Chapter Text
Space travel is boring.
Years more of this absolute nothingness is a real test of patience. It’s better than being in limbo orbiting the only functional star for several light years and ripping your own carapace into pebbles trying to find out why that is. But not by much.
Today, I suppose, is a thinking day. It’s a good break from experiments and design-work. Good to just let the stars pass by for a bit.
I find myself thinking back to the earliest days I spent with Grace; the struggle to even describe simple words, much less trying to impart nearly 50 Earth years of my research on Tau Ceti to a creature that was, in many ways, my complete opposite. Of all our early conversation, one topic sticks out in my memory.
“Apology… you will not know how you ended up here, statement.”
“What’s that?” Grace asks, still distracted by his thinking machine.
“ ‘Why is a schoolteacher in space?’ You said you did not know. I thought you find out when you return home.”
I expected it when Grace takes in a heavy breath at my statement. I can tell his eyes flick away from the screen, even though his back is to me. He releases a sigh, a barely audible wisp of a groan, pries his lenses from his face and wipes at them with his shirt.
It’s a touchy subject, talking about his memories. Grace talks and talks and talks, and I love him for it. But it is usually not about his personal experiences. He talks wistfully about landscapes, about plant life, about senses and experiments and culture. But I can tell that talking about individual people and about his life is painful. I’m not certain why I brought it up, other than the tinge of sadness the sudden memory hit me with. My purpose is carved into me, solid, even if my mind ever shattered.
I expect a platitude. He loves to hide behind half-truths. Grace never outright lies to me, not on purpose. But I can tell when he lies to himself and when he says something factual but unrelated to misdirect me. I usually let him. I will let him now.
What I don’t expect is for Grace to take another heavy breath, angle his head back towards me, and close his thinking machine. He does it anyway.
“Rock… I…” He starts. Swallows. He faces down again. I’d try to gesture comfortingly at him but I know he won’t see it.
“He should know.” Grace whispers in what I’ve gathered is meant for himself. He makes one more aborted motion to face me again, steels himself, and looks straight at me while he forces out a phrase that I know carries far more meaning to him than I could possibly guess at.
“I uh… I actually do know what I’m doing in space. Now, I mean.”
I raise my carapace in what I know would look to him as surprise. Was this another thing that he had tried to spare my feelings on, before? Protecting me from the tragedy of his circumstance when I could so easily fix it if he’d just let me. I turned the memory back over in my mind.
“Why is a schoolteacher in space?”
“To answer your question, I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Is okay. Grace find out when Grace go home.”
“I’m gonna go to sleep now.”
Back then, he had deflected. I had been so alarmed by his description of sleep and scared of returning to my own silent loneliness that I hadn’t considered how he hadn’t responded to my statement.
I want to ask several questions, to press him immediately. I raise one claw to step towards him but catch myself and put it back down instead. His body is singing with sorrow and I remind myself to stay patient. I’ve been practicing that lately, for him. I’m finally rewarded a few moments later when he turns in his chair to face me fully. In my tunnel I’m just a little above his eye level.
“I remembered a little while ago. I wasn’t supposed to be on this mission.” His throat is tight when he says these words, but he keeps his voice light.
“Obvious. Schoolteachers are meant for class, not space.” I could have told him that months ago. It’s not a shocking answer. But it rips a huff of laughter from him anyways.
“No – I mean… ugh. Sorry, just give me a minute and I’ll tell you the story.”
He shuffles back in his chair, faces away again, and stands, gripping his hands into fists on his desk. His whole body seems so tight.
“No need if it upsets you. Apology.” It’s all I can muster while keeping myself under control, trying to be as soothing as I can.
“No, you should know. I want you to know. I just need to find the words first.”
Grace seems to have a much easier time talking about these things he hates when he’s facing away. It’s strange, for a creature who has a front and a back and a clear bias on facing towards me when talking. He even turns towards me whenever I speak. He’s assured me that his own auricles – ears – can hear in front and behind him, at least when it comes to words. I almost want to tell him to keep his back to me, as if that might calm him. Maybe it’s my very presence that unnerves him so much in these times.
Grace takes one more breath and turns back towards me. He sits back down in his chair and I can hear as he forces his muscles to relax.
