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Rocky doesn’t leave him alone very often.
It’s not something Ryland minds, so to speak. He gets it. God, does he get it. Eridians might be wired vastly differently than humans, but between birthmates and clan and thrums, the way Rocky talks about life on Erid makes it pretty clear that Eridians are social species all the way down. (Also the sleep thing. Definitely the sleep thing. Ryland’s being reminded that the Western ideal of sleep, happening in a private room- and, if you are a disgraced, very single middle school science teacher, completely alone- is no longer an option for him. These days he doesn’t have to bother opening his eyes to figure out where Rocky is. The extremely warm patch of the xenonite he’s pressed up against is enough of a clue.)
He’s getting off track. Ryland doesn’t mind, is his point. Being trapped on a deteriorating ship, knowing that you’ll die, and that your homeworld dies with you, having no idea that anyone is coming to get you-
Ryland doesn’t like thinking about it for too long, and he’s only imagining it.
Sometimes he dreams about the Hail Mary dissolving and wakes up gasping. Sometimes he’ll catch Rocky staring- insofar as an Eridian can- at the taumoeba tanks, like he’s waiting for an alarm to go off.
This also means Rocky will not, categorically, let him be alone to go do “boring boring boring human activities.”
“I’m sitting under the sun lamp, bud,” Ryland explains, for the fifth time. “You can hear me from the other end of the ship. You know you can hear me from the other end of the ship too. Go.”
“Grace not doing private human activities,” Rocky says. Ryland recognizes the petulant two-tone inflection of his words under the translator’s TTS. He’s not making much progress in actually learning the language- human brains are leaky and inefficient, et cetera, he could sing along in his sleep by now- but broad, overarching tones are something he’s finally starting to pick up. “Grace not in shower or on toilet or in bed making-”
“Ooookay,” Ryland says. “We don’t need to bring that up, that’s fine, we are good without rehashing that-”
“Grace doing emphasis-private things, question?” Rocky continues. That chord progression, Ryland’s positive, is annoying smugness. “Rocky need leave question?”
Ryland throws up his hands as best he can without jostling the sun lamp away. He’s got all three pointed at him, under the basis that he’s the only human onboard and he probably needs the Vitamin D anyway, given that he was definitely supposed to be well on the way to Deadsville by now. “Fine! Fine, stay, but don’t come complaining to me that you’re bored.”
“Rocky not get bored,” Rocky says, and settles equally smugly down in his ball. The scary space spider comparison is still alive and well, but an Eridian settling comfortably down bears a kind of resemblance to a cat. All of Rocky’s limbs tuck neatly to his sides. Next to him Ryland kind of feels like a gangly, weird ape.
A gangly, weird ape who’s enjoying his light. He closes his eyes again and pretends the lamps are warm enough to pass for the sun; pretends he’s back on Earth sitting with his face turned to the sky. Outside his school, maybe, on one of the last days before summer break, waiting for the last of his kids to get picked up or bike off.
If he opens his eyes, Ryland pretends, he’ll see blue skies, with no mechanical-line screens intersecting it. Maybe a few clouds, maybe the edges of some trees. On a whim he pulls his head out just slightly. There’s a cloud, passing over his face.
“What Grace thinking about,” Rocky intones. “Grace not sleep. Bad for Grace to sleep extra.”
“I’m not asleep, buddy,” Ryland tells him without opening his eyes.
“Grace shift around like asleep.”
“I’m pretending.”
It takes closing his eyes, nowadays. The Don’t-Go-Crazy room is great, but it doesn’t let him pretend anymore. Ryland isn’t sure how he feels about that. He’s not sure he has to decide to feel any way at all anyways; it’s not like he has the power to turn them off this course.
That line of thought gets bitten off before he can think better of it. He doesn’t regret it. It’s him and Rocky, until the end of the line.
“Pretending to be asleep question.”
The searing, overwhelming moment of grief is familiar: he’ll never see Earth again. “I’m pretending I’m back home,” Ryland says before he can think better of it.
