Project Hail Mary

Chapter 12

Tap-tap-tap.

The sound barely penetrates my consciousness. It’s far away.

Tap-tap-tap.

I wake from a dreamless sleep. “Huh?”

Tap-tap-tap.

“Breakfast,” I mumble.

The mechanical arms reach into a compartment and pull out a packaged meal. It’s like Christmas every morning around here. I pull the top off and steam wafts out in all directions. There’s a breakfast burrito inside.

“Nice,” I say. “Coffee?”

“Preparing…”

I take a bite of the breakfast burrito. It’s good. All the food is good. I guess they figured if we’re going to die, we may as well eat good stuff.

“Coffee,” says the computer. A mechanical arm hands me a pouch with a pinch-straw in it. Like a Capri Sun for adults. Zero-g accommodations.

I let the burrito float nearby and take a sip of coffee. It’s delicious, of course. It even has just the right amount of cream and sugar. That’s a very personal preference that varies wildly from person to person.

Tap-tap-tap.

What is that, anyway?

I check the LCD screen taped near my bunk. Rocky is in the tunnel tapping on the divider wall.

“Computer! How long was I asleep?”

“Patient was unconscious for ten hours and seventeen minutes.”

“Oh crud!”

I wriggle out of my bedding and bounce up through the ship toward the control room. I carry the burrito and coffee with me because I’m starving.

I bounce into the tunnel. “Sorry! Sorry!”

Rocky taps the divider louder than before now that I’m here. He points to the Popsicle-stick numbers I taped to the divider and then to his clock. He balls one of his hands into a fist.

“I’m sorry!” I clasp my hands together as if praying. I don’t know what else to do. There’s no interplanetary symbol for supplication. I don’t know if he understands, but he unclenches his fist.

Maybe it was a mild admonishment. I mean, he could have made five fists, but he only made one.

Anyway, I kept him waiting over two hours. He’s understandably upset. Hopefully this next trick will make up for it.

I hold up a finger. He returns the gesture.

I grab my duct-taped laptops and launch the waveform-analysis software on one and Excel on the other. I press them against the tunnel wall and secure them there with tape.

I pull the Popsicle-stick numbers off the divider wall. They’re as good a place to start as any. I hold up the “I” and point to it. “One,” I say. “One.”

I point to my mouth, then back to the Eridian number. “One.” Then I point to Rocky.

He points to the “I” and says “♪.”

I pause the waveform analyzer and scroll back a few seconds. “There we go…” Rocky’s word for “one” is just two notes played at the same time. There are a bunch of harmonics and resonances in there, too, but the main frequency peaks are just two notes.

I type “one” into the spreadsheet on the other computer and note the relevant frequencies.

“Okay…” I return to the divider and hold up the “V” symbol. “Two,” I say.

“♪,” he says. Another one-syllable word. The oldest words in a language are usually the shortest.

This time, it’s a chord made of four distinct notes. I enter “two” and record the frequencies for that word.

He starts to get excited. I think he knows what I’m up to and it’s got him happy.

I hold up the “λ” and before I can even speak, he points to it and says, “♫♪.”

Excellent. Our first two-syllable word. I have to scroll back and forth a bit in the waveform data to get the chords right. The first syllable has just two notes and the second has five! Rocky can make at least five different notes at the same time. He must have multiple sets of vocal cords or something. Well, he has five arms and five hands. So why not five sets of vocal cords?

I don’t see a mouth anywhere. The notes are just coming from somewhere inside him. When I first heard him speak, I thought it sounded like whale song. That may have been more accurate than I thought. Whales sound like they do because they move air back and forth across their vocal cords without expelling it. Rocky may be doing the same thing.

Tap-tap-tap-tap!

“What?” I look back at him.

He points to the “λ” symbol still in my hand and then to me. Then back to the “λ” and back to me. He’s almost frantic about it.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. I hold the digit up properly and say, “Three.”

He does jazz hands. I throw some jazz hands back.

Huh. While we’re on the subject…

I stand still for a moment so he’ll know there was a break in the conversation. Then I do jazz hands and say, “Yes.”

I repeat the gesture. “Yes.”

He does it back to me and says, “♫♩.”

I note and record the frequencies in my laptop.

“Okay, we have ‘yes’ in our vocabulary now,” I say.

Tap-tap-tap.

I look over. Once he knows he has my attention, he does jazz hands again and says, “♫♩.” Same chord as before.

“Yes,” I say. “We covered this.”

He holds up a finger for a moment. Then he balls two of his fists and taps them together. “♪♪.”

…What?

