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He and Rocky have just finished a knock-down, blow-out fight – the kind of argument where both parties storm off in a huff and refuse to answer when the other calls until they cool off – when the mangled man washes up on the biodome beach, and Grace will never forgive himself for that.
If he hadn’t hurled the panic button after Rocky’s retreating form, screaming something unfounded about being treated like a pet, it would have been within reach like it was supposed to be. He would have had a direct line to the biodome team, and if he’d been able to get through right away, maybe – maybe things would have turned out differently.
Maybe the man might have lived.
Even looking back years later, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. One moment he’s sitting sullenly on the gravelly shore, head in his hands, his entire lower half freezing as the waves roll in, and the next moment a wad of seaweed washes up several meters to his left. Grace barely looks at it for a few moments – another mistake, more time lost – and when he does, it still takes him a minute longer to realize what’s wrong. There isn’t any seaweed in the biodome sea, and this lumpy shape is far too solid to be plant matter.
Also, it’s red – the kind of red that burns the eyes, because only one thing shares that shade, and most humans don’t like to be around that much blood.
To his credit, he reacts by scrambling toward the body instead of away from it, like he would have before. He thinks it’s got something to do with his subconscious realization that this is a person, even though his brain doesn’t catch up until he’s nearly on top of the guy.
“Hello? Oh my god, are you okay? What’s – who are you?” On his hands and knees, Grace claws at the wet red clothing. His fingers catch and knot in rough fabric, and he straightens his spine, heaving the body over onto its back. “Oh my god – Rocky? ROCKY!”
It’s been nearly an hour since Rocky sped away, growling about taking some time off to spend with his mate, someone who actually appreciates his presence – and it was a stupid argument, it’s so stupid, it’s not like it’s even the first time they’ve had this argument, but now it’s the worst thing Grace has ever done, because it means Rocky’s out of reach. His hand rises automatically to where the panic button should be – help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up – but his grip closes on empty space.
Under his other palm, the body jerks and coughs, and Grace shrieks as the shape flails, limbs thrashing. He yelps again when the person retches, bloody seawater splattering the wet rocks underneath them. They’re still half in the surf: Grace has water licking around his thighs, and the person – the person – is nearly submerged each time a wave rolls in.
“Let me –” Grace starts as he moves to grab under the person’s armpits and heave him up the beach, then stops with a shocked, punched-out exhale of horror. The man’s left shoulder is a hideous mess, a cavernous wound where there should be an arm. It looks like his entire limb was ripped violently from the socket. No wonder he’s covered in blood. “Oh my god, your arm!”
The man hisses, reaching up with his right hand and flailing until his fingers catch on Grace’s sleeve. “Don’t,” he slurs, his voice deep and thick and wounded. “Shh – it’ll hear you.”
Well, that’s just about the most terrifying thing he could have said. Grace tries to remember his first aid training (every other year for all teachers), and can only remember the instructor telling them that, in a crisis situation, people revert to their lowest level of training. This is definitely a crisis situation, and sure enough, his brain is blank at the sight of this horrifically injured person who shouldn’t even exist here on this planet.
His legs seem intact, and his right arm, but the wet shirt clinging tight to his torso shows bizarre lumps and divots in areas that shouldn’t have that kind of texture. And when the man rolls his head to the side, long strings of black hair drape across his face, framing a dark-stubbled jaw and an acre of swollen tissue. The whole left side of his face is grotesquely malformed, and his left eye appears swollen shut. As Grace stammers and tries to wrench his sleeve out of the man’s grip, a furrow forms between the mismatched brows.
“Who’s...where’s the black box?” He coughs, then retches again, bloody foam dribbling from the corner of his mouth. With some effort, he wrenches open his right eye, but its dark iris doesn’t focus on Grace.
“I don’t know what that is,” Grace replies, deciding that putting pressure on the major injury is the obvious first step. The icy seawater must be numbing the man to keep him from reacting as Grace folds one corner of his torn sleeve over and presses it against the raw meat where his arm should be. He’s never going to look at his meburgers the same way again.
The man’s breath catches, his one eye staring glassily up at the crest of the biodome and the projected sun in a bright blue sky. “I was right,” he breathes.
