Work Text:
So. To preface everything, I want to say I expect that my previous notes on the Eridian people will likely end up in every ‘xenosociology 101 for dummies’ lesson for the rest of human history. Probably on page 1 of the syllabus with a giant red warning symbol saying [DO NOT REPEAT WE GOT SO LUCKY THIS TIME AROUND.] Perhaps this manuscript will end up there too as a [OK WE DID A LITTLE BETTER THIS TIME BUT GRACE WAS STILL AN IDIOT IN SOME WAYS THAT HE CANNOT IDENTIFY CURRENTLY.]
As it were, I only hope that I can rectify the mistakes I made previously, of which I’m sure by this point the entire sociological and anthropological (xenoanthropological? Eridopological?) community back on Earth has been valiantly attempting to telepathically strangle me for the last many years. I can only be so glad I’m on this side of the galaxy and not there.
Because I committed that cardinal sin that so much of science has been built around trying to avoid. I extrapolated from incomplete data. I had an n of 1. I allowed personal bias to influence my interpretation of a very one sided view of a complex system.
Basically, I assumed. Oops.
Because, dear reader slash unfortunate future college student forced to read this, I may have in fact forgotten that:
- Rocky is in fact not a representative of the average person for his entire species, any more than I am a representation of the average human.
- People, Eridians included, are capable of ‘lying.’ I know, how novel.
As such, it really shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to have this follow up report that should, hopefully, help rectify some of the mistakes that I made with first contact. Hopefully I caught you guys before anyone started sending manned spacecrafts to Erid, it would be really embarrassing for them to be using outdated data. Especially the translations I had given expecting them to be accurate to how I interpreted them.
Right. Let’s start from the beginning. Supposition one which I have debunked since starting my long-term habitation on Erid; that the vocabulary of Eridian speech (or the specific science-chord that I have been exposed to most often) is accurate to the vocabulary that I had learned while aboard the Hail Mary…
~
“Rocky?” My voice was louder than was necessary (though that means very little when cohabitating with an Eridian) when I called over to him from where he was crowding the radio receiver he had jury-rigged into his side of the ship. He gave a warbly growl that definitely was just the Eridian equivalent to a mumbled swear.
“What question?” He muttered as the sound crackling through cut out entirely for a moment. Turns out, the Hail Mary was not made for the extremely wide range of frequencies that near-Erid space travel relied upon to coordinate movements when nobody could see oncoming traffic. I still didn't entirely understand it myself, but the best short-term solution until we could figure out which frequency the space elevator crew would use to coordinate with us was to run the radio transceiver up and down its viable range as many times as possible, which is definitely not something it was made for, while playing the whole length of sounds to be detected from as far a range as possible on any channel. Which was extremely annoying when it slid down through the human range of hearing on occasion, and doubly so I imagine for Rocky.
Thankfully, we had finally started getting some feedback, so we could probably put the eternal Shepard tone to rest for good. Unthankfully, though…
“Why can I not understand them?” Like, yea, it was understandable that it would be extremely garbled given our distance (we were still thirteen days from Erid orbit, a lot closer than humans probably would’ve given before announcing homecoming, but then again it’s not like anyone expected me to come back in the first place), but the words themselves were nonsense. I could pick out bits and pieces here and there, a “you (professional, unknown identity)” that Rocky had been nailing into my skull the importance of when talking in polite company, a “ship” that I had long since equated to ‘Blip-A’ but knew wasn’t actually a proper name for the craft, but… everything else? I had hoped that after four and some change years of immersive Eridian practice, I would at least be able to understand basic sentence structure.
“Grace illiterate,” Rocky dismissed. But even getting that far I had had to interrogate the sentencing structure and grammar for Eridian a lot! I knew that if I deconstructed the sentence structure of that short segment I could get “Grace (Referring to someone in room, descriptive, definitive) language not!knowledge.” I had gotten far enough as being able to even start interrogating specific phonemes! I did my linguistic research, dang it, it’s been a long few years!
I tried to listen to the sounds of Eridian speech through the receiver again as Rocky continued to fiddle with the mess of human electronics and Eridian engineering that was our long-range communications system. “- astrophage time (unknown?) (unknown?) 141 (sounds like ‘Erid?’) (unknown?) -” Ugh. I need to stop listening, already my head is spinning from the rapid cacophony of sounds. I have to assume Rocky is getting something out of it, since he’s still trying to make it come through clearer.
“I swear I was getting better at it,” I groused, settling back into the pilot seat to watch Rocky work. It was all I really could do at this point, between my lack of understanding of human radio systems on the best of days and the fact that it felt like I was already in 2g of Erid gravity with how shaky my everything has gotten. And I call myself a science teacher.
“You have knowledge of some language but not others,” Rocky hummed, as if displeased by that description. So was I, frankly. He tried again, hands working a little less busily. “Your words… are specialized.”
Ah. So I was fluent in ‘what needs to be known for Rocky and Grace to not strangle one another one of these days’ and nothing else. Or perhaps Rocky has what can be considered a strong accent that other Eridians sound dissimilar from.
“Can you get me up to speed on what’s being said then?” I really, really would like to try and pick his brain for what exactly I was going to expect from other Eridians, since I had kind of assumed for a while that my functional Eridian was a done deal for the time being given I haven’t opened the translation software in nearly nine months (and even then it was because Rocky was teasing me and used an obscure word he knew he defined for me years before only once). But. Well. Have I mentioned the nutrient deficiencies yet?
“I will get to that after fixing stupid human radio system.” Ah boy, he really is angry about it isn’t he. I sat and watched and let the unknown words wash over me like a tide.
~
What I had thought I had come to understand was Eridian (and had subsequently sent as much of my translation notes as I had finished collecting together when I had had to send off the Beetles after my taumoeba got loose) was, in fact, a very fast and loose pidgin that I had not even realized Rocky was creating before my eyes. As such, what I had thought I had begun to understand about Eridian sentence structure (and had further refined in the several years between turning back to Erid and arriving within transmission range) was… well, put frankly, entirely bunk.
