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Rocky had been more or less by my side for about a week straight. He couldn’t, of course, really be by my side. Even after years of speculating and theorizing, neither of us had come up with a solution to the atmosphere problem. His little hamster ball solution was temporary at best, and not a quick in and out, which it unfortunately needed to be at the moment much to Rocky’s chagrin.
The guy had instead been camped outside my little biodome watching me waste away like some kind of self induced torment. No matter how often I begged him to just go home, to rest or even just talk to someone else, he refused to budge. At the moment he was slouched against the xenonite wall, quietly fuming. All my continuous nagging has done nothing but put him in a constant foul mood.
I can’t really blame him, I suppose. It’s not like I’d be any better for wear if the tables were turned. Rocky had spent the better part of a week when we first got the Hail Mary docked at the elevator, putting together some form of containment for me to be able to survive here on the surface. It had been somewhat funny to discover that my hunch was right - Eridians are generally very handy people - but Rocky is a whiz of an engineer. A generational talent as it were.
After the construction of the first part of the biodome was complete, and I had managed to get into it without dying, Rocky and I had hardly had a moment to see each other. He was constantly roped into meetings and discussions, an investigation had been launched into the untold catastrophe that was the Blip-A’s voyage to Tau Ceti, and I was stuck in here, growing sicker by the day despite Erid’s best scientists’ desperate attempts to help. By the time things had slowed down enough for the two of us to sit down and talk, I was a mess and Rocky just about lost his mind.
I guess if I’d been forced to watch twenty two of my friends wither and die in a ship on a mission to save the world and then been subsequently left alone for nearly fifty years I’d be a bit protective of the one friend I’d made too.
To be honest, I was a bit over protective of Rocky … and it had caused more than one misunderstanding.
Eridian society is very different from Earth’s. Where an investigation into a mass casualty event would be very intent on finding fault back home, the Eridians had no interest in blaming the sole survivor. That hadn’t been relayed to me of course, mostly because - without Rocky there to translate - it was hard to get my concerns across. So though I gathered that an investigation was under way and that Rocky was caught up in it as the explanation for his absence, I ended up missing key details. This resulted in me being somewhat paranoid. Rocky had spent most of our first day that we finally had one on one just reassuring me that he wasn’t in any trouble.
Unfortunately it was all downhill from there.
I had run out of food by the time we reached the 40Eridani system, despite my best efforts to preserve some as an example of necessary nutrition for Eridian scientists to analyze. I had managed to avoid starving by taking Rocky’s suggestion of eating Taumeaba, but it still wasn’t enough. The biodome had some light, but not sunlight, leaving me lacking in vitamin D. The Taumeaba had the basic carbon I require to keep from dying of starvation, but didn’t really possess the trace elements I need to actually, you know, survive.
All this leading up to this point right now.
I’m lying on a cot I dragged into the little meeting space Rocky had carved out for us at some point, riddled with malnutrition based maladies. And Rocky is sitting on the other side of the barrier, bereft and miserable, watching me suffer.
“I don’t understand,” he says for what has to be the billionth time, “I thought you healed from that already.”
He’s referring to my left arm. The whole left side of my body really. It is covered in Erid’s best approximation of sterile gauze and - get this! - silver nitrate. “It’s scurvy,” I explain, “It attacks the connective tissues. The burns were bound to reopen at some point.”
Rocky makes a soft noise but doesn’t speak for a moment. I’ve explained Scurvy to him a few times now, along with Ricketts, Anemia, Beriberi and Pallegra. All a manifestation of the sacrifice I chose to make just over four years ago now. At least I am getting just nearly enough protein and carbs to keep from truly wasting. Not that it makes much of a difference at this point.
“Are you in pain?” He asks, another overused question.
“Nah,” I lie, as I always have. There’s no point in telling him the truth, there’s nothing he can do. And I can be brave for this part. It’s barely even a lie anymore. “I can’t feel much of anything to be honest.”
Rocky still doesn’t believe me. I see him rubbing absently at one of his arms. Though he no longer limps, and hasn’t for years, he still bears the ugly scars of his misadventures after the Taumeaba infestation on the Blib-A. I’m sure he’s thinking about those burns reopening now, all these years later.
I try to lighten the mood, “Look on the bright side, at least I managed to get through almost 30 years on earth with no major surgeries. Things could be a lot worse, I consider myself lucky honestly.”
“No you don’t,” Rocky huffed. “You never should have gone into the damn airlock.”
