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It's nice to know I did the noble thing, obviously.
There was a point where I couldn't say that. Where I did the ignoble thing. What a word, ignoble. Why not unnoble or disnoble or nobleless? Igneous, Ignatius, iguana.
Sorry. My focus is shot lately. I hang on to threads of thought like they're made out of gossamer. I use them for floss and snap 'em inside the gateways between each of my remaining teeth. I lose them in the air. If I'm stressed, if I'm blank, Rocky goes looking for them. He wants me to keep my sanity. I guess I want that too.
What was I saying? It's nice to know I did what was right. Heroic, even, that's nice. And it's nice that my friend – my best and only friend – is trying so hard to keep me alive through it.
Some days, though, I really wonder if it would have been better to take Ilyukhina's heroin and be done with it.
“Grace want to get up?” Rocky asks me, from somewhere – inside my room, I guess, I just hadn't noticed him come in. I don't need my computer to translate his language anymore, and I don't turn my face from my pillow.
I'm sick in a way I don't have to explain to him anymore, although I have. Thiamine, ascorbate, vitamin A: missing from my diet since we ran out of my own food supply. He's spent weeks on end working on ways to make the Taumoeba better for me, and more appetizing, at that – stuff tastes like wet cement and gasoline. Sometimes the mental hurdle of forcing myself to choke it down feels just as impossible as my body managing to get anything worth having out of it. Most days, I just wish I hadn't been so involved in the early stages of trying to plan for keeping me alive despite the lack of actual food, when I learned in excruciating detail about all the ways my body was going to give out on me while Rocky had to watch.
And I don't want him to watch. And I want to be better. I want to be cheerful and strong. But I'm losing the fight, and I think more and more about my options out.
“Only one week out,” Rocky chirps at me. I want to be happy about this too, how close we are to Erid. He tells me every day. He should be able to be celebrating, excited. Instead he spends his days obsessing over how he'll find things for me to eat as soon as we touch down on his planet.
I can't get out of bed today. Does bad things to your mind as well as your body, these kinds of deficiencies. Even if I had the strength, I don't think I could rise.
“Music time?” Rocky offers.
I take in a deep breath. There's blood in my mouth. My gums are disintegrating.
“Maybe just sleep for now, buddy,” I croak out. It hurts just to shift, to feel the creaking of my bones as they soften.
“Sleeping a long time, not good for humans,” Rocky reminds me. We both know I taught him this, back before it ever got bad, but now I'm irrationally mad at him for knowing it.
“Just quiet, please,” I whisper, turning my face further away from him, pulling the pillow over my head. “Just quiet.”
I think he sits by my bed for some time. I lose track of where either of us are, though. Maybe my mind's not supposed to be able to comprehend something like this. Evolution didn't build anything into me to make me able to reason with the idea of being nearly sixteen lightyears away from anyplace my ancestors ever stepped foot, dying of malnutrition and every disease that could go along with it.
“Okay, just quiet,” he says at some point, and I hear him shift to sit down and watch over me.
Morbid, that's what this is, and I don't want it to be.
I'll leave this part out of any memoirs, I guess, just mention it in passing. If there is any time to write memoirs: if Rocky gets me to Erid alive, and he and his fellow alien scientists are able to engineer some way to keep me functioning, then I'll jot this all down in their language and mine for posterity's sake. I've gotten used to chronicling. If I could get this story to Earth, everybody would line up in the bookstores to get their hands on it. They might even forgive me my faults. I'd read my book, too, but mostly for Rocky. He's easy to get attached to.
Not feeling like I'll have much time left for my memoirs today, though.
I've dragged myself from my bed, but don't have strength to stand; I sit in the lab with a cup of hot water between my hands, like the semblance of tea or coffee will afford me some strength in the vague memory of things like sugar and flavor. Rocky scurries around me from one end of the lab to another, but I've lost track of what we're discussing again. For a long time, as I felt my mental capacities start to decline, he would patiently re-explain whatever it was that he wanted my input on, but these days, I get the feeling he's talking at me without expecting much of a response.
My head is swimming, and I wonder if I've nodded off and just come back to consciousness again, except that I'm holding the water, so I haven't dropped out yet. My heart's doing this thing it's been doing lately. How to describe it? Beating like it's as tired as I am. Moving in a way so I think I can sense my blood making slow circuits through my body, though each one of my fingers, down my chest, across my swollen legs, back up towards the top of me. Maybe that's why I seem to think so slowly, lately: maybe there's blood in my head only about once a minute.
“Try to eat?” Rocky's suggesting, amid whatever else he was trying to tell me. I blink and the Taumoeba dish, cooked into something that is, in fact, edible, seems to appear at my side. I tried calling it Tau Mein for a while to improve the optics, but it just doesn't deserve the name. Rocky brought me the water to help me eat.
“Right,” I manage. “Okay.”
He hovers by my side. I set the water down beside me, pick up the spoon, and don't let myself think about it at all before I shove some into my mouth. My throat rebels immediately, works hard to spit everything back up; I'm horrifically used to this by now and resist the urge like a champ. I actually do pretty well at swallowing the spoonful down. Only problem? I think that's about all the effort I have in me right now.
