Chapter Text
There was really not a lot of warning.
It would still be eighteen months subjective time until they arrived at 40 Eridani, and in between increasingly inelegant fixes to whatever had decided to break down this week, Grace and Rocky were still working their way through the Hail Mary’s catalogue of movies. Today’s selection was Gone with the Wind, which Grace had always meant to watch one day but had never gotten around to it.
Now that he had, he wasn’t enjoying it at all. Scarlett O’Hara was a spoiled, manipulative brat, and the men around her were idiots who kept letting her get away with it because she had money. Grace was getting increasingly tempted to just turn it off, but Rocky was invested.
This how human courting work, question? He asked.
“Not usually,” Grace told him. “Not when everybody involved is sane and normal.”
Never happen on Erid, Rocky declared.
“Good.” Grace nodded. It was good to know Eridians had some sense. Not having gender roles probably helped, too.
On Erid, Red just have two mates, no problem!
Grace bit his lip and tried to picture Rhett and Ashley agreeing to share Scarlett. That would end in somebody getting shot. “Yeah, humans don’t do that.”
Grace said sometimes do.
“That’s... not in this particular time and place,” Grace said. “Humans do a lot of different things, depending on where and when they are. In the United States in the nineteenth century, women wore big skirts and men wore dumb moustaches, and you were only allowed one mate.”
Stupid time and place to live, Rocky decided.
“The people there and then didn’t have much choice about it,” Grace observed.
Scarlett had just taken a tumble down the stairs when all the screens in the Don’t Go Crazy Room suddenly turned checkerboard. Rocky jumped to his feet in the ball and let out a distressed whistle.
Red die, question? he asked.
“I don’t think...” Grace began, but he was cut off by the tranquil voice of Mary.
Object approaching, she announced.
“What? What object?” asked Grace. They were in the void between star systems! There shouldn’t be anything but random hydrogen atoms for light-years in any direction.
Unknown.
That was accurate but entirely unhelpful, which was normal enough. Grace grunted as he picked himself stiffly up off the metal floor. “Come on, Rocky, we better go check that out.”
Rocky’s ball trundled after him. Mary, Red die, question?” he asked.
Question unclear, the computer replied. Please restate.
Rocky sputtered in frustration. Grace! Ask Mary...
“He wants to know if Scarlett O’Hara is dead after falling down the stairs,” said Grace, climbing into the pilot’s seat.
Pilot detected, Mary noted. No, Scarlett O’Hara does not die after falling down the stairs.
“Well, why the heck not?” Grace muttered, doing up his harness. He rotated a screen to take a look at what the navigational equipment had detected... and blinked. “What is that?”
They were travelling at some ninety-two percent the speed of light, so the view out the windows was badly distorted. Stars ahead of them were bright blue, and those behind deep red. The readouts attempted to compensate for this, but what they were showing was so warped it didn’t make any sense. It looked like a gravitational lens, but that implied a lot of mass, and there shouldn’t have been anything like that out here...
... unless it was something nobody could see from Earth. Something like, oh, say, a primordial black hole, just wandering between stars giving off no radiation because it had nothing to eat, and never passing in front of another object to produce an observable effect.
“Is that, uh...” Grace licked his lips. “Is that a black hole?”
There appears to be a singularity of approximately fifteen Earth masses, orbited by a ring of artificial structures, Mary replied.
Grace was about to ask about its trajectory, but then he heard the second part of that statement. “Artificial structures? Somebody built a black hole?” He thought about that a moment. “Maybe not... maybe they just built around a black hole.” That still represented engineering far beyond anything humans or Eridians were capable of.
Black hole have radiation! said Rocky, alarmed.
“No, no, it’s fine, this one isn’t eating anything,” said Grace. “It’ll just be Hawking Radiation and that’s so weak it can’t do anything to us.” The stars all around it were pinched in towards it as if it were sucking them in, an optical illusion created by the gravity of an object with the mass of Uranus contained in a space the size of a grapefruit. “What we really need to know is, are we going to hit it?”
