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At some point, Grace is going to have to reckon with the fact that he’s turned humanity’s first alien contact into an iPad kid.
Don’t-Go-Crazy-room kid, if you’re a stickler for the specifics. Not exactly a kid either, given that he hatched before the periodic table was even invented. (And isn’t that a fact Grace has been trying very hard not to acknowledge, thank you very much!)
As if summoned, Rocky chooses the opportune moment to almost run over Grace’s foot with three hundred pounds of Ball.
“Ow,” Grace greets him without looking up from his microscope.
“Didn’t touch you,” Rocky replies, tilting his carapace in the facsimile of a long-suffering eye roll. “Mental Health Remote fell off the platform again. Grace do science faster. Remote is more important.”
See. iPad kid.
They’re just under a year into their journey to Erid, and so far there’s not really been a whole lot to do. Mary keeps them cruising along at just shy the speed of light, only every other meal comes with a side order of coma slurry, and their cargo has stayed contained, nitrogen-resistant and ravenous as ever. Grace’s day-cycles are a rotating door of Taumoeba checks, Eridani DuoLingo, and Don’t-Go-Crazy room time. (Interstellar travel; somehow less exciting than middle school recess).
Rocky clicks his claws against the xenonite impatiently. “Grace. Remote.”
Face still smushed against the microscope eyepiece, Grace can’t help but smile. They both know that if Rocky wanted the remote that badly, he could’ve whipped up a contraption to reel it back in faster than it would take him to roll from room A to room B.
Grace sets his slides to incubate, and pops his spine in a way he knows makes Rocky squirm. “Cool your vents, bud, I’m coming.”
(The insistence is a nice little reminder: that they’re not sick to death of each other’s company just yet.)
-
They’re in Tokyo, this time.
Upon deciding that all human movies are useless and terrible Statement after a particularly soul-destroying viewing of Up (2009), Rocky’s Don’t Go Crazy room time has tended to sway towards the ambience section of the Hail Mary’s database. Remote retrieved from the recesses of the node’s wiring, Shibuya Crossing unfolds over the screens in a cacophony of billboards and headlights. Digital rainfall makes the tarmac shimmer. Rocky’s Display Gun (name in progress) scans over the panels, his xenonite ball radiating heat where Grace’s spine curves against it.
Grace closes his eyes, and sinks into the soundscape: all car horns, phone calls, snatches of chatter in a language he doesn’t understand, as neon as the landscape around them. Grace has never been a big city kind of guy, but the explosion of colour-sound-energy still tugs at his soul a bit. An itch he can’t quite scratch.
The screens aren’t high enough resolution to make out individual faces, but the crowd still feels close enough to touch if Grace squints at it over the top of his glasses. They’re an echo of another time, on another world; June 2014, if the file name is anything to go by. Rainy season, Wednesday evening. With the Hail Mary folding spacetime like a hotel towel, twenty years would’ve passed on earth since the video was taken. Follow that line of thought, and you start wondering what products the advertisement boards show now, what topics people chat about as they hurry back from work.
Whether, after everything, Shibuya Crossing is still there at all.
Grace might’ve crash-and-burned out of academia, but he’ll always be a scientist at heart. He’s kind of allergic to not knowing things; being left in the dark brings him out in metaphorical hives. The giant, unanswered question that is Earth and the Beetles hurtling across space towards it is enough to make him want to crawl out of his skin if he thinks about it for longer than a few seconds.
Behind him, Rocky flutes out a perfect harmony to the sound of a car passing through the recording.
“Showoff,” Grace gives his ball a half-hearted shove. Rocky pretends to die dramatically. Grace shelves his thoughts to revisit definitely-not-now.
“Same human has passed the screen five times now,” after emerging from his death throes, Rocky’s voice lilts impatiently beneath the monotone of the translator. It’s one of the Eridani harmonics that Grace recognises best- learned through sheer exposure. “Rocky does not need Mental Health Room to see the same human five times in one hour. Rocky could just go to the lab.”
Huh. Grace hadn’t even noticed that the video was on a loop.
“Y’know, there’s loads of data showing that extended screentime is detrimental to attention span,” he muses. “Maybe you’re giving yourself permanent brain damage by spending so much time in here, and that’s why you’re bored.”
A flat tone comes from the ball; one Grace has been stubbornly refusing to enter into the translator, even though they both know full well what it means. “Rocky brain still works better than human brain. Human brain barely understand basic mathematics.”
(You use a calculator to multiply two by four one time-)
“Oof,” Grace goes boneless against the side of Rocky’s ball, listening to the skitter of claws as he scrambles to balance him. “Right for the jugular. No prisoners taken.”
Still, he has to admit that the explosion of neon playing over the screens is starting to get a bit much, so he concedes and grabs for the remote.
The Onsen that sprawls out in its place is muted and mist-shrouded, empty aside from the two of them. Grace pushes the phantom brush of rush-hour foot traffic to the back of his mind, and asks Rocky if he wants to hear about Earth’s geothermal gradient instead.
-
It’s not that Grace isn’t excited.
He’s going to be the first human ever to visit an alien planet. No matter how woefully underqualified he is for the task, the thought is accompanied by a breathless little what the heck! every time it comes to mind. He helped save the world, and now he gets to live in it with his best friend at his side.
It’s just-
Earth is a long, long way away.
Scrubbing a hand through his hair, frustrated, Grace pivots back to trying to remember what concentration of heavy glucose he grew the Taumoeba in for his isotope tracing experiment. His lab book- a trail of post-it notes the length of his bench- provides no help whatsoever. He’s just got the methods section of his latest paper on Taumoeba biology- (The metabolic fate of Astrophage cell membrane lipids in Taumoeba hydrolytic vacuoles, Grace, R. and Mary, H., 2034)- to finish now. He wonders if Rocky will peer review it for him once it’s completed.
(Wonders if, lightyears away under a dimming sun, scientists still publish papers asking the basic questions of life. Whether laboratories established decades ago have had to close. Whether the world’s classrooms now sit abandoned.
Whether he’ll ever get to find out.)
The discomfort at the thought is a bone-deep thing, so Grace does what he does best when faced with an uncomfortable situation, and pretends it doesn’t exist.
It’s easy to ignore the dread settling in his stomach when he’s got radiotracer product datasheets to find.
-
The low roll of thunder greets Grace when he enters the projector room.
Rocky’s been on a bit of a weather kick lately, morbidly fascinated by the unpredictability of Earth’s climate. (“So temperamental, no wonder humans evolved so inefficient.”). The day he discovered the concept of the tornado alley had been an interesting one. When Grace shimmies up the platform to join him, Rocky is in his latest exo-suit prototype instead of the ball, legs folded beneath him as he tracks the howl of wind over empty miles of Texan scrubland. Despite his complaints, Grace thinks he could make a storm chaser out of him yet.
