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“Grace,” Rocky sings one day, sidling up to me as he tinkers with something. “How old is Grace, question?”
“Oh, uh- well, that’s a bit of a loaded question, bud.” I could be about four different ages, and they’re all correct. “As far as Earth’s concerned, I should be well into my fifties by now. But I’ve only experienced a fraction of that, including the couple years we’ve been travelling, so… thirty-six? Thirty-eight?” I shrug. “If you’re counting the coma as experienced time, then I’m forty-one. Or forty-three. Kinda hard to tell, honestly.” I really didn’t want to admit that I only know my birthday and year because of the Hail Mary’s data. I also don’t want to admit that my calculations for what Earth-date it is have a… wide margin of error. If I’m being generous. “Why d’you ask?”
Rocky doesn’t speak. This in and of itself is weird – he’s always talking, chittering to himself or singing a woeful song he thinks is too low for me to hear. It is, but I can feel the way the ship vibrates with the sound. Point is, although he’s often quiet, he’s never silent.
“...You good there, Rock?”
“Grace is baby!” Rocky exclaims, a veritable orchestra of sound answering me. “Grace is so young! Grace too young! Grace child!”
“Woah there, Rock,” I say, barely able to contain my laughter. I know my alien best friend is having some sort of crisis over my perceived babyness, but it does feel a bit silly. “I’m not a baby, or a child. I’m a fully-grown human, see?” I stand up as straight as I can, and wriggle all my limbs as if to show them off. I then knock my head with my knuckles a couple of times. “Nothin’ still developing in there, promise.”
Rocky looks at me skeptically – or, as skeptical as a being without a face or eyes can look.
“Rocky ask because of Grace past surprise at Rocky Adrian joining.” Ah, right. Yeah. Makes sense.
“Yeah, I mean – nearly two centuries? In Earth years? Your partnership is nearly as old as my country,” I joke, the entire thing clearly going over Rocky’s carapace.
“Grace country is baby, question?!”
“No, it’s- it’s a common Earth joke. ‘Cause the country I’m from is really big, but- well, it’s not young, it’s just that it’s only been the way it is – or, was, when I left – for a really short amount of time. And, the people, we’re- we’re kinda known for being… self-important.” As much as I love America, I can’t blame the rest of the world for mocking us. We did make it easy, after all.
“Rocky understand,” Rocky trills. “Read about it on Earth Portable Thinking Machine. Rocky just pulling Grace leg. Idiom,” he adds, as if I’d forget. “How long Grace live, question?”
“Oh, like, humans?” He nods his best approximation of a nod, which basically just means he tilts his carapace to and fro a few times, so I continue. “Well, it depends on a few things, really – general health, genetics, Earth activity, jobs, and so on. On average, people live to about eighty. But that’s the mean,” I’m quick to add. I don’t want to misrepresent this information. It seems important. “Most people live until some point in their seventies. Some folks in more educated, wealthy parts of the world can live longer. One lady even lived to one hundred and twenty-two, though she died some time in the 90s. 1990s, that is.”
“Yes, human non-specific abbreviation is stupid.”
“Stupid when you live for hundreds of years, yeah, but we don’t. Most of us won’t see more than the supposedly-average eighty.”
“Grace unhealthy, question?”
“What?!” I squawk, before poking and prodding myself. I’ve been getting thinner, and I’m well aware of it, but it’s all going according to plan for now. Nothing to worry about. “No. I mean, I’m not the healthiest I’ve ever been, but I’m not unhealthy, like-”
“Grace no understand. Grace do anything that shorten lifespan, question?”
“Oh, you mean like smoking, or drinking,” I hum, thinking. “I mean, I’ve consumed alcohol before, but I don’t really like drinking, ‘cause it makes you unwell, and I usually annoy people when I’m drunk. I smoked once in high school,” I say, recalling the memory as I do. A flash, and it’s gone. “Didn’t like the taste, so I never did it again. So, uh, no, not really.”
Rocky hums lowly, voices like the calm wash of the sea over sand before a summer storm. He contemplates something, the same way he contemplates engineering issues before coming up with something like his xenonite suit, or the tunnel that connected our ships in the beginning.
“Grace age in dog years,” he says eventually, slowly, like the realisation might break me. It might’ve, if I hadn’t thought about it a billion times. Maybe it’s so it won’t break him.
“Yeah. Yeah, bud. I do.”
He shuffles a little closer to me than normal when we watch movies that night. I pretend not to notice. In exchange, when he says to me a few days later in his warbling tone, ‘Grace Rocky not live together forever,’ he lets me hug him as I cry.