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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has an entire passage talking about how overwhelmingly huge space is. Douglas Adams goes on for a long, long time about it, in that outrageous comedic style of writing he mastered before he died. For one very lonely teenage boy (hi, that was me) who first discovered his work in a derelict school library, it was a crucial element in what would wind up being an expensive and very frustrating (and, eventually, shameful) academic career.
I still don’t have all of my memories back, but by now I think I’ve regained most of them, and one thing I sorely miss is my tattered and dog-eared copy of that beloved book. We have a digital version downloaded on the ship’s database and all of the computers, of course, but reading it on a screen just isn’t the same. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of paper under your fingertips and the smell of ink. This is what I think about somberly as I curl up into a tight little ball, underneath the mountain of bedding and anything else even vaguely blanket-like that was scrounged up over the last few weeks, and try in vain to keep myself warm.
One thing Douglas Adams failed to mention was that space is also really, really cold. Super cold. Incomprehensibly cold. It feels like it’s creeping into the ship, slipping through the microscopic seams and chilling me to the bone. This, of course, is just my imagination running wild. The Hail Mary is as watertight (spacetight? Is that even a word?) as she’s ever been—aside from all of the holes I’ve had to cut into her, but we’re not talking about that right now—and if she wasn’t, Rocky and I would have been very, very dead a long time ago. The cold that has me burrowed under my blanket pile is just a side effect of starvation as my body consumes itself to stay alive.
But knowing the facts doesn’t make it suck any less. I’m still freezing, and I’d give anything to feel warm again.
Through the layers and layers I’ve taken to hiding under, I can hear Rocky’s voice. The translator kicks in half a second later. “Grace, you are awake now, question? Why still in nest, question?”
It’s been maybe five minutes since my aching body roused me from what supposed to be just a short nap, but I have yet to work up the courage to unbury myself from the covers, even just to poke my head out. Doing so means I would lose some of the heat that’s been trapped. The bed would have been far more comfortable, but I abandoned it in favor of the dormitory floor when it got to be too much work to haul myself into and out of. Much easier to curl up on the floor on the mattress like a sick and pathetic dog. I’m not standing much these days, anyway, so why bother?
“Because it’s comfortable,” I say to him. It’s a little muffled, but I know he can hear me just fine. “And I’m lazy. You know that.”
It isn’t like there’s much else for me to do, anyway. The Hail Mary is running smoothly on her own, chugging along contentedly with her sights set for Erid, like she has been for a long time now. We’re less than a year away from our destination, but I ran out of food rations and coma slurry ages ago. It’s all taumoeba now, when I can stomach it—which isn’t very often. Only when Rocky bullies me into it. He can be very persuasive. And by that, I mean that he nags at me until I give in. Never underestimate how effective being annoying is.
(I should know; I spent years teaching middle school kids. I loved them, but sometimes the things they said made me want to slam my head against the whiteboard.)
“Lies,” he responds. “I can hear Grace’s body—muscles very tense, not comfortable at all.”
With a sigh, I dig myself out of my hiding place just enough to free my head. I know my hair is probably looking more than a little wild, and I can’t see anything clearly without my glasses so I have to squint. He’s easy enough to find—the dark brown blob a few feet away can be only one thing.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say he’s upset. After a second of scrounging for my glasses and pushing them back up the bridge of my nose, I can confirm my suspicions. He’s very good at emoting, for someone who doesn’t have a face; all five of his arms are raised high around his body, as if he’s trying to shield himself from some invisible assailant. Or he’s sulking. He looks even more like a spider than usual, something I never thought possible until now, but his pose reminds me of an arachnid preparing to pounce on an unsuspecting bug. One of his three-fingered hands taps at a pane of his xenonite ball.
“What’s up?” I ask. My voice is rough; I should probably have a little water, but I’ve been trying to ration that, too, out of an abundance of caution. Humans die without water a lot sooner than they do without food. Gotta keep all my bases covered; I’m even more afraid of dying from thirst than I am from starvation.
“In nest all day.” I can hear how displeased he is from the tone of his song—it doesn’t carry over through the translation program set up on the laptop, but I’ve been learning enough of his language to pick up on it. There hasn’t been much else to do over the last three years. The melody he’s singing screams unhappiness. “The Wikipedia on the human thinking machine says that humans should only sleep nine hours maximum. Grace has been sleeping for twelve.”
I blink. Yikes. Has it really been that long?
“Sorry, buddy. Guess I’m just a little more tired than I realized.”
He can hear everything going on inside my body; it’s a fact I’ve gotten used to within the first few weeks of our friendship, and it means he knows exactly how much I’m keeping from him. But I’m reluctant to look at him in his carapace and say, straight-up, Hey, by the way, I’m actually doing pretty bad. Like, so bad that my body is eating itself to keep me alive, but we can’t do anything about it right now, so there’s no point in worrying.
