Chapter Text
here and now (atmosphere)
“♫♭♩♩,” the alien says again, making the head-removal gesture. Wait. Not head-removal – helmet-removal.
“Take my helmet off?” I ask him incredulously. (Phrosie’s been making fun of me for calling the faceless rock alien a he. Fair enough. Next alien I meet, I’ll use different pronouns, okay? I’m already two for two.)
The alien trills happily at my grasp of the concept, which, no thanks. “No,” I tell him, shaking my safely-helmeted head. “I’d, you know, pwoom,” I mime an explosion, “and I’d take Phrosie with me. So, uh, no thanks.”
“Grace,” Phrosie says hesitantly over my suit radio, “maybe you could…”
One of the lights begins to flicker behind me. Thank god! A distraction! I hurry over to fiddle with the wiring, saying, “It’s too big an ask, sorry. We literally just met, so I don’t exactly know how confident to be that your tunnel thing won’t leak all my atmosphere out into the void, you know?”
Phrosie huffs into the radio. “It’s already holding your atmospheric pressure, dumbass.” She’d seen me get blasted back as the airlock repressurised in the surprise-not-a-vacuum-this-time atmo of the tunnel. It was, of course, hilarious to her.
“Nope,” I say to her and the alien both. “Sorry. You’re safe behind the airlock, and he’s safe behind his wall thingie, but unfortunately for me, I need oxygen to breathe, so…” Then it hits me. I look down at the (hopefully not) handcuffs.
“Two rings of eight,” Phrosie says smugly. “O2. The little rascal’s already accounted for your atmosphere.”
Excited chords from across the wall. Wait, can he hear Phrosie too? Across his wall and the airlock doors? Jeez, that’s crazy.
“Yeah, uh, I still don’t think I can do it.” Something in my tone clearly dejects the alien, who slumps his carapace a bit lower. I shiver, feeling that presence-hum of his under my skin again take on a tone that I can only interpret as disappointment. I protest, “I’m sorry, it’s just – if I’m wrong, I’m really wrong. I can’t risk her.”
I turn my back on the alien’s bummed-out non-face, but his disappointed resonance still tingles under my skin. And now I’m face to face with Phrosie through my helmet and the airlock window. For once, she’s not saying anything. Just looking at me with those big amber eyes. More familiar than my own heartbeat, my own soul outside of my body; she is me. I’m looking at myself.
She trusts this stranger with our life.
Slowly, hands trembling, I release the lock on my EVA helmet. Phrosie keeps her eyes on me, steadying. I’m thrilling with tension inside to match the alien’s hum, squeezing my eyes shut as I pull the helmet off my head – and gasp, relief pouring into me with every deep inhale of clean oxygen, hearing Phrosie crow proudly in time with the alien’s happy trills as I lift my helmet into the air and we all stand face-to-face for the first time.
here and now (harmony)
“You missed something, you know,” Phrosie says from my shoulders as I reexamine the alien’s gifts, finally down to a reasonable temperature and out of the fume hood. By mutual agreement, we’ve started calling this metal form of xenon xenonite, because it sounds cool as heck.
“Are you gonna tell me what?”
She licks inside of my ear and I yelp at a pitch more foxlike than human. “Hey!”
“Look again, Grace,” she tells me, and I pick up the other model. One large sphere, one smaller sphere, a thick curving line connecting them…
Gosh darn it, she’s right. “It’s the Petrova line.” I throw my hands up in the air. “We’re all here for the same reason. Dang it, Euphrosyne, did you know the whole time?”
She perks her ears up playfully and doesn’t answer.
This time around, there’s no keeping Phrosie out of the Tunnel of Aliens. We have gravity, we have atmosphere, and I have a daemon whose burning curiosity could probably power the sun if the Astrophage really do eat it. She scampers after me as I heft my load of supplies into the tunnel and runs right up to the hot clear wall where our waiting alien friend perks up at our arrival.
I’d been pretty sure he could hear Phrosie earlier, and his seeming lack of surprise at her arrival (if I’m reading his literally alien body language right, which, given that I can barely read human body language is probably a stretch) confirms it. God only knows what he thinks she is, or me, for that matter. Maybe he thinks she’s the brains and I’m her big puppet (not too far from the truth sometimes).
Then again, we’re as alien to him as he is to us. We have nothing to expect of each other but the unexpected.
I feel Phrosie shiver as she comes into range of the alien’s strange/familiar tactile hum. It’s resonating under my skin too, more than a sound and less than a physical presence, an almost synesthetic sensation I keep thinking I could reach out and touch.
