He wears clothing. The legs are bare, showing the rocklike skin, but there’s cloth on the carapace. Sort of like a shirt with five armholes. I don’t know what the shirt is made of but it looks thicker than typical human clothing. It’s a dull greenish-brown, and inconsistently shaded.

The top of the shirt has a large open hole. Like where the neck goes on a human’s T-shirt. That hole is smaller than the carapace. So he must have to put that shirt on by pulling it downward and sliding the arms through their respective holes. Again, like a human’s shirt.

But there’s no neck or head to go through that hole on top. Just a hard-looking rocky pentagon that sticks up a little bit from the crusty skin.

On his side of the tunnel, he has handles and latticework on the walls. He casually hangs on to a couple of bars with two of his hands. I guess when you have five hands, zero g isn’t that big a deal. Just allocate a hand or two for keeping in one place and use the other three to do stuff.

For me, the tunnel is kind of small. But for him it’s absolutely spacious.

He waves to me with a free arm. He knows one human greeting and by golly he plans to use it.

I wave back. He waves again. I shake my head. No more waving.

He pivots his “shoulders” to rotate his carapace back and forth. He “shook his head” inasmuch as he could. I wonder how we’re going to break out of this game of “Eridian See Eridian Do,” but he takes care of that for me.

He taps the clear wall three times with a finger, then keeps the finger extended. Is he… pointing?

I follow the line and wow, there’s stuff in the tunnel with me! They left me a present!

I can be forgiven for not noticing. Seeing an alien kind of distracted me from the small collection of objects on the tunnel wall.

“All right,” I say. “Let’s see what you left me.”

“♩♫♪♪♫,” says Rocky.

My jaw drops. Yes, I’m in zero g. It still drops.

There was no pronunciation or inflection of the sounds. Just notes. Like whale song. Except not quite like whale song, because there were several at once. Whale chords, I guess. And he was responding to me. That means he can hear too.

And notably, the sounds were in my range of hearing. Some of the notes were low, some of them high. But definitely audible. That alone is amazing when I think about it. He’s from a different planet, and totally different evolutionary line, but we ended up with compatible sound ranges.

On top of all that, he decided my noises warranted a response.

“You have a language!” I say. “How do you have a language?! You don’t have a mouth!”