One Grumpy, Tired Hairless Ape

This took longer than it normally might have, because Rocky also took the opportunity to tutor Gracie a bit. He explained that a lot of the lumpiness of her efforts resulted from not keeping an even tension on the fibres, and suggested ways to improve it. She listened carefully and followed his instructions, although she was clearly out of her element, while Rocky did his best to be patient with her.

He’d never been that patient when Grace was learning to fly the Hail Mary, Grace observed sourly. He’d just waved his arms and complained that everybody was going to die. Of course, it was probably easier to be nice to a female of his own spe...

... no, that wasn’t it. Gracie wasn’t female, they were just calling her that because Rockwell had assigned her gender in honour of his mother's poodle mix. Grace probably needed to do some thinking about his own unconscious gender biases, because those definitely weren’t coming from the sexless Eridians.

Not far away, Rockwell himself was sitting on the floor with the parts of a disassembled spacesuit glove spread out around him, putting them back together into a configuration suitable for an Eridian. Grace sat down across from him.

“Okay,” he said, “how are we gonna do this? Obviously we’re going to take their food and water. That’ll increase our payload weight so we’ll need extra fuel, too...”

“Don’t forget the oxygen,” said Rockwell, without looking up from what he was doing. He was wearing a headband with a pair of surgical loupes mounted on it, the better to see the tiny screws he was working with. “It’s like toilet paper – better to have way too much than too little.”

“Oh, we’re definitely taking their toilet paper,” Grace said. God... what were they doing? What possessed somebody to see what might well be themselves from an alternate universe and decide to rob them? He understood the practicality of it, of course, but it was still incredibly weird. “What else? Spacesuits?”

“Sure. Anything not bolted to the floor,” said Rockwell. “We’ll divide it between us. Get their EAM, too.”

“What’s that?” asked Grace.

“Emergency Atmosphere Module.”

“Oh, that thing.” It was an inflatable kevlar cylinder that could be set up to shelter the crew if there were a hull breach or some other loss of atmosphere. “I don’t actually know where it’s kept.”

“Panel below the coma chambers,” Rockwell told him. He put his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he tested the motion in a glove finger. “That’s what I’ve been living in on the Blip. If I’ve got another one, it’ll double my space.”

Grace dimly recalled seeing the thing set up once. He was pretty sure he’d driven cars that were bigger. “How are you still sane?”

“I spent six years alone at Tau Ceti before Gracie showed up,” Rockwell replied calmly. “I probably can’t get any more fucked up than I already am.” He raised the loupes to examine his work at full size, then looked up at Grace. “See if they still have their Beetles, too. You sent yours to Earth, you said?”

“Yeah.”

“I only had time to save one. If we can get a few more, every one increases the chance that Erid gets the message.”

“I’ll check,” Grace promised. He swallowed hard. “Uh... what about the crew?”

Rockwell had been moving the loupes back into position. Now he stopped and took the headband off to look at Grace properly. Neither of them had brought it up yet, but both men knew there was probably a dead crew on that ship – and if there were, it might be people they knew, perhaps people they knew very intimately indeed.

“You know we’re gonna have to leave them,” said Rockwell. “We probably shouldn’t even look.”

“Yeah,” said Grace, but he knew he would do it anyway if he had the opportunity, just to see who they’d been. He suspected Rockwell knew it, too. It was the human thing to do.

Grace had liked both Yao and Ilyukhina as people. If they’d survived, he probably could have worked with them out here, with no more than the usual amount of problems for people stuck with each other. Burying them once had sucked. He wasn’t prepared to have to do it again.

The thing he really didn’t want, however, was the same thing he’d been terrified of in the docking tunnel – one of the people on that other Hail Mary might be him. Grace hadn’t wanted to meet himself alive in the tunnel, and he definitely didn’t want to find his own dead body. The only person who’d ever done that was Captain Picard in the second season episode Time Squared...

Why the hell could he remember that but still couldn’t dredge up his mother’s given name? It had been something like ‘Denise’, but that wasn’t it. Darlene?

