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They were three brothers.

That was probably why they succeeded where so many of their kind didn’t.  Three’s a good number for sorcery.  Witches know it, which is why they’re generally more successful than sorcerers. 

They summoned the spirit successfully, in a circle of molten silver.  They bound the spirit successfully, in chains of finest silk.  They tortured the spirit successfully, with fresh milk and warm blood.  And on the third hour of the third night it gave in, and it told them the secrets of immortality. 

“Be forgotten,” it told them.  “Never ever have a single creature, however small, recognize you for what you are.  Erase yourself from the page of history, and live in the gutters – forever fleeting, forever invisible, forever.”
The brothers were elated at this and banished the spirit to the netherworld, then they actually realized what this would entail. 

“Fuck,” said the youngest brother, who was the quickest thinker. 

“Fuck,” said the middle brother, who generally went with whatever was going on.

“Fuck,” said the oldest brother, who hadn’t figured it out yet but was starting to feel stupid. 

***

It’s a very useless thing, to become an immortal god-king of magical lore that nobody knows about.  But some people won’t settle for mere mortality, and so the three brothers bent and twisted and gnawed at the limits of their goal: to live forever and look good doing it. 

“What do people recognize?” pondered the oldest brother.

“It’s you,” said the middle brother.

“’You’ is far too big a concept for day to day business,” snapped the youngest brother.  “It’s your NAME they recognize.  Let’s just excise that.  I’ll get the orichalcum tongs.”

Now, most people would balk a bit at having the first gift anyone ever gave them extracted from their core conceptual being with a pair of spell-scalded metal claws, but that’s why most people aren’t sorcerers.  The profession attracts a certain kind of person, and soon each of the three people of that type present held a softly whispering sphere in palm: their own names. 

“Now throw them away,” bade the youngest brother.  “Throw them away where nobody will ever see them again, ever, no matter how long it takes.  Also, we’re never seeing each other again or this won’t work.  Goodbye.”
“Bye,” said the middle brother.
“See ya,” said the oldest brother.  “Woops.  Forget I said that.”

***

The oldest brother felt sort of stupid, and he despised that.  He brooded over his misstatements and belated realizations all the way home, chewed on them as heavily as he chewed his dinner, brooded on them like a motherly chicken. 

“I’ll bury it deep,” he decided.  “Where it’ll never come back out.”

So he hiked up the side of Mount Firegut – driving six guides to their deaths in the process – and chucked his name down into its caldera, and went home and raised up a mighty empire with conquering, killing, all that sort of thing. 

Mount Firegut groused and fussed and belched and erupted and subsided and burbled and eventually turned quiescent for good five hundred years later, which was a great boon for the wealthiest merchants of the oldest brother’s empire, who established diamond mines all over it.  Jewels flowed like water, and a particularly large and glowing one was brought to the emperor personally. 

The oldest brother laid eyes on it and immediately recognized it.  And at that moment, so did his entire court.

“Aw FU-” he managed, and then he turned into a dusty skeleton and everyone was quite embarrassed.

***

The middle brother went home by the long route, and he walked by the sea and listened to it rumble and roar.  He climbed the tall hill by his home and watched it go on and on forever. 

“Well,” he said.  “There’s a match made in heaven, if I’m a judge.”

So he sailed out to the middle of the ocean – losing half his crew to salt madness and dehydration – and threw his name overboard, and went home and established a towering sanctum of madness and magic with insanity and darkness the likes of which man had never dreamt and all that sort of nonsense. 

The ocean moved.

Continents crawled, plates shifted, seafloors raised and lowered, and the ocean moved. 

So did everything in it. 

Five thousand years later, a crab ate a funny thing and was eaten by a small squid which was eaten by a small fish which was eaten by a bigger fish which was eaten by a shark which was eaten by a murderous whale which died on a beach gasping for relief from the searing heat at its insides, which was stolen by a gull which was eaten by an eagle which dropped it near a fishing village, which brought it to their dark and sorcerous overlord as tribute. 

