The thing is, I didn’t have anyone in my life to tell me, “Ryland, don’t get into a situationship with the seventy year old woman who shot you into space to die.” Not even before I was shot into space, and definitely not after. Maybe if I’d poured my heart out to some of my fellow teachers at Grover Cleveland they would have, but I wasn’t the heart-pouring type, and when I returned to Earth the chaos was such that there was no way of finding them. I didn’t need a situation report to know that. As we decelerated into orbit around Earth, I walked out onto the observation platform and saw the poles caked in ice down to the tropic lines.
Rocky and some other Eridians examined the textured display map of the planet. From the weird banding on the map, they were looking at it in infra-red. Even without the computer translation that kicked in a few seconds later I could tell they were muttering, “Bad bad bad.”
Rocky added, “Ecosystem destruction more serious than on Erid. Many people die.”
“Many people die,” I said, staring the fingers of ice reaching so far down the planet. I wondered if Stratt were alive. Weird that this was my first thought.
I didn’t think much about Stratt for another week, which was a nightmarish sequence of big, cold conference rooms where they kept making me answer basic questions despite the thousand or so pages I had written on journey from Erid to Earth, and radioed in advance. I had detailed Eridians’ biology and culture, the scientific advances Erid had that Earth didn’t, and how those advances might be used to help save Earth. It sure needed saving. The human population was half of what it had been when I left.
That first week, I answered questions at state capitals, in underground cities, in orbit, at banquets, at fundraisers, on cruisers. At some point I learned Stratt was still alive, doing something in the Indian Ocean. She had told no one of the circumstances of my departure. Everyone thought I had gone willingly to Tau Ceti.
I thought about angrily refuting that, of shaming her. I remembered the horror of being physically chased around her office by big men at her bidding as she sat and watched, of being pinned to the ground and sedated by them. My very last memories of Earth. But it had been five subjective years for me, not counting the years I spent in a coma. That’s enough time to leach heat out of the hottest anger, and there was just so much to do. I kept thinking, I’ll say something later.
But of course that wasn’t true. On the brink of extinction, Earth had been hit with two miracles – my probes arriving from Tau Ceti, and then me coming with the cavalry, a massive ship full of Eridian engineers eager meet and help aliens. Stratt was a symbol of the first miracle and I was the symbol of the second. I couldn’t just start shit with her.
(I tried not to think of the deeper, more uncomfortable reason, which was that no one would care.)
So, no one knew I hadn’t gone willingly. Or, well, Rocky knew, but he didn’t understand. Eridians get cowardice, but not the kind of cowardice that makes you avoid going to space if the alternative is dying more slowly and pointlessly at home. But it was more than that. I think Rocky saw me as a hero. He wanted us to be the same type of person. He kind of resisted hearing evidence to the contrary. So did human women, as I’ll say later.
A week into landing on Earth and playing at cultural ambassador, I felt crazy with how over my head I was, how many demands were being made of me. I locked myself in my room and tried to get a big picture view of what the hell was going on.
I wished I could just… report to the president. But there was no United State of America. Nothing north of New Mexico was habitable. There were three different successor-states and none of them were that functional. All the new nations of the world clamored to host me or be my primary host. I read the (possibly heavily vandalized) Wikipedia articles on each major one, feeling shocked by how many war crimes they’d apparently all committed, and kind of confused about what standard of war crime I should be applying when half the world population was gone. Nothing like the international organization that Stratt had led existed anymore…
But Stratt was. While scrolling back through my almost-useless inbox, I saw an email from her. Sent the very day the Eridian ship had decelerated into orbit around Earth. It hadn’t hit my main inbox because it wasn’t from a head of state. That was how bad my email situation was – if it wasn’t from the president of somewhere I didn’t have time to read it. Her name made me lunge physically at my keyboard and click the email.
It was ten thousand words with headings and subheadings summarizing the state of Earth politics. She gave me three candidates for the very first state heads I should meet with, and twenty upcoming international conferences where it would be impactful for me to introduce Eridian technology personally. She’d highlighted the ones where the more minor nations’ heads wouldn’t be insulted if I met them there, rather than in a more personal meeting. She specifically warned against many of the cringeworthy mistakes I’d already made.
