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Rocky came back into himself on the floor, density of his atmosphere correct and his body mostly intact. He knew that he was hurt, and he knew he was on the mend; moving his limbs was unpleasantly hard and tiresome and he definitely had to sleep again to allow his body to recover and repair itself. He threw a sounding at the wall to get an impression of the state the ship was in and whether Grace survived. The Hail Mary part surrounding his compartment came back to him in the ordinary way, the shape of everything all at once, some things wrenched loose from their mountings but still familiar enough not to worry. Grace was lying in the sleeping shelf, and Grace was in a wrong shape.
Rocky knew his shape like he knew his tools, he spent + days and +IℓVV seconds – the amount of time Grace told him I Earth day consisted of – listening to it being both awake and asleep, arguing, eating and often making different wet noises, which could mean either happiness or sadness. Human chest was a pair of soft hollows that sounded empty, two beautiful resonant spaces that filled and emptied Vℓ to VV times every +I seconds when Grace was resting and much faster when he was excited or frightened. Those spaces were not empty now.
Rocky did not like at all that down at the bottom of both of the hollows the sound went thick and did not come through clean, every time Grace’s chest filled, Rocky heard the fluid move and resettle. The whole of Grace was actually duller. It read wrong all over, because his body was normally a thing of many textures, hard in the limbs and along the spine, and where his head was, soft in the middle, soft around the hard, and this Grace returned softer and flatter along his left side, the surface swollen and holding more fluid, the contours smoothed out but also thickened in all the unusual places. The surface of his upper left limb was ridged, cratered, irregular, bad bad bad, from the small appendages – fingers – up to the ball joint where the limb was attached to the body. It was fundamentally wrong to Rocky’s basic understanding of Grace's biology.
Their atmospheres were not compatible in any way. Rocky came to the only possible answer, which was that Grace had opened a valve into his chamber, taken a portion of what could mean death to him and then walked away from it and Hail Mary did the only thing it could do – attend to his damaged shape.
Rocky did not want to fall asleep again with no one to watch him or Grace but his body did not give him any choice. When he woke up again, feeling much better, nothing had changed on the outside of his chamber, on Grace’s part of the ship. Grace was still sleeping.
Grace slept in average I day and λVVℓ+ seconds and even though Rocky’s sample was only one human, he guessed for any of them it was a shallow ridiculous business, sound going in and out of them the whole time, their body shifting position on its own throughout the sleeping cycle, their breathing changing depth; and a noise of a right kind could bring Grace up out of it complaining, which Rocky had proven many times and enjoyed more than he ever admitted.
This was not that kind of sleep.
The breathing did not cycle, it went in and out at exactly the same depth and at the same interval over and over again through a tube that was inside of Grace, making Grace’s chest move slightly up and down and there was no variation.
Rocky climbed inside of his ball to check on the rest of the ship and to look if Grace managed to save the samples. He hoped Grace did.
There was not any way for him to work on the samples, but it was comforting to know they succeeded in their mission and he only had to wait until Grace woke up with as little damage as possible. His carapace felt heavy and limbs too but his body had repaired itself good enough.
Rocky monitored the machine attending to Grace’s upper limb. The exposed surface of it was worse than the tight bandage let him believe, hard in places the limb should be soft, a stiff shell forming over the tissues filled with fluids, the swelling still rising underneath the shell. The machine produced instruments and then it was cutting into Grace’s limb, joint to joint, tissue under the shell came apart and spread and stopped pressing on itself. The fluid came out of it and made a tap-tap-tap sound against the tray.
Grace slept through it too. Initially his heart sped up too much for Rocky’s liking but then the machine added something to the sack of fluids above Grace’s head and Grace’s heart returned to its basic rhythm. The machine then wrapped a bandage all over Grace’s limb and folded it one way and then the other, several times in all the joints and then set it down. Rocky was an engineer, he knew it was to work a hinge that had begun to seize and it was likely crucial, human anatomy wise, not to let the range of motion go.
“I sleep now”, Rocky said softly to the still form of Grace because it felt right to let him know even though Grace likely could not hear him anyway.
When Rocky woke up next time, something had changed. The tube was gone from Grace’s throat and now there was something over his face instead, much lighter, some other material, and he was breathing on his own – finally – even though it was shallow and uneven, somewhat ragged at the edges. It was entirely Grace’s, coming at whatever interval his body chose. The fluid, though, inside of the hollow spaces of Grace’s chest has not gone anywhere at all.
Rocky stood up, stretched his limbs, and came closer to the wall, because Grace moved too. He jerked badly, one hand coming up to his head, pulling the shell of the material away, dropping it, then he set up, gasping, murmured something that Rocky did not make out, then there was a small hard sound of something soft hitting metal. Grace sat up, turning his head from left to right, it was his method of finding something, the frantic panicked version of it, and his heart rate went up up up.
“Rocky?”
Grace’s voice was unrecognizable. Rocky involuntarily screeched because it was not what he expected to hear, it was a horrible horrible horrible imitation of what his name usually sounded out of Grace’s mouth.
“Here”, Rocky pushed the ball to come closer to Grace and pressed his carapace and forelimb to the xenonite, as close as possible. “You lie down, lie down, not strong, Grace, lie down now.”
Grace produced a sound which came out of the bottom of him and was very wet, and the second one was even wetter, by the fourth his whole chest was involved and the fluid was moving in both hollows at once and the anatomical tube-like structures that were Grace’s airways were narrowing with the sluggish wet sludge. Grace’s whole face was leaking, not the good kind, because he made little whiny sounds of what Rocky recognized as pain.
“Lie down, Grace, lie down now,” Rocky pressed, because Grace’s heart was speeding up and the wrapping around his left arm became dull with fluid too.
Useless.
