Grail - Elizabeth Bear [115]
They dropped into a sea of gray cotton candy, which opened up and swallowed them entire.
Perceval expected a sound, a shushing, shirring noise as the clouds wrapped them. But there was nothing, a curious hush, the thrumming of the engines and the life-support systems controlling the cabin climate. Tristen sneezed, quite suddenly, and Perceval sniffled as the scent of burning electronics filled the cabin. “Is something on fire?” she asked.
“That’s the smell of the storm,” Amanda said. “We’ve started filtering in some outside air. You’re smelling ozone from the lightning discharge.”
Lightning. She said the word over to herself to memorize it. “It smells like burning.”
“The air is burning,” Amanda said. “And being ionized.”
The smoke gray outside the windows gave way to charcoal, and lashings of rain. Then steady drumming, like a hundred thousand fingertips palpating the aircraft’s skin.
Perceval giggled. She bit her lip, glanced at Danilaw, and forced herself not to giggle again. Or tried, but it slipped out anyway.
He turned to her, dark face curving around a grin. How strange, that these alien humans grinned just like anybody.
Tristen craned his neck to look back at them, eyebrows rising.
“Rain,” Perceval said. “Rain on a real live planet.”
Whatever he was about to say was arrested when they broke through the underside of the clouds. Favorlight—Planetrise or planetset? Perceval had no idea. Did they look different? How did you tell?—slanted up from the edge of the world and smeared across the underside of the clouds.
The rain still hammered down, blurring the port. The windshield, Amanda had called it. A thing that shields one from the impact force of an onrushing atmosphere.
What weird things planets were.
Something about the quality of the rush of air along the skin of the lighter changed, a new note brightening the white noise toward pink. “Landing gear,” Danilaw said, when Perceval turned her head against the crushing strength of gravity to glance her question at him. His voice showed strain—the discomfort of a Mean under physical duress. What was uncomfortable for a Conn was acute distress for Danilaw and Amanda. And yet they bore it well, functioning and cheerful, Amanda in particular intent on her work.
Means. Their courage and resourcefulness. They would never quite cease to amaze her.
A moment passed before she realized that she’d just thought of Rien without pain, and that realization brought the pain instead. A few short decades, and was she already forgetting?
“Healing,” said Nova inside her. And had the sense not to say further.
When the landing gear—wheels, Perceval guessed—touched the landing strip, there was a hard uncomfortable bounce and a harder, more uncomfortable whirr. Almost a whine, the sound of machinery straining against intense natural forces. Rain still sheeted the windows—a dimpled, transparent glaze that nevertheless distorted the world outside so heavily Perceval could make no sense of what she saw. Only a jumble of objects dark and bright, each alternately illuminated and shadowed by the lightning and the storm.
Lightning cracked again as they rolled to a stop, this time without an accompanying rumble of thunder. That came moments later, and Perceval found herself calculating in her head. “That was a mile and a half off,” she said.
“Difference in flash and bang?” Amanda asked, turning in her seat to unhook the shoulder belts.
Perceval nodded, suddenly shy. “Is the storm moving away from us?”
“This wave,” Amanda said. “There might be more. The rain is a friend, though. It’ll cool our shell faster so we can disembark.”
“And drench us on the runway,” Danilaw said, but Perceval thought he was performing his crabbiness more than experiencing it. He was stretching in his seat, looking around, an air of excitement hovering over him.
Perceval decided to find it contagious. Maybe it would put an end to the apprehension and anxiety that wanted to rise up her throat like an anaconda and throw ropes of unease around her airway and lungs. When Danilaw rose, she