“What?” Grace pants, struggling to put pressure on the stump of his shoulder with the scraps of his shirt and casting frantically about for where the panic button might have landed. “Right about what?”
“It was just us,” the man mumbles, his eye slipping shut again. “We were the ones...who vanished...not the rest of the universe. Just us. I was right. It was...only us...”
Seawater trickles down his temple – or maybe it’s tears. Grace doesn’t have the brainpower to figure it out. He needs to get to the panic button, or to one of the emergency airlocks set evenly around the edge of the biodome so he can send a message. Rocky made sure there were a million failsafes during the construction of Grace’s enclosure, and yet, due to a stupid reaction on his part, zero of them are currently within reach.
Rocky’s going to make him keep a second panic button after this. Scratch that, Rocky is going to surgically implant a panic button like a pacemaker and assign a team to respond every time Grace’s heart rate goes above a certain level.
Right now, he wouldn’t turn that down if it meant getting someone here sooner. “I need to get something to call for help,” he tells the man laying in the bloody surf. Every time a wave rolls out, more blood coats the pebbles under his shoulder, only to be washed away by the next wave that comes in. Grace is pretty sure the water is as sterile as it can be, but that still can’t be healthy for an open wound. “You have to let me go for a second so I can find it.”
The man doesn’t seem to hear him. His fingers stay locked in the sleeve of Grace’s cardigan, which is sopping wet up to the elbows with a mix of seawater and blood. God, the Eridians don’t even have bleach. How is he going to get the stains out?
Rocky will help him synthesize something. He shakes his head. This is a stupid thing to get hung up on when he’s got an unexpected person bleeding out in front of him. He needs to find the panic button.
“Please,” Grace begs, prying at the man’s dirty fingers with his own. “Please let go.”
“Th’ black box,” the man croaks. “Where’s...”
“I’ve got to go find it,” Grace says, in a panicked stroke of inspiration. “But you have to let me go so I can do that.”
The man’s eye cracks open again. “Keep it safe,” he mumbles. “It should be floating. The data...there’s...it’s a fragment...but stay away from th’ light...” He breaks off, swallows, then coughs again, his whole torso jerking with each explosive exhale. Groaning, he rolls his head and immediately gets blasted in the face by an incoming wave.
“Oh – careful!” Grace gasps as the man splutters and wheezes, his heels kicking weakly at the rocks of the beach.
“Where,” he rasps, his eye blowing wide, his grip still locked on Grace’s sleeve. “What’s...?”
Grace gives up and fights to get the cardigan off with one hand, fumbling over the buttons and yanking his arm out of the sleeve, leaving it in the man’s tight grip. “I’ll be right back,” he promises, rubbing his palms together in the surf to get some of the blood off. “I’ll – I’ll be right back. Don’t die.”
“S’too late,” the man mumbles, and when Grace looks down at his battered face, his eye is closed again. “Too late...f’r me. It saw me...th’ eye...don’t – don’t look...don’t look at th’ light...”
Grace waffles for a moment, then staggers to his feet and lunges up the shoreline. His feet are numb from a mix of the cold water and kneeling on them, and the pins and needles shooting up and down his calves make him stumble more than once as he races back and forth across the rocks where the panic button should have fallen. At the same time, he’s trying to calculate how far he is from the closest airlock and realizing with a jolt of despair that he’s nearly right smack dab in between two of them – which means he’s as far away as he could possibly be from any of them.
There’s always the potential for some random Eridian to be wandering by outside the biodome, so he might as well keep shouting. “ROCKY!” he yells as he staggers and slips over the wet rocks. “ADRIAN! SOMEONE HELP! HELP!”
It’s not Rocky’s fault, he reminds himself as he dashes furious, helpless tears from his eyes. This is his fault. If he hadn’t gotten so mad he’d thrown the stupid thing –
He sees it just as he becomes aware of a new sound behind him. Tripping to his knees, Grace grabs the panic button and flips it over, flicking the cap up and punching it with his thumb so hard that his nail cracks. A tiny light comes on above the button, and Grace nearly sobs in relief. The signal worked. He didn’t break it by hurling it across the beach. Now he just has to wait for a response team.
