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The biodome smells like salt.
That’s the first thing Grace notices every morning when he wakes up – before the light, before the low ambient hum of the atmospheric processors, before the distant sound of Eridian activity somewhere beyond the dome’s curved wall. Just salt. And underneath that, something mineral and faintly cold, like the air after rain. The Eridians got that part almost exactly right. He doesn’t know how, since the closest thing to rain on Erid is an ammonia shower that would dissolve him in under four minutes, but somehow they cracked it.
He’s been meaning to ask Rocky about that for weeks.
He rolls onto his back and stares up through the transparent ceiling at the Eridian sky. It's a colour that took him a long time to name – not quite orange, not quite red, somewhere in the bruised spectrum between the two, deepening at the edges where the atmosphere thickens toward the horizon. Two of Erid’s moons are visible even now, pale and close. He’s catalogued them the way he catalogues everything: obsessively, in the little journal he keeps on the fold-out desk by the window, using a pen he has to refill himself because he ran out of cartridges about eight months in and spent a deeply embarrassing afternoon asking Rocky to explain the Eridian equivalent of a stationary shop.
There is no Eridian equivalent of a stationary shop. Rocky found this hilarious.
Grace gets up.
The biodome is – honestly, it’s bigger than his apartment back in Denver was, which he tries not to think about too hard because it implies something about Eridian architecture that makes him feel both grateful and vaguely judged. There’s a main living space, a kitchen that functions on Earth-compatible equipment the Eridiands reverse-engineered from the Hail Mary’s galley in a process that Grace still doesn’t fully understand, a bathroom, a sleeping area sectioned off by a partial wall, and then the large glass-fronted room he thinks of as the porch, which faces directly onto the Eridian landscape and where he does most of his actual living.
The beach is on the east side. Real sand, real water – salt water, specifically, calibrated to something close to Pacific Ocean salinity, which Grace suspects was Rocky’s work because Rocky is both meticulous and deeply smug about his own meticulousness. The water doesn’t go anywhere. It’s a contained pool, roughly eight metres wide and maybe four deep, with a gradual shield that lets him walk into it. He swims in it every morning. He has started talking to it, occasionally, which is the kind of thing he keeps out of his official logs.
He makes coffee. Real coffee, from actual beans, which come in sealed containers aboard the resupply pods that arrive every fourteen months. He has done extensive calculations about the remaining supply. He does not share these calculations with anyone.
The coffee is ready by the time he hears the familiar clatter-tap of Eridian legs on the outer wall.
He looks up. Rocky is at the connection point – the sealed tunnel section that joins their two atmospheres, the engineering miracle that has allowed them to sit in the same room, more or less, for the better part of three years now. On Rocky’s side of the transparent partition, the air shimmers faintly with ammonia pressure. On Grace’s side, plain old nitrogen-oxygen, slightly humid from the beach. They’ve gotten very good at speaking through it. Grace has gotten so used to the faint audio distortion that he barely notices it anymore.
Rocky taps twice. This means I have something to tell you. It is distinct from the one-tap which means are you there, and the three-tap which, as far as Grace can determine, means something like I’ve done something and I’m not sure how you’ll react.
“Come in,” Grace says, carrying his coffee to the porch chair.
The tunnel pressurizes. Rocky moves through it with the easy, unselfconscious efficiency of someone who has done this several thousand times, all five of his legs finding purchase on the floor. He’s carrying something – a small device, flat and angular, the kind of thing that looks like it was assembled very quickly from whatever was lying around, which is almost certainly true.
Grace eyes it. “What’s that?”
“New sonar thing.” Rocky sets it on the low table between them, which exists specifically because Eridian anatomy does not allow for sitting in human-style chairs and they compromised on a surface they could both reach. “For mapping. Better resolution. Been adjusting.”
“You’ve been adjusting it at-” Grace checks the clock on the wall. “-0600.”
“Yes.”
“That’s six in the morning.”
“Rocky knows that 0600 means, Rocky not stupid.”
“Right.” He takes a sip of coffee. “So this is your normal. Got it.”
Rocky makes the sound that Grace has catalogued as something between a shrug and a mild rebuke – a low, rolling harmonic. Then he settles himself into his resting position, which involves arranging three legs as a base and curling the other two close to his body, and he examines his device in companionable silence while Grace drinks his coffee and watches the sky change colour as the primary star climbs the horizon.
This is most mornings, more or less.
