Work Text:
I hadn’t learned about the Hail Mary’s triumph until much, much later than the rest of humanity.
Certainly, I’d caught onto something happening to Sol. It would be impossible not to notice when my solar charged batteries started giving progressively higher power output. At first, I had thought it was the Martian atmosphere clearing up after months long dust storm – too weak for NASA to take notice, yet significant in the long run. Specifically, significant for yours truly – an astronaut stranded on Mars, whose survival depended on the lack of dust blocking already dimmed sunlight.
So, yeah, it had been my first thought. The atmosphere clearing up, thus my solar cells receiving more light. But the levels had kept climbing up – and up – until there was no denying the fact that Sol was regaining its luminance.
I had had no way of confirming it with Earth. No way of learning what exactly happened – had it been a brilliant new technology? Had Astrophage simply had enough and left? The Hail Mary passed through my musings, then, but quickly and quietly, much like a passing sorrow.
The timing, of course, had been right. And, being one of those poor souls inspired to go into science – and, eventually, into space – by the crew’s sacrifice and the sheer desperate ingenuity of the people heading the Project, I learned by heart the gritty details, the timing, the expectations.
One of the latter: the Hail Mary had been expected to disappear quietly into the night, never to be seen nor heard from again. From those still living, Eva Stratt remained the only voice telling us to keep waiting.
I’d met her once, before Ares III, I mean. She struck me as someone who would move mountains and change the very orbits within our solar system to reach her goal. That might have been true in twenties as well. I can easily imagine her staring down the world to make the Project Hail Mary come together; not that I need to imagine, as history documented her and her work well. There are hundreds upon hundreds of video records and testimonies detailing her genius; she stares from displays and printed pictures with her eyes full of determination and arctic cold.
And oftentimes flanking her, Dr. Ryland Grace echoes her stare with his own. Light-eyed and tight-lipped, I couldn’t say if there is one picture of him as Stratt’s lead scientist where he isn’t looking like death warmed over; and still, where she demanded obedience, he commanded hearts.
A silly thing to say, of course. But it was true – something in Dr. Grace’s pale, overworked and jet-lagged appearance revealed the actual depth of the effort he had put in, the faith he had had that everything would work out, and, as some had been wont to say, his faith in us. That tired little half-smile; that attentive, almost warm air about him.
He had been for a long time regarded as the humane half of the pair, the heart to Stratt’s ruthless mind.
It’s hardly a wonder that their relationship used to fascinate and confuse the world. One of my own relationships fell apart because Jess had been more interested in them instead of in us. Not something a male with a healthy ego could easily let go.
But I don’t begrudge Dr. Grace that. I liked what I had thought I knew, the image our history and Stratt’s lies conjured in my mind; besides, he had been so far away and destined to die without ever learning about the strife between teenage Jess Bell and Mark Watney. Lucky him.
So, yes, of course, I knew about the Hail Mary and her mission. Her crew’s portraits hang in every classroom and decorate every space agency’s administrative center. Eva Stratt remains the most controversial figure of modern time; and Dr. Grace, her ever loyal sycophant and the man who put Stratt’s ideas into hard steel and science, would always be mentioned when she is.
But they had been, at the time I was killing my back on Mars by way of old-fashioned organic farming, only just having conceived the tour to Pathfinder’s last resting place, an idea. They had changed the world once already; all that remained was consequences and myth. No one had been expecting to actually witness them success.
For me, there had been twice the result. Yes, the sun growing brighter had been contributing to my survival. Of course. No question about it; in that regard, I was one with humanity, looking up at the skies and seeing a miracle. What really changed the game was the promise Dr. Grace made – the promise to come back. He sent the Beetles ahead, and he promised to follow them at a more reasonable pace – he had been going to survive where survival had been a thought foregone at the very beginning.
Teddy, Venkat Kapoor said then, even though I wouldn’t know about that conversation for a little while longer, I know about another mission that is supposed to have been over and done away with. In this age of impossible, would you pretty please give me some satellite time?
Poor Teddy. At least he had agreed (at last). I cannot imagine the fallout had he refused and Venk’s had been proven right when it was too late to make difference.