They won’t know, he realizes, spinning around and running back to the dark lump of the man in the surf. They won’t know the situation, or that they’ll need to get Armando’s surgical suite started up. His only hope is that there are, actually, the microphones he’d been yelling at Rocky about, that he’s actually being Truman-showed, because that’s his only hope that they’ll be able to tell what’s going on and react fast enough to save this man’s life.
He forgot about the strange sound he’d heard as he grabbed the button until he crashes back to his knees next to the injured man and goes to wad up his waterlogged cardigan, sacrificing it to use as a compress on that hideous shoulder wound. The sound comes again as he tugs it from suddenly-limp fingers – a harsh, wheezing gasp of an inhale that is heedless of the water that runs into the gaping mouth and bubbles at the back of his throat.
Grace once came around a curve on his bike and pitched right into the ditch to avoid the car that was pulled over directly in front of him. Still half in the lane, the driver was standing outside in tears with a deer crumpled at the edge of the road in front of her. That deer had breathed like this, huge irregular heaving inhales that moved her whole ribcage. It had only lasted a minute or so before she went still, and once Grace picked himself up and brushed himself off, he’d helped the woman move the dead animal off the asphalt and into the ditch he’d just vacated. The driver had told him she would take the day off work and drove away with a dented front bumper. Grace had biked painfully to class and then looked up agonal breathing on his lunch break, still rattled from the encounter. The kids had mocked him relentlessly for the dirt on his pants and the leaves that fell out of his coat, and he’d been grateful for the distraction.
Now, he stares in horror at the bloody man as his chest rises jerkily again, his jaw gaping open, his eye cracked open once more to show a sliver of white that stares at nothing. Grace fumbles for his throat, but can’t feel a pulse. He’s not sure he’s even checking in the right spot, and hysterically shoves two fingers against his own neck until he feels frantic thudding, then puts them back on the man’s throat and pushes in. Another wave of icy water coats his hand, swirling around them both and turning red as it retreats. He can’t feel anything, but the man’s shoulder is still bleeding. That must mean his heart is still beating, right?
“Please don’t die,” Grace begs as he shoves the wadded-up fabric of his cardigan against the man’s shoulder. “Please – please don’t die. C’mon, man!”
The biodome ceiling flashes dark, then flicks back to life. The sun and clouds are gone; now it is a flat gray with the words “HELP IS COMING” projected across it. The words are in the same font the karaoke lyrics were in, back in the Don’t Go Crazy room on the Hail Mary, and Grace’s throat closes up at the sight.
“See that?” he sobs. “Help is on the way. Please don’t – please...”
The limp, bloody man does not reply with anything more than another stilted wheeze. His breath bubbles in his throat once, and again, and then his chest stops moving. After a few more waves, the water that washes under his left side comes back clean.
The response team races across the beach, but by the time they reach him it’s already far too late. They find Grace half-laying in the surf, an unfamiliar human clasped in his lap as he sobs helplessly, rocking the body back and forth, blood smeared across his arms and chest, utterly soaking wet and completely inconsolable.
He doesn’t let them take the man away at first, not until Rocky charges up to him and physically pries him loose. The team arranges the body on a backboard-like plank and takes off, each of them holding the plank with one arm and running on the other four. The man’s body jolts and shudders limply from the movement, and Grace can’t look away until the team passes out of sight around the stony cliffs.
“Grace,” Rocky whistles urgently, and Grace realizes he’s been speaking for a while. “Are you hurt? Who was that?”
“I’m fine,” Grace mumbles, his face numb and his eyes hot. “I don’t – I don’t know. He just – washed up in the waves.”
Rocky’s claws pat him down, tapping gently against his elbows, his knees, his sternum, giving himself a better sense of Grace’s body through the resonating sound of his bones. Grace is accustomed to it – Rocky used to be able to play his ribcage like a xylophone, back when he was starving years ago. But they fixed that problem. There’s enough food for the rest of Grace’s life, and it would have been easy to manufacture more, if this stranger had lived.
“Where could he have come from? Is...was there a breach in the dome?”
“Never,” Rocky says vehemently, one limb looped around Grace’s back. Grace appreciates the gesture. “Any breach would set off alarms. There was nothing.”