“Uno or Rummy?” As a greeting, Grace pulls two packs of cards from his flight suit pocket- noise-cancelling marvels of xenonite engineering that probably rival The Chain in their complexity. He tosses them against the grille like discarded roof tiles.
“Uno,” Rocky trills. It’s Eridani immersion hour so he’s foregone the translator, leaving Grace to work through the arpeggios of his unfiltered voice. He still minces his words into an equivalent of baby-speak so Grace’s tiny human brain can keep up, but Grace likes to think he’s making progress. “Grace cheats at rummy.”
“Only because Rocky cheats first,” Grace rebukes, settling cross-legged to deal out the Uno cards. Overhead, the storm is really getting started, lashes of rain magnified on a room-sized camera lens.
“Question,” Grace asks, mostly as a distraction from the fact that hand-sized xenonite slabs are kind of awkward to shuffle. “What’s the weather on Erid like?”
Rocky hums in consideration for a moment before settling on; “Dry.”
Grace levels him with a flat look he hopes carries into the auditory field.
Message received, Rocky vents out a frustrated note. “I’m an engineer, not a ♪♫♪.” (Upper note; beauty, lower note; to compose speech. Underlying subharmonic denotes a purpose or profession. Grace makes a note to add Poet to the translator.) “Erid’s weather is dry. There is wind.”
“Jeez. Got ourselves a regular Shakespeare over here,” Grace laughs, sliding Rocky his hand of cards.
They make it through a couple of rounds- (“Learning Eridian insults is an important part of the immersion process. I thought you valued education.”)- before Grace’s attention inevitably drifts back to the storm-cell in the room.
It’s not as if Rocky hasn’t taught Grace about Erid. They’ve spoken at length about culture, language and scientific development; Grace could probably write an essay on the epoch of the Eridian industrial revolution if he really put his mind to it. The two of them don’t have conversations so much as they have series of loosely connected tangents and actually-have-I-told-yous, spilling over the span of days. A rabbit hole within a rabbit hole. Grace has been told he’s a rambler, and with Rocky’s endorsement, he intends to treat it like a full time job.
That’s all to say: Grace knows Erid’s inner cultural machinery and scientific history like the back of his hand. He doesn’t, however, know what it’s going to be like.
They’re still three years in a tin can away, so Grace hasn’t really put much thought into the everyday side of things. What the weather looks like, if there’s a tidal system, what energy production processes the food chain thrives on. Rocky has promised Grace that Erid will care for him as one of their own, but when he thinks about it for more than a second, he can’t even imagine what their definition of care will look like. The realisation is jarring; disconcerting to the extent that Grace thinks for a second he’s going to lose his pirozhki-coma-slurry fusion cuisine lunch over the railing.
From the Hail Mary’s projector room, they have scaled Earth’s mountains, traversed its oceans, explored its cities. But Erid? It might as well still be a blip on a photometric map, a single datapoint as it slices through 40 Eridani A’s starlight.
“Uno,” Rocky crows then, the word an amalgamate of the chords for Grace and Loser. He somehow manages to look smug, despite not having a face.
“I was distracted, that doesn’t count.”
“You don’t need distractions to suck at Uno,” Rocky replies, extra sing-song. (Lilting third harmonic denotes insincerity or teasing. See, Grace is learning.)
He pings a xenonite plus four card at Rocky’s exo-suit, then gathers the cards to deal in their next game. Around them, the wind has stilled; an exhale of sunlight spilling onto the torn-up scrubland.
If he squints, Grace can pretend that they’re out of the storm, and not sat right in the eye of it.
-
Rocky is asleep on the other side of the barrier, which is bad news because it gives Grace approximately six hours of alone time to spiral in.
Since their stint in the projector room earlier, Grace has been feeling nauseous and jittery to the point of distraction. He knows it must be bad because even Rocky didn’t have anything sarcastic to say when he cracked two glass slides in quick succession while nitrogen-testing their Taumoeba stocks earlier. Grace still has at least two years- (two long years, hurtling towards a completely alien planet)- before he has to worry about running low on coma slurry, but his thoughts still drift, unwarranted, back to waking up with two corpses suspended above his head. A nutritionally complete label on the bags of sludge doesn’t mean anything if there’s something missing from some of the batches.
Maybe he’s catastrophising. The thought still makes the stomach cramps worse.
Grace doesn’t think nausea is a symptom of scurvy, but the Hail Mary has unpaywalled access to humanity’s entire knowledge of organic synthesis. It doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
-
Grace is playing music in the lab, because otherwise he’s probably going to start crying, or maybe take a shot of HPLC-grade ethanol.
The looming threat of scurvy has put him on a fruitless jag into synthetic chemistry- an eleven-step scheme leading its victim from glucose to ascorbic acid (eight percent total yield!) pulled up on his laptop screen. He’s already run into some complicating factors- namely that the Hail Mary’s lab is woefully deficient in volatile, extremely flammable organics. Who would’ve guessed. Grace is debating whether he can really justify using the deuterated analytical solvents that would probably cost a month’s rent back on Earth, when Rocky shimmies into the lab tunnel system.
The song playing is an instrumental piece with a low thrum for a baseline- their compromise on music; keep vocals to the minimum- and Rocky tilts his carapace like he’s trying to soak up as much of the sound as possible. He’s only using two claws to prod at the pressure gauge he’s calibrating- the Rocky-equivalent of undivided attention.
“You like this song, pal?” Grace asks, returning 700 dollars of methanol remorsefully back to the cupboard. He’s yet to find human music that Rocky deems anything above vaguely tolerable, so this could be something groundbreaking.
Rocky trills and shifts his weight between his legs, an approximation of a head shake. “Song tone sounds like common animal on Erid. It’s,” he pauses. “Need word. ♪♬♩. Brings back memories.”
And- Grace knows that particular feeling all too well. He reaches for the laptop. “I think the word you’re looking for is nostalgic.”
-
For once, Grace is using the mental health node for its intended purpose: trying to stop himself from going clinically insane. The soothing percussion of waves against the shoreline is the only thing standing between himself and an organic-chemistry-induced breakdown. If he even thinks about his mass spec results- proudly proclaiming that he’s managed to synthesise everything but D-sorbitol- he’s going to jump out the nearest airlock. (Ryland Grace would like to remind the jury that, in this situation, dramatics are perfectly justified.)
The tell-tale lurch that precedes a memory is the only warning Grace gets, before he’s hanging out in the OChem office at San Francisco State again, watching as his friend- Hollie? Hannah?- reaches into her desk drawer and pulls out a half-empty bottle of tequila.
“Reaction is going great,” she says. It’s not even 11am.
