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It starts with echolocation and quickly escalates into existential dread.
Humanity, Grace knows, is lucky. Humans are happy to live in the era of stars: before the universe would expand so much that the light from distant galaxies would stop reaching the Earth and the sky would become dark, seemingly empty.
The stars were their teachers.
(Grace thinks now “they” more and more often. Not "we." He is human, Grace has no doubt about that, yet his connection with all the other humans seems to be disturbed, and not by the distance).
Light was their teacher. It traveled into human eyes and showed how galaxies move, how the universe evolves. It helped to measure time and distance.
But Eridians couldn't see the night sky. No echolocation shows you an object far outside the atmosphere, light-years away. So the Eridians must have some other sense, some way to detect the stars.
When Grace asks about the stars, Rocky just says, “We know."
“How?”
“We know."
“It’s actually funny," Grace mutters. thinking of experiments, of new questions to ask in order to decipher The Mystery of Eridian Sight. “The sky, the limitless space above Earth, is the place where we turn to when we’re alone."
Humans place the lost loved ones in "heaven." Or gods. Or other life, wiser and gentler than those of Earth.
In movies two friends apart look at the same moon to think of each other.
The 20th-century scientists sent the Voyagers in space with greetings from the earthlings written on two golden disks. No actual hope to find an addressee, but what a beautiful geste. Two love letters to no one in particular flying impossibly far. Just like a cry into the skies.
Heaven (or, with the modern scientific achievements, thankfully, space) is always there for you, however lonely you are.
“And they sent me in the deepest space reachable," Grace thinks. “Cause I'm the loneliest person they could find."
Grace had no one to ask about him when he disappeared. When he was taken. When he joined the mission. No one stood for him. No one tried to save him.
It’s like when you’re alone, you become a legitimate target, an obvious prey. You’re automatically less valuable. And when you try to say you have someone
- the children, I have my students! -
you're being denied to have this claim.
You have a fatal fault, a moral flaw. It’s you who should be sacrificed.
Grace doesn’t blame them, the human race.
Still, the cruelty lives in his bones, in his nerve endings – the sheer desperation of a caught animal.
Obviously, he doesn’t tell Rocky how he was captured, drugged and sent to space. It would’ve felt like a betrayal - to portray the whole Grace’s species as vicious beings ready to feed one of them to the void.
Grace tries not to relive the memory.
They caught him.
He was the most human human being – the only living specimen so far away from home.
At the same time, he was not even human anymore, just the thing with no right to feel or fear.
The space is the place of hope and deep, unspeakable fear.
Humans have always sought answers in the sky. From ancient Mesopotamian stargazers to the constructors of SETI. It was a strange balance, a dance between hoping for some sentient life and knowing of vast dead emptiness there.
They looked at the sky when they were lonely. And it was always unbearably painful to think there’s no one there.
Oh. And then, when they’ve sent the loneliest man to the loneliest place, the first thing said man did was to find a friend.
For thousands of years people fiercely dreamed of impossible connection.
And now, Ryland has Rocky.
Ryland looks at his closest friend and knows for sure Rocky sees him – sees him as a sentient, feeling being.
Something pinches deep in Grace’s chest. An ache, but a good, fulfilling ache.
“OK, yeah," Grace says. “The stars. Maybe we knew too”.