Back then, I had been less interested in Teddy Sanders’ possible ill fate and much more – in my own. But I had indeed known something was changing. I just hadn’t expected that it was everything – or, that it would happen again, with me living on Earth once more, able more than to simply witness the story change, but to take active part in its progress.
No; Mark the Martian, the poor hard-working farmer who had been dealing in disasters, solar energy, and endless fucking potatoes, had been too busy colonizing Mars to waste his time on imagining things like meeting Dr. Ryland Grace, making a fool and, let’s be honest, an asshole out of himself, and watching Eridians step claw on Earth for the first time in history.
About that last one? Well, since you ask…
*
I had been into the beginning of my autumn years when the Hail Mary reopened communication with Earth, if only by technicality. Mars fucked me over good; it is thanks to Dr. Grace’s trove of innovative knowledge that I am not looking forward to untimely and scientifically priceless death under the greedy eyes of NASA medics. I came close; but in the end, I, as Dr. Grace would have said, got better. Who knows, I might just accept that offer from Artemis Gardens. We’ll see; it is not relevant right now.
Where were you at the time? Me, I had been walking up to Daisy’s counter, a well practiced smile on, new prescription glasses pinching the bridge of my nose; whispers and stares following. Once she’d noticed me, Daisy abandoned her customer to greet me with Hiya, Mr. Martian! Black and soulless today, or refreshingly exotic? The customer recognized me and didn’t fuss; and Daisy’s eager smile was a welcome ray of sunlight after the stormy night I’d had. I miss her; she never once raised a brow at some of my, admittedly questionable, choices. I wonder how her doctorate had gone.
I was going to ask her to choose for me, not really in the mood. Some days, making an effort doesn’t seem worth the pain. Before I could open my mouth, the speakers across the lands blared to life – the speakers all across the planet, as we soon learned.
Attention, this is Commander Tule of the International Space Station speaking. We have confirmed sighting of the Hail Mary and expect her to enter Earth orbit in forty eight hours from now. Dr. Ryland Grace sends his greetings. I repeat, the Hail Mary is coming home.
In the days the Hail Mary had been constructed, there in the docks of the ISS, this kind of message was impossible. The commander of the station had neither the ability, nor the authority to broadcast. When the ship had been declared ready for voyage, just days before it had actually started, it was Dr. Grace who gave the ISS this power.
It was the Commander to announce the Hail Mary departure, not Eva Stratt, not some President or Director or a robot voice. Seems fitting that it was the Commander to announce her return.
But in the moment, no one had been musing if it was fitting or not. We just stared. Then, laughter, crying, swearing (lots of swearing) and prayers. Daisy pulled herself half over the countertop, eyes wet and teeth on full display to distract from her trembling lip, grabbed me by the shoulder and said, I quote, Congrats, Mr. Martian. You are old news now! She was not entirely right, but she got the gist of it – once more, the Hail Mary became the focus of attention for an entire solar system, and the name Dr. Ryland Grace has become fucking sacred.
No sense in listing the reasons why. Everyone knows why. But the part people rarely mentioned then, he was running late. I suppose that’s why GSA waited so long to confirm the ship’s arrival publicly, risking that a rival or some homegrown astronomer would beat them to it. Even with Dr. Grace warning us that he would come ‘some time after the Beetles make it’… He had been running late, and believe the expert in the room – when it comes to space, late used to mean never.
If you are truly interested, you can research it later – the topic is not hidden by any means. Once his message had been received together with the Taumoeba package, immediately the world started calculating. To make it short, Dr. Grace had been unofficially and very quietly declared dead three months prior to his arrival at Murphy’s Gravity Research Station. The Hail Mary herself, she could have eventually turn up, but Dr. Grace… I am horribly familiar with the kind of calculation they’d been running. I still have stashes of non-perishable food everywhere. I can’t blame them for thinking the worst, and, to be perfectly frank, I don’t think Dr. Grace did. He never struck me as a man to shift blame and search for faults. For all that he would be justified to.
So, back on track, the ISS and GSA and every other acronym in power there was, had waited until they could actually speak with Dr. Grace to tell us he made it back alive.
And oh, what a day it was…
*
For the first time in years, I turned invisible. Not unrecognisable or masked or at all anonymous – I simply wasn’t Dr. Ryland Grace, and thus I was utterly of no interest. Everyone knew where he was: out there, a new star in our system homing in on her dock. Everyone looked skyward.
