Chapter Text
He said pick a place with a nice view and chuckled at that. It was a human thing.
I took it seriously. I requisitioned one of the flood lights, and with my screen-viewer did my best to find a place he would have liked. It ended up being by the ocean, of course, in an area called Untouched Bay. Unchewed, the ruder locals go. I ended up moving there. Adrian and I don’t see each other much, because her work kept her in the city, and she refused to live on a lonely bluff in the periphery. We’ve both changed, but I think I changed more. Grace would be upset to hear this.
He loved the similarities in our burial culture. He found it disturbing that eridians could still see the body underground, but the decorative stone was familiar. There were differences; human tombstones were flat and stuck out of the Earth, whereas a normal stone was spherical, and sat mostly embedded in the ground. There is a proper memorial to the Star-Saviour in the nearest city to his dome, with a worthy statue, but I went to a quiet little stone-carver to have this one made. They cooed at the dates, perhaps imagining me a bereaved parent, and told me there were ways to seal a toy inside the ball. I hesitated before assenting, and at home I fashioned up something out of xenonite. Grace told me I could do anything I want with his stone. Funerals are for the living, he said.
There are not many lives out here. Its mostly a few tight-knit family clusters that carve out their little roosts in the sedimentary cliffs. They come together, occasionally. Their language is solitary and I have yet to pick it up, so I cannot thrum with them, but I listen. I repair things. I offer improvements to the radios, which are critical when everyone lives so far apart, but they refuse. There’s a cultural aversion to anything too technological out here. They want to be able to fix the radios themselves. I understand, having once been trapped where the only one I could rely on was myself.
I thought after those years in space I could never live alone again. When I met Grace I was sure of it.
Nobody out here lives alone. Even the hermits cluster together by the materium to sleep. Untouched Bay doesn’t understand my solitude, but writes it off as a weird city thing. Those strange places were everyone lived side-by-side, but nobody cared about each other (They do care, thats why I had to leave). The little measuring station I work at on Moro Point is the most remote and exposed spot in this remote and exposed town. Its supposed to be a temporary posting, and its surprising the Meteorology-Thrum can get away with a solitary position at all. For the health and well-being of its members, no one eridian should be stationed here for long. Star-Saviours do what they want, however, and I have become something of a fixture. Rather more permanent than the weather, and less permanent than the school house.
I am pulling my cart alongside the school house. It sits on the road between the materium and my shelter that overlooks the sea (I cannot see the ocean itself from my plateau, but rather the sudden drop where the cliffs give way to open ammonia. The sound of waves made soft by distance reassures me its there). I have had this cart as long as I have lived here, but today the air pressure makes my joints hurt, and I will happy to be rid of its weight.
Two pebbles are playing outside, taking advantage of the last day of calm before becoming trapped in their cluster-dens for the foreseeable future. They’re not cluster-mates but friends. One is Hazen, the other Surface-Scatters, but I never do remember which is which. They don’t try to slow down their vernacular for me, which once upon a time made them delightfully impossible to understand.
“Outsider-Rocky! Hi Outsider-Rocky!” Outsider is Untouched-Bay’s title for me, which I find less grating than others.
“Did you hear about the sky-whale fall?”
“There was a fall in Orenma!”
“I’ve never seen a sky-whale.”
“That’s nice,” I say, in my own language. “But a bit far. We won’t see a thing.”
“Are they really all up there though?”
“Yes,” I say. “Sky-whales are strattodwellers. They are very light, and live off of the tiny microscopic organisms that feed off of sunlight. Everything on Erid depends on those tiny creatures, and by extension, the sun. We simply wait for the energy to fall down to us, in one way or another.”
“Ok, but if whales live above us, what lives above them?”
“Nothing,” I say. Hazen (or was it Scatter?) has excitedly clambered onto my cart, which means more weight to pull. “Get off.”
“So then where do aliens live?” At least it listens to me and gets on the ground.
“Why don’t you save these questions for Teacher-Fluted-Ornament,” I say. They would probably love to have their students engaged for once. Teachers like that.
"What does Teacher-Fluted-Ornament know?” Scatter snorts. “You’ve been in the space elevator.”
“They’ve been to space, dummy,”
“No they haven’t!” It says. “Stop making stuff up.”
The school yard eventually stops, and the road continues. They’re not allowed beyond the arching outcrop, and are just young enough that such rules still matter to them. They call out more questions to me as I roll along, and I answer some of them, as I like. Eventually I reach the point where the path to my house veers off the main way, and climbs up and up to the sky.
