Chapter Text
It takes Grace a few more minutes to regulate himself. The herbs shudder in their beds as he tamps lab-grown earth around them, exhaling with great focus. Okafor waits apart for him, recognising the deep, steady breathing as an active calming technique.
When the garden is laid, Grace stands and shows her his face. He says, “Can you do me a favour?”
He has Okafor pull the crew together and meet him on the beach. He says to say he has a surprise for them. Okafor descends the rocky slates of staircase to find Grace on that iron-red sand, flanked on either side by Cornerstone and his old therapist, Topanga.
At first Okafor expects some sort of confrontation. Then she realises the thing Cornerstone is wearing on his head is a stack of fuzzy towels beneath a miniature tarpaulin. She puts two and two together and becomes glad she decided to wear black underwear today.
Holt arrives last, glancing curiously at Okafor. Okafor doesn’t recognise this part of the beach in the daylight. She doesn’t know if she’s been here before – if Holt is back in that time, or seeing whether she can hide from it.
Okafor takes a deep breath. She licks her lips and finds salt on them.
Once everyone is assembled, Grace doesn’t speak at first. He tucks his hands in his pockets and starts drawing shapes in the sand with one flip-flopped toe. Felix tentatively asks, “What’s the surprise?”
“Hey. Nice try.” Grace smiles up at him.
Felix continues, simply: “Dr Grace, are we good?”
Grace wasn’t expecting this. He glances nervily at the crew, then back at Felix. “Uh, I think so?”
Vance steps forward then. She walks to Grace’s side and addresses her people. She asks, “Are we good, Astrosoter?”
Everyone, like cowed children, takes it in turn saying, “Yeah, we’re good.”
“Okay,” says Dr Grace. He rubs at his bad arm. “Yes. Thanks. Good. Alright, uh. Yahweh, please will you do your thing?”
Okafor knows Yahweh is just a biodome technician with incredibly good hearing, but it’s more than a little strange watching Grace talk to someone invisible to her who’s named after a god. Around her, the crew, expectant but still at ease, all look up. It’s almost amusingly irrational, given that the ‘surprise’ is quite obviously that they’re going swimming. She notices that the waves have already started to recede; the ocean around them calms.
A fondness grows in Okafor, seeing them behave like humans, and seeing how. It’s a very different reaction than they would have had a day ago, if Grace had told them something was about to happen to them and refused to explain what it was.
And then, just then, something firm and delicate flicks the top of Okafor’s head. Right against a parting, between two knots, she feels a brief impact; she glances around and it happens again. This time on her forehead. Whatever just touched her is cool.
She wipes her face and rubs her thumb against her index finger. There’s damp between them. She tilts her head up and looks to the hazy translucent roof of the dome, and the floodlights casting from beyond it.
Droplets of water fall onto Okafor’s face. They land on her shoulders and start to soak into her blouse. Beside her, Abigail puts her hands out, trying to catch them as they fall.
She breathes in deeply through her nostrils, tastes the salt, and closes her eyes.
On her other side there’s a shuffling of feet in the sand, and someone says, “Vasquez!”
She turns. Mateo has taken his shirt off. Beside him, Priya is spinning slowly with her arms extended, grinning. Esther is rigid, muted by tears.
Okafor starts to hear it: the patter as it becomes a steady fall. Soon she will smell the petrichor.
Demir – Yusuf – says, “It’s raining.”
“It’s fine, Mateo,” comes Grace’s voice. “I’m going to get in too.” He folds his cardigan and pulls off his dorky T-shirt, giving a display of warped skin pulling over lean muscle, unselfconscious of the burns marring his side.
Priya looks to Vance for permission, but Esther doesn’t see her. She’s lost in her own head. Priya shrugs and starts to strip too.
They make it to the water in increments. Grace and Mateo are first; Mateo kicks at the surf, shaking droplets out of his hair by twisting himself back and forth. Grace walks straight in and floats on his back.
