[Issue 2024.69]

‘Sun-Dappled Sheets of Methane Rain’, Marc A. Criley

Art © 2024 Ellis Bray

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A few scattered raindrops float down from a hazy orange sky. They’re as big as my child-thumbs, plopping onto my enviro suit and spotting the visor. The liquid methane evaporates fast, leaving sooty splotches. The rain tapers off. Dad and I wait. I get antsy. Dad sighs.

“Summer’s over,” he finally says. “That’s probably the last rain for thirty years.” Grasping my suit-gloved hand, we trudge back to the waiting shuttle. “I got home as soon as I could, but… the transfer orbits weren’t good.” Just outside the airlock he stops and stares at yellow-orange Saturn and its thin rings playing hide-and-seek with Titan’s billowing clouds and haze.

“I’m sorry, kid. I’m sorry, but I need to get you back to my sister’s, I can’t stay. I’m flying out tonight. For a job.”

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Growing up, I didn’t see much of my father. And my mother passed before I could form any memories of her. I had a few holos; but there was only one with all of us together, she in the infirmary and me a newborn. Dad was a certified propulsion systems engineer, which meant he worked long-haul jobs in space. He sent comms when he could in the brief layovers between system-spanning transits. I was raised by his much older sister while he trucked around the solar system, signing onto anything with a fusion engine. Sometimes I got so mad at him for not being there, but when he came home my anger invariably cooled as he told me of the marvels he’d seen and the souvenirs he picked up during his travels—I had little bags of dirt from every world on which he’d set foot.

I got along fine with my aunt—she never had her own kids, but raised me like a son. Titan was a small and lonely place though, and I couldn’t wait to leave. On my eighteenth birthday, while Dad was en route to Triton, I enrolled in flight school.

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After graduation I accepted the first offer from a deep space freighter that would apprentice a navigator short on experience but long on enthusiasm. I wanted to see the universe—or at least old Sol’s part of it—and I did! In the ensuing years I walked on Mercury’s ever-shadowed polar ice; ate fresh fruit and vegetables from the greenhouse gardens of Ceres; made several “M & M runs” between Mercury and Mars; and on Pluto piloted barge skimmers across the Sputnik Planitia iceways under Charon’s baleful gaze.

My father and I kept in touch, though with both of us now on the move, connecting got even harder. One time we worked out a way to cross paths for a few hours on a Venus High Altitude floater; it’d been four years since I’d seen him, eighteen since Titan’s rain. We snagged a booth at Cat’s Cradle—the floater’s commissary—and plundered the all-you-can-stomach buffet, washing it down with the local bespoke algal beer.

When I got the report-for-duty call, Dad and I ugly cried as he whispered, “I’ll see you next summer on Titan.” Titan’s next summer was still a dozen years away.

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On a long, cold Kuiper Belt resupply mission I met and fell in love with Kai, a Valles Marineris Martian. Back in-system, we did the Verona Rupes Plunge, freefalling eleven miles while reciting abridged vows. We took a belated honeymoon on Earth—the only other world in the solar system where it rains. I didn’t care for Earth rain. Too fast, too small, and it hits the ground too hard.

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A daughter, Baelie, entered our solar system. Kai and I brought her to Lake Synevyr in Titan’s polar northlands as the summer rainy season reached its peak. Dad is with us here today, on Titan probably for good after surviving a harrowing hull breach during a Jovian scoop-and-go. His ship lost half its crew, and would’ve lost the rest had he not waldoed a laser igniter from just outside the containment field to restart the engines to pull them out of Jupiter’s deep gravity well. The X-ray ignition pulse flash-fried his suit—and him. He spent weeks in an amniotic regrowth tank and was medically advised to retire to a low-grav world.

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Sun-dappled sheets of methane rain pebble Synevyr’s surface. Oily swells surge against the shore. Kai and I dance a little jig with Baelie, who then runs off to stomp through the liquid methane puddles. She runs back to my dad and holds up her arms. He picks her up with the aid of his exo-suit. Baelie’s wearing an ear-to-ear grin, and on my father’s face I think I see tears mirroring the rivulets trickling down his visor. Raindrops drip and sizzle off Baelie’s helmet and suit. She leans her head back, raises two gloved fists, and squeals with a child’s delight.

Kai, Dad, and I all lift our heads in the shimmering methane rain and join in.

© 2024 Marc A. Criley

[Issue 2024.69]

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