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It doesn’t start until we’re nearly through with moving all of Rocky’s crap from the Blip-A back onto Mary for the second and final time. We’re both so giddy to be alive and back together that I think Rocky – well, doesn’t forget, exactly, because he can’t forget things. But I think he manages to force it way back into some dark corner of his crystalline brain.
I know the feeling. I did the same thing when I first woke up with Ilyukhina and Yáo’s corpses: refused to look at them, kept myself angled away from the sight of their bodies, distracted myself however I could. Denial, denial, denial. Even before I remembered their names, part of me knew that they meant something to me, and knew how much acknowledging their deaths would hurt. We were crew.
But there were only the two of them. And at least they died in their sleep. Rocky was part of a crew of twenty-three, and he watched them all die painfully from a cosmic threat he couldn’t even understand. That’s an exponential increase in the amount of denial a psyche can whip up to protect itself for a while. So I probably should’ve expected something like this sooner or later. I kind of feel like a crummy friend for being so blindsided, but in my defence, it’s been a distracting past few months.
“Okay, so that’s the last of your liquid xenonite stores back in your workshop, and your enclosure’s ready to be repressurised,” I tell Rocky, rolling my shoulders to release the ache of schlepping his bajillion boxes of things back into the Hail Mary. I’d say it was giving me deja vu, except I’ve barely been able to muster a complaint this time around. I’m just so dang happy to see him, alive and right back to bossing me around like always, that I can’t even pretend my demotion from spaceship captain to interstellar Man with a Van bothers me. “I think we’re almost done. What’s left, bud?”
There’s unexpected quiet from the other side of the xenonite tunnel barrier. With the Blip-A derelict, we can’t spin up our centrifuges to generate gravity, so I’ve just scooched Mary’s airlock right up against the tunnel and enjoyed the benefits of 0g as I shuttle all of the stuff Rocky passes me through the barrier’s exchange drawer into my ship. But being in 0g also means that we have no up or down relative to one another, so from my perspective, Rocky’s hanging from the tunnel ceiling by three arms right now. His other two hands are plucking anxiously at each other, a familiar nervous tic of his.
“Rocky?”
“Apology,” he says, low. “Rocky distracted. Thinking about – other things.”
I wriggle around in my EVA suit (since we can’t be 100% sure his tunnel gets a proper fix onto my airlock now that his ship’s out of power) so we’re oriented in the same direction. Weightless like this, his carapace isn’t sinking like it usually does when he’s sad, but there’s some kind of tilt to his body language that suggests it anyways.
Because I’m a dumb, self-absorbed human, I assume he’s worrying over my potential future food supply issues (like I am) and decide to jump straight to reassurance. “Hey, you know it’s gonna be okay, right? We’ll figure things out with me eating Taumoeba, and we’ll get the little guys back to save your star regardless.” I grin. “We did it, Rocky, you’re going home–”
He cuts me off with a sudden, sharp wail. A keen, actually, so high and harsh it almost shoots out of my hearing range. “Grace stop! Stop stop stop! Not want hear! Will not be okay!”
I’m completely taken aback (and have to fight the urge to press my hands over my ears, not that it’d do me much good, since I’m in an EVA suit and all). “Crap, sorry, okay – what’s wrong?”
He’s gripping the tunnel with all five arms now and hunching in on himself. “Grace no understand. Is things we…things Rocky cannot bring. Have to leave on ship, leave at Tau Ceti, can never come home. Bad bad bad.”
I frown, trying to figure out what oversize sentimental items Rocky might be so attached to despite never mentioning before that make him this upset to leave behind. I do a quick runthrough of my memories from visiting the Blip-A, and can only come up with one guess.
“Is it…those panels you showed me? In the hall, with all the carvings about your mission and your crew?” Seeing those, and hearing the pride in Rocky’s voice as he explained them, had been one of the best parts of visiting his ship (even with the whole recovering-my-worst-memory thing that came after). It’d clearly meant a lot to him. “They were like, your version of my ship’s golden records, right?”
Rocky’s silent.
“‘Cause if it is, I bet we could find a way to…I dunno, pry them off the wall or something? I mean, depending on how heavy they are, I could probably find someplace to keep–”
“Grace stop,” Rocky says, low and fierce this time. I shut my mouth with a snap. Then I look at him, really look.
His carapace, hunched down amidst the cradle of his five arms, is trembling. His fingers are all locked so tightly against the xenonite tunnel wall that I hear a scrape when one of them shifts. There’s an achy vibrato sensation in my ribcage that makes me worry Rocky’s letting out some kind of pained, subsonic moan too low for me to hear.
I swallow hard. Then I press my palm against the xenonite wall as close to him as I can get and tap three times, because that’s kind of our thing now. At first Rocky doesn’t move. But then, with a creak like faultlines running against each other, he reaches out one stiff-armed hand and taps back.
“Hey, bud,” I say softly. “I’m here, okay? I just want to help you.”
Rocky’s vents rattle like a sigh. “I know.”
“So what is it that you’re so upset to leave behind?”
There’s another long, silent moment, stretching until I start to worry that I’ve finally done it: found the first-ever cultural or personal barrier between us that we can’t cross together. I’m long past the point of being able to pretend that Rocky doesn’t mean the world to me – more than the world, actually, literally. I don’t need to have all my memories back to know that the moment we were reunited after I turned back for him was the happiest I’ve ever been. So I just can’t stand the thought that he’s hurting in some part of himself I can’t reach.
Then Rocky says, “Am upset to leave bodies of crew,” and my heart stops.
A huge part of intercultural miscommunication comes down to mistaken assumptions. It came up all the time back on the Vat, inevitably: we were a pressure-cooker of several hundred scientists, experts, and soldiers from countless countries, religions, and backgrounds all coexisting in cramped quarters and under apocalyptic stress. English, Mandarin, and Russian were the Project’s primary lingua franca (especially English, out of blunt practicality, since – as I learned onboard – L2-English speakers outnumber native speakers almost 3:1), but Hindustani and Arabic and Malay gave them a run for their money, with Japanese, Thai, a couple Romance languages, and Naijá all gunning for third. Stratt had a battalion of full-time interpreters and translators deployed 24/7 to keep communications running smoothly. Even so, there were screw-ups – a case of an English speaker in my lab misinterpreting a Spanish colleague’s note on Astrophage breeding timelines using actualmente as meaning “actually” instead of “currently” springs to mind.