“The extra supplies will give us more time to work on our problem here,” Rockwell went on. “We can explore the spheres properly and make sure we get it right. I don’t know if we can figure out how this works, but we probably don’t need to. We just need to be able to control it. Best case scenario, it’s on a predictable pattern and we can wait for our own realities to come around again.”

“Explore them. You want to go inside the spheres?” Grace asked. “You think they have doors?”

“Anything somebody built needs a way to maintain it,” Rockwell said. “Failing that, two out of four of us are living ultrasound units. Right, kids?” he asked the Eridians.

Gracie will help! Gracie promised.

Rocky did not immediately say anything, as he was focused on his xenonite. He held up a piece of it and made a whistling sound the translator didn’t know what to do with – it was one Grace had heard before, but only rarely... and usually when it was Grace himself doing something Rocky didn’t like.

“You okay, Rock?” he asked.

Xenonite not working! said Rocky. He offered the piece to Gracie. Touch, he ordered.

She tapped it a couple of times with one finger. Better than Gracie’s, she said.

Doesn’t resonate right, Rocky said. Bad xenon.

Good xenon! she objected. Never used. Eridian-Rocky tested.

Not right, Rocky insisted. Human-Grace, scan xenonite!

He got the scanner, and Rocky passed the length of cable into the human atmosphere so it could be examined. Although Grace hadn’t had the opportunity to work on the translator any more, the voices seemed to be settling down, as if each Eridian had figured out how to stay in the range the computer recognized as ‘theirs’.

The laser flickered across the xenonite, and Grace read out the result. “It’s pure xenon,” he said.

Rocky made another frustrated noise and took the piece back. More tests, he decided.

This consumed the next half hour or so, as Rocky tested and re-tested every fibre of the cable. Gracie handed him tools but mostly stayed out of the way, worried that her lack of expertise had ruined something. Eventually, Rocky was satisfied that the material was strong enough, but he was still unhappy as he got back to work on it.

Bad place, he declared. Bad for xenonite. Bad for people. He reached over and rapped on their sample of the black type, as if it were somehow responsible for corrupting the rest.

Gracie sorry, the other Eridian said. Didn’t mean to.

Not you. This place, said Rocky firmly. Need to leave soon.

“We’re working on it,” Rockwell promised. “Gracie, come here and try this out.” He offered the spacesuit hand he’d made.

She put it on and wiggled the fingers, then picked up and put down several of Rocky’s tools. Third finger too short, was her analysis.

“I’m working with what I’ve got, Sweetheart,” said Rockwell. “Is the range of motion okay, at least?”

Good enough, Gracie decided, and took it off again. Human-Rocky says will build Earth suit just for me, much better, show me whole planet, she told Rocky as she passed the glove back. Promise to take me to Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Yellowstone, and pride parade, and KISS concert.

Grace chuckled. “Sounds like the full Earth experience,” he said. “I’ve never been to Yellowstone... I’ve been to the Grand Canyon, but I was only eight years old so I didn’t really appreciate it. The main thing I remember is I got to ride a donkey.”

New word, said Gracie. What is, question?

“A donkey? It’s an Earth animal,” Grace said. He pulled the nearest computer over to look up a picture. “They’re good at carrying loads up steep slopes, but you’re probably too heavy for them. Here.” He turned the screen to show her.

Gracie scooped up the sight gun for a look. Unfortunately, the device didn’t do very well with photographs, as it needed high contrast to form an intelligible picture. Five legs? she asked.

“No, only four.” Grace leaned to see the texture screen, and figured out what she was looking at. “The thick one is its head. It’s got a mouth there and it’s eating plants off the ground.”

Have animals we can ride on Erid, said Rocky, and sang what must have been the name for them. Five legs. Not all soft and leaky like Earth animal.

Gracie hummed. Remember those, I think. Big, Scary. Loud when upset.

Grace had a sudden flash of a childhood memory, in which he’d been frightened by a large draft horse suddenly rearing up, but there were no details. Had that been at a farm? A circus? A parade? Had something similar happened to Gracie?

And we have canyons, better than Earth, Rocky went on. Biggest one twice as deep as Earth Grand Canyon. Bottom have hot springs, life forms found nowhere else on Erid! Good place for biologist.