I would have too, only my favorite employer pulled me into the thick of preparations with nary a thought about my preference. I guess, someone somewhere in the evil lair of psycho department looked up my profile and figured that since I had been at my new teaching job for the fourth semester in a row and still hadn’t had a screaming breakdown at the idea of sending people to explore the lifeless and miserable void we call space, that I would manage greeting a man coming back from that deadly trap – that, maybe, my own experience would come in handy when it’s time to look at Dr. Grace as an actual human being and not, you know, a case.
Jerks, all of them.
I don’t know why I agreed. Mark, I should have asked myself, just what do you think you are doing? Putting in one room the only two men who had been lost to space and came back against all odds, expectations, and basic decency of dying when you’re supposed to; how do you figure this is going to work?
But everyone had been so panicked, and so useless in their panic, that I decided, maybe, at least my skill of problem-solving would be needed there. Step after another step; focus and find a way home. You know? I thought, arrogant since I felt pretty much exclusive, that Dr. Grace would, truly and actively, appreciate my being available to him, whether to cry and rage and speak to, or to walk him through reintegration, or, dunno. The process of restoring one’s persona in the eyes of law when one has been declared dead was, in my case, managed by NASA lawyers, but I still had been present, and I’d thought if Dr. Grace would have any questions about it, I’d be the one with answers. I would be the one able to understand.
And that’s where I had been right, while simultaneously having been so very wrong.
*
You see, the problem of Dr. Ryland Grace was that no one, at the moment of his return, had known the man. Humanity idolized him. His peers, those still alive, hated to love him and loved to hate him – the leftover from his academia days, I’ve been told. Younger generation treated him as an old story. All of us learned to respect him, to mourn him, to bless him; but we all were missing some key points, without which anticipating Dr. Grace has become impossible.
I first met him a few days after his shuttle landed. The historic flight of the Io-II; she got more people watching and listening than my MAV-convertible back in the days. You must have seen the footage even if you hadn’t watched live: the shuttle landing, the mob of emergency service vehicles revving up to her, a very pale man squinting at an even paler sun before he’d ever looked at his welcoming committee. With the benefit of hindsight, I can safely state that Dr. Grace had been smiling before he took in that group, and that once he did, the smile dropped.
I have been honored to see it light his face one other time, and it wasn’t when he spoke with me. No. It was addressed to the Eridians he’s left with.
But back then, we didn’t know it. We watched him step foot on the tarmac, shake gloved hands, allow medics to take him away, and then we waited for a few excruciating days for their verdict. Before the week ended, I was invited to visit him where he had languished in quarantine, bored and poked and prodded, miraculously still alive.
He stared at me intensely. Not making eye contact, no; he simply studied me, as if a human male was a novelty, a curious creature for a scientist to meet. It has become a familiar look for me; I have been studied since applying for Ares III and I will be for the rest of my days. I guess that’s why I hadn’t clocked that gaze right away – I have grown so used to feel it strip me of my humanity; turning me into a specimen.
That’s what he had, in the beginning, regarded me as: a study subject in his species curriculum.
It isn’t the worst I’ve ever been made into.
*
He is refusing to cooperate yet, Dr. Shields told me in confidence. Note that ‘yet’. It is characteristic of NASA, this expectation that you would cooperate; that you would fall in line, whether you know what’s best for you or not; and that you would be happy you did.
Dr. Ryland Grace was the immovable object, however, and short of siccing Eva Stratt on him, NASA had been laughably helpless. Thankfully, before bringing her in, they called in Mark Watney, PhD, your local Martian colonizer, astronaut, etc., etc.
They called me, however, simply ‘Mark Watney, astronaut’. My own myth had by then become so all-encompassing that they forgot there would be people unaware of it.
Who are you? Dr. Grace asked after a moment too long of silence.
