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They’d buried her in the small village in the Netherlands where she grew up.
It hadn’t been hard to find this place. It hadn’t even been hard to get here. My doctors didn’t like me travelling, but I’d flown a few times before since returning to Earth, and there was nothing much they could do to stop me from doing it again. I’d asked Maya to book the flights, and she had. My team of micromanagers would have to deal with it —- and they did. When you save the world, everyone else just bends around you.
I’d taken a car down the picturesque roads here from Amsterdam. She’d had a house there, and Maya asked if I wanted to see it. I didn’t know how to tell her that the woman I knew was not the same one who’d ever lived within those walls.
It was a beautiful place, the Netherlands. I’d never been, even when the Project had dragged me all over the world. I didn’t realise until a year in that she was avoiding the country altogether. She’d had some fear, maybe, that her facade of absolute coldness would drop the moment she stepped on familiar soil, and some weakness might peek through.
I picked my way down the gravel path that ran through the graveyard. It was a sunny day, because of course it was. The universe had never been very good at listening to how I felt. Maya held my arm as she always did, and Rocky lingered by my side in his xenonite suit, his usual curiosity subdued into a low simmer.
We found it easily. My throat felt dry, and I swallowed when I read the name from across the path.
Eva Catharina Stratt (1981-2078)
Director of Project Hail Mary. Beloved daughter, sister, choir teacher, and advocate of Earth
“All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a thousand enemies, and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you.”
It was a modest grave. The headstone was small and understated, made of simple stone, but the quote beneath her name was undeniably expensive to carve. I’d read somewhere that an environmentalist group raised the funds to bury her, though there was no funeral. There were no documentaries about her heroism. There were no celebrations or decorations on her grave. She had no mourners, just grateful children who saw her name in the paper and wanted to do some good.
That was ten years ago today.
It was the 23rd of April, a warm spring day nearly a year since I’d returned to Earth with the Eridians. She died in her home, I’d read months ago. It took them a few days to realise she was gone. Asleep in her chair with a book in her lap, the dust motes dancing in the sunbeam that reached through the window toward her cold body — that’s how they said her neighbors found her. I’d cried when I read it, then again when I had to explain it to Rocky. Then I cried on the plane here for good measure.
I’d wanted her to be alive when I finally made contact last August. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I never planned anything, mostly because it had been so long that I’d already prepared for her to be gone. I didn’t think I’d forgiven her. I didn’t even know if I would have contacted her at all if she hadn’t died. But some part of me couldn’t bear to step back into a world without a single familiar face, and she was the closest person to me before I left.
We don’t always get what we want. In this case, Stratt got a comfy sofa in the afterlife, and I got a grave.
Maya helped me down onto the grass in front of the simple headstone, and I cushioned my chin between my knees, staring it down. Stratt stared back at me with the same stony intensity she always had.
“We’ll give you some space?” Maya asked.
I nodded.
Before he left, Rocky pressed up against me and let out a low hum, an Eridian gesture of comfort.
“Yell for me if the rotten bastard climbs out of there,” he told me sincerely.
Apparently, Eridians had zombies in their culture too. They also held grudges for a very long time.
“Sure, bud,” I said, giving him a pat and then pushing him away with all the limited strength of an old man messing with his old friend.
When it was just Stratt and I alone, I sighed.
A breeze flowed through the graveyard, cooling the aggressive warmth of the sun to a more tolerable temperature. It rustled the trees overhead, sent the birds chirping, and tugged at my greying hair. I looked up at the blue sky, smelled the Earth, and swallowed back the animal in me, the part of my body that wanted to burst with joy whenever I stepped outside and felt the dirt beneath my shoes. It may have been nearly a year, but it never got old. None of this did.
And it wouldn’t be here if not for her.
Then, I looked down and felt the twinge in my neck as it moved. I felt the ache of my joints, the slowness of my mind, and the tired beat of a heart that wasn’t designed to leave this place.
I was dying. I wouldn’t be if not for her.
Truly, I wouldn’t be alive right now either. I should have been well over a hundred this year. Instead, I was maybe in my early seventies. Relativity was a wonderful, terrible thing. It meant I got to see the 2080s and everything they had to offer, but none of my friends were here to share it with me.
Friends, I imagined Stratt scoffing.
Okay, hey. That was a little mean.
It’s true. You know it’s true. You had nothing on Earth to mourn, not even a family.
Look, we’re not going to have this argument today.
When would you prefer to have it?
Never. Never would be good.
Privately, I let myself admit she was right, as always. I’d loved my life before the Hail Mary, I had. And I’d loved the friends I’d made on the project. I’d loved my students, and my job, and the world. But I’d always been missing something.
I looked across the cemetery and found where Rocky and Maya had drifted off to. Rocky was scaling a sprawling fig tree with the lively youthfulness of some of my students back on Erid, and Maya was anxiously hovering around the base of it as if she’d be able to catch him if he fell. I assumed she’d brought them over there for the wooden bench below the branches, but Rocky had evidently ignored that entirely.
You love him, Stratt said.
Yeah. I did. And I never would have met him without her either.
Did you love me?
I pressed my lips together, and my gaze returned to the grave.
Before her betrayal, Stratt would have belonged on that list of things I’d lost on Earth. Now, I wasn’t so sure. It was complicated. It hurt my heart to think about it, so I tried not to.
“I don’t know,” I said into the warm Dutch air. “I think I miss you. I think…”
My hands wandered to the grass, and I picked at the green blades, pulling up dirt.
“I think you might have been the only person who’d have understood what I’ve gone through this last year,” I finally said. “Or— maybe not understood. Maybe just…”
I let out a long breath.
“I think you would have listened.”
There it is, she murmured. You loved me.
Maybe, I considered. A very long time ago, I might have loved her like a child loves the sunset. Like the ink loves the pen. Like a calf loves the farmer who heats its bottles and leads its kin to slaughter.
Maybe, one day, I’d loved her. One day, I’d curled up in her lap after a long day at the farm and wagged my tail. Not anymore. It was more complicated than that.
From my pocket, I pulled a small wax candle and a lighter. It wasn’t much. It was all I could find at the store in the airport with Rocky and Maya waiting in the car.
You love me, she said into my ear.
“Screw you, Stratt,” I told her as I lit the candle. The flame flickered around the wick, and the wax melted and pooled in the center, mesmerising.
I leaned forward and set it down in front of the gravestone. When I left this place, I wasn’t coming back. I doubted anyone would ever light this candle for her again. Nobody would ever leave flowers — even I hadn’t bothered to buy any. The stone was mossy enough to tell me no one had visited here since it was erected. I was her only mourner.
“Screw you,” I said again, but the words had long since lost their bitterness. “Rest easy.”
She didn’t respond. I didn’t expect her to.
I used my cane to pull myself up and hobble back over to Rocky and Maya, my chest tight. Then, I sat down on the bench beneath that fig tree and cried.
When I was finished, Maya rubbed my back and Rocky helped me stand. We walked back to the car together, and I didn’t look back.
The sun shone through the car window, its light spreading out into wicked tendrils as it hit the glass. It warmed my skin as I pressed the side of my head against it.
Apparently, adults these days had to be educated about sunscreen. Their kids had started burning under the rejuvenated sun, and the sight had brought their pre-Astrophage era grandparents to tears. Kids complained about the heat now, too. Why couldn’t it be winter all year, they asked. The glare of the afternoon sunlight on a wet road was a bother instead of a victory. These people heard about Astrophage and thought of electricity instead of doom.
Thank you, Stratt said as we pulled out of the cemetery parking lot.
Thank you, I thought back. It was a team effort after all.