Page 90 of Project Hail Mary

“Why?”

He waves a few arms, trying to find a way to phrase it.“Eridians do that.”

Eridians watch one another sleep. It’s a thing. I should be more culturally sensitive, but he threw shade when I talked to myself. “Eridians are unusual.”

“Observe. I sleep better.”

I don’t want to watch a dog-sized spider not move for several hours. There’s a crew in there, right? Have one of them do it. I point to his ship. “Have some other Eridian observe you.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I am only Eridian here.”

My mouth hangs open. “You’re theonlyperson on that huge ship?!”

He’s quiet for a moment, then says, “?????????????????????????????????????.”

Complete nonsense. Did my kludged-together translation software fail? I check it out. No, it’s working fine. I examine the waveforms. They seem similar to the ones I’d seen before. But they’re lower. Come to think of it, that whole sentence seemed lower in pitch than anything Rocky has ever said before. I select the whole segment in the software’s recording history and bump it up an octave. The octave is a universal thing, not specific to humans. It means doubling the frequency of every note.

The computer immediately translates the result.“Original crew was twenty-three. Now is only me.”

That octave-drop…I think it’s emotion.

“They…did they die?”

“Yes.”

I rub my eyes. Wow. TheBlip-Ahad a crew of twenty-three. Rocky is the sole survivor and he’s understandably upset about it.

“Wh…er…” I stammer. “Bad.”

“Bad bad bad.”

I sigh. “My original crew was three. Now it’s just me.” I put my hand up against the divider.

Rocky puts a claw on the divider opposite my hand.“Bad.”

“Bad bad bad,” I say.

We stay like that for a moment. “I’ll watch you sleep.”

“Good. Me sleep,”he says.

His arms relax and he looks for all the world like a dead bug. He floats free in his side of the tunnel, no longer hanging on to any support bars.

“Well, you’re not alone anymore, buddy,” I say. “Neither of us are.”

“Mr. Easton, I don’t think we need to be searched,” said Stratt.

“I think you do,” said the head prison guard. His thick New Zealand accent sounded friendly, but there was an edge to it. This man had made a whole career out of not putting up with people’s crap.

“We’re exempt from all—”

“Stop,” Easton said. “No one gets in or out of Pare without a full search.”

Auckland Prison, which the locals called “Pare” for some reason, was New Zealand’s only maximum-security prison unit. The sole point of entry was awash with security cameras and a micro-scanner for all guests. Even the guards passed through the detector on their way in.