Grace got his lower limbs down, then fell hard onto the surface which was once up and now was down. Grace tried to stand up and seemingly standing up on two limbs did not work, so he came down hard again with a “thud” onto his knees, both joints creaking, blood immediately pooling there. Grace put himself against Rocky's ball, all of himself, the whole front of his body and the side of his face and both arms, the sound one and ruined one, flat to the wall as if he wanted to go through it.
Grace just stood there on his knees, shaking and crying; and Rocky, pressing from the other side with his carapace just as hard, could not distinguish whether it was happy crying or not, he just sang his low chords to soothe Grace as if he was a frightened pebble. Rocky hoped, the heat did not hurt Grace any more than he was already hurting.
“Here, Grace. I do not go,” Rocky said.
Grace’s heartbeat very slowly returned to VIV-VVV which was acceptable. His breathing though whistled at the top of every intake, producing a thin high note in his throat tube.
They stayed like that for some time and then Grace moaned some sounds run together, stopped, coughed, swallowed around the wetness and made the same sounds again, now with a space in the middle.
/ˈpeɪnˌkɪl.ər/
Rocky held onto the sound and turned it over, for now he had a rather large inventory of Grace’s words, and he had not heard them together, but he still recognized them: the second half was what Grace said about diseases and about the Astrophage, and the first one meant hurting, state Grace was in whenever he hit himself on something hard or fell.
The machine handed Grace a small package of something rattling, which Grace tore with his teeth and tipped into his mouth, all of it in one swift motion and swallowed. He then coughed and wheezed again, fingers of his good hand curling against the ball, and then he relaxed and put his head back against the ball back.
“Medicine,” Grace explained. “For pain.”
“I understand,” Rocky moved his carapace exactly to the spot where Grace’s face was and held it there without touching the wall.
About Iλ days went by in which Grace simultaneously got better and worse. He was up and about much more, they worked together on the samples, he got his voice back from the unpleasant scrape to something merely damaged but understandable. They were safely in an orbit around Adrian and not on their way into it.
But there was still the wrong amount of fluid in one of his hollows, and the damaged limb went on generating thickness which the machine removed with every dressing change which required Grace taking Pain Killers which made him stupid for up to I whole day. His heart settled at V++ which was too fast and would not come down.
Grace had been asleep when the entire mass of him began to softly vibrate, jaw, limbs, long muscles either side of his spine, and this shiver had no purpose which Rocky could identify other than that it once again came with a change of Grace’s form. When Grace woke up, he was unusually slow, his movements lacked precision and he nearly destroyed one sample before stopping abruptly and going back to the medical bed.
“I have /ˈfiː.vər/”, Grace announced a bit later and sounded angry.
“Explain?” Rocky asked.
“My body temperature is higher than it should be.”
“How high, exactly?”
“Thirty-nine point four degrees Celcius.”
Rocky did the conversion: Iℓλ versus Iℓℓ did not seem that much of a difference to him but Grace clearly struggled.
Grace went back to the lab and sat heavily down onto his chair. His damaged limb was in a hard smooth surface holding device that he asked Rocky to construct for his limb not to bend too much.
“You need to be in bed,” Rocky moved his ball closer.
“Probably”, Grace nodded. Not good enough. “But I have fever and a wound and I am taking a drug that is supposed to be fixing both, and I want to know where the problem is. Want to learn more about human biology, buddy?”
“Yes.”
“Right. So – I’m going to take some blood and make a smear and count what's in it, and I'm going to say every step out loud and you can use your light-hearer. Oh f-fudge, my hands are shaking.”
Grace grabbed a cable and dragged it across the floor, then made an unhappy sound when he had to put in the connector twice because it went in wrong the first time.
“It'll come up on the center monitor. Give me a second and it'll be the only thing on the screen – I don't want you reading half of it by mistake.”
Rocky came up to the table and the monitor with an interest he did not bother to disguise. It was very good that Grace’s microscope had light output and he could read what his light-hearer transmitted onto his texture plate.
“Let’s go over how imperfect humans are… my blood is not like yours, right? Yours is metal, we call it mercury, plus whatever else is dissolved in it. It moves heat around, and it carries your little repair cells to wherever something’s broken. Mine is… water with things floating in it, and most things are cells. If I took all the cells out of me and left the liquid, the liquid would be about half of what’s there.”
Fascinating and so very inconvenient.
"Half is cells," Rocky said. "This is very crowded."
“You remember how I told you that everything on my planet is made of cells, built out of units. Little sealed containers, one thing in each, millions of millions of them, and every part of me is a pile of them stuck together in a particular arrangement.”
“How big container?”
“Ten microns, some bigger, some smaller, call it a hundredth of a millimeter.”
“You are built from ten million million small units? What is the wall made from?” Rocky knocked on the floor twice.
“Fat.”
“That is the worst thing you have ever told me!”
Grace laughed and the laugh turned into cough which went longer than the previous one, and Rocky listened to the liquid making it way up Grace’s breathing tube and then he leaked just a bit and threw a soft material – now wet – into a bin near the table.
“Ask, I see that you want to ask,” Grace said. His voice sounded a bit clearer.
“Inside the bag is fluid, outside fluid, too. Pressure cannot be equal. What is different for fluid to move?”
The stool creaked as Grace moved and turned his head.
“Every cell in my body is running pumps in its wall, all the time, moving charged particles in and out to hold the balance – sodium out, potassium in, over and over, and it costs me something like a fifth of everything I eat just to keep doing it. If the pumps stop, the balance goes, water follows the salt, and the cell swells and bursts. That's most of what dying actually is, at the small scale. The pumps stopping. I run on electricity which keeps the water in the correct place.”
Even more inconvenient than Rocky thought before. Fluids that could also go inside and outside of the cell if the electricity was wrong.
Grace continued as he gathered something on the table, small flat smooth surfaced cuboids, a piece of metal with an acute protrusion and bottles with liquids of different density.
“Most of the cells are /ɹɛd/, about forty five percent of my blood volume are /ɹɛd/ blood cells…”
“What is the word, no understand.”
