Grace snores with a lovely rumbling. I listen, reverent. I have not slept since he turned around for me.
An adult of Grace's species is supposed to sleep for 8 out of every 24 hours. A lot of time to spend unconscious for an already short-lived creature, but it has a nice structure and predictability to it. Because seemingly all human cycles are governed by their star (or to a lesser extent their moon), 24 hours is also equivalent to an Earth day. The Mary increases and decreases our buzzing photon emitters in concert with this cycle. I have grown to quite like the feature since Grace first rescued me.
Before his arrival in my life, I had been trapped in an endless, lonely loop of failure and frustration. It didn't matter how long had it been since I had made a new discovery or had a new idea. I had already run through the motions of my failed tests again and again and I would continue to do so until death took me. The monotony had ground against my carapace like a relentless sanding stone. Existence had lost all novelty, all texture. Frustration smoothed into futility smoothed into eternity...
Now, it is reassuring to be reminded that time moves onward, measured and tangible and with the promise of change.
It would be a lot more reassuring if Grace would abide by any of these cycles properly. Instead, he seems to treat them as limits to be tested. When engrossed in a project he will often continue for triple his standard time before resting, albeit at a reduced effectiveness. Annoying, and yet I wish I possessed the biology, the willpower to similarly extend my wakefulness. I wish it desperately and irrationally, even when it frightens me to see him do the same.
Life on an alien suicide ship is half long stretches of boredom and leisure, and half life-threatening emergencies that are unanticipatable by their very nature. The crises are when when I am most thankful for Grace's catastrophic functionality -- the core parts of him persisting onwards until the problem is fixed, even as his systems degrade from neglect. He can choose to wait to sleep until we are safe.
Not me, unfortunately. I am at the mercy of my mercury. It fills my hot circulatory system and floods my watery joints to create the steam that powers my movements. When it gets too hot, the steam cannot condense. Then I am stuck in place, sleep overtaking me with the relentless irrefutability of thermodynamics until I am cool enough to move again. The timing of that overheating can be at least somewhat predictable for an Eridian with a regular routine, but despite the clocks and lights, regularity is a luxury we do not have. When we were together before, sometimes there was an Earth week or two between my sleeps, and sometimes (the bad times, the frantic times) I slept nearly as often as Grace.
This had alarmed me at first--we could not both sleep at once!--until Grace gave me permission to "wake him up" if I needed to take a turn at sleep. I had to do so a few times as we orbited Tau Ceti trying to save our stars. It felt strange and wrong, but the discomfort was nothing compared to the terrifying prospect of sleeping alone again.
I needed to try and get Grace up now for the same reason, as much as I wished I didn't.
Grace is easy to wake (as he often grumpily reminded me when i dropped a tool too loudly during his slumber), but very difficult to KEEP awake. When forcefully roused, he hovers a while at some eerie liminal doorway between resting and waking, and sometimes something would reach from beyond the somnolent boundary to pull him back inside. I greatly dislike this uncanny re-sleeping. The obvious life-signs of human slumber are not enough to soothe the unease of hearing him flicker to consciousness only to quickly fade away again.
Luckily, my new thinking machine provides a potential fix. I have been messing with the ship recordings to try and create a more naturalistic voice for my translator, so I isolate a clip of Grace saying "Mary, coffee". From within my ball, I turn my machine's pitiful sound emitter up to full volume and play back the tinny Gracevoice. It isn't very loud, but it works: Armando produces a mug of coffee and I take the handle carefully through the mesh panel. So far so good.
Attempting to steer my ball on one axis while gripping an open container of sloshing liquid through the mesh on another axis proves... more challenging. I have to constantly swap limbs as each claw joint reaches its maximum torque, or risk upending the cup as I advance. Not ideal, especially with my body already clumsy from sleep-need. I mentally toy with a design for a gyroscopically stabilized gripper, but I have been puzzling for a while over how to easily attach and detach external manipulators to the ball without a good solution, so it only adds to my frustration.
Maybe a quarter of the coffee survives the trip. I am incredibly grateful, again, that Grace has abandoned his elevated sleeping pod for a nest on the floor against my atmosphere barrier. I place the still-steaming mug on the floor beside his secondary breathing/tasting orifices (I will never understand why evolution grouped those two functions together on a creature otherwise rife with single-purpose holes) and roll back to quickly wipe up the spills. Next time I will request the pouch and not the mug; I prefer to leave the mess-making to Grace.
"Mmfng...?"
Grace! I trill with delight as I hear him begin to stir across the room, wrinkling his hybrid-purpose nose as he senses the airborne particles emenating from the cup beside him. Any sensory organ he deliberately engages seems to come with its own microexpressions and gestures. I am still learning to parse these, but reason that this one must be associated with smell, the ability to taste from a distance through the air. (Oh, the air intake! This must be the reason for the smell/breath grouping.) I tumble back to his side eagerly.