Grace swallows thickly. There is nothing – nothing he can do, nothing he could save. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out, and Rocky jerks against him, standing up taller. “I’m so stupid – if I hadn’t gotten mad and thrown the panic button away, I could have hit it earlier and gotten help, and maybe – maybe he wouldn’t have –”
Rocky whistles breathily at him, as close as he can get to a shushing sound, but that makes Grace remember the man hissing at him to be quiet, telling him something would hear him, and he dissolves into tears again. The guy could have been crazy, he could have been a serial killer, and Grace would have welcomed the company of another person. He never thought he’d see a human again.
“What the fuck happened?” Rocky asks, and Grace blubbers it out, the whole story of the endless, panicked minutes as he struggled to save the life of a man who’d come to him already on death’s doorstep.
“He kept saying something about a black box,” Grace rasps, wiping his cheeks and only getting his face wetter. “Is there – is there anything else out there in the water?”
“I don’t think so,” Rocky says, tilting his carapace this way and that. “I can’t hear anything. We’ll ask the biodome team to do a sweep. Grace...you need to get changed. Clean up, dry off.”
“He’s dead,” Grace tells him, in case he hadn’t said it before. “He just – he just died.”
“Let’s get you home,” Rocky says, heaving Grace up, and Grace lets him push him to his feet. He takes three weak steps out of the waves before he freezes and looks back frantically.
“Where’s – where’s the button?”
“Here,” Rocky whistles quickly. “Here, Grace,” and he holds it up in a claw. The little light is still on.
“I need another one,” Grace says blankly.
“Of course,” Rocky replies. “After you get changed.”
“What if – what if something happens before –”
“I will stay with you,” Rocky assures him firmly, and Grace deflates. He lets Rocky guide him up the beach, lets Rocky all but carry him up the stairs, lets Rocky peel his wet clothes off and push him into the shower, an indulgence he’d designed for Grace based on blueprints and Grace’s longing descriptions. And when he stares blankly at the wall for too long, he lets Rocky sit him down on the floor of the shower and run an artificial sponge over his arms, gently rubbing away the crimson stains on his skin. Rocky keeps up a litany of gentle chatter, apologizing for leaving Grace in a huff, describing a project Adrian is working on, musing about what his own next project might be, now that he’s finished with the tree sculpture on the ridge next to Grace’s house. He’d reminded Grace over and over that he was an engineer, not an artist, but then he’d created the most beautiful tree-shaped silhouette Grace has ever seen, so he doubts that, a little. What is engineering but art in machinery? What is science but art in motion?
Still mute, still shivering, Grace lets Rocky dry him off and dress him in his softest clothes, then bundle him into bed, even though it’s still the middle of the day for him. Maybe it’s Eridian night outside – their days are so much shorter. Grace wonders what the recovery team has done with the stranger’s body, and then he’s crying again, feeling an echo of the unfamiliar chest heaving under his hands, then going still. Rocky climbs up next to him, the mattress compressing under his weight, and draws the blanket up to cocoon them both in warm darkness, the radiant heat from his exosuit slowly thawing the frozen core in Grace’s chest. When Grace can’t tell him why he’s crying, Rocky begins humming. Grace curls around him and sobs weakly, tears leaking from his hot eyes, throat thick and hands shaking. Eventually, he sleeps.
When Grace wakes up seven hours later, he asks to see the body. Rocky taps out a message on a tablet, then leaves it in Grace’s living room and walks him to the medical center that bisects the dome, the one the Eridians had built before they built Grace’s house, back when they weren’t sure they could keep him alive. When he steps inside, it’s to the sense that a crowd had been bustling around up until seconds ago. Now there are only two members of the response team in the room, both standing sharply at attention next to the human body spread out on a low platform.
They’ve cleaned him up, and that throws Grace more than anything. It’s not like they can see the blood the man had been coated in. Maybe they didn’t like the feeling of it under their xenonite-gloved claws. Still, it’s jarring to see his face without a sheen of red, and Grace crouches next to the body and reaches out, placing his palm on the man’s forehead.
It’s cold, of course. He doesn’t know what he was expecting.
“Where did he come from?” Grace asks.
“We don’t know,” one of the response team says after a moment. “We are trying to find out.”
Without the coating of blood, the man’s face actually looks worse. The left side is still swollen, tissue bulging grotesquely over his cheekbone, his temple. There are jagged lines of white – teeth, Grace realizes – poking out of his cheek, and the skin is rough and pebbled with pustules. Further down the man’s throat, it goes hard and scaley, like tree bark.