“Colour,” Grace hummed. “You called Adrian surface middle-rough and for me it is green, which is also a colour. Smooth for high frequency and rough for low, and green sits in the middle of what I can see. Human range is three-eighty to seven-forty nanometres. Red is at about seven hundred, which is long-wave.”
“So, very-rough.” Rocky stated.
“Exactly. And they do exactly one job, which is grab oxygen in the lungs and let it go in the tissues. They don't even have a /ˈnuː.kli.əs/. Human cells all carry a copy of the instructions for building me, in the middle, in a little sac – that’s the nucleus – and red cells throw theirs away when they're made, because they'd rather have the space for cargo. They're beautiful and disposable bags.”
Rocky nodded with his whole carapace because that made Grace happy and Rocky found copying human mannerisms endearing.
"Then there's a much smaller number of cells that do everything else, and those are the ones I care about today. /waɪt/ cells…”
“Explain /waɪt/,” Rocky said. “Is this frequency also, question. Where on the axis.”
“That's the thing. It isn't anywhere on the axis. White isn't a frequency. White is all of them. Everything from smooth to very-rough, arriving at the same time, in the same place. You'd have to make every texture at once and you'd end up with nothing.”
“How do humans see them then?”
“Here’s the joke. The white cells aren't white. On their own they've got no colour at all, they're basically invisible to me. They only look white when there are enough of them piled in one place. Spin blood in a centrifuge and they collect in a thin pale band you can finally see because there are millions. Or you get an infection and they stack up in the wound until the stack is big enough to see.”
“So you see them only when there are too many. And too many is already bad bad bad.”
“Exactly. We, humans, like to give names to all the little things, but I will try to. Among the white cells I have the most important ones for me now. First responders. Hunters to kill whatever got inside that should not be there.”
“I have small things too, they repair damage.”
“Good thing your system is sealed, Rocky. Mine leaks in about nine places per design. I need an army of those tiny hunters.”
Grace held the thin smooth surfaced plate in an unsteady grip, it traveled through the air with a wobble and entered a body of liquid five times with an interval of nearly I Earth second, except the last motion which took a bit longer because muscles in Grace’s shoulder tightened and Rocky heard it.
“What do now? Why put in liquid?”
“I am lucky that whoever stacked Hail Mary thought I would need a /dɪf kwɪk/. It’s a kit for checking what makes problems in different kinds of fluids of a human body.”
“You deep in all three liquids?”
“Uh-huh. Bottle one is fixative, methanol. Five dips, one second each, and it glues the cells to the glass so they survive the next two steps.”
“You did this.”
Grace nodded and held another bottle.
“Bottle two is red. And here's the part you'll like, because it isn't really colour, which I know says nothing to you. It's charge. The dye molecule carries a negative charge, so it goes and sits on anything positive – protein or haemoglobin or whatever is inside the cell. Five dips. Tap off.”
Grace did the next five dips.
“Aaaand bottle three is blue, and that dye carries a positive charge, so it goes for anything negative. In our case it is nucleic acid, something that carries the most important part of the cell.”
Rocky placed his light hearer from one limb into another.
“So, you not make picture of the cells,” he said. “Does it mean you make picture of how charged the cells are?”
“Run that by me again?”
“Red where positive. Blue where negative. This is charge map. You put dye on you own blood and the dye goes to the pump problem, to the same electricity that keeps water inside the bag.”
Rocky raised two limbs.
“Good good technique. Better than your eyes.”
“It is,” Grace sounded pleased too. “I think it is hundred and something years old and nobody has ever improved it. You can play with how long you keep the glass under the dye to improve microscopic details but it is still very simple and hands on. Could do it in class. Actually, I think I did in class…”
There was a brief sound of water running, a long pause filled only with Grace’s too loud breathing and heart beat of λVℓ per Earth I+ℓ seconds.
Then there was a dull knock and Grace slid the slide onto the stage of the microscope, and he turned the focus wheel a few degrees one way and back.
“Good, let’s see how bad the situation is. I get the number and shape of cells and I have to build the whole answer out of shape alone.”
“You can say what you cannot see,” Rocky said. “This is good science.”
“Let’s count? Give me a minute.”
Rocky had already turned the light-hearer on the monitor and was not waiting.
The screen came up on the plate with all the frequencies at once, so he brought the gain down until the field began to have shapes on it. There were discs, filling the plate edge to edge, each one rough and dished – somehow thicker at the rim than at the center. The middle of the discs went shallow under his claws. So these must have been the beautiful bags with almost nothing in the middle for the negative dye to find, that Grace had told him about.
“Teaching moment. A cell that matters is born deep in the soft part inside the big bones, the factory. It matures on the way out, and when it’s finished, the nucleus is pinched into three or four lobes strung together, thin threads between them, like beads. Segmented. Segs.”
Rocky ran claws across the plate very slowly and found one, and it was exactly as Grace described: a smooth island in four connected parts with fine thin bridges between them, sitting in a patch of rough that belonged to it. He then found a second and a third.
But the third was one piece. One smooth curved bar, no lobes, no bridges, bent like a fitting for a pipe.
“Grace.”
“Hold on, I'm at sixty.”
“Grace. Why is this one not in segments, question?”
Grace made a sad sound.
“When the factory is under pressure,” Grace said, slowly, “when demand is higher than it can meet, it starts shipping the ones that aren't finished. Nucleus still one solid curved piece. Horseshoe. No lobes yet. Those are called bands. You should see… uhm… You should see only a few. There are different normal ranges for each laboratory on Earth.”
Rocky did not answer, because he was moving his claws across the plate, and he knew perfectly well what he was finding. Solid bar. Solid bar. Four-lobed. Solid bar. Solid bar. Solid bar.
Then he found ten more. Seven had solid, unbroken nuclei.