But cultural mixups caused even more tension-in-potentia than linguistic ones. Stratt kept a pretty tight lock on all of us, always keeping our shared goal of saving the Earth at the forefront of everything we did, but even she wasn’t omnipotent. Mistaken assumptions led to gaffes (at best) almost daily. My habit of thumbs-upping everything was irksome to coworkers whose cultures used a thumbs-up like a middle finger. Half the boat came from places where casually getting up close in someone else’s personal space was perfectly normal. One of the ship medics asked my lab tech if she and her wife were cousins when he tested her blood for coma resistance – not because he was confused or bothered by gay marriage, as it turned out, but because in his culture, arranged marriages between distant cousins were fairly common, so he’d assumed a higher likelihood of both spouses having the genetic marker he was looking for.
All of which is to say, you’d think (even with the amnesia) I might’ve learned my lesson on assuming things about someone else’s culture by now. Especially when that someone is a literal alien from another planet. But Rocky and I have always understood each other so well, even from the beginning, that it was all too easy for this particular mistaken assumption to creep in.
Of course Rocky’s dead crew aren’t still on the ship, I would’ve said if I’d ever really even thought about it. Dead bodies decay, so a space burial is both a physical and cultural necessity. He probably released their bodies somewhere around Tau Ceti before I was even born.
Of course Grace’s ship must have some Earth technology to comminute his crew’s bodies and store their dust in whatever form their clusters’ traditions call for, Rocky would’ve said if I’d ever asked him what he thought happened to my crewmates. After all, Grace’s science is so advanced, and the crew’s bodies obviously aren’t here.
Eridians have very little organic material inside their bodies, so their post-mortem decay is minimal. Living Eridians don’t really need to fear pathogens unless they’re severely injured. They can’t even smell. A dead Eridian’s empty carapace poses no health threat to their living counterparts. So the twenty-two bodies of Rocky’s dead crewmates have been with him on the ship this entire time.
He couldn’t save them, but he’d kept their bodies safe all these years. He was going to bring them home.
...
Finding out that I didn’t keep Yáo and Ilyukhina’s bodies with me, in any form, was a total shock to Rocky. But not as shocking as it was for me to realise he’s spent nearly half a century alone on a ship filled with his friends’ corpses.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I hear myself breathe. Apparently my old reservations against swearing are countermanded in this dire of a situation by the even-older impulse to mimic my grandmother’s favourite curse (also, apparently I had a grandmother? Even now, new memories keep popping up at the least convenient moments).
Rocky trills confusedly. “Who they? Other ships, question?”
Oh, right. To him, the word ‘Mary’ just means our Mary. But there’s no time to explain two thousandish years of religion right now.
“Earth culture thing – doesn’t matter – Rocky, they’re still there?” The question sounds inane since Rocky’s already explained, but I’m not really asking; it’s just a social reflex, a blind grasp for a reality where something this horrifying doesn’t exist.
“Where else to be, question?!” Rocky stamps a little angrily onto the tunnel wall, but his tone is still low and sad sad sad. “I could not save crew. Could only keep. Keep bodies safe, bring home to Erid, to family and cluster where belong.”
“Oh, no,” I whisper, now that the reality of what’s upsetting him is finally sinking in.
“Does not make right, is not enough, but is something. Important important important culture rule. But now–” His words break apart into another agonised warble. The sound alone makes tears sting my eyes.
I say it for him. “But they won’t fit on the Hail Mary.”
No matter how much we wanted to. Not on my tiny rush-job un-suicided mission’s spaceship that’s already split down the middle to accommodate two different aliens. (Three, if you count the Taumoeba. Wait, four, with the Astrophage fuel, jeez, sometimes I forget how crazy my entire life is.) And even if we could fit them, Eridians are really heavy. Twenty-two bodies each averaging more than four hundred pounds at 1.5g’s of acceleration through interstellar space with a limited and irreplaceable fuel supply is not a physics problem that works out in our favour.
“Grace,” Rocky says brokenly, and presses up against the xenonite. I press back, my heart pounding, and wish for the hundredth time – the thousandth – that I could just hug him for real. Or do whatever the Eridian equivalent is that would help him right now. Because there’s no fixing this.
It’s a long time before Rocky murmurs something too low and quiet for me to make out. The EVA suit and xenonite wall between us aren’t helping, either. “I-I didn’t catch that, bud.”
He whispers, “Is my fault. Statement.”
“Rocky–”
“Is. Is. Is. I help design Erid ship, all crew but Rocky no protection from radiation, die. I orbit Tau Ceti forty-six years, no can find Astrophage solution, fail. I make breeder tanks, let Taumoeba escape. I lost in space, Grace save me. Now Grace never go home, crew bodies never go home. Now maybe Grace die too.” The last words are so low they’re practically out of my hearing range.
“It’s not your fault.” Oh god, I’m tearing up and I didn’t even realise it. Pull it together, Grace. “Listen to me, it’s not.”
“Is.”
“You didn’t know. You couldn’t have known. About any of that. You literally had no way to–” I scrabble against the xenonite wall, following after Rocky as he tries to clamber away from me. “It’s not your fault, Rocky, none of it.”
He finally stops trying to scramble away, but hunches so low inside his arms that I can barely see his vents ripple. I want to tear through this stupid wall and hug him, blazing ammonia be damned.
“You trust me, right?” I ask, reaching wildly.
Rocky flinches. “Of course trust. Question stupid. Trust Grace most of all.”
Trust Grace most of all, god, okay, I’m just going to pack that one away to treasure in a secret corner of my mind for the rest of my life.
I breathe out slowly. “Then trust me on this one, Rocky. I wouldn’t lie to you about this. Not even – not even to make it easier for you. I promise. It’s not your fault.”
Rocky’s trembling so hard I can feel it through the xenonite. That awful low vibrato of his is rumbling through my ribcage again. Finally, he says, “Does not change that crew died.”