“Oh like you could have stopped me.”
“Maybe I should have.”
“You were unconscious!” I snap, “Besides, without you I never would have survived, and then neither of us would be here to rehash this stupid speculative game of ‘what-if’!”
We lapse into silence for a moment.
“I’m sorry,” Rocky finally says. He’s been saying that a lot lately.
“Don’t blame yourself,” I say, my voice weak and raspy in my ears as it echoes off the xenonite wall between us.
“I don’t blame myself,” Rocky says, “at least not just myself.”
His voice is low in a way that I haven’t heard before. During all that time on Hail Mary with nothing to do but talk and bicker and try to piece our own shattered psyches back together, I don’t think I’d ever heard him sound genuinely angry in this way. Shocked? Hurt? Confused? Absolutely, but this was different. Different even from the hopeless frustration we both experienced after Adrian when the taumeba refused to stay alive in the presence of nitrogen.
Rocky is turned just slightly away from me, his carapace angled so that I’m primarily viewing something of a side profile. He is shifting from arm to arm, agitated but quiet.
“What do you mean?” I prompt, though I fear I may know the answer. “Who are you so angry at, there’s no one to blame for this.”
“Of course there is!” He finally erupts, “There is fault to be taken here, and though I’ll admit I find myself pretty fucking pissed off at the entirety of the human race for this situation, I primarily blame that woman!”
I blink, trying to think of who exactly he’s referring to. Then it hits me all at once. “Stratt?”
“No, the engineer,” Rocky scoffs - if he had eyes, he’d be rolling them, “Of course her, who else?”
Rocky doesn’t have a name for Stratt. It’s a family name, and doesn’t really have a single set meaning anymore. Or, if it did, Stratt never told me. I had tried providing the option of Eva - which means star - but Rocky hadn’t liked that. He seemed too fond of stars to use them as a moniker for the woman that doomed me to die in space against my will. Instead - like Ilyukhina and Yao - he just uses associated nouns. Ilyukhina is “engineer”, Yao is “commander”, and so on and so forth down the list of names I’d provided over our time together. Stratt, however, did develop an associated word over time, and I am beginning to think it’s probably not the kindest of options.
“Why are you mad at her?” I ask, “She was trying to save the world. It’s not her fault this happened -”
“Oh stop it,” Rocky admonishes me, “I know you hate her too. There’s no use trying to be modest about it now. I know you.”
I frown. “I’ve come to terms with it,” I finally say with a shrug, “She was utilitarian. She was just trying to make the best choices in the world’s shittiest situation.”
Rocky makes an angry trilling sound and turns to face me, “At no point did any Eridian consider forcing anyone onto that mission. Everyone, even me, was a volunteer. It would have been inconceivable to send anyone on a one way suicide mission. I didn’t even have a word for suicide before meeting you. That’s how outlandish the whole concept was!
That alone would have been enough, but to then proceed to force you to go. To drag someone, begging for their life, onto a ship with no way back. To drug and sedate you, to steal your memories so that you would do what she wanted. It’s unforgivable.”
I sigh. We had had this debate before. But before I could launch into another lecture about ethics and morals, he cut me off.
“I am not done. I could have gotten past that. I could have accepted your explanation and just believed it was … some cultural oddity. I can understand the desperation of it all, from what you told me about how dire the situation was, but that isn’t even the biggest issue I have.” He’s so agitated, his voice carries a full octave higher than normal and he has to wrestle it lower to be able to convey the depth of his meaning. “Had she just sent you out, perhaps even if she had apologized, maybe I could have moved on. But instead she chose to berate you! To call you a coward! The last thing she chose to say to the man she was condemning to death was to liken him to a child. The last bit of humanity you experienced was betrayal and insult. And I see no one better to carry the blame for all of -” he waved two of his arms about to generally encompass the entirety of the situation - “this, than that -”
Suddenly it occurred to me what Rocky had been calling Stratt. “Oh my god! Have you been just referring to her as ‘bitch’?!”
I think the shock in my voice catches him off guard because he honestly skitters back a step or two at my outburst. The hysterical laughter that follows isn't helping, I’m sure.
It takes a minute to compose myself, especially since every time I get close, I look up and see Rocky’s pouty little stance and set myself off all over again.
“It isn’t funny!” He complains as I finally wear myself out too much to continue.
“It kind of is,” I wheeze. “Why didn’t you tell me you felt this way?”
Rocky shrugs, “At first I thought it was obvious, but after a while I just began to worry you would be offended.”
