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I’ve spent almost eight years in space at this point, experiencing constantly fluctuating g-forces, full gravity EVAs, and having my ship spun in circles like the freaking Scrambler at the county fair. I’ve traveled at 92% of light speed. I’ve spent the last 42 months subsisting on the very fashionable “Amoeba Diet.” I can handle an elevator.
Yeah, nope. It’s been a good ten minutes of miserable motion sickness since we moved out of the Hail Mary, and my stomach is already completely vacant. The taumoeba slurry doesn’t look much different coming out than it does going in, a thought to which I owe the second losing of my lunch. At least I’m not in zero-G this time.
“Are we there yet?” I groan.
It’s not like I wasn’t impressed when Rocky told me about Erid’s space elevator. Let it be known that I was very intrigued. Engineers on Earth have been theorizing about space elevators for generations, but have always been brought up short by the issue of creating a material that can maintain tensile strength across all 100,000 kilometers of its necessary length. I knew xenonite was good--10 km of fishing line good--but no amount of reminders about how insane Eridian materials science was could ever keep my jaw in its place when I actually worked out the math.
Ironically, despite its much higher gravity, Erid’s space elevator is actually a little shorter than it would need to be on Earth. One day on Erid is only five hours long, meaning that it rotates at a rate of once per 18397 seconds- almost five times faster than Earth. This means that any satellites can maintain the necessary geostationary (Eridstationary?) orbit at a much lower altitude, because-
No, the math isn’t distracting me enough. I curl up in the fetal position and roll onto my side. I’m seriously beginning to regret requesting that the capsule be transparent (polarized, of course).
We’re not landing the Hail Mary on Erid for a few very good reasons. First, Erid doesn’t have the infrastructure to land a shuttle. No worse way to make an impression on an alien species than vaporizing a chunk of their planet with a spin drive. Secondly, the Hail Mary was absolutely not built to withstand Erid’s surface pressure. It would be like trying to get to the bottom of the Mariana Trench in a Honda Accord. We’d be crushed like a tin can. Luckily, all the smartest Eridian scientists have leant us the souped-up company car! And when I say car, I’m referring to the 5x5x5 meter partitioned xenonite cube that is currently zipping us (along with our things) towards the surface of the planet along a cable the circumference of my arm.
“Still not. Time to Erid is about five hours. Grace need help yet, question?”
He sounds less than concerned about me, probably because I’ve been at this for a good eight minutes now. Oh god. We’re only going less than about a kilometer per second. Come on, inner ear, this is so much chiller than what we’re used to! “I think I might be dying,” I mumble, and then, quickly, “Not literally, buddy. I’ll be good in a little b-” I’m cut off by another heave.
Rocky is fidgeting anxiously on his side of the partition. I’d like to think he’s worried after my health and safety, but he’s probably just eager to get back home. He’s been away for more than sixty years, from Erid’s perspective. I remember suddenly what he said about Adrian, that she might have found someone else while Rocky was away.
“You, uh, excited to be home?” It’s a bad conversation starter. We’ve talked about this so many times before. I just need something, anything, to steady myself on this Death Cube From Outer Space.
But Rocky doesn’t respond the way he normally does, with jazz hands and rapid-fire lists of the things he’s ready to return to. He stills, and shrinks a little. “Nervous. Many things on Erid have probably changed. Not want talk about it. Problem for solving five hours from now.”
“Your mate, right? You think she might have found someone else?” I plow ahead. It’s forgivable. I’m not operating on all cylinders at the moment.
Rocky gets stiffer. “Maybe. Problem for five hours from now.”
All right, I get the hint. He doesn’t want to talk about it, that’s fair enough. I venture into the bleary fluff of my own dizzy brain, searching for a new topic.
Rocky gets there first. “I ask Earth culture question, is okay, question?”
“Sure. Shoot.” I press my face into the floor. The xenonite surface is nice and cool, but it also gives me a clearer view of the Hail Mary receding in the distance. Oh man.
“When we meet, you give me male sex word. Why, question?”
As a middle school teacher, you have to get really used to fielding insane questions from people with yet-to-be-developed social skills. As an alien ambassador, that goes double. But this catches me off-guard, I admit: I wheeze. “Male sex word? Well, that’s not something I hand out lightly, I really think I’d remember giving you one of those.”
“Word using for human members of the male sex. No word in Eridian, Eridians not use.”