We will pass within one hundred million kilometres, said Mary. Not close enough to suffer tidal effects, but the object’s gravity will affect our trajectory.
“Then we’d better prepare a course correction,” Grace decided. “Rocky, you’ve got the math brain, what kind of burn will we need to get back on course for Erid?”
I am on it! he replied, with an excited whistle.
“I’m gonna see what kind of data we can get on the object,” Grace decided. There were smart people on at least two planets who would want to take a look at this – and it was way more interesting than whatever happened to Scarlett O’Hara. “Mary, when can we expect closest approach?”
We should reeeeeeaachhhh perrrrriiiasssssspppppppp... Mary’s voice suddenly dropped from ‘Priya Kansara’ to ‘James Earl Jones’ within a few syllables, and then stopped.
That sounded bad. “Uh... Mary?” asked Grace.
A couple more seconds went by in silence, and then the speakers started speaking gibberish. Yrotcejart ruo tceffa lliw ytivarg... it was replaying the conversation in reverse. The screens flicked to black, and then information began scrolling across them too fast to follow. Grace saw flashes of his video logs, of scientific papers they’d consulted recently, and even of Gone with the Wind.
Grace felt a lump the size of Rocky settle in the pit of his stomach. He was no expert but it sure looked like something was accessing the computers, reading all the data out as fast as it could. That sort of thing happened on Star Trek... could it happen in real life? The database on the Hail Mary contained as close as possible to all human knowledge as of March 20, 2041 when it launched. What were some black hole aliens going to think when they went through it? It had only taken Ultron fifteen seconds on the internet to conclude that humanity deserved extinction...
The only way he could think of to stop it was to turn the computers off. Everything had to go except the life support. Grace flicked switches one after the other, shutting down the LLM, the sensors, the navigational computer... rebooting them once they were past whatever this was would be a pain, but there was a manual for that. Screens flickered out one by one.
The very last display lingered on a frame from the movie: Scarlett’s $300 cheque, dated February 20th, 1866. Grace lifted the guard and pressed the last button, and darkness fell.
We die, question? asked Rocky.
“Not yet,” said Grace.
Then there was a scream of tearing metal. The stars outside suddenly snapped back to their normal colours, although there was no sense of deceleration – and the object in front of them, hitherto invisible, burst into brilliant light that swallowed them up and spit them back out again to apparently slam into a wall. Rocky squealed. Grace smelled ammonia. Sparks flew.
When darkness fell again, it was not the darkness of space. It was the darkness of oblivion.
Grace. Grace. Grace.
The low, sputtering tone repeated over and over, centimetres from his ear, several times before Grace recognized it – it was his name in Eridian, spoken without the translator. Rocky was calling to him. He managed to grunt, and opened his eyes.
Light was slanting in at an odd angle, falling directly in his eyes through a tangle of wires. Grace had to move his head, which hurt, and blink a few times to make sense of what he was seeing – when he did, he found that the cockpit had been crushed like a coke can, with screens and wires dangling from the walls and ceiling. The pilot’s seat was, incredibly, intact, but the jump seat was a crumpled mess. There was a flicker as the illumination reflected off the xenonite of Rocky’s ball, which was rocking back and forth so that its occupant could nudge Grace’s arm.
Grace. Wake up, command. Grace.
“I’m awake, I’m awake,” he groaned. He was lying on the floor – technically the wall, but gravity was not pointing in its usual direction – where he’d been dumped when his harness apparently came undone. When he reached to rub his face, he found dried blood in his hair. His nose hurt, possibly even re-broken, and there was a swollen spot around his right eye where his head had bounced off a control panel.
Grace alive! Happy happy happy! said Rocky.
Grace got up onto his hands knees and pulled his limbs out of the remains of the broken harness, breathing hard. He wondered what kind of shape Armando was in...
Halfway through that thought, the smell hit him.
It was not a bad smell, it was merely an unexpected one. The Hail Mary never smelled of anything except reconstituted astronaut food, occasional electrical fires, and maybe a whiff of ammonia when Rocky moved from tunnels to ball and back again. Now suddenly Grace could smell green leaf volatiles and petrichor and dimethyl sulfide... crushed grass and rain and the ocean. Was he hallucinating?
