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“So he finds this continent, right?” I say, digging through a storage cavity, “I won’t say he “discovers” it because there were already a bunch of people living on it, though a lot of people at the time conveniently liked to forget that.” I shove my hand deeper into what is currently hitherto unknown depths, the storage cavity swallowing my arm whole right up to the shoulder, my skin surrounded by crinkling plastic.
“Why, question?” Rocky asks.
“Cultural… well I can’t call it “differences”, because that would imply a simple misunderstanding instead of the result of centuries of technology-enforced subjugation.”
I hear Rocky pound his fist twice into the floor. “Say many times what it isn’t instead of what it is.”
I wave him off with my free hand. “Details, details. Later he goes somewhere else and one thing leads to another, and the people there sort of… cook him.”
Ironic.
Rocky warbles something quickly that I translate into shocked disgust.
“Humans eat other humans?”
“No, not normally,” I turn my face away from the storage cavity to look at Rocky properly, so he knows I’m paying attention, for real this time, promise. “They didn’t eat him. Common misconception. This time I can say that cultural differences were a factor. But no, humans don’t usually eat each other. Well,” I look away, “with some rare exceptions they usually don’t unless they’re forced to. It’s mostly taboo. Starvation, though, can drive humans to –”
I cut myself off. “It’s not important. What was I saying? Oh yeah, so the reason he was able to travel so much further than other people was because he’d solved the scurvy issue.”
Rocky has been tinkering away with his xenonite, but at that he stops and tilts his carapace towards me. “Your nutrition problem.”
I nod. “My nutrition problem.”
Rocky turns away and starts rifling around his stacks of xenonite off-cuts. “I knew…”
He trails off. Impressive for someone using a text to speech software which I know doesn’t have the capability to do so. He and his musical frequencies must’ve found an edge case in my programming and exploited it.
I tilt my head back at him. “You knew what, Rocky?”
“There was a point to this story somewhere.”
Oh, he’s funny. That’s even worse. I pout, knowing he can sense me without having to turn around. “Who gave you that horrible sense of humour?”
Rocky waves one of his unoccupied hands dismissively. “Finish story.”
I oblige. Rocky’s attention was limited when it came to me talking about food, so I try to fit in what I can. This was partly because he was Eridian, partly because he was an engineer and it was a problem he couldn’t solve.
“That guy figured out how to give Vitamin C to himself and his crew. I realised, after Adrian, that I would have to do the same.”
Rocky angles his carapace again. “You solve, question?”
I sit up straighter, unable to hide the smirk splitting across my face. “I solve, statement.”
After Rocky’s generous astrophage offering as we entered Adrian’s exosphere, and I had the new hope of surviving this mission, I started keeping the rinds of the citrus fruit from my rations. People had lost the ability to synthesise Vitamin C ourselves somewhere along the evolutionary tract and we needed it mostly from citrus fruits now. It took some time (up to three months) before the effects of Vitamin C loss were felt, i.e. scurvy, so I doubted the mission rations prepared for it. In fact I knew it, now armed with the knowledge of my place as Stratt’s second in command and the mission information that came with it. Why waste food space with long-term vitamin needs, when there were short-term vitamin needs instead?
I would need to make my own Vitamin C if I wanted to survive the journey to Earth. Or, as it ended up being, the journey to Erid and all the years that would follow afterwards. And I would have to do so without the last microbial step that made it easier for most other animals. Stupid most other animals and their ability to make Vitamin C themselves. Why did I, personally, have to lose that skill?
Fortunately, there was plenty of spare Vitamin C to go around. People could metabolise the Vitamin C found in fruit flesh, but not in the rind, where fruit kept most of its Vitamin C supply. All I had to do was figure out how to make the rind-based Vitamin C bioavailable, and all my problems would be solved.
And I did. I put the Vitamin C-rich-rind into a microwave, dunked it in water, protected it from oxidisation with nitrogen, microwaved it, added an additive, centrifuged it, and took out the supernatant. What remained, after some high performance liquid chromatography and a little more chemistry, was an acid I could absorb and use like any other vitamin my human body needed.
Okay, it was a little more complicated than that. It took me a few weeks of concentrated effort and a lot of research to figure out. But I did it! All you needed were fresh fruits and vegetables, which I had after I rehydrated the dried stuff they gave me. I was also helpfully provided with plants, seeds, and a bunch of dirt so it was likely I could grow my own sources of Vitamin C et al. with enough time. Which I now had. I had a lot more water available too than the original planners intended, with two thirds of my crew passed. It all gets recycled anyway.
Why would the Project Hail Mary team include plants on a mission that would end years before most of them would fully mature? In all honesty my memories haven’t all come back, so I have to speculate. There are plenty of fast-sprouting micro greens so I assume they are there to meet some nutritional needs, but maybe the other seeds were included so we could test astrophage-related solutions on our plant life. And if they were going to give us plants, why not give ones that grew fruits or grains?
I explain all of this to Rocky (though he already knew some bits and pieces) while I clear out the newly found storage cavity, half-hidden behind the med bay storage area and fully containing a whole bunch of odds and ends I could have used earlier.
Out comes the travel chess board. Out comes the vacuum-sealed shoes, the laundry detergent, replacement test tubes, telescopes, a bunch of fobs and IR receivers, eight hundred different capacitors, and a handful of different usb adapters.
Right. Well maybe I couldn’t have used these earlier, but it would have been nice to know that for my stocktake from three months ago, just before we set out on this four year voyage. I like to know what I’m working with.
“What’s that, question?” Rocky points at the travel chess board. “I hear small things inside.”
“Human game,” I tell him, “new word: chess. It’s a strategy game that goes back a thousand years or so.”
“I am good at strategy,” Rocky says.
That’s Rocky’s subtle way of asking to stop talking about food and to do something more interesting.
“Chess is boring,” I explain. “it’s a lot of time just sitting and calculating possible moves. Less interesting than, say, my plans for a forced rhubarb farm –”
“Don’t care,” Rocky cuts me off, “teach me to play chess.”
I sigh, extracting myself from the storage cavity and putting my hands on my hips. It would probably look more authoritative if I was standing, instead of sitting surrounded by plastic packaging. But I do my best. “You wouldn’t like it. There’s lots of thinking like a human involved.”
It was Ilyukhina’s game. She said it was her national pastime, no matter how many times Yáo told her India now dominated the sport on the world stage. We kept it alive, she argued, we gave it meaning. I think Norway did that, Yáo would say in reply.
Neither of them were here to use the chessboard now. I had played a game every now and then when our schedules on the aircraft carrier had allowed it, just to keep my eye in, but it wasn’t something I really did for fun. Once you reached a certain point you had to expend a lot of effort on rote memorisation and I couldn’t do that. Not if it wasn’t about space or biology.
Besides, if I did explain the rules, what chance did I have against someone who had a perfect memory? Once Rocky learned all the openings, he’d have a significant advantage in any game he played. He also had access to a laptop with humanity’s entire breadth of knowledge so he could learn human strategy too.
