Chapter Text
I haven’t bothered trying to organize the duffel bags in any specific way, so every time I want something out of one of them, I have to go through the process of guess-remembering which bag it’s in. This would be an incredibly stupid way of living my life if it weren’t for Ilyukhina packing her personal kit like she was headed to a party, Yáo packing his like a soldier volunteering for combat, and DuBois … DuBois, to his credit and my insane luck, packing like someone going on the opposite of a suicide mission.
I wish he were still alive so I could ask him why. Although, if he had lived, asking him about the contents of his bag would be a moot point, because I wouldn’t be here to rifle through it and come up with the question in the first place. Anyway, on the surface, packing a bunch of basic everyday items seems like the sort of completely practical thing he’d do. But you’d think that practicality would also mean he’d only pack enough to get through the couple months they were expected to live in order to solve the Petrova problem, right? It’s a mystery I’ll never solve. I just try to be grateful that there’s a buttload of toothpaste, soap, deodorant, and other necessities in his bag. They probably won’t last the whole trip, so I’ll have to figure something else out eventually, but it’ll do for now.
“Where Grace bag, question?”
“What’s that, buddy?” I’m only listening to Rocky with half an ear as I fish for a fresh bar of soap and re-zip the duffel.
“Two dead humans each have bag with name. Third human bag not have you name. Where Grace bag, question?”
A pit about ten miles deep forms in my stomach.
The embroidery. He can sense the raised lettering, and now that he’s started learning to read English, he can tell that the only bag with Latin script is not my bag. Great. Yeah, this is exactly the conversation I didn’t want to have today. Or ever.
“No, this one is mine. It just … doesn’t have my name.”
“Why bag not have you name, question?”
“Do we have to talk about this?” I snap, louder than I mean to. “So the bag doesn’t have my name. It doesn’t matter.”
Rocky taps on the wall between us like he’s trying to get a better look at me. He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “Okay. We not talk about bag,” in a very carefully neutral tone.
I let out a breath. “Good. You wanna lose another game of checkers after I clean up?”
“Why you act like next game is definite win for you when I win five of six games, question?”
“Because I was only warming up!”
Rocky bounces side-to-side. “You habitat temperature very very very low. Cannot warm up enough to win without dying. You definitely lose next game.”
“Oh-ho, somebody’s overconfident! I’m totally gonna kick your butt!” I scramble to tuck the duffels away in the storage compartment and get back to our center of gaming operations, that crisis gratefully averted for at least one more day.
“Grace very brave!”
I shrug uncomfortably. He loves breaking out the B word for some reason. I don’t really know how to tell him to stop using it without having to explain the whole awkward thing about me needing to be drugged and dragged onto this mission in the first place. “Sometimes.”
“All times! You come on mission to Tau Ceti. Walk on hull many many many times! And now make move with queen.”
Oh thank God. “… That wasn’t a real compliment, was it?”
“Grace very brave,” Rocky repeats cheerfully, forking my king and queen with his knight. I groan. We moved onto chess after checkers got boring, and while I’ve got an okay grasp on tactics, the guy with the eidetic memory has started to trounce me every game if I don’t play something different each time. We’re going to have to move onto something less skill-based if I’m going to have a chance at achieving any kind of consistent win record. Wow, what a testament to our respective intelligences that is!
I run my king away across the board, completely ignoring all the other pieces even though I know it’s a dumb way to play. He chases me into a corner and it’s all over in a few moves. Darn. I was trying to avoid seeing any conflict-avoidance symbolism in our game, but unfortunately, chess kind of is the game of metaphor.
“You play light pieces next game, make first move. Then maybe you win.”
I huff and set up the board again. Even when I make the first move, I inevitably get forced into making moves I don’t want to make, and boy, is that ever an on-the-nose parallel to my entire life.
We really have to play a different game.
“Ryland! Dinner!”
Mom’s voice is annoyed because it’s the third time she’s called me. She doesn’t get it, I’m too busy to come back right now! And anyway, I don’t want to eat green beans again, because they’re gross. And slimy. And I’m not even hungry, so yeah. I’d rather be out here!