It surprised me then, how his voice hadn’t changed. It was still the soft, unsure cadence captured on many records; despite having spent over a decade in space, both in a coma state and working his ass off, he hadn’t aged in a noticeable way. He’d looked tired and sickly, starved (though not as badly as I had been at the end of my Martian stay), somehow diminished, which I attributed to life at one point five Gs. But he didn’t look old or, dunno, frail. I’d met Eva Stratt; Dr. Lokken had walked my crew through the Hermes design; and, of course, having spent time with the Peace Corps on African continent, I knew Dr. Leclerc. He had bargained our access to the territories most affected by Astrophage farming in Sahara and the subsequent war, still feeling that he needed to atone for his so-called crimes. If I sound too sarcastic, credit it to all those officers confronting me over the matter of Martian sovereignty. There are people who genuinely believe I should have willingly starved to death rather than polluted Mars with my trash. So, yeah.
Dr. Leclerc had been a fine acquaintance.
All that to say, Dr. Grace’s colleagues each remain, or remained, a force unto itself. And each of them, when I knew them, had carried this air of brittle, fragile hope that is more poison than it is a vital supplement. Everything those people had done, every act they had carried out in a bid to win time, to slow down freezing death, it turned their dreams into nightmares. Was it worth it? I don’t know if there is an answer to that question – only that it wore them down and made them look dead inside.
Dr. Grace, I had guessed, was the only one to answer firmly and heartfeltly Yes. Yes, it was worth it. The desperate race against time; the silent war he had helped to lead and to win; the sacrifices made; everything was worth it, his calm eyes told me. Sol beating down on Earth with half-forgotten heat; Erid, saved from silent death in the void where sound doesn’t travel; himself, coming back to witness his life work success and suffice; everything.
Only later had I understood that Dr. Grace simply never was asked that question.
*
So, Who are you.
I admit I fumbled for a moment. My surprise at such a simple question was pleasant but staggering. In my shock, I answered with Hi, I’m Mark – I’m a botanist.
When people learned that I would be assigned to assist in Dr. Grace’s recovery process – because it went without a doubt he’d need to recover, it was, frankly, a logical assumption I hadn’t disputed – they had been quick to pelt me with their ideas. What should I say first. What should I never say, under any circumstances. What should I mention briefly, what should I explain in detail, what laws suggest to celebrate, what music introduce, what names smear with the dirtiest dirt. What words of thanks to relay.
In his shadow, I became the guy next door, just one with the useful connections. The novelty of that transformation had worn off quick, to my embarrassment. I’d thought I’d do anything to get rid of attention; well, Mark, thy name is hypocrisy, I’d discovered.
Huh, Dr. Grace said after a pause. Okay, so are you here about Adrian? His tone suggested I better.
I wanted to confirm so badly. Just, so fucking badly. Adrian. It was a strange name for a single celled life-inhabited planet orbiting a star that wasn’t Sol. Why did he dub it Adrian? There are so many aquatic themed names that would go hand in hand with Tau Ceti. My old fascination with Aquaman had reared its obsessed head and I nearly blurted out everything I’d thought about his choice. To catch myself in time had been painful.
He rolled his eyes. Rocky’s mate’s name that I can pronounce is Adrian, and he named the planet after her. Clearly, he’d been asked already, and enough times to grow irked.
Why the fuck, I sighed, all the best people are enamored with the last century’s pop culture?
He just stared at me, expecting me to move on. The resemblance to Anny Montrose had been uncanny, and I blabbed the whole shindig before I knew I was talking at all. All the tea, about my work with Leclerc, NASA, Ares III; about my experience with isolation, starvation, seemingly unavoidable dying – all in the name of a stupid idea. How Irene decided I was the best candidate to throw at him. Everything. Things I certainly should have thought through twice before saying. But, well, my brain-to-mouth filter had been quirky before I went to Mars; and the habit of narrating your every thought for a year and a half does irreparable things to that one cognitive function of stopping words in time.
He let me speak until I ran out of grit. Then, he sighed and looked at me with an apology clear in his eyes. I don’t think this is going to work. Unlike me, Dr. Watney, you took the risk willingly.
*
Yeah. What do you say to something like that?
Like the dumb shithead that I am, I gaped at him. What the fuck, man? I was gearing up for a rant, going to tear this weirdo a new one for suggesting that I went through isolation, starvation, breaking my bones, and let’s not forget about potatoes... – that I chose any of it. Thankfully, I was dragged out of his room before I could say another word. Irene had been listening, and she, being the actual brain in our group of space maniacs, understood at once what he had so casually admitted.