~
“- and I’m telling you it doesn’t matter that I can’t say it right, I swear that’s the wrong set of notes for that word!” I was getting more riled up than was strictly necessary but, dang it, I had thought I was doing well! But every time Rocky went and translated a short snippet of ‘other Eridian’ I kept snagging on the words he used. Specifically, the fact that he seemed fine enough with saying that a large amount of what he was saying was a one-to-one translation, despite the fact that so many of the words were wrong. When was ‘orbital period’ 𝄫♬𝅝𝅘𝅥 and not ♫♩♬𝅝? That was one of the first things we got nailed down, when we figured out time!
“Grace not hearing correctly then, words normal,” but I could see Rocky was getting nervous, starting to shift around a little more from his spot on the wall with agitation. Was he lying? No, it must be something else. Maybe the notes that he treats as ‘most important’ are out of my range of hearing or something, and he had just forgotten what normal Eridian sounded like or something.
I was on a roll though, and it seemed Rocky was as upset about this as I was slowly riling myself up towards. Another garbled staticky symphony of notes came through and I held up a hand for quiet before Rocky could start to translate. “No, wait, I can figure this out.” I needed to figure this out. That was - ok that set of chords seemed to most often mean words that related to time, but not in units of measurement like orbital period did (or I assumed it had!!). That one there, it was similar to when Rocky would call me lazy or slow, so perhaps it meant something like ‘behind,’ or ‘after,’ or something else similarly negative in connotation. “Are the elevator Eridians calling us late?”
Rocky huffed (and that was absolutely something he got from me, a puff of air forced out the ventilation coils that doesn’t seem to be natural for an Eridian but he got a kick out of abusing whenever he could) and tapped at the side of the horrible radio amalgamation. “Calling ship an (unknown, stranger?) that is coming back at the wrong time. What is the right time question!”
“Beats me, but you have told them that you had to hitch a ride, right?” I tried to roll the unknown word around in my head, but already my ears were ringing from the previous signal calibrations we had attempted.
“Told Elevator Crew ‘here from Blip-A’ told them ‘have answer for astrophage’ told them ‘name is Rocky name is Grace here to help’ and Elevator Crew not listening!” He gave the wall another flick, then bounced off to ping-pong off of a far wall. We had been slowing down for a while at 1.5g, which is why I was able to huddle in my captain’s chair, but Rocky had been getting more and more energetic the closer we got to Erid and it showed with how reckless he was getting with his bounding around. I’m just glad that he’s getting his energy out like this and not by attacking the offending radio.
“Maybe they just need some time to understand it all? It is a lot to throw at someone all at once, and the fact that Mary’s radios are probably not transmitting properly to Eridian systems is probably not helping.” I was trying to be pragmatic, right? But I was not-so-secretly quite worried about the communication mismatch we were having as well. It was one thing for me to not be able to understand what was being said, and Rocky seemed to be able to translate it into baby-Eridian-for-English-natives well enough. But for Rocky’s own words to not quite go through correctly as well? What if Eridian language shifts dialects extremely quickly and it was never known before now? What if Rocky spent too much time out in space and the dominant dialect for space travel shifted?
No, no that would be stupid. Eridians lived for hundreds of years, generational shifts would happen over longer than just 50 or so Earth years (and what a sentence for me to say, when every year I felt more and more out of touch with what was ‘in’ when a new collection of middle schoolers joined my class). It wouldn’t make any sense to have nobody around that spoke 50-years-ago-Eridian, especially with the crazy memory Eridians had.
Rocky had started piecing together the bits for responding again. “Elevator Crew,” and I was impressed by his perfect stressing of the ‘professional’ chord even when I could see his bad leg twitch with irritation, “Explain Blip-A late Explain new ship Hail Mary if (stranger word said before). I have answer to astrophage establish secure connection for information (polite).” The moment he took a claw off of the transmission button he buzzed nearly too low for me to be able to hear, the sound rattling up through my bones through the chair. Felt kind of nice.
But it was also mostly comprehensible to me, so I was suddenly getting a sense for where the disconnect might be. Oops.
“Hey buddy,” I started before the response came and cut me off(and man was it weird to be within a few light seconds of a response!).
“Blip-A (unknown) (unknown) speak (unknown) crewmate other than speaker (polite).”
At this slightly more comprehensible chunk of speech, my hypothesis was starting to seem more sound. “Rocky?” I tried to cut in again.
He was bouncing his bad leg again and suddenly came to the same conclusion that I had. “Word order wrong speaking English word order stupid stupid stupid!” He dove for the transmitter once more. “Blip-A Erid from Tau Ceti damaged fuel crewmate singular with solution with crewmate stranger, advise (polite).”
Wasn’t sure if that would be any easier to understand, but with how it turned my brain inside out trying to keep up with his rapid clip and reversed sentencing structure, perhaps it was something more comprehensible to the Elevator Crew.
“Repeat (unknown) stranger question?”
Rocky definitely hesitated there, and that guilty look was suddenly back. Oh, so it was something. Perhaps something to do with me?
“Stranger… (unknown), or (unknown), question?”
Or perhaps he just didn’t know whatever word that the Elevator Crew needed?
“(Unknown, establish? Or start?) (unknown) connection (unknown) statement.”
Well. That did it at least.
~
First contact with Erid proper was a bit of a confusing affair, and certainly going to be simplified down for the history books I’m sure. After all, how do you explain ‘the interlocutor forgot about their native language’s syntax structure from sheer exposure to your own slow brain’ without everyone involved becoming an utter laughing stock?
Sorry humanity, but it gets worse. As it happens, while I had thought I had a passing understanding of Eridian before, I was very quickly faced with the reality that. Well. Most of the vocabulary that Rocky had been using specifically with communicating with me was custom created on the spot. Even my attempts to transmit rudimentary information in what I believed to be the right order was fundamentally doomed to fail at actually being comprehensible.
