Chapter Text
asymptote /ˈa-səm(p)-ˌtōt/
noun
1. a line that a curve approaches as it heads toward infinity, but never touches.
I haven't slept since you left. I wonder if you have.
It has been over thirty hours. Yes, in [Earth] units. I can't help it. You are an unfathomable distance away and yet I am still performing the unit conversion. It's an unnecessary maneuver, a waste of energy. But the performance of the arithmetic reinforces your presence. Your ghost is in the math; the base-ten system a reminder of your soft, five-clawed hands.
A millennia of instinct-driven social expectations tells me I should feel afraid, I should drop everything and run to you at the very thought of you sleeping alone. And it does, successfully. I am fighting a significant urge to not turn this ship around and go right back to you, damn the entire mission, damn my entire species, perhaps damn you in the process, just to make sure you wake up.
Despite it all, I really hope you have slept. You become stupid and clumsy, or perhaps stupider and clumsier, when you haven't had enough sleep. I hope you have enough food to make it back to [Earth]. Oh, [Grace], I hope we didn't do all of this just for you to miscalculate your nutritional reserves and starve.
You have an instrument in your ship that you call a [Petrovascope]. I have something similar in mine. If I shut off my engines and run the scanner, I can hear nearby astrophage frequencies. Our shorthand for astrophage is what you may perceive as a D# minor chord. It's how we navigated to Tau Ceti.
I can hear you in the staccato chord chirped by the scanner. Within that same chord is information on the velocity of your movement, your distance from me, the density of your emission.
I hope to the Grand Maestra that you are lying awake next to your [Petrovascope], watching my [taillights] in the distance. I can imagine your [face] leaking at the sight of it.
I hope for it because I am doing the same, damned thing.
I keep re-listening to the suite in my mind. Eridians have perfect memory. You do not. So I will reiterate it.
I had sealed off the hatch and began the depressurization process of my half of the tunnel. From where you stood in your airlock, performing your half of the process, I could barely hear you. This is the caveat of space. You said that you could [see] my ship from yours. The vacuum of space distorts my perception.
Barely, faintly, I could pinpoint your [face] by the window of your airlock. Your [helmet] was pressed against its surface, which muffled you further. The depressurization completed. You stepped out and began to cut through the xenonite adhesive that connected my tunnel to your ship.
Even if I wanted to, I couldn't break my carapace away from the door, my fingers tapping away in a valiant effort to obtain all I could of you for one last time. I held out on the possibility that in this last moment I could obtain a new novel detail in the symphony of your body, log it into my brain and carry it until I die.
You turned towards my ship. You suddenly lifted your hand, loud against the vacuum of space. Your thumb was pointed downward as if to formally denote the coda of our time spent together.
To anyone else listening, it would have been a perfect authentic cadence, the ideal resolution. And it certainly was to me until the airlock closed and your [face] silenced, dragging the tonic chord down into something diminished, something unfinished, something unanswered.
*****
I had once noticed you [looking] at me for a prolonged amount of time. I was not bothered by it. After all, [looking] is a nebulous concept to me. But you became flustered, embarrassed. The vibrating, hot blood of your [face] began to crescendo in uneven patches. It was a beautiful composition. I couldn't stop listening. Rude rude rude, I know.
"Sorry for ████," you had said, rubbing the back of your [neck]. The contact between your palm and the thin filaments protruding from your carapace made such a strange sound. Like whispers.
"Need new word."
The request for definition made you more embarrassed, more flustered. I tried to not listen with such intensity.
"When a human looks at another human for too long, it can be considered rude or intrusive."
"Eridians do this when listen too long duration," I said.
You had laughed. Wonderful, strange sound. I find it so fascinating that both the human and Eridian expression of laughter carries a similar rhythm, choppy clipped notes. "You listen to me all dang day, Rocky. What does that mean?"
We are both trapped in a tube hurtling through space. Eridians are not known for being particularly discrete, and I am no exception.
"I like way Grace sound," I sang, and then added to cushion the blow: "Except when open-close orifice during mealtime."
That was a good memory. I enjoy listening to it.
After forty-six years of isolation on my ship, the concept of my home has become nebulous. No more tangible than the mathematics that propelled my ship forward. If it weren't for my mission, for the fact that [Adrian] and my family and my entire species were at stake, I would not have left the [Mary]. The idea of going with you to [Earth] and perishing in its unforgiving atmosphere feels more enticing than the lonely six-year voyage back to Erid.
I shouldn't complain. I know. Six years is nothing on forty-six, it's insignificant. I should be thankful. But rather than it being a relative reprieve, I feel as if I have vastly surpassed my limit for isolation. This may actually kill me. The "last [straw] on the [camel's] back" as you once said.
