Work Text:
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began,—
I loved my friend.
by Langston Hughes
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
In his university years, Grace read somewhere that people who do a PhD are running from something. At the time, the statement— simplistic and broad as it undoubtedly was— had struck a chord in him.
While his former high school classmates busied themselves with planning destination weddings and having 2.5 kids, he was still doing assignments in his late twenties, begging someone else to tell him what to do with his life.
A PhD was a direction, but as soon as he’d finished it, the donut hole at the centre of him was still unfilled, and all the pent-up, restless energy grew inside him until he erupted. The UNESCO conference in Denmark came almost as a relief.
Finally he had something new to be running towards (or from).
Grace had always been a quick runner.
Back in 9th grade gym class, it had been his only strength. He liked the wind in his hair, he liked how simple it was— a destination, a goalpost physically within reach.
Shunned by his academic contemporaries, he found his refuge as an 8th grade science teacher. He rode a bike to work, felt the euphoric rush in his chest.
He ran, and ran, and ran, until he was dizzy and breathless and had forgotten what he was running from.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
Grace dashes from the squad of military personnel running after him.
Patrol dogs catch a whiff of the hunt, and chase at his heels across the courtyard and towards the perimeter fortifications. Tall fences covered with entangled barbed wire.
They yap and snarl some feet behind him and Grace imagines their canine jaws closing around his ankles. Tails wagging, they herd him towards the lab coats and syringes.
His mind is quick. Of course it is, he’s an astrobiologist.
He’s not, despite what some in the scientific community believe after he published his doctorate, a total dumbass.
So his mind is quick to conjure up everything he knows about outer space— black holes, imploding stars, the sweeping and lonely unknown.
He’s breathless, on the ground, smelling grass.
edges of the memory smudged, static accumulating into a constant white noise, starbursts of rainbows
Grace wakes up.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
The patterns engraved into Rocky reminds Grace of something from back on earth, a Japanese art and philosophy called kintsugi or kintsukuroi (which means ‘golden repair’): the art of repairing broken pottery by mending the pieces with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. As a philosophy, it’s about treating breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than a flaw. Grace is mesmerised by the multicoloured hieroglyphs on Rocky’s five legs and body, stories told in figures and symbols like the painted myths on Ancient Greek vases. On one of his arms is an Earth, forest green and cerulean, as both a commemorative tattoo and medal of valour for their heroism.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
10 years.
Ten wonderful, whirlwind years of discovery and intense scientific exploration and a fulfillment of his deepest sense of curiosity. Answers to all the questions young scientists ask themselves: do aliens exist? What do they look like, what do they eat, how do they communicate?
A decade of spending time doing his favourite things: being a teacher and hanging out with his best friend.
One of the things he loves most about teaching the pebbles is how intelligent they are, their memories are so photographic, he can delve into material he wouldn’t have been able to with his class back on Earth— for example binary stars.
His pebbles adore learning about binary stars.
The whole classroom explodes into excited chatter and he has to hush them repeatedly, and count down from three, and tell them that in all his years teaching (and he’s taught two planets), he has never had a class more misbehaved than this, and finally, cross his arms and say that it’s fine, it’s not like his lifespan only lasts a seventh of theirs, he’ll wait. Which finally makes them shut up, if only out of pity for his frail human body.
“A binary star,” he tells them, “sometimes called a binary star system, is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and orbit around each other. If components in binary star systems are close enough, they can gravitationally distort each other's outer stellar atmospheres.”
“Evidence that stars in pairs were more than just optical alignments came when philosophers and astronomers on Earth applied the mathematics of statistics to the study of the stars, demonstrating that many more stars occur in pairs or groups than a perfectly random distribution and chance alignment could account for. They concluded that the stars in these double or multiple star systems might be drawn to one another by gravitational pull, thus providing the first evidence for the existence of binary stars and star clusters.”
“The brighter star of a visual binary is the primary star,” Grace says, and draws a circle on his whiteboard surrounded by small strokes, signifying beams emitting a large amount of light, “and the dimmer is considered the secondary.” He draws a smaller circle, emitting less light.
“Some binary stars orbit each other so closely that they share the same atmosphere, giving the system a peanut shape.” Grace draws two stars sharing an atmosphere, two closely-pressed circles, almost a venn-diagram, and then a smiley above them. “Look, they’re friends!”
