Chapter Text
We rolled from draft 3.5 to 4.0 of our return procedure when we were still 2 years out from Erid. At that time, Rocky wasn’t finished his expansions to Mary’s phased array yet, but we already knew we wouldn’t be able to boost our radio comms range to more than 0.3 lightyears. We were beating our deadline by almost a year and a half. This was just as well; by the time Rocky sent our first transmission to Erid, I was in no condition to design a planet-saving seeding protocol.
It’s a moot point. What ends up happening is nothing like what we wrote in 4.0.
For one thing, Rocky’s estimates about what the Eridians would be able to pull together in the 132-day (yes, Earth day) preparation window we gave them were a little conservative. You can’t blame the guy; a lot changes when you’re out running an errand for 68 years. When the Eridians finally responded – after a 108-day ghosting period (which was unavoidable, if rude) – we learned they’d already been working on a second interstellar ship. I’d lost track of the lettering in my original naming system, so I dubbed it the Blip 2.
Development of the Blip 2 meant Erid had a large workforce specialising in pressure vessels who were now looking to get laid off. This was excellent news for the incoming alien for whom Erid’s atmosphere was deadly.
Speaking of that guy – the second major difference from the original plan is, well, me. I’m not doing so well. This is why Rocky insists we do not deliver the Taumoeba before we get to Erid.
The Blip 2 is not ready to launch, not even to Threeworld, and I need more medical attention than Armando can provide. Also, food. The logical solution to both of these problems is a change of crew: one Grace in exchange for five Eridians, kitted out in the shiny new XEVA suits Rocky taught them to make.
Among the many data packets Rocky’s sent to Erid is a ‘Hail Mary for Dummies’ guide which the new astronauts have been using as a crash course. It will hopefully be enough to save them from getting pulled over on the trip to Threeworld. Rocky will make all the final calls when it comes to operating the ship, though. He’s had 4 years to learn the Hail Mary more intimately than any of the human flight specialists ever did. That’s why he has to stay behind.
I’m told there’s a second ‘for Dummies’ guide in Rocky’s data packets. This one is ‘Humans’. I’ve heard over the radio that there are chemists working on synthesising vitamins and protein sources, and botanists to house and proliferate my seedlings. There’s a primary and secondary habitat design team – for a primary and secondary habitat. There is a team of biologists backed by physicians, a physiotherapy team, and even what I roughly translate as a ‘xenopsychologist’. That’s a new one to Rocky, too. Entire fields of study are being invented for my treatment.
Rocky has shouldered the coordination of all of this, as well as continuing his ad-hoc reparations of the sardine tin we live in. Even in my best moments, I struggle to contribute.
I should be flattered by all the work they’re putting in. I am not. In my worst moments, I have to admit, I actively undermine it. I do this because I don’t believe them.
Poor Rocky. He has a lot of accounting to do. There will be a raft of screening and tests once he returns – not to mention quarantine, given his long-term exposure to multiple alien life forms – but right now the Eridians do not have the luxury of calculating whether they can trust him. They’re taking some of the breeder farms off the ship with me for redundancy, but they want the predator introduced yesterday, and Rocky’s the only one who can do it.
It is very much in the interest of the planet Erid to keep Rocky happy. Right until they seal the airlock, that is; then they can do whatever they want. They can return to expending their resources on a dying planet rather than a dying alien they don’t need to feed.
I imagine this fear started as a seed at some point and I missed the opportunity to nip it in the bud. I don’t remember it germinating. I’ve definitely discussed it with Rocky, but I can’t always recall which conversations we’ve already had. I’m not sure exactly how the brain fog is interacting with the preexisting amnesia, but the result is what I’d scientifically call ‘not great’.
I do not like to upset Rocky. The more apparent my deconditioning gets, the more distressed he becomes.
After we enter the solar system, I ask him again: “How can you know what they’ll do, though? How can you know for certain?” and I don’t think he knows what to say any more. Instead, he talks about the future – how he’s going to see Adrian again, to put his feet on the ground for the first time in decades. He asks me how I want to celebrate when I land.