Telly makes a rattle when I look through her at the sky. I don’t know what’s wrong with her, but she complains every time I use her now and I can’t always get her to focus, even on the things we’ve looked at a billion times. Me and her are both getting old—I’m too big now to name all my stuff like I was when I named her, so I won’t name my next telescope, but I can’t stop using the name I gave her when I was a little kid because that would be rude.
Sometimes when I look at different stars through Telly, I like pretending there’s someone like me looking right back. I could send him a message to ask him what his planet is like and he could tell me all about it and invite me over for dinner. I bet they’d have something better than green beans on an alien planet. And I bet they wouldn’t have the stupid parts of school on an alien planet either, just the cool ones like recess and the part of science class where you get to build a bridge with tape and see how much weight it can hold.
The stars look extra bright tonight because the neighbours are away and all their lights are off, so there’s less light pollution to get in the way. I know most of the names of the stars by heart, but sometimes I have to look in my books to make sure I’m right about which one is which, just in case.
Like there—that’s Diphda, one of the brightest stars ever, because it’s a giant. Even though our sun is closer and brighter to us, Diphda is way bigger and brighter than our sun. It doesn’t exactly look that way from Earth, but that’s only because we’re closer to our sun than we are to Diphda, so it seems the wrong way around even though Diphda is definitely way bigger.
Diphda is part of a big constellation named Cetus, which somebody named after a giant whale that was trying to eat people. There are a lot of constellations that are animals, but I don’t remember all of them because I don’t see the pictures in my head the way the people who came up with the names did. I think it’s weird that constellations are all supposed to be really fancy pictures of animals and people and stuff, because they don’t actually look like that at all—they’re just straight lines that make a lot of rectangles and triangles. So it doesn’t really make sense that people think they’re animals … but that’s okay, because it’s kind of fun to pretend they are.
There’s a bunch of other stars in the Cetus constellation too, not only Diphda, but none of them are as bright as Diphda is, at least if you lined them all up in a row and looked at them from the same ways away. I bring Telly around gently to look at all the different stars and systems in Cetus and play with her dials to focus on each one, even when it takes a lot of time to get it right. There’s Mira, Zeta Ceti, Tau Ceti, then Diphda—wait. There was something different about Tau Ceti. I swing back in that direction.
There’s a little object circling around the star! I try to magnify it further, but I can’t. I didn’t bring any of my other eyepieces, which was pretty dumb. The ship zooms around a bit and I laugh because it looks silly, and it stops all of a sudden like it hears me! Then I watch it turn, and then it speeds toward me, slowly getting bigger and bigger as I watch. But Tau Ceti is really, really far away so I don’t think it’ll get here before Mom comes out to drag me inside for dinner. And I don’t think she’ll listen if I try to tell her that the ship is coming and we have to wait for them, because she’s a big stickler about me getting inside before the bears and the wolves and the coyotes get me, even if we’ve never seen the first two around and I could totally fight a coyote before it ate me.
The ship is already way closer now. They must be moving super fast! I can see inside the windows and there’s a bunch of shapes moving around, little alien animals or something, but they’re moving too fast for me to really see what they are. They blur in every direction past a bunch of little porthole windows in the side of the ship, like how ants are always running around like crazy in every direction. Then one finally stops! It’s a big blurry dark shape, but it raises a hand-thing and it waves so I wave back because that’s manners.
Aliens! I’m gonna be best friends with aliens! I hope they eat all my beans so I don’t have to eat them and then Mom has to make us something else because you can’t let guests starve.
“Ryland! You get in here before the table’s set or I swear I’m hauling that telescope to the pawn shop! Don’t make me come get you!”
Yikes. She sounds mad. “Mom!” I yell back. “Mom, there’s aliens! The aliens are coming! Mom!”
But, like always, she doesn’t hear me. I gotta go ask her if the aliens can sleep over. I don’t mind sharing my room if I have to, but I hope they don’t touch my stuff unless it’s for cool experiments and they promise to give it back after. And also let me watch the experiments.