Think about it this way. Imagine if you met someone who has been taught your language purely on a vocabulary of ‘thingy that does something’ and ‘doodad that looks like this.’ It was impressive work, no doubt, for Rocky to perfectly remember the exact context of everything that was imperfectly transposed from English into Eridian for the sake of consistent communication. Obviously, it meant I never actually realized that he was just building a pidgin from scratch every time we spoke.
But. Well. I should’ve probably guessed something was up when he was able to effortlessly make a new word for the concept of ‘bachelorette’ during our reality TV show binge a few months previously.
Soooo… Whoops. Sorry.
~
The good thing about being wildly malnourished is that it’s pretty hard to get the energy to truly throw a fit. The bad news is that I don’t need to have a full fit in order to feel truly terrible. I groaned, draped out of the pilot’s seat at what is definitely an uncomfortable angle even in normal gravity and was starting to cause a headache from the floor pressing into my skull at 1.5g.
“Once, just once I’d have liked to make a good first impression on first contact. Like. I got to do it three times!” I waved a hand vaguely in Rocky’s direction. “And I killed the first astrophage I got, I became extreme survival roommates with the first Eridian I met, and I entirely fumbled my introduction to the rest of Erid!” Ow. Right, this position was not doing anything good for my neck. Probably best to stop before my osteoporosis decides to butt in. I was forgetting something. “Oh, yea, and I eat taumoeba. Not a good impression at all.”
Rocky doesn’t have eyes, but it was still pretty obvious that he was watching me bemusedly as I slowly wiggled out of the chair entirely to lay on the ground next to the xenonite barrier. A plus to having lost all energy left to feel shame around Rocky; he can no longer say anything about humans and their terrible anatomy that I haven’t already heard. “Grace being ridiculous.” I pick out the few words he did use desperately, trying to figure out if they are real ones or frankenstein’d monstrosities like what I apparently said to the Elevator Crew.
I think I’m in the clear. Too bad my previous attempts at overtures weren’t as lucky. I had been prepping a message for a while now, whenever I had the energy, using the bones of that translator program I had built at the start of all of this to create an Eridian text-to-speech synthesizer, but…
Well. I know what Eridian screaming sounds like now, and it sounds like the tinnitus I was still feeling. Or maybe it wasn’t screaming, and was simply a lot of people trying to talk over one another. What Rocky could get out of it before they started addressing only him for the more logistical problems had been something like ‘Don’t do that again that is weird.’ Assuming I can trust Rocky’s translations.
“I did tell you how important ‘first contact’ as a concept is for humans right? Not just me, all of humanity!” I slumped against the -by now rather grimy - join between the floor of the Hail Mary and the xenonite barrier. The floor got warmer here just purely on thermal conduction through the parts of the Hail Mary that aren’t super insulation xenonite. That exact issue had broken one of the interior walls a year back, and I’m a little scared of how much longer the Hail Mary will last at this point. Don’t expose metal to long term thermal stress, kids.
“Yes, talk about Star Trek many time. Grace stop being ridiculous now question?” Rocky sounded a little desperate for me to ‘stop being ridiculous.’ Too late.
“No, no, not just Star Trek. We’ve all been wanting to meet aliens since… since forever, basically! Since we could see the stars and know that there are other worlds out there, probably! You’ve seen all the movies with fake aliens in them. Humans have wanted to know what was out there, it was so important to us to imagine all the ways it could go, and now it’s real. We all wanted this to go right and-“ I growled and bumped my forehead into the barrier. “Gone and messed it up. All that planning and I didn’t even get a chance to say ‘hi’ from Earth properly.”
Rocky reached over and patted the other side of the barrier. “Words of condolence,” he intoned, somehow monotonously even when his language is literally made of tones.
Jerk.
~
That isn’t to say that even without the apparently quite-a-bit-wider communications gap than expected that first contact would have been easy. As it happens, Rocky has exhibited what could be considered considerable restraint when he only called me ‘a leaky space blob’ once a day, rather than in every sentence.
Alas, to the aliens we are considered quite ugly. Will have to get back to you on how to soften first impressions towards the Eridians when everyone’s bodies are made mostly of water. Maybe cool mech suits will be the future?
~
Another of the many things that I learned very quickly was different between Rocky and other Eridians was that they apparently had a disgust response to humans. Or perhaps to all Earth life, but I’m the only one here so. Humans.
That isn’t to say that Rocky had been making it discrete how much he found my ‘leaking’ distasteful at best and scandalous at worst, but for most Eridians the feeling of sound waves echoing through flesh that is 60% water is something that instinctively triggers a fear response. Like geometric holes and other trypophobia triggers do to humans, probably, if I’m understanding it correctly. Exposed organics in an Eridian is a sign of something catastrophically wrong, and I’m six feet something of ‘exposed innards’ just wiggling around. If I saw an alien that looked like a bunch of flailing guts, you bet I would start to feel queasy after a little bit. Heck, I remember a few times of getting spooked by Rocky just sitting in a decently dark enough shadow just for that split second of my hind brain detecting a potential giant spider whenever I was especially sleep deprived.
Thank you Rocky for being humanity’s first contact. Your iron (or mercury. Or thallium) stomach is truly appreciated by everyone on Earth, I’m sure.
(Now that I think about it, maybe Rocky was scared at the start, and my knowing nothing at the time about Eridian body language let him sweep it under the rug.)
(I’ll need to ask him later.)
As it were, Rocky had realized the issue the moment that the Hail Mary had connected airlock-to-temporary-xenonite-tunnel and let the rest of Eridiankind hear… er, me.
Is it funny to see a bunch of rock spiders start panicking and whispering to one another over the sight of me sequestered in the lab chair because Rocky didn’t trust me not to immediately fall over from the muscle spasms I’ve been having lately? Kind of. I guess.
