Chapter Text
I’m not proud of how long it took me to figure out.
In my defense: my first exposure to an Eridian was Rocky, and while I’d eventually learned just how long he’d spent alone, that first impression and his eagerness had imprinted a certain perception of Eridian-kind on me. Kind, trusting, overly excitable. Was this accurate?
Eh. Kind of. In retrospect it’s hard to tell how true it’s really been. Also after about four years of only talking to Rocky, who I understand better than anyone else in the known universe, I started remembering how bad I am at social cues.
I mean, take second contact. When I’d given them my first contact spiel, 'Hello from your friend Earth' and so on, there’d been a ton of buzz in the control room, so much that I gave up on understanding what they were saying and sat back to let Rocky handle it. He’d explained that I couldn’t follow more than one conversation at once, and they’d still been too excited to enact my request. I’m sure they remembered, but from my Rocky-biased perspective, Eridians seem to be pretty impulsive, and don’t always think everything through before they start doing something. Nearly perfect recall is great, but you’ve gotta have the elasticity in your thinking to put different concepts together.
Rocky had seemed annoyed, and told them to go fetch Adrian, and calm…there had been a lot of what I assume is profanity, actually, when he told them to calm their pieholes and pull their heads out of—each other’s seams? I’m not really sure just how vulgar Rocky’s swears are most of the time, because we have pretty different taboos.
Sometimes he seems a little too delighted by my child-friendly language, and I wonder. The speed at which ‘piehole,’ ‘cakehole,’ and ‘fudgesicles’ had appeared in his vocabulary concerned me.
I think it helped that Rocky had still been awake at that point. There was no reason for them to get worked up, because I wasn’t really directly interacting with the landing team at the space-elevator
The 40 Eridani system was harder to navigate than I’d expected. I hadn’t remembered it was a triple star system until we were about a month away, and even then it hadn’t set in just how many extra calculations I’d need to do to avoid being caught in any of the wrong gravity wells and avoid wasting unnecessary fuel. We were lucky that the Mary had been designed for a slightly longer flight than the 10 years of undilated space-time between Tau Ceti and Keid. Even with our intended stop to drop off the first round of Taumoeba dispersal canisters that Rocky and I designed during the past few years, we had enough to make it to Erid safely.
Then everything had gone wrong.
Somewhere during the last fifty years or so, Erid’s astrophage breeder-planet had captured some space debris in its orbit, not enough for a proper moon, but enough that it was forming a disc of densely packed small to medium asteroids that neither Rocky nor I had expected. And I’d needed to send off the dispersal capsules from outside the airlock. It wasn’t as bad as Fishing Time, but it wasn’t easy either.
I managed to get back inside before the first asteroid hit—but Rocky didn’t secure himself before I set us up for full thrust again, and while he assured me he’d be fine before settling into a long-term repair dormancy, it was still far more mercury than I’d ever seen in one place before. Fortunately our incompatible atmospheres mean that his side of the ship is sterile, and he’ll be healed up enough for Eridian doctors to be able to look after him once we get back to Erid without any risk of complications due to infection.
So I had been left to navigate the intricacies of contacting the Eridian space-elevator crew, docking, and getting Rocky into his own atmosphere myself. That was easy. Then I tried to pass off a few more Taumoeba tanks, the ones for further study and breeding, that I wasn’t using as food supplements. The space-elevator crew refused to let me finish a sentence, and kept interrupting with questions. Not good questions, either, mostly questions about me and my life, then seeming discontent with my answers.
It wasn’t reassuring that I’d be able to communicate more complicated topics, so based on what the doctors had told me, I’d decided to wait before I bring up my food problem.
There’s entirely too many things on Erid that could potentially poison me if I do a bad job explaining—yeah, I risk cutting it close on avoiding the worst of the malnutrition and vitamin deficiency issues, but I think it’s smarter to not deal with heavy metal poisoning on top of every illness ever. Rocky should wake up in a few days, it’d be fine.
And that was it.
Everything went well, but now I’m alone in the Hail Mary, and groups of Eridians keep trouping in to talk to me. It’s getting exhausting.
“Are you content with your surroundings? Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable?”
There’s been so many nonsequiturs—what are they expecting me to say? No? It’s not like I can leave the Hail Mary for the foreseeable future.
“Um. [No, is good. Happy you nice-help. Good.]” It’s nothing near how Eridians express gratitude or appreciation, but most of those words and tones are too complex for me. I’m not a trained vocalist, I’m not agile enough for some of the pitch changes in even single-voice Eridian words.
A flurry of high pitched chirps that fall neatly out of my hearing range, that I can only track because of the tool Rocky’d made me. It sits around my wrist, and has both haptic feedback and a small screen display. Nothing comes up, but the pitches are the same frequency, piggy-backing off one another—I have to assume that this is something akin to humans exchanging a glance.