Felix leaps after them; Yusuf jogs, whooping; Raghunathan turns cartwheels in her lingerie. They howl; they run like animals, set free on the first day of spring.
Okafor and Holt are the last on land; Okafor is caught up in watching and Holt says she’s not going in. So, they are the only ones who see it at first. Their heads turn in unison.
Cornerstone, noticing the motion which, to him, must be incredibly uncanny, says, “Both using eyes but look at air. What you see, question?”
Okafor says, “Hah. A-hah.”
The pressure is back between her eyes again. Her heart is sliding sideways in an off-kilter chest. She thinks she has it handled, and then it’s just too much. She’s completely overwhelmed. She can see it so clearly, but to him, there’s nothing there.
“I don’t know how to describe this,” she says, swiping at her eyes.
Holt says, “It’s like a light display. The white light is refracting through the water droplets.”
“Is rain bow, question?”
“Yeah.” Oh. He knows what it is. “There’s a rainbow.”
“Amaze. No have light gun. Looks like wisps see ghost.”
Abby says, “Not this time.”
Okafor says, “Wisps?”
“Humans, humans,” Cornerstone corrects, embarrassed.
Abby turns her hand, pink palm to the sky first, and then the back, watching water run around it, clinging against gravity, watching the light bend through. Then, despite having just confirmed she wouldn’t, she walks calmly towards the sea.
For only a moment, Okafor watches them alone - seven people, painstakingly selected to meet the end of the world, playing together.
Cornerstone asks her, hesitantly, “…Inheritor go swimming too, question?”
She thinks, I suppose that’s why we were chosen, though. She says, “I think I will.” She starts to unbutton her blouse.
Through his translation device, she hears Cornerstone mutter, “Shit.”
“Topanga told Rocky,” Topanga purrs. “Is instinct. Humans come from water; affinity is evolutionary. All will have zoomies. Gift not special.”
“…I upgrade prosthetic,” Cornerstone grumbles. “You win.”
Okafor asks them, “Are you joining us?”
Topanga says, “We no can swim,” but Cornerstone sets down his towel stack by the discarded uniforms and follows her as she walks, and then runs, to her crew.
Okafor dives into the ocean through the rain.
Later on, she finds him in his tree. He isn’t hiding, but he isn’t making himself readily available either. She cranes her neck up and asks if it’s a bad time.
He says, “Hello,” and doesn’t answer the question. He doesn’t move; he just stares at her from between wrought leaves, wavering like a cat who hasn’t decided whether he’s stranded himself yet. Seeing his expression, she wonders what has happened.
At length, Grace says: “I told Topanga. About… you know.”
Ah, yes. She saw them walking off together, after the beach.
She takes a step back in the scree, almost unbalancing herself for a better look at him. Okafor asks, “How did they take it?”
Grace takes even longer to respond to that. She can see him wrestling with what’s about to come out of his mouth. Then, it wins: “Topanga was angry at me for lying to them. They were angry about it a year or so ago, when they figured it out. Now they’re just glad they don’t have to hide that they know any more.” He releases his grip on the rigid, twisting branches to rub his hands against his face in self-conscious distress.
Okafor tells him, softly, “I’m not surprised they knew. It would have been your index trauma, after all.”
He quirks his head. “I’d never heard that term before, but they said something similar.”
He clambers down. His hands slip on the tree’s smooth, worn print-work. It takes him longer than Okafor would be proud of. When he finally reaches her, they sit together at the base, him with his knees drawn up so he can tap anxious rhythms on them.
“Am I really that easy to read?” he jokes.
Okafor represses her impulsive response and doesn’t tell him outright, “No, you’re not nearly as easy to read as I thought you were, and you made it difficult on purpose.” She considers what it is that Grace needs to hear instead.
In the face of her silence, he winds up, and then, with nowhere to go, releases himself.
The sun is creeping low against the planes of the dome, the floodlights dimming into a flame-coloured flare. Grace turns away. He squints at something he catches in the dusk, adjusting his glasses.