“Ohhh,” I say. I’m a teacher. What would I teach someone who just learned the word ‘yes’?

“That’s ‘no.’ ”

At least I hope so.

I ball my fists and tap them together. “No.”

“♫♩,” he says. I check the laptop. He just said yes.

Wait. Does that mean it’s not no? Is that another yes? Now I’m confused.

“No?” I ask

“No,” he says in Eridian.

“So, ‘yes’?”

“No, yes.”

“Yes?”

“No. No.”

“Yes, yes?”

“No!” He balls a fist at me, clearly frustrated.

Enough of this interspecies Abbott and Costello routine. I hold up a finger.

He unballs his fist and returns the gesture.

I enter the frequencies for what I think is “no” into my spreadsheet. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong and we’ll work it out later.

I hold up the “+” symbol. “Four.”

He holds up three fingers on one hand, and one finger on another. “♩♩.”

I make note of the frequencies.

For the next several hours, we expand our shared vocabulary to several thousand words. Language is kind of an exponential system. The more words you know, the easier it is to describe new ones.

Communication is hampered by my slow and clumsy system for listening to Rocky. I check the frequencies he emits with one laptop, then look them up in my spreadsheet on the other laptop. It’s not a great system. I’ve had enough.

I excuse myself for an hour to write some software. I’m not a computer expert, but I know some rudimentary programming. I write a program to take the audio-analysis software’s output and look up the words in my table. It’s barely even a program—more of a script. It’s not efficient at all, but computers are fast.

Fortunately, Rocky speaks with musical chords. While it’s very difficult to make a computer turn human speech into text, it’s very easy to make a computer identify musical notes and find them in a table.

From that point on, my laptop screen shows me the English translation of what Rocky is saying in real-time. When a new word comes up, I enter it into my database and the computer knows it from then on.

Rocky, meanwhile, doesn’t use any system to record what I’m saying or doing. No computer, no writing implement, no microphone. Nothing. He just pays attention. And as far as I can tell, he remembers everything I told him. Every word. Even if I only told it to him once several hours earlier. If only my students were that attentive!

I suspect Eridians have much better memory than humans.

Broadly speaking, the human brain is a collection of software hacks compiled into a single, somehow-functional unit. Each “feature” was added as a random mutation that solved some specific problem to increase our odds of survival.

In short, the human brain is a mess. Everything about evolution is messy. So, I assume Eridians are also a mess of random mutations. But whatever led to their brains being how they are, it gave them what we humans would call “photographic memory.”

It’s probably even more complicated than that. Humans have a whole chunk of our brains dedicated to sight, and it even has its own memory cache. Maybe Eridians are just really good at remembering sounds. After all, it’s their primary sense.

I know it’s too early, but I can’t wait any longer. I get a vial of Astrophage from the lab supplies and bring it to the tunnel. I hold it up. “Astrophage,” I say.

Rocky’s entire posture changes. He hunkers his carapace a little lower. He tightens his claws a bit on the bars he uses to keep in place. “♫♪♫,” he says, his voice more quiet than usual.

I check the computer. It’s not a word I’ve recorded yet. It must be his word for Astrophage. I note it in the database.

I point to the vial. “Astrophage on my star. Bad.”

“♫♩♪♫ ♫♪♫♩ ♫♪♫,” Rocky says.

The computer translates: Astrophage on me star. Bad bad bad.

Okay! Theory confirmed. He’s here for the same reason I am. I want to ask so many more questions. But we just don’t have the words. It’s infuriating!

“♫♫ ♫♩♪♪♫ ♫♪♫,” Rocky says.

My computer pops up the text: You come from where, question?

Rocky has picked up the basic word ordering of English. I think he realized early on that I can’t automatically remember stuff, so he works with my system rather than trying to teach me his. I probably seem pretty stupid, honestly. But some of his own grammar sneaks in once in a while. He always ends a question with the word “question.”

“No understand,” I say.

“You star is what name, question?”

“Oh!” I say. He wants the name of my star. “Sol. My star is called ‘Sol.’ ”

“Understand. Eridian name for you star is ♫♪♫♪♩♩.”

I note down the new word. That’s Rocky’s word for “Sol.” Unlike two humans fumbling to communicate, Rocky and I can’t even pronounce each other’s proper nouns.

“My name for your star is ‘Eridani,’ ” I say. Technically we call it “40 Eridani,” but I decide to keep it simple.

“Eridian name for my star is ♫♩♪♪♪.”

I add the word to the dictionary. “Understand.”

“Good.”