Although…
What if he didn’t? What if I asked him to avoid looking the game up, and he had to learn all the rules from me? From playing, from calculating strategy, from thought. It wasn’t all rote memorisation. You needed years of learning and experimentation to get good enough at it to play in the big leagues, no matter how smart you were or how good your memory was.
It might even take him longer than the journey to Erid.
Now this was an interesting way to spend our time. Especially if I could use the computer to look up openings… I could stay one step ahead of him and learn more tactics at the same time. I read recently in some pilfered Australian journal that chess was associated with a reduced dementia risk. So it would be a win-win all round, actually. Rocky could learn something new about human culture and I could keep my brain healthy.
By the time I retreat from my thoughts, Rocky is looking at me expectedly. I must have missed whatever he’d said. It was probably something about the “thinking like a human” I had said earlier.
“If you want to, I’ll teach you,” I say. “But you learn a lot differently than a human, so to keep it fair I’m going to make you work for it, is that okay?”
Rocky taps the floor twice in anticipation. “I like a challenge, statement,” he says.
Very well. I stick the chessboard under my arm and stand. I offer Rocky a faux bow. “Then I will give you one.”
“Does not make sense,” Rocky argues, “piece moves one square but one time two squares, unless enemy piece moves one special way.”
I hide my smile and move my pawn into Rocky’s defensive barrage along row five. We’ve made some adjustments to the board and now half the pieces are xenonite, which Rocky can see more easily than the two different wood grains. The board stays firmly in my atmosphere but Rocky is happy to call out his piece movements and I make the move on the board.
“I can explain the rules to you –”
“I will figure out,” Rocky confirms. “Just… confirm the move sequence is logical.”
“Yes, you’ve followed all the rules. That move is called en passant. Means in passing. It’s French.”
“It’s dumb.”
“It’s not dumb, there’s a historical precedence –”
“But I cannot do the same move back –”
“No, I have to have just moved that pawn –”
“Game is silly.”
I laugh. “Yeah, it is. Now how do you want to move?”
I stare down at the board, my head in my hands. “I take it all back. No more en passant, it’s too powerful in your hands.”
“It is historical! There is a precedence –”
“How about we live in the present –”
Rocky laughs and laughs and I groan into my hands.
“We knew eruption was coming for 60.04 years,” Rocky tells me. “City evacuated. Underground tunnels sealed. Biggest issue was keeping Eridians away from the danger areas.”
I check the casing of a fire extinguisher and put it to the side. “We have the same issue on Earth. Everyone wants to come see the pretty lava flows but they get surprised by the volcanic ash.”
“Curiosity universal,” Rocky agrees. “Can always tell when an Eridian was nearby at the time. Eruption produced unique materials, one particular one was well liked. ♩♪♫♬. Sounded pretty. Smooth, sharp, brittle. You have?”
I pick up another fire extinguisher. “Buddy, there’s got to be hundreds of volcanic materials – wait, how sharp?”
“Can get a finer point than even xenonite can make.”
“That would be obsidian then.”
“Obsidian,” Rocky repeats the word in Eridian but I don’t have my laptop on me. I’ll have to remind him to tell it to me again later. “Eridians used obsidian as their mating stones for a while. We called them ♫♬♫♬♪, which means something like “volcano lust” but that is not a perfect translation.”
“Funnier in Eridian, I guess.”
I put the fire extinguisher back and pick up another one. Yes, finally!
I let out a whoop. “Found it!”
Rocky rolls his ball over. “What is special about this one?”
“It’s an older model, a less effective version of the Purple-K extinguisher you’ll have seen by the lab. But it is a tried-and-tested model of extinguisher so I suspected Stratt would have wanted one on board. She liked that sort of thing.”
I don’t want to think about Stratt. “Importantly, it contains sodium bicarbonate, which is pretty good at putting out liquid and gas fires. We also use it in baking.”
“Edible, question?”
I stick my tongue out and Rocky recoils, but he’s pretty used to my gross oddities by now. “Tastes like soap. But we can do some chemistry and get something more usable out of it.”
“Explain process,” Rocky says.
I grin. This is awesome. I get to be a science teacher again for a little while.
I pause the Hail Mary’s acceleration and activate the ship centrifuge that gives me the right gravity to access my lab. Acceleration is conserved, independent of the local frame of reference chosen, so when I will power the engines back on hours later I will have only lost a few hours of time. It’s not like I need to build back up the months and months of acceleration towards the speed of light I have already gone through.
Normally the Hail Mary doesn’t like activating the ship centrifuge at near the speed of light. But I have a solution to that – the overrides provided in the Hail Mary’s documentation. Thanks whoever wrote those lines of code. Now I can do science while hurtling through space with wanton abandon to whatever else is flying around out here.
I stand in the middle of my little lab and gesture out at the great unknown. “The chemistry is pretty basic. Sodium bicarbonate is alkaline, so it acts upon acids to make water and salts. The hard part will be taking it out of the tube.”
“Pressurised.”
“It will be.” I squint at the fire extinguisher label and take a few notes. “There’s some silicates in here. I have to check a datasheet.”
I plod over to my laptop and plug it into the wall, accessing all human knowledge (and a little Eridian too at this point).
“Okay yeah, it’s fine,” I say after a few minutes. “Some of the stuff here is carcinogenic but only if I breathe it in. So I just won’t do that.”
“Grace,” Rocky warns, but I wave him off.
“I’m going to do this under the fume hood, don’t worry.”
“I always worry,” Rocky grumbles, but he rolls over to the fume hood to watch.
“At the top of the extinguisher is a bottle of sulphuric acid,” I explain, putting the extinguisher under the hood. “If you bang on the casing, the bottle shatters and reacts with the bicarbonate, and it makes a huge cloud of carbon dioxide.”
“That creates the pressure,” Rocky says.
I point at him. “Exactly. For this model it will be about 25 atmospheres.”
“Almost as much pressure as Erid.”
“Which is why I’m not opening this in the main lab.” I put on the thick rubber gloves and start inspecting the extinguisher. “And I’ll be really careful.”
“Grace, question?” Rocky says slowly.
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Did we bang on the casing over Adrian?”
I pause. The entire ship was under a lot of stress when we lost control. It’s possible the centrifugal forces damaged the internal structure and released the sulphuric acid. There might be a carbon dioxide bomb waiting for me just under my fingertips.
No, wait. There’s a pressure gauge. We’re fine.
“Pressure gauge doesn’t think so,” I point to it and he looks at it with his crystal.
“Did we bang on the pressure gauge over Adrian?”
I suck in air between my teeth. “We need to work on the assumption that we didn’t.”
“Why, question?”
“Because I really want what’s in that canister.”
Rocky releases three flat notes in descending order – a sigh.
“Shhh. I need to concentrate.”
Rocky grumbles something else but I’m not paying attention to him right now. I unscrew the very delicate top of the fire extinguisher and reveal the acid bottle just millimetres away from the hard edges of the metal canister.
I gently pull it out.
It’s just a little vial of clear-coloured liquid. I lay it on its side towards the back of the fume hood and pick up the extinguisher.
Phew!