That did sound interesting, and Grace was about to ask for more information when Mary spoke up.

Proximity alert, she said.

“I hope that’s the other Mary,” said Rockwell. He put his tools aside and climbed up to see.

It was indeed the ship Grace had decided to think of as the Ghost Mary. They did some manoeuvring to match the orbit while trying not to crash into it, and Rocky presented Grace with his latest creation. It was a sort of grappling gun, which would fire a cable to hook onto the other ship’s structure. Heavy items could then be clipped to it and pushed across, taking advantage of the frictionless environment of space to move them with minimal effort.

Despite the repeated tests, Rocky was visibly agitated, his legs twitching as he provided the instructions. Grace tried to reassure him, but this turned out to be a mistake.

“Don’t worry,” Grace said. “If it breaks, we’ll think of something else.”

Will not break! Rocky declared, annoyed. Rocky makes good xenonite!

“Okay, okay, I believe you!” Grace held up his hands. It wasn’t like Rocky to get snippy about it. “Just in case, all right? It’s always good to have a backup plan. Gracie, are you ready?”

She was next to Rocky in the xenonite tunnel, putting on her spacesuit. Once again, she tested the new hand, opening and closing the fingers.

Tight, she said, but bends okay.

“How’s the seal at the wrist?” asked Rockwell.

Eridian-Rocky tested. Is good.

Grace put his helmet on and locked it in place, while Rocky let Gracie out of the xenonite tunnel so she could follow her counterpart into the airlock. The suit that could protect her from the vacuum of space could also serve to keep her safe from the cold, corrosive oxygen humans required. She closed the inner door as if she’d done this many times before, and machinery whirred as the atmosphere was pumped out.

The green light came on, and Grace opened the outer door.

This time there was no breathtaking view, just the distant, smeary lights of young stars still shrouded in dust. The Ghost Mary was silhouetted against this, and while it was a good three quarters of a kilometre away, that seemed terrifyingly close in space. Grace clipped himself to the edge of the airlock and took aim at the lower ring, a railing structure conveniently close to the aft airlock. It was designed to allow a spacewalking astronaut to make their way all around the cylindrical body of the ship, but would also do nicely as a place to anchor their line.

“All right, first attempt,” he said, and triggered the grappling gun. Cable unspooled as the hook raced across the void – and missed. “Drat,” he said.

Rocky was not bothered. Rewind and try again.

He got it on the fourth try, which was not impressive, but at that point he was glad to have hit the target at all. The grappling end caught the frame and the claw closed, and Grace was able to fasten the other end as Rocky had showed him. From there it was simple enough to clip his tether to the cable and climb across hand-over-hand. Gracie stayed where she was, as she would be responsible for catching the items he sent over and getting them indoors, where Rocky and Rockwell would find places to store them. When Grace looked back, he saw her gripping the cable with one hand so she could follow his progress.

When he reached the other side, he found the emergency release on the Ghost Mary’s airlock was covered with frost, which made it difficult to move the lever. He had to hit it a couple of times with the metal ring where his glove connected to the rest of his suit in order to break the ice, but once it was gone he was able to force it open. He expected a rush of air as the atmosphere inside escaped, but there was none. The airlock swung open without resistance.

“Looks like it’s vacuum in here,” he said. “Must have been a hull breach. They might not have any air for us to steal.”

“Check the tanks anyway,” Rockwell replied over the radio. “They’re supposed to have safety valves... although some asshole at Goddard apparently doesn’t know how to install those.”

Grace climbed in, and almost shut the door behind him before realizing it would save time to just leave it open. “Okay, I’m gonna start in the kitchen,” he said. “Freeze-dried food doesn’t weigh much, and we won’t have to figure out how to disconnect anything.”

“Roger,” said Rockwell.

Just as there was no atmosphere inside the Ghost Mary, there was also no light. Grace turned on his headlamp as he started down the ladder, and discovered that the cabins were full of floating debris. Everything on board would have been locked up or tied down for launch and the trip to Tau Ceti, but whatever had torn the solar panel off and opened the hull must have jostled the ship enough for things to break free. Grace shooed aside a screwdriver and a piece of surprisingly racy lingerie, and entered the kitchen.