“Oh!” said the middle brother. 

And that was about all he had time for. 

***

The youngest brother went home looking up at the stars.  How he hated those twinkling bastards.  They were made from the same matter he was, but they smiled down fondly as he aged to nothing. 

“I’ll outlive you all,” he swore.  “Just you see.”

So he decided to show them. 

He buried his name in a chest in a box in a safe in a vault in a bricked-up basement and he began to send things into the sky. 

Birds were an early experiment.  But at a certain height they came back down dead. 

Balloons seemed plausible.  But they popped. 

Some kind of flapping machine nearly did the trick, but they could never flap high enough.

Then he tried fireworks.

And bigger fireworks. 

And engines attached to the fireworks. 

By the time he launched his first rocket the youngest brother was a billionaire many times over and he’d had to replace his name vault many MANY times more than that.  It was loaded aboard, triple-bound in enchanted whispers and hand-packed by blinded wage-slaves. 

“To forever!” he toasted the rising little mechanical star.

And he made a holiday of it. 

“To forever!” he toasted the six thousandth year of his reign as Global President. 

“To forever!” he ordered the Newmanity under-slaves as they carved the monument marking ten million years of their god. 

“To forever!” he called out across the boiling seas and the fires of apocalypse missiles as four hundred million years of history went up in atomic smoke. 

“To forever,” he whispered to the cautious invertebrates that were his only friends a billion years hence, wandering under the baking heat of the engorged sun. 

“Forever,” he chanted as the world was gently enveloped in the warm hand of its star. 

Forever, he remembered as matter slid away and the solar system washed into nothing. 

Forever, in the dark space as the last few coherent atoms raced ever greater infinitely apart. 

Forever. 

***

A long life is a fine thing.  But immortality brings with it concepts that don’t quite fit naturally into the human skull.  Try to keep them at arm’s length, and use gloves. 

The wind is blowing.  The sky is white.  The ground is white.  The window is white.

It’s a good day to be indoors.  I’m sitting at the window and will sit here all day and I will watch the nothing, the lovely white nothing that’s eaten outside.

And we will tell stories.

***

I tell the wind about my week.  How I hid from it, here in the warmth behind the walls where it can’t find me.  it doesn’t mind, I can tell.  How I took in proteins and carbohydrates and expelled waste.  How I spent nearly a third of it in torpor, electrical currents dying down to a smoulder in my skull.  How I watch the snow whip through its breath and imagine patterns in it. 

It tells me about where it’s been, where it’s come from.  Hot and cold clashing violently far above me, far away from me, sending it howling down and far away from its cold homes to scour the warmer places, to strip away their warm blanket and leave them shivering in the storm.  Of the trees it felled.  Of the animals it froze.  Of the stones it cracked.  Of the lights it put out. 

Both our stories are very repetitive.  We’ve told them all a thousand times.  Life is like that, but so is everything else. 

***

The next day I have to go get more firewood. 

The wind is waiting.

We play our little game that we do every time, and it’s in high spirits now.  It whips and whistles at my ears, my legs, my hands.  I numb right through my clothing, my teeth shake inside my head until it feels they might fall out; my hands freeze to the axe and I almost chop my foot off six times as the fog creeps in from around my thoughts. 

I laugh and laugh and laugh and it laughs too, howling and wailing at my ears until there’s no sound and all until I kick in my door and stagger in and light the fire that puts things back into the world.

Oh, that was a close one. It nearly had me today, it did.  Oh it nearly had me today. 

***

I go walking.  The wind walks with me. 

We talk as we go, about aimless things.  Fancies and flights and hopes and dreams and imaginary frivolities.  I remember the last time I had hot chocolate.  It whispers about the drifts it pushes under trees and into thickets, where the deer are hiding from it.  I tell it about the time when all this was green, and it laughs at me until my cheeks are numb and white from grinning into it. 

