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It’s on day four of arranging that gosh-darned chain that I finally crack. Though it doesn’t feel like cracking, really, so much as a gradual overflowing of all the stuff I’ve pushed aside, everything I’ve swallowed down in favor of more pressing things.
I have the brief thought that this would all go a lot quicker if my crewmates hadn’t died, if we had two additional sets of hands to help out, and my mind trips over the thought. They’re dead. They’re dead and I don’t know why, and they were my friends, and they’ll never know the mind-numbing boredom of working on a ten-kilometer chain, nor will they ever know anything else. Not the greenish glow of Adrian below us as we drift in its orbit, nor the overwhelming knowledge that we’ve almost made it. That their sacrifices were not in vain.
It’s all downhill from there. I click another xenonite link into the chain, wrap the slack around the spool Rocky made, and think about the lives that were lost. Two good, brave people died for seemingly no reason, leaving behind not just their expertise, but their friends and families. Back on Earth, millions of people will have died already. The weak, the sick, the compromised. All while I’m sitting here, feeling no more useful than a child putting two lego bricks together.
On paper, I know I’m doing good. It’s outright insane that I’m up here in the first place, that humanity has found a vessel to put their last hope in. It’s insane that I’m working with an alien lifeform to eradicate another alien life form, that we’ve learned each other’s languages, that we’ve arrived in something like friendship despite all our differences. I know that if this plan works, we’ll be off to our respective solar systems and be hailed as heroes for the rest of our lives.
But with all that responsibility, all the awe of what I’ve seen, I feel small and overwhelmed. In a tiny, irrational part of my brain, I wish someone more capable than me would tell me I’m doing the right thing.
I suck in a breath, rubbing my face along my shoulder so my hands can keep working uninterrupted.
But Rocky, who needs no more than a pindrop to make out exactly what’s happening, looks up from his own chain and hums.
“You are leaking fluid,” he states. It’s intoned like a question, but it lacks the usual add-on at the end of the sentence. He knows I’m crying—it’s not like I can even hide it, seeing as my tears are floating in the air around my face—he just doesn’t know why. I haven’t had the time to explain it to him in so many words, and I’m not even sure I could, even now that we have multiple days ahead of us and nothing to fill them with except that darn chain. I’ve seen Rocky emote through sound and movement; I’m not sure where I’d begin to describe the need for tears—not least because I would be actively crying during that description.
I wipe at my face, trying to catch the tears around me to at least let them soak into my sleeves. “Aren’t you homesick?”
He chimes wordlessly, a simple chord that would translate roughly to huh? It occurs to me that Eridians may not have compound words. He knows sick, and he knows home, but what I’ve just said might be nonsense to him.
We’ve just spent too long together for him to tell me so plainly when he knows I’m upset.
“I miss home,” I tell him. It feels underwhelming to say it out loud. It’s not even that I want to go back, not really. I would prefer not to die, but chances are I’d have a bad time even if I somehow made it back. We nuked glaciers to buy ourselves time. We have limited resources. Even if the mission goes perfectly, we’ll need even more time to use its results to fix things. I might save humanity as a species, but many, many people will still die, and there’s no guarantee that I won’t be among them. There’s no guarantee that I won’t remember who my loved ones were right as I realize that they’re all dead, just like I did with Yáo and Ilyukhina.
Besides, it’s not really about that. Even if all that weren’t true, I’d still be up here right now, so far from home that I can hardly comprehend it. I’d be homesick even if I knew I was coming back to a healthy, peaceful planet, simply because I’m away from it now, one tiny person in the vastness of space, a microscopic blip in an unforgiving void.
“I miss—” I choke on the words, feeling terribly childish. I’m practically on my way home already, but I feel near torn in two with the realization of how impossibly far away I really am, and it stirs something in my monkey brain. I don’t remember much of my old life. I know I was single and that I was a teacher, but I know nothing of my parents, if I had siblings, who my friends were. I don’t know what I left behind, can’t tell what the cost of my decision was. I was going to die up here, and now I’m not, but I don’t know what it is I’m excited for. I miss my home more than I remember it, nothing but a muddled canvas of feelings. All I have is the ache, as black and empty as space itself.
“I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head. “Did you never think about that on your way here? How you’re just one guy sacrificing everything?”
“There were twenty-two others,” Rocky reminds me, and I wince.
“Right. Sorry.”
“But yes. I thought much after crew died. Even before. Watched crew sleep, watched crew die. Thought maybe on Erid I could fix. But on Erid, crew no get sick. Sad. Confuse.”
“I bet,” I say. At least I woke up from my coma with my crewmates already dead. Rocky watched them die one by one. If radiation sickness is anything as gruesome for Eridians as it is for humans, I can’t imagine how that must have felt.
“Engineer in space,” Rocky goes on. There’s a warble in his voice that I think might be cynicism. “I think, how engineer save Erid, question? I fix ship. I remember what crew told me about science, but just engineer. If no meet Grace, maybe I die too. Much fear. Think about home.”