He is watching someone, a person washed in lamplight through the window of his house. Okafor can’t tell who it is. They are turned away. She sees him from the side, developing a very intent expression, like he’s still curious at his own ability to live through other people.
Okafor came here for a reason, not just to chat. She came to tell him that she’s made her decision. It didn’t take nearly as long as she thought it would. She hadn’t planned on spending the day with him, but it helped.
She still worries over her response to his question. She wants to tell him what she’s going to do, but she needs to let him know what she knows first.
She says, “It was and it wasn’t easy to get a read on you.” She adds, “I imagine the book will make a big difference.”
Grace’s attention is still cast away. He murmurs, “The book?”
“New Eridian Species ‘Human’ Complete Reference and Detailed Notes-”
Grace groans and folds his head between his knees. “-on Undeserved Forgiveness, yes. God. I preferred when it was just ‘Humans for Dummies’.” Then he sits up, abrupt and pale. “Wait, what? How do you know about that?”
“Topanga gave it to me.”
“Topanga-? Topanga! That little- They gave- you- you-uh.” His ire sputters almost immediately into a kind of quiet horror. He croaks, “You’ve read it?”
Slowly, Okafor shakes her head.
She hasn’t.
She thought about it. She wanted to. She says, “I wouldn’t do that without your permission.”
“Oh, God.” Grace drops his chin to his chest and exhales, winded, almost heaving with relief. She has to give him a moment to calm down. He puts his hands over his mouth, then his chest. He stays like that for a while. He stares into a middle distance.
At last, he says, “I was going to tell you.”
This has been another long day for Dr Grace, Okafor thinks. A lot is changing very fast. She doesn’t want to add to it any more than she needs to. “It’s okay,” she says. She faces the distance too, giving him slack. “It can wait.”
In her periphery, she sees Grace go through some facial gymnastics. “Er, can it?”
“We’ve had a lot of revelations lately. I imagine you’re at capacity. On that note, though.” Before she can stop herself, she turns back to face him. “Dr Grace. Ryland. I have decided I want to stay on Erid after the Astrosoter leaves. I’d like to know if that would be alright with you.”
She tells him this and he only blinks at her. Then, he shakes his head in slow denial – not, she thinks, of her request, but that she made it at all. Okafor has a sudden and furious impulse to grab him by the shoulders and rattle him, to impress her choice upon him physically.
He says, “You don’t understand what I’m saying. Seriously, I need to tell you – your decision needs to be an informed one.”
“It is informed,” she assures him.
It is. She says, “I’ve seen how the Eridians treat humans under their stewardship.” She gestures at him. “Including the human Eridians. I know enough.”
“You don’t. You don’t understand-”
She sighs. Alright, she can do it this way too. “I don’t understand about Contact Thrum, where someone here hurt you for the first time, and you broke your fingers and Topanga lost their arm? Or did you mean about how you’ve been eating your own cloned meat? Or about what exactly is going on between you and Rocky and Adrian? Come on, Dr Grace – unlike your spouses, I’m not blind.”
“I- I- The first thing,” he rushes, disbelieving, aghast. “All of it.”
She takes a leaf from his book and simply shakes her head at him.
Okafor already knows. He might not remember it, but she’s been here the whole time.
He focuses and inspects her, and gradually becomes incredulous. “Holy- Christ,” he wonders. “Are you serious?”
She nods. He covers his mouth with a hand again. “You’re serious,” he mutters into his palm.
She nods.
He leans toward her – unselfconsciously, almost intimately close – and scrutinises her face, tilting his head. There, he finally finds what he’s looking for. He rocks slightly, tilting forward off axis, raising his brows and releasing a breath of something between relief and awe. Then he lowers his heavy, brilliant eyes, and they begin to shine with tears. He scoffs, almost inaudibly. He starts to smile.
She watches him leaping through his own affect only inches from her face. She can see his hair, every golden strand of the bushels that shoot out over his forehead. Somehow, from somewhere, it’s trembling. He teeters; he closes his eyes.
“I’m a lesbian,” she says.
