Chapter Text
The day I've invited Meghan to come to the classroom with me is a day that the Eridians who take care of me and keep the human habitat, well, habitable and pleasant for me decide to roll in the fog and the clouds and drop the temperature a few degrees. I explain to Meghan as we head down the path, “We figured out pretty early that living without any kind of weather or seasonal fluctuations was making me kinda crazy. It really felt like I was living in a cage. So now I get clouds, and chilly days, and rain sometimes. They don't tell me what it's going to be, either. They haven't ever really figured out snow, and they get nervous making it too cold. But that's fine. I was from San Francisco, it's not like I ever had snow on Earth.”
“I'm kind of glad. I'd be happy to never see snow again. But they’ve put so much effort into this place,” Meghan marvels.
“Oh, Rocky was practically strong-arming his way into all of the thrums to make sure that my mental and emotional needs were being met with the design of the habitat just as much as the physical needs,” I chuckle.
“The fog makes everything feel really grey, though,” Meghan adds. “Do you ever feel like there isn't enough color?”
I shake my head. “There's plenty of color in my house, and my oak tree has color. And the Eridians themselves, they come in so many colors. My students love it when I describe their colors to them, even though they have absolutely no context for what that means.”
“What makes them such different colors, anyway?” Meghan asks curiously. “I don't really know much about their biology.”
“Part of it depends on what region of the world they're from,” I say. “Hematite and some silicates are the base for all Eridians’ carapaces, with trace minerals providing the color we see. Different trace minerals are more common in different places, and their carapaces are built with environmental minerals. But heritability plays a big role as well. The minerals in the egg when the pebble is developing for their first carapace, their first instar, is provided by the parents. And whatever that starting carapace is made of will affect what other minerals the kid can absorb as they're growing up. Some of them have a particular affinity for copper compounds, like Adrian, so they're blue or green. Some absorb a lot of extra iron, so they're red or orange. Some bind to sulfur, so they're yellowish. I've been working on a paper about the evolutionary advantages to this carapace composition diversity, actually. Haven't had the time or energy to finish it, but I gave Dr. Lutfi all of my notes.”
I really, really like Dr. Lutfi. They're exactly the kind of person I'd have been friends with back in my academia days on Earth, someone with enormous ideas and the conviction to stick to them. I have to admit, the idea of sending new research papers back to Earth, to be published again on Earth, co-authoring a paper with Dr. Lutfi…it sends a thrill down my spine. It's kinda funny to imagine a bunch of stuffy old journal editors trying to figure out whether to credit me posthumously or as a living author.
“And remind me how old your students are,” Meghan says.
“Anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two Earth years,” I reply. “They're all pretty new to their fourth instar. This is my fifth cohort of kids I've taught on Erid, with three classes per cohort. I get them for about two and a half Earth years, and then they move on. This cohort started with me only about three months ago.”
“They're pretty new to you, too, then!”
We're almost to the doors to the classroom. “They are,” I confirm. “But you and I know better than any other human on the planet that it doesn't take long at all to get attached to a new class of kids. They're good kids. You're going to love them.”
Meghan smiles at me. “I will. I know I will.”
I press the button to slide the door open. “Go on in,” I invite.
She bites her lip, eyes wide with excitement, and steps into my classroom.
The largest thing in my classroom, of course, is my keyboard and organ that I use to speak Eridian to my students. After that, it's my star system models. The Solar system hangs from the ceiling on my side of the classroom, and I've painted it with the colors of the planets. The 40-Eridani system on the other side of the xenonite wall isn't painted, but it is textured. Both are mechanized, capable of demonstrating orbital motion when I flick a switch. They're usually turned off, though, because the constant overhead movement is distracting to young Eridians. Next to my keyboard is a shelf full of trinkets and artwork and other gifts that my students have given me over the years, including a little chip from each of their carapaces. That might seem a little weird to a human, but it’s a normal thing for an Eridian to give a piece of their carapace to a person who's an important part of their life. All of those mementos are labeled with the name of the kids who gave it to me, both in English with the name I gave them and in the Eridian carved letters with their name in their own language.
Meghan lingers at that shelf, reading all of the names. I wait by my keyboard. “Are any of these your current students?” she asks.
“Some of the artwork is from these kids you're about to meet. But the carapace pieces are all my old classes. They give me those on their last day of class with me,” I say, and I feel a lump in my throat. I have to laugh. “And I can't talk about that or I'm going to cry, so come here and let me show you how to say good morning, class, okay?”
She comes over to me eagerly. I show her the octave pedals and explain how and when to use them to convey emotional tone, and I teach her a few words and phrases.
And then I say, “They didn't invent this technology for me, you know. I mean, they built this one for me, to be the right size and shape for my body, but the basic principle has existed for a long time. There are portable versions of this kind of device for folks who don't have the use of all five vocal cords necessary to speak fluent Eridian.”
“It's a prosthetic, but also technically an AAC device,” Meghan says. “That's what I thought when you first described your keyboard to me.”
“Exactly. And I thought you might want to see a more typical one in action,” I add. “So I invited somebody to come to class early. I'm going to introduce you to one of my students, Pause, and their little sibling, Felix. One of their parents is going to be here, too. I call them Kade. Felix is in their second instar, so they're quite a bit smaller than Pause.” I gesture with my hands to show Meghan about how large Felix is. They're about the size of a small rabbit, maybe eight inches wide. I could pick them up with one hand if they didn't weigh probably almost a hundred pounds in this gravity (and if I could touch them without burning my skin, of course).