It’s never really that quiet in space, with things humming and buzzing and clicking to keep him alive. His alarms. Rocky’s projects. Ryland focuses on each of them in turn, tries to drown them out. On Earth they wouldn’t exist. On Earth-
“Grace miss-”
“There’s no point in talking about this again, okay?” Ryland says, and sits up. The illusion is gone. There’s no sunlight, just fluorescent lighting and bright-white tables and grey steel and a million small little pixelated screens to satisfy some part of his brain that can’t stand to go without a blue sky above it. “I don’t want to talk about it, I just- there’s no use chewing it to death. I know. You know.”
Rocky’s disappointed cant is maybe kind of more awful than usual. “Rocky apologize,” he says, somehow quietly even though the translator is set to the same volume as it always is.
“Not,” Ryland stresses, “your fault.”
“But Grace not want to talk about it.”
“No,” Ryland says, and picks himself up. He has to check the tanks. When he comes back Rocky doesn’t say anything.
That night he sits next to Ryland and somehow manages to wait for him to fall asleep first. He doesn’t know how he can tell, he just does.
“So what’s Erid like,” Ryland asks one day over his lunch. Rocky still doesn’t like eating in front of him, but he’s seemed to begrudgingly accept that all human socialization will involve food at some stage and is giving it the good old college try, in lieu of anything else to do. Apparently it’s less weird when Ryland does it alone than when they both do it together.
This is probably for the best. Eridians thrum and sing together for socialization. Ryland can’t sing by human standards. Eridian ones? He’s fucked. Sorry, Rocky.
“Geographically,” he clarifies.
“Geographically Erid varied,” Rocky says. “Not uniform.”
“So not very flat,” Ryland says, and puts a hand out in demonstration. “Mountains?”
“Yes yes yes. Some. Good places for small-Eridians,” Rocky says, and turns in his ball. “Too flat equal too vulnerable. No good places to run. No good places for sleep.”
“Flatlands are inhospitable, huh?” It makes sense. If Eridians used their environments for camouflage or shelter, then the equivalent of an Eridian prairie probably would have been the absolute worst place to settle as a fledgling species. Old needs run deep. Just because humans developed methods for surviving extreme cold doesn’t mean Antarctica got torn up for real estate.
It won’t ever be, either. Hm. “Do you just leave those empty?” Ryland asks.
Rocky hums a four-tone ambiguous phrase. In his head, Ryland’s been calling it it’s-not-that-simple. “Not made for Eridian safety. Must manually-” he breaks off into a trill of a word and the translator cuts out. “Move dirt. No word in translator.”
“Terraform?” Ryland says. He pulls the ever-present laptop closer. “Dig?”
“Database emphasis-have dig,” Rocky says irritably. “Human memory very very very unreliable.”
“I remember! I remember now!”
“Remember because Rocky said again.”
“Okay! Okay!” Ryland says, and types ‘terraform’ into the database. “Say it once?”
Rocky obliges. “Terraform,” his TTS spits out in clipped English a second later. “Terraform terraform terraform,” he says again. “Grace remember.”
“One of these days I’m gonna figure out how to try to make you do something by muscle memory,” Ryland mutters. “Alright. Back on track. Erid.”
“Areas must be made good for Eridians,” Rocky tells him. “Then can settle usually.”
“So what about the other areas,” Ryland asks, and pulls his laptop closer. It maybe proves Rocky a little bit right, but it’s not like he can make his brain develop eidetic memory. If humans could do that, he probably would have done it his first year teaching- he hadn’t ever imagined there were so many ways to spell Mackenzie.
“Some flat, some small slope. Some large slope. Windstorm on Erid very rare but make very extreme slope,” Rocky says. He hamster-wheels his ball over to one of the lab tables and gestures human-style at it. “Nearly straight.”
“Vertical?”
“Yes yes yes. Tricky but not unable to do. Climb takes practice.” Flat areas often inhospitable, require terraforming; Ryland notes in the very middle of what had been a transcript of one of Rocky’s recalled oral Eridian histories.
(Name pending; Rocky keeps insisting it’s not capturing the nuance of his traditions. Ryland says approximation is better than nothing. They’ve been having this argument for a month now.)
