Chapter Text
Ryland Grace still counted the years. He tried not to. Some days, he almost managed it.
Then one of his students would ask about Earth, or he’d catch himself making coffee the way he used to aboard the Hail Mary, and the number would come back to him all at once.
Seventeen years.
Long enough for a child to become an adult.
Long enough for a world to forget him.
Long enough to wonder if there was still a world to go back to.
He still counted the years. He hated that he did.
The Eridians, of course, counted differently. Every graduating class was another Eridian year gone by. Every group he guided from simple arithmetic to the first principles of orbital mechanics was another memory etched into his mind.
The Eridians had never seen much point in celebrating the end of a course of study. You learn thing. You understand thing. Then you use thing. That was enough.
Ryland had disagreed.
The first class had graduated almost by accident. He had given a speech because it felt wrong not to. He had explained the idea of diplomas, though the translator struggled with the concept. Rocky had politely informed him that the entire process was “strange and inefficient.”
The students loved it.
By the second class, they expected another celebration.
By the third, they had started making Ryland class gifts.
Small things, usually. A polished stone from a mining tunnel. A carefully shaped piece of xenonite. Little sculptures made from scrap metal that only vaguely resembled the lessons they had shared. It was sweet how every student came together to give something to him.
Ryland kept every single one. Rocky claimed that it was irrational. Ryland pointed out that Rocky still had the first model of the Hail Mary they had built together. Rocky had no counterargument.
The celebrations became a tradition simply because a lonely human teacher missed the world he had left behind and wanted his students to know that accomplishing something deserved to be remembered.
The little gifts now sat on a shelf in his home. Nine of them. Nine classes. Nine Eridian years. He told himself they were souvenirs.
He tried very hard not to think of them as a calendar.
It was easier than counting the seventeen years since he had left Earth, the three years since arriving on Erid.
He had never expected to become a schoolteacher twice.
He had certainly never expected the second school to be carved into the side of an alien mountain.
The classroom was uncomfortably warm on some days.
The Eridians preferred temperatures that would have cooked a human in minutes, but Rocky had spent months helping him engineer a compromise. The room was divided into carefully controlled sections, one side filled with dense ammonia atmosphere behind thick transparent barriers, the other maintained at a pressure and temperature Ryland could survive.
He leaned against his desk and watched six young Eridians crawl across the walls and ceiling of the chamber. Their voices bounced through the atmosphere as chords and harmonies.
A translator sat on the desk beside him. He had grown past needing it in most circumstances, but sometimes he would have to explain a complex theory and needed other words to begin to translate to the Eridian kids.
The translator clicked. “Teacher Grace.” One of the students. “Question.”
Ryland smiled. “Hit me.”
“Why did human travel through dangerous space alone?”
A simple question. The same simple question every class eventually asked. Ryland always hoped they wouldn’t.
They always did.
It had taken months aboard the Hail Mary to explain the idea of personal boundaries to Rocky. Eridians were curious by nature. Questions were how they understood the universe. If knowledge existed, why would anyone hide it?
Rocky had eventually accepted that some subjects made humans uncomfortable.
The rest of Erid was still learning.
Ryland had never lied to his students. He wasn’t about to start now, but some stories hurt to tell.
He looked around the classroom. Nine times, he had watched the question arrive, usually after they had learned enough astronomy to understand just how impossibly far from home he really was. By now, Ryland had stopped pretending he didn’t know it was coming.
He took a slow breath. “Because…” he began.
The easy answer was that humanity had needed him.
The truthful answer was that humanity had forced him.
The answer he had settled on was much simpler.
“Because somebody had to.”
The translator sang his words back to the classroom.
The students thought about that. Another raised a forelimb. “Would human do dangerous travel again?”
Ryland laughed. It was a genuine laugh. “No, I don’t think so.”
The translator clicked in a different voice. “Friend Grace bad liar.” Ryland’s eyes flicked to his side of the barrier. Rocky stood just outside the doorway. The old engineer was larger now. His carapace bore scratches and wear that hadn’t been there years ago.
Ryland pretended not to notice, just like Rocky pretended not to notice the gray creeping into Ryland’s beard.
Both of them were terrible liars.
Rocky played a short chord. “Friend Grace making false statement.”
Ryland crossed his arms, an amused smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. It was an old expression by now, worn smooth by years of friendly arguments with the only other creature in the universe who could keep up with him. “Oh, really?”
“Yes.”
“Care to explain?”