I tip the powder inside onto a large plate. It’s a plate in name, but functionally it’s a bucket. There is a lot of powder, maybe about 3 pounds of it, that comes out of the extinguisher. I spill some of it. Unfortunately chemistry in a centrifuge a million miles away from home is not an exact science. I tap the bottom of the extinguisher for the last remaining powder dregs and then place it carefully towards the rear of the fume hood.
I withdraw from the rubber gloves.
I gingerly open the fume hood.
Nothing happens.
We survived. I’m a great scientist. I take the powder on its plate and weigh it over at my electronic scales.
“We have,” I say to myself, thumbing the cap off my whiteboard marker. I minus the percentage that is comprised of the silicates. “...1.692 kilos of sodium bicarbonate here.”
Rocky grumbles something while I potter away at my whiteboard, a calculator in hand.
I calculate the required hydrochloric acid content.
“That means we’ll need… 20.1405 mols of hydrochloric acid. We have that!”
I run to the storeroom and return with a jug of hydrochloric acid. The concentration is written on the label, and so I know exactly how many millilitres to pour to get my required 20-ish mols.
“We have a 69.55 percent return rate,” I say to Rocky. “So when I pour this liquid onto this powder here…”
“Under fume hood!”
“Yes, I’m – of course I’m gonna do it under the fume hood.”
Under the fume hood, I pour my acid onto my plate of fire extinguisher powder. Hydrochloric acid certainly reacts on sodium bicarbonate, and the fume hood fills with a white gas and beads of condensation form along the interior walls. That would be the water and the carbon dioxide that also forms as part of this experiment.
I am left with a watery pile on my plate. I place it on top of a bunsen burner and get rid of any remaining liquid.
The fume hood takes that and the carbon dioxide away. For fun I could calculate the quantities of water and carbon dioxide created by my experiment, but I don’t caaare. What’s on the plate is infinitely more interesting.
The bunsen burner does its work and I wait a while for the plate to cool down before removing it from under the fume hood. When I can take it out I am left with a white crystalline substance that crusts around the plate in fine layers.
I weigh it.
“1.076 kilos!”
“Minimal losses,” Rocky says.
I shrug my shoulders. “It wasn’t a complicated experiment. But the results are great!”
I stick my finger in the crystals and then put that finger in my mouth.
Salt. NaCl, sodium chloride. It tastes really salty, naturally, and I screw up my face about it, but I’m more pleased than disgusted.
I’d missed it. I ran out of edible salt a few weeks ago and really missed it. Hence the tearing through the Hail Mary until I found a way to make more of it. I really craved that mineral.
“I might even add a tiny splash of iodine to the stuff here and then I’ll be set for,” I pause. I pull out my calculator again. “Nine years. Including the salt content the coma slurry gives me.”
“What iodine for, question?” Rocky asks.
“I’m not entirely sure,” I reply. “Something to do with hormones, I think. It’s probably in the computer somewhere.”
“Human biology is such a mystery to you,” Rocky says, crossing his arms. “Miracle you know anything about humans at all.”
“That is –” I point at Rocky. Several times. “rude, man. Good thing I know a lot about Eridians instead.”
“Grace knows hardly anything about –”
I blow a wet raspberry at him. Rocky lets out a high-pitched shriek and rolls away, cursing at me.
I laugh to myself and find a container to store my new salt in. He’s not used to all my gross oddities yet.
King’s pawn opener. Rocky’s style has settled into the most common opening.
I move my pawn in reply. They meet at an angle.
Rocky takes – an aggressive play. He always plays aggressively.
I bring my knight out. I can attack his pawn and he can’t attack me in return.
Rocky shores up his pawn with another waiting in the back.
I start pushing my own pawns. Rocky retaliates by taking again, of course, because he thinks if he can attack faster than I can defend he’ll win.
Usually he’s right, but not this time.
My bishop snatches his pawn.
He pushes a knight in front of his pawns.
I set up my queen.
Rocky moves an ineffectual pawn. I don’t react. I hope he’s thinking about the game too much to listen to my heart rate speed up.
I take the opening he’s given me. My bishop lunges towards the exposed gap he’s left me and it simultaneously leaves his king open to attack.
Rocky holds a hand out, as if to move the piece himself, but he withdraws it. That’s never happened before. That’s a new thing he does here and now.
I fight to keep my face even. The game’s as good as over, and Rocky won’t be able to recover from that blunder. I can maintain my shallow lead over him in the game tally.
Rocky makes a grabby hand movement at me.
“Name,” he says.
I shrug. “They don’t all have names. Maybe what you and I have discovered here is the first anyone’s ever done it.”
“NAME, please.”
“Icelandic Gambit,” I say, but I cross my arms. “But if you look it up I will never play chess with you again.”
Rocky throws his arms up and about, warbling something I don’t understand. An Eridian idiom of some sort. “Not allowed to look it up. Am waiting for momentous occasion when I am allowed to use the human knowledge device Grace gifted me.”
“If you go off and memorise all the openings, it’s not going to be very fair,” I argue back. “You’ll win every game. Don’t you like the challenge?”
Rocky crosses his arms. “Grace should also not be allowed to look up openings,” he says. “It’s not fair.”
I put my hands on my hips. He does have a point.
“Okay fine,” I say. “I won’t look up any more chess openings. Cross my heart and all that.”
Rocky stamps one of his back legs. “Grace agreed too quickly. No looking up other chess things, no playing the knowledge device.”
I shake my head. “You are bossy, Rocky. But okay.”
Iron should be a pretty easy thing to add to my diet. It’s just a metal, and there’s got to be some on the ship somewhere. Literally all I would have to do was grind it up and add it to my food.
The trick was finding some. I wasn’t game to start tearing up my ship if it meant I might damage it, so I start looking through my equipment for anything that might have an iron weight inside.
I figure out pretty quickly that this is a useless exercise. Things like my microscope should have weights of some sort in the base to keep it from tipping over, but when I open the base up I can see they’ve been removed. The Hail Mary had to be as light as possible, after all.
The riders on my triple beam balance are made of stainless steel. Unfortunate.
Weights like you’d find in a gym are typically cast iron, but there’s none on the ship. In order for us astronauts to keep our muscles in working condition during long periods of zero g, we’ve been supplied with resistance bands instead. Not like the weights would work in zero g anyway. But they would have been really convenient to have right now.
I’m taking apart Ilyukhina’s headphones on the lab table when Rocky walks closer through one of his tunnels, a rectangle of clear xenonite in his hand.
“What are you doing, question?”
“Some companies put weights in their headphones so that they seem more expensive,” I explain, twisting a tiny bolt with a tiny screwdriver.
“♪♫♬♪, question?”
I wave my free hand. “Soul sucking, money-grabbing – dumb human thing. But these are pretty heavy so I’m just going to see if there’s iron weights in them.”
Rocky goes still. “You are looking for iron. For your nutrition problem.”
I pluck the screw from the tip of the screwdriver and place it with a handful of others. “Yep.”
“Why not use iron ball I gave you.”
I put the screwdriver down.
I fold my arms.
I drop my head into them.