His Eridian students jump up and down saying “happy, happy, happy!”
What he doesn’t tell them is this: while most such contact binary systems are stable, some do become unstable and either eject one partner or eventually merge.
Those are the two choices. Someone has to leave, or someone has to become an innate part of you, as much you as your lungs or your heart.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
It happens slowly. Then all at once.
Rocky starts to falter.
His carapace cracks and his vents don’t properly function. The Eridians have no idea what they’re looking at, and Grace is no medical doctor, but when they describe the foreign cells growing in tandem and overtaking Rocky’s little biomatter, Grace knows with a sinking feeling that Rocky won’t make it. The radiation got to him, after all. Rocky is dying of cancer and there’s nothing Grace can do.
Over the next five to ten years, Grace tries to play with his friend and keep him company, but Rocky can do less and less until he can only lie there.
Grace and Adrian take turns watching over him as Rocky sleeps more and more.
One day, Rocky sleeps for twenty-four hours without stirring. When he wakes up, he quivers and Grace puts a hand to his carapace and for the first time it doesn’t burn, and it’s only slightly warm to his fingertips.
“Cold,” Rocky trembles.
“I know, bud.”
Rocky burrows closer between Grace’s legs, using his quilted skirt as a blanket.
“I’ll watch you sleep”, Grace murmurs to a dozing Rocky, on that final day. “You’re safe now, friend. Go to sleep.”
His voice stutters and breaks at the word friend.
Adrian’s voice dips an octave in emotion. Murmuring a lullaby, they sing their mate into that deepest of sleeps, the one impossible to awaken from.
“You are good human.”
Rocky can barely speak. He hums the words in a subdued whisper.
“No,” Grace says. “No, I’m not, Rocky. Not without you.” He burrows his face in his hands and cries.
When Grace and Rocky met, both of them had been alone for so long. Grace told him: you’re not alone anymore, buddy. Neither of us are.
Binary stars, cleaved in half. Someone has to leave, or become an innate part of you. Somehow Rocky does both.
The news leaks and suddenly, they aren’t the only ones watching. Some Eridians make pilgrimages to witness the Savior of Erid in his last moments.
When he finally dies, there is a massive day of mourning across the planet. Eridians gather in droves to narrate stories of Rocky’s life and his interstellar voyage.
“A lot more will arrive soon,” Adrian promises him.
Mournful as elephants, the Eridians babble, whistle, and weep— weaving their warbling words into one deafening thrum.
When they first met, Rocky’s voice reminded him of whale song. Notes sung from deep within his belly. The whale song of the crowds strikes a chord in his vertebrae, pressure growing like seaweed in his ears from the deepest notes.
Grace has no idea what any of them are saying. Cannot pick apart a single thread from the woven tapestry of words. The song could be a psalm, a requiem, or a story— maybe it’s all of those things at once.
But it’s gorgeous, and devastating, and makes him feel utterly dissociated from himself. Hours later, when the eulogy fades into the quiet night air of his biodome, he has entirely forgotten who and where he is.
His face is wet, but he doesn’t know when he started crying.
They name a constellation after him— because after Adrian finds out about Adrian the planet, they insist on naming a celestial body after their mate, too. Equilibrium.
Something about the love to the point of invention. William Stewart Halsted who invented rubber gloves for his wife, Caroline Hampton, to protect her hands against the antiseptic that made her hand so swollen that she was almost unable to perform her tasks as a nurse. One of the crew members of the Artemis II naming one of the craters on the moon after his late wife.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
Grace wonders if his Earth students miss him.
Do they have kids of their own now? Did any of them become scientists? Or at least, interested in science?
He hopes they asked about him, after he left.
But what on Earth were they told after the launch?
Sorry kids, you’ll be stuck with a substitute, our former science teacher bravely volunteered to go on a shapeship to travel several light years away, and die a hero to save humanity?
It’s so far from the truth, it makes him laugh, even as the shame grows in his belly.
He asks himself if they had a good teacher the rest of the term. He wants to tell them how proud he is of them, no matter the size of their achievements.
He hopes he made Earth a safer place for them to grow old in.
A keen blanket of nostalgia envelops him. Grace misses Earth. He misses teddy bears and the smell of birthday cake and his students, every single one of them curious and full of potential.