Rocky stepped through the doorway, his personal atmosphere suit hissing softly as it adjusted to the human side of the biodome. The machine had been one of his first projects after Ryland settled on Erid. An ammonia-dense suit wrapped snugly around his carapace. Rocky insisted it was a great solution. Ryland insisted it looked like someone had turned a submarine inside out. They had been having that argument for three years.
“Grace climbed through tunnel to repair human heater.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“Grace entered unstable cave to collect rock samples.”
“Science emergency.”
“Grace touched unknown fungus.”
“It was interesting.”
“Grace would absolutely do dangerous travel again.”
The students erupted into musical laughter, only egging Rocky on.
Ryland sighed, running his hands through his hair. Similar to his beard, it was beginning to show age. “I liked you better when we couldn’t communicate.”
“False.”
“Pretty sure it’s true.”
“False.”
“You were way less argumentative.”
“Scientifically inaccurate.”
Ryland shook his head, unable to hide the smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. It was a good life. It wasn’t the life he had imagined, nor the life he would have chosen. But it was good.
Sometimes, late at night, he would stand beneath Erid’s strange sky and think about Earth. He knew the beetles had not reached Earth yet, but he wondered if they would arrive in time. He wondered if Stratt would survive long enough to see the answer. He wondered if the children he had once taught had grown up beneath a dying sun, if they had children of their own.
He wondered if someone looked up at the stars and remembered the idiot science teacher who had disappeared into them.
Then he would go home.
Because wondering was all he had left.
There was no way to know.
The beetles were still somewhere between the stars.
The Hail Mary remained where it had first touched down on Erid, in one of Erid’s great engineering caverns, wrapped in scaffolding and surrounded by generations of Eridian engineers who seemed determined to replace it one piece at a time. Rocky called it restoration. Ryland called it a miracle that the thing had held together long enough to get him there.
Sometimes he would walk through the old ship anyway.
Earth was farther away than any human being had ever traveled. The universe had given him one miracle. He did not expect a second.
Years after the Astrophage crisis was solved, Ryland and Rocky had settled into a quiet routine.
Teach.
Build.
Learn.
The last had become a compromise. Ryland had no interest in dangerous expeditions anymore. If an interesting rock needed to be studied outside of Erid, someone else could study it. He had done his part. Rocky, naturally, disagreed.
The argument resumed before the students had even left the classroom.
“Friend Grace would do dangerous travel again.”
Ryland gathered the lesson notes from his desk. “No, I don’t think so.”
“False.”
“I’m getting old, Rockster.”
“Grace only becoming slower.”
“Thanks.”
“Welcome.”
Ryland laughed despite himself. Rocky waited. Eventually, Ryland sighed. “Rocky, I have students now. I have a home.”
“Correct.”
“I’m not getting on the Hail Mary again.”
Rocky was quiet. For some reason, that silence bothered Ryland more than an argument would have.
Suddenly, he was seventeen years younger.
He was back in the conference room, sitting across from a woman who looked at the end of the world and refused to blink.
You have no wife. No children. No family. Not even a dog.
At the time, he had hated her for saying it. Mostly because she had been right.
He had was forced onto the Hail Mary with nothing waiting for him back home.
Nothing except a classroom.
The old memories felt strange now.
Ryland looked around the room. Student projects covered the walls. Outside, somewhere beyond in the biodome, was a small house that somehow smelled like coffee and machine oil, no matter how often he cleaned it.
Rocky stood in front of him now, and Ryland was trying hard to focus on the ridiculous atmosphere suit they designed instead of what Rocky was proposing.
“I have a life here,” Ryland said quietly.
“Correct.”
“I have kids counting on me.”
“Correct.”
“I don’t want to leave them.”
Rocky played a soft chord. “Rocky not ask Grace leave.”
Ryland frowned. “No?”
“Ask Grace look.”
Ryland closed his eyes. He knew exactly what Rocky was doing. Rocky wasn’t forcing him. Rocky wasn’t reminding him that he had nothing left. He was simply pointing at something and trusting that the scientist he had met all those years ago was still in there somewhere.
Ryland had spent years teaching Eridian children that curiosity was one of humanity’s greatest strengths. It was deeply unfair that Rocky had learned the lesson so well. Rocky knew him well enough to know exactly what would happen next.
Rocky was quiet for a while. “We find something.”
Ryland looked up. There was something strange about the way his friend held himself. There was tension Ryland had learned to recognize over the years. The smile slipped from his face. “...What?”