“What happened to him?” Grace knows it’s a question without an answer, but it bursts out of him anyway. “How did he get like...this?”
“We don’t know.” This time, it’s Rocky who speaks, and Grace knows he was in contact with the team, he woke up to Rocky tapping away on two tablets at once, but it still feels like his friend went behind his back for this. “We are taking – we’re trying to find out.”
“You’re taking samples,” Grace says dully. Of course.
“Yes,” Rocky says.
“Okay.” Grace nods jerkily. “Okay. But as soon as you’re done...we should bury him.”
One of the response team makes a fluting noise in protest, but Rocky buzzes angrily at them and they subside.
“Whatever you want, Grace,” he says. He surely remembers Grace recounting his treatment of his crewmates’ corpses, back before he knew who they even were. He understands the need to do this. “Whatever you need.”
Grace stays crouched on the floor for a few more moments, his hand on the man’s stiff forehead, before he runs his palm back over the corpse’s lank hair. Here, the cleanup wasn’t as effective – Grace can still feel dried blood gumming the strands together. Eridians don’t understand mammalian textures; they probably don’t know the difference. He pushes down the urge to ask Rocky to help him wash the body’s hair and stands up instead, turning away.
“I’m going back to my house,” he says, his back to the corpse. “You can – you don’t have to come.”
“I will stay with you,” Rocky says, and follows Grace out of the medical center. Grace doesn’t want to think about what might be happening to the only other human on Erid behind him. The man is dead – he can’t care. Anything they learn might be useful. He’s grateful, pathetically so, that Rocky chose to come with him instead of staying with the team. He’s sure more scientists came out of the woodwork as soon as Grace left the building, descending like crabs on a whalefall to study the strange human.
Abruptly, Grace stops walking. “Rocky,” he says calmly. “Don’t let anyone eat him. Any of him.”
Rocky tilts his carapace quizzically, but says nothing.
“I’m serious,” Grace says, looking down at him. Far below, waves crash on the shoreline. “You can do whatever you want with me after I’m dead – you can dissect me, eat me, whatever. But not him. He didn’t agree to any of that. He didn’t even know where he was.”
“I would never eat you,” Rocky protests, even though Grace gave him permission back during the astrophage crisis, before they solved the problem.
“Tell them not to eat him,” Grace repeats, and Rocky trills a quiet acknowledgement and taps out a message on one of his tablets as soon as they get back in the house.
After that, Rocky doesn’t leave the biodome for over a month.
He takes copious notes as Grace explains what he needs, tapping away as some of the biodome team suit up and carve a hole into the bluff, right under the tree sculpture Grace was only just getting used to. Rocky was alarmed when Grace told him he wanted the grave so close, but it’s not about the proximity. It’s about the tree. Humans have buried their dead under trees for millennia. It just feels right.
Only later, after the graveside ceremony, after Grace has spilled a handful of pebbles onto the xenonite box he helped load the shrouded corpse into, after he fought off a breakdown when he realized, again, that he never learned the man’s name – only after all of that does Grace figure out that Rocky was taking notes for Grace’s own eventual funeral.
“You could just ask me,” he says, sitting on the ground next to the blank headstone at the base of the tree sculpture after everyone else has left. “Or you can look up any funeral practice you want in the database. It’s all in there.” Stratt made sure of that – everything is in that database. Just not the origins of the bloody man. He’s still a mystery.
“I will, someday.” Rocky clicks his claws together, then continues slowly, “I do not like to think about it.”
“Neither do I,” Grace says, laying his cheek on his pulled-up knees.
“Do you want a second panic button?” Rocky asks hesitantly.
“No,” Grace sighs, closing his eyes to block out the headstone and the disturbed rock of the bluff that the Eridians put back as carefully as they could. “No. It’s fine. I just won’t ever let go of this one.”
“I’m sure one could be attached,” Rocky starts, and Grace barks out a laugh.
“Don’t implant a damn panic button in my chest, Rock.”
“...I was thinking your arm,” Rocky confesses, and Grace leans over and thuds his shoulder against Rocky’s carapace, smiling tiredly.
“Thanks for humoring me with this. I know your scientists wanted to pick his bones clean.”
