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“I’m sorry,” Stratt says after.
He doesn’t respond.
“Carl,” she says.
She’s never called him Carl. He introduced himself as such when they met, years ago, but in all that time she’s only ever called him by his last name. Most people do. It’s the suit, he supposes, combined with his status. Makes him intimidating. Only Grace ever—
“Carl.”
“Ma’am?”
“I’m sorry,” Stratt repeats. “I know that you were…fond of him.”
Carl leaves the room. She doesn’t follow.
* * *
Things to remember, since Grace will forget:
- What they were both wearing, a suit with a scowl and a yellow jacket with an awkward smile.
- “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your—”
- “The sun’s really dying, isn’t it?”
- The static of handheld radios through the window of an airtight laboratory. Grace saying, “Imagine for a second that you’re an interstellar microorganism.” Carl saying, “I’m not doing that.” Carl doing it anyway, for some reason.
- “Do we have an expense account?”
- The drive to Walmart in a black government van, Grace trying to change the radio and Carl knocking his hand away. Juggling with duct tape. Tin foil bowling. Sour skittles. How Grace grinned, Tau Ceti undimmable, when Carl caved and put on the sunglasses.
* * *
They’d been expecting an asshole, was the thing. That was how others in his field had described the guy: a pretentious academic who thought he was better than everyone, smarter than his superiors, a loose cannon who had left academia sulking because of a damaged ego. They had been expecting the man who had called one of the top scholars in his field a waste of carbon.
So Carl was—unprepared, for the Grace they got. The Grace who was nervous and friendly and wanted to save his children.
Unprepared. And vulnerable.
* * *
- The Carl Hypothesis.
- The sound of two sets of hands high-fiving themselves.
- Grace saying, “Are you sitting down?” Carl saying no, he’s standing like a grown man. Grace saying, “There’s a fourth. We’re fathers, Carl.” Carl sitting down.
- The drive to the plane and Grace screaming in his helmet and puking in an upside-down traffic cone.
- Grace making sure to credit him in conversation with the greatest scientific minds in the world.
- Stratt’s Vat. The long cramped echoing corridors and tasteless food. State-of-the-art equipment. Bright white lab fluorescents. Vaporizing a metric ton of metal. Sleepless nights working on a time limit. Going everywhere together, Grace somehow still blissfully unaware that Carl’s basically his jailer. Carl not telling him. How could he tell him?
- The unreal brightness of the stars the night of the karaoke party.
- They told me that the end is near—
- The way their eyes met midway through the song, and how Grace looked away, and how Carl didn’t.
- We gotta get away from here—
* * *
They have him pack up Grace’s belongings to be sent up to the ship. It’s awful. There’s not enough space for everything so he has to sort through it all, decide what’s important enough to go. It does not escape his notice that what he’s really choosing is what Grace will take to the grave. He didn’t know him nearly well enough for something so important, but who else is going to do it?
A fox keychain. A wristwatch. That comfy knit sweater. Most of it is dumb science pun t-shirts, wrinkled from being stuffed haphazardly in his footlocker. Carl feels like an invader, folding them, but then he guesses he’s always sort of been one as far as Grace is concerned. He’s been messing around with Grace’s life ever since they showed up at Grover Cleveland Middle School and told him to save the world. No point getting emotional about it now.
* * *
- Which one of them made the first move—that it was Grace chewing his lips and tapping his fingers, and Carl who snapped and gave him something else to do with them.
- Carl’s tiny cabin and cot, two grown men on top of each other both by necessity and by choice.
- How quiet you had to be in a room made of metal.
- Grace reaching to remove the glasses already hanging halfway off his face. Carl deliberately sliding them all the way back on. Shirts off. Pants off. Grace forgetting to get his shoes first and getting stuck, Carl smiling, get over here.
- Skin, hands, lips, braced with an arm against the bulkhead, feeling too much, bites in places hidden under a suit, Grace trying to suck his soul out through his dick, his long capable fingers, wet mouths and hot breath, Carl admitting he’s ticklish, Grace laughing and muffling it in Carl’s armpit and tickling worse.
- That Grace kissed him the whole time, even when Carl was finishing him off, and laughed dopily into his mouth afterwards, and how Carl felt fragile, like all the warmth gone from the sun had reappeared in his chest.
- The glow after, which up until then Carl had thought was fiction. Grace sleeping like the dead on his chest, Carl’s arms around him, enclosed and safe.
* * *
He’s the one who leaves the note on Grace’s coma suit, the one that says Good luck! He doesn’t have anything else.
* * *
- That Carl kept his eyes down, all through that final meeting, as Grace effectively begged for his life.
- That Carl only looked at him once, and Grace didn’t see whatever it was he needed to see, and he looked so betrayed, and Carl thought maybe his silence would make it a little better for both of them, but it didn’t.
- That Carl didn’t chase him. He was there when they pinned and sedated him, but he never laid a hand on him. Which means nothing, but it’s all there is.
* * *
Stratt comes and finds him after the launch. He thought he’d hidden himself pretty good, but she probably has access to the security cameras, or has a tracker on him, or is psychic. Nothing would surprise him when it comes to Stratt.
They sit in silence for a while. He can’t look at her. He stares at the sky instead, even though by now the ship is far out of sight.
“We had to do it,” she says.
“I know.”
He does know. He doesn’t regret it. He wants to freeze the world a little faster so he’s not the only one who feels like this, numb with his insides twisting up.
“I cared for him too.”
“I know.”
“It will pass,” Stratt says decisively, and he guesses it will. Grace won’t remember either of them when he wakes up. He won’t remember anyone or anything, including what he naturally viewed as a betrayal of cosmic proportions. It will be like none of this ever happened.
Stratt gets to her feet. Carl watches her walk away. He thinks he sees her shoulders shudder, just a little, but he decides he’s probably seeing things.
* * *
- “You know who you are.”
- “You’re gonna do great.”
* * *
It’s almost a relief when the sugarcane shortages start in earnest, if only because the supermarkets stop selling skittles.