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I open my eyes as the alarm on my watch goes off, piercing through the remnants of a dream I’m already forgetting. It’s still dark. I close my eyes again. I remember the green and gold of fields, I think, tall trees against a pale blue sky. Someone beside me, but they’re gone by the time I register where I am. I blink again. It’s still dark. But it’s always dark here.
I rub my eyes and turn off the alarm, but I don’t make any particular effort to get up. I don’t have to be anywhere this morning, but if I don’t set an alarm my sleep patterns will get all out of whack. I know this from experience.
It’s been a couple of months since I made the journey down to Erid. Things are going, if not fine, then we’ll enough. The Eridians are doing their best for me. They’re working hard on solving my food problem and they've made me a very comfortable set of rooms to live in while they work on expanding my habitat, but I can’t honestly say I’m thriving.
I’ll be coming to the end of my coma slurry in another few weeks, and despite the best efforts of the Eridian scientists and everything I’ve been able to teach them from the Hail Mary’s Infinite Reference Material, we still haven’t found a way to produce all the nutrition I need, in the quantities my body needs to stay healthy. I’m looking down the barrel of scurvy, beriberi, rickets and a whole host of other diseases of malnutrition that we’d largely eradicated in the Western world long before I was born. It’s not really putting me in the best headspace.
I groan and sit up, my hand flopping around for the light switch beside the bed. The Eridians got quite creative after I taught them to make lightbulbs, and my home is filled with lights of all different shapes and colours. Inside at least. Most of them are turned off right now, but I leave a small string of lights on the ceiling running day and night - it helps ward off the childish fear of the dark that I thought I’d long since outgrown. The Eridians can’t see the light but they can see the light bulbs and light shades, and they’ve produced some quite beautiful sculptural art out of glass and clear xenonite. My bedside lamp looks like a stylised geometric flower and sheds a warm glow across the walls, but the light doesn’t extend to the windows.
The curtains are still open. There doesn’t seem much point in closing them. It’s dark outside, no matter what time of day it is.
But I need to maintain some sort of routine, if only to keep hold of my remaining sanity. So I get up, turn on the main lights, and start my day.
This morning I’m expecting a shipment of things from the Hail Mary. When I came down to Erid I couldn’t bring everything with me – there just wasn’t room in my habitat for it all. But the Eridians have built on more rooms to this complex since then, and they’re bringing down more of my things. They’ve been in transit on the space elevator for the last week or so, and today they’ll unload them from the elevator car and bring them here.
A short while later there’s a knock on my door (well it’s not exactly a door, its more of an airlock, made of transparent xenonite, the same as my windows), and an Eridian I think I recognise but can’t remember the name of is waiting for me on the other side it, lit by the light shining through the airlock. They explain the crates are here and a team of Eridians begins placing bags and boxes in the airlock. I can understand them, even if they can’t understand much of what I’m saying yet (although Eridians are fast learners), so I try to engage the first Eridian in a conversation. We don’t get far before the number of words in each sentence that they understand falls below critical levels, and our exchange collapses.
The moving crew fill the airlock and then close it, chattering excitedly among themselves, seeming to forget I can understand most of what they’re saying. Its nothing offensive, just curiosity about this strange alien and all of his things. I think they’d like to see what’s inside the boxes, but I’m not in the mood to humour them, so I give them my polite thanks and begin emptying the airlock and carrying everything into the main living space.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all this stuff. I don’t really need any of it for my day to day life down here, as limited as it is, but it made no sense to leave it up on the Hail Mary, so here it is. I’ll probably just put most of it into the storage room.
I pull out the duffel bags. These are the bags carefully packed by Yao and Ilyukhina when they were preparing to leave Earth, and then ransacked by me when I woke up in Tau Ceti with no memory of who I was, where I was, or what I was doing there. After I’d given them both as good a burial in space as I could manage, I’d put their remaining things safely away and let them be (except for the vodka of course). But now it feels like enough time has passed in mourning, and I think they probably would have wanted me to make use of their things now that I’m on Erid, without any convenient shops nearby.
I open Ilyukhina’s bag first. Nestled in the top layer of clothes are the photos of hers that I hadn’t sent with her on her final journey. I flip through the photos slowly, one by one, and she stares out at me from them, grinning and smiling and having a great time with loved ones. The familiar wave of grief washes over me, shallower now than it used to be, but no less chilling. I remember her bright smile and infectious laugh during our time on Stratt’s Vat, her love of life, her fearlessness, her certainty that this mission was worth dying for. My eyes well up, but I blink back the tears. She was right, as it turns out, the mission was a success in the end and the beetles have hopefully made their way back to Earth with the solution by now, and that helps, a little.