I’ve seen his humility in action before, but this is different. I’m not gonna be able to bully him into taking a compliment. So I grab my chain, push myself off the floor, and float over to him to lean against his tunnel. “Well, we’re here now,” I tell him. “And we’re gonna get this right.”
It’s an optimism I don’t feel, but it’s all I have. Rocky looks at my still-crying face—as much as he can look, turning his featureless front toward me to better make out my shape.
“Is just us now,” he says, and I nod. “Injustice. Sad.”
And that, despite its simplicity—or maybe precisely because of it—feels true to my aching chest. It isn’t fair. I want to go home. I want Astrophage to not be a thing, and now that it is I also wish I wouldn’t have to leave Rocky so soon, and I also want to get home as soon as possible but also experience the beauty of space without a timer in the back of my head, and I feel like a child jumping in circles, screaming over everything and everything. It feels stupidly simple, but—yeah, I’m sad. It shouldn’t be me. It shouldn’t be anyone.
Someone has to save Earth, and I feel decently qualified considering what Rocky and I have achieved already, but yeah. It’s a lot, and a part of me wishes I could curl up in my bed at home and sleep in on a Sunday morning.
“I never thought I’d look at a planet from a spaceship and feel mocked by how pretty it is,” I say. Rocky slumps against his tunnel, resting his carapace near my head. I feel his temperature through the barrier, muffled to a pleasant warmth. “Injustice,” I agree. “It’s not fair.”
Rocky chimes his word for fair. I don’t move to type it into the computer. I think I’ll remember that one.
For a moment we just sit there. I hear Rocky’s breathing, a deep, scraping puff through the slits in his carapace. We’ve been productive and fast-paced ever since we met, rushing from one discovery to the next. It’s nice to just exist for once.
Still, Rocky is usually the one who won’t let me be sad for long, and I’ve come to appreciate it about him. It struck me as dismissive at first, but in a situation as daunting and previously hopeless as ours, it’s become a kindness.
“Hey,” I say, turning my head toward him slightly. Rocky makes a noise of acknowledgement. “What’s your favorite part of Erid?”
Rocky considers this. It’s a subtle difference, a favorite part versus the thing you miss most. It’s something I’ve tried to force myself to do, back when I was sure that I’d die on this ship: remind myself that all the things that are beautiful and comforting about home were still there, even if I no longer was. That I may not make new memories, but that the ones I already had could not be taken from me, at least once I uncovered them from the fog of my coma-ridden mind. There is an abundance there, no matter how hollow I may feel now.
“Ocean,” he says after a while. “Is hotter than Astrophage, but colder than Eridian. Feels good. I walked with mate Adrian often for long time. Before mission, we talked about laying egg in sand.”
I smile at that, though new tears spring to my eyes at the thought. I picture little Rockys hatching from their shell, climbing up his arms to greet him. I picture Rocky squealing and squirming with glee, skittering up and down the length of the beach in his joy.
“That’s beautiful,” I tell him. I replay the music of his words in my head, and I find my own longing mirrored back to me in the way he said it, the way he sang his partner’s name with the same yearning with which I might say Earth. I’ve taken it for granted, I think. I never thought I’d miss it, never thought I’d be among those who leave it, those chosen few who get to feel homesick for an entire planet.
“What is you favorite part of Earth, question?” Rocky asks. I’ve taken all of it for granted. Coffee in the morning, Netflix during dinner. A bed to drop into, rather than to strap myself to when gravity isn’t on my side. The freshness of spring, of a thousand things in bloom. Afternoons spent laughing with friends—because I may not remember who they were, but I know in my heart that there were people. Maybe not close, and maybe not often, but there were people.
“My job,” I say at last. There are a billion little things I never thought I’d miss, all the things that make Earth what it is, but I’m no poet. It’s not technically specific to Earth, but at the end of the day, it’s my kids that I miss most of all, and it’s that which I got up for every morning. That has to be my favorite part of all of it. “I was a teacher. I taught kids about biology.”
Rocky tilts, and I’m forced to smile again.
“Little humans,” I clarify. “Kids. Ten through fifteen. A lot of them had no appreciation for it, just, you know, doodling and putting their earphones through their sleeves when they thought I wasn’t looking, but some… Some just light up when they learn something new. They’ve got this—this hunger, and I thought I’d spend the rest of my life nourishing that, showing little humans how fascinating the world is, how much there is to learn, but now—”
My voice gives an ugly crack, like carbon fiber breaking. Rocky startles slightly; it’s not a sound he’s heard from me before. It startles me, too, the way that a new wave of grief comes washing over me when I thought I was on my way out of it.