The wind knows all this was white before it was green, and it will be again, and again, and again.  It proves its point when I fall waist-deep into it, am smothered in it, nearly drowned in its leavings, a heaped-up mound that covered a dimple in the path and created a sinkhole that would make quicksand blush. 

I dig myself out with my fingers and my guts and my heat and as I pull myself up my the roots and branches at closest grasp I shake someone’s hand. 

It’s strange to feel that.  It’s not at all like mine feels. 

Oh, and there’s a wrist and a palm and an arm and an elbow and a whole body with a face, a human face!

How surprising. 

The wind is surprised by this too, and it mutters itself into astonished silence the whole way home. 

I bring the human.  It’s something new.  I don’t know how to feel about something new.  Maybe further examination will tell me. 

***

The human wakes up after three days.  It makes noises at me with its mouth and its hands and its eyes.  I think it’s trying to communicate with me. 

I talk to it back.  I’m not sure it understands.  The fur above its eyes bunches when I talk. 

Instead, we eat.  It’s very grateful for the soup. 

The wind is annoyed with me for missing our talk today, but it’s a slow day.  It always gets irksome on the slow days.  I leave it to fuss and play with its drifts, pushing them hither and thither and piling them up thick and tall against the windows until it’s not fierce and sure white anymore but a soft comfortable grey that puts the whole world to sleep.

When I wake up, the human has made some sort of tea. 

It’s not hot chocolate, but boy is it close.  I thank it.  It doesn’t understand, but it understands.  I don’t understand it myself. 

***

The next day the human follows me out when I chop wood.  I wield the axe and it stacks the logs and we make faster work than before and we’re set and done before I’ve even lost track of all my fingers.  The wind is howling hard, but it can’t outrace us, and I chuckle a little at its discomfort.  It kicks snow at us as we scurry back inside, and I think the murmuring is excessively petulant as we feed the fire back up to a snarling height. 

The human conscripts some scraps and snarls of old torn bedding I’d thrown away and begins to incorporate them into its clothing.  It works with thread, makes new patterns out of nothing, turns openings into closings.

It hums as it works.  It’s a quite quiet sound.  The wind is very loud.

But I can hear it all the same. 

***

I wake up because something heavy and cold has fallen on me and it’s the roof, and when I try to move I realize it’s also a tree.

The wind has grown irate with me, it seems. 

I talk to it, I complain at it.  I even whine.  But it’s not listening, it’s not talking, it’s just yelling and ranting and howling to itself now. 

I thought we were friends! 
I really, really thought we were friends. 

Well, not friends.  On speaking terms, at least. 

The human digs me out.  The human pulls me out.  The human drags me to the unburied corner of the house and as luck would have it that’s the corner with the fireplace, so bit by bit all the feeling creeps back into me and I can feel my face again. 

I say ‘thank you,’ with it.

It shocks both of us so much we don’t dare say anything until we fall asleep. 

***

The wind is in my dreams.

It stands outside the door and scrapes against it with paws made of hail and sleet and snow, its voice almost silent.  It is angry with me, it’s so very angry with me, that I am not paying attention.  And I try, and I try, and I try, and I try, but I just can’t hear the words. 

The wind breaks the door in and starts gnawing on my foot.  I kick it.  The wind grunts and huffs and shuffles off and turns into a bear and I wake up and watch the bear leave.

Oh.

The fire is out.  The door is shattered.  And judging by the oodles of bear tracks, it finished off the potatoes before it investigated my foot. 

The house is no longer livable, and I’m only alive because the human and me turned each other into pillows in the middle of the night. 

It’s time to go. 

***

Sixteen miles past the edge of my world and the snowdrifts get deeper.  The crust grows more uneven.  Even the snowshoes the human bent together from tired pine boughs founder and stick.

The wind is most unhappy.

I don’t understand it now, in more ways than one.  First it wanted me dead, now it wants me to stay?  We shared so many stories together, we shared so many days together, I saw so much of me and it so much of I and nothing I saw would make it want to do this, any of this.