I flip to the next photo, one of Ilyukhina with a young girl in a park. I don’t know who the girl is, her name, or her relationship to Ilyukhina, and I feel like I’m intruding on something private (which of course I am), but I’m sure she’d be fine with this given the circumstances. But what catches my attention this time, is the park itself. They’re standing on a large green lawn, with trees in the distance and even further back a mountain with a snowy peak. There are spring flowers in a garden bed in the foreground, and behind Ilyukhina and the girl is a curving path with a couple walking past a streetlight and a municipal trash can painted with a scene of impossibly colourful birds.
Suddenly I’m struck by just how normal and everyday this image is, and how it bears absolutely no resemblance to my current surroundings. The grass looks so vibrant, and even the hardy dark conifers look lush and green to my eyes. The blue sky looks impossibly large and open and I feel like I could sink into it and drown. And in the background, blurry and out of focus, there are other people in this photo. Strangers, who are so totally inconsequential that I doubt Ilyukhina even really noticed them there, other people who are within metres of them, so close that if Ilyukhina just turned around she could speak with them. Maybe they’d stop and exchange polite greetings or maybe they’d just wave and carry on, but they would hear her, they would see her, and maybe they’d share a moment of connection in a world full of urgency and distraction. I will Ilyukhina to call out to them just so I can be an observer to their trivial interaction, but of course she doesn’t.
I feel the tears again, and this time I don’t bother to stop them. Gosh darn it, I’m homesick. Homesick for a stupid city park, some strangers, and a trash can.
I never thought I’d be the type of person to get particularly homesick. I mean come on, I’m exploring the galaxy, I’m on an alien planet for cripes sake, and I’ve never felt especially connected to the places I’ve lived before. But apparently I know diddly squat about myself. I miss so much about Earth. Including things I didn’t even think I liked. Like crowds on the streetcars, like waiting in line. I’d gladly wait an hour at the DMV if it meant I got to have an awkward conversation with the little old lady behind me who doesn’t understand the instructions, and scowl along with everyone else at the person listening to music through the speaker on their phone.
I wipe my eyes and put away the photos. That’s enough of reminiscing for today. I pack up Ilyukhina’s bag and put it away, placing Yao’s next to it, unopened.
The next few boxes are full of miscellaneous lab supplies and scientific equipment that I should be able to use in Erid’s gravity. Not that it will help with my food problem, but it’s more that it won’t be any use to anyone up on the Hail Mary, and it not like there’s a lack of new organisms and interesting things to study on the surface of Erid. One of the rooms the Eridians have just finished is what I’ve designated as my lab here on Erid, so I take the boxes through and stack them on the table. I’ll unpack the contents later.
The next box is a random assortment of things. There’s the xenonite cylinder that Rocky sent me messages in before we’d even met, the star map he made (he was going to throw it away but I asked to keep it), the model of the Hail Mary and a matching one of the Blip-A, and various other things I collected over the course of our long, long, journey to Erid. A lot of them are things Rocky made. Even after we’d learned to communicate without props, he still spent a lot of time making things – some useful, some simply decorative.
I pick out the model of the Hail Mary and turn it over in my hands. The metal is cool to the touch yet it’s so incredibly lightweight. I can see light through the intricate web of filaments that make up the hull and the solar panels. It looks fragile and delicate, but it’s made out of xenonite so it’s anything but. I smile to myself. The memories attached to this are largely good ones. The excitement of meeting Rocky for the first time and communicating with an honest to goodness real life alien, or us working together to figure out how to collect a sample of Taumoeba at Adrian, spring to mind. Even the weeks spent searching for the Blip-A have a pleasant sort of peacefulness attached to them. I knew what I had to do, and I was darn well going to do it. Just like I know he would have done for me, would still do for me.
I put the tiny Hail Mary on the shelf that holds some decorative things I own, between the few books that were on the ship and a couple of colourful mugs.
I go back to the box and pull out the next item. It’s another book. But this one is Eridian. When Rocky had to leave the Blip-A behind he brought even more things across to the Hail Mary, some of which I think he really could have done without, and some of which I was glad he chose to bring even if they weren’t a necessity. This book is one of them. It’s not made of paper, but some very thin, very strong synthetic, with the words punched out of the pages, rather than printed on them, so that they’re visible to Eridians. It’s heavier than a paper book, and the pages aren’t nearly so flexible, but it still looks and feels like a book enough for me.
