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One
Stratt had her doubts, at first.
She didn’t care about the volatility she read in the profile that had been prepared for her. The temper that had caused him to lash out like that at the conference. Stratt had spent her entire life around intelligent, volatile men; she knew how to leverage that type of energy.
It was the fact that he’d never tried to reenter the scientific community after that. That had her concerned.
Was that energy gone?
No, she could still kick up a spark of it, when she found him at the school.
He still tried to get out of coming with her, though. She worried that he was still burnt out.
But he had the expertise they needed. His research was far ranging enough.
He’d studied extremophiles. Life, mostly microbes, that lived in the most diverse environments Earth had to offer.
Stratt decides Grace is the best chance they’ve got. If they put him in the lab and he doesn’t get results, they can go to the next person on the list.
She has to use a show of force to get him into the car.
But once Dr. Grace is in the lab and working, he works. Very few breaks. Very little prodding needed. He runs test after test after test.
Even after he discovers Astrophage are mostly water. She thinks the motivation is probably gone after that. She gives him a chance to sulk, and she figures out how to move forward without him.
But when she goes to tell him she’s done with him, he asks to keep working.
He might have taken some pushing to get here. But if you push him until he moves, damn, the guy just keeps going.
She’ll have to remember that.
Grace keeps working, and Stratt keeps giving him the space to work, and sometimes that extra push.
She knows he can speak in front of a room full of people competently, and keep their attention. The man’s a teacher, for God’s sake.
She pushes him into the room. To the front of the room. She shares his comments with everyone. Until he starts sharing them himself.
And once he’s started speaking to the group, he makes himself part of the group in a way she did not even anticipate.
He’s not just doing the work of making fuel. He becomes the person who explains the process, explains the risks, explains the procedures. Coordinates with other scientists working on different applications for the stuff.
The funny thing is, Stratt isn’t even sure Grace knows he’s her second in command. He certainly isn’t here for the power.
She’d known that from the file. One does not insult the leader in one’s field like that if one is in it for the power. But this isn’t about vindication, either. He’d proven that when he kept working after the discovery that Astrophage are water based.
It isn’t about recognition. He can’t even take a damned compliment.
He seems to be in it for the pure sake of the knowledge. For the good it can do, maybe, but the knowledge itself has value to him, she thinks.
Once he wants to know something, he doesn’t stop until he knows it.
Stratt will take advantage of that. Happily. It is her job to take whatever advantage she can find and turn it towards the cause of saving Earth.
Then the entire science team dies in an explosion. Except Grace, because he is drinking coffee with Stratt a mile away.
And she knows what she has to do almost immediately, but she tries to find away around it. Because her earnest, curious, kind, good… friend, he deserves better than to be pushed into this.
She asks him.
He looks at her like she’s lost her mind.
She asks him again.
“Some people are failures,” he tells her. “Some people don’t rise to the challenge.”
That’s true. Some people are. But that has never been true of Ryland Grace. Not ever.
If Ryland Grace starts something, applies himself to it in earnest, he will not stop until he is made to stop.
Stratt believes that. Believes in him. And that is why this is the only choice she can make.
Get him moving to Tau Ceti, and he will finish that mission.
Give him a push, and he will fly.
Two
Grace is a strange, soft, clumsy alien who talks in jokes when he wants to avoid something. His memory is broken, and he gets startled easily.
But once he knows there is an experiment to run, his curiosity pushes away everything else. I knew that from the moment he took apart his protective suit in the atmosphere I made for him, without even knowing my language.
Grace wants to know how the universe works. He hesitates. He gets scared. He doubts himself.
But he finds a way to approach a problem, and he learns. He uses the thinking machines that have so much information from Earth and so many tools. He learns my language slowly, but he learns.
Neither of our crews have a trained pilot anymore. I have gotten very good at maneuvering my ship alone. But Hail Mary is better for our plan, and has shielding from the threat that killed my crew.
Mary’s controls are built for Grace’s strange, soft, three-jointed appendages to wrap around.
Grace must learn to be a better pilot. If we are going to make this work, he must work hard.
He complains. He avoids. He gets very grumpy when I point out his shortcomings. But he always comes back to learn more.
He wants to save Earth, to save Erid, but he enjoys the challenge. The knowledge. The puzzle.
