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"I measured the mass! I made a very smart experiment."
He wasted a whole assload of time, as a matter of fact, and now there's too little of it left before I sleep to start anything new. I hold up the sculpture.
"Twenty-six."
The mental effort to not say "forty-two" is minimal at this point; we've just been exchanging so many numbers back and forth in his base system. I sure hope I don't arrive back home reflexively thinking in random, incompatible sets of data.
Grace focuses on the sculpture and, surprisingly, doesn't hesitate in recognizing it. "Oh, °´æɲ."
He points a finger at it. "°´æɲ" he repeats.
He seems... oblivious, but at least I have another word. I point at it myself.
"Iron."
I wait for him to finish clacking on his mystery machine.
"... Iron."
"Iron."
Yeah, he definitely doesn't get it. Things were going pretty smoothly this cycle too.
The sphere is still sitting in his claw, and I dryly take my time as I point at it.
"Iron."
I don't know how what "dumb" Earthling body language sounds like yet, but I think I have a good guess. After a few moments, he suddenly raises his arm and swats himself on the soft side of his sensory limb, safely above all the openings and markers. I don't think it actually hurt, but it's loud enough to sharpen everything in the room.
Despite myself, I laugh. Who would have guessed, minor acts of self-harm: an expression of frustration all over the galaxy.
"You are bad," I chide. I know it isn't a priority, but I hope it isn't long before we can rib each other like adults.
The solution seems straightforward from there, thankfully. Pulling yet another mathematical-looking tool from his bag - his equivalent of a caliper, it seems - he gets a measurement of the sphere and gets to work on the arithmetic.
A few of my joints are getting achy now. I definitely shouldn't have stayed up this long, but I stay patient. The last thing we need is the mission going ass-up because we miscommunicated about a fundamental unit.
Just a bit more tapping and we have an actual number - his "gram" is worth just over a third of my own gram, specifically a factor of 0.37. Easy enough.
"I was only off by one percent," he says, but in a rather odd way. There's less enunciation, and it's much quieter than the volume he's consistently spoken to me with. I'm still guessing the exact range of Earthling hearing, but I have a hunch he didn't say that with the expectation of being heard.
"You talk to you?" I ask.
The softer side of his sensory limb - he said to refer to it like a geometric surface, so his "face" - crumples, mostly around the top half.
"Yes! I'm talking to me."
I tilt a little. "Earthlings are unusual."
He lets out a puff of air. No idea what that means yet, but he's smiling again so it's probably good. "Yes."
The ache gets annoying enough that I have to swap my anchoring claws and stretch out. Yeah, that'll have to do for a stopping point.
"I sleep now."
His face stretches a little.
"Wow! How long do Eridians sleep?"
I'm actually not surprised to hear him ask. Earthling "sleep" is bizarre to the point where I seriously doubt it serves the same biological purpose as mine, only bearing superficial similarities via convergent evolution, so I couldn't help but pay close attention to it.
On top of everything I noticed already, Earthling sleep seems to be more or less predictable. While he'd take a short break now and then that was only an hour or so, the vast majority of his downtime (and boy was it a lot, he almost never went more than 30 hours without it) took place within a fairly narrow range of uninterrupted time, always between seven and nine hours.
It's a very weird system, high on the list of things I want to ask about once we have the words for it. But to him, that's just how sleep works.
"I not know."
"You don't know?" His face tilts a little to the side, almost like an Eridian smile but not quite. "You're Eridian. How can you not know how long Eridians sleep?"
For all the drawbacks, I admit: being able to not only predict but exercise a degree of control over my sleep cycle would make life easier in a lot of small ways, especially in my line of work. Hell, it'd be very useful right now.
"Eridians not know how long sleep last. Maybe short time, maybe long time."
His face stretches again, the features rearranging. By now, I'm reasonably sure that this is a form of non-verbal communication, one of nature's consolation prizes for making Earthlings so malleable and soft. If I'm right, the sheer number of tiny muscles I'm hearing tells me there's a tremendous amount of nuance to it, perhaps their equivalent to all the nuance that goes into Eridian speech. It's weird to listen to and it'll take a long time to learn, if I ever do, but time is all we have out here.
He holds his claws out, such that the insides, the "palms", are facing each other - yeah, I really need to get over myself and start calling them "hands" at this point. Weird as it is to hear them on a sentient being, that's what they are.
“Is there a minimum time?" he asks, then he pulls his hands further apart. "A maximum time?”
“Minimum is 12,265 seconds. Maximum is 42,928 seconds.”
He pulls out his pocket-size mystery machine and tappity-tap it goes. However he's getting information out of it, the result makes him dip his face down for a moment before perking up again.
"I understand," he says. Then he turns in place, bracing his arm against the wall to push off and... leave.
Okay, no need to be presumptuous.
"You observe?"
Maybe it was naive to think I wouldn't have to explain this. I said so myself, what he calls "sleep" implies a radically different evolutionary history from mine. But it's worth a shot, right?
He pauses, then lifts a hand and lightly shakes his sensor limb.
"Not necessary."