Honestly- Grace gets it now.
When he resurfaces into the present, Rocky has joined him on the platform- a tangle of wires unearthed from the Hail Mary’s guts brought along with him for the ride. Inside the ball, their coloured plastic sheathes have melted clean off. Grace hopes they weren’t something important.
He can’t even bring himself to feel embarrassed about how quickly having Rocky in the same room as him improves his mood.
They sit and listen to the waves together for a while longer, before Rocky taps on the ball to get Grace’s attention.
“Wish Rocky could show Grace ocean on Erid,” he says.
Grace wishes that, too.
He taps a rhythm against the metal grille, an Eridian gesture of comfort that’s seeped into his own body language. “You kind of had other things to deal with when you left the Blip A, Rock,” he replies. “It’s not your fault you didn’t bring any recordings of Erid with you.”
When Grace turns to face him, he catches the exact moment that Rocky gets an idea. He shuffles, snaps his claws once, twice; the click of a lighter sparking a thought into life. “Don’t have recordings of Erid,” the excited clicks only grow in frequency. “But Hail Mary database has sounds like Erid.”
The spark jumps, catches, ignites. “Like the song I was playing earlier!”
“Yes yes yes! Rocky Grace make Mental Health room video, but for Erid!” Even under the monotone of the translator, Grace can hear Rocky’s excitement bleeding through. He nudges into Grace’s shins with the ball impatiently. “Grace get thinking machine quick quick quick.”
Preoccupied by fending off the sudden attack, the wobble of maybe-scurvy that’s been living in Grace’s gut for the past few days eases just a bit. (Besides, he’d take this over organic chemistry any day.)
-
Project Erid Soundscape starts with the weather.
After Grace does as he’s told and gets thinking machine quick quick quick, they set up camp in the dormitory so Rocky can fetch props from his portion of the ship, and Grace can huddle under a quilt as far away from the mass spectrometer as possible. Progress is painstakingly slow at first- Grace didn’t have the foresight to add things like greenhouse effect and Coriolis force to the translator, so they spend a while wading through jargon- but they eventually get to a point where they can elaborate on Rocky’s impassioned description of dry and windy.
They first establish that Erid’s climate is a lot more stable than Earth’s. Where Earth is a maelstrom of cold sinks and pressure systems, Erid has a five hour rotational period and almost 3000 kilopascals of ammonia, smoothing out temperature fluctuations like a giant, heated blanket. A large chunk of the weather events on Earth are driven by temperature gradients that simply don’t exist on Erid. Grace now understands why Rocky thought he was lying to him about the concept of cyclones. (“Grace is pulling Rocky’s leg, statement.”)
Weather on Erid is all about consistency. Winds are low but constant; channeled into jetstreams by the planet’s spin like a sluggish cousin of Jupiter’s big red spot. And although it’ll never match up to a gas giant megastorm, a gentle breeze packs a punch when you pair it with an atmosphere dense enough to block all perceivable light. It’s why Eridian cities tend to cluster in the shelter of mountains and valleys- when winds with enough force to take rocks for a ride are a constant fact of life, it’s easiest to just stay out of their way.
Which. Y’know. Nothing like hearing ‘gusts of superheated ammonia’ and ‘relaxing ambience’ in the same sentence to remind you that your best friend is from another planet.
After getting sidetracked by Rocky’s comment that the pressure and minimal temperature gradients mean it doesn’t really rain on Erid- news to Grace!- followed by a deep-dive into Earth’s water cycle complete with models- they circle back to the task at hand. Rocky brings out a device that’s meant to mimic the frequency of Erid’s wind speeds- kind of like an alien white noise generator- and by the time they’ve found the closest match in Mary’s database, it's already well into the ship’s programmed night cycle.
Dodging Rocky’s attempts to shoo him towards his bed, Grace closes his eyes and lets the proxy of an Eridian storm wash over the room.
“You’ve been holding out on me, Rocky,” he muses, as the wind hums through the laptop speakers. “Never took you for a budding meteorologist.”
“What do meteors have to do with Erid storm cells,” Rocky snarks. He hunkers a little closer to the ground then; a deflated half-loaf beside the barrier. “Adrian did long study on Erid weather patterns. So Rocky also unwillingly did long study on Erid weather patterns.”
“Oh yeah, Adrian’s a scientist, right?” Grace sits up a little. “They study the weather?”
“Adrian is weather science Eridian, yes,” Rocky sways in agreement. “Science Eridian and science Human similar. Talk lots. Universal constant.”
Despite the teasing, there’s a mournful tremor undercurrenting Rocky’s voice, his body sinking even lower to the ground. The sight makes Grace feel all gooey and sad, and he shimmies closer to the barrier to tap against it gently.
“Just three more years, bud,” he lets his voice fall quiet, a hum against the xenonite. “They’ll be talking your sound receptors off about convection currents again before you know it.”
Rocky trills a sad little melody, and for a while they sit in silence and let the wind speak for them.
-
“Question,” Grace asks later, because Mary’s day-night cycle is made up and it’s always not-4am somewhere. “You said Adrian did long study on Erid’s weather. New word?”
“Long study is ♫♪,” Rocky clarifies. “Adrian chose research, worked for long time,” To his credit, he doesn’t even mention the time. Probably because he’s talking about Adrian. Grace needs to use that loophole more often. “Study many many many things under guidance of senior science Eridian.”
And, Grace had an inkling already, but that just confirms it. That’s a PhD! Eridians have PhDs!
“How long did Adrian study for?” He asks. Really, he can’t believe the topic of alien grad school hasn’t come up sooner.
“Adrian study 72 years, learn lots, become qualified to do its own science.”
Ah.
“Earth years?” Grace asks, weakly. The flat note Rocky hums in response doesn’t even need a translation.
And there was Grace, complaining about his own five year stint in grad school.
“Yep,” he groans, rolling back under his blanket, much to Rocky’s outrage. “That’s enough nightmare fuel for today, thanks.”
-
Grace always reminded his students never to give up on something they had their hearts set on, no matter how difficult it seemed.
Fortunately for him, he has never believed in anything less than his ability to make sorbose out of the sludge currently coating the walls of his glassware, so he’s perfectly happy to give up on organic synthesis for the week and jump ship for his Taumoeba paper.
Unfortunately for him, one of Stratt’s cruel and unusual forms of torture was to pack three (!) gel electrophoresis tanks into the Hail Mary’s lab, so now he’s actually having to run a western blot for the first time since he graduated.
Aside from the looming threat of having to load a gel in 1.5g, Grace is feeling surprisingly chipper. Since the start of Project Erid Soundscape, his maybe-scurvy symptoms have faded into the background, only resurfacing if he thinks too hard about the long journey ahead. Instead, they’ve been replaced by a particular form of heartache, one that creeps in every time he hears Rocky playing their proxy of Eridian winds through the Hail Mary’s low-lit corridors. Grace kind of wants to tackle him into a hug and never let go again.