Grace had not expected this. He’d expected – he doesn’t know what he expected. Loneliness, probably. He’d made his peace with it somewhere in the weeks arriving on Erid, during the long, disorienting stretch when the biodome was still being built and he was living in a sealed emergency habitat the size of a large closet, eating military rations and watching Erid through a porthole window. He’d thought: this is fine. I made a choice. It was the right choice. I can be lonely and still have made the right choice.
He had not anticipated Rocky. Which was, in retrospect, the central miscalculation of his entire life.
Rocky is here more often than not. Rocky has opinions about Grace’s meal planning, which are not useful since Rocky has never consumed anything other than ammonia and finds the concept of nutrition baroque and overcomplicated. Rocky wants to show Grace new things – new Eridian discoveries, new engineering modifications, passages from the scientific literature that he's translated himself into appropriate English so Grace can engage with them, which is painstaking work that Rocky treats as a simple favour and Grace treats as proof of something he can’t quite articulate. Rocky asks questions that have no clean answers. Rocky sits on the other side of the partition at two in the morning when Grace can’t sleep and they talk about whatever is in front of them – the moons, the sonar, the correct way to explain the water cycle to a student who isn’t paying attention – until the words run out.
It is not lonely at all, is the thing.
It is aggressively, almost overwhelmingly, the opposite.
Grace is fairly sure it’s a Thursday. He’s lost track a few times and done recalculations, and he’s got a margin of error of about plus or minus two days in his Earth-calendar tracking, which means Thursday is more of a commitment than a certainty. But it feels like a Thursday, and that’s good enough.
They are working.
Working, at this point in their lives, means something different than it used to. During the mission it meant the Astrophage problem, the Taumoeba solution, the twelve-step nightmare of saving two solar systems while also keeping each other alive. Now it means research, which is calmer but has its own texture of intensity. The Eridians – and Rocky specifically – are deeply interested in Earth biology, in the same way that Grace is deeply interested in Eridian chemistry, and there is an entire collaborative project underway between Grace;s ad hoc Earth knowledge and the Eridian scientific community. He sends reports. He answers questions. He runs small experiments in the biodome when the equipment supports it. Rocky serves as translator, interpreter, and, frequently, a highly critical peer reviewer.
Today they’re working on a report about cell division, specifically about why Earth multicellular life reproduces the way it does, because three separate Eridians research teams have found the concept nearly incomprehensible and have been sending Rocky increasingly plaintive queries about it. Grace has been trying to explain mitosis. Rocky has been trying to understand it. They have been at this for four hours.
“Why, question?” Rocky says, for what is possibly the ninth time.
“I’ve explained why four times already.”
“Grace explain how. Why is different.”
“Evolution,” Grace says. He makes a gesture at the table that doesn’t mean anything but which he does anyway, a leftover habit from teaching. “Evolution is the why. It worked, so it stuck around.”
“Evolution not reason. Evolution process. Why process select this, question?” Rocky clicks his front legs together in the patterns that signals focused disagreement. “Bacteria not do this. Bacteria cells. Bacteria reproduce by splitting. They simple and good.”
“You sound like an antimutiplicity bacteriophile.”
“Grace sound like scientist.” Rocky picks up the data pad with two legs and examines it. “Grace diagram wrong.”
“My diagram is fine.”
“Arrows go wrong directions.”
Grace leans over to look. The arrows are fine. He makes a mental note to re-examine whether any of the arrows are, in fact, not fine. “Walk me through what’s bothering you.”
“Daughter cell.” Rocky points with one leg-tip. “Here. In picture it moves away from parent cell immediately. Real life, cells stay connected for some time, yes, question? Still communication. There is passing of materials.”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
“Why does arrow show leaving, question?”
“It’s a simplified diagram. I was trying to explain the core concept.”
“Simplified wrong.” Rocky sets the pad down firmly. “Simplified teaches incorrect. Then must un-teach, is harder.”
Grace opens his mouth. Then closes it again. Rocky has, in the past three years, given him more to think about pedagogy than his entire career in education did. He doesn’t say this because Rocky’s sense of its own correctness does not need to be inflated.
“Fine,” Grace says. “You’re right. I’ll redo the diagram.”
“Good.” Rocky resettles himself. A pause. “Grace is good teacher.”
“You just said my diagram was wrong.”
“Yes. and Grace say ‘Fine, you’re right, I fix.’ Good teacher. Grace not argue when Grace wrong.” Rocky examines the sonar device again, the one from this morning, turning it over in two legs. “Rocky told this to research team. Research team want to meet Grace.”