I don’t have to read the computer screen for that particular translation. I’ve started to recognize some of the more frequent words like “you,” “me,” “good,” “bad,” et cetera. I’ve never been artistic and I’m about as far from having a musical ear as anyone can be. But after you hear a chord a hundred times, you tend to remember it.

I check my watch—yes, I have a watch now. The stopwatch has a clock feature. It took me a while to notice. I had other things on my mind.

We’ve been at it all day and I’m exhausted. Do Eridians even know what sleep is? I guess it’s time to find out.

“Human bodies must sleep. Sleep is this.” I curl up into a ball and close my eyes in an overdramatic representation of sleep. I make a fake snoring sound because I’m a bad actor.

I return to normal and point to his clock. “Humans sleep for twenty-nine thousand seconds.”

Along with perfect memory, Eridians are extremely good at math. At least, Rocky is. As we worked our way through scientific units, it became immediately apparent that he can convert from his units to mine in the blink of an eye. And he has no problem understanding base ten.

“Many seconds…” he says. “Why be still so many seconds, question…Understand!”

He relaxes his limbs and they go limp. He curls up like a dead bug and remains motionless for a while. “Eridians same! ♪♫♫♪!”

Oh thank God. I can’t imagine explaining “sleep” to someone who had never heard of it. Hey, I’m going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can’t do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.

I add his word for “sleep” to the dictionary.

I turn to leave. “I’m going to sleep now. I’ll come back in twenty-nine thousand seconds.”

“I observe,” he says.

“You observe?”

“I observe.”

“Uh…”

He wants to watch me sleep? In any other context that would be creepy, but when you’re studying a new life-form it’s appropriate, I guess.

“I will be still for twenty-nine thousand seconds,” I warn him. “Many seconds. I will not do anything.”

“I observe. Wait.”

He returns to his ship. Is he finally going to get something to take notes with? After a few minutes, he comes back with a device in one of his hands and a satchel held in two more.

“I observe.”

I point to the device. “What is that?”

“♫♪♩♫.” He pulls some kind of tool out of the satchel. “♫♪♩♫ not function.” He pokes the device with the tool a few times. “I change. ♫♪♩♫ function.”

I don’t bother to note down the new word. What would I enter it as? “Thing Rocky was holding that one time”? Whatever it is, it has a couple of wires sticking out and an opening that reveals some complex internals.

The object itself is irrelevant. The point is he’s repairing it. New word for us.

“Fix.” I say. “You fix.”

“♫♪♫♪,” he says.

I add “fix” to the dictionary. I suspect it’ll come up a lot.

He wants to watch me sleep. He knows it’s not going to be exciting, but he wants to do it anyway. So he brought some work with him to keep busy.

Okay. Whatever floats his boat.

“Wait,” I say.

I return to the ship and head to the dormitory.

I pull the mattress pad, sheets, and blanket from my bunk. I could use one of the other two bunks but…they had my dead friends in them so I don’t want to.

I bring the pad and sheets through the lab, awkwardly through the control room, and into the tunnel. I use a copious amount of duct tape to affix the mattress pad to the wall, then cinch up the sheets and blanket.

“I sleep now,” I say.

“Sleep.”

I turn off the lights in the tunnel. Total darkness for me, no effect for Rocky, who wants to watch me. Best of both worlds.

I shimmy into bed and resist the urge to say good night. It would just lead to more questions.

I drift off to the occasional clink and scrape of Rocky working on his device.

The next several days are repetitive, but far from boring. We greatly increase our shared vocabulary and a decent amount of grammar. Tenses, plurals, conditionals…language is tricky. But we’re getting it piece by piece.

And slow though the process is, I’m memorizing more of his language. I don’t need the computer as often. Though I still can’t go without it completely—that’ll take a long time.

I spend an hour every day studying Eridian vocabulary. I made a little script to pick random words from my Excel spreadsheet and play the notes with a MIDI app. Again, a rudimentary program, inefficiently written but computers are fast. I want to be free of the spreadsheet as soon as I can. For now, I still need it all the time. But once in a while I’ll understand an entire sentence without resorting to the computer. Baby steps.

Every night, I sleep in the tunnel. He watches. I don’t know why. We haven’t talked about it yet. We’ve been too busy with other stuff. But he really doesn’t want me to sleep without him watching. Even if I just want to catch a quick nap.

Today I want to work on an extremely important scientific unit that’s been eluding us. Mainly because we live in zero g.

“We need to talk about mass.”

“Yes. Kilogram.”

“Right. How do I tell you about a kilogram?” I ask.