I wonder what it thought it saw in me?

I fall in another drift and that distracts us for a while longer. 

***

Nightfall comes, and with it comes the white-in-the-black, the wall of frozen water that comes in hard and fast and furious, without mercy.  We dig into a drift, then dig out an airhole, then dig it out again, and again, and again.  The whole world is trying to bury us at the wind’s behest. 

We are very good diggers, me and the human.  But we are not an entire world. 

So I pat them on their shoulder, and I take their hand and squeeze it, as if I were trying to warm them, and I start walking. 

The wind’s roaring like a lion now.  All brag and boast.  It’s won, it’s won, it’s won. 

And then it dies down, to a soft murmur again, all familiar and softness.  Whispering to my ears, trying to tell me of things very far away that it’s seen and done and been and I can’t understand any of it, not one word.

Not since I’ve been listening to the human.

The human.

Oh. 

It didn’t want to kill ME.

***

Oh it rages when I turn around.  Oh how it shakes and rattles at my bones.  But I know it’s bluffing now, it’s baring empty teeth at me, and I find the snowed-in shelter before it’s vanished entire and dig through before the air runs out.

The human isn’t moving.  It’s probably very tired. 

So I pick them up.  They’re heaving, and they’re bulky, but so is a sack of potatoes. 

One foot, two foot, one foot, two foot. 

Oh how the wind is screaming!

One foot, two foot, one foot, two foot. 

I can’t understand it at all.  What a shame.  What an awful shame. 

***

It’s a one foot that makes the first mark in the white. 

A dark smudge left behind in my bootmarks. 

The two foot follows.

And then it gets deeper.

And deeper.

And deeper.

Soil is coming through.  Soil and mud are clotting up my bootprints, melting up into the snow. 

The wind is spitting mad now, but it’s spit.  It’s froth.  Sleet at best, wet and nasty against my face. 

And then one foot two foot one foot two foot and I’m through, and it’s through, and I’m standing up to my ankles in mud and slush and the sky is a painfully normal blue, with a drunkenly bright sun, and there are birds calling again like I haven’t heard them in.

Ever?

No, that’s not right. 

I’ve been here before. 

Yes, I’ve been here before.  A lot. 

I turn around and look at my footsteps.  Look at the green sprouting softly out of the cold and into the warm.  I flex my fingers, feel the numbness long gone. 

I breathe deep, and when I exhale, the trees bud. 

Oh.

Oh.

Well. 

A naughty thing to do, that wind.  To lull me to sleep for so long.

But spring is here now.  I am here, by the flow and churn of the overfed creeks, by the hot sun and the dying gales.  I am here and the animals are moving again.

I hope that bear enjoyed the potatoes.

I hope that human is alright.  They seem warm enough.  Such a long trip they made to find me, there away from everything, all by myself. 

So I make them a pillow of moss, and a blanket of ferns, and I sit in the rising sun and wait and listen to the long-lost ghostly trembling echoes of the wind. 

The town had never never seen the sun.  If you don’t know it exists, you can’t miss it.  It was so. 

They saw pressure, and smelt darkness, and the soft rain of little fragmented things from above.  They moved ponderously, and with great care.  Ooze squelched under their heavy metal feet.

They were the anchorpeople, and they lived at rock bottom.  It was a good place to be because it was the only place to be. 

***

Manners came easily to the anchorpeople.  Their lives were tightly interwoven in their little community, and their pace could neither slow nor speed itself.  Neighbours would pass each other by over the course of many hours, and there were invisible layers of courtesy that they put on like clothing every time they had company. 

They did not put on clothing.  Anchorpeople did not have clothing. 

“Hello,” they would signal through waves of pressure and charm.  “Greetings,” they would say.  “How are you?  I myself am fine.  I have been fine recently.  All is well.  All is good.  It is a fine thing to be, at rock bottom.  Do you believe so as well?  Yes, that’s what I thought, what I thought, what I knew.”

