Chapter Text
I flopped onto my bunk, exhausted. I’d spent the whole day trying to make sure that the Taumoeba wouldn’t go bad before we reached Erid. I wasn’t sure what way it would go bad, given the lack of decomposers that I know, but there were definitely some smaller microbes mixed in with the Taumoeba. I didn’t want to wake up one day with a new space illness because they’d fermented it into something that would destroy my gut.
“Grace? Are you alright, question?” Rocky checked on me. He could be a bit of a mother hen when he wanted to.
Fine, tired. I toned.
There was a distinct beat of silence. “Grace, what was that, question?”
I groaned, and lightly slapped myself in the face, pulling my eyes open and my body into a half-sitting position. “Please tell me I didn’t say a bad word in Eridian.” I pleaded. It would be ironic if after all my work to make sure I didn’t accidentally swear in front of children, I ended up accidentally swearing at aliens instead.
“You did not,” Rocky’s tone was distinctly bemused. “All Eridian curses require at least three vocal boxes. Makes it difficult for young ones to say.”
“You childproof your curses?” As a concept, that was amazing, and definitely something I wanted to explore. Later, when my head didn’t feel so heavy.
“Yes,” Rocky tapped the ground. “But what was that noise, question?"
“It’s not really supposed to be something. It’s just…” I faltered. “It’s nothing to worry about.” I settled on.
Rocky rocked side to side thoughtfully. “Not worried, but curious,” He stated. “Grace appears tired. I will observe. Talk later, question?”
“Sure,” I agreed, and promptly flopped back down.
With him watching over me, I was out like a light in minutes.
I honestly didn’t expect it to come up again. It had slipped out, probably due to a combination of being tired and getting used to being around someone who only spoke in tones. But there wasn’t exactly a shortage of the first condition, and the second definitely wasn’t going away.
So, I slipped again. I was munching on a burrito, and Rocky asked me something about my opinion on what Eridians could do to improve their radio tech. Hold on just a moment, I toned. That, I could have probably passed off. But I followed it up with I’m not sure, let me think about it?
“Grace, what, question?” Rocky sounded even more bewildered than last time. “No curses,” he added. “Just not words you have taught. Don’t sound like the other words you use, or like words from the recordings.”
I put my face in my hands. “Rocky, it’s…” I sighed. “It’s something that my family did. It’s not really words.”
Rocky huffed. “It is communication, though. Want to learn,” he insisted.
“Give me a moment,” I requested.
Where did I even begin to explain this? I’d never really been able to. I’d just tried to stop doing it. Some people picked up on some of my one-part tones if I hung around them long enough. Melissa and, ironically, Stratt were the ones who had made the most progress in decoding them, even understanding some of the two-part tones. But nobody who wasn’t part of making the tones really got them, and I didn’t know how to make them understand. They just were the most direct expression of what I wanted to say, translated into hums, tones, grumbles, essentially any noise that I could make without opening my mouth.
"So, to be clear, this is a me thing, not a human thing." I paused. How do you explain this? I've never successfully explained this. "When I was a kid, I had trouble talking sometimes. Not like, I didn't know the words. I knew the words. I just couldn't… get them out. The whole system just went offline."
Rocky hummed and made the gesture for me to continue.
"So my parents needed a workaround. And I'd already been making noises - I didn't really decide to, it just happened - so we kind of… reverse-engineered them. My parents would guess what a noise meant, and if they were right, that's what it meant from then on. Sometimes I didn’t know what the noise meant until they guessed it. Some of them I made up on purpose later, when we needed them. It's like..." I grasped around for an analogy. "You know how I taught you English? We pointed at things and assigned sounds?"
"Yes. Same process, question?"
"Kinda, but way messier and nobody was doing it on purpose at first. Some adults thought the solution was to just make me talk anyway."
"They were unkind and stupid," Rocky stated. “So it was language making, question? To deal with trouble speaking other language?”
I winced. “It’s not exactly a language, buddy. It doesn’t have real words, and I don’t think it has grammar either. It’s not really useful to anyone.”
“Was useful to you,” Rocky pointed out. “You are still using it.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I’ll try to stop that, sorry.”
Rocky whistled in frustration. “No, I don’t want you to stop! I want to learn it!”
I blinked. “Uh, same problem there. No words and no grammar make it hard to do that.”
Rocky shuffled around. I’m not sure, let me think about it?
“Can do,” I responded automatically.
“What I say?” He demanded.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’d responded. Not like it was nonsense, or like it was an emotional noise. Like he’d said something in English or Eridian.
Oh god, were my tones a language?
If they were, they were my first language. I’d been making them as long as I could remember. They came so much more easily than English, flowing smoothly from my brain to my airways without any thought needed.
“You said,” I balked a little internally, and pushed past it. “Um, translated into English, it would be ‘I’m not sure, let me think about it?’ And said with that… I think speed is the right word, it kind of implies that you’ll need a while to figure out what you want to say.”
Rocky hopped from side to side. “Useful, very useful. You always want time. Will remember. Now. This one?” He toned out hold on just a moment.
“Wait,” I provided. “Specifically, asking you to wait for a little . The longer one would be…” I hesitated. Rocky waited. If he’d shown any sign of thinking that this was silly, I would have stopped. Instead, I toned out wait a while.
“Like this?” He repeated the tone back to me perfectly. Exactly as I’d toned it, with all of the right inflections and overtones. Melissa had tried a few times to imitate my tones, but she’d always messed up on the details, and eventually gave up, declaring that she couldn’t hear what I was trying to tell her.
Intellectually, it made sense that with hearing as his primary sense, he’d be able to hear everything. From there, reproducing it was fairly straightforward. Of course he was able to do it.
I wished that my parents could hear him.
I swallowed hard. “Yeah. That’s exactly right. Good job.”
He studied me for a moment. “Last one I know you said.” Fine, tired.
“Fine and tired,” I explained. “The first tone means fine, the second means tired. You can also hear it as fine but tired if you want.” I tacked on.
Oh no. That was a modifier phrase. It did have grammar.
“I want to learn all of it,” Rocky stated.
I squinted at him. “Why? It’s only useful in some pretty limited ways.”
Rocky vented deeply. “Grace being stupid again. We can both make the sounds. Want to be able to talk to you and have you talk back the same.” While I was reeling from that, he went on. “Plus, will be good for future, if Eridians and humans have a language in common.”
“Most humans can’t tell what I’m saying,” I pointed out weakly.
He waved a dismissive claw. “Read about human language acquisition. Was trying to make Eridian easier for you. Humans only lose ability to tell apart sounds that you don’t use in your language. Teach a young human and they will be able to hear you.”
I stared at the table in front of me, blankly. "Rocky, it's- you're trying to make an interstellar language out of the weird noises I make when I can't talk."
“Grace is emotional,” Rocky observed, quieter. "And leaking.”
I was crying, wasn’t I. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Sorry. This is just- a lot.”
Rocky tapped his claws uncertainly. “Give Grace break for now,” he offered. “Try one… unit a day?”
“Sounds good to me,” I agreed faintly.
He skittered off, giving me some space to sort myself out.
So. My weird sounds were a language. A language that both I and Eridians could speak. Rocky wanted to use my weird sounds to bridge the language gap between our species. Why? I toned out softly.
After a few minutes of wallowing, I took some deep breaths and readjusted my thinking.
For now, the only person learning it would be Rocky. It… would be nice to be able to really talk to someone with it for the first time in almost fifteen years. More, if I counted chronological time rather than biological.
I could do this.