5: Physics and chemistry (Patreon)

“Okay,” I explained to Glath, “so I need 240 volts, 10 amps to connect to these bits of metal on this plug here, as AC – uh, with the electrons zigzagging back and forth.”

“What are volts and amps?” he asked, crossing his front legs in what I was beginning to recognise as an inquiring gesture. Once I’d realised that Glath was way more comfortable imitating a giant mantis than a human, I’d explained that I didn’t expect him to look human just for my sake. You’d think that hearing my exact voice coming from an alien spider cloud imitating a huge mantis would be creepier than coming from one imitating a human, but it wasn’t. Nothing is creepier than an alien spider cloud talking in your exact voice while trying, and failing, to look like you.

He – I didn’t know if Glath had a single sex or gender, but the mantis he was trying so hard to emulate was male – watched patiently as I scrolled though a basic physics textbook, frowning. I’d prioritised finding a way to keep my devices charged over mere trivialities like finding out what I could eat without dying or whether it was possible to catch some sort of weird alien infection that my immune system would be powerless to resist. When my laptop died, my knowledge died with it. That laptop battery was the most important clock I was on.

“Okay,” I said eventually, “so in terms of electrons I need… hmm. What the hell is a Coulomb?”

“6.242x1018 protons,” Glath said after some internal translation rustling. “What is a proton?”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure we care about the electrons,” I mumbled. “Current is backwards because somebody guessed wrong before we knew what an electron was. If I’m reading this right.”

“What is an electron?”

“It’s… you know, an electron,” I said, waving my hand in what I was sure must be an informative manner. “The little balls whizzing around atoms. Makes electricity. Everyone knows what an electron is.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t know about electrons, but you know their unit of measurement?”

“My information for translation is incomplete.”

“No shit.” I scrolled through the textbook some more. “Okay, an electron is the smallest subatomic particle, it has a charge of negative 1 and orbits the nucleus of the atom.”

“Oh! The [untranscribable alien clicking sound]. Did you just describe this as a particle?”

“Probably. Your expression is getting better, by the way. That sounded almost like something a human would say, without sounding like a creepy recording of something I said.”

“Thank you.”

“Okay, so one Coulomb is on amp per second, meaning...” I did some quick calculations on the back of a receipt I’d found in my glove compartment. “Does this look right to you? I haven’t done algebra since high school, so...”

Glath absorbed the receipt. “And you need this charge moving back and forth?”

“I… think so?”

“It is easy. I will make sure the correct voltage and amps are available and source the materials for you to build a device to connect the supply to your machine.”

“A socket. It’s called a socket.”

Glath rustled. “Ah. Yes. Socket.”

While Glath was off collecting materials or whatever, I noted what pages of what books I’d probably need to build the socket and started to memorise the details. I, with my usefulness to the ship hinging on me being a master engineer, could hardly claim not to be able to do this trivial task. Once I was sure I knew enough of the basics that anything complicated enough to need checking wouldn’t be suspicious, I addressed my second most important problem: trying not to get randomly poisoned. Food turned out to be a way more complicated matter than I thought it would be, so I started with water.

Turns out, there’s all kinds of horrible things that can kill you in water, but I doubted most of them would be a problem on the spaceship. I didn’t think there were industrial solvents being dumped into the water supply and biological infection seemed unlikely; the water on the ship would have to be sterilised.

I did wonder, vaguely, whether I might catch something off the crew or vice versa, but I’d heard Kate rant enough to know that even on Earth, just because a bacterium or virus could live in one species didn’t mean it could live in another, so the chances of me being able to catch anything from an alien were remote. Besides, I was pretty sure the crew would’ve considered that when they abducted me.

All in all, and assuming the aliens didn’t have weird chemicals that did horrible things to the body that human science had not yet encountered, there were only two things likely to be in the water that I thought I would have to worry about – plastics, and heavy metals. Both were long-term poisoners, the heavy metals slowly collecting in the body and fucking shit up, and some plastics being mildly carcinogenic. So realistically, if I didn’t manage to steal the ship and fly it back to Earth fairly quickly, I probably wouldn’t live long enough for either to be a problem anyway.

At this point, Glath returned with a small pile of wires and clips, and helped me lever off a wall panel. He showed me a wire. “The requires electrical motion – ”

“Current,” I said.

“ – current is moving through this wire.”

“Great. So, just to get this straight, there’s an electrical network in this wall.”

“Yes.”

“And flowing water, because I took a shower earlier.”