“[Grace sleep now, please.]”
Another flurry of chirps. “Yes, yes! Of course! What a good idea—you should get some rest. We’ll arrange a rotation of watchers."
“[Is ok. Grace sleep alone, is good.]”
The band on my wrist blares red and squeezes tight with inaudible noises of distress.
“[Is ok! Promise. Grace sleep alone good. Grace people sleep alone good.]” It’s a poor explanation, since it doesn’t explain why humans sleep alone well, or that this is a cultural difference, or that I’m not even sure I can sleep alone well anymore. Four years is enough to be a heckuva habit builder.
And for some reason my poor explanation doesn’t soothe anyone.
One of the more levelheaded members of the caretaking team, a…ugh, it feels wrong to describe them like this, but I can only think of her as a particularly matronly Eridian, steps forward, and quiets the unheard squeaking cacophony of concern. “Grace, I think we would be more comfortable if we could keep an eye on you while you’re sleeping. Just for our own peace. I promise that you aren’t in trouble, and you aren’t inconveniencing us by asking someone to watch you sleep. Would you be alright if we watched you?”
“[Yes. Ok.]” I give up.
That’s when it clicks, and I realize what’s going on. Because, oh my god, they’re using the P.A.C.E model of talking to children after traumatic events. They were following all the same advice I recognize from the training modules that have somehow managed to stick in my head despite being pumped full of an unknown amnesia drug and sent over a dozen light-years from Earth.
Those early nonsequiturs? An attempt to give me a sense of safety, to help me regulate before progressing to the difficult parts of the conversation. Same thing with the way they approached asking to watch me sleep—the framing to convey their concerns, but ultimately give as much perceived control to the child as possible. I’d used a similar strategy before myself, talking to some of the younger kids when I’d been forced into lunch monitor duty.
Alice had discovered a new allergy. It wasn’t fun.
My permission doesn’t settle the unease, in fact some of the less tactful team members crowd extra close, arranging my pillows behind me and poking at the mattress and just generally being in the way, until the one who’d taken charge earlier shoos them all away. She settles in the stool-chair thing someone had dragged through the airlock, and placidly pulls out a stack of what could only be Eridian paper. Her preferred sensory range is outside of my hearing, so as soon as I slip off the wristband, I’ll be fine to sleep.
And so now, here I sit, having been tucked into my bed by a team of alien childcare specialists, having realized that somewhere along the line, someone made some really bad assumptions. Wires were crossed and thoroughly tangled.
I’ll have to sort them out, because otherwise I’ll have botched any future attempts at Eridian-Human diplomacy. A little hard to have interstellar negotiations when the other party keeps trying to play peek-a-boo.
I wish Rocky were here.
I spend most of the ‘night’ thinking about the problem instead of sleeping. There’s a rotating crew of Eridians in the corner, but I don’t think they’ve realized I’m not sleeping and can see them coming in and out, and even overhear and understand their side-conversations. Seems like Rocky’s notes on human sleep are stuck on the thinking-machine until he wakes up, because I doubt I have the vocabulary to describe it. Like all of his other notes. Including the ones on my food
The good news is that this gives me plenty of time and opportunity to gather information on my predicament. From what I understand, it’s not a straightforward misunderstanding that got us here—just a bunch of unfortunate coincidences about the Eridian perception of the human body.
Surprisingly, the problem isn’t that I have a ballpark of under a thousand ‘words’ to work with, and my grammar makes Rocky shudder worse than that time I threw up on him after trying an attempt to ferment Taumoeba into some sort of alcohol.
I’m an alien, nobody expects first contact to involve fluently conversing with an alien that can speak your language perfectly. Just because Rocky and I have had two years together doesn’t mean that it wasn’t better to just go for comprehension over communication. If Rocky was awake, there’d be no issue with me understanding more than I speak. It’s not like I’d be able to pick up a wider vocabulary than my current level anyway, without a bit of help. Or an instrument. Or doing a significant amount of vocal training. Or both.
The problem also isn’t entirely the physicalities of my speech that hold me back from further fluency. I’m human, I have one set of vocal cords, and because I’m a man whose voice sits somewhere in the ‘baritone’ register, they don’t like to make sounds outside of about 110-440 Hz. About sixteen distinct notes, a range of two octaves. Add in the average human whistling range, and I expanded the upper end of my range to 500-5000 Hz. Eighteen more notes, another three octaves, but still less than half of what I could hear. Hence why I’d need help.
Eridians were capable of generating sound from about 13 Hz to 125 kHz. About 105 kHz worth of sound above where human hearing topped out—forget about what I could actually hear or generate. I was somewhere in my late thirties or early forties, biologically speaking, and there was no way I’d be able to measure my telomeres anytime soon to nail it down. Those highest registers were going fast. Luckily, in communication Eridian frequency usage seemed to roughly align with Zipf’s law, and made a curve that lined up pretty well with human hearing.