I leave Telly and my other astronomy things and book it toward the house. I can hear the rumbling of the ship’s engines now and I look up for just a second, and their ship is all of a sudden hovering sideways right over me—how’d they get here so fast? It looks kinda like the Challenger that exploded a few years ago. I cried a bunch about it even though boys aren’t supposed to do that, but it was only because I was really little and I wouldn’t do it now—
I’m still looking up instead of at my feet while I run and I catch my toe on a big rock and trip. My hands fly out to catch me but instead of going down to the ground I start falling up to the sky, tumbling head over heels over heels over head, my stomach lurching every time I spin like I’m on a loop-the-loop rollercoaster.
“Woah, woah!” The wind rushes around me in a howl and my guts hurt and this isn’t fun anymore, I thought meeting aliens would be fun but it’s not. I’m gonna be sick and I’m so scared, I don’t actually want them to take me away, it was just a joke, I’m scared— “MOM!” I scream, and I lied because I’m crying again like the little baby I always am even when I try to be brave. “MOM, HELP, MOM! Please! I can’t get back down!”
I’m still flying through the air and I see my stargazing field and Mom’s car and my house so little down on the ground, the same way the birds must see everything, and I miss it all so much, I want Telly and my books and my—there! Mom’s running out the door and she’s looking at me and she’s got her hand over her mouth all terrified. I scream HELP ME as loud as I can but my mouth won’t make any sounds, even though I can feel the words climbing up in my throat, they won’t come out.
I kick out at the air and try to push myself towards her, but Mom can’t even reach me—even if I could scream, she couldn’t reach me, so it won’t work. She stretches out a hand out toward me and I reach out back to her even though I know it doesn’t matter, but I want my mom so bad—I can barely see her because she’s so tiny and my eyes are so cry-blurry and I know, I just know the aliens are about to get me and I’m going to die out in space all alone with them—
A warm, impossible hand clamps onto my arm. Then Mom’s pulling me down, down through the sky to safety and I don’t understand how but we’re in her room in the rocking chair and I’m all folded up in her arms the way she used to do when I was really small and had bad dreams. It’s like nothing’s ever been wrong at all.
“I gotcha, baby,” she says. She’s warm and smells like dish soap. I tuck my face into her stomach and bawl and she doesn’t tell me I’m too old for it, just holds me tighter. “You’re safe. Mom’s here. I told you to come in before the coyotes got you, didn’t I?”
“They weren’t coyotes,” I mumble into her shirt.
“Well, whatever they were, they’re not gonna get you.”
She holds me tight and rocks back-and-forth, back-and-forth, humming quietly under her breath while my crying slows down into hiccups. I burrow further into the folds of her big blue fuzzy sweater to blot out everything else, even though it always makes my face itchy.
I’ll eat all the green beans she wants if it means I don’t have to be abducted by aliens. I’ll eat anything she makes. Her arms around me make me feel like the whole world is gone, but in a good way, like I don’t have to look at it or be nice to it unless I want to. Her humming gets louder.
I don’t recognize the melody. It makes the hair on my neck stand up.
“Mom, what’s that song?” It’s a new one, not a lullaby or anything I really know—something I heard on the radio a couple times, or maybe at a karaoke bar.
I’m too young for bars.
I’m—I’m not me anymore, am I?
“Mom?”
“Ryland, now’s not the time. You have a big day tomorrow, you have to sleep.”
“But—“
“No.”
I wriggle in her grasp. I want to see her face. Is she mad at me? Am I still her good boy, even if I know, somehow, that I’m decades too old for that? My heart is pounding so hard she should be able to feel it through both of our sweaters. “Mom?”
“I love you bunches. You know that, right?” She squeezes me hard. Something in her voice is weird.
“Can you let go? You’re squishing me.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I can’t.”
I need to see her face. What if she turned into a monster while I wasn’t looking? What if she doesn’t look like Mom anymore?
… What does Mom even look like, anyway? My stomach cramps. Why don’t I remember?
I squirm harder, but her arms are locked tight around me. “You’re hurting me!”
“Just think of the kids, Grace,” she says softly. That’s not Mom’s voice.