“They’ve been asking for eighteen months”
“Yes. Rocky been putting Research team off.”
Grace looks at Rocky. “Why?”
Rocky does not immediately answer, which is itself an answer. He adjusts the device. He runs a brief click-pattern through two of his leg-tips, which is a thing he does when he is choosing words carefully.
“Research team curious about Grace.” Rocky says finally. “This good. But research team are scientists. Research team want to study Grace. Ask questions about Grace biology. Grace processes.” He clicks. “This not comfortable.”
“I’m fine with biological questions.”
“Grace. Research team want to know about Grace sleep cycle for research.”
“I know, and I answered-”
“Rearch team ask how many times Grace turn over in sleep.”
Grace blinks. “How would they even-”
“Research team been monitoring biodome’s resonance patterns.”
There’s a silence.
“They can tell how much I move in my sleep from the resonance patterns,” Grace says slowly.
“Yes.”
“Have they been doing that the whole time?”
“Rocky ask research team to stop,” Rocky says, which is not a yes but is also, clearly, a yes. “Grace experiencing difficult period. Rocky did not want Grace to feel- Need word.” He stops.
“Observed?” Grace offers.
“Yes.” Rocky sets the device down. “Grace already feel like specimen, sometimes, Rocky can tell. Rocky not want this more.”
Grace looks at him. Rocky is not looking back – his sensory organs don’t work that way, and eye contact is a concept he understands intellectually but doesn’t perform – but there’s a quality to his stillness that Grace has learned to read. An attention. Rocky is listening to the specific silence Grace makes.
“Rocky,” Grace says. “You told an entire research team to stop their data collection. Because you thought I was having a hard time.”
“Yes.”
“When was this?”
“Approximately-” Rocky clicks, running the Eridian calendar conversion. “Fourteen earth months ago.”
Fourteen months ago. Grace doesn’t have to think hard about what fourteen months ago was. It was the anniversary of the launch, which he’d handles about as well as he handles most things he’s pretending not to feel, which is to say; fine, and then abruptly not fine at about eight o’clock at night when he’d sat on the beach and done a lot of staring at the water and very little else. He’d thought he was being discreet. He is not, apparently, ever as discreet as he thinks.
“I didn’t tell you I was struggling,” Grace says.
“No.”
“You just-”
“Rocky know Grace,” Rocky says, simply. “Grace not eat for one say. Grace swam very long time. Grace not work.” A brief harmonic. “Are signs.”
Grace doesn’t say anything for a moment. Outside, the wind is running against the dome wall, a sound like white noise and pressure, one of the moons is visible on the horizon now.
“You were watching out for me,” Grace says.
“Yes.” Rocky picks the divide back up.” Is obvious.”
“It’s not- Rocky, for most of my life, that would not have been obvious. People don’t usually-” He stops. Tried a different approach. “Most of the people in my life were not paying that level of attention.”
Rocky makes a sound Grace doesn’t have a translation for. It’s short, low, and ands on a question-pitch. Not dismissive – more like it’s something Rocky genuinely doesn’t understand how to process.
“Earth wrong for that,” Rocky says finally.
“It was just – normal. You’re busy. People get busy. It’s not personal.”
“Still wrong.”
“Yeah,” Grace says. “I guess it was.”
Later that day, after the mitosis report is revised and Rocky has declared the new arrows acceptable – not good, acceptable, Rocky does not give unearned praise – Grace makes dinner and Rocky watches.
This is also a routine. Rocky is not eating, clearly, because the smell of whatever Grace is cooking would be to Rocky roughly what breathing pure ammonia would be to Grace, which is to say a very efficient way to die. They’ve solved this by Grace keeping the kitchen sealed behind its own filter during actual cooking, with a small speaker system that lets them keep talking. Rocky watches through the partition glass and asks questions. Tonight's questions are about the maillard reaction, which Rocky has decided is the most philosophically interesting aspect of human food culture.
“Only works with heat,” Rocky says.
“Correct.”
“Many of Grace foods have Maillard before eating. Bread. Meat.”
“Also correct.”
“But Grace also Maillard while eating. In Grace body.”
Grace pauses, spatula in hand. “That’s not- that’s not really the same thing. Maillard is a surface-level reaction. Digestion is-”
“Both transformation of organic material, is chemical process.”