Bagels; the butterflies in his stomach whenever he travels by airplane; the warmth of crowds; cacophonies of noise; concerts; cafés and bookstores; he misses his friends and being hugged by another human body; being a regular at his local diner; the crisp taste of bacon and American pancakes with maple syrup.
For the first time in a long time, Grace recalls the memory of Stratt without the aftertaste of bitterness. He wonders how she is, if she’s alive, if she’s safe. Was she imprisoned for her involvement in Project Hail Mary, or praised as a hero? Is she content? Does she sleep at night? Does she ever think about him?
Earth has become something unfathomable and distant to him. A vivid dream that pours into his cupped palms like soft sand, and then through the small openings between his fingers, until only the feeling remains. Like a word on the tip of his tongue. More and more often he has found himself unable to think of an English word for something, the songful Eridian translation taking its place in his brain like a parasite.
Once, before his knees creaked when he stood, when his hair was still sandy and had no streaks of grey, he had wanted to spend the rest of his life studying Eridian biology.
And he had.
In many respects, being sent aboard the Hail Mary all those years ago was the best thing that ever could’ve happened to him. On Earth he had been lonely, and he’d always wanted to find someplace where he belonged.
Seven billion people on Earth, and none of them had understood him half as well as a rock from space. Grace doesn’t believe in fate, but he does believe in coincidence, and sometimes coincidences happen to be beautiful.
A small voice, from deep inside a part of his heart he usually tried to ignore, says: what is the point of any of it? There’s nothing for you here anymore.
But still. He wants to live.
You have no immediate family, you don’t even have a dog.
No, he thinks, but I found a best friend.
And what, says Stratt from his memory, eyes soft and filled with regret, do you have now?
What does he do now? Without Rocky, without his best friend?
Earth scientists will take it from here, he thought, when sending the beetles back to Earth. Mission completed. His only remaining objective now is to die a hero. He can retire on Erid, and live peacefully the rest of his days.
But couldn’t he still help? He wants to be brave. He wants to go home.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
Because it’s human tradition, Grace dips his palm in paint, soaks every corner and presses his hand into the mountainside.
Beneath it, he writes, or rather, carves into the mountain with a small, sharp rock:
Grace was here. Rocky was here.
Grace Rocky save stars.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
Thunder shakes the firmament of his biodome.
Dogs bay, growl, and whine. A rejoicing chorus of fox hounds— chasing a fox.
He does what he does best.
He flees.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
He gets on a spaceship chartered to arrive at its destination, Earth, in about four years.
He’s given food and water, and medical supplies to last him double that. All piled up by the Eridians, who wish him a comfortable journey home. It takes some convincing, but they don’t want to keep the savior of their planet prisoner.
Only one Eridian refuses to attend his departure feast. Adrian, who took years to warm up to Grace in the first place, doesn’t even tell him goodbye as he boards the spacecraft.
He listens to the roar of the engines, and feels the tremble of the launch beneath his feet. Vomits in a trash can. Takes deep breaths, and tries not to panic.
A familiar voice echoes in his ears, still the one to chastise him after almost twenty years.
Coward, she says. Coward, coward.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
For a long time, Grace stays awake.
He admires the clusters of stars, the luminous clouds of nebulae, the meteor showers and bundles of moons orbiting unfamiliar planets. He basks in the loneliness of it all. He eats stockpiled food, he sleeps and mourns. He keeps his hair trimmed. Sits alone in the mental health room and talks aloud to himself, explaining Earth stuff to no one at all.
“Amaze, amaze, amaze,” Grace murmurs to himself. His voice is quiet and hoarse from lack of use, and has none of the melodic qualities Rocky had.
Do you believe in ghosts? the phantom of Eva Stratt mumbles into his ear. It’s better than the alternative, he thinks to himself, nonsensically.
This is the foolishness of grief.
A myriad of constellations dusted across the vast heavens like moles and freckles on the expansive back of the cosmos. Grace counted them and lost count and begun counting again, the lover of the universe carefully monitoring its moles to ensure none of them were growing too swiftly or contained skin cancer. He supposes the universe is, in a manner of speaking, afflicted with a form of cancer: astrophage.
He makes himself solve complex equations to keep his thoughts occupied.
Daydreams become so vivid, he’s afraid they may spiral into hallucinations.
Sometimes he spots Rocky out of the corner of his eye. His heart leaps in his chest and he whips around, desperate and hopeful in equal measures, but Grace is alone, always alone. No one is in the corner.