“Grace!” A couple hundred kilograms of rock slam into the bench, and Grace deposits his sample into entirely the wrong well.
Change of plans. Grace wants to murder him.
He’s made some adjustments to the exo-suit, Rocky explains, as Grace debates the pros and cons of trying to pipette the Taumoeba gunk back out, or just scrapping the whole thing and going back to bed.
“Added dexterity for enhanced fine motor function,” Rocky barrels on, unconcerned. He demonstrates said enhanced fine motor function by untying one of Grace’s shoelaces. “What is Grace doing with tank, question?”
Grace settles for the secret third option of just accepting fate and running his samples in the wrong order. It’s not like he’s planning on publishing in Nature any time soon. Grace weighs up his options, before asking cautiously; “Do science Eridians ever use electricity to separate proteins by size?”
Rocky replies with his flattest what-are-you-on-about note.
“Don’t worry about it, then.”
(On one of Mary’s whiteboards, Grace has a chart titled ‘pros of relocating to Erid’. As soon as he’s done- never have to run an SDS-PAGE gel again is going right at the top of the list.)
-
Rocky insists that Erid is a stable, comfortable environment to live in. He’s also just thrown volcanoes into the mix of their soundscape project, so Grace is beginning to have his doubts.
After much deliberation and vetoing the Hail Mary’s selection of magma flow videos, it becomes clear that what Rocky is referring to- (Eridani lesson of the day: harmonic denoting a natural object, major chords for hot and tower, tonal undercurrent indicating a sense of awe.)- aren’t so much volcanoes as they are terrestrial hydrothermal vents. Plumes of superheated gas spilling from fissures in the planet’s crust, intense enough in places to split ammonia into hydrogen and nitrogen, which then get busy forming all sorts of interesting reactions with the mineral-rich substrate brought up from deep in Erid’s mantle. The part of Grace that used to spend his days reading speculative papers on the prospect of silica-based life is suddenly not offended by the volcanoes at all.
The projector room has taken them to the Endeavour Vent Field, the sonorous rumble of Earth’s tectonic activity filling the node. Rocky drums an excited staccato into the railing.
“Sounds like Erid!” The percussion migrates to Grace’s leg, the heat bleeding through Rocky’s exo-suit a warm spot of comfort- even if Grace will probably wake up with bruises tomorrow. “Surface vents are important to some Eridian culture,” Rocky continues. “Rumble sounds like Eridani subharmonics. Some Eridians think vents are communicating.”
Grace hums. Chatty geothermal vents. He hasn’t heard that one before. “And what do you think?”
A pause. “Rocky thinks is bullcrap.”
(Grace can just tell he’s going to get an earful about censorship later.)
As Grace runs his hydrothermal vent soundtrack through the ship’s Eva-Stratt-Approved Youtube to mp3 converter, he draws Rocky’s attention to the life clinging stubbornly to the vent’s ragged surface. Because look closely, and the whole place is thriving with it. Vent clams, Yeti crabs, entire fields of chemosynthetic bacteria. An alien ecosystem, right there on Earth. (As he talks, Grace crushes down the ache in his ribs at the thought of the science club Deep Sea Special he’d been planning, before he was bundled into a blacked-out SUV and his entire life was flipped upside down. His kids would’ve loved tube worms.)
“400 degrees of superheated fluid, 200 atmospheres of pressure- and life is still down there, surviving,” if he notices that Grace has fully slipped into his teacher voice, Rocky doesn’t comment on it.
Instead he shimmies- a full-body eye-roll. “So Earth life can survive on Erid. Humans just weak.”
Grace sighs. Really, he should’ve seen that one coming a lightyear away.
-
Fused at the metaphorical hip as they are, even Grace and Rocky need alone time on occasion.
It’s part of a healthy crew environment; to stop them from airlocking each other before they even make it halfway to Erid. Grace definitely doesn’t get a weird floundering feeling in his chest when Rocky shambles off down his tunnels to spend a few hours knitting xenonite backups for all of Mary’s screws. He’s coping just fine.
His own alone time mostly consists of sitcoms, and on a few memorable afternoons, trying to google translate the stash of purposefully trashy romance novels Ilyukhina had smuggled onto the ship in her personal affects.
He isn’t lonely. Rocky is just a few rooms away, probably inventing some marvel of engineering like it’s an average Tuesday. Grace has the entire universe they’ve built together as proof that he’s here- from the crates he assembled so Grace wouldn’t have an excuse to keep leaving his socks on the floor, to the divot in the xenonite walls perfectly shaped to best watch fragile humans sleep. They saved each others’ worlds, long before they put the first Taumoeba sample under the microscope.
Something in Grace’s chest lurches.
And- Ryland Grace is a grown adult. Ryland Grace is a scientist. He knows that google loves nothing more than the worst case scenario.
But the Hail Mary doesn’t have a medical doctor.
The Hail Mary does have Wikipedia.
By the time Rocky re-emerges from the tunnels with a prototype board for Grace to finally learn how to play Eridian mega-Catan, Grace is freshly convinced he has scurvy, and also maybe a spontaneous coronary artery dissection.
He’s coping.
-
Project Erid Soundscape is coming along strong. Rocky might be the worst helicopter sound director this side of the Milky Way, but he’s finally approved the specific blend of low-wind-earthy-rumble that is apparently characteristic of Erid’s ambient noise. He’s green-lighted them to move onto animals soon.
He’s also grown increasingly cagey about letting Grace listen to the soundtrack they’re putting together. Something about wanting it to be a surprise, that it’ll ruin the immersion if he knows what to expect.
So, Ryland Grace is teaching an alien how to use GarageBand.
The process is somewhat hindered by the fact that Rocky is back in his ball, having retired the exo-suit to make some important adjustments to the thermal regulatory system. (As it turns out, overheating is a Pretty Big Deal for Eridians.) It’s kind of painful watching him try to use a mouse through the mesh panel, but he’s nothing if not persistent.
“Ball is dumb,” for emphasis, Rocky thumps a leg against it, making the whole construction shudder. “Why did Rocky decide ball was a good idea. Rocky is top predator on Erid. Now can’t even open file directory on Human Thinking Machine.”
“Aw, pal,” Grace pats the sphere comfortingly. “I think you’re still an apex predator, even in your ball. We can be dominant species together.”
Easily placated, Rocky preens. “Many thanks,” he pauses. “Still think Grace is lying about humans being major predator on Earth, though.”
One day, Grace is going to teach him the concept of persistence hunting. If it helps Rocky’s ego recover though, he’s happy to keep it to himself for now.
