Work Text:
The numbers were the easy part. We had different bases, sure, but once you know that you’re basically just working with synonyms. It’s like saying 100011 instead of 35. Crimson’s still just red in fancy dress.
After that, we killed a solid few hours on equations. I know what you’re thinking – but Grace, if Rocky says ‘two lalala two ladidah four’, how do you know that first note stands for ‘times’ and not ‘squared’? To you I say: that’s what good old yes-es and no-s were for.
They were gimmees too. We’d already worked out jazz hands versus angry fists. So once we knew what each other’s words sounded like, it didn’t take long to realise we’d both been repeating the same two of them over and over. Turns out the concept of right and wrong was pretty friggin’ crucial when you’ve got a whole new language to learn. If Rocky couldn’t tell me when I was using a word wrong, we’d be dead in the water.
But, speaking of words…
Where do you even start?
I found myself wishing more than once I’d made an actual lesson plan. That I’d looked up the ESL equivalent of an order of operations, so I would know how to introduce concepts like subject-object-verb and tenses without giving my guy Rocky a migraine.
But I didn’t do any of that. So instead, we start with clocks.
“Clock,” I say, pointing at mine. Then I move to point at Rocky’s. Again: “Clock.”
“♫♫,” agrees Rocky. So far so good. Turns out it’s pretty easy to establish a shared meaning when you have a physical doohickey to point at!
I scan my surroundings for my next prop, and come to the immediate realisation that the pickings are slim. Rocky’s apparently never seen a light before, so he’d have nothing to say even if I told him my name for them. I could point at the rungs of his ladder, but they were pretty far from me. What if Rocky couldn’t tell what I was pointing at?
…The atoms!
I have to back away from the divider for a minute to go track down wherever Rocky’s models rolled off to. Normally I’m not the type to so callously misplace another scientist’s thoughtfully crafted visual aides, but I’ve had a lot of things on my mind.
First the two rings of eight. “Oxygen.” I say, holding them out in front of me.
“♫♩♪♩♪.”
I nod. “Good!” Then I immediately scramble to correct myself. “Uh, yes.”
My computer tells me that Rocky repeated his own yes. It was kind of like saying ‘over’ on the radio, if you only had the vocabulary of a toddler. Were we ever even gonna be able to say ‘vocabulary’?
Stay focused. I place the handcuffs (thoughtfully; considerately) back on the outcrop Rocky’s container had been sitting on. A moment later, I’m back to Rocky with fistfuls of hydrogen in tow. “Ammonium.”
Rocky responds with a new word. That’s a good sign! He could’ve just repeated his version of ‘atom’ or ‘model’ or something, and then we’d be in trouble. Still, to double check, I cycle through the two again, this time playing Rocky’s names for each element back through the speaker. I get both a “Yes,” and jazz hands for my efforts, which is disproportionately affirming.
Here’s the risky bit. It’s straying dangerously close to sentence territory, but pointing can only carry us so far. We need points (hah!) of reference.
“This,” I pause, then shake the models around a little. “Ammonium”. Then I quickly put up a finger. Rocky rocks in place a little, no doubt eager to contribute his own word, but copies me. Waiting.
Then I turn my attention back towards where the oxygen is waiting on the shelf. Waving in its general direction I say, “That, oxygen.”
One of Rocky’s arms is mirroring me. Pointing between the two models in turn. Maybe he’s picking up what I’m putting down?
Holding my finger aloft all the while, I place the ammonium on the ground this time, near where Rocky’s standing. Then I walk over to the oxygen. Once I have it in my hands, I say: “This, oxygen.” I pause, waiting for a few seconds for Rocky to (hopefully?) recognise the same word in a new context. Then: “That,” directed at the model spilling out in front of him, “Ammonium.”
Finally, I lower my finger. “This,” I say, and wait.
Rocky taps the ground with one of his hind arms. “♪.”
I note it down. Trying not to hold my breath, I up the ante: “That.”
Rocky raises the arm he’s been using to point with, and gestures to the wall. “♪♪.” Without skipping a beat, he skitters up the wall, and taps it with his hind arm. “♪,” a pause, then he points back to where he was just standing. “♪♪.”