“Rocky, you can’t call digestion a form of cooking.”
“Rocky not call it cooking. Rocky call it same process.” Rocky’s front two legs tap against the partition glass in a rhythm that Grace has learned means I believe I’ve made my point. “Grace body Maillards things.”
“Oh my god.”
“This interesting, Grace. Not insult.”
“I know, it’s just-” Grace turns back to the pan. “It’s a weird image.”
“Grace body performs complex chemistry. Multiple times per second. Grace like slow star.”
Grace thinks about this. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Is accurate. Not nice.”
“You’re incapable of separating the two.”
Rocky makes the low rolling harmonic, the fond-exasperation one. Grace has, over three years, gotten very good at cooking while being observed and questioned about the fundamental chemistry of his own digestive process. He’s gotten very good at a lot of things he wouldn’t have predicted. Eridian calendar conversion. Reading Rocky’s posture. Going six months without talking to another human being without the silence caving in on itself. FInding which angle of his biodome window catches the primary star at the exact right moment in the morning that it looks, briefly, almost like earth light.
“Grace have face.” Rocky says.
“I always have a face. I have one face, actually, which I can’t remove.”
“Different face. Thinking face.”
“I’m cooking.”
“Grace thinking something that makes Grace quiet,” Rocky says, with the flat certainty of someone who has simply stopped pretending to be uncertain about these things. “Rocky can hear.”
“You can hear quiet.”
“Rocky can hear quiet Grace make.” Rocky clicks. “This not difficult. Grace make different quiets.”
Grace sets the spatula down for a moment and looks at the partition. Rocky is watching him – not with eyes, not in the way Grace watches Rocky, but with the full-body attention of an organism whose entire sensory relationship with the world is about listening. Being really looked at, Grace has learned, does not require eyes at all.
“I was thinking,” Grace says, “about how weird it is that this is normal.”
“What normal, questions?”
“This. Cooking dinner while you watch and we argue about the Maillard reaction.” He gestures vaguely at the kitchen, at the biodome, at the visible slice of Eridian sky through the porch window. “Years ago I was a middle school science teacher in Denver. And now I live on another planet and have philosophical arguments about digestion with a rock spider and this is just-” He stops. “Thursday. This is just Thursday.”
Rocky is quiet for a moment.
“Is bad, question?” Rocky asks.
“No,” Grace says, and finds that he means it completely. “It’s just strange. In a good way. Mostly.”
“Eart part,” Rocky says. Not a question.
“Yeah.” Grace picks the spatula back up. “The earth part”
Rocky says nothing. He doesn’t try to fix it or explain it or minimise it, which is something Grace has come to understand is one of Rocky’s most fundamental kindnesses. Rocky does not try to argue Grace out of his grief. He just stays in it with him, which is rarer, and harder, and worth considerably more.
The food finishes cooking. The filter seals. Grace carries his plate to the porch.
Rocky joins him on the other side.
The word comes up six weeks later.
They’re outside, which is still a novelty to Grace even after years, even though outside on Erid means in a sealed mobility suit that makes him look like an extremely well-padded astronaut and limits his movement to a careful shuffle. Rocky is beside him, which on Erid means Rocky is in his element – moving with the fluid, confident efficiency that Grace always associates with watching someone be fully themselves. Rocky on the Hail Mary had been slightly constrained by his suit, by the tunnel, but the basic physics of existing in an environment calibrated for someone else. Rocky on Erid is just Rocky, and it’s a different thing, wider.
They're looking at a new geological feature – a ridge formation about two kilometres from the biodome, recently exposed by one of Erid’s more dramatic weather events. Rocky is mapping it with the sonar device from six weeks ago. Grace is holding a secondary monitor and trying to be useful which mostly means saying ‘mm-hm’ at appropriate intervals and not tripping on the uneven ground.
“Hold still,” Rocky says, without looking at him.
“I am holding still."
“Grace oscillating. Stop it.”
“Oscillating- I’m breathing, Rocky. That’s breathing.”
“Less breathing.”
“I genuinely cannot do less breathing.”
Rocky makes a sound that in context Grace has learned to translate as fond exasperation, which remains one of his favorite things about Rocky, that fond exasperation exists in Rocky’s emotional vocabulary at all. Rocky had been, in those first weeks of communication, so relentlessly precise that Grace had been worried he was dealing with something like affect-flat engineering intelligence. Then Rocky had made his first joke – a genuinely terrible pun about ammonia and ambition that made no sense in translation but had clearly been pun-shaped in Eridian – and Grace had recalibrated everything.