I know that accent. Sour-milk dread curdles in my gut.
She won’t let me go until it’s time to load me into a capsule like fragile cargo and ship me off far, far away. I’m going to die alone and afraid and a billion miles from home, and there’s nothing I ever could have done about it.
“All those kids you’ll be saving. Think of them.” Stratt smiles at me. It’s a cold thing.
Her iron grip on my arm burns the skin in the shape of a three-pointed star and in the same moment the pain registers, the wind rips me from her grasp, tearing the skin where her hand wraps around it. I shriek as I fall up again, away from the ground as if gravity’s reversed itself, with no one who cares enough to pull me back down this time.
“No, I don’t want to die, don’t let me die!” I sob, flailing. “Please—NO—oh my God, please—please don’t do this to me, I’ll do anything—STRATT!”
She walks off into the looming sunrise without so much as a glance over her shoulder, the shape of her dwindling and then vanishing completely as I tumble away into the sky. I twist and grab at the clouds, at the air of the atmosphere itself, desperate for anything to slow the ascent, but Earth has abandoned me.
I scream with everything I’ve got, over and over, heaving in air with a violent whooping sound between shrieks that eventually turn to retching as I fall out of orbit into a black, starless sea. There’s no rhythm to my hysterics, just wordless, animal fear forcing itself out of my body in howls. I convulse. Sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum. Nobody will ever hear me again. I’m thrashing in every direction but it doesn’t matter, none of it matters, the total momentum of a system can’t be changed by the forces inside that system. Fight like Earth’s hero or run like a coward, I’m never getting out of here alive.
The world disappears and I’m left in total darkness. Each time I stop screeching to inhale, I get a taste of the vast nothingness that surrounds me in every direction—even the stars are gone. There’s only total, hopeless isolation. My cries turn to bawling.
I can’t even die quickly. There’s nothing to injure myself with, no EVA suit to pierce.
My voice gives out and just breathing makes my throat feel like it’s two sheets of flaming sandpaper rubbing together, but I try to scream again, once, twice, three times in full-body heaves, my chest burning with the effort of pushing air from my lungs. I don’t stop. I can’t. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts, I need my vocal chords to work again because I can’t die like this, I can’t, I’ll do anything, please, Mom, God, Stratt, I need someone to save me, I can’t die alone and terrified and endlessly falling away from the only place I’ve ever felt loved, PLEASE—
I land hard on my right side, every muscle clenched tight, nauseous with fear. The world lurches into view around me, all-white and claustrophobically close. Where … ?
The hum of the Hail Mary orients me.
How could I forget, even for a second, where I am? Where she put me? I can still feel her hand on my burn, the heat off her body, like my skin is holding onto the dream even as my head tries to reject it. It wasn’t real, but it’s the closest thing I’ve had to a human touch in over a decade, at least by Earth’s measurement of time. Some miserable little part of me wants to cling to it as desperately as I’ve ever clung to anything.
“You are okay, question?” There’s a high, panicked quaver to Rocky’s voice.
I can't do anything but gasp in lungfuls of stale air and feel my heart in my throat pounding about thirty miles a minute while my forehead soaks up the coolness of the floor. My arms and legs are trembling like crazy and I’m tangled in my blanket, so I won’t be getting up anytime soon. That’s fine. It’s not like there’s any reason to move. It’s not like there’s anywhere I could go! My next gasp of air turns into a hysterical little wheeze.
I try to take a slower breath in. It hitches in my chest. “Fine,” I manage.
“Have nightmare, question?”
“I said—that I’m fine.” My voice cracks. This is so pathetic.
“ … Okay.”
I immediately undermine that conversational win by curling into a ball and crying. What does any of it matter? There’s nobody else around that cares about our made-up standards for masculinity. I saved the stupid Earth. I did my job as their sacrifice. Now that my life’s worthless to them, I can act like a baby whenever I want.