I’m sure he’s been doing his research while I sleep, now that he’s figured out how to work the laptop without me. But if he knows, he hasn’t said it. Probably because he’s as unhappy about this as I am.
Free time is something we have an abundance of right now, and I’ve been using a lot of it to think about him and the crew he had to leave behind. They were kept in a storage room on the Blip-A that he modified into a makeshift morgue. Eridians don’t rot and decompose the same way humans do, since so much of their bodies are inorganic. Instead, the few fleshy bits hidden in their carapace just petrify very slowly through mineralization, because their insides are so effective at holding onto the water they get from their food. It means he spent forty-six years alone on a ship full of the frozen corpses of his friends. When we went separate ways, he’d planned on delivering their remains back to their loved ones, but that idea had to be abandoned with the Blip-A.
I know he feels guilty about it. He hasn’t told me much about Eridian funeral rites, but surely there’s some kind of custom they follow, and to come back empty-handed after being the first crew to journey into space must be weighing on him. Over twenty of his brethren, his comrades, will never have the chance to be put to rest on Erid. And until his kind decide to journey into the abyss of space again, they’ll be the only ones truly lost forever, in the entire history of their people.
Instead of returning home with the heroes who bravely gave up their lives (and died horrible, horrible deaths), he’s coming back… with just me.
An alien. A gross, squishy, leaking alien, who wouldn’t last a minute on the surface of his planet. An alien who is dying. Slowly, by increments, but dying, all the same.
I knew this. I knew what would happen when I turned the Hail Mary around to save him from a horrible fate of drifting forever, stranded in space, before perishing the same way his friends did—and, which, as a result, would also doom Erid. But that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow now that I’m having to stare it down, face-to-face. It isn’t fair to him. He’s lost so much already: his crew, the Blip-A. Decades without his mate. More decades than I’ve even been alive. The last thing I want is for him to have to worry about being stuck on another ship with nothing but the dead. It isn’t fair to him, especially since he already risked his life to save me before when the fishing expedition went wrong on Adrian.
So I keep the worst of it to myself. And if he knows more than he lets on, he spares me from having to confess to the truth. We’re existing in a tentative limbo, him and I, with the facts sitting between us as wide as the universe, but more fragile than glass. He keeps making plans for how I’ll survive on Erid with him, and I don’t stop it, because right now we both need to be able to pretend everything will be fine.
I just have to make it long enough to get him home. If I can do that, it’ll all be okay. Both planets will have been saved, and he’ll get to go back to his mate, who’s been waiting for him all this time. The mission will finally be complete.
Right now he doesn’t seem to be in the mood for lecturing me very harshly. Instead, he listens as I draw the blankets tighter around myself and try not to shiver. Try, and fail. Miserably.
“Grace is cold, question?”
“A little,” is all I’m willing to admit. “A teeny-tiny bit. It’s no big deal.”
“Hmmmm.” He’s thinking. And then, after a while, he says, “Grace is still tired, statement.”
I am, but that doesn't mean much. I’m always tired these days. Existing requires a lot of work, after all, and so does staying awake. Sleeping takes a lot less energy in comparison. My body keeps trying to put me in low power mode—like a cellphone with a draining battery.
“Nah, I’m fine.” I even make a show of sitting up all the way, and stretching with my arms over my head. It backfires miserably when I remember how much muscle mass I’ve lost; I doubt the picture I’m painting is very convincing. “Just gotta get my blood pumping again—I miss coffee even more than the beach.”
But he isn’t listening to me anymore. Or rather, he heard me just fine, but elects to ignore it; another thing he’s really good at doing. He stamps one fist against the floor of his ball. “No. Grace is tired, Grace is cold. Should stay in nest.”
“Buddy, you were literally just complaining about—”
“I was wrong.” Whoa. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that before. “Apology. Must reassess the situation. Grace should remain in nest. Safer there.”
Uh-oh. I don’t like where it sounds like this conversation is going. What happened to our mutual agreement to leave this topic alone? I really don’t feel like getting into it, it’s a whole can of worms (and worms kinda creep me out. Especially when they wriggle around all over each other).
Mortality is never fun to have to face head-on; telling him the truth about my journey to Tau Ceti was bad enough. A reprise is something I was really hoping to avoid, at least until we got him back to Erid. Then he’d have the consolation of knowing he was home, with his mate, and that his sun would be saved.
I can’t even think of anything to say. My mouth opens as I search for the right words to convince him that everything’s fine, but it’s all a blank. He’s smart. Smarter than me a thousand times over—he’s the most intelligent person I know. We never would have made it this far without him. How am I supposed to convince an actual engineering genius that there’s nothing to worry about?
