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Without the Blip-A in tow, Rocky and I make good pace of the distance between Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani. It took some time for Rocky to construct an outer shell over the centrifugal hull, making the Hail Mary almost 45% of Eridian creation now that the fuel bays are primarily of Rocky's handywork. My only sadness is that the Blip-A will never see home again - Rocky, like me, was too sentimental to leave his crewmates bodies to rattle in space until some other space-faring beings maybe encounter it drifting out there, so part of the outer hull retrofit that he has built is a carefully crafted resting place for the bodies to be transported home.
Apparently, in his culture, the bodies of the dead were used for multiple things - grief, it turns out, is something universal to Earth and Erid, which I knew from Rocky's voice dipping and warbling when he speaks about his crew, but to hear about it first hand is beyond fascinating. The body is allowed to rest in a place of their own choosing, but often the bodies are buried below nesting grounds, so that their rich mineral deposits could help seed the next generation with all the iron and thallium and other inorganic goodies a little pebble could dream of. Other bodies were carefully taken to various resting grounds; their equivalent to cremation was to lay bodies to rest in areas of volcanic activity, so that eventually the body was retaken by the molten lava and recycled into the environment. Often a small piece of the outer shell was given to their children, or if they died before reproducing, to their own parents.
But because so little of their body is organic, death is not seen as the gross, scary thing that we often do on Earth. I think of the stomach churning shock I felt seeing Yao, and Ilyukhina, withered of their life and smiles-
Guh!
“So,” I start pulling up a list of words for funeral, rites and rituals, mummification, and related concepts, “When you die-”
My voice catches in my throat without meaning to, and I clear it as Rocky perches above me in the little alcove he has crafted to watch me sleep, “-Sorry, anyway, when you die, what will Adrian do for your body after?”
Rocky sings a word I - and the computer software - haven’t heard before, and then, “When future, Adrian will carry body to-” he sings again, “-need word. Stone large, part of planet.”
I scour my mind trying to think of how to connect this to a concept familiar to my own words.
“Uhm, maybe a boulder?” On my tablet I flip through English definitions to make sure I tell him exactly the right thing - the only downside to Eridian’s perfect recall, I’ve found, is that once they understand something one way, it takes significant effort to convince Rocky that his internal concept is either wrong or shallowly defined. Thankfully, he tries really hard to relearn anything I’ve taught him incorrectly, because we both know we’re working across a language divide beyond what either of our cultures could have prepared us for. Rocky, for his part, already knew 4 other languages, having learned rudimentary versions of his spacefaring crew mates native languages in the 2 earth years they spent preparing for the flight, and he spent the rest of the time on his ship learning more from them before-
“Boulder, very large rock, smooth from erosion.”
“Grace, final word new word,” Rocky finishes his sentence by firing off all 5 air bladders in an imitation of my sigh, and I laugh.
“Well, darn,” I rub my forehead, “I guess without much water, erosion for you would be…do you have sand on Erid?”
“Sand, is water based, question?”
“No, sand is many very very little small stones, very small.”
“Yes yes yes,” Rocky shifts, his stony shell making the clear xenonite echo for a moment, “We call this-”
Into the program it goes - I wonder what he thought the original word I have encoded for sand is?
“So, when wind blows sand against sharp stone, over the years, the sand will make the large stone smooth. Erosion, when it is happening, eroded, it already happened.”
Rocky sings, I write.
“Stone large, how, question?”
I mentally translate what he means to ask without even thinking, “How large? Uh, you know, bigger than me.”
“Stone falls off larger planet face, question?”
“Yeah.”
Rocky sings, and I plug in boulder for him.
“Boulder not word needed.”
“Aw-”
“Large planet surface boulder falls from?”
“Oh!” I flash Rocky a sheepish smile, “Mountain? Formed from tect- actually we don’t have those words yet.”
After a few more moments of deliberation, I ask him to say mountain again, and I try to commit it to memory for myself. Some things have become easier, my ears acclimating to the tones of his voice, and certain words that he repeats often becoming easier to simply understand and not bother waiting for my software to translate. I’ve realized that while I speak my normal language to him, he speaks a pidgin of his own, essentially speaking to me as he would a baby at first, and now that he’s become comfortable, I’ve had to have him re-record many words as his tone has shifted and the computer gets confused.
“So Adrian takes you to a mountain.”
“Yes, yes, yes. Special mountain, many-” he paused, “-body grounds. Predator eat little meat on body. Contaminants eliminated by predator; family visit with stories.”
Rocky says something with a certain sadness, lapsing into his own more comfortable language, and I place my hand on the barrier between us. Despite all the layers of xenonite, its still hot like a warm oven, but I’ve come to like it, against the cold of space sapping the warmth of the Hail Mary - his enclosure keeps my entire area warm for a fraction of the energy cost of my own heat systems, so I’ve set the entire ship to only heat once we hit a certain temperature drop. I remember how his body scalded my arms when I tried to save him, but I wish I could touch him one more time. And not melt to death, hah!
“When future, Grace want same as crew?” he asks me.
We try not to talk about my puny lifetime compared to him. I can tell it makes him desperately sad, and he clambers around closer to me whenever we bring it up. I look, unwillingly, towards the area where I carefully tucked Yao and Ilyukhina into their space suits in the airlock. The only reason I didn’t float them out to give them the dignity of a burial was because after wandering the ship, I realized Mary was built to be a tomb. The gold plates on the wall, the multiple items I knew had been crafted by people from around the world, the drawings from children, a small shrine Yao had packed, Ilyukhina’s family bible. I couldn’t keep their bodies in here with me, while I am still living, but I felt sick to remove them from the space that they had accepted as their final resting place.
“No,” I shake my head, wiping at my wet eyes, “We do things a little different on Earth. If I die, Rocky-”
“No, no, no-”
“No, listen,” I sit up, and bump my head but I hardly mind, “Rocky-”
Rocky hums at me unhappily, “I am sorry.”
“Its okay,” for Rock, the concept of an apology was contingent on a person being the one to speak it, so there was no word for ‘I’ in the term, but I coded it that way anyway, as this one was a heavier word than a simple ‘sorry’.
“I left them here because-” I point at the ship, “This entire thing honors their sacrifice. Maybe one day Earth will come retrieve them. Maybe they’ll be buried back with their families one day.”
Rocky warbles and shifts across the space.
“I just- Put me out the airlock if I die.”
Rocky dislikes this, and snaps across the xenonite barrier to stubbornly sit where he does when I sleep. I notice he does this nearly for the same reason I hug myself.
“Don’t like. Grace wants, question? Family on Earth?”
“....No,” I bite the inside of my lip and rub a hand through my hair, “I have no one.”
“Yes,” Rocky says, the way he does when he already knows, asking redundant questions, “But Erid, Grace has Rocky and Adrian. If Grace Eridian-”
His fingers fidget, and I get the feeling that others don’t choose for an Eridian.
“Body ground with Rocky. Family visit and tell stories together.”
I blink away more tears, and rest my forehead against the barrier. After holding my breath, I let out a burst of air and shake my head with a faint laugh.
“I love you,” I admit. Not my manliest moment, but hey. Rocky doesn’t have the concept of a man to judge me by.
Rocky presses the flattest part of his carapace against the barrier, and hums a deep chord that I can feel vibrate through the xenonite.
“New word,” he says. But I somehow know I don’t really need to translate the emotion.