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There weren’t many constants in the natural world, but soulmates were the exception. Water boiled at a hundred degrees Celsius, the Earth was round, the sun was bright, and everyone had a soulmate. Ryland always knew he was going to be a scientist, and how rare it was to deal in absolutes, so there was a particular brand of comfort drawn from having an assurance right there on his wrist to see.
Naturally, there were deviations from the norm— some peoples’ soulmates died before they met; others had deformations on their marks. The pediatrician had clucked her tongue and murmured something to Ryland’s mom upon his first soul mark examination, causing Ryland’s mother to place her head in her hands. He hadn’t quite caught what the pediatrician had told his mother, but he was smart enough to know that meant something was wrong. Wrong with him, wrong with his soul mark— regardless, he was not part of the majority. His mark was not as immutable as he had thought.
Ryland had taken matters into his own hands, hiding in the nonfiction section of the library and poring over books about languages with different alphabets. He had scoured them, for hours on end, everything from Greek to the Thai alphabet. Nothing matched the script inked into his left wrist; not Armenian, not Georgian, not Arabic.
Nothing.
Hell, even the date was unrecognizable. If the writing was meant to be in Ryland’s soulmate’s native language, it wasn’t anything he could find in the library or out of it. The vague familiarities— an I here, a lambda there, even a V— were still too irregular, too far interspersed with utterly alien script to be anything but a deformity. The pamphlet that Ryland’s mother received at the end of that awful visit to the pediatrician confirmed it all: Ryland Grace was one of the three percent of people who had some type of deformity to their soul marks.
He tried not to let it bother him. He covered it up with a band, citing religion if anyone brought it up. No one had to know anything proving the contrary. Besides, it was still the nineties; he got bullied about other stuff like reading books and being the second-slowest boy in gym class. Normal things to be picked on for.
And, really, after the initial diagnosis and his responding research, followed by his conclusion that it was, in fact, a deformity— soulmates just stopped having meaning for Ryland Grace. He’d probably never know who they were, not with his mark as screwed up as it was. Sure, he got around, and it wasn’t like the word was taboo or anything. Heck, he usually got asked by his kids multiple times a year if he’d met his soulmate. He’d answer honestly, tell them no and apologize for not being able to describe the feeling or the science behind it, and move on with his lesson.
It was fine.
Even after the discovery of the Petrova Line and astrophage, soulmates remained the least of Ryland’s concerns. Sure, he took note of the name and date on each team member’s wrist, whether they had already met or were still waiting, if the marks were faded gray to signal their other half had died or sporting a sheen marking a recently formed bond; but everyone did that. It was as second nature as seeing what color one’s hair was.
Commander Yáo had met his soulmate nearly twenty years ago. Ryland hadn’t studied Chinese long after he’d realized the characters didn’t match with his mark, but he knew the numbers meant 2002. Similarly, Dr. Leclerc had met his wife in the 1980s, and Bob Redell was still waiting on his.
Tragically enough, Doctors Shapiro and Dubois were soulmates, allowed a brief period of time together before Dubois had to depart. It would have been funny, how much they stressed out Stratt, had everyone not felt endlessly guilty about separating them. However, both were adamant that the mission was more important than their relationship— even if they provided far too many details about their sex life for Ryland’s standards.
“Why do you cover up your mark?” Ilyukhina inquired, leaning over the table, bare forearms exposing a woman’s name and a date that passed eight years ago in Cyrillic.
Ryland scratched at his band self-consciously. “It’s personal.”
Dimitri scoffed into his vodka, then clapped Ryland heavily on the back. Ryland grunted, nearly spilling his Guinness all over Ilyukhina. “Please, Dr. Grace. You are not a religious man! Tell us!”
“You can be a scientist and still be religious,” Ryland complained, but relented under Ilyukhina’s wide-eyed, prodding gaze. Seriously, that woman had a way with her puppy eyes; it was ridiculous. Even Stratt was only immune to them ninety-five percent of the time. “My mark’s deformed.”
It felt strange to admit it aloud— Ryland wasn’t sure that he’d ever done that before. Maybe it was the alcohol, or perhaps it was just because it was the end of the world; whatever the reason, Ryland knew that he would be alright with the Hail Mary team. Ilyukhina clucked her tongue in sympathy and patted Ryland’s wrist. Yáo, who had been pretending not to listen to the entire conversation, gave him a nod.
“We cannot be entirely perfect,” Dimitri said with a sigh, nudging his shoulder against Ryland’s before downing the last of the vodka in his glass. He then laughed and boomed, “At least you have a pretty face!”