Thankfully, he doesn’t give me the chance to stew on it for very long. He turns away from me (which is really just for show—since, y’know, he has that nifty 360-degree echolocation) and scrambles off to his side of the dormitory.
“Grace, stay,” he commands. “Do not worry. I will fix.”
There’s no fixing starvation when there’s no food, is what I think about telling him, though I wisely elect not to. I also almost say that I’m not a dog, but by then he’s already in the tunnels and running for the lab, and the effort isn’t worth it. His entire job on the Blip-A was to repair things. There is, in his brilliant, alien mind, no problem that cannot be fixed. Not even the issue of me slowly wasting away is impossible to solve.
It’s nice to think that he can. And if this gives him something to focus on, then who am I to stop him?
So I don’t. Instead I do what he told me—something I got very good at over the years—and retreat back under my mess of blankets. It’s seriously unfair that I’m still tired, but my blanket pile is soft and doing its best to keep me warm. With nothing else to do, I decide to take another nap. It isn’t like I can manage much else.
Dreamless sleep is interrupted a while later by the tinkling of what sounds almost like crystal as something hurries across the floor of the dormitory towards me. I have no idea how long it’s been since the talk we had, but I’m not given much of a chance to wonder about it, because my attention is immediately stolen by the feeling of an intruder wriggling around under the blankets.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I croak, as I try to get free from my self-made mess of bedding. “What the heck—”
The next thing I know, I’m stuck on my back, held down by a weight against my chest and staring up at what looks like a very large, brown stone only inches away from my face.
Rocky.
Not in his tunnels, not in his ball, he has me pinned down and trapped between all five of his limbs. Understandably, I begin to panic as the sight dredges up memories of hauling him through the ship while my air supply tried to kill him. My arm aches with the ghosts of the chemical burns that left my skin permanently blotchy and red.
What happened? Why is he out here? No, no, no, not again. He’ll die—
“Grace,” he says, entirely too calm for someone who’s in mortal danger. “Stop moving.”
“What are you doing? The oxygen on the ship—”
“Is not a problem,” he interrupts me. “I make a new suit. More efficient than ball. Lets me get closer to Grace. No danger.”
A new suit?
I blink up at him like an idiot. He doesn’t have eyes, but I know he’s staring right back while he waits for me to put all the pieces together. Slowly starving to death has made it hard to concentrate, but he doesn’t berate me like he used to, even though I feel more and more stupid as the days go by.
He is in a suit, I realize, as I look him over. I didn’t see it at first, because he’s always been in his ball or in his little tunnels in the past, but he’s right. This new one is incredibly form-fitting; it’s composed of those same clear xenonite panes as before, but much smaller, fitting over him like a second skin. Or, rather, a second carapace.
“Wh…” I swallow. “When…”
“Was a secret,” he tells me, unable to keep the pride out of his tone. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was puffing up with self-satisfaction, like a cat with a mouse.
“How?”
He mimics the sound of my laugh. “Easy. Worked while Grace slept. Grace is always sleeping. Worked harder when I realized Grace is uncomfortable. You like, question?”
Do I like it? Of course I do. His brilliance never fails to amaze me; the things he comes up with, and with the resources as limited as they are on the Hail Mary, are nothing short of works of art. I wiggle one hand free so that I can run my fingers along the little triangles covering one of his limbs. It’s…
“Warm,” I think aloud. “It’s warm.”
Despite being almost three hundred pounds, he doesn’t crush me as he settles back down against my chest. Something about the design of the suit must keep the weight off of me. Load-bearing? That’s the term, right? I don’t know—he’s the engineer, not me. Amazing.
“Grace is always cold,” he chitters, “and I am warm. Now Grace can be warm, too. And I can watch Grace sleep the right way.”
My brain must have finally decided to give out on me completely, because all I can do is say stupid sentences and parrot his words back at him. “The right way?”
“Yes. On chest, like Eridians do on Erid.”
It feels like so long ago—because it was—but I remember him mentioning that during one of our very first interactions after I set up the translator. He was adamant about watching me sleep as he hovered above me, and upset that he couldn’t get any closer. Sitting directly on top of one another is apparently the norm on his home planet; it helps his kind feel comfortable and safe while they sleep, according to him.
To say that I was apprehensive about it in the beginning is the understatement of the century. But right now all I want to do is squish myself against him and syphon his heat like a little temperature thief. The feeling reminds me of being outside on a warm summer day back on Earth, with the way it soaks deep into what little muscle I have left and takes away some of the aches and pains in my protesting bones. I can’t believe that he put in all of this work—and just for me. Just so I could be a little more comfortable on the journey to Erid.
If there was an award you could give for being the most amazing best friend of all time, he’d win it in a heartbeat. But for now I’ll just settle for stretching up as far as I can so that I can wrap my arms around him.