Grace boots up his computer and with a couple of clicks finds the Eridian-English translator he made with Rocky, all those years ago.
Earth thinking machine, says a warbling voice in his ear.
I’m a sentimental old man, he thinks, when the screen becomes so blurry he cannot read the words. Stubbornly, he wipes at his eyes and comes away with a damp sleeve.
Thousands of sound recordings of Rocky speaking into the microphone. Comfortingly familiar and soothing sounds. Grace imitates the warbling sounds, finding the low tones and high notes of his less than stellar singing voice.
Which makes him think of Eva Stratt, singing karaoke to a crowd of astronauts, scientists and engineers, three of which she would willingly send to their deaths only a week later.
An unforgiving rage bubbles up inside his chest. So Grace sings to distract himself. He weaves the melodic Eridian words into a mournful song, a eulogy for his friend. Someone who died young, but not alone.
Grace goes to sleep again, a deep, unyielding sleep. Being pulled into its unknown depths, drowning.
Fresh soap. Is that… lavender? You are my solution. Heavy buzz. Sleepiness. Is he drunk? He always gets sleepy when he’s drunk. How does he know that? An Odyssey. Be careful. You are friend now— a songful baritone voice. A requiem. He falls asleep in a softer world and wakes up in a harsher wind.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
He’s enveloped in a soft, diffused light. His limbs feel stiff and his eyelids are so heavy he almost can’t make himself open them.
“Jus’ wanna go b’ck to sleep.” He mumbles groggily. “Five more minutes.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Wh—“
It takes him a moment to recognise her voice.
It’s more mellow and rough than it was 25 years ago, though for her it’s been a lot longer. When he pushes his eyelids open, Stratt is sitting by his bedside in a spacious hospital room.
She’s older than he expects her to be.
Even though he knows about time dilation, a part of him still thinks she’ll be the same person he left behind. Her hair is white as snow, but still long and majestic. Her wrinkles are deep and defined. She looks a little tired.
He’s hooked up to an IV line and feels bruised, like he’s been beaten to a pulp by the doctors.
Last time they met, she was stone-faced, condemning him to his death, as he begged her for mercy.
“Hi,” she says, and smiles. Her eyes are soft, and she looks almost like that one evening when they ended up watching the sunset while the others sang karaoke. “How do you feel?”
“Um…” he attempts to say something. “M’ fine.”
Stratt laughs, eyes wrinkling.
He’s lost count of how many times he’s gone to sleep thinking he was going to die, only to wake up still breathing.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
The next day, he goes to the hospital cafeteria and buys two black coffees.
It takes him almost twenty minutes to locate Stratt, but eventually he finds her on a phone-call outside, in the parking lot.
He stands there shifting from one foot to the other for the couple of minutes it takes her to finish her phone call.
Stratt raises an unimpressed eyebrow. “Ah. You got us coffee.”
“They’re both for you.”
“I have a heart condition. I don’t drink two coffees in a day anymore, my doctor would be very disappointed.”
An ache flares in his chest. At her wrinkles, her
snow-white hair, the signs of age and a life spent carrying the fate of the whole world on her shoulders.
Grace feels crestfallen. “Oh. It— it was kind of… meant to be an inside joke. Between us.”
“I told you, I’m not good at jokes.”
After they finish their coffees, Grace begins to quietly retreat back into the main building.
Stratt grabs a fistful of his coat. “Come for a walk with me? I would like to show you something.”
Just like that he’s following her around again, like her own personal lap dog.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
They walk through the winding corridors and onto the populated streets of San Francisco. People light up when he passes, waving at him and shouting his name, and a cluster of young adults cheer and whistle as he walks past.
One young girl with the NASA logo embroidered on her messenger bag stops him and asks him politely, though she stutters and stumbles on every other word, if he’d be so kind as to sign her bag, which he does.
I would love to go to space someday, she says. I want to be important. Brave, like you.Which makes him so flustered, he can barely form a coherent thank you.
Finally, Stratt leads him onto a busy public square and pushes through the crowds into the centre.
“Here.”
It’s a statue. For a solid minute, Grace looks and looks, and can’t figure out who on earth this statue is of and why Stratt would bring him here, of all places.
Then he squints and pushes his glasses down from his hair onto his nose and reads the inscription on the small pedestal the statue stands on.