It wasn’t about me volunteering for Ares III. It was about him not volunteering for the Hail Mary.
*
I had been kicked out of that ‘help Dr. Grace with the modern society’ project very quickly. It had been, Irene said, the same apology ringing in her voice, for the best for both of us. She was so incredibly thankful for what I had already done; and yet, the doors hiding Dr. Grace from sight had been barred again.
Patient-doctor confidentiality back in place, there had been no more glimpses into Dr. Grace’s state. All the grateful words and well-wishes people asked me to give him had plagued me day and night. He deserved to know how appreciated he was. He deserved to know he was wanted. Failing to fulfill that task left me morose and stuck in my head on most days; my psychotherapist, whom Irene hadn’t hesitated to fill in on my own confessions made to Dr. Grace, had had a field day every other day.
Both of them, in the end, had come to a consensus I still disagree with: they believe that I not so much wanted to help Dr. Grace as I wanted him to help me.
I like to think I am not that kind of a person.
*
Of course, there is something to consider; perhaps, the same something that led them to their condemning resolution. I did anticipate a lot of lively discussions with myself and Dr. Grace riling each other up to find out who comes with the most offensive and insensitive thing to say about space. I did have the realisation that there, right there, finally was someone who knew.
I had all the help NASA and the world could have provided. I had resources at my disposal, people at my beck and call, I had, astonishingly, my crew. Scattered around the globe, they never left me to sundry. It is hard sometimes to look at each other, but more and more rarely so.
Mostly, we throw ourselves at each other with whoops of joy at yet another death-defying reunion. They are dorks, and they sang Fuck you, Mars at my last birthday party, and they are incredible, and I…
I understand Dr. Grace.
*
If my crew ever decides to return to space, I’ll go with them. I’ll tour Artemis, I’ll take a commercial shuttle to the ArkLight Station at Venus, I’ll go back to Mars.
Many refuse to understand, to even consider his side, but I never doubted Dr. Grace sincerity and happiness when he took Eridians up on their offer.
The day he boarded the ship, the project revisioned and radiation proof, he looked truly happy for the first and only time.
*
He had disappeared quickly, quietly, and devastatingly efficiently. It’s a testament to his mind as well as to the team who worked with him in my stead. The man who time-traveled into future learned to navigate the world so well he couldn’t be found unless he wanted to. I could cry from envy, even now.
He resurfaced once for Eva Stratt’s public testimony. History calls it her Judgment Day; but I was there, thanks again to my Peace Corps days, and believe me, no one dared to actually judge that woman. Old, thin, bleached of color, she stood straight and proud, her ice cold countenance that of an ancient statue. Her lack of regret was like the marble veil hiding her true face.
Dr. Grace watched the birds warbling outside on one of the windowsills. When Stratt confirmed, loud, clear, concise, that she did indeed order him detained, drugged, and put on board against his explicitly stated refusal to go, he glanced in her direction once and grimaced. As if she knew, she looked back; their eyes met, her – full of steel and darkness, his – warm despite everything. She smiled. He shrugged and nodded, acquiescing to some unspoken argument.
When his name was called, he refused to take the stand. It was against the protocol, but he didn’t seem to care; and no one dared make him. He spoke, however briefly, to the reporters outside, his ridiculous cardigan subject to their looks of politely masked shock, his voice firm.
I will never forgive Stratt, but what does it matter? In the end, I did for Erid what I refused to do for Earth, and for that alone I deserve the scorn you are aiming her way. Can’t you just enjoy your life? It was hard won, after all.
I don’t need to recall it, I know; it was all aired live and is still a subject of many debates. But you have to understand, witnessing that personally, being there in their presence, it was different. It was like history and myth stepped off a schoolbook page and played reenactment around you. She was there, watching him from the top of the stairs, as if willing him to look at her one last time. Her stare could bend the will of any man, but his had been once more an exception.
Dr. Grace, does this mean there would be no reconciliation?
He laughed and shrugged the question off before pushing his way through the crowd and disappearing. She nodded silently, letting him run away this time, and I thought – Well, it seems neither won that argument in the end; if there even was one.
