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“Do you believe in /://:?”
Rocky perks up from their position. The tune was so faint they had almost missed it, and they did not want to miss anything.
“New word, question?”
Grace lays on its side, facing the barrier. Its bones are painfully audible, folded beneath a layer of fragile skin. It wastes away along with the days, stretching on forever and ever.
From the corner of Rocky’s periphery, a fuzzy echo shape moves. Death stalks the other side of the barrier, pacing back and forth on two long legs. Mirroring its prey in vicious mockery. They can both perceive it, now.
Grace will not survive the journey.
The human clicks in its throat. “Predetermined destination. Supernatural belief that something will always happen, no matter what.”
Oh. Fate.
Rocky does not believe in fate.
Fate is not observable. Not quantifiable. There is nothing that moves the universe save for random chance.
But Grace sounds scared, and alone.
Rocky closes the distance between themselves and the xenonite, curling their legs underneath of their carapace as they settle to the ground. “Perhaps. Stranger things have happened.”
Grace huffs out a breathy laugh and smiles with its bleeding teeth. ”I think I was born to meet you.”
Rocky hears its labored breathing and brittle bones; how painfully fragile and short-lived it was. Barely a blip in existence. Shorter, now, than it should have been. They sing a mournful tune.
If fate does exist— if they were both split from the same star stuff at the beginning of time— it had not cleaved them equally.
There’s an old story. Every Eridian knows it. It’s the story of how their sun did not die. How twenty-three brave explorers left home to traverse the stars, and two returned with salvation.
One of the two was not of the twenty-three that had left, but that was beside the point.
They have been alone for a long, long time.
They had started as the third microbiologist in a crew of twenty-three, holed up in their lab as they had poked and prodded at the Star Eater organism. That was before the bodies of their thrum started failing. Before a sickness had swept through the ship like a silent predator, slipping through the cracks of quarantines and lockdowns. Claiming and killing.
Now, they were a crew of one.
When they emerge from their lab, the ship is silent. There is no one left, and they realize with a creeping cold dread, that the hope of an entire planet falls on them and them alone. But there is no solution to be found.
They cannot go forward, they cannot return home.
And so the ship becomes like a tomb for them. Their own personal torment of studying the Star Eater, panicking, sleeping, eating, trying to fix the broken ship systems, failing, studying the Star Eater, sleeping, eating, wailing—
Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Then one cycle, the spiral breaks.
It drifts out from the suffocating vastness of space. It’s small, and it’s definitely a craft of some kind. It trails their ship purposefully, blinking thrusters in timed intervals.
They had tried evading it, once. It had chased after them, and had thrown a small container at their hull. They think about fleeing again, but they are tired, and are running out of willpower.
There is a fear that is so deep in them, but they are also so terribly alone.
It takes two tries to connect the ship’s scaffolding to the alien hull, and they almost accidentally ignite its combustible atmosphere. But they do it. What crawls out of the foreign ship defies all logic.
It’s too large. And soft. Its limbs are too long and it’s body temperature is too cold. It taps the xenonite barrier to the beat of their own rhythm and a part of themselves whispers wistfully here, here you are. Finally you are here and I’m not alone—
They sing their name to the large scary thing, and it sings it own. Stunted, ugly— the most beautiful tune they have ever heard after countless years of isolation and grief.
“Rocky.”
Twenty-two die of star sickness. It’s a sad beginning, but it’s the only way the story goes. And the twenty-third, Rocky, is castaway among an endless sea. Alone, adrift,
Until they aren’t anymore.
“So,” Grace traces a large circle along his whiteboard, “40 Eridani.” He caps his marker and turns back to the class. “Any guesses to why we’re talking about it, today?”
He’s met with a whole lot of silence. Grace can see Zack trying to balance a pencil on his finger; Jessica and Britney passing a note back and forth. Right. He should probably nip that in the bud. Maybe he can pull them aside after class, not make a spectacle about it. It’s hard being a middle schooler, you know?
But anyways, 40 Eridani.
It’s a beautiful star. It’s his favorite star, he thinks. Flowing through the river constellation Eridanus. The trail of Phaethon’s blazing chariot, as he fell through the heavens. Burning the night sky all the way down. Grace thinks he might have cried the first time he looked at it through a telescope— some old part of himself howling to the sky like a back alley dog. But he also might’ve been drunk. And high.