The exact big picture I had been trying to piece together. Earth was a mess. No one was in charge the way Stratt had been in charge at the time I left.
I stared at the email weakly. Amaze amaze amaze. I wish I’d read and acted on it when I arrived. I could kiss her. I mean, I wanted to push her out of an airlock. But for one blazing second I could have kissed her. Unsure what to do with my strength of feeling, I opened a new browser tab and did what any man ravaged by a sudden passion for her competence would do, and googled her.
I expected her to be leading some sort of effort, and she was, but I was bemused to see that the effort in question was a maritime trade coordination thing. Her career had gotten very weird after I left, starting with… a stint in a French prison right after the Hail Mary left Earth? I clicked through, stunned, to an article. It showed Stratt in a prison jumpsuit, looking exactly the way I remembered her. Had they imprisoned her for what she’d done to me? I laughed at this naive thought once I started reading. Funds misappropriation. Abuse of power. Power that they’d given her, I was pretty damn sure. She had been sentenced to life but broken out only a few years later, when France was rocked by its third coup in so many years.
Five years after that, no one really cared anymore, but there had technically still been a warrant out for her arrest in much of the northern hemisphere. So she had randomly ended up in some research station off Madagascar, figuring out how to keep trade routes navigable. From there she’d consolidated power. Her influence had ballooned significantly since my probes returned, but maritime research was still her nominal field. She’d had no reason to be at any of the meetings I and the Eridians had with Earth leaders the past week.
Even though she really should have been.
Okay. I closed my eyes. Big picture.
I needed an agent.
Earth needed a centralized, tightly coordinated interplanetary force like the one Stratt had used to run, to figure out how Eridian technology could help us and deploy it as fast as possible around the whole planet.
I was no political genius, but I didn’t need to be one to know that my surprise return from the one-way mission Stratt had sent me on, five years after my probes had reversed the decline of Earth’s sun, was a unique opportunity to launch Stratt in particular back into power. I knew she could lead such a project. And I could give her more cachet than I could give anyone else I threw myself behind.
I groaned extensively into my hands and complained to Rocky, who said, “Good decision, send her missive now.”
“No! I need to complain a little more!”
“Okay, complain five more minutes and send email. Hurry hurry. People dying.”
So I asked for and got a private meeting with Stratt. It was so weird being in a room with her again. She was an old woman now, but if anything she had even more of that unpleasantly quiet, dangerous presence. I mostly didn’t look at her as I explained my whole thought process.
Stratt didn’t say, “Wow, that’s so gracious of you, I feel honored you want to make me god-empress of Earth, given the givens”, or “I couldn’t possibly rule Earth, that privilege must go to someone else”, or “Mwahaha, with your help, I will, etc”. She steepled her hands, looked at me for a long time, and said, “You are willing to commit?”
“Commit to what?”
“Supporting me. Because if you withdraw it in a fit of pique, my organization will probably collapse and the disorder will be greater than before.”
“Fit of pique,” I muttered. “What could I possibly have a fit of pique about.”
“Doctor Grace,” and oh man I forgot how she called me doctor in that crisp angular accent, “Be warned that if you put me in a position where I can save so many people and then do anything – anything – to withdraw that opportunity from me, I will be as ruthless as I was the first time.”
I felt my lips thin. “I know.” I wondered if this meant she would have me killed. It was… kind of nice of her to warn me.
Stratt gave a clipped nod. “Then we have a deal. Give me a few days to get my people in order. There is a large conference coming up where you will make a proposal for putting me in charge of an Earth-Erid Engineering Corps. I will send you an itinerary and plan for your travel.”
I left unsure whether I’d made the right decision. But things started moving fast after that. Fast and laminar.
Right. I was going to say something about human women not wanting to hear about how I didn’t go to Tau Ceti out of manly altruism.
A year later, we were headed towards one of those samey cold hard conferences full of cold hard people, when it got canceled due to a disease outbreak in the whole region. Stratt shrugged, rooted around on her metaphorical atlas, and diverted us to Indonesia. “Think of it as a vacation,” she said to her team, while filling up their calendars with new quests.
