Chapter Text
When the Hail Mary launched, Dr. Ryland Grace was the only crew member who did not instance.
For decades, everyone believed that this was because he was unconscious when he crossed the border between Earth and space.
“The first requirement for instancing is settled culture…the second requirement is intent. Sailors throughout history are recorded as having sailed from their home ports without instancing for decades, until one morning they boarded their ship and looked back to see their instance standing at the docks. Something must have shifted in their heart, some secret admittance that their leave-taking is permanent…”
—Sublimation, p.6
Before the Hail Mary, there were three recorded cases of astronauts instancing upon launch. Two were American; one was Japanese. Many spirited voices debated the existence of instanced Russian cosmonauts or Chinese astronauts, locked away by the authorities in secret black-site prisons until their instance could return and reintegrate with them.
After the Hail Mary, there were five.
Everyone expected this. There were plans in place. Yáo and Ilyukhina had trained a little, along with their seconds and the primary and secondary science officers, for the media relations and appearances the world would expect from them after the Hail Mary’s launch.
Yáo had been prepared to help Dr. Grace catch up.
There was no predicting instantiation; still, everyone had been surprised. The team had tracked Dr. Grace’s unconscious body—warily, then incredulously, then sadly—all the way from the launch into orbit, to the ship herself, to the moment he had slipped from medically induced unconsciousness into a medically induced coma. Yáo and Ilyukhina had provided faithful updates as they prepared the Hail Mary and their crewmember, themselves obviously uneasy.
Or maybe it had only been obvious to Yáo and Ilyukhina, listening from mission control on Earth, where they had been taken after watching themselves finish crossing the launchpad to the transport that would take them into orbit.
No doppelgänger of Grace had appeared at the launch site, or inside the transport when he was transferred to the Hail Mary, or (as some of the more morbid tall tales might have had one believe) halfway up into the atmosphere in the launch’s wake and fallen, screaming, back to Earth.
“There’s no point in waiting,” Stratt had said brusquely, sensing the mood in the control room. “If he hasn’t already, he’s not going to. Are we clear to launch, or not?”
The two record-setting instances of astronauts standing against the wall behind her made eye contact, and said nothing as one of the flight operators began the countdown.
Yáo—with Ilyukhina’s help—laid a little pressure on the right people and had a funeral held. His—and her—own arrangements would be made when their natural ends came, whenever that would be. The deaths of their instances would not reverberate across the universe to kill them of sympathetic gunshot wounds and heroin overdoses in thirteen years.
If there was no Dr. Grace still around to wait for, it made sense to have his now.
The department heads all came; Dr. Lokken, Dr. Komorov, Dr. Leclerc, Dr. Lamai, even Redell. Stratt was, naturally, there. An unexpected number of government officials showed up, either to look good to their constituents (the Americans), or to keep an eye on the other attendees (everybody else). A handful of Dr. Grace’s pre-Project colleagues had accepted invitations, and looked nervous at all the dress uniforms in attendance. A young lady from the American Department of Energy stood off to one side the whole time, in an impeccably pressed black skirt and jacket, staring at the tombstone.
Steve Hatch had volunteered to officiate, which no one felt strongly enough about to prevent him from doing. Dr. Grace did not appear to have left behind a specific opinion in any particular direction regarding the afterlife.
Stratt had managed to empty and cordon off a five-block radius around the cemetery, where a plot had been purchased next to two other Graces already buried. (Yáo did the math from the dates on the headstones—Dr. Grace’s parents.) The ceremony wasn’t interrupted. It didn’t take very long.
After the funeral, Yáo and Ilyukhina went out for drinks together—for a relative definition of ‘out’. They found a corner of the government site Stratt was borrowing to host them all on land, where nobody would stumble upon them and only their superior officers knew where to find them, and shared some of the drinks Ilyukhina had left behind for her instance.
“It’s very likely they will split us up,” Yáo said, even though Ilyukhina would have guessed that already. She was not a dumb woman; nobody on the Project was. Their countries would have differing goals in the coming years.
“We will see each other again,” she said dismissively. They were each using their own languages, relying on the other to understand what was being said, and if not, get some practice in. Ilyukhina spoke better Chinese than he spoke Russian.
“Not like this.”
“So what do you want to say now, then? It’s not about Dr. Grace. You don’t need me to say, we will look after him on board.”
“‘We’?” Yáo repeated in Russian, mimicking her pronunciation. He didn’t know that word, but it sounded like a plural.
“Them. Us. Foreign ‘we’.”
Yáo nodded understanding. He hadn’t known Russian had particular pronouns for instances. “No. That is no longer our concern.” They had no way to change what was happening on a ship already on its way out of the solar system. “But maybe we should have a plan for what happens next.”
“You are not my commander,” Ilyukhina said, smiling a little, with an emphasis on the pronouns.
Yáo took the push back. Thirteen years from now, Tau Ceti Yáo would wake, and he would be the commander of their mission—but here and now, Earth-he was, technically, unemployed.
“I hope he will be all right,” Yáo said, “with DuBois’ nitrogen.” Dr. Grace had not struck him as a gunshot type, but the option would still be there. Maybe he would turn his back, and ask Yáo to do it quickly.
