“Relief! I try so long. So many times. Fail.” He’s quiet for a moment. “Much time here. Much time alone.”

“How long were you here alone?”

He pauses. “Need new words.”

I pull my laptop off the wall. We run into new words every day, but they’re happening fewer and fewer times per day. That’s something.

I launch the frequency analyzer and bring up my dictionary spreadsheet. “Ready.”

“Seven thousand seven hundred and seventy-six seconds is ♩♫♩♪♪. Erid rotate one circle in one ♩♫♩♪♪.”

I immediately recognize the number. I’d worked it out back when I was studying Rocky’s clock. 7,776 is six to the fifth power. It’s exactly how many Eridian seconds it takes to wrap an Eridian clock around to all zeroes again. They divided their day into a very convenient and (to them) metric number of seconds. I can follow that.

“Eridian day.” I enter it into my dictionary. “A planet rotating once is a ‘day.’”

“Understand,” he says.

“Erid circles Eridani one time every 198.8 Eridian days. 198.8 Eridian days is ♫♩♪♫♪.”

“Year,” I say, and enter it. “A planet going around a star once is one year. So that’s an Eridian year.”

“We stay with Earth units or you get confused. How long is Earth day, question? And how many Earth days is one Earth year, question?”

“One Earth day is 86,400 seconds. One Earth year is 365.25 Earth days.”

“Understand,” he says. “I am here forty-six years.”

“Forty-six years?!” I gasp. “Earth years?!”

“I am here forty-six Earth years, yes.”

He’s been stuck in this system for longer than I’ve been alive.

“How… how long do Eridians live?”

He wiggled a claw. “Average is six hundred eighty-nine years.”

“Earth years?”

“Yes,” he says a little sharply. “Always Earth units. You are bad at math, so always Earth units.”

I can’t even speak for a moment.

“How many years have you been alive?”

“Two hundred ninety-one years.” He pauses. “Yes. Earth years.”

Holy cow. Rocky is older than the United States. He was born around the same time as George Washington.

He’s not even that old for his species. There are old Eridians out there who were alive when Columbus discovered (a bunch of people already living in) North America.

“Why you so surprised, question?” Rocky asks. “How long do humans live, question?”

Chapter 16

“This is Earth gravity, question?” Rocky asks. His ball rests on the control-room floor next to the pilot seat.

I check the Centrifuge control screen. We are up to full rotational velocity and spool extension. The crew compartment has done the 180-degree turn correctly. The diagram shows the two halves of the ship at full separation. We are spinning smoothly in the void. The “Lab Gravity” value reads “1.00g.”

“Yes. This is Earth gravity.”

He steps side to side, rolling his geodesic dome one face back and forth. “Not much gravity. What is value, question?”

“Nine point eight meters per second per second.”