“We find something.”
“What kind of something?”
Rocky’s atmosphere suit hummed softly. “Machine singing.”
The words landed somewhere deep in Ryland’s chest. Resisting everything in his body, Ryland shook his head, attempting to leave the classroom to go back to his simple home in the biodome. “...No.”
Rocky tilted his body, instantly spidering to catch up to Ryland. “No?”
“No. I’m not doing this again.”
“Grace want know.”
“I do.”
“Grace want investigate.”
“I do.”
“Grace already investigating.”
Ryland opened his mouth. Then promptly closed it. He stopped walking.
His eyes drifted to the blanket of cool fog curling through the trees, softening the edges of the biodome. Somewhere beyond it, water trickled over carefully arranged rocks. The sound had taken Rocky almost six months to get right.
A breeze stirred the leaves. Not real wind, a ventilation system designed by engineers who had patiently listened while a homesick human tried to explain what autumn felt like.
His house sat half-hidden among the trees. There was a light in the window. He had forgotten to turn it off before class. The sight of it caught him off guard.
It looked like someone was waiting for him to come home.
For a long moment, Ryland simply stood there.
Seventeen years ago, someone had sat across a table and calmly listed all the reasons he had nothing to come home to.
She had been right.
But somewhere along the way, an alien engineer had built him a sky. An alien city had built him a home. A generation of children had decided he belonged there.
His gaze drifted across the little lake. The breeze had died without him noticing. The water had settled. He caught his reflection in it.
Older. More gray than he remembered. Lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there when he left Earth.
For a strange moment, the face looking back at him didn’t belong to the frightened man who had boarded the Hail Mary. It belonged to the teacher who taught humanity on Erid.
He looked at Rocky. “...that’s not fair.”
Rocky turned and started toward the other direction. “Friend Grace accompany Rocky.”
“Where?”
“Docking cavern.”
Ryland blinked. “I already told you I don’t want to get on the Hail Mary.”
“Grace dumb. Follow smart Rocky.” Ryland could only sigh as he followed his friend.
The path wound away from the classroom and deeper into the biodome. They walked past the little lake, past the garden, past the grove of trees the Eridian engineers had somehow convinced into growing, past his house.
“I don’t remember this trail,” Ryland started slowly.
“Correct.” The path ended at a stone wall. Or what he had always assumed was a stone wall. Rocky reached out and pressed a claw against the rock. A seam appeared. The entire section slid aside with a low mechanical rumble.
Ryland stumbled back.
For one brief, irrational moment, he thought Rocky had opened the biodome. His heart lurched into his throat.
Cold ammonia atmosphere. Pressure drop. Death.
Then his brain caught up. Warm air drifted through the opening. The familiar scent of damp earth and trees.
His pulse slowly settled. “...don’t do that without warning a guy!”
“Apology.” Rocky stepped through the hidden doorway. Ryland followed more cautiously. The chamber beyond was still part of the biodome. The Eridian engineers had simply built more of it. The artificial sky stretched overhead. The walls curved so far upward that they disappeared into mist and cleverly placed lights.
Something enormous sat in the center. Ryland stopped walking.
It was not the Hail Mary.
It was smaller, sleeker. Its outer hull was unmistakably Eridian, built for practicality instead of aesthetics, but pieces of it looked painfully familiar.
Human control panels. Human restraint systems.
He could only stare.
The ship looked like two impossible ideas had collided and somehow decided to cooperate. Its sensor packages were a collection of ideas Ryland had carried across the stars in his own head. Its wiring made sense only to Rocky. Many of its systems, he realized with growing horror, somehow made sense only to him. It was, beyond any reasonable doubt, hideously ugly.
“...Rocky.”
“Yes, question?”
“...what is that?”
“Our ship.”
Ryland looked from the vessel to his best friend. “Our ship.”
“Yes.”
“When were you planning on telling me about our ship?”
“When finished.”
“You expect me to fly it.”
“No.”
Ryland frowned. “No?”
“Rocky fly. Grace navigate. Grace bad pilot."
Ryland looked back at the ship. Then at Rocky. Then back at the ship. “...how do you know I could even understand any of this?”
Rocky made a confused chord. “Dumb question. I ask long time ago.”
Ryland looked back at the ship. The longer he stared at it, the more pieces of himself he found hidden inside. The emergency control layout. The sensor arrangement. The restraint harness. Even the absurd amount of redundant backup systems.