I understand, because I can be the same. It is why I volunteered for this mission. I would have had trouble staying at home, waiting, while other Eridians went to space to try and solve the puzzle of the stars.
(Instead I had to wait at Tau Ceti, not able to solve the puzzle of why everyone else died.)
So I push, because I know the regret of not having the skills to suit the situation.
Grace gets very good at piloting. He risks himself to retrieve the sample. And despite everything, we both survive. We solve the puzzle of the stars.
My soft, clumsy alien friend with his broken memory is very, very good at keeping working on a puzzle until it is solved.
I am alone again. Wondering, again, how to solve this puzzle when every hope is already gone.
No astrophage. Taumoeba everywhere. No fuel and no protection from the danger that killed the others.
And then, like a memory come to life, a wish made real, Grace is back! He has fixed the problem on Hail Mary. He says he will bring me home.
He says he will bring me home, he will stretch out his food as long as he can to make sure he makes it that far, and then he will die.
This is not allowed.
He cannot eat my food, but we have taumoeba. We have so much taumoeba.
He says maybe this will let him live longer, be more likely to make it to Erid, but there are things he needs in his food that the taumoeba does not have, and he will still get very sick by the time we reach Erid.
I don’t like that answer.
This is a puzzle.
This is a puzzle about molecules and biology. Grace has a laboratory. He has his thinking machines. He has his strange, wobbly brain. A science brain that knows molecules and cells.
I will make him work on it.
I will make him work on it until he solves it.
Three
While Grace is sleeping in his strange, noisy, restless way behind his pressure wall in the surface medical facility built for him, Adrian asks Rocky to tell them about the mission.
Some things, Rocky is excited to tell. Some things, Adrian has already heard, from Rocky or through conversations in the human caretaking thrum.
Rocky is very quiet about the years before Grace came to Tau Ceti.
Rocky tells Adrian about that first meeting, about watching the spot of petrovalight grow brighter on the readouts as it entered the system. About how tiny the ship was compared to the Eridian explorer. Rocky was not expecting the inhabitants to be larger than him.
Rocky tells Adrian sheepishly about how that first probe bounced right off of Hail Mary’s hull, how the second probe was slower but still almost too fast for Grace, as Mary had no hull robots and Grace had to come out into the naked vacuum in a protective suit, attached to Mary with a piece of string, to catch the second probe.
Adrian listens to the hush, gurgle, shift of Grace behind the pressure wall — a whole landscape of sounds from one lightly sleeping alien — and wonders how the delicate thing ever survived.
“Grace isn’t delicate,” Rocky says. “Grace is smart and stubborn and resilient.”
“You called him fragile before,” Adrian reminds him.
“That was rude of me,” Rocky tells them. “And not fair. But not exactly wrong, either. He needed a push.”
Adrian thinks about that.
Their Rocky has always been stubborn and restless and eager to take on more than others might think he is ready for.
But he’s come back different. Nervous. Afraid of normal things and used to very, very strange things.
No one else from the explorer came back at all.
There are things Eridians are not equipped to handle, out there in space. Grace survived those things.
Rocky survived them, too. The two of them made it through together. Two stubborn, eager, curious beings.
“Tell me,” Adrian says. “How did you help him to survive?”
“He is either very confident about things or not confident at all,” Rocky says. “Maybe his skills are in the middle. Maybe they are pretty good. But if he is not confident, he has trouble starting to try. Example: he was not trained as a pilot on the Hail Mary. Only his dead crewmates were. He needed to be better, if we wanted to survive retrieving the predator from Planet-Adrian’s atmosphere. But he would avoid practicing. He needed a push. I knew he could be better. So I made him practice. Until he was confident, and then he practiced until he was good.”
“And you lived,” Adrian says.
“We both almost died,” Rocky says, tapping nervously at the floor. Clearly listening hard to Grace’s sleeping-noises. “We prepared so much, and still so much went wrong.”
“But you are here,” Adrian says. “You are safe. Both of you.”
“Hard to believe,” says Rocky. “After so many years. Hard to believe. It doesn’t seem real. I only know space, and danger. I know they are real.”
“You are safe,” Adrian tells him firmly. “You are home. You did it. You saved each other, and you saved both your worlds. This is real.”
They will tell Rocky this as many times as he needs to hear it, until he believes.
Their stubborn, smart, nervous mate might need a bit of a push.