“Oh!” Dr Grace pulls back, rocking onto the dirt and dust beneath his tree. He puts out a hand to steady himself. “Uh, congratulations?”
“It – ah, it seemed like this might be an apt time to bring that up.”
He stammers. “Uh, I wasn’t – I didn’t, I – I mean, me too.”
She raises an eyebrow at him.
“I’m, not a lesbian. I’m just.” He fiddles urgently with his ring. “I’m not- I’m not. I was never really into that kind of thing. I didn’t mean to make you think I- yeah.” He flushes. “I was just, I’m just happy.”
“I see.” She lets herself release a chuckle.
Quietly, he asks, “Did you have someone, back home?”
She wants to regret having pushed him away again, but seeing Grace fumble for small talk is privately endearing. “I don’t. I never really felt settled. I liked travelling. I find it easy to get along with people.”
“Yeah, I get that. …I mean, personally, I don’t get that.”
He watches her sidelong. “…You’re not the person I was expecting you to be,” he admits.
“No. I’ve heard that before. It’s okay.”
Again, she doesn’t act on her first instinct. That is to say that he is not who they were expecting him to be either, and more specifically that they thought of him first as a martyr, then a phantom, then a bot, then a brainless husk, then a torture victim, and then, at last, as someone being treated very well by people who were still developing the capacity to do it.
She searches for her next step. He beats her to it.
He says: “For three years, I waited to meet you.”
Now it’s Okafor’s turn to be taken aback. She looks at him, she sees him – his worn hands now holding each other over the rough knees of the old cargo trousers, his doleful eyes flitting behind his glasses, his lip folding slightly, bitten from the inside.
Around them lie the converging layers of the cliff and the soaring simulated sky. Okafor feels it peripherally and keeps her eyes on Grace.
He says, “I imagined it would take –” he laughs – “so much longer. Maybe longer than I had.” He swipes against another nascent tear. “I didn’t realise until you got here, but I was, ah. Scared. Really scared.”
Absurdly, he laughs again. This is how he deals with things that hurt, she thinks; he either hides from them or treats them as a joke.
She wants to put an arm around his shoulder. She holds herself back.
He laughs, he keeps laughing; it’s self-deprecating and a little bit ghastly. He says, “Also. I don’t know why, but I thought there would be a cat.”
“Oh,” she says, caught off guard. “Interesting. We talked about it, actually. But it wouldn’t have been fair. A cat in 0g.”
He nods. He pauses. He asks, with one foot still obviously in the conviction she’s going to change her mind, “You’re really going to stay? You’re certain?”
“Yes,” she says, “I’m sure. I’ve talked it over with the crew. They can use the medical bot on the way home. It’s ready for a promotion. And I know they can make the trip without killing each other. They’ve done it once already.”
She tells him, “I’ll keep you company for the next decade or so, until the next ship arrives.” She shrugs at his continued skepticism. There’s no nuance to this. It’s simple. “I’m a student of biology and psychology and I’ve just discovered a novel sapient species. I have a ride waiting on me to go home any time I want, same as you. Why would I be in a hurry to leave?”
He faces forward, sitting still, and then nods to himself. And then that’s it; it’s simple.
He tells her, “Adaeze, I don’t know what to say.”
She huffs at that. She leans forward, mirroring him, pulling up her knees and wrapping her arms around her slacks, defence against the cool evening air. In the dying haze of the Eridians’ sunset, she says, “You don’t have to thank me, you know. It’s not a sacrifice I’m making for you. I’m doing it because I want to. I want to live on Erid. And to the extent that you are part of it, it certainly wasn’t out of pity.”
She looks to the cliff, up to the tree, and across him to the house. As twilight blankets the biodome, Grace’s home is becoming a lighthouse, clearly illuminating the silhouettes in his window – now numbering three. One of them is definitely Priya. She is holding her hand out with one thumb up. It’s a question; Okafor doesn’t have the answer yet.
Grace, watching the sea now, doesn’t notice. Okafor tells him, “Also, well, someone has to keep Holt company.”