-
The Hail Mary wouldn’t be humanity’s longshot without its own copy of the Golden Record.
Grace found the files early on, fresh from his coma and scrambling to cobble together the Petrova Line of his identity left scattered between Earth and Tau Ceti. The first notes of Brandenburg concerto No.2 were probably the first time after waking up that he just stood, and stopped, and breathed.
Headphones on at his lab bench, Grace listens to the sounds of Earth, laughter, greetings for the cosmos.
Humanity at its most hopeful sends a worldwide hello to the stars.
Humanity at its most desperate sends three people to die in a tin can.
Though, as much as it grates at the bitter, temperamental part of him that insults leaders at conferences and threatens sabotage on missions to save humanity- Grace can’t entirely blame Eva for sending him here. She was right, after all. (She usually was). He can’t blame her, blame Earth, for placing the lives of three over the lives of billions. It’s pretty hard to hold a grudge against a place you’re never going to see again.
(It’s even harder to hold one against a place that pieces of you are always going to miss.)
Grace doesn’t regret his decision. Knows, deep down, that even if the Taumoeba stayed snug inside their xenonite containers, he would’ve found a way back to Rocky anyway. If you have to travel parsecs to find the first person who really, truly gets you, you don’t just fly away from that.
But.
“各位好嗎？祝各位平安健康快樂,” says the Golden Record. “Adanniš lu šulmu. Здравствуйте! Приветствую Вас!”
Now the only human voices Grace will hear.
When he plotted a trajectory across the stars towards where Rocky’s ship should be waiting, Grace knew that it would be a lonely journey.
Maybe he never stopped and really prepared for what that would entail.
It’s not even the hugs or handshakes or arms around his shoulders he misses most. It’s accidentally brushing elbows with someone on a crowded bus. Someone’s hand skimming yours as they passed you the receipt for your shopping. A kid stepping on your foot as they run past you in the corridor.
The constant, low-level reminders that you’re here, you’re alive, you exist.
Maybe one day, Rocky will find a way to shoulder-barge into him authentically, with no barriers in the way. If anyone could figure it out, it’d be him. For now, Grace will have to settle for life separated by a pane of glass.
Still, anything could happen when they reach Erid. That’s why he’s so-
(“-afraid! I don’t want to die!”)
Grace lets his forehead thunk against the bench.
“Iechyd da i chi yn awr, ac yn oesoedd,” the golden record continues. “Tanti auguri e saluti. Hello from the children of planet Earth.”
-
When Grace wakes up, there’s a quilt draped unevenly over his shoulders, his headphones have been placed on the desk beside him, and there’s no feeling in his right leg where it’s pinned between his chair and a lump of xenonite-covered rock.
Beneath him, Rocky has started up the wind noise generator- filling the lab with quiet, alien music.
Grace should get up and move to the dormitory. Instead he closes his eyes and lets the sound sing him back to sleep.
-
They’re finally getting to the good stuff.
And by the good stuff, Grace means Eridian ecosystems- taking the nature soundscape Rocky has embargoed on the laptop, and filling it with life.
Rocky has already covered the basics, and Erid is practically an astrobiologist’s dream- from the dense clouds of photosynthetic microorganisms drifting in the upper-atmosphere jetstreams, to the gliding filter feeders that prey on them, to the boundary predators bringing that energy into the darkness of the ground below. It’s an ocean above sea level, and Grace has never been so interested in food chain energy transfer in his life.
“Erid does not have Earth plants,” Rocky has the teacher hat today, poised on his side of the barrier with an air of authority. “No light. Would die,” he holds up a model of something that looks a bit like coral on steroids. “Closest thing is ♬♪♪♩. Individual cells. Builds mineral deposits in hot areas, makes energy out of chemicals. Nice whistling sound in Erid wind.”
Grace stands corrected. It’s chemosynthetic coral on steroids. How could he be so stupid.
“Question,” he interjects, before Rocky can bulldoze on. “Can we go back to the upper atmosphere microorganism clouds for a bit? I really want to know-”
Rocky raises his hand. Grace is really starting to wish he didn’t teach him that. “Rocky does not understand how high altitude photosynthetic protists are relevant to soundscapes Grace. They don’t make any noise Grace.”
Grace has a feeling that arguing will get his Erid ecology lesson pass revoked, so he swallows his complaints and sits back down.
Satisfied, Rocky continues to explain that, thanks to Erid’s thick atmosphere and air currents full of parasailing phytoplankton- (kite-oplankton? Grace will workshop the name later)- light from 40 Eridani A fails to penetrate deeper than a few thousand feet into the stratosphere. The surface is left in near complete darkness, and life evolved accordingly; why waste energy on eyeballs when you can hear your way through your surroundings instead?
As a result, life on Erid is blind, carnivorous, and noisy. Methods of echolocation evolved on at least thirty independent occasions.
Eridians named their planets’ native species exclusively by their sound, which makes a convenient springboard for Rocky to add them to his soundscape. For ♪♬♩ (notes for scale, rhythm and rattle)- Grace notes down woodpeckers, coconut shells, seed pod windchimes. For ♫♩♪- (an overlaid chorus of whistle and burst)- he chooses bats, dolphins, the sound a firework makes as it doppler-shifts into the sky.
Rocky staunchly refuses to include one of Erid’s most common species- ♪♪♫, said as an arpeggio sliding from spiral to scrape with a brief subharmonic containing the hum for flight- on the principle that Adrian finds them disgusting. If that’s not true love, Grace doesn’t know what is.
It takes a few hours, but by the time Mary’s lighting has started to dim towards its evening cycle, Grace is pretty certain they’ve got Erid’s nature ambience down to a tee.
“So, pal,” Grace repositions the laptop and gets comfortable against the barrier. “What about sounds for Eridians?”
He knows he’s somehow made a bad move before the words are even fully out of his mouth.
Rocky shifts uncomfortably on the spot, trills a low, unsettled note, then hurries off down his tunnels with something about needing to check on the Hail Mary’s fuel tanks Immediately.
Grace is left to stare bewildered after him.
Huh.
-
The first time it happens, it’s weird. The second time it happens, it’s a coincidence. By the third time, it’s a pattern.
Rocky is avoiding putting anything distinctly Eridian into the soundscape.
He’s building an empty city; Shibuya crossing at a standstill, a storm cell with nobody to chase it. If Rocky wasn’t acting so cagey about the whole thing, Grace would just assume he was going for Erid nature sounds to study and relax to, and call it a day.
But Grace knows Rocky better than he knows himself. There’s something he’s avoiding.
(That doesn’t mean he has any clue how to ask about it, though.)