I can’t help but grin. He didn’t even need the models! “Yes!” I cheer. “Yes!”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Rocky repeats, his carapace bopping up and down – maybe humouring me, but I’d like to think figuring out how to talk to a brand new alien lifeform would be just as exciting no matter which of the aliens you are.
Huh. Is this first contact for him, though? Just because he’s my first alien doesn’t mean I’m his. Geez, that’s kinda an embarrassing thought. This sort of thing could be totally mundane from his perspective, while I’m standing across from him absolutely losing my gourd.
…Nah, no way. Doesn’t matter how many times you saw a new planet on Star Trek (AKA: most times), you still got hyped. Rocky’s definitely never seen a human before. That part alone makes this awesome.
Now to check for comprehension. Pop quiz time, buddy. Now that I’m back by the laptop, I tab over to playback mode. Painstakingly selecting each word in sequence, I direct the speakers to say (sing?): “This oxygen, that ammonium.” As it plays, I gesture first towards my tunnel, then towards Rocky’s.
I’m greeted with immediate jazzhands. Okay! At the very least, I’m close enough to the general definitions that I didn’t just ask Rocky to help me order a library for dessert.
Rocky responds with his own musical notes that, honestly, blend together way too much for me to pick apart. But my computer says it corresponds to: “This ammonium, that oxygen.” He had been pointing just like I had – first at his side, then at mine.
“Oh thank God,” I breathe, wiping my face with my hand. I made a joke about it before, but really we’re both the ones being tested. Student and teacher in one. Not an enviable position, as any pre-Bachelor will tell you.
Well, four words down. Only a couple thousand to go before we can get to work, right? Deep breath. This is a marathon, not a sprint.
(Some linguist has probably said that somewhere. Right?)
We hit our first snag with directions. Up and down go fine. But then Rocky spins in a full circle, saying “Left,” the whole time. He didn’t even turn left – just proclaimed every direction as left.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. This is the first time Rocky hadn’t attempted to use both of my words after I introduced them. Left got a full circle, while right got nothing at all. What does that mean? I’d done a different gestures for each of them–
Wait. Does he think they’re synonyms?
See, if Rocky doesn’t have eyes (my working theory – if it turns out he does have vestigial ones somewhere, they’re clearly transmitting little to no light), how would he even express his positionality laterally? He’s essentially facing all 360 degrees around him simultaneously. Obviously his people would need words to distinguish above or below their carapace, but other than that… Maybe Rocky’s species use something analogous to humanity’s clock positions for directions? That holds up fine with a top-down perspective. But even that would need a universal reference point for exactly where ‘twelve o’clock’ is…
It’s possible I’m overthinking this. Rocky may not have a face, but his body is in no way symmetrical. Wherever his ear-equivalents are, there has to be some sense of ‘forward’. If not through relationship to space, then in relationship to acceleration. If something that’s already close to your ears gets closer, then you’re almost certainly going ‘forwards’.
…Damn. How to translate that into a digestible vocab lesson…?
I need to zoom out. I rap on the back of my clock a few times – apologising instinctively to Rocky’s disgruntled rumblings (we haven’t actually exchanged ‘sorry’s yet. Maybe he’ll pick it up from context?).
“Near,” I say, placing my hand against the rim. Then I bound backwards a few steps. Reaching out for it: “Far.”
I repeat this a few times, from different angles, to try and narrow down what I mean. Eventually, Rocky catches on, demonstrating his words with his own clock. Good.
Now I reach out to touch it with both my hands. “Forward,” I say. “Near.”
Belatedly, I realise this is going to be a lot of words in quick succession. Buckle up, Rocky…!
I pivot 90 degrees clockwise. Without turning my torso back towards the clock, I reach out with my left arm to touch the clock. “Left, near.”
Once I’m facing away from the clock, I don’t even try to touch it. Just waggle my arms about uselessly. I know that only having half of my limbs available to interface with things is probably a hell of a culture shock for my guy Rocky, but I’m hoping he’s at least noticed by now that my feet are pretty bad at also being hands. “Behind, far.”
Finally I demonstrate my right, and then I’m facing Rocky again.