A little quiver runs along Phrosie’s spine, and her ears rotate with curiosity. The alien seems just as interested in her, tapping against the clear xenonite and leaning his carapace closer to the wall with low clicks and chords. She bumps her nose against his little claws.
“Grace,” Phrosie says in a strange, distant voice, “he has a soul.”
I trip over my own feet coming to join them. My heart’s pounding as I kneel at the xenonite wall. The closer I get, the more I can feel that familiar certainty that came to me when he and I were first in proximity: that this is a person, a conscious individual person the same way that I am, even though we literally couldn’t look more different. He doesn’t even have a face, but somehow I never had a moment’s doubt that he was. You can tell the difference between someone with an unseen daemon like Stratt’s and someone severed, is the thing. You just know, your daemon just knows, in some intuitive Dust-quantum-consciousness way that science is still figuring out.
“It’s that hum of yours, isn’t it,” I murmur to the alien, and suddenly I hear Phrosie doing her best to mimic the tones that he’s resonating out to us. If I tried, I’d sound insane, but somehow she’s at least approximating an aural version of whatever innate subsonic chord that I’m pretty our alien friend projects in place of a daemon.
And it works. Maybe because she’s made of Dust, a macroscopic manifestation of the elementary particle of consciousness just like the alien’s presence-hum is. Maybe that’s what lets them find a harmony together.
Our friend shoots up on all five legs and starts humming his soul-song aloud in time with her. Then he dips his carapace and shunts two legs together to display a matching pattern carved between them, and lets out a rippling series of chords. A name, it has to be.
I realise I’m a bit teary-eyed with wonder, and try to catch my breath. “Nice to meet you, pal,” I manage to warble. “I’m gonna call you Rocky.”
Rocky jazz-hands at us and gestures excitedly between me and Phrosie, speaking in a tumble of tones. Points to himself, oralises in time with that presence-hum of his, then points at Phrosie with one arm and me with another before bringing both hands together and interlocking his claws.
“He gets it! He understands!” cheers Phrosie, leaping up into my lap to rub her cheek eagerly against my heartbeat.
I jazz-hands back at Rocky, beaming like it’s my birthday. “Yeah, buddy. She’s my soul. I’m sentient, you’re sentient, we’re…sentient bros.”
Phrosie baps with me a paw for that one. Whatever, I’m overwhelmed with profundity here.
here and now (jazz hands)
The next order of business is communicating.
I spend several frustrating minutes trying to explain numbers to a guy who apparently just wants to play with a tape measurer before Phrosie literally jumps into the air with excitement. “Oh! Oh, Grace! He’s like Marissa’s Myskia!”
I’d completely forgotten about Marissa until that moment (thanks, amnesia). I mean, even before I ended up on a spaceship, I hadn’t seen her since I joined the Project, and we were pretty casual buds back on Earth anyways. I’m not exactly good at having friendships. But now I did remember our semi-weekly bar nights, and how she’d been the first person to clue me into the Petrova problem, and how she’d slumped dejectedly over her whiskey as Myskia, her bat daemon, hung just as dejectedly from her ear.
A bat. I’d been so jealous that Marissa had a daemon who could echolocate, I was always peppering her with questions about how his sensorium influenced hers until she inevitably retorted with the “What Does the Fox Say” joke that I’d heard, I swear to god, a hundred billion times. The point being: echolocation.
“It is dark in there,” I muse. “I got an idea. Wait just a second, Rocky, don’t go anywhere – Phrosie, don’t let him go anywhere–”
“What the fuck am I supposed to do if he does?”
“Just – everybody stay! I’ve got an idea!”
It takes me like, thirty seconds tops to find an analog clock (seriously, this ship has everything) and a bunch of electrical tape. I’m frantically rolling up bits of tape and sticking them over the clock numbers to make a tactile surface as I stumble back into the tunnel.
“Echolocation, right, Rocky? You need surfaces to see. Probably passive sonar and active, too, I’ve seen you tapping a lot… Here, try this.”
I press the clock up against the xenonite and point to the numbers. Rocky’s smart, I see him get it immediately. He jazz-hands at me again, makes a wait gesture, and darts off into the dark of his spaceship.
Turns out Rocky’s really smart. The Eridian version of an analog clock he shows me doesn’t just prove that we can succeed at clock-to-clock communication; it also tells me what Eridian numbers look like, that they use a base six system, that they read from left to right, and the length of an Eridian second and minute. I nerd out over all of this and type everything down eagerly while Phrosie tries to teach Rocky how to do a human-style thumbs up.