Meghan nods. “Can I ask a very silly question?” she blurts out.
“Go for it, I love silly questions.”
“You have referred to every single Eridian other than Rocky with they/them pronouns,” Meghan says. Then she reaches for the keyboard and plays one of the phrases I just taught her: “You explain (polite tone indicator), question?” (Can you explain what that means, please?)
“Well remembered,” I say. “And, uh, Rocky is special. I started calling him he before I knew anything about Eridian culture or biology, but Eridians don't have separate sexes. And Rocky is…a little possessive over being the only Eridian with gendered pronouns. He liked sharing with me. It probably would have made more sense to come up with an Eridian-specific pronoun in English than to use they, but…” I shrug. “Didn't occur to me until I was too used to doing it this way.”
“Thank!” Meghan plays. In English, she adds, “That makes sense. So, does Felix use a keyboard or something like it as an AAC tool?”
“Not quite a keyboard, but yeah. Felix is gonna look a little different from the Eridians you've seen so far. They've got a condition that I'll translate as quadrilateralism,” I say. “So, most Eridians are pentalaterally symmetrical. But about three in every ten thousand pebbles hatched end up with a different symmetry. Quadrilateralism is the only potentially survivable one. Hexalateral pebbles rarely end up even hatching, and trilateral pebbles don't usually make it through their first molt. But quadrilaterals like Felix have about a forty percent chance of making it to adulthood. At least with modern medicine. It used to be a much smaller chance.”
“Ohh,” Meghan says softly. She sits down in the seat at my keyboard. I'm in my wheelchair today, so I don't need it. “What causes it? Do you know?”
“Mm-hmm, it's pretty well studied. The closest analogy using Earth genetics, Mendelian genetics, would be that it's a recessive mutation of a major Hox gene. Obviously not the same mechanism, but some Eridian worker cells are in charge of making the body plan layout of a new pebble forming inside an egg,” I explain. “If just one parent's egg has worker cells with a mutation that dysregulates that process, the Hox-type cells in the other parent's egg usually compensate and keep the developing pebble on track to be pentalateral. But if both parents happen to lay eggs with a mutation that messes with body plan, you end up with a pebble with atypical symmetry.”
“So does it run in families?” Meghan asks.
“Yep, it does. It sometimes doesn't show up for generations, because it's recessive so it needs to come from both parents. But if a pair of mates has one pebble with it, they're very likely to have another,” I say. “It's about a twenty five percent chance. Two pebbles in Pause's litter were also quadrilateral. Neither of them made it to their fourth instar.”
Meghan takes a shaky breath. “Oh.”
I put a hand on her arm. “Before modern medicine, it was pretty much expected that only one to three pebbles from each litter of five would make it through all of their molts to adulthood,” I murmur. “Now, it's still common to lose at least one. It makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Eridians live a long time and they can have up to five litters of five pebbles in a lifetime. They're more r-selected than humans are, but humans also used to be more r-selected, before vaccines and pasteurization and all of the other things that made infant mortality drop. They had more babies because not all of them were going to survive. Most Eridian parents now only have one or two litters, and more and more pairs are choosing not to have their own litters at all, and that keeps the population stable.”
“The molting,” Meghan says. “That's what causes the mortality?”
“It's a dangerous time in an Eridian's life,” I say. “It's scary, and painful, and it gets worse each time. Also, they don't talk about it in polite company, so the process isn't something to casually bring up in conversation. You can ask a kid what instar they're at, that's fine. Though after a little while, it gets pretty easy to tell, honestly. They're usually proportioned a little differently each time.”
“Duly noted,” says Meghan.
“What else?” I muse. “Mmm, quadrilateralism usually comes along with intellectual disability. It varies in severity, but it causes memory issues, distractability, some trouble with complex language and concepts. Quadrilateral adults struggle to participate in thrums since their vocal cord prosthetic doesn't resonate in the hive mind in the same way that a natural one does.”
“When you say Felix is in their second instar, what does that mean developmentally?” asks Meghan.
“Great question. Think early elementary school,” I say. “They're out of the baby and toddler stage of that first instar before they had any molts, but still really little.” I grin. “Also, they think I'm basically the coolest person on the planet since I have four limbs like they do. And since you also have four limbs, you will probably be added to that very awesome and exclusive club in their mind.”
Just then, there's a tapping at the classroom door on the other side of the xenonite. I hit the button to let them in, and the door opens. In tumbles Pause and Felix. Felix is a little darker red than their bigger orange sibling. Their parent trots into the classroom after the kids, greeting me politely while their kids shriek with delight and rush up to the wall.
“Hi, Kade!” I call and play at the same time. “Thanks again for agreeing to let Felix come show us their voice. And hey, buddy, slow down! We're not going anywhere.”
Felix trips in their eagerness to get to the wall. “The second alien! The second alien!” they exclaim, sprawled on their back and trying without much success to squirm their way upright with their stubby little legs. “I hear the second alien, Pause!”
Pause hauls their little sibling back up with one limb and waves at me with a second. “Hi, Teacher Grace!” they say. “Hi, second alien! Welcome to our classroom!”
“This is Teacher—shoot, wait, do you want to be Teacher Thayer or Teacher Meghan in this classroom?” I ask her. I should have checked about that before.
“Oh! Let's go with Teacher Thayer,” Meghan says.
“This is Teacher Thayer! She's a friend of mine,” I tell the kids. Since she doesn't have an Eridian name yet, I just don't play anything when I say Thayer.