The next time he was seen was long after her death and burial. There was an alien ship in our orbit, carefully navigating her way around the traffic and heaps of trash that were yet to burn in the atmosphere. The world had been quietly panicking, subdued in the knowledge these were Eridians – the same people Dr. Grace credited with the Hail Mary’s ultimate survival and the Project’s success. No one liked that the Eridians just came – no probe sent ahead, no message, just this huge ass ship sauntering up to Earth without how do you do. No one appreciated the Eridians brushing off our scrambled attempts at hospitality and some interstellar politics – cannot blame the guys for that last one, I’d have turned tail and sent the Hermes for another slingshot, had I known what a fucking hullabaloo had laid in waiting for me following Mark Rescue.
Once more, I watched the skies together with the mankind, someone in the crowd, thinking the same as everyone: So, the Hail Mary’s story is still not over yet.
*
The ship they sent planetside remains a marvel our engineers, of which I am counting myself, have been studying and trying to replicate ever since. Erid engineers keep laughing and clicking their claws off in exasperation at our attempts, but I swear, we are going to get there.
Some time in the future.
Honest.
*
She landed like a feather, not even disturbing the grasses. Close up, she was tiny compared to our shuttles, flat and streamlined, and shining, and fucking graceful. All that xenonite Eridians produce like it grows in dirt, it differed from the material we managed to learn to manufacture by that time, and was obviously treated to withstand space radiation and, at a guess, some aggressive extraplanetary amoeba. That protective outer layer caught sunlight and gleamed so prettily, so proudly; many people who had made that delegation teared up just looking at her in awe. Maybe or maybe not, I was one of them.
Dr. Grace, when he teared up, did it for an entirely different reason.
He had been squinting against the harsh wind; his locks had grown out a bit and the wind tossed them haphazardly – he looked a bit electroshocked. Age seemed to start catching up to him; at the very least, there had been crow feet and something like dryness about him that I am now uncomfortably familiar with, and I mean intimately so.
Other than the wind, I remember it had been quiet. The ship just sat there, and humans just stood facing her, and everyone waited. Then, Oh, for freaking out loud, Dr. Grace mumbled and jogged forward, ignoring desperate hands trying to pull him back. Foxes dancing on his beloved cardigan seemed to laugh at those pitiful actions.
When what we now understand to be Erid space equivalent of our 3D-printer detached itself from the previously sleek hull, everyone but Dr. Grace stepped back involuntarily. It glided and gleamed and did its magic, and before our eyes, a tunnel was created like it was nothing. This feat of engineering thought had finally convinced the Hail Mary’s most stubborn critics of the sense behind Dr. Grace’s eagerness to befriend an alien.
Some people just need to be hit over their head with sense for it to enter their brains, unfortunately.
But back to that ship, technology, dress it any way you like, has a universal base. In this instance, people going into a harmful environment need to have a buffer zone between their space and that environment. Or, you guessed it, they need an airlock.
I may have had some trouble focusing for a moment there, once I figured out what exactly the tunnel was. The idea that such a crucial piece could be built so easily… It’s unfair to be angry, but holy shit. Holy shit was I mad. When I got a grip, Eridians had already been there.
*
I know Dr. Grace described them spider-like. To me, they look more like crabs, specifically the giant ones. Once they start dancing sideways with that gesture Dr. Grace so lovingly dubbed ‘jazz-hands’, any lingering shadow of doubt disappears.
And did they dance.
That was when Dr. Grace had teared up. Sniffling so mightily it could be heard over the raging wind, he walked closer to them, doing jazz-hands of his own, but his smile, when I look through the footage, had been strained. He’d made a few noises – weak, trilling sounds that clearly meant something to the Eridians. Then, he’d stopped and let his hands fall, and stared.
Please, he said, slightly choked up, tell me the laptop made it to Erid and you actually have the translator up and running. I’d hate to replicate that darn thing, I am not even sure I can.
Lucky you, came a sarcastic reply in the same archaic English he’d spoken. The one making it had been hiding behind the crowd of Eridians, and Dr. Grace immediately zeroed in on them. It did make it; in fact, it works better now than when you had it. I don’t know why someone as stupid as you had been trusted with such nice things.
Now, that rudeness, while refreshing, had been a little disconcerting. Dr. Grace had only ever spoken about Rocky the Eridian in the best of terms. He’d sung him praise at every opportunity; and the word ‘kind’ had been one that stuck. That little speech hadn’t sounded kind at all.