Not really.
It did kind of confirm the problem with our shared vocabulary though, as most of the initial overtures that Rocky made to the Elevator Crew (assuming these are the same people that he had been coordinating with via radio before; I will need to figure out how to tell more Eridians apart by voice extremely soon now) went entirely over my head.
“Grace sleep soon question?” Rocky had turned back to me, limbs canted slightly to indicate a direction of focus for my benefit. “Can stay on Hail Mary while I deliver taumoeba yes question?”
I need to not be a big baby and burst into tears about Rocky leaving me like this. I need to extra not be a big baby and throw a tantrum over how little I was understanding from the other Eridians at this point, and how poor of an initial impression I was making just by doing nothing at all. Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have sat by and watched the grown ups talk shop while politely ignoring him like some lost toddler, dang it!
(Neil Armstrong also wouldn’t have crushing banks of brain fog coasting in on the daily that made it near impossible to think, or the spasms and cramps of a body slowly tearing itself apart to get the chemicals it needed to stay alive a moment longer. That doesn’t exactly help, though.)
I opened my mouth to tell Rocky that I could handle it, I wanted to come with, perhaps I could use the suit that he had made for my quick trip to the Blip-A all those years ago again, rather than sticking to the plan we had had already of waiting for a biodome to hopefully be constructed on Erid before I moved off the ship.
I wanted to tell him to start translating properly, to tell me what everyone was talking about and how I could do better than just appear like a half-dead mound of exposed guts to these people who will be my stewards and neighbors for the rest of my life, however long that’ll be.
I close my mouth. The tiredness settles over me once more, and I burrow into the quilt.
“Fine, just be quick, ok?" I turn away as the chattering renews between the strangers at the airlock door at the alien sound of my voice.
~
Next supposition that I really should’ve taken into account when formatting my initial understanding of spoken Eridian for the Beetles; I was always interacting one on one with a singular person. Obviously, this isn’t something that could have been avoided, but to expect that the tenses, the social cues and body language, even the specific word order choices, all of that was something that all Eridians used and not a result of the extreme circumstances that Rocky had been living in since before I was even alive… Well. That’s just negligence on my part as a scientist.
As it happens, I was swamped with the differentiations to be had between solitary Eridian communication and group conversations. Chief among them being how, for lack of better wording, omnidirectional they appear to be. The concurrent trains of thought that I had always observed in Rocky are utilized in other Eridians to have many conversations at once with those nearest them, an ebb and flow of information moving up and down between a mass cluster of people all working on the same general idea. It’s like an enormous amorphous brainstorming session, best I can tell.
I’m pretty sure this is what Rocky meant when he said that his people will thrum for a solution once we made it to Erid. I wish I could tell more about its exact mechanics, it looks fascinating, but… well, from the outside it sounded more like a dozen orchestras preparing to play without ever finding the tuning note.
~
Non-Rocky Eridians are weird. Or, Eridians not force-socialized with a human for four years are weird. (Or, Eridians that didn’t undergo long traumatic isolation in the depths of space are weird? But that makes me sad to think about.) It kind of hits me every so often just how strange first contact has become, when I interact with other Eridians.
There’s a team, not just of the Elevator Crew, but what appears to be the entire Eridian equivalent to the Petrova Task Force back on Earth, all jumbled in the enormous platform at the highest point on the space elevator. They were kind enough to give me a little clear xenonite window in from the tunnel scaffolding that they had hastily set up to accommodate my incompatible atmosphere (though I notice that a good bit of it was, in fact, repurposed sections of Rocky’s own tunnels from within the Hail Mary, probably removed first along with the Eridian life support so that the heat stress of our clashing temperature ranges against the non-xenonite walls would not threaten any more structural stability in the ship). It felt a little like sticking my head in one of those aquarium domes, the ones that let people look in from the bottom of the tank and see the fish face-to-face, to see all of the unrecognizable mishmash of Eridians skitter to and fro below where I watched. It was dark. It was loud. It was, frankly, something that I really didn’t want to have to wade into and figure out what to do next. Thank you Rocky for doing all that important ambassadorial stuff for me. I can barely hear myself think and I’m all the way out in a secluded tunnel bolted to the side of the platform.
That is something else strange that I don’t remember happening too often with Rocky; the ever present hum on the elevator platform. Now, it definitely can just be Eridian machinery - I never was on the Blip-A long enough to get a good sense for what is ‘normal machinery noises’ and what is ‘Grace’s heart almost exploding from excitement.’ But, from what little I can understand through the buzzing and general loudness and brain fog, it seems like that hum shifts in pitch and loudness as disagreements breakout between people. Is it… some kind of social signalling perhaps? That would be fascinating.
Wait, but if that was the case why would Rocky not have done it much before?
Oh, or perhaps this is the ‘thrumming’ that Rocky has tried to explain to me a few times now. Less ‘hive mind’ and more… group consensus based on… buzzing?
Clearly my pathetic little human brain wasn’t going to get anywhere on this. At least I don’t really have much to do besides watch, sleep, (hope to anything and everything out there that one of the multitudinous projects they are working on out there is some way for me to eat) and wait for Rocky to get back.
I just… need to wait until Rocky gets back. It’s all fine.
There is a tap at the window, a gesture that was quickly picked up when I entirely spaced out the first time someone attempted to talk to me. So sue me my audio processing isn’t the best anymore, I’ve only had one other guy to talk to for the last while! I tried to remember which one this was. Someone from the… ship rebuilding team?
“Grace (referring to someone in-room, honored, non-Eridian) need question?” It had been a doozy trying to figure out how to hear those micro-tones above the buzz, but I think I got those down well enough for now.
“No, I’m good.” Because what else am I supposed to say? Start cracking the whip and saying ‘make me vitamins faster,’ or something? They are already going as fast as they can, if the movement I can see from the spotlight shown from the window is any indication. “Can you find out if Rocky is coming back soon?”