“Hi,” Meghan says softly. She stands up and goes over to the wall, looking down at the kids with love and wonder in her eyes. She kneels down to be on the same level as them. “You're Felix and Pause, right? It's so nice to meet you.”
“You are bigger than Teacher Grace,” Felix observes bluntly, and I try not to laugh.
The humans’ translator devices are still working on catching up to Eridian grammar since all of the information I sent back to Earth about what Rocky was teaching me of the Eridian language was just about vocabulary and not grammar. Meghan squints at her translator, which says [Mass yours (more than) Grace-(respectful) teacher comparison.]
“Felix is making the very astute observation that my mass is pretty small for a human,” I say. “They haven't had anyone to compare it to before. You're right, Felix, I am pretty thin.”
“Oh!” Meghan laughs. “Yes, that's right. And I'm on the larger end of average. You know, Felix, you're the smallest Eridian I've ever seen.”
All four of Felix's legs straighten indignantly. “I'm big! Grown up! Second instar! Lots of people littler than me.”
“Well, yes, but remember, Teacher Thayer has never seen a baby in their first instar!” I say.
“It's true,” Meghan confirms. “I haven't.”
“You are very new to Erid,” Felix says. The name of the planet is the first word they've said that requires a fifth note, and they reach up and swiftly twist a knob on the little device mounted to their carapace. That tunes a metal wire stretched across the device to the note they need to finish the word. A second claw plucks the string and the word rings out flawlessly. They're good at it. There’s only a momentary hesitation between the previous word and Erid. “Do you like it here?”
I wait to see if Meghan needs me to translate any of that. I think it's simple enough that her software should be able to handle it. Sure enough, she says, “Yes, I like the planet. I think it is beautiful.” She types that into her little device and lets it play out. The words are in a strange order for an Eridian sentence, of course, but again, it's such a simple statement that the meaning gets across.
“You talk different,” Felix notes. “You make sounds with your body I don't know, but also talk with that thing in my kind of words.” Now Meghan does look over at me for help, so I give a translation. We chat back and forth for a while about the similarities and differences between what Meghan is using as a translation and speech aid and what Felix uses as their fifth vocal cord and what I’m using as all five vocal cords while I speak Eridian to translate. And then Felix says, “Teacher Second-Alien, why don’t you have a name that I can say?”
“Oh! Well, because I haven’t been given a name in Eridian yet,” Meghan answers.
Felix bounces on all four legs. “Can we give?! Can we give?!” they squeak.
Meghan takes a very shaky breath. I’m grinning. I had hoped for this. If the pebbles hadn’t suggested it, I was going to before the conversation was over. “Absolutely,” Meghan says. “Yes, yes, yes. I would love that.”
Pause, who saw the process of me finding English names for all of their classmates, steps in to help their baby sibling with the logistics. “What does your name mean in human languages?” they ask.
“My given name, Meghan, means pearl,” Meghan says.
“Huh! I didn’t know that,” I interject. “Does it really?”
“Mm-hmm, it comes from Margaret, which is Latin for pearl. And a pearl is a precious gem made by little marine creatures,” Meghan tells the kids. “They make a smooth round mineral blob around something that gets into their shell and annoys them so it can’t hurt them anymore. And humans come along and find those blobs, and we think they’re beautiful, so we make them into jewelry.”
With that explanation, we start to discuss name options. Pause fixates on pearls being used in human jewelry and comes up with a plethora of names based on different stones that are used in Eridian jewelry. Felix gets hung up on the fact that pearls are usually round, and they insist that Meghan’s Eridian name should be a word I translate as “marble”. The translation is my closest approximation to the round metal ball toys that pebbles play with by setting them rolling towards other marbles while one of them is crouched in wait with the goal of reaching out with a quick claw and grabbing the moving marble as close to the stationary ones as possible but before they clink together. (Ambush predator play is a little different from persistence hunter play; Eridians don't really do tag, though they do play a version of hide-and-seek.)
Importantly, this word is very much not a name, and Pause refuses to consider it, which makes Felix upset, and then the siblings have a bit of a scuffle. Felix, being about a third of Pause’s weight and having only four (still rather stubby) legs, loses.
“Not fair! Not fair!” Felix yelps. Pause is dangling them in the air by one leg.
“Oh, dear,” Meghan says, looking at me anxiously. She seems understandably startled by the little altercation.
But I just chuckle. “Siblings,” I tell her. “I don’t let my students act like that in class, but there’s not much I can do about siblings.”
Pause gives Felix a shake. “The new alien is a person,” they say very sternly. “Not a pet! They need a person name! You can’t just name them after your favorite toy.”
Felix wriggles and chirps a little distress call. “Mama! Help!” (I translate the affectionate baby-word for parent as mama despite there not being any gender to it; it's a different word than the grown-up word for talking about parents generally. Just like the word mama and many of its variations in different languages for humans, it's a simple, repetitive, two-syllable word made up of one of the first sounds that new babies can make intentionally. The universality of that pattern made me sob the first time I heard and understood the Eridian word.)
“Your big sibling is right, Felix. That’s a person, and they need a person name,” Kade says calmly.
“Marble can be a person name!” Felix insists.
“That’s dumb!” Pause says. “You’re being dumb!”
“Pause, that wasn’t very kind!” I interject.
At the same time, Kade bursts out with a little warning-frequency, basically telling Pause in no uncertain terms to knock it off. A little roughhousing during a disagreement before being mature enough to settle it with a thrum is acceptable, but Kade and I both draw the line at being mean, it seems.
