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i.
The last time he felt soil, real soil, there was a knee in his back. The grass and dirt and grit were rough against his cheek – it was getting in his mouth as he twisted and bucked. He fought like a cat. Scratching, clawing at the ground. Adrenaline. He wasn’t strong enough.
That was the last time he’d seen Earth’s sky. Felt real gravity. Breeze. Dirt. Human touch.
Then there was the prick of the needle and it was gone forever.
ii.
He dreams about riding his bike. Sometimes he’s in the city, on the way to work, the wind tugging at his hair as he picks up speed. But other times his wheels are bumping down a trail back home – back where? – and the sunlight comes through the trees in blotches, and he knows that he’s about eleven years old by the way his scrawny body feels in the seat and everything is a blur of color.
The first time he put on glasses and could individuate the leaves on those trees was like a miracle. Being able to see the veins and the stems and the way the sunlight hit the tin roof of the MacAulay’s shed – who’s that? – and after his optometrist appointment he rode his bike down to the little stream and stood in the water with his jeans’ cuffs rolled up and the water flowed over his bare feet and it was so cold and clear, and then a rock cut his left foot and there was a little trickle of blood that he staunched with his white tennis sock.
He likes this dream. Even the sharp pain in his foot and the coldness of the water, he likes. Some part of him knows it isn’t real while it’s happening; he cherishes it because he feels – though eleven-year-old Ryland doesn’t understand – that when he wakes up, he will be strapped to his bunk on Mary, so unfathomably far away from Earth that thirty-two-year-old Grace can’t quite wrap his head around it.
Because he will die here. There will be no one to send his body out like he did for the others; Mary will be his tomb. He will waste away slowly, rationing his food until he starves to death. He will not kill himself: he’s too much of a coward.
He forgets, sometimes, that his ending is inevitable. When he and Rocky are doing science, when they figure out the impossible and make something else work that shouldn’t work, when he remembers that his best friend is a freaking space alien and he’s going to save the world, he forgets. His hope is the bright-eyed optimism of a boy seeing leaves for the first time.
iii.
“Grace say Grace will die. Rocky fix.”
The words tear his heart out. Hope always costs him later. It is infectious, joyful, the highest of highs. It sets one up for the lowest of lows – disappointment. Loss. Betrayal.
He can’t let himself be happy. His exes had always said something to that effect, in the end. He protects himself, always, from heartbreak. His anxiety won’t let him be happy for long. Always, the other shoe drops.
The night they make their plan, Grace dreams about Earth again. About the knee in his back, the needle. He gasps awake, a sob or a scream caught in his throat.
“No!”
Rocky, watching him sleep from his side of the bedroom, jerks sharply with surprise. He trills a question, but the laptop is in sleep mode and his brain, also still in sleep mode, catches only the “…question?” part.
He’s panting, heart thudding. Rocky can hear his distress from across the room and scuttles closer, planting two feet against the xenonite panel that separates Grace’s atmosphere from his own.
“Grace sick, question?” Rocky repeats. Or really, ♫♪♬♪♪♫. But the words are simple enough, and he has learned enough Eridian to get by without the computer when his brain is functioning at full capacity.
He shakes his head. “No, I’m fine, sorry.” He runs a hand over his face. “Just a nightmare.”
Rocky makes the new word, question sound.
This is not a two-word kind of conversation. He reaches for the laptop and jiggles the keypad. Lets the software load. Sighs. Some concepts are easier than others.
“A nightmare is a type of dream. Have I told you about dreams?”
“Grace brain hallucinate while Grace sleep.”
“Right, yeah. There are good dreams and bad dreams. Good dreams are like – replaying a happy memory, or inventing a fun story, or doing something impossible, like flying. I can’t fly, on Earth. But maybe in a dream…” He holds his arms out like an airplane and makes a whooshing sound.
“Good dreams make Grace happy, understand. Nightmare bad dream, question?”
“Always getting ahead of me,” he sighs. “Yes. Nightmares are bad dreams. Reliving a sad memory, or feeling scared, or imagining a horrible thing. Sometimes you get hurt or die in a dream, and it wakes you up. It feels real for a second, but then it… fades.”
Rocky hummed in understanding. “Eridians do not do dreams.”
“No, I know.”
“But when sleep, is ♪♬♫. Need word. Not feel safe. Exposed to danger.”
“Vulnerable,” he supplies, and adds it to the laptop’s cache.
“Eridian vulnerable when sleep. When young, feel fear. We watch sleep, feel safer. But still fear.”
He watches Rocky, relaxing. Rocky makes him feel safe in a way he’s not sure he’s ever felt before.
“Rocky sing Grace sleep. No fear. No nightmare.”
“Oh, you don’t have to –”
But then Rocky is making this beautiful sound. His words are always musical, but this is… better. Different. Wordless, seemingly. (Or at least, he can’t parse any words in it. His Eridian isn’t perfect.) It is calming, melodic. His eyes feel heavy. He gets back into his bunk.
“Thanks, Rock,” he sighs. “No nightmare.”