I hate Stratt for sending me here. I hate myself for getting roped into it. I hate the quartermaster who gave DuBois too much astrophage and I hate DuBois for accidentally killing himself and Shapiro with it. I hate Yáo and Ilyukhina for dying on the way here. I hate the computer robot for not saving them. I hate the coma slurry I have to choke down multiple times a day and the years this trip is going to take to get to a planet that isn’t even my home, I hate that I’m never going to see my home again and that I’m never going to talk to another human ever again and that I’m so, so desperate for someone to touch me that I’ll be rewinding that fake hug and I love you from my mom for the next six months, if not the rest of my sad little life. I hate astrophage. I hate astrophage. I hate astrophage.
“You are leaking much water. You are sure you okay, question?”
The burst of anger fades. I feel like a deflated balloon animal. I’m never going to see another balloon animal. “Give me a minute.”
Rocky goes quiet. I’m scaring him. I need to get up and do something other than sulk—it’s not good for me, it worries him, and if I let myself start sinking into a depression this early into the journey, how am I ever going to make it to Erid with my sanity intact?
… But it’s so much less effort to lay on the floor and let the nightmare terror fizzle out into numbness. What does one day, one hour, one more minute matter, when I have thousands of them to waste?
“You are okay, question?” I’d bet my food supply he waited exactly sixty seconds to ask again. I’d bet my food supply on anything, at this point—I don’t want it anymore.
“Yeah.”
“You get up, question?”
I pull the quilt over my head. The tear tracks on my cheeks itch and I’m still shaking a little and my stomach hurts. “No. Can you leave me alone?”
I swear I can hear him thinking about what to try next. I wish he’d stop. I wish he weren’t here, trying to look after me, but safe on Erid with Adrian and the rest of his people. Then I could just lay here until my body decides it’s had enough.
“Grace—”
“Please.” It comes out of me in a croak. “Leave me alone.”
He goes quiet again.
I curl up tighter. The light that makes it through the quilt tints everything a soft orange. I’m exhausted in a way that always seems to walk hand-in-hand with total misery. All my muscles ache, there’s a tension in my jaw that means I was probably grinding my teeth in my sleep, and I can’t stop trembling like I’ve really overdone it on the coffee. God, I wish I still had some coffee left. Everything about being awake and alive right now is too much effort. I don’t feel like I slept at all, but I’m too afraid of another nightmare to try closing my eyes, so I stare at the stitches holding my blanket together, let my head go foggy, and pretend the combination makes me feel nothing at all.
I drift. The floor under me is hard, enough that my hips and lower back are already aching—I’m going to stiffen up if I don’t move. Falling off my bunk didn’t do me any favours either. I’m supposed to be taking better care of my body, because all the extra gravity is going to wreck it. Whatever. If I have to live, I can live to regret it. I push the heels of my hands into my eyes and curl my fingertips into my scalp until it hurts. I need to trim my nails. I lay still again. Now the world is dark, and my eyes are itchy, and my palms are wet.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Thunk. Thunk-thunk. Thud.
Breathing starts to get hard. There’s not enough fresh air under this blanket. I can’t find it in myself to care. Maybe I’ll pass out. I don’t think you dream when you pass out.
My hands smell like DuBois’s soap, some kind of generic clean scent. If it’d been DuBois laying here, he would get up. It would go against his entire ethos to sulk like this. If Stratt were here, she’d probably smack me. Although, if Stratt were here, one of us probably would’ve killed the other before this became an issue in the first place.
I wonder if she had secret backup plans for all of the primary team, or if she really was just that lucky with me. Probably not—I’ve never known her to not plan for the worst. I wonder if she put herself on Yáo’s backup list. I don’t even know if she was coma resistant.
Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. Thunk-thunk-thunk. Whooooosh.
Thunk.
Thunk.
Rocky’s apparently not going to leave me alone. If I could feel like anything other than a used tissue that missed the garbage can, I’d probably be annoyed at him for ignoring me.
Thunk-unk-unk-unk-unk-unk-unk. Scraaaape. Scraaaaaaaaaaaaape.
Something suspiciously warm and xenonite-feeling pushes up against the length of my back through the quilt. My body immediately relaxes—it’s not even a conscious thing, I’m just that much of a sucker. My breathing goes shaky again.