None of that matters though, because it was going out soon. Star death, he explains to his kids. The collapse of a star under its own gravity, exploding into a supernova. The whole reason why he brought this particular one up. That’s what 40 Eridani A is doing. Or rather, what it had already done.
Because stars are so far away, you see, and the speed of light is only so fast. 299,792,458 meters per second, he reminds. Which is pretty fast, but it takes time for the light from a celestial body to travel all the way to our humble little globe. A very long time.
40 Eridani A is 16.3 light years away. That means if its light is going out now, it had died many years ago.
But that was the funny thing about stars. One could die years before you were even born, and all you would ever see of it was its ghost.
He ends class on that note. Outside, the tulips are coming into bloom a month early. The ice caps are melting and there’s a heat dome over the southern hemisphere. Ryland shoos his students out and settles down in his chair to grade papers.
It really was a beautiful star, he thinks.
But there were many others like it.
—Because there’s another castaway, drifting into their orbit. One just as lonely. Just as desperate.
And so for the first time, two species reach across the stars to link hands.
“Do you think we meet like this every time?”
___
“Always?”
___
“Always.”
___
“Always—“
___
“— was just there,” Grace swallows thickly, rubbing at a spot on his neck, “when they needed someone. Wrong place, wrong time—“
___
“— it was always going to be me,” Grace stirs at the congealed brick of ramen with his chopsticks, watching the noodles disconnect and float away. The muscles in his neck tense. The axe forgets, but the tree remembers. “I was there right when I needed to be. No one else was as qualified as me, in the end.”
Rocky makes a low hesitant sound, then sidles up to tap from the other side of the xenonite.
“Happy it was you.”
Grace smiles and bumps his shoulder against the barrier. “Thanks, buddy.”
They brave the perils of space together, find the cure for the dying sun together.
And at the end of their quest, they leave together.
Grace thinks that he prefers the lives where the planet is dying. Where Stratt drags him— kicking and screaming and threatening death to their salvation— deep into the bowels of the Hail Mary. He sleeps for years and years until he wakes up to his friend in a world apart; reborn from Ryland Grace’s ashes into something better. Something worthy of the love.
It’s a deeply selfish thought, he knows, but Grace is also wise enough to know his own nature.
—That’s the important part; together—
—The little alien stands stock still for a few moments, as if sizing him up. He’s about to ask again when it straightens up and puts two limbs together.
”—..—- ,—.—.—-, —. --.”
Oh. That’s a mouthful.
“Uh,” Grace fidgets with the hem of his jumpsuit. He’s already screwing the pooch so badly, and you’d best believe that he’s about to make it worse.
“I don’t know if I can pronounce that one. Can I call you—“
“— Rocky?”
Ilyukhina points an accusing fork at him. “You named them Rocky? You couldn’t have thought of something more dignified?”
Grace stares down at his tray, suddenly put on the spot. They’re in the middle of dinner in the Hail Mary’s lab, and he can feel the color rise to the surface of his skin. Yao chews slowly, eyes flicking between them.
“He says he’s fine with it.”
“He? And now you’re gendering them? Couldn’t even give them a she/her for variety? For my sake?”
“Bite me.”
Yao puts down his chopsticks. “You have been spending much time with him, out of all of the Eridian crew.”
Grace pushes his food around on his plate. It’s not like he set out trying to single out one of them. The newly united crew of the Hail Mary and crew of the Blip-A had rotating shifts, trying to solve the Astrophage problem together. He’s met all of them by now, and they’re all pretty nice.
But none of them are like Rocky; whip-smart, a real bonafide wizard with their xenonite, and a great sense of humor to boot.
So maybe he does hang out with him more than anyone else. So what?
“He’s a nice guy when you get to know him. Swears like a sailor, though.”
—Together—
“We go together—“
This cycle is Grace’s birthday.
Or maybe it isn’t, but it’s approximately around this time. When Grace had arrived to Tau Ceti it had been missing a horrifying section of its memory, and time dilation never made that any easier. But they had estimated it to be around 35 earth years old, so Rocky picked an arbitrary cycle 11 earth years into their mission.