One of the storage drawers had broken open, and packets of food were drifting around. He started collecting these and wrapped them up in duct tape to hold them together before stuffing them back in the drawer.

“It’s hard to tell, but I don’t think anybody’s been awake in here. Everything seems full,” he said. “Okay, Gracie, I’m gonna tape up this first batch and zip them across to you. I’ll shake the cable before I hook them on, so you’ll know to be ready.” He had to remember that an Eridian in a vacuum was nearly blind.

Understand, said Gracie.

He used more duct tape to package up the entire first drawer, then pushed it ahead of him back up to the airlock. That was one good thing about space, at least – when nothing had any weight, it was relatively easy to move stuff around, although he had to bear in mind that things still had inertia. This was illustrated when the drawer hit the ceiling and bounced off, and Grace had to grab it before it drifted all the way back down to the bottom.

“Here comes!” he said, shaking the cable as promised.

Gracie is ready! she promised.

Grace clipped the bundle to the pulley and gave it a push. It slid along the xenonite, and he could just barely see by the Hail Mary’s external lights as Gracie caught it.

“Any thoughts on how we’re gonna get the water?” he asked, climbing back inside.

Will need flexible tube, Rocky said. Must get very close, though. Otherwise water will freeze on the way.

“Yeah,” said Grace, then realized: “wait, that’s not a bad thing. Ice is much easier to control in microgravity than water is.” It was also an unfamiliar material to Eridians – their pressure cooker of an atmosphere kept water in the form of a superheated liquid at the surface. Ice was something they encountered only in laboratories, so it was no surprise they didn’t think of working with it. “If we can get a pulley on it, we can just send it over.”

“Good idea,” said Rockwell. “We’ll just need a way to thaw it out without getting it everywhere. You got any really big plastic bags?”

“Your EAM would work for that,” Grace decided. “And since it’s just water you can still use it after.”

Grace pulled the rest of the food storage drawers out, and taped them together in twos and threes so he could move more than one at a time. He brought the second batch to the airlock and hooked it to the cable, and as he sent it off he happened to look up at the looming shape of Erebus, just in time to see something extraordinary. The blue aurora was still dancing across the cloud tops, lighting them up like the flame of a gas cooktop... and then it winked out.

For a moment he thought the whole planet had vanished, leaving them stranded, and the thought nearly gave him a heart attack. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he realized that Erebus was still there. The diffuse light of the shrouded stars was falling on the cloud tops. It was only the aurora that had disappeared, and after he watched for a moment, he realized that was also still there. It was flickering around the limb of the planet, much fainter but definitely present.

“Did you guys see that?” he asked.

“No. I’m in here sorting food packets,” said Rockwell. “What was it?”

“The planet just glitched! I think we’re outside the area of the effect,” Grace said. That meant they could at least keep themselves in a single reality, even as the planet wandered across the multiverse. Unless... “are the spheres still in orbit?”

“Let me check,” said Rockwell.

A few minutes crawled by, in which Gracie wrestled the load of food into the airlock so that Rocky could bring it inside, while Rockwell returned to the cockpit to take a look at the radar. “There it is,” he said finally. “The big one is just passing interior to us.”

“Okay, good,” Grace said.

“Yeah, the debris in the ring has definitely changed,” said Rockwell, “but it didn’t come out this far. That’s good. Once we figure this out and get back where we came from, we’ll have time to get away from the planet before it carries us off again.”

It took a few hours to get all the food packaged up and sent off, and though it might not have weighed much, manipulating large unwieldy objects in the strange environment of low light and zero gravity was exhausting.

“I think I’m done,” said Grace, sending the last one over. “I’m gonna grab that EAM so we can figure out how to bag the water with it, and then I’m coming back.”

“Roger,” said Rockwell. “We’re pretty tired over here, too. I’ll heat dinner up.”