Thud-thud. The temperature increases as he settles against the side of the ball I’m leaning on. I can’t help but press myself a bit tighter to the wall between us. Under the blanket like this, with my eyes closed, and if I ignore the fact that there’s no give to the material, I can almost pretend I’m laying back-to-back with another human. Maybe I’m in my apartment, sharing a bed with someone, and all of this was a bad dream. Maybe I can get up and look out my window and see the San Francisco skyline again, with the glimmer of the ocean in the distance stretching out what seems like forever. Or maybe I can roll over, curl around whoever’s behind me, and hold onto them as hard as I can until it hurts us both.
Who am I trying to kid? I know where I am.
I turn over and crush myself against the xenonite anyway. Even through the blanket, the heat is almost too much on the sensitive skin of my face and it makes breathing almost impossible, but a couple minor burns and a little oxygen deprivation won’t kill me. I fold around the base of his ball and he shifts to bump up against the part of the wall where my chest is. The impact feels like an earthquake. I swear it rattles my ribs.
I was wrong, earlier. My mission might be done, but I still have a responsibility to Rocky. I need to stay sane so he doesn’t have to face this journey alone; I can’t hide away under a blanket like a coward. It’s not fair of me to make him worry like this—he spent half a century alone in space, trying to save his world, and yet I’m having sobbing meltdowns after only a few months, even with the best company a guy could ask for? How much more self-absorbed can I possibly get?
Rocky makes a gentle thrumming that I feel as a vibration deep in my body. It seems to move through my bones and across my skin in a tingle, some kind of intensely pleasant paresthesia. I shiver.
“What—what is that?” My voice is scratchy.
“Soothing sound. Comfort.”
Oh. I cry a little more. There’s some gross sniffling involved. Rocky is so brutally, unflinchingly kind to me and I don’t really know what to do with it most of the time.
I start running my fingers over the burn scars on my left arm, the three-pointed star and the mottle of chemical and heat damage. It’s strange to be glad they’re there, but I like what they represent. They say, there is someone who loves you above all else, and, this is someone you love just as much.
It’s a thought that has weight to it, the kind you think and bask in the feeling of for a minute and then get embarrassed about because of how earnest it is. I’ve blown so far past any ability to feel shame right now that I can’t even muster token awkwardness. It’s just nice to know someone cares about me.
I take a breath. It’s a little unsteady, but not as bad as it was.
We stay like that for a few minutes while my nervous system tries to regulate itself, me wrapped like some kind of human croissant around the spot where Rocky huddles at the base of his xenonite ball, and him making that same constant low hum that drips serenity. Eventually, I’m calm enough that I actually start falling asleep. I feel warm, soothed, safe. I could sleep again, if I wanted to.
I shift my weight to one side and only groan a little as I climb to my knees. I’m gonna need to stretch more often. I wonder if Rocky could make me some kind of massage gadget.
He’s watching me quietly. On a whim, I lunge forward to give the xenonite ball another hug. “Thanks, pal. I needed that.”
“You are actually okay now, question?”
“Mostly, yeah.” I sit back on my heels and shake my head. “Dreams are funny, because they feel like real life when they’re happening. As real as me talking to you right now. And even when you wake up, a lot of the time—at least for me—I remember what happened, and exactly how it felt. When something scary happens … it’s hard to shake off, even if I know it didn’t actually happen—or didn’t happen the way it did in the nightmare, anyway—because it … it feels so real.”
Rocky tilts his carapace curiously. “What was nightmare, question?”
I grimace. I’d rather forget about it, but I guess I should tell him something. I owe him that. I’m quiet for so long he taps the xenonite to get a better look at me.
Deep breath. Keep it brief. “I, uh, was back on Earth. And then I got sucked out into space. I was completely alone, and all the stars had gone out.” I put a hand out to touch the wall. On the other side of my hull, a few inches at most from my fingertips, is endless space. But if something happened, I wouldn’t go tumbling off into nothingness. The explosive decompression would probably kill us both before we had time to realize anything was wrong, which is … almost comforting. “Dreams usually aren’t super realistic, but it’s hard to notice that anything is wrong. Logic doesn’t really exist in them, but you also can’t tell it’s gone.”