I think of waking up alone, with no identity and no name and no memories, greeted by two corpses who were the last humans I’d ever see. I think of what it would be like to know exactly who I am and what I’d lost, and to wake up alone for forty-six years to my friends’ dead bodies and a world-saving mission I couldn’t possibly fulfill on my own.
I think I’m out of comforting words. Maybe there aren’t any to say for something like this. I just tell him, “I know. I-I know, Rock. But I’m here, okay? I’m here with you.”
I tap him through the xenonite. He taps back, twice, in time with my heart. His words fall in little stalactite drips: “Grace here. With me. Yes.”
...
Eventually, I convince Rocky to get back in his ball and let me carry him into the Hail Mary. It only takes a few minutes to refill his habitat’s atmosphere, since we’d already finished setting it up, so it makes sense to bring him back over for now. Or at least that’s the excuse I give. After all this, I just can’t leave him in the dark with the dead any longer. And Rocky doesn’t seem to mind.
We talk about nothing for a while. Even when his habitat’s repressurised, Rocky makes no move to get out of the ball. I hold him and we float through the quiet ship, eventually drifting beside the cupola window that looks out the Blip-A.
At first I instinctively try to turn so my body covers Rocky’s view of his derelict ship. Then I remember that I’m an idiot, and the window is basically another wall to him. For half a second I consider telling him about my little brain fart, just to make him laugh. But I don’t think anything about his ship could feel funny to either of us right now.
“So, my parents died when I was a teenager, and then I lived with my grandmother for a few years,” I hear myself tell Rocky out of nowhere.
Didn’t know I was going to say it. Didn’t even know that I knew it. But the words keep coming anyway.
“Then I grew up and went away to school and she, um. She died too. That’s not the point. The point is, I-I’m kinda good at funerals. When I have to be. So…”
Rocky’s curled up loosely in his ball, looking more like a dead spider than my best friend. He’s not even holding on to anything in there, just drifting. I hold the ball a little tighter for both of us. I’m definitely feeling a little bit unmoored from reality myself at the moment, but hey, I can work with that.
“So – what I’m trying to say is – if there’s anything you’d like to do for your crew, or any, you know, customs you have that would work here, whatever you need – I’d like to help. If you want that.”
I’m babbling. I definitely don’t feel like I deserve to be called anyone’s most trusted person right now. Let alone someone like Rocky’s, when he’s been through things I can’t even imagine. But I have to try.
Rocky stirs a little inside the ball. One claw comes up and loosely grasps an interior handle near where my hand rests. “New word is…things humans do for dead humans, question?”
“New word – oh, you mean funeral? Sorry. Yeah. Special ceremonies to, um, honour and remember people you’ve lost.” I swallow back several emerging sets of memories that I really, really don’t want right now. “Lots of different kinds for different cultures. What’s your word?”
I don’t have the Frankenlaptop I use for translations on me right now, but I try to remember the notes Rocky says anyways. “♬♪♩. Many many kinds on Erid. Special words, behaviours. Important part of person cluster ♭♪.”
I shake my head. “Sorry, need word. The last thing.”
“♭♪…how explain? Is like ideas, very big and old. Important to person life and community. Very culture.”
“Um, tradition? Like…things people do just because they do them. Because it’s part of who they are?”
Rocky waves a hand in the so-so, más o menos gesture that both our species convergently evolved. “Tradition and more. Ideas for life, death, purpose, meaning. Like pattern person choose to find or make from world. Special.”
“Oh.” Oh, boy. I think I know what he’s talking about. Or at least the closest English approximation, which is the best we can do right now. “Word is religion, I guess. Um, believing in things like a god or an afterlife to make yourself feel better.” Then I wince and mentally slap myself. That kind of r/atheism attitude is definitely not becoming of the anthropological role I’m accidentally going to be playing on behalf of humanity for the rest of my life.
I try again. “I mean, believing things that aren’t true in, like, the way science is true. Not evidence-based. But that are true to you in a personal, cultural way. Usually with stories about where the world comes from and what’s right or wrong, that kind of thing?” Oh, god, I don’t think that’s better.
But Rocky seems to be coming back to himself a bit more now. He’s got two hands each on handles and another set tapping idly away like they often do when he’s thinking. Like always, he loves proving me wrong, the little rascal. “Mmm, is close. Maybe not same on Erid. No extra stories about how planet happen or what is bad. Most ♭♪ is for find… Find ways of thinking about what is ♩♩♮. Inside world? Within things that happen?”
“Reasons? Meaning?”
“Yes! Both. Not reason like gravity make thing fall, or – or radiation make people sick. But reason like…” He pauses for a long moment. When he starts again, his voice is stronger. “Like crew die. Rocky alone long time. And then Grace find me.”
He says the last five words like…I don’t even know. Or I do, but I don’t want to think it. Now and at the hour of our deaths. Like the words my grandmother would murmur over her rosary beads. Soft and full of wonder. It takes my breath away.
“Grace know everything I not know. I fix for Grace what broken. We fit together. Save stars, save each other. Amaze, amaze, amaze. What happen to us before sad sad sad. But together, now, is very good.”
I try to nod and make some kind of agreeing sound, but it mostly just comes out as a goopy sob-laugh. Rocky very kindly isn’t saying anything about how gross and leaky my face has gotten, even though crying in 0g is pretty gnarly. The tears and snot just kind of hang out until the surface tension breaks and they start floating around in globs.
“Good event happen after bad event, because of bad event, does not make bad good or good bad, so what is meaning, question? Is no answer, I know. Part of ♭♪ is for find ways to think about question with no answer. To make mean something.” I feel him shiver a little through the xenonite. “To make peace.”
This time my sob-laugh is more of a laugh. The really stupidly fond kind that would probably embarrass me to hear if I wasn’t busy making it. “Okay. Okay, Rock. I think I get it. Word could be philosophy, or spirituality. Or even religion still, heck, why not.”
Rocky manages to give me a flat, unimpressed look despite not having a face. He’s good at that. “After all that, Grace say use same word?”