Rocky had built this from Ryland’s little lectures over dinner about why human pilots liked chairs and why navigation systems should never, ever be attached to the same power supply as life support.
He had assumed Rocky was being Rocky. Fascinated by the strange habits of an alien species. Instead, the bastard had been taking notes. His eyes widened. “...you sneaky little spider!”
Rocky played a delighted chord. “Friend Grace finally understand.”
“...Okay. Fine. So you built a whole spaceship because of one signal. I am not climbing into another deathtrap because you found an interesting noise.”
“Rocky not find interesting noise. Adrian find interesting noise. Adrian working with Hail Mary restoration team. Long-range sensor calibration. Calibration find wrong number.”
Ryland frowned. “Wrong number?”
“Signal not match stars. Adrian think equipment broken. Rocky think equipment interesting.”
“...how long have you known?”
Rocky was silent. Long enough that Ryland already knew he wasn’t going to like the answer. “One Eridian year.”
“You kept it secret for an entire year.”
“Correct.”
“Rocky!”
“Human said no dangerous travel.”
Ryland rubbed a hand over his face. “You built a whole argument around my own words.”
“Proud statement.”
Ryland looked back at the vessel again, suddenly feeling very tired. “So let me get this straight. You built…” He pointed at the ship. “...all of this because you found one signal?”
“No. Built because signal continue.”
Ryland’s expression changed. “...how long?”
“Approximately fourteen Earth years.” For a moment, Ryland almost found himself laughing.
He spent fourteen years travelling to Tau Ceti. The beetles would spend fourteen years crossing back to Earth.
Fourteen years. A machine had been singing into the dark.
His mind immediately started looking for easier answers. It could be an automated beacon or maybe a forgotten probe. Or a damaged satellite trapped in an endless cycle. Anything except the thought quietly forming at the back of his mind. Anything except the possibility that, for fourteen years, something had been waiting for someone to answer.
Ryland swallowed. “...I want to hear it.”
Rocky climbed down from the landing strut and led Ryland to a console built into the wall. It was another compromise. It was too tall for an Eridian and too low for a human.
A console built into the wall came to life with a low mechanical hum. Waveforms spread across the screen in neat, overlapping layers. Harmonic maps sat beside translated frequency charts. Distance estimates were stacked against pages of calculations and observational notes. Ryland recognized half the equations. The other half were written in mathematics that belonged to another species. He stepped closer despite himself.
Static.
Frequency maps.
Signal degradation curves.
Distance calculations.
Orbital projections.
Archived observations stretching back an entire Eridian year.
His eyes moved across the information automatically. He hated that they did. For one brief moment, he was not a teacher standing in a hidden hangar beneath an artificial sky. He was back aboard the Hail Mary. Tired. Staring at impossible data because the universe had once again decided to make his life difficult.
His hand reached toward the controls before he consciously decided to move. He adjusted one of the filters. The waveform sharpened. “...this could be stellar interference.”
“No.”
“Pulsar reflection.”
“No.”
He changed another setting. The signal remained. “Sensor ghosting.”
“No.”
“A calibration error.”
“No.”
Ryland frowned. “Equipment drift.”
“No.”
He looked over the brim of his glasses to his best friend. “And you’re sure.”
“Correct.”
Ryland hated that answer because Rocky was not arrogant. If he sounded certain, it was because he had already spent a year trying to prove himself wrong. Ryland looked back at the display. His eyes traced the same line again. And again.
His pulse had started to quicken. He told himself it was because he had finally found a flaw in Rocky’s calculations. He very carefully ignored the part of himself that already knew he hadn’t.
Ryland leaned closer. The pattern repeated.
Again.
Again.
Again.
It was too regular.
He adjusted another setting. More static disappeared. The tone remained. It was almost disappointing. There was no mysterious alien language, no secret message.
It was just a broken machine trying to do one thing. Over and over.
“...how old did you say this was?”
“Dumb Grace. Approximately fourteen Earth years.”
Blue eyes drifted back to the display. A machine broadcasting for fourteen years. His mind began solving the problem without permission. He rubbed a hand over his jaw. “...could be automatic.”
“Correct.” That helped him relax a little. Then Rocky spoke again. “Signal changing.”
Ryland looked to his friend again. “...changing?”
“Slow.”
“How slow?”
Before he was able to react, Rocky pulled up older recordings. There were dozens. The main signal was almost identical. The carrier underneath drifted. The longer he listened, the more he heard tiny changes, tiny imperfections. It still wasn’t enough to prove anything, and that bothered him, and he hated bothering. Bothering led to experiments. Experiments led to discoveries. Discoveries had a nasty habit of changing his life.