Pause sets Felix down carefully, humming an apology tone right away. After a second of sulking where they run off and hide behind Kade’s legs, Felix acquiesces to join in with the “it’s okay, I forgive you” pair of notes, synching to form a word for which there is no direct English equivalent but which essentially means, “okay, our relationship survived whatever conflict just occurred”.
“Well done, little ones,” Kade says. “Try again.”
With a lot more patience, Pause says, “Felix, a lot of people already don’t think of the aliens like Teacher Grace as being fully people, and not as grown-ups either, because they have shorter lives than we do. Giving Teacher Second-Alien a name is a very important thing and a big honor. We need to be responsible and give them a good name that grown-ups will respect and take seriously.”
“Okay, okay. I just don’t know what else to name them, they’re so weird.” Felix comes back up to the wall where Meghan is still sitting quietly. They put a claw on the wall and tap with a low hum, trying to send some echolocating vibrations through to get a better “look” at Meghan.
“Lean against the wall, Teacher Thayer,” I suggest softly.
Meghan rests her shoulder and side against the wall and puts her hand right where Felix is touching. I’ve been translating the argument for her, so she knows what’s going on. “Felix, maybe you know the answer to this one for me. Do Eridians ever have shorter names that their friends call them?”
It doesn’t quite come across with Meghan’s translator. I help out, telling Felix that she wants to know if Eridians have brief-names—basically nicknames in English. It’s a different connotation for Eridians. Most name-words are 4-8 chorded syllables long and they are said fairly swiftly and aren’t often abbreviated. Except for in a thrum, where one chord out of the name is used to identify each member of the thrum when they join and exit. Kind of like a call sign, I guess. There are also affectionate pet name type nicknames within families, but those aren’t individualized to the person. It’s more like calling someone “love” or “baby” or “darling”.
Felix eagerly gives Meghan the explanation of brief-names, and Meghan in return explains human nicknames. She suggests that Marble could be a special nickname just for Felix to call her, while Pause picks one of the jewelry-stone names to be the name that everyone else can use for her. Felix really likes the idea of getting to do a special alien culture thing. Everyone seems happy with that arrangement. The jewelry name is settled on and we chat more about what Felix’s schooling looks like and what they’re interested in before it’s time for my class to start. Those students will be arriving in a minute or so, and Pause will come back inside with their friends. On their way out, Felix says, “Goodbye, Teacher Grace! Goodbye, Teacher Marble!”
“Bye, Felix!” Meghan calls.
Halfway out the door, mostly just to Kade, Felix adds, “I can’t wait until I’m big enough to come to Teacher Grace’s class!”
The soundproof door shuts behind the little family.
“Did Felix just say they want to take this class, too?” Meghan says with a smile in her voice.
“Yeah.” There isn’t a smile in mine, but I’m not sure Meghan picks up on it.
“How long before they’d be old enough?” She stands up off the floor and relocates to my keyboard bench again.
“Felix has another five years of their second instar and then seventeen years of their third, give or take a couple years because some kids grow a little faster or slower than average. But it’ll be about 22 years before they’d be ready to take this class.” I drum my fingers on the arm of my wheelchair in the same pattern Rocky does when he’s thinking and has nothing else to do with his claws.
“Oh—ooh,” Meghan says, realizing.
I don’t want to talk about the likelihood that I’ll still be alive in 22 years. I also don’t want to talk about whether I’ll still be on Erid even if I do live that long.
Luckily, I don’t have to. Saved by the bell (almost literally). The door opens and my students come flooding in. There’s an immediate high, excited, chattering hum throughout the whole room. I can't pick out individual words. It's almost thrum-like in its choral agreement. All of my kids are saying basically the same thing as they react with abundant enthusiasm to Meghan's presence in the classroom. I warned them ahead of time to go straight to their desks if they wanted to get to ask questions in a timely manner. Most of them stick to that agreement. The couple of kids who get too excited and start rushing down to the wall get quickly hauled back and shoved towards their seats by more restrained classmates. All told, it's the quickest I've ever seen this group get settled and ready for class. They even quiet down before I say anything. They're on their best behavior to impress the guest.
I grin at them all and play our greeting hum an octave higher than usual to convey to the kids that I'm also very excited. Meghan joins in. She matches the tone pretty well, but not perfectly, and a couple of pebbles get distracted and laugh. I don't think she notices, thankfully.
“Good morning, class,” I tell them. “As you can hear, we have a very special guest visiting us today. This is Teacher Thayer.” I play the name that Pause had given her only a little while ago, and I hear them let out a delighted chirp. I say a little bit about Meghan and the mission she came on, tell the kids they'll be allowed to ask questions for pretty much the whole class period, and add, “Remember, Teacher Thayer doesn't speak your language like I do, so please be patient while I translate.”
Then Meghan introduces herself and greets the class. Her teaching voice is very sweet: bubbly and kind without being grating or overly sugary. As soon as she finishes and we open the room up to questions, there are more claws in the air than there are students in the class. I chuckle and start calling on kids beginning in the top left corner of the room so I can keep track of who has already asked a question for fairness's sake. “Chime?”
With a little exclamation of surprise (they aren't expecting to get called on first), Chime stammers for a second and then asks, “How old are you, Teacher Thayer?”
“I'm 49 Earth years old,” Meghan answers. “Younger than Teacher Grace but older than all of you!”
As always when they're confronted by human lifespans, the class murmurs in shock. I move on to the next kid in the row.
“Are you always happier than Teacher Grace?” Crescendo asks.