Dr. Ryland Grace
Born April 1st 1996 — Died in Space
Who Bravely Sacrificed His Life To Find A Solution to the Petrova Problem & Saved Millions of Human Lives
It's made of marble and there’s a stiff, inhuman quality to the posture.
A younger version of himself looks back at him, edges smoothed out and with no sign of his insecurity or cowardice in sight.
His eyes are a creamy white, blind and unseeing, but wide-blown in a manner that speaks of scientific curiosity and starry-eyed idealism. Eyebrows furrowed in solemn determination. Something heroic, something unrecognisable. The whole sculpture is shaped with the intention of communicating courage and whole-hearted self-sacrifice in the face of the unknown.
He’s wearing an astronaut suit, featuring a proud NASA-logo on my chest, with his astronaut helmet tucked into his elbow. Kind of like a nerdy Neil Armstrong.
Something about seeing Died in Space written out in plain text caused a strong and sudden dose of vertigo. Everything is spinning around him and he staggers back and accidentally bumps into someone.
A memory emerges from a bottomless cavern within his mind.
Outside his biodome, on Erid, an overgrown monument dedicated to the two of them within a lush alien forest.
He doesn’t think he ever saw it with his own eyes, but Rocky told him about it and the inscription, which said: Rocky and Grace — Saviors of the Stars.
The statue is him, but it’s also not.
He looks almost like a saint. Like St. Sebastian, woeful eyes cast heavenward, or like the patron saint of astronauts, St. Joseph of Cupertino, being lifted in flight. Divine and unreal.
Brave, like you.
But he isn’t— he isn’t brave. The world has made him a hero and a figure of the Earth’s salvation. More a symbol than a person. What happens when they unveil him, or he unveils himself, as just another clumsy coward?
For a moment he becomes untethered from the earth itself. He’s floating, and it feels like he’s clinging onto a small cord tying him to the ground beneath his feet. As if the earth could tilt, and he would fall into the sky, which would open its mouth and swallow him whole. Apple to earth, earth to apple.
“Doctor? Dr. Grace?”
He’s kneeling on the pavement, knees digging into the solid asphalt, with his head pressed between his knees. Dizziness and motion sickness rolls over him like cold waves in a thunderstorm.
Stratt is looking down on him, eyebrows knitted together in worry.
She isn’t touching him. He wants her to. Hug him or press her hand into his back or pat his hair— anything. Brushing into someone is one thing, as swimmingly euphoric as it felt the first couple of times a doctor examined him. Being touched deliberately is something else.
“Do you feel okay? Do you have to go back to the hospital?”
He shakes his head.
“No, you don’t feel okay? Or no, you don’t have to go to a doctor?”
“No. I’m—“ he takes a deep breath. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you just collapsed on the ground. I thought you fainted.”
“Just got dizzy for a second. Feel fine now. Can we get something to eat?”
Stratt shakes her head at him, exasperated.
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
Because it’s his favourite food, and one of the things he’s missed most about Earth, Grace drags Stratt along to his local— or what used to be his local— breakfast place.
He orders a stack of pancakes, slathered in maple syrup, with a cube of butter on top. Stratt gets the same, if only to quell his complaints which he doubtless would’ve raised had she gotten something as boring as toast.
For a while, they sit there quietly and eat together. Grace listens to the familiar bustle with the most attentiveness he can muster, helplessly relieved to be among people and light and noise again.
He’s the first one to say something.
“I wanted to say… I understand.”
She doesn’t ask him what he’s talking about. After a pause. “Thank you. I… missed you.”
Grace looks at her, utterly stunned. “Oh?”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
Warmth floods his chest.
Something about the sweet, familiar taste of maple syrup and being home again makes the tears come easy to him. His eyes well up, and he has to ask one of the waiters for a tissue to blow his nose into.
Stratt pretends to be occupied with one of the newspapers on their table, and doesn’t make any snide comments about how he’s a grown man sobbing into his maple syrup-laden pancakes over nothing at all.
Which Grace thinks is unusually considerate of her.
After he composes himself, she starts talking. She tells him about everything that happened post-launch.
Not long after launch, the Petrova Taskforce declassified some of the most important scientific documents, and heaps of public speculation and conspiracy theories followed.