He doesn’t offer up his own words immediately, which is fair enough. Instead he sort of just… fidgets, picking all of his claws up, then putting them back down one by one. Eventually, he just says: “No.” Pretty sure that this time that’s short for ‘I don’t understand’.
“Again,” I say, because what’s one more word when you’re already working on four others? I start facing the right this time, to try and emphasise the whole relativity part of this. Then at the end, I improv a little addendum.
First I point at myself. “Two.” Then I waggle my arms around like a whacky inflatable tube man.
Then, I point at Rocky. “Five.” Getting right up close to the wall between us to make it as clear as possible what I’m pointing at, I count off each of his limbs. “One, two, three, four, five.”
This time I could swear Rocky’s “Yes,” has a tinge of impatience to it. I have no idea how someone would sing impatiently, but you develop a sense for these things after enough after-school tutoring sessions. I’ll skip over the nouns then. The numbers will do for now.
“Forward, near two,” I say, then bring the clock close to my chest. “Yes.”
Putting it back in space, I then turn around, and try to make more deliberate grabbing/missing motions. “Backward, far two,” I declare after coming up empty, “no.”
Now I’m back to Rocky. Pointing at him, I say, “Backward, near five, yes.” I grab the clock for emphasis. “Forward, left, right, backward, near five, yes.” Jesus. I’m doing all this to establish that human directions are all relative to the body, but it kinda just sounds like I’m casting spells.
Back to me. “Forward, near two–” Hm. It’s pretty late in this whole routine to throw in emphasis. Ah, screw it– “yes yes. Left-right, near two, yes. Backward, far two, no.”
Rocky visibly perks up. I hear, “Yes, yes, yes!” Wait, that worked!?
Repositioning himself in front of his own clock, Rocky turns on the spot so one claw is resting against it. Lifting that claw up, he says, “Near, one, yes.” Then he goes through each of his other claws with, “Far, no.” Holy moley. I can’t believe it!
This time, when I go through each direction, I get a new sound for each of them (funnily enough, I’m pretty sure the word Rocky had been saying for ‘left’ earlier was actually his ‘right’. Seems fitting, considering our mis-adventures with screw caps).
“Yes yes yes!” I echo, exalted at the progress. It’s official: overthinking is out. Serpentining from topic to topic at random? In.
Speaking of which: basic anatomy. I’m gonna skip over the face for now, because who knows what sensory organs Rocky would/wouldn’t recognise. I don’t even want to think about explaining my eyes right now.
I keep the body real simple – head, torso, legs, feet. Only once I’ve recorded Rocky’s words for those do I move onto arms. Here I take my time, trying to demonstrate the range of movement of most of the joints. Either Rocky is a gymnast on the side, or his species has remarkably posable limbs, not to mention the prehensile claws for each, er… hand? So I figure it’s better to let him down sooner rather than later vis a vis humanity’s comparative maneuverability.
Of course then I have to come up with names for Rocky’s anatomy. Bad news, considering my lizard brain still hasn’t quite decided if he’s more of a spider or a crab. I split the difference. His centre can be a carapace. The limbs will be arms, and the claws can be… claws.
Rocky’s reciprocal demonstration of his own movement is a real flex, if you’ll pardon the pun. His arms have elbow-like joints in the middle, so they can’t double back into an obtuse angle, but he doesn’t need to. The joint (?) connecting his upper arm to his carapace shifts and rotates so much he can either reach inwards towards himself, or outwards towards me with the same basic arc.
The trade-off appears to be his claws. From eye-balling it, it seems like he can only extend those about half as much as a comparatively-sized human’s fingers. I don’t have any concerns about his fine-motor capacity – if he’s the one making the models he’s been showing me, I’m sure he can out-DIY me any day of the week. But it’s good to know he wouldn’t be able to hold anything much larger than those xenonite containers.
Also, yes, he can hold onto his rungs with only two arms. I’m choosing to believe that’s only possible because his ship’s in low (for him) gravity. Otherwise my jealousy is going to have a negative effect on our working relationship.
Hm. We’re doing a lot of pantomiming right now. Could it be time for verbs…?
Wait, no. You need subjects for verbs. Oh my God. Have I really not thought about names this whole time!?
I smack myself in the forehead. Rocky, ever the obliging mime, copies me. Thanks bud.