“Factory send many unfinished parts,” Rocky knew he said it an octave lower, and Grace still understood him. “Bad sign. Worst. Supplier does not send unfinished part unless supplier failing. Grace failing? Grace dying?” it came out as a pitch, and the thought of Grace failing and dying now frightened Rocky immensely.
He had no idea how to fix it. Grace did not tell him how to fix him.
“Teach more,” Rocky demanded. “How fix supplier? How fix Grace?”
“We’re still on the counting part,” Grace tapped on the monitor. “Also, this is called a left shift, comes from an old chart where they printed the youngest cells in the left-hand column and the oldest on the right, so if the population of the cells slides toward immaturity, it shifts left. It also can shift right, I am just telling you that it can shift both directions.”
“You say not important things for now! What relevant, question?” Rocky tapped the wall of his ball between them.
“I counted a hundred and thirty cells and thirty one bands.”
“I count also,” Rocky said, impatient. “One hundred four, twenty six bands. I count fast. You show me picture. Explain what mean if around the smooth part, in the rough part that belongs to cell, there is grit. Small hard smooth points, many, scattered. Cannot find them in the good four-part ones.”
“Toxic granulation,” Grace said which did not explain anything.
“Are there holes in the cells? And also some patches, small, sitting right at the boundary.”
“Those are vacuoles and /ˈdoʊəl/ bodies. Leftover machinery from cells that got built in a hurry. The cells are being made too fast, shipped out too early, worked too hard and come apart while they are still doing the job.”
Grace drew air in and blew it out.
“My body is fighting something and not winning.”
“High number bad bad bad?”
“High number means my body still has resources and hunters but it needs an extra help… but before that, I would love to know what exactly it fights.”
Turned out, for that Grace needed to take a sample from the fluids that were on his damaged limb.
“I could wait until these things grow up in a dish,” Grace mused, “but I think it would be enough to know whether they look like rods or balls and what dye they take.”
He was silent after he looked into the microscope and then adjusted the monitor for Rocky to light-hear too.
“Rods,” Grace said at the same time as Rocky places his claws on his plate. “Little red rods, which in case of a burn, would likely mean Pseudomonas until proven otherwise. You know what is funny? This thing has a distinct smell, any human nurse working in a burn unit walks into a room and knows what her patient has without any need for culture. I had a diagnostic instrument that would have caught it earlier and I set it on fire.”
“What instrument?” Rocky scanned the room but did not find anything damaged in a way that would suggest high temperature.
“My nose.”
Rocky lowered his light-hearer and was silent. Grace hurt himself bad bad bad while saving him.
“You saved me,” Rocky trilled. “Thank Grace.”
“You saved me first. And do not worry, I think I will get of most of the functions I have temporarily lost, just will have some unpleasant consequences…”
Grace then made a sound that started as a laugh and became a coughing, which once again went for too long, and the strain that it put on his body made fresh fluid seep through his arm dressing. Grace put his forehead down onto the lab table and left it there.
“Your body try the same as Eridian body. Make hot blood cook the disease. Same idea, not enough because human die of own heat. I make two hundred degree and live.”
“Yeah,” Grace said into the table. “That’s about it.”
“Unfair.”
“Evolution does not mean fair.”
“How fix?”
Grace propped himself up with his sound limb and motioned somewhere to the back of the ship.
“I hope, Mary has a vast collection of medicine. I would need a strong one, an invader killer. And hope I am not allergic to it.”
Grace stood up, not very steady on his feet and Rocky followed him.
The ship supplies had whatever Grace looked for and it had a long name /pɪˈper.ə.sɪl.ɪn tæz.əˈbæk.tæm/ which Grace pronounced three times for Rocky and did it differently each time.
“It’s two-in-one,” Grace placed a bag with liquid above his own head. “The infection I have, those rods, they are tricky, because they build a wall around themselves to survive and it has a defense mechanism, a molecule to chop-up my wall-breakers. So, one component is a bait and the rod spends its scissors on it and then the real drug walks in unopposed.”
“Smart trick.”
Grace hesitated after he let the machine insert a line into the blood vessel on his limb.
“If my body decides this drug is worse than infection, it will swell up. It happens in minutes, closes my throat,” he pressed his hand against his throat.
“Chance, question?” Rocky tapped the ball. “If dangerous, than not do?”
“The chance is very low, under one percent. The chance that the rods kill me in a slow miserable way is wa-ay higher.”
“Then do,” Rocky said.
“Bossy,” Grace said, and his tone made Rocky preen happily.
Nothing happened for λλℓ+ seconds, and Rocky listened to Grace’s heart and his body that was not swelling dangerously. It was good good good he did not have to watch Grace suffocate through a xenonite wall.
“I need fourteen doses, I think,” Grace said. “Machine has forty two grams of it. Then may be I can move onto oral doses. Also, these have to be infused for three to four hours. That… sucks.”
Rocky did the arithmetic.
“You stay in bed,” Rocky said, pleased. “Time for you to get better.”
“Don’t get too excited.”
Turned out, the medicine still managed to hurt Grace. It happened after the second dose, when Grace was still lying on the cot, nursing a packaged meal. There was a wet sloshy sound coming from his stomach, moving in the wrong direction, and Grace stood up fast but made only three steps before the food came up and through the wrong orifice.
The sound of it was simply violence, the passage forced open backward, the whole chest and belly contracting, Grace’s breath coming thin, his whole face leaking.
“Medicine damaged you?” Rocky stood up on his limbs and observed Grace from above.
“I’m fine,” Grace’s voice was dull. He spat, coughed and sat back against the nearest wall. “The medicine makes me nauseous. I programmed the machine to give me something for it but looks like it is not enough, huh.”
He tried to eat that afternoon and lost it after VVℓλ seconds. Then he tried again in the evening, much slower, half a portion, and it managed to stay down for ∀∀IV seconds before Grace parted with it too.
“Kilocalorie number today, question?” Rocky checked.
“Don’t.”
“Say number,” Rocky demanded.
