Chapter Text
Rocky has calculated, down to the second, when the light from 40 Eridani’s trinary stars reflecting off of Erid will be detectable to my blobby human eyes, without a telescope. He set up Mary with a countdown timer, which has been giving me hourly updates for the last four days.
I’ve been wigging myself out about it. All this build up, and what if I can’t find anything to say? Maybe it’ll work out like being shown photos of a coworker’s fresh baby and trying to come up with something more complimentary than ‘it’s amazing how our species has survived with such underbaked offspring’. Maybe, somehow, Erid is ugly, and it’ll show on my face, and Rocky will eject me from the airlock.
I am, of course, an idiot. Erid is spectacular.
It’s absolutely massive, which Rocky has prepared me for. He was very pleased to report that it was 8.47 times the mass of Earth, and even from this distance, it looks it. The swirling, opaque blue of its atmosphere teems like waves on a global ocean. Then there’s the ring, the masses within it sparkling in 40 Eridani A’s soft light, its accumulated body spilling a hazy shadow north from the equator.
We’ve talked a lot about the ring. Depending on the axial tilt of Erid relative to 40 Eridani A, the ring’s shadow swings to the north or south, bringing significant seasonal cooling and a scale of storm that inspired a great deal of early Eridian mythology. Rocky has firmly stated that he is not a religious, superstitious, spiritual, or woo-woo guy, but he has implied that these stories are still important to others on the planet. He’s promised that there will be anthropologists (Eridianologists?) who are better-suited to introduce a space alien to comparative theology, and would in fact commit many crimes to be given the opportunity to do so.
From here, the wave of midnight cutting through the cerulean sea of Erid’s upper atmosphere seems a reasonable thing to stake some beliefs in. I’m feeling kind of hot behind the eyes, all of a sudden, and my throat is tight.
Rocky’s tunnels have expanded across the ship, not unlike mold. I’d say there’s a 66:33 split of real estate in his atmosphere’s favor. He argues that since I am incapable of ‘basic vertical locomotion’, his colonization of the ceilings shouldn’t count. Right now, he’s hanging out above me, over my shoulder. I’ve floated myself right up to the window, my hand resting against its acrylic panel. From here, Erid is still only three times the width of my palm.
Rocky taps his claw against the xenonite panel separating us. The planet is too far for him to echolocate — he’s getting a better look at me.
“Making sure I’m properly appreciative, huh?” I huff a laugh. It doesn’t sound that wet. “It… it’s really pretty, Rock. If you’re trying to sell me on it, consider it — well, consider it sold.”
“Erid is not for sale.”
“Figure of speech, you know that. It means I like it. It’s beautiful.”
“Thank,” he hums.
I tear my eyes away from Erid, glancing back at him. “You just wanted to hear me say it.”
It took me some time to work out Eridian body language. It doesn’t always map directly to the emotional literacy of a white American man who spends a lot of time in online forums or in a lab, but once I got a handle — jeez, but is this guy easy to read.
He’s settled his weight onto his back three legs, extending his forelimbs and wiggling his carapace smugly. He’s preening. “Rocky has complimented Earth, often. Now it is Grace’s turn for compliments.”
I roll my eyes and turn back to the star — planet — of the hour. As fast as the Hail Mary moves, the planet is not perceivably growing. But in a few days, Erid’s black frame will disappear, and this window will be filled with brilliant blue. Earth was — is blue, too. A small blue planet.
“Well, it’s gorgeous. Very blue, very big, very… planet.” I ruffle my own hair, grounding myself. “It kind of feels bad, y’know.”
I hear Rocky settle behind me, clunking against the xenonite as he folds his legs under him. “Why everything make Grace feel bad, question?”
My laugh fogs the acrylic. “Wow, no, it’s just — I shouldn’t be the one getting the first look at this. I wish you could see it, too. This is your home.”
He does not immediately respond, and I fully turn to face him
He has settled into a loaf, catlike. “If Rocky wanted to, he could,” he says, in a considerate mid-frequency tone. “Tell Grace to use camera, use Rocky’s texture monitor to sense what Grace senses.” He shrugs. “But Rocky feels, instead.”
This one throws me. Rocky has surprised me more than once with his blunt declarations of feeling, but they’re generally action-oriented. He’s yet to point-blank shoot me with ‘hey man, I’m feeling big feelings’.
Rocky’s gotten better at reading human body language, too. My eyebrows must be doing his least favorite thing again, reaching up for my hairline.
“The magnetic field. Rocky is feeling the magnetic field of Erid.”
Oh. The magnets, right, the magnets — we’ve talked about those before.
Most complex life on Erid can sense magnetic fields. On their home planet, Eridians have an innate sense of magnetic north and their own position relative to it. This gives them an excellent sense of direction; combined with their omnidirectional echolocation, these guys are natural born navigators. The Blip-A had a light magnetic field built in, for the comfort of the crew. According to Rocky, the lack of such a field on the Hail Mary, plus the novelty of the xeno-ball, are the cause of every single time he has run into a wall, table, whiteboard, or human. On Erid, he insists he is ‘just like Alysa Liu’ (we spent a few movie nights watching the 2026 Winter Olympics, and he quickly picked favorites). The conversation had then turned to the etymology of ‘graceful’ and ‘Grace’, and gotten pretty darn insulting.