“Okay okay okay,” I say. Taking a step forward, I point at myself. “Grace.” Then I point at my name-tag with my other hand. “This, Grace.”
Look, there’s a non-zero chance he thinks I’m giving him the word for ‘human’. But it’s not like that’s gonna make any difference. I’m the only human around for literal lightyears!
(...That wasn’t supposed to sound so dire. Yikes. Don’t think about it.)
Pointing at him, I say, “That, Rocky.” Then I gesture for him to give his own introduction.
His is… long. Beautiful, probably, if I was a musician. But it seems disproportionately elaborately compared to the length of every other word he’s shown me so far. It’s also accompanied by a new gesture – his front two arms come together, and he fully extends them in front of his body like a shield. I can see now that some of the carvings (tattoos?) on those arms actually connect together when lined up side by side. So, what, they’re identifying in some way? Maybe they’re his culture’s equivalent of a nametag? Argh, so many questions, so little time!
Also, his name for me is a single dull note. So either he has the longest name on his planet, or that whole phrase earlier was closer to him saying: “My legal name is Rosswell Bartholomew the Third, fourth of my line, inventor of the patented Xenonite™ Tunnel™. But you may address me as ‘Rocky’.” I go back to my computer and add a little star next to my translation (it just feels a bit more professional than a question mark). We’ll come back to that when we have some more words.
…Or we’ll come back to it right now, actually, because the second I play Rocky’s self-tape back to him to use as his name he hits me with a, “No, no, no.”
I blink. “No? Then…?”
He gestures for me to point the mic at him again. Sure.
This time, his word has way more in common with everything else I’ve seen of his vocabulary. It’s only three notes or so, blended together. I can’t pick out sonically where it fell within his longer intro earlier, but the waveforms tell me it was a few seconds (beats?) in.
“Okay,” I mutter to myself. “So:”
This time, he enthusiastically affirms his own voice on playback as I indicate towards him. Great! We have liftoff!
I only mostly regret wasting so much time on directions now that I can just our names to indicate our respective sides of the barrier. Still. At least I can use something approximating full sentences for the next dozen words:
“This Grace ship. That Rocky ship.”
“Grace atmosphere oxygen. Rocky atmosphere ammonium.”
“Grace 1 atmosphere. Rocky 28 atmosphere.”
I end up doubling back inside for Rocky’s model of our stars — which Rocky uses to initiate the exchange of ‘wait’. Smart thinking – but with that in hand we can motor through ‘star’, ‘planet’, and ‘space’.
“Rocky’s planet far,” I say, half to myself, while looking at the model. Space looks so compact and neat the way he renders it. But those inches represent further in space than humanity had ever travelled before Astrophage.
Rocky sings something back. When I check the computer:
“Grace [POSSESSIVE*] planet far ♪♪♫.”
Huh. ‘Too’? Or ‘as well’, maybe? I’ll put down too for now. And my assumed possessive marker’s been placed consistently the last few sentences, so I reckon I can upgrade that to an apostrophe-s (with my old friend the asterisk making sure I don’t get complacent).
…Wait, holy cannoli, we just talked to each other. Like, we talked to talk, rather than just to share words! Holy cow!!!
“Grace,” I say, grinning like an idiot. “Happy.”
Rocky rocks his carapace back and forth. The computer declares his response as: “♫♪♫ Grace ♪♪♪ ♫.” So much for our communication streak.
Oh, there’s a gesture at the end of that one as well. He tapped the ground with his claw. Could just be an idle gesture — god knows I’ve been flailing around like an idiot this whole time — but it seemed more pointed than his previous fidgets. He started and finished within the span of his last note.
“Uh, yes yes yes.” I add some jazz-hands, jumping in place. I keep smiling too, even though that definitely means nothing to a species without a face. “Grace plus Rocky plus yes equals Grace happy.”
…That might be the most ridiculous sentence I’ve ever concocted. All the English teachers I’ve ever had just fell into simultaneous depression, I’m sure of it.
“♫♪♫♪♫♫, ” warbles Rocky. “happy. Rocky plus Grace plus no equals ♫♪♫ ♪♪♪ ♫.” Then he taps the ground twice.
