Tell Me Not In Binary Numbers

It’s embarrassing to be upset about little things, because it makes you feel stupid, and feeling stupid makes you feel more upset, and feeling upset about that makes you feel more stupid, in a spiral of feeling bad about everything. Being upset that I was going to die in space? That was normal. Anyone would be upset about that. But about two years into the journey to Erid I realized I had eaten the last of the freeze-dried meals with the chocolate cake yesterday and now I was never going to have chocolate or cake ever again, and I hadn’t even appreciated it.

I stood at the food storage compartments, staring stupidly at them, trying not to either cry or throw something. I was in the third week of my new meal regimen: coma slurry for breakfast, taumoeba slime for lunch, and then real food for dinner, to end on a high note. Intercutting real food with taumoeba was my idea, and I was mad at myself for doing it. I had enough real food to last until Erid, but it was dwindling scarily fast. Rocky was insistent that Eridian scientists would drop everything and figure out how to make food that would keep me alive as their first priority, but… well, I’d come from an Earth that was having the same problems. I didn’t think they’d want to drop everything they were doing to save their own planet to invent a whole new technological infrastructure to keep one alien alive. So I wanted to make sure what I had would stretch out long enough for them to figure out something I could eat that wouldn’t kill me. But what that meant was slime for breakfast and slime for lunch, every day, and the lunch slime was filling but it wasn’t energizing. By dinner time I was always cranky. And this was going to be how every day was going to go for at least the next two years and probably the next rest of my life. And all I wanted was something with chocolate in it and there wasn’t any and never would be again.

I slumped down on the floor.

“Grace?” Rocky called from the other room.

“Just deciding on dinner,” I said.

“From the floor, question?”

“Yeah.”

Ilyukhina had wanted chocolate cake.

The memories still keep filtering up, though by now they feel more like remembering things normally that I just hadn’t been thinking about before. Ilyukhina’s 39th birthday was a few months before launch, and she was making the most of it.

“Cake, champagne, and zakuski should have eggplant, I like the eggplant,” she said, counting off on her fingers the things she wanted for her big birthday bash. Stratt listened with the kind of patience she rarely had time for anymore, but Ilyukhina was good at making you want to listen to her. “Smoked salmon on rye bread. Music, dancing. Flowers. Everyone brings me a little card that says nice things about how much you all love me and how much you all will miss me. Also I want bouncy castle from American movies.”

That actually earned a brief but real smile from Stratt. “We are not importing a… bouncy castle… onto the ship.”

“Will be my last birthday party ever,” Ilyukhina said. “And I have never seen a bouncy castle in real life.”

Stratt held firm on nixing the bouncy castle, but Ilyukhina did get her party with music, dancing, lots of champagne and vodka, eggplant, smoked salmon, and everybody on the ship making toasts about how great she was. There was also a chocolate cake.

My last birthday ever was a month later and was mostly DuBois and Shapiro ambushing me as I left the lab with leftover champagne from Ilyukhina’s party and cookies stolen from the mess hall. If I’d known it would be my last birthday party ever, maybe I would have tried to do something more special. There wasn’t even cake.

Rocky rolled up in his xenonite ball. He was working on a more articulated suit, but hadn’t come up with a design that worked well yet. The suit would help him interact with me and the oxygenated side of the Hail Mary better, and I was torn between feeling like it was really sweet that he would put in all that effort for something that he didn’t really need to do in order to make things easier on me and feeling weird that soon he wouldn’t even need me for the one thing I could do that he couldn’t. But for now he was still in the ball and he still needed me to interact with most things on my side of the barrier.

He nudged me with the ball. “Something is wrong with the food, question?”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that I’m out of the one that I wanted.”

“Other ones are not good, question?”

“You don’t taste flavors, or, I don’t know, maybe you do, but sometimes humans want specific things,” I said. Rocky still didn’t love talking about eating, so I wasn’t entirely positive if Eridians had any equivalent to sense of taste or not, but I’d definitely gotten that there was a lot less variety of things Eridians ate than humans did. “And right now the thing I want is chocolate cake.”

