Page 120 of Project Hail Mary

Then a gray blob plops out of his body into the pan. It lands with a damp-sounding splat.

He seals the pan and puts it back in the box it came from.

He returns to the food and flips over onto his back. The gaping abdominal hole is still open. I can see inside. There’s soft-looking flesh in there.

He reaches over with a few of his hands and grabs some choice morsels of food. He brings them to his opening and drops them in. He repeats this process, slowly and methodically, until all the food is in his…mouth? Stomach?

There is no chewing. There are no teeth. As far as I can tell, there are no moving parts inside.

He finishes the last of his meal, then lets his arms fall limp. He lies spread-eagle on the floor, immobile.

I resist the urge to ask if he’s okay. I mean, he looks dead. But this is probably just how Eridians eat. And poop. Yeah. I’m guessing that blob that came out earlier was what’s left of his previous meal. He’s a monostome—that is, the waste comes out the same opening that food goes into.

The opening in his abdomen closes slowly. A scab-like material forms where the break in the skin was. But I don’t see it for long. The rocky abdominal covering folds back into place shortly thereafter.

“I…sleep…”he slurred.“You…watch…question?”

A food coma for Rocky is no small thing. This doesn’t look voluntary at all. This is a biologically enforced post-meal siesta.

“Yes, I watch. Sleep.”

“Sle…ee…p…”he mumbles. Then he conks out, still belly-up on the floor.

His breathing speeds up. It always does when he first falls asleep. His body has to dump all the heat in the hot circulatory system.

After a few minutes, he stops panting. Now I know he’s well and truly asleep. Once he gets past the panting phase, I’ve never seen him wake back up in less than two hours. I can sneak off to do my own thing. In this case, I’ll write down everything I just saw about his digestive cycle.

Step 1: Subject defecates from mouth.

“Yup,” I say to myself. “That was pretty freaking gross.”

I wake up with Rocky staring at me.

It happens every morning now. But it never stops being creepy.

How do I know that a pentagonally symmetrical creature with no eyes is “staring” at me? I just know. Something in the body language.

“You awake,”he says.

“Yeah.” I step out of bed and stretch. “Food!”

The arms reach up and hand me a hot box. I open it up and take a peek. Looks like eggs and sausage.

“Coffee.”

The arms dutifully hand me a cup of coffee. It’s kind of cool that the arms will hand me a cup when there’s gravity, but a pouch when there isn’t. I’ll remember this when writing up theHail Mary’s Yelp review.

I look to Rocky. “You don’t have to watch me sleep. It’s okay.”

He turns his attention to a worktable in his partition of the dormitory.“Eridian culture rule. Must watch.”He picks up a device and tinkers with it.

Ah, the c-word. “Culture.” We have an unspoken agreement that cultural things just have to be accepted. It ends any minor dispute. “Do it my way because it’s how I was raised,” basically. We haven’t run into anything where our cultures clash…yet.

I eat my breakfast and drink my coffee. Rocky doesn’t say anything to me during that time. He never does. Eridian courtesy.

“Trash,” I say.

The arms collect my empty cup and meal package.