Chapter Text
Saying goodbye to my Grace at Tau Ceti was one of the hardest goodbyes of my life.
It was hard, but there was a sense of justice to it. I was sending it away for something great, for a cause we both believed in. I knew it would survive, because it was my Grace, and my Grace always made things work. It would rear its precious hatchling, ship fueled by my astrophage, and they would make it back to save their home and prove every single doubter wrong. It would be valued, as it always should have been. It would survive, and it would thrive, and the unceasing ache in my hearts would be worth a lifetime of missing Grace and a youngling I never got to meet.
I got lucky when Grace found me again. No one gets that lucky twice, and I know it.
Saying goodbye to my Grace this time feels like I’m losing a limb; or better yet, vivisecting one of my hearts straight from my living, breathing carapace. It hurts, and I want it to stop. Were I a single degree more insane, I’d tell the crew outside our door to fuck off and leave us alone. Were Grace’s survival not wholly and totally dependent on it, I wouldn’t go down at all. I don’t want to leave my family. If I had my way, we’d stay up here together forever, maybe not wholly safe in these walls but cradled as if we were. The only thing that could hurt us here is time or orbital decay.
But Grace does not have time. Grace is running out of time, and doing it fast, and if I want to be worth anything to my family then I need to act quickly. I am tired, and at the risk of sounding crass, I am hungry. But most of all, I am very, very afraid.
Grace must know my resolve is weakening because it clings to me so weakly and begs me to stay. I’ve been here the whole time, I want to tell it, even if you couldn’t hear me. But I’m scared, and my vents are clamping horribly and it’s so hard to speak, so I speak quickly.
“I know, my beloved. It is scary, but you are brave.”
I hope it knows that. I hope there is some part of it, no matter how small, that remembers that I have forgiven it for something it need not apologize for a long time ago. I hope so, but I don’t think it does, because it just hones its wide, terrified eyes on me and shakes its head.
“Kiss me. Please. Just– one more time.”
I could scream. In a moment of clarity and logic, we’d agreed to refrain from showing Erid our unorthodox displays of affection. Grace is smart, and it understands that not everyone will see it as I do. It’s a good decision, it’s a wise decision, but it’s a fucking horrible awful terrible decision and I hate that I ever agreed to it in the first place. A life without knowing Grace’s touch, no matter how brief, is not a life I want to live even for a moment.
But this isn’t about what I want. I gather Grace into my arms, and it would be so easy even with gravity in the way, because Grace has grown so small and so terrifyingly close to nothing at all. I take great care as I press myself against it. It holds me the best it can, and it sobs open-mouthed against me and once again I am tempted to tell the elevator to go away. Its soft, elastic lips press desperately against my body. Something like this would have been tender, gentle, erotic, were it long long ago. Now it serves only as a frantic mode of our survival.
I pull it close but not too close, firm but not too firm. Loved but not too loved, not enough to hurt it. It’s so scared, and so am I.
It tells me it loves me. I manage to sob out some pathetic notes of “love, love, love” because that’s all I can make myself say.
“– I’m so glad the universe put us together–”
No, Grace, you put us together. You are both the canvas and the string, the needle and the knot that holds my entire being together. You turned around and brought me back to life when I would surely die. You granted me life then gave birth to a reason to live it.
My vents are too tight and my breath too thin to say any of that. Instead I hold it close to me, trembling in every limb, and I tell Grace that it and Adrian are my hearts, my stars, my joy, my loves, because it’s true and there will never be a universe in this lifetime or the next in which it isn’t.
I hold it until there is no more denying the inevitable. Someone shouts some instructions on the other side of the airlock door, and I know our time together is whittled as thin as I can let it.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Please don’t.”
I bring my claw to the hollowed space that was once plush and soft. My Grace’s face used to be so full, always so stretched with smiles and joy, proving to me that light could exist outside the context of wavelengths and photons. Its smile was my own form of audible sunshine, but even that has grown dull and weak. I cup what little flesh remains, and I lean in close so there is no chance it will not hear me.
“I will be back for you. I will always be back for you. I love you, my beautiful Grace.”
I’ve said goodbye to Grace once before at Tau Ceti. But I’ve never said goodbye to little Adrian, and I fear it may kill me.
I can hear it shivering and covering its head beneath the blanket. Would it be kinder to just go, and spare it the pain of saying goodbye for the first time in its unfathomably short life? Or maybe it’s myself that I’m trying to take mercy on. I’m no stranger to selfishness. I carefully pull back the covering, and only when I tap at its arm does Adrian dare open a singular eye.