-
The maybe-scurvy is getting worse again. Every time Grace thinks too hard about his back-of-the-envelope calculations of the limits of his food supply, or the miles upon miles of empty space the Beetles will have to make it through before reaching earth, or the fact that his final class would now be old enough to attend university on Earth, if there’s even any universities left- he kind of worries he’s about to throw up.
He feels like the Milky Way’s most pathetic Schrodinger’s cat experiment. A black box for what will happen on Earth. A black box for what will happen on Erid. Put Dr. Ryland Grace between them: which nutritional deficiency will he die of first?
He’s spiralling just a little bit when Rocky clatters into the lab in his ball.
“Need closest Earth animal,” he demands. “Sounds like this;” he makes a noise which starts as a gentle tremolo, then crescendos into the offspring of a rusty door hinge and lung infection. Grace winces involuntarily.
“Seagull..?” He offers, weakly.
“Thank,” evidently satisfied, Rocky rolls back out of the door.
Grace can’t help but smile.
(Yes, the black boxes are terrifying. No, that doesn’t stop them from being so, entirely worth it.)
-
Grace realises that his vial has shattered against the bench, before it registers that he’s the one who threw it.
There’s glass flung across the floor like shrapnel and a smear of what isn’t ascorbic acid and never will be ascorbic acid splattered halfway up the wall, probably doing more good there as a decoration than it has done since he started trying to make the- freaking thing. Because even if, by some miracle, Grace did manage to fully synthesise vitamin C, what then? As soon as the coma slurry ran short, he’d just start running out of A or B12, or any of the other essential nutrients his body needs to not fall apart instead.
Or they could get to Erid and find out that there’s no feasible way to keep Grace alive in its atmosphere. Or Rocky’s tunnels could break on the way and he could burn alive in the Hail Mary’s oxygen. Or they could make it to Erid, look back at Sol in thirteen years time, and still find it dimming, dimming, dimming.
They could make it to Erid, and find that they were already too late.
Grace heaves in a breath, and finds it doesn’t work. Tries again, same results.
A good scientist repeats their experiments at least three times before coming to a conclusion, and Grace’s is that he’s maybe dying.
He aims for the chair and ends up sat on the lab floor instead, surrounded by broken glass and splattered chemicals that could’ve saved his life if he ever knew what the hell he was doing and-
And Grace knows he doesn’t have scurvy, not yet at least, but the alternative is having to acknowledge that he’s been losing his mind for weeks because he’s homesick and scared of change and still just as terrified as he’s always been and the piece of his brain that bites when cornered refuses to admit that, not now, not ever and-
And there’s Rocky; fluttering at his side, a nervous keen of the notes he chose for Grace’s name, tugging at his sleeve, tapping the ground to hear him better, a steady thud thud thud, the one-two beat of a human heart, constant, constant, and-
And Grace breathes.
-
Neither of them are talking about it.
Correction; neither of them are talking full stop. Grace holes up in the lab with his Taumoeba paper, his brief career as a synthetic chemist vacced out into space alongside his broken glassware. Rocky hedges around the perimeter in his tunnels like he can’t bear to let Grace out of his audiosphere, then pretends to be suddenly engrossed in the Hail Mary’s water recycling system every time Grace turns to look. They spend their time skirting around each other in awkward, concentric orbits.
It’s fine.
(It’s terrible.)
Grace wakes up in a bad mood to begin with. He increased the coma-slurry-content of his meals a few days ago, and it’s leaving a bad taste in his mouth in more ways than one. Throw in the fact that he can’t find the data from an experiment he knows he’s already run, plus Rocky hovering around the lab like Grace’ll break if he takes his metaphorical eyes off him, and it all starts to wear at his nerves just a little bit.
And then, to top it all off, Grace drops a vial of Taumoeba while he’s running his round of tests. Glass shatters, amoeba gloop slops all over the bench, and by the time Grace has grabbed a canister of pressurised nitrogen and nuked the containment breach back into submission, Rocky is all up in his space on the other side of the barrier, chittering out these worried harmonies that do nothing but make Grace want to pull his hair out.
“Jeez, I’m fine,” he snaps, choosing not to dwell on how distinctly un-fine the statement ends up sounding.
“What like Grace was fine when Grace threw glass at wall and stopped Human Respiratory Function. Question.” Rocky’s voice flattens beneath the translator, the verbal equivalent of an eye roll.
Oh so they’re doing this now, are they. Grace scoffs. “That was- I was ill. Humans get weird when they’re ill. You’re overthinking it.”
“No. Rocky knows human body function now,” Rocky insists. “All other systems were fine.”
“That’s- first: ever heard of something called privacy?” Shaking his head, Grace moves to go- somewhere. Anywhere else. “Second: not having this conversation right now, buddy.”
“Just Grace heartbeat and breathing increase,” of course, Rocky follows him along the barrier. “Like when uncomfortable, or scared-”
“Okay!” Grace claps his hands sharply, and absolutely does not feel like the worst person alive when Rocky flinches at the abrupt sound. “Y’know what? Today’s lesson: boundaries. B-o-u-n-d-a-r-i-e-s. Means leaving someone the heck alone when they ask for it.”
Rocky vents out a frustrated whistle. “Rocky knows boundaries. Rocky isn’t dumb.”
“Yeah, no, you’re right. Rocky isn’t dumb. Rocky is just a hypocrite,” Grace pointedly ignores the outraged staccato of clicks from the other side of the xenonite. “Rocky can interrogate Grace as much as he likes, but as soon as Grace asks why he’s refusing to acknowledge the existence of his own species, Grace needs to mind his own business, Statement.”
“Rocky is not-”
“What? Not having this conversation now?” Grace grabs the metaphorical shovel, digs the hole deeper. “Boundaries, see? We’re learning so much today!”
One of Rocky’s legs thumps against the xenonite. “Grace is acting like human infant.”
“No, Grace is acting like a perfectly reasonable adult whose best friend won’t freaking talk to him!”
And. Okay.
Maybe they’re both hypocrites.
Momentum killed, nowhere left to dig- Grace deflates. He gestures vaguely at the remains of the Taumoeba vial left on the lab bench. “I’m gonna. Go deal with that.”
Hunched low, Rocky lets out a dispirited hum, right on the limits of Grace’s hearing range. “Rocky will check fuel lines in case of contamination.”
He leaves, and the lab falls into unbearable silence. Grace scrubs a hand roughly over his face, closes his eyes, and lets it shatter over him like a wave.
-
They don’t even make it through a half day-cycle of the silent treatment before drifting back into each other’s orbit again.
Grace is in the Don’t Go Crazy room- panels off, starfished on the platform, feeling distinctly like roadkill. It should be embarrassing how quickly his spirits lift when Rocky skirts into the room, xenonite-covered legs folding as he drops full-loaf to settle beside him.