He turns to her again, amazed. She meets his eyes and nods. Then he laughs – actually laughs.
Okafor says, “To be honest, I think – probably Raghunathan will join us too. And probably Felix, if he can.”
Grace stares at her. His chest tries to push up another chuckle, but it’s hollow. He is stunned, perplexed. He says, “Oh. Ohh,” and the tears fill his eyes, rising until they spill, and, silently, Grace begins weeping.
Okafor curls towards him. “We’d all stay, honestly, if we could. The problem isn’t whether we want to. It’s- I know she’s seen the Mary logs, and we’ve had the beetles, and the Eridian probe too, but Vance will never accept an outcome that isn’t her delivering Taumoeba to Earth in person.”
“It’s her life’s work,” Grace says in a cracked whisper. “I understand.” And Okafor imagines he does.
“So,” she continues, “She can’t operate the ship alone, and we wouldn’t leave her to make that journey solo anyways. There’s going to have to be more discussion about it. But I, at least, and Holt-”
Grace says, “But, Adaeze. This isn’t a problem. This is the opposite of a problem. You can all choose to do what you want, whether to stay or go, without anyone ever being left on any ship alone again”.
Okafor tilts her head to the side. She doesn’t understand.
“There are billions of people on this planet. Many would accompany Vance at the drop of a hat. But they won’t get the option, because there’s an Eridian crew already selected for our next interstellar trip. They’re just waiting for the Blip 2’s radiation retrofit to pass testing. Now they won’t have to. Or, if Vance is willing to wait a few months, the ships can leave as a party of two.”
Okafor has to sit with that revelation for a moment. It makes a mockery of all the hair-tearing of the last 24 hours. In all their discussion over who would stay and who would go, they never considered a third option.
“So,” Okafor says, somewhat vapidly. “You’re saying you wouldn’t mind a few roommates.”
Grace’s eyes brighten over cheeks still streaming with tears. “No, not as long as Astrosoter wouldn’t either. Of course not. Of course you can stay. Anyone who wants to can stay right here.” He blinks back a glaze of saline. Something animates him – maybe, the spirit of his own future as he watches it transform. “We’re going to build a community here for you. Our Little Earth. I already have the plans. For three years, we’ve had the plans!”
Grace springs to his feet, carried away as he plots out loud. “And in the meantime, you can’t stay in the gym - that’s not a home - you can use my house, you can sleep in my bed if you like, I’ll sleep on the couch. I’ll sleep on the beach! Whatever you want, we’ll make it happen. It’s going to be incredible.”
“You don’t have to entertain us, you know,” she says, and he cuts himself off, stammering. The fervour, without momentum to carry it, disperses almost as quickly as it grew. But it’s important that he understand what Okafor is saying, right now.“You don’t have to worry about us. You don’t have to do anything at all.”
She’s not sure why it only occurs to her in that moment, but it does: no member of his species has actually thanked him for the astronomical, unquantifiable thing he did for them. Never mind the things he’s going to do. And so, she explains: “Whoever Ryland Grace is, it was enough. You’ve done enough for us; you did it well. All that’s left is to be what you are.”
He wavers before her, arrested, for a moment longer. Then he turns, to drop quietly back down by her side.
He murmurs, as if still bewildered by it, “A human being.”
She nods, feeling him shifting close to her. She sees him clench his fists over his knees. She holds her hand out like an offering, palm to the sky. She says: “Ryland. It’s alright that you’re scared. I’m scared too. But none of us is alone anymore. We’re going to figure it out.”
He smiles a little, privately, at that. Then he sighs. A tension’s released. And in that same movement of breath, he reaches out, he angles his shoulder to press against her side, she feels the weight and the heat of him, the body coming in to alignment, and at last, at last, he takes her hand.
Okafor’s entire centre unfurls, reforming in equilibrium. Beside her, Grace falls into solace over the roots of his tree.
He leans on her. She props him up. He gives her fingers a squeeze. He says, “Okay.”