Er. Ignore the crack in my voice. I’m doing fine without Rocky here. I’m a grown man and I don’t need my best friend right here at all times.
The maybe-ship-rebuilder reached out an arm to tap another Eridian nearby, saying something that was lost to the hum. Translating, probably, because it was decided that rebuilding an understanding of my words from first principles was more efficient than trying to detangle what Rocky did. Apparently. Then they (he? it?) tapped the window again, as if to be sure of my attention. “Rocky (referring to someone somewhere else, honored, unsure of status) busy (unknown, something about talking) (unknown, specialized word relating to teaching?)”
I guess that will have to do. The vocabulary pool just isn’t wide enough for much more at this point. Rocky was probably still doing the thrums that he had mentioned he would need to get in the middle of as soon as possible, and it just… takes longer than I expected. Or something. I give a thumbs down (Rocky ironed out ‘basic human hand signs slash inside jokes that have gone on too long’ immediately, so I had that at least) and let the ship-rebuilder get back to work, then slump back down into one of the more comfortably human-sized curves in the repurposed xenonite tunnel.
Below me was miles and miles of open space between the top of the elevator and the highest points of Erid’s atmosphere. It was beautiful and terrifying in equal measure, especially since the xenonite tunnels that I was using right now were entirely see through. If I really wanted to, I could retreat back to the Hail Mary, her airlock was still open so I could travel as I wished. I’m certain some of the thrum members would appreciate having less of a front row seat to my internals.
But I want to be here to spot Rocky the moment he comes up. Call it pathetic, call it needy, whatever. I checked and rechecked his location every day when we had briefly parted ways before, it just felt bad to not know where he was now.
~
Final consideration that I would appreciate some better sociologists taking over and unpacking for me is the apparent degree of expected shared knowledge that a group of Eridians have with one another, generally to the detriment of the outgroup (me). If I were to guess, this is a side effect of the thrumming system, as there seems to be an assumption of shared understanding and thus agreement in larger scale actions. Effective for getting things done by ensuring that nobody is harboring feelings of dissent. Less helpful for those who cannot actually hear in on the discussion slash do not have this mental framework. Perhaps there will be some interesting studies to be had about the comparisons between Eridian psychology and the human psychological concepts of ‘theory of mind’ and ‘mirror neurons?’ I will defer to those that actually have practice in these subjects though. I’m only a molecular biologist. Ultimately, it means that communication between humans and Eridians may be a little more rough around the edges than we may have hoped for, though I will do my valiant best to identify and smooth things out in the time I have left.
(And… I don’t know how I feel about the way that they seem to assume consent as a result. I’ll work on that too.)
~
So… I might’ve made some kind of miscalculation along the way. I really don’t know exactly when, but.
It started when I finally managed to get a bit of fitful rest. I know, I wouldn’t have expected to be able to get any either, given the circumstances. But I had just managed to bully Armando into a few aspirin for the headache that keeps rising and falling in time with the thrum on the Elevator. I wonder if maybe there is some note outside of my range of hearing that is messing with my system, a resonance that is rattling my brain something fierce. Or I’m just tired and kind of wish we were back to a month out from Erid again.
Along with the fairly won aspirin, I had pulled out the good quilt and as many pillows as I could manage in one go in order to create a little pillow nest in the xenonite tunnel. So I might have missed having Rocky watch me as I slept and was coping rather poorly by pretending that sleeping in line of sight of the elevator thrum would be equivalent. So what?
They had continued nearly ceaselessly through the hours, and while it continued to make my teeth rattle in a way that had me suddenly recalling how scurvy is likely to start majorly affecting me if a new food source doesn’t come through soon, it is a little calming knowing that there are people nearby. People who I will like, one day, once I can actually understand them.
I fell asleep nursing that headache and hoping that by the time I woke up Rocky would be back. I hoped he came back. I hope he didn’t take one look at all the other Eridians that he could now be around and remembered ‘oh right, I don’t need to be stuck with the forgetful space blob anymore.’ I miss him.
Then I woke up to the sound of a seal closing. It was too loud and too close by to not be within my little enclosure. I whipped my head around just to see several xenonite-suited Eridians startle and the airlock door for the Hail Mary closed.
“Wait – no,” I pushed myself out of the boneless slump of pillows I had been curled up in, suddenly and awfully awake. The other Eridians on the other side of the airlock, inside my ship, had turned away from me and went further into the cupula. Out of sight of the airlock window. I pounded at it desperately. “No! Wait come back, what are you doing!”
There was a tentative tap-tap-tap at the opposite window, and I swung around in the weird gravity of the Elevator a little too hard towards the noise. One of the thrum Eridians was there at the window again. I scrambled over ungracefully. “You! What are they doing – what are you doing – my ship!”
The speaker cringed back a little as I pressed my hands against the window but come on, this is important! “Ship(connotation of stranger?) parts build structure(living? unclear tense) (unknown – something about necessity, or requirement). Ship(maybe it’s not ‘stranger,’ and means alien?) break (current) (unknown) (unknown, some base parts from ‘thinking machine’) (unknown) Grace (future tense? Honored, not in room?).”
I gripped at the headache building again, looking between the speaker and the sealed hatch. Suddenly the space felt way too small. “Are you breaking my ship down for parts?” I sounded more than a little hysterical now, but I couldn’t quite keep a lid on it. I paced back over to the other side of the tunnel (“12 meters,” a part of me guesstimated, and for a moment I could only remember the prison cell I had been in on my last day of Earth.) to stare desperately through the window again. It was scratched from tiny bits of interstellar dust chipping at the thick glass. I was never meant to see it from this direction, it had always been open when the Blip-A and Mary were connected, it had always been open when I was out on the hull, it was only closed when I was inside.
The speaker started talking again, but the words slipped through my ears like sand. Something about “calm” at one point which – too late for that, not when you locked me out of my own house!
