Chapter Text
2052
No human being had seen a selkie since the Hail Mary launched.
That anyone could prove, at least. Any person on the street could have been a selkie, without their coat, but enough people had vanished—random families gone all together, homes left behind, belongings abandoned—that the humans in their wake were able to put together the reports from trusted friends, similar stories around the world, and realize: oh, the selkies all left.
Maybe the much-scattered, human-passing population had decided to leave their human lives for the ocean to ease the strain on the food supply in the coming years, and fish for their own subsistence. Maybe the sub-species had, to a one, decided that they did not trust humans enough to continue living among them as things got steadily worse.
Whatever the truth was, selkies had faded back into legend for most people by the time the beetles arrived.
Nobody thought of the selkies as the beetles’ precious cargo was deorbited, studied, carefully fed, prepared for a journey to Venus. Maybe a few people at home who were old enough to remember, while watching the news, said that maybe the selkies would come back when the sun became bright again. A few children might have laughed at their parents and said that selkies were only from stories, not real life.
Nobody was thinking about the selkies when planning the next general meeting of the UN, to be held in New York, as the sun slowly brightened and the world trained its telescopes on 40 Eridani.
So it was quite a surprise when, all across the east coast, people started walking out of the ocean and heading inland.
2025
There was a small but noticeable personnel shortage on the Project, at the very end.
It happened three days before launch, and none of the missing people were serving in critical roles. A few cafeteria staff didn’t show up to work. A security guard was absent without leave. One of the data analysts on the team monitoring the Sun’s luminosity was found to have abandoned her quarters, last seen on the security cameras from the night before, slipping past the gates.
The one thing they all had in common had been deliberately excised from any possible record. Only someone who knew everything about everyone on the base, or was extraordinarily observant about the smallest details, would have been able to guess what linked all those unrelated people without being told.
Stratt did not plan to start telling.
“You’re not going to do anything?”
“No,” Stratt said. “We’re days away from launch. Do we need those people desperately? No. There is no time to go chasing down unnecessary wild geese. If they have cold feet now, better that they get far away from here, instead of sabotaging us.”
But she knew it wasn’t cold feet.
Stratt had crossed a line, and they’d all put the clues together about what really happened—maybe communally, maybe not. She’d been banking on none of them liking Grace enough to risk their own skins by confronting her about it.
She’d been right. That meant there was one less obstacle between the Hail Mary and success.
2052
“I’m here in Massachusetts as we observe the third day of this enormous surprise march,” said Mary Pike, Channel 11, “and it’s becoming clear that all of the participants are heading towards New York City. The crowds are getting thicker by the day, especially closer to NYC, but we are still seeing new arrivals showing up to make the last part of their trip over land.”
There were chairs and tents on the beaches, now, humans bundled up and keeping a lookout for new participants. The long march was moving at a walking space, so slowly that there were always a few still lingering on the snowy sand. But no one ever emerged from the waves, wrapped in a sealskin, without at least three others to huddle with.
“Locals are dealing with the congestion on streets and sidewalks as best they can,” Mary reported, sketching out in her head how the news report would cut away here, then there, to the clips her team had shot the previous day. “People are setting up stations with hot food and warm drinks along the march’s path, and collecting winter clothes and shoes to distribute for free, as the—the selkies do not appear to have anything but their coats with them.”
And why would they? They’d all been living in the ocean for two and a half decades.
Selkies walked past the camera with marks like shark bites marring their coats, gazes fixed firmly away from the cameras and the eyes of human onlookers. They carried babies with little coats of their own, in fishnet slings with plastic bobbers still hanging off the edges. Children old enough to be in school huddled between their parents, clutching hands or flippers, while the bolder teens stared around, looking at the spring snowfall and the houses and the bare trees in between the evergreens.
“While the community here is reaching out, the selkies seem extraordinarily focused on their goal,” Mary reported. The human children, alongside their parents, had tried to venture out and make connections. Some lucky cameraman in Long Island had gotten a great shot of a selkie in a coat, puffer jacket, and pom-pom hat, maybe fourteen years old, taking a turn on some kid’s Razor scooter, while the high-school student who owned the scooter ran alongside the march to keep pace. “Rather than stopping to settle themselves back on land, they seem to be returning for a purpose that, so far, they have not shared with us.”
The selkies didn’t seem resistant to talking. But they wouldn’t stop moving except to sleep at night—and they wouldn’t answer anybody’s questions. All the reporters and curious locals kept being directed to “our chosen representatives.”
“I’ve been informed that here, today, one of the selkie representatives will be willing to speak to us,” Mary told the camera, cheeks pink with an excited flush even without the chill getting to them. She couldn’t have her scarf bundled around her face on television; it interfered with her ability to speak clearly into the handheld microphone, and she couldn’t use the small mics that could be worn against the cheek to interview someone. The news station didn’t issue those unless the temperature was life-threateningly cold within minutes, anyway. “We’re now waiting in the proposed meeting spot and—I think someone is coming towards us.”
The crowd was parting around a single head, moving perpendicular to the rest of them.
The selkie had a deep brown coat, mostly dry but crusted with snow around the hems. Rough shoes made of some kind of woven fiber, stuffed with padding, peeked out from under flippers that, for the moment, were not mobile. Her loose brown hair was down nearly to her elbows, spilling out of the coat that was drawn tightly around the skinny body underneath.