“I don’t know, okay? Six hundred, eight?” Grace managed to drink some liquid and lied back down. “I know that I need about four thousand and before you ask, there is nothing you or me can do about it now. We can talk about something else or I can watch you sleep.”
“I watch you sleep.”
“You have not slept for the past day and a half, buddy. You need it more than I do,” Grace said and raised his sound limb, making a motion at Rocky with one of his fingers. “I’ll watch you sleep, so go sleep.”
The damage to Grace’s hand was significant enough to slow him down when he climbed the ladder. The dressings and keeping the limb movable also required more Pain Killers. It was because of them that he made a mistake, and it saved the entire mission, which Rocky found so offensive that he planned to tell it to everyone on Erid.
What he did was that he set a live Adrian sample down on the bench in the lab and forgot it there for eleven hours at room temperature while he went to get his two doses of medicine. He found it the next morning and swore at himself for a full minute and refused to translate it to Rocky.
“Explain problem,” Rocky said.
“The problem is I left a sample of an atmosphere that lives at minus fifty-one degrees sitting at twenty-two degrees overnight, because I was dosed, and I have therefore probably cooked the only chance either of our species has.” A pause. “Drugs are bad, Rocky. Don’t do drugs.”
“Is it dead, question?”
Grace put it under the microscope, went very quiet, and then made a weird noise, pushing his sound limb up up up.
“No,” he said. “No, it's– Rocky, it's fine! It's completely fine! Whatever is in there doesn't care… It went from minus fifty-one to plus twenty-two for eleven hours and it did not care…”
“Good good good. But Grace very stupid. Grace should not do science while under influence of Pain Killers.”
“This is amazing news, and I got it by being an idiot! And a drugged idiot, oh my God!” Grace was laughing, and the laugh did not turn into the coughing. “It eats the Star Killer. Astrophage is ninety-six point four degrees, always, every single one of them, and this thing lives at minus fifty-one and eats a meal at ninety-six. It's built for a range. It has to be…”
“Then it survives on Erid and Sol.”
“I sure hope it does,” Grace said and made another short laughing sound.
He found it later, at some late afternoon hour before he could get his last intra-blood-vessel medicine dose. Rocky heard it happen before he was told, because the pattern of Grace’s breathing changed, he stopped completely and then his heart went fast fast faster from Vλℓ to λ+λ inside a couple of beats.
“Got it,” Grace exclaimed. “Rocky, we got it got it got it! Ro-ocky! Rocky! The predator, it ate Astrophage right in front of me, it's eating them now, they're going grey, they've lost the black, they can't hold the heat any more, you can see straight through them into the organelles! Fudging fudge, yes! They're so dead, they're dead and there's a thing in the middle of the field that ate them!”
“Found!” Rocky's own happy chords came out two octaves up and he made no attempt whatsoever to bring it down. “Found found found. Isolate now!”
“I’ll isolate it. I'm isolating it right now, hang on, nano-pipette-“
“Happy happy happy,” Rocky said, and then, because it had occurred to him some time earlier and he was not going to let it go: “Now you name.”
There was a pause, and the sound of a pipette being fumbled with and caught.
“I don't follow.”
“Earth culture. You find, you name.” Rocky was pressed against the wall of his ball with his six of his claws open. “You found it. You name it, statement.”
“Rocky,” Grace’s voice was whiny. “I’ve got a fever of thirty-seven point eight and I'm about four hours from being able to think, I'm not really feeling creative here-“
“Name it.”
“It’s… ugh, I don't know. It's an amoeba. It's an amoeba from Tau Ceti. A Taumoeba, I guess.”
Rocky said it back. He said it four times, adjusting, because it sat badly across his sound holes and he intended to be able to say it properly for the rest of his life.
“Taumoeba,” he said. “Good name. Good good good, Grace, you did well.”
“It's a terrible name,” Grace grumbled back but there was definitely blood pooling under the skin of his face which indicated to Rocky that Grace was pleased and shy.
Grace always reacted so to being praised. Rocky tried not to exploit it.
“It is a good name, and it is now the name and it cannot be changed. This is Earth rule. Your rule. You are stuck with it.”
Grace still needed to get infusions. His cell-count was better than before, it was getting lower – the bed cell count – starting the treatment but it was a certain number above the normal range that the computer prepared eight more doses. The rate by which the fluid in the bag entered Grace’s bloodstream was rather slow, and Grace preferred to be asleep for the infusions, so Rocky had enough time to work on his own side project of making his ball more useful.
He knew he could not lift Grace while in the ball, could not put his claws on him, not in Grace’s atmosphere any way, could not help him change a dressing, could not feed Grace when he was unable to eat on his own, could not do experiments in the lab where the instruments were so much better than Eridian's.
They had a discussion before, when Grace tried to hide to expel the contents of his belly. Rocky asked why would he hide? They had no shame, they had seen each other eat and expel food. Rocky did not appreciate Grace hiding to endure the violence his body did to itself.
What if Grace fell where Rocky could not help him?
Grace did not think about it like that. So Rocky told him to think about it like that and Grace promised to stay near. Also, called Rocky a bully. Rude rude rude, when Rocky was only correct.
Lying above Grace’s sleeping form, Rocky began to think about joints for the ball, a sleeve-like protrusions, movable and flexible around at least two of his limbs, about how a bellows section might be corrugated so it could flex without losing containment. How much of his fine work he would lose to a wall between his claw and the thing he was going to hold.
He thought about the heat and the mass and the only thing he could do about all of it was – to build.
He gave up on a whole suit almost immediately. Not now, not with the resources he had. A suit was a body-shaped problem with extensions for all five limbs and he would have to compromise because he wanted to complete everything as soon as possible.
Grace was sleeping under his chamber, his sound limb across his chest. Rocky had a complete acoustic model of it, twenty seven bones, some of them long and connected and very good for manipulation and some arranged into rows, pads of the palm side that returned soft and nails that returned hard.