This place runs on trust. When I first came here, I had none. I would go to the local materium, and leave with less than a fistful of xenonite. That wasn’t so bad— when I first moved here, I still hadn’t recovered my full strength. The weight of the cart itself was enough to leave me winded. It took years, but slowly they learned exactly what they could expect me to do. I was trusted with more and more material, and I grew stronger and stronger to accommodate the heavier loads. Merchant-Dropt jokes he is the greatest physical trainer on Erid.
They have given me more than usual, because there’s a storm on its way. Not a gentle wind, but something that picks up and tosses away anything unlucky or dumb enough to still be outside. I noticed it brewing on the edge of my sensors and carefully monitored and reported. Other posts confirmed it and a warning was composed and broadcast. If we’re lucky the station’s instruments will stay operational in the thick of it, and the sorts of scientists that get excited when they hear the words ‘occluded front’ will have the closest thing to Christmas an eridian will get. For the eridians who live here, they are grateful for the warning, but will not be enjoying much of the next few days. They think I’m crazy for staying at Moro Point, instead of sheltering with one of the family clusters. I’m quite certain they’ve braced themselves for the day I don’t come to town, and someone will go up to my Point and find the entire top blown off. It is convenient for the eridian maintaining the atmosphere monitor to live there. It didn’t have to be me, but might as well be.
I pull the xenonite into the house, and anything sitting outside I wish to keep into the storage unit. It is embedded in the ground, and should withstand anything the storm can throw at it. The main shelter sticks out a little, but curves like a bell and allows the wind to bend around it.
I am economical with my movement, and do not spend too much time fretting over the observation station. Movement hurts, and one check is fine enough for the equipment, if I do it slow and right.
The one thing I allow myself to fret over is the grave.
It sits on the same plateau where my house lives, tucked into the edge that’s opposite the ocean, where a smaller set of cliffs rise again. The waves are quiet when you walk up, but a little divot in the stone catches the sound and amplifies its song just in that spot, making it quite beautiful. Presumably to the human eye it would be beautiful too, if there were light, but I can only see the projection from the screen-viewer in my memory. It is a quirk of geography that I’d like to last forever, but in my short time here I have already a sense on the inevitability of erosion. I will not have to face it so long as I don’t think too far into the future; its time frame is far beyond the lifespan of a single eridian. Up until now the spot has survived countless storms. It was shaped by them in the first place. I wish I could carry it inside too and hold it tight.
I tap, tap, tap, first to the monument stone, and then the figure inside. The third astronaut. The first astronaut sculpture pinged off of his hull and is to this day floating about somewhere in the Tau Ceti system. The second was sent to Earth, and the third will sit here on Erid for as long as I tend to it, and centuries more. Beneath it is something yet more precious.
Most of him would not survive this atmosphere, even in death, so his body is kept preserved in one of the many specialized facilities that sprung up around the Dome project, for the scientists to pick and prod over. I instinctively found the idea distasteful, but Grace loved it. That was his plan for his body on Earth, he said. I asked if there would be anything left for his family, and he turned all gummy and clammed up at that. Amnesia, buddy. He had been using that explanation less and less and time progressed, but any questions about family brought in old reliable. I decided to make him feel better, and said No, I mean here family, as if he were dumb for misunderstanding. He was a bit leaky at that.
So a part of his inner carapace, his skeleton is buried here. One large piece from one of the limbs specialized for mobility, the upper section. It resembles one of the long narrow pieces of my goat-leg. All in all, I have made his final sleep a perfect blend of eridian and human sensibilities.
I reassure myself of its constance, then return to my den, where I will stay for the next XX days.
I set up my bed, and prepare my meal. I leave the radio on, a poor facsimile of company. Untouched-Bay is rather old fashioned (backwards), in that it considers any part of eating unfit for polite company. Where I grew up is different. A place like the First Mountains especially, where Adrian hails, loves a shared meal. They brought me sweet-paste when we reunited and, in the privacy of our den, where we should have been whispering sweet nothings, asked me the gory details of eating in Zero-G.
After eating, I immediately climbed onto my bed. It puts my limbs at strange angles, and I deeply regret using the provided stand instead of bringing my own. But I suppose with this air pressure I’d be in pain either way.
I fall asleep. I wake up in the midst of the storm.
It wants to kill me. It wants to pry its howling wind under my shelter like claws and flip it over, so it can rip at the soft underbelly beneath. But stone is stone, and a shelter flush with the erid may as well be miles away in Tau Ceti, as far as that storm is concerned. The laws of physics reign on Erid. No, if it wants to kill me, it should have tried it in the void, where sense and logic break down like DNA.
