finemeal

“They caught me. I couldn’t run. The fence—it had barbed wire up top, there were security guards and soldiers everywhere, and she knew, she knew I was going to say no—” He shudders away from the memory of Stratt, and I instinctively tap the floor to verify the soundscape. She isn’t here. Obviously. My second grounding technique is to check the clock, which reminds me of the previous visit, not yet twelve human hours past.

“… This is not your normal sleeping schedule.”

“No,” Grace confirms. He is reluctant, and terrified. There is something like guilt as well. “Rocky, I think—I think I made a mistake. I, uh. I spoke without thinking.”

“Bad habit,” I tell him, as I’ve told him many times before. It’s what got him in trouble at that fancy conference; it’s what got him unceremoniously dumped by Linda.

“I know,” he says mournfully.

If he did know, as he's claimed so many times before, he would stop talking faster than logic and reason could kick in. But maybe this is true, too: his tendency to communicate sharply (in Grace’s preferred sensory figurative language, the word is transparently) is mine. I brace myself and ask, “What did you say?”

The pervasiveness of Grace’s guilt weighs on my limbs; one joint buckles involuntarily. I spout a curse that Grace wishes he could untranslate, and then I shake off the phantom sensation. Awful, awful, awful. 

“I said I’d sabotage the mission,” Grace confesses. The shame burns in waves like the ocean, boiling hot. I cannot shield him from my involuntary disgust and secondhand embarrassment. And he cannot help his urge for self-defense. “They’re murdering me! They gave me the—the illusion of choice! Stratt had me look into that list of candidates, and the whole time, the whole time she knew she would be forcing me into the mission! I don’t want to be here!”

There’s no chance of me getting to complete my usual checks when I’ve got a soulmate on the brink of a meltdown. To be honest, I think I'm on the verge of matching his wavelength. It’s not like I’m unfamiliar with Stratt and her approach to knotty, thorny problems. Met with Grace’s defiant attitude, what would she do to ensure his compliance? She is going to break him.

She is, however unintentionally, going to break me. 

“What’s going to happen to you?” I demand. “When is your ship scheduled to arrive?”

I know his ship will have a tiny crew. There were meant to be three, clued in at the last minute of my existence, because Grace wants to help my planet, he does. He’s been frustrated by my ship’s technology—advanced in some ways, hugely limited in others; he’s helped me chart and assess the various objects in space, but the fact of the matter is that he doesn’t know what to do with Tau Ceti-e anymore than I do with my dead crew’s scientific tools. He made sure that the Hail Mary would be outfitted with all the instruments that I had no foundation to weave, and yes, the only lacking thing would be Grace himself, but we agreed that I would be a decent medium, presuming the Hail Mary did not immediately move to kill me.

He refuses to answer. The omission upsets me; for whatever reason, whatever pattern of life he lives when I am not sharing in its dizzying, treacherous path, Grace likes to think that hiding the hurt is mercy. He is a creature predisposed to leak its emotions (if not its body contents); it infuriates me that his world functions off gilded manners.

“I don’t like not-knowing,” I tell him. He understands it for the guilt-trip I intend it to be, but I emphasize, “It took a long time before Grace helped me know why my crew died. I do not want to wait a long time before finding out… whatever I will find out.”

Grace caves to my insistent prodding. “They have a drug. Stratt says it’s been used to—erase memories. The skill set of the person stays the same, but—”

The concept doesn’t translate at first. My people very rarely forget; our minds may buffer as we grow older, but even at the brink of death, I have known elders to reach back for the first song that touched them to each deathwatcher, and to sing them so steadily it could hardly be believed that they died the same day cycle they woke up. To forget something is to be weathered away, overwritten to the point of complete loss of meaning. But I have been enmeshed in Grace’s culture, media and science alike, so I get the picture, so to speak. 

I am abruptly terrified, and Grace is startled out of his own wallowing when he hears me wail.

“You’re going to forget? Us?! For how long?!”

I don’t even know if Grace will be capable of sharing when he is induced into a coma. A coma has never happened to us before. 

“I don’t know!”

I cannot help it. I rage. “Stupid! Stupid, stupid! Humans are so stupid!” If my predilection for needing to have the last word has crossed over to Grace, Grace’s occasionally volatile temperament has surely warped mine. I seize a clawful of communication cables and yank, like sending an emergency signal would do any good right now. A discordant message sings, “Help, help, help!” It reverberates and cancels out the blinding fury long enough for me to refocus.

“Rock,” Grace says, timid. Like he is a child again, finally cognizant that I am myself, a being separate and living and yet so entangled in his soul that it would take death to dissolve the connection. An imaginary friend would be so much kinder. I, already over two human centuries older, was disinclined to entertain the wishful thinking of an extremely leaky organic creature the universe had seen fit to graft onto my soul.

“Grace,” I answer tiredly. 

“I’m sorry.”

I contemplate the apology. I wonder how the isolation from my home, from my people, has affected me, because my response is a totally honest, “I’m not.”

Grace is silent, but even at his most petty, when he was truly committed to giving me the ‘cold shoulder’ (like it was my fault for being the designated task master when Grace chose to tackle diploma after diploma)—I know he is here. I do not need to register his heartbeat for proof; I know him by the similar crystal keen resonance of his curiosity and intelligence, by the simple warmth lodged as a background radiation frequency for the past forty (human) years of my life.

“This will not be a suicide mission,” I remind him. “Only two million kilograms are needed for the return trip, and you know that I have plenty.”

“But the relativity,” Grace protests.

“The time will pass anyway,” I trill, just to annoy him. “The issue will be your forgetting. But I’ll fix that.”

“You’ll fix medically-induced amnesia?”

He knows how to annoy me, too. Such is soulmatism. I gesture dismissively, claws in the raised hand clicking in a deliberate triplet rhythm. “Easy, easy, easy. Would be impossible if we weren’t soulmates. But we are. And I have a perfect memory, so something will be found in the balance.” My bravado is just that—I will be facing yet another unprecedented problem, and I will not have a young scientist to help find the answers in a human library text.