Unlike most of the icy, hungry countries that we spent the most time visiting and helping, Indonesia was doing really well. We ended up at this low-key, party-y megahotel, although it became high-key as soon as Stratt arrived. Indonesian politicians started materializing out of the woodwork to get a word with her – that was who she was these days.
I had few duties the second night and was left alone to enjoy the cocktails and merely autumnal breeze. The shimmering line of someone’s low-cut dress caught my eye and held it for a few long seconds. I guess the woman saw me looking, because she slid into the neighboring seat the moment the Indonesian Minister of Agriculture left it five minutes later. And the moment I looked at her face, trying to avoid her cleavage, I was like, oh right, SEX.
I’d last had sex when I was thirty. When I looked into the mirror I saw someone who should have been sixty five, looked like forty five, and felt like forty. Looking at her, I remembered all at once that sex was nice, and maybe I wanted to have it again.
I would have bought her a drink, but bartenders never accepted my money. She grinned and bought me one instead. Then started asking about the mission, of course. I was about a drink further in than I should have been and said, “Yeah, funny story, I wasn’t supposed to go, I was a last minute desperation pick.”
“So you were not prepared?”
“Not in the least. The only reason I was selected was that they needed a astrophage specialist on board and there I was. Single, healthy, genetically suited to a coma, and everything.” Everything an ambitious lady wants in a man.
“Must have been an honor.”
“Didn’t feel that way at all. It was a freaking one way trip. A suicide mission.”
She looked at me weird. “But you’d die anyway if a solution weren’t found.”
“Well, I wish someone else could have found it,” I muttered. Rocky had said that, too. It was funny how obvious it seemed to everyone. How would this woman like it if I started chasing her around the hotel with a tranquilizer?
She said, bracingly, “Well, it’s good that you found your courage in the end.”
I stared at my drink. Don’t say anything to ruin your chances of getting laid. More importantly, don’t blow up the career of the woman I was trying to make god dictator of Earth. We desperately needed one while the climate recovered. Erid didn’t have a dictator, but… I don’t know, the Eridian planetary committee was really functional. They weren’t perfect, of course – they spent a lot of time enthusiastically in the weeds – but I’d spent months close up to their proceedings before we left for Earth, and I knew humans just couldn’t work the way Eridians did. We needed someone like Stratt, and unfortunately Stratt was the only Stratt I knew.
Unnerved by the silence, the woman said, “Well, what changed your mind?”
I looked up at her. “Nothing as likable as you’re hoping for. Excuse me.”
I got up and left.
The ethanol was still pulsing through my veins. My stupid dick twitched. I looked around, trying to figure out how to begin the sex seeking process all over again. I’d never figured out the approaching women thing. I saw motion at the corner of my eye – two suited men rising from their table, looking at me. Doubtless wanting a conversation I had no patience for right now. I practically jogged to the elevator and pressed the button for the fourth floor, which was mostly booked up with Stratt’s people. And Stratt herself.
Aimlessly, I looked for Stratt on the floor’s tea room where the team held meetings. I had no idea what I would say to her. I just felt restless and a little buzzed with anger. I didn’t know why I’d bothered – she was surely downstairs mingling. Everyone was. So, I told myself, there was no harm knocking at her door.
“Who is it?” Stratt called out.
“Grace.”
A pause. “The door is unlocked.”
I came through. Stratt was sitting at her desk, reading through a very thick binder. With a jolt I recognized a diagram from my own document, the one I’d put together on the ride home. The one I’d emailed everyone, that no one seemed to have read fully. She was about two thirds through, and the page she was on was dense with notes and streaks of highlighter. This wasn’t her first pass.
“What is it?” she said.
I sighed. “I struck out with a woman.”
A brow slowly rose. “And so you came to… your dating coach?”
“Everyone thinks I went on board the Hail Mary willingly.” It burst out of me. “Presidents. Distant cousins. My students who send me emotional handwritten letters. Even Rocky, my best friend, didn’t really want to hear that I had to be sedated and forced on board on a mission to save Earth. Women who are hoping to get into my pants definitely don’t.”
She just looked at me.
“It’s been fifteen years for me,” I said, “and the only women on the planet who are interested are interested because they want me to be a hero.”