This one is fiction, a story that Rocky would read to me during our long evenings, to help keep the both of us sane. I flick through the pages, I can’t read it myself yet, but I have learned a few words here an there, enough that at a glance it feels like it should make sense, but on closer inspection that impression falls apart. But it’s a good story. I’ve heard it a dozen times or so now. The Blip-A didn’t have computers filled to the brim with books of all kinds, only a few physical books brought aboard by the crew, so those few Eridian stories were on high rotation to balance out the avalanche of Earth entertainment that was stuffed on the Hail Mary’s computers and e-Readers.
Having an Eridian read aloud to you is something special. Even their prose takes on a poetic tone when the language is essentially music. Sometimes I’d get distracted by the rhythm and the harmony of the words and lose all sense of their meaning, and have to ask Rocky to repeat himself. But he was pretty good about that, only complaining about my soft human brain a little bit.
I smile at the memory. I almost miss it. Don’t get me wrong, living in such close quarters for four years with not a lot to do isn’t something I’d generally recommend, but there were moments of peace, and moments of fun. We had lots of time to get to know each other, and I’m pretty sure we talked about every topic under either of our suns. It was impossible to hide really anything from the other, so whether I wanted it or not, Rocky probably knows me the best of any living being. He knows how I react under pressure, what I’m like when I’m sad, or when I’m deep into a topic and can’t stand being disturbed, or what I’m like when I’m scared, but it was an equal trade and I know all of the same things about him too.
I look around this comparatively big and empty room and it dawns on me that I’m homesick for the Hail Mary, something I never would have thought possible. This place doesn’t feel like home to me in the way that the Hail Mary did – still does. I couldn’t wait to get off the ship when we arrived. I was sick of the same three rooms and the lack of space to run, to move, to be alone. But now that I’ve been down here for a couple of months I think I can honestly say I miss it. I shake my head. Unbelievable. But the Hail Mary was our home and our sanctuary. A tiny mote of life in an endless empty void.
Time stood still for us during our trip to Erid, and I don’t mean in any weird relativistic physics kind of way, just that four years is a long time to be doing more or less the same thing every day. I think we both acclimatised to that, you have to really to stay sane, but once we arrived on Erid, time started flowing again and swept us both along on different tributaries. Rocky’s been busy working with the engineers of Erid to teach them about what he learned on the Blip-A and what he’s learned of human technology. He’s also been the most in-demand speaker for purposes ranging from archiving important historical events through to the Eridian equivalent of news and entertainment media. And on top of that he’s been working closely with the team responsible for my habitat. All in all there’s not been much time for late night conversations and heart to hearts.
I stand up and walk over to the shelf again to put the book away with a deep pang of sadness that we will never be able to recapture that experience. It’s a time and place, a home, that is past. The shelf’s getting a little bit crowded now, so I move a few things to the side to make room for Rocky’s book.
Just then the doorbell rings again. I leave the opened carton on the floor and go to the airlock. Rocky’s there and he greets me excitedly, rolling into my rooms in his ball when I open the airlock.
“Grace have many more things,” he observes, looking around the living room piled high with boxes. “Grace very messy.”
His teasing about my household cleanliness makes me relax. This feels normal and his irreverent presence improves my mood no end. I haven’t seen him for days, but I know he doesn’t have a lot of time at the moment.
“What brings you here?” I ask.
“Habitat team have been working on light sensing equipment,” he says. “Curious to hear what Grace sees. They have made new more sensitive camera.”
“That’s cool,” I say. Anything that helps bridge the gap between our experiences is welcome news to me.
“I asked to try it out. I took it outside and hear that Grace really sees nothing. Is sad,” he says, sounding deflated for a moment. “But then I used new lightbulb and looked again. Still see little, but big improvement.”
I smile, imagining Rocky outside running a little experiment of his own, pointing a flashlight at random objects in the environment. Of course I’ve seen some of the outside, during my trip from the elevator to my habitat, but the lights on my vehicle showed only a few tens of metres around me, most of which was flat empty land as far as I could tell. When we got closer to the urban areas there was plenty to see, but it was all man-made, uh, Eridian made – buildings, roadways, bridges etc. I still haven’t had the opportunity to go exploring outside. Rocky promises me a team are working on a way to make that possible, but its not the highest priority right now and its unlikely to be ready any time soon.