“Stay.” Rocky says.
“I’m not a dog.”
“Grace move like dog.”
Grace laughs, which is also oscillating, and which Rocky ignores in apparent favour of his mapping work. The sonar device does its thing – Grace can hear the pings even through his suit, faint and evenly spaced, and the monitor in his hand fills up with topography.
“Good ridge,” Rocky says. “Very old. Older than biodome site.”
“How old?”
“Calculating.” Rocky moves around the northern face of the ridge, trailing one leg along the rock surface, reading texture. “Forty thousand Eridian years.”
“Forty thousand-” Grace does the conversion. “That’s over a hundred thousand Earth years.”
“Yes.” Rocky sounds pleased. “Old place. Rocky like old places.”
“You’ve mentioned.” Grace watched the topography build on the monitor. “Rocky?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been out here mapping this thing every day for a week. It’s even without your current research scope.”
“No.”
“So what’s the appeal?”
Rocky is quiet for a moment, doing the methodical thing he does when he’s deciding how much of something to say. Grace has gotten good at the silence shapes Rocky makes.
“Old rocks,” Rocky says finally, “Old rocks not care what happening. Old rocks here before. Old rocks be here after. When things-” He pauses. “Difficult. Old rocks useful.”
Grace processes this. “You come here when you’re stressed.”
“Rocky come here when Rocky need perspective.”
“That’s what I said.”
Rocky’s legs do the thing that Grace thinks of as the Eridian equivalent of rolling one’s eyes, even though Rocky’s sensory organs don’t roll. It’s a posture thing. “Is not same thing. Stress is suffering. Perspective is choice.”
“Okay, when you need perspective.” Grace looks at the ridge. “What needs perspective right now?”
Another silence. This one is longer – not the choosing-words silence, something else. Rocky has stapped mapping and is standing with most of his legs in resting position, which means he is thinking rather than doing, and for Rocky those are genuinely different states.
“There is word,” Rocky says. “In Eridian. Rocky not translated for Grace.”
Grace looks over. “Okay?”
“Rocky been trying to find English word. Word-” Rocky clicks. “Not love word. Eridiands not have love words. Love not stated. Love-”
“Assumed,” Grace says. “Structural. You’ve explained this.”
“Yes. But word is adjacent. Is-” Rocky moves one leg tip back and forth in a pattern Grace doesn’t recognise, which usually means he’s working through something conceptually. “When other person exist. Become aware that- person better. For the existing. Not love. Not-” He clicks. “Not need. Something else.”
“Like gratitude?”
“No. Gratitude person give. This someone is. That person is.” Rocky is still. “Grace understand difference, question?”
Grace thinks about it. The monitor hums in his hand. Around them, Erid’s wind moves in the ammonia haze beyond his suit.
“Like relief,” he says slowly. “That they exist. Not what they do for you, just- that they’re in the universe.”
“Yes.” Something in Rocky’s harmonic register shifts – a tone Grace hasn’t heard before, soft and held. “That is word.”
“What does it sound like? The Eridian?”
Rocky makes it. Even through the suit audio, through the distortion, it’s a remarkable sound – three tones, overlapping, the kind of chord that makes Grace’s chest do something complicated. It rises and then settles. It sounds like something being recognised.
“I can’t reproduce that,” Grace says honestly.
“No. Eridian throat architecture. Grace cannot.”
“What do people use it for? Contextually?”
“Is said-” Rocky pauses. “Is not said often. Is significant word. Say it when person want other to understand person existence is-” He clicks. “Good. Word is something like; existence is good. Is enough. More than enough. But Eridian ‘more than enough’ implied in word so not say it separate.”
Grace is very still.
“It sounds,” he says carefully, “like the word for being glad someone is alive.”
“Yes,” Rocky says. “Specifically, glad person is person. Not just alive.”
The ridge stands in front of them, forty thousand Eridian years old, not caring about anything.
“Rocky,” Grace says.
“Yes.”
“Why are you telling me this today?”
Another silence. This one is the shortest one yet.
“Tomorrow,” Rocky says, “Is anniversary Grace arrival.”
Grace doesn’t say anything. He’d forgotten. Or he hadn’t forgotten, he’d done the thing where you almost-forget because the almost-forgetting is easier than the remembering and then the remembering catches you anyway, sideways, while you’re standing on an alien planet holding a topography monitor.