“Am I—huh?” Meghan says, looking over at me with confusion.
I had translated without thinking to explain. “Because your voice has a higher register than mine,” I say, gesturing to my throat.
“Oh! Right. No, that's just the way my voice naturally sounds. I have a pretty high speaking voice, but it stays like that whether I'm happy or sad.”
Next question. “Do you have a mate on your planet?” Mal wants to know.
Meghan kinda laughs. “Nope, no mate for me. I've never been the kind of human who wants a partner like that.”
“Just like Teacher Grace,” Mal says.
With a curious glance at me, Meghan says, “Well, lots of humans are like that!”
I give her a bit of a shrug and call on the next pebble.
“Did you teach human kids that were the same age as Teacher Grace's human students?” Beatrix says.
“Pretty much, yeah! A little younger sometimes. My students were anywhere from eleven to fourteen Earth years old.”
“Did you teach science?” asks Prism.
“Sometimes. I taught a little of everything,” Meghan replies. “My students were the ones who needed more help and support when they were learning than the average human kid their age. So we worked on all kinds of subjects and life skills in my classroom.”
“Maddie?” I say next.
“Since you're shaped differently than Teacher Grace, does that mean you're a different—” Maddie cuts themself off with a stuttery hum of self-correction. “Well, not instar, you don't do that. I guess, why are you a different shape?”
“Oh! I know!” Minnow blurts out. “Teacher Thayer must be the other reproductive type that humans have.”
I turn a bit red as I translate that for Meghan. “You'd think I'd be able to escape from teaching health class to pre-teens all the way on another planet,” I mutter to her.
Meghan giggles, but she takes it in stride and gives the pebbles a very thoughtful answer about human sexual dimorphism and gender expression. Even when the next question is an innocent inquiry about whether that means that Meghan and I could theoretically make a baby human together, she doesn't seem thrown off or embarrassed like I am (I really should have seen this kind of question coming). She just answers that well, even theoretically, no, because she's a little too old for that (which, again, shocks the pebbles) and also because she had the organ where offspring can grow removed before she left Earth. I'm impressed. She handled it better than I could.
The next few questions are all about Earth. What it was like living through the Astrophage crisis, what Meghan's favorite things on Earth were (she makes the mistake of mentioning cherries, which we then have to explain as being a type of food, which sets the class off tittering, but they reign themselves in pretty quick and I don't even have to beg them to please be more mature), and how the particular Earth animals they're named after are faring (Gazelle, Sparrow, Minnow, and Fawn are my critter crew in this class).
And then the conversation turns to me. They want to know how humans on Earth talk about me, whether I'm as famous there as I am on Erid, whether Earth is sad that I never came home. Whether they miss me.
I have a hard time translating some of those questions. There's a lump in my throat. Meghan notices my voice getting wobbly (so do the pebbles, but since I've never explained to them what that means, they don't really have the context to understand how emotional I'm getting) and comes over to me to put a supportive hand on my shoulder. Then, of course, the pebbles want to know why she's touching me, and we have to explain that humans use physical contact to convey social support and reassurance in the same way that Eridians use sound to do the same thing like with synching words. Luckily, they don't hone in on the fact that I've been without that for a very long time. I don't think I could handle explaining touch starvation to my students right now.
“Why do you not use a stick to lean on while you walk or a wheelchair like Teacher Grace?” Phobos asks. “Your bodies both didn't evolve for our gravity here.”
“If I stayed on Erid for twenty years like Teacher Grace has, I'm sure I would need a cane or a wheelchair,” Meghan says. “But I've been training to get stronger in gravity halfway between Earth's and Erid's for four years now, so my body can handle the gravity here just fine for the months before I head back to Earth. I'll probably have some arthritis when I'm older because of all of this time in high gravity, and that's okay. Having all of these incredible opportunities and experiences are more than worth it. And when I get back to Earth, I'll be well taken care of.”
I like that answer. I call on the next pebble.
Sequoia shifts and fidgets nervously with their claws. Shyly, they ask, “Will you miss Teacher Grace? When you go back to Earth?”
I freeze, my heart starting to race. Meghan waits for me to translate the question. I can't. Buried in Sequoia's precious, sensitive query is the choice I can't bear to look too closely at or discuss with anyone on the crew. Instead of saying anything to Meghan, I play just in Eridian, “That is a good question, buddy, but I think it will make Teacher Thayer very sad to think about right now. I’ll miss them, and I'm sure they feel the same way. Can you pick a different question to ask them for me to translate?”
The class is quiet, letting Sequoia think. Eventually, Sequoia says, “Can Teacher Thayer tell us about your old students who are here on Erid now?”
And yeah, that's a question I'll happily translate. None the wiser to the exchange she missed entirely, Meghan starts to talk warmly about Imara and Yiming and how much she's enjoyed becoming friends with them over the long voyage. I relax. My heart stops pounding.
I don't have to decide anything. Not yet. Not today.
Excerpt from To Us, He Was Just Mr. Grace: A Biography of Dr. Ryland Grace by Yiming Hart
The very first interview that I conducted for this book, long before it was actually conceived of as a book, was for an essay that I wrote during my senior year of high school. My very patient dear friend Rebecca Russell, who I've mentioned a few times in other chapters, sat down with me on my bedroom floor and let me ask her a series of questions while I scribbled down notes in a tattered composition book with a bright orange cover.
“What was your first impression of Mr. Grace?” I asked her.