“Good,” Rocky chimes, a little feebly, and I – very feebly – bury my face in my hands and try to remember how to breathe like a normal human. My beard is in patches beneath my palms.
“Only five days,” he says to me, not for the first time today.
“Mmhmm,” I agree, trying to summon some enthusiasm.
“Erid might look strange to you,” he says.
We have spoken about this before too, but really, when you're trapped on a ship together for this long, you're going to loop some conversations.
“I'm sure it will.” I imagine Erid as being metallic everywhere the Earth would be green, rocky everywhere the Earth would be blue. I imagine Erid in different colors and continents and sizes. I will be the first human to set eyes on this planet. “It's science fiction, all of it.”
Rocky has been well-introduced to the concept by now. “Asimov and Clark,” he puts in wisely. He doesn't seem to connect with the questions of robotic sentience and autonomy the way humans do, but he likes stories about aliens. He liked Star Wars.
“C.S. Lewis,” I suggest instead. “'Out of the Silent Planet.' Did we do that one yet?”
“Who, question?”
“It's about a man going to a planet he's never seen or heard of before. He gets kidnapped, against his will, and they force him up there. The other humans are scared to confront the aliens on the planet. They want them dead. But the man who's forced to go, he's a linguist: he's curious about them. And when he tries to learn their language, he realizes they're kind. They make sure he's safe, and they send him back home. Read it a long time ago.”
Rocky pauses thoughtfully. “Why haven't shared it yet, question?”
“Didn't think of it,” I say. “He was writing about God, actually. Not typical science fiction stuff. About God being so strange he would be alien to us. And we'd fear him and the angels. Maybe for good reason.”
We've talked about God before – or big force, about the closest way I can translate the way Rocky talks about it. Believers? Neither of us in a traditional sense. Not that I know what counts as a traditional sense on Erid.
“Could read some to you,” Rocky offers.
I'm beginning to get light-headed again. I'm scared to pass out in front of him, not because of any humiliation or even the risk of smacking my head, but because it scares him, and he's scared enough.
“Yes,” I agree breathlessly. The room moves around me like the start of centrifuge. It brings up bad memories. I'm not a big fan of being spun around anymore.
He goes for the computer while I cope with my vertigo. The Taumoeba dish wants to come back up again. I drop the spoon and let it clatter uselessly to the ground. My skin is clammy.
I'm scared to die. It would be alright to not be in pain anymore. But I can't leave him now, after everything he's done to keep me alive.
Just five more days.
Suddenly the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some demon had rubbed the heaven’s face with a dirty sponge, the splendour in which they had lived for so long blenched to a pallid, cheerless and pitiable grey. It was impossible from where they sat to open the shutters or roll back the heavy blind. What had been a chariot gliding in the fields of heaven became a dark steel box dimly lighted by a slit of window, and falling. They were falling out of the heaven, into a world. Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom’s mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets—the ‘earths’ he called them in his thought—as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven—excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void, the real death? Unless... he groped for the idea... unless visible light is also a hole or gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths...
Well, I didn't come down to Erid like Lewis imagined. I didn't see the planet from afar or brace my body against the descent into gravity. I lost consciousness. I never got up from the floor of the lab by my own strength again.
I don't like to think of Rocky trying to take care of me in these last five days, alone. Shifting his attention from his reading – we had used audiobooks for a long time, but in recent weeks, he had insisted on reading to me – to find me out cold, my hand limp beside me. Coming to my side, trying gently to rouse me, to get me back to bed. Calling “Grace Grace Grace.” Not able to wake me up. Maybe not able to sense my pulse. How can he know if I am alive or dead if he can't sense the rhythm he is used to my body keeping? I am unresponsive. “Grace Grace Grace!”
I am only vaguely conscious at any point over the next week, eyes slit open, but not absorbing what's happening around me. Probably he talks often to me, continues to read, watches seriously over everything the machines do to take care of me as my body gives out, as my heart threatens to fail. Do I lose teeth and nails, and does he collect them somewhere, unsure if a human being will need these again for later? Do I sometimes speak back to him in my delirium, running a fever of a hundred and three, talking about aliens and Earth and Jedi and robots, but mostly about food, every kind of food my mind can bear to even imagine, burgers and skittles and bagels and raspberries, milk and jam bars and deli turkey, Snickers and curry and ramen? Does he understand that this is all I have the capacity left to think about, to dream of, to crave? That I'd give up my life's last chance at having human contact if it just meant I could scarf down as many Crunchwrap Supremes, mashed potatoes, and french silk pies as I could physically fit in my body?
Maybe he wishes he could touch me, to make sure my body had some awareness of any comfort, since it knows by now it can't have food. Maybe I cry out for someone to hold my hand, and nobody can.
I can't get warm even under every blanket we have. I shiver uncontrollably, shaking my brittle bones. I have fever dreams of my body blowing away like dust or a dune of Ryland-colored sand. My hair sheds onto my pillow and sometimes gets in my mouth.