Rocky could go the easy way and build sleeves from the wall of the chamber but he needed to be mobile so the sleeves went onto the ball. He constructed them in sections and the corrugations were the the difficult geometry, so he made them shallow and numerous because if he made them few and deep he would have ended up with not mobile pipe-like structure. No use to Grace.
It was the heat problem that nearly stopped him because human skin only survived so much of it and definitely not the kind of heat that Rocky lived it. Grace’s damaged limb was evidence enough. Rocky solved it with a vacuum: two shells with a gap between them, no air, gap held by pillars of xenonite that did not conduct all of the heat. It was in no way elegant and it cost him one and a half millimeter of thickness which meant it cost him dexterity.
He worked on the shape around his claws last and it took him even longer than dealing with the heat and pressure problems combined. Two claws and an opposed third, everything on the outer surface had to be blunt, nothing sharp anywhere .
He tested the sleeves when Grace slept after another tiresome therapy session for his hand, which, as he explained, was crucial not to loose the range of motion in any of the joints of the damaged limb because soft outer tissue tended to connect itself to itself and lead to constricted movement.
Rocky could hold a cup, grab a cloth, he could move objects on the table from left to right and back to front. This meant he could probably help Grace change the dressing. He could do things in the lab, too. There was not optimal feedback from the sleeved hands, just as he predicted, and the pressure differential made them stand out slightly stiff. But because moving them was like moving through resistance, it, in its own way, added more control and to some extent, proprioception.
Rocky observed Grace who was lying on his back, still getting his infusion even though it was strangely going inside of him at a slower rate than before. Rocky moved closer and set his claw down Grace’s good shoulder joint.
Grace’s whole body startled in one violent contraction, heart going +Iℓ beats almost instantly and breathing shallow and wheezy. He flailed with all of his limbs and tried to move back which meant he would fall on the down surface and hurt himself.
“Sorry! Sorry sorry sorry! Is me! Is only me!” Rocky trilled, going back in his ball and placing his limbs one on another nervously. He should have waited for Grace to wake up on his own but Rocky could not wait.
Grace finally went up onto his good elbow, turned his head wildly around, stopped when he faced Rocky and it took longer than usual for him to calm his breathing down.
“Rocky? What – what is this. What did you do?”
“I make arms”, Rocky tentatively moved his limbs inside the xenonite sleeves, to protrude them into Grace's atmosphere, very slowly for Grace to catch and focus on it. “Is xenonite. Is safe. I test at fifty-eight atmosphere for twenty minute. Outside is thirty-one degree, thirty-four maximum, I measure many times, is not hot for you. Is safe. I promise is safe.”
“You… built…” Grace put his good hand over his face, than jerked around and found his seeing device on his chest, which he put on. “You built this… tonight?”
“Started before, but I have much time, you sleep every infusion.”
“Rocky.”
“Yes?”
“Do… do it again?”
Rocky brought his limb across, slower this time, and Grace was sitting still, waiting for the touch. Rocky put his claws on Grace’s shoulder, and Grace shuddered again, and almost instantly made a wet happy noise.
“Oh.”
Rocky closed his claws just a bit, closing his two claws around Grace's shoulder gently. He knew he did not hurt Grace, the only thing Grace would feel was bit of pressure.
Rocky tested the soft tissue, it yielded slightly beneath his touch, flesh cool even through all of the layers.
“You’re warm,” Grace said.
“I make correct temperature.”
“Of course, you did.” Grace was leaking from his eyes and his nose and Rocky really did not find it disgusting because it meant Grace was happy. “Of course you did, you absolute–” Grace shifted, turned so that his shoulder stayed under Rocky’s limb and lifted his damaged hand, placing it on the second xenonite sleeve. He hugged Rocky and now Rocky could return the hug.
Then Grace moved back a bit and caressed Rocky’s claws with his fingers, closed them around two of the claws, pressed, checking the give of the xenonite cover.
“You think you can change my dressing?” Grace asked, raising his head.
“Do not know. I learn fast.”
Grace laughed and moved much much closer then before, pressing his head against Rocky’s ball and then he made a surprised annoyed sound.
“What wrong?”
Grace lifted his sound limb and took out the cannula clumsily with the fingers of his damaged limb.
“Ah, it failed.”
“That’s why it slowed?”
“Yes, it tissued. And I have another couple of doses, if I counted correctly.”
“Machine cannot make new line for you?”
“It can… but,” Grace grasped Rocky’s claws. “I would very much like if you tried it.”
“Absolutely not!” Rocky said, delighted and terrified.
The dressing came first, because it was the right order of things. Grace prepared a new dressing and a new gauze which was neither wet nor dry and said he was going to put it on himself because it was sticky.
Rocky mapped out the new surface of Grace’s arm while listening to Grace’s directions. From the wrist the surface went irregular immediately and stayed that way, replacing the smoothness that had been Grace’s arm everywhere. There were a couple of deeper defects which were oozing liquid. The worst damage was around elbow, and then there were patches of almost smooth skin and two weird forms with liquid inside.
“There are a few rules. Everything comes off in the direction of hair, everything goes on without tension. If we stretch the dressing tight, it will pull on the skin and I will get blisters where the good skin is. Loose is good, but not too loose so it does not fall off.”
“Understand.”
Rocky was rather proud of himself and to an extent of Grace and how they handled the first change. He surely was much slower than machine or Grace because it was the first ever time he had to do it with xenonite on his claws and on a human limb but Grace did not mind in the slightest.
It did take λℓI∀ seconds and it was not as good as the machine's and it was not bad. When Rocky finished he ran his claws down the whole length of Grace’s bandaged limb and found the tension even everywhere and no ridges under the layers.
“Well?” Grace said.
“Is acceptable.”
“It's better than acceptable. The machine puts it on like it's wrapping a stick.” Grace flexed the elbow experimentally, twice, and did not hiss. “That's actually the first time I could do that without it pulling.”