“Hey, bud,” Grace sighs. Rocky doesn’t have the translator, but the harmony he thrums to the shape of Grace’s voice has no need for words.
This time, when they turn on the projectors, they don’t go to Earth, or Erid, or anywhere.
Rocky patches into the hull camera, stars unfold around them- and they stay exactly where they are.
-
When Grace emerges from an impromptu nap on the hold’s laundry bags, Rocky is arms-deep in one of the maintenance hatches just outside. The Hail Mary’s humidity regulator has been on the blink for the past few days, and they’re both starting to get fed up with the condensation constantly precipitating on the tunnel walls. Clearly set on fixing the problem, Rocky has a wirecutter in one claw and the display gun balanced in another, monitoring Mary’s schematics pulled up on the laptop screen.
Also, there’s music.
It’s more chime than song, echoing silvery through the laptop’s speakers- a recording of some obscure instrument plucked from the depths of Mary’s database while Grace was asleep. Rocky hums a call-and-response to the rhythm of it; a chorus of one.
It takes an embarrassingly long time for Grace to remember where he’s heard something like it before: playing through the Blip A’s corridors, an entire universe ago.
Grace stifles a yawn, and the music cuts off abruptly.
“Perfectly good bed, ten Earth meters away,” Rocky warns with a cautionary jab of the display gun. “Right to complain about sore appendages revoked.”
“Thank you Rocky, I slept great, Rocky,” Grace rolls his eyes, then scoots over to wick condensation off Rocky’s exo-suit.
They still haven’t talked about it. Sometimes, it’s best to pretend you just didn’t hear.
-
One of Grace’s shirts has a hole in it, and somehow that’s what brings his attempts at fine-thank-you crashing to the ground.
It’s not even one of his-something CNSA-branded he pilfered from Yao’s personal affects in the early days of the journey- but the fraying hem kind of feels like the world is ending all over again. It’s- another one of those unknowns. Will Erid have the resources to make new thread, new fabric? Will these be the only clothes he’ll ever have? Insignificant in the grand scope of things, but there has to be a black box that breaks the camel's back.
Rocky insists- always will, never if- that Erid will take care of him. But alien is still a pretty terrifying thing to be. He’s hurtling towards a planet with different food, different fabrics, different species with entirely different ways of existing in the world. Grace’s memories of Earth might be spotty at best, and he might never have really found a box there that fitted him right- but at least on Earth he knew what a box was supposed to look like.
Now, Grace has a 300-foot tube containing the last familiar things he’s ever going to have- (potentially the last things from Earth ever, if something goes wrong and the Beetles don't make it home and that’s not something he needs to be entertaining right now)- so he thinks he might be a little bit justified for spiralling over a hole in Yao’s slightly uncomfortable t-shirt.
He doesn’t realise Rocky has been lingering in the hatch to the dormitory until he hums a questioning note, splitting into the trainwreck of Grace’s thoughts for just a second.
“Not now, Rocky,” he motions him away, but there’s no heart in it.
Instead, Rocky inches closer, low to the ground in a universal display of no-threat-here. “Grace has been weird lately,” he starts. When Grace offers a wet little laugh, he reappraises. “Correction. Grace has been weirder than usual lately.”
Grace’s first instinct is denial- falling back on the lies he’s been telling even himself since he first stopped to question what leaving Earth behind for good would really mean. He’s tired, He’s been working hard, He’s got- goddamn- scurvy, of all things.
But the way Rocky is approaching him like he’s a scared animal with a propensity to bite is kind of making Grace feel like the worst person alive, plus they’re pretty much soul-bonded at this point. He was going to have to face the truth eventually.
Statement: Dr. Ryland Grace is going to another planet, and he’s absolutely terrified.
“It’s just-” he swallows hard. “Thinking about Erid. What I’m gonna find there. Alien planet, y’know?” Grace aims a useless gesture at the xenonite tunnels. “I mean, Jeez. I’m the kind of guy who gets weird about sleeping in a hotel room for more than a couple nights because I start missing my own bed, never mind all this, and-”
Rocky hums a soft rambling, Grace below the detection of the translator.
“Right. Of course I’m excited to be the first human ever to explore a literal freaking alien planet. How could I not be?” Then, defeated, Grace sighs. “But I’m leaving everything I’ve ever known behind. I’m scared, and I thought I was done with that.”
Once, Rocky described to Grace how exhausting it is for an Eridian to hold concentration on one singular thing. To converge their attention, their entire universe, into a singularity.
So when Rocky settles down beside Grace, every limb unoccupied, it kind of means the entire world.
“Rocky is scared too,” he admits after a moment of stillness, a gentle harmony. “Many many many years since last saw Erid. Might not be the same any more.”
His turn to tell the truth.
“And that’s why-”
“Scary to think about Erid as Rocky remembers it. Erid could have changed. Rocky could have changed,” He clicks his claws together in a mournful rhythm. “Might not fit each other any more.”
Wordlessly, Grace leans into Rocky’s warmth- a human gesture, but one he hopes crosses the border between planets. As he does so, he revises his previous assessment.
When they arrive, Erid won’t be getting one homesick alien.
It’ll be getting two.
-
And- things aren’t quite so terrifying when you don’t have to do them alone.
-
Besides- hasn’t Grace survived being scared before?
If anything, he’s spent most of his life in varying states of terror: ranging from phoning the local gas company, to conference networking sessions, to the-sun-is-dying-and-we-want-you-to-stop-it. He’s fight-flight-fawned his way through most of the human experience- always best at arguing when he should've asked and running when he should’ve stayed- but each time he’s learned.
(Even if all he’s learned is that he really needs to shut his mouth sometimes- it’s still knowledge.)
Something he always told his students: fear is just curiosity you haven’t given room to grow. It’s about time Dr. Grace took Mr. Grace’s advice for once.
He did it when he crash-and-burned out of academia, and re-invented himself into a job that actually made him want to get out of bed in the morning.
He did it when he turned the Hail Mary around and found that navigating the stars is nowhere near as terrifying when you have someone to do it for.
Grace can do it again now- and he has no intention of doing it alone.
-
“Hey, Rocky,” Grace swings through the hatch into the control room, the window illuminated by a thousand unfamiliar stars. “I think it’s time our soundscape had some life added to it.”
-
They start, of course, with music.
Grace scavenges every blanket he can find on the Hail Mary and settles in for a long haul in the Don’t Go Crazy room. He relinquishes his favourite patchwork quilt to Rocky though, draping it over his exo-suit for emotional support. Rocky complains that his body runs a tight ship of 210 Degrees Exactly and doesn’t need to be kept warm, but burrows into the fabric anyway.
