It’s been forever since you left; do you realize she’ll be twenty-one next month? Well, she’ll be twenty-one before you get this; it won’t be next month for you. David says that within five years the monorail will make it possible to visit the Province on vacation. Perhaps we can all com visit you in your new home. I haven’t seen pictures of the urs, but would be interested in meeting your pad. I have no mental picture of them; your descriptions just don’t make sense to me. No disrespect meant to you, its just my lack of imagination, I’m sure.
By the way, David says that we should be able to decant the horses starting in only six months, FAR earlier than originally projected! We already have a three cows and a bull, although they are more curiosities than livestock. One of the cows is due to calve in a few days, and David & I have been invited to a party given by the (science guys in charge of breeding live animals from frozen sperm & ova) at which they are planning to serve fresh milk!
The Andromeda will be leaving in three months; if all goes well with the birth of my twins, my parents may well be on it. It’s equipped for coldsleep, and they’ve been medically cleared for it. They want to go back “home”, back to the society of their youth and the planet they were born on. It’s been no use telling them that nothing is the same there; they came out in coldsleep and they’ll be going back in coldsleep. It’ll be what, five hundred years later there? Six? You know I was never good at science, I still don’t remember how to calculate the coldsleep timeslip. Their only regret is that Andrea can’t go with them. The law still says that no one who’s had the longevity treatments and is still capable of reproduction can return. Not that Andrea cares; she says that by the time she could be persuaded to go there, the law will have died a natural death of old age anyway.
Oh, David’s home and we’re going out to dinner; I have to run. Andrea says to tell you she was serious about coming and keeping house for you.
Thanks for staying my friend. Pick a new name or I’ll start calling you Alphonse.
Take care,
Sascha.