“Grace remember to breathe today, question?,” Rocky chides me, and I deserve it. “Grace remember how to walk today –”
“Grace is going to go check on the taumoeba farm,” I say, and rise from my seat.
“Does Grace remember –”
“Grace is going to steer this ship into the nearest black hole!”
To help with the monotony, I’ve programmed Mary to adjust the lighting and temperature to create different “weather”, with some days being darker and colder (rainy days) and some brighter and warmer (hot summer days). Today is one of the rainy days and I’ve wrapped my quilt around me before sitting down to eat breakfast.
It’s also the first day I’m eating a meal entirely made of coma slurry and taumoeba. Real food supplies are starting to run low and I want to save the ones that remain for an emergency.
I stare down at the off-white sludge in my bowl. Coma slurry perfectly meets the nutritional needs of your average coma patient, but someone moving around and fixing a spaceship has higher nutritional and caloric requirements. That’s where the taumoeba comes in.
And in two year’s time, I’m going to only have taumoeba, whatever I can grow, and the vitamins and minerals I’ve so far been able to scrounge together. Hopefully that will be enough to keep me functional. I need to be here for Rocky.
I dip my spoon into the mixture and eat some.
Oh… no, I can’t do this for that long. No, that’s disgusting. It’s like eating cold snot dipped in flour.
Is it better salted? I sprinkle some on the next mouthful and grimace. It’s just salty now.
I run through my stock of food additives. I sprinkle some vitamin c powder. Now it tastes very faintly sour. I add some iron. Now it tastes very faintly like blood. I throw in some dill I’ve grown. Now it tastes like slimy with a hint of earthen freshness.
None of those are great.
At least with all the experimenting I end up eating the whole bowl. I’m not going to be able to do that for every meal, though. There’s just not enough of all my additives. I need it for later in the journey.
I clean my bowl and head up to the “Don’t Go Crazy” room. I want to watch a movie about someone having a worse time than I am.
“Rocky, do you want to watch Life of Brian with me?”
“E7,” Rocky says.
I move the piece for him.
“No, I said E7,” Rocky says. “Move to correct square.”
“I did,” I argue, and I move the piece one square to the left.
Rocky stamps his foot. “E. E!”
“Oooh,” I say, “I thought you said B.”
“Then why move to C?!”
“I thought you said C.”
Rocky stamps his feet and spins in an agitated circle. “Grace does everything to avoid losing chess game except play better.”
I finally move the piece to the correct square. “Is it working?”
“You are lucky there is a sheet of xenonite between us,” Rocky says. “Check.”
I move my king.
“Check.”
I move my king again.
“Checkmate. Grace loses again. Add that to the tally.”
I groan and add another tally to the whiteboard. Rocky’s side is growing faster than mine.
While it’s annoying to lose all the time, I’m actually quite proud of him for picking the game up so quickly. It’s been what, a year? He really is the smartest person I know.
“Did you want another game?”
“No, I have a project that needs my attention,” Rocky replies. “We’ll play again after you sleep.”
“I wasn’t that bad!”
“Next game, Rocky plays without a rook.”
I scoff at him. “Go do your thing, I’m gonna analyse this game for a bit.”
Rocky scuttles away and I look back down at the board. I huff and start moving the pieces around.
I water my plants. The broccoli and radish micro greens are coming along nicely. I’ve been dumping some of the cold dregs of my coffee into them and I think they’re enjoying the extra nutrients. A little goes a long way for a plant.
I have since tried adding coffee to my taumoeba slurry and it helps a little bit. But the last thing in the universe I want is to associate the taste of coffee with something that turns my stomach, so we’re saving that as a last resort.
Rocky walks down the hallway and waves at me.
I stare at him. There’s a spider-thing in my atmosphere.
“Jesus Christ!” I leap about a foot in the air. “What –”
“I made a suit!” Rocky tells me, and yeah, okay, now if I’m looking I can see the xenonite he’s wrapped himself in. It’s not like it’s invisible, but it took me a second to comprehend what I was looking at.
“How?”
“Much easier than making a suit for Grace,” Rocky explains, and he runs over to me. And then over me, as I am bowled over by his exuberance. “My anatomy makes much more sense. Easier to build a suit for.”
“Air, Rocky,” I gasp out, and Rocky lifts himself off of me enough that I can breathe again. It’s – wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve been this close to someone else. Even if they were crushing me a little bit. The pressure was nice.
“Apologies,” Rocky says, and starts tapping my head. “Can hear better now. And now I can be close to watch you sleep properly!”
I tap him back on one of his legs. The xenonite gives a little. It’s stretchy. I can see that it’s wrapped closely enough for him to articulate each of his fingers. “Is that why you made this? So I’d sleep better?”
“In part. Mostly so I can move my own chess pieces now,” Rocky says.
I roll my eyes. “Are you for real?”
“In part.” Rocky starts tapping my shoulders next, then he moves down to my sternum and then my rib cage. I flinch a little.
“Sorry, sensitive there. You can tap any other bone on my upper body.”
Yes, we’ve long since had the talk on what parts of my body it was polite to listen to and enquire about. Except for emergencies. But a little reminder didn’t hurt.
“Painful?” Rocky asks me, and I shake my head.
“No, not if it’s done briefly. That spot is “ticklish” and touching it makes me move a bit. Though it was used as a form of torture in ancient Japan –”
Rocky clearly isn’t listening because he’s too busy poking me. I, predictably, flinch and laugh.
Oh no. What have I done? I’ve given Rocky a tool he can use against me from now until the end of time.
Then again, turnabout is fair play. I lick my hand and press it against his new xenonite suit.
Rocky shrieks in a way I haven’t heard him do before and he high-tails it away from me. I get up and chase after him, a sound coming out of me that I can only describe as cackling.
“What’s wrong Rocky,” I call out, “why don’t we find out where you’re sensitive?”
It shouldn’t surprise me that Rocky loves a good orchestra. The sound is complex and moving. He doesn’t even care about the visuals, the instruments actually clacking away a very small part of the experience he finds fascinating. I play The Four Seasons, Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9, and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos for him. Mass in C, Rhapsody in Blue, and Eine kleine Nachtmusik blare over the Hail Mary and then my knowledge of orchestral music runs low, and I show Rocky how to perform his own searches through the computer database.
For several weeks all I hear on repeat is Rachmaninoff. It’s a favourite of Rocky’s. Before this trip I wouldn’t have been able to pick a tune of his out of a top ten list (apart from the Piano Concertos) (and that information was from DuBois anyway) but now I can tell each piece from a second or two of audio.
One day I make Rocky pull out his seeing crystal to watch a ballet with me, and he loses his mind all over again. He liked the 1812 Overture well enough (and I was sick of Rachmaninoff) so I show him Swan Lake, and we watch the flow of human movement across the stage.
It’s nice. I know barely anything about ballet, so I sit just as enraptured as Rocky does.
During a particularly beautiful movement he gets up and starts dancing to the music.
“You do dancing?” I ask him.
Rocky shakes his carapace to say no. Then he moves in a way like nodding, and I instantly understand how annoying I was when I first started breeding the taumoeba.
