“Damn,” I say. “Sorry. Totally. Are you okay? You need… like little pebbles to munch on or something?” I laugh.
“Fuck you,” the rock says. “What I need is some water.”
This is me, in a beacon, out on the edge of sector eight, so damn near the edge that I might as well be in sector nine, running the tap on my moisture reclaiminator, filling a plastic cup with water, then drizzling it on top of a rock in a smashed wooden box.
“Not on my fucking head!” the rock says.
I apologize but laugh. The rock has what sounds vaguely like a British accent, which makes everything it says funnier than it should.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Just a little puddle, man. And save me some time by putting me in it.”
I do this. It occurs to me that I haven’t called this in or checked with NASA about what I found. I go over to the QT to see if there are any messages. Nothing. That’s pretty damn curious. So I fire off a quick “55” to Houston, which is beacon code for “Everything here is hunky-dory, in case you were wondering.”
“Where are we?” the rock asks. And I realize that I need a name for the guy. And how really fucking cool it is to have some company other than my freaked-out OCD roommate.
“Beacon 23,” I say. “Sector eight. On the outer edge of the Iain Banks asteroid field, between the ore rim and—”
“Yeah, jeez, okay. The middle of nowhere, I get it. So when’s the next pickup?”
“The next what?”
“WHEN DO I GET HOME?” the rock shouts. It sounds like a little squeal more than a great roar, like a piece of chalk on a blackboard.
“The, uh, next supply shuttle will be in… I think three months?”
The rock stares at me.
Did he just shrug?
He looks exasperated.
A bubble forms on the surface of his little puddle.
I wonder if rocks can fart.
“I need to name you,” I tell the rock.
“The hell you do.”
“I’m thinking…”
“Already got a name,” the rock says.
“…oh, but that’s too obvious.” I laugh. I laugh hard. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in so long that all my emotional triggers, which have only known sobbing, mix some tears in with the laughter.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” the rock says.
“I’m going to call you…”
“I’VE GOT A NAME!”
“…Rocky.”
Rocky stares at me. It’s more of a glare, really. I start laughing again. Damn, it feels good.
“You’re the worst human I’ve ever met,” Rocky says.
I wipe the tears from my cheeks. “I think maybe when the supply shuttle comes, I’ll just keep you. Not tell the labcoats about you.”
“That’s called kidnapping, you sadistic ape.”
This makes me laugh some more. It’s the accent. It kills me.
“Are you stoned?” Rocky asks.
And this is too much. I double over and clutch my shins, there in the command pod, not a stitch of clothing on, laughing and crying and wheezing for breath, fearing I might not be able to stop, that I’ll die like this, die from so much joy and mirth, while debris from a destroyed cargo ship peppers the hull and cracks into the solar array, and ships full of people navigate through space at twenty times the speed of light, narrowly avoiding this great reef of drifting rocks, and all because I’m here, because I’m holding it together, this trained and hairless monkey in outer space.
• 6 •
Rocky and I sit up in the business end of the beacon, past the weightless tube that extends off to the side for a dozen meters, up where the GWB broadcasts all the local gravitational disturbances to ships traveling through hyperspace. My head rests against the broadcasting dome, which makes me feel like a warm hand is cradling my skull, soothing me down to my toes.
“Tell me about your homeworld,” I say to Rocky. His box is positioned so he can gaze out the main porthole with me, at the stars and the wreck of debris he miraculously survived.
There’s a pause. A wistful pause.
“It’s beautiful,” he says. And then: “You’re from Earth, right?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Until I was ten. Then moved to Orion with my dad. Then Ajax for a few months. Then New India. I was an army brat.”
“Okay, okay, I didn’t ask for your entire life history,” Rocky says. “Well, imagine Earth, but nothing like that.”
I laugh. “Gotcha.”
We sit in silence for a long while. It feels good up here. Even better with the company. I could do another four years. I could re-up. I remember feeling this way in the army, the days that were really good, when you’d survived the bad shit and felt kinda invincible and actually, deeply happy, but maybe in an unhealthy and manic kinda way, and how those were the days when you went to your CO and saluted and shouted, in your best boot camp voice, “Sign me up for another tour, SUR!” And how later, when the high wore off, and you came down from the survivor’s rush, and your mood went back to normal, you were like, “What the fuck did I just do?”
I felt that kind of good right then.
After a while, Rocky starts telling me about his home planet. I listen while I gaze out at the stars and the twinkle of aluminum tinsel.
“Your race named my planet Orvo when you found it. After the name of a physician on one of the scout ships. I think he’d died the week before or something. Anyway, you probably assume that my planet and my name sound like some gibberish series of clicks and scratchy noises, and while that’s really fucking xenophobic, you’d be right.”
Rocky makes a series of clicks and scratchy noises. I smile. Life is really good.
“We don’t have a moon, and our sun is a very long way away. What heat we have comes from a radioactive core, and there’s very little tectonic activity, which makes for an incredibly still planet, covered with a few meters of water in most places, except for these really shallow ledges and flat islands where most of the cool stuff takes place. That was home.”
“So, not space-faring, I assume?” I say.
“Yeah, asshole, not space-faring.”
“But sentient.”
“Smarter than you.”
I smile. “And your anatomy? I assume something like neurons?”
“Not quite as simple as neurons, but similar. And yeah, we’re very social. So we developed sentience. Theory of mind and all that.”
“What’s theory of mind?” I ask.
Rocky pauses. Like he’s wondering if teaching a monkey is within his boundaries of patience.
“It’s me being able to guess what you’re thinking,” he says.
My brain is already drifting off to a different topic. “What do you call a small group of your kind?” I ask.
“Say what?”
“Well, a group of cows is a herd. What’s a group of rocks. A bag?”
“A bag of rocks?” Rocky asks.
I laugh.
“Fuck you.”
“Rocky, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
“That settles it. I used to argue with the professor that there was no such thing as hell. I was wrong. I relent. I give up. I’ve found the joint.”
“Where did you learn English?” I ask. “And who did you used to argue about heaven and hell with? This professor?”
“We didn’t argue. We debated. We discussed. It’s what civilized people do. You should try it sometime.”
“Okay.” I feel a little more sober. And for some reason, I don’t mind. I sit up, away from the GWB for a moment. “Tell me about your owner—”
“I own me,” Rocky says.
“Yeah, sorry.” I shake my head. “About this professor you were being sent to. On Oxford.”