“Don’t know that word.”

“It’s a type of food. It’s a dessert. We eat it at parties. It tastes really good and… I mean, it’s really meant for sharing. It’s kind of sad to eat cake alone.”

Rocky made a sound that was kind of like a laugh and kind of like a disbelieving snort. “Human social eating. Strange strange strange. Humans are weird perverts.”

It wasn’t anything new, it was a running joke, but it was not what I wanted to hear right then. “I can’t help it if eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing, okay? Eridians are the weird perverts for getting weird about it! It’s important to me even if you think it’s stupid! I’m allowed to miss it!”

I didn’t mean to snap that forcefully, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Rocky was quiet, then when he responded, his tone was clipped. “I know. All you want to talk about is food anymore. I sit with Grace while eat because it makes you sad not to. You think I don’t know this.”

“All I want to talk about is food anymore because I’m afraid of starving, Rock. Even Eridians have to worry about that!”

“I know!” The whistle in his tone was frustrated. He made a noise kind of like “ugh” then said, “Was trying to make joke. Was not trying to insult.”

I had the presence of mind not to say “well, you did,” but what I did say was more like, “Mmh.” I got up and rifled through the food packets again. I paused over the babaganoush. That was eggplant, right? We’d has something like that at Ilyukhina’s party, back when I was on Earth and worrying about food was something abstract for me. Something I knew was a real problem in the world, but not one I’d ever faced.

Maybe even if I was still on Earth, I’d be worrying about having enough food. But at least everyone else would be, too, and they’d be willing to commiserate.

That wasn’t fair. I knew Rocky was worried about me. He spent a lot of time fretting over my health and my safety and if I was sleeping enough and if I had enough food and if I was feeling restless or bored and he freaked out a lot the first time I threw up the taumoeba slime because he was afraid his suggestion had killed me. I had to reassure him that I was fine and I wasn’t dying even as I had no idea if that was true or not.

“My turn to choose the movie tonight,” I said, as I mixed water into the babaganoush to rehydrate it. “The Great British Bake-Off.”

“Don’t know two of those words,” said Rocky.

“It’s relaxing. Humans like watching it because it’s calming. And I still miss cake.”

It was not relaxing or calming to Rocky. I could tell he was on edge the whole time. “Grace didn’t say it was food show,” he said accusingly.

“Like I said. Eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing.”

Rocky bunched up his arms around his carapace in a way I could tell was an expression of discomfort, and as much as it made me feel like a total jerk, it was also kind of satisfying. I was feeling like crap, watching this show while eating rehydrated chemical-infused babaganoush was making me feel like crap, and maybe I had decided to do that because I wanted Rocky to join me in feeling like crap. Also, babaganoush is a slime, which I hadn’t consciously remembered until I chose it. Three square meals of slime today. It didn’t even really leave me feeling full, and after I finished it, I couldn’t just heat up another one, because I had a ration schedule. I could eat more taumoeba, but eating taumoeba while watching polite and friendly British bakers in their cute sunny kitchens and green grassy lawns make cake I couldn’t eat would probably have pushed me over the edge.

“Grace feeling relaxed and calm now, question?” Rocky asked.

“I’m still hungry,” I grumbled. It wasn’t Rocky’s fault that he had 220 years’ worth of food and I had three, but it was hard to believe that when my stomach was grumbling and I had only eaten slime all day.

“Can eat taumoeba—”

“I don’t want taumoeba!” I was acting like a child and I didn’t care. I think I was also crying. “I want to go home.”

Rocky rolled his ball closer to me. “What can I do that would make Grace feel more like home?”

“You can’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. You can’t. The Hail Mary isn’t home and neither of us know what’s going to happen on Erid, if I’ll just die or what—”

“Erid will be Grace’s home! Grace won’t die!”