His dancing is fraught, as we are still accelerating and therefore vertical, so our floor is extremely limited and the edges drop steeply away over nothing. But Rocky moves surely and with a fluidity that’s completely reassuring, so alien to the two-step I did with the dressed-up mop way back when I was alone and perpetually drunk, that I can’t help but hold my hand out to him, and he shows me all his favourite steps while the humans on the screens act like comets, like streaks of movement and light in the background, and we dance and we laugh and I can’t help but think that everything is going to turn out just fine.
A year passes.
Do you know how long a year is? Really?
Imagine a day.
The longest day of your life. One where you wake up early and watch the clock and count every second as it ticks by. The afternoon feels as distant to the morning as here feels to Erid. You’re in the middling hour of a road trip, when the excitement of beginning has long since left you and all that remains are the long, dreary hours ahead. There is only the slow tick of numbers on the highway signs to tell you time is passing.
Eventually after an eternity eight, nine, ten pm, ten-thirty passes, ten forty-five, ten fifty, maybe eleven pm as well. Longer. It’s only after that you’re finally able to go to sleep. It’s that sort of day.
Now do that thirty times. Count it in your head from one to thirty. Take a second to count each number. Really appreciate hitting number six, number seventeen, number twenty-six.
Go on.
Now think about doing that eleven more times. I’ll help.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Eleven.
And twelve.
It sucks, doesn’t it? Sitting and reading each word. It’s experiencing that times thirty. But thirty days, not seconds. Imagine counting to thirty twelve times but waiting eighty-six thousand and four hundred seconds between each number.
That’s how long a year is.
At the end of it, I need to try making meals without even the coma slurry. I need to stretch the nutrients out, even if I’ve made several of them myself at this point. The important things are the ones I cannot.
And there are still two years left to Erid.
That lengthy process, again.
And again.
I stare down at my bowl of taumoeba. It’s garnished with a handful of radish leaves. Next to me is a pill of vitamin C and a dusting of iron powder.
I pick up my spoon.
I place it back down again.
I already know what it tastes like. It’s disgusting. My stomach churns at the thought of eating some without the shield of the coma slurry. How I miss the taste of flour, and the texture of something dry on my tongue.
I can’t do this.
I can’t do this!
...I’m not entirely out of options. There are ways to make this a less monotonous process. It just depends on how desperate I am to try them.
I watched Only Lovers Left Alive about a month ago. The vampire one, where they eat blood popsicles. I could add some of my blood to the meal (I can’t just add more iron – I will get poisoned. But blood has a strong taste!) and freeze it for the same effect. That and the salt, it would almost be like eating a raw beef patty.
My mouth waters.
Look. If you spend enough time in space without a normalising force you’re bound to get some wires crossed. I’m like if someone was trapped at a distant, lonely lighthouse and the other guy trapped with him had no reference for normal and is happy whenever you do anything at all.
I could be going way crazier. Salivating over the thought of drinking (eating) my own blood is nothing. I would do a lot worse to make sure I kept Rocky company while he returns to Erid. He spent long enough alone.
Besides, if the calories going out (through blood donation and blood restoration) end up being less than the calories going in (blood-soaked taumoeba meals) then I’m gaining calories, and that’s a net positive. I can probably spread a blood donation over several meals too, to increase the effect. Blood keeps in the fridge a few weeks if you filter out the platelets, which I can do with my self-balancing centrifuge.
I leave the bowl where it is, since it keeps at room temperature, and walk over to Armando, rolling my sleeve up.
“Armando, can you give me two hundred millilitres?”
It’s… it’s pretty good. It’s novel, it’s different. I wasn’t a big sashimi guy before I left Earth, I think, but I see the appeal now. The texture is off but I can no longer recall by how much, so it’s good enough for me.
Okay. I can work out a schedule and add this to my rotation. We’re gonna get through this.
I gasp awake, sitting up and pressing a hand to my chest. I only narrowly avoid braining myself on the ceiling because this is a familiar exercise I’ve done before.
“Asleep for 2.1 hours,” Rocky tells me, “you interrupt REM cycle.”
I press two fingers to my neck and feel my heart rate slow beneath my fingers. “Must have gone to sleep too warm. Mary? Lower the temperature by 2… and a half Celsius please.”
“Yes Doctor Grace,” Mary replies.
I wave Rocky goodnight again and roll over. Something I do like about the astrophage that’s currently killing Rocky’s Erid and my Earth is that they really are nature’s perfect little heat sinks. A huge problem for spaceships usually is dispersing heat but they eat it up like it’s CO2, so changing the Hail Mary’s temperature isn’t difficult.
Later I wake up again, my chest heaving.
“0.83 hours,” Rocky tells me. “You need to sleep for longer. Rocky hasn’t finished his shows.”
I look over to the laptop he has open near me. He’s pointing his crystal at the screen and has the subtitles on size 200%. Recently he’s been learning written English so this makes sense. He’s got the audio down so low that I can barely hear it and he’s so good at multitasking he doesn’t even need to pause it to have this conversation with me.
“What are you watching this time, pal?” I can’t see the actors through the subtitles. They take up half the screen, and the laptop light is a little blinding with my astigmatism.
“The Devil’s Hour. Grace say one time that he liked.”
I crack a smile. I feel my heart rate slow under my fingertips. “It’s not bad.”
“All good. Grace go back to sleep.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
I wake up again. This time my head impacts against the soft ceiling surface but this time I’m also a little discombobulated.
“Time?” I ask Rocky before he has a chance to tell me.
“2.1 hours again,” Rocky says.
“How is The Devils Hour?”
“Grace needs more than five hours of interrupted sleep,” Rocky says. “Maybe he should focus on that.”
I lay back down and shuffle my blanket around. I’m facing Rocky this time. “I’m clearly struggling with that a little bit.”
“What are you dreaming about, question?”
“Nothing new. Where are you up to in the show?”
Rocky relents and regales me with his thoughts and opinions and, eventually, I fall asleep to the sound of his voice.
I massage my temples and stare down again at the taumoeba. It doesn’t change. In fact, since I bred it to withstand Threeworld and Venus’s atmospheres, it hasn’t done much.
Turns out there is only so much directed evolution you can inflict upon a species from a spaceship with limited resources. One chemical element is apparently not too hard to breed a resistance to, but you just can’t force an alien species to produce useful vitamins or texture for you, no matter how nicely you ask.
“Grace grumpy,” Rocky says, and I give him a look over the rim of my microscope.
“I’m not grumpy,” I tell him. Can’t a guy sigh and hold his head in his hands over his taumoeba not doing what he wants without having to be called out on his behaviour?
Rocky pauses his current xenonite project in a way I find condescending. “Grace very grumpy,” Rocky replies, “Can Grace try sleeping continuously for eight hours tonight, question?”
I push the microscope away. “Alright, I’ll get on that. Just for you.”
Rocky turns back to his xenonite. “Grace very grumpy.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m not! I’m normal, I’m just – doing normal things, over here, at this microscope.”
Rocky points an arm at me. “Grace is a liar.”