His tone is arch and teasing again. It’s a relief to hear. “Rocky so much effort to explain ♭♪ for Grace, much culture, so complicated. Rocky say soft squishy inside things to help Grace understand, make Grace face leak all over Rocky ball, then Grace say, no need word, same word use before is fine!”
Now I’m just laughing, the helpless rib-creaking kind that washes you in endorphins. I can hear the little squeaks of Rocky’s laughter too.
“Okay, okay, I’m sorry! In my defence-” Rocky fake-punches at me through the ball and sets my giggles off all over again. “In my defence! We both know I’m bad at naming things!”
“You name me Rocky because carapace is like rock. Yes. I know Grace bad at names.”
I laugh some more and blink away the saltwater that’s blinding me. I’m sure my face is all pink from being squished up against the xenonite where Rocky’s heat leaks through. Now I can actually see Rocky, and it’s kind of crazy how much affection wells up in me just from looking at him. More importantly, he doesn’t sound so broken-up anymore, thank goodness. I guess I do an okay job at being his best friend.
“Grace bad at names, but I do still want to help,” I say softly. “If you want me.”
Rocky hums, a warm little sound that thrills right through me. “Yes. Rocky want. Feels…feels right to do.”
...
I half-consider calling it for the night, but I don’t want to leave Rocky alone right now for six to eight hours while I sleep. It’s fine, he doesn’t know what time it is onboard anymore, since we’re more than fifty days out of sync. So at least for the moment, there’s no chance of getting my alien bedtime reinstated. He really is such a mother-hen.
So instead, I scrounge up a laptop while Rocky finally gets back into his tunnels. And I swear, just seeing him back there on his side of the Hail Mary makes some tight muscle in my chest relax for the first time since we said goodbye. Everything just seemed so empty without him here. And I don’t only mean everything on board, if I’m being honest.
I float over to brace myself and my laptop against Rocky’s tunnel and angle the screen so it’s within range of his visualiser gun. I’ve pulled up my old friend eridian.docx, the all-purpose document where I’d first started keeping my notes on Rocky, his species, and his planet back when we first met. By now it’s ballooned into an over 7,000-word monstrosity, and I fully intend to keep adding to that wordcount for however long the rest of my life is. (If I actually do survive for any length of time on Erid, I’ll be living out an astrobiologist’s dream.)
I scroll through to my Basic aspects of culture and civilization subheading and realise that section is woefully brief. I’ve written over twice as much about heat rejection in Eridian physiology as I have about their entire planetary civilisation. Listen…I’m a STEM guy. Besides, when I started this document I didn’t know I’d be (hopefully) going to live on Rocky’s planet. And writing down in detail all the physical issues an Eridian faces from overexposure to a cold atmosphere felt…really necessary to me, after what happened around Adrian.
“Okay,” I say with a clap (and then have to grab the laptop really quickly before it floats away). “Gimme that basic rundown on Eridian philosophy again.”
“Grace not calling ♭♪ religion now, question?” Rocky asks wryly, but obliges. I type away, thinking with half my brain about how we could jury-rig a keyboard for him once he learns to read English. His fingers are way the heck faster than mine, even though he’s only got three per hand. He’d probably be able to beat whatever my WPM is within a day.
I try to casually glance over my shoulder every few minutes to gauge Rocky’s body language. (It’s probably not really that casual, but whatever.) His voice is holding steady, and his body is a familiar warmth against mine through the xenonite. One hand’s wrapped casually around an interior handle to keep himself in place. No more trembling, clenched fists, or slumped carapace. He’s doing okay.
“So what customs do you have after people die?” I say, trying to keep my tone mild. We’re just exchanging information here. There’s no rush. Everything’s fine.
Rocky forges ahead bravely, rattling off what sounds almost like a translation from an Eridian textbook. Maybe it is, for all I know. “Different customs in different parts of Erid. But most common kind, because of most common ♭♪, is to ♩♯♫.”
Dang, we ran out of vocabulary fast there. “Sorry, need word.”
“♩♯♫. Is part of ♭♪ idea about Eridian connection to home stone. Bedrock, stone, silt, even topography.” (When your best friend’s a rock alien, geology-based synonyms are a top priority for your translation program.) Rocky taps for my attention and gestures to the brown-and-teal mottling of his carapace. “Qualities of Rocky body match parts of birth home. Has science reasons – hatch, eat minerals from local geology – but has ♭♪ resonance as well.”
I quirk an eyebrow at his uncharacteristically metaphorical use of resonance there. (At least, I think it’s metaphorical. But today’s done a lot for reminding me of that old joke about what you do when you assume.) Then I actually think about what he’s saying.
“Wait a minute,” I say, grinning. “You’re telling me you look like the rocks in your hometown?”
I’m not sure why the idea tickles me so much. I guess part of me is picturing some kind of Looney Tunes situation where Rocky could stand very, very still against a local cliff-face and blend right in, like an alien chameleon. (Chamalien? Man, maybe I do need sleep.)
“Not know look,” Rocky grumbles. “No one on Erid have eyes. Home stone and carapace share audible, chemical qualities. Grace will have to say if Rocky look like home stone when we get to Erid.”
I catch my breath a little. Hearing Rocky talk so casually about what we’ll do on Erid, as if it’s a guaranteed part of my future – our future – somehow makes it feel so much more real. Not just something we’re hoping for, but something that’ll actually happen. In just a few years, too, if we can stick out the crummy bits.
“I’d really like that,” I tell him, maybe a bit too earnestly. “So, okay. You look kinda like your local geology, and there’s also spiritual ideas about how people are connected to it, am I getting this right?”
“Yes. Ideas about connection different in different time and place. Some people not think much about ♭♪, just do ceremony because family or cluster do.”
“Same on Earth. Same same same.” I get a goofy mental image of a younger Rocky all dressed up for his first communion and complaining because eating the Body of Christ in front of all the other people in church is disgusting. I force myself to swallow down a half-hysterical giggle. We’re talking about funerals, for god’s sake.
“♩♯♫ very common for funeral because of ♭♪ connection idea. ♩♯♫ mean take carapace of dead person, grind into small particles with special machine. Make dust.”