Earth astronauts always talk about missing proper food. I tell him I’m saving a bag of sour Skittles for when it’s all over. He makes a sound I can roughly translate as “Eugh.” The disgust is better to see in him than the fear.
At this point the round-trip delay on our radio transmissions is hours rather than days. This gives me a good opportunity to insist, over and over again, that I should be on call for any Taumoeba-related issues that crop up on the journey to Threeworld. Of course, 4.0 and its descendants contain all my Taumoeba knowledge – they had to, in case I didn’t make it to Erid – but I make it clear there’s added value in my being able to troubleshoot problems on the fly.
After he ends our last recording, Rocky turns to me – something he only does for my benefit – and says “Grace acting strange.” He doesn’t add, again. He asks, "Grace feeling confused, question?”
“No. I know.” I sigh. I search for a half-truth that’ll appease him. “It’s first contact. Or, I guess, second. I really want to make a good first impression.”
“Grace no need worry about this,” he explains. “Saved all of Erid. Cannot possibly make bad impression.”
Today is a good day. Today I know I am not being rational. It’s kind of like realising your brakes aren’t working right as the light turns red. I tell myself: Rocky has never lied to me. He’s only ever been wrong when it’s to do with concepts in physics his people haven’t discovered yet.
It’s just that it’s possible he’s wrong. How do you manage risk with a non-entity? An entire alien race, with all predictions about behaviour extrapolated from one individual? And so my fingers tremble as I pull on my flight suit.
Heck, why do I even care? I’ve been ready to die on Mary for years. I guess I just don’t want to leave him.
Docking onto the space elevator is precise, tedious and uncanny. There’s a reverberation as our hull groans at the mating. I wring my hands. We’re hooking on to a secondary airlock; Mary’s couldn’t withstand their environment. As I listen to it cycle, I realise they can already ‘see’ us. I notice Rocky perking up, at attention. I guess he can see them too.
I am very well behaved as the new team of Eridians boards my ship. I wait patiently, neatly hovering next to my personal items packed up in boxes, my plants, and a disconnected Armando. I carry our new inverted translator. Its transmitting frequency is set outside of human auditory range, so I don’t have to hear myself stammering out “Hello, Erid, I come in peace” in two different languages.
There are more than five of them. There is a team of xenobiologists boarding, as well as, I assume, diplomats. I have to admit I wasn’t prepared for the variety between individuals. I see exoskeletons of hematite and rutile, and even one Eridian with something like magnetite coating their carapace. The black crystalline structure glitters fetchingly beneath their XEVA suit.
They move aside and I see the pressurised container waiting in their airlock.
I feel heat flare up my throat and fall in pulses along throttled nerves as I realise they want me to get inside that thing. They want to fit all my kit in there too. There isn’t enough space. I know, with a clarity I’ve missed terribly and now resent: That is a coffin.
They are lying to Rocky. They are lying to me. I am forfeiting all control.
I am giving them my ship; I’m giving them everything. I’m giving them computers. I’m giving them all they need to know about nuclear warheads and anthrax and every piece of media ever made that tells them exactly how we feel about people like them.
This is ridiculous.
I turn and propel myself away from the airlock. I get a few feet before I stop, firstly because this behaviour is not becoming of Earth’s ambassador on Erid, and secondly because I’ve reached the back of the cockpit. I splay my hands against a monitor and try to breathe slowly. My emaciated heart can’t take much more than my baseline level of exertion these days. I wonder if they can hear it as blaringly as I can.
Something approaches me from the left-hand side. Oh, they’re tall. I try to jerk sideways, but Rocky’s in my way. He’s holding two hands up and saying my name. He’s saying, “Stop”. Then he’s saying, “Be gentle”.
I’m halfway through apologising when I realise I don’t understand what he means. “What?”
There are hands on my flight suit. Claws. Rocky has his hands in the air: Peace. I can stay still but I can’t move away; I’m fixed in place. I never realised how strong Eridians were. There’s a song in the air, a lamentation. There are pins and needles in my hands - pain, when I try to grip the claws that grab me.