“He was not theirs,” Rocky says primly. “He was yours to decide for.”
“He wasn’t mine,” Grace whispers, squinting up at the overcast sky he’d requested. Funerals should be somber. His own took place under a rainbow and was wholly undignified, what with all the running and crying. “I couldn’t even keep him alive long enough for help to get there.”
“Well,” Rocky whistles, “he was human, and that makes him yours. No one else has more of a claim.”
“Was he human?” Grace hadn’t looked too closely at the shrouded shape before loading the corpse into the xenonite casket. He’d only flipped the cloth back, once, to look at his slack face again, and regretted it. Decomposition was already setting in, and Eridians don’t know human morgue procedures – no preservation had taken place, and the man had been leaking. He wishes that wasn’t his last view of the strange human, but it’s what he’s stuck with.
“Yes. Mostly,” Rocky amends. “There is some...discrepancy, in the samples. We...the bioscience thrum will keep investigating.”
Grace nods. “Tell them to let me know, please? As soon as they find something out. Anything about who he was, or what happened to him, or where he came from – anything at all.”
“Of course,” Rocky says.
In the end, they don’t figure much out. The man had been exposed to long-term hardship, judging by the composition of the tooth the team pulled which showed years of malnutrition, and he’d been in dire straits just before he died. Grace had been right – his arm had been traumatically ripped from the shoulder blade, dislocating his collarbone in the process. He’d had multiple cracked ribs, lots of contusions, and the strange skin anomalies that Grace eventually accepted were some kind of ongoing mutation that had been halted by the man’s death. Oddly, both non-human animal and plant tissues were isolated from the left side of his face and body, but the team couldn’t tell anything more specific than that. It was like he’d been infected by two different things at the same time, and both were duking it out under his skin as they killed him.
Eventually, Rocky goes back to spending more time with Adrian, leaving Grace alone in his house for the first time since the man had washed up in the waves next to him. Eventually, he returns to teaching, and fields blunt questions from the Eridian children that none of their parents would be rude enough to ask. It’s almost a relief to talk about it – death, and what comes after. They are collectively disgusted that humans decompose, and Grace spends an entire day going over the process, feeling a bit sick himself. Rocky stays over that night, and he must have said something to the class parents, because the children are subdued the next lesson, and they don’t ask anything else about human death.
Grace almost misses it. He was processing, too.
It’s almost a year later that he overhears one of the older students telling a younger one to do your homework, or the bloody human will get you. That requires a sit-down talk with the whole class about superstition and respect, but Grace can recognize an urban legend forming from his own childhood experiences. Kids won’t let go of something like that. And, after all, he knows nothing about the man who had been so briefly alive under his hands. Maybe the guy would have been tickled pink about being turned into a bogeyman to scare alien children.
That’s what gets Grace most of all: he knows nothing about the man. He couldn’t tell how old he was, but he was grown, so he’d lived a whole life before he washed up on Grace’s shore. His hopes, his dreams, his history – all of it was gone, forever, with no one to remember. Grace doesn’t even have a name to carve into his headstone. Had he left people behind – friends, family, a partner? Was anyone looking for him? What about the black box that had taken up so much of his dying mind’s attention? Had that ended up where it needed to be?
Grace doesn’t know. He’ll never know.
“That won’t happen to you,” Rocky tells him when a nightmare wakes him and he explains, trembling, the all-too-human fear of being forgotten. “All of Erid will remember you, forever. All of Earth, as well. Two whole planets know your name.”
“They should know about him, too,” Grace mumbles into the dim light of early dawn. “Could you remember him, as well? For me?”
“I will,” Rocky promises. “I will remember both of you.”
Many decades later, long after Earth’s sun joined Erid’s back in full brightness – after teams of Eridians in astrophage-shielded shuttles inoculated more stars in their local cluster using engines powered with a mix of human and Eridian tech, after the whole galaxy had grown a little brighter – a pair of Eridians entered the biodome and picked their way up the bluff. The house, long-since abandoned, had been turned into a museum. The whole biodome was a protected space, a monument to the one who had occupied it for so long – and the other, the one who had occupied it for less than an hour before dying.