“I need things in there! Air! Water!” I gestured frantically at the tiny space around me. “More space than this!” I started pacing again, kicking the pillows to the side (as much as one could in the curved interior of a tunnel not built for human proportions!) as I went.
There was more talking behind me, and I think another Eridian joined the group because the timbre was slightly different. Still not comprehensible, but different. I could only pick up one word in the jumble, though, and it was one I knew well. “Rocky.”
I whipped around, and the group of now four Eridians here to watch the alien panic in his cage stepped back as one. “Rocky! Where is he, I need him, he needs to translate for me about all this.” I waved a hand exasperatedly at the closed door.
One of the Eridians who hadn’t spoken up yet (I assume) shuffled a claw against the ground and let out a high keening note that made me remember the filling I had gotten when I was 20 in my left upper molar. “Rocky (unknown) (unknown) strange speaking(past tense?). Necessary separation (unknown, does it mean ‘conclusion?’ or ‘ending?’) interpretation (or maybe it's ‘understanding’) science novel.”
I have no idea what most of that means. But I can get the gist, and it was filling my head with red. “You’re keeping us separated? You’re –“ I choked, then keened myself and buried my head in the quilt. They’re going to keep us apart. Why not? Rocky is the savior, the person that people could understand, the brilliant engineer and part of the original crew. I was the curiosity, the dying alien who had a ship full of goodies to gut and -
No, no I'm panicking, I need to not panic, need to not make an even bigger fool of myself than I have already because of the language barrier. I gripped tighter to the quilt.
(How much air do they think I need to survive? Eridians only needed air for venting heat, not for gas exchange, I had been keeping Mary open to the tunnel partially so air could keep circulating, but now -)
There was a crack that rattled me hard enough to jump, and I immediately pressed my face against the clear xenonite around the edges of the airlock seal.
Those - fuck. My ship! It's coming apart! A part of the hull had just buckled, a few Eridians were perching along the hull like horrible space spiders, picking at the damage, did they cause it?
I was shouting before I realized I was going to. "My ship! What are you doing to her!" I slammed my fist against the airlock then, failing that, slammed a shoulder against it for even more force. "Stop taking her apart! That's my home!"
Behind me a chorus of "calm" started up again, and I wanted to scream at them to shut up. That was my SHIP! She was doing just fine before now, where was Rocky! Rocky would never have let her fall apart like this!
I watched with horror, still yelling at the shoddy engineers that must've let this happen, as one large machine was extricated out the hole of the hull. The air circulator. Not all of it, not the pieces that utilize bits of astrophage-warmed radiator pipes to sort CO2 from O2, but a solid chunk of it. That was it. I was going to suffocate and die. I made it all this way only to stumble on the last step and trip and make a stupid idiot of myself and let myself get separated from Rocky and now someone just broke the only source of human safe oxygen on Erid!
I started to wail and pound on the wall, wanting so desperately to have brought my Orlan suit, to be able to leap out into the void and kick them out of my ship. They would never see me coming, haha.
It seemed that at this point, the crowd of milling Eridians poorly trying to get the alien to stop freaking out for entirely justified reasons decided to finally get Rocky to translate for them. Because they wanted us separate, but not if I was going to throw this big of a fuss, maybe. Do they even understand what they did? To me, to Mary?
Just to add more salt to the wound, apparently, they were keeping Rocky pretty dang close to me. Maybe lower down on the elevator, assuming it wasn’t just a straight shaft down from the top floor to the surface of Erid. It took him only fifteen minutes to make it back to me.
Fifteen minutes of seeing more and more pieces of Mary get taken apart and carefully packed into cases. Of seeing my stuff, our stuff, getting packed away and taken by these strangers. I had only ever felt a vague respect for the Hail Mary before now, an understanding that her engineering was the only reason that I had managed to get this far. Well, her engineering and the hundreds of patch jobs Rocky and I made over the years. I never anthropomorphized her as much as I really could’ve, apart from the weird love-hate thing I have with Armando. Or the cautious politeness that had melted into a kind of long-suffering fondness for the limitations of the on-board computer. Or the way that I always felt that she deserved to feel proud of how she had managed to go so much further than her anticipated lifespan.
Maybe I did anthropomorphize her a little bit. You unsuicide a mission and tell me how you feel about the vessel you survived in for over four years!
And now they were killing her. Taking her apart piece by piece and I could do nothing to stop them.
I was inconsolable by the time Rocky finally got my attention. It had started with the same tapping as before, until Rocky just decided to yell my name. I jumped, shocked out of the terror paralysis that had me staring out the window, to see him standing at the bubble dome window.
“Grace! What are you doing question!” He stomped the ground with a little more force than usual, and that of all things was setting me off. He goes running off to start who knows what, leaving me behind to sit around and let my stuff get taken, and then he’s bossy when he gets back?
“They’re taking apart Mary!” I yell back, my own voice jangling in my ears oddly in the small space. “Tell them to stop!”
“No, necessary!” Rocky had raised in volume as well, enough that the other Eridians had started taking a few steps back. Who cares. “Mary damaged, need fixing, need repairing, need parts!”
I flung my arm out to the tubing that is being pulled out into the vacuum of space. “You call that fixing?!”
“Yes, Rocky told parts to take parts to keep,” he stomped at the ground again, in that way that I cannot tell means exasperation or trying to get better clarity of sound. I’m angry enough to not care.
“Tell them to stop! I need her, why didn’t they ask!” I swallowed, feeling my throat grow tighter by the word. “Why didn’t you ask!”
Rocky made that grumble hiss sound that I knew absolutely was of exasperation now. He prodded at the window. “Slow human brain slow human plans need to get things set up fast for Grace! Stop being ridiculous, Rocky busy!”
It felt like things were getting further and further away, like suddenly I was taking notice of just how fast my heart was beating. I swallowed, then gasped, and tried not to think about how irritated Rocky was with me. With how quickly he had left and decided to plan things for me and not with me. At how I’m being shuffled around without my say so, again, and this time I don’t even have the benefit of speaking mostly the same languages as everyone else around me.