I chuckle again. I had kind of gotten the vibe that Rocky disliked most of the rest of the taskforce, and especially Stratt, but I’d never considered he was harboring this level of animosity. He’s such an easy going guy most of the time, it never occurred to me. The whole situation was made even funnier by the fact that I had never put together the “bitch” and “Stratt” connection.
The word isn’t exactly a one for one translation, but during our trip home, we’d worked out near approximations for cursing in our separate languages. What he was calling her was more like “very ugly vermin”, a word used to describe a creature on Erid that was considered a pest and rather disgusting. Four years alone with the guy had given me a pretty good insight, and it was no shock to me to realize that Rocky cusses like a sailor. I still carry around the social weight of watching my language - came from years of teaching - so sometimes curse words go over my head. But Rocky has spent centuries working primarily with machines and materials. Inanimate objects don’t generally care if you have a potty mouth.
“You know,” I croak after a minute, “I was always a bit worried you were disappointed in me.”
“What? Why would I be disappointed?”
I shrug, “I guess I was just so impressed with you - the whole ‘willing to die for you species’ thing - that I convinced myself you would hate me when you found out I was actually a coward.”
Rocky stomps one limb against the ground, “That. That is exactly what I’m talking about. You’re not a coward. That’s just what she told you, and you believed her for some stupid-ass reason.”
“It’s not stupid, it’s true,” I argue, “She was just telling me the truth. There was no way I would have gotten on that ship if she hadn’t dragged me onto it. I was too afraid to see the writing on the wall.”
Rocky throws up a hand in exasperation, “Did you not decide to work on finding a solution? Did you not ensure your comrades had some semblance of a proper burial? For fuck’s sake, you ran around on the hull of your ship in nearly double your natural gravity twice! How is any of that cowardly?!”
I sigh and shake my head. “No, that was just obligation. I had to do that. I wouldn’t have survived otherwise.”
“You weren’t supposed to survive AT ALL! But fine, let’s just gloss over the fact that you didn’t just give up and use that gun, or your engineer’s drugs. You dragged me back to the airlock and practically walked into hell to save me!” Rocky is pacing now, skittering back and forth in the small space. Sometimes I lose track of him in the shadows at the back of the room he’s in.
“I told you,” I try to convince him, “I wouldn’t have -”
“Yes you would have!” He cries, “You would have survived just fine on your own. I’d already done what I could. Everything else from that point on, every success, it was all on you.”
“I nearly destroyed the one sample we managed to get!”
“Only because you burned yourself to the point of needing narcotics!”
“Well, what do you want from me?!” I snap, my voice cracking, “I wasn’t just going to let you die! I wasn’t going to just let one more person die when I could have done something about it! I couldn’t -” I have to pause, I’m crying just thinking about it, “- I couldn’t do that again.”
Rocky’s voice is softer when he speaks again, “And coming to find me after the Taumeaba outbreak? You didn’t have to do that. No one expected that of you. I certainly didn’t.”
“Oh gee,” I sniffle, “Thanks for the vote of confidence. I already told you why.”
“Because you couldn’t live with losing someone else,” Rocky supplied, “Which is the exact same reason I gave you for why I went into that control room.”
I shake my head, “It’s not the same. You nearly died.”
“Oh I’m sorry, is this - what you’re doing now - not dying?” He snarks in response, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have been less worried.”
I have to laugh. It’s the only way I won’t break down in tears. We have been avoiding the “D” word for a while, like everyone knew it would push me over the edge if they said it. Or maybe they were just following my lead. I hadn’t said it out loud just yet.
“I saved you because it was the right thing to do, and it was my fault the Taumeaba evolved to get through xenonite,” I said.
Rocky made a sharp noise I’d come to recognize as unbridled annoyance - a very familiar sound at this point in our friendship. Before he could express himself better, I pushed on.
“It’s the same reason I saved Earth. It was the right thing to do, there was never any other choice,” I sighed, “Stratt was right. In the end, I was too weak to go against her.”
There was a pause, then Rocky stepped closer, his voice quiet as he spoke. “That’s not what she said.”
“What? Yes it was. She said I was too much of a coward to go, and too weak-willed to sabotage it all if she made me.”
“No,” Rocky insisted, “She said you were too good. You’re too good of a man to damn all of humanity to extinction. She was counting on it.”
“You’re wrong,” I mumble.
“I think I would remember the only thing I’ve ever agreed with her on,” he shot back.