He stepped back from the console. “No.”
Rocky waited.
“No,” Ryland repeated. “We don’t know what this is.”
“Correct.”
“We don’t know if anyone’s there.”
“Correct.”
“We don’t know if it’s safe.”
“Correct.”
He laughed once. “Stop agreeing with me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m trying to talk myself out of this.”
Rocky played a quiet chord. “Rocky know.”
Ryland looked at the ship, at the human chair, at the controls, at the hidden hangar tucked away inside the biodome. Then he looked past it toward the path home, toward the little lake, toward the house with the light still burning in the window.
He had spent so many years losing home after home. He had no interest in losing another. He turned away from the console. He climbed back onto the landing strut. “I’m going home.”
Rocky did not stop him. “Grace choose.” The Eridian followed after his human friend. “Signal here tomorrow.”
Ryland stared at him. “No mission.”
Rocky nodded. “No mission.”
“No pressure.”
“No pressure.”
“No guilt.”
“No guilt.”
Ryland looked at the display one last time. The little line continued across the screen.
It was steady.
He left.
Ryland did not sleep well.
In the morning, he made coffee because making coffee was a ritual, and rituals were comforting. The smell filled the little house.
He sat by the window. He watched the fog drift through the trees. The Eridian engineers had spent months getting the weather right. Ryland had once made the mistake of describing a quiet autumn morning, and a week later, Rocky had proudly announced that the ventilation systems had been recalibrated.
The breeze was never quite Earth. The fog was a little too even. The birds were conspicuously absent. But sometimes, in the half-light before the biodome’s artificial dawn brightened the sky, he could almost pretend.
His eyes wandered to a board across the room. On it were the drawings his human students made him when he left Earth. He had spent seventeen years losing things. He spent the last three building them back. A pit formed in his stomach, and he couldn’t look at the board anymore.
The signal had been singing for fourteen years.
He hated that his brain immediately compared the numbers. He hated that he was doing math. He hated that somewhere out there, between Erid and Earth, the beetles were making the same impossible journey. Tiny machines crossing an ocean of stars.
He thought to the machine singing in the dark. He wondered if it was lonely.
The thought irritated him.
Machines were not lonely. Machines followed instructions.
He had spent half his life teaching students not to assign feelings to equations.
He took a sip of coffee. It had gone cold. He could not remember making it.
The next morning, he taught. The classroom felt smaller than usual. The students asked questions.
Why did asteroids form belts instead of rings? How did humans know what stars were made of? Why did gravity behave differently around rotating masses?
Ryland answered automatically. He drew diagrams. He laughed when one student insisted that human mathematics was “needlessly decorative.”
He corrected homework. He listened to musical arguments echo across the classroom. At some point, one of the younger students approached his side of the barrier.
“Teacher Grace.”
“Yeah?”
The student held up a small polished stone to the barrier. It folded into Ryland’s side of the biodome. “We find near gardens.” Ryland took it. The surface had been worn smooth by water. A streak of pale crystal ran through the center. “Look like lake at night.”
Ryland smiled. “It does.”
The student seemed pleased. Then they hurried back to the lesson.
Ryland turned the stone over in his hand. A gift. He smiled. He laughed.
He went through the entire day pretending there wasn’t a machine somewhere between the stars that had been singing for fourteen years. Pretending he wasn’t already wondering how something could survive that long. Pretending he wasn’t mentally calculating power reserves. Pretending he wasn’t trying to estimate how much radiation damage a communication array could sustain before complete failure.
Pretending he hadn’t already started solving the problem.
By evening, he found himself walking the path toward the hidden door. He told himself he was going to talk to Rocky and explain, calmly and rationally, that the signal was probably nothing more than an old machine following old instructions. He told himself he was going to point out that one unexplained phenomenon was not sufficient reason to abandon a school, a home, and three years of hard-earned peace.
He told himself he was going to tell Rocky no.
He told himself a lot of things.
The little trail curved around the lake. The artificial sky had begun its slow transition toward evening, soft blue fading into warm shades of gold and orange. The lights reflected across the water in gentle ripples, and for a brief moment, he could almost pretend they were stars.
The fog had started to roll in. It drifted lazily through the trees, curling around trunks and winding across the path. Somewhere nearby, water trickled over the carefully arranged stones that Rocky had spent months adjusting because Ryland had once admitted that he missed the sound.