“The maaaagnets,” I say, dragging out the word. “Right. Neat.” I haven’t asked permission for invasive questions in two years. If Rocky doesn’t want to answer, he won’t. “Hey, how does magnetoreception feel? Like, the physical sensation?”
“How does Grace feel when using eyes, question?”
“Alright, fair.”
We sit in companionable silence for several minutes, me converting the light landing in my retinas into electrical impulses chugging through my soggy meat brain, him doing something I assume is similarly overcomplicated to his home’s supercharged magnets. Erid’s got a magnetic field roughly 25 times as powerful as Earth’s, one of about a trillion differences between our home planet.
Erid’s upper atmosphere is beautiful. Under that atmosphere, there's an alien, truly literally alien planet, currently uninhabitable to my species. Filled with true-actual-literal space aliens, who, in theory, will help me inhabit the uninhabitable. If they want to. Which Rocky says they will. If Rocky’s a good indicator of what the average Eridian is like — heck, if they’re half as intelligent and doggedly empathetic as Rocky is, it’ll be maybe two weeks before they’ve built me a luxury resort.
Rocky hums, low and serious. I’ve been using the translator software less and less for the last two years, to get me prepared for the full immersion of an Eridian-only planet. Now it’s only me and his voice.
“Magnetoreception feels like… pulling. Pulling not to move, but to orient. Like when Rocky pull clothing of Grace. Grace not move, usually, but feels fabric pull, and knows where Rocky is.” He rubs two claws together, a little like twiddling thumbs. “Rocky is not a poet, and knows no poets,” he continues, using a chord for ‘know’ that is a little too complicated for me to fully understand. Closest I can get, there are no poets in his family, and he does not frequent the same conversations poets do. “But. Many Eridian poets say, when away from home, Eridians feel magnetoreception to home. Is same feeling.”
“Homesickness,” I say.
“Not sick. Just pull,” he refutes.
I’m curled against the window now, legs pulled to my chest, arms folded on my knees. I rest my chin on my crossed arms and look at him askance, through my lashes. “When will you be able to feel that? The, uh, pull?”
“Rocky is already feeling. Rocky has been receiving magnetic signal from Erid for last 1,032 minutes.”
“That’s — more than seventeen hours? Geez, Rock.”
He rocks back and forth, angling his carapace slightly. I wonder if it’s like cocking his head for large-eared Earth mammals, if it lets him tap into the magnets more easily. “Rocky has difficulty explaining to human, but Rocky tries.” How magnanimous of him. “Because Rocky feels Erid, feels North and feels self, can feel where the home of Adrian is. Rocky can feel the path home.”
Look at that, my throat is getting tight again. I squeeze my lips together hard. First so that I don’t emote too hard, then for — oh shoot — there it is again. I book it for the bathroom.
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It’s kind of a jerk move, running away in a moment of what Mary would call ‘constructive emotional vulnerability’, but I know from experience that Rocky prefers to be as far as possible from what’s happening next.
He can absolutely hear me blowing chunks down here. Making him listen feels almost as bad as the barfing itself.
There was a point where I was vomiting twice to three times daily. Usually after the taumoeba slurry — obviously not ideal. My body was ejecting it both as ‘not food’ and ‘too much food’, due to the volume I needed to ingest in order to get adequate-ish caloric intake. Switching to a slow drip through an internal tube (insertion assist courtesy of Armando) has helped a lot. I still skip down to the bathroom every day or two, but at least I’m usually just standing here swallowing for fifteen minutes rather than fully, actively yarfing.
Today’s a full, active day. Once the day’s intake has been vacated and I’ve splashed my face with cold water (which does nothing), Mary pipes up.
“Dr. Grace: Rocky wants to pass along a message.”
She waits patiently as I jam a toothbrush into my mouth. I burble out something she accepts as ‘receive message’.
“Rocky wishes to know if you need anything. He lists options like ibuprofen and anesthesia,” she reports, warmly.
I spit into the sink, ignoring Mary’s protests that it has not yet been two full minutes of brushing. The taste of bile has mostly disappeared, which is all I’m going for for now. “It’s just nausea, dude, it’s fine. It’s a human thing. It’s — cultural difference.”
And it is nausea. The nausea is, I know, a symptom of something probably more concerning, but explaining the wider ramifications of human malnutrition would accomplish nothing but giving Rocky more stress cracks in his carapace, and at least one of us should be functional, here.
It’s early, mild undernutrition, too. I ran out of prefab rations a month and a half back. I’d been, at Rocky’s suggestion, stretching them out — ‘real food’ for breakfast, ‘calorie-sparse Elmer’s glue’ for evening meal (I’m not calling it dinner). So I’ve only been on a totally nutrient-free diet for six weeks. I’ve got another two weeks before the scary stuff. In theory, we’ll be on Erid by then, and we’ll have figured something out. Or I’ll be dead! It’ll work itself out one way or the other.
