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She watched the videos that came on the early hours of a Tuesday. Eva Stratt was alone in the operations room, when the feeds began to populate, four drones, all successful, all carrying data back from somewhere between here and Tau Ceti. She had not slept in two days. She did not think she would be sleeping anytime soon.
She watched the first one standing up, her arms folded across her chest, her jaw set in the way that had become second nature over fifteen years of impossible decisions. Then she sat down slowly. By the third video she had stopped noticing that her face was wet.
He was alive. Despite all the odds, The idiot was alive.
She had not always been fond of Dr. Ryland Grace. That would be the generous revision of history, and Eva Stratt did not deal in generous revisions. The truth was simpler and more embarrassing: she had found him profoundly, exhaustingly annoying.
He had a way of turning every briefing into a seminar. He would answer a question –a simple operational question, a yes-or-no question, a question whose answer she already knew and simply needed confirmed– and then he would continue, pivoting into some tangential wonder he had apparently been saving up, gesturing at whatever surface was nearest as though she had expressed a passionate interest in the finer details of tardigrade metabolism. She had not.
And yet. She had found herself, at some point she could not precisely identify, knowing what tardigrades ate.
There was something relentless about his enthusiasm that wore down defences the way water wears down stone, not all at once, but persistently, over time, until one day you looked at the stone and found it had changed shape entirely.
She had caught herself, in the deep insomnia of the project's worst months, thinking of something he had said and almost smiling. She had caught herself, during the ethical review boards and the political negotiations and the increasingly hostile meetings with men who had the power to end everything, thinking: Grace would find this fascinating and then entirely boring.
The absurdity of it. The genuine, uncomplicated curiosity he would have brought to bear on some bureaucrat's attempt to classify astrophage propagation data. She had kept that thought to herself. She kept most things to herself.
Then came the day she gave the order.
She had known, in the clean logical space where she made decisions, that Dr. Ryland Grace was the best possible candidate, the only candidate left for the Hail Mary. She had known it the way she knew that four drones were better odds than one, that a three-person crew was an acceptable casualty ratio, that the survival of eight billion people was worth the sacrifice of those three. She had done the math many times. The math was always correct.
What she had not known,what she had refused, with professional precision, to account for– was how it would feel to watch the man who had explained radiotrophic fungi to her in the car park of a government building, on a Wednesday, in the rain, with the cheerful concentration of someone who had completely forgotten where they were going, be wheeled into sedation knowing he would not wake up until he was somewhere between here and the possible end of everything as she knew it.
She had not stayed to watch. She had gone back to her office and completed three reports and eaten a sandwich she did not taste, and then turned off the lights and cried. The math did not change. She told herself that was the point.
In the years between, the mathematical equation had visited her often. In a cell in Lyon. In the empty hours after her reinstatement, when the people who had imprisoned her looked at the drone data and needed her again and tried to make it seem as though there had been no gap, no cell, no years she was made the scapegoat of an apparently unsuccessful project. She had let them try. She had her own equation now, a private ledger of things done and undone, choices whose cost had not been clear until they were already spent.
She had thought about his apartment. She had not meant to, and she was not prone to that kind of thinking, but the thought had come anyway, more than once, in the worst of the waiting: the flat in Cleveland that would have sat untouched while the world scrambled to save itself. The books on the shelves, hundreds of them, she was told, annotated in the margins in a handwriting that was both chaotic but legible– the sign of a scientist whose mind worked too fast and the control of a teacher who knew he needed to be understandable.
The coffee mug in the staff room at the school, the one his students had given him with some earnest printed slogan, the kind of thing he would have used daily and without irony. The rumpled bed. The half-empty bottles in the bathroom. The ordinary debris of a life interrupted.
No one had cleared it out. She had quietly made sure of that. It was not a logical decision. She made it anyway.
The videos played through the night.
She watched him wake up alone and figure out where he was using only what was available to him, which turned out to be enough.
She watched him grieve the crew, briefly and practically, in the way of someone who understood there was work to do. She watched him talk to himself — to the camera, to the ship — with the slightly unhinged energy of a man who was keeping his own lights on by sheer force of will, and she recognised it, because she knew something about that.
But then.
Then there was Rocky.
She watched the first contact sequence three times, which was two more times than she watched anything. She watched Grace explain how he triangulated the tapping sounds. She watched him deduce an atmosphere, a biology, a mind.
She watched him construct a language from musical tones and sheer enthusiasm of not being alone, and she thought: of course. Of course it was him. Of course the man who could not stop explaining things, who had explained the symbiotic relationship between Warthogs and Mongesse (he had been blasting the lion king soundtrack in the lab that day) to a project director in the middle of a crisis briefing, who had the constitutionally inconvenient gift of finding everything interesting — of course it was him who found another mind in the dark and knew instinctively how to reach it.
She laughed once, in the empty operations room. It was not a happy laugh, exactly. It was the laugh of someone who has suspected for a long time that the universe has a sense of humour and has just found another data point to support it.
