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It’s been a month since we started flying towards Erid. I can now say I’m used to having an alien roommate. Mostly.
I try to be a considerate host, as much as is actually possible. Our species have completely different ideas of what needs to be private.
I schedule my meals so he can be elsewhere. This works, when I remember. When possible, I save things he says “sound gross” for when he sleeps. He’s taken to conking out where I can see him from the toilet, so he’s definitely picked up on what I’m doing. It makes it easier for both of us. I’m growing oddly uncomfortable when I can’t be there to watch him. I elect not to examine this.
But living with someone in quarters this tight inevitably means you end up showing more than you mean to.
I’m working on my mobility exercises. Rocky’s in one of his tunnels across the room, tinkering with something. It's supposed to make my air system better at capturing ammonia and sending it back to his side. I hope that means my air will smell less like cat pee soon.
The soft clicking and tapping of his work is background noise to me. The same way that the sound of birds in the school garden was during rare quiet moments, the middle of a test or grading after school. It’s a nice backdrop to the tedious pain of stretching my left arm and side. It’d be nice if there was a less boring way to preserve my future range of motion.
Xenonite is a pretty good insulator, but nothing is perfect. Rocky’s atmosphere is an incredibly high temperature. Basic thermodynamics means that my side of the Hail Mary runs around 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
This isn’t something I normally mind. I loved summer on Earth. But that’s heat by itself, not combined with physical therapy in 1.5 g. I am, unfortunately, starting to overheat.
I groan and strip my shirt off, letting it drop to the ground. It makes a plopping noise I really don’t like. I’ll pick it up after I finish today’s work. Or whenever it’s… dry.
If I’d been paying more attention, I would have noticed Rocky’s tapping stall. I definitely notice when one of his limbs slams down, emitting a loud clack. That’s something he does when he needs to “see” something better than his normal tapping allows.
“Rocky? Anything you need me to bring over?” I check. It’s often easier for me to fetch an item for him to examine in greater detail than it is for him to hop in his ball to come over and listen at it.
“How damaged is arm, question?” Rocky’s melody is unusually shaky. It vaguely reminds me of when Trang was trying to learn the harmonica.
I blink. “Uh, well, it’s getting better? It never got infected, so. Perks of living in a mostly sterile environment.”
“How damaged, question?” He asks, tone uneven and slightly discordant. “Tissue is not the same surface texture as other arm. Tissue on arm is inconsistent in density. Has been months. Why still damaged, question?”
Oh. My burn had been covered ever since I woke up with the bandage on my arm. All of my shirts had long sleeves. I didn’t exactly have a physique that inspired the kind of confidence needed to walk around shirtless. Even with the amazing precision of Eridian echolocation, anything that acts as a sound muffler acts the same way to him as frosted glass does for me. This is the first time he’s gotten this good of a “look” at my arm since the injury.
I resist the reflexive urge to cover the angry red splotches and lines with my hand.
“Well,” I say. “This is a healed second degree burn. The top layers of the skin burnt off, but the lower layers weren’t gone. The top layer grows back differently from the original tissue. I was pretty lucky, honestly.”
I leave out that there are spots of the burn that were in the fuzzy area between second and third. There are a few dots that clearly had been third degree from their pocked appearance. Alkali burns are nasty things.
If I was given the chance to redo it, I wouldn’t take it. It’s one of the only things I don’t regret.
Rocky makes a tiny whistling noise that I recognize as distress. I drop next to his tunnel. “Hey buddy, why’s this getting to you? I’m fine. You’re fine.”
The next whistling noise is pure frustration. “Grace says fine! About losing large part of skin! Grace is wrong,” Rocky says. “Grace says skin acts as barrier like carapace does, not having large part of carapace is bad!”
I lean back, a little startled by his vehemence. “…I am fine,” I point out, not sure what else to say. “It’s healed. I’m working on keeping my full range of motion. The prognosis is good.”
Rocky whistles unhappily, pacing lightly around his tunnel. “…how, question?” he finally asks.
“You’re going to have to be a little more specific there.”