In fact, it had been so harsh it broke Dr. Grace into pieces. He fell apart before two worlds, and I don’t know a soul who hadn’t felt some urge to grab him in a tight hug and never let go.
He fell to his knees. Raised his arms. It looked like supplication. You can tell me you rewatched the footage thousands of times, you can describe to me every movement and sound our equipment caught, but if you hadn’t stood on that field, if you hadn’t seen Dr. Grace break down in genuine tears, all your memorizing worth shit.
He had been undone, and we didn’t know enough to react – but we never needed to. The Erid delegation parted, and forward came the one we all knew from the many pictures and videos Dr. Grace saved. Rocky, the Eridian who had been studying Tau Ceti for decades when the Hail Mary had flown into the system, who had befriended an alien and risked his life when the ship was in danger. Rocky, who had left for his home just as Dr. Grace had left for his.
Some thirty light years down the road that took them both yet more decades to live through, the two met again. There was a lot of tears after that – and I still remember wincing in sympathetic response to Rocky barreling into kneeling Dr. Grace, just bowling him over really, and the man just throwing his arms around that hard xenonite suite while wheezing in pain. Apparently, neither of them accounted for the gravity.
*
This next part is something previously undisclosed. I am not sure what talking about it is going to cost me. Some Eridian is probably going to treat me to a dinner, and you should know how much that means. I am also probably going to be banned from learning state secrets again – but the thing is, this part should never have been made secret.
Dr. Grace had left for Earth believing that Rocky was dead.
*
Yeah. Yeah, I know.
*
No, Erid was never not in danger; otherwise, I believe, Dr. Grace would have had Stratt to run another ‘save-a-star’ project.
No, even with Rocky presumably dead, there had been other Eridians to carry on his mission.
*
It went like this. When Dr. Grace bred Taumoeba so it would thrive on Venus and Threeworld, he also accidentally bred into them the ability to penetrate xenonite. He’d discovered it soon enough, thanks to the Hail Mary’s bio alarm, but it had been after weeks of space travel. By the time he’d contained the breach, loaded and sent off the Beetles, turned around and traced the Blip-A, the Eridian ship had been long stranded, depleted of Astrophage fuel and defenseless against radiation. It was a miracle that Dr. Grace managed to find the Blip-A without the Petrovascope; it would have taken another to find her in time to save Rocky.
No one answered when Dr. Grace, so to speak, rang the bell. He had hung around, in his own words desolate to the point of true despair. He was silently considering making his own way to 40 Eridani, bringing them salvation to honor his best friend. Before he could start on the journey, another Eridian ship appeared.
*
The Blip-B – I know. Yeah, for a people always ready to deride our naming habits, Eridians suck at it themselves, really. So, the Blip-B, the very same ship that arrived at Earth all those years ago, was the second ship Erid sent, as the time went by and there had been no news from the Blip-A. By then, they discovered radiation, and they had rightfully been thinking the worst.
The Blip-B had been wary of the Hail Mary. They didn’t know what exactly happened; for all they knew, the Hail Mary attacked the Blip-A. It took Dr. Grace some long and miserable days to communicate with them; days he had refused to talk about in great detail. Anyway, what matters is finally the Eridians believed him. They took Taumoeba Dr. Grace had saved, refueled the Hail Mary (they had discovered radiation but not time dilation yet), and asked Dr. Grace to leave, promising to take care of the Blip-A.
And so he left.
I cannot imagine what had been going through his head as the light years stretched and stretched until suddenly Earth filled the vista. I don’t know how he had survived the trip, or what he had been thinking when he stepped out under the blue sky, surrounded by the crowd and yet so utterly alone.
But I know that when Rocky told him about the home Eridians built for him on their planet and asked if he would like to visit, Dr. Grace rolled his eyes hard and said, and I quote, For pity’s sake, you darn space monster, do you need to ask? And you call me stupid – I swear.
*
There are many questions still left unanswered. Whether or not the Project Hail Mary was worth it is not one of those anymore.
*
What I would like to know?
*
Well. I think I’d like to know how they managed to make themselves go back into space. Sometimes, I miss it.