“It’s a long story buddy, are you up for it?”
Of course I am. I gently work my way into a seated position, to match him. To let him know I’m not going anywhere.
“Earth is very dependent on our sun. The sun feeds the plants, the plants feed animals, and the animals feed bigger animals. No sun means no plants and no animals.” I hope this story he isn’t literally starting from the beginning of his planet, but at least Grace seemed to pick a point to start that he was more comfortable talking about.
“It’s a fine balance, the Earth relative to the sun. We had an ice age, thousands of years ago, that wiped out a huge amount of life on the planet just because it wobbled only a little bit in its normal orbit. Another time, a big enough asteroid kicked up so much dust on impact that it also caused a mass extinction. Small changes cause big impacts.”
What a fragile existence. Humans are so squishy, so light, so vulnerable. I suppose it must make sense that they are a reflection of their planet. I suppose, too, that I am a reflection of Erid. Funny how transitive properties crop up.
“For Erid, our star warms us. But first life evolved in our skies, closer to our star.” I make the logical leap of where this is going and continue, “I was sent out long ago, and our star has likely dimmed considerably, but we did not expect a major impact for still many years to come.” I put my leftmost family arm out, closer to the xenonite wall, and rest it on the ground there. I leave my claws slightly open. Grace is always reaching, touching; I hope my mimicry reminds him I’m here with him.
Perhaps not, as he shifts a little away from me, almost imperceptibly closer on himself, and shifts his gaze further. Not facing away, but I can tell he’s not looking at me either.
Maybe his mind needs him to look elsewhere for memories? He’s described them before like looking at the screens in the simulation room.
“We had so little time. A difference in only a few degrees, our sun dimming only by a few percentage points, would wipe out so much life on Earth. By the time we discovered it, we had only a couple of years to do anything, anything at all, to try to prevent our world from ending.”
Grace states this like a fact. Like it’s ingrained into his very cells. And the way he’s speaking is like it’s being pressed out of him. Thinking back to my own planet, I’m not entirely certain we had grasped the full gravity of the situation. Maybe I didn’t grasp it fully, not at the beginning, since our estimates were still a lifetime of relative normalcy.
What must it have been like, to have your existence ripped out from under you in what is just the snap of a claw?
Rather, I think I know what it’s like. My crew were with me, and then they weren’t.
I did everything I could. It wasn’t enough. I keen softly for both of our species, hopefully Grace doesn’t notice. I’m trying not to interrupt.
“Our mission required everyone on board. We had to throw every person, every government, every resource we had at the problem. It was a numbers game, after all, and the Hail Mary had to get into the skies within 3 years. Probably less than 10% of the population even worked in science or engineering. Of those, a fraction had the skillset to actually be useful to the project.” Grace smiles, but it’s wrong. He still looks sad as he talks. He often puts himself down, makes himself lesser, but the words he’s just spoken prove the opposite.
“Grace stands out above the rest.” I say simply.
This seems to startle him back into focus. He looks dead at me, still with that wrong smile.
“I wouldn’t say that…” He scoffs. I tap against the xenonite and can tell his face is warming up like when he’s embarrassed.
“Just did. Fraction of a fraction includes Grace.” I press on.
The silence lingers for a moment. Grace is probably recollecting his thoughts; always needs so much time to think think think. I’ll offer my own way to fill the silence, for a moment. Not an interruption, but hopefully a connection for him.
“Erid thrums. One Rocky can only think so much. Two Rocky can think better. Dozens of Rocky plural can think fast, fast, fast and big, big, big. Astrophage project resulted in the largest thrum of the generation.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Grace offers.
“It is strange… how alike we are. But how different too.” That earns me a smile from Grace. It’s small, but I can tell by the crinkling of his skin that it’s genuine. It finally drops a moment later; back to the mission.
“I had some unpopular opinions on Earth. But when the astrophage came knocking, some people thought I was just crazy enough to be able to help. Or at least disposable enough to get them some data. I managed to study it, to breed it, and then tell the others about it. That was my role. I didn’t really want to do it, but it was my job and I did it.” He’s looking down at his hands again.
I wish I could do more to comfort him.
