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I walk up to my love when the fog is still high.
It takes me longer than it used to.
The familiar sound of another world draws me near. Something alien, so comforting now. Water particles dance with the simulated breeze, a gentle blur in the air, their presence nothing but the faintest resistance against my searching clicks.
The fog will settle later, will drift down and be taken by the ceaseless push and pull of the waves. For now, it encases us in its gentle embrace.
I rumble the day's special greeting as I approach. Be graced.
Rocky does not acknowledge me, long swallowed by the memory as they always are. I always allow it.
“I thought I might find you here.”
This is less an observation and more the retelling of a story, words as familiar as the growing cracks in my own carapace. This exchange, we know it well. The lines have been rehearsed countless times and written down even longer ago.
It has been many years, yet my love has missed this occasion only once: The death of our second-oldest hatchling. It had seized up and not returned from sleep, days before the naming ceremony. The communal heal took priority.
I sit by Rocky's side, close enough for our exosuits to touch, and vibrate at a soothing frequency. Rocky is perched on three folded arms. The other two are digging holes into the sand.
“Are you still intending on giving the lecture?”
This is another familiar line, the answer to which I know before Rocky trills their low affirmation. The answer to which I knew before I had so much as uttered the question, before I had even donned the xenonite or walked on the wet sand and heard the simulated caw of Terran birds.
Rocky would never skip the lecture.
The large auditorium is being expanded every few years because the audience continues to outgrow the available tiered rows. Even clusters from far-off nodes will bring their learning-age children to listen to Rocky's and Grace's retelling of the Tau Ceti Miracle.
Over the years, Rocky modified and expanded the lecture, incorporating more and more non-official recordings of the late Dr. Grace, personal logs and the like. Now, the lecture is in part science lesson and in part a show wherein Rocky brings Grace to life by arranging the recorded lines and their own answers in a way that will mimic a natural conversation. Their pretend back-and-forth is informative and factual all the while remaining light-hearted and engaging. The pebbles adore it.
“Mary and Rye are excited to give the tours. Nervous. They want very much to do right by him. By you,” I say.
This line is new.
Our children will perform tours of the biodome for the first time, explaining to the visitors its inner workings, rudimentary beginnings, and the many ways in which it has been modified through the years. They will emphasize the complex fusion of Eridian and Earth science required to create this habitat, a feat which kept our human alive for 82 years even while 16.5 light years from its home planet.
Many subfields of science were born here. By necessity first, intrigue later. Climate engineering, Anthrobiology, Anthrotrophology, Computer science, Relativistic mechanics, to name a few.
“Do right by him? That is too easy. Whatever they do, he would make it out to be the greatest thing he had ever witnessed,” Rocky warbles, a familiar exasperation suffused with affection.
I hum, knowingly, and rub the side of my arm into Rocky's. “But you are harder to please.”
“It is an important, important, important occasion.”
“They know this, my love.”
Rocky begins covering the holes they have been digging.
“I will attend at least one.”
Grateful, I continue my comforting rumble as I speak. “They will be delighted. But be patient with them. No meddling.”
“No promises.”
“You have lived it. Living and knowing is different. They can only try to grasp it.”
Rocky chuffs a quiet sound and fills the last hole in the sand. The beach lies changed and unchanged before us. Were it any other day, my mate would continue to argue with me just for the sake of arguing. Instead, Rocky draws inward again.
Away to a day many years past, when this place was a home and not a site of pilgrimage.
“Do you need anything before I go?”
This too, is practiced, a way to remind them I am present, feeling, listening. Always with half a hope that there is something I might offer that Rocky could want, that might make this time pass more easily.
But Rocky croaks a very quiet no, mate Adrian, and I accept this.
I rub my arm in goodbye and approach the house to make preparations for tonight.
It's a short walk. The tide tells me there will be a tomorrow, lulls me into a gentle sense of acceptance.
Today is a day of remembrance, honor, celebration. Not of mourning. As a people, we do not mourn. We join for music-making and dances inspired by Earth culture, we listen to lectures on distant stars and foreign-but-not-foreign beings and greet each other by calling a human name.
As a people, we take this day to be grateful for each other, and to be curious.
Many will flock to the Anthropology Museum. There, within a full-scale replica of the Hail Mary, all which we know and cherish of humanity is displayed. Its knowledge, its stories, its material objects. Ryland Grace's bones. By his own wish, of course, he wanted to educate even beyond the grave.
Rocky avoids the festivities. Not very much like an Eridian at all, to pull away in times of distress, but it is what they need. Distance from the ever-present greatness of him to be closer to the memories. The truth, the smallness. They need the tireless waves, and soft things to touch, and they need for these six-hundred pebbles in the auditorium to learn the truth of Tau Ceti, which is that it was not a miracle at all. It was perseverance, a show of faith, and love most of all.
Grace is written into our song. The children will continue to sing it, and they will continue to know him not as myth, not as a thing larger than life, but simply a creature who conquered fear with curiosity.
The thought comforts me as I enter the house.
My steps echo in the strange quiet. He is most present at the beach; here, the absence is what is most noticeable. Every molecule within these walls is suffused with a meaning. With purpose. We would have given him everything, but he had never asked things from us he didn't think he would truly need. He only wanted to live, and to teach and be taught. For a short while, he did.
The personal effects and miscellaneous artifacts are tucked into their respective places, preserved by specially crafted boxes that will keep the brittle, sensitive fibers and plastics from degrading too quickly. I begin taking them out of their protective shells.
In the evening, when the simulated day-cycle draws to a close and the beach will draw in its foggy breath, we will return to the shore. Rocky will speak to him as though he were there, as though he had never left, as though he was simply diving somewhere beneath the waves or sitting atop the craggy cliffs.
The house will wait for us, without a presence to make it sing. We will sit and ponder it all, the absences and the presences; books, glasses, clothes, mobility aids, countless gifts of instruments and tactile games and metal-stone sculptures and a rack of precious Eridian jewellery.
If we listen close, we will hear the bed creak and worn soles scuffing the floor. Clipped words we cannot speak. A hum, perhaps, comforting in its tonal simplicity. Rocky will sit and listen and trace the lines of one particular carving in their carapace. It is the one most dear, the one re-chiseled more frequently than any of the others. The one that is always reaching out, always holding on. With the five fingers and square palm.
In the morning, the water will still be clawing at the shore.
The fog will come again, and he will be in the air, this air we cannot breathe. But he will be there.