Rocky trilled, feeling a specific kind of satisfaction that had nothing to do with having solved a problem.
The cannula – the needle first – was much more easier.
Grace tightened a tourniquet above his elbow joint himself.
“This helps veins to fill but I did not close it tight enough to stop the arteries, and if you can hear my pulse…”
“I can.”
“You can– right. You can, I am stupid.”
A vein under human skin was a soft-walled tube full of moving liquid, about λ millimeters beneath a surface, and Rocky found the whole network at once, the big one on the outside of the forearm running up toward the elbow, the pair that met near the wrist, the deep ones he was to leave alone, and the entire pattern was swelling and filling and becoming easier to read as Grace clenched and unclenched his fist.
“There is a fold inside the blood tube here,” Rocky touched where he heard it. “A valve. No good for needle?”
“No good,” Grace made a laughing sound. “Wow, you have, like, no idea, how indispensable you could be in a hospital setting. The best /fləˈbɑdəməst/!”
“What mean?”
“Those who poke people’s blood vessels.”
It made sense. If humans could catch diseases very easily, they required those who knew how to cut them and insert things into them.
Grace swabbed his own hand with a small wet gauze. It meant Rocky had to insert the needle without touching this place again with anything other than the needle.
He beveled up, Vλ degrees off the skin surface, aimed along the axis of the vessel (not across it), went in slow enough that when the wall gave, he felt it even through all the layers, and a fraction later he heard the blood come up into the chamber of the cannula.
“Flashback!” Grace cheered. “You’re in. Drop the angle almost flat, advance both needle and cannula about two more millimeters, then hold the needle still and slide only the plastic in.”
“Good design.”
“Isn’t it? Somebody worked hard on that.”
Grace was watching him, Rocky knew. His head was tilted a bit though, which he did when he was tired.
When Rocky inserted the plastic part in, Grace released the tourniquet, and pressed his two fingers hard over the vein above the cannula tip, while Rocky drew the needle out and then two of them did the fiddly cooperative part that neither of them could manage alone: holding the hub steady, screwing on the cap with rubber septum, holding the line, laying a transparent sticky film.
“Want to flush it?” Grace held up a tube with liquid in a crinkly package and slotted it into Rocky’s claws. “You put it inside here, like that, then push… good, it feels cold a bit, doesn’t hurt.”
“Good?”
“Good good. You’ve successfully cannulated a human!” Grace connected the bag to the cannula and held up his palm. “High five?”
Rocky spread his claws and pressed them against Grace’s palm.
“High three?”
Graced tried to pull him into a hug but instead actually fell into him and Rocky caught him.
The dexterity surely improved over the following days. Rocky calculated around whatever he lost because of the safety precautions and, after all, the sleeves he gave himself, were just a tool and he was excellent at using many tools. He did misjudge heights and drop some things at first but then he adjusted accordingly, and they worked in the lab together, and Rocky could hold a slide and could open containers, got very good at dressing Grace’s wounds which were finally beginning to close and helped him with stretching and massaging the damaged limb, which Grace called “occupational therapy”.
It did start as a function and necessity and evolved into a habit over a couple of days. There surely was a reason to steady a sleepy form of Grace on his way from the lab to the bed and no reason at all to press his claws into Grace’s back between his shoulder blades, directly above his spine, when he was sniffling softly in pain, resolutely refusing any strong Pain Killer. No reason at all, and yet Rocky touched Grace and kept his limb pressed tightly because pressure seemed to help.
When Rocky watched Grace sleep, he let himself settle his limb on Grace’s good shoulder, or the top of his head, the crown of his skull, which once woke Grace up and he murmured questioningly in a thick voice: “Are you petting me?” and did not remember it later.
Rocky could not feel him the way he wanted to. It was his private grief, and he wished he had access to science hive on Erid to find a way to touch Grace properly without hurting him and without getting hurt.
“Want me to hold your hand while you sleep?” Grace suggested.
“I would not sense.”
“But you will think about it. I can see you thinking about it right now.”
“Can no see. Carapace not transparent,” Rocky argued tiredly. He felt his body shut down and he was grateful Grace sat beside him, watching him.
Grace made a soothing sound and wrapped his hand fully around the two of Rocky’s claws, thumb tucked, and the third folded over the back of Grace's knuckles.
“Feels better than the human version of hand-holding,” Grace said.
Rocky suspected he was being flattered and fell asleep.
He woke up to Grace having untucked his thumb and running it back and forth across the back of Rocky’s claws, slowly, over and over, apparently without even noticing it. It felt like a repetitive smear of pressure.
It made Rocky rethink the design a bit. He tried filling the microcavities with liquid metal and while being acoustically superb, it put the outer layer of xenonite at a temperature Grace’s skin did not tolerate.
It could be he needed to come to it from another angle entirely. Grace’s domain was feeling with his entire model of touch and dedicated organs reporting to brain, he had fingertips with nerve endings crowded at a density Rocky thought indecent. Rocky needed for his gloves to give him almost the same indecent amount of feedback.
Rocky stopped thinning the xenonite and started dividing it into fields of small independent islands, each isolated from its neighbors by a compliant seam that would not carry a sound wave sideways.
He tested it in Grace’s lab and on Grace’s sleeping hand and it worked perfectly.
It allowed Rocky to touch whatever he wanted and whatever Grace allowed him to. And Grace did not really have any boundaries when it came under the pretense of “science”.
“Open.”
Grace laughed. “You are obsessed with my mouth, aren’t you?”
“It is the most disgusting thing about you,” Rocky trilled. “Need to understand it.”
Grace obeyed and opened his mouth. Rocky went in with one claw and was very careful despite his bubbling enthusiasm. Grace had stones inside of his mouth, made out of the same material that comprised his bones and was building up on the walls of large blood vessels that carried blood from the heart. Each stone was anchored into the bone by a root that Rocky could not feel from above but knew was there beneath each stone. He went along the upper row from the front backward, counting the flat cutting stones, the sharp one, the wide ones at the back with their ridged working surfaces, the grinders.