They immediately rule out anything with lyrics- apparently human singing is the Eridian equivalent of when your washing machine kind of sounds like it’s making words during its spin cycle- and instead focus their attention on Mary’s alphabetised database of every instrument ever invented. Rocky approaches the task hesitantly at first; it’s not easy to describe an experience you can’t be certain exists any more. But, if they can’t make a soundscape of Erid as it is now, then a time capsule is the next best thing.
Besides- trading fear for curiosity is kind of how they saved the world in the first place. Grace gets to watch in real-time as his enthusiasm comes to life.
Talking almost too fast for the translator to keep up, Rocky tells Grace about the sound of Eridani chatter, each conversation a song improvised. On Erid, public spaces are made to echo, and joining in a discussion overheard on your way between clusters is an expectation rather than an intrusion- although Rocky confesses that he’s far from a good model of Eridian culture in that regard. To their dictionary of sound, they add whalesong, theremins, the echo of bats in village-sized caves, the calls of birds that Grace didn’t even know existed.
He tells Grace about the reverb of a thrum in full harmony. More sensation than sound, a togetherness that feels like your understanding of the world is finally complete. A rumble of ideas that aren’t your own but are your own, the way a violin is a violin and also part of an entire orchestra. They add concertos, acapella, the Earth-deep rumble of the tectonic plates; a whole planet in symphony.
He tells Grace about the chimes strung through every street of every city, singing in the constant breeze. Each tone unique to one place, a way to find home in the dark. He sings Grace the melody of the cluster he worked at, the home he built with Ardian, the geode-filled hall where he learned that Erid’s mission to the stars needed him to join it.
When Rocky deflates under the memories, Grace reaches to tuck the quilt a little closer around his exo-suit.
“Which chime do you want to put in the soundscape?” He asks, to fill the quiet.
Rocky plucks at a thread fraying from the edge of the quilt. “Will make new chime,” he says eventually. “For Grace Rocky home.”
Grace searches the database for windchimes, and tries to pretend he’s not about to cry.
-
Inevitably, they get sidetracked soon after.
A brief intermission to explain the physics behind different human instruments turns into a crash course on the concept of a symphony orchestra, and Grace makes the groundbreaking discovery that Rocky is kind of into Dvořák.
He supposes classical music snobs must be onto something, as the New World Symphony crescendoes through the projector room, and Rocky admits that he doesn’t hate it entirely.
“Sounds like clumsy thrum,” he appraises. “But still has ♫♫♪.” (the word is a perfect harmony to the brass line of the symphony. Grace logs it in the translator as togetherness.)
So they’ve discovered music that Rocky can tolerate. The next logical thing is to dance about it.
Grace sways to his feet, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a lopsided cape, and grabs one of Rocky’s claws. “Up and at ‘em, bud!”
“What.” Despite his protests, Rocky follows Grace’s pull upright. “What is happening.”
Grace reaches for a second claw, and twirls around Rocky in a clumsy approximation of a waltz. “Dancing,” he grins, then almost eats platform as he trips over the blanket.
“This is not dancing,” Rocky huffs air from his vents, exasperated. “This is ♪♬,” He whistles a melody encompassing something about newly-hatched pebbles getting stuck on their backs in deep sand. The information transfer rate of Eridani is a marvel to behold.
Still, he lets Grace tug him on a wonky orbit around the projector room, adding his own little jazz hands and twirls where he deems necessary. He dips into a dramatic imitation of the conductor on the recording, and Grace is laughing so hard he’s breathless with it, his spine protesting from stooping over and one of the blankets tangled uselessly around his ankles. Just when he thinks he’s recovered, Mary’s voice chimes over the speakers- erratic movement detected, caution advised- and that gets him wheezing all over again.
Then, next time he tries to pull Rocky into a spin, Grace does eat platform.
“No sympathy,” Rocky trills helpfully from above him. “Grace’s own fault.”
“Way to kick a guy when he’s down, Rock.”
The symphony is overlaid by the chitter of alien laughter, and for a moment, there’s absolutely nothing to be afraid of.
-
Grace opens his lab notes, finds his doomed ascorbic acid synthesis, and inserts a record that he’s cured scurvy with the power of friendship. Take that, James Lind.
(He’ll have to deal with it again at some point, Grace knows this. But- for now- it can be an unknown for another day.)
-
Grace sends Rocky his Taumoeba paper for peer review.
They end up huddled in the main corridor; cupola window in view, Grace curled into a cosy nook of the tunnel while Rocky dismantles one of the CO2 scrubbers on the other side. They’re pressed close, and Grace can almost imagine the hum of touch through the xenonite. Narrating his paper like an audiobook is slow business- especially since Rocky has decided to take his job as a reviewer very seriously by questioning every other paragraph- but it’s not like they’re going anywhere else any time soon.
Part way through describing the conditions of his protein expression trials, Grace turns to look at Rocky through the barrier.
“Even if everything is different,” he muses, “Maybe we can get to know Erid together.”
Rocky hums lightly. “Grace keep reading methods section.”
(And underneath it, there’s a new chime. A simple melody, one even Grace could whistle if he wanted to. An address, a place to call home.
An entire universe in a sound.)
-
The soundscape is ready.
Rocky doesn’t even let Grace wake up fully before he’s getting tugged towards the projector room with great fanfare. He’s still in his pyjamas- the CNSA t-shirt with the hole in it, because fear is overrated- the corridors still steeped in the dark of Mary’s night cycle. It’s only after he’s pulled Grace onto the platform that Rocky seems to have second thoughts, hunching lower to the ground in hesitation.
“What if Grace doesn’t like it?” He worries, tapping out a nervous rhythm on the grille below.
Settling down on the platform, Grace smiles. “It’s going to be home. I’ll learn to like it.”
He lies back like he would for his usual Don’t Go Crazy room content, folds his arms behind his head, closes his eyes. He can hear Rocky messing with the laptop a few feet away, clicking frustratedly at the keys.
And then, suddenly, Grace is on another planet.
Wind sweeps over him, whistling through the gullies of a deep, weather-carved canyon. A creature soars somewhere overhead, skimming the clouds of algal snow as its clicking cry echoes into the dark. Around him, conversation echoes like music. Halls fill with the thrum of art-science-history-knowledge. Streets strung with windchimes lead tired Eridians home.
Grace has never heard anything like it.
Even if he tried, he doesn’t think he could pick out where each sound was borrowed from- the whole symphony of them so alien that they’ve taken on a life of their own.
With his eyes still closed, Grace feels it rather than sees it as Rocky settles in beside him; the soundscape washing over them both like gravity.
Grace doesn’t know if he’s ever going to stop missing Earth. A huge part of him will always live in that black box, wondering what sort of ending their story is going to have.
But- surrounded by streets that sing and the silver-gold chime of home- why shouldn’t he be excited to learn something new?