Even after Erid and Earth made contact, Erid was unable to find any answers on the origin of the mystery man who had appeared as if from thin air in the biodome sea. The humans of Earth were just as confused – and far more disturbed than the Eridians, who had had decades to come to grips with the strange situation.
Artificial sunlight glittered off the facets of the Eridians’ xenonite suits, though they didn’t know that. The biodome was kept on the same day-night cycle now that it had been during Grace’s life. The whole dome was a memorial to him. His voice still played in classrooms around the planet, but here, there were only ambient sounds of wind and waves.
The two Eridians – one short and compact, the other imposingly tall – carefully stepped around the xenonite sculpture of an Earth tree and settled themselves on the bluff beneath it. Two divots were worn in the rock where they lay.
“Hello, Grace,” Rocky said, his voice a little creakier than it was when Grace was alive. “Hello, bloody man.”
“Hello, Grace,” Adrian said, their voice a little deeper, a little more sonorous. “Hello, bloody man,” they sighed, then added, “My love, don’t you think it’s time to pick a name for the other human?”
“Grace did not name him,” Rocky replied, shifting his weight to ease pressure from some of his joints. He was headed for a molt soon, and the suit felt tight. “If he did not, we have no right to.”
“It just feels like talking to a children’s story,” Adrian said, as if they hadn’t had this same argument every time they come here. It was a comfortable conversation.
“It is talking to a children’s story,” Rocky replied. “But the story is because of him. At least Grace got them to treat him less like a scary monster in their stories.”
In fact, the bloody man of legend had morphed into a kind of benevolent, if slightly creepy watcher, someone who would appear if a pebble fell asleep with no one else around. Some even claimed to have heard him – one-armed, blood dripping – upon waking, only for him to vanish as soon as they rose. That story started going around when Grace was still alive, and Rocky could never quite tell what his opinion of it was.
“At least they feel like they’re not alone,” he’d said when Rocky asked, bony hands steady on his xenonite cane. “That’s something good, isn’t it?”
Rocky had to agree with him. He would never wish on anyone the decades he spent alone in the Tau Ceti system with no one to watch him sleep. He knew he came back different, that it took Adrian years to get him back to a normal sleep schedule, that he still had issues with it, even nearly a hundred years later.
“I heard a new story the other day,” Adrian said slowly. “One of the – what would Grace say? – grandchildren was talking to another, and told them that the bloody man isn’t the only sleep-watcher anymore.”
“Oh no,” Rocky trilled.
“Oh, yes.” Adrian’s vents buzzed in amusement. “Apparently, if you’re a good pebble, the bloody man will have a companion: another human, with a familiar voice.”
“I knew he shouldn’t have recorded all those lessons for the planet-wide teaching thrum,” Rocky groaned.
“I think he would enjoy it,” Adrian mused. “I think he would be pleased that they still remember both of them, and that they are remembered together. Apparently, if you say their names fast enough as you wake, you can ask them any question you please.”
Rocky huffed. “And have any of them done that?”
“Oh, many of them say they have,” Adrian shrugged. “It’s all just stories, of course.”
“Of course.” Rocky tapped the stone of the bluff to hear the shape of it around him: the tree sculpture, the twin xenonite boxes beneath the ground with their skeletal contents, the two headstones above it. One headstone had Grace’s name on it. The other had a carved image of a sun, or maybe a star – Grace never said which one it was. He just gave the design to Rocky one day, and asked him to make it happen.
“Wait,” Rocky paused. “If the pebbles say their names fast enough? Have they given the bloody man a name?”
Adrian gave a low trill. “Pebbles over the age of fifty Earth years have access to level one information from the Hail Mary’s databanks, remember? They got very into human names and human name origins recently.”
“Oh no,” Rocky said again, and Adrian laughed at him.
“Yes, unfortunately, there are many competing names being thrown around, so I’m not sure their questioning will ever work out the way they want it to.”
“What do our grandpebbles call him, then? I’m sure they feel they have more claim than most others.”
“Of course they do. And they decided that since he watches over them while they sleep, if they sleep alone, he must be a great listener. So they searched for names about hearing and listening, and settled on the one they liked the most.”
“What do they call him, then, Grace’s bloody man?” Rocky asked.
Adrian laughed again, their voice gentle above the rush and crash of waves below the bluff. “They call him ‘Simon.’”