“Oh. You mean pronouns?” I reply. Rocky hums affirmatively. I know Rocky’s not a man, of course. Reproduction was one of the first topics when we were exchanging biology lessons, and while there are some gonochoric species on Erid, Eridians aren’t one of them. By that point, though, I’d already kind of gotten in the habit of referring to him as a he. “Remember I was telling you about the movie I took your name from? Well, the character named Rocky in that movie is a man, and he uses male pronouns, so I just stuck with that, I guess.” Except I started calling Rocky ‘he’ before I gave him his name. I don’t have a better explanation, though. “Does it, uh, bother you? I can call you something else, if you want.”
“No, not bother. Important Earth culture thing, but no meaning for me. Only curious.”
“Oh. Well… just let me know, I guess.”
“It bothers you, question?”
“What? People talking about me with male pronouns? No, it doesn’t really bother me, that’s what I am. Or how I identify, I guess.”
“No. On Erid, Eridians not have male pronouns. Hmm… Rocky wonders… Rocky is worried that…”
That pricks my ears. He’s slipped into a formal register. Eridians are an extremely collectivist species in general, but Rocky’s particular home culture is unusual on Erid: they really don’t like to impose or make assumptions. When they have opinions or thoughts that might not be universally shared, it’s good etiquette to express them in the third person, just to emphasize the speaker’s own responsibility for them. He hasn’t done it much since the Hail Mary charted a course for Erid. He says it’s not so important when you’re talking to someone you’re close with. Most often, he does it when we’re discussing cultural differences. It usually means he suspects our cultures might be incompatible somehow.
“Eridians know about sex,” he begins, and I stifle myself before I can say I’ll bet you do because I know he’s trying to go somewhere with this. “But gender, it is more difficult. Erid not have social equivalent, language not have equivalent. We use same pronoun for everything, even not-Eridian things and not-alive things. You say humans, they are bothered by the wrong pronoun; you will be upset that we do not use for you a male pronoun, question?”
I furrow my brow and grin in disbelief. “Rock, no, that’s quite literally the least of my worries right now.”
“When we discuss habitat, you say you are sad if it is not sunny enough, not colorful enough, not enough temperature fluctuation. Humans are sensitive. You are certain, question?”
“I… honestly hadn’t thought about it like that.” Should I have? Is it going to be a problem that nobody on Erid will understand me as a man? Are there humans that would actually have their health affected by something like that? I mean, I’ve had students that are trans and non-binary, I don’t live under a rock. I know what gender dysphoria is, and I always make an effort to accommodate my kids who experience it. But I can’t say I ever really understood it, personally. I don’t care much about my own manhood one way or the other. It wouldn’t really be any more accurate to call me a woman, and I don’t even know how I’d go about becoming they. Except on Erid, I guess that’s my only option? That doesn’t sound so bad. Much better than the scurvy I’m already developing, as far as problems go.
Something occurs to me. Still dizzy, I flop over to the box that contains my stuff and dig my laptop out. “One of my old, uh, crewmates,” I say, skimming over the tide of sadness that still rushes in when I think about Yáo and Ilyukhina, “spoke a different language than me. Actually, both of them did, but I feel like I remember… aha!” I click triumphantly on an article titled 24 Amazing Facts About the Chinese Language That You Probably Didn’t Know!. Obvious clickbait, but it’s from a site offering study abroad opportunities in about seven different Chinese cities, so I figure it’s trustworthy. “Look: ‘17: There is no gender in Chinese!’ Some human languages have the same thing, just one pronoun.” I frown. “I mean, they still have the concept of gender, so I guess it’s not exactly the same. But, like, I remember this one time at a party--Yáo’s English was usually perfect, so he must have been wasted--he slipped up and called me ‘she.’”
“Female pronoun. This one for Stratt and Ilyukhina, and your former mate. You give this one to Adrian.”
“Yeah, exactly. Anyway, nobody actually cared, or even noticed, I think. I, uh… honestly, I don’t know why I even remember this. It’s just funny how quickly everyone moved on. Not that I cared either, just…”
Rocky senses that I don’t actually have an end to that sentence, and rescues me. “You say funny has two meanings. Funny like joke, or funny like strange, question?”
“Neither, I guess. Maybe that’s not the right word.” I do kind of feel like laughing, though--I’ve always been a nervous laugher. I’m not sure how we got here, but I’m definitely realizing that I should not be Earth’s Gender Ambassador. “Anyways, the point is that not having gendered pronouns is not detrimental to human health, or else a solid eighth of us would be in real trouble. I’ll be fine.”