Ouch.
But my rational brain steps in: if he really meant "no," he would have just said that. He isn't being callous; very clearly he just doesn't understand what's going on. This is the same guy who warned me that watching him sleep would be boring.
"You observe?" I repeat, a little louder. I don't know Earthling tones and he doesn't know mine, but volume is a pretty safe bet.
"No."
And with that, he pushes off the wall. He's leaving.
As quickly as they came, my rational faculties falter. I know I'm drowsy, and I'm not exactly the model of mental health, but all the same, I'm infuriated by my lack of resilience. My brain has had years and years to acclimate to this, to grow a few and worry at least a little less about all the scary shit it imagines going bump in the dark. If it had paid even a modicum of attention it would know, all too well in fact, that I've been completely alone out here.
Sure, the ship needed attention once in a while, but its critical systems were designed with as much redundancy and leeway as possible specifically for the unlikely event of everyone who could attend to them being asleep at the same time. I'd been given one hell of a raw deal, but barring a total system failure with odds in the hundreds of millions, there was nothing objective to worry about in all this time, and sleeping alone was something my brain, given no other options, had gotten used to.
And now it has its first opportunity for relief, and it just folds. Completely. It's like I'm being dragged toward a cliff.
"Observe!"
He touches the wall to stop himself and turns. Just hearing that stems the anxiety a little.
"You want me to observe you sleep?"
"Yes, want want want!"
God, I'm so stupid - how have we gotten this far without learning "please?" It's one of the first words you teach to a baby, and now here I am, acting about as dignified as one. I'm groggy and scared but that's no excuse.
He pushes himself a little closer, but not all the way. "Why?"
He acts pretty stupid sometimes, but I know he's not actually stupid. There's no way he'd ask that unless he genuinely did not know. Where do I even start...
"I sleep better if you observe."
Will that do?
"Why?"
Fuck.
I frantically wrack our shared vocabulary, my free arms flailing about in frustration. We've been talking almost exclusively about nerd stuff; useful nerd stuff to be sure, but not for a situation like this.
How do you even explain a primal fear to a species that doesn't experience it?
Yeah man, sorry to bother you, but my brain is absolutely convinced there are giant monsters prowling around just outside my hearing range that will swoop in and crack my flesh open or drink the blood from my veins the moment I'm incapacitated. Never mind the fact that we're in the soulless vacuum of space, or that the majority of those monsters have been extinct for at least a few thousand years (largely because of us, no less!) - evolution just hasn't had time to make up for the hundreds-upon-hundreds of millions of years wherein a proto-Eridian who was afraid to sleep alone was overwhelmingly more likely to survive and pass on that fear to their children than a proto-Eridian who wasn't. No need for concern, but if you don't stay at least a few meters away from me when I fall asleep it will literally feel like I'm killing myself.
Do Earthlings have anything like that? They probably do, fear is an integral part of survival, but I can't even begin to imagine what specific things they may or may not innately fear if they aren't fazed by something as basic as sleep.
They must have a primal fear of death, at the very least - every living thing does - but in the state I'm in, I don't think trying to make that comparison would be wise. I might phrase it badly and make him think that I'm actually going to die, and you can't tell a sleeping Eridian apart from a dead one at the best of times. I don't want to pass out and wake up to find that he's spent the last however many hours thinking I was dead.
God, I'm so tired. This is the worst possible time for this.
"Eridians do that," I finally say. It barely feels better than giving up.
Grace tilts his sense limb and smiles, but it isn't the same kind of smile he usually makes. I don't know what it means, but I can tell there's a difference.
"Eridians are unusual."
Are you fucking kidding- fine, fine, I walked into that one.
I know, though, I know how stupid this is. Evolution is stupid. It's math brainlessly playing God in a godless universe. It's stupid that I'm wired like this, but just the same, is it any less stupid that him needing to spend almost a third of his time lazing around in his weird sleeping nest? It's all a bunch of stupid, barely-functional ad hoc engineering, but we both have to live with it.
And he knows this, surely. Why is he suddenly acting so obtuse?
"Observe," I repeat, praying my lack of amusement will break through the language barrier somehow. "I sleep better."
He puts the tip of his finger against the wall, a good bit above me. He's pointing toward my airlock.
"Have some other Eridian observe you."
Ah.
The simple sentence clears my thoughts, instantly. I deflate of all but the barest dreg of my anger. Even the call of the void doesn't seem so pressing anymore.
It was an entirely reasonable suggestion. I still don't know the limits of Earthling hearing, but I know he can't hear the inside of my ship. And if his ship's equipment is anything like mine, it would be readily apparent from the outside that it was built for a crew.
I hadn't forgotten about that, of course. I just... hadn't thought of it. This had been my definition of normal for such a long time.
"No."
"Why not?"
I don't brace myself. I know that will only make it worse.
"I am only Eridian here."
I'd imagined having to admit that out loud, many, many times. It was easier than I expected it to be, probably because I'd always imagined saying it to hundreds of grieving, outraged loved ones and never a wet, creepy alien with no characteristics I could identify with. Still, that didn't make it easy.