I wait for him to take the opportunity to make some kind of joke at my expense about not being logical even when I’m not dreaming, but it doesn’t come. He just shifts uncomfortably, a weird tension in his stance, fully stiff like he’s trying too hard to distribute his weight evenly across his arms.
“Something wrong? Besides, y’know, me being a total mess.”
He bursts out, “I know you not supposed to be here. On ship in space. You no need to pretend.”
“You—huh? You know?” The bottom drops out on my stomach.
“I not know why you here, or why you not supposed to be here. But you are not good at lie about it. Do not have to explain why you here, but not need to pretend either.”
“Oh.” I don’t know how to react. Maybe I should panic? The biggest feeling I can muster right now is probably close to what a damp towel somebody wrung out and left in a pile on the bathroom floor experiences.
Rocky fidgets. “Apology. We no need talk about it. Want to lose at chess again, question?”
“I—look, it’s not that—I don’t not want you to know,” I stammer. “It’s just that if I tell you then I have to re-live it, and I know it’s going to upset both of us, and I don’t want to deal with feeling bad when we don’t have to. If you could absorb the information by osmosis or something and we never had to think or talk about it ever, I’d be totally cool with that.” It’s great that being a spineless wimp is what got me into this mess in the first place and that I’m continuing that behaviour by avoiding this extremely-overdue conversation. That little not-coincidence definitely doesn’t bother me at all.
“You write it down, question?”
“No, no, that’d be worse. What I want is to skip the talking and processing and coping parts and get right to the bit where it’s old news.”
“Understand. I make time machine, then we skip talking.”
“Yeah, that’d be good.” I sigh. “We should talk about it. I should tell you. It’s just … hard.”
“Do not have to explain if not want. Is painful. No need cause more pain.”
“I know. But I’m gonna tell you now, because I don’t think I’ll ever have the will to do it again if I don’t do it now, and I—I should.” I exhale. I’m still tense, but it’s not as bad as it was. “Thanks, though, for giving me the option not to.”
I move so I can sit with my back against Rocky’s ball, blanket in my lap. I don’t think I can look at him for this. Yes, I’m still a coward. Not even he could fix that.
Rocky shuffles up to the edge of the ball and leans against his side—I can feel the slight extra warmth of him even through my shirt and it makes my chest give a funny little twinge. I tip my head back to rest against the xenonite.
Then I tell him all of it, from the very start. How I got my PhD and banged my fists against the wall of academia as hard as I could until they threw me out. The move to teaching and the way my students helped me feel like a normal person again, like I was actually meant to live in the world with other people, like I might mean something to anyone. Stratt tracking me down and abducting me and the rest of our team, so many of us going half-willingly at best, over and over in a pattern I feel like an idiot for only recognizing halfway through describing it. The joy and terror of sciencing the heck out of some astrophage. The joy and terror of working to save the planet alongside the best and bravest people I’d ever known. The way that somehow, everything was going fine, great even—right up until it wasn’t.
“Human eyes are good, but they’re not accurate enough to tell the difference between a milligram and a nanogram of astrophage. And that was it. One tiny little mistake by a quartermaster probably running on the same three hours’ sleep all of us were getting that close to the launch, and both DuBois and Shapiro paid the price.
“… And so did I. Because I was the only one who could replace them. And I knew that then, sort of, but—I didn’t want to die. Of course I didn’t want to die! Yáo and Ilyukhina had months to come to terms with going on a suicide mission, but I didn’t even get a week. I got a meeting where everyone else walked in knowing Stratt was about to hand me my death sentence and I got to sit there and be blindsided by the fact that—that she didn’t keep me around on merit, but because I was lucky enough to have the right combination of genes and choice of dissertation.
