Selina looked up at the dull gray skies and smelled the damp, heavy air, and knew that there would be no escape this year. She wanted to cry. It just didn't feel fair. They'd almost made it this time. She thought that the ship had signaled its approach well in advance of the spring rains, but Lilac's eccentric orbit had defeated her best attempts to predict the weather yet again. Spring came early this year. Spring came earlier than she thought every year.
Maybe that wasn't an accident. She thought that the winters were safe, but who could be sure? Maybe it was more than just survival instinct that kept them too busy stockpiling food and reinforcing shelters against the snowfall. Maybe it was more than just lack of equipment, lack of knowledge about Lilac's orbit that made Selina predict the spring rains wrong again. She could never be sure. She lost so much during the summers. They all did. Winter was as much a process of rediscovering lost knowledge as making progress. They forgot so much about Lilac in the spring. They forgot so much about everything.
Thunder flashed in the sky overhead. Selina looked out at the fields with wary dread. The snows had melted in the early spring thaw, but the landscape still looked barren. Back on Earth, Selina had always hated that time of the year, the end of March and the beginning of April, when the coat of snow had melted away but the new green hadn't come in yet. The world looked like an old woman, her beauty faded to wrinkled grayness, and it somehow seemed cruel to strip her of her white robes and make everyone look at her.
Lilac looked a lot like Earth right now, but Selina wished that spring could hold off just a little bit longer. Just until the rescue ship got here. Forty people, just hoping the rains would hold off another month, another week, another day until the ship could arrive. Selina looked at the shelters, made out of the remnants of last year's rescue ship. Last year, it was twenty-two. Next year, they might not send a rescue ship at all. When did they cut their losses and classify Lilac as a dead world?
"Dead world." The cruelest phrasing of all. Lilac was anything but dead.
The breeze picked up. Selina thought about racing back in, about trying to radio the rescue ship and convincing them to turn around, but she knew that the storms would make reception impossible. She thought about smashing the radio, too, but she knew that the rescue ship would bring new parts. They would spend the summer repairing it, and then when autumn came and they remembered again, they would be too busy preparing for the winters. It was the cycle of seasons on Lilac. Remembering, surviving, forgetting, and obeying. She laughed harshly. Perhaps they should teach the children that, in the school they talked about running during the winter months. It would mean more to them than the meaningless words from Earth.
Selina hadn't had a child yet, but she suspected it would happen this year. So many of the summer memories were hazy, distant, and hard to access, but she remembered rutting with the men. They would work all day, clearing the fields and planting the seeds, their arousal growing with every breath; then as dusk fell, they would simply fall upon each other in an orgy of unbound desire. Selina remembered nights when the men would take her, one after another, fucking her fiercely and swiftly and coming inside her almost within minutes. She remembered her cunt still aching with need, all the men spent with exhaustion, rubbing herself off on other women who were equally needy. They would fuck until they finally passed out, then wake up with the dawn and begin their duties again. She supposed it was a good life, in its own way, but she hadn't come to Lilac to fuck.
In fact, when she'd come to Lilac, she didn't expect any human companionship at all for quite some time to come. She didn't need any. She'd taken the pills, RNA synthesis chains that force-fed knowledge of every scientific discipline into her head, she'd had libido-suppressants and books on chip and the therapist programs and a whole planet to study. She was a one-woman research facility. Who needed other humans?
That had been in the spring too. In the Forgetting, she corrected herself. And in the Remembering, she had spent her time desperately trying to rebuild the equipment she'd destroyed, wondering why the radio was so much less damaged than some of the other devices, and trying to assemble her scattered, fuzzy memories into disciplined theories of what might have happened to her during her first summer on Lilac.
And in the Surviving, she'd spent her time in the ship repairing the radio. The drive had been beyond repair, of course. The computer was junk. She had heat, she had light, she had food, and she had a radio that was fixable with a few months of work. And at the beginning of the Forgetting, just before the first rains, she'd signaled for a rescue ship. The next year, there had been eleven people.
This year, there were forty. Thirty-one people who had come to Lilac, and nine very young natives. Thankfully, during the Obeying, they didn't neglect the children. Selina wasn't sure if she could live with herself if they spent their time planting and sowing and clearing and fucking while the babies starved to death. But she knew that every hand was needed on Lilac. There were so many fields to till. The endless orgies during the Obeying created more labor for the future, for when the rescue ships stopped coming. Neglecting the children would defeat the purpose.
The first droplets of rain splashed onto Selina's cheeks. At least, she thought it was rain. She might have been crying after all. But no, the droplets tasted fresh on her lips. Unspoiled. There was no pollution on Lilac, no heavy industry choking the skies with the taste of soot and oil. There never would be, either. Her children and her children's children would forget more than they remembered every year. How could they not, with parents who did the same? Until in the end, they would just remember the cycle of the seasons. Even the words 'Remembering' and 'Forgetting' would lose their meaning, eventually. There would be nothing to forget, which meant that there would be nothing to remember. Only Obeying and Surviving.
She heard a voice behind her. "Selina?" It was Cris. She'd been hoping to avoid this conversation. She'd been hoping to avoid Cris completely, at least until the Forgetting began. One advantage of the Obeying, when you spent all night fucking someone you didn't have to have a long, boring talk about your emotions the next day. As awkward as the Remembering was sometimes, everyone had the same excuses for their behavior. They didn't have to say, "My libido-suppressants ran out a month ago and you were there."
Selina ignored Cris and began to walk out into the fields. In a few minutes, she'd be able to put off the conversation for quite a while. Maybe Cris wouldn't remember after the Remembering. She hoped so. She didn't have the patience for a relationship, especially not with Cris. He'd been following her around like a lovesick puppy for months, now. Last night would only make things worse.
For fuck's sake,
she thought, feeling a sudden sting of anger at the young man who continued to call her name,
if I was capable of love, I wouldn't have come to Lilac in the first place.
