Work Text:
I'm working on a way to introduce Rocky to Earth’s animals when I get my first spell of vertigo. One minute I'm reading a guide on teaching the blind, and the next the ship starts spinning. Panic rises in my chest - the last time I checked, the ship was coasting just fine, but what if there's a complication?
I try to get off my chair, thinking through all the possible scenarios that could make me feel like the ship is spinning relative to me, without me spinning inside it. It takes a few tries, but I stand up, only to fall to the ground. Thankfully, Rocky is asleep, otherwise, I would have had a fussy alien screaming in my ear as I tried to figure out what the heck is going on.
The bout of vertigo ends almost as soon as it started, but it leaves me feeling off-kilter. Starting then, I have a bout of vertigo at least once a day, if not more. As a person with a PhD in microbiology, I can tell you that this is slightly concerning. Lucky for me though, I have a brilliant robot built by the best minds in the medical community, access to literally all of Earth’s knowledge on my hard drives, and a ton of spare time to kill. I'm the only human within 12 light-years of myself, the only one to meet our alien neighbours, and the only one who can communicate with Rocky. I'm not going to let myself die of some lowly disease that I could have fixed with a couple of pills. Not to mention, I'm the science human (Rocky’s words), so I'm not going to let myself live uncomfortably, because even the slightest distraction could have life-or-death consequences. So, I abandon my research on animals and set off to find out what the heck is wrong with me.
And then I start losing my hearing.
I don’t notice it at first, but after trying to call me a couple of times, Rocky gets frustrated. Every time I hear my name, I see his fists balled up in annoyance, and get some snarky Eridian idiom about how ignoring people leads to consequences. It’s not that bad, yet, but I have a feeling I know what’s going to happen next. The medical computer is slightly useless, sure, it can diagnose me with any number of illnesses, but it can’t take into account the time-dilated space travel or the first contact with aliens or the millions of “firsts” I’ve done. I feel fine though, apart from the vertigo, and I have a slight suspicion this is because of Stratt’s drugs. Now I have to figure out how to explain hearing loss to an alien whose basically only way to sense and communicate is hearing.
“Hey Rocky, are there Eridians who can’t hear?” I ask, hoping he’d make it easier by admitting that there are.
“Can’t hear, question? That is very funny joke, Grace.” he responds, and I can see his carapace bouncing up and down. The Eridian version of laughter. Great.
“Rocky, come here, I have something to tell you.”
He immediately comes over to where I’m sitting on the floor of the dormitory and puts whatever he was tinkering with down. I have his full attention.
“Humans have many senses to understand the world, most of which are more sensitive than Eridian senses, except hearing of course. Sometimes from birth or sometimes due to disease, one of these senses stops working well or at all.” I say, dreading what’s coming next. I can see he’s confused in his body language but does his version of a nod.
“Why are you telling me this, Grace, question?”
“I have a disease, Rocky. I searched in the computed and it doesn’t know what I have, so I’m pretty sure it’s a side effect from the drugs Stratt gave me. I keep getting bouts of vertigo, that’s when it feels like everything is spinning for a few seconds, and I’m losing my hearing.”
“Losing your hearing, question? How you going to survive, question?” His voice is an entire octave higher - he’s worried. Rightfully so.
“Well, since this isn’t a very rare thing in humans, we’ve developed some ways to communicate despite it. Mainly, sign language, which is a language using movements of hands instead of spoken words.”
Rocky relaxes a little. “Like” He waves at me, then gives raises a finger for the ‘wait’ signal.
“Well, yes,” I respond. “Those are gestures, ways we communicate using hands even when we can speak. Sign language is a little more complicated. It has different signs for each word, and its own syntax and grammar. Some signs use one hand, and others use both.”
There’s a pause while he thinks about everything I’ve just said. Then his body language shifts. He stands up straighter, walks closer to the wall dividing us, and says, “Teach me.”
—--------------------------------------------
“Okay, this is the letter ‘a’,” I say, holding up a fist with my thumb out, my hand facing him. “You only have three fingers on each claw, so we’ll have to modify it a little. Put two fingers down and one out.”
He nods and tries to copy the sign as best as he can. Eridian joints aren’t build the same way as humans, so it looks a bit unusual, but it’s still recognisable as the sign for a.
“Why not use more hands, question?” Rocky asks.
“Well, each shape of the hand is a spoken word or phrase, so the shapes are very important. Using two hands for the shape would make it a different shape altogether, so you might end up saying something you don’t mean.” I respond. He makes a good point - if you have five hands, why not use them?
He nods his understanding and we move on.
“Okay, next is the sign for ‘b’,” I hold up an open palm with my thumb touching it. “Two fingers up, one finger touching the middle where they all meet. We’ll be using these letters to spell out words to communicate, at least until we can learn more signs for words”
“You teach me to spell, question?” He asks, excited. Of course, I forgot to teach him how to actually spell. I taught him what words were, which letters were which when written, and how to put them together, but not how to spell.
Guess that’s our next project.
—------------
Rocky pinches two fingers on one hand together and uses another one of his hands to hit the floor. It's his version of the sign for 'g' in ASL, and also the sign we use for my name. He wants my attention. I look at him from the pilot seat in the control room.
"Yeah?" I ask verbally. He will always be able to sense whatever I say, so for the most part, I stick with verbal speech. The hearing loss isn't that bad yet, but it's bad enough that Rocky pretty much exclusively needs to sign to me. I can't detect the nuances of his speech anymore.
C-O-U-R-S-E C-O-R-R-E-C-T-I-O-N, question? he asks, painstakingly spelling out the words and waiting for me to parse them. His modified signs aren't really similar to ASL at all anymore, but I understand them anyway. We even added a sign for the 'question' he's so fond of.
I make a fist and nod it in his direction.
—---------
I can finally get back to the point we were at in human lessons before all of this happened - Animals. I'm really excited to teach him this one, and he's been asking for a long time.
"Okay, first up is an elephant." I create a wave shape with my hand starting from my nose and going out, the sign for elephant.
"Why sign like that, question?" he asks.
"Because of the shape of the trunk"
"What is trunk, question?"
Another one of those classic Rocky questions. I can’t fault him for it, of course, he’s literally an alien, but it is very hard to explain basic human things to aliens, especially without visual aids.
“Wait” I say, moving towards the computer to pull up a picture of an elephant. I send the file to his modified laptop so he can use his camera, and for good measure set a model to 3d print as well. He takes a look at lets out what I can only describe as a squeal, so high pitched it hurts my ears.
“C-U-T-E” he fingerspells. I look up the sign for cute in the computer and show him. He repeats as best as he can.
“Okay, next up, penguins.”
—--------------------------------------
We made it to Erid. I’m pretty much completely deaf at this point, but Rocky and I are quite fluent in our modified version of ASL. I don’t doubt the fact that we’ve butchered a lot of the signs, and probably paid no attention to the cultural contexts, but it’s a functional language. And it’s pretty impressive if I do say so myself. I am not only the first human to make contact with an alien species, I am the first to communicate with them in not just one, but two languages.
Even though we’ve been here over 4 Eridian years, the Eridians are still quite confused about me. It probably doesn’t help that Rocky is the only one who can actually communicate with me. He’s eager to help out, but he also wants to spend time with Adrian and his kids. But now that astrophage is no longer an issue, the rest of them have turned all their attention towards me anyway. They’re working on making me a bigger habitat, more nutrition sources, and even some decoration. The other day Rocky even mentioned setting me up with a job as a teacher, although I have no idea how that will work.
There’s still no news of Sol, but we’re waiting patiently. We won’t know for at least a decade. Until then, I’m happy here.