It’s not going well. Mostly because, again, she has no opposable thumbs. And his fingers come in sets of three. I think we’ll just stick with jazz hands.
here and now (save stars)
Two hundred fifty words in on my hacked-together Excel-MIDI Eridian-to-English translator and we finally have enough shared language to communicate about Astrophage.
“Astrophage on me star, bad bad bad bad bad bad bad bad,” Phrosie reads out from the computer. The three of us share a moment of bleak commiseration.
“Us too,” I say.
Rocky trills something else, and Phrosie lets out a little whimper at what she reads. I join her at the computer, and see: Rocky happy not alone.
My heart sinks. He’s the only person on that giant spaceship? What the heck happened to him? God, how long has he been out here all alone? The idea of being out here with no one makes me go cold to the bone.
Phrosie nudges up under my arm and I cuddle her close. Sure, Rocky’s soulsong (which is what I’ve decided to call it, even if it’s not actually something I can hear, because it sounds better than subsonic resonance emanating from the quantum of consciousness) is his version of a daemon. But you can’t hold a hum, you can’t talk to it. Having a pattern that defines you isn’t the same thing as never having to be alone.
“Why are you alone?” Phrosie asks Rocky softly. She’s never shown a hint of shyness around talking to him the way that daemons usually do with talking to other people. Partly because social norms kinda go out the window when you meet an intelligent alien in space, I think, and partly because…well, I don’t know. I guess we really trust him.
Rocky’s voice is lower than I’ve ever heard it. The computer struggles to pick it up.
Was twenty-three Eridians on ship. Now only one.
“Twenty-three,” I breathe. “What happened to them?”
I can guess the answer even before Rocky shows us, giving a sad, quiet pantomime of death from across the wall. Phrosie’s tail droops as I add died to our vocabulary list.
“How did they die?” I ask hesitantly.
Rocky not know. Only Rocky not died. Rocky could not fix.
God. Horror on top of horror. I can’t bring myself to ask how long it’s been. I can’t even think of anything to say, but Rocky spares me by asking, How many humans on Grace ship, question? Can only see Grace and ♫Phrosie.
There’s some kind of extra echoing chord he adds on whenever he says Phrosie’s name, or says my name in a way that somehow includes Phrosie. Something that has to do with however his language describes consciousness and Dust, though I haven’t yet been able to figure out its exact meaning.
Then Rocky’s question really hits me. I take off my glasses to rub my eyes and automatically place them on top of Phrosie’s head, like I always do.
“Oh…um, there were six of us, I guess. Three humans, three daemons.” I want to say their names – Yáo and Fèng, Ilyukhina and Vasilisa – but the memory of releasing my crewmates’ bodies to sail daemonless and undecaying through space forever is still too sharp.
Phrosie says it for me. “The others died on the way here.”
I stroke the top of her head, dislodging my glasses. “I wish I knew why. Now it’s only the two of us.”
Rocky sings out a chord. I look down at the computer.
Only three of us.
Three of us, I think. And it’s not the same thing, but I remember all the press releases that talked about the Hail Mary and her crew of three (“Daemon erasure,” Phrosie always sniffed). The three astronauts who would sail across lightyears as the Earth’s last hopes. The three heroes who were our chance to save the world.
None of this has gone how it’s supposed to. I don’t remember why I ended up here, but I know I wasn’t originally meant to be on the mission. I’m no astronaut and I’m definitely no hero. And Rocky wasn’t meant to be out here alone.
But he’s right. “The three of us,” I agree, smiling at him.
Grace♫ Rocky save stars.
It’s my name with the tone he uses for Phrosie. Our name, I guess. Phrosie lets out a quiet little hum in harmony with Rocky’s ever-present soulsong, and I kneel in front of the xenonite to press my fist against Rocky’s.
“Deal,” I tell him. I can feel his hand through the xenonite, its incredible heat softened into a gentle warmth.
Phrosie, with the kind of perfect moment-ruining timing that really proves she’s my daemon, butts in. “That’s called a fist-bump, by the way. What you two are doing.”
Rocky trills something in response, and Phrosie scampers back to the computer to read it. Except instead of telling me what it says, she just falls over laughing. Straight-up cackling harder than I’ve ever heard her.
“What? What’d he say?” I cry, but Phrosie paws at the keys like a pet cat until she’s managed to delete Rocky’s last words.
“Nothing nothing nothing,” she insists in Eridian-style triplicate, still snickering like crazy. “The same thing you did. Don’t worry about it. Also, I love this guy.”
I’m starting to get the feeling that aliens might be a bad influence on my daemon.