I point at myself too, offended. “Where is this coming from? Why does it matter if I’m –”
“So Grace is grumpy.”
“I’m not grumpy!” I say louder than I probably should.
“Can tell when Grace is grumpy,” Rocky stubbornly argues.
“Oh yeah?” I say. “How?”
“Thoughts are pointier.”
I throw my hands up in the air. “And what is that supposed to mean? Pointier? Are you a mind-reader now? Are you reading my thoughts?”
“Grace’s tongue moves slightly when he thinks,” Rocky says, and he mimes what I assume is my mouth with one of his hands. “Movements exaggerated when annoyed.”
I run my hands through my hair. I’m tempted to just hold onto the strands but then I wouldn’t be able to lace my fingers together and let them rest against my neck. He’s listening to my subconscious tongue movements.
“So you are just – you’re reading my thoughts. You’re literally reading my thoughts and – didn’t we talk about boundaries, Rock? A while back? Aren’t I entitled to some privacy –”
“Cannot just turn hearing off, like you can eyes,” Rocky says back, “what am I supposed to do, question? Not learn from you. Not try to understand how this alien works. Planets depend on us. I depend on you. Now you are mad I learn from you. What am I supposed to do, question.”
I let my arms pull my head down. Heat rushes to my face and I’m filled with shame. “I’m sorry,” I tell him, “I wasn’t thinking. And you’re right, I’m grumpy.”
“Apology accepted,” Rocky replies, and I hear his xenonite suit click closer and then feel a tug on the bottom of my jeans. “Now we fix.”
“What?”
“Why do you think I ask if Grace is grumpy? We fix, then Grace goes to back to little experiment with smoother thoughts.”
I huff at that, and Rocky tugs on the bottom of my jeans again and my stool rolls away from the lab bench.
“Woah – careful!” I hop off the stool before I fall off. “What did you have in mind?”
“Grace hungry and tired,” Rocky says, skittering over to his half of the lab space. “Can solve one of these. Go get blankets and the good speaker and return here.”
“Alright, fine.”
I do as he says (with only minimal complaining) and when I return Rocky is out of his suit and tinkering away at something on his side of the xenonite. I settle down near him and get comfortable while Rocky starts messing with his display screen, adjusting the wafer-thin xenonite needles that make up the display. He asks me to put on this unusual space-rock-opera band he found on the computer, which he says is the closest to the type of performances he would hear on Erid.
The story of the album unfolds quietly as Rocky tinkers with his screen, the quiet clicking and ringing of tools and crystals punctuating the beats of the music.
It’s peaceful. I doze, half listening to the story, and fall asleep before the album hits the halfway mark.
I stare at my notes on the whiteboard and cross my arms. Rocky points his crystal at the board, taps on the floor, and then crosses his two front arms in a similar fashion.
I fight to keep the smirk off my face. It’s pretty endearing.
Here is how a space elevator works.
A long, long cable, many times the length of the radius of the planet, goes out into space and acts as a line you can use to travel into space without having to worry about rockets and all that. You just need a counterweight at the end to keep everything under tension and a strong enough anchor to the planet’s surface.
Once you get out pretty far, the centripetal force counters gravity’s waning effect and you enter a geostationary orbit where there’s no gravity. Go any further up and you get pushed away from the planet, towards the counterweight.
It’s easier if the planet you anchor your cable to is lighter, or rotates slowly. If you made a space elevator from Earth, the zero gravity point would be about 36,000 km above the Earth’s surface (about 5.5 times the Earth’s radius!) and your counterweight would need to be out ever further than that.
Erid has a lot more mass than Earth and spins much faster. A day on Erid is shorter than Earth’s, so Erid’s space elevator cable flings around its equator much faster than it would on Earth. And Erid has rings, and a really thick ammonia atmosphere, so the extra stresses battering against the elevator cables are exposed to are massive.
“Wait,” I say to Rocky, “exactly how long was your day length again?”
“5.1 Earth hours,” Rocky replies.
I add that to my whiteboard.
“Erid spins crazy fast,” I tell him, and I putter around on my calculator for a moment. “Wow! You’re looking at a spinning speed of fifteen thousand kilometres at your equator!”
“Normal speed for Eridians,” Rocky says, “Earth spins so slowly.”
“I have no idea what the tensile strength of xenonite is, but it’s incredible. Just as incredible as astrophage, for what it can do.”
Rocky puffs his chest out in pride. “Our space elevator was our greatest engineering achievement until we built the Blip-A. I helped with the foundation construction.”
“You are the coolest person I know, you know that, right?”
“Am currently… yes, agreed.”
“So,” I run a few more numbers, “I’m thinking, if your fellow Eridians would agree to it, you could put a platform about eighteen thousand kilometres down from the zero-point and that’s where I would have normal Earth gravity. I would still have to dock the Hail Mary at the thirty thousand kilometre zero-point as she’s not built for gravity, but it would be nice to have something with the gravity I’m built for. I understand if it’s too much trouble though.”
Rocky tilts his carapace at me. “If you want a place on the elevator of course we will make one. But I have another idea.”
“Oh?”
“Can build you a much bigger and better environment on the moon. Ninety-three percent of Earth’s gravity, can build it underground to protect from radiation. Easy to get to and from with astrophage. You could visit Erid whenever you like, and vice versa.”
“Oh.”
Wait, I frown to myself. “You don’t have a moon, though. There’s no way a planet that close to your star has one.”
“I will tell our moon that when I next hear it.”
I snort. I cross my arms. “Ha ha, okay, yeah. Moon base. Okay, I can get behind that. And you said ninety-three percent of my gravity?”
Rocky does that little twist of his carapace that looks like a nod. “Big open space. Bio dome with light cycle, weather. Water. I make a place just like Earth but just for Grace.”
“Ah.”
I can feel my eyes prickling and I have to blink a few times. He would do that for me?
I have to blink a few more times.
“Grace upset?”
I throw my arms around him and hold him close.
“Not even a little,” I sniffle, and Rocky brings up two of his arms to hug me back. “You’re incredible!”
Another year passes.
“I hate you,” I slam the box of plastic tarps on the ground, just to hear it the thump, and dive back into the storage cavity.
Rocky chitters and gestures at me. “I refuse to believe you are so… so juvenile.”
“Put a sock in it, would you?”
“Wasting precious calories,” Rocky stamps his foot, “looking for coffee you know isn’t there.”
“I remember a box being here!”
“Two Earth years ago!” Rocky shouts back. “You used it up! And who here has the better memory, and who here has the stupid –”
“Yes my stupid, idiot, human brain! I know!” I kick a box that feels like it’s made of lead and fight back a wince. “Everything I do is stupid, and I’m gross, and –”
“Not everything is stupid,” Rocky says, “but this is! Won’t watch shows, won’t play chess, won’t do science, won’t nap. Grace just wants to make loud noises with supplies and feel bad.”
“Yep,” I grunt as I move the box-filled-with-lead to see what’s behind it. Just the wall. “You’ve got me all figured out, pal.”
“You are ass.”
I snort. Apparently it’s a much worse insult in Eridian. “It’s grammatically correct to say “you are an ass”, not “you are ass”.”