“Doctor Grace, how to break it to you? You are a hero.”
I shook my head. “Don’t give me that crap.”
“I didn’t have a gun to your head when you figured out how to breed astrophage,” she said. “I didn’t make you learn how to communicate with an alien from scratch. I didn’t force you drop into dangerously low orbit on Adrian to gather atmospheric samples. I certainly didn’t make you sacrifice your first and best shot at returning to Earth to save your friend instead.”
My face went warm. People talked about that one a lot. It had become a founding myth of first contact that helped Earth-Erid relationships significantly. I said, “I don’t see it that way. And there is no one, not a single person on Earth… or Erid, or anywhere in the galaxy… who understands.”
Stratt closed the binder.
My mouth went dry. It was scary having her full attention.
She hesitated a long time. Blearily I remembered that, to her, I was a crucial, unstable asset to be managed carefully. I wondered how she would do it. I wasn’t expecting her next words: “It has been thirty years for me.”
“Hmmn?” I said stupidly.
“It’s a difficult thing for a woman in my position – a famously unmarried woman – to find someone with whom she has an understanding.”
“And what is it that you think they can’t understand? Did someone drop kick you into leading the Petrova line investigation?”
“No, but I am a ruthless, power-hungry bastard, and I have spent most of my life in the company of other ruthless, power-hungry bastards,” she said, unexpectedly. “Don’t get me wrong, many of them do good work. But the good work is usually not the point for them.”
I leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. “So what no one understands about you is that you are evil, but also good.”
“Well, maybe except you.”
I had been joking about the evil-good thing. But I had met a lot of politicians in the past year. And Stratt really was different. I knew by now that she had led Project Hail Mary knowing she’d be scapegoated at the end for the “overreach” she’d needed, and had been granted, to fund and run the operation. In the past year, I’d met many world leaders who were doing good work, as she said. But I had met almost no one who gave me the sense that they’d do that.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Did you just share all that with me in a comforting way, like ‘this is just how things are if you’re a sufficiently important or interesting person’?”
She regarded me warily. “Well… essentially. It does not sound so convincing if you put it like that.”
I barked out strained laughter and then said, “Stratt. Do you want to have sex?”
Couldn’t even make her blink. Damn. She said, at her usual measured pause, “That would be pretty absurd.”
I looked at her. Really looked at her. She was, and looked like, a seventy year old woman. Her hair was much the way it had been, straight and combed, except it was now a pure white-silver. Her humorless mouth was surrounded in a wreath of creases. The joints of the hands on my thousand page document were thickened. Her gaze was steady, blue, and wary.
I said, “Okay, worth a shot. Forget I said anything.”
“Were it that I could,” she muttered with the beleaguered weariness of managers everywhere. “Go hunt down the next pretty young thing in the lobby, Grace.”
“The whole point was that I don’t want a pretty young thing. I want someone who understands my deal as a person.”
A pause. “You were serious.”
“Well, yeah.”
I think she was going to say no. She opened her mouth to say no, I’m sure of it. Then she sighed. “Okay. We’ll have sex tomorrow if you still want it when sober. When you don’t, we can, as you say, forget you said anything.”
“Huh,” I heard myself say. “Cool. Smart idea. Okay. Bye.”
I fled to my room and dialed Rocky, who was overseeing the construction of a massive dome arcology in Mongolia. “I understand, promise, keep secret!” he said happily. The human workers lugging xenonite in the background jiggled as he waved his phone in emphasis. “Grace court Stratt? Want world-administrator as mate? Very good choice, she is smart and caring human.”
“Okaaay, bud, so let me explain all the problems.”
At the end he said, “Rocky hesitate to give opinion. Earth sex not like Erid sex. Grace list many problem. But if Grace and Stratt both lack mate due to understanding, not preference, seems good if they understand each other and can mate. Stratt old, as you say, but calculation from naive demographic reference class say Stratt live for another 16 years, one fifth of human lifespan. Seems pretty good, not terrible investment.”
“Oh, well,” I said. I recalled I hadn’t been able to say anything useful when Rocky had agonized about whether to court Adrian’s new mate. Parallel marriage was culturally uncomplicated for them, but triangles apparently muddied lines of inheritance between children in ways I couldn’t wrap my head around. I tottered off to bed and fell unconscious.