“Adrian,” I sing gently, and I pray my voice doesn’t shake. I push the sound-coverings from its ears so that it can hear me. “I must get our elevator ready.”
“No! No, Dada.”
I hate when Adrian cries. The sound used to upset me because it was sharp and unpleasant, and I could never quite understand why it would cry at such random times as a newly-born. But the sounds stopped bothering me a long time ago, and Grace did what Grace does best and it taught me to understand the whens and the whys. That means that I understand that Adrian cries in front of me now because it’s scared, and it hurts, and that fact alone is almost enough to unravel me.
Adrian lifts its arms to me and that’s all it needs to ask. I don’t have much time– I don’t have any time at all, really– but for Adrian I will always make an exception. The elevator can wait. Erid can wait. They’ve waited all these years; what’s a few more minutes? The thick patchwork blanket– (I have many memories of Grace teaching Adrian wavelengths with this blanket)– stays wound around Adrian’s little body. I handle the extra bulk effortlessly. Again, even in normal gravity, it would be so easy to hold my sweet hatchling, not because it is getting smaller but because there will always be a notch carved out of me in the shape of Adrian Sterling Grace.
Grace has a word for Adrian that Erid has no translation for. A child of a certain gender. I cannot replicate it, but phonetically it is the same as sun. It’s only appropriate; Adrian, my gift, my star, my sun.
I sing to it, like I always have, spun tales of heroes and bravery and comfort. It clings to me, just as Grace had, and it begs me to stay, just as Grace had. I’d always hoped Adrian would never hear me cry, but I choke on a few notes despite myself. I’m sick of being the first for everything. The first mission to space, the first survivor, the first to make contact with humans, the first in Adrian’s life to leave it behind.
I pet a claw over Adrian’s messy hair and, with all the strength in my body, force myself to pull back enough so Adrian can see me. Its wide, frightened eyes are an exact copy of Grace, looking up at me with identical terror. I force myself to speak.
“I love you, my perfect little star. I promise I will be back soon.”
One final time I consider calling off the entire mission, and that is when Adrian begins screaming for me as I drift towards the airlock. Grace has to hold it back, and what kind of mate am I to leave it alone so sick and so weak? What kind of parent am I to leave my child so terrified? I can’t do it. I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t I can’t–
“Rocky?”
Faint and thin through the triple-insulated walls of the ship. All I can hear are fuzzy, vague shapes on the other side, but that alone is enough to remind me where I am. All I have to do is open the door, and I will be one step closer to going home.
Wherever that may be.
“I’m here,” I say shakily. Adrian still cries behind me. I can hear Grace trying to soothe it, but it’s not working. I speak again before I can change my mind. “I’m here.”
“We’re ready for you, Rocky. The pressure should be equalized.”
I remember that voice. Instinctually, I flinch back before catching myself. That was the last voice I heard before takeoff. Before everything.
They make an affirmative noise when I sing their name, which will someday be pronounced as “Jessie” by my two humans.
“I… I’m afraid.” I say.
The inner door has closed behind me, leaving me encased in the small airlock room, facing the outer door. Around me, relics of the last four years float lazily. A cloth diaper, hung clean to dry but never picked back up to use. Human writing utensils, scraps of cloth, a small toy I meant to give back to Adrian but never got the chance. Bits of trash that Grace and I were too afraid to throw away, just in case we needed it someday. The history of our life, of our family, stacked like the layers of an exposed canyon side.
Through the wall, as even and calming as the day I left, “I know, Rocky. You can be scared. You just have to do it.”
Jessie, our old supervisor– the one in charge of it all. The building of the ship, the selection of the crew, the date of the launch. The one I made promise me, no matter what, they would keep my mate safe while I was gone. They seemed to have kept up their half of the bargain, so it’s only fitting that I keep mine. Scared, I pull on the modified lever and step back.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. I’ve been so enraptured by the responsibility of keeping Grace and Adrian alive, I never quite had the time to wonder what the elevator would be like, made in such haste with only my verbal instructions. For a moment, it is silent, and I try not to twitch anxiously at the sound of my hatchling still crying for me behind me.
The elevator looks exactly the same as the last. So much, in fact, that the first stupid notes out of my stupid vents are, “Is this the right one?”
The rolling trill sound of four Eridians laughing gently is enough to make my legs buckle beneath me. I don’t go anywhere, since the gravity is still nonexistent, but being in the presence of real, living Eridians after a lifetime of isolation is overwhelming. I find that I can’t speak. I try, oh do I try, but I’m so overcome with every emotion imaginable that I manage nothing but a strained rush of ammonia.
“Welcome home,” someone says, and I begin weeping.