A hug! It’s a real hug! One of his several limbs reaches around to return the gesture and to keep me from having to strain. I can’t remember the last time I had a true hug; until now, the closest I’ve been able to get is just wrapping my arms around his xenonite ball the best I can. He always reciprocates by pressing against it to get closer, and I treasure it each time, but this right here is an actual hug. If I had the water to spare, I’d weep, but I don’t. Which is probably a good thing. He always teases me when I leak.
“It’s great,” I say, when I can trust that my voice won’t break. “Thanks, buddy.”
Rocky does a little all-over shake as he trills with happiness, and then he pulls away from my embrace. “Good, good, good. No more cold. Now stop moving and go back to sleep.”
The last thing I want is more sleep. I had been studying up on Eridian culture in preparation for when we finally reach Rocky’s solar system, but that was before the fatigue from my malnutrition started to catch up with me. And I haven’t done any actual work in months; it feels wrong not to be. I’m a scientist. It’s literally my whole thing. A new suit like this… there’s so many possibilities to explore! There’s a hunger in me that has nothing to do with food. Despite my exhaustion, I want to discover all the limits this new suit has, and study his work one inch at a time until I have it memorized.
But, of course, he can sense the restlessness that’s welling up inside me, because he settles more firmly on top of my chest. I struggled enough with moving him when I was toned; I don’t stand a single chance anymore. He has the upper-hand here, and he knows it, too.
I try to reason with him, but to no avail. “Rock—”
“No, no, no. I will not listen. Time for science later; time for sleep now. I will watch.” For emphasis, he makes a show of crossing two limbs over my chest and wiggles lower, like he’s settling in. He likes to copy the human gestures he’s been learning from Earth media. I think that he thinks it’s fun.
I’m trapped like a beetle in one of those exhibit cases. No amount of arguing with him is going to get him to change his mind… and to be honest, now that I think about it, I might actually be kind of okay with that. This is a special moment. We’re having a cuddle. A full-on snuggle. I’m not usually one for physical touch—even our attempted hugs in the past have been rare—but humans need some kind of affection every once in a while. It’s important for our health, they say. And I didn’t realize just how much I would miss it until it was gone.
But now we’re here.
Sure, I’m still slowly wasting away. Sure, I’m further away from Earth than any human has ever been. Sure, I’ll probably die after we make it to Erid. All of that sucks majorly. But I’ve done what I could to save the Sun, and now we’re going to save Rocky’s solar system, too. And I get to have some prime snuggle time, which is something I never thought I’d get for the rest of my life.
Sometimes you just have to focus on the positives. This doesn’t change the fact that I’m going to die, but right now things feel a little bit better. In the end, it’s lots of small good things that make the huge bad things feel less horrible, right? And in comparison to dying alone, stranded back at Tau Ceti, this is much more preferable. Like, infinitely preferable. Because now I have a friend.
So I decide to take the easy route today, and relent. “Okay, okay. Fine.” I reach one hand up for another quick hug. “I guess science can wait.”
He rumbles like the purring of a cat. “Good, good, good. Now stop talking. I watch, keep Grace warm.”
It’s like having my own little heater under the blankets next to me. One that likes to tease me when I make mistakes, and demands that I sit down and watch Star Wars with it at least once a week, even though it knows perfectly well that I’ve been a Trekkie since I was, like, eight.
In short, he’s the best heater I’ve ever had.
The contented rumbles make for nice background noise, and between him and the blankets, it isn’t long before I’m feeling nice and toasty, and safe with him literally watching over me. He was right—there will be plenty of time for experiments later. I think I’m just going to enjoy this for a little while. Soak it in, and all that.
After all, how many people can say they get to have cuddle time with their real, actual, alien buddy? Not many, that’s for sure. As far as mankind is concerned, I’m the first. And ever since we first discovered the Sun was dying, I’ve been setting records all over the place when it comes to extraterrestrials: first contact with astrophage. First to kill one, too. (Oops, my bad.) First contact with Eridians. First to become pals with one. Maybe it’s a good thing I won’t ever go back to Earth, because if they never end up mentioning that in any of the history books back home, I would be so annoyed.
“Smiling. Grace is not sleeping,” Rocky admonishes, clearly exasperated. He often is, when it comes to me. “What is so funny, question?”
I keep my eyes closed as I try to fix my face. “Nothing. I’m going to sleep now, for real. Promise.”
“Lying. Stubborn.” The notes he sings drip with frustration, the Eridian equivalent of a groan. “Grace is being annoying, annoying, annoying. No more talking.”
“I said I was going to sleep!”
“Still talking. Still annoying.”
“Goodnight, pal.”
He whistles an irritated tune, but I know he doesn't mean it, because he stays right where he is. I guess that means I’m trapped, but honestly, there isn’t anywhere else in the galaxy I’d rather be.