Slopes vary, extreme slopes caused by windstorms. “Best areas have caves.”
“Do you guys- I mean, did you live in caves primarily? Back in the ancient days,” Ryland says, unreasonably curious. It’s not impossible for their species to make contact, someday. Someday within his students’ student’s lifetimes, even. He’s sure the anthropologists will have a freaking field day then; there are probably questions he hasn’t even thought to ask. Still.
“Unclear,” Rocky says, then trills a bit and rolls his ball back and forth before clattering over back to Ryland. “Not evidence for. Not evidence not-for.”
“Against,” he corrects mindlessly.
“Against is move word,” Rocky grates, and bashes- very lightly, for a 400-pound creature- at Ryland’s shins. It still stings like a bitch. “Rocky hit against Grace legs. No evidence to hit.”
“Augh,” Ryland moans dramatically, and then slumps over onto the floor as dramatically as he can manage holding a laptop. “Oh my leg. It’s broken. You’ve broken my leg, Rocky, how could you do this to me.”
“Grace emphasis-fine.”
“You don’t know that.” Ryland clambers himself back up, complete with undamaged laptop.
“Can hear Grace bones move,” Rocky tells him, with the Eridian low-high-low whistlechord of annoyed but only lightly. “Grace bones all good. Very normal. Very normal and flawed human bones of Grace.”
“Hey,” Ryland says, mostly out of habit, and takes another bite of his burrito in retaliation. Rocky shifts, side-to-side and a little unnaturally, in discomfort. Hah. “I forget you’re like, the alien version of Daredevil sometimes,” he adds.
“What is word question.”
“Dare- ah.” Ryland wonders where Stratt would have stashed comic books. They’ll be in the data somewhere, the question is where. “Nevermind. Just- you hear my bones, man.”
“Hear everything,” Rocky agrees. “Grace fine statement.”
“Yeah, yeah, you caught me. My original point stands. Erid is varied geographically- are there lakes? Oceans?”
“Yes yes yes. Cooled.” A pause. “Not for Grace. Grace oceans must be emphasis-very cold. Eridian oceans too hot.”
Lakes and other similar features full of liquid. “And doesn’t that bode well for me, big squishy water sack human?”
“Will make space for Grace. Will not boil. Unless Grace emphasis-very annoying, then maybe boil small amount.”
“Oh, only if I’m very annoying?” Ryland laughs.
“Erid biologists very very very excited once they understand alien is with Rocky. Erid biologists-” he breaks off into a word that doesn’t translate- “every one for chance to study Grace. Rocky get in much much trouble if Grace boil.” Rocky titters and stretches himself all the way up on his legs. “Only reason help Grace, obviously,” he adds.
“I regret letting you know I understood sarcasm,” Ryland mutters.
“Too late.”
Ryland chews loudly and vindictively in his direction. “Erid,” he remembers after a second. “What- well, I guess you won’t be able to tell me what color anything is, will you?”
“Humans so obsessed with color. Oh look at me-” he stands up as best he can in his ball and braces two of his hands on the topmost arch of it- “I am human. Exclamation of excitement. Human Rocky will be squishy and stand on two legs and talk about blue like blue is emphasis-thing. Blue is emphasis-radiation. Human Rocky see radiation colors. Exclamation-”
Ryland reaches out a leg and, with all the strength he can muster, rolls Rocky backwards.
Unfairly, Rocky doesn’t even lose his balance, just stays stretched in his human-position like he’s a performer in a giant circus hoop. “Wow. Rocky see more colors now.”
“I’m going to eat in front of you forever,” Ryland decides, and bites vindictively into his burrito.
“This okay,” Rocky says, and scrambles back up. “Grace gross alien. Know Grace like me best.”
ERID VERSUS EARTH Ryland writes on the whiteboard in big chunky letters. He never got the hang of the teacher handwriting thing but by God if he hadn’t learned real quick to make things clear and legible. The Fork Fiasco of ‘13 is still burned into his brain.