“What happened?” he asked. Everything was still turned off. Grace reached for the nearest switch just to see if anything would happen when he flicked it, but as soon as he touched it there was a plasticky burning smell, and he thought better of it.
Don’t know, said Rocky. We stop.
“Stop? We can’t just stop,” Grace protested. If they’d stopped from 0.92c they’d be paste. And yet...
Did, said Rocky.
This was, undeniably, true. There was no sense of motion. The light coming in the split in the wall was not changing its angle as it would be if they were rotating, and if they’d been speeding along between stars there shouldn’t have been any external light at...
The split wall? If there was a hull breach...
... but there couldn’t be, because Grace was breathing just fine. He crawled over to the crack – about five centimetres wide – and put his eye up to it for a look.
At first there was nothing but impossible and yet weirdly familiar brightness. Then his eyes adjusted, and there was... there was sand, and grass, and waves rolling up under a grey sky with a chilly wind blowing off the sea. Grace took a deep breath of the achingly familiar scents, and felt his eyes prick. He had to be dreaming, he thought. There was no way. Tears stung his bruised skin as they spilled over.
He had to get out there.
The Hail Mary didn’t have emergency exits because once the crew was on board exiting was not supposed to be a thing. Grace tried the airlock, but the ship was oriented such that the door faced down – if he opened it, he’d find nothing but dirt. He made his way through the half-collapsed crew quarters until he found the observation cupola. Two panes had popped out when they hit the ground, and the window openings left behind were big enough for him to crawl through. He squirmed out and rolled down the side of the hull to land in a heap on the sand.
There was a rustle and a low, hoarse sound of surprise. Grace propped himself up on his elbows, and saw...
... a bird. There was an actual bird sitting on the wreckage of the Hail Mary, turning its head from left to right to get a look at him. It was brown pelican, Grace though. He’d seen them on the Presidio during the summer and fall. Many planets might have beaches, but surely there was only one with pelicans.
“Hello,” Grace said to it.
The pelican was not interested in conversation. It flapped its wings twice and hopped ungracefully into the air to fly away. Grace flopped back onto the ground, then rolled over onto his back and shut his eyes. It shouldn’t be possible for him to be outside and breathing freely, with a planet below him and a sky above, and yet it felt so real. The smells and the sounds and the feel of sand under his fingernails... yeah, he was gonna wake up at any moment.
He did in fact wake up, probably only a few minutes later, to Rocky calling his name again and water dripping on his face. Grace opened his eyes and looked up at the grey sky. Three gulls flew over, mewing at each other, and Grace realized it was raining. Not heavily, just a mist. He reached up and wiped drops off his face, then kicked his feet in the sand like a child and started laughing.
What funny, question? asked Rocky. He was still inside the ship, but now that there was an atmosphere on both sides of the wall he could see Grace clearly.
“Nothing’s funny, I’m just... do you know where we are?” Grace asked him. He got to his feet again to climb back inside the ship.
Grace outside and not dead, said Rocky. On Earth.
“Yeah, on Earth!” He dragged himself halfway up to the cupola, then suddenly let go and fall on his backside in the sand again. “We’re on Earth!”
Grace just say that, Rocky pointed out. Grace Rocky on Earth, mean Grace Rocky not go to Erid!
That was exactly what Grace had just realized. “We have to send them a message!” he said.
Yes! Rocky agreed. Send taumoeba, save Erid!
“We gotta get in touch with somebody.” Grace picked himself up again and brushed sand off his butt, and took a look around. The Hail Mary was lying with the crew compartment on the beach, surrounded by cracked and twisted fuel tanks. The back end, with the engines and solar panels, was in the ocean. Black astrophage goo was seeping into the water but it would die and decompose there, unable to feed or breed. It looked like they’d hit the ground hard, but not ninety-two-percent-the-speed-of-light hard. Where had all that energy gone?
