Eating

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.

Rocky shifts his carapace left and right a few times. Eridian body language for mild annoyance. “Is biological. Is gross.”

“Science.”

He wiggles his carapace again. “Okay. You watch.” He continues downward.

“Yes!” I follow him down.

I squeeze into my little area of the dormitory. All I have these days is my bed, the toilet, and the robot arms.

To be fair, he doesn’t have much room either. He has most of the volume, but it’s laden with all his junk. Plus, he made an ad-hoc workshop in there and a life-support system out of parts from his ship.

He opens one of his many soft-sided bags and pulls out a sealed package. He tears it open with his claws and there are various shapes I can’t identify. Mostly rocky material like his carapace. He sets about tearing them apart into smaller and smaller pieces with his claws.

“That’s your food?” I ask.

“Social discomfort,” he says. “No talk.”

“Sorry.”

I guess eating for them is something gross that is to be done in private.

He tears the rocky chunks off the food and exposes meat underneath. It’s definitely meat—it looks just like Earth meat. Considering we are almost certainly descended from the same basic building blocks of life, I bet we use the same proteins and have the same general solutions to various evolutionary challenges.

Once again I’m struck by melancholy. I want to spend the rest of my life studying Eridian biology! But I have to save humanity first. Stupid humanity. Getting in the way of my hobbies.

He pulls all of the rocky chunks off the meat and sets that aside. Then he tears the meat up into small chunks. At all times, he keeps the food on the packaging it came in. It never touches the floor. I wouldn’t want my food touching the floor either.

After a while, he has shredded the edible parts of his meal down as far as his hands can do it. Far more than any human would with their food.

Then he steps over to the other side of his compartment, leaving his food where it was. He pulls a flat, cylindrical container from a sealed box and places it under his thorax.

Then things…get gross. He did warn me. I can’t complain.

The rocky armor on his abdomen splits and I see something fleshy rip open underneath. A few drops of shiny silver liquid dribbles out. Blood?

Then a gray blob plops out of his body into the pan. It lands with a damp-sounding splat.

He seals the pan and puts it back in the box it came from.

He returns to the food and flips over onto his back. The gaping abdominal hole is still open. I can see inside. There’s soft-looking flesh in there.

He reaches over with a few of his hands and grabs some choice morsels of food. He brings them to his opening and drops them in. He repeats this process, slowly and methodically, until all the food is in his…mouth? Stomach?

There is no chewing. There are no teeth. As far as I can tell, there are no moving parts inside.

He finishes the last of his meal, then lets his arms fall limp. He lies spread-eagle on the floor, immobile.

I resist the urge to ask if he’s okay. I mean, he looks dead. But this is probably just how Eridians eat. And poop. Yeah. I’m guessing that blob that came out earlier was what’s left of his previous meal. He’s a monostome—that is, the waste comes out the same opening that food goes into.

The opening in his abdomen closes slowly. A scab-like material forms where the break in the skin was. But I don’t see it for long. The rocky abdominal covering folds back into place shortly thereafter.

“I…sleep…” he slurred. “You…watch…question?”

A food coma for Rocky is no small thing. This doesn’t look voluntary at all. This is a biologically enforced post-meal siesta.

“Yes, I watch. Sleep.”

“Sle…ee…p…” he mumbles. Then he conks out, still belly-up on the floor.

His breathing speeds up. It always does when he first falls asleep. His body has to dump all the heat in the hot circulatory system.

After a few minutes, he stops panting. Now I know he’s well and truly asleep. Once he gets past the panting phase, I’ve never seen him wake back up in less than two hours. I can sneak off to do my own thing. In this case, I’ll write down everything I just saw about his digestive cycle.

Step 1: Subject defecates from mouth.

“Yup,” I say to myself. “That was pretty freaking gross.”

***

Chapter 16