“Yes.”

“In a rotating ring. Which I assume is supplied through the non-rotating central axle, or another place rotating at a different speed.”

“Yes.”

“How is it that my species can’t seem to get past our own moon if interstellar travel is a problem solvable by people who build ships like this?”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Of course you don’t, buddy, you’re not a master engineer. Would electricity earth in this floor I’m lying on?”

“We are quite far from Earth.”

“No, I meant that in the case of me… you know what? I’m just gonna assume the worst and try not to die. Hand me those wire cutter things and that strippy thing.”

Glath did. I prepared to cut, then a horrible thought struck me. “The electricity is off, right?”

“No.”

I blinked. “You mean this wire is live right now? And you were just gonna let me cut it? With my hands?”

“I assumed that was procedure. I am not a master engineer.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being funny or not, Glath, but if you are, that slight change on my inflection is perfect for it. Could you please have somebody shut off the electricity while I do this?”

“I will.”

Once the electricity was off, the project was pretty simple. Turns out alien wire was an awful lot like Earth wire – metal for the electricity, surrounded by some kind of rubber or plastic to stop the electricity. I cut the wire, added some more wire to each to make a cord, and ended each end of the cord with a bit of metal shaped to clip around one of the laptop charger plug’s prongs. Glath had brought me some kind of non-conductive putty that started to harden when you took it out of the packet, so I shaped a blob of that around my work, taped my two wires leading from the wall together to make a single chord, and gave Glath a thumbs-up, hoping that my hands weren’t shaking too obviously.

I then explained the meaning of a thumbs-up to Glath, so he could go and get the power turned back on.

“Okay,” I said once I’d confirmed that the socket was working, “Next problem. Water.” I pulled up a picture of the periodic table. “Anything here,” I said, circling quite a lot of the bottom of the table with my finger, “will kill me quite fast, maybe, I think, if there’s too much of it. And anything here,” I added, circling the heavy metals, “will kill me a lot slower.”

Glath reached out a long arm and poured some spiders over my laptop screen. I resisted the urge to drop the laptop or start frantically crushing spiders. The first time Glath had looked at my screen had resulted in a few crushed spiders, a terrified interpreter (letting me learn several of Glath’s body language cues for shock and terror, which I hoped never to see again), and a long, apology-laden talk about different senses in different species. Glath’s sight, as it turned out, wasn’t great; they could make out shapes through a combination of sight and a few other senses based on sound and pressure, but colour was harder. Turns out computer screens only emit three colours, none of which Glath had much luck using to discern the shape of letters or diagrams; it was far easier to simply pour himself over the surface and have his spiders compare notes.

This time, Glath briefly flowed over the screen, pulled back, and said, “I do not know these symbols.”

I reread the paragraph under the periodic table. “Okay, um, so the number is how many protons, which means… those electrons we talked about before? The number on each element should be how many electrons, too, then.”

“Which number?”

“Uh, the top one. The other is atomic mass, which… for the most common isotope… nope. Not going there. Let’s stick with electrons.”

“But such a field can easily shift… I mean… the electron amount can change. Easily at any given place.”

“Hmm. Is there a chemist on the ship?”

“The filtration expert has a lot of chemical knowledge.”

“Oh, good, he’s exactly who we need for this water stuff anyway, right?”

“Yes.”

“Great. Then let’s go see the filtration expert.”

------------

I was trying to ignore the itch in my scales.

It had been getting worse. I wanted to shed, and the Stardancer had no core tree to scrape the scales off. Some of my colleagues had started to shed anyway, pulling theirs free on whatever rough surface was available for the task, but I’m somewhat of a purist and wasn’t about to engage in such perverted nonsense. I could see why they had been tempted, though; the itch was getting distracting. Soon enough, I’d have to shed at least one layer.

A few of my colleagues had shed several, peeling off layers almost as soon as they matured. They’d had the decency to be ashamed at first, and tried to hide their habits, but we’d been in space a long time and the resulting accelerated maturity was starting to show; their wings were shrivelling and crumbling, their bellies becoming heavy with the core seeds growing inside them. At this rate, they’d be fully female before the captain ever made good on its promises and landed us.

The rest of us said nothing about the shedders, of course. After all, when we did land, we wanted people in separate stages of maturity. We wanted a few people ready to lay core seeds so that the rest of us could shed properly when the trees were strong enough. What was the point of a single-sex colony? It would be nonsense.