Three years. Three years on Erid. Three years since he came over the Hail Mary’s console and made the choice. Three years since the signal went out and then came back, since Rocky said you are here in a voice pitched so high he could barely understand it and it had been the best thing Grace had ever heard in his life.
“Rocky know anniversary difficult,” Rocky says. “Things Grace had on Earth. Things Rocky can’t give.” He is precise about this, the way Rocky is precise about everything – not apologetic, just accurate. “Rocky know this.”
“Rocky-”
“Rocky want Grace to know Eridian word,” Rocky says. “Because Rocky not have English one. English words not-” He clicks. “Rocky looked. ‘Friend’ too small. ‘Important’ wrong. ‘Grateful’ wrong direction.” A brief harmonic. “Eridian word correct word. Rocky want Grace to have word.”
Grace’s chest is doing the complicated thing again. He is, he notes, not going to be able to talk normally for another few seconds, and he’s grateful Rocky can’t see his face clearly through the suit visit, and he’s also aware that Rocky almost certainly knows anyway, can hear it in his breathing or read it in how still he’s gone, because Rocky knows him in the deep specific way that means Grace has essentially zero privacy, emotionally, and has stopped resenting this somewhere around month eight.
“Is it something you say to someone,” he manages, “or about them?”
“Both acceptable. Usually to person.”
“You could say it to me right now.”
“Yes.”
“But you told me the word instead.”
“Yes.”
“Because-” Grace stops. Thinks. Rocky waits. “Because you thought- because it’s more meaningful if I understand what it means. Before you say it.”
“Teaching bad things worse than not teaching,” Rocky says. “Same with words. If Rocky say word and Grace not know meaning, word just sound. Rocky want Grace to know whole thing.”
Grace breathes out slowly.
There is something Grace has thought about, in the quieter parts of his Eridian life – something he’s turned over in the dark at 2 am when he can’t sleep and Rocky is a familiar presence on the other side of the partition wall. He’s thought about the specific quality of being known. Not just liked, not just valued – known. The experience of someone mapping you the way Rocky maps geology, carefully and over a long time, building up resolution until they have the real shape of you.
He’d had people who liked him, back on earth. He’d had colleagues who valued him, mostly after the fact. He’d had a twin brother who called twice a year and a handful of students who remembered him fondly and an ex-girlfriend who’d once told him, not unkindly, that he was very easy to forget when he was out of the room.
He has Rocky, who monitors biodomes resonance patterns during his difficult months and tells entire research teams to back off and learns the specific shapes of his silences and goes to look at forty-thousand-year-old rocks because they help him think. Who catalogued Grace’s face alongside Eridian geological features in the ship database, the first month, just because he wanted to understand what he was looking at. Who once, early on, asked Grace with complete sincerity whether humans were pack animals and when Grace said yes said good, Rocky concerned without explaining what he’d been concerned about and had never clarified since.
“Rocky,” Grace says.
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
Rocky makes the sound. The three tones, overlapping, the one that rises and settles. Through the suit and the distance and the alien air, it reaches Grace anyway.
It doesn’t need translation.
Grace knows what it means.
He looks at the ridge and the red-orange sky and the two small moons and the alien landscape that has, without his entirely noticing, become something he would describe as home, if pressed, if someone held his logs up to the light and asked him what he actually thought. He thinks about the Hail Mary sitting in its dock on the edge of the biodome complex, functional, fuelled, pointed at the correct vector for Earth. He thinks about the choice that is always available to him and that he had, every morning, continued not to make. He thinks about Coffee and salt water and bad diagrams and a word he can’t pronounce.
“Rocky,” he says. “I don’t have the Eridian throat architecture.”
“No.”
“And ‘I’m really glad you exist’ is not- that doesn’t really-”
“Correct. Insufficient.”
“Yeah.” Grace watches the moons. “But you know what I mean.”
Rocky is still for a moment. Then he makes a sound – not the word, something smaller, something that sits under the threshold of formal vocabulary. The Eridian equivalent, Grace has come to believe, of yes, I know, obviously, I always knew.
“Yes,” Rocky says. “Rocky know.”
They stand together on the old planet, looking at the old rocks, in the particular comfortable silence of two people who have run out of ways to qualify what they are to each other and have long since stopped needing to.
The sonar pings. The topography fills in.
Grace oscillates, slightly, because he is breathing.
Rocky says nothing about it.