Dubois nearly snorted champagne up his nose, he laughed so hard.
Ryland had come to find that the impending death of the sun meant that all good things must come to an end. Sometimes, that meant ending his career as a middle school science teacher to become the world’s leading expert on astrophage. Other times, that meant being involuntarily forced onto a suicide mission thirteen light years from Earth because both Dubois and Shapiro were dead.
Their funerals had been nice. Ryland wasn’t so sure anyone would show up for him.
I don’t want to die, he realized, sliding his hand through the band so his mark was visible. Dull and black and absolute gibberish, just as it had always been. The skin surrounding it was pale and dewy with sweat, and in a fit of frustration, Ryland threw the band against the wall of his prison cell. It did nothing to alleviate the grief, the panic winding its way through his lungs, whispering that he was going to be some faded name on somebody’s wrist that they would never know. He had to convince Stratt that he couldn’t go on this mission. Just in case.
But Stratt entered the prison cell, and she looked at his mark for the first time just as he stared at hers, so faded against her skin that her soulmate must have died when they were still a child. And she did not relent. Ryland screamed, he sobbed, he threw the biggest bitch fit of his life, and Stratt stood there and took it, the guilt in her eyes only steeling to call him a coward.
And maybe, just maybe, her drugging him to forget everything was a blessing. A small one, but a blessing nonetheless.
When he woke up, four years older and thirteen light years from home, with no idea what his own name was, just him and his mark with two corpses and a murderous nannybot— he knew he should be angry. At something. Anything; heck, he didn’t know. He couldn’t understand the mark on his wrist; why Yáo’s was still dark and black on his mummified corpse while Ilyukhina’s was pale and faded. He just knew that it was bad, and he was upset, and things were coming back to him in bits and pieces and it still wasn’t enough.
So maybe soulmates weren’t the natural constant that the scientific community had made them out to be. That was fine. Ryland was much more intimate with another kind of permanence; could walk right up to loss and shake its hand, ask how its day had been.
His dad lost him, really, and he lost his mom young. Lost his sister, his students, his job, his crew. His friends, if he could ever really consider Dimitri and Stratt among them. Regardless, he was alone in a spaceship thirteen light years from Earth, tasked with solving the death of the sun and the end of the human race.
He peered down at his wrist from where he was using the Petrovascope to confirm the existence of Tau Ceti’s Petrova Line. “Where the hell were you, huh?” he demanded. No one around to hear him but himself— it wasn’t as much comfort as he would have appreciated.
The mark stared back up at him, black and illegible as always. Ryland sighed and turned back to the Petrovascope, frowning at the sudden blockage in the IR spectrum. He switched it over to visible light, just to ensure that someone hadn’t abruptly taken a chunk out of the Petrova Line, and…
“Holy fucking shit!”
Ryland could probably say it a thousand times and not feel as though he’d driven the point home: the human ability to compartmentalize was, frankly, insane. And— okay, he was making first contact, which was kind of a huge deal, but it didn’t even occur to him that, hey, maybe the alien had a written language and could tell him what his soul mark meant.
At least, until Ryland tried to show Rocky when he would be back from his nap.
In response, Rocky held up one claw and skittered back inside the Blip A. Ryland squinted, wishing they could see the same frequencies of light because it was pitch black in Rocky’s ship. Fortunately, Rocky returned soon enough, holding a cylindrical device in one claw. Eridians really liked cylinders, apparently, except for when it came to making spacecraft. There were five windows, each with a symbol raised slightly above the surface of the device. The window on the far right rotated once at certain intervals, changing the symbols with it.
“It’s a clock!” Ryland realized aloud. “I showed you a clock, so you showed me a clock!”
He floated closer to the xenonite wall (and he really needed to ask Rocky how Eridians managed to create that) to get a better look. Rocky was kind enough to hold the clock steady for Ryland to observe. There were only six numbers total, with a strange looking L marking zero, and—
“Wait a minute,” Ryland murmured, glancing from the clock to his wrist and back again. “Wait.” He watched a full cycle of six Eridian seconds, his heart pounding so loudly against his ribs he could feel it in his throat. “Oh my God.”
It wasn’t a deformity. His mark had never been disfigured, or altered, or anything of the sort. Ryland wasn’t sure what to feel more of: relief that, after thirty some-odd years of living, believing he was destined for loneliness (he should really look into how old he is; relativity is weird), he had a soulmate after all; or the complete and utter shock that came with learning that your soulmate was an alien from 40-Eridani.