They start to guide me towards the airlock. I scrabble at the monitors and the bungee cords and whatever else I can find but there’s nothing I could do to stop them, even without the weakness brought on by malnutrition. They’re pulling me and supporting me to move at the same time. In front of the container is exactly what I imagine you’d get if you asked someone to build a stretcher based on a description only. There are restraints attached to it.
No, no, no. No, thank you. “Rocky”, I say. “Don’t do this.” Wait, that's not what I meant. “Don’t let them do this.”
“Grace, we talked about this.”
“That thing is – please, it’s not for – Rocky –”
And then – it’s strange – all of a sudden, I’m already in the ground. I feel the earth all around me. I walk in darkness. There is dirt beneath my body and underneath my fingernails. In one and the same moment I am in a field and I’m on a stretcher and I am saying “Rocky, please, please.”
And then I’m on the elevator.
I am strapped to the stretcher and it is fixed in the container and the container is secured against the elevator floor and wall. Because of this, every time the elevator shudders – which it does constantly – I am not thrown around like a ping bong ball. The container is mostly opaque but there are slit-like translucent windows through which I can peer like a cat at a vet, searching for another human to hiss at. I see only Eridians in specialised seating and alien machinery infrastructure. I am listening to them speak, when I can hear them over the strange clangs which signal transitions between sections of the shaft structure. I am not in orbit but instead experiencing the cessation of weight caused by a free-fall. I am sick to my stomach. I am weeping.
A few of the Eridians are hovering around my crate instead of staying seated. They come through the clearest. One taps the xenonite wall between us, and it resounds. “Support systems stable,” they say. “Cannot find source.”
I would rather have not heard that, actually. If something is wrong with the container, the only thing I can do about it is pray it’s not critical.
Another anxiously chitters, “Hear that, question? Now Grace make ball.”
“It can understand you,” admonishes a third.
“Can it, question? It no respond.”
“I can understand you,” I squeak. But it turns out that’s a lie.
I don’t remember the elevator decelerating. I don’t remember the transfer to my new habitat. I remember they kept trying to speak to me, but I could only understand two words of it: Grace, Grace, Grace, and ‘sedate’.
Rocky was wrong about first impressions. I would categorically define this as ‘bad’. But it’s all just too much.
Once they unbox me they carry the stretcher into a slightly larger box. They roll me onto a cot and someone hands me a prefilled Capri-Sun-style pouch of something that tastes even more disgusting than Taumoeba. I prop myself up against the wall and watch them while I struggle to inflate my lungs against twice the gravitational forces they developed to handle.
This cramped space is full of Eridians. There are Eridians unpacking my things and securing Armando to the ceiling and scuttling around in circles with no apparent purpose at all. The one who looks like magnetite directs two others to take my temperature and blood pressure and heart rate. All the while they are saying “Grace sedate, Grace sedate.” No, I have that wrong – it must be “Sedate Grace,” with a different cadence – how am I now jumbling a two-word sentence?
I say, “No, that’s okay. I’m okay,” and I try to smile. I’m letting them treat me, aren’t I?
Armando whirs to life. I wait to hear Mary say “Administering sedative”, but she’s not here. He just quietly whips out a needle instead.
Magnetite drones, “Grace sedate. Grace, sedate.”
I try to stay in the room. I try to be brave. I have the uncanny sense that I weigh almost nothing and could float away. But they are stronger than me, and I have nowhere to run to and nothing to do to make this easier for myself other than be compliant. One of the assistants has to hold my arm steady as Armando approaches. They murmur, “Please, Grace sedate.”
The syringe was already depressed. I see that and don’t really clock it until Armando performs a blood draw. All that time he was coming toward me, it was already empty.
Magnetite takes the sample to the airlock. The assistants follow like an ebbing tide.
I sit in a huddle on my cot, in a box, outside of which is nothing, no one I know, only a dark and existentially hostile planet. The lines of this place waver around my body. I sip my Capri-Sun.