“He will be fine,” Ilyukhina said. “He’s going to save the world!”
Yáo smiled a little at that. It was true that neither of Tau Ceti–them were going to be the ones to crack the secret of Astrophage’s defeat; that would fall to Dr. Grace, the world’s foremost expert.
Surely, the best man for the job.
Then Ilyukhina said, “Which of us do you think will live longer? Them, or us?”
After the funeral, in an empty office, with her tablet black and unpowered on the desk in front of her, Stratt sat quietly.
After roughly fifteen minutes, she said to nobody, “Well, I don’t have to plan for him anymore.”
Stratt had had a lot of plans. In hindsight, this was obvious.
Leclerc went back to the cemetery a few days later. He hadn’t expected to.
Somehow, he had been the one to take responsibility for this. Stratt didn’t have Dr. Grace around anymore to be her general dogsbody. Leclerc had been lingering, looking for an excuse to delay his return to France. Now he was accompanying a group of high school students to Dr. Grace’s grave on the worst field trip in history.
Possibly there had been worse ones. This seemed quite bad. Some of the children were clutching flowers, real or fake, and some of them had beanbags, which Leclerc refused to ask about, because he was only sure that he didn’t want to find out why and then have to keep himself together through the whole trip, knowing.
He shouldn’t have agreed to this.
He hadn’t wanted to disappoint the children.
The story of Dr. Grace barging back into the Astrophage trials for his students’ sake had made its way around the Project. Every new arrival or confused veteran who inevitably cracked and asked why in God’s name a junior high school teacher was the first officer heard it.
Leclerc had helped to ruin these children’s future. He could at least give them a chance to process what they’d lost right now, before they grew up and realized how much he’d personally helped them lose.
(Stratt would have said that if his plan for Antarctica helped the children live long enough to grow up, that would make his deeds worth the destruction.)
A teacher was there to oversee the trip, and one student’s mother as a chaperone. There seemed to be far too many children for just one class, but what did Leclerc know about how American schools worked. Maybe these were multiple classes’ worth, from all the years Dr. Grace been a teacher—certainly he’d been on the Project long enough that none of the children were middle schoolers anymore. Was Dr. Grace that beloved by his students? How long had Dr. Grace been teaching? Leclerc didn’t know.
He didn’t even know that much.
He unlocked the cemetery gate for them (Stratt had ordered it to be locked, and the area was monitored; probably she was keeping an eye on extremist groups that might be targeting the grave, or something) and let everyone in.
“Why are there other Graces?” one of the students asked. He was clutching a beanbag, standing a little back from the crowd as the children (without much arguing) jockeyed for space to put their flowers down.
“Those are his parents,” Leclerc said. He’d checked, to be sure, which meant he’d asked one of Stratt’s remaining assistants, and the assistant had looked at him with the mania of not enough coffee and said “Of course they’re his parents, we already checked, why did you think we put him there of all places? You know it was suggested he be buried at Arlington?”
“God,” Leclerc heard the teacher mutter to the chaperone, behind him, “both gone before him.”
“Maybe that’s better,” the chaperone murmured back. “Can you imagine having to send him away without one to keep?”
There wasn’t enough space for all the flowers and beanbags. Ryland Grace ended up with an overflowing gravesite, so one could barely read the name on the tombstone, and a rainbow line of beanbags along the flat top of the stone. They were too small and light to weigh him down much.
Leclerc caught himself. It was so easy to keep talking, to keep thinking, as if there was actually a body six feet below.
“The other astronauts were on TV last night,” one of the children abruptly said. “Why wasn’t Mr. Grace? Didn’t he have an instance who could be interviewed?”
Their teacher looked, a little helplessly, at Leclerc. He recognized the man as one of the handful who’d come to the funeral.
“No,” Leclerc said. Surely someone must have answered this question for these children already. They were here at a grave. Didn’t they know? “He didn’t instantiate.”
“Why not? I’m an instance, and I only moved here from Greece. Mr. Grace went to space.” The child’s mouth twisted at the rhyme. It sounded too charming for the subject matter. “Shouldn’t he have?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Then how does it work?”
How could he tell an American fourteen-year-old about all the poems written about instantiation? About the whims of the heart revealed so nakedly, so publicly, to friends and family and sometimes instances themselves? These students had never read the Odyssey, or The Count of Monte Cristo. How could Leclerc begin to explain that Ryland Grace must have refused to believe he was leaving Earth so stubbornly that he’d left in the most permanent way possible?
“A lot of people still debate the answer to that question,” he told the child. “It happens because of how a person feels. Only Dr. Grace could tell us how he felt.” If he’d had the option to feel at all.
They shouldn’t have knocked him out for the launch, no matter that he’d asked for that last small mercy.
“Did you know him?”
Suddenly the mass of children and two adults were all looking at Leclerc.
“Yes,” Leclerc said, his mouth dry, “briefly. We were in some of the same meetings.” What kind of answer was that? That he’d been in the same room as the man? What else could he say—that Dr. Grace had been on the ship off Antarctica and tried to offer comfort?
“He was a good man,” Leclerc managed.
The adults looked satisfied by that. The children didn’t.
A tall young girl who had brought a polka-dotted beanbag said, “So he’s not coming back to school?”