Challenge #01302-C207: Free Falling Water

Someone from a desert community or space community - anywhere where water is an extremely finite resource - visits somewhere like England where it falls from the sky on a semipermanent basis. -- Gallifreya

If there was one thing that freshly-minted Sahra Johnston would never get used to, it was the fact that she had her own space yacht. With a crew. And cabins enough for not just her entire family, but the crew's as well. Not that the Galactic crew had any more than three babies at any time. But, assuming that they were allowed to breed like Hevun's humans, there would be cabins enough for everyone.

The second thing to get used to was her duties. She was no longer allowed to crawl through access tunnels and fix things. In fact, her security personnel frowned on her going anywhere near access tunnels at all. Instead of being useful, they took her around in plush, fancy suites to other plush, fancy suites and to go and see what Terra and her colonies had to offer.

Which included a visit to Earth.

The Sol system had one two-way wormhole, somewhere between Saturn's orbit and Jupiter's. Of course, there was a minor Galactic Market station there. Monitoring traffic and making sure nobody brought unwelcome biota to Earth.

From there, it was a slow cruise of a week or two to the small, blue-green rock that had started a lot of problems for a lot of people. Most of their money came from tourists who went to see the planet that launched a million colony worlds of varying sanities. The rest of their money came from people wanting to use Sol's abundance of one-way wormholes for profit.

Sahra's first stop was a tiny island called, depending on who you asked, Great Britain, the United Kingdom, or England. And her first impression of the place was... somewhat awe-inspiring.

Her first view of England was through the window of the spaceport in Heathrow, and it was besmeared by water. Falling. Out of the sky.

Mining Station had weather anomalies if the space was big enough. One of those phenomena, she and her friends had done to create 'miracles' to frighten the Tu'att away. But this was real water. Falling out of the sky.

She ran out into it, her bodyguards trailing behind. Fresh water! Clean water! And they just let it fall down on everything! The Tu'att masters had figured out exactly how dirty water could get before it made their human slaves sick, and let them have that. Even for washing.

Sahra got soaked, and she didn't care. She did object when one of the bodyguard put an old-fashioned weather shield between her and the falling water.

"Have you never seen rain, before, Ambassador?" said a guard.

"Nuh," she said. "Should'a tole me they put this on. I'd'a wore sum'pin water-frien'ly."

The guard sighed a very Mama-like sigh. The sigh that said, This child needs to learn so very much...

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