“Then we should’ve planned before! So you could set things up without me being unable to say anything to anyone else! Did you know this would happen?”
I was angry. I was scared. I was humiliated, most of all, for being yanked around like this and for Rocky to get irritated that I wasn’t just going to do whatever he wanted - I can’t afford to do whatever he wanted when people are taking my stuff without asking!
And he knew, in some way. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, but I know that he contributed in some way to this wretched powerlessness. He was hesitating I can tell he’s hesitating why was he HESITATING!
Seems the breakdown I had been trying to stay in front of was finally happening now. Joy.
“Was all this some kind of big joke to you?” My voice broke terribly on that, in a way that physically hurt. But who cares!!! It’s not as if anyone else on the planet is mutually intelligible with me other than the person right in front of me!!! “Get Grace all this bogus data and then send him on his way to utterly ruin every first impression he makes?” It’s getting hard to breathe, and I don’t know if its because of the crying or the tiny space or the fact that they probably are gutting the rest of the oxygen reclaimer right now as we speak.
“What? No!” Rocky pressed further against the dome, and I just couldn’t be there right then. I pressed myself against the far edge near the airlock, suddenly unwilling or unable to look at any Eridians right now. “Was mistake, was unforeseen consequence! Rocky forgot -“
“You don’t forget! You’ve told me countless times you don’t forget and now you want to pretend you did that on accident?” Am I hysterical? I might be hysterical. I can’t look down because Erid is there to terrify me with how far away it is, can’t look up because the stars are too closely pressing in, can’t look to my sides because I’m surrounded by Eridians -
“Fine!” Rocky’s voice was sharp in a way I haven’t ever properly heard from him. “Didn’t forget, but was for important purpose! Will explain later, after Grace eaten and slept.”
I buried my face in the quilt (hey, there’s one place I can look without the terror rising further!) and muffled a moan. “Explain now! Explain why you let me sit around and think I was learning the right stuff and now I have no idea what anyone’s doing!”
“Grace sick! Need to rest brain is acting strange, not correct not correct!” A whine so similar to how the thrum had sounded was building up in Rocky’s voice as well, though it was hard to hear over the drowning sound of my own heartbeat.
“They’re taking apart my ship, Rocky! The place that we lived in for years! The place that I know can keep me alive! I don’t know if they expect me to live in this tube or something, because nobody is capable of talking to me! Because of you.” That scream finally came out properly, a yell that only barely was caught by the quilt. My throat hurts, my chest hurts, my heart hurts.
I waited, shivering with tension, for Rocky to answer me.
I waited, chest heaving, tears streaming, for anyone to answer me.
I waited, breathing slowly pettering down to pathetic whines and gasps, for my panic to be acknowledged at all.
…
“Grace.” Rocky’s voice was quiet, was soft as it was when I would wake from a nightmare, when I would get a little too stir crazy and throw stuff across the lab for reasons that felt important in the moment. When he decided to treat me like some fragile feral animal rather than a person. “I am sorry. You are scared, and… purpose was important but not more important than Grace.”
I want to be angry. I’m just tired now. It’s hard to move my hands enough to even move the blanket now, no mind prop myself up enough to look at him. So I do none of that. I try to focus on my breathing, but that only reminds me of the limited air supply I now have.
“Grace,” Rocky starts again, and his voice is very low now. At that limit between where I can hear it and can’t. If I want to hear him any better I’d need to get closer. “I was scared to tell. I shouldn’t tell because it will not work if I tell.”
(I am tensed as a coil, ready to flinch. That feeling buzzed in the back of my skull, the one that reminds me that there’s always something wrong with the way I act that causes others to quietly, subtly keep their distance from me. That reminder that I will always have some social difference to me that I can never notice, yet shines like a beacon to anyone else around me. Seems I had only been this lucky thus far because Rocky literally had nobody else.)
“I was scared of being separated from Grace,” Rocky barely whispered, voice as close as it could get to me now without me moving. “Erid needs to know about Earth and need Rocky to translate, cannot separate Rocky-Grace if Grace not know Eridian.”
I couldn’t help it. I looked up, staring at Rocky now from a gap opened in the quilt folds.
He continued, cringing slightly at my attention. “Erid… Science chord, diplomacy chord, Elevator hive think Rocky stranger, alien because of being alone. Want to fix Rocky, want to make sure Rocky is normal Eridian. Would separate from Grace to make sure Rocky is normal Eridian again.” It felt a little like all those feelings that had choked me were drying up, a saline lake of anger and fear boiling off and leaving a fine layer of crystal salt in its place along all my insides.
I didn’t know how to feel. Or if I believed him even. But I knew Rocky’s fear at this point, extremely well. I had been there with him as he slowly tried to parse and explain the sheer amount of horror he had gone through in the years he spent alone on the Blip-A. We had tried to figure out what bits of human mental health could be applicable across the species divide, and what we could try and make together to work in the interim. What we could do to survive and make it here in one piece, without losing either of our minds.
This was that terrible and sharp fear that raised its ugly head every time Rocky would panic and fret about if Adrian would even recognize him anymore. The same fear that backed his actions when he was stubbornly clinging to the faith, no, certainty that Erid would help me once we arrived without question.
If he was telling a lie here, it was one he was planning for as long as I knew him.
“They would’ve kept us apart?” I finally asked, mostly because I needed him to say it again.
“Talk of it once we arrived, of how I did a poor job at first contact. Meant fun, I think. But do not know for sure.” He had tucked himself down in what I might imagine to be a ‘cat loaf’ pose but I knew meant distress. “Tried to be better, get thrums started faster, get biodome started faster. Missed steps, got reckless.”
I scooched closer to him, laying my head maybe a meter away from the dome. “But you let me learn the wrong language the entire time.”