He says it so matter-of-factly that I get halfway through typing the definition before the meaning really hits me. Pulverizing a corpse. Crushing a dead body like grain through a mill. I’ll grind your bones to make my bread…
I clench my teeth and fight with all my might to keep my expression neutral. I am going to be so normal and respectful about this. Anthropological.
“Holy crap!” I say, failing immediately. Then I clap my hands over my mouth with an audible smack. (Forget the floating laptop, I’ll get it later.) “I mean – shoot – sorry, sorry, I shouldn’t have said–”
Rocky snickers. “Knew Grace would be big baby about ♩♯♫.”
“Hey!”
“Is very normal for Eridians. Important part is after. Dust from ♩♯♫ is stored or changed in special way to honor person. Some clusters keep all dead people dust in one place, mix dusts together or bury in ground, same place for thousands of years.”
“We call that a cemetery, I guess.”
“Also common is use carapace dust to make object. Long long long time ago, objects simple, just flat rock. Stack rocks of families in tall pile.”
“Like a cairn. Um, regular Earth rocks, but piled up for some kind of memorial.”
“Cairn. Yes. That was in old time. Some still do, not many. Most make object into special art. Represents person, person ideas, what person loved.”
He thinks for a moment, and then tries to outline some example contours of these Eridian cremain objects with his free hands. It’s one of the few sensory depiction methods that actually works the same for both of us, since we both perceive shapes, just through different mediums. It’s unfortunately not giving me any idea of what Eridian funerary art made out of people’s freaking corpse dust looks like.
“Help me out here, bud. Are they like statutes? Sculptures?” I do a quick image search for just the word sculpture, and a bunch of familiar pictures pop up: Winged Victory, the Thinker, Nefertiti’s bust, and David in all his naked glory.
Rocky hmms as he listens to the image on his texturiser. “Some like that. Some different. Many kinds.” He thinks for a minute. “Grandparent of Rocky had story they loved. Asked for dust to become ink for texture pen, so grandparent mate could write words of story with them into book. Now book is treasure of Rocky family.”
I’m so absurdly touched by this idea that I actually press a hand to my heart. I’ve seen Rocky writing with an Eridian texture pen before, laying down almost 1mm-thick lines of ‘ink’ onto a substrate. He wrote me his full name in Eridian to bring home with me, although he insisted that I couldn’t judge his handwriting. I don’t know why I would. Even if he’s no expert, it was clear that the swirling, interlocking symbols were pure calligraphy. Now I’m imagining a tiny Rocky practising his handwriting by listening and copying the symbols in his grandparents’ book, and I want to cry.
“That’s - that’s really beautiful, Rocky. I mean it.” I smile at him, and he hums happily.
“Must show Grace book when arrive on Erid. Grace will like story.”
I think my heart actually skips a beat. I mean, I couldn’t even be normal about his funeral traditions and he still wants to share this family treasure with me, the weird alien he’s bringing home? That’s just…that’s really something.
I manage to babble something to that effect for Rocky while I kick off from the tunnel to retrieve my floating laptop. Then we spend some quality time with the computer’s thesaurus to find the best-sounding English gloss for ♩♯♫, because I think we both want to stretch our research time out as much as possible – this little bubble where we’re a bit more detached, just learning things together, and don’t yet have to face the reality of leaving twenty-two people’s corpses behind forever at Tau Ceti. Maybe neither of us are doing too hot, considering the circumstances.
“Comminution sounds good, right? It can be mechanical or geological. Grinding down solids. It’s got my vote,” I say.
“I like word pulverise,” Rocky tells me with a slightly manic glee. “Dramatic. Meaning is same as ♩♯♫.”
I wince. “Okay, sure, but the connotation is just – I really don’t think it’s appropriate for, like, a funeral practice.”
“Grace big baby.”
“It’s human culture! We’re uncomfortable with death, so we talk around it as much as we can. Hedging, I think it’s called. Like saying someone passed away instead of died, or calling it cremation instead of burning up a dead body.”
“♩♫♩♯♫!!” Rocky shrieks, so high-pitched my ears ring.
“Ow, Rocky, jeez–”
“♫♩♩! Humans burn up dead humans? With fire, question? ♩♫ fire?!” The last time I heard him sound this horrified was when he annoyed me into explaining mukbangs. He’s twisting his carapace back and forth in a full-body parody of a headshake. “Grace say lie! Grace confirm lie right now, statement!”
“Calm down, oh my god, it’s an Earth culture thing – hey, how is this more crazy than pulverising corpses?!”
“♩♯♫ very normal! Humans burn up corpses crazy crazy crazy!”
“We don’t even all do that! Lots of people just get buried!”
Rocky clicks suspiciously, like he’s trying to hear if I’m lying somehow. “Bury where, question?”
“Wh– in the ground, jeez. Like your cemetery things!”
Rocky mutters crazy crazy crazy and several of what I’m extremely sure are curse words at his lowest audible volume. I can’t tell if he’s genuinely disturbed or just having his turn at being shocked by his best friend’s funeral traditions. I’m really, really hoping for the second one, actually, because–
Oh, awesome. Another memory. Thanks, brain. I try to swallow down the lump in my throat, but my voice still comes out gravelly when I say, “Cremation really isn’t that crazy. It’s, um, it’s what we did for my parents.”
There wasn’t any other choice. I remember now. Cremation costs less than burial, which was part of it. Mostly it was because car crashes don’t leave very pretty corpses. No chance for an open-casket wake, like my grandmother’s family normally preferred; we tried to make up the difference by surrounding the urns with my parents’ photos. It wasn’t the same.
I guess Rocky can hear whatever it is my heartbeat’s doing right now, because his whole demeanour changes. “Apology. Grace? Apology apology apology. I not thinking well.”
He butts up against the xenonite beside me and gives me a moment. I grapple with the weirdness of the memories I’ve gotten back today. All my recollections of these griefs feel like things that happened a long time ago, and that I’d basically gotten over, at least as much as anybody can get over these things. But having recovered these memories for the first time since I woke up makes them feel weirdly immediate too, as if they’ve just happened all over again.