I shake my head. “I’m not a good person.”
“Why is it so hard for you to believe that you are?” Rocky asks, “After everything you’ve done, how could you possibly believe anything else?”
Because a good person would have gotten on that ship the first time they asked. A good person wouldn’t have needed to be sedated to get on it. I’m not a good person. I’m just the last resort.
I must have said that last part out loud because I hear a soft chitter as Rocky leans in closer, his carapace thudding softly against the wall. “You are good, Grace. Or we wouldn’t be here. A lesser man would have never helped me.”
“Oh that’s the other thing,” I scoff, “I nearly doomed the whole human race because I was too excited about aliens existing.”
This time he laughs. “Didn’t I make first contact?”
“You were stranded in space with no way home!” I counter, “That wasn’t stupidity, you were desperate!”
Rocky shrugs again, “I could have gone back …”
That was new. “So,” I asked after a moment, “why didn’t you?”
“I was too afraid to face everyone. I didn’t think I could do it, tell my crew’s families that they were all dead.”
“But that wasn’t your fault,” I said, “No one even knew about radiation.”
“Would you have gone back? If you couldn’t figure anything out and had the fuel, would you have gone home and told your engineer’s son that his mother died for no good reason?”
I hesitate, he picked Ilyukhina’s kid to poke at my weak spot. “We’ve already established that I’m a coward.”
“So then I’m a coward?”
“No!” I gasp, “Of course not!”
He thrums at a slightly more level chord now, proud of himself it seems. “Then it’s settled. One poor choice made in fear doesn’t automatically make you a coward.”
“But it wasn’t just - how did you - ugh!” I struggle into a more upright position so I can wag a disapproving finger at him, “You tricked me! Was that even the real reason you stayed?”
“It was part of it,” he admits, “that and the concern that I might be bringing home some previously unheard of, deadly, space pathogen. But mostly it was the shame.”
I seethe in my cot. “It’s still different. There was nothing you could have done -”
“I was the engineer,” he cut me off, he voice low and deep with emotion, “It was my job to make sure the ship functioned properly. To fix things that went wrong and bring everyone back. I failed.”
“But you didn’t have all of the information. You can’t think of it as failure when you weren’t even set up for success.”
“And you can’t consider it cowardice when you weren’t even given a choice,” he stomps a foot for emphasis, “Not a real one anyway. They were never going to let you go back to teaching. You threw your old life away the moment you stepped into the project. She would have taken you down with her in one way or another. Even you have to see that.”
I did see that. I had been considering it ever since the launch when I realized everyone thought I was sleeping with Stratt for a leg up. If I had stayed, I would have been viewed just as culpable in her madness as she was. When the time came for her to ultimately pay her dues to the society she bulldozed in her quest to be its savior, I would have had a cushy cell right between hers and Leclerc’s. Hell, probably all of us would have been behind bars. Dimitri, Lokken, Ruddell, anyone in the taskforce that didn’t have enough money or power to absolve themselves of association with it.
But I would have been alive. I would have had a chance to fight the charges. And I knew I would have preferred that to the guarantee of death that was the Hail Mary.
But I’m tired, and I’m sick and I just can’t keep going around and around with Rocky on this subject again. So I sigh and lay back down, closing my eyes to feign sleep.
Rocky hums discontentedly behind the xenonite. “You’re not a coward, Grace. Even if you decide this particular fight isn’t worth fighting anymore.”
I suspect he’s not talking about our argument.
I’ve been declining for weeks. Even with the massive leaps in research and lab-grown (see: non-toxic) food and dietary supplements Eridian’s scientists have been working on, I’m just not getting better. There’s a not unwarranted concern that I may never. That my body is too far gone, too damaged by the toll I’ve put on it to recover. There was a moment when a few Eridians had offered me another course of action: death.
Euthanasia was often seen as a kindness back on Earth, at least when it came to animals - creatures unable to conceptualize the meaning of their suffering, or comprehend a future without it. But I had refused. Just as I do now.
“If I just give up then none of this was worth it. I’ll never know if my life had any meaning,” I explain, “I’ve worked too hard to just lay down and die now.”
Rocky doesn’t argue - he for one had been furious to learn that the option had even been presented as a reasonable path forward. Instead he just says, “You’re wrong. Your life has meaning because you exist. You are worthy of it just by being you. You should have never needed to prove that.”
“You say that like I’ve ever proved anything,” I say, “I couldn’t even prove the one theory I staked my entire career on.”