Across the room in his own fort, Rocky’s making what Ryland can only assume is a similar document on a whole slab of xenonite. Damn. Ryland’s just gonna copy this down onto a hard drive and put it in the time cache for when he’s done. Fifteen hundred years from now maybe someone on Earth’ll get to read his and Rocky’s stupid arguments.
Oh, he can’t think about that for too long. Ryland blinks reflexively. “Point for laptops to Earth,” he says.
“Grace wait.”
“Point for being fast to humans and also Earth!” Ryland cheers, and uncaps a marker.
“Point to Eridians for not being emphasis-rude.” There’s the tink-tink-tink of Rocky reorienting himself. “Grace no cheat.”
“Swear on my life,” Ryland says. “Okay, okay, but, like, laptops though.”
“Human laptop machine very interesting. Hard to use. Rocky will document.” Laptops are cool, Ryland writes under Earth’s heading.
“Okay, your turn.”
“Erid buildings better than Earth buildings,” Rocky says instantly. “Erid buildings not fall over.”
“Hey, our buildings don’t usually do that! We generally don’t want them to!” Ryland defends.
“Eridian buildings last for thousand years easy. Human buildings fall over.”
Well. Assuming Rocky’s not just lying- and really, he has to, doesn’t he, the same way Rocky has to assume he’s being honest about Earth- that’s fair. It took most world governments and the GDP of several small countries to build the Hail Mary. According to Rocky, there’s probably another ship being built right now on Erid, and the Blip-A’s been sitting in orbit longer than Ryland’s been alive.
Nope, can’t think about that either. “Fine, okay,” Ryland says, and lets his hand blindly squeak out Engineering (building stuff) under the Erid column. “Oh. And xenonite.”
“And xenonite,” Rocky says and makes a happy chord, just barely in the range of Ryland’s hearing- it’s like trying to listen to subsonic bass through your neighbor’s walls, except for the part where it’s coming from an alien. When he presses his hand to his chest, he can feel it vibrate. “Good.”
They fill the board, slowly. Movies goes in Earth, and then they get into a furious debate about if it’s fair when Eridians literally can’t see. Song goes in Erid’s column- Rocky concedes experimental noise as his favorite of the genres he can stand from Ryland’s playlist and Ryland quotes him verbatim because, seriously, an alien liking your music best has to be an unheard-of compliment- and dance ends with Rocky violently gesturing and Ryland on all fours, trying to replicate some kind of popular moveset.
(“I feel like I’m ten and getting yelled at in ballet again,” Ryland manages, and crouches even more closely together. He bounces a little, experimentally.
“No no no! Other way!”
“Rocky I literally cannot bend that way.”)
Theater remains a solid, unbroken middle ground. They’ve got a lot more Earth media than Eridian, but it’s not like Rocky can do a whole play by himself.
Jewelry goes to Erid, skirts go to Earth. Rocky mocks Ryland’s glasses for five minutes while he tries to defend his life choices in general. The concept of drawbridges, meanwhile, makes him bang his carapace against the xenonite in exasperation that Erid, apparently, didn’t think of that one. Ryland also wins boats, submarines, sailing, and the concept of a cruise for Earth, if only on the technicality that Rocky seems to regard all of the above as horrifying and-slash-or incomprehensibly stupid.
“Okay, I think we might have to move this to digital,” Ryland admits, as he just-barely squeezes Long-distance communication (no tech) onto Erid’s side. He really wants to see whatever the heck Rocky means by ‘vibration amplify if chained’.
“Fine. Rocky sleep soon. Grace watch?”
“Yeah, Grace watch.” A pause. “Hey, what about pillows, does that get a point for us?”
He’s mostly resigned himself to sitting under the Vitamin D lamps with Rocky, which means that daydreaming isn’t an option but also means that Rocky has started demanding stimulus. They have yet to make a casing for the remote Ryland dug up (after how many months in zero-g and the entire ship flipping around like the universe’s most expensive version of The Zipper?) that can survive Rocky’s atmosphere.