This is not how I wanted my reunion to go. These are not the first sounds I wanted Erid to bear witness to. I wanted to be brave, and strong, and be the savior everyone was counting on, but I’m reduced to mere squeaks like a tiny hatchling. I cry not for myself but for my crew that never made it back. I cry for their families who will have to watch me, and only me, walk out of this elevator.
There is a sound. A familiar sound, the ghost of a memory burned into me, unable to truly forget but not quite able to remember, and I realize someone is singing comfort to me. A real, true comfort chord, not one prerecorded or coming from my own vents. I haven’t heard one of those in…
It’s been a long time.
“I’m sorry,” I say weakly. “I should… we need to hurry.”
They guide me into the elevator, which is truly nothing more than a glorified xenonite box, same as the first one. There’s a small bunch of buttons and levers on one side, which Buck works expertly despite the clunkiness of their hastily-made suit. There’s a mighty shudder, then a lurch, and we begin descending.
I listen to the ship until I can’t hear it anymore. In a matter of seconds, I am officially farther away from Grace than I’ve been in over four years, and the farthest I’ve been away from Adrian in its entire life. Before I can begin panicking, or lamenting the loss as if it were my own limb, I realize someone is speaking to me.
Jessie floats closer to me, using small notches in the floor to keep themself from drifting away. Smart. We didn’t have those in the first elevator, I recall. Just five limbs and a dream.
“The suneater cure,” they say seriously. “Is it on board? Are the samples safe?”
Oh. Of course. There’s two vastly different alien species on board the ship, and I’m worried about the wrong ones. I force myself to make an affirmative sound.
“We have… many samples.” I think of all the long nights of tube-feeding Grace boiled Taumoeba. “They are stable. Have you been designing the shuttle like I suggested?”
“Of course. It should be ready for launch to Threeworld in six days.”
I do the math. It’s so hard to think in anything that isn’t Earth units. That’s just over thirty Earth hours.
“Good,” I say weakly. “That’s… good.”
I fidget with my thermometer-barometer-oximeter mashup. I’d ripped it straight from my ship as soon as I realized I’d be going home with Grace, not away from it. It’s a simple little device, no matter how impressed Grace seemed to be with it, but it’s done its job well and I trust it to serve me now. It was originally primed to Erid’s atmosphere, of course, but with a little bit of tweaking and reprogramming, I set it to the ambient atmosphere of the inside of the Hail Mary.
The raised screen shows all calm inside of the elevator. So far my humans would survive, but we’ve got a long way to go.
Eridians don’t mind silence. It’s important to us. Grace had tried to explain the very human urge to fill silence, lapse in conversation, and I simply told it I wasn’t surprised with how much talking it did already, and that was that. I like to think I influenced it over the years, to drink up the silence when it came. But it also influenced me, and I find myself nearly grateful when Buck clicks their claws together nervously and speaks up.
“The aliens,” they say hesitantly. “The– starfriends. You say they saved Erid.”
“They did,” I say quickly, defensively. “Grace did. It will.”
A stretched silence, begging to be filled.
“How?” Asks another, one I don’t quite recognize. They told me the names of everyone who would be meeting me up here, but I was distracted. I’ve been nothing but distracted for a year now.
I’m not confident in my ability to retell our reunion without sobbing. The closest thing I’ve gotten to respinning the tale is in bedtime stories for Adrian, rehashed and dulled down as not to scare it before sleep, or gently reminding Grace where it is during its most recent fits of delirium.
“The Taumoeba,” I sing the new word for suneater-eater, “can travel through even the strongest xenonite. Neither Mercy or myself realized until we’d gone our respective ways. I was alone when my fuel was depleted. It only took a day for it to be reduced to… nothing.”
The anxious shuffling of twenty limbs fills the elevator. We’ve descended enough that there are now whispers of gravity, just enough to keep our claws on the ground. Me, though. I am standing perfectly still.
“I was going to die there, and Erid was going to die with me. All I could do was wait for my systems to fail, so I could die. But Grace was on the same mission for its own planet. It realized what was happening, and what was going to happen to me. So it… sent its Taumoeba samples in a self-sufficient pod and turned around for me. It cannot eat our food, and it knew it would die. I am only here because of Grace. Without it, we would all be dead.”
A somber silence. I can nearly hear the realization sinking in.
“And what of the other– the… Joybringer?”
“Adrian was born shortly after Grace and I turned back for Erid.”
A small, polite eruption of overlapping questions and raw disbelief. It’s going to be a long journey down.
In attempts to keep the passengers in the– absurdly noisy– space elevator from going insane on the way down, the boxcar itself was soundproofed. This works wonders for those entering, for those ascending, and for those descending. But for those exiting, it comes with the disadvantage of having absolutely no idea what waits on the other side of those doors.