I am dying.
And it's good to have done the noble thing, but it won't save me from this end. Like the sinners on the cross next to Jesus musing aloud about such an ignoble death for somebody supposed to be the king of kings. One of them bitter, one of them full of so much empathy it saved his soul, or something like that.
I guess I might be the bitter one, because I don't really care if anyone saves my soul. And geez, you'd think I'd deserve some redemption by now either way. But God, if anything is out there that gives a rat's behind, I hope somebody saves my friend from having to watch this happen to me.
I sleep. Rocky guards me. I have no concept of what's happening, but I know, if I know anything, that he doesn't leave my side.
Erid smells like Arizona.
I happen to think this is a bit of letdown. I've seen a mesa before. I know what sand is.
But that's what I think, anyway, when something resembling a strand of consciousness makes it way back to me: am I in Arizona?
There is definitely a rock next to me, but this is hardly conclusive. I shift, annoyed by something in my nose, and look to my side.
There are at least twelve Rockys watching me from behind a transparent screen.
I yelp like a dog who got his paw stepped on and scramble to sit up, tearing at something in my arm – ow! – and making myself very suddenly and seriously dizzy.
“Awake!” someone chimes, and then a chorus like waves of music rushes towards me, and the Eridians behind the screen start racing around and waving their appendages in triumph. My head swims laps and I heave for air, eyes burning from being open after so long shut.
“Grace calm, Grace safe!” The Eridian next to me is the familiar one, and I turn to lock onto the sight of him like he's the only thing in this whole environment that I've ever seen before. Which, actually, he is.
No, wait. I'm wearing one of my chemistry shirts. Other than that, yeah, Rocky's all I know.
“Rocky,” I gasp out, slumping back down into the bed that they've tried to make soft for me (I don't even begin to guess at the material). There is cool oxygen in the nasal cannula I'm connected to. “What – ”
“Grace asleep so long,” Rocky cries. “Grace sick and talking sick! We landed. Everyone wanted to hear story! Everyone came together, to help make vitamins!”
“Make vitamins?” I stare down at myself – a mistake, I'm not ready to cope with how hollow I look, how unfamiliar my body is to me – and turn my attention to the needle in my arm. They've synthesized some of the vitamins and nutrients I need, they must have. Otherwise, I...
“I was bad, wasn't I?” I ask.
Rocky droops sadly. Behind him, the other Eridians are still hurrying around, maybe notifying others or preparing more orders of whatever worked to finally get me awake. I can't believe all the colors and varieties of proportions they come in. Geez, that red and brown one there must be twice Rocky's size. Seems he wasn't the only one who wanted to watch over me. I'm touched, really, I just also still feel like I could pass out again at the drop of a pin.
“Grace sick,” Rocky repeats. “Didn't recognize Rocky.”
“I didn't?”
“Not always.”
“Oh.” I brush my thin hair from my eyes, breathing out a long sigh. “I'm sorry.”
“No sorry.” Rocky pats the bed like he means to pat me instead. “Grace awake now.”
“We made it?” I ask, still not having comprehended it.
“To the alien planet,” Rocky jests. “Are we like scary angels?”
I stare around me, breathless. The Eridians move and work and sing their language across from me. I raise my head to the other side of me.
A window. Rocky's made sure I have a window. And beyond me: Erid.
I'm breathless. Might be the sickness. Might be the fear. But maybe I have gotten braver through all this, because actually, I think this feeling might be exhilaration.
I lived. I'm not better yet, and maybe I'll still be sick for a long time. But I want to get better. I want to see this. I want Rocky to have the chance to show it to me.
Okay, maybe I'm not brave. Maybe that's just what happens when you trust someone this much.
“I'm alive,” I breathe out.
“Alive,” Rocky concurs. “Both of us.”
“Both of us.”
I'm in pain, and I'm weak. The gravity of this planet is heavy on me. I am not well. But I would do it again for this.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Erid, hello. Hello.”
I lean over to touch Rocky's bubble. He presses himself closely up towards my hand.
To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within. For Ransom, this moment had now come in his understanding of Malacandrian song. Now first he saw that its rhythms were based on a different blood from ours, on a heart that beat more quickly, and a fiercer internal heat. Through his knowledge of the creatures and his love for them he began, ever so little, to hear it with their ears. A sense of great masses moving at visionary speeds, of giants dancing, of eternal sorrows eternally consoled, of he knew not what and yet what he had always known, awoke in him with the very first bars of the deep-mouthed dirge, and bowed down his spirit as if the gate of heaven had opened before him.
‘Let it go hence,’ they sang. ‘Let it go hence, dissolve and be no body. Drop it, release it, drop it gently, as a stone is loosed from fingers drooping over a still pool. Let it go down, sink, fall away. Once below the surface there are no divisions, no layers in the water yielding all the way down; all one and all unwounded is that element. Send it voyaging it will not come again. Let it go down; the hnau rises from it. This is the second life, the other beginning. Open, oh coloured world.