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Grace entered the lab carrying his second-to-last crate of instant ramen—he was gonna have to resort to choking down taomoeba and coma slurry soon, ew—and stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Rocky standing on the other side of a xenonite panel, holding his creepy screen-gun.
For a creature without a face, he could sure look ominous sometimes.
“Hey, Rock, whatcha doing just standing there?” Grace asked with a laugh.
Rocky chirped a few times. “You once say that humans have ♬♩♪♩♪♬♩—need a word. Symbol that grows on body when meeting important person.”
Grace blinked, his hand almost unconsciously going to his cheek, where one of the largest and easily the most prominent of his soulmarks was laid into his skin.
“A soulmark,” he almost whispered, mentally filing away the new Eridian word. “Why do you ask?”
Rocky brandished his screen gun, and Grace almost flinched away on instinct, even though he knew well by then that it wouldn’t actually do anything.
“Humans have too, question? Rocky want to see!”
“Ah.” Grace had never really thought of it before, but he supposed Rocky couldn’t see any of his soulmarks. They were flat to his skin and identical in texture, so Rocky’s echolocation would do no good. When they were almost crashing into planets and breeding stubborn bacteria, they hadn’t had much time to think about stuff like that, but now that they were at the tail-end of a years long journey, they had all the time in the world. Grace shrugged and walked toward the xenonite partition in the lab.
“Sure, why not. Got your screen hooked up?”
"Yes, yes! Show your favorite first!"
"Okay, fine, you've gotta tell me about yours, too, now," Grace insisted. "Now that you brought it up, I'm really curious."
Rocky stomped a foot impatiently. "Show show show!"
Grace thought for a moment, then tapped a finger to his cheek. Rocky had asked for his favorite, after all.
"Right here."
Rocky’s texture readout showed an outline of the symbol, a brightly shining star.
“Amaze, amaze! Same as mine!”
”Yeah, we match. Pretty cool, right?”
Rocky grumbled a bit. “Can’t believe you never told me that you had soulmark from me!”
At that, Grace could do nothing but laugh out loud. “You serious, Rock? Of course I do! It just never really came up.”
They both went silent for a few moments, and Grace wondered if Rocky was thinking the same thing he was. The two of them sported the first ever interplanetary soul connection… the fact that both species had even developed soulmarks was amazing, and the fact that they were compatible enough to effect each other was even more so. It was either further evidence of the panspermia theory, or simply some force that science couldn’t explain, there to tell them that a friendship between Eridians and humans wasn’t only possible, but somehow predestined. Grace favored the first option, but maybe he was biased.
“Show another, question?” Rocky asked after the pause. Grace nodded and hiked his pant leg above his knee, a task which was easier than it had ever been thanks to his ever-dwindling weight.
“These were the other astronauts on the Hail Mary mission,” he explained. Rocky slowly waved the crystal tool over Grace's leg, observing the shapes as they appeared on his texture readout.
"Amaze! Look interesting! What do symbols mean, question?"
Grace gently ran his fingers over his shin, suddenly feeling wistful. He started at the bottom, tapping his finger against the simple black silhouette of a bow and arrow that Commander Yáo had left him with just a few inches above his ankle. "This is a representation of an ancient weapon that's still around today." Moving upward, he pointed at the simple colorful strand of DNA from DuBois. "This is the structure of human DNA."
"And Eridian DNA is very similar, too!" Rocky added in. "What is third?"
"Oh, it's a firework!" Grace said happily, running his hand over the brilliant red firework mark from Ilyukhina. "Uh, a kind of human entertainment, made from a fuel that combusts and explodes in the sky when you give it a spark."
"What, question?"
"What, what?" Grace asked, slightly awkwardly. He supposed the concept must seem pretty strange to Rocky. Eridians had no point in setting off fireworks, so of course they'd never developed them. The color and display would be lost to them, and the loud ignition would likely be pretty overstimulating to an Eridian’s sensitive hearing. Rocky sounded disgusted when he spoke.
"Humans set on fire and explode sky for fun, question? Humans reckless and weird."
"Hey!" Grace protested with a laugh. "It's a culture thing, leave it alone."
Rocky hummed thoughtfully, then turned around and pointed at one of his back legs. This one was scattered with small engravings in the rock-like outer shell. Grace recognized a few of the symbols, like the atomic structure of argon and the little wrench-like tool he always saw Rocky using, but most of them were incomprehensible.
“These are from Blip-A crew,” Rocky explained, his voice an octave lower than usual. “After they died, I remember them by these marks.”
Grace didn’t know what to say. It was times like this where he wished he could give Rocky a big hug—a real hug. Obviously, that was impossible for a multitude of reasons, but that didn’t mean the urge wasn’t there. Instead he just slumped down on the floor so he could be closer to Rocky.
“Tell me about them,” he quietly prompted.
So Rocky did.
It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. The two of them had swapped stories about their respective colleagues many, many times. Grace listened while Rocky explained the origin of each and every soulmark, then he returned the favor. Eventually, the scope expanded far past just the astronauts, and Grace and Rocky were both clambering to brag about every single mark they each possessed. Grace was fascinated by the two halves of a family crest Rocky’s parents had left him with. Rocky laughed about the force of gravity equation emblazoned on Grace’s lower thigh—that one had been Lokken’s doing, of course. They went back and forth between sharing pointless anecdotes and scientific musings, lazily trying to justify the conversation with some sort of hypothetical.
What it really all meant, to Grace, at least, was “You’ll never be alone like that again.”