Human dramas are- well, it was bad enough watching when he had the omnipresent reminder floating over his head that you’ll never get to have this again, coupled with the bile-bitter you didn’t have this in the first place, which all mix to form a lovely you missed your chance to ever connect with another human like this before you even knew it and the last person who knew you that well was entirely willing to condemn you to death.
But that’s not it either. Nope, Ryland’s issue is more that he’s started remembering the kids. His students.
His last set of students, specifically, in great, painstaking detail.
(Elise Jayven Alexi and Alexa (separate) Riven Carter Eli Lillie (suffix -ie) Solomon (C., not M.,) Hannah and Finn; Eli gets dyslexia accomodations Charlie doesn’t like milk but Alexi can’t have milk and Lillie can’t have peanuts and Carter reads in the back of the class when he’s bored and Solomon doesn’t sign his name on his assignments and Finn is never late always early except for third period math sometimes holds her and Jayven draws a smiley face on the back of the test every time and, and and and-)
He can’t keep crying every time some kid walks on screen, he can’t. It’s unsustainable. Rocky’s started following him to the bathroom just to check that he’s not going in there to sob, which is an issue.
Eventually: it’ll clear up and he can start Rocky on the Sopranos and consequently convince all of Erid that humans are bloodthirsty, gang-warring creatures they should probably eradicate ASAP. In the meantime: no human shows, which narrows the scope drastically.
Fortunately, models of Earth exist.
“Anywhere on the planet that’s got this outline,” Ryland says. It’s not the first time he’s done this, he’s got a shortcut saved to his laptop. “Otherwise we’re going to end up in the middle of the ocean and it’ll boot us out.”
“Yes okay. Left. Left, left- other- no you- up. Up! There.”
They drop somewhere into Paraguay. In the distance a skyscraper is going up, slowly, in pastel yellow. Someone is walking past a row of wall-set mailboxes, face blurred. There’s overflowing garbage bins on the corner. It’s overcast. It’s gorgeous.
“Again,” Rocky says, once he’s finished interrogating Ryland about the mailboxes and Ryland has finished explaining, with infinite patience, that yes, they do still use mail systems with actual paper, yes, seriously, yes, for most of human history, yes, he is aware of the flaws.
The middle of India. A stack of three-story apartments is plastered with posters for an outdated movie. He can’t read what it’s about but the effect is clear. An advertisement for e-scooters hangs next to it. Someone still in his work clothes is driving down the lane. France, outside Paris by a respectable enough margin that Ryland won’t need to explain giant towers quite yet. In front of a car dealership, of all places, which Rocky is baffled by; bracketed on the other side of the street by blocky, brutalist apartments. What Ryland thinks must be Albania. It takes only a few moments of circling orientation before Ryland realizes he’s dropped them basically on top of a graveyard. A proper one, attached to a church and everything.
Rocky’s silent for a moment. “What is that, question?” he asks, after a moment.
“It’s- for when people die. We bury them there. The stones mark where they are.”
“Rocky thought so,” Rocky says, and lowers his wand so he can’t see it on his texture screen anymore. “Eridian and human share tradition sometimes.”
“Oh,” Ryland says, and then, for several seconds, fails completely to come up with something to say to the guy he’s been sharing a ship with for over a year. Christ. Get it together, Ryland.
“Do you want to- go look for something else?” he says, eventually. “We’ve gotta have some stuff that’s the parts we haven’t really touched on Earth.”
“Okay,” Rocky says. He still hasn’t put his wand back up. A+ communication on their part.
It takes a second- several minutes, actually, of scrambling around trying to find things in the folders’-subfolders’-sub-subfolders; he should have mentioned something about how to browse for specific pieces of media when Stratt had softlaunched her plan to download all of The Internet (™) and shove it into the Hail Mary- but eventually Ryland pulls up a 360-camera-projected tour of Witches Gulch. He vaguely remembers one of his students doing a presentation on it after a summer trip- it’s gotta be suitably untouched.
Rocky, again, objects rather strenuously to the fact that half tour is being conducted via boat-
“Bad bad bad, danger, Grace stupid species go in water, humans dumb question? Want emphasis-death question?”