Maybe that’s what it’s like for Rocky right now. His crew’s been dead for years, but it’s only now that he has to face leaving them behind forever. That feeling of finality. Like they’re only really, truly dead when you leave the cemetery after their funeral and have to figure out how to go on living without them. I remember that, too.
My head’s spinning a little. But Rocky’s tentative tap-tap on the xenonite cuts through it and pulls me back out of my brain. I tap back, like always.
“It’s okay, pal. Sorry. Uh, I’ve just been getting some new memories back today. Still a weird feeling.”
“Scary,” says Rocky, because he’s never been one for hedging.
“That too.”
“Grace want to stop?” he asks, a bit hesitant.
I shake my head. This isn’t about me. “Nope. Sorry. I’m good. Um – let’s go with comminution, yeah?”
“Word is fine.”
“Even though it kinda sounds like cremation?” I add, just to push my luck.
“Grace no need joke. Rocky will respect human tradition now. Will be very normal.”
“So normal,” I say. Then I can’t help but laugh. Or something close to a laugh, anyways. “Actually, who are we kidding? Nothing about death is normal. I mean, it is – everybody dies – but who says we can’t feel weird about it? It is weird that humans burn up dead bodies sometimes. Even if it’s normal.”
Rocky hums quietly. “Is weird to pulverise dead Eridian carapace. And make into object. Normal, but weird weird weird.”
“I guess it makes sense. Evolutionarily, I mean. That neither of our species would be able to feel…easy about death. Life wants to perpetuate itself, that’s basically its most fundamental goal.” I think back to some of the conversations on self-sacrifice and risking our lives for our planets that we had before saying goodbye – before I remembered that I didn’t choose to be here, that my entire species needed me to die so they could live and I said no – and I kind of wish I hadn’t spoken.
Rocky’s claws are ticking against each other. Something’s eating him.
“Grace?”
“Yeah?”
He hesitates, then finally asks, “What you do with bodies of you crew, question?”
“Oh.”
We’re in the lab, floating, but for a moment I can still feel their corpses in my arms. They were shrunken by death, but the 1.5g’s of acceleration we’d been under made their weight almost lifelike. Getting them up the ladder was hard. Getting myself to say those final words to them was harder.
“I, um. I put them in the airlock. With some of their things, like pictures they’d brought on board of their l-loved ones. I said – I said some things to them. And then I cycled the airlock, and…”
And they flew away, but no, they didn’t. The airlock’s depressurisation gave them a little momentum, but it was the Hail Mary that left them behind. They never even made it to Tau Ceti. They’re still out there in interstellar space.
I must say some of that aloud. Because I hear Rocky murmur, “So now they never decay. Like Eridians.”
“Y-yeah. Yeah, they’re still…they’ll be like that forever.”
“Grace do this for human culture reasons, question?”
I give myself a shake. I’d forgotten I need to give Rocky the Earth context for things like this. “Partly, I guess. I-I knew I shouldn’t keep them on board. Decay, and…psychological reasons. And it’s not like we were ever going home. So I did what sailors used to do on their ships, on the ocean, you know? A burial at sea. Except this was a space burial. I just…let them go.”
Behind the xenonite, Rocky’s holding himself very, very still. Like he’s trying not to shiver. Maybe I’ve horrified him. He kept his crew’s bodies for nearly half a century, holding out hope of someday bringing them back to Erid; he’d bring them home now if he had any other choice. Maybe the space burial I gave Yáo and Ilyukhina seems heartless to him, selfish.
Then Rocky says, “Grace braver than me.”
I go cold all over. In my brain, in my body; I think my heart literally freezes up in my chest. I want to be sick. A part of me is still clutching the dry grass at Baikonur, screaming – ready to let the whole Earth die if that gives me just a little more time – and it begs to run again.
“Rocky, you can’t – why would you say that?” I gasp out.
So low I can barely hear it: “Because is true. Grace braver than me. I cannot let go.”
“No. No, Rock, I’m not. Don’t – don’t say that, okay? You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met. Braver than I can even imagine being. Letting Ilyukhina and Yáo go, that was just me doing something I had to do.” And it wasn’t enough, I know that much. Not for heroes like they were. Not from someone like I turned out to be.
Doubt rises like bile in my throat, now, that anything I can contribute here would ever be enough for people like Rocky’s crew. Or for Rocky himself. But I swallow it back. I told him I would help, and I will. However I can.
“Hey.” I press a palm to the xenonite. “I mean it. You have to know that.”
“I know. Grace very bad liar,” Rocky says quietly, which makes something in my gut twist. The only time I’ve ever openly lied to him was while we were orbiting Adrian, when I said I’d made peace with never going home again.
I hope he knows that it’s really true now. That I don’t regret the decision I made to turn back for him even a little. It scares the hell out of me that that’s true, but it is. I guess people really meant it when they said you could love someone more than life itself.
But because I’m me, I can’t quite make myself say any of that. Instead, I ask weakly, “Was that an insult? Should I feel insulted?”
“No. Is good thing. Truth important.”
“Yeah,” I say, nauseous again. “I-it is.”
We’re quiet. It lasts for a long time.
“Maybe we think about this wrong,” Rocky says after a while, softly, his voice almost as tiny as his little body hunched in the xenonite bulb behind my palm.
I start tracing a finger along the contours of his shape. “Yeah? How so?”
“Grace ask, what customs do Eridians have after die. I think practical, think methods. What do with body. I not think of… of actual funeral.”
He’s found his way to the other side of the realisation I was having earlier. There’s nothing we can do with the bodies of his crew, not really. At the very least, if we leave them here, some future Eridians might be able to chart our course back and find them again someday. Maybe. Right now, what Rocky has to do is find a way to let go.
“I get it,” I say. “So…what do Eridians do for funerals? In your culture, I mean.”
Tiredly, heavily, Rocky lifts a hand and matches the trailing of my finger along the xenonite with one of his claws. We move in tandem. “In Rocky home, for funeral, we sing.”
Well, yes, I think, but then I double-back on that thought. “Singing – so, not like talking? Because your voice sounds like music to me.”
“Sing is different than talk. Special tones, special rhythms. Follows pattern.”