“My very first impression of him was that he had a nice smile,” Rebecca replied. “He didn't say a whole lot in the IEP meeting I had at the end of seventh grade with the eight grade teachers, but at one point my parents were doing the thing where they talked about me like I wasn't there, and I felt like I wasn't there. Mr. Grace looked right over at me and he made eye contact and he smiled, and I stopped being invisible. But then my first impression of him in the classroom was when he lit that $20 bill on fire, and I was like, is he allowed to do that? What if he sets off the fire alarm? Is this guy crazy?”
(I later asked the administrators at the school if Dr. Grace had been allowed to use open flames in demonstrations that weren't part of a standards-based lesson. As long as everyone close to the flame was wearing proper protective equipment and he didn't set off the fire alarm*, he was in the clear. We didn't have to evacuate and he was wearing safety goggles while everyone else was almost ten feet away, so it turns out that he wasn’t doing anything untoward.)
“What was your favorite lesson or activity that he gave us?” was my next question.
“Remember when we were learning about evolution,” Rebecca said, “and we did the experiment with the spoons and the clothespins and the chopsticks and the straws?”
“The Bird Beak Bonanza.”
“Yeah. Darwin's finches. And we had to figure out which beak was best at picking up the most marshmallows, or dry spaghetti, or birdseed, or sugar water,” said Rebecca.
“Sammy ended up with the sugar water all down the front of his shirt,” I recalled.
“Because someone knocked the whole container over trying to prove that he was good enough with chopsticks to win with them at that station even though that's basically impossible.”
“Really? I don't remember that,” I said innocently. “I wonder who that could have been. The knowledge must be lost to time.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes.
“So that was your favorite lesson?”
“Yeah, but not because the activity was fun. I did stuff like that in OT all the time as a kid, it wasn’t novel. Do you remember what happened after that, when Mr. Grace was explaining natural selection?”
“Not specifically.”
“Someone** asked if that was the same thing as survival of the fittest,” Rebecca said. “Mr. Grace said, well, kinda, but it’s a stupid phrase.”
“He didn't say it like that, surely.”
“He didn't call it stupid in those words,” Rebecca agreed. “But that's basically what he meant. Anyway, the kid who asked the question said something like well, but, animals who are strong and can fight everyone else off are always going to be the ones who do best. They're the ones who survive, ‘cause the world is all kill or be killed, and anybody who isn't strong enough to take care of themselves just dies. And then our classmate said, if natural selection is really how it works and if animals are all evolving to get stronger and better at fighting to survive, and if humans are just animals, why do people like her exist?” At this, Rebecca gestured to herself. “And he pointed at me.”
Now I remembered. The same indignant rage flooded me sitting on my bedroom carpet that I had felt in the classroom five years earlier. Rage, but also shame. I hadn't said anything. I wasn't very good at speaking up, not for myself or for anybody else.
Rebecca continued, “And I mean, I froze. And I just looked at Mr. Grace, and I thought for a second…for just a second, I thought he was just going to shrug it off, or tell the kid it wasn’t polite to ask questions like that and move on. But no, he said, that’s a good question. He said, in a world with evolution by natural selection, why do people with disabilities exist? He said—and I’ve researched all of this since then, I have all of these articles printed out and put in a binder that lives under my bed—the earliest evidence of a human who lived for a long time with a disability was an older man who lived 500,000 years ago with an injured back. He probably couldn’t walk very well, not for years, probably would have needed a cane. Couldn’t have hunted for himself or taken care of himself. And there was a young adult with Klippel-Feil syndrome, with a fused spine, who would have been paralyzed since he was a teenager but lived for years. That was 4,000 years ago. There was a Neanderthal, 45,000 years ago, who had part of an arm amputated and was probably mostly blind and deaf and would have limped, and he was older when he died. One of the pharaohs of Egypt, 3,000 years ago, had cerebral palsy like me and lived to adulthood. Mr. Grace rattled off all those examples and asked again, so how come those people, who probably couldn’t survive on their own, didn’t just die? Why do people with disabilities exist?”
“I remember this now,” I said quietly.
She nodded. “Do you remember what he said next?”
“Not as well as you do, probably.”
“He said, because our communities and our families live better lives when we take care of each other. It is not just the right and kind thing to do to take care of people who can no longer or never could fend for themselves, it is also evolutionarily advantageous. If evolution is about the survival of the fittest, then the fittest humans aren’t necessarily the ones who can chuck a spear the hardest or run the furthest or fight the biggest bear. The fittest humans, the ones most likely to survive all of the dangers of the prehistoric world, were the ones who looked out for each other. The ones who could collaborate well enough to feed and protect anyone who wasn’t physically strong enough to make it on their own. Because humans didn’t evolve as solitary hunters in a kill-or-be-killed world. We were never meant to have to look out for ourselves. We’re an obligate social species. No human could survive without the help of other humans. And that, he said, is why people with disabilities exist. Because we all make each other stronger.”
“Yeah.” I smiled at her. “Was it just me, or did it sound kinda like Mr. Grace was furious underneath how calm he sounded when he asked the kid if that made sense?”
“Oh, he was this close to biting the kid’s head off if he said anything else stupid,” Rebecca laughed. “Our classmate knew better than to argue, I think.”
“Did he say anything to you about that exchange after class?” I wondered.
Rebecca nodded. “Mm-hmm. He stopped me after class to ask me if I was okay. And said that he was sorry if he had made it sound like…oh, what did he say? Something about hoping he hadn’t implied that disabled people have to justify their existence in any way. And then when I was like, it’s fine, Mr. Grace, you handled that super well, most people would have just looked the other way, he told me…” She got a distant look on her face. Her eyes were shiny—not quite teary, but just on the edge of it. “He told me that he was so glad that I was in his class, and he hoped that I’d always remember that. Well, I’m sure as hell never going to forget it now.”
