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The heart monitor chimes at a steady, intermittent pace. It hasn’t changed its beat in nearly thirteen hours, when it gradually slowed to its current rhythm after it was beating so hard that Stratt thought he might have a heart attack and die. The oxygen tank puffs out its own rhythm from the ventilator, synthetic breaths respirating from deep within his intubated chest. The fluorescent lights hum. The furnace rumbles. Lorries beep and grumble outside. Eva Stratt removes her face from her hands, lowering one to hold her chin up, elbow propped on her knees.
She sits on a plastic chair in a small, quiet room in the clinic. The blinds on the window at the far wall are open. The large satellite dishes blink in the darkness, red lights flashing intermittently. Dr Ryland Grace lays in the bed in the center of the room before her, dead to the world. Stratt has spent the last few years staring at him, but he has never looked like this to her. Gone are his expressions of focus, confusion, euphoria, frustration, discomfort. His brow is easy; his eyes are closed. His yoke is easy; his burden is light. Under his smudged eyeglasses now packed away, he has straight eyelashes, deep crow’s feet and bags under his eyes. He would look quite peaceful if it wasn’t for his mouth taped shut around the plastic intubator. Grace won’t wake up until he reaches Tau Ceti, almost twelve light years away, but just in case, he is handcuffed to the bed. His capillaries have all burst on his wrists where he struggled against the metal cuffs earlier, deep, bruised striations slicing through the starry sky of red pinpricks beneath the skin. Dirt is packed under his short fingernails from holding on to Earth. She will ask a nurse to clean them later.
Stratt reaches over and pulls a few pieces of dead grass from his hair, combing them out with her fingers and tossing them to the floor.
His clothes have been cut away, replaced by a paper hospital gown. Earlier, she watched the medical team shear away the jeans, blades running through that yellow raincoat, his shirt as they quickly began the procedure. These hallmarks of Dr Grace are now in the incinerator. She only thought to keep his sneakers. They sit on the identical chair beside her, laces still tied from when they were pulled off his feet. She will add them to the small collection of his personal effects, which she gathered from his cabin earlier once the doctors had finished inducing his coma.
The ancient Egyptians, Stratt recalled, standing in the threshold of his quarters, buried the deceased’s most treasured items with them in the tomb so that they might enjoy them in the afterlife. It was a funerary ritual that served a great communal purpose, allowing those surviving to remember their loved one through the items they left behind as they gathered them. It was supposed to be easy and cathartic, but Stratt found it difficult and frustrating. Part of the struggle came from the fact that Dr Grace seemingly brought nothing of any emotional or material value with him. No photographs, no CDs, no books besides textbooks and faxed journal articles. No religious tokens, no games, not even a niche tea variety she could have overnighted in bulk. He was a blank canvas, an unformed person. A single-celled organism flailing his flagellum along the path of least resistance. It was deeply annoying that he insisted such a life could be worth so much amidst a sea of vibrant humanity.
This frustration fed into the other significant issue: Eva Stratt wanted to twist the knife. Dr Grace is a pathetic, selfish, weak malingerer who has wasted her time and others’ in his malingering, has critically jeopardized the mission with his shameful emotional crisis, and therefore does not deserve this kindness. She has no desire to secure his comfort on his voyage. She has comforted him enough in allowing him his meltdown. She should have been at the blast site, helping to recover the mangled remains of her dismembered subordinates--whatever wasn’t instantly vaporized--instead of coddling him. Entertaining him with the illusion of choice, wasting time even talking with him about his obligation, allowing him that opportunity to gain some dignity was more comfort than she was obligated to provide, and he summarily rejected it. It wasn’t enough that he could not resist her authority; Stratt wanted to punish him by denying him any familiar reminders of home. He could have his threadbare shoes and the clothes on his back.
But that would mean introducing more risk to the mission.
Yáo and Ilyukhina would wonder why their comrade brought none of his meager, milquetoast possessions. They would easily piece the truth together. And if not that, then she simply couldn't risk Dr Grace’s already-feeble psychological state if he had none of his creature comforts to stabilize him.
So she packed the bag angrily and threw the rest of his belongings in the trash compactor. Happy medium.
His eyes begin to move under his eyelids. Stratt leans forward, ready to jump up and press the alarm, rip the monitor from his finger to make the machine flatline. Anything to get help. Dr Grace stills after a few seconds, and Stratt settles. Space is dubbed the final frontier, but intergalactic travel is more straightforward than comas. Anyone can point to Tau Ceti on a map, find it in the night sky. No one knows where the soul goes when the body is comatose. Stratt’s mind wanders back to graduate school in an anthropology seminar, reading about Mbembe’s necropolitics and how the comatose liberate themselves from the sovereign powers expressed through the control of life and death. A precarious and arcane state of being. This might be the most perilous stage of Hail Mary’s journey.
The least Stratt can do is keep watch. It is slowly becoming all she can do. In a matter of hours, it will be the only thing she can do for good. Keep watch.