And so on and so forth. 

All the anchorpeople had these conversations very carefully enmeshed in their heads from beginning to end, because you never knew when you would be talking to someone and they would be lifted away forever and you would have to finish the conversation by yourself.  It was very embarrassing to lose track of yourself when you were talking to yourself.  Embarrassment was unpleasant, and to be avoided.

“Why do people get lifted away forever?” asked the newest anchorperson, who was very small still and had just seen that happen in person for the first time. 

“It just happens,” said her mother. 

“Will it happen to me?”
“Oh, probably not for a while.”
“Oh,” said the newest anchorperson.  She looked up out of rock bottom and wondered where ‘away’ was, and if her friend was enjoying himself there, and so she asked about it.

“Pardon?”
“What’s ‘away’ like?” repeated the newest anchorperson. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” said her mother, who was very much telling the truth. 

“Is it different from rock bottom?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said her mother.  “I’m not sure I understand at all.”

***

A while later the newest anchorperson’s mother was lifted away forever and she had to get a new mother again. 

“It happens,” said her mother. 

“Yes,” said the newest anchorperson.  “Do you think she’s happy in ‘away’?”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said her mother.  And she too was very much telling the truth. 

This distressed the newest anchorperson, because she didn’t understand either and she wanted answers that nobody seemed to have.  It was confusing and uncertain and frightening. 

So she did what all anchorpeople did and fidgeted with her cable.  It spun and knitted and twined in her fingers into the many many patterns that a cable could form; half-knots and maybe-twirls and loops and loops and whoops.

The newest anchorperson had been a bit too nervous, and had made a real knot.  She swore some anchorpeople swears and untangled it until she’d stuck her fingers in it too and had to call her mother for help.

Her mother helped.  And while she watched, the newest anchorperson thought about how vexing it was to be stuck fast. 

That wasn’t the idea.  The idea popped into her head later, when she was about to fall asleep.  But it was probably where it had come from. 

***

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a bit. 

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a bit longer. 

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a bit longer still. 

“Help,” the newest anchorperson told her mother.  “I’ve tied myself up again.”
“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she helped her out, though it took a good long time to fix. 

“You really should be more careful, dear,” she told the newest anchorperson reproachfully. 

“Sorry,” said the newest anchorperson.  And this was her first lie, which was a very important part of growing up that nobody ever talked about and was to be admired. 

The newest anchorperson had a plan.  She had a plan and a cable, and that was all she needed.  And a good thing too, because she didn’t have time to test her sixth knot before she felt something she’d never imagined before. 

A tug.  A long, slow tug on her cable. 

***

The newest anchorperson’s fingers were greased lightning these days.  And she was so rushed, she didn’t even have time to worry before the knot was done. 

She took a deep, long breath of cold smooth water. 

“Help!” she called.  “I’ve tied myself up again!”

“Oh dear,” said her mother.  And she hurried over at her anchorperson’s pace and she helped out.  Which, unfortunately, involved helping in.

“Oh dear,” said her mother.  “How did you manage this?”  The two of them were quite tied together now, in an awkward sort of meshed mush that tangled their cables. 

“I’m not quite sure,” said the newest anchorperson, which was either her second lie or just part of the first one depending on how you counted them.  “Help!” she called to their neighbour.  “We’re tied together!”

“Oh dear,” said the neighbour.  And she hurried over as fast as she could and tugged and pulled and carefully tied herself to them.  “Oh very very dear.”
“Help!” called the newest anchorperson. 

“Help!” called her mother. 
“Help!” called their neighbour. 

“Help!”

“Help!”

“Help!”
“Please!”

Manners came easily to the anchorpeople of rock bottom.  And one by one, so they came, and one by one, so it went.  It brought the whole place closer together than ever before. 

“Help!” called the oldest anchorperson.  “That’s funny.  No one is helping.”
“I think we’re all here,” said the newest anchorperson’s mother.