“It won’t be, and you don’t know that!” And now I was yelling, which Rocky didn’t deserve, but—“Nobody there knows me, nobody there will know or care what humans do, even you—you don’t really get it, and nobody ever will again and I’m going to feel like this forever—”

“I have been TRYING!” Rocky’s pitch shot up almost past the point I could hear him, and he had to bristle and compose himself to drop his voice back into the range my weak stupid human ears could pick up. “Trying everything that I can to make you comfortable and tolerate your stupid food rules because everything is about food always and you get sad when you eat alone and get sad when you eat taumoeba and get sad when you eat coma slurry and I watch your human movies where everybody is eating together all the time and you talk about how much you want to eat the food they are eating and it doesn’t matter that I try to make the Hail Mary comfortable for you and change my voice to talk to you and make xenonite suit so I can do outside hull tasks so you don’t have to do them all, because I can’t make more food for you! Don’t know what else I can do!”

“You can’t!” I said. “And I didn’t ask you to do any of that! You can’t fix what’s actually wrong!”

“I know!” Rocky hissed steam out of his vents, then said, in a tone so measured it was almost insulting, “Rocky can’t fix what is actually wrong. So I try to fix what I can. But Grace needs to tell me what can be fixed or else I have to guess and then make Grace angry that I try.” His words were choppy again, like he needed to use small words to get the point across.

The screen still showed happy humans being nice to each other on a sunny, happy Earth that probably didn’t even exist anymore and it was making me feel awful about everything. “I want to go home,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong. And that can’t be fixed, because I’m gonna be eating taumoeba soup alone on Erid forever and that was the stupid choice I made. I wish I’d never turned around.”

Rocky was quiet at that.

I should have apologized. I should have said I didn’t mean it. The problem was, right then, I did.

Stratt once told me I was a good man. She’s not wrong often but I think she was wrong on that one.

Then Rocky rolled forward and bumped his xenonite ball against me roughly. “Grace is being stupid. Grace sleep now.”

“I’m not tired.” I tried to shove his ball. Obviously it didn’t move because he weighs about three hundred pounds.

“Don’t care. Humans can choose when sleep. So Grace sleep now. Statement.”

It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Neither could I come up with anything to say to Rocky that would make what I’d just said not horrible.

So I acquiesced, and I went to sleep.

Or I tried to. I mean, I brushed my teeth (I was running low on toothpaste, too) and flopped into my bed and pressed my face into the pillow and pointedly kept it there.

When Rocky was confident I was actually in bed, I heard his xenonite ball roll away. I looked up from sulking into my pillow in shock, sure that he hadn’t actually just left while I was sleeping. But he had.

It hurt way, way more than I expected.

“Screw you,” I mumbled into the pillow. And then felt bad.

Down the hall in Rocky’s half of the ship, I heard the muffled rush of escaping air I’d only heard a few times before when Rocky was very, very worked up, a sound that meant he was in the other room screaming in frustration.

Me too, buddy. We both got to be mad and miserable, I guess.

Unfortunately Rocky was right that lying down in my bed was making me feel… if not better, at least more tired. It was like the anger that had been pent up inside me that had been giving me energy was gone and now I was just tired. Tired, and stupid.

Was this it? Was this really my whole future? I couldn’t even avoid pissing off and getting pissed off by Rocky, who was easily the best friend I had ever had. He was still so sure that all of Erid was going to love me and dedicate round-the-clock care to making sure I could thrive in his crushing boiling ammonia world, when I wasn’t even convinced he would still love me by the time we got there. Definitely not if I was going to act like this.

It wasn’t his fault that he was going home and I wasn’t. It wasn’t his fault we both messed up the taumoeba breeding because neither of us could have predicted that taumoeba would adapt to escape xenonite, any more than it was anyone’s fault that his crew had all died and Yao and Ilyukhina had also both died and the two of us were the ones who survived due to pure stupid luck.

It wasn’t anybody’s fault, which made it feel really bad to get mad about.