Didn’t matter. Grace climbed back into the ship and found a flashlight. First step was to make sure the taumoeba had survived.
“What shape are your tunnels in, Rock?” he asked, shining the beam around. The inside of the Hail Mary was as much of a mess as the outside. Panels were bent and wires were dangling. The fume hood was smashed. The hydroponics were all over the floor.
Some broken, said Rocky. Workshop seal off breach, still good.
“Good to know,” Grace nodded. The workshop Rocky had built in the lab was where his life support system was, built into the space behind the rolling shelves. His food and tools could be retrieved – that could not. “I’m gonna check on the taumoeba and have something to eat, and then we can figure out how to call for help.”
Good plan. Rocky fix atmosphere leaks.
One of the taumoeba canisters had broken in the crash – its contents were setting into a sticky puddle on the floor. The others, however, were fine, and Grace wrapped them up in blankets to keep them safe in case more of the ship collapsed. As long as some was still alive, they could breed more and have enough for Earth and Erid both.
With that done, Grace pulled out a package of freeze-dried spaghetti and meatballs and a packet of apple juice. The rehydrator was as dead as everything else on the ship, so he had to eat his dinner dry – not ideal, but with the possibility of real, non-astronaut food in his future, Grace was willing to put up with it. Rocky also had a meal, which Grace politely averted his eyes from.
“So I’m just guessing here,” Grace said, through a mouthful of very crunchy pasta, “but it looked to me like whatever we encountered up there was reading the computer files.”
That why Grace turn Mary off, Rocky observed.
“Exactly. So my working hypothesis is that was some kind of transportation system. The stuff it downloaded told it that the ship came from Earth, so it sent us back here, either because it thought it was doing us a favour, or just to get rid of us.” They hadn’t been going in that direction, but maybe the thing thought they were lost. Heck, maybe it was broken.
Might be fun, see Earth, said Rocky, warming to the idea now that he knew they had plenty of taumoeba. Grace show Rocky Earth stuff, question?
“Of course!” said Grace. “We’ve already got a beach right here. You can see trees over there, and you can see a rocket launch when we ship the taumoeba to Venus! I’ll take you to New York and Toronto and Beijing... I’ll even take you to task force HQ in Baikonur and you can meet everybody!” Grace would have some very unkind words to say to a number of people who worked there. He’d gotten used to the idea of never seeing them again, but now that the possibility of telling them off presented itself... yeah, he was looking forward to that.
I like! Rocky said. Earth will like Rocky, question?
“Earth is gonna love Rocky, statement.”
Grace wholeheartedly believed that. Rocky was a character and humanity was going to think he was great. The question was... would they love him enough? Space hardware was darned expensive, and Grace doubted there was a government on Earth that would put up the money to save an alien planet out of the goodness of their hearts. They were going to require some pretty compelling persuasion.
He’d hoped to accomplish a little more that day, but by the time Grace finished his dinner and looked outside again, it was getting dark. The location of the sunset told him he was on the east coast of somewhere... he kind of hoped it was North America but honestly anywhere on Earth would do as long as there were people nearby. Summoning those people, however, would probably have to wait until tomorrow.
It was still drizzling and the air was damp and chilly. Grace made a bed for himself in the wreckage, in a place where Rocky’s xenonite tunnels could hold up the roof if it tried to cave in on top of him. Rocky himself, having patched the broken panels and refilled the tunnels with his atmosphere, took up his post to watch.
“Tomorrow, first thing,” Grace promised him. “If the rain’s stopped, we’ll work on a signal.”
Good good good, said Rocky.
Grace probably slept better that night than he had in years, lulled off by the sounds of wind and rain and waves breaking. He woke to cold fresh air and the calls of the gulls, and smiled at the realization that yesterday had not been a dream. He still had a black eye – it would barely open now – and an eclectic collection of scrapes and bruises, but he was alive and on Earth... somewhere. Man, it was great.
Hi, Grace! said Rocky, still perched above him.
“Morning, Rocky,” he replied. Grace rolled out from under the xenonite and sat up to stretch. “What have you been up to?”