And he sleeps like, well, a rock.
iv.
Rocky can sense when his sleep is disturbed. He watches for it, now, and sings a little of the lullaby – he hates that he calls it that, but there’s no better word for it – when he thinks Grace is on the verge of a nightmare. The sound penetrates his dreams sometimes. It soothes him.
“When Grace nightmare,” Rocky says one evening, much later. “What is Grace dream, question?”
They had been sitting quietly in the rec room, watching the beach. He was thinking about the stream, and cutting his foot on the rock. He thinks maybe that was real. His dreams and his memories are all mixed up, still.
The question startles him. Rocky has been singing to him a lot lately. Since the accident. The burn on his forearm has scabbed over. He knows it will scar. He will have a piece of Rocky forever on his skin, which is something he secretly loves. Like Rocky’s etchings.
“Lately? Adrian. The planet, not your mate.” He doesn’t know why he feels the need to clarify, but he does. “About fishing and just… flying off into space if the tether snapped. Or, after when you –”
Rocky makes an agitated sound. “Bad bad bad.”
“Yes. But the lullaby helps. Thank you.”
“But before Adrian. What is Grace bad dream, question?”
He wants badly to pick at the scabs on his arm. They itch when he’s nervous. He hasn’t told Rocky about Eva or Carl or the knee and the needle. His heart is thundering in his ears.
“The last time I touched Earth,” he says.
“Why bad, question?” Rocky asks. “Why bad dream if Grace love Earth, question?”
“It’s hard to explain…” But of course, Rocky insists. He is patient, he says. They have time, while the computer is running simulations and the Taumoeba are breeding.
He closes his eyes. Lets his brain sit in the dream for a moment. “The last time I touched Earth, there was a knee in my back. I was being held down by a guard, a human with a weapon that could hurt me – could kill me. I was scared, and running, and then he caught me and pushed me down into the dirt and shoved a needle in my neck to inject me with a sedative.”
The story comes out in pieces. Rocky’s questions eat at his omissions, demand clarity. Why was he running? Why was he scared? Each answer bringing the alien new distress. How he was recruited. The explosion. Three hours. His answer. The needle.
“Bad bad bad! Grace forced to come!”
“Yes,” he says. “I wasn’t brave, Rocky. I didn’t volunteer for this mission. I was the only one who could do it, so they made me.”
“Bad humans do bad thing! Very bad! Angry!” Rocky stomps so hard that his ball careens into a screen. Rocky is making frustrated sounds that he thinks might be actual swear words – if Eridians have such a thing.
“Me too,” he sighs, reaching out to grab the ball. He holds it steady while Rocky – the most empathetic rock anyone could ever hope to meet – continues to shake with fury. Every few seconds he lets out another burst of discordant notes that need no translation.
When the noise becomes words again, Rocky’s voice is softer.
“Grace think coward because fear,” the laptop translates his quiet trill. “Wrong.”
He goes very still.
“I was afraid,” he says. “I ran.”
“Good.” Rocky’s answer is immediate.
“Good?”
“Grace run from danger. Correct action.” Rocky taps the panel for emphasis. “Coward stay where bad humans catch Grace.”
“That is… not how we define cowardice.”
“Then humans need better word, statement.”
He snorts, then clamps a hand over his mouth when the laugh turns wet around the edges. He hadn’t realized he was about to cry until the tears are impossible to stop. He turns his face away on instinct.
“Grace leaky blob.” Rocky says. “Is okay. Grace leak. Rocky watch. Need lullaby?”
“No,” he manages. They are quiet together for a long time.
v.
The first time he feels sand again, he cries.
It is ridiculous, really. He has survived interstellar travel, starvation, suffocation, radiation, Taumoeba, and approximately ten thousand near-death experiences caused by enthusiasm and poor planning. He has a PhD. He and his best friend saved two worlds. He is, by any reasonable metric, a grown man.
And yet the moment his bare feet sink into the warm grains of his enclosure’s new beach, tears spill down his face so fast he can’t even pretend otherwise.
“Grace leaking,” Rocky says beside him.
“I know,” Grace chokes out. Because he is eleven in a creek bed, jeans rolled to the calf, water shockingly cold around his ankles. Because he is thirty-two and face-down in grass, choking on terror. Because he is here: he is standing on an alien planet, barefoot in the sand, and it feels real.
“Is good cry, question?” Rocky asks.
“Adrian did a great job,” is what he says, but what he means is thank you. He bends down and puts his hands in the sand.
“They are working on the water,” Rocky reminds him. “But I will tell them sand is good sand.”
It is good sand. He wants to bury his face in it. He lets a handful of grains run through his fingers. He wants to make an hourglass, to measure time in grains of silica.
The last time he felt soil, there had been violence in it. Bile rising in his throat. A needle pricking his skin.
He had thought that memory owned the feeling forever.
But the body is stubborn. It keeps learning new truths.
Sand can mean this too: a friend at his side. No countdown clock, no mission, no one forcing him to go anywhere or do anything. Just gravity and warmth and the simple miracle of standing still on a planet moving through space.