I am an engineer. I am pragmatic. I am a logician. I was deemed as a worthy candidate for this mission. I will not step out of the airlock.
I will not step out of the airlock.
It has only been a week.
Fucking hell.
It is with this acknowledgement that I discover my first side-project of the voyage: a probe, or several, no different than the [Beetles] that you plan on sending to [Earth].
Insurance.
*****
I can't shake away the memory of the sound of your expression dropping in response to my offer to continue Earth-Eridian communications once we arrive home. I had pieced it together then, but you granted me mercy, explained it anyways even though I know it must have hurt you.
"I won't live long enough for it to matter, buddy," you had said. Your [eyes] were on the verge of leaking, again. As always. In perpetuity. "Once I get back to Earth, I probably only have another… thirty years, maybe? That's enough to send maybe one message and a response."
I wanted to throw a tantrum. I wanted to wail. My body and mind compromised by emitting the smallest, most pitiful, wobbling chord. A sound that I had never heard before, not from a mature Eridian at least.
Not enough time with [Adrian]. Not enough time with [Grace]. If the Maestra were real and listening, they would find me to be an insatiable, endless pit, I am sure. But I don't feel that way, I feel that I have once again been slighted.
My hands won't stop shaking. I don't want to admit the amount of models I have had to smash and recreate and smash again.
I need to sleep.
The first time I was alone, I was able to accept the risk because I felt death was inevitable. I was surrounded by corpses. I was stranded. The idea of falling asleep and the ship experiencing a catastrophic failure almost felt on-par with the course of events. I expected it. The fear of sleeping alone never left me, but it became diminished.
This, however, is different. I have hope. You helped me set a course to home. I have enough fuel. I have the vital cargo. There is nothing, outside of some unforeseen hazard, that can interrupt this voyage. Sleeping alone now carries the full weight of its risk.
I curl my legs beneath myself. I, with great deliberation, begin the process of winding down. Most of this process is involuntary once the ball begins rolling. I need to be calm, for starters, which is something that having you nearby ensured.
I can't believe I did this for forty-six years. You reset my tolerance for suffering. Damn you, [Grace]. Damn you.
My hearts begin to slow. The capillaries of my hot circulatory system decrease their firing.
Welcome the soft, yielding silence. I remember that verse from an old lullaby. Too old for my parents to have sung it to my siblings and I. I must have read it in school or heard it in a museum.
[Adrian] was always fond of things like that. Strange, archaic things. The macabre.
[Adrian] would have loved you, you eldritch beast. They would not have been fearful of your wet mouth, your dissonant body. They would have commented on your bizarre beauty with complete sincerity and wonder and asked to hear more.
I would have too, if we had more time.
You were in a [coma] for four years before I met you. From how you explained it, it sounds similar to what I experience every time I sleep. But I refuse to conflate the two definitions. What you experienced sounds incredibly negative, forced. I would rather allow our two versions of sleep, as different as they may be, share the same word.
Did you [dream] during the [coma]?
Eridians don't [dream]. But if we postpone sleep long enough, venture too far into the twilight zone of consciousness for too long, we may experience [paracusias].
I can hear the clacking of opals, of fine useless gems. The kinds that [Adrian] wore when we celebrated our mating ceremony. Pretty, hindering things. I had brought out a similar outfit for you when we celebrated our taumoeba synthesis. You said I [looked] good. I reveled in your praise.
You were [drinking] [vodka]. It was in a collapsible bag with a [straw] sticking out of it. The crescendo of your blood was bringing my attention to your [cheeks], to your [neck], to the brief sliver of your [collarbone].
"Sorry, I'm… I don't drink often." I had a hard time parsing through your words. The notes were slurring.
"Is fine," I sang.
"Grace sound beautiful anyways," is what I wanted to sing but could not.
I had imagined the sound of a Eridian jewelry on you. How would they sound with your odd, two-legged gait? You would have to hang them from your [neck], or perhaps over your auricles. I imagined you wearing them on your carapace like a crown, accentuating the radiant chord that I would sometimes hear when you brushed your fingers through the filaments.
I can feel myself nearly breaking back into consciousness. My heartrates are increasing. I forcibly re-submerge myself.
There is no point in any of this rumination. You are gone. You are nothing now but a muse, something that I can conjure upon command and listen. You are nothing more now than a lullaby, a prayer, a dissonant, augmented, ugly, beautiful melody.