But to get far enough to make a colony, I had to keep everybody alive. And my scales were distracting me.

So was the thing that marched into my office behind Ceramic.

Yes, ‘office’ was a grandiose term for the small section of my people’s ring that I’d walled off to work in, but it was still mine, and I couldn’t afford to be distracted. I flicked two of my tails at the intruders to show displeasure and returned to my screens. But Ceramic was already dissolving out of its template’s shape and into a shape that more mimicked mine; four legs, four tails, two big wings. It was preparing to speak with me. I wondered whether ignoring or acknowledging them would get rid of them faster.

“Yarrow, this human needs your help,” Ceramic said, in a mixture of vocalisations and tail-gestures.

Acknowledging it was, then. I hoped it would be brief. Ceramic could never get our tail-gestures right, which garbled its language somewhat. I’d had the pleasure of talking to an ambassador colony who had used one of ours for its template for ten years, once, and the conversation had been smooth and clear all the way through. Ceramic spoke like an injured child in comparison.

“And just how can I help this...” the meaning of my words only hit me halfway through my own sentence … “human? Really? The captain actually took one?”

“You didn’t know? It wasn’t a secret.”

“I assumed the captain would change its mind!”

“The human’s been wandering around the ship.”

“I’ve been in here for days, I haven’t seen anybody on the ship!” I inspected the beast. It was a lot taller than me, but this was largely because it was balanced up on its hind legs for some reason. It was able to hold its body very straight on just two feet, with no wings or tail for balance. It appeared to be doing this because it had an electronic device cradled next to its body with one foreleg, much in the way I might carry something with a wing. It wore most of a flight suit, missing only the helmet. No… on closer inspection, it seemed to be breathing with its clearly visible mouth, meaning that it was missing its breathing apparatus, too. The parts of it that I could see were covered in smooth skin, somewhere between pale yellow and pink in colour, and fine brown filaments growing above what were presumably eyes and from the top of its head. The eye filaments were much shorter than the head filaments, which were tangled and knotted like uncombed bark fibres and hung a little lower than the human’s mouth. It was ludicrous-looking, certainly, but not dangerous. It bared its teeth at me, briefly; I decided that this couldn’t possibly be a threat, because they were clearly blunt and ineffective as weapons.

Of course, most of its body was obscured by the suit and whatever it was wearing underneath. It could be hiding all manner of natural weapons. If the story of Jupiter told us anything, it was not to underestimate humans.

Ceramic said something to the human. It didn’t change shape, but the human seemed to understand anyway, bobbing its head and saying something back.

“Charlie wants to know if anything in the sections being indicated on this chart is in the ship’s water supply in significant quantities,” Ceramic said.

Charlie. I tried pronouncing the name. With effort, I almost could. I looked at the chart. “What am I looking at?”

“It is a layout of all individual chemical elements arranged – ”

“Oh, yes, I see the pattern.” The elements were arranged by proximity to stable charge cloud counts, ordered by increasing internal charge. I had been momentarily mislead by the fact that the central columns had been removed from the table and lined up underneath it for some reason. I examined the two groups that Charlie had indicated with a long, flexible foretoe. The bottom group was largely irrelevant; most of those elements were either extremely rare, highly unstable at local conditions and wouldn’t last in water for long enough to be a problem even if they got in somehow, or already filtered out due to their danger to life aboard the ship. The second group indicated were a contamination possibility, but also filtered due to their potential danger to certain life forms. I made a note to check on those filters, in case they were more dangerous to humans than the other life aboard. I explained this to Ceramic, who flicked its wings to indicate satisfaction.

“Can I be of any further service?” I asked.

“Not right now,” Ceramic said. “Thank you.”

“Do try not to get murdered,” I advised politely.

“It’s been perfectly compliant,” Ceramic assured me. “I see nothing to indicate danger.”

“Neither did the Jupiterians.”

-----------------

The filtration expert turned out to be one of the dragon people. Glath led me onto their ring in the ship (gravity and air pressure still too light for my taste, but better than the bridge) and led me through a small maze of colourful hand-woven tapestries, some anchored to make walls and some dangling to make curtains, depicting various geometric patterns that, if they had any meaning, I couldn’t interpret. Occasionally was an actual picture of a sunset or something that was probably some kind of alien animal or tree, but mostly it was lines and shapes, ranging from blocky things you’d buy for a preschooler to straight lines shot through a tapestry at random in various beautiful colours to intricate details diagrams that looked like magic demon-summoning circles from TV.