"Izzat... coffee?" Grace asks as he smushes his face around with his hand and pushes back the protective skin covering his eyes. Blinking, he percieves the room groggily.
"Lazy human need a bribe to get out of bed", I respond, smug. "Rocky turn sleep soon," I mean to add, but don't.
Instead I say, "Grace just like dog, statement. Easily manipulated with treat."
Grace had recently laughed over a video clip of an Earth companion animal being roused by a food morsel, and while the supposed humor had failed to move me, I am pleased to confirm that the same principle applies here.
"Heeeeey," protests Grace, shifting up onto one forelimb joint to take the mug. He leans in for a sip, then tilts his head sideways and smiles with half his mouth. "Wait, where's the rest of it? Have you been drinking my coffee, Rock?"
"Rocky cannot drink, statement. Only fill ball, vents with drink steam particles," I remind him.
"Okay... weeeell, if you really want me up, I'm gonna need more," he says, leaning back to drain the cup. He waggles the empty vessel at me demandingly and then flops back prone onto the bed. Entitled creature! He is not beating the dog allegations.
"Grace forget say thank you," I grumble, but I roll back within reach of Armando. I move an audio snippet around on my thinking machine and hit play.
"Mary, coffee pouch", fake Grace recites dutifully.
"Wait, no, not the pouch, it's always too cold! And... is that my voice? Can't you just do that with the translator, bud? It's kinda creepy."
Click, click, click. "Is more fun," the computer says. Also, I hadn't thought of that. I had been having too much fun isolating Graceisms while he slept.
"Uuugh!"
Armando hands me the pouch. Although this vessel is thankfully sealed, I clutch it with two claws this time as I carefully roll back to the nest.
"Both coffee feel pretty cold to Rocky," I say.
With my two claws still on it, I squish the cool bag. It sloshes and bulges like a human organ in my grip. It feels nice.
"Make warm for Grace anyways," I concede as I continue to manipulate the sack. I wish not for the first time that I had my own stock of alertness chemicals. As far as I know, the closest thing Erid has to coffee is emergency cooling chambers.
Hmm...
I tap-tap in inquiry, an idea starting to form. The pouch is already losing some of its chill, but I press it firmly against my forelimb, seeking its relief.
The bag melts.
"Disgust!" I flute as fluids pour over my mesh-covered claws. "Disgust, disgust, disgust! Poor engineering, pouch design bad, inadequate!"
"It's for me to drink, not an alien ice pack!" says Grace. "You suck as a barista."
"Need word," I rumble as I try to clean up the fluid with some of Grace's nesting materials.
"Barista? It's like a person who brings you coffee. Hey, not the quilt!"
I drop the quilt and try instead to scrape the melted plastic off of the xenomesh. It gums up the junctures and makes it harder to manipulate.
"Rocky not care why "suck", is lie, statement." I use the finger-quotes gesture I picked up from Grace to indicate my disdain for his word choice. "Rocky good coffee bringer, human design bad. Need other word."
"Oh, ice pack? It's a passive cooling device. Usually frozen liquid inside plastic. Helps reduce swelling and discomfort for minor injuries."
"Cold wet bag for healing cold wet bag, question?"
Grace's laughter begins with an abrupt bark before tumbling into a lovely arpeggio. It is not dissimilar from my own laugh. Simpler and lacking subtlety, yes, but ran through with sweet raw joy. Grace is like a pebble: primitive, surprising, full of promise.
"Yeah, I guess so! Although it's usually frozen, so it's a solid. Not as wet as me, until it melts."
"Grace is big ice pack, question? Melted, question?"
"What?! No! I'm a whole guy."
"Whole guy ice pack, statement."
Maybe it was the shock of the pouch bursting, but I could swear I feel a little less tired. Ice pack. I really, really do not want to sleep.
"Grace come closer, request."
"You come closer. There's still coffee on the floor, and I don't have any more clean socks."
"Grace messy messy messy, clean socks doubtful, statement."
"I-- they're the cleanest I have, okay?! C'mere."
It is a welcome invitation. We have been doing a lot of Earth hugs since our reunion. I chirp happily as the ball bumps gently into his outspread arms.
I lean into the xenonite, pushing myself close to his chest. A thundering, squelching cacophony greets me with undeniable aliveness. I am not alone.
"The lights are still dimmed, bud," Grace says softly. I can hear his thin, cool breath shushing from his lungs.
"Why'd you wake me up? You usually love it when I sleep. Is it your turn? I know you haven't slept since I got back."
I don't want to answer that. A tiny bit of my exhaustion is relieved as I continue to try and burrow into his frigid chest through the barrier. How can I explain the terror of falling asleep alone on the Blip-A again, knowing this time with certainty that I had failed, knowing that we had found one another, had come so close, only to die anyways, alone, along with both our planets?
"Missed Grace," I say simply, and lean even closer. With his faint chill seeping into me, I can wait a little longer.