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“Grace,” says Rocky, and I nearly fall out of my chair.
“Oh my—Rocky!”
From one moment to the next, my heart is pounding in my throat. I look down at Rocky where he stands in my kitchen, clad in his xenonite shell. I don't know how I didn't hear him come in.
“You remember knocking?” I ask, hand on my chest. “That's literally the first thing we did together, and you have yet to forget anything.”
“I knock!” Rocky says. “Knock many time, knock, knock, knock. No reply, so I come in.”
There's a fifty-fifty chance he's pulling my leg. I know I get immersed in my work sometimes, and this morning sure has been grabbing my attention. With little else to occupy myself on Erid—most notably, the lack of a Wi-Fi connection and therefore the loss of everything I didn’t finish on Netflix—I’m forced to peruse the other things my laptop has to offer. I can’t access any new papers uploaded to the internet, though I am terribly curious how Earth is doing, but what I can do is access literally everything in existence prior to the start of my mission.
There’s so much stuff there that I spent half the morning just picking where to start, but I’m now about a third of the way through a paper on mycorrhizal networks and their transfer of nitrogen among themselves and other plants. Definitely on the outskirts of my field of expertise these days, seeing as I’ve spent the latter half of my career teaching children basic biology, but working through first contact with an alien species has really reignited my drive to learn about whatever I can get my hands on. As it turns out, the whole forced suicide mission thing had its perks.
Anyway, the point is: it's entirely possible that I didn't hear Rocky knock.
But it's just as possible that he's lying through his non-existent teeth.
“Excite!” Rocky says, and I come to terms with the fact that this is happening. “I read up on human culture. Come, come!”
His shell is not molded to his body finely enough for him to grab my hand, so he starts shoving me out of my chair instead. It would be quite a hard fall, seeing as I’m subjected to twice the gravity I’m used to, so I get up. “Alright, I'm coming!”
I expect to be led outside, but instead he takes me to my bedroom, chittering excitedly all the while. That's something I've learned since my arrival on Erid: Rocky never shuts the heck up, so I didn't notice it back when we were in space, but other than their musical language, Eridians also give wordless noises sometimes. Those, too, have meaning, but they're broad enough to not be classified as speech. Kind of like how a laugh usually means general happiness or a sigh means sorrow.
Rocky positions me by the window, bobbing up and down. “I read about human ritual,” he explains, like that's meant to give me context for why he broke into my home and started pushing me around. “Read about human gender. Much information! Attraction to same gender, word is gay.”
It's unnerving to hear him imitate human words. I understand it more often than not, the same way that parents can understand their babbling toddler when no one else can, but it’s still freaky to hear him shape whatever orifice he uses to speak into an approximation of a consonant.
“Okay?” I say. Nothing he said was untrue. I also don’t know why he was reading up on that of all things.
“Eridians all same gender,” Rocky says. “No gender at all. I read about escaping from closet.”
Before I can say anything or even laugh at him, he nudges open the door of the wardrobe set into my bedroom wall. He’s careful as he nestles himself between my clothes, making sure not to put too much weight onto the bottom panel. From there, he looks at me expectantly, and I hide my smile behind my hand. “Go ahead, bud.”
Rocky emerges, and his body language alone is enough to get me going. I struggle around my laugh, clamping my hand over my mouth. He waits patiently for me to gather myself.
“Eridians are gay,” he declares. “I escape closet for all of them.”
I fail. I tuck my glasses into the collar of my shirt so I can put my head in my hands, wiping tears as they come.
“Rocky,” I say between giggles, “Rocky, I don’t think—I don’t think you can apply human sexuality to Eridians.”
Something in him shifts, then. He perks to attention from his relaxed state, and though he has no eyes or facial features, I swear I can feel his gaze narrow on me.
“I also read about gay rights,” he says slowly, warily. “Read that gay humans are hated some places. Bad.” He comes closer, looking up at me with all the accusation his flat face can muster. “You hate gay, question?”
“Oh, you are such a—” I cut myself off, opting to shove him with my foot instead. It took a while for me to get comfortable with it, but after watching Rocky and Adrian push and kick each other around as casually as a human couple might exchange kisses on the cheek, I’ve come to terms with the fact that Eridians, in their sturdiness, require a firmer hand for affection to be received. Rocky staggers slightly but comes right back to where he was, pointing a claw at me.
“You hate gay,” he states, and I roll my eyes.
“Yes, Rocky, I’m super uncomfortable that your species procreates at all. Please stop immediately.” I give him another nudge, which he dodges by stepping back as if I’ve horribly offended him. He thinks for a moment, and I’m reminded of our first few days together, when we did not yet have the vocabulary to say things plainly.
“I organize thrum,” he tells me at last. “We throw you out. Put you in space to—”
He stops to pantomime suffocation, clutching at his carapace where one might anthropomorphize the location of a chest.
In the space between one moment and the next, I am hit—not for the first time—with the reality of my new life. We can joke about these things because neither of us died a horrible death in space. We can talk like this because with every day that passes it becomes more and more unthinkable to load the Hail Mary back up with Astrophage and go back to Earth. I may lack all the comforts and attachments I was used to—mindless entertainment, junk food, my kids and the friends whose faces I remember only vaguely.
But I have gained so much, and after months of recovering and acclimating this new environment, I’ve finally arrived at a decision that might’ve been lingering in my subconscious all along.
Rocky keels over in front of me, finishing his vivid performance, and I seize my chance.
“You’re gonna have to catch me first,” I say, and then I’m leaping over him and running for the door.
It hurts. My joints scream with every bounding step, and I know I’m gonna curse my current self when I get old, but I can’t bring myself to care right now. All I know is that the air outside is warm and freshly salted, the sand soft beneath my heels. All I know is that Rocky’s laughter as he chases after me is all I wanna hear for the rest of my life.