A Quick Errand

Here is how Emily Pritchard came home.

She went to Kepler-186f to collect soil samples. The trip took six months of her life. It took forty-two years of everyone else's.

You will say: that is how relativistic physics works, and it is not fair. You will be right on both counts.

Emily Pritchard was thirty years old when she left. She was a geophysicist, which is a person who tries to understand the ground by hitting it with things. She had a husband named Marcus, a ten-year-old daughter named June, and a cat named Ptolemy who was of an age where he mostly lay in sunbeams and thought about nothing.

The offer to go to Kepler-186f came in a Tuesday email, the way most things that ruin your life do. The mission was to retrieve two kilograms of regolith from the planet's terminator — the strip of land where day meets night, which, on a tidally locked world, is the only place an unprotected human could walk. The regolith was of scientific interest because it contained, preliminary spectrography suggested, a new class of silicate compound. Emily's specialty was new classes of silicate compounds. She would be away, from her own perspective, for approximately six months. From Earth's perspective, because of the particulars of the Alcubierre drive and its peculiar time debts, she would be away for forty-two years, three months, and eleven days.

She talked it over with Marcus.

Marcus was a patent lawyer. He was a good man, and he had done all of the things a good man was supposed to have done, which is why Emily had married him. He listened to her explanation of the mission for an hour without interrupting, which was also why she had married him. Then he said: "I will not be alive when you come back."

"No," said Emily.

"I will be dead for a long time."

"Yes."

"June will be middle-aged."

"Fifty-two."

"My god," he said. "She'll be older than I am."

"Yes."

They sat in their kitchen for a while without speaking. The cat walked across the counter, which was a thing he was not supposed to do, and neither of them corrected him.

"You should go," Marcus said finally. "You have been waiting your whole life for a planet with a new class of silicate compound. You cannot say no to that."

"I can."

"You can, but you won't, because I know you, and neither should you. I am going to be sad every day for forty-two years, and then I am going to die, but that is not a reason for you not to go. It is only a reason I wish you weren't going."

This is, if you have ever been loved properly by anyone, the voice of it.

She left on a Thursday in August.

From Earth, the ship was visible as a point of light for the first seventy-two hours, and then it wasn't. From Emily's perspective, the ship began to move strangely at around the six-hour mark. Strangely is the word the pilots used. They said: the numbers start doing something strange, and then they do it more, and then the Earth is a long time ago.

The trip was uneventful. She spent three of the six months reading. She spent two of them playing a very long game of chess with the ship's AI, which she won in a way that the AI said was statistically improbable and possibly insulting. She spent one month writing letters to June, to be delivered in sequence after her return.

She did not write letters to Marcus. She could not think what to say.

Kepler-186f was exactly the planet the preliminary spectrography had promised. The silicate compounds were real, and they were new, and they were beautiful under the spectrometer — crystalline structures that rotated in six axes instead of the usual three, which would be a minor problem for mineralogy textbooks for the next several decades.

She collected her two kilograms. She walked, briefly, on the terminator strip. The sky was half dark and half the color of old honey, and the shadows of her suit stretched in two directions at once because the thin atmosphere refracted the local sun into a kind of gentle doubling. She stood there for four minutes, which was three minutes longer than protocol allowed. She did not explain herself to the ship.

She came home.

Here is what was waiting for her.

Marcus had died at seventy-three, of an unexpected complication from a routine surgery, sixteen years before her return. His obituary was preserved in the packet she was given at re-entry. It described him as a "patent attorney and widower."

June was fifty-two. She had three children, whose names Emily had to ask for. She had a husband named Tobias, who was kind to Emily but whose kindness was the particular professional kindness of a person dealing with a stranger who has a painful connection to someone he loves. June had told her children about the astronaut grandmother. Emily was a story they had been told.

Ptolemy the cat had died at nineteen, in 2061. There was a photograph of his little grave in the back yard. The grave had been disassembled in 2067 when the house was sold.

The house had been sold.

Emily had not thought about the house. She had sent June a letter from the ship, which had arrived forty-two years before Emily did, which had advised June to sell the house if she needed to, and to be kind to herself, and to remember that her mother was proud of her. June had sold the house in 2067. The money had paid for medical school.

Emily was thirty-one years old.

She sat with June in June's kitchen on the evening of her return. June had made a kind of pasta that Emily had never eaten before. It had been invented in 2053.

"I am very sorry I was not here," Emily said.

"You were here," said June. "Just on a different schedule."

"I missed everything."

"You missed a lot of things. You didn't miss everything. I have pictures. There are pictures of Dad that you haven't seen. There are pictures of the kids when they were small. There are pictures of Ptolemy at about eleven, when he was still climbing things."

"I don't know if I can look at them."

"You will," said June, who was older than her mother and knew some things her mother didn't. "You will look at them. Not tonight. But you will."

Here is the thing Emily learned, which the relativistic physics textbooks do not mention:

Time does not pass evenly. That is not merely a claim from general relativity; it is a claim from the kitchen table.

She had been gone for six months.

Marcus had been alone for forty-two years.

These were the same journey. Neither of them had made it easier for the other.

On the morning of her third day home, Emily walked to the cemetery. She took a bouquet of flowers that June had selected, because Emily did not know what flowers were appropriate in 2094.

The grave was old. The stone had weathered. The dates on it read 1994–2067. The inscription below Marcus's name read: He waited.

Emily set the flowers down. She sat on the grass beside the grave. She said, out loud, because there was no one to hear her:

"I came back as fast as I could."

And then, because Marcus had loved her properly, and because proper love requires a response even across forty-two years of silence, she added:

"Thank you for waiting."

The sun was the same sun she had left. The grass was the same kind of grass. A bird she did not recognize, of a species that had not existed when she departed, sang briefly in a tree, and then flew away.

So it goes, thought Emily Pritchard, who remembered the phrase from somewhere.

So it goes.