Rocky made the little tittering sound that meant he was particularly pleased with himself. Make plan! he said. How to signal humans on Earth for help.
“That’s great.” Grace arched his back until he heard something pop, then began rummaging through the food stores for breakfast. “What did you come up with?” Knowing Rocky, it would be something very clever indeed.
Earth atmosphere much oxygen, Rocky said. Can hear Hail Mary oxidizing already. Take something oxidize fast, apply heat, make big sound, humans hear! Maybe see, too, he added as an afterthought.
Grace paused to consider that. “So... your plan is to make a big fire?”
Yes yes yes, Rocky declared.
“We could do that,” said Grace, biting down on the temptation to laugh. Oxidization was an exotic and dangerous reaction as far as Eridians were concerned. Most of them probably wouldn’t have thought of it, or dismissed it as too risky, and they wouldn’t know it was literally the first thing any human would come up with. Grace had thought of it himself, but had figured there must be something better for one important reason – also something an Eridian wouldn’t think about. “It won’t be very visible in the daytime,” he said. “Not unless... hmmm...”
After a breakfast of cold, half-rehydrated oatmeal, Grace climbed out of the ship again, splashed some seawater on his face – it was seawater, he could taste the salt – and got to work. The beach was surrounded by grasses and low scrub, all of it damp and glittering from last night’s rain, but this morning the sun was shining. Grace collected a bunch of the driest fuel he could find, while Rocky ripped up flooring from the most damaged parts of the Hail Mary and pulled the batteries out of the crushed remains of the centrifuge. They used the batteries to make a spark that set the kindling alight, and Grace threw mission checklists and technical manuals on to build the flames up higher.
Honestly, it felt pretty good to watch those burn.
Once they had a good blaze going, Grace tied a t-shirt over his nose and mouth, put a set of lab goggles on, and added the PVC flooring. This produced a cloud of choking black smoke that Grace quickly scrambled back from, knowing it was full of all kinds of horrible toxic things. But it spiralled into the air in a thick, dark column that, once it got high enough, would be visible for kilometres in every direction. Provided they weren’t on a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific, that ought to get somebody’s attention.
Grace and Rocky sat upwind and played tic-tac-toe while they waited.
It didn’t take long. Help arrived less than an hour later, although it came not from the water, as Grace had expected, but from over the dunes. It took the form of a stout black man in his late thirties with his hair cut very short, wearing a blue striped shirt tucked into grey trousers held up with suspenders, and a pageboy cap. Grace looked up from their game and saw him standing on the dune with one leg up on a piece of driftwood, looking at the crashed spacecraft in astonishment.
“Hello!” Grace got to his feet and motioned for Rocky to stay put while he approached the man. “Hi! Man, you have no idea how good it is to see you.” The last living fellow human Grace had seen with his own eyes had been Carl Boyce, three years ago not counting coma time. It was an honest effort not to just hug this total stranger, but Grace settled for holding out a hand. “Dr. Ryland Grace.”
The man just stared at him. He was about Grace’s own height, with a round face, broad shoulders and neck, and a gap between his front teeth. He actually rather resembled Carl the security guy, but Grace pushed that thought aside, fearing he was having an ‘all black guys look alike’ moment. Finally, the man seemed to realize he was being offered a handshake, and accepted it.
“Isaiah Boyce,” he said, in a Southeastern American accent.
Another Boyce? Maybe he did legitimately look like Carl. Grace pumped the man’s hand up and down with enthusiasm. “Nice to meet you! I went to Harvard with a guy named Isaiah. He tried to get everybody to call him Ice but nobody would because he was a huge nerd. Can I use your phone? Is there service out here? Where are we?”
“Roxburgh Island,” said Isaiah.
Grace had heard of it. He tried to situated it on his mental map of the United States. “That’s in Florida?” he asked hopefully.
“Georgia.”
“Close enough.” That wasn’t a bad area to crash a spaceship. “I need to get in touch with the Kennedy Space Centre, then. Have you got your phone?”
“No, Sir.”