I keep scrolling through the article. “Oh, hey, Chinese does the same thing you do! Puts a little word at the end of a sentence when you want to ask a question! Well, I guess I don’t know if this is literally the word question, like yours is, but still. Neat.”
Rocky perks up. “Really? My language is strange on Erid because of that. Most other languages make questions like this.” He produces some tones with a strange gurgling quality, and after a moment, I realize he’s actually saying something: the same Eridian words I know, a little slower, with that extra layer of sound. “Apologies. Rocky not good at that. Should practice more. But other Eridians like to make fun of Rocky’s language for form of question, sometimes.”
I scowl. “Yeah, humans do that kind of thing a lot, too. Mostly the ones who don’t know anything about the world, and don’t want to learn. That form is definitely very common on Earth, though.”
At the end of the article, there’s a link that leads me to a page offering an online Chinese course (with a discount if I use code hskWOW!). For a moment, I smile. Aside from whatever experiments the Eridian scientists are gonna want to do on me, I’m about to have nothing but free time. Why not learn Mandarin? I’m basically the best xenolinguist in the universe right now, other than Rocky, obviously. Surely some of those skills translate to Earth linguistics. But when I look up at my friend, watching me curiously as I type, I realize that I wouldn’t actually have anyone to practice with.
“Man, I wish you’d gotten to meet Yáo,” I say, sighing. “You guys would have gotten along really well. Or maybe killed each other, I don’t know. But you’d have both had fun laughing at me dying on this elevator, at least.” Sometimes I wish I’d gotten to meet him myself, on normal terms. The crew on Stratt’s Vat was close, but I wouldn’t necessarily say we were friends.
“Yes. Grace is… very brave, kind, interesting. I wish Erid could meet more humans.”
“One day, buddy.”
Rocky hums absently. He fidgets a bit, two of his legs messing with the settings on the readouts panel, the other three tapping out a rhythm on the floor of the box. He’d told me that before he left for Tau Ceti, he’d helped engineer this elevator. It makes sense that he’d want to check out all the new tech that’s been developed since he’s been away.
“I hope that you will get along with Adrian,” he says, voice quiet. “I think that you will. Both are very smart, interested in many things. You talk a lot, but Adrian likes to listen. Before I left, we were thinking about expanding our family.”
“What, like, having kids? That’s great!”
“Yes, maybe pebbles, maybe including another mate. Maybe both.”
Huh. Eridians mate for life, I always just assumed they were monogamous, too. Maybe they are, and Rocky and Adrian are just open-minded. “Uh…”
“I will talk to Adrian first, and of course you and Adrian need to know each other more, but I think you will be a good addition for our family.”
“Wait, you’re talking about me?”
“We not have need to talk about that right now. I want to say, I care very much about both of you. My relationship with you, and my relationship with Adrian, are important. I am scared… I am scared that they will change. I am scared that being back on Erid will change many things for me. I not know what to do. Not know if I will be able to fix.”
“Hey, you don’t need to worry about me, man. I mean, please worry about making me a habitat where I can, you know, survive, but after everything we’ve been through? It’s not like I’ll go crazy or keel over just because you’re doing a little marriage maintenance and I don’t get to see you as often.” Truthfully, I might. I get a strange pit in my stomach whenever Rocky talks about Adrian, one that I don’t want to look too closely at. But that’s not the point. “I don’t really know what to say about that other stuff, but I’m right here. Always will be.”
Rocky trills happily, having apparently said everything he wanted to say. He must have been holding that in for a while. I look back at the laptop, which is still displaying that page for a Chinese course. No, I’ll probably never get the chance to have a real-time conversation with a native speaker. 16 light years from Earth, I won’t be able to use it to make friends, or order food, or anything like that. But Stratt put the whole internet on here, right? I have the rest of my life to learn how to read a children’s book, or something, at least. Maybe I’ll learn something that would help me eulogize Yáo again, properly this time.
We’re passing through one of Erid’s rings right now, and it sounds exactly like hail on a moving car, if the car were going over 2000 miles per hour. I can’t really see the Hail Mary anymore, but I’m feeling less sick, at least. Rocky is engrossed in the stat readouts--either he’s anxiously watching the clock tick down, or he’s just curious about how thick the elevator cable is at this point in the journey. Probably both at the same time.
So many things I missed out on, back on Earth. Never learned another language, never took a gender studies class, never had a relationship that worked out. Now, given another chance to try again? I refuse to miss anything about Erid--I refuse to miss any of Rocky.