So the countdown starts this cycle, and the Eridian makes themselves busy. Their ship is the first of its kind, and there are many things to maintain. Many parts that break and need fixing. But they have had plenty of practice.
Rocky misses their crew. They miss Erid and Adrian, even though they know they will see them again. They miss Grace, even though they know that it is on its way. All Rocky needs to do is wait. They are good at waiting.
Rocky does not know what can be changed; if destiny will not tolerate being toyed with. The Eridian had not been able to save their crew. The memories had come too late. But what follows— this next part. Maybe they can do it better this time.
The empty corridors fill with alien song.
Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! You look like a monkey—
“I think my life is only ever this tragedy—“
___
“This decision—“
___
“—This red lined path out in space, linking one celestial body to another.”
Rocky traces swirls into the sand. “Does it ever feel worth it?”
Grace barks out a laugh and turns to his companion, arms thrown wide. The waves crash upon the sand and if he concentrates hard enough he thinks that he can smell the decaying brine of the ocean. In another place, he’s dead. He’s dead he’s alone he’s someone or something else entirely. But here he’s himself and alive.
“You kidding? I wouldn’t trade it for anything!”
—And so Rocky boards the human’s ship, and they slip off into space. Grace lives to see Erid. Everything goes the way it should.
Their vessel had circled the ship for several cycles. Rocky had attempted everything; from blinking of thrusters to throwing messages and packages to the alien structure. Each offering had bounced silently off of its hull.
Thirty cycles in, Rocky decides to attempt boarding. They have a rudimentary xenonite suit hobbled together after several failed attempts. A quick scan of the ship’s fragile interior revealed an extremely thin atmosphere of 78% nitrogen, 20% oxygen, with trace amounts of argon and carbon dioxide.
Maybe they have gone crazy. Maybe they are suicidal. Maybe they are already dead and their mind just has not noticed it, yet. A corpse drifting through the empty vacuum of space. Rocky does not care. They fuse their scaffolding to the aluminum hull and pressurize the connection before taking a cutter to its surface.
The ship’s interior is just as silent as the void. No click of machinery to greet its new visitor. No alarms. Rocky drifts through an alien world, devoid of meaning.
They arrive at a section of the hull with three hollows in the wall. Three forms lay motionless within. They are organic; Rocky can hear the difference in the way sound moves through their tissues. But there is no movement, inside or out.
These creatures are dead.
Rocky observes them one by one, stopping at the bottom of the rung at its last inhabitant. This one has less decay than the other two, its form more filled out with tissue and water. It had died last.
They feel a pang of sympathy. The last survivor in a doomed mission, just like themselves.
The Eridian commits the ship to memory— every slope and groove of the interior. The engraved plates hanging silently in the corridor. The dead bodies, lurking in their hollows. They trace every detail into the crystalline structure of their mind and then they step back into the connected tunnel, listening forlornly as they stand at the other end.
Maybe these creatures had left their home for the same reason as them, drifting aimlessly through the void. Searching for a solution. Maybe there was care, and they had gone with an entire planet’s hope. Rocky wants to believe. They want to believe that there was love there, once upon a time.
Their vessel disconnects from the alien ship, and continues its endless quest.
“Do you believe in fate?”
Grace tosses the hacky sack in the air, tracing the moment where it reaches its apex, suspended momentarily in space, until it falls back to him once more. Always falling back to him. They are 2 years into their trip to Erid, and Grace has been living carefully. With any luck, he will have just enough food to make it.
Beside him, Rocky draws a long string of xenonite out of his gloves from the other side of the barrier.
”New word, question?”
“Predetermined destination. Supernatural belief that something will always happen, no matter what.”
Rocky makes a humming sound, clicking his claws against the ground. Outside, the stars and time fall around Mary like river water over a stone. Come tomorrow, Grace will lament about the Taumoeba, or his boredom, or how long the journey will take and whether or not it’ll kill him.
But right here, in this moment, there is no beginning or end, and he thinks that he’s fine with that.
”Baseless superstition. Like believing in ghosts.” Rocky weaves the strand back into his project, “No. Do not believe in fate.”
Grace laughs. “Yeah, me neither.” He tosses the hacky sack again.
“But it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?”