The French justice department launched an investigation of her leadership, which led to her finally resigning from the Taskforce. Additionally, the United States General Assembly called on the International Court of Justice to consider persecuting her for crimes committed while leading the Petrova Taskforce, including ecoterrorism.
Rumours and conflicting statements about the manner of his death all culminated into an international court case, with Stratt as the main scapegoat.
“I was imprisoned for 15 years—“
“What?!”
She smiles at him, her expression a touch rueful. “You didn’t honestly think my international immunity would be permanent, did you?”
“But they— they promised you, that was a condition of your leadership position, you— you saved the world. They can’t just change their minds!”
“Have you ever heard of the glass cliff?”
“What? No.”
“It’s—“ She shakes her head. “Not important. Nevermind.”
“I was given a pardon after the beetles returned. Originally they wanted me back into leadership on the Petrova Taskforce. I told them to go to hell. But public sympathies changed after it was made clear I had in fact contributed to the mission—“
“Contributed to the mission? You mean how you saved the freakin’ world?!”
“Please don’t interrupt me while I’m talking.”
He shuts up.
She also tells him about the world’s growing interest in Ryland Grace. How the Hail Mary’s departure day officially became a public holiday a year after the launch. About the murals, statues and monuments of Yao, Ilyukhina, and him, and memorials for Annie and Dubois that became commonplace all around the world.
When Grace arrives home— and by home, of course, he means the hospital wing— he types Eva Stratt International Court of Justice Trial into the search engine on his phone. What he finds, or stumbles onto, is a YouTube clip of one of Eva Stratt’s counterclaims. Apparently large portions of the trial were broadcasted, due to widespread international interest.
“Dr. Grace was a dear friend of mine”, the visibly exhausted Eva Stratt in the court room footage is saying. “However, millions of lives were at stake. Whatever my actions, my motivations were selfless. And with my actions I saved the lives of either you or people you care about.”
A mob of journalists and bystanders made a commotion from the public gallery.
“In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Brutus says: ‘If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: —Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.’ You’re asking me to defend my decision to trade one man’s life for millions of people? That’s my defence. I loved Earth more.”
⋆⭒˚.⋆ ——— ⋆⁺₊⋆ ☾⋆⁺₊⋆———⋆⭒˚.⋆
Above him the moon is a crescent, and the stars burn bright. The world is alive and ablaze, and the late summer night is as pleasantly warm as they come. Humidity fogs the mirrors and open windows of San Francisco apartments. Night life bustles along, the commotion of tourists stumbling drunkenly home to their hotels, the clinking wine glasses of students and divorced 40-somethings still drinking, the fervent shouts of a football game.
Dragging a hand through the tufts of his silver hair, and leaning on the balcony railing, Ryland Grace breathes in the fresh, plentiful oxygen. He feels almost high on the summer night wind. Maybe all the fumes from the bar downstairs from his apartment made the air intoxicating.
He squints up at the starry sky. One star in particular, about 12 light years away from Earth, is the one he endeavours to spot. Instead, what identifies is two stars, seemingly clustered closely in a pair— though the scientist in him knows they have to be light years apart. Distortion within distance perception is an essential imperfection of human sight.
On the comfortably-sized balcony of his apartment, wedged tightly between the railing and paved masonry of his apartment building, is a small but functional telescope.
His landlord is not at all informed of this, but Grace figures that what his landlord doesn’t know won't hurt him.
The telescope is mounted to align with the motion of 40 Eridani in relation to the motion of the Earth, tracking the distant star as it moves across the sky while compensating for the Earth’s rotation. Grace looks through the eye piece, situates the slow motion control into the most comfortable view and turns the focus knob— first one way, then the other— until the home of his best friend comes into focus.
“Hey bud,” Grace whispers to himself, teary-eyed. “There you are.”
To view a star through the lens of a telescope is kind of like viewing the world through the lens of grief. A small object to the rest of the world, engulfs your entire vision. Grief has a magnifying ability, just like a telescope. It amplifies and mangles memories into a taste of the past, crooked with sorrow.
Suddenly losing a friend feels like losing a limb.
Like a statue on a pedestal makes a figure larger-than-life, and a biography embroiders heroism into the life of a small, cowardly scientist where there was none, a telescope fattens a star like a helium balloon, soaring across the celestial sphere.
Saviors of the stars, explorers of the unknown.
“Me and you. That’s me and you.”