“Ridges are worn at the back. Should be sharper, yes?”
“Mm-hm,” Grace said around his claw.
At the lower left, second from the back, Rocky stopped and made two notes a semitone apart.
“You have hole in stone.”
Grace moved back to be able to speak.
“Yeah, that’s a cavity. A hole in a tooth. Sadly, the machine only can put me in a coma and back and does not do dentistry work. If I continue to have a good oral hygiene, the hole does not progress, and I won’t have to pull the tooth out.”
Grace let him explore his face too. The brow ridge and the two hollows under it that Rocky did not go into because there sat a pair of Grace’s light-hearing organs and he would be defenseless and dependable without them. The bridge of his olfactory organ – nose – followed by cartilage which gave under the slightest of pressure and sprung back and Rocky made a small delighted chirp when it did. The cheek bone was hard, the tissue under it was not and a hollow there was more prominent than before they went to catch Taumoeba.
“You have less mass in you face. In you, general.”
“I’ve lost about… six or seven kilograms. Sepsis does that, as well as throwing up.”
“You will get it back.”
“I will probably get some of it back. The food supply’s not infinite, buddy.”
Rocky hummed four low notes.
The outer ear was soft cartilage too. It folded and unfolded under Rocky’s claws and Grace could not move it at all, unlike apparently some humans, who could. Which was useless. Rocky explored the whorls of the ear.
“The sound goes into the whole in the middle. The rest of this does nothing, question?”
“It shapes the sound. Tells me whether something is in front of me or behind. Not always reliable though.”
Rocky came down to Grace’s chest and put both limbs with claws spread flat over the middle, and Grace let his arms fall loosely to his sides and stopped talking.
The bars – the ribs – curving round from the mid-bone toward the back. The spaces between them, wider than the bars. Grace’s hollows were moving underneath, a swell against his claws as they were filled with air and a fall as they emptied. Rocky went hunting for fluid.
“Breathe all the way in.”
Grace breathed all the way in, coughed, and did it again without being asked.
“Much smaller,” Rocky praised. “Only one place where fluid should not be.”
“I know, I can hear it from the inside too. It will be gone, hopefully, in a week or two. I think there’s also some scar tissue, scar in a lung doesn’t move air and that part just… that’s what I got. Probably I’ll be short of breath running up the stairs for the rest of my life and it’s a cheap price to pay and I’d pay it again any day.”
Rocky moved the claws to the left side of Grace’s chest, where the knock came up through the gaps in the bones right into his limb. It was regular, hard, as healthy as Rocky could wish right now, rhythm steady, not too fast and not too slow. He knew now how it sped up when Grace’s body’s temperature went up, it sped up when Grace took Pain Killers, it sped up when Grace lied and it sped up when Grace was happy and excited.
It sped up just a bit under Rocky’s claws.
“Rocky?”
“I am listening.”
“You can hear it from the other side of Mary.”
“And I like it like this.”
Grace grumbled a word Rocky did not catch because he concentrated on a more important thing.
“Turn over?”
Grace sighed and all his joint made a faint squeaking sound as he turned, face down on his blanket with his sound limb folded under his head and the damaged one at his side. He did it without a word, which was a new thing. Not unwelcomed.
Rocky pressed down on the spine nodes and counted out loud.
“One. Two. Three. Four. These small and close.”
“Cervical vertebrae,” Grace’s voice was a bit breathless. “Seven of those.”
“Five. Six. Seven. Now change.”
The next vertebrae were bigger, with ridges standing up off each other and a rib running away either side.
“Eight. Nine. Ten.”
He went slowly. The ridges had nothing over them at all, no muscle, no fat padding, he could crush them with just a wrong amount of pressure.
When the ribs ended the bones got larger and thicker and a bit further apart. Grace made a sound when Rocky pressed into the curve of his spine and it was not a bad sound, so Rocky went with it and repeated the motion, paying attention to how Grace was arching at the end of it.
After the twenty fourth bone there was one big bone that was apparently fused from five.
“Why hollow in middle?”
“Spinal canal,” Grace explained. “The main nerve trunk runs down inside it, it conveys commands from the brain to the limbs and organs and relays the sensory and proprioceptive information back to the brain. If something happens to it at any level, anything below this level just stops working.”
“Your body very stupid.”
“Thanks,” Grace said.
“No, listen. Body is stupid. Every part of it can break. Nothing is protected. The bone is inside where it cannot protect anything. There is no seal anywhere on you.” He ran a hand up the whole line of the spine, all twenty-four, one continuous stroke. “May be brain is protected. Skull is good. And you are strong. You are so strong. Both things are true and I do not understand how both things are true.”
Grace did not answer.
Rocky checked, and found his heart at sixty-six, and the breathing long and even, and – arriving up his own arm as a small irregularity in the rise and fall – that Grace's shoulders had begun to shake.
“You are leaking,” Rocky said. “Face leaking. I hurt you, question?”
“No.”
“You certain, question? I pressed on the spine bones. If I pressed too hard–?”
“Rocky.” Grace’s voice was wrecked and it was not the illness doing it. “No. It's good. It feels good. That's all it is. It just feels–” He stopped, breathed and started again and his voice was wet wet wet. “Nobody's touched me in four and a half years. Do you understand that? Four years in a coma, then two months alone, four months with you on the other side of a wall. The last person who touched me was a nurse putting a line in my arm before they put me under, and I don't even remember it, because I was already out. I've got no record of the last time anyone touched me. It's just gone.”
Rocky held very still. He clenched and unclenched his claws, resisting the immediate desire to press them to Grace’s body anywhere.
“And you're doing it for what… for twenty minutes and counting my bones?” Grace said, into the blanket, “and it's the best I've felt since I woke up on this ship. So no. You didn't hurt me. Please, don't stop.”
“I will not stop.”