“Eat shit.”
That almost makes me laugh. I stick my head out from the storage cavity. “Is there something productive you can do? Because sitting here and insulting me isn’t!”
“Have to make sure you don’t hurt yourself during your tantrum,” Rocky says, and that really ticks me off.
“I am not a damned toddler, Rocky –”
“Then why act like one. Statement.”
Now he’s done it. I stand up, put my hands on my hips, and really let him have it.
The screens go black, and the end credits of Manchester by the Sea begin to scroll.
I sit alone in the Don’t Go Crazy room. Tears track continuously down my face and I’ve given up wiping them away.
I’m such an asshole. Why does Rocky put up with me? He should have punted me out of the airlock once he learned to read and devoured all of the Hail Mary’s instruction manuals.
I peer over the edge of the landing down the ladder. It’s awfully dark, and a long way down. I feel the press of the 1.5 times gravity especially heavy in this moment, as we decelerate on our approach to Erid.
Under a year left. Not a long time in the grand scheme of things but impossibly distant right now.
I miss coffee.
I miss real food.
I crave an ocean breeze and the give of sand beneath my feet so much it aches. The whispering crackle of trees swaying in the breeze. The clouds at sunset when they’re heavy with rain, all the pinks and purples and navy blues of them, interjected with a glittering city skyline. The look of San Francisco just after it rains, and the streets are wet with light and splashing footsteps and raincoats and it’s us against nature, the great unifying factor, and the wet leaves that are such a tripping hazard, but I don’t mind dancing around them and sometimes I get to help someone else navigate around them too.
I’ll never get that again.
Do you have any idea how the bridge looks, the Golden Gate, appearing out of the fog like a saviour, like a promise, like a solution to one particular problem and doing so so beautifully and elegantly, the curved lines of the suspension wires appearing from nothing and gently concaving their way down towards us miserable humans, down to earth? I’ll tell you, it looks beautiful.
There’s a cavern in my heart and it’s going to be empty forever. I don’t get to go back there, it’s gone, and it’s never coming back.
I clutch at the metal grate of the landing. I’m still crying. It’s slow and continuous.
I miss Rocky. He’s asleep, so he may as well be on Erid for how difficult it is to reach him.
I sigh. Scrub my hands over my eyes. Turn the lights back on, turn the screens off, and carefully make my way down to the sleeping area. I pick up the book I’m reading, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, and settle in to wait for Rocky to wake up.
I have some apologies to make.
I grin.
Oh, I grin.
Rocky’s hand hovers over the board. He can’t make up his mind on where to move, because there’s nowhere for him to go. Every route he can take only makes his position worse.
“Zugzwang,” I tell him.
“What, question?” Rocky replies. “You’re not making any sense. Grace needs to sleep.”
“It means something like “you have to move”. German word for a chess situation like this, where every move is bad.”
Rocky twiddles his fingers together. I take a surreptitious glance at the chess clock app on the laptop.
“Clock is ticking, Rocks.”
“Have time.”
I shift around and wrap my blanket closer around myself. It isn’t a cold night on the Mary but I’ve been feeling it more lately.
I yawn. Since today is Thanksgiving I’ve opened up one of my few remaining real meals and I feel pleasantly full for the first time in a while. We’re taking a small break from decelerating and have activated the lab’s centrifuge, so I get to enjoy normal gravity for a while too.
Rocky’s being quiet for longer than I would’ve thought, and I almost nod off.
“Hurry up,” I tell him.
“I’m thinking,” Rocky replies.
“You’re stalling.”
“Mary,” Rocky calls out clearly, “play Rain Noise Playlist Number 3.”
“Yes Rocky,” Mary replies, and a gentle white noise fills the lab.
“You –!” I shake my head. “I’m not falling asleep and losing this game on time.”
“Breathing is slowing.”
“I’m good,” I yawn again, which doesn’t help my case, but this is the first game in a while that I actually have a chance of winning! “White noise doesn’t work on me anyway. The Mary’s always making noise, if you haven’t noticed, and I’m pretty determined.”
“Computer says –”
“You can’t believe everything you read on there, you know.”
“Grace said that on long timescales glass flows as a liquid,” Rocky counters, “can’t believe everything Grace says either.”
“So I was wrong about one thing, it happens from time to time.”
Rocky falls silent. I watch him tap his fingers against the floor, as if he needs a better look. We’re sitting down next to the lab benches and I’m leaning up against one of the xenonite panels. It’s warm. I could almost lean my head back and –
I slowly climb to my feet and stretch. It was Rocky’s idea to play on the floor.
“Nope, it’s not happening,” I tell Rocky. “I am awake, I am alert, it’s your move.”
“Fine. I move now.”
Rocky makes his move and of course it’s one of the better ones. I sit back down under my blanket and start calculating all over again.
Rocky comes over, innocent as anything, and settles down next to me. He lays two of his legs over my two outstretched ones.
He’s warm. And heavy.
Oh no.
I wake up and check my watch. That’s… wow, that’s the most uninterrupted sleep I’ve gotten in a long time. Worth the crick in my neck.
I look over at the chessboard. The pieces have been put away and the laptop with the timer has long since powered down. There’s not even a screensaver lighting the screen.
“Crud,” I say, and Rocky, who is scanning through The Man Who Loved Only Numbers with his crystal much faster than I could possibly read, laughs.
But I do see he’s updated the whiteboard with our scores on it, and he’s added a tally mark under my name.
I’m too tired to get up today.
My micro greens are grown to give me the nutrients found in the fast-growing leaves of the plants, but I have saved a few to grow to full maturation. The seeds don’t last forever and I’ll need some flowering specimens to replenish my supply.
I’ve grown some beetroot to maturation for a completely different reason, though. I take my precious three mature plants and place them on my lab bench – well, they’re all full. My benches are littered with xenonite, mugs, dirty clothing, scribbled notes, and chemicals I should probably store better. The only place to put them is under the fume hood so I lift the hood to do that.
I’m going to see if I can preserve the juice to flavour my taumoeba. I could just add the beets to the goop but I want to stretch the taste for as long as I possibly can -
I place the beets too haphazardly under the fume hood. I bump the vial of sulphuric acid I have idiotically left there for several years and have completely forgotten about.
Sulphuric acid spills over my beets. I close the fume hood before I can ruin anything else.
“Crap, crap, shit –”
“Grace okay?” Rocky asks, because he’s nearby sorting his xenonite into more piles for my benches.
“Grace is great,” I snap at him, and he recoils slightly. “I just destroyed my entire beetroot supply because I am a complete failure of a human being –”
I’m so mad I can barely see. I bang my hip into the corner of a bench and that does it.
I stomp to the tunnel by the airlock and return with a wrench. The big one.
“Grace –”
“Stupid –” I bring the wrench down as hard as I can on the glass of the fume hood.
“Grace!”
“Worthless –” It’s not designed to break but neither is the wrench. Let’s see which goes first.
“Stop!”
“Waste of –”
The wrench is snatched out of my hands and tossed away at a slightly frightening speed.