“We had to play another numbers game. Of that fraction of a fraction, only about 0.015% of the population could survive the trip to Tau Ceti. The astronauts needed to be put into a coma, an induced sleep, but only about 1 in 7000 had the DNA that could handle it.” An induced sleep? It seems like such a violation. As I start trying to grasp what that means, he looks back up at me and says, nonchalantly, “Honestly, it’s kind of like how you normally sleep. We don’t move or dream, our body is almost entirely shut down and needs someone else to take care of the essentials.” Entirely dependent on someone else to keep you safe, I think.
I try to imagine Grace, my Grace, still as stone and silent as the vacuum of space. Every time he’s slept has been a blessing of movement, of sound, of his heart beating as proof of life.
A coma-sleep is more like an Eridian’s and yet, I can’t conceive of it for a human, for Grace. Our species are so similar, but so impossibly different. I’m shaking, some of my limbs twitching at the wrongness of the thought, but I force myself still with a couple trembling huffs.
“People volunteered for the mission. They knew it was suicide, but they did it anyway.” Grace is othering himself from this group. I’m feeling overheated from where I can tell this is going. Where I know it must end up.
Grace soldiers forward regardless of my thoughts. He brings his knees up to his chest, still in his chair, and curls inward. “There was an accident, a big one. Three days before launch the two science officers, François Dubois and his backup, Annie Shapiro, were supposed to work with 1 nanogram of astrophage for an experiment. They instead got 1 million nanograms.” The last part, he whispers like a prayer ripped from his throat, “it leveled the building.”
“Leveled” - it’s a term I don’t recognize in this context, but I know the power of astrophage. The explosion would have been catastrophic. I can’t stop myself from warbling out a few nonsensical notes – shock at the news, sadness for the loss of those people, trepidation for what must come next, heartbreak for Grace. How well did he know them? How well did they know him?
Grace takes in a shaky breath, and while I can’t ever see him as he sees himself, I can tell his ever-present soul song that strums from his very core has been muffled - I can tell he’s far away. Back at that explosion. And yet still he continues in a death march.
“We had three days. I guess I stood apart from the rest. I didn’t even have a dog.”
I can hear how his diaphragm hitches, but he doesn’t cry. It’s like my Grace isn’t even in the room. Something in me tightens, overheats. I try to ignore it.
“I wasn’t an astronaut. But I knew the science. I was there for every project meeting. I was in that 10%, in that fraction that knew enough, and I had the gene to survive the coma. I was expendable; no immediate family, no mate, not even a dog. No one would miss me. I was the only choice...”
Grace suddenly focuses his gaze back on me, head tilted in an inquisitive position. There’s a moment of silence, and I realize I’ve stood up, vents raising. I’m bouncing my weight between my legs. My shock at the absolute filth coming from Grace’s mouth is overtaking me. I have so much energy and I need to put it somewhere before it explodes out of me.
“I was expendable…”
I stomp one leg. And another. I can’t stop the ugly dread that tears its way through me. The noise is loud in the quiet ship, and I know the register is high enough to hurt Grace’s ears. I try to seal my vents shut to silence it.
“No immediate family…”
If I speak now it’ll all come tumbling out in a cacophony. Grace said he wants me to know this about him. I want to know it too, because this is a burden he has been carrying for too long alone. And the first drop of that weight already has me acting like a petulant pebble. I know there’s more coming. The story isn’t over yet; I know where it ends. I need to show Grace support, and my frustration isn’t helping.
“No one would miss me…”
My mind grasps to the most basic form of communication we have. Back to when we were two strangers clinging desperately to the first friendly face we found. When we were alone, all alone, in a tunnel and awestruck by the others’ presence. I had been terrified if I left that tunnel he would disappear forever. But when he needed to leave, with a promise to be back, he found a way to communicate the promise of return. I replicate it now.
I manage to get one limb up, extending one claw outward. I forcefully shake it with emphasis.
Grace has been staring at me, mouth slightly open, a flurry of movement. I’m not sure if he’s said anything until now. He’s halfway out of his chair, but I hear him say “…Wait? You want me to wait?”
My brilliant Grace. It’s all I can muster to think before moving my carapace in a nod and trundling through my tunnel system and to the cockpit, where my ball is.