We Float
by Dorianne Emmerton
We float. Jenny says she's only floated before while in water. There is no water where we come from, though Jenny says it was plentiful in her land. She drank it. She swam in it. She washed with it.
Jenny complains about the lack of washing, although she says our rurr "hydrates" her. Our translator stumbles over the word "hydrate" but, given context, we believe it means that consuming rurr enables her body to live. We are unsure how that differentiates from "nourish," the word she uses for the sotolf she places in her mouth and grinds up with her strange white teeth.
We absorb both rurr and sotolf by contact.
Often Jenny does what she calls "crying." We have analyzed the substance that falls from her eyes and it is water, according to the data we have extracted from her brain as to what water might be. Hydrogen and oxygen. Our technology is proficient at acquiring knowledge from alien brains, when it pertains to matter, at least.
Other things are harder to parse--emotions particularly, but also actions and the motivation behinds them. "Crying" is an action where saltwater falls from Jenny's eyes (often while she makes stilted noises) but the reason for the action is unclear.
She tells us she is sad because she has lost everything.
We do not understand sadness. We do understand loss.
Her planet was ruined, as was ours. Long ago, aliens came and they did not care about us. They cared about the substances in our land. Soft and shiny solid matter. Dark and viscous liquid matter. We were not as valuable.
We used to move with most of our bodies pressed against the ground. We are built to traverse any sort of terrain with contractions of large muscle groups. But now our planet is uninhabitable and we float inside the safety of our spaceship.
Jenny does not appreciate that we have saved not just her life, but her species. Our sister spaceship hosts the only other rescued human, and we have determined that reproduction is possible. But she refuses to meet. It is not what we expected.