The next morning I sat down in front of Stratt at the hotel breakfast and said, “Rocky thinks it’s nice that we have an understanding. Even though, for me, the understanding is that every earthshaking discovery I made is inflected by your sending me to die making it.”
Stratt glared at me. She was dividing her attention between her tablet and her egg whites. “We both have to give a talk on a conference call in fifteen minutes. Can you proceed quickly to your point?”
So much for romance. “Well, I still want it sober.”
She blinked. “Okay. Then I will see you at –” She pulled up her calendar. “Ten thirty tonight. I just emailed you two points I would like you to hit during your section, ideally when the Australian PM questions you aggressively. He is bound to. I am going to rile him up. After that, I think we’ll have the Papuans on our side for the vote.” She sounded much more pleased about the Papuans than about the tryst.
I sighed, and opened up my own tablet.
And then. Yeah. We had sex.
I returned to my room at ten thirty to find Stratt sitting at my desk, examining the xenonite figurines Rocky had made of me and himself on our first meeting. They were the first objects to come out of my travel pack when I arrived at a hotel, and the first get packed in when we left. She hadn’t touched them but had gotten very close, hunching to look.
Somehow I’d forgotten she used to head the European Space Agency. People don’t end up in that position if they don’t really care about what’s out there. There was a softness in her eyes I’d never seen before. I held my breath when it remained there upon seeing me.
The last time I’d had sex, my partner and I were in our early thirties. It was kind of a shock to run my hand along skin that felt radically different, over a different composition of fat and muscle. Mostly the composition was ‘less’. Stratt, like most people I met, was a bit gaunt. Even if I hadn’t known her when she was decades younger, I could have sort of known that the flesh I touched had once hung off more body. It was cool and dry and textured. Nothing like the skin of my ex, who had been in the prime of her life. But it was human. I’d spent five subjective years in the company of Eridians and my skin sang when I touched another naked person, or heard a female voice hitch. She did have a lovely voice. So many people talked to her without realizing it. They hadn’t heard her sing. They hadn’t kissed a trail down her shoulder to her thigh.
It was awkward but not bad. At least for me. She got me off pretty easily. I tried to return the favor, except she did not work like my ex did, so nothing I was doing with my tongue or fingers worked. She got off by grinding against my leg, which… well, I feel like that’s not a credit to me.
“How often do you… usually?” I said, once we were done. I felt embarrassed but good.
“Have an orgasm? A few times a year,” she said. “I suppose it’s going to be more often, now.”
I grinned into the darkness. “Yeah.”
But we didn’t get that much sex in. We were very busy. The randy mood I’d propositioned her in turned out to be a blip – which made sense, I had never been very into sex. We did spend a lot of time in bed, though. Talking about politics and engineering, mostly. I was no longer of much use to Earth as an astrophage specialist. I had spent years on the ride back to Earth digesting Eridian literature on xenonite manufacturing, so most of what I did now was help less industrialized nations start and scale up xenonite production.
I admit, I usually snuck out of Stratt’s room feeling better than I’d ever felt with my ex. This made me sad sometimes. What did this mean about me? Maybe I’d never been suited to normal love.
Five months in, after a rare bout of sex, even rarer because both of us had orgasmed, I said, “So, er… what are w –”
“Absolutely not,” said Stratt. She was already glaring at a spreadsheet of South Asian agricultural yield.
“Okay,” I said meekly.
My students had once told me it was a situationship if the other person refused to define it. I decided not to ask Stratt if the term was still around. I was mostly fine not getting clarity. Again, we were just so busy.
A half year after that, Stratt fell ill.
It was bad. Viral pneumonia, and all of a sudden, bacterial too. She’d been running world trade and arcology construction from her bed, and suddenly, bam, ventilator.
It shook me badly. I watched her swim in and out of consciousness for hours, feeling like I was on an EVA and suddenly doubting I was clipped in. Outside of her hospital room I heard Stratt’s aides discussing what to do about a grain shortfall in Greece. Pull from Romania, they were saying. I heard it as if through a dream, rolling it over in my head, and then I marched out there appalled.