It is, she thought, genuinely very difficult not to like Ryland Grace. She had resisted it for years on the grounds that liking people was an operational liability, and she did not regret the resistance, but watching him and Rocky solve the astrophage problem with what appeared to be competitive levels of enthusiasm and a great deal of mutual bewilderment, she accepted the truth of it. He was like a puppy. An overgrown, scientifically literate puppy who had been sent to the edge of the solar system and had responded by making a friend.
If she had believed in anything larger than probability, she might have said that something had put him on that ship. That whatever governed the movement of things had looked at the calculus, her equation of the situation –the silence of space, the scope of the problem, the particular quality of despair that had settled over the project in its last months– and had decided to put Ryland Grace in the middle of it. Not because he was the most qualified. Not entirely. But because he was the kind of person who looks at a void and sees a puzzle. Who meets the incomprehensible and says, well, enough moping, let's figure it out.
She did not quite believe this. But she thought it at three in the morning, alone in the operations room, with four drones' worth of data telling her they were going to live, and she did not entirely dismiss it either.
She smuggled the videos out herself. She was not supposed to. She did not especially care.
She had spent fifteen years making decisions that could not be explained, that would not survive public scrutiny, that were correct and necessary and deeply, fundamentally unacceptable to anyone who had not been standing where she stood. She was finished making decisions that could not be explained. The people of the world deserved to know what had been done in their name, and more than that — they deserved to know who had done it.
The response was not what she had expected. She had expected outrage, or curiosity, or the particular kind of parasocial fixation the internet turned on anyone who became briefly legible to it.
Instead, the videos spread the way things spread when they touch something real: quietly at first, then everywhere. People watched a middle-aged science teacher wake up alone between the stars and choose to work. They watched him grieve and keep moving. They watched him build a friendship across the most improbable distance in recorded history, in a language he had invented himself, with a creature whose existence he could not have imagined a year before.
His former students found the videos. They made their own. There were dozens of them, hundreds eventually: adults in their thirties and forties sitting in front of cameras saying, he was my teacher, he was the reason I studied biology, he made me feel like the world was worth figuring out. A woman in São Paulo who had corresponded with him about his previous research for a decade before the project began.
Two retired teachers from the school in Ohio who had shared a staffroom with him for years and wanted people to know about the man’s unending enthusiasm for teaching people and making it fun,sometimes as a detriment to himself.
They started calling him Earth's Saving Grace. It was the kind of pun he would have appreciated and immediately made worse.
She made sure there would be statues. She had promised and Eva Stratt honoured her debts.
There was one in Cleveland outside the school, installed on a grey November morning with a crowd that was larger than anyone had organised for. There was one in Geneva. There was one, which she had not authorised but had not opposed, outside the building in Lyon where she had spent three years in a cell going over hee own thoughts over and over.
She stood in front of that one for a long time one evening after everyone else had gone home. She did not say anything. She thought he would probably have said something stupid, something self deprecating, probably something about the metallurgical properties of bronze.
The news came on a Thursday.
She was in her office, the reinstated one, the one that meant the people who had imprisoned her needed something from her again — when her assistant knocked and came in with the particular expression people wore when they were trying to modulate between professional and undone. She knew before the words came.
The Hail Mary was on course back home. The trajectory was consistent with a return. Someone — someone — had figured out a way.
It was 13 years before the ship entered the solar system. She watched the news in he apartment in warsaw, she had handed over most of her duties to the new Director of the project, she was old now, but she was still part of it all, and she would be there at the end.
She watched the feeds from cities with the sound off, the square in Warsaw and the waterfront in Cape Town and the plaza outside the school in Cleveland where the statue stood, countless cities worldwide. People were in the streets. Standing in the evening air, looking up, in the direction of something they could not see but knew was there and coming home.
She thought about what she had said to him, in a clinical room, before everything. She had listed the categories of absence like a ledger: no family, no partner, no dog. She had said it to reassure herself as much as him, she understood that now. She had needed him to be untethered. She had needed the equation to work out.
She looked at the feeds. She looked at the people in the streets of the world, some of them holding signs, some of them just standing, some were crying with the particular expression of people who had been quietly carrying something for years and had just been told they could put it down.
He was coming back to all of them. To the whole complicated, exhausting, improbable planet, which had learned his name and would, find a thousand ways to be overwhelming and wonderful and too much, exactly the correct amount for Dr. Ryland Grace.
She hoped it would be enough. She hoped he would step off whatever transport they sent and be met by noise and people and the particular beautiful chaos of a world that knew what it owed him. She hoped that wherever he went, for the rest of his life, there would be someone he could explain things to.
She hoped, most precisely, that he would never again have to count the empty frequencies.
That the loneliness she had heard underneath the cheerfulness in those videos, the loneliness of a man performing being okay into a camera because there was no one else there, would be a thing he used to feel, a thing of the past, a chapter that had closed.
She did not consider herself a sentimental person. She turned the sound on.
The crowds were singing.