Rocky hissed, that same way that meant nothing to an Eridian but was Rocky’s way of imitating a human sigh. “Was… Always weird. For Eridians. Not right, but was good at job. Knew that others would separate soon, even if not immediately. Grace too important.” He clonked against the barrier. “Always hard for others to understand. Always hard to tell what others mean. Easier with Grace. Never was confused by if Rocky was mad versus sarcastic. Knew same language.”
Way to cut straight to my heart, bud.
I let out my own long sigh, though it still whined out a little because of how abused my throat now felt. “So you wanted to figure out a way to make sure I couldn’t be separated from you.”
“Yes. I… It was not on purpose at first. Finding words in common with English, finding ways to finish mission with Grace, finding words to not be alone.” Two of his notes diverged in a tremolo that wasn’t normal. Mimicking me when my voice breaks, or an Eridian sign of sadness I never caught before?
“But… was easier, to find new words and make than use Eridian ones. Was fun even. You got good at remembering, and I never felt like I was using the wrong ones. Like games. And you never got confused by what I meant. Was exciting.”
I noticed, for the first time, that the rest of the Elevator floor was clear. It was hard to see, since the light reflected weird off of the xenonite tiles, but I’m pretty sure Rocky and I were the only ones up here. No wonder I was able to relax for the first time in over a day.
“I think I get what you mean. Still… It means that now I will need to remember the right words along with your ones.” It probably will be doable, but I cannot imagine how much of a mess my Eridian vocabulary will be for probably the rest of my life. “It… I won’t lie. I don’t like that you didn’t tell me.”
“Needed to…” Rocky stomped the foot furthest away from me in nervous energy. “Needed to know you couldn’t go. Couldn’t be taken. Needed to make sure you would be safe.”
Which. Creepy. But.
Why am I kind of relieved by that?
Why am I already feeling a little more with it and sure of our future now that the possibility that Rocky could ever be taken from me was introduced and removed in the same conversation?
(Is this normal? Probably not, but why start now?)
The headache pangs me warningly when I start to cry again, though these are less desperate-panic tears and more love-my-friend tears. “Thanks, bud,” I croak out.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, and I find I’ve moved the last meter and pressed myself against the barrier with him again. “So scared to be alone again, haven’t even seen Adrian yet, too scared. Needed to be sure Grace was safe but Grace was scared, ruined everything.” I really cannot tell how other Eridians could find him hard to read, with how he stretched towards me like a plant towards sunlight so we could pretend we were leaning against one another.
“Thank you,” I repeated, feeling a little like a stuck gear. “I didn’t know we could be separated like that. I didn’t… Is that why you were so certain I would get help? Because you would make sure you couldn’t be removed?”
“Yes.”
“You know that was part of why I was so worried about arriving at Erid in the first place, and why I didn’t believe you when you said it would be handled, right?”
Rocky froze for a moment. “Same language all along,” he grumbled, some of that terror finally loosening from his limbs.
I laughed, weakly. The relief was so electric I felt like I was floating away. Maybe it’s just the weird elevator gravity. I wasn’t going to be left alone, even if Rocky had to become a limpet against my side to ensure it. I would never be alone again.
“Sorry for disrupting the thrums.” I shuffled a little more upright.
“Was fair, bad situation for Grace,” Rocky instantly argued back.
“Well, sorry then for yelling at you.”
Rocky hummed and hawed (and, hm. What’s weirder to me, seeing just how much I’ve adapted to his specific body language and idiosyncrasies to the detriment of my interpretation of other Eridians, or considering just how much he must have had to forcefully change his own reactions to better fit with my mental framework years ago?) before languidly stretching out his legs. “Apology received. Accepted.” He hesitated before adding, softly, “I know I strange. I know I… not normal Eridian. You… deserve normal Eridian.”
“What? No, absolutely not. We’re both weird together, and I know you best, and I love you a lot Rocky!” I was stupid and tired and a little more worn out from today than I thought, but I meant it with all my heart. “Sure, it was a bit of an asshole move to do that in the first place but…” how to explain ‘it’s kind of sweet to know someone’s latched to my side as severely as I had feared I was to them’ without it being weird? “I know no other Rocky. I like you for what you are. Strangenesses and all. And I don’t want to be separated from you as much as you don’t from me.”
Rocky held up a hesitant thumbs down at my eye level. I returned it, before clonking my head very gently into the barrier in the same way Rocky did it.
“Then no separation. I am here with you.” He finally got up out of the distressed-loaf position, shaking out his other legs in succession as if getting feeling back into them. “And… Biodome still in progress, but working fast. Mary machinery being moved and installed, trust Mary better than new technology for now.” He tapped at the barrier, and I finally turned around to look at the gutted ship. There were a few Eridians there still (I can’t imagine he could’ve gotten them out of there without a better reason than ‘Grace is panicking’) carefully pulling out more bits of the lifesupport, but now that I was a little calmer I could at least see that it was meticulous and careful. What I had seen as rampant butchering was more a dissection, if anything.
“I trust her too. But I’m sure there’s better than her out there at this point.”
“Better for Mary’s systems for temporary Biodome before main is finished. Preparations nearly complete, will be able to move Grace down soon as systems re-installed. Wanted you not in Mary any longer than needed.”
“Will you be there when I get moved? Make sure that I understand the others?” I couldn’t help the fear that re-entered my tone, though I tried my hardest to keep it neutral.
“Always.”
And, well, I suppose I couldn’t help but always trust Rocky.
~
Please find enclosed my updated Eridian translation notes, as well as my attempts at linguistic studies on Rocky’s ‘Hail Mary dialect’ that we were using. There may be some interesting studies to be done on the ways that he formatted Eridian root words as a building block to cross the language divide. I will have to hope that I have included enough information to help with this study. Though, if you are that hypothetical xenosociology college student, all I can wish you now is luck.
I’ll see you on the other side,
Capt. Dr. Ryland Grace