“We can and do float, dude, we’re seventy percent water on the low end.”
“Emphasis-die in water. Grace says humans do this.”
“...I mean yeah, people drown, sure, but-”
“Not meant for water. Stop being in water. Stop being on water. Avoid water. Bad bad bad.”
“I need water to live!”
“Stop needing. Simple solution, statement.”
-but once he’s had his fill of tormenting Ryland about the dangers of water-based travel, he makes fewer and fewer comments, turning his wand every which way at the undulating walls. Five minutes stretch on where Ryland’s pretty sure Rocky’s lost interest entirely and is quietly tolerating Ryland’s weird digital boating adventures.
He nudges the xenonite hamster ball. Rocky doesn’t nudge back. The walls oscillate around them, geological strata on full display. The camera guy gets off the boat and begins the long wooden trail into the tight cliffs. It’s green all around, moss dripping off of the rocks, and whatever day the tour video was taken must have been clear, because the sun casts swirling shadows onto the rock.
“Rocky?” Ryland says, after another minute. Rocky shifts.
Ryland’s about ready to pause the video and call it a day when Rocky says, very quietly, “Is like where Rocky hatched.”
“Oh,” Ryland says, mostly because out of all the things he was expecting, that wasn’t one of them. “Um. Is it a good memory?”
Rocky stills. “Yes. Yes also no.” He flexes a leg. “Have not been back in many many Earth years. Have not been back in many Eridian years also.” It takes Ryland a second to parse that one- Rocky doesn’t usually make the distinction.
He folds forward, leans against Rocky’s ball without looking directly at him. There’s not much use for eye contact here. “Can I ask why not?”
“Already do. Grace ask question about asking question is inefficient,” Rocky complains, but it doesn’t match with the way he slows his wand. “...Many things happen. Rocky busy. Rocky birthmates here. Migrated early. Did not-”
Rocky stops. He makes a hum Ryland’s come to associate with frustration. “No word,” he finally says.
Ah, shoot, where’s the laptop. “Describe it?”
“Not like that no word.” Rocky lowers the wand, slowly, like he doesn’t know whether he wants to keep the cavern walls in sight or not. “Experience does not line up with Eridian language either. Is reason Rocky migrated. Did not know how to say.”
“You ever go back?” Ryland asks. “Even just as a trip?”
“Rocky did not. Sorry sorry sorry,” Rocky says.
Ryland blinks. “What? Sorry for- Rocky, I don’t mind listening. You’re-” Ah, he’s about to be horridly sentimental, isn’t he. Well. “Rocky, I want to hear about it. It sounds…well, it sounds rough- difficult,” he clarifies. Rough sounds like it might be a compliment in the literal sense on Erid. Maybe an insult. He’ll have to ask.
“...Grace and Rocky are going back to Erid,” Rocky says finally. Witches Gulch continues all around them. “Rocky can go back to birthplace.”
“Y…yeah?” Ryland says, confused. “Of course you can, bud. You can do whatever you want.”
Rocky looks- well, he doesn’t look, Ryland kind of can’t believe he’s still making that mistake but it’s hard when it feels like there’s a pair of eyes he can’t see, regarding him solemnly- at Ryland for a minute. Then another.
He shifts a little in his seat. Is this also some kind of Eridian culture thing he doesn’t know about? Ryland feels like it might have come up sooner than this, but what does he know?
“Rocky?” he asks. “Mind filling me in?”
“Earth very lucky for Grace. Rocky very lucky for Grace also,” Rocky says finally, and settles back down onto his ball, clearly content to have that non sequitur be the end of it. “Grace show Rocky more Earth locations yes yes yes. Share Earth.”
Well. Okay then. They’ve got the years on the clock to spend.
“You better share Erid like this,” Ryland warns, even as he pulls up a 360 view of the Twelve Apostles. “I want the VIP tour, you know.”
“Hmmm. Maybe,” Rocky says, with the whistle of teasing teasing teasing. Then he makes a shriek. “All of human monuments in emphasis-water, question? Dumb dumb dumb!”
Ryland laughs so hard he cries.