I don’t need the frequency analyzer anymore. That was an A-below-middle-C major fifth, followed by an E-flat octave, and then a G-minor seventh. I enter it into my spreadsheet. Though I don’t know why. I haven’t had to look at that thing in days. “What does it mean?”

“It is name of my mate.”

I widen my eyes. That little devil! He never told me he had a mate! I guess Eridians don’t kiss and tell.

We’d covered some biological basics during our travels. I explained how humans make more humans, and he told me where baby Eridians come from. They’re hermaphrodites and they reproduce by laying eggs next to each other. Stuff happens between the eggs and one of them absorbs the other, leaving one viable egg that will hatch in one Eridian year—forty-two Earth days.

Laying eggs together is, basically, the Eridian equivalent of sex. And they mate for life. But this is the first I’ve heard of Rocky doing it.

“You have a mate?”

“Unknown,” Rocky says. “Mate possibly has new mate. I gone a long time.”

“Sad,” I say.

“Yes, sad. But necessary. Must save Erid. You pick human word for ♫♩♪♫.”

Proper nouns are a headache. If you’re learning German from a guy named Hans, you just call him Hans. But I literally can’t make the noises Rocky makes and vice versa. So when one of us tells the other about a name, the other one has to pick or invent a word to represent that name in their own language. Rocky’s actual name is a sequence of notes—he told it to me once but it has no meaning in his language, so I stuck with “Rocky.”

But my name is actually an English word. So Rocky just calls me the Eridian word for “grace.”

Anyway, now I have to come up with an English word that means “Rocky’s spouse.”

“Adrian,” I say. Why not? “Human word is ‘Adrian.’”

“Understand,” he says. He heads down his tunnel into the lab.

I put my hands on my hips and crane my neck to watch him leave. “Where are you going?”

“Eat.”

“Eat?! Wait!”

I’ve never seen him eat. I’ve never even seen an orifice other than the radiator vents on top of his carapace. How does he get food in? For that matter, how does he lay eggs? He’s been pretty cagey about it. He ate in his ship when we were connected. And I think he snuck a few meals here and there while I slept.

I scamper down the ladder into the lab. He’s already halfway down his vertical tunnel, climbing the many handholds. I keep up, climbing my own ladder. “Hey, I want to watch!”

Rocky reaches the lab’s floor and pauses. “Is private. I sleep after eat. You watch me sleep, question?”

“I want to watch you eat!”

“Why, question?”

“Science,” I say.