She takes her tablet and her laptop from her bag. There is a deluge of communications waiting for her. The meteorologists are updating her and the launch team about every Celsius degree, every kilometer per hour that the forecast changes. Mission control are communicating regularly about the results of their continued simulated launches, given this variable and that variable. Medical, engineering, astrophage, ISS, CNSA, the ESA, ISRO, NOAA. Everyone is in need of updates, and everyone is providing updates. Stratt even checks her horoscope. These are the last vestiges of control humanity holds over the Universe’s destiny. She can feel it rolling off her fingertips, soon to be out of reach. She can feel the dirt jamming under her fingernails.
Stratt sets her laptop on top of Grace’s shoes, props her tablet against his leg, and gets up. She knocks on the door. The lock clicks and jiggles, and the armed agent standing guard cracks open the door. “Get me a coffee.” Movement behind the door, some shuffling, and a mug of black coffee appears in her hand. She takes a few sips, stretches, yawns, and sits down again. Taking her laptop, she taps out one word responses, or, in many cases just K. A full sentence where she has reservations or critiques. She accepts every calendar invite, skims through the hourly progress reports from each of the taskforce departments. One email catches her eye.
“Ryland Grace suicide method?” The subject line reads. It’s from Dr Lamai. Stratt opens it. “Stratt,” says the email, “Has Dr. Grace specified a preference for suicide method? He is not responding to messages. Please let me know ASAP so I can make proper arrangements.”
Stratt swears. She goes to reply and types, “Apologies for the confusion. Dr Grace expressed his anxiety regarding launch to ISS. His coma was induced earlier this evening to reduce risk of medical complication during launch.” Here she pauses. How would Dr Grace kill himself? A difficult question to answer given the circumstances. He refused to embark willingly on the mission because he could not stomach the prospect of dying. He couldn't accept a far-off, mostly immaterial suicide. What decision would he make when it was time? Would he make a decision, or would he passively accept a dwindling life alone on Hail Mary until he languished away? “He asked for a small-calibre pistol. No preference on manufacturer. Please include detailed instructions.” Send. Make a decision, Dr Grace, she thinks. Commit. Pull the trigger.
When she has managed to clean up her emails and the only alerts coming in are regular timely reports, the clock on the wall opposite the bed reads 0322.
Stratt scrubs her face, digging her knuckles into her eyes, and sighs. She goes for another sip of coffee, but the mug is empty. She moves her cursor to refresh the page and start again, but hesitates. There’s nothing more to do but wait and trust that her contractors have this figured out. Her job is virtually done for this stage of the mission. Exhaustion grips her, making her joints sore and her eyes irritated, but she’s too nervous to sleep.
Dr Grace’s heart monitor chirps on steadily. The rhythmic whoosh of the ventilator forcing oxygen into his lungs, accompanied by that low-frequency hum from the internal pumps. If he were awake, he would run his hands through his hair, smudging dry erase marker ink from his hands to his forehead, and announce his intent to go get coffee and sweets from a vending machine. He would help himself to Stratt’s procurement card from her bag and bring her back paprika chips and two coffees. He would rattle off his completed and outstanding tasks while he ate his carcinogenic snack cakes on the floor and then, announcing that it was time to “lock in”, he would get back to it. Where was that resigned resolve when they all needed it the most?
She shuts her computer and tablet, laying them on top of his shoes next to her. Her hands dance together and she taps her fingers together. Her leg starts to bounce.
Stratt stands up and goes to the cabinets by the window. She rifles through them until she finds a plastic basin, a sponge wrapped in cellophane, and a curved metal needle driver. She pumps soap into the basin and fills it with water from the sink. She sits on the side of Dr Grace’s bed and takes his hand, handcuff chains jingling. She dips his fingers in the water and scrubs them, careful to not let the water run down his forearm where the IV catheter is installed. His limp hands are soft, fingers framed with torn hangnails. Taking the needle drivers, she carefully scrapes the mud out from under each fingernail. Some of them are broken and snagged from gripping the Earth so tightly, brittle keratin ripped against buried stones or caught on the grass. Stratt dumps the water, refills the basin, and cleans his other hand.
“I’m still mad at you, Doctor Grace,” Stratt mutters, drying his hand between hers with a paper towel. “I won’t shed a single tear for you.” She thinks she’ll be angry at him for a long time, but not forever.
She dumps the water in the sink and stares out the window. The sky is beginning to lighten, the brightest stars still visible against the deep blue sky materializing in the east, heralding dawn. The aviation obstruction lights on the satellite dishes gleam, the silhouettes of the dishes starting to appear. The launchpad on the other side of the complex will still be in darkness, but soon after sunrise, the dying light of the sun will make the ice crystals on the metal towers shine. The autumn sunlight will rouse the cold air, coaxing vapor up from the Kazakh lowlands, and the ten kilometer south by southwest to quarter west breeze will sweep it across the grassland before it rises to the atmosphere. Perhaps the rocket shuttling the three Hail Mary crew into orbit will pass it by as it bursts through the partly cloudy sky. It will be, perhaps, Earth’s final spectacle before it withers into a long, brittle winter.
Stratt lowers herself onto the plastic chair once again, elbows resting on her knees. She needs rest; the next twenty hours will be exhausting. But there will be time yet for resting.
The EMTs will be here soon to transport Dr Grace to the shuttle. Stratt will follow them as far as the mission control center. From there, she will watch him be stowed away, out of reach forever.
Until then, she’ll keep the vigil.
She’ll watch him sleep.