“How possible to heal that, question? Your outer layer is what protects you from infection. Keeps most of your fluids internal. How recover from full breach of that size, question?”
I cock my head at him. “Rocky, you healed from being on fire. Not burnt. On fire. Why is this the thing that's freaking you out?"
Rocky let out a frustrated whistle. “In my air system, not my organics. If my organics burnt, I have internal failure. I would die. If my carapace breached along a full limb, I would bleed out. I would die. You healed. How, question?”
I pause, rubbing the back of my neck with my good hand. My neck hair is full of sweat. Gross. I make a face and shake it out. “Okay, so just to warn you, this is not my specialty. My specialty is in microbiology and this is broader human biology, okay?”
“Yes, Grace not expert in every human science, this is clear.” Rocky says.
“Rude,” I complain with a smile, leaning my sore left side into the warm xenonite for the relief. Rocky scoots backwards. I pull back. “Ah, shoot, forgot that’d give you a really clear impression of it. Sorry.”
“…is fine.” Rocky tells me. “Better impression better for understanding. Move back.”
I hesitate, but he gestures at me impatiently. I’ve looked at some pretty gross things myself for science, so I get where he’s coming from. Also, the warm xenonite feels really good. I sigh a little with relief, settling back against it. After a few seconds, Rocky comes over and starts tapping at the xenonite where I’m resting my scar tissue.
“Anyway. Humans have some pretty robust repair mechanisms for injury. For anything that breaks the skin, we have some cells that cover over the wound, like yours got covered.”
“You call that scab,” Rocky observes, “Same thing in humans, interesting. Protection from infection likely universal need for break in protective coating.”
“Probably, yeah. There’s also cells that hang around the wound and kill as many infectious bacteria as they can. This helps to make sure that not too much gets in, and that what does dies.”
“Amaze, Eridian system does not have this, only heat. Would be good for heat-resistant microbes. Why worried about infection at all, then, question? Why these cells not just kill all invading cells, question?”
“It’s a matter of volume,” I explain, falling into the familiar rhythm of teaching. “Our bacteria-killing cells can only kill so many. If too many get in, the body has backup systems, but they're… messy. Collateral damage.”
Rocky grumbles, but settles into a loaf, seemingly done with prodding the xenonite near my arm. He’s still angled towards my left side. I can’t imagine that it sounds great to him.
I pull myself back from the xenonite so he doesn’t have to look at my scars in the Eridian version of HD. I start working through some of the lighter flexibility work. It mostly boils down to using my right hand and arm to pull on my left in various creative directions. “All this is carried by blood, so the area heats up and a lot of fluid can be lost through the break in the skin. If you lose too much of it, you don’t have enough fluid to carry everything around.”
“Fluid loss bad for sustaining life. Grace has too many fluids, makes losing fluid worse. Bad design, statement. ” Rocky sounds like he’s plotting a better one. I wish him the very best.
I switch positions, working my left wrist through its full range, stretching it a little beyond what was comfortable. “Yeah, there are a lot of medical people who would agree with you. Anyway, after the wound is healed over, you’re mostly out of the woods. You have to scrape off anything that dies so it doesn’t rot and make you sick, but you’re probably going to make it unless enough bacteria got into the wound for an infection. From there, the skin works on regrowing where it can and stretching over the areas it can’t.”
Rocky is quiet for a moment. When he speaks, his voice is low and careful. "I can hear the new tissue. It is thicker, less elastic than rest of skin. Sounds more likely to tear."
I don't really have a rebuttal for that. That’s what scar tissue is like. It's worse at basically everything skin is supposed to do. "It's functional," I say. "It keeps the inside on the inside."
“And it covers most of arm and side.”
“…Yeah.” I say. “It was a pretty big burn. Hence why I have to move around to make sure I stay flexible.”
“Are you awake for the healing, question?” Rocky asks. I can hear a whistling note of suspicion creeping into his tone.
I shrug lightly, pulling on my left hand with my right to stretch the tendons. “Most of it, yeah. Sleep helps, but we don’t only repair during sleep like you do. It took about a month and a half for the skin to fully close, and we would have been in trouble if I was sleeping the whole time.”