Rocky sighs, “Please just go to sleep.”
I do, for a few moments, before something occurs to me. Something I feel like Rocky needs to know, right now this very instant.
“Rocky?” I ask, like he wasn’t right there. Like he hasn’t been right there every day this week.
“What?”
“I can’t hate Stratt,” I tell him, “I can’t even hate her for what she did to me specifically. She’s the reason I met you.”
“Go to sleep, Grace,” He says, “I’ll watch.”
***
It took time and a lot of experimentation, but eventually we got the food problem figured out. The meburgers were horrifying to most everyone, including Rocky, but I could care less at this point. It wasn’t like it was hurting anyone, and I’d never had any interest in being a vegan - I liked meat too much. And near starvation really took away any lingering transgressiveness of eating human flesh.
Within a few weeks my body was able to hold itself together again. After a few months I was walking and even running when the urge struck me (which wasn’t very often - this level of gravity makes just standing up straight a marathon in and of itself, there’s really no need to add anymore ardor here). And so now - just a shy of a year since I touched ground on Erid - I was trailing after a grossly overexcited Rocky as he practically skipped ahead to show me something.
“Do I really have to go to this?” I ask. All I have been able to gather so far is that it’s some kind of ceremony, possibly with a gift of some sort. Rocky has been surprisingly tight-lipped about the whole thing.
“Yes,” he said, “Unless you want me to have to explain that the alien I brought home with the universe’s grossest problem is also disrespectful and ungrateful.”
He doesn’t actually mean that, I know. The Eridian’s are aware of just how grateful I am, though I don’t think I’ll stop saying thank you until the day I die - hopefully now a long, long time in the future. But still …
“I’m really not good at these kinds of things,” I try again, “I nearly puked at the last award speech I had to give and that was back in college.”
“Well good for us then that there’s no speech required,” Rocky laughed, “Hurry up! I don’t want to be late!”
He led me to the very edge of my biodome, a part that, presumably, looked out into a general part of the city, not that I could see it. Erid’s surface was utterly devoid of light. But the light from my dome shines out just enough here to reach beyond the xenonite edge and illuminate a small statue. A small crowd is here too, and the soft hum of Eridian voices overlaps in the air around us. Everyone stops as I come closer and Rocky hops down to flank the other side of the statue.
In front of me an Eridian I have met a time or two before, but whose name escapes me at the moment, stands tall and says clearly and slowly (likely for my benefit, though I didn’t really need it anymore), “Dr. Grace, we would like to present you with this small token of our gratitude. Thanks to you and your sacrifice, we have seen our star’s radiance return to full luminosity. Our planet is saved, and we will be forever grateful. Thank you.”
He steps aside so I can get a clearer view. The action strikes me as incredibly thoughtful - Eridians didn’t need people to step out of their way so they can look at something better. Someone, probably Rocky, had to have explained sight to him.
It isn’t like he signed it or anything, but I have come to notice that all Eridians have personal touches for their preferred craft, and I can see Rocky’s signature in this piece.
It‘s lovely. Really it is. Simple and elegant.
Erected before me is a near perfect replica of the Hail Mary’s crest: Three circles, the smaller two of which are connected by an arc to represent the Petrova Line. At the bottom of the statue reads an inscribed plaque in Eridian “To our saviors from the stars” and below that was written every single name of the project Hail Mary. Yao, Ilyukhina, DuBois and Shapiro, even Dimitri and Carl got a line. And just above mine, right at the top was written in perfect human English “Eva Stratt”.
“What?” I ask.
“Well,” Rocky explains, likely guessing at my surprise, “In all of that information you gave us, we found the complete list of every human involved in the project, including her. We figured if what you said was true and she isn’t being honored on her own homeworld, then she should at least be honored here.”
I chuckle, “And how did you manage that? I thought you hated her.”
Rocky shrugs, “I thought about what you said. She is still not my favorite human, and I can’t promise I would have anything kind to say to her if we ever had the displeasure of meeting, but you’re right. Without her, I never would have met you. And without you, none of this would have been possible. I suppose I owe her at least that much gratitude.”
I smile. “Thank you, Rocky. Seriously, thank you. This is amazing.”
Rocky chittered a happy sound in response, before changing the subject - he never was one to take a compliment well. “So?” He asks, “Have you considered the offer?”
I nod, “I’m not quite fully recovered, so just hold off on celebrating, but yeah. I’d love to get back into the classroom again.”