“Oh.” So…literally like Earth singing, then. Which makes sense, since we both use verbal language. Probably should’ve expected as much. “And there are special songs for funerals?”
“Mmm…” Rocky’s finger falters a bit. “Yes, but funeral song is different from most song. Maybe need word. Funeral song have some structure from tradition, but most parts of it is ♪♮♩. Means new invention of mind in that moment.”
“Improvised.” That’s the best I’ve got, anyways.
“Improvised. Funeral songs improvised on old structures at special time when everyone gathers to mourn person. Song must use notes of person name, tell memories of their life.” His tone wanders, grows dreamy. “First singers are closest people – friends, mate, family. Core-cluster. Bedrock of person. They start singing person name, then expand song to say memories of person. Then song joined by others. Outer cluster, members of working hives, people who live near. Eventually whole community. One great song, growing until everyone present in state like thrum.”
“Wow,” I breathe. It sounds beautiful. And…intense. “It must take a long time.”
Rocky fidgets. “Is good if funeral song needs long time. Song go for ratio of person lifetime, one ♩ for every sixyear.” He uses a word that I know translates to a small unit of Eridian time, a handful of Earth minutes. “Is…sad sad sad when song short.”
I swallow down the memory of looking at my kids and realising half of them could die of starvation before they even reached my age.
“Is there…” I think I know the answer, but I have to ask anyway. “Is there anything close to that that we could do here? Any way to – keen for them, like you talked about?” The word strikes me out of nowhere, the faint memory of a memory, a remnant of the culture that my grandmother had lost nearly all connection to. I don’t even know if humans still keen on Earth. But it’s the only kind of connection to a deeper tradition like Rocky’s describing that I have to give him.
“How to do, question?” he asks flatly, but it’s too sad to be biting. “You not Eridian. I only one voice. Cannot thrum. Twenty-two crew, centuries old, all from different clusters, but no people who loved them here. Except for me.”
“Rocky,” I say, half-strangled by the tears trying to rise in my throat.
He balls up one little fist and punches against the air, away from the xenonite, like even now in the midst of his anger and grief he doesn’t want to scare me by hitting the wall between us. I can just barely make out high-pitched whistles of pain. He’s shaking again, I realise, because the vibrations of it are trickling up through my bones. I say his name a second time, and a third. He goes still.
And then there’s silence.
Then: “I not know what to do, Grace.”
His voice is so, so low.
“Cannot just…do nothing. I have to leave crew behind, bad bad bad, no other choice. But must give crew something for ♬♪♩.” Funeral. “No can do comminution, no can do ♩♯♪, no can do anything that is right to do. But must, must, must do something. So it mean something. Is what my crew deserve.”
You deserve much more than this. I’ll do my best.
The thing is, I knew I wasn’t really talking to Ilyukhina and Yáo then. They were gone. I’d been alone for a long time before I woke up here with their bodies. When I said goodbye to them, I was talking to myself.
I think about that, and about Rocky, and about how much I don’t understand yet about his people and his world, and a small part of me wonders – like I did when I said goodbye to Ilyukhina and Yáo – what will happen to my own body when it’s my turn to die, in a few years when my food runs out or in a handful of decades, if things on Erid go like Rocky insists they will. Even if we can postpone my death long enough that I get a full human lifespan, I’ll still be gone long, long before Rocky’s even old. I’ll be his last lost crewmember.
And then I realise that what I want, even more than I want to just keep living (which I do), is to make sure he’ll be all right. Now and after I’m gone. That’s why I turned around for him. And even though they’ve been dead longer than I’ve been alive, I think that his first crew would want him to be all right as much as I do. Unless they were all total jerks, which I doubt, they must have loved Rocky too.
I look through the clear wall at Rocky, who’s hunched so low he looks small enough to scoop up in my arms. There’s that tremor coming off him again, that miserable subsonic vibration I can feel all the way into my teeth. His crew have been dead since before I was born. Now he’s the one who needs to say goodbye. He’s the one who needs to be able to live after this.
I catch my breath and pray, not to anyone or anything, just a silent plea inside myself that what I’m about to say is right.
“Rocky, you… you already did do something for them. You did everything. You finished their mission. You saved their entire world.”
His claws seize around their handholds.
“Everyone they love is going to live, because of you. You fixed it, Rock. It’s awful that they died, and that we can’t bring them back to Erid with us. But there’s an Erid that can mourn them because of you.”
A low, choked warble: “Also – also because Grace.”
“Well, I’m only alive because of you, too.” I lift the arm he left his handprint on, my favourite part of myself. “You saved me, you saved Erid, you saved Earth. That’s more than anyone could ever ask of you. That honours your crew and mine.”
“Grace,” he keens, high enough that it makes my ears ring.
Eridians don’t cry, but they do shriek – long, wavery-pitched ululations of grief or pain, sounds so intense that they’re physical presences. The waves of Rocky’s cries roll over me as he rocks against the xenonite and I press myself against it in the closest thing to a hug I can give, gripping the tunnel as hard as I can so I don’t float away.
At first I think I should be quiet and let him cry. But Rocky keeps shoving himself against the xenonite like he’s trying to burrow into me, and I can’t hold him like I want to, but I can give him something to hear.
So I do what I’ve always done and keep talking. No more big declarations, not now; that’s not what he needs. Instead I just tell him the things you always say to someone you love when they’re hurting – at least on my world, and god, his too, I hope. Because he deserves to hear them.
That he’s loved, that he’ll be all right. That it’s all gonna be okay. That I’m right here with him.
I just talk and talk until my voice goes hoarse, and let him use it as a tether until he can come back to me.
...
I don’t go with Rocky onto the Blip-A to gather his crew’s personal effects. I really, really want to, but the xenonite he used for my exosuit that one time got melted down for reuse in one of his many attempts at solving the taumoeba dereliction. Besides, as much as I hate not being there with him, I wouldn’t be much help onboard. Not for this part, at least. I didn’t know his crew, and I don’t know what personal effects their loved ones would want to receive. I just love Rocky.