“So we are,” said the newest anchorperson.  The tug had grown stronger and stronger with every addition to the knot, and now all of rock bottom was there, stuck fast.  Her cable was singing through the water now, tension pulsing like a deep current. 

“What can we do about this now?” asked their neighbour. 

The newest anchorperson’s cable twanged three times, each impossibly stronger than the last, and went slack. 

“Oh!” she said. 

“What happened?” asked her mother. 

“I’m not sure,” she said. 

They were still trying to figure out the knot four hours later when the boat fell on them. 

***

“What is this?” asked the oldest anchorperson. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” confessed the newest anchorperson’s mother. 

“I’m not sure I understand,” admitted her neighbour. 

“I understand,” said the newest anchorperson.  “It’s from ‘away.’  This is something from ‘away.’  It’s not from rock bottom.”

“Oh,” said the anchorpeople.  “Oh.  Oh!”

And they thought about what that meant. 

“There are other places?” someone asked. 

“There must be,” said another. 

“And other people,” concluded a third. 

“Could we see them?”

“I don’t see why not.”
“Why did we stay here?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Oh!”
“What was that?”
“My cable.  It tugged.”

“Well, there’s no sense in letting it take you.  Let’s go now.”
“Yes.  Let’s.”

***

The town had never never seen the sun.  It had been rock bottom, once upon a time. 

Now it was empty. 

The anchorpeople did not live there anymore.  They didn’t know where to live anymore. 

But they were figuring out how to live, so they didn’t mind. 

At age nine, Eddie Bifteck had no patience for other children.  They didn’t know what the hell they were doing; they all wanted to be veterinarians or astronauts or some other nonsense like that. 

Eddie knew what he wanted and he knew what he wanted was the only thing that mattered: Eddie Bifteck wanted to be a space marine. 

He knew there wasn’t any water in space, so the name confused him a little, but he didn’t let that stop him.  Because that was the kind of attitude a space marine needed. 

“Space marines aren’t real, honey,” his father kindly told him many times over in an effort to crush his hopes and dreams and undoubtedly lead to doom for all mankind.  Eddie forgave his treason against the species, but ignored him all the same. 

The dream was bigger than them both. 

So he worked on it.  He he pumped weights all the way through middle school; he lied on career aspiration surveys all the way through high school; he graduated with barely any time spent on science or math or anything else but he paid a lot of attention to anything with astronomy and spent all his free time at his uncle’s gun range firing things in ways that probably weren’t legal and practicing retrieving ammo under fire which was definitely not legal and sometimes pretending the other patrons at the range were treasonous scum and fantasizing about executing them to the rapturous applause of a planetary tribunal, which wasn’t exactly illegal but was the sort of thing people didn’t like to hear. 

That was what Eddie wanted.  To do the things people didn’t want to do, for the reasons they didn’t like. 

Because that was the kind of thing space marines did. 

***

“You’ll have to go to college, sport,” said Eddie’s father warmly.  

And Eddie did, but only to enter in debate clubs and argue ferociously for the necessity of exploding rocket bullets as mandatory equipment on all expeditions outside Earth’s atmosphere.  He honed his arguments to killing points of lethal sharpness based on an unorthodox technique he called ‘no, that’s treasonous.’ 

“This sounds a little excessive,” his opponent said. 

“No, that’s treasonous,’ said Eddie, shrewdly. 

“What?”
“You heard me.” 

And that worked very well until the last debate of his first year, when he was arguing against a particularly wily and cold-eyed classmate. 

“Your idea is preposterous and useless,” she told him. 

“No, that’s treasonous,” said Eddie, advancing confidently. 

“Putting the propellant in the gun AND the missile itself is pointless,” she continued. 

“No, that’s treasonous,” said Eddie, pressing his advantage. 