“Now I’m up here and they’re down there, and they’ll be all grown up by the time I get back. And I could be missing my apartment or my mom or a mate like you are, but I miss their smiles when they leave my classroom and know they’re gonna pass the next test because my classes made sense. And I miss when they’d stay after class to ask me more questions, and they’re not even my fudging kids, but I miss that. I lived for that.”
So much for abundance. I give a frustrated huff, glaring at nothing.
“Hey,” says Rocky. Or at least I think it’s the Eridian equivalent of it. I look up at him from my hunched-over position. His claws have fallen quiet, frozen mid-motion; Rocky, fervent engineer, never still, is now giving me his undivided attention.
“I don’t know,” I say. My hands are filthy and smell of metal, so I just jerk my head to get the tears out of my vision, feeling miserable. I’m suddenly embarrassed by the intensity of Rocky’s regard, though he’s as slumped as I am. “I’m tired. Talking nonsense.”
“Sleep,” Rocky says. It’s not a demand this time, the way it normally is. It’s not laced with playful annoyance over having to coax me into doing what my body needs. It’s gentler, barely a hum, and my eyes well up anew at the sound of it.
I don’t fight him on it. The last thing I want is to make a mistake with the chain and to have to do it all over again when I’m out there on the hull and realize that I’m an idiot. I push myself up with my hands, then reach for one of the ropes strung across the room to pull myself along. My mattress is taped to the wall with the ends of the covers pinned underneath, brought to this room for maximum efficiency. I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve slept horizontally. I wonder how long it’s been since I’ve slept alone.
“You get stupid when tired,” Rocky says as I manoeuvre myself into bed like a reverse caterpillar. “But what you say now is not stupid.” He pauses, and his carapace sways slightly. “Maybe is smartest thing you say.”
It shocks a laugh out of me, simply because I didn’t expect him to tease right now. Rocky has a sense for these things.
“Prick,” I say, smiling through my tears. I press my face into the pillow to catch them.
“What, question?”
“Insult. Affectionate.”
He gives me the Eridian equivalent, a short burst of a sound. It sounds a bit like a fart. I giggle into my pillow because I’m tired and stupid, and also because I have so little to laugh about lately.
“I think little humans love you,” Rocky says. “Must. You are—”
He hesitates, thinking.
“Need word. Love very much, but not person. Love thing. Love doing. Need nothing else.”
He has a way of working his limited vocabulary into just the right order. I turn to look at him like a starving animal that’s just been offered food, crumpling under how warm it makes me feel.
“Passionate,” I say weakly. Rocky sings the Eridian word, a multi-layered crescendo of chords that each seem to pour into the next, one by one by one. “I guess I am.”
Rocky gestures with a chain link he’s picked up, getting back to work. “Everything you do, you are focused. Work work work. You teach me language. You teach me human ways. No give up until problem is solved. No rest until stupid. Passion.”
It’s not news to me, exactly. Similarly to the space stuff, I know I do a good job because I see the results in real time. I find methods to explain difficult things in ways that children understand, and I see them retain it all year. I have dozens of drawings and crafts set around the Hail Mary’s control panel, and more in my luggage. Of course I’m good at the thing I love.
But it feels different to hear it from Rocky. It feels different to hear it said this way, like that alone is enough for a good, worthy life. Like I was sent to space not because I’m disposable and happened to write a bad paper that got my foot in the door, but because I bring stuff to the table.
Rocky is one of the first Eridians in space. He’s older than any human ever will be, and he’s still young for his species’ standards, younger than I am in human years. He has a partner that he considered children with.
And he describes me as needing nothing else. Like it’s a strength, an asset to envy.
“Darn,” I say, for lack of more intelligent words. Rocky briefly looks up from his chain.
“What, question?”
“I never thought about it like that.” I shift on my vertical bed, my gaze set forward to watch Rocky work. “People usually just think I’m a loser ‘cause I got nothing else going on besides teaching.”
And Rocky, without looking up from his work again, gives a monotone drone that might be reminiscent of my own voice at times. “Those people save Earth, question?”
I laugh, pulling the blanket tighter around myself. Snarky bastard.
“No,” I say. “I guess not.”
It’s not really a consolation. Nothing has changed about our situation, about the ache clawing at me from the inside. But unlike a few months ago, I have someone to talk to, and that alone is soothing.
“Sleep,” Rocky says again, just as kind as before, and for the first time since meeting him, I begin to understand the comfort in being watched over. I am not paralysed during sleep—I mean, I am, otherwise I’d be sleepwalking all over the ship, but it’s different from what Eridians have going on. I have no predators to worry about, and the processes of my body are simpler than Rocky’s, nothing that might get damaged if I’m interrupted halfway through.
Still, there is someone there who could, in theory, protect me. Someone who’s taking care of the ship while I rest.
And, more importantly, there is someone there.
I may be light years away from home, and it may be another decade or so until I get back, assuming I get back at all and don’t die on the way there, but I am not alone.
Up here, in the dead-yet-living void of space, I am not alone.