"Grace. Teach me about colors."
The Hail Mary had held up remarkably well over the years. She wasn't meant to last for so long, certainly not long enough to make it all the way to Tau Ceti and then back around to Earth. Or out to Erid, for that matter. But Grace was smart (usually) and Rocky was Erid's greatest engineer (even if he said he wasn't) and they knew not to over-stress her systems.
They were so close now. In a month, Rocky would be home. And Grace would run out of coma slurry to have with his taumoeba, but that was less important.
Rocky really ought to be focusing on the radio, and the makeshift pilot controls he'd long ago installed on his side of his xenonite chamber. Instead, he was asking Grace about something he'd thought Rocky found boring.
"Colors? As in, the frequencies of light humans can see? The low-medium-high rough textures on your screen reader?" Maybe there were wires getting crossed around in Grace's brain and he was mixing up Rocky's words. He'd been getting pretty darn good at Eridian and Rocky didn't have to speak to him like a concussed child anymore, but spending so long on a tiny ship with no real food to eat was maybe starting to mess with his perception of reality just a tad.
"Yes. You call planet Adrian a certain color, you say it's pretty. You say you miss the color of Earth's sky. Colors are important to humans, question? Like sounds for eridians."
"Well, I... colors..." Grace hopped off his bed and sat on the floor in front of Rocky's workstation. "Humans don't usually have an easy time describing these things, Rocky. And you can't even perceive them. I don't know what I could teach you about them that isn't just their wavelengths and what we name them."
Rocky was fiddling with some sort of tablet with two hands. A large flat rectangle with a malleable clay-like substance on one side, so he could write on it. It was currently blank apart from a few absentminded scribbles, though. He fidgeted where he stood, but Grace could tell by now when Rocky was focused on him vs something else. "You're a scientist and a teacher, you can figure it out. It is noon for you, you shouldn't be stupid from no sleep yet."
One thing about eridians, they were very blunt. Or maybe just Rocky was. Not that Grace minded, he could be blunt too. See: calling someone a staggering waste of carbon in front of a bunch of really important people.
Now how in the name of heck did he describe colors to an alien species that didn't have a way to see them the way humans did?
Use descriptions that don't involve sight, of course. Why not?
"Okay!" Grace clapped, wondered why he did it at all, shook his hands out and decided to ignore it. "Okay. First, let me just say there's about a million different subsections of these colors with their own names and meanings, but the main six are most important. You already know we can see from about 400 to 750 nanometers."
"Confusing, but understood."
Maybe Grace was feeling a tiny bit stupid at the moment. He'd blame his diet, as usual. It sucked and was easy to blame for most problems. It took a lot of effort to focus, but one by one, explained each color to Rocky in a way that hopefully made sense to him.
It was the color of the Petrova line and human blood. It burned, it ached, sometimes like pain, sometimes like love.
It came in many forms, from the fur of human pets on the darker end, to the glow of morning light at the other. Warm, but not scorching.
The color of Sol at full luminosity, bright and friendly. Like a raincoat to keep someone dry, or a school bus to take kids home.
Life. Most plants on Earth were green, and plants were deeply important both for human medicine and also for their emotional well being. It could be soft like grass, or harsh and unpleasant like poison.
The ocean and the sky. Sometimes it was used to represent sadness, but it could also be cool and relaxing, something to ease pain or worries.
A rare color not often found in nature. It stood out, bold, proud, mysterious. It meant many things, from poison to royalty. It showed up a lot more in man-made creations, from clothing to stories.
"And do you have a favorite, question?" Rocky asked quietly, once Grace was finished. There was a certain warble in his voice, something close to awe. His writing tablet remained blank.
"I dunno." Grace did say he missed the color of the sky. And back on Earth, he had worn an obscene amount of yellow. "I like them all. But yellow and blue, those two are pretty special I guess."
"Yes, good, I will remember this." Grace didn't understand why Rocky needed to know any of this or what he planned to do with the new information. "...I need new words for all colors. Low-medium-rough textures are bad bad bad names."
Grace chuckled. "Good idea."
He hummed mischievously. "I name your favorites... bright hatchling vehicle color and leaky blob color."
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