The breeze stirred the leaves.
Artificial.
For fourteen years, he had imagined going home. Then he had spent three years accidentally building one.
The little porch. The coffee pot that always seemed to smell faintly burnt. The stack of lesson plans sitting on the kitchen table.
He had not realized how much those things mattered until he found himself standing between them and a hidden door.
His chest ached. He looked toward the house. Then toward the hidden trail disappearing into the trees.
The signal would still be there tomorrow. Rocky would still be there tomorrow. His students expected him in the morning.
He stood there for a long time. Then he turned around.
He walked home.
He did not sleep well that night either.
He dreamed of the Hail Mary. He dreamed of the quiet, empty hallways. The cold lights. The soft hum of life support echoing through metal corridors.
He walked through the ship calling for people who had never answered.
A hatch stood open somewhere ahead. Beyond it was only darkness.
He could hear something. A faint mechanical sound. A slow, steady rhythm.
He followed it. The halls stretched longer. The lights grew dimmer. The sound continued.
Always just a little farther away.
He rounded a corner. The ship was empty. He opened another hatch.
Empty.
Another.
Empty.
The machine kept singing.
He never found it.
He woke before the biodome’s artificial sunrise.
For a few seconds, he did not move. The dream clung to him, the feeling that he had forgotten someone.
He sat on the porch until the fog burned away.
Somewhere in the distance, he could hear Eridian workers beginning their day, faint musical conversations drifted through the trees. The little world kept moving.
He made coffee. He watched the steam rise from the mug. He took one sip. It tasted wrong. It was too bitter and cold. He looked toward the engineering caverns, then he looked away.
The signal had been singing for fourteen years. He wondered if anyone had ever answered it. The thought made him angry.
He finished the coffee anyway.
He did not enjoy it.
The morning after that, he lasted until lunch. He taught orbital mechanics. One of the students asked how humans found their way between stars.
Ryland opened his mouth. Stopped. Then he spent twenty minutes explaining dead reckoning, inertial guidance, and stellar navigation. The lecture was longer than he intended. The students loved it. He hated that he did too.
After class, he walked home. He ate. He cleaned the kitchen. He reorganized a stack of lesson plans that did not need reorganizing. He sorted them by subject. Then by difficulty. Then, by the order he would teach them next year.
He stopped. His hand rested on the papers. Next year. His eyes drifted to the empty corner of the desk. A substitute would need notes.
Slowly, he set the papers down.
“...darn it.”
He had not decided to go.
Had he?
He stood. He told himself he was going for a walk. The path carried him through the biodome. Past the gardens. Past the little stream. Past the lake. The water reflected the artificial sky overhead. Mist drifted between the trees. His house stood quietly behind him. The light was still on. He had forgotten to turn it off. He almost went back. Instead, he found himself wandering toward the engineering caverns.
He stopped. The entrance stood at the end of the path.
He looked back toward the biodome, at the little world he had built. He wanted to stay. God, he wanted to stay.
No one was asking him to give it up. No one was waiting in a conference room with impossible choices. No one was telling him he had no wife. No children. No family. No dog. No one was forcing him onto a ship.
That was the problem.
If he walked through that hidden door, it would be because he wanted to.
Because somewhere, deep inside himself, he had already heard a machine singing across fourteen years of empty space and had not been able to stop listening.
Because he had spent three days trying to convince himself to forget it.
Because he had already started writing lessons for a teacher who was not there yet.
Because Rocky had not asked him to go.
He stood there for a long time, then he reached out.
The hidden seam in the stone slid open. Warm air drifted out to meet him. He walked into the hidden chamber. Rocky immediately looked up from a console.
Ryland sighed. “You said the life support systems were built for two?”
“Correct.”
“You said Rocky fly.”
“Correct.”
“And Grace navigate.”
“Correct. Grace bad pilot.”
Ryland looked at the ugly little ship, then to the friend who had built said ugly little ship. “...I need someone to cover my classes.”
Rocky was silent for what felt like eternity. “Grace choose, question?”
Ryland looked back toward the hidden doorway a final time. Beyond it was the little world he had built. It was the fog, the lake, the house, the students. The life he never thought he would have.
Seventeen years ago, someone else had decided he would go to space. This time, there was no conference room. No orders. No impossible ultimatum. Only a mystery. And a choice.
He looked at Rocky. “Yeah.”
His voice was quiet.
“Grace choose.”