“A month and a half?” Rocky’s shriek startles me into twisting to look at him better. I hiss, having forgotten to account for the injury that we were actively talking about. One more brilliant moment from Dr. Grace.
“Apology,” he amends, more quietly. “Your skin was open for a month and a half. That mean… during the Taumoeba breeding…” he trails off.
I sigh, dropping my arms and swinging them lightly. “Yeah, remember when I was taking a lot of painkillers and was kinda stupid for a few days? That was the early part where the skin was still open. The bandages mostly made up for it, but you’re not really supposed to be missing your skin.”
“Grace is correct about that,” Rocky grumbles. “Should keep Grace skin on Grace… “ he hesitates. “Did you stop painkillers too soon, question? To stop being stupid sooner, question?”
I make a sort of half-gesture. “Eh, too soon is relative. Different humans have different pain tolerances. I’m not the toughest person, but I can put up with a decent amount of it. I made sure to stop once the pain was mild enough that it wouldn’t distract me from working.”
Once again, Rocky makes a distressed noise. It was odd, I was the one with the injury, but he was definitely the one who was more upset. “Could have waited,” he mumbled. “A few more weeks-”
“Would have mattered for Earth,” I cut him off firmly. “Me being uncomfortable isn’t equal to the amount of lives saved by the Beatles being a little earlier.”
Rocky shifts side to side, almost, hah, rocking back and forth. “…Grace is very brave. Working while in pain to save more people.”
I wince internally, and then externally after plopping down on the floor. My skin was informing me loudly that we were done with PT for today. “It’s not that big a deal,” I dismiss. “Other people have done more impressive things.”
Rocky puffs in exasperation. “Grace save two planets.”
“Okay, that’s pretty impressive,” I concede.
“And save Rocky’s life three times.”
“Three?” I squint. “Your math’s usually better than that.”
“Three,” he insists. “Found in space. Put back in atmosphere. And came back. Three times.”
I open my mouth, then close it. I could argue, but.
“You came into my atmosphere first,” I say instead. “You’re the one who was brave first.”
“Order doesn’t matter. Grace brave. Grace impressive. Grace resilient.”
I hope that he hasn’t figured out how blushing sounds. He probably has. “Yeah, well, back at you,” That was a lame response. “You're the smartest person I've ever met. And I worked on a project full of the smartest people on Earth, so that's a high bar.”
Rocky vents lightly. I'm starting to think that's Eridian blushing. “Same on Erid. Best of best gathered together. You are the best.”
“You’re biased-”
“You are biased too.”
I sigh dramatically. “I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree, then.”
Rocky whistles in amusement. “…human biology interesting.” he admits, going back to tinkering. “Gross still. Too many fluids. But systems interesting. Which human system have least fluids?”
I have to think for a moment. “If I had to guess, probably the skeletal system, by percentage? But-”
“Grace teach skeleton tomorrow.” Rocky decided.
“What?” I yelp. “I told you, this isn’t my field. You have access to literally all of human knowledge-”
“Grace better at explaining. And Wikipedia hard to stop reading.”
Wiki walks. Add that to the list of things humans and Eridians have in common.
“Wikipedia isn’t the only source of human knowledge, you know. Pretty much every research paper ever written is in the database.”
Rocky scoffed, pressing the layer of mesh he was working with into its frame. “Boring. Use words they don’t need. Treat themselves as important when finding small things. Grace and Wikipedia all Rocky needs.”
I sigh dramatically. Rocky manages to give me side-eye for repeating the gesture without having eyes. Come on, my arms are lumps right now. I can only express myself so many ways. “Alright, I’ll go and brush up on the human skeleton. Do you know when you’ll be done with that filter?”
"Two days,” Rocky answers promptly. “More if does not work. This mesh annoying annoying annoying to make.”
“Thanks.”
“Anytime.”
I leave to pull up whatever I can about the human skeleton. It’s been a while, but I remember they work in tandem with tendons to hold the body in shape, are most of why kids need calcium, and their marrow makes blood…
…why was I cold?
Crap, I left my shirt on the floor.