There’s no verbal response from Rocky. There is, however, an insistent paper cup of room temperature water being offered to me by a robotic arm. Rocky must have ordered it. Annoying and thoughtful. I don’t think I can drink it yet — I do my best not to crumple the cup as another wave of nausea rolls through me.
I think about the big, blue dot, and the billions of Rockies scuttling around on it. In my head, some of them are wearing little doctor uniforms, stethoscopes strapped all the way around their abdomens. One of them produces a container of Flintstones gummy vitamins from under an old-timey nurses cap. Positive thoughts.
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Several days have past since our first sight of Erid, mostly uneventful, aside from the barfing. I’m glad I’ve got the tube in, the idea of willingly eating is repulsive right about now. I feel like a big, tingly water balloon.
For the last three days, Rock’s been sending out signals to Erid. Every fifteen minutes, outside of his one four-hour nap, he sends out the same calm, polite ping.
He’s pretty much using a MIDI radio. Instead of sending complex, continuous waveforms, his device transmits instructions: play this frequency, then this one, then this one. The receiving end synthesizes the tones for whoever’s at the other end. For a language built primarily of frequency modulation, it’s darn effective. Rocky says a lot of things get lost in translation, and that young Eridians have games centered around this — turns out Eridians and Humans both have versions of Telephone.
I’ve been splitting my time between revising my rudimentary Eridian-to-English dictionary (they should have sent a linguist), cleaning up my Human Physiology Medical Report, watching the big blue dot grow slowly larger in the window, and sleeping. We went over my incredibly basic understanding of human medical practice during our nearly four year transit, and he had taken a real shine to the ‘human body reconstructs during unconsciousness’ part of it. Apparently, sick Eridians are usually instructed to sprint around as much as possible.
I am on a strict and very enforced ‘be unconscious more than you are conscious’ regimen. The watching-me-sleep stuff has been tough, duration-wise, so we’ve set up what I’m calling a sleeping nest in the lab. That way, Rocky can actually get stuff done while I am comatose. He’s conspired with Mary to have alarms set for every meal, every shot, every cup of water. I had to personally set alarms to wake me up otherwise, since I don’t only want to be awake for medical examinations, thank you. I want to resent it, but, truth be told, the staying awake part is sometimes harder than the sleeping sixteen hours a day part.
Still. I don’t want to miss anything.
Rocky’s been away from home for more than fifty years. He has firmly, repeatedly stated what he believes our reception will be — big big speeches, parades, medals, global citizenship, etc. — but intellectual belief is not the same thing as knowing. I know he’s fretting about Adrian, what they’re doing now, if there’s a place for him left in his home. He’s fretting about me, too. Not just the falling apart thing, but the ‘what if the government finds the falling apart body super interesting and would like it to fall apart more’ side of things, which he says Eridian society would find unconscionably unethical, but he can’t stop thinking about since we watched E.T. That one is on me.
The point is, he shouldn’t be alone. He’s been alone long enough.
Speaking of missing things. I appear to be missing something right now. When I awake, blinking crustily, Rocky is not in the lab. This is in itself unusual, he likes to keep a pretty short distance from the nest while I’m out.
I sit up. There is some truly rapid-fire MIDI occurring in the cockpit. I’m not the brightest upon first waking, so I usually leave the laptop with the translation software up during my naps — it recognizes all the pinging as Eridian, and helpfully translates every sixth word. Alongside the notes, there is a warbling stream of meaning-free, needle-pitched trilling.
I try to tune in to what he’s playing.
Rocky. Second engineer. ♫♬♪ Hail Mary ♫♪♬♫♬♪ dock. Permission to ♪♬♪♬♫♬.
I roll myself out of my nest, my whole body on pins and needles. My ears feel tingly, even, and my skull feels like a semi-deflated helium balloon. I know, consciously, that my brain is part of my body, but right now they’re feeling pretty darn separate. I don’t think this is a vitamin thing, not entirely, I think this is a geez-louise-alarm-bells thing. Gravity is still off, and I pull myself up the ladder to Rocky.
On his end, the radio device looks like a miniature keyboard, just one octave-ish of frequencies. He’s brought it up beside the pilot’s chair. Three of his limbs are spread in a stable, tense stance, one waves his texture monitor gun across the many screens of information open on Mary’s cockpit interface, and one dances rapidly across his board.
He’s looping repeatedly through codes. His name, his title, his mission. A string of words that sounds like a description of the Hail Mary craft. Asking — stating? — that he will have permission to approach the Eridian Elevator. All the while, he vibrates, rattling the xenonite panels below him.
The response comes slowly, tinny notes clear and precisely paced. Like Rocky’s playing, there is no emotional register, and it is impossible to read any tone in the message we receive back.
“Second Engineer Rocky identification received. Greater Entity ♪♬ authorizes ♫♪♬♫♬♪ to enter ♫♬♪ airspace. Vessel Hail Mary will approach now at docking speed.”