Erid itself breaks apart. Not inside my shelter, but out there. I can hear it through every wall, a great sudden rumbling that might be the cliff itself crumbling away, letting the storm fill in the noise as it leaves.
I see no reason to worry, and nothing I could do about it anyways. I could get up and tinker with one of my endless projects, or read, or play with my portable Earth thinking machine. I’m wasting away time, and I remember once being unable to withstand the thought of doing so. It is hard to care too much at the moment.
I fall asleep.
______
I wake up. An unnecessary sleep cycle will let you know exactly how unnecessary it was, and I am stiff in my movements as I climb off the bed and shove it to the side, not bothering to fold it properly. I go to the resonant window, which tells me the world has returned to sanity. I should check the atmospheric station first.
I refrained from describing the space around my shelter before, because that doesn’t really matter. This storm has molded it into something new. Years of change packed into one wrathful, frightening expulsion. Giant boulders ten times the size of the largest, oldest eridians carelessly flung from their hundred-year homes, yet just as unmovable to eridian will as before. Exposed like this on a plateau, nothing stops my soundings from being carried off by the wind, so I cannot see the entire thing at once. I walk around a bit and examine the damage. I was right— it was a piece of the cliff that fell off, one that was already jutting out into the sea and I had noticed as unstable when I first came here.
I check the house and the storage room (undamaged), and instead of walking out to the station, I set out the other direction to check his grave.
No boulders stand blocking access, which was my main concern, but I’m distressed to see the area around it has altered, even from what little I can see from a distance.
This is not storm damage, I realize as I get closer. Something dug here.
I am not ashamed to say I am imagining the critter that might have done this and am planning on killing it. Pest! Wretched pest. Perhaps it was a crawling-pawed-digger, and I might fling it from the cliffs, or grab it by the joint and bash it against the stone. It has likely scurried off, and I won’t get the pleasure.
There’s movement. Lucky stars. It’s still there.
I creep silently, and instead of sounding (which some crawlers would be alerted by), I allow the noise of its own digging illuminate the scene.
It is small, and moving strangely, but it is an eridian.
And I am angrier. An animal is acting on instinct, but an eridian knows exactly what this means. This is a strange looking grave but still a grave, and even without the buried carapace, the stone should tell them exactly what it is.
They— it, I realize, it is not merely small but a pebble, though not young enough for innocence. I don’t know this pebble, which is strange, but I don’t care. It’s belly up, and jerking without purpose. Dirt clumps on its carapace, in its joints, and if there were any doubt on what had occurred, in its claws. The monument stone is overturned, and gorges in the ground are inter-mixed with careless piles.
“You miserable waste-eater!” I say without thinking, and now it knows I’m here. It shrieks, wriggles faster, and goes nowhere. With a few short strides I am on top of it. I grab it by the limb and it immediately freezes. Caught!
I find the mischief of pebbles amusing, I was a rather unmanageable pebble myself, but this is an entirely different matter. Was it caught in its wild celebration of life after the storm, the revelry, the freedom from brain numbing boredom, that it needed to do something abominable? Oh, it will be sorry. Now that I don’t care about stealth, I can get a proper look at the scene of the crime. The monument stone is undamaged, and I look for—
I frantically tap the ground but it’s gone. The femur, his bone, the large limb bone that the scientists relinquished to me, a toy for this reckless adventurer. If it threw it over the side it is gone—
“I won’t insult you by asking if you know what you’ve done,” I hiss, every voice directed to this one statement. Its respirators are fluttering rapidly, and if it continues cooling itself like this it’s going to pass out. “Calm down, stop breathing.” That obviously doesn’t work, and I find I don’t care enough to try and properly soothe it. It should be upset; it has done a monstrous thing.
“Where did you put the bone?” I say, then realize it might not know the word. “The carapace, the little carapace piece, what have you done with it?”
It doesn’t respond, but just wheezes rudely and whacks a free claw against the arm holding it.
“Desecrator,” I squeeze a little harder, not enough for it to start hurting, but to let it know that I am much stronger than it could ever hope to fight. A second little leg scrabbles to join the first.
“What is your name?” I ask, too late. The pebble is still. It has passed out. It will wake up cold, sluggish, and in pain— not life threatening, but uncomfortable. If that was attempt to avoid this confrontation, it was stupid. I will be there when it wakes up.