“Rocky found this,” he says, reaching into a pocket on his toolbelt. He pulls out a large rock and holds it up to the xenonite so I can get a good look. “Is rock from outside your house. Is green,” he says, the new word sounding slightly uncertain in his language. He’s picked a different word to use in Eridian than ‘middle rough’ which I like. It carries connotations of ‘fresh’, ‘calming’, and ‘life’. And he’s right, this rock is green. It’s a deep green right through with flecks of white and yellow across it’s surface. It’s more colourful than anything I’ve seen on this planet so far.
“That’s beautiful,” I breathe. “Thanks buddy.” I crouch down for a closer look. The surface is smooth, I guess the Eridians polished it up for me, and the green is semi-transparent, like thick green glass, such that the light reflects in interesting ways.
“Is gift!” Rocky says proudly. “Rocky give.”
He rolls back over to the airlock and climbs inside and cycles it. He gets out on the Eridian side and then opens his ball and puts the rock in the airlock and then rolls back into it himself. It’s a comically long process to simply hand me an object, but we’re used to it now and chat about other things while we wait (im)patiently. Eventually the cycle completes and Rocky joins me in the house while I go and find a towel to pick up the still hot gift.
I bring it through to the living room and set it on the table, swaddled in greying old fabric. Eventually it cools enough to touch, and I pick it up, cradling it in my hands. It’s still warm and feels like an egg that’s just been laid, a really giant, heavy, egg. But the surface feels like I expected, smooth to the touch. I run my fingers along it and hold it up to the side of my face, pressing my cheek against it and feeling the residual warmth.
Suddenly I remember that this is an alien planet and I don’t know the first thing about its geology. Maybe there’s all sorts of toxic minerals in in here. I freeze.
“Um… Rocky, do you know if this is safe?” I ask. “Like there’s nothing in here that will hurt me from touching it?”
He laughs. “Is all good, I asked science team to check.”
“Oh, okay, thanks!” Of course he did. I relax. “Thanks for this, Rocky,” I tell him. “I really like it. It’s like a housewarming present.”
“What is ‘housewarming’, question?”
“Um, it’s like a celebration for moving into a new house,” I explain. “There’s usually a party. Your friends come over and you have fun. It helps the place feel more like your home.”
He thinks about this for a minute. “Then yes, this is gift to make this feel like home.”
I smile. “Thanks bud.”
I give the top of his ball a playful pat, get up, and make space for his housewarming gift in pride of place in the centre of the shelf, and set it down next to the model of the Hail Mary.
This place still doesn’t feel like home to me. It’s all just so alien, and the ever present darkness is doing a number on my head. But I guess the Hail Mary didn’t start off feeling like home either. It was cramped and lonely, and on the worst days it felt like a jail sentence or a tomb. Yet that all changed when Rocky sent me a gift. The little xenonite cannister was the start of something unimaginable, something fantastic, something that I now look back on fondly despite dreading at the beginning.
Rocky watches and makes no move to leave.
What are you doing today, I ask prodding to understand how much longer I’ll have his company.
“Nothing, today,” he says. “Is Rocky’s day off.”
Oh. Okay. “So you’re just going to, what? Spend the day hanging out with me?” I ask, half joking, half desperately hoping he’ll say yes.
“Yes. Unless you’re too busy, question?” he replies.
That’s a joke. We both know I’ve not had a lot to do since I moved in.
I laugh. “Make yourself at home, pal,” I say, gesturing to the big empty room. He’s welcome to stay as long as he likes.
We spend a companionable afternoon together. Rocky keeps me company while I deal with the boxes and putting away the items. Having him here makes me less prone to lonely musings when I unearth another item with strong memories. He tells me about what he’s been up to and what’s going on beyond my tiny habitat. It helps me feel more connected to Erid, which has been a lot harder than I’d expected, being stuck in this isolated little bubble of mine.
I relax as we fall back into our usual rhythm. This is good. The weight of darkness pressing in around me lightens, just a little bit.
I keep glancing at Rocky’s gift, it’s deep green catching my eye in this room barren of houseplants or views of trees from the window. There’s beauty to be found here in unexpected places, despite the dark.
I never thought I’d miss living on the Hail Mary, so maybe, with Rocky here, one day I’ll also feel the same about Erid. Maybe one day I can call this place home.