“I would’ve had to have been crazy to say yes, right? That’s what I kept telling myself. No normal person would’ve said “well, I’ve had a good run, sign me up to die in space!”. So I said no. And I know—I know that makes me a coward, but I’m just not that good of a person. I don’t know how to be. I kept replaying it in my head after she stuck me in that cell, wondering if I could’ve done anything differently. You know, there were over a million volunteers for this mission the first time Stratt put out the call? A million people that were better than me. But I’m the one who ended up here and I couldn’t even leave with dignity.” I bury my face in my hands and take a deep, shuddering breath.
“Stratt left me in a cage until the launch and had me put in a coma early, so I couldn’t sabotage her plan before I got here. Because she knew that I could save everyone. That I would save everyone. And that’s the part I hate most—how can I hate her when she might’ve prevented the deaths of all of humanity by killing me? Am I that much of a self-serving bastard? It’s the trolley problem, and I know pulling the lever is the right option, I’m just mad that it was me on the other side of the track.
“And the worst part now is that you and I could be having a dance battle or something right now instead of talking about this if I hadn’t been such a spineless, selfish waste of oxygen. I could’ve decided to come here willingly. I wouldn’t be so miserable if I hadn’t had to have been drugged into unconsciousness to get me on this ship. I’m still—I don’t forgive Stratt for what she did, I told her to go to hell and I stand by that, but … when it’s one life against an entire planet, it stops being a real choice you get to make. I just wish it hadn’t had to be my life.”
Rocky’s been very silent, sinking further into the floor with each sentence. He makes a low, mournful noise. Then he asks, voice quavering, “You say you were put into early sleep, question?”
Oh. Of course he’d ask about that. “Yeah. So I couldn’t tell the rest of the crew that I was being forced to go. It wasn’t a normal human sleep, not the kind you can wake someone up from. All I remember is being on Earth with some guy giving me an injection, and then I was here.” Without my memory of myself, or any knowledge of where I was or why I was here, and with two corpses that it hurt to look at even before I remembered their names. I don’t want to talk about that. I’m ready to be done with this conversation now.
“I need new word,” Rocky says, and it’s been so long since I’ve heard him say it that I start.
“Yeah?”
“To hurt other for no reason. To hurt other for joy of causing hurt.”
“That’s not what—“ I take a breath. Close my eyes for a second. “Cruel. We call that cruelty.”
“Cruel,” he says. His voice is shaking. “What was done to you. To make go on mission of death. To put to sleep by force. Is worst thing person can do to other person. Grief. Grief. Grief.”
I don’t know what to say. I press against the warmth from him I can feel even with the panels between us. I can tell I’ve been sitting like this for too long because my back and legs are locked stiff, but I don’t want to move, either.
“You are good person. Is okay you want to live. Is not selfish to want to live.”
I wish he wouldn’t say things like that. “Did you go to Tau Ceti willingly?”
“... Yes. Volunteer as part of ship-build. Then volunteer again for mission.”
“Right. So don’t tell me it wasn’t selfish to put my life above the life of every other human being.”
“Is not what I said. I say, is not selfish to want to live.” He pauses. Then he adds, hesitantly, “And you change behaviour. You sacrifice self to save me. Save Erid.”
I put my head in my hands. I don’t know how to tell him that decision doesn’t change anything without sounding like it didn’t matter to me. Just because I did the right thing once, doesn’t make up for the kind of cowardice that leads a guy to be willing to sacrifice his entire planet. Learning a lesson I never should’ve needed in the first place doesn’t wipe my conscience clean. “Can we talk about something else now?”
“Apology,” Rocky says miserably. When I turn around, he’s curled up tight, carapace pressed right to the ground. It hurts to see him like that. All I accomplished with this conversation was upsetting both of us. He gives himself a shake and straightens up when he notices me looking. “Is enough. Want to listen to human music, question?”
“I really, really do.”
He puts on a song from what I guess is one of the new artists we’re listening to today, since I don’t recognize the jaunty rhythm. If I felt less like week-old garbage, the lilting percussion and the echo of multiple voices raised in song would make me want to get up and dance. As it is, it only makes me think of Earth and a room full to bursting with warm bodies, chilled booze, and the knowledge that at least three of us wouldn’t see next month’s full moon.