I made the mistake of paying too much attention to the tapestries and not enough to where we were going, and got lost immediately. Fortunately, it wasn’t long before Glath led me under a woven curtain into the office of the filtration expert.

Said expert was one of the dragon aliens, like those I’d seen on the bridge. I’m no expert in alien body language, but as they simply refused to look at us until Glath coaxed them to start talking, somehow I don’t think they wanted us there.

Talking seemed to be a full body experience for dragons. The pair used wings, tails and voice, and probably a bunch of other stuff I didn’t notice, to have a brief conversation. It wasn’t long before the filtration expert started, and stared at me.

“He did not know you were aboard,” Glath explained.

“Oh.” This seemed like a problem to me. Wasn’t that the sort of thing the filtration guy needed to know? What if there was something in my body that wasn’t being filtered out of the water supply and could kill aliens? “Well, uh, now he does.” I gave a halfhearted smile and wave to the stocky dragon who was very openly looking me up and down. He seemed to take everything in, immediately lose interest, and turn to the problem at hand.

I could respect a guy like that.

The whole issue was resolved very quickly. Apparently those things weren’t in the water, but the filtration expert would check the filter systems to be sure. Okay then. I carefully watched how Glath and the expert moved their tails at the end of the conversation and experimentally copied the gesture with my fingers to say ‘goodbye’, but my gesture seemed to go unnoticed, so I’d probably gotten it wrong.

Glath’s translator fluttered as we left, so I kept quiet and let him assemble his sentence in peace. As we entered the shaft to the central corridor and the gravity began to drop, he said, “Does your water’s acidity need to alter chemical?”

“You mean, does it need to be a specific acidity? I… don’t think so? I mean it didn’t melt my skin off when I showered or anything, so I’m sure it’s fine.”

“Even for digestion?”

“Well water’s water, isn’t it? We can drink it from rivers and pipes and the sky and stuff so I’m sure whatever acidity it normally has is fine.” My laptop slipped from my hands in the dropping gravity; I grabbed it and did a quick search of the high school biology books I had open. “So, uh, the pH scale – that’s the scale we use for acids – has water at around 7 if it’s clean, but we can drink up to 8.5 or even higher. And apple juice is 3.3, so there doesn’t seem to be any trouble with low pH either.”

“How does this pH represent acidity?”

“Good question.” Looking that up filled in the journey back to my ring and then some, during which time I learned some extremely boring things about the importance of hydrogen and how logarithmic scales work. I summarised this for Glath.

Glath’s volume contracted briefly in what I’d started tentatively theorising was a gesture of disbelief. “You are certain of this scale?”

“Well, I dunno, that’s just what the book says.”

“That is more acidic than digestive acids!”

“Not our digestive acids,” I said. “I mean, I think they’re less potent when we’re not digesting? But on this scale, when they are, they’re around 1.5, so – ”

“There is clearly a misprint in this formula.”

“I’ll check the other books and get back to you on that.”

“An acidity that low should burn your flesh.”

“Oh, yeah, it totally does. I mean it’s fine in our stomach but if it gets out, man does it burn. I used to go to school with this girl who had an eating disorder and she’d make herself throw up and her vomit started to dissolve away the enamel on her teeth after awhile.”

Glath took a long time to translate that. When he was done, he just stared at me. At least I assumed he was staring. It’s kind of hard to tell when you’re being stared at by someone with millions of too-small-to-see eyes all over his amorphous body. His faux head stayed pointed at me, anyway.

“I’ll check the books, anyway. Let’s move onto food. I could eat a horse.”

The sense of being stared at intensified. “How would you fit it inside you? Your clothing did not look designed for expanding.”

I laughed. Glath’s spiders shifted in a sort of flinch. “No, no, it’s an expression. Exaggeration. Uh, it’s like saying something is bigger than it is, for emphasis,” I explained, to save Glath the bother of translating. The internal rustling told me that perhaps I shouldn’t have used a word as obscure as ‘emphasis’. “I just meant that I’m getting hungry.”

“I will allow you to find this information,” Glath said, heading for the shaft. Was it my imagination, or was he moving faster than his normal comfortable pace? Well, maybe faster was his normal comfortable pace. Maybe he just walked slower with me so that I could keep a comfortable pace.

“Okay, textbook,” I mumbled to myself, scrolling through pages about photosynthesis that had no relevance whatsoever to my current situation, “divulge your delicious secrets. Human’s gotta eat.”