The Depths

He's just the one who came home.

I think Erid is eternally grateful for Rocky and Grace, but there's so many who will struggle to celebrate because of what they've lost. I think they have the right to be angry and Rocky grew more anxious about how he would be welcomed back as the Hail Mary got closer.

Imagine waiting for your mate to come home. Maybe you have pebbles together and they miss one of their parents. Like everyone else going to investigate the Tau Ceti System, your mate is one of the best scientists of your kind. There are risks, but you are confident and your mate was too. Your planet's best engineer is also on board to make sure the trip goes smoothly.

Decades go by—much longer than anyone thought. Some Eridians mourn their loved ones, but you hold out hope. Your mate is smart and capable and you're sure they're just working.

And then one day a ship (ungracefully) lands on Erid. It's one textured like you've never seen before and it has architecture your crystalline brain struggles to understand. Still, you expect your mate to come trotting out and everything will go back to how it was.

The engineer steps out dragging an alien creature behind him. Those are the only two on the ship.

You learn it was a error with how the ship was made and it's fuel was stored. They try and explain relativity to you, but you don't understand and even if you did, your mind is too clouded by grief to be anything but angry.

Angry that your mate is never coming home; angry that so many other lives were lost, some being the mates and relatives of your friends; angry that you have an answer and angry that you don't understand it; angry at closure; angry that you will never have bodies to bury.

Grace had a hard enough time waking up and finding his dead crew mates, and he only had to deal with that for a couple weeks before meeting Rocky. He didn’t remember who they were at first. He didn’t watch them die. Rocky basically survived a horrific space plague, watching helplessly as his crew mates - his FRIENDS - died around him, and then spent 50 years in silence. Rocky was the final girl of the Blip-A except after his horror movie was over he was just stuck there, in this huge ship that had become an empty mausoleum, for decades. With no one to watch him sleep.

Obviously Rocky gets his happy ending after he and his new best friend save the stars and return to Erid, but I can’t help thinking about the absolute genre whiplash Rocky received going from the events before meeting Grace into the events of the book. It’s honestly a miracle that he wasn’t a raving madman (madrock???) by the time Grace showed up at Tau Ceti. It’s easy to imagine another version of the story where Grace meets Rocky and finds a vicious, terrified, angry animal, with no idea that this violent beast used to be a person, that his mind has completely broken after nearly half a century of horror and grief and solitary confinement in space.

In the book somewhere in the tunnel scenes (so I hear) rocky freaks out that grace returns later than he agreed because he slept in. That implies that rocky couldn't hear the ship from his part of the tunnel.

Compared with humans that can see for MILES unless something gets in the way.

They're absolutely chucking lampposts in all kinds of weird places to see if Grace can see them from the edge of his biodome at night.

Grace: "Oh yeah, I can see Adrian at lamp 58"