“Dia duit,” said the selkie.
“Um—and to you, too.”
“Close enough,” said the selkie. She had an odd accent, not quite Irish, or at least not the kind of Irish spoken on land. “I do speak English, for your sake.”
“We appreciate it,” Mary said, feeling self-aware. She knew from some hasty research the night before that selkies were strongly associated with the British Isles, but it hadn’t occurred to her that they might still speak those small, endangered languages. Had that been a priority underwater, when they couldn’t even speak in seal form? “And that you’re willing to talk to us on camera like this. I’m Mary Pike, Channel 11.”
“My name is Alice,” said the selkie. “What do you want to ask?”
“Good to meet you, Alice. I think I’ve got the same questions that everyone at home watching wants the answers to, right now. Why are you marching like this?”
Alice barely blinked. “Well, humans are best at slow, persistent movement, not sprinting, and we are a subspecies of humans. Walking is better than trying to run the whole way.” Her tone had been perfectly even, but the words were snarky despite every effort to the contrary.
“What are you walking towards?” Mary asked, undaunted.
“We’re here for the United Nations conference,” Alice said. “Just like everyone else.”
“You’re saying that the selkies want their own representative at the UN?”
“Why should we trust that humans will give us one, when our only nation is the ocean?”
Mary tried to find a way to keep the conversation going without answering. ‘Why should selkies trust humans’ was a tricky question to air right now, especially when some humans kept asking it the other way around. “It’s been decades since selkies have been seen on land. What’s special about this meeting that it’s brought all of you here for it?” The sheer number of people didn’t seem to allow that anyone at all had stayed behind in the water.
“Because they have announced that they’re going to decide what to do about Erid,” Alice said.
‘What to do about Erid’. That was what was really on everybody’s minds. The light of Erid’s star—whether growing brighter or not—wouldn’t be visible from Earth for nearly another decade and a half. Had the alien known as Rocky succeeded in returning home? Had Ryland Grace found him, out in the blackness of space, when Dr. Grace’s last message said only that he was turning around to try? Whether or not lives might hang in the balance, should Earth try to reach out to their brand-new, confirmed intelligent, neighbors?
“What stake do the selkies have in potentially communicating with Erid?” Mary asked.
Slowly, Alice shook her head. “That you don’t know why,” she said, “is exactly why we’re coming to speak for ourselves.”
It was impossible, for a number of blocks away, to get through the crowd surrounding the UN building.
The diplomats had only made their wary entrances that morning, watched from all directions, because the selkies had cleared their camp off a single road leading from the main thoroughfare to the front driveway. The security guards were all inside the doors, because there was no room for them outside, muttering about overcrowding and emergency exits and how fast they would get overwhelmed if “something happened”.
Nothing, yet, had happened. But the selkies had asked to speak at the meeting. Everyone wondered what might happen if they were refused.
As the group was shown in—the selkies had insisted on sending in twelve people—a woman at one of the desks shot up with a cry. “Vincent! But—surely you died!”
At the center of the twelve, an old man with a beard looked around. One of the younger selkies nudged him in the correct direction. “Is that you, Ioanna?” he asked, squinting through glasses whose metal frames bore the marks of awkward repair work. “I apologize; my prescription is roughly twenty-six years out of date.”
“It’s really you,” said the representative for Greece, gone pale. “But...you’re...”
“Very old, even for a selkie,” Vincent said. “Come now, surely humans have not forgotten that we are a little longer-lived than you.” One of the other selkies leaned in to tap him on the shoulder, murmuring something. “But we are here for business. You may come out to catch up with me later.”
The moderator of the meeting said, “What business?”
Vincent stepped forward. “Our business.”
The room was quiet, except for the murmur of translators, but it was large, and an old man’s voice only traveled so far. Some futzing around produced a microphone that Vincent could speak into without having to be seated at one of the desks; there was no desk for ‘general representative of all selkies and/or the ocean’.
“Our business,” Vincent repeated.
“Your people have been underwater for decades,” said the representative for the USA, leaning into his own microphone. “What happens on land and out of the water is not anything you have a stake in.”
“No. You are debating whether or not to send a crew to Erid,” said Vincent, and the collected representatives shuffled and muttered, wondering who told, looking sidelong at the news cameras who had come in to record the answer to the selkie’s mystery march. Everyone knew the meeting was about maybe talking to Erid; so far the idea of sending a ship was not supposed to be public. “You are going to vote that yes, Earth will build a ship. And our people will provide the astronauts.”
There was an immediate uproar.
Vincent shouted over it, the other selkies preventing anyone from getting close enough to turn off his microphone. “We have already decided!” The voices only quieted reluctantly, but it was too tempting to hear what he had to say for himself, to hear the answer to the mystery. “We never stopped thinking about how to retrieve the bodies from the Hail Mary. We have studied; we have trained; we are prepared in ways that your ideal pool of candidates would have to catch up to. Our experts are here, in this room, for you to question, and you will find them satisfactory. You will send one of us.
“Ryland Grace was one of ours; he deserves to be returned to the sea by one of us.”