“One struggles to find the right words to describe the sheer amount of wastage and excess this concept represents,” she said.  “What would you call it?  ‘Deliberate self-sabotage in a manner best fit to destroy the entity enacting it from within?’”

“No, that’s treasonous,” said Eddie, sensing victory within his grasp, and then he realized what he’d just said and burst into screaming tears with lots of snot. 

***

Eddie graduated with a degree in accounting and applied for a job at NASA. 

“Can you do math?” they asked him. 
“No,” he said. 

“Can you fly rockets?”
“No.”
“Can you run software?”
“No.”
“Can you assemble impossibly delicate and complex machines?”
“No.”
“What CAN you do?”
“I can fire a gun and reload it and will never surrender against any threat assailing our species from the stars, fighting to my last breath.”

NASA said they’d call him back and never did.  

Eddie applied for a job at a private space launch company instead. 

“Can you do math?” their interviewer asked him. 
“No,” he said. 

 “Can you fly rockets?”
“No.”
“Can you run software?”
“No.”
“Can you assemble impossibly delicate and complex machines?”
“No.”
“What CAN you do?”
“Annihilate the aliens that seek to destroy us all,” he said. 

“We’ll get back to you,” said the interviewer.

Eddie realized he had to take matters into his own hands and started with the matter of the interviewer. 

“Take me to the spaceship,” he told them through a gentle chokehold.  “There is empty space to guard.”

***

Liftoff was less tricky than anyone had told Eddie, which made sense to him.  You just pressed buttons and hey he was in orbit. 

Good, but not good enough.

“The aliens will take over the moon before they assault Earth,” he explained to ground control, “so I need to guard there first.  Which is why you need to send me there.”
“The spaceship isn’t designed for that, Eddie,” said ground control.  “Eddie, we have your father here.  We have your teachers here.  We have your uncle here – which took some doing, because he was in a supermax prison.  We’d have your childhood friends but we can’t find any.  Eddie, won’t you come home?”

“I’m doing this for them, and for home,” said Eddie stoically.  He was surrounded by those that lacked vision and courage and spine and honor and some other stuff he couldn’t think of.  “If men like me don’t stand guard over the sheep then the sheep don’t have watchdogs and they get eaten by wolfdogs and that’s bad and I’m great and whatever or something.  Point me at the moon.”
They pointed him at the touchdown site, which almost worked until he saw through their cunning stratagem. 

Fine.  He’d do it himself. 

***

Any landing you could walk away from was good, Eddie knew.  So this was at least 50% good. 

“Aaargh,” he gargled heroically to Earth.  “I’ve aaargh taken up ooooeeurgh offensive ouch ouch ouch positions in a defensive owwwww emplacement in the rubble of the main cockpit.  For the first time in Earth’s jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeSUS history it is secured against threats extraterrestrial and insidious.  Anyone that travels dozens of lightyears across the nightmarish emptiness of the void to attack you will have to go through me first.  I did this all for you, for all of you, except for those of you that tried to stop me because you’re all traitors seeking to subvert and destroy our species.”

“Eddie, buddy,” sobbed his dad over the radio, “please, special boy, what led you to do this?  Why couldn’t you stay here and be happy?  What put this idea in your head?  Why are you dying on the moon?  That last one’s the most relevant right now the rest are rhetorical.”
“Because,” said Eddie, as he prepared to straighten his right leg out, “that’s what space marines do.”

Eddie straightened his right leg out. 

“OooooohSHIT,” he confirmed, and passed out for six hours, which is pretty bad when you have two hours of air left in your tanks.

***

When the Betelgeuser archaeologists showed up thirty million years later, he was the only human they met in person.  A small shrine was built around him to commemorate the occasion, admiring that the alien who had expired so far from air and warmth had done so with his hand outflung and outstretched towards the stars in the spirit of universal brotherhood, reaching out with an open mind and optimistic soul to the hope of finding aid in a seemingly uncaring and empty universe.

It was all very heartfelt and they never found a history book that could tell them otherwise.