*Footnote: Most public school science classrooms in the United States are equipped with heat detectors and not smoke detectors specifically so that small flames being used for labs don't set off school-wide fire alarms and cause an evacuation.
**Footnote: When I asked Rebecca, upon polishing up the notes from this amateur interview to include in the first draft of the book, whether she wanted me to include the name of our classmate in this segment (I have mentioned him by name in other segments of the book), she told me no. She would prefer that I left his name out because, like Mr. Grace said, it was a good question. Nobody knows anything until they are taught it, and the question came from a place of ignorance and not malice. She didn’t want to shame anybody for not knowing something. This is why she is studying to become a history teacher, and also why she is going to make an amazing one. (She has now told me three times to take that sentence out of the final draft. Absolutely not. I’ve promised to use this book to tell the truth, haven’t I? Sorry, Bex. It stays.)
Imara had gotten used to close quarters and cramped living spaces after spending so much of her life in orbit on a space station around Earth, then on a mission to Mars, and then after four years and four months on the Terra’s Grace. She thought that she understood the restrictive nature of living on a spaceship, the way there seemed to be a wall every way she turned and that even the screen room that could simulate the sights and sounds and even air movement of outdoor Earth environments created the unshakeable feeling of being trapped, confined, unable to run or escape no matter how fast she sprinted on the treadmill. She wasn’t claustrophobic (nobody on the crew could be, it was an instant deal-breaker for an applicant), but nobody could live in a spaceship with so little square footage of living space without feeling a little cooped up now and again.
But the sense of the walls closing in around her on the Terra’s Grace was absolutely nothing compared to how it felt on the Hail Mary.
Visiting the Hail Mary hadn’t been an immediate priority. There was no necessary science to do there. It was just…well, cool. And the Eridians still had a space elevator hooked up to the Hail Mary in a geostationary orbit just like the Terra’s Grace (close enough that the Hail Mary was actually visible to the Terra’s Grace’s hull cameras), so it was an easy enough operation to arrange. As soon as things had calmed down enough to start doing non-essential mission functions, Imara had requested access to humanity’s first interstellar spaceship.
She had asked Dr. Grace if he would be willing to take them up and give them a tour. He told her very decisively but not impolitely that nothing in the galaxy could possibly convince him to get on board that spacecraft again. Imara had not pressed the issue. He probably had a lot of terrible memories from when he was aboard the ship, and she didn’t want him to have to relive those.
Floating just past the airlock in her big atmosphere suit (theoretically the Hail Mary was maintained by the Eridians with Earth atmosphere and temperature, but no human had been up to check in a while so it was better to take precautions), Imara was struck so immediately and with such severity by just how tiny this ship was that it knocked the wind out of her. She actually sucked in a breath and held it long enough that the vitals monitor of her suit gave a worried little warning beep at her and she had to remind herself to breathe again.
The two airlocks opened directly into the Hail Mary’s control center, which was…well, it was tiny, and it was gutted. The room was about four meters wide and not quite three meters tall at the highest point, with the ceiling slanted inwards along the same angle as the conical nose of the exterior of the ship. There were a couple of monitors still attached to the tilted walls, but the rest had been ripped off, leaving dangling cords and bare patches of metal. On the floor sat the remains of a mechanism that had once anchored the pilot seat. Rough, sharp edges of plates of metal that were never supposed to have been exposed jutted up. Some bits looked like they had been broken and cobbled back together and then broken again deliberately. Imara recalled the “armchair” in Dr. Grace’s house on the surface—it had been reupholstered and probably padded out, but the framework and some of the stuffing must have been repurposed from this exact chair.
Imara had seen plenty of photographs of the interior of the Hail Mary from when it was getting assembled in orbit. She knew what it was supposed to look like. And she had seen the declassified photos that had been included on the hard drives that the beetles carried back to Earth, so she knew objectively that there had been clear xenonite panels forming tunnels and partitions where Rocky could move throughout the ship. Seeing it in person was a completely different story, though. It cut into the functional living area of the ship so much, and it looked so…alien.
“Commander, are we clear to move around the ship?” Jayden asked, his voice coming through clearly on the suits’ radio comms.
“Yes,” Imara said, shaking herself out of her shock. “Yes, go ahead.”
There were three crew members who had accompanied her into the Hail Mary. Jayden was there for security reasons and also because he was a very good photographer, and they wanted to document all of the changes to the Hail Mary since it left Earth. Makala, the ship engineer from FurthestReach and one of Imara’s dearest friends, had come along to examine how well different ship systems had held up over the years, what had needed repairs, and how those repairs had been handled. And then Kokhta, the ethologist who studied animal (including human) behavior and had once written a paper on behavioral adaptations to captivity in intelligent species, was there to see if there was any physical evidence left behind about what Dr. Grace and Rocky had gotten up to in their years alone together on the ship.
Makala got to work quietly, examining the places where bits of technology had been forcibly removed from the ship and pointing out specific things for Jayden to take photos of. Imara headed for the hatch and ladder leading to the next segment of the ship, the laboratory, and Kokhta came with her.
The laboratory was just as torn apart as the control center. Maybe more so. There were none of the scientific instruments left along the walls or on any of the shelves. That made sense. They had probably all been given to the Eridians to study, since a lot of Earth science was more advanced in many ways than Erid science.