*****
On the large screen room, you had shown me a [video], a montage of life on [Earth]. You chose it partly due to educational purposes, but also because you enjoyed the music. You wanted to know what I thought of it, if I could perhaps pick out words from it.
I did. I certainly did. It sounded like pebble-song, though, what you compared to a [keyboard-smash] when I tried explaining my entertained confusion. It still made me feel comfortable, though. As abstract as it was, there was some semblance of my language.
"There are so many languages on Earth," you had said. "Some of them share the same alphabet, although many of them have their own system of writing that is completely unreadable to others."
You had picked up random items from the ship and [showed] them to me. You made an effort to find things with raised notes so I could distinguish them.
"This is written in the Russian language, which uses the Cyrillic alphabet. English uses the Latin alphabet." You had paused then, suddenly in thought. "I don't remember learning Russian, but I must have taken a class in college because I can kinda sound out the letters. But it's really difficult for me."
You picked up another item. "This one is written in Chinese, which uses a logographic system instead of an alphabet. I am completely lost with this one, unfortunately." You [smiled] then, but it sounded sad. "If Yao were here, I wonder if he and I would have shared a language exchange like we did."
I could hear you swallow the [saliva] in your mouth. I refrained from making a comment.
"Anyways," you said. "Some languages share the same alphabet, despite being different. For example, Italian uses the Latin alphabet, but I don't speak it. However! I could at least try to sound my way through the words while reading it. If I were stuck in a room with only text written in Chinese, I would probably feel a little relieved to find something Italian, even if I couldn't understand it."
"Oh, jeez," you added, quickly. "I didn't breeze through that too fast, did I? There were probably a bunch of words you didn't know. I'm sorry."
I waved a hand. A dismissive gesture that is somehow shared by both [humans] and Eridians.
"Is fine. I learn many linguistic chords from [Wikipedia] [rabbit-hole]," I sang. "[Earth] music sound like this. Make feel almost nostalgic."
"That sounded like a 10-point word. I'm gonna need a definition for that one."
"Hm. Nostalgic. Think about past with positive association."
"Oh, nostalgia. That's nice," you fiddled with the controls for the large screen. "I feel the same way when listening to Earth music, but for obviously different reasons."
"Continue [video]."
You laughed and obliged. "Yes, ████."
"Need word."
"Word of endearment," you simply said, rather quickly, as if you hoped I would misunderstand you. The fear in your body was so, so loud.
Through my sensor, I could hear the [image] of an [Earth] [flower] unfurling. There were liquid droplets on the surface of its folds.
"Common word of endearment in Eridian means," I paused, trying to navigate our shared vocabulary. "Like hatchling. Not young as but desire to protect and take care of like hatchling or pebble. Make no sense to human I assume." I sung the chord to you in Eridian so that you could log it in your translator.
It broke the tension enough to make you laugh. "We actually do have a very common word of endearment like that. Our version of that would be 'baby' or 'babe'."
I recall the discussion of [human] family units. A [baby] is the [human] equivalent of the smoothest, youngest hatchling. A [child] is perhaps closer in direct definition to pebble.
This was not the same word of endearment you said to me previously.
"Word of endearment different than [Grace] said earlier."
"Oh, ████? It's similar, but not the same exact definition." Your [face] is crescendoing again. "It's a bit of an out-dated phrase. You only really hear it in old movies or from old folks. But I like it. It's kinda chaste. Just means something you care about. If you hold it close, it is ████ to you."
I log in the word "dear" into our dictionary.
Did I already sing that [Adrian] would have loved you? Of course I did. I remember everything.
It wasn't very long that we were together. It felt significant to me, though. It felt so large even when contrasted against the releative expanse of my existence.
Did you feel the same, you and your tiny, brief life?
Eridians do not forget things. And yet, I somehow forgot how oddly silent my ship can be.
The [Mary] was an awfully loud ship. Flimsy and thin, made of aluminium, of all things. It felt as if the vacuum of space was perpetually on the verge of breaching its hull. I could hear every room and its contents simultaneously without tapping a finger.
You complained about me eavesdropping on you, several times. I was quite offended. If you didn't want me to listen, you should have gone into an insulated partition.
That was before I learned that the [Mary] did not have insulated partitions, nor did you have any idea what I was singing about.
An Eridian ship does not have this problem. Quarters in which personal tasks such as eating are performed are sound-insulated for privacy. The sound-architecture of the ship also allows for gradient muffling. This ensures that you are not constantly barraged with every sound from the engine room to the cockpit simultaneously. This was especially useful for me, when working in the engine room required an exceptional level of precision.
Distraction wasn't the issue to me, it was always annoyance.