“Do you hear yourselves!” I snapped. They jumped and stared at me. They had never known me to snap before. “Absolutely not Romania! Their ‘spare’ grain is pledged twice: once to Greece on paper, once to keep Turkey from closing priority transit through the straits. Break that bargain and we lose more calories than we move. Pull from Spain, then cover Spain within a month with…” I stopped to think. “Brazilian soymeal, probably, but see if you can find a better option.”
They stared at me. “Uh,” said one, and started frantically pulling up ag data. “Did Stratt leave instructions -”
“No, I’m just using common sense!”
I stared at the wall for a second while they whispered. These two were pretty good at what they did, they just didn’t have the whole picture in their heads the way Stratt did. So if they were making mistakes like this, what else… oh lord. I started sprinting towards the elevator. I had to get to my workstation where I could access classified chats and catch mistakes, instead of mooning uselessly here over Stratt.
Behind me, one of them muttered, “How does the xenonite guy know about Romanian grain pledges?–”
I was halfway around the world when I learned Stratt was up and irate, because I got an email ping on a big thread course correcting a dozen people at once. Then, fifteen minutes later, another email. No “I’m back”, no addressing the well wishes. A smile spread across my face.
Two weeks later I saw her in person at a climate engineering summit. Rocky and a bunch of other Eridians were attending, which means the security was extra crazy. I wasn’t expecting the guest list to change last minute, but these days there isn’t a conference she can’t just walk into if she wants. Which she literally might have.
I saw her while catching up with Rocky. Seeing him in person was a big treat for me. He was begging me to do the thing with the champagne (“no, Rocky, this is just some random champagne on a table, I can’t do –”) when I saw Stratt walk in. My heart kind of went whlomp. She looked weak but her eyes were bright, alert. Silver hair soft and clean.
I played it casual, walking up to her with Rocky after she’d efficiently shed her first wave of admirers. Rocky said, “I was happy to hear of your recovery.”
I was interested to see that Stratt was still overwhelmed by being up close to aliens. She emailed with them a bunch, but said the ROI of in-person meetings was too low given the language barrier and unimportance of body language. She looked 10% tenser than usual, and checked Rocky’s nametag on his atmosuit to make sure he was in fact Rocky before answering, “Thank you. It’s a pleasure to see you and your colleagues here. I look forward to hearing the Eridian lectures on infrared re-emission aerosols.”
Wow, they’d just rotated that one into the talks list an hour ago. She was so back. I opened my mouth to say as much but she neatly forestalled me: “Rumors of your unexpected competence have been reaching me, Doctor Grace.”
Rocky did a little dance. I was pleased, too. I tried not to smile too much at her in public. “Heh. It wasn’t rocket science.”
She ignored the joke. “Some of your suggestions to my staff were inspired. Perhaps I should be giving you more responsibility.”
“Oh no. No thank you. I’m fine being the manufacturing consultant. I’m satisfied with my impact on human history.” I lowered my voice and said, “No more Stratt specials, please.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to be in Baikonur next week?” she said casually.
I blinked. Baikonur – as in the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where the Hail Mary had launched? Where DuBois and Shapiro had died, leading Stratt to… find a substitute precipitously? As far as I knew, there weren’t any upcoming launches there on our radar –
Wait. A week from now, as in… our anniversary?
I shook my head. The nerve of this woman. But I couldn’t help smiling, and I saw her mouth was slightly compressed also. Stratt never laughs at my jokes, but it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a sense of humor. “Sure. Yes. I would appreciate that.”
Rocky was unusually still and quiet. The gossip. He was probably wiggling inside, absorbing everything he could about Earth courtship.
“Good,” Stratt said briskly. The summit host who had been trying to catch her eye finally succeeded. She nodded slightly and started moving towards him. But she paused and threw back one more quiet comment: “You should know by now that I like people in my vicinity to be as great as they can be, not as great as they want to be.”
I sighed. I felt like I was pretty in her vicinity. Rocky fluted loudly enough that people passing by him glanced down at his atmosuit’s display for a translation, but there was of course nothing. Had they been familiar with Eridians, they wouldn’t have bothered, since they’d have recognized the sound of delighted, and slightly schadenfreude-laden, laughter.