Rocky produces a small ball from his satchel. It’s about the size of a ping-pong ball. “I know mass of this ball. You measure. You tell me how many kilograms ball is. Then I know kilogram.”

He thought it through!

“Yes! Give me the ball.”

He hangs on to several support poles with various hands and puts it in the mini-airlock. After a few minutes of waiting for it to cool, I have it in my hands. It’s smooth and made of a metal. Fairly dense, I think.

“How will I measure this?” I mumble.

“Twenty-six,” Rocky says out of nowhere.

“What about twenty-six?”

He points to the ball in my hand. “Ball is twenty-six.”

Oh, I get it. The ball weighs twenty-six of something. Whatever his unit is. Okay. All I have to do is work out the mass of this ball, divide by twenty-six, and tell him the answer.

“I understand. The ball is a mass of twenty-six.”

“No. Is not.”

I pause. “It isn’t?”

“Is not. Ball is twenty-six.”

“I don’t understand.”

He thinks for a moment, then says, “Wait.”

He disappears into his ship.

While he’s gone, I speculate on how to weigh something in zero g. It still has mass, of course. But I can’t just put it on a scale. There’s no gravity. And I can’t spin up the Hail Mary’s centrifugal gravity. The tunnel is connected to her nose.

I could make a small centrifuge. Something big enough for the smallest lab scale I have. Rotate at some constant rate with the scale inside. Measure something I know the mass of and then measure the ball. I could calculate the mass of the ball from the ratio of the two measurements.

But I’d have to build a consistent centrifuge. How would I do that? I can spin something in the zero-g environment of the lab easily enough, but how do I spin it at a constant rate across multiple experiments?

Oooh! I don’t need a constant rate! I just need a string with a mark in the center!

I fly into the Hail Mary. Rocky will forgive me for running off. Heck, he can probably “observe” me from wherever he is on his ship anyway.

I bring the ball down to the lab. I get a piece of nylon string and tie each end around a plastic sample canister. I now have a string with little buckets at each end. I put the canisters next to each other and pull the now-folded string taut. I use a pen to mark the farthest point. That’s the exact center of this contraption.

I wave the ball back and forth with my hand to get a feel for its mass. Probably less than a pound. Less than half a kilogram.

I leave everything floating in the lab and kick my way down to the dormitory.

“Water,” I say.

“Water requested,” says the computer. The metal arms hand me a zero-g “sipper” of water. Just a plastic pouch with a straw on it that only lets water through if you unlatch a little clip. And inside is 1 liter of water. The arms always give me water a liter at a time. You have to stay hydrated if you want to save the world.

I return to the lab. I squirt about half of the water into a sample box and seal it. I put the half-depleted sipper into one of the buckets and the metal ball into the other. I set the whole thing spinning in the air.

The two masses clearly aren’t equal. The lopsided rotation of the two connected containers shows the water side is much heavier. Good. That’s what I wanted.

I pluck it out of the air and take a sip of water. I start it spinning again. Still off-center but not as bad.

I take more sips, do more spins, take more sips, and so on until my little device rotates perfectly around the marked center point.

That means the mass of the water is equal to the mass of the ball.

I pull out the sippy. I know the density of water—it’s 1 kilogram per liter. So all I need to know is the volume of this water to know its mass and therefore the mass of the metal ball.

I get a large plastic syringe from the supplies. It can pull a maximum of 100 cc of volume.

I attach the syringe to the sippy and unclip the straw. I draw out 100 cc of water, then squirt it into my “wastewater box.” I repeat this a few more times. The last syringe is only about a quarter full when I empty the bag.

Result: 325 ccs of water, which weighs 325 grams! Therefore Rocky’s ball also weighs 325 grams.

I return to the tunnel to tell Rocky all about how smart I am.

He balls a fist at me as I enter. “You left! Bad!”

“I measured the mass! I made a very smart experiment.”

He holds up a string with beads on it. “Twenty-six.”

The beaded string is just like the ones he sent me back when we talked about our atmospheres—

“Oh,” I say. It’s an atom. That’s how he talks about atoms. I count the beads. There are twenty-six in all.

He’s talking about element 26—one of the most common elements on Earth. “Iron,” I say. I point at the necklace. “Iron.”

He points at the necklace and says, “♫♩♪♫♫.” I record the word in my dictionary.

“Iron,” he says again, pointing at the necklace.

“Iron.”

He points to the ball in my hand. “Iron.”

It takes a second to sink in. Then I slap my forehead.

“You are bad.”