“It’s so empty,” Kokhta marveled out loud. “And it wouldn’t have felt nearly this spacious when it was full of equipment.”
Spacious. A circular room just over twelve feet across and just under ten feet high, spacious.
On Earth, Mr. Grace had always been opening windows in the classroom, keeping the door propped open, and taking the class outside (before the unfortunately timed lockdown that had made him too nervous to keep doing that). There were no windows on the Hail Mary except in the airlocks. There was no sunshine, no drifting coo of a mourning dove, no cool breeze wafting in through a door kept ajar with a big chunk of speckled granite. Imara was struggling to picture him spending almost five years in this metallic grey cylinder. She kicked lightly off the wall and went over to the table still bolted down in the center of the room, the only major piece of furniture still in place. She put her thickly gloved hands down onto the table, holding herself in place there while her legs floated out behind her.
The almost suffocating weight of this room’s history bore down on her from all sides. When she closed her eyes and opened them again, she almost expected to see the equipment restored and a much younger Dr. Grace, looking like how she remembered him from the classroom, rumpled light brown hair and eyes that sparkled and weren’t yet framed by creases, leaning over the table across from her and peering into a microscope. On the slide would be small amorphous blobs, nothing too special at first glance, devouring the tiny black dots that were killing two planets full of life. It was in this room that the Taumoeba, their single-celled saviors, had been seen for the first time.
Kokhta had already headed deeper into the ship, into the dormitory section. Imara heard a gasp over the comms. “Ohhh, Commander, come see! Come see! Jayden, Makala, get over here!”
Interrupted from her reverie, Imara pushed off the table towards the ladder and pulled herself down into the dormitory. Much more of this space was taken up by the xenonite compartments, including a bulb-shaped protrusion that pressed right up to the side of one of the three oval bunks. Imara caught another glimpse of a ghost of the past, of Dr. Grace curled up in his bunk, tired or sad or not feeling well, while Rocky sat as close as their incompatible atmospheres allowed. She felt like she was seeing something private, intimate, like she was snooping in somebody’s house without their permission.
“Come here, come look,” Kokhta insisted, gesturing to Imara to join her looking into one of the other two bunks.
The curved walls of the bunk weren’t smooth like the one in the bunk by the xenonite bulb. It looked like they had been etched into with some kind of narrow, sharp tool. There were words and drawings, though none of it was particularly neat or professional. In fact, Imara could see lots of sketches that looked like the stick figures that Mr. Grace would draw for diagrams on the board. The largest lettering read, “The Not-So-Golden Record” and underneath it in smaller, scratchier writing, “humanity’s most important accomplishments and pieces of knowledge as decided by me, Dr. Ryland Grace.”
Imara shivered.
“It looks like he would lay down in this bunk and add to it whenever he was bored,” Kokhta was saying. “There’s clearly some parts that were carved with different tools, so it wasn’t all done in one session. Oh, look, look, look!” She pointed at the outline of a hand right in the middle of what would be the ceiling of the bunk in normal gravity conditions.
Makala and Jayden had arrived at Kokhta’s calling and were marveling at the discovery now as well. “Who do you think he made this for?” Jayden wondered. “They didn’t take it out of the ship and bring it down to give the Eridians.”
“I bet he did it just for himself,” said Makala softly. “To remember Earth by.”
Imara wasn’t so sure. “Some of these are jokes,” she said, pointing at a stick figure doodle of two humans clinging to a rectangle and each other, clearly supposed to be Jack and Rose from Titanic. “But some of it is serious. Look, he drew the pyramids, and all of these constellations…mathematical formulas and an explanation of the base 10 number system right next to the handprint. There’s lines from Shakespeare right here. And…”
“A list of curriculum standards for eighth grade science from California in 2019,” Kokhta read aloud. “Right next to an explanation of human developmental stages, and then an explanation of how humans measure time, using…”
“Radioactive half-lives as universal standard periods of time to compare to,” Makala finished. “So this was for someone else.”
“If the Hail Mary never made it to Erid,” Imara said. “If Rocky and Dr. Grace both died somehow on the way and the ship got lost in the vastness of space, this was…this was for in case someone else found the ship someday.
Kokhta gasped. “I wonder—” She kicked off to the other side of the room, peering through the clear xenonite barrier. “Yes! Oh, look! They were doing it together! Like an alien Rosetta stone, with…it must be all the same information, because there’s Rocky’s claw outline and then that looks like an explanation of base 6!”
Imara’s throat felt tight as she looked from one record to the other. They were the same layout, sure enough, mirrored across the room. Cosmic constants and sketches of the two species’ body plans, bits of Eridian writing that must have been famous stories or songs where Grace had written out an Aesop’s fable or the lyrics to Bohemian Rhapsody. And there were silly things, yes, like some poorly drawn renditions of memes that Imara’s classmates might have shown him, but also deeply poignant things like recreations of the shapes of horses in ancient cave paintings and some lines from the poem “The Old Astronomer to his Pupil” which almost brought her to tears.
And then she saw a bit of writing and a small drawing, carved near the bottom of the wall of the bunk, that made her burst out laughing.
“Dear aliens, if you find this and decipher our writings, and your biology just so happens to not be based in H2O dominant chemistry, will you send a message back to Earth from me? Please tell them that Dr. Ryland Grace said I told you so. And show them this symbol. They’ll know what it means.”
The symbol in question was a very meticulously drawn image of a human hand with just the middle finger raised.