That same gesture. Is it an uncertainty thing?
“Um, no equals…” I trail off. I should probably just go with the antonym, right? “Sad.” It’s not strictly accurate — really I just feel a little stuck. Not like, depressed. But it gets us a new word, so sure.
“♫♪♫♪♫♫, sad.” I could be hearing things, but I think I’ve heard that first one a few times now as well. I’ll have to pull up all the sentence’s Rocky’s used it in at some point. Try and deduct the meaning. “Rocky plus Grace plus yes equals Rocky happy, too.”
…Woah. That was borderline intelligible.
I blink, staring at the readout for a moment. And just like that I’m lightheaded. If I was still bumbling around in zero-g, I could’ve just gone slack in mid-air. As I am instead surrounded by a million Xenonite vertices with an unknown BESS score, I valiantly take a knee. Which morphs into two knees. Basically I double over with extra steps.
I’m talking to an alien, and he’s talking back. Learning what he knows, working together, actually having someone else there to save the world with – save multiple worlds, even – it was really happening.
The odds that whoever was piloting Blip-A would be able to help me had been so astronomical it wasn’t even funny. But from the minute I’d seen Rocky’s engines flashing in the Petrovascope, I hadn’t stopped once to think about what I’d do if it didn’t pan out. I just… couldn’t.
It was like if you’d been stranded in a desert for years only to finally see an oasis on the horizon. No, scratch that. It was like if you’d been stranded in the desert for years, and you’re stuck climbing this dune that’s the size of freaking Everest, and all you can think about is how you’re gonna die in this desert, and then you look out from the peak and you’re face-to-face with a freaking ocean.
Maybe you know what mirages are. Maybe you even happen to know that you’re so messed up from heatstroke and dehydration you could easily kick the bucket while chasing after a forever vanishing horizon. But does any of that matter? You can see water. A minute ago you were going to die, and now you can see water.
The space walk, the canisters, sending the models back and forth, even charging straight into Rocky’s tunnel – this whole time I’d been running blindly into the dark, grabbing desperately for a single strand of hope. Never stopping to think about the risk, or the statistical impossibilities, or the Fermi Paradox. I’d just–
I’d needed this mirage to be real.
And now it is.
It’s real.
Rocky’s real.
…I can feel my throat burning ominously. Uh oh. No vomiting in the airlock, brain, we’ve been over this! And geez, definitely no vomiting in front of the aliens.
Speaking of the alien: Rocky definitely thinks that I’m ignoring him. Again, this call has everything to do with my previous career as a professional tantrum-detector and nothing at all to do with xenolinguistics, but there’s just something behind the tremolo on these notes.
“Sorry, sorry,” I say, waving my hands around all higgeldy-piggeldy as if to physically recapture his patience from the air. This quiets Rocky back down, but not for long.
“♫♪♫ ♪♪♪ ♫.”
“Um.” I say. It’s a pretty harsh reality check, going from a comprehension rate of 100% to 0%.
Rocky goes through his vertical fidgeting routine again. Then: “Grace’s near ♪♪♪, equals ♫.”
…Near? There’s nothing near me. Nothing that we haven’t already named, at least. I shrug – my choice for a human gesture of confusion.
“Clock. Clock near.”
“Clock?” I repeat, skeptical. Oh no. Surely my software isn’t breaking already? We’re barely a few dozen words in!
But no, Rocky’s giving me jazz hands. He even redoubles them when I point back to where my clock’s taped against his barrier. Huh. So it’s definitely not a mistranslation. He’s trying to teach me something with only the words that we already have. Like I’d done earlier with directions.
Aw man, now I really am the one being tested.
Okay okay okay. Focus. Something that’s near a clock… It’s probably not a physical object. If it was, I have to imagine he’d be making another model. He loves those things.
“Left.” Rocky says. I look to the left on instinct, but of course there’s nothing there. So when he follows up a few seconds later with, “Right,” this time I just cross my arms, waiting for the punchline.
“Left clock far ♪♪♪. Right clock near ♪♪♪.”
This is rough. I’m hunching in on myself as I think, staring sightlessly at the floor and willing myself to see Rocky’s vision. He’s cashing in every lifeline he has, and I’m still floundering in the hotseat (I make an executive decision to pardon the confused metaphor, as the humanities side of my brain was already getting the type of workout it hasn’t seen in years).