Those exiting, such as myself.
The sound of hundreds, maybe thousands of Eridians crowding around the base of the elevator nearly sweeps me off my feet. Gravity is so strong down here. My poor, weak legs wobble dangerously beneath me as I try to take a step forward, but I’m disoriented and unbalanced and I end up bumping right into who will later be known to my humans as Bullseye. I am guided, heavy-footed and clumsy, into a small clearing, which I realize is meant to serve as my humans’ new… enclosure.
The dome-like walls provide a wide berth between the five of us and the crowd, but the walls are not soundproof. The overlapping shouting, questions, and cheers crashes into me as I imagine a violent landslide would. People rap their claws against the panels, and each ricochet of sound pierces straight through me. Oh, stars. I haven’t heard this much noise since the day we launched. The crowd grows crisp in detail, then fuzzy, then back to normal, then fuzzy again. I just can’t keep up. My auricles are overloaded, and I find myself taking a step back to the elevator in hopes that maybe Jessie will take mercy on me and send me back up to the Hail Mary.
Jessie does take mercy on me, but not how I’d hoped. They step forward and face the noise effortlessly.
“Take a step back, everyone!” They cry. “Savior Rocky will answer your questions later. The aliens are not here, so stop trying to listen. Give us space to work!”
I’m so overwhelmed I barely register the ‘savior’ prefix stamped to my name. Jessie has always had a strong presence, and the crowd is compelled to listen. Slowly, the wave of clamor becomes a river, then a stream, then merely a trickle. I notice other workers on the outside of the dome, corralling the crowd back a few yards, as more suited team members enter through the dome’s airlock entrance. Finally, silence, or close enough to it.
I listen closely to my monitor, and I am pleased to hear that the inside of the dome matches the ambient atmosphere of the Hail Mary.
“Is it safe?” Bullseye asks anxiously from beside me. “For the aliens. Have they done it?”
The dome is small, and it is hardly furnished, but it will bring Grace closer to help and that’s enough for me. I nod my body, then remember that means nothing to them, so instead I wave my hands in a little flourish that they will understand.
“Yes. We should be ready to bring them down. The atmospheres match almost perfectly. It’s…”
I’m about to sing my praises to the science team when there is a sharp, loud rapping at the panel closest to me, which sends a deep rumbling reverb all the way up the top cusp of the shallow dome. It drowns out the residual chatter of the crowd.
Eridians do not forget, but the memory of many, many things have worn thin and faint with time. I am haunted by shapes of what once was, eternal songs muffled but not quite silent. The memory of a memory. I cannot forget, but remembering is a battle. Things I once swore would be with me forever have been lost to time, and grief, and trauma, left behind in the stars. I do not forget, but I have gotten very, very close.
I remember Adrian. I remember everything about them. I remember the smooth rippling texture of their body, every sweet note of their voice, I remember the chip in their right arm from when they were a youngling playing too roughly with their clutchmates, I remember I remember Adrian.
Adrian.
“Adrian!” I cry. For a moment, I’m not even sure if I’m even making any sound at all. “Adrian!”
“Rocky? Rocky!”
I remember those cries, too, ripped straight from the day I left. We’d been separated in the chaos and I almost didn’t get to say goodbye to them. That itself was scarier than heading into the unknown. My legs carry me across the dome, up to the panel, and at the sound of my beautiful mate so close my legs truly do give from beneath me. I hit the ground and weep.
All of Erid can hear me now, sobbing like some hatchling, but let them listen. Let them witness our reunion so they may hear the last tether I have to this planet strain but not break. I have come back a million times more alien than Taumoeba or human combined, but still Adrian calls for me. They sing my name from above me, like what Grace would describe as an angel, as I sob.
I am home, I am home, I am home, home is here.
“Let me in,” I hear Adrian command, and they scrabble at the panels as if they could move them aside on their own. “Rocky, let me in! I need to hear you.”
“No,” I sob. “No, beloved, it would hurt you.”
I shakily raise my arm to meet their claw on the other side of the panel. That’s all my life ever has been and ever will be, divided from those I love by barriers. Adrian has not yet learned to be deterred by these obstacles, and they eagerly press their claw back opposite mine. They tap their fingers, and I tap back.
For just a moment, we are the only two people in the world. For just a moment, I never left the surface of Erid at all, and there is no such thing as astrophage or Taumoeba, and my humans are safe and happy on Earth. But I did leave Erid, and the sun is still dying, and my two humans are relying on me and only me.