English has a phoneme inventory of about forty, in my generic American accent at least. We have roughly fifteenish vowel sounds, and the same twenty-four consonants as other broadly spoken English accents. I fall about six notes short of having the same level of flexibility in my notes as I have in my syllable generation.
Oh shoot, I forgot sharps and flats.
Okay, so maybe I have more than that. I’m not a musician. I have a better sense of pitch than I’ve ever had in my life at this point, and I’m still nowhere near human perfect-pitch. Which I think is another big part of the problem.
Lack of finesse, control, identify pitches correctly, and being able unable to hear at higher registers were all markers of youth in Eridians, but I suspect they would have been able to get over it.
But really the main problem is my skin.
I hadn’t realized, because Rocky had never brought it up, and I had never thought to ask until well on our way to Erid, but Eridians aren’t all hard and stony their entire lives. They’ve got rock solid carapaces for most of their lives though, and certainly once they’re old enough to attend school—which is the main point of comparison I asked about, since I was curious about how age markers might line up with my students. My former students.
Eridians that aren’t quite old enough to leave the burrow, though, have a layer of organic material that coats their carapace. Rocky called it the ‘dermis’ when explaining it to me, and it’s a thin film comprised of the remaining organic material from the egg, including worker-cells that are actively building the pebble’s outer layer, and needs to be left alone for as long as possible to ensure there are no major developmental issues down the line.
Basically, Eridians are a bit more like starfish than I’d known, but unlike starfish, one of their major life stages involves shedding the fleshy outside to reveal the skeleton underneath. It’s a very vulnerable stage, as the dermis makes a good environment for pathogens to live while waiting for the next opportunity to infect the kid—aka, the next time the kid has to crack themselves open to eat.
Rocky didn’t explain more than that, but based on our other conversations, I know that Eridians have a massive child mortality problem, despite being a space-faring species. A lot like we might’ve had, if we hadn’t invented vaccines. They’re very sensitive about it, and obviously protective of their young.
With that context, I can understand the overreaction to potentially being responsible for an alien child. Maybe I’m a little flattered to get the same consideration as one of their own? No. Definitely not. It’s just that I’m not even that upset about it. Actually, no, not that either.
Fine, I’ll admit it. Maybe I’m a little peeved.
Look, to make a comparison: if a weird oozing jellyfish alien showed up on my planet with a cure for the dimming sun—or before that, with a cure for world hunger, or climate change, or any of our messes—then told me it was four years old, had the vocabulary of a four year old, and sounded like a six year old who’d just lost both front teeth, I still would have never assumed it was a child.
Because it was frickin’ nuts for anyone to send a child into space. Barring some sort of ‘survival ark for the planet’ situation. (I know my sci-fi tropes, and I’m still a little bummed Stratt didn’t toss a little seed vault or something onto the Hail Mary for the sake of it.) Children also usually aren’t capable of solving global catastrophes on their own, so, y’know, another reason for me to believe them. Especially if they had a human guy they helped out, and he was vouching for them. Even if their ‘face’ had looked like those pruney wrinkly newborn photos that everyone who has a friend with kids has seen, I still would’ve taken them at their word and treated them like an adult. Okay, maybe I would have been a little confused, but I would have chalked it up to lifespan differences, and moved on with my life.
Alright, maybe this is more than peeved. Maybe it’s downright pissing me off. Enough to curse over it. Not out loud though, that’s a little too far, and I don’t feel like doing the whole ‘these are the alien swears’ cultural exchange lesson again right now. It might also scandalize them and get Rocky into trouble, because again: they think I’m a child.
But also, I do feel a little relieved. Because Rocky, who loved his home planet and people enough to be launched into space on Erid’s inaugural spaceflight, was not an unbiased source in regaling me with the virtues of his home. And now they feel a little bit more like people than some sort of utopian society of angels who are all far too happy to spend a lot of time and resources on making sure this weird squishy alien doesn’t die. Even though I knew it’d be a long-shot, I’m not ready to die yet. Not until Rocky wakes up, that’s for sure. Ask me again when the scurvy and beriberi set in for real, and my answer might change. I’ve always been a weenie about pain.
And about confrontation. It might be annoying, but I’m already wondering if I should just go with the flow and let the care team assume I’m a child until Rocky wakes up and can tell them otherwise. It’ll save me the headache.
Wait.
Rocky.
Oh crud, Rocky’s never going to let me live this down if I let all of Erid continue to believe I’m a toddler. He already gives me so much crap over minor human things like swallowing down the wrong tube. I can already imagine the jokes.
I have to fix this—before he wakes up.