“Thanks.” Grace climbed down the ladder again, and opened the hatch into the room containing the coma chambers and medical supplies. The Ghost Mary’s version of Armando was in there, hanging lifeless from its chassis. One of its arms was floating free, and Grace pushed it back into the clip to keep it out of the way before looking for the panel he needed. It was the second one from the left, Rockwell had told him – he opened it and pulled the object out, rolled up to fit in a bag the size of a hiker’s backpack.

They had already agreed that it was a bad idea to investigate the crew of the Ghost Mary, but Grace put the panel back and then floated there a moment, contemplating the three closed chambers. The bodies of Yao and Ilyukhina had been distressingly well-preserved when Grace found them. Was this crew in a similar state? Or was there a crew at all? Had this vessel somehow ended up out here totally empty?

He knew he shouldn’t, but he went up to the first one, the Commander’s, and pulled the handle. It was surprisingly difficult – like the outer airlock release, the mechanism was covered with frost. Eventually something groaned and came free, and Grace was able to slide the drawer open. Inside was a man with a feeding tube down his throat, wrapped up in plastic like a package of thin mints. There was a name printed on the bag.

“Hey, uh, John,” he said. “Who did you say was in charge of your expedition?”

“Dan Murdock,” was the reply. “Australian guy.”

“Yeah... that’s what it says here,” Grace said. “Commander Daniel Murdock, Royal Australian Air Force.” With a shaking hand, he undid the zipper on the bag, and then pushed himself back when he saw what was underneath. The man’s face was not recognizable. His skin had dried out and shrunk onto the skull, and the eyes were caved in. He looked like an unwrapped pharaoh, as if he’d been sitting in the frozen vacuum for centuries. Grace could just barely make out that he’d had dark hair, buzzed short, and only stubble of a beard. That meant he’d died very early in the mission... it hadn’t had time to grow.

“You looked, didn’t you?” asked Rockwell.

“Yeah,” said Grace, swallowing hard.

There was a long silence. “I guess the second one will be me, then.”

Grace was already regretting this, but he couldn’t leave that alone. He broke open the second chamber and took a moment to wonder if he was ready for this – but he knew he wasn’t going to stop even if the answer was no. He pulled it open and unzipped the bag.

“It’s a woman,” he said, a bit relieved – he hadn’t wanted to see Rockwell’s dead body, either. She had dark hair in a pixie cut, and was wearing diamond studs in her ears and nose, but her body looked like Murdock’s, a dried and darkened husk. “It says Sylvie Deslauriers, ESA.”

Rockwell’s own sigh of relief rustled in the microphone. “I don’t know her, but hats off,” he said. Then, after another pause, “who’s the third?”

Grace moved on to the third chamber and rattled the handle. Would it be Dubois? Shapiro? Another stranger? “Who was yours?” he asked.

“Dr. Izumi Takehito, JAXA astrobiology.”

This one had less ice on the mechanism, and unlocked more easily. Grace opened it, and found the remains of a heavyset man with a nearly shaved head. “Definitely not her,” he said, and took a look at the name printed on the bag. “Dr. Carl B...” his voice trailed off as his insides went cold, and time seemed to freeze around him as if he were in another glitch.

“I didn’t get that,” said Rockwell. “Who?”

“Dr. Carl Boyce,” Grace read off. “SETI Institute.”

“I don’t know him, either,” Rockwell said.

“I do,” said Grace. “Sort of.”

He looked at the man’s face again. It was hard to tell what any of these people had looked like in life, but he could make out the shape of the man’s brow ridge and the narrow moustache he’d worn, and his open mouth showed a gap between his front teeth... all of it hauntingly familiar.

“He wasn’t a scientist in my world,” said Grace. “He worked in Petrova Task Force security. He was...” he licked his lips. “I think I’d better come back.”

“Yeah, I think so,” Rockwell agreed.

Grace grabbed the packaged EAM and started to leave the room, but then decided he couldn’t do that with the chambers still open, so he put his feet against the opposite wall and tried to close one. Carl’s – no, Dr. Boyce’s. He didn’t want to think of this dead man as Carl – had been the easiest to open, but now it didn’t want to shut. He pushed harder, but something had gotten stuck and it wouldn’t budge.