It was a fun experiment, but a total waste of time. Rocky was giving me all the information I needed. Or trying to, at least. I know how dense iron is, and I know how to calculate the volume of a sphere. Getting to mass from there is just a little arithmetic.

I pull a pair of calipers out of the toolkit I keep in the tunnel and measure the sphere’s diameter. It’s 4.3 centimeters. From that I work out the volume, multiply by the density of iron, and get a much more precise and accurate mass of 328.25 grams.

“I was only off by one percent,” I grumble.

“You talk to you, question?”

“Yes! I’m talking to me.”

“Humans are unusual.”

“Yes,” I say.

Rocky stretches his legs. “I sleep now.”

“Wow,” I say. This is the first time he’s had to sleep since we met. Good. This will provide me some time for some lab work. But how much time?

“How long do Eridians sleep?”

“I not know.”

“You don’t know? You’re Eridian. How can you not know how long Eridians sleep?”

“Eridians not know how long sleep last. Maybe short time. Maybe long time.”

They sleep unpredictable amounts of time. I guess there’s no rule saying sleep has to evolve as a regular pattern. Does he at least know a range of times it might be?

“Is there a minimum time? A maximum time?”

“Minimum is 12,265 seconds. Maximum is 42,928 seconds.”

I often get strangely specific numbers from Rocky on things that should be rough estimates. It took me a while to figure out, but I finally did. He actually is coming up with rough, round numbers. But they’re in his units and in base six. It’s actually easier for him to convert those values to base-ten Earth seconds than it is for him to think directly in Earth seconds.

If I converted those values back to Eridian seconds and looked at the numbers in base six, I bet they’d be some round number. But I’m too lazy. Why un-convert data he already converted? I’ve never seen him be wrong on arithmetic.

Meanwhile, I have to divide by 60 twice on a calculator just to convert from one of my own planet’s units to another of my own planet’s units. He’ll sleep for a minimum of three and a half hours and a maximum of almost twelve hours.

“I understand,” I say. I head back toward the airlock.

“You observe, question?” Rocky asks.

He watched me sleep, so it’s only fair he offer to let me watch him. I’m sure Earth scientists would jump all over the place to learn anything about what an Eridian sleeping looks like. But I finally have time to do some deep analysis of xenonite and I’m just dying to know how xenon bonds with other elements. If I can get any of my lab equipment to work in zero g, that is.

“Not necessary.”

“You observe, question?” he asks again.

“No.”

“Observe.”

“You want me to observe you sleep?”

“Yes. Want want want.”

Through unspoken agreement, a tripled word means extreme emphasis.

“Why?”

“I sleep better if you observe.”

“Why?”

He waves a few arms, trying to find a way to phrase it. “Eridians do that.”

Eridians watch one another sleep. It’s a thing. I should be more culturally sensitive, but he threw shade when I talked to myself. “Eridians are unusual.”

“Observe. I sleep better.”

I don’t want to watch a dog-sized spider not move for several hours. There’s a crew in there, right? Have one of them do it. I point to his ship. “Have some other Eridian observe you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I am only Eridian here.”

My mouth hangs open. “You’re the only person on that huge ship?!”

He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “♫♩♪♫♩♪♫ ♫♪ ♩♪♫ ♫♪♫♪♩ ♫♪♩♪ ♫♩ ♪ ♫♩♪ ♫ ♩♪♫♩♪ ♫♩♪ ♫.”

Complete nonsense. Did my kludged-together translation software fail? I check it out. No, it’s working fine. I examine the waveforms. They seem similar to the ones I’d seen before. But they’re lower. Come to think of it, that whole sentence seemed lower in pitch than anything Rocky has ever said before. I select the whole segment in the software’s recording history and bump it up an octave. The octave is a universal thing, not specific to humans. It means doubling the frequency of every note.

The computer immediately translates the result. “Original crew was twenty-three. Now is only me.”

That octave-drop…I think it’s emotion.

“They…did they die?”

“Yes.”

I rub my eyes. Wow. The Blip-A had a crew of twenty-three. Rocky is the sole survivor and he’s understandably upset about it.

“Wh…er…” I stammer. “Bad.”

“Bad bad bad.”

I sigh. “My original crew was three. Now it’s just me.” I put my hand up against the divider.

Rocky puts a claw on the divider opposite my hand. “Bad.”

“Bad bad bad,” I say.

We stay like that for a moment. “I’ll watch you sleep.”

“Good. Me sleep,” he says.

His arms relax and he looks for all the world like a dead bug. He floats free in his side of the tunnel, no longer hanging on to any support bars.

“Well, you’re not alone anymore, buddy,” I say. “Neither of us are.”