So instead, I recheck that the xenonite-encased laptop and speaker are properly hooked up to the converter Rocky made. It draws Eridian prime-sequence electrical power from a little Astrophage battery. The battery alone could probably power a city block for a hundred years; the actual failure points of the setup are the laptop and speaker. There’s no way they can survive the centuries it might take – if it ever happens – for Erid to build another ship and locate the Blip-A drifting in interstellar space.
But whatever time we can get, we’ll take. It’s something. It’s the start.
We came up with the idea together. I’m not sure either of us really know who originated it, actually. Sometimes when we talk together, work together, we’re so synced up that it feels like the boundaries between us blur away. Like we’re one person, or a gestalt of ourselves, and there’s nothing less alien to us than each other. I don’t really have a word for it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s the closest a human can get to experiencing a thrum. Or maybe this is just what it’s like to be bonded so closely to someone, and I never knew it before.
Whatever it is, I’m glad to know it now.
Our idea was simple, in the end. Rocky had explained that Eridian funeral songs all begin with a person close to the deceased singing their name. So we recorded him, twenty-two times over, singing the full formal Eridian names of each of his crew members in the low strident tones of a funerary keen.
Then I used a variation on my translation program to loop the recording, and messed with the laptop itself until I was as sure as possible that it would keep running as long as it had power. So now Rocky’s voice can sing the crew’s names endlessly inside of the ship. Over and over, until the technology reaches its limits, the Blip-A will be filled with the beginnings of the crew’s funeral songs.
And one day, maybe, if Erid finds them again, those songs will be finished. But no matter what, the crew won’t go unmourned.
The laptop, speaker, and Astrophage battery are all working perfectly. Of course they are, because Rocky made them. So I give up on distracting myself with tasks and just watch the Blip-A from a cupola window.
There’s a faint golden glow emanating from one corner of the ship, moving slowly towards its centre. That’s Rocky. Since I couldn’t go with him, I asked him to take a light along into the ship, so I could see where he was through the semi-transparent hull and wouldn't worry too much. So he wouldn’t be alone in the dark. And he said yes, just to be kind to me, because he’s Rocky.
Finally, the light inside the Blip-A descends into the tunnel. I wriggle back into my EVA suit, tether the laptop-speaker-battery setup to me, and cycle the airlock to go join him.
Behind the xenonite wall in the tunnel, the light Rocky’s carrying for me halos him in rainbows. It’s beautiful enough to make me catch my breath.
He holds up the bag of personal effects and taps the wall once I’m close enough to hear. “Finished.”
“Okay,” I say softly, tapping back. Our hands linger against each other for a long moment, connected by the xenonite. I let the moment exist between us, as heavy as it needs to be. I wait for Rocky. When he’s ready, he’ll say.
And he does, his voice low but steady: “Grace put speaker-device in airlock drawer, please.”
My breath catches again, ridiculously. I think that’s only the third or fourth time Rocky’s ever said please to me about anything. Carefully, I set the xenonite-encased device in the wall’s exchange drawer and pass it through.
Rocky braces the laptop gently in his claws as he presses a button through the xenonite case, playing the recording. He lets the whole setup hang in the air of the tunnel, weightless and unmoving. Rippling out of the speakers, the recording is loud – almost painfully loud, even through the wall. I feel the ringing notes of the crew’s names pour over me in a torrent of sound.
The co-captains, a pair of hatchmates chosen for their lifelong ability to lead harmoniously. The primary, secondary, and tertiary pilots – a triple-redundancy arranged around sleep cycles. Three microbiologists, two general biologists, and one person who was Erid’s equivalent of an astrobiologist – I wish I could’ve met them. An astronomer and a physicist, two doctors, a quartermaster and their psychologist mate, two xenonite materials specialists. And two astroengineers, the closest counterparts that Rocky had onboard as the Blip-A’s mechanical engineer. Whenever he needed to sleep, the plan was for them to watch the engines he maintained in the workshop accidentally shielded by Astrophage fuel tanks. But the effects of radiation killed the rest of the crew too quickly for that to ever happen. Rocky spent almost all of the desperate journey to Tau Ceti – not to mention the forty-six years there trying to save Erid – completely alone.
Never again, I promise him silently – and myself, then and there. It doesn't matter how rough things get on Erid when I'm facing down starvation; it doesn't matter that I'll never see a human face again. I'm not leaving Rocky until and unless I have to. He deserves all the time we can have together.
We listen to the names of the crew Rocky lost for one entire loop. Then another. And I wish – I don’t know what I wish. That I’d been here for Rocky sooner, even though all of this began before I was born. That Rocky’s crew had never died, except that’s what led to the two of us finding each other out here in the first place and saving our stars. That Astrophage had never come to either of our planets – but then I’d never have met Rocky, and that’s not even worth contemplating. I know that I’d do everything again, all of it, even the parts that hurt, if it meant I could be here with him now.
I guess that’s what he was trying to explain before, about the good of now not justifying the bad of before. How we find or make whatever meaning of it we can, cobbling it into place like the device we’ve created to sing his crew’s names, something we could only have made together.
The recording begins to play a third time. Rocky’s hand finds mine across the xenonite again, not tapping, just touching. With another hand, he rubs along his ridged forearm, making his body sing goodbye. Behind the wall, I whisper the same word.
Then Rocky slips into his ball to pass through the airlock, leaving the Blip-A for the last time. I’m already reaching for him, hugging him despite the clumsiness of my EVA suit, clipping my tether to his ball, hugging him again even tighter.
“Grace, Grace, Grace,” he says. It’s not mournful, or pleading, or even sad. It’s just my name, sung in my best friend’s voice. A fact, like how Astrophage is always 96º, how galactic cosmic rays cause radiation sickness, how he and I are here together now despite everything.
“Hey, Rock,” I tell him, leaking again. I bump the faceplate of my EVA suit against his ball and he leans into me. And then I just let myself say it, because it’s true: “I love you, bud. You ready to go?”
He’s no longer shaking. Past the wall, the names of his crewmates are filling the silence of the empty ship. “Love Grace too,” Rocky says, warm against me. “Yes. Time go home.”
“You got it, pal,” I say, pushing off from the tunnel so we go sailing into the airlock together. “Let’s go home.”