If he’s using ‘near’ as the closest synonym, the word I’m looking for is probably an adjective, right? Or at least expresses some kind of quality. A quality to do with clocks? It can’t be anything physical, that’s too species-specific. He has no idea what humans make clocks out of. So maybe it’s something to do with measurements, or circular motions, or–
“Time!” I shout, shooting back upright. Oh of course, how did I not get that immediately!? Rocky said left, waited for a sec, then said right. So left was ‘further’ from us in time, while right was ‘closer’. Or: it was new, rather than old!
Rocky’s perking up himself now, reacting to my excitement (or maybe just my volume). I all but fail over myself rushing to the computer to check my work.
This time round it’s nothing so simple as plugging in a definition and all of Rocky’s sentences falling into place. He never actually said his word for ‘time’ (I’ll have to double back for that in a minute). He just wanted me to realise he was talking about time. But with that context, I can reasonably assume what he wanted to say to begin with was:
“Grace’s new ♪♪♪, equals ♫.”
…Ah. Okay, still not the most illuminating. The sentence before that, though, surely–
“♫♪♫ ♪♪♪ ♫.”
…Is still 0 for 3. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
Dang it.
While I’m squinting accusingly at the waveforms though, willing them to resolve into something sensible, I realise they actually look pretty similar to one another. Unless I’ve come down with space madness astonishingly early, sentence two looks like it shares two of its unknown variables with sentence one.
It’s difficult to isolate any of the individual words without bespoke clips of Rocky pronouncing them for me, but I give it my best go. When I play them back to Rocky (“This equals this?”), he jazzes like he’s never jazzed before.
Okay! So surely the rest of this is up to common sense, right? If Rocky started by saying “[???] [A] [B],” then went on to say, “Grace’s new [A], equals [B],” when I didn’t get what he meant…
Hang on, these two words are actually all over the place in our history. Variable A was scattered randomly through every other sentence, but it was usually paired with ‘Grace’. Meanwhile B always came at the end of its sentences…
Huh. All of B’s sentences were requests for information. At least, that’s how I’ve been treating them, and Rocky has hardly been rebuffing me. Whenever it had appeared, I’d given Rocky a word, and then we’d continued on our merry way. So what if it wasn’t really a word at all?
The whole transcript lights up when I enter my guess for B: ‘Question’. Suddenly every other sentence is filled in. It’s daunting, but not inconceivable. What has this whole conversation been if not us trading questions back and forth?
(Oh, wow, wait. If Rocky’s been trying to find a verbal common denominator that mark my questions, he probably has no idea whether I’m asking or telling him something. Better clear that up fast.)
Before I do that, though, let’s see if this breakthrough helps us solve for A.
“Grace’s new ♪♪♪ equals question?”
Still vague, but not hopelessly so. It’s good that this softwares keeping track of everything I say as well, so I can just scroll back a ways to remember what prompted the question.
Thaaat’s right, I’d spaced out to have a moment, and after I apologised that’s when Rocky–
Wait. Was it seriously just…?
“Grace’s new word equals question?”
Oh my God.
Rocky wanted to know what ‘sorry’ meant.
Of course he did. I’m an alien who just used a new word in front of him. What else would he possibly be asking!? Oh my God, I’m a moron.
…Admittedly, it’s hard to feel that bad about myself once the translated variable A lights up the other half of Rocky’s transcript. Rudimentary or not, this is a good basis for communication. And once we add concepts of time into the mix, we’ll have a much more accurate way to ask about one another’s vocabulary.
Incidentally, when I go to get a clean recording of each of our new words, I realise that ‘question’ is the word that Rocky gives that double tap. I can’t tell at a listen whether that’s intended to build onto the sound, or if it’s a gesture for gesture’s sake. I make a mental note to start tapping the ground for my own questions, just in case.
Anyway. With ‘time’, ‘new’, ‘old’, ‘word’, and ‘question’ all squared away, we can finally end this tangent and move on to answering Rocky’s question.
So now I just have to figure out a way to define ‘sorry’. Hah. How hard could that be?