“I have missed you more than you know,” I say weakly. “Adrian, my sweetest song. Are you well? I hope the years were good to you.”
“Rocky, I… I missed you so much. I prayed for you every day. I knew you would come back to me.”
Adrian has never been one to cry, but neither have I before all of this. I rise to my feet again with a newfound strength, and we sing together. I sound awkward and out of tune, severely out of practice, but Adrian harmonizes with me anyway as if not a single day has gone by. The music fills me up like I imagine sunlight would. My chords are weak from not being used, so I have to cut the song short, but at the end of it I feel stronger and safer than ever before.
“I love you. I must continue working, but I will be back for you as soon as I can.”
Their hand only falls away from the panel when mine does. For a tense, frightful moment, I think they aren’t going to respond. But instead they tap the ground and say, “I love you, Rocky. Go show them who you still are.”
I don’t know who I am anymore. But Adrian steps back and blends back in with the crowd, and I feel the tug of responsibility pulling at me once again.
My attention turns back to the dome around me. I lament that it’s so much smaller than the Hail Mary, but my team did spectacularly with what little resources and instructions they had. The fact that they were able to match atmosphere in both the dome and the entire elevator is a testament to their skill. I turn around to face the team, a habit picked up from my monodirectional humans, and I tap a claw on the floor.
The sound lets me hear clearly across the room, where we entered. I pause. I tap again, harder this time.
“Buck,” I say mildly, and they step closer to me with a curious chirp.
“Yes?”
“Where’s the fucking elevator?”
A true silence washes over the room. I note, distantly, as if I’m not truly with myself, that there are six less team members in the dome with us as there was before. No one answers me, so I tap my claw twice so that it cannot be mistaken that I’m asking a question.
“Buck?” I ask again, and the poor soul actually takes a small step back.
“You said it was okay to bring the aliens down. I… Jessie and Bullseye took some crew back up to retrieve them.”
“Without me?”
Miraculously, in a room full of some of the most brilliant minds on Erid, it seems no one is able to answer me. There must be an invisible forcefield around me, because everyone in the dome keeps a wide berth away from me as reality sinks in. My vents whistle with how tight and tense they are.
“Bring it back.”
Silence, save for the whining rush of spinning cable from far, far above.
“I said bring it back.”
“It doesn’t… come back. Once launched,” someone says, and the you should know, you designed it, is implied but left unsaid.
“Then why,” I sing, my words clipped and tight, “would you launch it?”
I promised them I would be back for them. They were so scared, and I told them I would be back. Every inch that elevator ascends away from me is another promise severed. No one says anything, perhaps on the account that superheated ammonia is whooshing loudly through my vents, and I take a step forward. Each of them takes an equal step back. I hear someone’s suit clink against the panel as they back nervously into the dome wall.
“Let me radio the ship, then. So I can tell them I won’t be there.”
The awkward shuffling of nervous claws scraping the floor. “We haven’t reissued connection yet. You said they understand you, so we planned to just… talk to them upon arrival.”
“Bo,” someone calls gently, to stop them from telling me more, but the damage is already done. I take a thunderous step forward.
“You cannot just ‘talk to them’ because you don’t know how to account for their hearing ranges yet and they WILL NOT FUCKING UNDERSTAND YOU!”
And suddenly, just like that, they all see me for who I truly am, who I truly became in those lost, long years. A staccato of dozens of claws all stepping back at the same time, xenonite suits bumping into the walls of the dome as they collectively shy away from me.
“Savior Rocky–”
The bravery does not last long. I whip around to face whoever spoke up, yet another habit picked up from my humans, and the mimicry of pointed, monodirectional gaze is unsettling enough to kill any further argument.
“You can build an entire orbital tower in days but you can’t follow simple directions?” I roar. “Those aliens are depending on us, and I swear to each and every one of you, if anything–” I raise a claw, brandished like a weapon, “–and I mean anything– happens to either of them, I will make sure you can never make another mistake again.”
Someone asks weakly, “Is that a threat?”
“IT’S A PROMISE!”
The following profanities that tumble from my vents are just as shocking to myself as it is to the poor souls in front of me. They’re old-school, long out of circulation among the general populace, but I haven’t been part of that in decades. I’ve always been abrasive, but never this serrated. Isolation and desperation has sharpened me as a whetstone would, and my words slice through the small dome nearly effortlessly.
I’ll apologize later. Wounds can be patched, and cuts can be mended, but I can’t be up there with my family and that alone is justification enough, even if the others don’t yet see it that way. Behind me, Erid listens, and one by one the crowd realizes it’s not a hero they’re welcoming back.
Not a hero; a stranger. A madman.
An alien.