I sniffled into the pillow. It brought back memories of grad school, getting comments back from my committee on my dissertation chapters; my advisor was helpful but thorough with her commentary, rewriting so many sentences and correcting my commas and n-dashes every single time, and I had a pure Reviewer 2 type who would add comments like “What? That’s not correct” and “this sentence is incoherent” and “this isn’t the original source for this theory, you should be citing Whoever, Date.” And it would make me feel like crap every time and I’d punch my bed and sulk and feel sorry for myself, and then take a nap because I didn’t want to deal with that right then. And when I woke up from my nap I would be ready to face the files again and make the changes.

It had never occurred to me before how lucky humans are that if we don’t feel like dealing with our feelings right away we can instead cry and take a nap. Eridians can’t do either thing.

I was doing a lot of napping on the Hail Mary on my way back to Erid, ostensibly to conserve my energy and stretch out my food supply, but mostly because there were long stretches where I had nothing else to do.

When Rocky was alone on the Blip-A, before I’d come to Tau Ceti and after the taumoeba had escaped and eaten all his astrophage fuel, he couldn’t even do that.

Yeah, telling him I wished I had left him like that was a really shitty thing to do.

This was what I was supposed to be going to sleep to avoid thinking about.

Rocky still wasn’t back. I fell asleep feeling bad and also very alone.

—

He was back when I woke up.

“Oh,” I said. “How long have you been there?”

“Hours. Grace feeling less stupid, question?”

“A little.” I was actually still feeling extremely stupid, but close enough.

Rocky fidgeted with something or other in his hands. I didn’t know if it was an actual project or just something to fidget with. He hummed a little, a low sound that didn’t mean anything. I guess he didn’t know what to say any more than I did.

“Uh,” I said.

Smooth.

A few years ago, I’d had to sit a student down and have a talk about why it was inappropriate to tell your classmate you hope they die. What would I say to me if I were a seventh grader having a fight with my friend?

“I’m sorry I said that to you,” I said, finally. I couldn’t truthfully say I hadn’t meant it, because yesterday, when I said it, I did. But I felt gross at yesterday-me for feeling that way. And I had to say something. “I don’t mean it. I don’t actually wish I’d made a different choice. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t leave you like that.”

“I know.”

“I’m not actually mad at you,” I went on, because Rocky was being unnervingly quiet. “I’m trying to be hopeful about going to Erid. I really am. I’m just…” I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.

“Erid is not your home,” Rocky said.

“Yeah.”

He kept fidgeting. Then he said, “When taumoeba escaped, I thought I would die on the ship and never go home, never save Erid. Then Grace came back. Gave up everything for me. But now there is nothing I can do for you even close to what you did for me. Never will be, no matter how much I try. Because I am going home and Grace is not and there is no way to change that.”

“I wouldn’t have even had the possibility of going back to Earth in the first place if it wasn’t for you,” I said. “So it’s a net zero change, really.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that. But it was better to believe than anything else.

Rocky made a sound that indicated he didn’t really believe I believed that either.

“If it helps,” I said, “there’s no way I would have ever been happy on Earth again if I’d left you stranded in space.” That was true. When I’d been facing down the choice to keep going to Earth or turn around for Rocky, even when I’d been trying to find a way to convince myself that Rocky would be okay and I could go home… I knew deep down that I wouldn’t know how to live with myself after, if I’d just left him there to die.

Rocky slumped a little. “Going home, or tired and hungry and restless always. No way for Grace to be happy then.”

I knew he’d been stressing about this, but I don’t think I’d realized how much he’d been stressing about this. I mean, I’d been stressing about this, but that was because I was going to have to live it. “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”

“I’m trying too.”

“I know.”

I think sleeping did make me feel better, at least a little bit. I didn’t feel as hopeless about the future as I did last night. “And hey,” I said, “If I had to be trapped in a tiny spaceship for four years on the way to a brand new planet with anybody, I’m glad it’s you.”

That earned a little laugh equivalent from Rocky. “We save stars together. We can do anything.”

“Yeah. I believe in us.” I thought about it, and then added, “Although, just so you know, when I’m feeling sad about missing Earth and hungry for Earth food, that’s not a good time to make fun of human eating habits, okay?”