The big hole on his face opens and holds position, letting sound escape. I'm vaguely aware that it's gross, but I hardly have the energy to care. He did that the first time he heard me talk, so I think it's a reaction of surprise.
After a moment he speaks again, and even in this state, I can tell the tone is wildly different: "You’re the only person on that huge ship?!”
Well now, why don't you just take one of your fancy tools and stab me square in the gut while you're at it?
But I know he didn't mean it. The responsibility for this does ultimately fall to me. This time I do brace myself; if I don't, I probably won't be able to keep my voice within his hearing range.
But I still can't keep my composure. Despite my efforts, pain still creeps into my voice and my words all come out a little low: “Original crew was twenty-three. Now is only me.”
I know it doesn't matter - if I can't understand the nuances of his speech yet then there's no way he can understand mine - but I still feel ashamed.
Grace turns to get input from his mystery machine and... does nothing.
For half a second this horrific, irrational sense of dread hits me, but then I hear his hands getting to work on the machine. I still don't know what it is but I can infer that its somehow necessary for understanding me, and it had been a while since he needed to do anything time-consuming with it. So this was a technical problem, I hope. I grip my rails tight, hoping desperately that I won't have to repeat myself, or worse, find out I'm wrong about the machine and we're simply too different to-
Grace's entire posture changes. His hands stop moving, his face goes slack. All the sounds roiling around in his thorax stagger. They don't quite stop, they never do, but the difference from just moments before is incredibly stark.
He turns to focus on me, his movements suddenly very tense. It reminds me of the way I move when I'm anxious. I don't know if that's what this is, but then again, I'd never once heard him make a face like this before.
"They... did they die?"
"Yes."
I can hear some kind of chemical reaction going on, just, generally around his sensing limb and the arm connecting it to his body. It sounds like irritation. He tries to speak but no proper syllables form, as if the act is suddenly physically difficult. I listen closer and, sure enough, the organ that he uses to speak is constricting in on itself, seemingly on its own.
I'm about to ask if he's okay, but, whatever this is, he doesn't seem surprised by it, and it's already starting to abate. He reaches up and rubs at his face a bit, which seems to help. Finally, his voice cooperates: "Bad."
"Bad bad bad," I agree.
I've had centuries to try and compose something better, but, it's all I can do. I know I'm dealing with a fifteen-lightyear communication barrier but it still feels loathsome to say so little.
Grace lets out a loud breath, which seems to steady him further. This... whole thing here, was it related to emotion? I don't have to wonder for long.
"My original crew was three. Now it's just me."
Damn, right on the money. It wasn't exactly a hard pattern-recognition puzzle to solve, with no sound-proofing around the ship's sleeping quarters and all, but still.
... two people died, and that's my first thought? Two more people, who I have every reason to believe were just as decent and brave as my own, fucking hell. I really have been out here too long.
Grace reaches out and touches the dividing wall. There's no follow-up motion, he's not tying to push himself back into the ship anymore, he just holds the hand there. At this distance, no amount of insulating soft tissue can stop me from getting a loud and clear read of its inner workings: a staggering, overwhelmingly complicated mesh of scaffolding, tendons, and points of articulation.
It's funny - the shape is very strange, but if someone gave me infinite time to design a hand in that shape using my own anatomy for reference and nothing else, they'd probably end up with a shoddy imitation of exactly what I'm hearing. There just aren't that many ways to build a set of opposable fingers.
The other Earthlings, two of them... how had they died? Was it the same cell death plague that took everyone else? It's as good a guess as any. What would that even sound like, for a species that exists in the form of, as far as I can tell, amassed cell?
Without any way to know if I'm right, my mind dredges up a very old memory, something that I saw in a class once. To me, it was merely a bit of morbid fascination, but it disturbed a fair few of my classmates.
In a lab somewhere, a sample of single-celled organisms had been soaked in alkaline so that they would die. The process was recorded with extremely sensitive scientific equipment and transcribed into audible footage, and a copy of that footage was shown to us. We all listened as the organism moved, still moving even after its cell wall breached and began hemorrhaging fluid, but not for long. Within moments, the entire outer barrier dissolved, and the organelles simply drifted apart, destined themselves to dissolve not long after. Once a cohesive, functional, breathing organism, now a dissociated, arbitrary set of molecules that might as well have never had anything to do with each other.
No body, no object of grief, no stone to mark a burial - nothing. Complete and utter obliteration.
I put a claw on the divider, opposite his hand.
"Bad."
"Bad bad bad."
I really hope I learn how to read Earthling faces. Listening to him now and just hearing a formless, ugly mass of biology and liquid, it didn't feel right all of a sudden.
After a moment, he speaks again, gently.
"I'll watch you sleep."
Oh yeah, that.
It all hits me in a rush; I need to summon all my willpower to not fizzle out on the spot. It's not much, but I have to at least answer him first: "Good, me sleep."
Then I blank out, right there in the weightlessness of the tunnel, carried off to oblivion by one last parting thought - good thing whenever we learn "please" we'll inevitably learn its counterpart.