Even so, he kept trying for far longer than he should have. Finally it moved a few centimetres, but when Grace tried to rearrange his position to push further, it sprang open again. He thumped on the slab with a fist. “Gosh-darned fudging...”

Rude rude rude! complained Gracie.

Rockwell had, rather surprisingly, refrained from making fun of Grace’s schoolteacher expletives so far, and he had more sense than to start now. “Calm down, Girlfriend, he’s not being rude. He’s trying very hard not to be,” he said. “What’s going on over there?”

“I’m trying to close the chambers again,” grunted Grace. “I don’t want to look at these people.” Especially the one who’d been his friend. He’d had thanksgiving dinner with Carl and his wife Regina. She’d been expecting twins... two girls. Carl had been over the moon about it, and Grace suddenly remembered thinking that Carl must really believe in this project, because it was the only chance his unborn daughters had at a future.

Had that entered Grace’s own head when Stratt had told him it was up to him? He couldn’t remember.

Did this Carl have twins at home, waiting for a father they’d never met? A father who’d promised to save the world for them?

Had that world had a Ryland Grace? Where was he? Had he just never existed? Had he been killed in the explosion? Or was he just some security grunt, and the idea of sending him had never even been entertained?

“Riley?” asked Rockwell. “Talk to us, man.”

“I’m coming back,” Grace repeated.

“Good.”

Unable to do anything else, Grace left the chambers open and returned to the aft airlock. He climbed back down the cable, and found Gracie waiting for him at the far end, hanging onto it to monitor his progress. She reached out a hand for him to take, which he accepted gratefully, and let her help him into the airlock.

Release cable, said Rocky on the radio. Don’t want to bump into other Hail Mary.

“Got it.” Grace disconnected the grappling gun and reeled it back in.

Rocky was waiting just inside, and Grace passed the device through to his atmosphere before getting out of his spacesuit – a task complicated by the fact that his hands would not stop trembling.

“It worked just fine,” he managed to say. “Whatever’s affecting the resonance, it doesn’t seem to be a problem.”

Rocky made a raspberry noise. Do not like, he declared, and scuttled away to examine the grappling gun in minute detail all over again.

Grace himself went and sat down at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. Rockwell was in the room, going through the food he’d brought back, but he paid very little attention to him. He needed to find something to think about besides what he’d just seen. Now might be a good time to dip into Ilyukina’s vodka stash, but he didn’t want to do that in front of guests...

The touch of a hand on his back made him jump. Grace still wasn’t use to the idea that there was another human here, and after those first few heady minutes he’d avoided physical contact with Rockwell because... well, the situation was weird. Feeling it now made him want to burst into tears all over again.

“You knew the guy, you said,” said Rockwell.

“Yeah,” said Grace, wiping at his eyes. “He was... he wasn’t meant to be assigned as my personal security detail but that’s kind of how it ended up. He helped me with the experiments that figured out how to breed the astrophage. I insisted he be the first co-author on the paper. In my world he’s safe on Earth, at least as far as I know.” Heaven only knew what was going on there as the sun dimmed and temperatures plunged.

Rockwell nodded. “I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing Grace’s back. The sensation made him feel like he would melt into a puddle on the floor. Grace wanted to flinch away from it and lean into it at the same time.

“Thanks,” said Grace. “It’s not just that, though.”

“Yeah, I know. If everybody on their Hail Mary is dead, their Earth isn’t gonna make it.”

“And maybe not their Erid, either,” Grace said. He reached for the tissue dispenser on the wall, but his arm wasn’t long enough. Rockwell pulled one out and handed it to him, and Grace nodded a thanks and blew his nose. For a moment nothing was real except the man’s hand rubbing his shoulder...

Then he sat up straight. “If they’ve still got their Beetles...” Grace began.

“Don’t go there,” said Rockwell.

“No, listen. We can keep two for you to send to Erid, and that will leave us two more...”

“We don’t even know what universe they came from,” Rockwell pointed out. “We’re gonna have enough trouble finding our own. They’re not our responsibility, okay?” He squeezed Grace’s shoulder. “We can’t save everybody.”