Ryland chose excitement. He held up a finger and Rocky copied the motion, then used the xenonite wall to propel himself back through the airlock into the Hail Mary. Cursive lowercase L, I, V, lambda, plus sign, upside down A. Repeat. Translating that to Arabic numerals gave Ryland 13230, which he stared at for a long moment before realizing that he had to convert it to base ten. That took a bit longer to figure out, but he managed with a little more madman scribbling on the walls.
2034, according to his calculations and the Eridian numbers tattooed on his arm. Which… could be sooner than he realized. Were there more Eridians on that ship? Was Rocky just the leader, designated with the task of talking to the strange, scary alien?
Speaking of Rocky, Ryland realized that he would have to put relativistic physics aside for later to determine when he would meet his soulmate. Now, he had to tell an alien life form that he needed a damn nap.
“You have written language, question?”
“Yeah,” Ryland replied, floating down into the dorm room from the lab. Rocky was fiddling with some sort of contraption in his room, though he momentarily paused in acknowledgement of Ryland. “It’s how I read the information the laptop gives me. We don’t have to make indentations like you guys do, though.”
The mention of written language had Ryland instinctively glancing down at his wrist. All he knew was the five numbers, spelling out 2034 for humans like himself.
“What about you? All I’ve seen are your numbers. Can you write your name down someplace?”
“Yes yes yes. You write you name so I can hear.”
“Alright,” Ryland agreed, floating back up to the lab to search for some aluminum foil. It had been eons since he’d actually been to middle school, but he’d seen the art his kids carried through class sometimes. Embossing was one of their big projects, and it seemed like the most reliable medium so Rocky could “see”.
To make things simple, Ryland wrote his name in all caps, using the butt end of his wall pen to press an indent deep enough for Rocky to hear. He then toted his sheet of foil back down to the dorm, careful not to wrinkle or rip it, then placed it against the xenonite wall for Rocky to observe.
“You name have two parts, question?”
“Yeah. Humans have a first, informal name. My informal name doesn’t have a good translation, so the second part is ‘Grace,’ which is the formal name. It also distinguishes me from all other people with the informal name Ryland.”
“Understand. Eridians only have one name, usually no translation. My written name is this.”
Rocky held up a tablet, made of a soft enough material for him to scratch symbols into with his claws. If they weren’t floating in zero gravity, Ryland’s knees would have given out underneath him.
It’s him. All this time, it’s been Rocky.
“You are leaking. You are okay, question?”
“Yeah,” Ryland told him, but his voice wobbled, incriminating him. “I’m okay. Humans do this when we’re happy.”
“Leak when extreme emotion. Humans are very messy.”
“Shut up.”
“Why you so happy, question?”
Ryland tilted his head up in an attempt to stop crying, but because of zero gravity and surface tension, that just made the tears float on top of his eyeball, clouding over his vision. He blinked them away, then turned back to Rocky.
“I guess I haven’t been entirely honest, when it comes to human mating practices,” Ryland admits. He holds up his left wrist, even if Rocky can’t hear his name tattooed onto Ryland’s skin. “Humans are born with a mark here. It tells them the name of the person most compatible with them, along with a general time frame that they will meet.” Ryland decided not to explain everything, not to tell Rocky how little humans truly know about soul marks. “It’s not always for mating, though. Sometimes it just means that person is really important to you; that they’re going to be your best friend.”
“Understand. But does not explain why you leak.”
“Sometimes, the mark turns out wrong, and you can’t read the name or numbers. I always thought my mark was wrong.”
“It is not ♩♩♪, question?”
“No. My mark is in Eridian. This whole time, I thought something was wrong with me, when in reality, it was your name.”
“You mark my name, question?” Rocky’s voice was at least two octaves higher than normal, pitched towards utter elation. Ryland felt the same way, his voice catching in his throat as he placed a hand on the xenonite wall separating them. “Yeah, buddy. You’re my soulmate.”
Rocky raised one hand to mirror Ryland’s position, then more quietly, he said, “Eridians no have mate this way. Adrian my mate, no reproduction. I can be both mates?”
Ryland fought the urge to blush and laughed instead. “We’re definitely not that kind of soulmates. More like… you’re going to be my best friend, probably for the rest of my life, yeah?”
“Understand. Happy happy happy.”
“Yeah,” Ryland echoed, unable to keep himself from beaming, “happy, happy, happy.”
And if they can save their planets, soulmates or not; if they try to sacrifice themselves for each other a solid time or two; and if Ryland gives up the chance to go back home to instead save Rocky and spend the rest of his life with him…
Well, it doesn’t sound that bad at all.