Page 119 of Project Hail Mary

Anyway, now I have to come up with an English word that means “Rocky’s spouse.”

“Adrian,” I say. Why not? “Human word is ‘Adrian.’ ”

“Understand,”he says. He heads down his tunnel into the lab.

I put my hands on my hips and crane my neck to watch him leave. “Where are you going?”

“Eat.”

“Eat?! Wait!”

I’ve never seen him eat. I’ve never even seen an orifice other than the radiator vents on top of his carapace. How does he get food in? For that matter, how does he lay eggs? He’s been pretty cagey about it. He ate in his ship when we were connected. And I think he snuck a few meals here and there while I slept.

I scamper down the ladder into the lab. He’s already halfway down his vertical tunnel, climbing the many handholds. I keep up, climbing my own ladder. “Hey, I want to watch!”

Rocky reaches the lab’s floor and pauses.“Is private. I sleep after eat. You watch me sleep, question?”

“I want to watch you eat!”

“Why, question?”

“Science,” I say.

Rocky shifts his carapace left and right a few times. Eridian body language for mild annoyance.“Is biological. Is gross.”

“Science.”

He wiggles his carapace again.“Okay. You watch.”He continues downward.

“Yes!” I follow him down.

I squeeze into my little area of the dormitory. All I have these days is my bed, the toilet, and the robot arms.

To be fair, he doesn’t have much room either. He has most of the volume, but it’s laden with all his junk. Plus, he made an ad-hoc workshop in there and a life-support system out of parts from his ship.

He opens one of his many soft-sided bags and pulls out a sealed package. He tears it open with his claws and there are various shapes I can’t identify. Mostly rocky material like his carapace. He sets about tearing them apart into smaller and smaller pieces with his claws.

“That’s your food?” I ask.

“Social discomfort,”he says.“No talk.”

“Sorry.”

I guess eating for them is something gross that is to be done in private.

He tears the rocky chunks off the food and exposes meat underneath. It’s definitely meat—it looks just like Earth meat. Considering we are almost certainly descended from the same basic building blocks of life, I bet we use the same proteins and have the same general solutions to various evolutionary challenges.

Once again I’m struck by melancholy. I want to spend the rest of my life studying Eridian biology! But I have to save humanity first. Stupid humanity. Getting in the way of my hobbies.

He pulls all of the rocky chunks off the meat and sets that aside. Then he tears the meat up into small chunks. At all times, he keeps the food on the packaging it came in. It never touches the floor. I wouldn’t want my food touching the floor either.

After a while, he has shredded the edible parts of his meal down as far as his hands can do it. Far more than any human would with their food.

Then he steps over to the other side of his compartment, leaving his food where it was. He pulls a flat, cylindrical container from a sealed box and places it under his thorax.

Then things…get gross. He did warn me. I can’t complain.

The rocky armor on his abdomen splits and I see something fleshy rip open underneath. A few drops of shiny silver liquid dribbles out. Blood?