What I would give now, though, to be slightly irked by too-loud crewmates while trying to work.
The prototype for the probe is going well. It is fairly simple. I may have copied your design for a spin-drive, both out of curiosity and because it seems effecient enough to send this little thing to Erid. If it doesn't meet my standards, oh well. I have another six years to figure out another design.
An unoccupied hand is tapping on the [thinking-machine] you gifted me. You introduced me to [Earth] music and I am trying to absorb all I can.
I begin to listen to "[Scheherazade]" by [Rimsky-Koraskov].
I can identify a few Eridian words. [Faux amis], you had explained, is when a word is phoenetically shared by two languages but has a different meaning. They are without the proper accent or emotion, strange, more alien than your spoken [tongue].
I pinpoint the our definite article, what we have compromised as the word "the". I also identify what sounds vaguely like the verb "to trust" and the noun "key". It makes no sense whatsoever, but it's entertaining while I work.
My scanner tells me that the [video] displays [humans] playing instruments that create these sounds. I pretend this is you singing to me in the only way you can.
*****
Your staccato note sounds slightly diminished. Your astrophage emission density is far lower than expected. It doesn't take me very long to calculate the expected values given your velocity, your distance, the amount of fuel you began with.
Either our initial calculations were incorrect, or there is something wrong with your ship.
I don't like the answer, so I occupy my entire evening re-calculating. Maybe I am not taking account for [relativity] properly. You only recently explained it to me, but it seeemed straightforward enough despite its novelty.
Even if my calculations are correct, how would I know what is wrong with your ship? From this distance, all I can do is speculate. If it turned out you had a leak, or a major structural fault…
I am a month's travel-time away. What could I possibly do in that scenario?
How could I fix it?
How could I save you?
If it came down to it, would I turn around and head towards you?
Before I can answer that, a warning chord chirps from another instrument.
It chirps again, incessant.
Scratch that, that was not a just a warning chord. That was a critical warning chord.
"FUEL SYSTEM CONTAMINATED," it sings.
I cease my self-flagellation. I don't move.
Another two critical warnings chime, almost simultaneously.
"ENGINE #5 OFFLINE"
"ENGINE #2 OFFLINE"
I can feel my capillaries firing. My vents are still tender from when you accidentally blew off my protective healing layer. I am producing so much steam that I can feel old wounds re-opening.
The taumoeba. The taumoeba must have gotten into the fuel.
How the fuck did the taumoeba leak? It was quarantined. It was encased in xenonite. If there was a leak, you and I would have noticed it on your ship.
Oh, [Grace]. Your diminished signal. That explains it.
We are both going to die out here. We are both going to die alone.
*****
I am completely fucked.
I am no biologist. I am no scientist.
You said I was the smartest person you ever met. That I was the best engineer in the universe. I would beg to differ, especially right now. The absolute truth is that without you here, I have no idea what to do. I can fix the ship, I can tinker, I can engineer my way out of most problems. But I have no idea what to do in this situation.
I tried to isolate the fuel tanks, but the taumoeba was in all of them. I don't understand how it was able to spread so fast without any friction. It was as if the xenonite wasn't there.
I tried nitrogen, but of course that did not work. We bred nitrogen-resistant taumoeba. The one point of weakness we knew and we removed it from them.
I have a secondary reserve of astrophage that is not used for engine fuel. There is no junction between this secondary reserve and that for the engines. After you described the effects of [radiation] and astrophage's natural disposition to shield from it, I relocated the secondary reserve to the opposite side of the ship. I then ran astrophage lines, inspired by the layout of [Mary's] hydraulic system, in order to create a [radiation]-buffer around the entire ship.
I run my scope and find that these lines are, too, significantly less loud.
A pianissimo, in fact. They are incredibly faint.
There is not a single partition of my ship that is not compromised.
It was as if they adapted to pass through xenonite.
Like we trained them to adapt to nitrogen.
That can't be it.
I built the breeder tanks out of xenonite. We bred them exclusively in my breeder tanks. Then, when we synthesized our ideal strain, I built another set of tanks to store them.
Also out of xenonite.
Of course I did. It's my most abundant material. My entire damned ship is made of it, after all.
I am going to die out here. You too, unless you are somehow able to figure out a plan. But even if you do, what are the chances that your remaining fuel is enough to get you back to [Earth]?
I know I called you stupid stupid stupid, [Grace], but I don't really mean it. In fact, I would argue that you are the smartest person I have ever met. I don't think the probability is quite right to ensure that we both met the smartest people from our respective planets. One of us had to have been wrong.
I think it may have been you.
I am so sorry.