Whatever. I don’t need it, I have my stupid hands. Let’s see how they fair against the glass.
I smash my fists once, twice, against the glass before my legs are pulled out from under me and I need my hands to stop me from breaking my face against the floor.
“Stop! Stop!” Rocky’s calling out to me, “We need the fume hood –”
“I don’t care!”
Rocky drags me away but I wrap my hands around a leg of the bench like a vice. He says something to me but I don’t hear it, I’m yelling over him as loud as I can.
“Get off me!! Leave me alone, I’m gonna –”
Rocky’s hands pry open my own, it’s unfair that he has more of them, I feel something dislocate, and he clamps his hands around my wrists and drags me out of the lab.
I thrash, kicking something over and I try to wedge my knees behind the airlock seals between rooms, but Rocky is stronger than me. It’s not even close, but I make it difficult for him anyway.
“AAAURGH!” I scream at him.
“You’re hurting yourself!” Rocky cries back, voice an octave higher than normal.
“I DON’T CARE!”
He’s dragging me to the sleeping area. To the medical bay.
“It sounds like you’re having an argument,” Mary says, “arguments are –”
“Medical override,” Rocky cuts her off, “crew member Ryland Grace, scenario Gamma. Confirm. Confirm.”
I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about until I remember he’s read all of the Hail Mary’s manuals. The medical ones were probably the first things he read.
He’s going to put me down like a dog.
“Confirmed,” Mary agrees, and Armando moves towards me.
“No! Please –” I’m tiring, but I manage to kick one of Armando’s limbs away. “Please, you can’t –”
Please.
I’m not thinking of Stratt. I’m done thinking about her, I told Rocky how she – I’m not, I’m not – please –
Rocky holds my forearms down. My hands are pressed down to the fabric on the floor near my head but I claw upwards, scraping my fingernails against Rocky’s xenonite. A third hand tangles in the hair by my scalp, keeping my head still.
Armando’s needle goes into my neck.
I wake up in the recovery position. I’m still on the floor, but someone’s moved my bedding out of the sleeping hollow and it’s now underneath me. I’m covered by my favourite quilt.
Everything is quiet.
Oh, wow. Everything hurts. I feel like I’ve been dragged thirty yards down a corridor covered with metal non-slip platforms. My hands hurt the most, and when I inspect them I find several fingers have been splinted. I must have done some serious damage to myself, fighting Rocky down that corridor.
There’s also a thin xenonite cuff around my right wrist, connecting to a divot in the floor.
I look up to see Rocky sitting silently between me and the corridor back to the lab.
“Grace okay, question?” Rocky asks quietly.
I don’t know how to answer that. “What’s this?”
“Are you going to try and break the lab again?”
“Rocky, I –”
“Break yourself?”
“No, Rocky, I’m sorry –”
“I know Grace is tired,” Rocky ruthlessly continues, “I know Grace is hungry. Cold. Frustrated. Rocky is not easy to live with either. But we have solved so much together. Or made it better. What is one more thing. How do I help you, before you end up more hurt?”
I look away.
“I don’t know. I’m sorry, Rocky, I’m just stupid and –”
“Grace not stupid,” Rocky says.
“I dunno –”
“No.” Rocky stamps his foot. “Grace is smart. Smart smart smart. Grace saved Earth, Grace will save Erid too soon enough.”
“I make lots of mistakes. I’m not that smart.”
“To mistake is human.”
That draws a huff of laughter from me. I point at my wrist. “Would you mind?”
Rocky snaps the xenonite with a flick of his fingers and the pieces fall away.
“Thanks.”
“You are strong,” Rocky continues.
“You just –”
“Hush.” Rocky reaches out and his xenonite-covered fingers run through my hair. He doesn’t do this often.
I hush.
“You carry the weight of planets on your back.”
I don’t try to say anything. I just let my head drift back to my pillow, Rocky’s hand following.
“You are patient, you are determined,” Rocky continues, “you solved your scurvy problem. Taumoeba. Many others.”
I blink, and now there are tears streaming down my face, silent.
“You are heroic. You came back for me at a great expense.”
If Rocky notices the mess I’ve made of my face, he doesn’t mention it.
“You are witty. You make me laugh every day for 3.6 years. You challenge me to learn more, to think more. You are second best chess player on this ship.”
I flash my teeth at him, which draws a high-pitched whistling laugh from him. “You are not nearly as gross as I say. Most of the time.”
His hand in my hair is… it’s really nice.
My eyes slide shut.
We make it to Erid.
I spend an Earth month in orbit dealing with Eridian diplomacy and science (you can guess which one I prefer) and then an Earth year getting my bones crushed on Erid’s surface.
It’s not as bad as I make it sound. A year can fly by with the right people around you.
We take the space elevator into orbit where we board a small craft that takes us to the moon. When I say we, I mean me, Rocky, Adrian, my medical team, my engineering team, a couple of diplomats, a few news reporters, and one artist.
When we actually make it to the biodome, there’s only Rocky and Adrian with me. We plough through the airlock procedure as fast as humanly and Eridianly possible.
And then.
I’m standing on sand. The granules are very coarse, but who really cares about that?
I spy a structure in the distance. My new house. Closer is the goddamned ocean Rocky and Adrian built for me, and I can see and hear and taste the churning waves rolling away right there and.
I take off along the beach.
I don’t know what it’s made of. But I enjoy the grind of the particles beneath my feet, the slightly sticky tension of globules of sand and water kicking up behind me, the water racing around my ankles when the tide catches up to me.
The water is amazingly hot. I can barely tolerate it and I sidestep away from the waves when they try to reach me again.
I don’t care. It’s an ocean and it’s here and it has waves and -
I let myself falter and collapse into the sand. What a joy, to feel the sand particles between my fingers and against my back and in my pockets and my hair and my ears.
The granules are warm against my fingers and I curl my hand into a fist, just to feel them.
I’m in love. This was made for me. It’s perfect in a way I don’t know how to describe.
Rocky and Adrian cautiously approach, their xenonite suits gleaming in the artificial sunlight. I admire the bright gleam reflecting off their angles. They move slowly, carefully, like this is foreign to them. Which is fair.
“Is satisfactory?” Rocky asks, and I laugh and laugh and I have to use my shirt to wipe the tears from my eyes.
“Yeah,” I say, “yeah.”
I do reach out to Adrian, though. “We should discuss the ocean temperature a little bit. Everything else,” I kiss my fingers, “perfect.”
“Whatever you need,” Adrian replies.
“Yes yes,” Rocky says, “ocean great. Come see home I built! Come come come,”
I laugh again. The sound is light and high in my chest. “Yeah, man, okay. Lead the way.”
Adrian leans in conspiratorially. “Something important inside,” they tell me, “chess game set. Rocky says you are very skilled. Bemoans how difficult you are to beat.”
I raise my eyebrows at Rocky. “Does he?”
Rocky warbles something noncommittal while Adrian continues. “All the time. I need you to teach me how to play. So he can also bemoan having to play me as well. Is this okay?”
I grin and incline my head. “Absolutely. Do you want to learn the easy way, or do you want to work for it?”