“Don’t call me Sir,” said Grace. “Can you take me to the nearest telephone, then? They didn’t pack mine when they shot me into space.”
“I can...” Isaiah looked at him sideways. “I can take you to Dunhammer.”
“Great, thank you.” Grace nodded and turned towards the wreck of the Hail Mary, where Rocky was swaying from side to side with impatience. “Rocky!”
Coming, Grace! Rocky rolled up the slope to meet them. Isaiah’s eyes went huge and he stumbled backwards a couple of steps, which was a perfectly fair reaction to a stone spider the size of a retriever, running towards you in a hamster ball.
“It’s fine!” Grace told him. “He’s a friend! This is Rocky, he’s from 40 Eridani. Rocky, this is Ice. He’s from Georgia.”
Hello hello human friend! sang Rocky, delighted. From Georgia, like Red!
“Yeah, like Scarlett O’Hara,” Grace agreed, remembering the cheque appearing on the screen... had the alien technology used that as a guide for where to drop them? There were certainly maps of Earth in the ship’s database. They were probably lucky they’d ended up on Roxburgh Island and not in Tbilisi. “Ice is gonna take me to town so I can find a phone. Don’t burn the place down before I come back, okay?”
But Rocky did the wiggling motion that was his imitation of a head shake, and said, I come with.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea, buddy,” Grace told him.
Grace say Earth love Rocky, Rocky reminded him.
“They will once they get used to you,” Grace promised him, “but that might take a while. Until we can introduce you properly, you should stay here.” To be entirely honest, he wasn’t sure he liked the idea of leaving, either. Rocky had been his constant and only companion for the last three years. It seemed wrong to just leave him home alone for any reason.
Rocky made a sad whistle. No want to be alone, he admitted.
Grace was pretty sure that was a deliberate guilt trip and he kind of wanted to resent it... but then he wondered how he would feel if they’d arrived on Erid and Rocky just wandered off and left him alone for an unknown amount of time. If they’d gotten there, then they would probably have had to do that, but Grace knew it would have made him miserable.
“Have you got enough air in there?” he asked.
Will bring stuff, Rocky replied, and rolled back down the hill to the ship. Wait for Rocky!
“Okay!” said Grace, and looked back at Isaiah.
The man was standing there as still as a statue. He clearly had no idea what to do with the idea that he’d just met an alien.
“Sorry,” Grace told him. “I’m sure this is a lot to take in. Uh, you’re not related to a Carl Boyce, by any chance, are you? Big guy, works for the Petrova Task force?”
“No,” said Isaiah. “I don’t think so.”
Just a coincidence, then. “Well, you get to be the first person on Earth to know we’ve made contact with aliens, and the first to learn we’ve got a solution for astrophage!” Grace told him. “It might take a while, but we’re getting the sun back.”
Isaiah looked up at the blue sky, with the morning sun streaming down and glittering on the water to the East. The air was already warming up... it was the kind of day when people had found it hard to believe in astrophage. “That’s good to know,” he said.
“Out of curiosity,” Grace added, “what’s today’s date? I haven’t kept track in years.”
“It’s the twenty-first of February,” Isaiah told him, seizing upon the apparently normal question. “Wednesday.”
“Nice day for February,” Grace observed.
“It’s been a warm winter,” said Isaiah.
Grace wondered just how weird it would sound if he asked for the year. The Hail Mary had left Earth in 2041, so it would have arrived at Tau Ceti in 2053 or 2054, but they’d been on their way to Erid for a couple of years and time dilation was happening, so he honestly had no idea anymore beyond ‘maybe 2060-ish’...
Rocky return!
Grace decided to worry about dates later – Rocky was trundling back up the slope. He was wearing his tool belt now, as well as a sort of backpack strapped around his thorax. He rolled to a stop in front of the two men, looking pleased.
Have tools, food, first aid kid, patch to repair ball, all set! Rocky declared.
“Great,” said Grace. “Let’s get this show on the road.” Once he’d gotten in touch with the Task Force, Grace was going to find a hotel room, take long bubble bath, and eat the biggest steak he could find. It was gonna be great.