Grace nodded, but that was the whole problem, wasn’t it? Ryland Grace hadn’t wanted to save anybody, and yet it had turned out to be his job, and nobody else’s.

“I’m gonna take my share of this over to the Blip,” said Rockwell. “The Eridians will be here, all right? You guys will watch him?” he looked over at the two aliens.

Human-Grace sleep again? asked Gracie.

“No, he just needs company,” said Rockwell. “Keep talking to him, okay?”

Okay. Gracie scuttled up the tunnel and settled down in a cat-loaf position with her legs tucked under her. Rocky dragged the sample of black xenonite he was working on up to sit beside her. Grace was glad they were there, because when Rockwell’s hand lifted off his shoulder it felt like he was suddenly the only living thing in the entire cosmos. He heard the ladder creak as the man climbed down to the docking tunnel.

Gracie had been told to keep him talking, so she tried. Human-Grace is schoolteacher. Like teaching children, question?

“Yeah,” he said.

Gracie too, she told him. Children very smart, learn fast.

“They do,” Grace agreed. This was probably the best thing they could talk about, he realized. Something that actually made him happy. “Anybody who says children don’t like to learn isn’t teaching them right. If you don’t make it a chore they just soak it up like sponges. Sometimes if we got through the class material early, I would throw a few higher-level concepts at them, something related to what we’d talked about that day. Relativity, or protein folding, or whatever I could think of. They didn’t always understand it, but they thought it was a treat.”

Yes! Children make Gracie very happy, very proud! She paused. Don’t remember why left and went to space.

Oh... that was what she wanted to know. “The people in charge probably thought they needed you,” he said.

Why need Gracie?

“Because if you’re like me, you’re a microbiologist who spent a lot of time thinking about extraterr... extraeridian life early in your career,” he explained. “You probably figured out how to breed the astrophage, so there’d be enough of it for the mission.” She might even have had a friend in security who’d helped her do it. “But I didn’t actually want to go. They thought they needed me, so they forced me to.”

Gracie raised herself up on her legs again. Forced, question?

“Yeah.” So much for things that made him happy, but if he tried to stop now, she’d keep asking questions – just like he would have. “I told them I didn’t want to go die in space. Stratt said if I didn’t die in space I’d die on the ground, but I would rather do that. I didn’t want my life to have a deadline hanging over it,” he explained, hoping that made sense. “Stratt thought I was a coward, but she also thought I was the best person for the job, so they drugged me and put me on the ship, and when I woke up at Tau Ceti the others were dead and I didn’t even remember why I was there.”

Rocky find, said Rocky firmly, still working on taking apart the black xenonite. Not alone anymore.

Gracie didn’t say anything right away. When she did, it was, Gracie coward, question?

It was probably silly, but Grace’s automatic reaction was to try to reassure her. “You aren’t. I mean, I don’t think so,” he said quickly. “You made it, didn’t you? You did what you came to do. Hey, I bet Rockwell told you you’re the bravest Eridian he’s ever met.”

Rocky sat very still for a moment, and then knocked his body once against the tunnel wall, the way he did when he thought Grace had just done something particularly dumb.

Gracie, meanwhile, would have side-eyed him if she’d had the anatomy to do so. That was joke, she said. Rocky only meet one Eridian...

“... and it’s you,” Grace finished for her. “Well, now he’s met two and I bet he still thinks that.”

Human-Grace bravest human Eridian-Rocky ever meet, no joke, said Rocky – but Grace was pretty sure that was a lie. He wouldn’t have hesitated to say Rockwell was braver than he was. Why should Rocky?

People on Erid think Gracie is coward, Gracie said miserably.

“People on Erid thought Gracie was the only one who could do it,” said Grace, “and they were right.” That wouldn’t make her feel better, though, because it didn’t make him feel better. The fact that Stratt was right was worse, because as he’d already observed, it made things so inevitable. There had to be a Ryland Grace on this mission, or it wouldn’t work. They now had two universes in which he’d been where he needed to be – and one where he hadn’t.

Glad I don’t remember, said Gracie, and got up to scuttle away. Rocky shifted his weight from leg to leg unhappily for a few moments, then left his xenonite and went after her.