“Understand. Sorry sorry sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt. Wouldn’t hurt on purpose.” Rocky clicked his fingers against the bottom of the ball. Then he said, sounding cautious, “Also. When human movie has eating scene that will be long or gross, please tell Rocky that will happen. So many movies have them, and is uncomfortable when not expecting. Regent of the Southern Kingdom was disturbing.”

“Regent—oh. Yeah. The Denethor scene is supposed to be disturbing, even to humans.”

“It worked.”

“I can do that, yeah. Springing Bake-Off on you last night was mean.”

“It was. I was trying to help and felt like you were punishing me.”

“I kind of was. I was being a jerk.” I sighed. “I think… I don’t know. It feels stupid to say it isn’t fair. But. I think that’s it, isn’t it? It isn’t fair.”

“Isn’t fair,” Rocky agreed.

“And if it can’t be fixed, it just… feels better to know that you know it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed, you know? Rather than try to fix it.”

“Not really.”

“Well. It does.”

“Will try. Well. Try to not fix unless you want.”

“Thanks.”

I sat cross-legged on my bed in silence for a couple seconds. Then, because sitting in silence has never been a thing I’ve been particularly good at, I asked, “Are you mad at me?”

“Not mad now,” Rocky said. “Frustrated. But mostly frustrated because it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed and don’t know what to do.”

“Yeah. Same here.”

I didn’t really know what to go from there, because I was already exhausted from trying to talk about my feelings and my next thought was “I’m hungry” which probably would not be a welcome topic of conversation right now. (It was coma slurry time. Wonderful.)

“Grace wants to see body suit progress, question?” Rocky asked.

“Oh,” I said. “Sure, yeah.” Rocky showing me the stuff he was making was much more comfortable territory.

Rocky rolled away. I stretched and got up. I could sulk about it, but this was going to be my future, and I didn’t want to spend it resenting Rocky.

I had changed into new clothes and was brushing my teeth by the time Rocky came back. He stepped stiffly and awkwardly, the form-fitting xenonite suit still clearly bulkier than was comfortable.

I spit into the sink, which earned a disapproving chitter from Rocky, then rinsed my mouth out and jogged back over to the “bedroom” area. “Hey! That’s impressive.”

“Still needs work on usage flexibility and use-length,” Rocky said. “More flexibility means less air inside, which means harder temperature regulation, so can only wear it safely for 36 minutes. Not good for spacewalks yet.”

“It’s cool that you can walk around in it, though,” I said. “And you can operate the controls on my side of Mary. That’s gotta be useful.” I was selfishly glad it wasn’t great yet, though, so Rocky would still need me to do some things on my side of the ship. I was trying to be optimistic but I wasn’t ready to be wholly useless yet.

“Can also do this,” Rocky said. “Get down.”

“What?”

“Get down. On floor.”

“Um, okay,” I said, and sat down on the floor in front of Rocky.

Rocky took a minute shuffling back and forth next to me in the awkward suit. Then, once satisfied, he braced three of his legs and reached out the other two to wrap around me.

“What—oh!”

“Can give Grace hug like this.”

“Oh,” I said, suddenly blinking back tears. “Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you can.”

“Is this good?”

I shifted position so I could hug him back. The xenonite was gently warm. “Yeah. It is.”

“Sorry upset Grace.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m the one who was an ass.”

“Don’t know word.”

“It’s an English swearword. It means jerk, except ruder. It refers to the human backside.”

Rocky yipped in delight. It’s not like he hasn’t picked up words from movies, but I don’t usually define them.

“Okay to tease about leaking?” Rocky asked.

I sniffed. “Yeah. That’s fine.”

“Grace is leaking all over fancy new suit.”

“You’re bringing me home with you, buddy, you have to get used to it.”

“Think I will,” Rocky said. I really, really hoped so. Even with the stiffness of the suit, it still felt completely different from hugging the hamster ball.

“Feeling hug over yet?”

“Nope.”

Rocky made a fond-exasperated noise but let the hug keep going. After a few moments, he said, “I want Grace to be happy on Erid.”